Peter Greene puts his finger on the reason that Secretary DeVos is unmoved by charter failures. In her ideal free-market model, failure is a feature, not a bug.
in the free market, businesses open and close all the time. Where is Eastern Airlines, Braniff, TWA? Gone.
Stability, in her view, is not desirable. Disruption and churn show that the market is working well.
Thats why she is not at all disturbed to learn that one-third of the charters funded by the U.S. Department of Education either never opened or closed soon after opening. That’s music to her ears. The market is working!
He writes:
“This is one of the area where choicers have a fundamental disagreement with public education advocates. For public schools, stability is a basic foundational value. The school is a community institution, and like all institutions, part of its values comes from its continuity, its connections to tradition, the past. It means something to people to see their children and neighbors all passing through the same halls, having the same teachers, being part of a community collective that stretches across the years. For free market Reformsters, anything that gets in the way of their idea of free market mechanics is bad; there should be winners and losers and the market should judge their worth, ruthlessly culling the weak and undeserving.
“Reformsters know they have a hard sell. That’s why they don’t try to use this as a selling point (“Don’t forget– the school your child chooses could close at any time due to market consitions! Isn’t that awesome!”) That’s why they are adamant about calling charters “public” schools– because it lulls the customers into believing that charters share some of the fundamental characteristics of public schools, like stability and longevity. They (e.g. Governor DeSantis of Florida) also want to hold onto “public” because the change to privately owned and operated market based schools is the end of public education as we know it; it truly is privatization, and almost nobody pushing these policies has the guts to publicly say, “I propose that we end public education and replace it with privately owned and operated businesses, some of which will reserve the right to refuse service to some of you, and all of which may not last long enough to see your child from K through 12.”
“The person who almost has the guts to almost say this is, ironically, Betsy DeVos– the person charged with taking care of the public system that she would like to kill. What a wacky world we live in. So don’t expect her to be moved by all the waste of tax dollars paying for failed or fraudulent charter schools; every time a charter school closes, a free market reformster gets their wings, and Betsy is a-fixin’ to fly.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Betsy the Brainless needs a good Bashing along with all of the free market advocates that cheer when she destroys something that is really honest and worth supporting.
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“Stability, in her view, is not desirable. Disruption and churn show that the market is working well.”
It still amazes me that conservatives hew to this idea. Think about it- STABILITY in children’s lives is unimportant. That’s their position?
It’s nuts. I don’t know any of these children who embrace chaos. They really think the children embroiled in the constant charter churn in Detroit are excited to switch schools every 6 months? Don’t they have relationships with the adults and other children in the school? I mean, I would hope so. I would assume so, if they’re like every human being.
I’d love to try this out on the reformers themselves. We’ll “disrupt” their work places every couple of months. See how much they embrace that. It hasn’t escaped my notice that many of these bold disrupters have secure sinecures in universities and think tanks or are wildly wealthy, like DeVos, so have a very ample fall back.
I was thinking about my own kids when DeVos was comparing schools to food trucks- how they had this whole social web in school that was so important to them. To just pitch that in the trash like it has no value is breathtaking arrogance.
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Betsy doesn’t care how many Amway dealers wind up with a garage full of her brand as long as the DeVos family gets paid. She knows there’s a “sucker born every minute.” They move on to the next person that falls for the pitch. That is how they can afford so many yachts.
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As usual Peter has it right. I happened on this report on billionaire investments in schools and why these “gifts” are really anti-democratic, even if well-intentioned. https://nonprofitquarterly.org/2019/04/10/foxes-henhouses-and-billionaire-philanthropists-eradicating-inequity/?utm_source=NPQ+Newsletters&utm_campaign=1fbd31d400-DAILY_RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_94063a1d17-1fbd31d400-12896525&mc_cid=1fbd31d400&mc_eid=49638bd204
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It’s really interesting to see that many of these billionaires are now concerned about the growing wealth gap and calling for more steeply progressive taxation. Dialo is not alone. Gates and Buffet and Dimon have also done so. I think this is a good sign. They are recognizing that the current trends toward bifurcation of wealth and income are dangerous.
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Diane Today’s Mueller Report: What better evidence do we have for education fostering a lively dialogue, all the way through K-12 SCHOOLING, about kinds of governments, and the freedoms and responsibilities of living in a democracy: aka history, civics, culture, (or whatever we want to name it).
In the light of the Mueller Report, Trump and his “base” present us with the ABSENCE of an intelligent and critical relationship between The People and their elected government officials, as well as the PRESENCE of what is more like a cult leader and his followers, or (as others have said) a mob boss and his mindless strongmen. What more do we need to “get it” about how what has gone missing in education in the last century is, in good part, responsible for Trump and his base. CBK
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And to go into schools with no understanding or appreciation of how schools operate within communities. Did these people go to school? None of them experienced any kind of continuity or community role for a public school? None of them had a cherished friend in school that they would miss? None of them went to an athletic event at a school that was community-wide, where the whole town shows up? Did they all go away to boarding school, or what? I just don’t think this is a hugely rare experience for most people, yet all of ed reform is unfamiliar with it.
They were really blown away with shock when people in Chicago really mourned those schools they lost? I wasn’t surprised at all. They’re a public center of the neighborhood, and it’s generational. We demolished a school that was a neighborhood center since 1908. It took two years and numerous community meetings to get public consent. They’re attached to it, and rightfully so.
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“Did these people go to school? None of them experienced any kind of continuity or community role for a public school? None of them had a cherished friend in school that they would miss? None of them went to an athletic event at a school that was community-wide, where the whole town shows up? Did they all go away to boarding school, or what?”
As one who went K-12 in Catholic schools I can say that the concept of “community” was one of the highlights of the environment. Our church was the center of the Catholic community as it still is. I’ve many cherished friends from grade/high school. The thing is is that until I went to college I didn’t realize just how insular and restricting that “community” can be in regards to the “other”. And that is why my children attended public schools, to experience being with all members of society, not just a small group.
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Duane: great comment. I too had the experience of attending an insular private school. I was in a public school until grade 8, when I was sent to a private school that was that year celebrating its 100th birthday.
Both of the schools were the creators of community, and for the past 32 years I have taught at the successor of the public school. Of course, I have many friends from both experiences.
What was true was that there was rare mixture between the schools. The private school was in the community but not of the community. Most of the people at the private school were from other places since it was a boarding school, so it had its own culture. Here our experiences diverge, for the cosmopolitan nature of the population meant that it was actually more inclusive than the public school, which tended toward the agrarian southern tradition and rejected rather unconsciously any outside influence. Thus both places had their insular quality.
I was steeped so much in the culture of the community that i shared much of the xenophobic attitude. I recall a wonderful older English teacher in the seventh grade. I remember her heartfelt eulogy for King the day after he was shot. I still remember not doing any work that day, but listening to her as she expounded and cried over his loss. To her, an African-American of the generation barely older than King and the wife of a minister, he was the god-sent prophet who had brought her to this school with all of these kids. And I recall rejecting her characterization of King, whom I thought of then as a rabble rousing troublemaker, a N who needed to know his place. Many years later, perhaps still, I am in repentance for this tribal attitude so pervasive in European thought until very recently. (I cannot resist pointing out that a test of the effectiveness of her lecture about King and civil rights would have shown that most of her class failed to understand her. So much for testing)
To a great extent, it was the private school, where I was introduced to Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and a host of their fellows, that I began to understand what that English teacher was trying to get across to us. Similar lessons from both places continually surface.
What the private school did not teach was the way in which community served to blunt the more negative aspects of human behavior. Often behaviors at the private school caused conflicts and hostility because it was so competitive an environment. The rest of the community, however, tended to blunt even the prejudices described above. Horrible racists would have good relationships with the objects of their prejudice because they knew them. They brought them food when their relatives died. They hugged their necks when they saw each other on the street.
But I have rambled. Thanks for this post, Duane.
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The problea one runs into again and again is that due to inequitable and inadequate funding, many parents see their students as attending schools that do not provide the best opportunities for their children and these parents are looking for a way out. Like all marketed products, charter schools promise benefits they can never deliver. Parents are willing to trade almost anything for the chance that the hype will be true in their particular case, even if the odds are against it.
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When the S&P 500 turned 50, 70 percent of the businesses originally on the list no longer existed. Scientists at Xerox PARC–the research center–basically created most of the technologies that led to the whole computer revolution–the graphical user interface, the laser printer, the computer mouse, Postscript fonts, local networking, for example. These innovations had trillions of dollars worth of potential value, but Xerox, at the time, saw itself as being in the copier business, and it didn’t capitalize on its own inventions. Others did that.
One can understand why right-wingers think that innovation can only occur when you have independent charter and private schools that can do their own thing and either succeed or fail. However, there is another way to get innovation and continuous improvement while maintaining the stability provided by long-lasting neighborhood public schools. The secret, there, lies in the lessons taught by Juran and Deming and Shewart–the pioneers of the quality control movement. Here’s how to do that:
Scrap the “standards” and the pedagogically useless summative high-stakes standardized tests. In their place, promulgate a very broad framework (perhaps six or seven general principles) specifying very broad goals (e.g., “The student will be broadly familiar with great works in American, British, and World Literature reflecting a variety of voices and perspectives. The student will develop intrinsic motivation to read, write, and learn. The student will be able to recognize and to reproduce in his or her own work standard literary and rhetorical genres, techniques, styles, and structures. The student will develop an active vocabulary in a broad range of knowledge domains. The student will develop phonetic and syntactic fluency sufficient to enable reading of adult texts. The student will develop command of the verbal and nonverbal techniques of effective oral communication and demonstrate these routinely.” That kind of thing.) These should provide the degrees of freedom within which real curricular and pedagogical innovation can occur
AND
Do open-source crowd sourcing of alternative, innovative ideas by creating an open source national ELA portal or wiki to which scholars, researchers, curriculum developers, and classroom practitioners can post
–Competing, VOLUNTARY standards, frameworks, learning progressions, curriculum outlines, reading lists, pedagogical approaches, model lessons and lesson templates, model exercises and exercise templates, etc.;
–for particular domains;
–subject to ongoing, vigorous, public debate and refinement;
–based on results in the classroom and ongoing research and development;
–freely adopted by autonomous local schools and districts;
–and subjected to continual critique by teacher-led schools–teachers who are given the time in their schedules to subject those, and their own practice, to ongoing critique via something like Japanese Lesson Study.
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Bob: I see problems associated with “competing, voluntary standards” the problems stem from my own experience being from a small, country village. I also see a problem challenging the assumptions of a guy like you, but here goes anyway.
It took me a long time to acquire the vocabulary that people in other parts of the country got simply by living. It was not that my parents were not educated. Both of them had college degrees. But my mother was a musician, so I knew about a treble cleft but not a rhyming couplet. When I would go down to Miss Jeans to get an ice cream cone, the weather was usually the subject. My culture did not include much vocabulary. There was relatively little discussion of particle physics around the old army cannon stove down at the store. Down there an intrusion into private affairs was called buttnin”. An African-American friend later taught me it was called “dippin”. This lack of vocabulary prowess did not keep me from having a special understanding of medieval agriculture when I got to the point of studying it in college. Not did it keep my friend from taking part in an oral history in high school that studied the burning of the local courthouse during a race riot in1934.
So some kids grow up without the richness of an academic environment. Standards compare these children to those who grew up like me. If we ever start down the standards road, we arrive at testing again, even if our conversation is broad instead of specific.
If you hear my daughter talk, you will understand what it is like to grow up in a house with two parents with a big vocabulary. That does not mean she deserves to be put on top of the stack (she deserves that because she is mine, and she is so wonderful). If she does not learn all her life, she will be like friends of mine who never read a book after college and never stopped on the side of a vacant Nebraska highway to sketch the wildflowers.
Instead of standards, maybe we should discuss appropriate goals relative to our students. Or maybe that is what you meant and I just wasted a lot of electronic ink. I probably would have done better just listening to Bob Sheperd
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What I am suggesting, Roy, is voluntary, competing materials that individual schools can choose to adopt and subject to ongoing critique AND REVISION. So, a given school might use part of this, part of that, and revisit this decision a year later. That’s nothing like the invariant, top-down standards from the past. It’s not “One ring to rule them all.” So, to give you an example, E. D. Hirsch, Jr.’s Core Knowledge Foundation published its alternative to the state standards–the Core Knowledge Sequence. Schools would be free to go to documents like that and lift parts of it for use in their own curriculum planning.
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When I taught at the beginning of my career, years ago, it was typical for English teachers, under the direction of their Department Head, to make the curricular and pedagogical decisions for a school, including curriculum design and text choices. English teachers in those days typically subscribed to the English Journal, and they would debate curricular and pedagogical innovations and, when they seemed promising, try them out. That bottom-up way is how continuous improvement can actually occur.
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When I taught at the beginning of my career, years ago, it was typical for English teachers, under the direction of their Department Head, to make the curricular and pedagogical decisions for a school, including curriculum design and text choices. English teachers in those days typically subscribed to the English Journal, and they would debate curricular and pedagogical innovations and, when they seemed promising, try them out. That bottom-up way is how continuous improvement can actually occur.
On some matters, one would get an emergent consensus that lasted for a long while. But there was this built-in mechanism–those local, autonomous English teacher “quality circles”–for change and improvement. That’s all gone now. A typical English Department meeting now involves the department head reading out a list of this week’s mandates from administrators interested in doing exactly what needs to be done to run test prep factories to improve test scores.
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One of the things that makes what I am proposing so much more sensible is that kids and communities differ–they have unique needs–an a system such as I have proposed empowers local educators to design what’s going to work to meet those needs.
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It sure would be great to have flexible curriculum guides instead of standardized everything. In the meantime, I believe it is possible to wrest control of English department meetings and curriculum control back from Common Core happy administrators, as long as there is a teachers union engaging in collective bargaining for the contract under which we work. My contract says that elected department chairs run department meetings. I have been trying for three years to get admin to honor the contract (without filing a grievance and likely angering the principal into vengeful behavior) and the tide is beginning to turn.
I’ve filed an application, successfully so far, to opt out of standardized interim assessments. The strike helped shed some light on such concerns. I am close to getting back full professional authorship over what I teach. It’s a long, difficult, but possible road to autonomy. I just wish I didn’t have to engage in politics to be able to do my job right, in other words, I wish billionaires like Gates and DeVos didn’t have such a penchant for telling everyone what to do and how to do it, and punishing those with the knowledge and intellectual insight to know the billionaires are wrong.
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Roy,
One of the things that can make a difference between what happens in schools now in comparison to when you and I went to school that obviates the need for national standards is the vast amount of easily available curricular materials available to the teachers. Back in the 60s/70s those materials were not as easily available at all.
As Bob points out, let’s get back to giving those who know the pedagogical process the best, the teachers, the opportunity to provide the teaching and learning environment that fits each and every unique class, and all classes are unique due to myriad factors (as you well know).
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I can certainly not argue with any of these responses. I guess the thing I would try to avoid was our tendency years ago to flex our local muscles, claiming that we teach particle physics to seventh graders and making everybody else feel inferior to us. We do that now, an exaggeration of the thing that got us into this reform stuff, the pervasive belief that we were locked in a cycle of failure.
You all are obviously correct to suggest that teachers are the correct instruments for making instruction better.
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To all on this thread,
I would like to add that n Finland, teachers make up most of the tests K -12. Your ideas about designing curriculum are great, but educators should control the design of the test items as well and offer multiple modalities in which to test for growth, achievement, or acquisition and application of new knowledge.
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Robert R, PC,
“in which to test for growth, achievement, or acquisition and application of new knowledge.”
I agree with your prior thoughts about teacher made assessments of whatever type.
But what I have come to disagree with in general and which your statement shows is the concept of assessment as a mechanism for the teacher to “diagnose” the student. When did we determine that the teacher’s job was to be a diagnostician a la medical model and not a teacher?
My contention is that the primary/main/fundamental focus of any assessment should be to help the student learn, to help the student better understand where he/she is in the learning process and what she/he needs to do to increase/better learn the subject matter at hand.
Were we to shift our focus from being a diagnostician to one of being a true teacher wherein the main focus is to help each individual student best learn for themselves we would go a long way into providing a truly proper teaching and learning environment. As my friend Tomato Tom says “I can teach it to you but I can’t learn it for you”. The actual learning that takes place in a classroom is actually the learning that occurs in the students’ minds.
I never felt I needed a formal assessment to know how the students were doing in learning Spanish–it was fairly obvious from the work that they did in class. And even then, sometimes I was fooled by how much a student actually knew but didn’t actually express. But I don’t remember ever overestimating what I thought a student knew as most students like to show that they are indeed learning.
Teachers as diagnosticians is a subtle long term poison that ultimately can destroy the teaching and learning environment.
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Well stated. Many districts were on the road to continuing improvement through collaboration prior to NCLB and high stakes testing. Test and punish put public schools on the defensive where they have been ever since.
With each passing year we seem to be further and further from what works best. Each year increases the undermining and denigration of the common good. Deform has made many teachers run around in circles, and micromanagement will not allow them to move forward.
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and the hardest truth is that each year brings more and more dependence upon technology and its ability to allow an increasingly picky micromanagement — a technology which, once instated, denies the likelihood of any return to used-to-be best practices
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As a foreign-language teacher, I have been delighted to find just about any resource I need plus a lot I never imagined online. In early internet days I discovered that a particularly good teacher’s college FL program had a “bulletin board” to share/ discuss ideas from their coursework. Through them I learned of TPRS, my now long-fave conversational-teaching method [& Krashen, & TPR]; TPRS has developed huge blogs [there’s even one for PreK/Elem!], matls/ resources. The ever-evolving, best-practices ACTFL standards have been available online for 2 decades (most public schools use these, since thank god CCSS has not yet come near WL). You can design an excellent course through those two basics alone [TPR/ TPRS methods & ACTFL stds]. There was a 3rd great resource in early 2000’s (until UK quashed its early-learning WL program): CILT teachers’ blog & linked free materials from their best district programs. And today if you hunt around there are just a zillion WL teacher-blogs sharing ideas and materials.
I guess I am a one-man example of voluntarily adopting stds, matls & resources from the internet. In my case it was not really voluntary—the US has no PreK/K FL-teaching programs or stds, & that’s what I chose to do. Why? I learned from my own kids’ public schooling [’92-2010]that midsch/hisch WL pgms had not developed effective advances from the same-old grammar-first failures of my own ‘50’s-‘60’s pubsch WL ed– & because even when the district got a clue & started teaching WL in elemsch, they continued to pursue century-old methods modeled on learning Latin—just backed them down into 2nd or 3rd grade. Meanwhile I already knew from tutoring my younger sibs in ‘60’s & own kids in ‘90’s that ages 2-6 is the optimum age for putting wired-in lang-learning skills to use.
The only reason any of this has been possible for me is (a)US is still so backwards globally that they don’t invest in WL-learning, so I’ve been unhampered by fed or state DofEd micromgt, and (b), parents understand kids’ preternatural early lang-learning capacity, & see the value in WL ignored by the ed establishment—so they seek out PreK/K’s that offer it.
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I love these immersion approaches to foreign language instruction, and yes, absolutely, 2-6 is the optimal age for starting such instruction. That we wait, in the US, until kids are in middle school or in high school is just crazy. Whole language works well for second language instruction but is not effective for initial first-language reading instruction. The takeaways from whole language that are valuable for the ELA teacher are emphasis on a) what is being communicated in b) whole, authentic texts.
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I was never a fan of Krashen and the TPRS. It seemed way too teacher centered, that the teacher was an actor on the stage, entertaining the students. But I also know that different methods can work. Why?
Because ultimately it is the student who determines what he/she will learn from any given method.
While I was not the total grammar oriented approach to learning like I had been instructed in, I am a firm believer in using grammar to bridge two languages. I never believed as Krashen does that one will automatically learn the inherent grammar of a second language when one starts so late in life (for most students that is in either middle or high school). I know, as Bob stated that the sooner the better in beginning to learn a second language and no doubt that then, when begun in early childhood, that a person can and will learn the inherent grammar.
I also did not limit my teaching of Spanish to just being able to say, write and/or understand a few phrases as my class was also a study of the Spanish language, much like native English speakers study English to learn more about how it works.
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When a private enterprise is no longer able to “cut it” in the marketplace, it goes out of business. Consider Radio Shack, and Circuit City. see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction
When a charter school (or any non-public school) is unable to survive in the marketplace, it will close. Then a new entity, that can satisfy the consumers will rise up.
When a public school cannot deliver a proper education to the students, the politicians just throw more money at it.
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One of the recurring bits of Ed Deform scripture is that US public schools have failed. However, the fact is that when you factor in the diversity of the US student population–including high percentages of students living in extreme poverty–the US ranks near the top on international tests. We have a much more heterogeneous student population than does, say, Finland.
The US public education system is one of the glories of the world. It’s accomplishments are astonishing. I have written above about a real mechanism for getting continuous improvement in public schools. That’s to empower school-level decision making based in teacher-led quality circles that can adopt pedagogical and curricular innovations. Another great idea is a return to the original conception of charters as put forward by Albert Shanker years ago–as teacher-led, unionized schools within public schools that can act innovation factories–alternative schools. That’s a far, far cry from the charter schools that we have today, many of which are privately run vehicles for turning taxpayer dollars into enormous private profits.
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cx: Its accomplishments. Oh, for a correction feature for typos in WordPress posts!
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Chas,
“When a public school cannot deliver a proper education to the students, the politicians just throw more money at it.”
Do you have any sort of independent proof for your opinion? Please supply as I’ve never seen that happen.
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Duane,
You were in the schools. Did you see any of that money they were throwing at you?
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Ha, ha! That’s a good one Diane!
I did though, see how a fairly large public school district’s monies were handled by being on the district budget committee for a couple of years. There was no extra money to throw at the teachers.
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It was really difficult to decide what to do with all the money I was getting as a teacher in Florida–buy a private island? a luxury yacht? a Bugatti? Endow a wing at the local art museum?
I got a tiny check from the state of Florida for school supplies. It was enough to buy supplies for my classroom for about a month. The rest of the time, I bought supplies out of my salary, which amounted to about what the folks bagging groceries at the local Publix were making.
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My school is so awash with politician supplied money that the heating and cooling unit for my classroom only works on high (this is year three for that). I have learned to open the back door and cool the blasting hot air in the winter and open the door to let in warm air to warm the cold air blasting us out in the off season
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Have had similar issues with HVAC in my classrooms.
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Charles, I hope you will read my general comment on Diane’s post down there somewhere. There is simply no resemblance between competitive private businesses and charter schools. Charters fail for many– related– reasons, & probably least among them is parents “walking with their feet.” The idea that limited school-tax resources can support a smorgasbord of quality private-run alternatives to public school is ludicrous on its face.
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Charles,
It is important to remember that public schools do compete for students because students do have other options than attending the school they have been assigned to attend by the local school board.
If the wealthy do not believe the local public schools do a good enough job, they simply send their children to private schools. When they do that, the per student funding from the state declines and those that are left in the public schools are worse off.
The less wealthy move to school districts that do better, depriving the original school district of the per student funding from the state as well as reducing the property tax revenue to the school district because of lowered property values. One again, the students whose families are unable to move out of that public school district are worse off.
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@Teachingeconomist: I have been saying exactly this all along. There is SOME school choice in the USA. The School choice in place, primarily benefits the wealthy. Wealthy families can opt-out of the public system, and pay for a non-public school. Less wealthy families can relocate to a district with good schools, and opt-out of the failing public school in their old district.
(My wife works in real estate, and the word gets around FAST about which public schools are good and which are bad).
The result of this limited choice, is that poor families, in areas with low-quality schools, are basically “stuck”. They cannot move to a wealthy area, and they cannot afford a non-public school. Everyone else gets school choice, except for the poor families.
One result of this, is that higher income families are much less likely to vote to raise their (school) taxes, and much less likely to want to see their tax money go to the low-quality schools that their children are not attending!
Denying school choice to poor and minority families, and condemning them to attend low-quality underfunded schools, is the worst kind of racism.
That is why in many polls, minority families want to have the option to leave the public school system.
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Charles,
This is the absolute last time I will post any comment by you about school choice because you say the same things every time and I have answered the same comments every time.
School choice does NOT give poor families the same choices as rich families. Rich families spend up to $50,000-60,000 a year, as Trump did to send his children to the Hill School. In urban districts, the rich send their children to private schools where the tuition ranges from $25,000-$60,000.
Vouchers will not allow any poor student to attend any of these schools. They are typically the same or less than the district’s per pupil spending, about $5,000 per student. Guess what? That’s not enough to go to the Hill School or Lakeside Academy in Seattle or St. John’s in Houston or any other private school where the rich send their children.
It is enough to attend a religious school with uncertified teachers that does not teach science. The rich don’t send their children to those schools, Charles.
In the future, any more repetitive comments and you will be banned permanently.
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dianeravitch Glad to hear it about Charles. But his and others’ major oversight is that DEMOCRACY and the whole idea of PUBLIC-anything have the same root. That means that ALL of us can partake of and contribute to the public domain, regardless of wealth, origin, religion, etc.
Further, public education is even more foundational than other public entities because it is charged with preparing the children who live in a democracy to be free and responsible citizens, to understand their form of government, and to preserve it for others if they will.
At its core, the takeover of PUBLIC by private entities, especially for education, constitutes damage and ultimately destruction of that root and the intimate relationship between all-things-public and the democracy that we all live in.
The irony about charters is that, insofar as charters engage in, or even CAN engage in, avoiding some students while accepting others (via funding or this-or-that phobia): by their written or covert policies, it’s the charter and not the families who actually CHOOSE who goes where. CBK
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Charles, poor families are not the victims of poor quality schools. Poor families are the victims of poverty and poverty is the problem, not the schools. Those schools just happen to be in areas with high rates of poverty.
Giving poor families the choice of moving their children from a local public school to a local corporate charter school is not going to get rid of the poverty that is the problem.
There is a lot of evidence that points to the fact that poverty is the problem, and the allegations that poor families suffer because of failing schools is nothing but BS!
For instance,
This 2013 study out of Stanford:
“The report also found:
https://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/january/test-scores-ranking-011513.html
“Poverty effects a child’s brain, which effects her ability to learn in school. New research shows the mere fact of being poor can affect kids’ brains, making it difficult for them to succeed in school. Untreated, researchers have found these events compound, affecting many parts of the body.”
http://www.elevatemontana.org/poverty-effects-a-childs-brain-which-effects-her-ability-to-learn-in-school/
“ISSUE (s): Chronic exposure to poverty has been documented to have a detrimental effect on student learning. Students living in poverty do not always have equal access to education. Poverty is a high priority condition affecting our students’ success in the United States.
“The poverty rate in 2011 for children under 18 was 21.9% (US Census Bureau). The overall child poverty rate in New York State has varied within a fairly narrow range during the past three decades, from a low of 18.3 percent to a high of 26.4 percent.(Council of Children and Families) Educators must deal with the effects created by the inequalities of wealth every day.”
CHOICE is not the way to deal with the damage poverty causes a child’s ability to learn.
https://www.newyorkstateascd.org/domain/58
“The Effects of Poverty on Child Development and Educational Outcomes
Poverty affects a child’s development and educational outcomes beginning in the earliest years of life, both directly and indirectly through mediated, moderated, and transactional processes. School readiness, or the child’s ability to use and profit from school, has been recognized as playing a unique role in escape from poverty in the United States and increasingly in developing countries. It is a critical element but needs to be supported by many other components of a poverty-alleviation strategy, such as improved opportunity structures and empowerment of families. The paper reviews evidence from interventions to improve school readiness of children in poverty, both in the United States and in developing countries, and provides recommendations for future research and action.’
https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1002&context=psycd_fac
The false allegations that public schools are failing poor families are ignorant and stupid and a crime against humanity.
GIving a poor family the choice between attending a non-profit public schools that must be transparent and offer proof they are spending the public’s money wisely and a for-profit corporate charter school (even when they claim to be non-profit) that is allowed to be opaque and secretive and offer no proof they are spending the public’s money wisely is INSANE and again, I say, I CRIME against humanity.
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I appreciate your comments, and the depth of your commitment to the cause of education. It takes courage, and a commitment to the principles of free speech, to publish ideas and statements that are so thoroughly at variance with your own. I congratulate you.
BTW- I attended the Seder at the local synagogue last night. What a wonderful celebration. The rabbi asked me to ask the four questions in sign language for the celebration. Shalom!
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It’s astonishing, really, that a proposal such as mine would now be considered radical. Basically, I am calling for a return to how things were before the Ed Deform standards-and-testing mess, when there was a lot of school-level autonomy, but with this difference–the teachers in those schools would be able to make use of resources from a national portal for sharing innovative curricular and pedagogical approaches in ELA and mathematics that classroom practitioners, researchers, curriculum developers, and professors of English, education, and so on could participate in. We’ve devolved so far that a call for such a return to normalcy will be considered, by many, to be a radical proposal. Aie yie yie.
And now, after all these years of Ed Deform, an entire new generation of English teachers has become inured to operating under conditions of low autonomy in which they are no longer treated as or expected to function as professionals who make curricular and pedagogical decisions. So, a return will require a lot of learning, anew, on the job. But that can easily happen. It’s amazing how people rise to the occasion when you give them the autonomy/self-direction. That creates a lot of intrinsic motivation and excitement, and amazing stuff happens.
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Excellent commentary, Bob! And oh, it’s radical only in the sense that it is basic common sense to implement your suggestions. That sort of environment obtained (at least for the school I was in) in the 90s only to be co-opted by top down strong LÍDER* dictates and mandates in this century.
*I purposely use the Spanish spelling to indicate the classic banana republic tinpot dictator strongman type control.
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Absolutely right, Bob. All NJ would need is to return to its open-ended standards of the ’90’s, which engendered active choice & involvement by dept professionals– shared among districts!– & go back to the days of roughly 3 rounds of stdzd state assessments in K12. Today the resources available to those dept professionals is endless.
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That would improve education tremendously! Prior to NCLB we were doing wonderful, collaborative work.
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English teachers: Take back your classrooms!
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There is really no validity to the idea that schools can function as a marketplace. Is there a service to the public that has functioned better as a private entity? Consider some of the attempts from history.
Transportation during the Nineteenth century was primarily accomplished on a private competition model. Railroads were given government help in the form of right-of-way grants and legal leeway to move goods and people. Nonwithstanding our nostalgia for the days when we boarded the train for a quick run to the towns we wanted to visit, this was a disaster, with an entire political movement, the populist movement, growing out of the opposition to the dominant big rail companies of that day. Meanwhile, plank roads, turnpikes, and macadamized surface roads for horse and mule traffic were almost exclusively junked in the era of the auto because stopping every few miles was an imposition.
In medicine, the old doctors who traded their services, bucolic as these attempts were in the 1800s, gave way to government by insurance companies. Today it is hard to tell whether it is the insurance company that makes a decision about your health or a doctor who is masquerading as a private contractor. Most industrialized countries have opted for a service run by a government that admits to being one.
Private contractors build houses, but with regulatory oversight in the form of inspectors and codes. Private HVAC people and plumbers operate within a private sector that is successful so long as the clients are fairly wealthy. Still, every winter there is a story about a poor old person who cannot pay the electric or the gas bill.
I have a hard time seeing why we expect something complex like schooling will be subject to rational supply and demand pressures placed there by parents who know what is going on in their children’s school. Too often I have seen schools get a bum rap in the mind of the public or be given too much credit by a gullible public.
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And now for something completely different.
Oh no, there was no collusion. There just happened to be business arrangements between Trump and Moscow, and the whole Russian intelligence establishment just happened to be dedicated to getting Trump elected and to spreading his gospels about our Confederate Heritage and secure borders and guns and isolationist American exceptionalism, and there just happened to be hundreds of meetings and trips to Russia and other contacts between Trump campaign officials and Russian intelligence officials and kleptocrats in Putin’s circle, and Trump just happened to get big loans, despite his bankruptcies, from the bank that handled the accounts of those kleptocrats. All just coincidence. Ask William Barr. He’ll tell you. No way he was hired because he wrote a memo a year ago saying that the Mueller investigation was illegal and has had a long history of support of a sovereign presidency that is above the law.
And if you believe all that, I have some real estate courses I would like to sell to you offered by Bob’s Really Great Make a Million a Minute University.
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I understand view lots on Mars are going for a premium.
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Yes, we have a whole do-it-yourself terraforming kit that you can share with prospective clients for the real-estate on Mars that you sell to them!
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What’s the commission?
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Well, let me explain how that works. You provide funds to set up a Lloyd Lofthouse commission brokerage account with me, and your commissions get added to that, where they will multiply like maggots on roadkill. Just write your name on a stack of twenty dollar bills and send them to me, and I’ll get that started for you right away.
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I have a better offer. I’ll sell you the 1,000 view lots I already own on Mars at a discount and you can resell them for ten times the amount you will pay me. Since you are such a nice guy, I’m going to give you a deep discount and all you have to do is may me 10,000 a lot instead of the 100,000 each lot is worth.
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Grifters like Donald Trump have a saying, Lloyd: Don’t bs a bs’er.
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What about this idea — let’s sell Donald Trump a high rise on the Moon called Trump’s Moon Towers and make sure he gets the penthouse.
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No, Lloyd.
Let’s send Donald Trump into outer space with no spacesuit and just let him float around in zero gravity . . . . .
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The problem with that is if an alien FTL ship came along and picked him up, revived him with their advanced technology, they’d come to think he represents the average human and probably decide to eradicate our species.
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Lloyd Lofthouse: Maybe Trump is thinking ahead and knows there is a leftist plot to send him into outer space. THAT is the true reason for having a Space Force as the next military investment. He is protecting himself. He surely wouldn’t care about the whole planet being eradicated by aliens unless it involved saving himself.
………………….
“The problem with that is if an alien FTL ship came along and picked him up, revived him with their advanced technology, they’d come to think he represents the average human and probably decide to eradicate our species.”
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I don’t want to send him to outer space. That rocket would cost too much. Instead, I want to drop him in Kilauea from a helicopter flying over the crater. No parachute.
After he is convicted in court, that should be his sentence.
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You win, Lloyd. I agree!!! Hands down!
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Likening a charter school to a “free-market” business is risible. Let’s take a restaurant, apples to apples: open it with subsidized loans and govt grants, waive health and safety inspections, & put a chunk of school-taxes equivalent to 60-90% of the price of a meal into each customer’s pocket. You’d think owners could make a killing w/eyes closed, but unfortunately you’ve removed incentives to do competitive things like targeting an actual market, or even employing good business practices.
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Peter Greene really nailed it on this one. Deformers don’t just detest institutions such as public education for the masses; they only get the so-called disrupting innovation espoused by Clayton Christensen at Harvard Business School. Big-city districts have gobbled him up since the late 90s:
The irony, of course, is that traditions and institutions are fine for their own kids—but gems like American public education, which has sustained the middle class for generations now, are abhorred for everyone else (as if only they, the wise ones, know what’s best for us).
However…we are going to have to learn their language, at least: non-profit organizations like TFA & KIPP are their darlings—and THEY’RE the ones who get their attention & funding. How to break down the impervious walls…?
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Culture is whatever is created by humans and transmitted to the next generation. For a VERY long time now, older people have taught younger people what they knew and thought of as important for the next generation to learn. Schooling, formal or informal, is this sort of interaction between persons. You disrupt that–via, say, depersonalized learning–at your peril. Walking around my house and firing off random shotgun blasts would be a disruption, certainly, but it probably wouldn’t result in a more livable abode. Christensen’s book is one of the Deformish scriptures (along with the A Nation at Risk Report, The Bell Curve, and Lord Coleman’s puerile bullet list of “higher’ (roflmao) standards). And it has led to a lot of the random shotgun blast sort of disruption.
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I do not mean to disparage Mr. Christensen’s work. He’s an interesting, reflective fellow. But many have read him and then have gone of half cocked or, to change the metaphor, where angels fear to tread, and have done a lot of damage to US education–siphoning off funds from public schools into charters, subjecting students and teachers to a pedagogically useless regimen of invalid, unreliable high-stakes summative standardized testing, basing important decisions about teacher pay, merit pay, and school closings on testing-based numerology, and so on. Ed Deform hasn’t worked. It’s caused a lot of harm. Put a fork in it. It’s done.
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It’s okay to disparage Clay Christenson’s Work. His book encouraging disruption has done great damage to American education.
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It has indeed. Often a disruption takes hold, but it’s not a good thing. Often, there are unintended and unforeseen consequences of the change. The trivialization of ELA curricula by Coleman’s bullet list of skills is an example. That wasn’t his intention. But because all that is supposedly measured by the high-stakes tests is supposed mastery of that list, ELA curricula has devolved to be little exercises on items from the list.
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“That wasn’t his intention.”
Very very few act with evil intentions. All of the worst human atrocities ever committed have been done with “good” intentions. The leaders and the people believe that they are doing good, all the while harming, killing, maiming many others.
I don’t care about intentions, I care about the results of the actions.
And in the case of Coleman the results are quite clear that his efforts have obtained many harms to the very being of the students.
Yet we continue to do those things, i.e., standards and testing malpractice regime (not to mention other malpractices).
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There’s a wonderful association called the Sociotechnical Systems Roundtable that consists of business people and consultants who are interested in the typically negative unforeseen consequences of implementations of technologies in businesses. It’s really easy to come up with a technological solution to a problem, but it is really difficult, often, to see what negative unintended consequences of the new system. Here’s an example: For a long time, sales people kept their information about their clients in a little black book that they carried around with them. That little book was gold to the salesperson. Then managers introduced Customer Management Systems–the replacement for the salesman’s little black book–because they wanted a) to keep track of the salesperson and b) to have all that information available to themselves. So, here’s what happened–salespeople naturally resented this intrusion on the private cache of data, and so they held back info from the system or put garbage info into the system, and companies ended up making decisions based on this garbage info. The CMS makes sense on the face of it, but it didn’t take into account how sales people actually worked and thought. Here’s another example: years ago, I was managing a large publishing team. I learned that I could use Microsoft Project to create GANTT charts to keep track of every tiny aspect of each project. But I soon found that I was spending more time updating the chart than actually doing my work. I tossed it into the trash can and went back to old-fashioned “management by walking around,” which kept me in the know and ensured that I nurtured relationships with staff members.
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Can career teachers be enough of a disruption to the Deform Movement? I think so—but we’ll have to get out of our own echo chamber, or safe zone, here. My being a 35-year-union-member career public school Latin teacher IS disruption to the business model. Do we have the juice left to challenge School Boards, Non-profits, the Chamber of Commerce, or legislators? They count on our not doing so.
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You have to read Diane Ravitch’s new book, coming in January! The answer is yes. It’s happening, all around the country. Very, very exciting!!!
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I’m glad to see that arrogant Christensen’s “creative disruption” theories taken to task. There’s nothing creative about demolishing a school system, firing large numbers of employees & replacing them with technology.
One thing that sticks with me – from hearing some friends who work in finance & business talk about their workplaces – is how flat-out conventional, unimaginative and dull some of these business types are—which doesn’t make me feel good about their ideas for my 402k or education.
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401K (geez!)
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An Update From the Indiana Department of Education for April 19, 2019
Deadline Approaching for Charter School Teacher Recruitment and Retention Grant
IDOE [Indiana Department of Education] has announced a new grant opportunity available to all currently operating Indiana charter schools. The Teacher Recruitment and Retention grant is a competitive grant that is providing the opportunity for charter schools to fund innovative solutions and programs supporting teacher recruitment and teacher retention.
Please click here to access the application materials under the accordion file labeled “Teacher Recruitment and Retention Grant.” Grant awards are a maximum of $50,000 and applications are due no later than May 1, at 12:00 p.m.
Contact
Amreen Vora
Charter School Grant Specialist
(317) 234-3063
avora@doe.in.gov
Beatriz Pacheco
Charter School Grant Specialist
(317) 232-9057
bpacheco@doe.in.gov
Nathan Williamson
Director of Title Grants and Support
nwilliamson@doe.in.gov
(317) 232-6671
Cole Dietrich
Assistant Director of Charter Schools and Special Programs
adietrich@doe.in.gov
(317) 233-0786
Valerie Beard
Assistant Director of English Learners and Migrant Education Programs
vbeard@doe.in.gov
(317) 232-0558
Adisalem Coulibaly
Assistant Director of Title Grants and Support
acoulibaly1@doe.in.gov
(317) 232-7179
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I sent this waste of money email to my Senator Niemeyer [R-IN] and Representative Chyung [D-IN] along with my thoughts on the matter.
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Here is a story of a former TFA charter teacher in Indiana and her lousy salary. Indiana is such a great state. [SARCASM!]
……………………….
This Indianapolis teacher’s salary covered the basics. Then came everything her students needed
BY STEPHANIE WANG, SAM PARK – 16 HOURS AGO
When Anita Saunders joined Teach For America and was hired by an Indianapolis charter school, she didn’t discuss compensation.
She was later in her career and already had decades of working experience — and she also had a mortgage, a car payment, and student loans.
When it came time to sign her contract, Saunders was surprised to see she was agreeing to a salary that was $23,000 less than what she had previously earned working at a nonprofit.
The salary stress ultimately drove her out of the classroom. Saunders now works as a school psychologist for Indianapolis Public Schools, in part because it’s a better-paying job in education. She recently shared her experience at a story slam event co-hosted by Chalkbeat and Teachers Lounge Indy at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art…
https://chalkbeat.org/posts/in/2019/04/18/this-indianapolis-teachers-salary-covered-the-basics-then-came-everything-her-students-needed/?utm_source=email_button
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Is Fethullah Gülen still the dominant player in private education in the US?
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Gulen is one of the dominant players in publicly funded charter schools, which are privately managed.
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Thanks. I’ve watched the video, “Killing Ed.” I thought that Gulen was the biggest.
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FLY BY NIGHT: Some famous pro-charter names have also said it’s normal and expectable for charter schools to close down, as part of a grand experiment. Bill Clinton said closing low-performing charters was part of “the original bargain of charter schools”.
But also Joel Klein who bragged on Twitter about closing charters, and Joe Belluck, the Cuomo donor who chairs the SUNY charter committee, the state’s largest charter authorizer.
When Belluck denies a charter reauthorization, he boasts on Twitter:
“This is what being a good authorizer is all about: Two Citizens of the World charter schools will close at the end of this year”
Instead of saying “Wow, that school we authorized last time didn’t last past its fifth year, I wonder where all those families are going to send their kids”.
Or Jeb Bush, who opened a charter school and used it for photo-ops and tours to boost his African-American voter turnout. But after Jeb’s interest waned, the school was closed down.
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This is off topic but something that I find absolutely horrifying. How many children and teachers are going to be killed in a shoot-out at schools? More guns equals more deaths. Children are curious and will find that gun. I would have been terrorized to think that a teacher at my school was packing a gun. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO!!!!! What is wrong with this country?
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Florida Moves Toward Arming Teachers, Despite Opposition From Parkland Students
The State Senate approved legislation that would allow some classroom teachers to carry firearms, a policy opposed by student activists.
…Then, late last year, a state commission investigating the Parkland shooting came to a conclusion that made even some of its members uncomfortable: Some of the deaths at Stoneman Douglas High might have been prevented if faculty inside the building had been armed.
Based on that conclusion, state lawmakers are now poised to lift Florida’s ban on arming classroom teachers, allowing them to receive the same voluntary training as other staff to carry weapons in school. On Tuesday, the State Senate approved the change, which now heads to the more conservative State House for what is expected to be final passage.
Some parents and students from Parkland who have become activists against gun violence are steadfastly opposed to the change. They traveled to the State Capitol in Tallahassee in recent weeks to protest against the expansion of the so-called school guardian program, saying more guns on campus would put children in more danger. The National Rifle Association has sought to arm Florida teachers for years…
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