This is not satire. It is real.
In a guest post for EduShyster, a hedge fund manager explains why Wall Street loves charters.
To them, the way to manage schools is to treat them like a stock portfolio. Keep the winners, dump the losers. Report the success of the winners, forget about the losers. It is a great formula.
The CREDO study has been cited as evidence that charters are getting better but the study notes that 8% had closed, thus removing some of the weakest charters.
He or she writes:
“In statistics, this is a textbook case of what is known technically as “survivorship bias”—otherwise known as “ignoring data that makes you look bad.” This statistical fallacy opens up enormous opportunities for people with flexible ethics and an entrepreneurial bent. It is a mainstay of the hedge fund industry, for instance. Hedge fund indices routinely appear to outperform simple, non-fee generating investment strategies like index funds by neglecting to include funds that closed down, and take funds out of the index whenever they stop reporting performance (hint: no fund fails to report good performance!).”
And then adds:
“The parallels to the emerging charter school paradigm are obvious. You start a lot of charters. Some do better than public schools, some do worse, but overall they underperform. You shut down the bad ones. Now repeat the analysis with the non-terrible ones. Improvement! Except that the students unfortunate enough to attend these terrible school don’t just disappear (we hope – let’s not give charter schools any ideas!). However, they do disappear from the CREDO study, and that seems to be good enough for the charter sector and its advocates to proclaim this a success story.”
I wonder if Wall Street will love charters less after the news of their dismal performance on the Common Core tests. What an embarrassment for a guy who wants to be a winner every day, then discovers he has been sitting on the board of a schools that did worse than the neighborhood public school.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Ha, “flexible ethcs” … that is putting it in a kin light.
Because we all know kids are amazingly resilient and do well when their communities are under constant threats and attack.
Lord knows that simply shopping will make it so every child has an excellent school, solid teachers, and a commitment to a community that supports them.
Why is education being reduced to the parents should choose wisely and then underfund all the choices?
It creates constant churn for most of our students and the political cover to say something is being done and abdicate responsibility for having an equitable education system while managing to turn some of those public dollars into campaign donations.
If you have a bad performer in this system, shut them down and offer their school to someone else – you don’t take responsibility for what they did (after all parents “chose” them – even if they didn’t choose to grant the charter license).
Parents do have choice in what they subject them to – and it shouldn’t be this system. I’ve never seen such a systematic way to demoralize society and prevent them from getting a solid education unless they can afford to opt out of it.
This post needs to go viral. Children aren’t commodities for a portfolio, yet using schools as such extends to using kids this way, too. Does anyone else see irony in the whole whole “accountability” argument when hedge fund managers can simply ignore their failures to promote their successes?
Who gave these people the right to mess with our children and the livelihoods of the adults who teach them?
politicians who like Rolex watches
And, there are some who have only one understanding of humanity and that is “us” and “them”……
If you look at some of the top gurus it is the value system they live by (Pete Ptereson’s value system ) and with others it is greed and still others it is “make a name for myself” and always be associated with the Alist.
Now would be an appropriate moment to remember the following and take action:
“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” George Orwell
Yes, this IS a systematic demoralization of society. Democracy dies, is replaced by Oligarchy and it is heaven (or hell) in Hedge Fund Land, depending on your address. Oligarchy doesn’t wait to be given the right to do anything. Obscene amounts of money are amassed, and then used to buy the influence necessary for seizing the right to mess with our children. We participate “professionally” and don’t protest along the way (a 20+ year journey) but finally wake up to the takeover only after it is pretty much a done deal. George Orwell imagined what resistance would look like so, what WOULD it look like? Let’s begin to list the ways we can take back our schools in every community and for every child.
so Place your bets folks (wasn’t it Frank Sinatra who did that song in Guys and Dolls?)
quote: “The press release trumpeted that in 2013, charter school students were a whole “8 days of learning in reading beyond their local peers in public schools,” and were running just about even in math. Now, an average of 4 learning days doesn’t sound like much, but if true, ”
Or, we could sing the Beatles song 8 days a week ……..
These are two anecdotes that are absolutely , positively true:
(a) my niece is about 40 and is manager in a furniture store in Albany. The owner has meetings with the employees and says “I can’t buy the newest jaguar because you people didn’t sell enough furniture.” (He already has a plane and a jaguar)
(b) In 1972 we were told by a supervisor “You can take 2 days at Christmas; Christmas is when we work to get ahead of the competiton.”
….and if they are too big to fail, the Federal Department of Education will bail them out and move that money into other charters.
The plan is to use mom-and-pop charters as a facade for “choice” – in fact, it’s the schools that have choice, not the parents/students – and eventually castigate and close them, or merge them with the chains. Economies of scale…
Wall Street, flexible “ethics”, gambling, taking a chance. This seems to be the convincing mantra. Jump in, take a risk, when you can, grab the cash and run …until you have exhausted all possibilities, bankrupted the unsuspecting, and left people floundering. Disagree, and you are called negative, defensive, backward, and unintelligent. It has happened to business after business. Now schools, prisons, community agencies, fire, safety, infrastructure… It never seems to stop. Opportunists have been around for centuries. They used to be called snakeoil salesmen. But $$$$$$$$ will lead so many astray. Funny how those who defend Wall St seem to tbink that a teacher with a middle class salary is a moocher and greedy.
But I thought it was all ” for the kids”?
Perhaps this type of I formation will help Mr and Mrs America get a clue about “reform”.
A wise real estate attorney told me that during the “boom” mortgages were sliced and diced and sold so often that even now large lenders cannot identify who owns the note. So you get abandoned houses that cannot be foreclosed on because the bank cannot prove who owns the note.
The attorney calls the houses “Zombies.” The part I found wise was his comment that “This is what happens when you take people out of an equation.” So in the “boom” people assumed (lots of people—-smart people even) that real estate values would always go up. But as we learned from the crash, this is not so, as a piece of real estate must have a user for it to have value.
While the paralell with education privatizing is not direct here, the spirit of it seems similar to me. It seems to me portfolios based on charter schools is another “boom”-like pattern to build a market of charters (and a portfolio based on it) that is not giving true regard for people. It is asking for trouble.
I think about this whenever I see these Zombie houses.