The Problem of Parent Centered Education

Teacher gag laws spreading across the country are generally billed as anti-CRT, but of course their reach is much broader than that, forbidding discussion of "controversy" and outlawing any teaching that might make students "uncomfortable" or be "divisive." 

The debate--well, actually not a lot of real debate because GOP legislators are using their majorities to just ram these bills through--even highlights apparent splits in the reformy astroturf community. This week the National Parents Union was in Tulsa to march in commemoration of the Tulsa Race Massacre (a topic that now probably can't be taught in Oklahoma) while the Parents Defending Education continue to work hard to ferret out anyone teaching controversial race issues (by which they appear to mean any race related issues at all). It's an odd apparent split between people who have worked in the edu-astro-turf world for a while. 

But these groups, and the larger push for these restrictive teacher laws, actually feed one basic tenet of the privatizing push--the idea that education is a consumer good, and the real consumers are parents. Further, as the primary consumer, the argument goes, parents should get to decide how the school works, what the teachers teach, the whole operation.

There are a couple of problems with this idea of parent-centered education.

One is that the promise is a lie. To parents who dream of being able to choose a school that delivers the exact product they want for their child, I invite you to look around and show me any consumer good that works that way. The next time you walk into Walmart, find a manager and tell him exactly the product and features you want to see on his shelves and insist that he get it for you right away. Go to McDonalds, and if you can still find a human working there, explain to them exactly how you want your burger and your fries prepared, and see how that works. "You will be able to have it your way," is a lie told to open the market. Once the market is open, all bets are off.

The other is more fundamental. When folks demand that students not be taught any of that controversial stuff, what they're saying is "I don't want my child's education to go any further than my own. My child should only learn the things I know."

New knowledge, new understandings--that stuff is always controversial, all the way back to Galileo. It would be great if adults regularly said, "Oh, that's cool. I'll just toss out my old understanding of this and modify it with this new stuff," more regularly, but they don't.

These gag laws are the cry of "I don't want my kid to believe things I don't believe and know things that I don't know." There may be hundreds and hundreds of learning and exploration and growth and building that led up to me, right now--but I want all this growing and building to stop with me. Or, in the case many of these folks, I want it to have stopped with my grandparents, so we're going to need to roll some things back. Things like the 1776 project are anti-growth, a complaint of "Why can't everyone just understand history the way my grandad learned it in 1952."

Simply absorbing the received fossilized wisdom of previous generations is not education. It certainly isn't the key to the critical thinking skills that everyone claims to value. There has always been a tension in US education between "You are going to get all the education that I never had" and "Your grandpa and I never needed any of that book learnin' so I don't see why you need it," but right now, the latter is ascendant. For education and learning and collective wisdom and depth to grow, children will have to learn things their parents didn't know. That may seem like a statement of the obvious, but clearly to some folks right now it's not obvious at all. 

Should Some School Districts Be Broken Up?

New York City's school system is not really an example of anything except itself, despite the many times it's written about and pointed at. This should not be a surprise. We are lousy at history in this country, and so we miss obvious things, like the change in scale. Thomas Jefferson was the President of a country with roughly six million people in it; New York City contains a bit over eight million. 

Our biggest school districts are huge. NYC schools contain almost a million students; the tenth largest school district (Palm Springs) just under 200K. 

So when Howard Husock writing for the reliably right-tilted Fordham Institute thinky tank says that large urban districts should be broken up, he's raising a topic worth talking about. 

Unfortunately, he mostly likes the idea of breaking up large districts because it would break up large unions, which is certainly in keeping with the current narrative that the Biden administration was Very Naughty for talking to teachers unions about re-opening schools. Why is it that when business folks form community groups in order to insert themselves into education policy, that's commendable and swell, but when unions that represent the people who actually work on the ground in education try to speak up, that's considered bad and selfish?

But it's still worth talking about.

The bigger the district, the harder to represent the interests and needs of communities within the larger whole. It's harder for voters to have a voice in the district, harder for teachers to have a voice in the union (I long ago gave up trying to keep track of all the sub-groups in the NYC teachers union). And contrary to anti-union sentiment, a union can be a big aid in helping a district run smoothly--if they know their people.

A small district provides huge benefits. I live and worked in a district of 14K or so citizens, teaching in a school of roughly700-900 students (things changed over the thirty-some years). There was never a year in which I did not know some of my parents outside of school. You want to talk about accountability? In small town teaching, you meet the people whose tax dollars pay you and whose children you teach every day, everywhere. In the grocery store. In church. At the hair dresser. When you walk down the street. In the bar--so watch yourself. All of that goes double for administrators and school board members. If you have been in the district for more than five years, people in the community know about how you do your job, what you teach. There may even be a unit or content that you are "famous" for. 

Not everybody can take it, and some never move into the district where they teach. People think less of them for it. "I don't even know what s/he looks like," is one of the biggest insults that can be leveled at an administrator.

Nor is that the end of it, because a large percentage of your students stay right here, and if you are an awful human being to them in the classroom, you will pay for it forever. My car is fixed, my food is made and served, my innards probed, my streets patrolled, most things I buy sold to me, the volunteer groups I serve in populated, and my own children taught by people that I taught in school. 

Another story. When I was a local union president and contract negotiations turned first contentious and then into a strike, the board president and I met once a week for breakfast. We did no negotiation or discussion of issues; mostly we were doing it to remember that the Other Side was human. 

And we haven't even gotten to all the accountability effects that come because I'm also a parent whose children went through the system. And the ability of teachers to coordinate because they have regular contact with each other. And the strong sense of community. And the positive effects on communication. Let's just summarize by saying that there are many good effects from a small district.

There's a lower limit to size effectiveness, the part where you can't offer certain courses because only two students sign up (and one is going to drop out once she sees what it is really like). or when you can't offer sports or band or other extracurriculars because too few students.

But there is a huge problem with breaking up large districts. We've seen districts do it, and it almost always turns out to be a sneaky form of segregation. School district secession all too often is about "We'd like to take our children into a district away from Those People's Children." An awful lot of de facto segregation has been accomplished by drawing district lines. At the same time, New York City schools, divided into a giant maze of sub-districts, are the most segregated in the nation.

There's also the problem of breaking a large district into smaller districts separated by wealth (or the lack thereof). Once again, Chester Upland School District of Pennsylvania provides an example--Delaware County contains some of the richest and poorest districts in the entire state, carefully separated by well-drawn boundaries. The prospect of using the same kind of computerized tools that have facilitated political gerrymandering--that's not a good prospect.

Any attempt to break up a large district would require some serious oversight to avoid the risk of simply replicating the same inequities already present elsewhere. (And choice policies also replicate those problems, while stripping parents of rights and communities of representation.) An answer probably looks more like a community school, but that's a conversation for another day. For today, breaking up school districts might well be worth it, if done carefully and with a care for all students involved, and not just because you're excited about sticking it to teachers unions.

Eroding Trust In Chester Upland

Chester Upland School District in Pennsylvania has the distinction of having been put through every gauntlet that a modern school district ca be forced to run. Currently, that means that CUSD is facing a partial takeover of the district by charter operators. 

Parents, taxpayers and teachers within the district have not developed much trust in the various processes put in place to "help" the district. That may be related to the parade of shady shenanigans along the way.

In particular, there's the cozy relationship that so many folks seem to enjoy with Chester Community Charter School. CCCS is, itself, a shady operation that started up in conjunction with CSMI, a charter management organization founded by Vahan Gureghian, a guy who runs a billboard company and CSMI and is now, after 23 years in the charter biz, really really wealthy. There are three charter companies operating in Chester (so far) but CCCS is by far the dominant one. How big a pile of taxpayer dollars does CSMI rake in? You aren't allowed to know--they're a private business. 

CUSD is under state receivership, but it's often unclear whose interests are being guarded. In Pennsylvania, charters are only supposed to be renewed for five year spans, but receiver Peter Barsz went ahead and gave CCCS a nine year contract. The argument was that this would "save the district" by getting a deal that the charter would not try to extend its reach to high school students. Except that word on the street was that the charter had no interest in high school students. That's been confirmed; while charter operators are currently making their bids to take over schools in the district, nobody has made a pitch for taking over the high school. So Barsz gave CCCS a big fat gift in exchange for a guarantee that CUSD would not be attacked by yetis riding on unicorns.

It was a great deal for David Clark, the CCCS CEO. Dr. Clark is the community face of CCCS, well-regarded enough that the city leaders decided to give him a whole honorific ceremony. And when folks got heated up over the CCCS petition to charterize the district back in 2019, Clark took to the paper to say, "They did not petition to take over the school." Technically true--they petitioned to have bids opened for charter schools, however as Chestrer's only charter heavy hitter, they were (and remain) the obvious big winners in such a move. Clark also claimed that Gureghian didn't found CCCS, which is a distinction without a difference. In fact, the actual founding of CCCS is a bit opaque, but it's clear that launching the school also launched the charter management organization that runs it and which was founded and owned by Gureghian. Clark adds "nor was he even involved with the school when it was established." That puts us in gaslighting territory; certainly it does not establish Clark as a straight shooter.

But Chester has attracted an endless stream of not-straight shooters. The district has trust issues with its own board, which has been spectacularly reluctant to conduct any of this charterization business out in the open (even though the court told it to). They've hired administrators seen as favorable to charterizing. Fred Green ran an unconventional campaign for the board and won, immediately offering pro-district words in support of a "Local Control Is Our Goal" rally:

We encourage residents and community supporters to come out and help us fight to take back our school district and get it back into local control.

But when CCCS recently opened a new campus in Aston to help it expand into the Philadelphia market, this was part of the scene:

There are two pairs of scissors there for the ribbon cutting. The pair on the right is being held by Dr. David Clark. The pair on the left is being held by Fred Green.

Chester Upland School District is plagued by broken promises about things large and small, repeated problems with mysterious disappearing money, and a lack of allies in any powerful places. When their woes are tallied up, we have to include an erosion of trust. What a rough place to be.

What Privatization Actually Means

When we talk about the privatization of education, the conversation is almost always about the privatization of the vendors. Publicly owned and operated schools replaced by privately owned and operated charter and private schools, plus a dizzying web of real estate developers, charter management organizations, other support businesses. Even the extreme form, where education is unbundled and can be provided piece by piece--a nice prospect for those who balk at operating an entire school, but can imagine making a buck selling math tutoring.

This vision also includes a privatization of oversight. Let the parents vote with their feet. Let free market forces handle the issue of "quality." Make it easier for vendors to have access to the market and make a buck; let the market sort out winners and losers.

How far do some of these folks want to go? Here's Jeremy Kaufman, voice of the Libertarian Free State outfit, being blunt on Twitter.

All of this privatized profiteering can well be a feature of reformster policies (they never, ever, call it privatization), but to stop here is to miss a critical part of the picture.

The education privatization movement is also about privatizing "consumption" of  education.

In a public system, education is "consumed" by the public. All of the public, together, collectively. Hence the system of everyone paying for it and everyone voting for the board members who manage in the name of the collective owners. That's because everyone, collectively, is a stakeholder. We, the public, receive the results of the education system. 

Privatization doesn't just privatize the "vendor," but it privatizes the "customer." The premise of the privatized system is that there is no collective ownership of the results, but rather that each individual student's result belong to each individual parental unit. Put another way, all the business of oversight, accountability, all of the market research and interpretation required--all of that weight rests on the individual parental units. Quality of education is no longer a shared community responsibility, but the private, personal challenge of each parent. 

"Well, yes," some privatizers are going to say. "That's all the freedom." But without launching into another post's worth of argument, let me just offer--

1) How much freedom you have in the marketplace is in direct proportion to how much money and power you have at your disposal. 

2) We're talking about making fundamental change to the entire US system of education. We're talking about ending the promise of a free, good public education for every child. Well, actually, we're not talking about these things at all, which is my point. If we're going to implement such a major change to a foundational institution, we ought to be talking about it, rather than selling America a Porsche and delivering a worn out bicycle. Let's not promote a beautiful new dawn and then leave parents to wake up tomorrow to discover that they the country has washed its hands of them and they are on their own. 

Should Schools Offer Virtual School Options In The Fall?

 I'll admit that this blooming controversy snuck up on me. In Pennsylvania, school districts have offered virtual options for years in the Time Before Covid. It would never have occurred to me that a district shouldn't. But apparently we're going to have fussing about that. kickstarted today by the NYC mayoral announcement that public schools will be all in person this fall.

That's a dumb idea. 

I understand where some of it comes from, given the insistence that we must get students back in school Right The Hell Now. Political leaders trying to court a certain constituency are going to go this route, plus it will also be a way to signal that you aren't going to be pushed around by the teachers unions for all those folks buying the bullshit narrative about how the evil teachers are solely responsible for the closing of school buildings. 

It's still a bad idea.

Mostly it's a bad idea to demand only-in-person districts because the alternative sucks. And it's not going away. There are many, many states already offering "free" online "public" [sic] school, and that's before we even get to cyber-schools that hide behind the mask of homeschooling. 

Cyberschooling isn't going away any time soon for three reasons. First, it does actually work for a small percentage of students with very specific special needs. Second, particularly in states with PA with dumb rules governing cyber-tuition, it is a very attractive way to make a lot of money. Third, the charter worlds not only finances a good assortment of astroturf groups, but it also funds plenty of regular lobbyists, too. Legislatures could shut cyber charters down, but it's a lucrative business that has rented lots of friends in high places.

Pennsylvania is the case study in how impervious this business has become. You can look at the national studies that show cyber charters failing big, or you can look at the PA-specific schools that have all--every one of them-- failed to make the grade. Granted, the measurement of success for PA schools sucks, but that's the reformy game reformsters wanted to play--and they're losing at their own game. Meanwhile, districts around the state report the devastating economic effects of charters, with cybers draining money from "markets" where brick and mortar charters don't bother to go. There is literally no defense of cyber charters in PA, and yet year after year, efforts to rein them in fail. Right now, legislators are fighting against the governor's radical ideas like A) pay cybers what it actually costs them to educate students and B) audit them like we audit public schools. 

Consequently, most districts have developed their own in-house cyber school program. This has a couple of virtues.

One is that students have a better chance of getting an actual education that includes actual learning and is also aligned to the district that they may return to some day. I cannot overstate the value of this benefit. I long ago lost count of how many students returned from cyber school who would have been better off taking a year to play video games. The saddest cases have been those who know it, who returned to say, "Yeah, I don't like getting up and coming here, but I wasn't learning anything and what the heck is going to happen to me?" No, that's the second saddest--saddest cases were those who went to cyber school and proceeded from there to just dropping out. With our in house virtual school, I could have input in what was taught, and students were monitored closely enough to be held accountable and helped forward.

I would be lying not to say that the other benefit was that a whole lot of money stayed with the district instead of buying some K-12 charter executive a new summer home. But by far the big win was the number of students that weren't lost to an education. 

One of the best ideas for a bill in recent years was one that proposed that if you wanted to send your child to cyber school, and your home district offered a cyber school, you'd have to pay tuition at the corporate cyber charter out of your own pocket. Cyber charter businesses hollered and squealed that they'd never survive, which is probably true--their whole pitch is based on the word "free." Free school and you get a free computer and a free printer! It would have been fair and healthy and better for the students, but of course it was shot down. 

Most of the country is now painfully aware that virtual schooling is difficult and draining. While it serves some students and families well, the vast majority of folks probably would not list it as their #1 choice for How To Do School. Also in the mix are all those folks who were pre-covid huge fans of virtual school and then decided that anything other than a live classroom is terrible horrible no-good very bad education (looking at you, Mrs. DeVos). 

It's limited, difficult, and few people's choice over live humans in a classroom. But I think it's safe to say that virtual education is not going away entirely, ever. So the only real question is this-- should the field be dominated by a bunch of amateurs who are just trying to cash in on a computerized education-flavored product, or should actual public school educators get in the game? And why should a district in 2021 run what is essentially a marketing campaign for the cyber-charter business world by insisting on live classroom only?

ICYMI: And Now I'm Older Edition (5/23)

 What a week here at the Institute. But now it's time to get back to reading, and we've got a fine selection of pieces this week. I'll remind you that you can also keep up on the current writing about public e3d by following the Network for Public Education's Blog of Blogs. Hop on over, put your email in the little box, and get a daily dose of quality education writing. Now on to this week's list.

How Biden's cash paid for Florida GOP's pet education projects.

Well, taxpayer money, actually. But no matter what you call it, the Florida GOP are enjoying using it to paper over one of their secrets--their anti-public education policies are running a huge deficit.

Texas GOP gags teachers

It's the most draconian of the anti-anti-racism laws. Way to go, Texas.

The K-12 Culture Wars

Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire go on a little tour to hot spots around the country for some chilling reminders about how all this current conservative culture onslaught of schools is experienced in an up close and personal way by actual teachers.

Judge: Betsy DeVos cannot quash deposition

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider has the results of the DeVosian attempt to avoid having to do one of her least favorite things-- explain herself to the little people. The fallout from her refusal to provide relief to defrauded students continues.

Dartmouth blindsides med students with shaky cheating "evidence"

A Mercedes Schneider two-fer this week, as we get a look once again at how poorly those anti-cheating surveillance systems actually work.

A scholarly masterpiece: William Franz Public School

Thomas Ultican provides a review of an important book about how one school was hit by the New Orleans reformster movement.

Idaho teacher who stopped 6th-grad school shooter says she hugged girl after disarming her

Only a teacher can really grasp the many threads running through this People magazine tale of the Idaho teacher who stopped a school shooter (without using a gun). 

Southeast PA superintendents call for charter funding reform

Dale Mezzacappa is at Chalkbeat with a story of PA districts coming out in support of Gov. Wolf's proposal to pay charter schools an amount that actually makes sense.

Taking the math SAT when you've forgotten math

A few weeks ago, John Warner tried taking the verbal portion of the SAT. Now he's gone back to take a whack at the math. Interesting insights into everybody's favorite exam.

Education without controversy? What's the point?

As states try to clamp down on teacher freedom and universities look at axing the classics, Andrea Gabor is at Bloomberg explaining why art and literature (and arguing) are important in education.

65 years after "Brown v. Board," where are all the black educators?

At EdWeek, Madeline Wil looks at one of the important questions of education--where are the Black teachers, and how did we get to this place?

Play-based learning isn't free play and may be connected to online learning

Nancy Bailey, ever vigilant about language, points out that "play-based" isn't quite the same as actual play.

The Value of Preschool

Oh, Florida. Accountabaloney lays out how the dependably dim Florida legislature is screwing up preschool. (Spoiler alert: more testing).

GOP Election Preview: Our Children Were Robbed

I live in Northwester Pennsylvania, and this is Trump country. We've got a GOP controlled legislature and a Democratic governor, and a great deal of contentiousness stemming from that situation. And in the recent primary election, voters passed a constitutional amendment that de-powered the governor in the case of, say, a massive pandemic and gave emergency powers to the legislature instead.

Though we don't have many votes to offer up here, we make a good place for conservative candidates for state office to try out their road show, because lots of folks are gunning for the governor's seat.

As with most states, there are peculiarities that apply only to this state (e.g. the ongoing feud between Philadelphia and the entire rest of the state). But it's still a good place to spot some of the upcoming arguments that the GOP will use in their next election bid. 

Lou Barletta just announced his run and swung through my neighborhood. Barletta was mayor of Hazleton, PA, where, teamed up with the infamous Kris Kobach, he spearheaded anti-immigrant rules that were declared unconstitutional. He then was a Us Representative for almost a decade, before having his ass handed to him by Bob Casey, Jr., in 2018. He went into private consulting, including helping boost Brexit, and he has maintained his Trumpist credentials--he was one of the "electors" who met up in 2020 to vote for Trump, just to, you know, keep options open.

Barletta stopped just up the road from me this week, and the local paper covered the visit (paywall--sorry). Some of his talking points were the usual boilerplate. Election security--more ids, no mail-in votes. Don't defund the police. CRT and Project 1619, bad. No abortion ever. Second Amendment, good. 

But there's a new talking point in his shtick. Barletta told the crowd that the state's schoolchildren had one year of education "stolen from them" by the governor's pandemic shutdowns, and nobody knows what the long term effects will be. 

Fore folks who have been paying attention, this will not come as a surprise. The Great New Culture War is aimed squarely at schools, and bundles anti-masking, anti-vaxxing, anti-anti-racism, anti-unions, and anti-closing-of-school-buildings. The most extreme form of the narrative is that after Democrats cooked up a fake pandemic scare, unions forced schools to close and stay closed (for reasons that I still haven't seen clearly articulated anywhere--unions, I guess, are just evil and teachers went into teaching to not not teach), leading to Learning Loss, in which knowledge drained out of student brains even as they were being indoctrinated in the critical race theory. 

So "our children were robbed" fits the program. It contributes to a certain thematic unity--the underlying theme of much conservative politicking right now is grievance over having things stolen. "They stole the election, stole our jobs and our resources, stole our freedom, and stole our rightful place in society," goes the complaint. Why not "they stole our children's education" as well. 

We'll see if Barletta gets any traction and how the Battle for the Crown of Most Trumpy goes; after al, this is also the home state for Doug Mastriano, who says that Trump asked him to run. 

Side note--Barletta was pretty lukewarm on charter schools. While the "we can't leave our children in failing schools" line plays okay in urban areas (aka Philadelphia and Pittsburgh), here in rural areas, charter schools are known mostly as a financial drain on local school districts and taxpayers. "We need to look at how we can change our education system and improve our public schools, especially in urban settings," he told the crowd. 

But the early signs are that the GOP is poised to use students as props in the next election go-round, and teachers and their big, evil unions as part of the giant probably-Marxist conspiracy to steal America. Hope the pandemic hasn't tired you out too much, because there's no rest in sight.