Charter Schools Want More Money

If you're old enough, you can remember the days when one of the selling points of charters was that they would do more with less. Well, pack that notion in the junk drawer right next to your powerless Motorola Razr. The trend continues to be legislators attaching charters more solidly to the taxpayer trough.

In Indiana, Rep. Bob Behning is shocked--shocked!-- to hear that charters receive on average $7,000 less per pupil than public schools. Do we need to look into this more closely? No, we need a new law that simply forces public school districts to share their assets with any charter school that says, "Gimme." Ka-ching!

Democrat Rep. Ed Delaney has pointed out the obvious--that this will require taxpayers to fork over even more money just to avoid losing services in their local school. And Delaney also points out (for what may be the gazzilionth time) that the charter system lacks oversight and accountability.

“You’re going to give money to people who are not under your control,” Rep. Delaney said, “This is really a novel idea. This has nothing to do with the understanding we gave our taxpayers twenty years ago.”

But when it comes to forcing taxpayers to subsidize non-public schools, you always have to look at Florida.

HB 1259 is wending its way through the legislative process, but the fundamental idea of the bill is clear enough--charter schools get a cut of any construction money (capital improvement, etc) raised by the public district to which they're attached. 

In other words, if East Egg School District decides to raise $1,000,000 for a new elementary school, and Bogwash Charter School has 2% of the students who should be at East Egg, then Bogwash is entitled to $20,000 of that. Ka-ching! Well, practically speaking, what it really means is that if East Egg needs to raise a million for a new school, they'll actually have to raise one million, twenty-some thousand to cover the amount that Bogwash Charter gets to skim right off the top. Or they build a slightly smaller school.

There are a lot of details wrapped up in this (including the mysteries of Florida school finance), but the notion is a simple one--every time a public school builds or renovates something, charter schools get a nice little bonus. Proponents of the bill argue that this is about "parity" and getting more money for charter school students. 

I guess when the money follows the child, it's not enough.

House Minority Leader Fentrice Driskell calls it. 

“This really is about the businesses, the contracts, the leases for these buildings. Not really school performance, not really providing the students with the things that they need,” Driskell said.

Well, yes. The charter school business is at least as much about real estate as it is about education. These sorts of legislative attempts to direct more and more money toward charter schools have been ongoing for years. The amount of money that follows the child is never satisfactory (unless we're talking about public schools, in which case they already get more than enough). 

Charter schools are absolutely a means of taxation without representation, a mechanism by which taxpayers are required to fork over money to feed education-flavored businesses that do not at all answer to those same taxpayers. These kinds of laws are just ways to expand the business model. Ka-ching.

McKinsey Has Some Data On Teacher Attrition, And Some Of It Is Interesting

McKinsey, the 800-pound gorilla of the business consulting world, took a look at the Great Teacher Exodus. They have some data, and some thoughts, and for a change, it's not all junk.

McKinsey surveyed 1,800 educators in February and March of 2022, and to their credit, they frame the report of results in sentences like "When school districts can’t attract and retain enough teachers, students suffer" instead of trying to call it as a shortage, as if the teacher tree out in the back yard just mysteriously failed to yield fruit. To their discredit, they also bring up Learning Loss, but there are still some interesting moments in this report.

The pattern of attrition and the pandemic

Per US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2020 (aka The Lost Year) was the worst year in a decade for teacher loss. However (plot twist) that was not due to quits, which were actually down, but due to layoffs and discharges. Now the overall attrition ("separations" the bureau calls them, which has unfortunate resonance for those of us who have done the divorce thing) is back to pre-pandemic levels, but where quits used to account for forty- or fifty-some percent of that loss, for 2021 and 2022 it's sixty-some percent.

Openings are running far ahead of hirings. No surprise there. ESSER funds are allowing many districts to create new positions--which they then have trouble filling.

Who wants to leave?

About a third of the respondents. As usual, this doesn't mean much without figures from previous years, but the breakdown is interesting. Younger teachers (<34) are more likely to say they want out, and elementary and middle school teachers are less likely to say they plan to get out than high school and pre-K folks. 40% of free and reduced lunch school teachers plan to get out, while only 25% of low FRL counts.

Why they stay. Why they leave.

Huge props for asking both questions, because people often assume they're the same question, and they aren't. 

The list of factors, in order, for those who consider leaving and those that actually have left-- compensation, expectations, well-being, and leadership (leadership is actually ranked higher by those who left than those just thinking about it). Workplace flexibility brings up the rear.

But stayers stay primarily for meaningful work, followed by colleagues, compensation, geography and community. 

Classroom teachers and school leaders have different views.

They stay for completely different reasons. While meaningful work is way at top for teachers, for educators (70% say that), for administration--well, only 23% say that's why they stay. 

In fact, only two factors garnered the top percentage of administrative response--and that was only 30%. 30% of school leaders cited well-being and career development for why they stay, followed closely by workplace flexibility and expectations. 

When it came to factors contributing to considering departure, the largest percentage of school leaders cited lack of well-being (31%), with meaningless work, workplace flexibility inadequate compensation, and lack of community close behind.

McKinsey's bright ideas

Having gathered this bit of data, McKinsey would now like to offer some thoughts about recruiting and retaining teachers. 

You probably can't afford to give them more money, so look at some other stuff. Like maybe support staff or, hey, a school nurse. Administrators could help out with class coverage so that teachers aren't losing time.

Then, for a 'sense of purpose and meaning in their job," schools could try "nonfinancial incentives" including "public recognition." Also, we hear that there are other factors important to carbon based life forms:

Across industries, 70 percent of people noted that they define their purpose through their work, which is also true for educators. Therefore, education systems could focus on helping educators at all levels find purpose in their work.

Seriously. In my summers in private industry, we used to make fun of this kind of consultant advice, where some guy in a suit would instruct you how to mimic human behavior. Use people's names when you talk to them. 

To enhance the satisfaction and sense of purpose of school leaders specifically, actors can consider taking steps to increase the time available for leaders to connect with students and provide greater support to teachers—both in and outside of the classroom—through coaching, feedback, and mentorship. In addition, providing support for completing administrative tasks, for example, could help free up leaders’ time so they could focus on developing relationships with stakeholders in the district and help alleviate challenges associated with well-being and burnout.

It's like educators are some sort of alien species--an alien species that could never on its own think of groundbreaking ideas like "have someone help them with work so they have more time to do other stuff." Oh, well. The data is kind of interesting, even if the authors have no idea what to do with it.

PA: Going After Climate Change Porn

Wiser heads have pushed back in Kutztown, but it's worth noticing how the boundaries of what kinds of books students must be protected from just keep expanding.

Kutztown schools have a cool annual tradition, the One Boo, One School program, in which every student in every class reads a selected book, thereby allowing for all sorts of projects and discussion and shared educational experience, including a meeting with the author, and it's one of those things that makes me wish I could go back to the classroom to pitch it at my own school.

Only this year's program was almost scrubbed because some of the new conservative members didn't like the book choice.

Too much sexualized content? LGBTQ stuff? 

Nope. Climate change.

The book selected was Two Degrees, by popular teen lit author Alan Gratz. It's a sort of disaster/adventure story featuring teen characters who must navigate a world that has become hostile due to climate change. So readers get adventure stuff and also discussion of climate change issues. 

Board member Jason Koch did not like this idea. 

“We’ve gone through a couple of years where fear was used to shape our students’ perspectives,” he said. “Is that a good thing to continue as we talk about climate change, using a fear-driven book? Do we want our children to look at us in the way we live in this community and say it’s wrong?”

I'll give him credit for articulating what drives so much of these attempts to limit students' reading rights-- what if our children look at some aspect of our lives and say it's wrong--but not much else. 

And so, reported the Philadelphia Inquirer, the program was axed:

The district superintendent, Christian Temchatin, had already called off the “One Book, One School” program before that board meeting, after some teachers told him they didn’t want to get dragged into a political controversy over a program intended to promote literacy. Call it a different kind of dangerous “climate change”: a political climate in which global warming is now joining racism and LGBTQ issues as under fire by culture warriors who don’t want young minds exposed to debate around such ideas.

That was a few months ago. Since then, the progressive grassroots organization Red Wine & Blue raised money to buy 200 copies to give away to Kutztown students. Gratz heard about the cancellation, and arranged to have a meet-and-greet at a local bookstore, with two signing events happening last Saturday.

“The reason I’m writing these books is because kids are asking me to write about these topics,” Gratz told me. “We always want to say we’re trying to protect children by keeping these kind of things from them, but honestly the world is coming at kids faster than before. The kids have been going through active shooter drills since kindergarten” and have also been exposed to debates over tough issues like racism at a young age. The world is coming at them, he said, “and I hope that books like mine can give them a way of seeing what’s happening in the world without having to experience it just yet.”

May 16 is election day in Pennsylvania, and in Kutztown, with several seats open on the board, the contest is heating up. On one side, a slate from the Concerned Citizens of KASD, who call for banning what it called “critical race theory” as well as diversity programs in the Kutztown schools, and which has been showing up at board meetings with signs like, “We Do Not Co-Parent With the Government.” On the other side, KOFEE (Kutztown Organized for Educational Excellence) running on an “Open Books, Open Minds” platform. Four KOFEE candidates were at the book signings Saturday.

Again, none of this was sparked by alleged porn or CRT or SEL or any of the ideas already on the Naughty List. Just climate change. The list of ideas that some folks want to hide from children just gets longer and longer. 

ICYMI: Happy Taxes Edition (4/16)

You've still got a couple of days--use them well. If you're already done, just hush. Nobody likes a showoff. There were bits of good news this week, including Oklahoma's decision to, at least for the moment, not authorize a Catholic cyber charter school. So here's your reading for the week.



The People We Need To Reach Aren't Online

At Book Riot, Kelly Jensen argues that social media is not where the fight over censorship is being won or lost. She also offers a sadly long list of some of what's happening out there.

Child labor push in Iowa forgets our history

A reminder from Iowa about the troubled history of child labors and the ubiquity of the business complaint, "But that kind of law would ruin us!"

What’s Behind the State Takeover of Houston’s Schools

Jeff Bryant at The Progressive breaks down the hostile takeover of the giant Houston school district. Spoiler alert: it's not about education.

School Choice Is Just A Ploy To Defund Public Ed

At Texas Observer, David Brockman looks at " the latest front in Christian nationalists' battle to undermine separation of church and state."

A Well of Conservative Support for Public Schools in Rural Texas

New York Times (so mind the paywall) look at the conservatives who are putting up resistance to subsidizing private schools for rich folks in the cities, all at the expense of rural public schools.

Education Profiteering Accelerates in Texas

Didn't realize we were going to spend so much time in Texas this week, but Thomas Ultican has dug up some of the connections between the players in Texas.

School's transgender policy trumped teacher's religious rights, US court rules

In one of many "you can't make me use the students' preferred pronouns" cases in the country, the court finds in favor of the district. 

St. Pete school will continue showing movie about Civil Rights icon

That Florida school that was contemplating the cancellation of a movie about Ruby Bridges decided to do the right thing and show the film.

Success Academy Attrition Worse Than Ever

Gary Rubinstein has always tracked the real numbers at Success Academy, and he's done it again this year. 100% graduation rate? Not really.

'Algebra for none' fails in San Francisco

Well, that doesn't seem to have worked out so well. 

Competing schools or competing families? The segregative effects of neighborhood racial change and a school lottery in Washington DC

Interesting look at how school choice plays out when it comes to segregation.

Where parental snooping is becoming the law

Among the scary laws being floated out there are laws that would require tech companies to give parents full access to their child's online activity. Politico breaks it down.

Exercise your Rights, Parents!

Vanessa Hall blogs in Virginia, and she has some thoughts about the performative Parents' Rights bill the GOP is bating around in DC.

As a parent, I sympathize with my students' moms and dads – not politicians using them

It's true--a huge number of teachers are also parents. Larry Strauss takes the balanced look at USA Today. 

Iowa Parents Deserve Real Rights

Amy Adams lives in Iowa and argues here for the rights that parents really need (and they aren't the ones right wing groups are talking about)

Catholic leader accuses Ron DeSantis — who has positioned himself as a defender of the Christian faith — and Florida Republicans of seeking to criminalize empathy

Florida is getting ready to pass yet another dumb law--this one could criminalize giving your undocumented immigrant neighbor a ride to church. 

The US Finally Started Building A Functional Childcare System During The Pandemic. We’re About To Tear It Down.

Bryce Covert at Talking Points Memo looks at how pandemic funding helped build child care --with money that's about to run out.

Adventures in Censorship: The Adventures of Schloomphy Boopher!

David Lee Finkle dug back into the Mr. Fitz files for a story of book censorship in schools that could have been written right now. 

School Reformers’ Pledge of Good Conduct

Larry Cuban digs out an old code of conduct for education reformers, and it's not bad. It's not been used, but it's not bad. 

Fox Chapel seniors win first place with video on suicide prevention

From a district in the Pittsburgh area. No implications for school policy (other than, isn't it nice some schools can afford a digital media lab), but a nice reminder of the good work that students can do.

What Spongebob Taught Me About Optimism In The Now

One of my most fun theater gigs in a long time was pit conducting for a production of Spongebob The Musical, so this post from Jose Vilson hits me right in the feels. It's true--the show is a fabulous celebration of a positive view in dark times. 

What kind of mind does ChatGPT have

This Cal Newport piece in The New Yorker (mind the paywall) is hands down the best explainer I've seen about how chatbots do what they do (which does not involve actually understanding anything). Everyone should read this piece.

As always, you're invited to sign up for my free substack, because these days it's good to have more than one way to connect on line. It's free, and you get everything that I'm throwing out into the void.

The Rise and Fall of the Teaching Profession

This is a fascinating working paper from Matthew Kraft (Brown University) and Melissa Arnold Lyon (University at Albany). It's from last fall, but it's one o0f those papers to just hang on to because its relevance will not fade any time soon.

Kraft and Lyon tracked four aspects of the profession-- prestige, interest, preparation and satisfaction.

Prestige means the "reputation and social standing" of the profession, as measured by a variety of studies that look at that sort of thing by examining many factors. Interest looked at how many people wanted to get into the profession via traditional college teacher prep programs. Preparation--how many people are coming out of the pipeline? And satisfaction looks at measures of teacher job satisfaction.

The paper is a brisk 68 pages, and it reaches a conclusion that is simple and clear:

The time-series figures we present on the state of the teaching profession reveal dynamic and surprisingly consistent patterns across all four constructs. We find compelling evidence of three major periods of change in the status of the teaching profession across the last half century. Prestige, interest, preparation, and satisfaction declined rapidly in the 1970s, rose swiftly in the early to mid-1980s, remained somewhat steady for the next 20 years, and then began declining precipitously around 2010.

Emphasis mine. 

Ordinarily I would write up a study like this over at Forbes.com, but that space calls for a less personal approach, and this study surprised me by being extremely personal. I went through high school and college in the 70s, started my first teaching job in 1979, and retired in 2018. So this study basically covers my life, and it rings absolutely true.

So the study lays out its methods and data clearly, and it's right there for you to examine (it all seems solid to me), but I'm going to talk about how all this looked on the ground at the time.

The drop of the seventies was real enough. After I left for college, my old school district had its first teacher strike in pretty much ever. Many of them had started around the same time, and were middle-aged family guys who were noticing that wages hadn't kept up with life.  I graduated from a school where most folks were pre-med or pre-law; nobody was breaking down the doors of the ed department, and we understood that we were never going to be rich or beloved.

In 1979 I landed in Lorain, Ohio, just in time for a strike. By the late seventies we had all reached one of those moments that comes when everyone sort of agreed that teaching paid poorly, yet it took lots of noise and uprising to do anything about it, accompanied by the usual handwringing ("Yes, teachers should be paid better, but when they go about this it's so unseemly, and doesn't help their cause at all.")

And as the study suggests, right after I started in the profession, things got better. Pay got better, respect got better. And it stayed better for quite a while.

That precipitous decline of 2010? Well, that was a year. It was sinking in that the budgetary hammering of education from the Great Recession was not going to be followed by a rebound. It was also sinking in that Barrack Obama, rather than reverse the high stakes testing and manufactured failure policies of No Child Left Behind, was actually going to double down on them. We were all just starting to hear about Common Core by the end of the year. And Race to the Top and the Core were both premised on the idea that US public education was failing, and that failure was the root of other societal failures (like poverty), and that the cause of this massive failure was probably all those bad teachers. Even the president of the NEA, the Very Unfortunate Dennis Van Roekel, supported the Core not just because he thought it was swell, but because he appeared to buy into the whole Massive Failure of Public Education narrative. If you were a classroom teacher in the early teens, it seemed that nobody--not Republicans, not Democrats, not even union leaders--was supporting you. 

On the ground, there was a marked shift in how all these Great New Reform Ideas were delivered. Under No Child Left Behind, the emissaries from the state department of education descended upon us for waves of professional development, but it was all designed to win us over, to get us to buy in. They would talk, explain, cajole, and construct convoluted metaphors to try to get us to buy in.

But sometime right around 2010, that changed. The delivery of the Latest Big Thing became, "This is what's happening. We don't give a rat's ass whether you like it or not. You'll shut up and do as you're told, or we'll just roll over you." Well, in more bureaucratically diplomatic language, of course.

2010 was the Year It All Sank In, finally. The insane demands of high stakes testing, the ones that required every district to have 100% above average test scores by 2014, the ones laid out on a curve that shifted from a gentle upward slope to a steep cliff (a shift that was set up to coincide with Bush's successor), the ones that guaranteed that in 2014 every district in the country would be either liars of failures--all of this was a feature, not a bug. 

On a personal professional level, 2010 was about the year that I started losing the juggling battle. My life as a professional had always been about getting one more ball in the air, finding ways to be more efficient so that I could squeeze one more piece of learning into the year. But 2010 was around the point where my professional development became about not losing any more than I absolutely had to as the school took away days and weeks of teaching time to give practice tests, actual tests, and "We'd like you to start using these workbooks we've bought--we think they'd help get some of our at risk kids to achieve higher test scores." Data days. "We got you a sub so you can spend these days in a department meeting to align the curriculum with the standards (and in a few years, we'll do it again)."

And all of this, on the state, federal and local level, done to teacher-- not with them, and certainly not while consulting their expertise. "No thanks," said all the Powers That Be. "You've done enough already, what with destroying the US education system and global standing and economy and all." 

In other words, this part of the study's findings was completely unsurprising. But it's nice to have independent research to corroborate our lived experience. 

The Libertarian Argument Against Religious Charters

The Catholic Church's proposal for a religious cyber charter school in Oklahoma has been denied, though the church has been given a month to revise their application and take another run at it, so the game's not over yet. 

I could argue--again--all the many reasons that religious charters are a terrible idea, but today let's change it up and let somebody from the school choice camp make the case. Here's Neal McCluskey from the Very Libertarian CATO Institute:

The danger of entangling religion and government when government decides which schools can exist is real. Most directly, an authorizer might reject a charter application because it is religious, or of a disfavored religion. But even if that were not the motive, it could easily be suspected, with religious applicants wondering if their religious status led to their rejection, and possibly to open accusations of religious animus. On the flip side, a non‐​religious applicant that was rejected might point to a religious one that succeeded and suspect religious favoritism by the authorizer.

Now, this argument is based on some erroneous assumptions, including the notion that charters are public schools, but his central point is solid--there is no way to have religious charter schools without also having a real de facto, or implied Government Department of Deciding Which Religions Are Legit. People from many places on the political spectrum can agree that's a bad idea.

McCluskey also argues that religious charters would "end up enrolling students who otherwise would have attended private schools."

Religious chartering would carry a strong incentive for private schools to give up much of their autonomy in exchange for the financial security of being “free” public schools. But that could well be a net loss of choice: Yes, it could make more schools available to families, but also constrain what those schools could do or teach, making each one a less meaningful option.

So, if you give parents these particular choices, they won't make the correct choice. 

If the goal is more freedom in education, choice supporters should put their resources into advancing private choice, such as the universal programs that have ballooned over the last few months. It avoids government entanglement concerns while fostering much more true choice. Indeed, as Shaka Mitchell of the American Federation for Children just argued, charters should be looking to become private schools, not vice versa.

So, if the goal is not to serve the needs or desires of students and families, but to defund public education to the greatest possible extent, then charters must yield to vouchers. 

The tension between charter and voucher advocates has been around for years, and was a notable subtext of Betsy DeVos's rise to Ed Secretary. 

I think McCluskey is wrong to imagine that similar entanglements between government and religion will not happen in a system of private school subsidy vouchers; ultimately the government is going to be forced to decide whether or not each religious group has been properly subsidized to a non-discriminatory amount. 

But he's absolutely correct that religious charters will result in government involvement in religion. One more reason that a secular, religion-free public system is the better choice. 

Moms For Liberty Plays Victim Card

A press release just hit my inbox from the PR firm employed by Moms For Liberty, declaring that a vast conspiracy is out there trying to make the Moms look bad:

Moms for Liberty Co-Founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich released the following statement today warning of a targeted effort by some who oppose the parental empowerment movement in America. The allegations against their members accuse them of spreading “bigotry,” “hate” and “violence.”

There are no actual sources for those quotes, but M4L would like you to remember the last time they were being repressed:

The recent misinformation and false stories appear to be aimed at reviving the U.S. Department of Justice effort to target Moms for Liberty members as “threats” and “domestic terrorists” because they spoke out against Covid lockdowns, mask mandates and vaccine requirements for children.

That's an "effort" that never actually happened, and it especially didn't happen in a way that "targeted" Moms for Liberty. School Boards freaked out a bit over previously quiet meetings now erupting in threats of violence against board members and other parents, and they asked if the DOJ couldn't step in. AG Garland told the department to look into threats of violence against board members while still specifically respecting "spirited debate." But M4L is sure the feds are out to get them.

M4L would also like us to know that this is a vast conspiracy.

Justice and Descovich said, “There appears to be a coordinated effort underway aimed at marginalizing and discrediting the serious concerns of our members about the public K-12 education system. This effort is using false allegations and misleading stories - often taken out of context and without any original sourcing.

There is no sourcing in the press release for these allegations.

The reality is that we are Joyful Warriors, passionate defenders of our country, fighting for its survival with a positive and optimistic attitude because we know our children are watching. We reject any accusations of dangerous behavior made against us as false. We strongly reject any attempts to portray our members as violent or threatening. In fact, we have a Code of Conduct for members that instructs them to act professionally and respectfully at all times or they may be removed from our organization. We firmly believe that our peaceful activism and unwavering commitment to the values of democracy and freedom will ultimately prevail.

This joyful warrior business is a real balancing act challenge for M4L (and not just because it also Kamala Harris's tag line), which on the one hand wants to talk about how to work with people they might not agree with, but on the other hand plans to fire everyone and publicly calls people they disagree with groomers and pedophiles. They've roused a lot of rabble and used a lot of rhetoric about taking schools back and tried to pretend to be non-partisan even as they boost Ron DeSantis like crazy. 

It's easier to pull off that balancing act if you can portray yourself as a victim, as someone who's been forced into a corner by Those Others and so justified in striking back to defend yourself and your embattled values. That's more of a challenge when nobody has actually made you shut up, the DOJ has bever actually said so much as "boo" to you, and your members are commandeering school boards with inconsistent-yet-still-alarming frequency. Not since Barrack Obama didn't come to take anybody's guns has such a Cry of the Oppressed been so overblown.

It's a political shell game, and this press release suggests that M4L needs another jolt of money or support or attention, so they refer to the appearance of some coordinated effort to bring up the allegations that the DOJ didn't actually make, but which were some ill-considered words that the people who did use them (the National School Boards Association) quickly backed away from. 

And of course none of this addresses any of the actual issues, like book bans and personal attacks on anyone who dares disagree with them.

It's the kind of maneuver that suggests, once again, that M4L is less about concerned parenting and more about pushing a political and cultural agenda. 

And, as always, when a whole lot of people look at you and say, "Why are you being such a jerk?" there are two possible explanations. One is that a whole bunch of people who are not closely connected have somehow come up with the connections and coordination to pull off a broad batch of attacks; the other is that everyone is noticing that you are being a jerk. Well, there's a third possibility, which is that you're exaggerating how large the crowd of jerk-callers actually is. Pick whichever option feels right this time.