It is possible that the Gates folks just don't know the meaning of the word "support."
At Impatient Optimists, the Gates Foundation blog, well-traveled reformster Vicki Phillips starts out with a new twist on a classic teacher narrative trope.
Of all the teachers I had growing up, I think about Miss Marjorie the most. She was the hardcore head teacher of McQuady Elementary, the poor grade school near where I grew up in Falls of Rough, Kentucky. Miss Marjorie taught me hard work, how to treat my peers, how to respect my elders and how to hold myself accountable.
But it turns out that Miss Marjorie sucked. When Phillips got to college, she "wasn't ready." Which is why Phillips flunked out of college and failed to ever get a job. Ha! Not really. Vicki Phillips has two college degrees, spent time in a classroom, was a superintendent, and rose through various edu-supervisory positions to now act as the edu-mouthpiece for one of the richest men in the world. Damn that Miss Marjorie and the life of abject failure she condemned Vicki Phillips to.
What Miss Marjorie needed was "support." She "didn't have the tools." She wasn't "supported with high standards or insightful teacher evaluations or professional development to improve her practice."
By using our context clues and doing some close reading, we can quickly conclude that as used by Phillips, "supported" means "fixed."
This is one of the premises of the Gates Approach To Education-- teachers do not know what they're doing, and they'll never figure it out until someone 'splains it to them. And let's combine this with another Gates premise-- the definition of a Good Teacher is "one whose students get better scores on the Big Standardized Test."
The poor, dumb loser, Miss Marjorie-- she probably thought that she was teaching Little Vicki the life skills she needed to succeed in life and to become a life-long learner so that she could keep learning what she needed to know. What a dope. She should have been teaching Little Vicki how to better filter out the distractors in a multiple-choice question.
Gates has latched onto one idea-- "teacher evaluation and teacher development are the same thing." It's an arguable notion, but focusing on it causes the Gates to miss a crucial factor. The Gates Foundation has no idea what good teaching looks like, has no idea how to do meaningful evaluation, and has no clue how to promote teacher development. This is primarily because the Gates Foundation steadfastly refuses to consult, listen to, talk with, or otherwise involve itself with actual teachers.
See, "support" generally means you don't get to drive the bus. Support means that you help people achieve goals that they set for themselves and pursue on their own. If I tell my spouse exactly how she's going to make a meal and exactly how she's going to eat it and where and when and correct her repeatedly when she's doing it in a way I consider "wrong," that's not support. That's badgering and bossing. A support crew at a racetrack does not drive the car; they just help keep the car working.
You might get excited to hear that your corner of the world is going to get "support" from the Gates, because that often looks like a giant pile of money, but even there they are confused. Say what you like about Rockefeller and Carnegie (and you can rightly say many bad things), but when they decided to support a cause like universal libraries or black universities, they handed money to people who knew what they were doing, and they left them largely alone. When you get a Gates Foundation pile of money, you often get a Gates Foundation contact person, who basically stays with the money and makes sure that it is used the way Gates wants it to be used. This is not support-- this is just hiring someone to do a job and then micromanaging them.
Standing over my mechanic and giving him instructions while he fixes my carburetor? I'm just supporting him. Telling my spouse exactly what to wear and then dressing them so that they get it just right? That's just support. Hiring a surgeon to rotate my spleen and insisting that I be awake to guide him through the surgery? That's just support.
I wonder if Gates doesn't conflate two ideas. On the one hand, giving folks money is a form of support. But on the other hand, guys who run a giant corporation might get the idea that anything they spend money on is a thing they have controlling interest in.
But the disconnect between the Gates and the World O' Teachers remains the same-- Gates is just one more amateur who doesn't really understand how schools and classrooms and teaching work, but who thinks he's an expert because he was in school when he was a kid. The only difference between Gates and your know-it-all brother-in-law or the guy you run into at the Piggly Wiggly is that Gates has a giant mountain of money, and when he stands on top of it, he looks taller and bigger and more wise than he really is.
If you want to support someone, including teachers, the very first step is to ask, "What is it that you want to do?" The very first step is NOT to say, "Let me tell you what you're supposed to be doing."
If Phillips and the folks at the Gates want to say, "Teaching is messed up and teachers are broken and we have a theory about how to fix them," then say it and make your case. But the intellectual PR-massaging dishonesty of calling your desire to criticize and control, to make the teaching profession bend to your idea of what it should be-- calling that "support" is rank, transparent dishonesty. It signals, among other things, that you aren't really talking to teachers, who are in a position to know that they are being showered with something other than rain, but to bystanders, parents, taxpayers to convince them that you are Doing a Swell Thing. This is not just the language of someone who beats a child and says, "I'm doing this for your own good," but the language of a mugger telling a passerby, "I'm just helping the guy out."
Thursday, October 22, 2015
Wednesday, October 21, 2015
Can edTPA Be Gamed?
Over at EdWeek, Steven Sawchuk is asking the musical question, "Are New Teacher Tests Vulnerable to Cheating?" I look forward to other tough-to-answer EdWeek articles like "Will the sun rise in the east tomorrow?" and "Does the Pope avoid bears in the woods?"
The answer is, "Of course." edTPA (the "new teacher test" in question) is one more demonstration of the Law of Bad Assessment-- the more inauthentic the assessment and the more removed from what is actually being assessed, the easier it is to cheat.
edTPA does not assess an aspiring teacher's teaching skills. It assesses their skills in filling out the paperwork involved in edTPA. It assesses their ability to cough up a bunch of money to pay for the edTPA process. It assesses their ability to jump through the edTPA hoops in the exact manner preferred by the edTPA assessors.
All of these tasks are far removed from actually teaching a class. They are inauthentic measures of teaching skill, aptitude and knowledge, and they are all enormously gameable, and it was utterly and completely predictable, given the high stakes involved (will you get to be a teacher, or have you just wasted four years of your life and a buttload of money), that some business would emerge to help with that gaming.
Meet edTPA Tutoring.
We can help you in any way you need to complete and pass your edTPA. We are a small company with dedicated tutors ready to work with you individually and confidentially to help you pass the edTPA. We have been in business for three years and we have a 100% success rate.
The confidentiality part is particularly tasty. There's also a part about how "the Client will handle all video cutting as requested by the Consultant." In other words, these guys will help you edit your video for best effect.
The cost? $49.00 an hour, which is pretty manageable given how much is riding on your edTPA hoop-jumping festival.
Blogger and retired teacher Fred Klonsky has had many conversations and taken much flak for his comments about edTPA as it has sunk its fangs into Illinois, but he's been right all along.
edTPA is a crock and a swindle. I haven't studied it extensively; I don't need to because what I know is enough to indict it.
edTPA is the privatization of the profession. New teachers should be evaluated and certified by other teachers. Period. The system we have, where the gateway to the profession is guarded by state-level bureaucrats, is also a crock. But edTPA is worse, because on top of bureaucratic baloney, we have Pearson using the process to generate revenue, which means making sure they evaluate new teachers fairly and accurately is not their primary concern. The entry to the teaching profession should not be in the hands of a private corporation. I'm a reasonable man, but I can't imagine anything you can say that would convince me otherwise.
edTPA is ass-backwards. The correct way to evaluate teacher performance is to go watch the teacher work. As the supervisory body, it's your job to go find out how well the proto-teacher does the job. It is backwards to say that it's the proto-teacher's job to find a way to prove herself to you. It's an extension of what I say about assessing students. And that's because
edTPA is inauthentic assessment. Again-- there is only one way to find out if somebody can cut it as a teacher, and that is to go sit in their classroom and watch them work. Period. Seriously. I don't know why we even have to argue about this. If you want to hire a cakemaker for your wedding, you go taste their work. You don't have them fill out some complex forms and take pictures of the tools in their kitchen and mail the whole thing to somebody far away who isn't even going to be at the wedding.
edTPA is highly cheatable. The hallmark of inauthentic assessment is that it's easy to cheat, because you don't have to be good at what you're allegedly being judged for-- you just have to be good at the assessment task which, because it's inauthentic, consists of faking proxies for the real deal anyway. What it really measures is the proxy-faking skills.
There is one respect in which edTPA is an authentic task for our day and age in teaching. It confronts the proto-teacher with a basic ethical conundrum-- is it okay to cheat a bogus task in order to win the chance to do some actual teaching. As it turns out, this is a problem that most teachers in the age of Common Core and Big Standardized Tests face-- do we cheat our way around a bogus, pointless, anti-education obstacle in order to do some actual educating.
If someone is holding your career hostage, is it ethical to get past the hostage taker by any means possible?
Because, unfortunately, the Law of Bad Assessment has a corollary-- just as inauthentic assessment can be cheated by faking the required inauthentic tasks, it cannot be satisfied by the use of authentic skills. Being a really good proto-teacher with promise won't necessarily help you succeed with the edTPA process. Or to look at it another way-- not only is it easier to cheat to succeed, but it may be necessary to cheat. So what is cheating, exactly?
Congratulations, young proto-teacher, and welcome to the modern, ethically murky world of teaching.
The answer is, "Of course." edTPA (the "new teacher test" in question) is one more demonstration of the Law of Bad Assessment-- the more inauthentic the assessment and the more removed from what is actually being assessed, the easier it is to cheat.
edTPA does not assess an aspiring teacher's teaching skills. It assesses their skills in filling out the paperwork involved in edTPA. It assesses their ability to cough up a bunch of money to pay for the edTPA process. It assesses their ability to jump through the edTPA hoops in the exact manner preferred by the edTPA assessors.
All of these tasks are far removed from actually teaching a class. They are inauthentic measures of teaching skill, aptitude and knowledge, and they are all enormously gameable, and it was utterly and completely predictable, given the high stakes involved (will you get to be a teacher, or have you just wasted four years of your life and a buttload of money), that some business would emerge to help with that gaming.
Meet edTPA Tutoring.
We can help you in any way you need to complete and pass your edTPA. We are a small company with dedicated tutors ready to work with you individually and confidentially to help you pass the edTPA. We have been in business for three years and we have a 100% success rate.
The confidentiality part is particularly tasty. There's also a part about how "the Client will handle all video cutting as requested by the Consultant." In other words, these guys will help you edit your video for best effect.
The cost? $49.00 an hour, which is pretty manageable given how much is riding on your edTPA hoop-jumping festival.
Blogger and retired teacher Fred Klonsky has had many conversations and taken much flak for his comments about edTPA as it has sunk its fangs into Illinois, but he's been right all along.
edTPA is a crock and a swindle. I haven't studied it extensively; I don't need to because what I know is enough to indict it.
edTPA is the privatization of the profession. New teachers should be evaluated and certified by other teachers. Period. The system we have, where the gateway to the profession is guarded by state-level bureaucrats, is also a crock. But edTPA is worse, because on top of bureaucratic baloney, we have Pearson using the process to generate revenue, which means making sure they evaluate new teachers fairly and accurately is not their primary concern. The entry to the teaching profession should not be in the hands of a private corporation. I'm a reasonable man, but I can't imagine anything you can say that would convince me otherwise.
edTPA is ass-backwards. The correct way to evaluate teacher performance is to go watch the teacher work. As the supervisory body, it's your job to go find out how well the proto-teacher does the job. It is backwards to say that it's the proto-teacher's job to find a way to prove herself to you. It's an extension of what I say about assessing students. And that's because
edTPA is inauthentic assessment. Again-- there is only one way to find out if somebody can cut it as a teacher, and that is to go sit in their classroom and watch them work. Period. Seriously. I don't know why we even have to argue about this. If you want to hire a cakemaker for your wedding, you go taste their work. You don't have them fill out some complex forms and take pictures of the tools in their kitchen and mail the whole thing to somebody far away who isn't even going to be at the wedding.
edTPA is highly cheatable. The hallmark of inauthentic assessment is that it's easy to cheat, because you don't have to be good at what you're allegedly being judged for-- you just have to be good at the assessment task which, because it's inauthentic, consists of faking proxies for the real deal anyway. What it really measures is the proxy-faking skills.
There is one respect in which edTPA is an authentic task for our day and age in teaching. It confronts the proto-teacher with a basic ethical conundrum-- is it okay to cheat a bogus task in order to win the chance to do some actual teaching. As it turns out, this is a problem that most teachers in the age of Common Core and Big Standardized Tests face-- do we cheat our way around a bogus, pointless, anti-education obstacle in order to do some actual educating.
If someone is holding your career hostage, is it ethical to get past the hostage taker by any means possible?
Because, unfortunately, the Law of Bad Assessment has a corollary-- just as inauthentic assessment can be cheated by faking the required inauthentic tasks, it cannot be satisfied by the use of authentic skills. Being a really good proto-teacher with promise won't necessarily help you succeed with the edTPA process. Or to look at it another way-- not only is it easier to cheat to succeed, but it may be necessary to cheat. So what is cheating, exactly?
Congratulations, young proto-teacher, and welcome to the modern, ethically murky world of teaching.
PA: Opt Out Bill Proposed
PA House Bill 1634 is as short as it is sweet. It adds the following language to the section of PA law that require the Keystone exams (our own version of the Big Standardized Test).
(b) Notwithstanding any other provision of law to the contrary, no child may be required to take a Keystone Exam if the parent or guardian of the child notifies in writing the superintendent or chief administrator that the parent or guardian wishes for the child not to take the Keystone Exam.
(c) No student may be penalized by a school district, the State Board of Education or the Commonwealth for failing to take a Keystone Exam if the parent or guardian of the child has provided notice under subsection (b).
(d) No student may be required to take a Keystone Exam as a condition for high school graduation.
Currently, Pennsylvania families can opt out of testing only for religious reasons. The state cannot ask you what your religious reasons are, and so the effect is that PA parents can opt out any time they want to. But this makes the opt-out less equivocal, and it reduces parents' need to stand up for their principles by lying about their principles (The test makes me want to holler "God damn it" so, it's kind of a religious objection).
Most important is d), a can that the state has nudged down the road a bit, but which is still definitely in our future. That, combined with our growing insistence that students with special needs take an unmodified Keystone, promises a diploma-denying catastrophe down the road. And of course the use of BS Tests as a grad requirement insures that the lowest functioning students will be denied any education except an endless volley of test prep. Making BS Tests a grad requirement guarantees that for the most vulnerable students, school will no longer be about preparing them for life as fully-function full-grown. For them, school will be the place you go to get prepared to take a single test.
Now that you're excited, let me point out that A) this is a bill in the PA House of Representatives, which like most Houses of Representatives, floats DOA legislative ideas every day, and twice on Sunday and B) it has currently been sent to the Education Committee, a black hole from which it may never return.
Still, it has been written, and it is out there, and if enough people made a fuss to their representatives, maybe it will make a difference.
Opt Out PA has kindly provided the contact information for all the members of the education committee, and here is a handy email address block that you can copy and paste into an email to these folks:
So step on up and get your two cents in. Encourage the PA legislature to do their part to lessen the impact of these tests on public education and to give parents a vital tool in making their voices heard. As always, one of the most damaging parts of the reform movement is the silencing of parent and community voices. A bill that lets parents speak up about testing abuse and frees students and schools from an unhealthy focus on a single big (not very good) test for graduation-- that's a good bill.
Make some noise.
(b) Notwithstanding any other provision of law to the contrary, no child may be required to take a Keystone Exam if the parent or guardian of the child notifies in writing the superintendent or chief administrator that the parent or guardian wishes for the child not to take the Keystone Exam.
(c) No student may be penalized by a school district, the State Board of Education or the Commonwealth for failing to take a Keystone Exam if the parent or guardian of the child has provided notice under subsection (b).
(d) No student may be required to take a Keystone Exam as a condition for high school graduation.
Currently, Pennsylvania families can opt out of testing only for religious reasons. The state cannot ask you what your religious reasons are, and so the effect is that PA parents can opt out any time they want to. But this makes the opt-out less equivocal, and it reduces parents' need to stand up for their principles by lying about their principles (The test makes me want to holler "God damn it" so, it's kind of a religious objection).
Most important is d), a can that the state has nudged down the road a bit, but which is still definitely in our future. That, combined with our growing insistence that students with special needs take an unmodified Keystone, promises a diploma-denying catastrophe down the road. And of course the use of BS Tests as a grad requirement insures that the lowest functioning students will be denied any education except an endless volley of test prep. Making BS Tests a grad requirement guarantees that for the most vulnerable students, school will no longer be about preparing them for life as fully-function full-grown. For them, school will be the place you go to get prepared to take a single test.
Now that you're excited, let me point out that A) this is a bill in the PA House of Representatives, which like most Houses of Representatives, floats DOA legislative ideas every day, and twice on Sunday and B) it has currently been sent to the Education Committee, a black hole from which it may never return.
Still, it has been written, and it is out there, and if enough people made a fuss to their representatives, maybe it will make a difference.
Opt Out PA has kindly provided the contact information for all the members of the education committee, and here is a handy email address block that you can copy and paste into an email to these folks:
ssaylor@pahousegop.com, jroebuck@pahouse.net, rbrown@pahousegop.com, jchristi@pahousegop.com, henglish@pahousegop.com, mgillen@pahousegop.com, sgrove@pahousegop.com, khill@pahousegop.com, HLewis@pahousegop.com, boneill@pahousegop.com, tquigley@pahousegop.com, klrapp@pahousegop.com, Mreese@pahousegop.com, CStaats@pahousegop.com, wtallman@pahousegop.com, mtobash@pahousegop.com, dtruitt@pahousegop.com, mcarroll@pahouse.net, sconklin@pahouse.net, pharkins@pahouse.net, RepKim@pahouse.net, mlongiet@pahouse.net, dmiller@pahouse.net, gmullery@pahouse.net, mobrien@pahouse.net, ssantars@pahouse.net, schreiber@pahouse.net
So step on up and get your two cents in. Encourage the PA legislature to do their part to lessen the impact of these tests on public education and to give parents a vital tool in making their voices heard. As always, one of the most damaging parts of the reform movement is the silencing of parent and community voices. A bill that lets parents speak up about testing abuse and frees students and schools from an unhealthy focus on a single big (not very good) test for graduation-- that's a good bill.
Make some noise.
Tuesday, October 20, 2015
Eva Moskowitz Has Big Brass Balls
Eva Moskowitz, head of New York's Success Academy chain of charter schools, might just have the biggest, brassest balls in the business. Let's look at the record.
She has fought for and won the idea of co-location, that charming arrangement where charter operators get to take over a public school a few floors at a time. What better way to force the public system to foot all the bills for your private enterprise?
She claims that her charter chain is a public school-- except when the state wants to audit her, in which case she's willing to go to court to assert that her academies are not public schools at all.
When the mayor of New York City wasn't going to give Moskowitz her way on opening more charters, she simply went over his head to the state legislature and governor (who has reaped at least $400,000 in contributions from Moskowitz's backers).
She has routinely closed her schools in order to use staff, students, and their families as prop for pro-charter rallies in the state capital, giving her staff specific instructions on how to "handle" parents.
She pays herself a salary of $475,000, more than double the actual head of the entire New York City public system-- or the mayor himself.
And now, Eva Moskowitz would like an apology.
Well, demands an apology would be more to the point. She wants Judy Woodruff and PBS to take back the mean things that John Merrow said about them in his piece about Success Academy.
I hesitate to link to the letter because it includes what I would have to assume is confidential student information. The problem is familiar to everyone who works in a school-- the school is accused of one misbehavior or another by an dissatisfied student, and the school cannot defend itself publicly because that student's records are confidential.
But Moskowitz gets around that problem by simply ignoring the confidentiality of the student, and smearing the child's name by listing his many alleged offenses (she calls him John Doe, but all you have to do is look at Merrow's piece to get the name). She even includes what is presented as the teacher's write-up of some of the incidents. Here's a link to an excerpt from the letter; you can follow through to the whole text if you wish.
And here's the thing about the teacher write-up. It doesn't really make the school look any better. The child is upset because he didn't do well on the regular test, and then resisted taking his "mandatory cool down,' but instead climbed under the desk and was crying and shaking. I've been in public education in my sleepy little town for thirty-some years, and I know that even the youngest classes can contain extremely hard-to-manage bad actors-- but that's not a kid crying and shaking under a desk.
What the hell is wrong with a school that it drives a small child to this state?
The rest of Merrow's report repeats what we've heard over and over again-- that Success Academies demand compliance and obedience in the pursuit of test scores, and that those who will not knuckle under must be driven away.
Moskowitz also demands a retraction for the reporting of a high attrition rate, claiming, "Our attrition rate is actually lower than the average for either district or charter schools." This is an exceptionally ballsy claim. You can look at these charts from Democracy Builders, a pro-charter group in NYC, showing that for eighty-eight students starting in third grade, Success ends up with thirty-one in eighth grade. In 2014, the Daily News reported that the first graduating class at Harlem Success was just thirty-two of the original seventy-three-- and despite their awesome test scores, none of them qualified on the entrance exam for the top high schools in the city.
Moskowitz also disputes the claim that Success Academy's policy of practice-- excuse me, "alleged practice"-- of pushing out students helps them game the test scores. Moskowitz's response is to construct a straw man version of Merrow's point and dispatch it. But if you want a good fact-filled analysis of Success Academy's approach to race and discipline, this Leo Casey piece from yesterday will more than fill the bill.
Look, the tales of Success Academy's oppressive treatment of children and omnipresent test prep are omnipresent. Everybody has read a few (You can find Jack Covey's collection of teacher stories here.). At best, critics and fans of Success Academy agree that Success Academies are not for everyone, which is kind of the point-- if you are truly a public school, you are "for everyone."
Moskowitz has created an unsustainable model that burns through teachers quickly, depends on infusions of donated cash and the co-opting of public resources, defines success as "good test scores," and serves only about half of the students who enroll, who are in turn a small percentage of city students.
But sure-- demand "a correction and an apology" because somebody didn't follow the Eva Moskowitz PR script. Because while listing the many ways in which Success Academy is nothing like a public school, be sure to include "no transparency." A real public school takes its lumps because how it operates, how it treats its students, how it achieves its success, or even defines its success-- all of that must remain open to the taxpayers who pay the bills.
I suppose you have to admire big brass ones that are so big, the sheer force of will of a woman who, having lost a position of influence as a councilwoman simply carves out her own kingdom of power and influence by operating a business that serves a very small clientele. And to demand an apology from a reporter for actually reporting. Man-- they are just soooo big.
She has fought for and won the idea of co-location, that charming arrangement where charter operators get to take over a public school a few floors at a time. What better way to force the public system to foot all the bills for your private enterprise?
She claims that her charter chain is a public school-- except when the state wants to audit her, in which case she's willing to go to court to assert that her academies are not public schools at all.
When the mayor of New York City wasn't going to give Moskowitz her way on opening more charters, she simply went over his head to the state legislature and governor (who has reaped at least $400,000 in contributions from Moskowitz's backers).
She has routinely closed her schools in order to use staff, students, and their families as prop for pro-charter rallies in the state capital, giving her staff specific instructions on how to "handle" parents.
She pays herself a salary of $475,000, more than double the actual head of the entire New York City public system-- or the mayor himself.
And now, Eva Moskowitz would like an apology.
Well, demands an apology would be more to the point. She wants Judy Woodruff and PBS to take back the mean things that John Merrow said about them in his piece about Success Academy.
I hesitate to link to the letter because it includes what I would have to assume is confidential student information. The problem is familiar to everyone who works in a school-- the school is accused of one misbehavior or another by an dissatisfied student, and the school cannot defend itself publicly because that student's records are confidential.
But Moskowitz gets around that problem by simply ignoring the confidentiality of the student, and smearing the child's name by listing his many alleged offenses (she calls him John Doe, but all you have to do is look at Merrow's piece to get the name). She even includes what is presented as the teacher's write-up of some of the incidents. Here's a link to an excerpt from the letter; you can follow through to the whole text if you wish.
And here's the thing about the teacher write-up. It doesn't really make the school look any better. The child is upset because he didn't do well on the regular test, and then resisted taking his "mandatory cool down,' but instead climbed under the desk and was crying and shaking. I've been in public education in my sleepy little town for thirty-some years, and I know that even the youngest classes can contain extremely hard-to-manage bad actors-- but that's not a kid crying and shaking under a desk.
What the hell is wrong with a school that it drives a small child to this state?
The rest of Merrow's report repeats what we've heard over and over again-- that Success Academies demand compliance and obedience in the pursuit of test scores, and that those who will not knuckle under must be driven away.
Moskowitz also demands a retraction for the reporting of a high attrition rate, claiming, "Our attrition rate is actually lower than the average for either district or charter schools." This is an exceptionally ballsy claim. You can look at these charts from Democracy Builders, a pro-charter group in NYC, showing that for eighty-eight students starting in third grade, Success ends up with thirty-one in eighth grade. In 2014, the Daily News reported that the first graduating class at Harlem Success was just thirty-two of the original seventy-three-- and despite their awesome test scores, none of them qualified on the entrance exam for the top high schools in the city.
Moskowitz also disputes the claim that Success Academy's policy of practice-- excuse me, "alleged practice"-- of pushing out students helps them game the test scores. Moskowitz's response is to construct a straw man version of Merrow's point and dispatch it. But if you want a good fact-filled analysis of Success Academy's approach to race and discipline, this Leo Casey piece from yesterday will more than fill the bill.
Look, the tales of Success Academy's oppressive treatment of children and omnipresent test prep are omnipresent. Everybody has read a few (You can find Jack Covey's collection of teacher stories here.). At best, critics and fans of Success Academy agree that Success Academies are not for everyone, which is kind of the point-- if you are truly a public school, you are "for everyone."
Moskowitz has created an unsustainable model that burns through teachers quickly, depends on infusions of donated cash and the co-opting of public resources, defines success as "good test scores," and serves only about half of the students who enroll, who are in turn a small percentage of city students.
But sure-- demand "a correction and an apology" because somebody didn't follow the Eva Moskowitz PR script. Because while listing the many ways in which Success Academy is nothing like a public school, be sure to include "no transparency." A real public school takes its lumps because how it operates, how it treats its students, how it achieves its success, or even defines its success-- all of that must remain open to the taxpayers who pay the bills.
I suppose you have to admire big brass ones that are so big, the sheer force of will of a woman who, having lost a position of influence as a councilwoman simply carves out her own kingdom of power and influence by operating a business that serves a very small clientele. And to demand an apology from a reporter for actually reporting. Man-- they are just soooo big.
Monday, October 19, 2015
Top States for Special Ed Lawsuits
At Education Week, Christina Samuels reports on recent research showing which states find themselves most often in court over special education issues.
The paper, "Frequency Trends of Court Decisions Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act," was recently published in the Journal of Special Education Leadership. And it shows that ten states are responsible for almost two thirds of the lawsuits filed.
Let's go to the chart:
Note that some of the states have high total numbers, but don't crack the top ten in suits-per-capita. In other words, California has a huge number of lawsuits because it has a huge number of people. DC, on the other hand, is apparently is apparently doing its best to make sure that every special education student has her own personal lawsuit.
It's particularly in light of my piece yesterday that Pennsylvania ranks high both ways. Pennsylvania's parents have found ample reason to sue the state on behalf of their students with special needs, and Pennsylvania is now responding with a program that will insure that SWSN get even fewer resources. I suspect that the new initiative will not help Pennsylvania with its lawsuit problem; I don't think those several hundred lawsuits represent parents who wanted the state to offer their students less help and support.
The authors of the original paper suggest that this information shows that special education lawsuits are a local problem, not a national one, and that the frequency of such suits can best be addressed by looking at the state issues, not the federal ones. I would go a step further and suggest that these numbers indicate that something is spectacularly wrong in a handful of states.
Meanwhile, in Utah there were only 8 "decisions" over that 34 year period, with a per capita rate of 1.6. I suppose that the secret in low-lawsuit states is a set of terrible laws that give SWSN no legal protection and therefor not basis for going to court. It may also be that high-lawsuit states are extraordinarily deficient in avenues of recourse for parents other than dragging schools to court. In other words, Utah schools might just listen better than PA and NY systems.
Whatever the case, the data certainly suggest that something is going on in those top ten states, and it's probably not a good thing-- not good for the states, and not good for the families that end up feeling that court is their only recourse, and especially not good for the students whose needs are not being met while everybody is busy arguing in court instead of taking care of some of the state's most vulnerable students.
The paper, "Frequency Trends of Court Decisions Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act," was recently published in the Journal of Special Education Leadership. And it shows that ten states are responsible for almost two thirds of the lawsuits filed.
Let's go to the chart:
Note that some of the states have high total numbers, but don't crack the top ten in suits-per-capita. In other words, California has a huge number of lawsuits because it has a huge number of people. DC, on the other hand, is apparently is apparently doing its best to make sure that every special education student has her own personal lawsuit.
It's particularly in light of my piece yesterday that Pennsylvania ranks high both ways. Pennsylvania's parents have found ample reason to sue the state on behalf of their students with special needs, and Pennsylvania is now responding with a program that will insure that SWSN get even fewer resources. I suspect that the new initiative will not help Pennsylvania with its lawsuit problem; I don't think those several hundred lawsuits represent parents who wanted the state to offer their students less help and support.
The authors of the original paper suggest that this information shows that special education lawsuits are a local problem, not a national one, and that the frequency of such suits can best be addressed by looking at the state issues, not the federal ones. I would go a step further and suggest that these numbers indicate that something is spectacularly wrong in a handful of states.
Meanwhile, in Utah there were only 8 "decisions" over that 34 year period, with a per capita rate of 1.6. I suppose that the secret in low-lawsuit states is a set of terrible laws that give SWSN no legal protection and therefor not basis for going to court. It may also be that high-lawsuit states are extraordinarily deficient in avenues of recourse for parents other than dragging schools to court. In other words, Utah schools might just listen better than PA and NY systems.
Whatever the case, the data certainly suggest that something is going on in those top ten states, and it's probably not a good thing-- not good for the states, and not good for the families that end up feeling that court is their only recourse, and especially not good for the students whose needs are not being met while everybody is busy arguing in court instead of taking care of some of the state's most vulnerable students.
Sunday, October 18, 2015
PA: Shutting Down Special Ed
The Background
Among the Duncan-Obama administration's beliefs about education, we find the belief that special ed is unnecessary.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has been pretty clear about this. He has argued that students with disabilities just need teachers who expect them to do well (Stop being dyslexic, Pat-- I believe in you!). The USED just this summer denied New York's request to use adapted testing for the Big Standardized Test-- students must take the test deemed appropriate for their chronological age and not their developmental level. And all along, trundling down the regulatory highway, has been this: Improving the Academic Achievement of the Disadvantaged; Assistance to States for the Education of Children with Disabilities,
That regulation says basically that states may no longer make any kind of adaptations for any but "the most significant cognitive disabilities." Now all students must ride the same one-size-fits-all magical test unicorn, because many education policy leaders believe that expecting all students to do well on the same test will cause all students to succeed. If you want an uglier spin, you could also say that the USED thinks that teachers are lying and making excuses for students with disabilities instead of teaching them. Here it is in government-ese:
The Department shares the goal that students with disabilities experience success. Removing the authority for modified academic achievement standards and an alternate assessment based on those standards furthers this goal because students with disabilities who are assessed based on grade-level academic achievement standards will receive instruction aligned with such an assessment
Translation: if we take away your ability to do modifications, you'll be forced to find a way to bring your teaching up to level. No more coddling those kids just because some fancy psychologist found them to be developmentally disabled or autistic or have some other kind of scientifically proven brain-based processing problem.
Pennsylvania's version
With all that in the background, we arrive at Pennsylvania's new Project MAX.
Launched at least a year ago, Project MAX is the result of the Pennsylvania Department of Education mating with a five-year State Performance Development Grant, and its purpose is simple enough:
The Pennsylvania Department of Education has been awarded a five year State Performance Development Grant that is designed to increase the capacity of local educational agencies (LEAs) and schools to provide all students, including those with complex instructional needs, with maximum access to and learning of the general education content and curriculum.
First, kudos to whatever bureaucrat coined "those with complex instructional needs." We've needed a new fancy-speak term for students with special needs, and this is pretty fancy!
Second, is it just me, or does this sound suspiciously like our old friend Mainstreaming?
PA has been working at Project MAX (short for MAXimiizing access and learning) for a year now, rolling it out in a few districts last year and extending the reach this year, so they ought to have a handle on it. Let's look at some materials that might help us make sense of all this. And let's start with this fun little "webinar" (which you might be inclined to call a video lecture) featuring Ann Ainkson-Hermann and Jacqui DiDomineco, from the PA Training and Technical Assistance Network. These two have three "objectives for this webinar" (aka "points they want to make").
Project MAX's first problem
First, they want to explain why students with special needs can benefit from having "challenging academic instruction" aka "being jammed through a one-size-fits-all instructional program with no regard for their actual developmental abilities." And in the fake chatty way of this sort of sales job, Ann offers this:
I don't know about you, Jacqui, but when I think about people having rich and fulfilling lives, I think about things like having a job, enjoying the community, having friends, being involved in recreational activities, and participating in family functions, and being as independent as possible regardless of how significant that disability might be.
You might imagine that this would be followed by an explanation of how forcing SWSN to be hammered through the general curriculum actually helps achieve these laudable goals. You might imagine that, and if you want to see any such critical link, imagination is all you've got to go with. Instead, Jacqui (who has a son with special needs) says, yes, right, that's what she wants, and Ann follows with the observation that the world has changed and if SWSN are going to have a happy place in it, they have to be thumped soundly with the PA Core (aka "Common Core pig with PA brand lipstick").
Project MAX loves theCommon Pennsylvania Core
We want all children to be ready for the world when they graduate. And for students with more significant disabilities that we sometimes refer to as have complex instructional needs, it means raising the bar for those students as well.
Is there any evidence that the PA Core prepares students for the world. No, there isn't. Is there any sense in saying, "Hey, Chris. You have trouble clearing the bar when we set it at five feet, so we're going to fix that by raising the bar to seven feet. That should make you a better jumper." There's only one circumstance under which that makes sense, and that's the situation where teachers and students are just half-assing things and need to have their lazy feet held to the Core Standards fire. But so far nobody from the state has shown the guts to come call classroom teachers lazy slackers to our faces.
Next, Ann (who is clearly in the driver's seat here) will move on to talking about the general curriculum, kind of. She kind of mushes the PA Core and general curriculum together, suggesting that it covers math and science and music and language and social studies and so on, and maybe Ann has just forgotten that the PA Core covers math and reading and writing and a little bit of those for science and social studies and nothing else at all. She compares the standards to a building code and tries to play the "kids can move anywhere and stay on the same page" card (aka "big load of baloney")
Jacqui pretends to be curious about the standards and Ann proceeds to explain the whole increased rigor thing, and if you want to read about why all of this refried Common Core beanery is bunk, there are plenty of posts here for that conversation, and we have miles to go. Jacqui also notes that, gosh, there are subjects other than math and English like science and music and art, and those matter too. But what do we do if a student can't match grade expectations in the standards, and Ann says, "Well, we pull the child pout of all those other classes and dedicate the student's days to nothing but test prep." Ha! Kidding. Ann doesn't admit that at all. She also doesn't answer the question, other than suggest that whatever we do, it's going to involve keeping that student in the classroom with same-age peers. Because we've apparently decided after looking at reams and reams of research that what's most important in a child's education is that the child goes through it in lockstep with other children born in the same year. That's the important factor in educating a child.
The discussion of the magical PA standards (aka "the part I couldn't bear to wade through for the zillionth time") was apparently or second objective, because we are now seguing into the third.
Project MAX doesn't love students
Well, you know, Jacqui, your last question about that is a very nice segue into our third aspect of this webinar, and that is, how can we help students with disabilities access and meaningfully participate in the general education curriculum.
And that sentence tells you a lot of what you need to know, because you'll note that our objective is not to assess and meet the needs of the child, or to meet the child where she is and help her grow from there, or to find an educational path that best suits that child's individual needs and challenges. No-- the goal is to find ways to help the student deal with the fact that she's stuck in the mainstream classroom doing the unadapted curriculum.
But we arrive now, obliquely, at the IEP Question (aka "Isn't this whole business borderline illegal under IDEA?"). Ann's answer is basically, "We can't completely dump the IEP, but we're now going to approach them starting with the assumption that the student is going to be instructionally mainstreamed. But we can totally individualized other stuff, like if he needs help with getting around or opening the leveled books that we're going to force him to read. The student will also still be free to choose where to part his hair. So school will still be totes individualized."
After discussing terminology like accommodations (aka "how you do it") and modifications (aka "what you do"), and UDL (aka "sometimes stuff we come up with for adaptations turns out to be useful for everyone"), Ann cues up a heartwarming and moving (I am actually not being sarcastic here) video of a student coping with Cerebral Palsy, which is impressive, but which also doesn't really address the issues for the vast majority of students who will get hammered by Project MAX.
Which is the very program that Ann is excited to introduce, and as everything up to this point has suggested, Project MAX basically starts from the premise, "How would we handle SWSN if we assumed that they had to be in a regular classroom and had to take the same BS Test and had to follow the same general ed curriculum as all students? What adaptations and modifications and accommodations would we make?"
So, mainstreaming.
Ploughing through other MAX resources, two prongs of the attack on SWSN are evident. One is the federally-approved magical wishful thinking approach. One MAX publication is called "Presuming Competence, Raising Expectations." Aka "Hey, teachers. Those low scores and low achievement of your special needs students? All your fault." The other prong is magical yet non-specified accommodations and modifications-- but only in the classroom and not on the Keystones or PSSA (Pennsylvania's BS Tests). But now the state knows that, since you have to get those kids ready for the BS Tests somehow, you classroom teachers will come up with awesome teaching techniques (because, I guess, we were all previously just kind of tossing the books at the students and hoping we wouldn't have to, you know, do stuff).
Can we see pictures?
And here's a magical graphic that wants to capture all the Project MAXitude:
That's just about the prettiest graphic of vague bureaucratic jargon I've ever seen.
Reasons and Faults
I do understand, a little. There's no question, at all, that sometimes students are mis-labeled as having special needs because they are obnoxious or troublesome, and there's also no question that sometimes students with special needs are sometimes the victim of low expectations.
But the federal response, and the state responses coming in its wake, are like finding cockroaches in one apartment, and then deciding to burn down all the homes in town. This is the repeated issue with education reform-- reformsters identify a real problem, and come up with a non-solution that they want to impose on everybody.
Project MAX is, first of all, insulting to the vast majority of teachers in schools across the state. Its message, not even very subtly hidden, is that the low achievement of students with special needs is entirely the fault of lazy teachers with low expectations. If the state so much as assumed good intentions on teachers' part, there would be an element of "We know you're doing your best, and you could probably use some extra help in doing this important and challenging work, so here's what we've come up with for you." But Project MAX never strikes that note. Instead it's just, "Get these kids' scores up. We know you've been just letting them slide because you're lazy and you don't believe in your students. Well, we're done going easy. Get off your ass and get it done, or else." But, hey, state-- thanks for suggesting modifications and accommodations, because we didn't know anything about that stuff.
Second, and worse, Project MAX is not interested in what the student needs. Or rather, it tells students and their families what they need-- "You need to pass the Big Standardized Test. And you need to be in a regular classroom." There's no recognition of individuality here-- you will all be hammered into those round holes, and if you happen to be square pegs, we'll just hit harder with an adapted hammer. Which is what we're currently telling all students in public school, so I guess we're reaching equity there.
And we know there are vultures waiting on the sideline, waiting for all those SWSN to take the test, fail the test, and "prove" that the public school needs to be shut down and replaced with a shiny charter.
As anyone who has taught for more than ten years knows, the special education pendulum is always swinging. We swing way over to "Let's put all the SWSN in regular classrooms and just make adaptations for them there so they can have the benefits of mainstreaming" until someone says, "You know, it would be easier to do these adaptations if these students were in their own self-contained classroom" and back and forth and back and forth.
How to wrestle the pendullum
The pendulum is always swinging because some folks are always looking a system. But students with special needs underline (twice, with bold italics) what we ought to understand about all students-- that each one is a unique individual and any system that you design will absolutely not serve the needs of some students. But some systems are better than others. Here's how you know you're designing a system that's worse:
1) Put the demands of the system ahead of the needs of the child.
2) Don't trust the teachers who actually work with the students.
3) Attach the whole thing to an unbending, narrow, unproven set of assumptions, such as, say, that getting a good score on a single standardized math and ELA test is an indicator of how good a life you'll live.
Project MAX appears to be failing on all three points. Maybe there will be course corrections, or teachers on the grounds will implement it in a way that makes it useful. But the early indicators are not good. Students with special needs (and really-- which students do we want to turn to and say, "Yeah, your needs are nothing special") need a system that responds to what they need, what they want, and what they can achieve. They need a system that helps them become the best versions of themselves they can be, and that frees teachers to help them do it.
Among the Duncan-Obama administration's beliefs about education, we find the belief that special ed is unnecessary.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has been pretty clear about this. He has argued that students with disabilities just need teachers who expect them to do well (Stop being dyslexic, Pat-- I believe in you!). The USED just this summer denied New York's request to use adapted testing for the Big Standardized Test-- students must take the test deemed appropriate for their chronological age and not their developmental level. And all along, trundling down the regulatory highway, has been this: Improving the Academic Achievement of the Disadvantaged; Assistance to States for the Education of Children with Disabilities,
That regulation says basically that states may no longer make any kind of adaptations for any but "the most significant cognitive disabilities." Now all students must ride the same one-size-fits-all magical test unicorn, because many education policy leaders believe that expecting all students to do well on the same test will cause all students to succeed. If you want an uglier spin, you could also say that the USED thinks that teachers are lying and making excuses for students with disabilities instead of teaching them. Here it is in government-ese:
The Department shares the goal that students with disabilities experience success. Removing the authority for modified academic achievement standards and an alternate assessment based on those standards furthers this goal because students with disabilities who are assessed based on grade-level academic achievement standards will receive instruction aligned with such an assessment
Translation: if we take away your ability to do modifications, you'll be forced to find a way to bring your teaching up to level. No more coddling those kids just because some fancy psychologist found them to be developmentally disabled or autistic or have some other kind of scientifically proven brain-based processing problem.
Pennsylvania's version
With all that in the background, we arrive at Pennsylvania's new Project MAX.
Launched at least a year ago, Project MAX is the result of the Pennsylvania Department of Education mating with a five-year State Performance Development Grant, and its purpose is simple enough:
The Pennsylvania Department of Education has been awarded a five year State Performance Development Grant that is designed to increase the capacity of local educational agencies (LEAs) and schools to provide all students, including those with complex instructional needs, with maximum access to and learning of the general education content and curriculum.
First, kudos to whatever bureaucrat coined "those with complex instructional needs." We've needed a new fancy-speak term for students with special needs, and this is pretty fancy!
Second, is it just me, or does this sound suspiciously like our old friend Mainstreaming?
PA has been working at Project MAX (short for MAXimiizing access and learning) for a year now, rolling it out in a few districts last year and extending the reach this year, so they ought to have a handle on it. Let's look at some materials that might help us make sense of all this. And let's start with this fun little "webinar" (which you might be inclined to call a video lecture) featuring Ann Ainkson-Hermann and Jacqui DiDomineco, from the PA Training and Technical Assistance Network. These two have three "objectives for this webinar" (aka "points they want to make").
Project MAX's first problem
First, they want to explain why students with special needs can benefit from having "challenging academic instruction" aka "being jammed through a one-size-fits-all instructional program with no regard for their actual developmental abilities." And in the fake chatty way of this sort of sales job, Ann offers this:
I don't know about you, Jacqui, but when I think about people having rich and fulfilling lives, I think about things like having a job, enjoying the community, having friends, being involved in recreational activities, and participating in family functions, and being as independent as possible regardless of how significant that disability might be.
You might imagine that this would be followed by an explanation of how forcing SWSN to be hammered through the general curriculum actually helps achieve these laudable goals. You might imagine that, and if you want to see any such critical link, imagination is all you've got to go with. Instead, Jacqui (who has a son with special needs) says, yes, right, that's what she wants, and Ann follows with the observation that the world has changed and if SWSN are going to have a happy place in it, they have to be thumped soundly with the PA Core (aka "Common Core pig with PA brand lipstick").
Project MAX loves the
We want all children to be ready for the world when they graduate. And for students with more significant disabilities that we sometimes refer to as have complex instructional needs, it means raising the bar for those students as well.
Is there any evidence that the PA Core prepares students for the world. No, there isn't. Is there any sense in saying, "Hey, Chris. You have trouble clearing the bar when we set it at five feet, so we're going to fix that by raising the bar to seven feet. That should make you a better jumper." There's only one circumstance under which that makes sense, and that's the situation where teachers and students are just half-assing things and need to have their lazy feet held to the Core Standards fire. But so far nobody from the state has shown the guts to come call classroom teachers lazy slackers to our faces.
Next, Ann (who is clearly in the driver's seat here) will move on to talking about the general curriculum, kind of. She kind of mushes the PA Core and general curriculum together, suggesting that it covers math and science and music and language and social studies and so on, and maybe Ann has just forgotten that the PA Core covers math and reading and writing and a little bit of those for science and social studies and nothing else at all. She compares the standards to a building code and tries to play the "kids can move anywhere and stay on the same page" card (aka "big load of baloney")
Jacqui pretends to be curious about the standards and Ann proceeds to explain the whole increased rigor thing, and if you want to read about why all of this refried Common Core beanery is bunk, there are plenty of posts here for that conversation, and we have miles to go. Jacqui also notes that, gosh, there are subjects other than math and English like science and music and art, and those matter too. But what do we do if a student can't match grade expectations in the standards, and Ann says, "Well, we pull the child pout of all those other classes and dedicate the student's days to nothing but test prep." Ha! Kidding. Ann doesn't admit that at all. She also doesn't answer the question, other than suggest that whatever we do, it's going to involve keeping that student in the classroom with same-age peers. Because we've apparently decided after looking at reams and reams of research that what's most important in a child's education is that the child goes through it in lockstep with other children born in the same year. That's the important factor in educating a child.
The discussion of the magical PA standards (aka "the part I couldn't bear to wade through for the zillionth time") was apparently or second objective, because we are now seguing into the third.
Project MAX doesn't love students
Well, you know, Jacqui, your last question about that is a very nice segue into our third aspect of this webinar, and that is, how can we help students with disabilities access and meaningfully participate in the general education curriculum.
And that sentence tells you a lot of what you need to know, because you'll note that our objective is not to assess and meet the needs of the child, or to meet the child where she is and help her grow from there, or to find an educational path that best suits that child's individual needs and challenges. No-- the goal is to find ways to help the student deal with the fact that she's stuck in the mainstream classroom doing the unadapted curriculum.
But we arrive now, obliquely, at the IEP Question (aka "Isn't this whole business borderline illegal under IDEA?"). Ann's answer is basically, "We can't completely dump the IEP, but we're now going to approach them starting with the assumption that the student is going to be instructionally mainstreamed. But we can totally individualized other stuff, like if he needs help with getting around or opening the leveled books that we're going to force him to read. The student will also still be free to choose where to part his hair. So school will still be totes individualized."
After discussing terminology like accommodations (aka "how you do it") and modifications (aka "what you do"), and UDL (aka "sometimes stuff we come up with for adaptations turns out to be useful for everyone"), Ann cues up a heartwarming and moving (I am actually not being sarcastic here) video of a student coping with Cerebral Palsy, which is impressive, but which also doesn't really address the issues for the vast majority of students who will get hammered by Project MAX.
Which is the very program that Ann is excited to introduce, and as everything up to this point has suggested, Project MAX basically starts from the premise, "How would we handle SWSN if we assumed that they had to be in a regular classroom and had to take the same BS Test and had to follow the same general ed curriculum as all students? What adaptations and modifications and accommodations would we make?"
So, mainstreaming.
Ploughing through other MAX resources, two prongs of the attack on SWSN are evident. One is the federally-approved magical wishful thinking approach. One MAX publication is called "Presuming Competence, Raising Expectations." Aka "Hey, teachers. Those low scores and low achievement of your special needs students? All your fault." The other prong is magical yet non-specified accommodations and modifications-- but only in the classroom and not on the Keystones or PSSA (Pennsylvania's BS Tests). But now the state knows that, since you have to get those kids ready for the BS Tests somehow, you classroom teachers will come up with awesome teaching techniques (because, I guess, we were all previously just kind of tossing the books at the students and hoping we wouldn't have to, you know, do stuff).
Can we see pictures?
And here's a magical graphic that wants to capture all the Project MAXitude:
Reasons and Faults
I do understand, a little. There's no question, at all, that sometimes students are mis-labeled as having special needs because they are obnoxious or troublesome, and there's also no question that sometimes students with special needs are sometimes the victim of low expectations.
But the federal response, and the state responses coming in its wake, are like finding cockroaches in one apartment, and then deciding to burn down all the homes in town. This is the repeated issue with education reform-- reformsters identify a real problem, and come up with a non-solution that they want to impose on everybody.
Project MAX is, first of all, insulting to the vast majority of teachers in schools across the state. Its message, not even very subtly hidden, is that the low achievement of students with special needs is entirely the fault of lazy teachers with low expectations. If the state so much as assumed good intentions on teachers' part, there would be an element of "We know you're doing your best, and you could probably use some extra help in doing this important and challenging work, so here's what we've come up with for you." But Project MAX never strikes that note. Instead it's just, "Get these kids' scores up. We know you've been just letting them slide because you're lazy and you don't believe in your students. Well, we're done going easy. Get off your ass and get it done, or else." But, hey, state-- thanks for suggesting modifications and accommodations, because we didn't know anything about that stuff.
Second, and worse, Project MAX is not interested in what the student needs. Or rather, it tells students and their families what they need-- "You need to pass the Big Standardized Test. And you need to be in a regular classroom." There's no recognition of individuality here-- you will all be hammered into those round holes, and if you happen to be square pegs, we'll just hit harder with an adapted hammer. Which is what we're currently telling all students in public school, so I guess we're reaching equity there.
And we know there are vultures waiting on the sideline, waiting for all those SWSN to take the test, fail the test, and "prove" that the public school needs to be shut down and replaced with a shiny charter.
As anyone who has taught for more than ten years knows, the special education pendulum is always swinging. We swing way over to "Let's put all the SWSN in regular classrooms and just make adaptations for them there so they can have the benefits of mainstreaming" until someone says, "You know, it would be easier to do these adaptations if these students were in their own self-contained classroom" and back and forth and back and forth.
How to wrestle the pendullum
The pendulum is always swinging because some folks are always looking a system. But students with special needs underline (twice, with bold italics) what we ought to understand about all students-- that each one is a unique individual and any system that you design will absolutely not serve the needs of some students. But some systems are better than others. Here's how you know you're designing a system that's worse:
1) Put the demands of the system ahead of the needs of the child.
2) Don't trust the teachers who actually work with the students.
3) Attach the whole thing to an unbending, narrow, unproven set of assumptions, such as, say, that getting a good score on a single standardized math and ELA test is an indicator of how good a life you'll live.
Project MAX appears to be failing on all three points. Maybe there will be course corrections, or teachers on the grounds will implement it in a way that makes it useful. But the early indicators are not good. Students with special needs (and really-- which students do we want to turn to and say, "Yeah, your needs are nothing special") need a system that responds to what they need, what they want, and what they can achieve. They need a system that helps them become the best versions of themselves they can be, and that frees teachers to help them do it.
Charter Real Estate
You know who really loves the charter school movement? According to the Wall Street Journal, real estate investors are just loving the growth of the charter school biz.
There's a real estate boom that comes attached to charter growth. In LA, I've watched a huge new charter go up on a several-lot parcel across the street from my son's apartment building in Koreatown. It doesn't look cheap. But according to the WSJ piece, it's extra-popular to buy and convert it into school space-- McDonalds meets education meets Flip This House.
This can happen because of the ready availability of money. The article quotes the VP of Highmark School Development: "There's no shortage of cash."
Highmark School Development is a good example of the kind of players working this part of the business. They were founded in Utah in 2005, then grabbed up by Stephens Capital Partners in 2008 (that group appears to be headquartered in Little Rock). The Highmark mission?
HighMark School Development will drive educational excellence by developing world-class educational facility solutions while exceeding the expectations of our clients, investors, partners and associates.
Their vision?
HighMark will be recognized as the premier developer of school facilities in the United States. We will seek to partner with schools that are well positioned for growth, demonstrate strong and consistent academic performance, and exhibit solid and effective board governance.
Note particularly the part about "solid and effective board governance." That would be different from, say, "transparent and open governance that is controlled democratically by and accountable to the community." Their business model is to help school operators get charters up and running and help the new board "avoid many of the common pitfalls and mistakes made in developing a new school facility." Highmark has a whole team of charter expertise, and if you look down the list, you will see people tasked with handling construction and finance and management, but none whose expertise is listed as "actually educating young human beings." They have a page "about charter schools," but it's under construction at the moment.
Highmark has built several schools in Colorado, North Carolina, and Utah, plus others here and there across the country. They appear to be moving into New Jersey as we speak.
Because there's no shortage of cash. And as the WSJ lays out, that's what drives much of this development-- not questions of what the community needs educationally, but questions of where the market is ripe to provide a good return on this sort of investment and development. Folks don't ask, "What does the community need" but instead "what can we get money for?" (And yes, public schools sometimes do the same thing. It rarely ends well.)
Part of that ripeness is related to that readily available cash. A month ago, Alex Wigglesworth and Ryan Biggs at Philly.com laid out how a tasty loophole in Pennsylvania law allowed charter real estate developers to borrow have a billion-with-a-B dollars at taxpayer expense.
And sure enough-- in Pennsylvania, you can find companies like Universal Companies, a corporation that operates charter schools and is also a real estate business. And as the WSJ notes:
Some states are beginning to make financing tools available to charter schools that had been limited to traditional public schools. For example, the states of Texas, Colorado and Utah now backstop tax exempt bond issues for some charter schools, reducing their capital costs when acquiring facilities, according to Scott Rolfs, managing director of B.C. Ziegler & Co., a niche investment-banking firm that has underwritten more than $600 million in charter school bonds.
The real estate side of the business is one more way for investors and corporations to privatize rewards while letting the taxpayers bear the risk. As Wigglesworth and Biggs outline, a developer can use school bond money to renovate a property, and if the charter school goes belly-up, the charter operators (and ultimately the taxpayers) must carry the burden of debt. Meanwhile, the real estate developer now has an empty, recently-renovated property ready to lease to a new client.
In fact, just as the educational programs of many charters reflect the problems that come with letting amateurs play school, the business of real state investment in charters is suffering from folks who aren't really sure what they're doing. Once again, from the WSJ, talking to Scott Rolfs, managing director of B.C. Ziegler & Co. (another charter real estate loan bond financier):
Even people in the business warn that the charter school owners need to beware when agreeing to lease and buy buildings from private players. Charter schools often are launched in church basements or donated space by well-intentioned people who lack the financial sophistication to take their operations to the next level.
“There is a ton of capital coming into the industry,” Mr. Rolfs said. “The question is: Does it know what it’s doing? I don’t know yet.”
Well, that's certainly re-assuring.
As always, I'm not here to argue that any business that tries to make money is evil. But business and education don't mix, because when you're primary concern is, say, putting money into a piece of real estate for the purpose of getting a good return on your investment, things like transparency, local control, listening to the community you serve, and actually providing the best possible education for all students-- those things just don't land very far up your list of priorities. What you end up with something that looks vaguely like a school, but is actually aligned with purposes other than the purposes we associate with actual public schools.
Additionally, we are talking about opportunity cost. It's not just that the charter school will drain financial resources from public schools, but that the money that's being steered toward charter real estate adventures is money that is NOT being spent elsewhere. And nobody, anywhere, seems to be looking at what the opportunity costs of this charter real estate boom might be.
Charters of this sort may be a great idea for investors; on the other hand, they may be a short-term-thinking financial mess. But they are definitely a lousy idea for public education and actual students.
There's a real estate boom that comes attached to charter growth. In LA, I've watched a huge new charter go up on a several-lot parcel across the street from my son's apartment building in Koreatown. It doesn't look cheap. But according to the WSJ piece, it's extra-popular to buy and convert it into school space-- McDonalds meets education meets Flip This House.
This can happen because of the ready availability of money. The article quotes the VP of Highmark School Development: "There's no shortage of cash."
Highmark School Development is a good example of the kind of players working this part of the business. They were founded in Utah in 2005, then grabbed up by Stephens Capital Partners in 2008 (that group appears to be headquartered in Little Rock). The Highmark mission?
HighMark School Development will drive educational excellence by developing world-class educational facility solutions while exceeding the expectations of our clients, investors, partners and associates.
Their vision?
HighMark will be recognized as the premier developer of school facilities in the United States. We will seek to partner with schools that are well positioned for growth, demonstrate strong and consistent academic performance, and exhibit solid and effective board governance.
Note particularly the part about "solid and effective board governance." That would be different from, say, "transparent and open governance that is controlled democratically by and accountable to the community." Their business model is to help school operators get charters up and running and help the new board "avoid many of the common pitfalls and mistakes made in developing a new school facility." Highmark has a whole team of charter expertise, and if you look down the list, you will see people tasked with handling construction and finance and management, but none whose expertise is listed as "actually educating young human beings." They have a page "about charter schools," but it's under construction at the moment.
Highmark has built several schools in Colorado, North Carolina, and Utah, plus others here and there across the country. They appear to be moving into New Jersey as we speak.
Because there's no shortage of cash. And as the WSJ lays out, that's what drives much of this development-- not questions of what the community needs educationally, but questions of where the market is ripe to provide a good return on this sort of investment and development. Folks don't ask, "What does the community need" but instead "what can we get money for?" (And yes, public schools sometimes do the same thing. It rarely ends well.)
Part of that ripeness is related to that readily available cash. A month ago, Alex Wigglesworth and Ryan Biggs at Philly.com laid out how a tasty loophole in Pennsylvania law allowed charter real estate developers to borrow have a billion-with-a-B dollars at taxpayer expense.
And sure enough-- in Pennsylvania, you can find companies like Universal Companies, a corporation that operates charter schools and is also a real estate business. And as the WSJ notes:
Some states are beginning to make financing tools available to charter schools that had been limited to traditional public schools. For example, the states of Texas, Colorado and Utah now backstop tax exempt bond issues for some charter schools, reducing their capital costs when acquiring facilities, according to Scott Rolfs, managing director of B.C. Ziegler & Co., a niche investment-banking firm that has underwritten more than $600 million in charter school bonds.
The real estate side of the business is one more way for investors and corporations to privatize rewards while letting the taxpayers bear the risk. As Wigglesworth and Biggs outline, a developer can use school bond money to renovate a property, and if the charter school goes belly-up, the charter operators (and ultimately the taxpayers) must carry the burden of debt. Meanwhile, the real estate developer now has an empty, recently-renovated property ready to lease to a new client.
In fact, just as the educational programs of many charters reflect the problems that come with letting amateurs play school, the business of real state investment in charters is suffering from folks who aren't really sure what they're doing. Once again, from the WSJ, talking to Scott Rolfs, managing director of B.C. Ziegler & Co. (another charter real estate loan bond financier):
Even people in the business warn that the charter school owners need to beware when agreeing to lease and buy buildings from private players. Charter schools often are launched in church basements or donated space by well-intentioned people who lack the financial sophistication to take their operations to the next level.
“There is a ton of capital coming into the industry,” Mr. Rolfs said. “The question is: Does it know what it’s doing? I don’t know yet.”
Well, that's certainly re-assuring.
As always, I'm not here to argue that any business that tries to make money is evil. But business and education don't mix, because when you're primary concern is, say, putting money into a piece of real estate for the purpose of getting a good return on your investment, things like transparency, local control, listening to the community you serve, and actually providing the best possible education for all students-- those things just don't land very far up your list of priorities. What you end up with something that looks vaguely like a school, but is actually aligned with purposes other than the purposes we associate with actual public schools.
Additionally, we are talking about opportunity cost. It's not just that the charter school will drain financial resources from public schools, but that the money that's being steered toward charter real estate adventures is money that is NOT being spent elsewhere. And nobody, anywhere, seems to be looking at what the opportunity costs of this charter real estate boom might be.
Charters of this sort may be a great idea for investors; on the other hand, they may be a short-term-thinking financial mess. But they are definitely a lousy idea for public education and actual students.
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