Bruce Baker of Rutgers University is well known for his candor and scholarly acumen.

Here he dissects the new plan to destroy public education in Kansas City and shows what an outright farce it is.

He writes:

This past week, the good citizens of Kansas City and Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education were graced with one of the most vacuous manifestos on education reform I’ve read in a really long time. Yes, on my blog, I’ve pontificated about numerous other vacuous manifestos that often take the form of blog posts and op-eds which I suspect have little substantive influence over actual policies.

But this one is a little different. This report by an organization calling itself CEE, or Cities for Education Entrepreneurship Trust, in collaboration with Public Impact, is a bit more serious. No more credible, but more serious, in that it is assumed that state policymakers in Missouri might actually act on the report’s recommendations.

I’ve had the displeasure of reviewing several reports by Public Impact in the Past. Their standard fare is to establish a bold conclusion, and then cite (including self citation) materials that support – with no real validation- their forgone conclusion, cite other stuff that’s totally unrelated, and cite yet other stuff that doesn’t even exist. Thus, they are actually able to construct a report with a few graphs here and there and lots of footnotes, without ever validating a single major (albeit forgone) conclusion (see for example, this one, by the same author, under a different organizational umbrella, or this one).

Is the plan original? No, he says, it is the same old song, which has no research to support it, just a mountain of assertions and assumptions. Here goes:

Here’s a synopsis – call it an advanced organizer – of the story line crafted in the report:

  • Urban districts don’t work (and aren’t stable)
  • Kansas City is an urban district, therefore, it doesn’t work (even though we find it has stabilized)
  • Privately operated charter schools in Newark, New Jersey, New York City, Texas and New Orleans are producing miracles – yielding incredible graduation rates and high test scores while serving comparably low income and otherwise needy children (even though they really aren’t serving similar kids, and many have far more resources)
  • Thus, the same can – no must – work in Kansas City (even though it hasn’t)
  • Somewhat tangentially, decentralized financing – driving money to schools for site based control – is necessarily good (even though reviews of the research suggest otherwise)

Therefore, the only solution is to deconstruct the entire failed urban district, turn control over to a non-government authority which shall loosely govern a confederation of private non-profit entities that shall compete with one another for students, choose which market niche and geographic space within KC they wish to serve and be evaluated on the test scores and graduation rates they ultimately produce.

None of the assertions and assumptions are true, but so what? That is what it will take to tear apart the KC school district and hoax the fools who buy the story.

After a good deal of fascinating analysis of demography and statistics about results, Baker concludes:

While the authors of this report so confidently conclude that the obvious solution is to replace the failed urban district with an under-regulated, loosely governed confederation of benevolent non-profit actors, one might easily alternatively conclude from the evidence herein… that simply put, large scale chartering in urban centers like Kansas City simply doesn’t work. It never has and likely never will. It fails to serve the neediest children because “market forces” and accountability measures favor avoiding those children and the neighborhoods in which they live.

Further, large scale chartering leads to deprivation of important constitutional and statutory rights for children, primarily low income and minority children. Meanwhile, suburban white peers are not being asked to forgo constitutional protections in order to access elementary and secondary schooling.

Finally, large scale chartering has made far more opaque financial and governance accountability as governing institutions have created more complex private structures in order to shield their operations, records and documents from full public view.