PA: Why Commonwealth Charter Academy Is Bad News

The following post is addressed directly to my friends and neighbors in Venango County.

You may have heard over the last month that Commonwealth Charter Academy is planning to put up a building near Home Depot, and more recently, Cranberry Area School District officials expressing some concern over that development. Their concern is well-placed; CCA is bad news.

What is Commonwealth Charter Academy?

A charter school is a school that is privately owned and operated but which is funded by taxpayer dollars. CCA is a cyber charter (sometimes called a virtual charter) which means there is no actually school building; students attend school by logging on to their computer and getting their instruction on line.

With over 20,000 students, CCA is the largest cyber-school in Pennsylvania, the state with the largest number of cyber-students in the nation.

Pennsylvania and cyber charters

One might imagine that a school that has no physical building, that has no expenses like transportation and books, and which can assign hundreds of students to a single teacher would be able to operate for less money than a bricks-and-mortar school, thereby saving taxpayers money, and in some states that is true (sort of).

But Pennsylvania funds cyber charters differently than any other state in the nation. In any state, when a student switches from public school to a charter school, their public school is required to send the per-pupil cost to the charter. In all other cyber states, the formula is different for cyber charters than physical charters. But not in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania school districts pay the full brick and mortar charter per pupil amount to cyber schools. One study from California found the cyber charters would be profitable if they charged as little as $5,000 per student. In 2022, the superintendent of Wattsburg schools said they were providing cyber school at a cost of about $3,000. Our local districts pay about $13K per student. 

And the smaller the district, the bigger the hit. Forest, because it spreads its costs over fewer students pays cyber charters over $22K per student. Yes, because of the way the law works, students from different districts are charged wildly different amounts to attend exact same school. 

Local taxpayers take a double hit. In theory, when a district loses a student, they lose the expenses associated with that student. In practice, the district carries "stranded costs." Cranberry sends 42 students to cyber-school, spread over K-12. Can they cut teaching positions, bus routes, building maintenance, or administrators for that small number of students? No--but last year they lost $676,425 of taxpayer dollars, which means they either cut services or get more taxpayer dollars to make up the difference.

(There is also a crazy wrinkle with special ed funding. If you want more info, here's the link)

Just how wealthy is CCA?

Cyber charters are hitting Pennsylvania taxpayers with a huge mark-up for services. What are they doing with all that money?

CCA HQ-- What does your district's main office look like

A report from Education Voters of Pennsylvania shows that in 2022, the largest four cyber charters in the state had net assets and fund balances of $485.5 million. (Unlike public school districts, charter schools do not have a legal limit on how much unreserved fund balance they can sit on,) The Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School Association estimates the current price tag for all cybers in PA is $1.4 billion. 

CCA was founded in 2003 (right after PA passed its charter school law) and owned by a group of investors. It was owned for a while by Pearson, the education book publisher that wanted to get into digital education. Nowadays, CCA is its own thing. 

Cyber charters spend a great deal of money on marketing. In the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years, CCA spent almost $19 million on marketing and advertising. That includes not just the ubiquitous online advertising, but items like a Jerold the Bookworm float in Philly's Thanksgiving parade, sponsorship of the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton hockey team, and gift cards that families can use at places like Dave and Busters and Kennywood. 

CCA has amassed a huge real estate empire. In the past six years, CCA has paid a total of $88.7 million for properties; those properties have an assessed value of $43.1 million, according to the Ed Voters report. 

In 2020, CCA purchased a redeveloped office complex that used to be the Macy’s at The Waterfront near Pittsburgh. CCA had previously leased the first floor of the complex (about 70,000 square feet); now they own the whole building, while the same company they previously leased from manages it for them.

That same month, they spent $15 million on a the former headquarters of Ricoh in the Greater Philly area. Back in 2016, CCA bought the former PA State Employees Credit Union headquarters in Harrisburg for $5 million to replace several leased offices. 

In Johnstown, CCA purchased an office building and several nearby vacant lots. In Moosic, CCA purchased the former Cigna building for $17,788,381 (the previous owners had the assessed value dropped to under $300K). In Dubois, CCA is planning to build an office complex on the vacant lot they purchased. In Erie, CCA bought the former Erie Business Center. In West Manchester, CCA spent $4.4 million on a building with an assessed value of $314K.

All of this is paid for with taxpayer dollars--specifically taxpayer dollars that would have been used to fund local public schools. If a Venango County School District was buying up buildings, stockpiling hundreds of millions of dollars, sponsoring a minor league team, and handing out gift cards to parents, what do you suppose taxpayers would say about that. But county taxpayers are funding exactly those things--just for cyber charters instead of local schools.

If CCA is doing a good job, who cares about this other stuff.

It is important to note that for some students, cyber charters are an absolute life-saver, and it would be a mistake to outlaw them entirely. 

However, the results for cybers are, overall, lousy. 

Students typically average about two years in cyber charters. The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University (a group that supports charter schools in general) found that cybers have an “overwhelmingly negative impact” and that a year at a cyber charter left students a half year behind in English, and a full year behind in math. The Thomas Fordham Institute, a group that promotes charter schools, issued a report highly critical of Ohio cyber charters. Pennsylvania’s cyber charters have not outperformed other schools in the state — not public schools, not brick and mortar charter schools, not even high poverty schools. 

The report “The PA Disconnect in Cyber Charter Oversight and Funding” from the PA Charter Performance Center of Children First shows our oversight compares poorly to that of other states. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania charters may go years without a state audit. In 2019, Maddie Hanna at the Philadelphia Inquirer found that many cybers were operating years after their charter had expired. The cyber charter graduation rate is about 65%. 

When it comes to proficiency scores on the PSSA and Keystone exams, cyber charters have never met the state averages. The wrinkle there is that cyber students aren't required to take those tests. Only about 20% of CCA students took the test (despite CCA's many field offices). But if the state only counted the CCA students who tested, the proficiency rate would still be below state average. 

Cyber schools will argue that they are dealing mostly with students who have trouble with the whole school thing. That may or may not be true, but even if it is, if their business model is to deal with those challenging students, after over twenty years, shouldn't they be better at it?

It's not hard to see where some problems originate. Cyber teachers are asked to handle hundreds and hundreds of students at a time. Student attendance is a matter of occasional log-ins to the computer platform. Their CEO, Thomas Longenecker, is a business guy; his second-in-command is a lawyer. Longenecker makes a $268,000 salary. 

So why is this still going on?

There has been little real revision of the charter law passed in 2002. There have been proposals to bring our charter funding in line with what other states do; most recently, Governor Tom Wolf proposed that cyber charters be reimbursed at a flat rate of $8,000. In 2019, a lawmaker proposed a bill saying that if a district had its own inhouse cyber school (as many do, including our local districts), the district didn't have to pay for an outside charter. 

But cyber charters have money to spend lobbying, and any time someone proposes a funding system more in line with what other states do, cyber charter advocates complain that it will be a hardship and limit student choices. And so simple reforms, reforms that would require the same accountability for charter schools as for public schools, and which would create some sensible funding policies--none of the gets adopted.

Meanwhile, more than 450 of Pennsylvania's 500 school boards-- boards representing a full political spectrum--have passed resolutions calling for funding reform, and that includes Venango County districts. Legislators have continued to ignore them.

Local consequences

This year, Oil City has 84 cyber charter students, and that costs the taxpayers of the district $1.4 million dollars. Franklin has 106 cyber students, costing taxpayers of the district more than $2.1 million. Cranberry has a modest 42 cyber students, costing over $626,000. 

You can argue that the school district should try to hold onto those students or win them back, but experience and the data tell us that many of those students will be back--and they will be academically behind when they return. 

So Venango County taxpayers are sending millions of dollars to companies that do a poor job of providing education, but make enough money to hand out gift cards and buy up millions of dollars' worth of real estate. 

Cranberry Superintendent Bill Vonada told his board, "They are ion our community to take our students and teachers." That's not exactly true-- what CCA is here to take is local taxpayer money. 

What can be done?

Cyber charters are approved or not approved in Harrisburg; local taxpayers have no say. Regulations are also set in Harrisburg. So if anything is going to be done, it will need to be done by legislators who have, for twenty years, refused to take any action. School boards have been begging for action for years to no avail. There's not much left to do except for taxpayers to call or write their elected representatives

What's the ask? 

Accountability and oversight. Ed Voters of Pennsylvania had to drag CCA to court to get it to honor Right To Know requests that any taxpayer-funded school should honor. Cyber charters can never be as transparent as public schools, because they have no elected board and you will never be able to attend meetings by their operators. But at least they can approach a public school's level of transparency.

Fair funding. A flat fee would make far more sense than the current system. Right now every school in the region pays a different amount to send students to the exact same cyber charter. Cranberry pays $12K per regular student; Forest pays $22K. Oil City pays $28K per special ed student; Forst pays $45K. With flat fee of $8K per regular student and $12K per special ed, taxpayers would save and hold on to $308K in Cranberry, $359K in Forest, $676K in Oil City, and $1.1 million in Franklin. 

Bottom line

CCA was already in Cranberry and the rest of Venango County already. A physical presence just means more opportunity to recruit and market. But local taxpayers should remember that every brick of that building, every chirpy as they see, every salary for someone working in that building represents taxpayer money that didn't make it to their own local public school. When you are complaining that your school board doesn't do a good enough job shepherding your tax dollars, that new CCA building should be a reminder that your school board never had a say in what happened to those dollars which were hoovered up by an organization that can afford to build in county after county across the state while your own district has to struggle over how much to spend n playgrounds and has to ask parents to send in boxes of tissue just to make it through the year. 

Map vs. Territory

I was reading in Cybernetic Forests, when I came across this quote from "The Map is Eating the Territory" by Henry Farrell, and it's all very technology/AI/academic stuff, but boy, this quote:

To direct these politics, we need to know more about the underlying political economy. So here is my best stab at one aspect of what has been happening over the last couple of decades. Over this period, we have been seeing the rise of new technologies of summarization - technologies that make it cheap and easy to summarize information (or things that can readily be turned into information). As these technologies get better, the summaries can increasingly substitute for the things they purportedly represent.

Farrell is talking about of technopolitical stuff, but if you think of "new technologies of summarization" as, say, testing instruments used to summarize the whole world of student achievement, well, yes. Bullseye.

Test scores (especially when massaged by some cool math-flavored VAM sauce) are supposed to provide a map of the whole territory of student understand, their whole ability to read and math, We call scores above a certain point "Proficiency," as if the score of any student in that range is actually their street address in the land of reading or mathing skills, when in fact that score is more equivalent to a vague "over there" hand wave. 

But having convinced themselves that the test score is a very specific address on a very detailed map, education leaders start trying to change the map. "If I can get the map to show a different address for this student, then the student will move," goes the reasoning.

We mistake the map for the territory. That gives us the mistaken belief that knowing the map is knowing the territory, a problem that is only exacerbated if we hold onto the belief that the map is flawless. And from there we move on to the fallacy that changing the map is the same as changing the territory.

This map-and-territory idea is a close cousin of Campbell's Law:

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

Which is itself a close neighbor of Goodhart's Law:

Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.

They circle around the same insight for the test-centric approach to schooling-- the insistence that test data are a perfect representation, a perfect map of the student territory, gets us quickly to trying to manipulate and alter that map. If scores on the Big Standardized Test are a perfect map of student achievement, and we fixate on that map as if it were the territory, then we succumb to the fallacy that changing the scores (the map) will somehow change students' reality (the territory). 

It's not just that we have no real proof that the BS Test score map is a perfect representation of the territory. It's that we have absolutely no proof that changing the map changes the territory. IOW, we have no proof that if we get this roomful of students to score higher than the would have (thereby changing the map), they will be wealthier, happier, more successful than they otherwise would have been (changing the territory). 

I'm going to say that again, because it's important, Yes, we have oodles of proof that a high BS Test score correlates with certain conditions, like having a high-income family and desirable life outcomes. That correlation is solid. What we don't have is evidence that if we take students who were destined for a low BS Test score and get them to somehow get a higher score, those students will then achieve higher life outcomes than otherwise expected.

Once more. We've got guys like Raj Chetty who argue thus: Group A has high scores, and Group B has low scores. Group A will go on to make Big Bucks in life and Group B will make Fewer Bucks. What we don't have is any evidence that if we move someone from Group B to Group A, he will go on to make the Big Bucks.

The map is not the territory. It is a proxy, an attempt to represent the territory through a set of symbolic marks. But those symbolic marks, those summaries, those measures-- they are not the thing. In education, teachers live and work in the territory and not on the map--at least they should, as long as folks who can't tell the difference don't take control of the whole business. 

 

 

FL: Waving the Sheep's Clothing

School Boards for Academic Excellence is a far-right organization was launched to "challenge woke bureaucracy." Yet they are brandishing their sheep's clothing, trying hard to look neutral and non-partisan. So why not wave their right wing flag proudly. I have a story from Duval County in Florida that is an excellent illustration of why these groups pretend to be something other than what they are.

SBAE's right wing credentials are unquestionable. Their leadership team combines experience from the State Policy Network, assorted Koch groups, the John Locke Foundation, the Heartland Institute, the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, the Independent Woman's Foundation, and more of that flavor. Their leadership team has previous experience lobbying against the ACA, attacking unions, and launching "classical" charter schools. And they have teamed up with Jordan Adams, a Hillsdale College product who has tried to make a dent in the business of dewokifying school curriculum. (If you want more details, I've written about the group here and here.)

It's a culture panic, Moms for Liberty-style, public school dismantling group. 

So why pretend to be anything else? Why not wave the MAGA hat boldly about?

The Duval County school board in Florida was one of the boards targeted by Governor Ron "Florida is a free state for people who agree with me" DeSantis, and the right has been successful in turning the board over. And the new right-wing majority would like to go to the SBAE conference in January, a conference co-sponsored by the Florida Coalition of Conservative School Board Members, a group with actual direct ties to Moms for Liberty. Oklahoma's Ultra-MAGA Ryan Walters and Florida's DeSantis sidekick Manny Diaz will be speakers.

There were members of the public that were educated enough to know what SBAE represents--an attempt to hammer a far right agenda into local school districts.

But board members just waved the sheep clothing. 

"This event is no different than any other non-partisan organization like FSBA, (which the board is attending this week) or the Council of Great City Schools conference which board members attended In October. It is simply another opportunity for our board to receive professional development to better serve the students of DCPS," Vice-Chair April Carney told Action News JAX, apparently with a straight face. JAX also copied some of the neutral language from the SBAE website. 

Meanwhile, First Coast News reached out to SBAE executive director David Hoyt to ask about the claims the group was hyperpartisan. “We are a truly nonpartisan group,” Hoyt said. Reporter Regina Di Gregorio asked about comments made and the fact that "conservative" is right there in the co-sponsors' title. “Conservatism is a set of values, it’s an ideology, but partisanship is a political party," Hoyt said. "So, I think there’s an important distinction to be made there," responded Hoyt. So, you see, ideologues can still be non-partisan. To her credit, at the end of her report, Di Gregorio wears an expression that says, "Yes, I know that's a bunch of baloney."

So why put on the sheep's clothing. Because it provides cover for folks who want to use super conservative activist services without looking like wingnuts. Because sometimes the press will not bother to look under your costume to see what's hiding there. Because it gives you something to say when people who have seen under the costume speak up. Because it lets the ideologues that want to ally themselves with you some political cover so they don't have to deal with too many of those pesky people who like representative democracy and public schools. 

Duval has its issues, like other districts, with financial problems and hiring challenges, so it will be great for the conservative board majority to go learn about how to manage the media and do some lobbying for your favorite culture panic issues. I'm sure that will help.

The lesson here is to pay attention and do your homework, not just for yourself but for all the other folks (including, in some markets, the media) who haven't. That's the only way to be sure you don't get surprised by a sheep with really sharp teeth. 

No, The Sliding Scale Won't Work For Vouchers

Thomas Arnett, senior fellow at the Christensen Institue, has an idea about how to make vouchers work better. It won't work. But watch how he almost gets it, and it's an instructive failure.

The Christensen Institute is all about the beauty of Disruptive Innovation, that whole process of kicking things over so you can Get Shit Done beloved by Silicon Valley dudes (many of whom have moved on from disrupting things to offering piles of monetary tribute to new the new President so that maybe he won't disrupt them). So they've been fans of the disruptive innovation of dismantling public education and innovatively selling off the pieces.

In "Bending the Arc od Innovation To Benefit All Students," Arnett is responding to a discussion between Derrell Bradford and Mike Petrilli about whether or not wealthy families should benefit from vouchers. Bradford said sure, for the practical reason that wealthy folks make good and powerful allies when you're trying to sell a policy to legislators (the only people to whom voucher policies are ever sold). Petrilli said that states should target lower income folks in the name of fiscal responsibility. 

But what Arnett is interested in is the idea, mentioned in passing, that vouchers could be based on a sliding scale. Arnett loves him some ESA vouchers, invoking the tired cliche of the 100-year-old outmoded school model. Reform stuff, he says, fails because it's incremental when what's needed is massive transformation--"new models of schooling outside established value networks." Yes, if we could just get everyone to drop their existing values and replace them with my existing values, the world would be a swell place.

ESAs, he thinks, could provide that clean break, based as they are on the model of handing people a stack of money and saying, "Okay, go find some education for your kid somewhere, somehow." He acknowledges that some ESA recipients will just gravitate back to the old ways, but maybe some would come up with cool new innovation. Unfortunately, his cited examples are microschools and hybrid programs, which are neither new nor innovative.

He now pauses to explain disruptive innovation, models that start "serving the fringes of a sector but eventually transform it." He cites examples Netflix and Amazon and Apple, all of which serve as excellent reminders that we are really talking about free market stuff, and that the free market will never ever display a commitment to providing quality service to all possible customers, and on that count alone, the free market is not qualified to take over societal services like education or health care.

But what about disruptive innovation in education? What would that look like?

They could look like microschools across a metro area forming a network that allows them to collectively offer experiences like team sports, band, theater, and school dances. They might be school sites that work like shopping malls, where independent course providers, tutoring centers, coding camps, makerspaces, and companies offering internships are all co-located to make it easy for students and families to assemble highly customized schooling experiences. Or imagine a single microschool expanding into a large franchise of schools across the country, thereby achieving the scale needed to systemize a model for helping any student—regardless of background—ace elite college admissions.

So, it looks like the free market. You know-- the market where everyone is free to buy either a brand new Lexus or a heavily used 2006 Kia. 

Now, Arnett is partway there with me on this. The disruption he cites, he notes, run on a motivation to pursue upscale customers who will pay a higher premium for a higher quality product.

In most markets, the more demanding customer tiers will pay a premium for higher-quality products.

Almost there...

But in education, there’s a problem with this pattern. Education’s “most demanding customers”—those with greater needs and more challenging circumstances—are often not those who can afford to pay higher prices for improved services.

Like students with special needs. If ESA policies "don't offer a premium" to those who handle these demanding students, the market will just walk on by, in search of more profitable business cases.  

That is as close as he's going approach Getting It. His idea is to make serving the more expensive-to-serve students, aka those with special needs, those from lower-income families, those that are more challenging. Because 

Without a mechanism that rewards schools for serving students with greater needs, we risk seeing a generation of new schooling models that only cater to students and families with inherent advantages. We’ll likely get models that are ever expanding the breadth, flexibility, and rigor of what they offer middle- and upper-income families while never tackling the expensive circumstances that make them hard for many lower-income students and families to take advantage of.

Which is, of course, exactly what we've got. And we don't have it, as he suggests, because we just stumbled into it by accident. In state after state, voucher laws have treated as sacrosanct the private school's right to operate without any interference or oversight by the state. That means that A) better private schools keep their right to discriminate as they wish for whatever reason and B) fly-by-night subprime pop-ups that exist only to cash in on vouchers can do a half-assed job without the state telling them to shape up ("market forces" will take care of them, we are promised). Exactly what he described is pretty much what we've got (though not much expanding of middle- and upper-income awesome offerings is happening), and we've got it on purpose.

The sliding scale that he proposes, with "market signals" that "motivate" providers by "tying higher funding to the ability to effectively serve students with higher needs" would require a couple of things. One is oversight and accountability (how else would we know who was effectively serving those students), and the other is money. And there's only one place to get the money, and that's from the people who have it. 

And there's the heart of his problem. We have plenty of hints about how people who have money feel about the government taking that money to better serve Other People's Children-- they don't much like it. That redistribution of wealth has been problematic since at least Brown v Board came down. The whole point for a whole bunch of school voucher supporters is to get rid of a system that requires them to pay to educate Those Peoples' Children and replace it with a system in which everyone's education is their own problem. 

Arnett is describing an education social safety net, and that's exactly what so many of his disruptive friends hate about the system we've got. He may want to see the "arc of innovation" bend in this direction, but many of his reformy colleagues would rather snap that arc into pieces before it bends an inch further. 

The School of the Future

It will be seamless and swift. AI will develop syllabi and lesson plans. AI will design and assign all the work to be completed. Then AI will complete all the assignments and send them to AI for assessment. (AI can then send personalized assignments to address the AI's weak areas, but it probably won't have to).

All the teachers will be fired. All the students will stay home. Building repairs will be unnecessary as long as the computer hub at its heart is preserved.

Leaders and Ed Tech companies will survey the empty building, buzzing with electricity whizzing up and down the wiring in the hollow walls, and congratulate themselves on its modern efficiency.

The school year will last about a half an hour, depending on how many AI are enrolled. 

You can say that this is extreme hyperbole, that of course things will never progress this far. My question is then, where will the line be drawn? At what point will Important People step up and say, "This has gone far enough." 

At what point will Important People say that we can't remove any more human element from the process.

Maybe at this point we're just too overwhelmed by the gee whizzakers of it all, like the guy who showed up on Bluesky "So excited to publicly launch All Day TA," a teaching assistant that would work 24/7 and coincidentally free a college from having to hire one more live human. 

Maybe some of us are just so amazed that we aren't ready to ask questions like "What problem is this supposed to solve" or "Does it actually solve that problem" or even "Are the costs worth the results?" 

I can remember the days decades ago when my students discovered personal computers and printers. They were so amazed that they could print their work in any font in any size in any color that they absolutely never stopped to ask if printing their paper in, say, 8 point French Scrip rendered in yellow ink, might not be a great choice. 

That's the initial moment of technological exuberance--so excited you can do it that you don't stop to ask if you should.

For the current AI irrational exuberance, add-- so excited at what you've been promised you can do that you don't stop to check if you can really do it.

As with the pandemic, we are being challenged to think about what, exactly, we think the point of education and schools is supposed to be and make deliberate choices to build schools around that vision and not some higgledy piggledy attempt to incorporate every shiny thing that attracts our attention, whether it furthers the actual purpose of school or not (and whether it can deliver its promised product or not).

Too many AI-in-education seem to think that the whole purpose of school is to produce and assess school work, resulting in grades that lead to a credential, and if you think the purpose of school is to crank out these various products, then sure--computerizing these processes makes perfect sense.

But if you think the purpose of education is something like helping each individual human being become their best self, to be fully themselves, to grasp what it means to be fully human in the world-- well, then, we need at a minimum to remember that it is AI, and not the humans in the loop, that is the tool.  

ICYMI: 10 Shopping Days Left Edition (12/15)

Well, maybe just nine. What are you doing sitting there looking at your screen?? You have responsibilities as a consumer to go consume stuff. Go on. 

We've got newbies around here, so let me review the idea behind this weekly digest. I have a platform--not a huge one, but a platform--only because people once upon a time boosted my signal. Folks like Anthony Cody and Nancy Flanagan and Jennifer Berkshire and especially Diane Ravitch, plus lots of other folks, too. I started out not really knowing what I was doing other than venting a great deal of frustration. I was at the time a long-standing classroom teacher in a small town with bot a single direction to the wider world of education policy and practices, but people found what I wrote useful at times and shared it and amplified it and here I am, still at it.

I'm here with more than three readers because folks helped boost my signal, and so I feel a powerful obligation to boost other signals. Yes, I also always have an urge in life to point at interesting things and say, "Look at that!" Hence the teaching career. But the one thing we can all do is boost the signals of people who are saying things that are important, useful, helpful, recognizable as True. So I have a blogroll on the side column of my regular blog, and I have this weekly digest that lets me say, "Look at all these smart people saying smart things. Maybe you missed it, but I don't think you should." 

So when you see something here that speaks to you, go to the original source and share it on your social mediums. Boost that signal. We have an extraordinary infrastructure in place for spreading ideas and words, even if it is a pipeline that delivers toxic waste as easily as lifegiving water. But when I think of the kind of trouble it took for someone like Thomas Paine to get his word out in a country just a smidgeon the size of ours today, I think how lucky we are to be alive right now, and how we have such a powerful chance to spread whatever good words we see.

So do that. Some of the people who appear here don't really need my boost--they have strong audiences of their own. That's okay-- an expanding audience is always a good thing, and this is one of the ways we move forward in 2025--by amplifying what is good and right. So join me every Sunday, and share what you find that speaks to you. 

So here we go.

Who’s afraid of a public library?

Colbert King in the Washington Post commenting on the loss of one more library to culture panic actors.

Billionaire Ideas: Andrew, Bill and Elon

Speaking of libraries, Nancy Flanagan looks at how the very wealthy used to spend their money.

Why being forced to precisely follow a curriculum harms teachers and students

Yeah, you already know why, but Cara Elizabeth Furman in The Conversation really makes it clear. Like this:

The term “fidelity” comes from the sciences and refers to the precise execution of a protocol in an experiment to ensure results are reliable. However, a classroom is not a lab, and students are not experiments.

Sixth period horseback riding lessons

Meg White looks at the state of education in Arkansas, and it's not pretty. But it does come with riding lessons.

What Should We Be Watching For if Linda Mahon Is Confirmed as Education Secretary?

Jan Resseger looks at the possible treats we might get under McMahan's leadership.

Secretary Cardona Was a Huge Disappointment

If you read me, you probably already read Diane Ravitch regularly, but I don't want you to miss this one. A reminder of how much Joe Biden disappointed us in education, and the tale of how NPE dug up evidence of costly charter shenanigans, and the ed department just waved it on by.

Measure Once, Cut Twice...or Something

Andrew Ordover writes a thoughtful post about the nature of assessment and the ways we have been led into the weeds on the subject.

Is calculus an addiction that college admissions officers can’t shake?

At Hechinger Report, Jill Barshay looks at debate over calculus and the question of whether or not there's reason to cram it into high school senior's heads and/or transcripts.

Where Have All the Plumbers Gone (long time passing)?

John Merrow is a long-time top education reporter, now sort of retired. He addresses one of my favorite issues--the importance of blue-collar vocational training in a world that keeps telling students they must go to college.

An Open Letter to the Listeners

Writer, scholar and teacher Jose Luis Vilson writes about the power of listening. While you're going to look at this, you should be subscribing to his blog.

12 Years and 60 Minutes Later

Audrey Watters watched 60 Minutes fawn over Sal Khan, and she hasn't forgotten when they previously fawned over his predictions about changing the face of education-- twelve years ago. Not to mention all the crap in between.

How Assessment and Data are Used to Stigmatize Children as Failing

Nancy Bailey on some standardized assessments that collect data, label students, and generate income--but not much else of use.

Yule Time Education Policy News from the Volunteer State

Nobody does better at capturing the grit and detail of Tennessee education shenanigans than TC Weber, and the beauty of it is that even if you aren't in Tennessee, you can see and recognize the patterns of how these things work. Like, say, a school board that fails to hold its superintendent's feet to the heating grate, let alone the fire...

To the Victors Go the Spoils, Part III: School Vouchers

Nate Bowling continues a post-election series with a look at school vouchers, and what they mean to those who already have privilege.

Will The Real Wackadoodle Please Stand Up.

How messed up are you when even a Moms for Liberty chapter says you are in the wrong. In Florida, a Conservative School Board Association member got caught at the M4L summit talking smack about everyone in the district where she sits on the board. Sue Kingery Woltanski has the run down on Jessie Thompson.

Dubuque private school raises tuition by 58% after voucher expansion

Once again, the advent of vouchers is treated like a windfall by private schools who just jack up prices. Reported by Zachary Oren Smith for the Iowa Starting Line.

Behind the Curtain: The Boston Foundation Is Underwriting that “Science of Reading” Lawsuit

Maurice Cunningham does the work the Globe won't. Who's actually bankrolling that Science of Reading lawsuit.

Pedagogy of the Depressed

I did talk about this post from Benjamin Riley already this week, but it is too hilarious/sad to miss. A quick scan of some of the AI for education "training" out there.

The Pennsylvania Society is Decadent and Depraved

What do rich folks like Jeff Yass do in Pennsylvania to figure out how they're going to handle their lessers? Turns out there's a whole organization for that. Lance Haver reports for the Philadelphia Hall Monitor.

How Christian extremists are co-opting the book of Esther

Not strictly about education, but an interesting explication of one thread of far-right christinism that's on the march these days.

Don't Bite the Hand That Feeds You

Jess Piper looks at some of the myths on the left about rural Americans, and boy do I feel her. 

At Bucks County Beacon this week I added to the copious literature on the subject of What Trump Might Mean for Education.

At Forbes.com I wrote about Ohio's place in the march on cell phones.

I also wrote about the federal voucher bill and, frankly, am a bit concerned to see low readership numbers on the piece, not on my own account, but because this bill could turn out to be a major issue, and I'm afraid people aren't paying attention to just how bad it could be. 

If you are moving over to Bluesky, you can find me there at @palan57.bsky.social

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Stock Trading Naughtiness With Stride

You may have heard about Senator Markwayne Mullin lately because he's been a big ole MAGA cheerleader for unqualified cabinet nominee Pete Hegseth and indeed the whole misbegotten cabinet. 

But he's also in the news for some stock trading shenanigans, specifically shenanigans involving Strife (formerly K-12) the 800 pound gorilla of cyber-charter schooling. Mullin sits on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, so trading involving stock in an education firm smells a little fishy. 

Still, the whole scene is on brand for Stride, which was never so much about education as it is about profiteering. Stride's history isn't nearly as well known as it deserves to be; let me pick some details from my own coverage.

It was founded in 2000 by Ron Packard, former banker and Mckinsey consultant. One of its first big investors was Michal Milken. That investment came a decade after he pled guilty to six felonies in the “biggest fraud case in the securities industry” ending his reign as the “junk bond king.” Milken was sentenced to ten years, served two, and was barred from ever securities investment. In 1996, he had established Knowledge Universe, an organization he created with his brother Lowell and Larry Elison, who both kicked in money for K12.

K12 was frequently in the news for one shady deal after another. Packard was himself sued for misleading investors with overly positive public statements, and then selling 43% of his own K12 stock ahead of a bad news-fueled stock dip. Shortly thereafter, in 2014, he stepped down from leading K12. 

The New York Times had quoted Packard as calling lobbying a “core competency” of the company, and the company has spread plenty of money around doing just that. And despite all its troubles, Stride is still beloved on Wall Street for its ability to make money.

So maybe it's no surprise that a big (quiet) investor in Stride is the investment behemoth Blackrock. BlackRock is the largest money management company in the world, founded and led by Larry Fink. Larry's brother Steve is on the Stride board. Steve was also, starting in 1984, Michael Milken's next door neighbor and "trusted confidant." It was 1988 when Larry Fink started BlackRock under the umbrella of Steve Schwarzman’s Blackstone Group. In 2000, Steve Fink was heading up Nextera, part of Milken’s Knowledge Universe web. Additionally, according to a 2011 Seattle Times article, Milken graduated from the same public high school as Larry Fink.

In short, Stride has always been about getting investors a return for their money, and not so much about providing an actual education to students.

So in that setting, how unexpected can it be that a senator might decide to dip in for a little insider trading. This is all just part and parcel of unleashing market forced in a human service sector. Just another day with the invisible suggesting that folks grease its invisible palm.