If Charter Schools Are The Answer We Need Another Question

We just found out that here in the Water Winter Wonderland we have more private for profit charter schools than any other state in the union, which makes us number one in turning our children into commodities. Sure that doesn't sound like much, but when you're a state that's 13th in infant mortality, 14th in child poverty and 28th in children living in food insecure homes, being number one in something is important.

Besides, it's not like kids aren't profit centers in other states. It's the latest symptom of cancer capitalism as it metastasizes through what's left of our democracy, eating away at the social contract, replacing it with a tumor made of greed.  Oh sure, we were all told this was in the best interests of the children, but nobody much believes that anymore. Take Pennsylvania for example, where "The percentage of Pennsylvania charter schools that met academic benchmarks plummeted after the state Department of Education was forced to recalculate the performance rates." Or on a national level:

Across the 25 states in the study, a sample of 167 operating CMOs were identified for the years 2007 - 2011. CMOs on average are not dramatically better than non-CMO schools in terms of their contributions to student learning. The difference in learning compared to the Traditional Public school alternatives for CMOs is -.005 standard deviations in Math and .005 in reading; both these values are statistically significant, but obviously not materially different from the comparison (p. 6) (emphasis original)

CMO schools are part of corporate chains like KIPP schools that have the advantage of

1) creaming of top performers, 2) shoving out of low performers and discipline problems, 3) huge $$ advantages, 4) 10 hour school days, 5) laser focused test prep, etc., the rest of the CMOs can only say they are no better than the struggling public schools they were designed to replace.

So after 20 years and Lord only knows how much money, we're pretty much right back where we started when it comes to effective schools. But like we said, that was never the point in the first place. When you replace the democratic foundation of public schools with the profit and loss values of the market you shouldn't be surprised  when the kids are no better off, but the investors are.

Which recently prompted the New York Times to be shocked we tell you SHOCKED to find that:

Despite a growing number of studies showing that charter schools are generally no better — and often are worse — than their traditional counterparts, the state and local agencies and organizations that grant the charters have been increasingly hesitant to shut down schools, even those that continue to perform abysmally for years on end. If the movement is to maintain its credibility, the charter authorizers must shut down failed schools quickly and limit new charters to the most credible applicants, including operators who have a demonstrated record of success.

That just goes to show you how out of touch the editors are. They're still expecting charter schools to justify their existence based on educational outcomes, when we all know these schools will continue to exist as long as there's money to be made, which means as long as politicians are willing to play along with the scam. And it is a scam too. As the editorial says:

A study released this week by the center suggests that the standards used by the charter authorizers to judge school performance are terribly weak. It debunked the common notion that it takes a long time to tell whether a new school can improve student learning. In fact, the study notes, it is pretty clear after just three years which schools are going to be high performers and which of them will be mediocre. By that time, the charter authorizers should be putting troubled schools on notice that they might soon be closed. As the study notes: “For the majority of schools, poor first year performance will give way to poor second year performance. Once this has happened, the future is predictable and extremely bleak.

This is a variation on the extended warranty ploy. When you buy a car, or a washing machine or DVD player the salesmen tries to get you to buy the extended warranty because the product might not break until after the regular warranty is up, but we all know this is just an opportunity to suck a little more profit off of the consumer. Charter schools say just keep giving us money and maybe we'll get better in a year or two, but nothing will change because the money's still coming in and the dividends are still being paid.

In the mean time, some children will be lucky enough to get a half way decent education, some will not, but they'll all have the privilege of contributing to some corporation's bottom line and that seems to be what America is all about these days.

Educational Reform: Now With Twice The Whitewashing Power!

Now comes before us Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of Washington D.C. schools and current CEO of StudentsFirst, a rather Orwellian name for an organization designed to make Michelle Rhee rich by playing off the experience of Michelle Rhee.

Ms. Rhee is one of those rather rare educational reformers who actually have some experience as an educator.  Even though her degrees are in government and public policy, she entered the classroom through the Teach for America program, eventually earning a teacher certification. After receiving her certification Rhee returned to teaching and oversaw a significant drop in her students’ test scores, but by the time she left the classroom she boasted of raising scores to the 90^th percentile. Later analysis showed those numbers to be somewhat overblown, but by then Rhee had stopped being a teacher and had become an educational entrepreneur, starting The New Teacher Project which, picking up on the Teach for America vibe, recruited teachers for urban schools.

Because of The New Teacher Project’s involvement in Washington D.C. schools, then Mayor Adrian Fenty offered Rhee the Chancellorship of the whole system. This was a new position created when the elected school board was stripped of its power. Even though she had no experience in any educational administrative position, Rhee took the job and a mayoral carte blanche to do pretty much whatever she wanted.

And pretty much whatever she wanted was what she did, firing the principal of a high performing school and replacing her with a friend who was later the target of a federal investigation regarding discrimination against minority children, closing schools without community input and failing to completely report budget figures.

In spite of her stormy tenure though, test scores in the district rose, sometimes dramatically and even though there were rumblings that all wasn’t right, no real investigation was done until recently . Now it seems that the improvement of scores in the DC schools may be more the result of test tampering than improved curriculum. As Professor Emeritus Thomas Haladyna, a Statistician familiar with the investigation said, "the odds are better for winning the Powerball grand prize than having that many erasures by chance."

As for Rhee, repeating her earlier experience when she was a teacher, she left DC schools in 2010 to start StudentsFirst, blaming the reports of cheating and score manipulation on “enemies.” Now, before you get the idea that we’re just out to bash Michelle Rhee, let us set the record straight, we are not (well, maybe just a little). What we’d like to suggest is that Rhee represents the new face of school reform.

When education became a commodity it changed the whole dynamic between teachers and students, schools and their communities. Education was no longer about relationships, nurturing growth, or dealing with human complexities, it was about inputs, end results, the products that get us there and the way they are marketed.

When you buy a toaster, you don’t take it apart first, examine how the connections are soldered, how strong the filaments are. You don’t talk to the people who built it. You take it home and try it out. If it works to your satisfaction you keep it, if not you take it back and get another.

It’s the same with education. We assume the process works if the results are satisfactory, so we create a class of reformers who attempt to sell us on the idea that their particular product will produce the results we are looking for. We try one out, if it doesn’t work we move on to the next one. A market is created.

It should be no surprise that the Michelle Rhees, the Jeb Bushes, the people who brought us DIBELS, the whole new class of educational entrepreneurs created when schools became profit centers and children became input units play fast and loose with the facts in an attempt to create buzz around their products because the relationship between educational reformers and education has become a commercial one, a relationship about things rather than people, about profit and loss. So the Michelle Rhees of the world profit, but the loss belongs to the children.

If They Were Selling Apples Instead Of Education We'd Be Long Gone

OK, we're going to say this as simply as we can: When a charter school moves into the area all the children in that area become commodities. Sounds harsh we know, but there it is. Now we're willing to believe that at least some of the charter school advocates had good intentions and sincerely believed that turning our educational institutions into for profit corporations would improve them because capitalism! You know, it leads to more choice and just look how that has improved our lives when it comes to things like buying cars, or refrigerators, or toasters, or toothpaste.

Let's set aside for a moment  that this is a classic example of the logical fallacy called false equivalence for a whole lot of reasons, not the least of which is that while a toaster is created to be sold for a profit, a child is not, and just look at what inflicting "choice" on students has gotten them.

In a word, nada. Or more recently, and more specifically in Wisconsin, the word would be zilch. (pdf)

But that is not to say "choice" hasn't been good for some folks. Take Michelle Rhee for example who parlayed some rather questionable test score improvements while Chancellor of Washington DC schools into a sweet sweet gig as Head School Improver at studentsfirst.org, an organization that is working "with parents, teachers, administrators, and citizens across the country to ensure great teachers, access to great schools, and effective use of public dollars." And what could be a more "effective" use of public dollars than to give them to people like Michelle Rhee?

Now we come to the great lesson about success in a capitalistic economic system which is...get in the middle. If you can burrow in and set up shop between the producers and the consumers, and convince both that you need to be there your ship has come in and it's a luxury liner. Of course we don't mean to imply that all those who occupy middles in our system are leeches draining off scarce dollars from communities for private gain. Take the transportation system for instance that gets a farmer's crops from his field to consumers. Pretty important. But a charter school that sets up in a neighborhood and diverts money to a sometimes distant and disconnected corporate headquarters? Not so helpful.

The "choice" advocates would tell us that our farmer is motivated to produce the best crops he can because if his product were to show up on the shelves spoiled, or be substandard in some way we would buy some other farmer's apples who had better quality control. Yet the product we've been served by the charter movement is, at best, indistinguishable from the product it purports to improve upon, and it's more expensive.

So how do they manage to keep parents buying a substandard product in a system that's supposed to improve everything by giving consumers more "choice?" Two ways: have a great marketing department, and don't take kids with educational challenges.

Sort of like if that farmer with the bad apples made sure they were extra shiny.

Jeb Bush! Motto: I Don't Know Anything, But You're Going To Give Me A Lot Of Money Anyway

Can someone please tell us why Jeb Bush is an educational expert.  Is it because he has a BA in Latin American studies which he has never used? Or because before he went into politics he worked in a bank? We have three college degrees in fields related to teaching and learning and we've been in the classroom for our entire career. Does that qualify us to be a hedge fund manager?

Bush is trading off his experience as Florida governor to enhance his post politics career as an educational snake oil salesman. While it's true some scores did go up in Florida during his tenure, most notably fourth grade reading scores, this was also a time during the housing boom which produced a 22% increase in funding for schools, and the passage of a Constitutional amendment which limited class size in Florida schools (an amendment which Bush opposed and worked against even after its passage.)

In addition, while some scores rose, others did not. Student ACT scores, for example did not rise, high school graduation rates to this day are still lower than other similarly populated states, and "huge" numbers of high school students need remedial help in reading and math. Low income students are well behind the progress of their more wealthy peers.

We call this Potemkin Village school improvement because it is more form than substance. The specifics of Bush's "Florida Formula" are not much different than the thinly veiled reforms of most of the corporate pirates who look at education and see profit. It's a program that can be summed up in three words: test, test, test. Bush grades schools on student tests and gives more money to schools with high scores. If this seems counter intuitive it's because the rich get richer policy isn't designed to improve education, but to thin the herd, making students at poorly performing schools free floating profit centers more vulnerable to vouchers and charters.

Every marketer knows if you want to sell a product, particularly a product without a corresponding need, first you have to create that need, so in education a crisis was manufactured and since low income and minority schools are the most vulnerable (and their communities least able to fight back), they are the first target. Legislatures are encouraged to rewrite educational policies to open funding streams to for profit companies instead of local communities; parents are sold on the need to abandon their schools rather than fight for them; and educational entrepreneurs like Bush show up to take advantage of the situation with charters and online virtual schools.

The fact that the reforms don't work is immaterial.They were never designed to work in any substantive way. Designing educational reform around for profit companies is like a chef being more concerned with who made his pots and pans than the ingredients he uses.

It's a recipe for disaster and a generation of children are paying the price.

Look, If God Wanted You To Think He'd...Uh...I Lost My Train Of Thought

We remember, back in the day, as inmates of the educorporate pre-employment training system we would often be confronted with situations in which we were asked to "discuss," or "explain," or the one we hated most, "give reasons why." Look, if it didn't have something to do with the possibility of one or more of the buttons on Elizabeth Arden's blouse coming off, we just weren't that interested, OK? Besides, everyone knows that teaching students there are simple answers to complex problems is the best way to ensure a bright and prosperous future for us all.

Right Arizona?

Classrooms should not be forums for schoolteachers and college professors to lead discussions that might result in critical thinking, a group of lawmakers concluded. A proposed law would prohibit any instructor in a public school or college from advocating or opposing a political candidate or one side of a social, political or cultural issue that is not approved by the legislature. "We feel there's far too much discussion and stuff going on in schools," said said Senate Majority Leader Thayer Verschoor, R-Cementhead, who wrote the bill. "That takes away from time the units should spend getting ready for tests."

When asked how teachers in classes like Social Studies, English, history and the like could teach if they weren't able to lead discussions of "social, political, or cultural" issues Verschoor responded that his office was working on a hand book to be given to teachers with "all the opinions already in it."

Supporters said the measure would let students disagree with instructors without fearing retribution, but college students and education advocates explained to legislators that if teachers weren't allowed to take positions, there would be nothing for students to agree or disagree with.

Legislators disagreed and approved the bill in a House committee, saying students should not receive an actual education. "No education is better than one that teaches kids things we don't agree with, and that's what we're going for," Verschoor told reporters.

"In any class, any issue could be discussed as long as the instructor is neutral on the issue and not telling you what your conclusion should be," Verschoor said. "Take civil rights for example. You can still talk about it as long as the teachers don't advocate for equality."

When asked how students could be taught to navigate through complex social issues without the guidance of trained and experienced adults, Verschoor responded that was "the whole point. Kids just need someone to tell then what to think. I didn't get to where I am today by thinking," he added.

As an example of the type of behavior he is targeting, Verschoor said one of his granddaughters' elementary teachers required the class to write letters to a lawmaker opposing a certain bill. "Now, it's true the bill was to cut more funding from public education, but that's not the point. That teacher should have brought someone into the class to tell the kids why they didn't need new textbooks, or subsidized lunch programs. It's also only a coincidence that bill was introduced by me."

Senator Linda Gray, R-Spineless, said she has concerns about Verschoor's proposal, but she voted for it so it could move out of committee and to the full Senate for consideration. "Anything I can do to avoid making a decision is fine by me," she said. "I believe it's what my constituents want from me."

Senator Charlene Pesquiera, D-Oro Valley, said she has been to 17 schools in the past two months, and she has not seen a teacher lead a debate. "They're all to busy getting units ready for the next test," she said. "Who has time for debate?"


The Senate K-12 Committee voted to kill bill, 5-3. Verschoor then sought approval in the Government Committee where bill was approved 4-3 with Republicans voting for the measure and Democrats voting against. When asked why he took the education bill out of the education committee, he replied he had to find someplace "where they don't actually read the bill before voting on it."