FL: Schools of Hope and Charter Property Grab

Florida is implementing a whole new way for charter schools to hoover up taxpayer dollars.

Schools of Hope started out in 2017 (the bill originally called them "Schools of Success" but someone must have decided against overpromising). The idea was the ultimate in targeting struggling public schools; the idea is that when you find a school that is struggling, you don't give them additional resources or support, but instead pay some charter school to come into the neighborhood. 

The scheme was cooked up by then-House Speaker Richard Corcoran and then-Rep. Manny Diaz, two long-time opponents of public education in Florida. And they got some help-- according to Gary Fineout, an AP reporter who has covered many Florida crazy-pants education stories:

Rep. Michael Bileca, a Miami Republican and chairman of the House Education Committee, said legislators met with charter school operators and asked what it would take for them to set up schools in the neighborhoods now served by traditional public schools. He said one answer was that they needed help paying for new buildings to house the school.

Emphasis mine-- we'll come back to that. Cathy Boehme of the Florida Education Association pointed out the obvious:

You are saying funding matters. You're saying good strategies matter. And then you turn around and keep those strategies from schools that you could save from these turnaround options.

Yup. "We've found schools that need help," said the legislature. "Let's give that help to someone else!"

However, Schools of Hope did not take off. Florida was hoping to attract national charter chain action, but it turns out that national charter chains understand that in neighborhoods where public schools struggle, charter schools will also struggle (see also: sad story of Tennessee's Achievement School District). The League of Women Voters attributes the program's struggles to four factors:

• Facility costs remained prohibitive even with 25% loan caps and state subsidies  
• Building schools from scratch takes years of planning, approval, and construction 
• Local opposition emerged in some communities skeptical of outside operators 
• Easier markets existed elsewhere for charter operators seeking expansion

The legislature, more interested in nursing the charter industry than the public school system, tried modifying the law. They expanded the range of public schools that could trigger Schools of Hope, both in terms of school achievement and location. They threw more money at the program.

It still wasn't enough.

So this year, the Florida State Board of Education just went ahead and changed the rules. 

Remember that problem with getting new buildings up and running. Fixed! Colocation! Now districts must provide "underused, vacant, or surplus" facilities to SOH charters. No rent, no lease, no cost, and districts can't refuse. However, the district must provide building maintenance, custodial services, food service, and transportation. And as long as the facilities are "underused," the district has no say.

"Underused" is a big problem here. There's an administrative rule in the state code that defines "fully used" roughly as "no unused student seats," but that's not much help at all. Intermittent or irregular use? And there's a whole world of other programs that serve students in schools. As Education Matters in Manatee points out

[P]erhaps on an Excel spreadsheet (page 2 of 4 is shown below), a classroom housing six or seven students, one teacher, and several aides may appear to be “underutilized” - but it isn’t. It is in fact providing essential services to some of the most vulnerable citizens of our county.

Imagine you and some neighbors have a regular car pool to work. You share gas expenses, even pool money for a morning cup of coffee. Then one day another neighbor says, "I see you've got a spare seat in the car. I'm going to sit in it and you're going to drive me to work." The seat's not really empty, you reply-- most days we put the stuff we take to work there, and on Tuesdays we take Pat's mom to the doctor. "Don't care," says the neighbor. "You have to take me." Will you chip in for gas money? "No way," says the neighbor. "Also, you're going to buy me donuts and coffee every morning."

If this sounds like a sweet deal for charter operators, well, they agree. Dozens of charter operators have informed a public district that they want the district to fork over the space (WFTV9 pegs the number at 60, but that total appears to be a moving target-- Miami Times Online reports almost 700 "Give us your space" letters going out to school districts). 

And now that the rules have changed--Schools of Hope no longer target just low-performing schools, but any school with mysterious "underused" space-- many of the schools that are being targeted are A and B rated schools, which is swell for charters, because that's the market they want to tap anyway. Schools of Hope were launched with all sorts of florid grandstanding ("No longer will we rob children of dignity and hope. Now every single child will be afforded an opportunity of a world class education.," said Corcoran in 2017). Now charter operators can skip right past those challenging schools and head for the more profitable neighborhoods. Once again, school choice is really school's choice.

Sure enough, here comes Eva Moskowitz and Success Academy to cash in on Schools of Hope. Success has perfected the art of creaming families that will fit in-- none of this "every single child will be afforded an opportunity" baloney for Eva. Backed by $50 million from Citadel CEO Ken Griffin, she's looking to set up shop in Miami-Dade, a move that would have been expensive before the state figured out how to give her facility space (and food service and transportation) for free. In return she gets to pick and choose the most agreeable students from a market that didn't include any low-performing schools under the original definition. 

SOH present an assortment of problems on the ground--what, for instance, happens in a building where the public school staff and the charter school hours don't match up? Cafeteria time? Can schedules be worked out to manage students passing and mingling in the halls? 

And what the heck happens if the public school enrollment grows and they need some of the space back? The law doesn't appear to have any clue (perhaps because Florida legislators are focused on gutting public schools, not building them. 

A Success rep says this will be great for the public school because the co-located school will get increased state aid because of increased head count in the building. I wouldn't bet on it. Meanwhile, the charter gets to double dip-- the state hands over taxpayer dollars so that the charter can operate a school, but at the same time, the public school has to carry some of the costs of operating the charter school. 

And somehow, the party of small government is once again stomping on local control. The members of the community have no say, no voice, in whether or not the charter becomes a squatter in their public school building, and no say in how the charter operates inside that taxpayer-owned building.

What do they get? Hard to say. The results of Schools of Hope are, so far, not particularly amazing and in many cases have been outstripped by public schools that work with the same demographics. SOH charters are not subject to the same sorts of penalties for low performance that public schools suffer. No School of Hope operators have lost their designation because of their low academic performance. But beyond that, much is mysterious because Florida does not collect information about students at SOH charters-- not which groups are represented nor which attendance zones they came from. You would think that a program supposedly aimed at rescuing poor high-risk students would collect data about whether or not those students were being rescued, but no. 

If you're in Florida and want more information, I recommend the website schoolsofnope.org  and the recent report from the League of Women Voters. If you aren't in Florida, watch for this manner of picking taxpayer pockets in your state. 

It's Not About Freedom

You may have seen this meme floating about--

It's a pretty thought, but here's the problem. A bunch of people are going to look at this and think, "Well, I can already put my kids through college without debt, always have access to good health care, and get sick without going broke." These are the same folks who can always have access to good schools for their children, who never worry about affording food or shelter. If being free from fear is freedom, these folks feel pretty free already.

So their question is not, "How can we all be free like the Norwegians," but instead, "Why should I have to pay so that Those People can enjoy my kind of freedom? I deserve it, but what have they done to deserve the kind of power and privilege to which I am so rightly entitled?"

Taxpayer-funded school choice vouchers are not about empowering parents or unleashing parental rights. States have created laws that prioritize a private school's ability to charge what they wish, teach what they wish, exclude who they wish over any family's "right" to choose. "School choice" advocates have taken none of the steps needed to create an actual school choice system. 

Vouchers are about getting the government out of the education business and, by doing so, also get government out of the work of equity. Vouchers are about telling every family, "Your kid's education is now your problem, and nobody else's. Society has washed its hands of you. Good luck."

You can see the same philosophy in action in Trump's health care "plan"-- give the money to the consumers instead of the insurance companies and let the people go find their own health care with "health care savings accounts." It took him a whole decade to come up with what is essentially a school voucher plan for health care. Will your health care voucher be enough to get you the health care you needs, and couldn't you get more buying power by pooling your resources with others? Doesn't matter, because as RFK Jr repeatedly suggests that if you live right, you won't need health care that you can't afford (and if you end up dying, you deserved that, too-- hooray eugenics). 

Social safety net? Unnecessary. Just make good choices. If you do need help, get it from a church (which may not be equipped to help everyone, but may be well equipped to judge who deserves help and who does not).

The idea simmering under school choice and now bubbling up all around us is simple-- Why should I have to help take care of other people (particularly people of whom I disapprove, people who are not like me)? 

"Freedom" is a pretty word for dressing policies of abandonment. It gets traction because there is such a thing as levels of bureaucracy that can bind us in frustrating ways. But pretending that "freedom" is living life without any help or support but your own is myopic. "I saw that the car had spun off the road and slammed into a tree and I didn't want to take away the passenger's freedom to save themselves."

The freedom being advocated for is "freedom for me" or "freedom for those who deserve it." Or maybe "freedom from worrying about anyone else." It's the freedom that comes in a society that assumes that some people matter more than others, that all humans are not, in fact, created equal. We can do better than that. 

CBS Covers Florida Charter Schools

Well, look at that! Someone in the mainstream media noticed some of the very things about how charter schools operate that some of us have been talking about for over a decade. Charter school owners hire their own companies to make bank from taxpayer dollars??!! I am shocked! Shocked!!

Watch this segment, which includes Bruce Baker, one of the Institute's favorite school funding experts. Plus a look at Erika Donalds, Florida's leading school choice grifter. 

NH: Less Transparency for Vouchers

Turns out the New Hampshire taxpayer-funded voucher program would rather that people not be able to see details of how their money is spent. So much for transparency.

Last April, when the legislature was hearing testimony about its proposed plan to make New Hampshire's taxpayer funded vouchers open to any and all comers, Patty Long, a Peterborough resident who opposed the bill, testified that she had actually called one of the vendors listed on the state report. Were people really getting $750 piano lessons? Nope. They were buying pianos.

This year, the Concord Monitor published a five part series looking at how the money for the state's vouchers were spent (New Hampshire calls them Education Freedom Accounts). Their reporter, Jeremy Margolis, dug through the then-transparent database to find that, for instance, 90% of the taxpayer dollars used for tuition went to private religious schools, and that a quarter of all the taxpayer-funded tuition dollars went to just five schools. In 2022-23, families spent $520,000 – or about one-seventh of all money that did not go to private schools – on extra-curriculars-- $46,000 at area ski mountains, $35,000 at martial arts schools, and $16,000 at equestrian facilities. They took a fascinating look at how the vouchers touched off a firestorm of debate in the homeschooling community, and broke down competing estimates of the full cost of universal taxpayer-funded vouchers (the last two didn't involve the database, but they are still great reportage).

But if Margolis tried to do that same reportage now, he'd be stumped. Because Kate Baker Demers, the executive director of the Children’s Scholarship Fund, decided to hide a bunch of the information about what money was being spent on which vendors. CSF is the business that manages the voucher money for the state (because for voucher programs you need an extra bureaucratic layer to allow you to pretend that it's legal to spend taxpayer dollars to fund private religious schools). 

Baker Demers explained to Margolis:

“We learned that some individuals may have been misusing these reports to contact or harass small providers, or to question them about students and their activities,” Baker Demers said. “If true, this behavior is deeply concerning and could even be viewed as a form of stalking.”

This is baloney on a couple of levels. First, the state already has a full list of eligible vendors where voucher families can spend their pile of taxpayer dollars, so in terms of saving participating providers from being revealed, this does nothing. Anyone with a desire education service providers (because that's certainly a real thing) can still get all the information they need to stalk away. At the same time, voucher users who want to see basic market info about which vendors are popular are now denied that information. 

Second, what it does is prevent taxpayers from seeing where the money they paid is being spent. "You are not allowed to see where your tax dollars went," would not be tolerated coming from, say, actual public schools, and it should not be tolerated here.

This turns out to be one of the attendant problems of voucher systems. Most are built with barely any safeguards in place to insure that taxpayer education dollars are well spent, and so when word starts to get out about where those dollars are going, the voucher crowd gets embarrassed and/or cranky (see Arizona for extensive examples). 

CSF has no business telling taxpayers and the press that they can't know where the money is going. A voucher program that depends on operating with little or no transparency is waving a big fat red flag about financial shenanigans and legislative irresponsibility, and the people who aren't going to be bothered include the ones who believe the taxpayer-funded voucher system is working exactly as they want it to. 

Trump Is Not Sending Education Back To The States

The continued dismantling of the federal Department of Education is both a con and a lie, one more piece of a quilt of patchwork policies all built around a simple idea-- some people are better than others, and the uppity lessers really ought to learn their place. And the rhetoric being used to sell the dismantling is a lie.

The over-simplified version of the department's origin comes in two parts. First, Congress created some major funding streams meant to level the playing field for students and families, and with those funding streams, some civil rights laws to make sure states leveled their own playing fields for schooling and education. Second, Jimmy Carter, who had promised a cabinet-level ed department (and who wanted to be re-elected) proposed the department as a way to collect, organize, and administer the various policies.

The department's job was never supposed to be to determine what an excellent education should be. It was supposed to make sure that whatever a good education was presumed to be in your state, everybody got one. So even if a child was presumed to be a poor Lesser, a future meat widget, a child whose special needs made them harder to educate-- no matter what, the district and state were supposed to have the resources to meet the challenge. The quality of a child's education was not supposed to depend on their zip code. 

This does not fit well with the current regime's conception of civil rights, a conception rooted in the notion that the only oppressed group in this country is white guys, or their conception of democracy, a conception rooted in the notion that some people really are better than others and therefor deserve more power and privilege. (Nor does the regime love the idea of loaning people money for college and not collecting it).

So they've undone the second step of the department's creation, and parceled out a bunch of programs to other departments, a move that philosophically advances the idea that education has no point or purpose in and of itself, but exists only to serve other interests.

For example, as Jennifer Berkshire points out, now that the Department of Labor exists to serve the interests of bosses, its interest in education centers on producing more compliant meat widgets to serve boss's interests. Meanwhile, the ed programs now farmed over to the Department of Health and Human Services can be reorganized around RFK Jr.'s interest in eugenics and identifying those lessers whose proper place in society is, apparently, on a slab. 

That unbundling of education programs from the department only undoes the second phase of the department's origin. But Secretary Linda McMahon's assertion that these interagency agreement will "cut through layers of red tape" or "return education to the states" is thinly sliced baloney. It's a lie.

"Instead of dealing with this government department, you will deal with this other government department" does not even remotely equal "You will now have less red tape." In fact, given that you may have to track down the correct department and then deal with people who don't have actual expertise and knowledge in education may spell even more red tape.

"We moved this from one government department to another government department" is definitely not the same as "we sent this back to the states." 

Some programs may be sent back to the states in the sense that the feds would like to zero out the budget entirely which means the states that want to continue those programs will have to create and fund the programns on their own. If you tell your kids, "I'm not making you supper tonight," I guess that's kind of like saying "I'm sending the supper program to you."

But the big ticket items, like IDEA and Title I will still be operating out of DC until such day as Congress decides to rewrite them. And given Dear Leader's shrinking political capitol, I'm not sure that gutting IDEA is high on his To Do list right now. 

Matt Barnum suggests that gutting the department is largely symbolic and that actual schools won't feel that much of a difference. On the one hand, that's true-ish. "What is less clear," Barnum writes, "is the Trump administration’s longer-term ambitions." I'm not sure that's all that mysterious. The far right's goal, often in tandem with the modernn ed reform movement, is to get government entirely out of the education business while turning education into a get-it-yourself commodity. If government is involved in education at all, it would be 1) to provide a school-shaped holding tank for the difficult students that private schools don't want and 2) to provide taxpayer funding for schools that deliver the "correct" ideological indoctrination. 

The parcelling-out of the department may only be a small step in that direction, but its long-seething right wing critics can see it as a means of shushing those annoying voices that keep bringing up rules and civil rights and stuff.

The best hope at this point is for a chance to build a new version of the department under a new administration (in an imaginary world in which the Democrats don't face plant in 2028). But one of the worst things about the department has been the irresistable urge to use those massive grants to force DC-based education ideas on states, and this attack on the department doesn't really address that problem at all. 

What this latest move clearly does not do is send education back to the states, which is, acfter all, where education esponsibility already rested. The regime may be rtying to hamstring and privatize education, but they aren't sending it anywhere. It's an unserious lie from unserious people. Stay tuned. 

ICYMI: Pops Concert Version (11/30)

I play in a 169-year-old town band, and the day after Thanksgiving we present one of our biggest concerts of the year. It's a huge treat for us and audiences seem to enjoy it as well. It is how I wrap up the Thanksgiving holiday, though we get an extra-long weekend because here in NW PA, tomorrow is a day off from school because it's the first day of deer season. Hope your celebrations, whatever form they may take, have been pleasant as well.

Here's your reading list for the week.

Why ChatGPT for Teachers Might Make Things Worse

ChatGPT has a teacher version now, and it stinks, Carl Hendrick points out some of the more egregious flaws (beyond, you know, using a bot to do your job).

The Quiet Collapse of Information Access

The AI School Librarian blog takes a look at some issues around access to information. Kind of scary stuff here.

EdTech companies are lobbying their way into your kids' classroom. Who's vetting them?

Well, you already know the answer, but Lily Altavena at the Detroit Free Press looks at the details.

What the Success Academy Scandal Says About the Charter School Model

Yes, there was a scandal, again, as Eva Moskowitz was caught, again, requiring her staff and students to be taxpayer-paid lobbyists for her charter chain. Ismael Loera at The Fulcrum connects the dots to the bigger picture.

Gratitude and Canned Goods—Teaching Children to Care

Nancy Flanagan considers one of those holiday traditions-- trying to get students to care about other folks and then do something about it.

The Elimination of the Professional Status of America’s Helpers!

Nancy Bailey looks at the details of the latest Trumpian kneecapping of teachers and other helping professions. Who was deprofessionalized, and what will that mean?

What to Know About Trump’s Definition of Professional Degrees

Another take on the same issue, from Jessica Blake at Inside Higher Ed. The whole thing may be a little more complicated than your social media threads make it out to be.

New Plan to Decimate U.S. Dept. of Ed. Exposes Trump Administration’s Deficient Educational Vision

Jan Resseger provides an excellent collection of reactions to and comments on the Trump plan to gut the Department of Education

The Education Department’s Forgotten Antiracist Origins

This New York Times essay from Anthony Conwright explains the history behind what the Department of Education was for in the first place. 

Teachers are outing trans students thanks to state’s new “Don’t Say Gay” law

Here's how Texas's Don't Say Gay law works out on the ground, with trans students outed and deadnamed. Greg Owen at LGBTQ Nation reports, and it's not pretty.

Souderton residents say school board’s Thanksgiving Eve appointment is a ‘lame-duck power grab’

Many conservative school board majorities were canned in the last election, but some aren't going to let a little thing like the will of the voters stand in their way.

Colleges Are Preparing to Self-Lobotomize

"After three years of doing essentially nothing to address the rise of generative AI, colleges are now scrambling to do too much." Michael Clune explains the trouble in the Atlantic.

Relationships First: A Skeptic’s Look at AI in Schools

Sue Kingery Woltanski is the skeptic, and this post offers some practical resources and questions to consider.

On artificial time

Chatbots can't wait, because they can't quite detect the passage of time. Ben Riley with more useful tech insights.

The Radical Power of Gratitude to Rewire Your Brain and Life

Thom Hartmann on research that suggests gratitude is actually good for you. 

From blast!, the who that demonstrates just how much you can do using a marching band as your building blocks.

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Warding Off Classroom AI

There's a lot out there from folks trying and suggesting and selling ways for teachers to put their fingers in the dike holding back the allegedly inevitable AI tide. 

But I think playing AI whack-a-mole with computerized detector bots and policies designed for the express purpose of curbing chatbot cheating are not the way to go. Simply forbidding it is as effective as was the banning of Cliff Notes or Wikipedia. Numerous bots claim they can catch other bots in action; I am unconvinced and too many students have been unfairly and incorrectly accused. Trying to chase the chatbots away is simply not going to work. More than that, it is not going to help students grasp an education.

Cheating has always had its roots in a few simple factors. Students believe that success in class will be either too hard or too time-consuming for them. Students believe the stakes are too high to take a chance on failure. And students do not have a sense of the actual point of education.

I usually explain The Point like this-- education is the work of helping young humans figure out how to be more fully their best selves while working out what it means to be fully human in the world. That's a big soup with a lot of ingredients (some academic and some not), and the required ingredients vary from person to person. 

Because it's human.

As I've now said many times, AI most easily rushes into places where humanity has already been hollowed out. And unfortunately, too often that includes certain classrooms.

We've had chances to work on this before. Nancy Flanagan (and many others) tried hard to bring some attention to using the pandemic to reset schools into something better than either tradition or reform had created. But everyone (especially those in the testing industry) wanted to get back to "normal," and so we passed up that opportunity to reconfigure education. And so now here we are, facing yet another "threat" that is only threatening because we have created a system that is exceptionally vulnerable to AI.

Modern ed reform, with its test-centric data-driven outcome-based approach has pushed us even further toward classrooms that are product-centered rather than human-centered. But if class is all about the product, then AI can produce those artifacts far faster and more easily than human students. 

Carlo Rotella, an English professor at Boston College, published a New York Times piece that argues for more humantity in the humanities. He writes:

An A.I.-resistant English course has three main elements: pen-and-paper and oral testing; teaching the process of writing rather than just assigning papers; and greater emphasis on what happens in the classroom. Such a course, which can’t be A.I.-proof because that would mean students do no writing or reading except under a teacher’s direct supervision, also obliges us to make the case to students that it’s in their self-interest to do their own work.

Yup. Those the same things that I used to make my high school English class cheat-resistant for decades. Writing in particular needs to be portrayed as a basic human activity a fundamental function with lifetime utility. 

In education, it's important to understand your foundational purpose. It is so easy in the classroom to get bogged down in the daily millions of nuts and bolts decisions about what exactly to do-- which worksheet, what assignment, how to score the essay, which questions to ask, how to divide up the 43 instructional minutes today. Planning the details of a unit is hard--but it gets much easier if you know why you are teaching the unit in the first place. What's the point? I hate to quote what can be empty admin-speak, but knowing your why really does help you figure out your what and how.

If you have your purpose and your values in place, then you can assess every possible pedagogical choice based on how it serves that central purpose. The same thing is true of AI. If you know what purposes you intend to accomplish, you are prepared to judge what AI can or cannot contribute to that purpose. And if your purpose is to help young humans grow into their own humanity, then the utility of this week's hot AI tool can be judged.

Ed tech has always been introduced to classrooms ass-backwards-- "Here's a piece of tech I want you to use, somehow, so go figure out how you can work it in" instead of "Think about the education problems you are trying to solve and let me know if you think this piece of tech would help with any of them." 

But I digress. The key to an AI-resistant classroom is not a batch of preventative rules. The answer is to create a classroom with such a thoroughly human context, values, and purpose that AI is required to either provide something useful for that context, or is left out because it doesn't serve a useful purpose. The big bonus has nothing to do with AI, and everything to do with a more deliberately human approach to educating young human beings.