How To Stay Open

My Uncle Frank, about whom I've written about before, recently suffered a stroke. He spent a couple of days at the hospital on a gurney, rather than on a bed in a room, because those beds were filled with unvaxed freedom fighters, presumably none of whom were saying, "Don't give me any of your life-saving medicines or treatments, because I don't know exactly what's in them." 

While I'm generally pretty good at remaining open to different viewpoints, I'm about done with anti-vaxers. I am sympathetic to the folks who have legitimate medical reasons to avoid the covid vaccine, even as I'm pretty sure that "religious objection" folks are just making shit up.

The lack of will surrounding the opening of schools is staggering. From districts that don't really have any policies and procedures in place yet, to those that think that having talked about them is as good as having actually done something.

I was reminded yet again last night as I sat at an organizational meeting for directors in local community theater. It was such a stark contrast with what we're seeing in schools.

First, the theater started with a basic premise--they want to stay open and put on shows.

From there, they went to some pretty simple policies.

Everyone in a show this season must be vaxed-- cast, crew, everyone. If they won't do that, they must be tested weekly. If they won't do either, they can just stay home. Also, everyone masks.

Meanwhile, the theater has an HVAC system that completely replaces all the air in the place about every 30 minutes. 

And if people are feeling kind of covidy, they are to stay home until they know one way or the other.

Of course this isn't perfect. People who don't drink before they drive sometimes have accidents. People who wear seat belts are sometimes injured or killed. But these steps improve your odds. 

The key is, I think, knowing your objective. Notice that the theater objective is not "make sure people who have political objections to mitigation methods don't feel put out." The one conce3ssion the theater has made is not to take the step most other live theaters have--requiring proof of vaccination to sit in the audience. 

The goal is to stay open. The goal is to mitigate the spread within the place so that critical personnel are not lost to illness, thereby putting the whole operation at risk of being unable to continue. 

Do these goals sound familiar?

There is much about the US response to COVID that I will never really understand, but high on the list will be the huge disconnect on re-opening schools. 

Folks really, really, really want schools to be open in person again. They have had two years to figure out what it would take to do that. In some cases they have spent the two years just kind of wishing hard. In some case, they have spent the two years figuring it out, but now that it's time to implement some of that, they're just going to not. In some too few cases, they even used the time to figure out how to do a better job if a school had to go remote. And in some cases they're going to be shocked and angry that teachers don't want to get back to it without any serious safeguards in place.

Vaccine mandates are somehow an intolerable act against human freedom, even though we already mandate an assortment of vaccines for school attendance. 

It is a reminder, once again, that we just aren't a serious people. We aren't serious about education in general. We aren't serious about gun deaths, and we aren't serious about dealing with COVID. We aren't serious about getting and keeping schools open safely, and we aren't serious about recognizing that in some cities, under some conditions, we can't have it just because we want it.

Somewhere along the way we also loss our pragmatism, becoming far less interested in getting the job done and more interested in Being Right or Making Our Point. So we end up with schools closed or open uselessly, even though we know plenty about what it would take to get it done right.

ICYMI: The Week It Hits The Fan Edition (1/9)

 Well, that was almost as much fun as when schools started up last fall. Fun times all around, for sure. And a hefty reading list for the week, and I'll warn you up front--it's not a cheery collection. A reminder that sharing is caring, and that if you find something here that speaks to you, it's a great idea to signal boost it out into the world. 

Teacher shortages will linger after the pandemic wanes

Andrea Gabor at Bloomsburg opinion looks at the problems that pre-date covid and will outlive it as well. Secrets to try? Maybe rethinking what professional respect id supposed to mean.

Michigan superintendent: Let's address teacher shortage

The MI state education leader in an interview discussing the problems that have led to this challenge, and what might be done about it.

TennesseeCAN Knows the Plan

Governor Lee has a great new idea of how to carve up inadequate funding to make it better, but Andy Spears notices that somehow, reformsters at TennesseeCAN already know what's in the plan. Not a good sign.

Why we could soon lose even more Black teachers

Sarah Carr at the Hechinger Report talks to some former Black teachers about what could be done to stop the loss of so many Black teachers.

Open letter to Indiana legislature on subject of pending critical race theory bills

Shane Phipps tries to help the legislature understand why this is a bad idea.

I am a school board member. Anti-CRT bills are stoking fear in our district.

Oh, New Hampshire. What happened to you? A school board member in the granite state talks about what the attacks on teaching about race have meant. Here's a line about the transformation into more strident parent comments:

That transformation was concerning — not because parents don’t have the right to share their views and concerns with their school board, but because the content of their concerns seemed divorced from the reality of the teaching happening in our district.

It's been a long, arduous week for Massachusetts teachers. Why won't state leaders apologize?

Neema Avashia talks about how MA leaders dropped the ball this week.

Controlling the fear

Jennifer Orr blogs about her own stress this week as a teacher, and asks some important question about what, exactly, the current goal is.

NY High School Students' COVID Experience

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider has a look at that Reddit post that's been making the rounds, describing NYC's opened schools as not exactly firing on all cylinders.

Who gets the blame when school shut down?

Well, you know the answer, but Jessica Winter at The New Yorker offers a more fair and balanced look at the issue.

Don't blame teachers for covid quarantines and closures

Steven Singer would like you to stop laying all of this disruption on teachers. Here's why.

America doesn't have enough teachers to keep schools open

Anna North at Vox explains just how close to the edge most schools are right now.

The demise of genuinely public education

One of the hardest reads I had this week. Nancy Flanagan has stayed pretty optimistic for years, but that has changed, as this doom post explains.

Profits for Non profit charter schools

An interview with Carol Burris appearing in Jacobin

Why education is about to reach a crisis of epic proportions

Mark Perna at Forbes lays it out again in an article that you probably already saw this week because everyone was sharing it.:

In order to reach and teach students effectively, teachers must forge a human connection with them. Today’s younger generations simply will not move forward in their education and career journey without that connection. This is a non-negotiable; it’s just who they are.

What K-12 textbooks are like now

Bob Shepherd lays out a sample lesson. Tongue firmly in cheek.

100 Ohio school districts file anti-voucher lawsuit

Jan Resseger has a great explainer for that lawsuit in Ohio in which public schools are fighting back against privatizers.

Voucher lawsuit filed, voucher proponents dissemble

As voucher fans try to defend against that Ohio lawsuit, Stephen Dyer looks at some of their claims, including the claim that they provide a great service to communities of color. (Spoiler alert: they don't)

Dark money in the holy city

I don't usually put Diane Ravitch posts on this list because I figure if you read me, you probably already read her. But this is one not to miss. A reporter was looking at charter shenanigans in Charleston. Here's what he found, not published anywhere else, including at the paper that used to employ him.

A Note of Reassurance from your School District Regarding Our Updated Omicron Policies

McSweeney's is here once again with a darkly funny take on school district responses to the current surge.

Finally, over at Forbes this week I wrote about an important new book and why school choice is really bad at transparency.

PA: Number of New Teachers Plummets

 This was rocketing around the Book of Face this morning. It's not encouraging, but I have verified it.

The actual source of the data is what's known as the Act 82 report, which requires the state Department of Education to report on how many Instructional Certificates it issues every year, which is a good measure of new teachers. I'm looking at the spreadsheet for Act 82, and I can report a few details to go with these lousy numbers.

Some of those numbers are out of states certificates, and some are add-ons. Both have plummeted. The peak year of 2012-13 saw 2,343 out of state certs; 2019-20 it was 878. At peak, there were 6,771 add-ons (way above average) but 2019-20, the number was down to 931.

Looking from 2013-14 through 2019-20, here's what has happened in certain certification areas of K-12.

Grade PK-4 has dropped from over 3,000 to under 2,000.

English 7-12 has dropped form 666 (I know) down to about half that.

In 2019-20, there were 5 new certifications for French K-12 issued in PA.

Phys-ed dropped from about 350 to 130.

Math from almost 400 to under 150.

Social studies from 722 to 300.

Act 82 also breaks down new certs by the college that birthed them, and virtually all of the state's heavy hitters saw big drops over the last decade. A handful (Geneva, Grove City, Tork, West Chester) hung on or improved. Geneva and Grove City have small programs and are very conservative schools--make of that what you will. Many of the big programs have seen a collapse over the last decade of around 50%, driving or driven by shutdowns of some or all of their teacher programs.

Administrative certs follow the same pattern. The high was 1,032 issued in 2012-13, but in 2019-20 there were just 693 new administrative certificates issued.

At this point, there's no reason to be mystified about this. We're talking about a generation that has seen teachers maligned and reduced to test-prep content delivery units. They have seen public school denigrated and teachers micro-managed, and they watch teachers struggle to support a family on stagnant salaries. They are choosing a different path. These numbers just help see clearly how bad the problem has become.

Bonus: If you'd like an even deeper dive from an actual scholar, here's a report on this data from Ed Fuller and Andrew Pendola at Penn State.

AI Did Not Write (Most Of) This Post (Or: "Why our screens are filled with so much crap")

Once more, someone is trying to cash in on the prospect of teaching an AI to "write" and resolutely calling it an AI when it's just one more algorithm scraping the internet for samples that it can regurgitate, sort of correctly, sort of not. Hooray for automating mediocrity.

Meet Jarvis (yes, that's a cute nod to comics nerd-dom), an algorithm that can make it "fast and easy to create content for your blog, social media, website, and more!" It's not cheap, but there's a free trial, and I gave it a shot because I remain fascinated by the still-unfulfilled dream of getting a computer to do language.

Jarvis is one year old, founded by Dave Rogenmoser, who was co-owner of Market Results, co-founder of Redwood Recruiting, and co-author of Beyond the Grind, a book that may never have made it out of Kickstarter about how to "fuel the fire" (and add value") by two guys who quit their jobs to become entrepreneurs. It was supposed to kick off a movement, but the kickstarter was canceled in November 2014. Rogenmoser's co-entrepreneur/author was Chris Hull, who is also a co-founder of Jarvis. Rogenmoser graduated from Kansas State U with a BA in Marketing back in 2011; Hull has a BS from Oklahoma State U in Secondary Science Education, though he apparently has never taught. It's not clear what "quit our jobs" really means in this context, but these plucky guys are here to have a computer write your stuff.

Jarvis promises big--just give it a topic, maybe a sentence, and some hints of what "tone" you want, and it spits out words lined up in sentences and paragraphs. You can ask for your output in many different languages, which gives this the extra level of bad computer translation on top of bad computer writing. And I can report that it does it all in seconds. Entrepreneurs will never have to hire humans to string words for them again, ever. Hooray. 

Here are some samples. This first one is sort of an open attack, where I start and then hand it over to Jarvis, then he tosses back to me, and so forth. You get two tries by the algorithm for each prompt, but for our purposes, one will be plenty. The result...

Trying to advocate for teacher safety during a pandemic is like trying to push jello up a pile of dead salmon. While, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on who you ask, the "pandemic" hasn't happened yet and can be argued as not even happening this year. But teachers in Chicago are still fighting to keep their jobs, in fear of catching the flu or any other illness that may be going around.

This year, as the pandemic drags on, the number of flu cases continues to drop off. But the fear and panic that accompanied it at its height remains. Covid cases are up thanks to omicron and andromedous crashing at the same time.

You can also ask Jarvis to just pump out some stuff. Here I asked him to give me an opening paragraph for a blog post about teacher evaluation systems (thus letting me "blast through writers' block).

Are teacher evaluation systems effective? This is a question that has been debated for years, with no clear consensus. Some people believe that such systems are essential for improving teaching practices, while others maintain that they do more harm than good. In this blog post, we'll take a closer look at the pros and cons of teacher evaluation systems and discuss some of the latest research on the topic. Stay tuned!

At least this is recognizable as Actual English and not Almost English, but it's still terrible.

Jarvis will also write your concluding paragraph. On this one, Jarvis actually surprised me a little. The only prompt I gave him was that high stakes testing is bad for schools and damages the educational process. He also requires a call to action, so I said get legislators to end the practice. Here's what he wrote:

Conclusion paragraph: High stakes testing is bad for everyone involved. From the school children who are subject to these tests, to teachers who have their lesson plans influenced by test scores and parents of students whose grades may affect where they go to college or if they get scholarships, high stakes testing has a huge impact on all aspects of education. The best thing we can do as Americans is advocate for legislators that will end this practice once and for all. What’s your opinion? Do you think our politicians should take steps towards ending standardized assessments like PARCC, ACT Aspire and other common exams across the country? If not why not?

That was with a "casual" tone, so I tried again with a "witty" tone

Conclusion paragraph: The practice of high stakes testing is a bad idea for schools and damages the educational process. It’s time to get legislators on board with ending this damaging practice—for our children, we can’t continue to make education about money. Testing should be used only as an occasional diagnostic tool, not something that determines if students graduate or teachers keep their jobs. We all deserve better than what high stakes testing offers us; it's time that we demand change!

In both cases, the program scraped up some statements that aren't accurate, but did manage to scrape up some specifics. 

Jarvis will also generate a blog post outline from a topic idea, a feature the site says works best with listicles or how to posts, so I tried both. Here's the response to "10 bad education trends," formal style

1. The US is ranked 31st in the world for education

2. There are more than 1 million homeless students in America's public schools

3. 25% of high school seniors don't graduate on time with their peers

4. Black and Hispanic students drop out at much higher rates than white or Asian students

5. Average SAT scores have been steadily decreasing since 2006, while ACT scores have remained steady 

6. College tuition has increased by an average of 5% every year since 1978, which means that it costs twice as much today to attend a private college than it did 30 years ago

The student does not appear to have understood the assignment. Now let's try a How To for teaching reading

1. The benefits of reading

2. The importance of phonemic awareness

3. Phonics instruction

4. Fluency instruction

5. Vocabulary and comprehension instruction

6. Assessing reading progress

So who would possibly use Jarvis? Well, there are even whacky story generators, but most of the templates are for generating marketing posts. That includes content specifically aimed at Google, Amazon and Facebook. It will also crank out scripts and captions for Youtube videos and generate SEO titles and meta tags. 

Attention: Are you a writer who wants to improve their writing skills?

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Desire: If you want to become a better writer or simply need some guidance on how best to communicate with your readers, then this course is perfect for you! Whether it's blogging, copywriting or social media posts - we'll teach you everything there is know about creating great content so that people actually read what you write! And if that wasn't enough - our instructors have years of experience working as journalists at major publications like Forbes Magazine and Mashable so they really know what they're talking about when it comes down to good writing practices. So sign up today! This offer won't last forever...and neither will these prices! (limited time only)

Action: Click here now before this deal expires!!!

Weirdly, the algorithm managed to tie me to Forbes, but I've never written a word for Mashable in my life. This keeps with the algorithm's tendency to be sort of right, sort of not. 

Like all good services, this one has lots of upselling going on. At Boss Level the algorithm can do even more of the word-stringing for you, even if it's rudimentary crap. Here's the video sales pitch for having the algorithm create a five paragraph essay. Yikes.

So what have we learned?

Well, first, we've reinforced for the 60 gazillionth time that algorithms can't write. They can scrape through what a bunch of other people have written and string together words that sound right and may or may not be right. If they were students in my old high school classes, they would not do particularly well.

Second, we've gotten a peek at how soi much internet sausage is made and a sense of why so much "content" doesn't feel particularly authentic, rich or good. I can only imagine what will happen when the algorithms are all scraping up word strings churned out by other algorithms

Cowardly Silence

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

--J.R.R.Tolkein

The word came out of the office pretty quickly, via a printed message that was sent out to classrooms by hand-- don't show it on tv, don't talk about it, just carry on normally. 

It was September 11, 2001, and my school administration's impulse was the typical for them--if we can just put off dealing with this Scary Uncomfortable Thing, maybe we won't have any trouble. Just hush. Just stay quiet. Just keep still, and maybe this will pass without disruption.

I used to say about my principal at the time--a good guy and a pretty good building administrator over all--that if the building burst into flames and you ran into his office shouting "There's a fire," his first analysis of "What's the problem" would be that a person was in his office yelling. Over the years, I've seen many districts that believe the best way to handle bad news ("We're closing the elementary school in your neighborhood") is to just hide it. A good day is a day without a phone call from someone who wants to complain.

I sort of get that. I'm not a fan of conflict, and I have a gut-level distrust of people who seem to enjoy it and seek it out. I can also appreciate the degree to which being a school administrator can turn into a constant Space Invaders gauntlet of One Damn Thing After Another.

But I remain convinced that the best way to deal with all of that is to keep your eye on the ball, to remember what your actual focus and purpose are. In running a school, the focus, the whole point, is to help students grow into a better understanding of themselves and how to be fully human in the world.

Sometimes, in the world, stuff happens. Schools can try to figure out how to deal with it and, especially, how to help their students process it. Or they can dig in their heels and adamantly argue for an education that rigorously avoids addressing anything in the actual world that students actually live in.

But instead some students are getting this sort of thing. The Pennridge School District, in Bucks County, PA, has issued an edict that teachers are not to "wade into" any class discussion of the events of the January 6 insurrectionist riot in DC. Administrator Keith Veverka told teachers via email that, if students ask about the insurrection, teachers should “simply state that the investigation is ongoing and as historians we must wait until there is some distance from the event for us to accurately interpret it.” Just stick to "business as usual."

This is on brand for the district, which has just axed its diversity and inclusion committee and started pulling books out of the library. The school board president was in DC on the 6th, though she allegedly did not enter the capital building. This is a district with a long list of things that it just doesn't want to talk about, because it has a hefty share of agitated parents. 

The plan, I guess, is for Pennridge students to grow up in the middle of a fiery real-world conflict in schools where that conflict is ignored, and they are daily silently reassured that their education has nothing at all to do with the real world.

Granted, there are bad ways to do this. Teachers have no business teaching about January 6 by vociferously arguing that the insurrectionists were either noble freedom fighters or despicable criminals. My own students heard a gazillion times, "I'm not here to tell you which side you should agree with, but let me tell you what they believe, and here's the evidence." It is possible to discuss sides of a controversy without editorializing. It's also possible to create a classroom where a teacher can share her own viewpoint and students can be comfortable knowing they are not required to agree with it. (It is also possible, especially given their age, students may be blissfully unaware and uninterested in an event.)

It can be done. More to the point, it can't be avoided. Maybe your district doesn't want you to editorialize, but choosing to ignore a controversial event, to carry on "business as usual" on a day like today is editorializing, a tacit attempt to argue that the events are simply no big deal and not worth our time and attention. As with most difficult moments in life, choosing not address it is most definitely a choice about how to address it. I get that some administrators and teachers really really really really really wish they didn't have to address it, but sometimes the world just doesn't give you a choice. 

For students who have awareness of the world, shying away from such discussions confirms their suspicion that school has nothing to do with real life, that their education is disconnected from the actual world that real people live in. At best, it helps convince them that school is irrelevant; at worst, it convinces them that the education system is delusional. 

Navigating moments like this one--that's a hard thing. Hard to thread the needle between all the different ways it could be mishandled, hard to face the prospect that somebody isn't going to like what you do. But sometimes hard things come to us whether we want them to or not (and really, do we ever want them to) and we either find the nerve to move forward or we back away and hope, somehow, we can avoid it (spoiler alert: we never can).

Policies like the one in place today in Pennridge are acts of cowardice, an attempt to avoid what cannot be avoided, an attempt that damages the credibility of the school itself. As Tolkein said, we don't get to pick the times we live in, but we do get to choose what we do with them. Here's hoping your school chooses well.

Addendum: I've been asked, "So what should a district do?" The short answer is "Trust teachers, who are in the best position to know what the mood and needs of their class might be."

Social Impact Bonds Are Still A Thing, Sadly

 Remember Social Impact Bonds? They've been around for at least a decade or so (here's an explainer I wrote in 2015). Also called "pay for success" programs, these are another instrument for privatizing public stuff.

As such, they make an appearance in the new book The Privatization of Everything, a must-read from Donald Cohen and Allen Mikaelian. The book is a deep dive into the many, many, many ways in which privatization has wormed its way into the public sphere in everything from prisons to pharmaceuticals to patents to health care to municipal water systems to parking spaces. And roads. And the weather. And, of course, education. You should buy this book, and read it slowly and carefully while sitting down.

Tucked in the book (page 175) is a look at social impact bonds, and reminder of what a lousy scam these things are, a great method for "taking money from a public good and transforming it into private wealth."

What the hell are social impact bonds? This is always hard to explain, starting with the fact that they aren't actually bonds. They're a deal for private investors to fund social welfare programs and make a profit doing it, as if it were a literal investment.

The steps as listed by the Corporate Finance Institute are:

1) Identify the problem and possible solutions

2) Raise money from investors

3) Implement project

4) Assess the project's success and pay the project manager and investors

It's a chance, as one site says, for "doing good while doing well." It's also a creepy way to monetize people's struggles.

So, for instance, Cohan and Mikaelian explain one SIB program that involved veterans. The VA looked to set up a program to help deal with PTSD and veteran suicides. They ran a pilot, and the turned to investors to scale it up. Those investors would get back all their money, plus up to 18% bonus based on reaching certain numbers of veterans having sustained employment. 

The price tag for the scaled program was $5 million, and the SIB "investment" certainly looks a lot like a plain old loan with a huge interest rate.

As Cohen and Mikaelian point out, there is some weird reasoning going on here. The premise for many SIB programs is that government needs private investors because government can't afford to finance the program itself--except that it's going to pay that same amount plus extra to pay the investors. It's like saying, "I can't afford to pay a babysitter $25 to babysit tonight, so will you please pay them for me, and then if they do a god job, I'll pay you $30." 

Worse yet, an SIB leaves all the risk with the government. If the program doesn't succeed, it's true that they investors don't get paid--but the social need still has to be met, plus cleaning up whatever mess the failed program left. 

SIBs also rest on the notion that the private sector will drive efficiency and innovation that will make the program leaner and better. This is baloney.

First, in practice, SIB pretty much never fuel innovation, because investors like sure bets. From a NYT piece about SIB's in 2015:

“The tool of ‘pay for success’ is much better suited to expanding an existing program,” Andrea Phillips, vice president of Goldman’s urban investment group, said in an interview on Wednesday. “That is something we’ve already learned through this.”

And as far as the efficiency goes, this is just the same old Myth of the Gifted Amateur, with which we're already plenty familiar in the education field. In fact, SIBs have targeted PreK programs, because investment bankers know so much about early childhood education. But they do now how to bet carefully; an SIB in Chicago funded the expansion of a proven program, using trained personnel and district infrastructure. Mostly what Goldman Sachs provided was a very expensive loan that the district has to pay back. In Utah, as the authors report, Goldman Sachs bankrolled a program that promised lowering the number of children needing special services and then used pre-existing programs and a population of students that was already free of special needs. They did nothing and brought no value to the program, but they still made a bundle on it.

And let's not even start on the heavy lifting involved in imagining that Goldman Sachs is in a position to teach people about disciplined  efficiency.

SIB programs also depend on stark, clear definitions of success, preferably a number of some sort, what one interviewee called "incentives that would be considered corruption pressures." This doesn't just encourage a simplistic, bone-headed definition of success--it requires it. It's Campbell's Law on steroids, goosed up by putting a bunch of investor money on the line. Put another way, SIB investors don't get paid for changing reality, only for hitting their numbers.

There is something very icky about the idea of investment bankers sitting around a desk cheering, "We kept 123 kids out of special ed! Ka-ching!!" And there's something unpleasant about having our tax dollars used to hire somebody to hire somebody to deliver a program. 

I've talked for years about how high stakes testing turns schools upside down; instead of serving the students, the upside down school now demands that students serve it by generating the right test numbers. This is more of that. Theoretically with SIB, we still get the social welfare programs we asked for, only now they are set up not to serve the human beings who need them, but to serve the investors who put the money into them. Every dollar spent on a child cuts into investor profits, so make sure to spend the least possible on the service that is actually supposed to be the point. It's no way to run a school--or much of anything else.

I'll finish with this paragraph from the book

The rise of social impact bonds fits a pattern. Throughout our history, private interests have worked to separate the worthy from the unworthy poor and to reinforce the idea that assistance is charity--a benevolence from on high--not a right and responsibility that we should bear as citizens. Social impact bonds and pay-for-success models are, far from being innovative and disruptive, simply a slightly altered means to the long-standing goal of putting the private sector in charge and sidelining the public while separating citizens from government and from each other.

PA: One More Cyber School Regulatory Failure

This is a small thing, but it's an important one that points toward how the rules in PA are written to make running a cyber-charter just like printing money.

In Pennsylvania, there's been a rule since 2003 (Act 48) limiting how much money a school district can park in its unreserved fund balance--basically just extra money in the bank that's not assigned to any purpose. Limits are in the 8%-10% range. This addressed a real issue--when my local went on strike in 2002, we found that the school district had so much money in the bank that they could have given taxpayers a full year off and still run the district without going into debt. It's legit to wonder why schools should collect taxpayer dollars just to sit on them. 

So the legislature said that the districts could only have X% of their full budget parked in the bank as undesignated "extra" money. 

Guess which outfits the rules does not apply to?

A report issued back in June, 2021 by the Pennsylvania Charter Performance Center shows that thirteen Commonwealth cyber charters were sitting on $74 million in unassigned fund balances in 2019-2020--$52 million of that added in just the previous year. Some gains were modest-- Commonwealth Charter Academy has less than a million banked. Some are astonishing; PA Cyber added $18.7 million to its bank account, bringing its total to $32.4 million. PA Leadership jumped from $1 million to $16 million (a whopping 1,140% increase). 

But maybe they just have really big budgets, and these amounts aren't out of line? In some cases, says the report, that is true. But PA Leadership's extra money is 38% of its budget. PA Cyber's nest egg is 21% of its budget. 

All of that would be before the cybers hoovered up large piles of American Rescue Plan and ESSER II dollars (CCA pulled in an astonishing $54 million). PA Cyber which, remember, already had $18 million in "extra" money got a federal bailout of $34 million. 

Two things to remember about all that money parked in the bank. First, every dollar came from taxpayers. Second, it could have been spent on students, but it wasn't.

Two caveats with this. One is that public school hands are not all clean--many now instead of undesignated fund balances simply park their extra money in the "big roof project some day fund" or some such shenanigans. The other is that having a low charter fund balance can just as easily mean that they just handed all that extra money to their CEO and the Chater Management Organization.

However, it is one more way in which cybers are not subject to the same kind of oversight and accountability that public schools are, and that there is no way to characterize this non-regulation as beneficial to students--it is, in fact, the exact opposite. It makes it really easy to take taxpayer dollars and NOt spend them on students.