NC: Charter Accountability Fails Again

The deal with charters, we are frequently told, is a trade of autonomy for accountability. Let charters do things their own way, charter fans say. If they can't produce, then shut them down. Hold them accountable.

Except somehow the accountability parts keeps not happening, as in North Carolina, where a couple of failing cyber charters have been renewed despite their continued failure to produce results.

North Carolina Cyber Academy and North Carolina Virtual Academy opened in 2015, the state's first two cyber charters. That was just a year before the charter school industry itself issued a blistering report about the many ways in which cyber charters fail students and families. That's the same year that charter-friendly CREDO issued a report indicating that students in cyber charters might as well just take a year-long nap. And of course it is five years before the nation launched the biggest experiment ever in distance learning and found that pretty much nobody was a fan.

NCVA appears to be actually operated by Stride (formerly K-12), a cyber charter business that has a list several miles long of misadventures and misbehaviors, much as one would expect from a business that is centered on making money and not all that interested in educating young humans. 

The two schools have underperformed, scoring straight D's on the state's evaluation system (NCVA did better than a D in 2023, the only time either school did so). North Carolina's Charter Schools Review Board mostly didn't seem to care as they renewed the two schools for another five years. As reported by T. Keung Hui for the Herald-Sun

“We’re renewing two schools for five years that have been continually low performing for all 10 years and have not met growth, except one school for one year, and yet the enrollment is almost 2,500 in one and 4,000,” said Rita Haire, a Review Board member. “Do they not understand the quality of education that’s being delivered?”

Much like cyber charters in Pennsylvania, the two North Carolina cybers are sitting on a huge pile of taxpayer dollars--  $16 million at Virtual Academy and $9.7 million at Cyber Academy. Maybe, some board members observed, that money could be spent on making the educational program results suck less (I'm paraphrasing). 

Bruce Friend is chair of the review board, runs a virtual academy of his own, and thinks cyber charters are just awesome. He says that the schools draw students who "transition" in and out through the year, which is why many states use them as alternative schools. I'm not sure which states he's talking about, but at any rate, when he was cheerleading for North Carolina to get on the cyber charter train, his pitch was that flexibility and personalized education and building confidence. Nothing about a holding pen for students "transitioning" in and out. That's a version of a standard cyber charter argument, which is that cybers get a disproportionate share of students who are already in academic trouble and come to cybers already behind the curve. I expect there is some truth to that, but if that is the cyber charter customer base, and they know it's their customer base, why have they not gotten any better at educating those students? 

The Herald-Sun asked both cybers to offer a response. NCVA hasn't so far (which is on brand for Stride), but NCCA chief Martez Hill said that it's great to be renewed. His only offer to push back on the perception that they aren't doing a great job is to note that NCCA has graduated more than 1,000 students in the last five years. This is no great achievement, since NCCA can graduate anyone they want to graduate. 

The board apparently doesn't have a lot of flexibility. One member complained that they would pick apart the pieces of a bricks and mortar charter to hold them accountable, but can't do that with the cybers. They also have no flexibility to, say, renew for only two or three years, but either had to okay a five year renewal or none at all.

None at all seems like the correct choice here, but that's not how seven of the ten-member board saw it, so North Carolina taxpayers get another five years of not-particularly-effective cyber chartering with no real accountability and no reason to think these charters will do any better in the next five years than they have in the previous ten. But at least they'll have autonomy. 

ICYMI: Noncompliance Edition (1/11)

It's like you're living in a house and someone sets fire to the front porch while they're also burgling your kitchen and stealing the shingles off the roof, all while telling you that for your own sake, you'd better follow orders and stay seated on the sofa. And maybe you feel like you can't possibly respond to all of it, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to deal with whatever piece of it you're positioned to look after, because every piece of the house matters. That's what it's like, I think. So here are readings from the week. 

The Schools Are Failing (Again)

Does this all seem familiar? Jennifer Berkshire assures that it should be, as denigrating schools is one of America's oldest pastime.

This isn’t school ‘choice.’ It’s public money siphoned off for private education.

Kevin Bolling points out that vouchers are a bit of a scam, including the kind of "choice" being peddled in Colorado.

Celebrating Traditional K-12 Public Education

Greg Wyman on resolving to make this year the year you support and celebrate public schools.

Minneapolis schools cancel classes after Border Patrol clash disrupts dismissal at Roosevelt

Yeah, ICE figured maybe they could go find some other people to beat up and threaten-- at a school.

Irreversible Robust Tempo of Charter School Failures and Closures

Shawgi Tell looks at the latest report on charter schools from NPE.

Where Do Kids Get Their Information?

Nancy Flanagan looks at the online sources of information, and it's not all great.

Complex Issues Rumble Beneath Plan to Close Cleveland Schools

Cleveland is going to close a bunch of schools, reflecting a complicated mess of issues that we'll be seeing all across the country. Jan Resseger has the story.

Legislative proposal would create a new mayor-appointed board over Indianapolis schools and charter schools

Yet another urban system may get to experience a new experiment in governance. Amelia Pak-Harvey and Aleksandra Appleton report for Chalkbeat Indiana.

School Sports Case Reaches the Supreme Court at a Fraught Time for Trans Rights

Looks like SCOTUS may get to address the whole business of schools forbidding trans girls to play in girls sports. 

AI Changes NOTHING About What Students Need to Learn

AI threatens to supercharge the whole "Kids don't need to learn stuff because they can just google it" argument. It's a dumb argument. Rick Hess offers a spirited takedown of the AI-before-content and skills of the future arguments.

More than 160 Texas faith leaders urge school boards to oppose setting aside time for prayer, Bible readings

When you combine religion and politics, you get politics. A whole lot of Texas faith leaders get that and keep trying to explain it to legislators.

We Need to Talk About How We Talk About 'AI'

Emily Bender and Nanna Inie offer an excellent explanation of why we really need to stop talking about AI as if it were sentient and even human.

Grok Can't Apologize. Grok Isn't Sentient. So Why Do Headlines Keep Saying It Did?

With that in mind, Parker Molloy addresses one of the major journalistic fails in covering AI stories. Grok can no more "apologize" than can Microsoft Word.

The nation’s strictest privacy law just took effect, to data brokers’ chagrin

California is set to rein in the data brokers, who are super-sad about it. Absolutely an education story when you consider that schools are considered a data-collection gold mine. Dan Goodin at Ars Technica.

The role of AI in the death of my father

Ben Riley shares a sad, strange, and very personal story about AI and his father.

2025: Because We Had To Do Something About It

And speaking of personal stories, this is a moving piece from Jose Luis Vilson. How do we make community even as we feel moved to strike back against those who damage our sense of safety.

This week at Forbes.com I looked at the Education Law Center report on fair funding. Cool thing. You can look up how well your state is doing be three different measures.

Laura Lootens this week, with a piece by Mario Casteinuovo-Tedesco, considered one of the foremost guitar composers of the 20th century. He immigrated to the US to escape racial repression under the Italian fascists, and became a citizen in 1946. He taught a large number of major writers, including Andre Previn, Jerry Goldsmith, and John Williams. He did film scores and composed operas based on American poetry, Jewish liturgy, and the Bible. A tremendous artist and musician. 

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WI: Charter School Bonus Pay

Some folks in Wisconsin have figured out a way to give charter schools extra extra funding. Assembly Bill 818 creates a whole new kind of charter school (a wealthy kind).

Currently (as explained in the bill analysis), the Office of Educational Opportunity in the University of Wisconsin System can authorize charter schools. The law sets a per-student amount that the charter school is paid; for 2025-26, that amount is $12,369. That's the amount for a regular old charter school, what Wisconsin calls an "independent charter school."

The bill proposes that the director of OED could designate a charter school a "demonstration public school operator," and that any such school would be paid an additional $6,863 per pupil-- over 50% more than an ordinary charter school. (Both amounts would be adjusted annually).

The bill explains what a charter would have to do to score this extra-renumerative designation:

[T]o be designated as an demonstration public school operator, an independent charter school operator must demonstrate to the OEO director that it meets specific criteria, including that for each of its charter schools authorized by the OEO, the operator participates in a longitudinal study; provides professional development opportunities; disseminates best practices from its educational model to other schools; and establishes and maintains partnerships with community organizations.

In short, the charter school must do all the things that charter boosters always said they were going to do. Study and share what works? We were told repeatedly that charter schools would be pedagogical laboratories, where cool new educational miracles would be nurtured and then turned loose. Professional development? You mean there are charter schools that don't tell their staff anything at all about how to do the job? Maintain partnerships with community organizations?  Weren't charters going to lift up poor communities? 

Heck, the Education Freedom Foundation (Erika Donalds' new name for her Optima Foundation charter business) says of Wisconsin charter schools that charters "can exist as living laboratories" and furthermore, "Wisconsin also wants each charter school to meet the unique needs and interests of its community, parents, and students."

It certainly looks as if every single charter school could qualify for this tasty new windfall with just a little tweaking of paperwork. For an extra 50% funding boost, I'll bet most charter school operators would be willing to put on funny hats and call themselves a clown school, and this seems much easier than that.

But hey-- that longitudinal study is a great idea, because I'd bet you that one likely result is the discovery that boosting a school's funding to 150% of its previous level is a big help. I will go out on a limb and predict that "increased funding helps" will not be one of the "best practices" that demonstration charters share with public schools. 

So far this is just a proposed bill. For the sake of Wisconsin taxpayers and children, let's hope it goes no further.

Your Robot Weight Room Assistant

Weight room training is an important part of the development of young athletes. Now your school's athletic program can get a boost from our new human-centered LiftBot weightlifting system.

Let's face it-- using exercise machines is time consuming. But LiftBot can save your student athletes time and enhance your program with greater efficiency and speed.

Let's say your athlete wants to do some bench presses. They select a weight amount, selects the number of reps, lie down on the bench, and grip the bar. Then LiftBot quickly raises and lowers the weighted bar. LiftBot can complete the movement far more quickly and efficiently than your human athlete. While the human athlete might grunt and sweat and have difficulty completing the required number of reps, LiftBot can whip that bar up and down.

Isn't this just doing the work for the athlete, you may ask. But LiftBot's system still requires a human in the loop. Because this is a human-centered process, your athlete still has responsibility for checking LiftBot's work. Did LiftBot perform 2 or 200 reps rather than the required 10? Did LiftBot return the bar to its proper resting position, or fling it through the gym wall? The athlete will provide the human element needed to check LiftBot's work.

What are the benefits to your athlete? They will be able to finish their weight room work in half the previous time, and athletes who previously tried to avoid the weight room will now be more enthusiastic about getting those reps in. Of course, some athletes will attempt to skip their weight room time entirely and just leave LiftBot to do all the work without student participation. We recommend that the program include a session stressing ethical LiftBot use. That should totally fix the problem.

Maybe you think that athletes benefit by lifting the weights unaided. This just shows that you are a dinosaur. Robot-assisted physical activities are the inevitable wave of the future, and if you do not allow your student athletes to use LiftBot, they will be woefully unprepared for their future as meat-based robot assistants productive members of society. Also, we here at LiftBot need a shit ton of revenue, like, last week, and we hear that school programs are an excellent money well to tap. 

So sign up today to get some agentic robots in your weight room. Your young athletes will benefit from watching LiftBot heft weights almost as much as if they lifted weights themselves. 

MO: A New School Surveillance Idea

Missouri is going to start watching school wastewater for drugs.

Wastewater monitoring is not an entirely new idea. Here in PA, we've been looking at monitoring K-12 school wastewater for indications of Covid in the school. 

But in Missouri, a $7 million project is being launched to monitor wastewater for fentanyl and other drugs. $4 million of that goes to monitoring K-12 wastewater in schools, while $3 million will go to "wastewater testing involving law enforcement efforts." Superintendents across the state received an e-mail inviting them to sign on for the project. 

"Through the collection of one small wastewater sample per week, schools will receive near real-time insights into local substance misuse trends at no cost and with no additional responsibilities for your staff," said Mark James, director of the Department of Public Safety in the email.

Mike O'Connell of the Missouri Department of Public Safety told Missourinet that 40 schools have signed up and twelve have already begun the weekly testing. 

“By doing weekly testing, you’ll be able to track trends and then the data are shared with the schools and then the schools can look at what types of programs they want to implement, and some may decide that it’s a bigger problem than they anticipated,” said O’Connell.

Asked if the data would also be shared with law enforcement, O'Connell replied that there was nothing contractually to prevent that sharing. “But I believe that that is still being worked out.”

The company contracted for the work is Stercus Bioanalytics, a company already doing similar wastewater analysis in other states. They belong to Mighty Good Solutions, LLC, a company that includes a variety of products from antibacterial wipes (Wipe Those Hands and Wipe That Tush are actual MGS company names that I did not make up), diagnostic kits, and household products like Pizza Saver, toothbrush head covers (Germ Guard) and measuring spoons. Mighty Good was founded in 2012 in Kansas City and started out making "plastic consumer goods." When COVID hit, they started making and donating medical face shields for hospitals and health professionals, then moved into health and hygiene products. The founder Ben Rendo and his company seem like swell folks.

Wastewater testing, particularly when it doesn't require the school to do anything except look at the data, could be useful. Testing wastewater for fentanyl use has been around for several years now. Nobody seems to be questioning its accuracy. Commenting on the practice in 2024, Jeffrey Brent, MD, PhD, a distinguished clinical professor in the CU Division of Pulmonary Sciences and Critical Care Medicine and a national leader in medical toxicology research, pointed out the danger of stigmatizing an entire community. "Such stigmatization has implications for factors like real estate prices, the likelihood of community improvement related to the willingness of businesses to establish themselves locally, and community gentrification.”

Is that a possible problem for schools? Probably. I'm wondering what happens to a student who is applying for college from a "notorious druggie school." I'm more concerned that the results could be used as an excuse for law enforcement to land on a school with both feet. 

I get that if a school has a fentanyl problem, it is better for school leaders to know than to not know. But every time someone comes up with a new way to put students under surveillance, I have concerns. When we collect data about young humans, the Law of Unintended Consequences always seems to kick in. We should keep an eye on how this pilot program pans out. 

AI Student Spectators

States are trying to figure out how to respond to AI in schools, and they are most flubbing it. A piece from CT Insider shows just how far in the weeds folks are getting. 

The piece by no less than five staff writers (Natasha Sokoloff, Crystal Elescano, Ignacio Laguarda, Jessica Simms, Michael Gagne) looks at how Connecticut's district approaches are working out in the classroom, and the items touted as success are... well, discouraging. Meanwhile, the state is putzing along and "plans to build its formal AI guidance for all districts based on the findings of the pilot program; collaboration with experts and AI educational organizations; and research-based documents 'to ensure we get this right,' [state academic chief Irene] Parisi said."

Westport Public Schools has AI tools in place that are, according to Parisi "education-specific and have privacy protections." 

“They said it was like having a teacher in their pocket,” she said. The tools could help students work through a particular problem, brainstorm ideas, research for projects and provide feedback, she said.

 "Help" and "work through" are doing some heavy lifting here. "Provide feedback" remains one of the popular items in the AI arsenal. I remain unconvinced. Feedback that does not understand or include student intent-- what they thought they were doing, what they meant to do-- is just correction. "Do this instead of that." If you don't know why the student did "that" in the first place, you can't provide much in the way of useful correction, and since AI does not "know" anything, all it can do is edit the student's work for them. What do students learn from this? This is the pedagogical equivalent of an adult who shoulders the student aside and fixes their work while the student watches.

But the proud example of an AI project, shared by the superintendent in a board meeting, is even worse. 

Students in a middle school social studies class used AI to create and question “digital peers” and “characters” from the Middle Ages while the teacher guided them in evaluating responses for accuracy and evidence.

Many teachers (including me) would recognize this assignment immediately, only Back In The Day, we would have the students create and role play the characters themselves. In Mrs. O'Keefe's eighth grade English class (back in 1971), we had to research a historical person and then portray them as a guest on a talk show (my friends Andy and Stewart drew Van Gogh, and in the middle of his interview he became over-emotional and cut off his own ear, complete with fake blood).  My sister-in-teaching Merrill annually had her students put Milton's Paradise Lost on trial, with students role playing characters from the work.

This is a variation on that same assignment except AI does the role playing and students are transformed from actors into spectators.

Almost any version of this assignment would be better. Let students role play. Let them craft faux social media accounts for their characters. Anything that had them actively creating the character based on their own research, rather than feeding some stuff into an AI and sitting back to observe and judge the result. What does the teacher even assess in such an assignment? How is this any better than just watching a video about the topic?

If you're considering incorporating AI in your lesson and wondering how to decide what to have it do, here's a hint-- do not have it turn students from active participants into spectators who simply watch what the bot does for them. Students should be main characters in their own education, and not observers, sidelined so that the plagiarism machine can shine. 

When Implementing New Tech, Always Ask This Question

Installing new ed tech? Implementing new policies or procedures? I wish with all my heart that the People In Charge would ask a simple set of questions.

Who is helped by this? Which job does this make easier?  

This has always been an issue, because it is easy to sit in an administration office and come up with procedures and paperwork that would make your life easier. And that's a perfectly human impulse-- to look at the work you're slogging through and think, "Man, this would be so much easier if I had my subordinates do X." 

In education, it's often something data related. "I would love to have data on how many left-handed students bring their own pencils," muses some admin. "I wonder who could collect that data for me?" (Spoiler alert: it will be the teachers). 

You don't have to look any further than the Big Standardized Test, which is the result of a whole bunch of policymakers saying, "Well, we could impose some of our favorite policies if only we had some data to excuse them."

The astonishing thing about applying the "Whose job does this make easier" lens to education is how truly rare it is that the answer is "teachers." 

It's not always huge stuff. When my old school switched from a paper attendance system run out of the main office over to a computerized system run by teachers, it created one more nuisance. Now every period had to have a built in moment within the first five minutes of class that allowed me to go to my desktop computer and record attendance, rather than doing it on paper to be checked later against the master attendance list. 

Was this a massive inconvenience? Of course not. But what generally grinds classroom teachers down is not the massive weight of large policy ideas, but death by a thousand small paper cuts. 

And this was a case where the central office was very proud of how this saved labor and made their job easier. But many labor-saving programs are actually labor-moving programs, and in school, the labor is most commonly moved to teachers. A thousand paper cuts.

Imagine a district where the administration said, "Yes, this would make my job easier, but it would put more burden on the teachers, so let's not do it." If you don't have to imagine that district, God bless you.

I am not arguing that the goal should be to make teaching the easiest walk-in-the-park job ever envisioned; that is neither possible nor desirable. But the basic function of a school administration is to make it possible for every teacher in the building to do the best job they can, and every administrative decision should be examined through that lens. Every decision should be centered on the question, "Will this support teaching in classrooms?"

A whole family of ed tech products are based on the proposition "If teachers put their work into these tech platforms, it will be easier for administration to monitor them." Digital lesson plans don't make it any easier for teachers to plan, and in fact can add time to the whole process, but they do make it easier for admins to monitor those plans (and in extreme cases, admins may have visions of an entire digitized program, so that the teacher can be more easily replaced).

The newest tech wave of AI products should face the same question. What job does this AI-powered whizbang actually make easier? Is it, for instance, easier to have an AI extrude lesson plans which the teacher must then edit and check for errors? Who does this actually help? Does it help a teacher to automate the brainwork of teaching (hint: does it help athletes to have a robot lift weights for them). 

Teachers aren't the only stakeholders who need to be considered. Yes, it may make communication easier for the school, but does it really help parents and students to have to download one more app in order to get important information from the school?

Even worse is the tech that is adopted simply because it's cool, with no idea that it will help anyone at all. It's just cool, you know, and we've heard other schools are getting it. Surely you'll figure out some use for it. 

The thing is, every new tech a teacher adopts (willingly or not) is either helping or hurting. Even if it's not actively making the job harder, a non-helping piece of tech represents opportunity cost, money that could have been spent on something that was actually useful. 

So administrations, I beg you-- before you adopt, ask yourself who would be helped by this new technowidget, and if the answer is not "The people who do the actual work of teaching students," maybe ask yourself if it's really worth purchasing.