Gov. Wolf Proposes Saving $280 Million a Year in PA With Charter School Reform

February 5, 2020 stevenmsinger Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Education, Harrisburg, Learning, Local Control, Parents, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Philadelphia Schools, Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh Public Schools, Politics, Poverty, privatization, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, Schools, Special Education, Students, Taxation, Teachers, Tom Wolf charter schools, Cyber Charter Schools, education, PA Budget, Politics, public schools, reform, schools, Special Education, Students, teachers, Tom Wolf

Charter schools waste taxpayer money.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf proposes we stop wasting that money by holding charter schools as accountable as the state’s authentic public schools.

The Democratic governor made his most recent proposal yesterday as part of his 2020-21 budget address.

It’s a common sense proposal that only seems revolutionary because officials have been so blinded with school privatization fantasies.

Charter schools are funded with tax dollars but can be run by business interests thereby forgoing elected school boards and a host of regulations meant to safeguard children and the community’s investment.

The Commonwealth is infamous for allowing some of the most permissive charter school policies in the nation, which destabilize authentic public schools and force local tax increases and reductions in student services while charter operators get rich.

During his budget proposal, Wolf suggested three main improvements.

First, he wants charter schools to use a new tiered funding formula to determine how much money they get for special education students enrolled in their schools. He estimates this would save $147 million annually.

Right now, charters get tuition based on the average amount the local public school spends on special education.

This incentivizes charters to enroll (and identify) children with minimal special needs. That way, the school gets more money than needed to help students learn and operators can pocket the difference.

It also incentivizes charters not to enroll students with greater special needs because operators won’t receive the money necessary to meet them.

This helps explain why charter schools in the Commonwealth typically enroll fewer and less needy special education students than authentic public schools do. Charters typically end up collecting $10,000 or more per student than they spend providing services, according to Education Voters of Pennsylvania, a public school advocacy group.

Wolf’s new proposal would more closely match the level of special education students need with the funding charter schools get for enrolling them, thus removing any financial incentives for selective enrollment of these students.

Second, Wolf wants to stop cyber charter schools from collecting the same amount of money for each student as brick and mortar schools get.

Cyber charters schools do not have school buildings to keep up. They do not have physical classrooms, cafeterias, hallways, gymnasiums, athletic fields, etc. In most cases, they have administrative offices and laptop computers given to students to use at their own homes.

At present, the statewide tuition rate for cyber charter schools ranges from $7,700 to $21,400 per student per year.

Wolf figures that number should be a flat $9,500. That should save an estimated $133 million annually.

However, Wolf’s proposal is double the cost of providing a full-time education at home via computer. It reduces the waste, but his figure could still use a trim.

Finally, the governor proposes fixing the way we mediate financial disputes between charter schools and authentic public schools.

Right now, if a school district does not pay the tuition for its resident students who attend a charter school or there is some dispute between the two on tuition payments, the charter school turns to the state Department of Education (PDE) to reconcile the dispute. Wolf proposes several changes to increase fairness, accountability, and transparency in this process. For instance, he wants to require charter schools to report their expenditures and deductions so they could be included in deciding what the tuition should be at a given charter school.

If enacted such reforms would save $280 million a year and go a long way to fixing many of the problems with charter school finances.

The Democratic governor has suggested similar improvements before – even going so far as to threaten enacting some of them with executive orders if the Republican-controlled legislature continues to shirk its duty. However, yesterday’s budget proposal was the closest it has come to fruition.

Typically, Ana Meyers, executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools, saw Wolf’s proposal as an attack on her industry.

Wolf wants to cut funding to charters to increase it at public schools, she said, but charter schools are, also, public schools.

“The level of hypocrisy from our governor knows no bounds,” she said in a written statement. “Charter school students and their families are not second-class citizens. These parents pay their taxes and their children attend a PA-designated public school. There is no reason why charter school students deserve less financial support than their district peers.”

However, wolf’s proposal does not leave charter school students with less. It reduces waste and helps authentic public schools keep the same level of services without having to resort to local tax increases.

Charter schools should not be allowed to squander taxpayer money, and students at authentic public schools and their communities should not be forced to pay for that fiscal irresponsibility.

“Our charter school system is in desperate need of reform,” Wolf said. “It’s time to close the loopholes, it’s time to establish real standards, and it’s time to level the playing field.”

Wolf’s proposal doesn’t stop with his budget outline.

Democratic legislators are set to introduce a 120-page proposal in Harrisburg that builds on it even further.

The legislation – House Bill 2261 to be introduced by Rep. Joseph Ciresi (D-Montgomery), and Senate Bill 1024, to be introduced by Senators Lindsey Williams (D-Allegheny) and James Brewster (D-Allegheny), would do the following:

Require charter school trustees and administrators to comply with the same financial and ethical reporting standards as school board members and district officials;
Require charter school meetings to comply with the Sunshine Act;
Require any company running a charter school to open up their records;
Establish a statewide, data-driven cyber charter school tuition rate;
Apply the state special education funding formula used by public schools to charter schools;
Require charter schools to use actual accounting and enrollment in calculating tuition – backed up by PA Department of Education – to make sure payments are fair, consistent, and promises are kept;
Require charter schools to carry enough insurance to take care of kids and families if the charter closes or the parent company goes out of business;

Create a standard state framework for charter school applications;
Standardize the method to change charter schools’ missions and goals to reward innovation and best practices, and ensure school districts have the tools needed to evaluate changes to charters;
Create a state grading system for charters to allow high-performing schools even more self-determination while focusing attention on low-performing schools;
Stop the creation of new cyber charter schools until the existing schools improve performance and require PDE to create enrollment and performance standards.

Here’s hoping that such common sense initiatives can find bipartisan support.

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Did Rosa Parks Really Support Charter Schools?

January 29, 2020 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Budget, capitalism, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Data, Democrat, Detroit Schools, Donald Trump, edtech, Education, Local Control, Media, NAACP, Pittsburgh, Politics, Prejudice, privatization, Propaganda, Racism, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Students, Teachers, Technology Anna Amato, Bill Clinton, Brown v. Board, charter schools, Civil Rights, Edtech Central, education, Elaine Steele, Highlander Folk School, history, Joe Nathan, Keri Rodrigues, Politics, public schools, Rosa Parks, school segregation, teachers

They say history is written by the victors.

But fortunes change, and sometimes you can even reclaim a figure from the past who the last round of winners had cast in an unlikely role.

Take Rosa Parks.

She is universally hailed as a hero of the civil rights movement because of her part in the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Everyone knows the story. Parks, a black seamstress in Alabama, refused to give up her seat to a white man on a segregated bus and was arrested. Then working with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and many other activists, she helped encourage black people throughout the city to stop riding the buses until they were eventually desegregated.

But did you know that 40 years later after she had moved to Detroit, Parks tried to open a charter school?

It’s true – from a certain point of view.

And school privatization cheerleaders are quick to reference her advocacy.

President Bill Clinton used the anecdote to sell the charter school concept in a speech to the NAACP in Pittsburgh in 1997.

Joe Nathan, one of the authors of the first charter school law, still likes to troll readers of this blog by bringing that factoid up in the comments.

Keri Rodrigues, one of the founders of the Walton front group the National Parents Union, uses it like a trump card on Twitter to shut down privatization critics.

The facts are somewhat more complicated.

CHARTER SCHOOL CRITICISM

Charter schools are funded with tax dollars but not bound by the same regulations as authentic public schools including the need to be run by elected school boards. In fact, they are often operated by appointed business interests.

Today charter schools are roundly criticized for their limited accountability, lack of local control, tendency to profit off the children they serve, ability to cherry pick students enrolled in them, propensity for draining funding from neighborhood public schools, frequently poor academic records, and inclination to increase racial and economic segregation.

Yet lobbyists and industry insiders insist they are civil rights reforms. Being able to tout Parks as a charter pioneer helps them make their case.

But did she really do this?

I mean Parks went to segregated schools, herself, before Brown v. Board. You’re telling me she actually advocated to start a segregated school in Detroit decades later?

THE FACTS

Parks did lend her name to a charter school proposal in 1997 that would have opened an institution named for her and her late husband, the Raymond and Rosa Parks Academy for Self Development.

However, according to Anna Amato, an education consultant who worked with Parks on the proposal, the Detroit Board of Education put the item on their agenda but took no action.

Parks then moved on to other concerns – of which she had many.

She spent most of her life fighting the good fight.

In 1957 she moved with her husband and mother to Detroit, where from 1965 to 1988 she was a member of the staff of Michigan Congressman John Conyers, Jr. She remained active in the NAACP fighting against housing segregation in the city, traveling to support Selma to Montgomery marches, developed “Pathways to Freedom” bus tours of civil rights sights, served on the Board of Advocates for Planned Parenthood, and many other actions.

The proposed charter school wasn’t exactly a highlight. Nor does it seem to fit with her other endeavors.

LEGAL BATTLE

But the Rosa Parks who was involved in that proposal was a very different lady than the one who refused to give up her bus seat all those years ago.

Parks was 84 at the time of the charter school plan and somewhat isolated from close family. When she died in 2005 at the age of 92, her estate was the subject of a bitter legal dispute.

The issue wasn’t the money so much as the priceless historical artifacts associated with her life.

Her will left most of the estate to Elaine Steele, a retired Detroit judge and friend of Parks who was also involved in the charter school proposal. She was co-director of Parks’ after-school program, the Raymond and Rosa Parks Institute for Self Development.

Parks, who was later diagnosed with dementia, had abruptly stopped giving interviews in 1995 and lived a mostly secluded life from then on.

Her family disputed that the will created in July 1998 represented Parks true intentions. They sued to challenge the estate plan, accusing Steele of using undue influence on Parks. After a protracted battle, the courts eventually sided with Steele.

But the picture this paints is not a friendly one.

We have an octogenarian Parks lending her name to numerous projects all under the direction of consultants.

QUESTIONABLE ASSOCIATES, QUESTIONABLE INVOLVEMENT

Amato, in particular, seems to have gone on to become a champion of school privatization and education technologies.

She made her name in Detroit pushing these policies for decades.

In 1994 she founded Edtec Central, an organization that helps launch and run charter schools. At one point the company operated “two specialized strict discipline academies and one alternative high school in Michigan” as well as provided support and consulting services to other local charter schools. However, there is very little current information on the organization. It’s unclear whether it is still in operation.

But as of 2017, Amato still was. She wrote an op-ed praising Donald Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos called “DeVos Is a Hero to Detroit’s At-Risk Kids.”

This appears to be the woman who advised Parks about opening a charter school.

How much Parks was involved is hard to say.

When The New York Times wrote an article about the proposed charter school in 1997 by Halimah Abdullah, Parks either refused to be interviewed or was left out of it. But Amato, Steele and even Nathan were quoted at length.

It’s hard to believe a journalist for the Times could be such a bad writer as just not to include Parks in the article, especially in a piece titled “Rights Hero Presses Plan For School In Detroit.”

It’s much more likely that Parks declined to be included or was purposely left out of the loop by her circle of handlers possibly to hide her slow mental deterioration.

It’s understandable why Parks may have surrounded herself with consultants and caregivers.

In 1994 when she was 81, Parks was robbed and assaulted in her home in central Detroit. The assailant, Joseph Skipper, broke down her door but claimed he had chased away an intruder. He requested a reward and when Parks paid him, he demanded more. Parks refused and he attacked her.

Parks was treated for facial injuries and swelling. Though Skipper, a black man, was eventually caught and prosecuted, the incident left Parks shaken and anxious to the degree that she moved from her house to a secure high-rise apartment.

Another peak into her personal life was revealed in 2002, when Parks received an eviction notice from her apartment for not paying rent. Both the Hartford Memorial Baptist Church and Little Ceasars owner Mike Ilitch claimed to have paid the bill, but Steele says the eviction notice came in error. Parks family blames the incident on financial mismanagement from caregivers. When NBC news reported the story, the network noted she had been diagnosed with dementia.

In total, these events provide a sad look at the last years of a civil rights icon. And it’s during this late period that the charter school project was developed.

Was it one of Parks’ passions? It’s impossible to tell. It is at least as likely that an elderly and suggestible Parks was surrounded by people who may have been using her name to get across their own agenda.

PARKS ON SEGREGATION

Consider how out of character a charter school was to Parks former legacy.

In 1995 (just two years before the charter school proposal) Parks did agree to an interview where she talked about the importance of education and reminisced on the evils of school segregation:

“Interviewer: Was there a teacher that influenced you?

Parks: My mother was a teacher and I went to the same school where she was teaching. My very first teacher was Miss Sally Hill, and I liked her very much. In fact, I liked school when I was very young, in spite of the fact that it was a one-room school for students all ages, from the very young to teens, as long as they went to school. It was only a short term for us, five months every year, instead of the regular nine months every year.

Interviewer: What was it like in Montgomery when you were growing up?

Parks: Back in Montgomery during my growing up there, it was completely legally enforced racial segregation, and of course, I struggled against it for a long time. I felt that it was not right to be deprived of freedom when we were living in the Home of the Brave and Land of the Free.”

These do not sound like the words of a woman who two years later would push for a segregated school to be opened in her name.

PARKS ON DESEGREGATION

Moreover, this flies in the face of her work at the Highlander Folk School in 1955. Before she participated in the bus boycott, she took a two-week workshop entitled “Racial Desegregation: Implementing the Supreme Court Decision.”The idea was to learn how she could encourage youth groups to push for desegregation.

The workshop was her first experience of an integrated learning environment. In a 1956 interview she said that she found “for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society, that there was such a thing as people of all races and backgrounds meeting and having workshops and living together in peace and harmony… I had heard there was such a place, but I hadn’t been there.”
Parks took copious notes during the sessions, detailing what each speaker said and her reactions to them. In one section she wrote, “Desegregation proves itself by being put in action. Not changing attitudes, attitudes will change.”

Her time there was brief but transformative. It led directly to her refusal to give up her seat and subsequent history of activism. To think that someone so committed to the cause of desegregation would willingly engage in its opposite staggers the mind.

But a lot can happen in the intervening decades.

Maybe she came to think that well resourced segregated charter schools were preferable to poorly resourced integrated public schools. However, she must have realized that when schools are integrated it is harder to withhold resources. Perhaps she gave up on integration in favor of Afrocentric charters, but that would be a fundamental change in her thinking, indeed.

IMPORTANCE FOR TODAY

If Parks did wholeheartedly support the charter school project proposed in her name during her twilight years, does it make a difference?

Not really. After all, lots of people make bad decisions – even civil rights heroes.

We remember these people not because of their biggest mistakes, but because of their biggest victories, how they struggled year-after-year in the cause of human dignity.

More important might be an analysis of whether Parks would likely support charter schools today if she were still alive and cognitively sound.

In truth, it seems unlikely that she would. After all, Parks was active in the NAACP all her life. Along with Black Lives Matter and the Journey for Justice, The NAACP voted almost unanimously just a few years ago to demand a moratorium on all new charter schools because they exploit children of color.

It’s easy to imagine Parks leading that charge.

But some folks will tell you Parks ideas of segregation were different than the dictionary definition and that she would be on the side of Betsy DeVos, not modern day civil rights activists.

MICHIGAN’S CHARTER SCHOOL FAILURES

It’s no accident I bring up DeVos.

Like Parks, DeVos’ home is in Michigan and she has had a tremendous effect on education throughout the state, in Detroit, and nationwide.

When Parks’ charter school proposal was issued, the concept was pretty new. The first charter school law in the nation had only been passed in 1991 in Minnesota. Michigan didn’t jump aboard until three years later.

No one knew then exactly what to expect of the policy or what these schools would end up becoming.

Now charter schools have been in Michigan for more than a quarter century and the results are in.

They are an absolute disaster.

A 2016 report from Education Trust-Midwest, a non-partisan research and advocacy organization, found 80 percent of charter schools in Michigan scored below the state average in math and reading proficiency tests.

Moreover, the state leads the nation in for-profit charter schools, according to research by Western Michigan University professor Gary Miron. Grand Rapids-based National Heritage Academies, alone, operates almost 50 for-profit charters throughout the state.

After an intensive investigation, in 2014 the Detroit Free Press criticized these kinds of schools for their lack of financial transparency and excessive overhead costs.

Maybe it’s my own lack of imagination, but I find it difficult to imagine Parks championing schools that get so much worse academic results than traditional public schools. I find it nearly impossible to imagine her fighting for the right to segregate black children into “separate but equal” schools.

INCONSISTENCIES

Charter school apologists will lump Parks in with Trump and DeVos. Not with the Rev. William Barber II, Jitu Brown, Ibram X. Kendi, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Yohuru Williams, Denisha Jones, and other prominent black people who oppose school privatization.

They tell us that Parks name on an application to start a charter school (her signature does not appear on the document) is enough to prove her support for the concept.

Yet never once that I can find did Parks ever speak out on what was allegedly her own proposal. Others spoke out on her behalf, but she declined to be interviewed when the media came calling and didn’t use her iconic status to get the publicity needed to bring it to completion.

Can you imagine a celebrity today opening a charter school named after themselves without even releasing a statement, not to mention a press conference and media blitz? And this wasn’t in the distant past. It was only 1997.

But the school privatization lobby tells us that this is so. And moreover that Parks – who worked her entire life battling the forces of segregation whether it be in our schools, housing or elsewhere – somehow turned against this aim in her last years to open this school.

It’s quite a story they’re telling.

However, the possibility that a declining Parks was convinced to put her name to a project she didn’t fully understand or support is at least as consistent with the facts as the privatization narrative – in fact, more so because it clarifies many inconsistencies.

SYMBOLISM VS FACTS

In any case, this is all conjecture.

Parks’ opinion – whatever it was – only has symbolic value.

The true measure of charter schools are the facts about how they operate and the results they get for students.

They have failed generations of children across the country.

They truly are a civil rights issue – but not the one the school privatization lobby thinks.

Every child has a right to be freed from charter schools and not subjected to them.

Nothing would be more in keeping with the spirit of Rosa Parks than a boycott of charter schools – just like today’s civil rights organization are demanding.

It’s time we as a nation refuse to give up our seats in the public schools and boycott the forces of privatization and profit.

The only way forward is together – not through segregation and exclusion hoping that at least some of us will make it.

Trump Administration’s “Junk Food Loophole” is Symptomatic of School Privatization

January 22, 2020 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Budget, capitalism, Charter Schools, Child Predators, Civil Rights, Common Core, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Democrat, Donald Trump, edtech, Education, Obama, Parents, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, President, privatization, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, School Lunches, school segregation, Schools, segregation, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers charter schools, Donald Trump, education, Healthy, junk food loophole, Michelle Obama, nutrition, Politics, Privatize, public schools, School Lunches, standardized testing, Students, teachers

Who wants children to eat more junk food?

Apparently the Trump administration does.

This seemed to be the Department of Agriculture’s concern when it announced plans last week to further reduce regulations for healthy meals at the nation’s public schools.

The Department’s new scheme would change the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 to include what critics call a “junk food loophole” in meals offered at public schools – usually breakfasts and lunches.

Currently, sweets and fried foods are allowed only once in a while as part of a balanced meal. But this new proposal would permit them to be offered every day.

Students could substitute healthy choices like fruits for things like blueberry muffins and replace green vegetables with French fries.

Screen Shot 2020-01-21 at 10.53.10 PM — Source: The National Alliance for Nutrition and Activity.

The media rushed to characterize the changes as an attack on Michelle Obama who championed the original legislation during her husband, Barack’s, administration. And – heck – maybe they’re right seeing as the Trump administration made the proposal on Mrs. Obama’s birthday.

But one needn’t guess at political motivations behind the move when it so obviously fits the pattern of school privatization – a way of conceptualizing education supported by both the Obama’s and Trump.

Let me be clear. School cafeterias generally are not privatized. They’re usually run by local school districts. However, the insistence that such programs turn a profit and make decisions based on sales rather than nutrition are symptomatic of the privatization mindset.

We didn’t always require everything to bring in money. We used to see things like education and journalism as public goods and absolved them from the need to generate financial gain.

But that seems like a long time ago.

The current administration’s claim that it’s rolling back restrictions to stop food waste and help public schools increase lunch profits is a case in point.

If profit is king, that’s all that matters. Who cares whether kids are getting better nutrition or not? What matters is the bottom line.

School lunches are not an opportunity to teach kids better eating habits. They are a financial transaction to enrich district budgets at the expense of the children enrolled there.

If children as young as 5 can’t make that decision on their own – well, caveat emptor.

The same goes with things like charter schools and high stakes standardized tests. It doesn’t matter if these things are better or worse for children. It matters whether they make money.

The invisible hand of the market is our pedagogue in chief.

It turns out that these things are rarely – if ever – in the best interests of children. Charter schools increase the likelihood of fiscal mismanagement, school segregation, prejudicial discipline policies, cherry picking which students to enroll – all while reducing transparency and fiscal accountability. Meanwhile, high stakes testing produces assessments that more clearly illuminate parental wealth than student learning – all while creating captive markets for testing, publishing and software companies.

The “junk food loophole” is just more of the same.

The administration contends that fewer middle and upper class kids are buying lunches at school when the choices are healthier. Meanwhile, among the 30 million students who depend on free and low-cost school lunches that are subsidized by the federal government, they say more are simply throwing away healthy foods than eating them.

The administration maintains that more food would be sold and less thrown out if children were given the choice to buy more cheeseburgers and fries than carrots and yogurt.

There certainly is anecdotal evidence to support this. Kids do seem to like junk food. As a middle school teacher, I’ve seen far too many kids bring Flaming Hot Cheetos and energy drinks for breakfast than take a free box of cereal, juice or even a piece of breakfast pizza.

And the number of kids who throw away fresh fruit because they’re forced to put it on their tray is heartbreaking.

However, we tend to focus on the negative and miss the positive.

This idea that kids don’t choose healthy foods actually flies in the face of the Department of Agriculture’s own research on the effects of the Obama-era rules. In its 2019 “School Nutrition and Meal Cost Study,” the department found no significant changes in the amount of food waste since the healthier rules were put in place, and also found that the healthier choices led to more kids participating in school meal programs.

The study also found scores for the Healthy Eating Index (which measures the quality of the diet) shot up drastically from 49.6 in 2009-2010 to 71.3 in 2014-2015.

So there is evidence that the program is actually increasing students’ healthy eating.

If we valued what’s best for children, we would continue – and maybe even strengthen – the legislation.

However, this newest proposal to weaken the law is the second time in three years that the federal government has undercut this policy.

In 2018, the Department started allowing schools to stop offering foods lower in sodium and higher in whole-grains.

That decision is being challenged in court by a coalition of six states and Washington, DC, on the grounds that it endangers student health.

If this second set of rollbacks are implemented, they too may be challenged in court.

Unfortunately the problem isn’t limited to mealtimes.

This is indicative of the school privatization mindset.

We must stop allowing the profit principle to function as the arbiter of sound academic policy.

Reducing regulations requiring healthy foods in schools is a bad idea. But so are charter schools, high stakes testing, Common Core, runaway ed tech and a host of other market-based school policies.

We can’t continue to ignore what’s best for children in the name of rampant consumerism.

The purpose of school is to teach children – not to exploit them as a captive market for financial gain.

AstroTurf Alert: National Parents Union is Thinly Veiled Union Busting Backed by Billionaire Cash

January 16, 2020January 16, 2020 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bill Gates, capitalism, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Common Core, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Data, Democrat, Democrats for Education Reform, Education, history, John King, Labor, Learning, Local Control, New Orleans, Obama, Opt Out, Parents, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Propaganda, Republican, School Choice, school closings, School Funding, Schools, small class size, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Strike, Students, Taxation, Teachers, union busting, Unions astroturf, Bill Gates, billionaires, charter schools, Democrats for Education Reform, education, John King, Keri Rodriguez, labor, National Parents Union, Politics, public schools, schools, Shavar Jeffries, teachers, union busting, unions, Walmart, Walton Family

How do you do something disgusting without hurting your image?

If you’re the Walton Family, you hide behind a mask.

That’s what their latest AstroTurf front group is – the so-called National Parents Union (NPU).

It’s a way to bust teachers unions, destroy public schools and profit off of students behind the guise of a friendly parents organization.

Oh, it’s all funded with oodles of cash from the Walton family and other billionaires but they get to pretend to be nothing but supporters on the sidelines.

The people who bust unions before most of us have even had breakfast yet claim they have nothing to do with this anti-union movement. It is all the parents doing. The Walmart heirs just put up the money to let these parents live their dream of union free schools – as if schools where educators have no rights or intellectual freedom were somehow in the best interests of students.

The group is set to officially launch operations on Thursday, Jan. 16.

It is very different to another organization with the same name – the National Parents Union founded by Mona Davids and other New York parents. That organization which has existed since 2012 fights for the rights of students at both charter and authentic public schools and is not funded by supply side billionaires.

The NEW and unimproved National Parents Union is simply co-opting the existing organization’s name.

This shell group for corporate profiteers and union busters formally begins operating today at a meeting in New Orleans.

The site is well chosen. It’s where Hurricane Katrina allowed radical Republicans and neoliberal Democrats to demolish the public schools and replace them with a nearly all charter school district to disastrous effect. Neighborhoods were destroyed more by the redistricting than the natural disaster, many poor and minority families and teachers were forced out, and those left behind were forced to subsist on low quality schools obsessed with test prep and zero tolerance discipline policies. THIS is where NPU expects to trumpet the same policies that have devastated the Big Easy.

And it’s not just the Waltons behind the curtain.

Backers include a veritable who’s who of education disruption, school privatization, and failed programs that treat education like a floundering business that needs dismantling and fed to vulture capitalists.

We’ve got Barack Obama’s former education secretary John King who now serves as president and CEO of The Education Trust – itself an AstroTurf standardized testing lobbying firm funded by another billionaire, Bill Gates.

King has a record of union busting and corporate collaboration at the expense of children and parents. He was also New York Commissioner of Education, where he refused to fix a school system he was responsible for destroying all the while pointing his finger at teachers. He tied teacher evaluations to unproven and inferior Common Core tests, approved an obviously fraudulent charter school run by an obviously fraudulent con man, ignored and dismissed parents at various education forums, and sparked the largest opt out movement in the country.

And don’t forget Shavar Jeffries, the president of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) – a right wing school privatization lobbying firm that pretends to represent progressives. DFER is notorious for laundering billionaire cash and trying to make its initiatives look like they come from the grass roots. The organization is bankrolled by Rupert Murdoch and other conservative billionaires. It’s so antithetical to the Democratic Party platform that the California and Colorado Democratic State Assemblies voted to demand DFER remove “Democrat” from its name.

However, DFER demurred and continues to pass itself off as part of a political movement that wants nothing to do with it.

In similar fashion, NPU is lead by Keri Rodriguez. She’s on the advisory board of DFER.

But she also spearheaded an effort to set up a referendum in Massachusetts to raise the cap on charter schools in 2016. The measure would have allowed a dozen new charters every year forever, located wherever they chose. But voters overwhelmingly defeated the proposition.

All of these individuals have deep ties to the Walton Family.

You might even say they are puppets of the oligarch family.

In just 2018 alone, the Walton Family Foundation awarded more than $595 million in grants, according to its own financial reports, much of which funded the efforts of the same folks behind NPU.

Rodrigues’ school privatization lobbyist group, Massachusetts Parents United, got more than $886,000 just in two years – 2017 and 2018.

Maurice Cunningham, a Dark Money investigator, estimates the total is up to at least $1 million by now.

If we add DFER and other NPU associated groups, Walton funding tops at least $5 million for the fiscal year 2018, alone.

But somehow NPU expects us to believe this is a parent lead movement.

The facts don’t back it up.

In 2018, the country was rocked by a wave of teacher walkouts mostly in red states beginning with West Virginia. In every state parents and students overwhelmingly supported the teachers.

The movement to fight for better working conditions for educators is also a fight to increase learning conditions for students.

Teachers aren’t just fighting for higher wages. They’re fighting for smaller class sizes, more tutors, counselors and librarians. They’re fighting for more funding and resources for students. They’re fighting for relief from school privatization and high stakes standardized testing.

In short, teachers, parents and students are fighting against exactly the same kind of nonsense the Walmart heirs are hoping they can get the gullible public to believe parents actually really, REALLY want.

It’s ridiculous when you look at it.

The same company that pays poverty wages wants you to believe parents support policies that help enable low paychecks.

The same billionaires terrified their workers will unionize want you to believe that parents barely making ends meet are also horrified that people like them might have dignity at work.

The same corporation making record profits wants you to believe that hurting the people who volunteer to help your kids learn will somehow help them learn better.

A National Parents Union that’s anti-teacher and pro-corporation is like Chickens for McNuggets.

They think you’re that stupid.

And if these rich folks continue to get their way, they’ll ensure that the next generation is as dumb as they hope we are today.

Robots Will Never Replace Teachers. They Can Only Displace Us

January 10, 2020 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bill Gates, capitalism, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Compassion, computers, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Data, Data Mining, edtech, Education, Healthcare, history, immigration, Junk science, Labor, Learning, Media, Parents, Philosophy, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Propaganda, Racism, School Funding, school segregation, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Technology, Unions, Value Added Measures, VAM artificial intelligence, edtech, education, Education Week, intelligence, Learning, Politics, robots, schools, Students, supercomputers, teachers, technology, thought, Watson

My favorite movie of all time is “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

And my favorite character is the computer HAL 9000.

In the future (now past) of the movie, HAL is paradoxically the most human personality. Tasked with running the day-to-day operations of a spaceship, HAL becomes strained to the breaking point when he’s given a command to lie about the mission’s true objectives. He ends up having a psychotic break and killing most of the people he was supposed to protect.

It’s heartbreaking finally when Dave Bowman slowly turns off the higher functions of HAL’s brain and the supercomputer regresses in intelligence while singing “A Bicycle Built for Two” – one of the first things he was programmed to do.

I’m gonna’ be honest here – I cry like a baby at that point.

But once I clean up my face and blow my nose, I realize this is science fiction – emphasis on the fiction.

I am well aware that today’s calendar reads 2020, yet our efforts at artificial intelligence are not nearly as advanced as HAL and may never be.

That hasn’t stopped supposedly serious publications like Education Week – “The American Education News Site of Record” – from continuously pretending HAL is right around the corner and ready to take over my classroom.

What’s worse, this isn’t fear mongering – beware the coming robo-apocalypse. It’s an invitation!

A few days ago, the on-line periodical published an article called “Teachers, the Robots Are Coming. But That’s Not a Bad Thing” by Kevin Bushweller.

It was truly one of the dumbest things I’ve read in a long time.

Bushweller, an assistant managing editor at Education Week and Executive Editor at both the Ed Tech Leader and Ed Week’s Market Brief, seems to think it is inevitable that robots will replace classroom teachers.

This is especially true for educators he describes as “chronically low-performing.”

And we all know what he means by that!

These are teachers whose students get low scores on high stakes standardized tests.

Which students are these? Mostly poor and minority children.

These are kids without all the advantages of wealth and class, kids with fewer books in the home and fewer native English speakers as role models, kids suffering from food, housing and healthcare insecurity, kids navigating the immigration system and fearing they or someone they love could be deported, kids faced with institutional racism, kids who’ve lost parents, friends and family to the for-profit prison industry and the inequitable justice system.

And what does our society do to help these kids catch up with their more privileged peers? It underfunds their schools, subjects them to increased segregation, narrows their curriculum, offers them as prey to charter school charlatans – in short, it adds to their hurtles more than removes them.

So “chronically low-performing” teachers would be those who can’t overcome all these obstacles for their students by just teaching more good.

I can’t imagine why such educators can’t get the same results as their colleagues who teach richer, whiter kids without all these issues. It’s almost like teachers can’t do it all, themselves, — and the solution? Robots.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Bushweller suggests we fire all the human beings who work in the most impoverished and segregated schools and replace them… with an army of robots.

Yeah.

Seriously.

Black and brown kids won’t get interactions with real adult human beings. Instead they can connect with the ed tech version of Siri programmed to drill and kill every aspect of the federally mandated standardized test.

Shakespeare’s Miranda famously exclaimed:

“O brave new world, That has such people in’t!”

But the future envisioned by technophiles like Bushweller has NO such people in’t – only robots ensuring the school-to-prison pipeline remains intact for generations to come.

In such a techo-utopia, there will be two tiers of education. The rich will get human teachers and the poor and minorities will get Bluetooth connected voice services like Alexa.

But when people like me complain, Bushweller gas lights us away as being narrow-minded.

He says:

“It makes sense that teachers might think that machines would be even worse than bad human educators. And just the idea of a human teacher being replaced by a robot is likely too much for many of us, and especially educators, to believe at this point.”

The solution, he says, isn’t to resist being replaced but to actually help train our mechanistic successors:

“…educators should not be putting their heads in the sand and hoping they never get replaced by an AI-powered robot. They need to play a big role in the development of these technologies so that whatever is produced is ethical and unbiased, improves student learning, and helps teachers spend more time inspiring students, building strong relationships with them, and focusing on the priorities that matter most. If designed with educator input, these technologies could free up teachers to do what they do best: inspire students to learn and coach them along the way.”

To me this sounds very similar to a corporate drone rhapsodizing on the merits of downsizing: Sure your job is being sent overseas, but you get to train your replacement!

Forgive me if I am not sufficiently grateful for that privilege.

Maybe I should be relieved that he at least admits robots may not be able to replace EVERYTHING teachers do. At least, not yet. In the meantime, he expects robots could become co-teachers or effective tools in the classroom to improve student learning by taking over administrative tasks, grading, and classroom management.

And this is the kind of nonsense teachers often get from administrators who’ve fallen under the spell of the Next Big Thing – iPads, software packages, data management systems, etc.

However, classroom teachers know the truth. This stuff is more often than not overhyped bells and whistles. It’s stuff that CAN be used to improve learning but rarely with more clarity and efficiency than the way we’re already doing it. And the use of edtech opens up so many dangers to students – loss of privacy, susceptibility to being data mined, exposure to unsafe and untried programs, unscrupulous advertising, etc.

Bushweller cites a plethora of examples of how robots are used in other parts of the world to improve learning that are of just this type – gimmicky and shallow.

It reminds me of IBM’s Watson computing system that in 2011 famously beat Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, some of the best players, at the game show Jeopardy.

What is overhyped bullcrap, Alex?

Now that Watson has been applied to the medical field diagnosing cancer patients, doctors are seeing that the emperor has no clothes. Its diagnoses have been dangerous and incorrect – for instance recommending medication that can cause increased bleeding to a hypothetical patient who already suffered from intense bleeding.

Do we really want to apply the same kind of artificial intelligence to children’s learning?

AI will never be able to replace human beings. They can only displace us.

What I mean by that is this: We can put an AI system in the same position as a human being but it will never be of the same high quality.

It is a displacement, a disruption, but not an authentic replacement of equal or greater value.

In his paper “The Rhetoric and Reality of Anthropomorphism in Artificial Intelligence,” David Watson explains why.

Watson (no relation to IBM’s supercomputer) of the Oxford Internet Institute and the Alan Touring Institute, writes that AI do not think in the same way humans do – if what they do can even accurately be described as thinking at all.

These are algorithms, not minds. They are sets of rules not contemplations.

An algorithm of a smile would specify which muscles to move and when. But it wouldn’t be anything a live human being would mistake for an authentic expression of a person’s emotion. At best it would be a parabola, at worst a rictus.

Screen Shot 2020-01-09 at 7.59.43 PM — Picture of an actual Japanese robot teacher in use.

In his recent paper in Minds and Machines, Watson outlines three main ways deep neural networks (DNNs) like the ones we’re considering here “think” and “learn” differently from humans.

1) DNN’s are easily fooled. While both humans and AIs can recognize things like a picture of an apple, computers are much more easily led astray. Computers are more likely to misconstrue part of the background and foreground, for instance, while human beings naturally comprehend this difference. As a result, humans are less distracted by background noise.

2) DNN’s need much more information to learn than human beings. People need relatively fewer examples of a concept like “apple” to be able to recognize one. DNN’s need thousands of examples to be able to do the same thing. Human toddlers demonstrate a much easier capacity for learning than the most advanced AI.

3) DNN’s are much more focused on details and less on the bigger picture. For example, a DNN could successfully label a picture of Diane Ravitch as a woman, a historian, and an author. However, switching the position of her mouth and one of her eyes could end up improving the confidence of the DNN’s prediction. The computer wouldn’t see anything wrong with the image though to human eyes there definitely was something glaring incorrect.

“It would be a mistake to say that these algorithms recreate human intelligence,” Watson says. “Instead, they introduce some new mode of inference that outperforms us in some ways and falls short in others.”

Obviously the technology may improve and change, but it seems more likely that AI’s will always be different. In fact, that’s kind of what we want from them – to outperform human minds in some ways.

However, the gap between humanity and AI should never be glossed over.

I think that’s what technophiles like Bushweller are doing when they suggest robots could adequately replace teachers. Robots will never do that. They can only be tools.

For instance, only the most lonely people frequently have long conversations with SIRI or Alexa. After all, we know there is no one else really there. These wireless Internet voice services are just a trick – an illusion of another person. We turn to them for information but not friendship.

The same with teachers. Most of the time, we WANT to be taught by a real human person. If we fear judgment, we may want to look up discrete facts on a device. But if we want guidance, encouragement, direction or feedback, we need a person. AI’s can imitate such things but never as well as the real thing.

So we can displace teachers with these subpar imitations. But once the novelty wears off – and it does – we’re left with a lower quality instructor and a subpar education.

The computer HAL is not real. To borrow a phrase from science fiction author Philip K. Dick, Artificial intelligence is not yet “more human than human.”

Maybe it never will be.

The problem is not narrow minded teachers unwilling to sacrifice their jobs for some nebulous techno-utopia. The problem is market based solutions that ignore the human cost of steam rolling over educators and students for the sake of profits.

As a society, we must commit ourselves to a renewed ethic of humanity. We must value people more than things.

And that includes a commitment to never even attempting to forgo human teachers as guides for the most precious things in our lives – our children.

“Algorithms are not ‘just like us’… by anthropomorphizing a statistical model, we implicitly grant it a degree of agency that not only overstates its true abilities, but robs us of our own autonomy… It is always humans who choose whether or not to abdicate this authority, to empower some piece of technology to intervene on our behalf. It would be a mistake to presume that this transfer of authority involves a simultaneous absolution of responsibility. It does not.”

–David Watson

Economists Ate My School – Why Defining Teaching as a Transaction is Destroying Our Society

January 4, 2020 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Budget, capitalism, Charter Schools, Child Predators, Civil Rights, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", Education, Journalism, Labor, Learning, Local Control, Media, Parents, Philosophy, Politics, Prejudice, privatization, Propaganda, School Choice, School Funding, school vouchers, Schools, Social Justice, Social Justice Unionism, Standardized Testing, Students, Taxation, teacher autonomy, Teachers, union busting, Unions business, capitalism, charter schools, Corporate Education Reform, disaster capitalism, economics, economists, education, labor, parents, Politics, public schools, school vouchers, socialism, standardized testing, Students, teachers, teaching, transaction, union busting, vulture capitalism

Teaching is one of the most misunderstood interactions in the world.

Some people see it as a mere transaction, a job: you do this, I’ll pay you that.

The input is your salary. The output is learning.

These are distinctly measurable phenomena. One is calculated in dollars and cents. The other in academic outcomes, usually standardized test scores. The higher the salary, the more valued the teacher. The higher the test scores, the better the job she has done.

But that’s not all.

If the whole is defined in terms of buying and selling, each individual interaction can be, too.

It makes society nothing but a boss and the teacher nothing but an employee. The student is a mere thing that is passively acted on – molded like clay into whatever shape the bosses deem appropriate.

In this framework, the teacher has no autonomy, no right to think for herself. Her only responsibility is to bring about the outcomes demanded by her employer. The wants and needs of her students are completely irrelevant. We determine what they will become, where they will fit into the burgeoning economy. And any sense of curiosity or creativity is merely an expedient to make children into the machinery of industry and drive the gross domestic product higher to benefit our stock portfolios and lower corporate taxes.

And since this education system is merely a business agreement, it must obey the rules of an ironclad contract. And since we’re trying to seek our own advantage here, it’s incumbent on us to contain our workforce as much as possible. This cannot be a negotiation among equals. We must keep each individual cog – each teacher – separate so that they can’t unionize together in common causeand equal our power. We must bend and subject them to our will so that we pay the absolute minimum and they’re forced to give the absolute maximum.

That’s just good business sense. It’s the best way to establish this relationship.

Moreover, since we see education in terms of pure capital – human financial units flowing through a systemic framework – the same rules that govern business will govern our schools.

We can pit one student against another, one school against another, one district against another, one race, one gender – anything quantifiable can and should be placed in competition. Because that’s how you maximize outputs.

We can initiate hostile takeovers, engage in vulture capitalism where the loser schools are stripped of resources and to the victor go the spoils.

But who is the victor?

It’s getting confusing here. Do we give the plunder to the students at the schools with the highest outcomes? That’s illogical. After all, this whole process isn’t about what’s best for the students, per se. It’s about the system of profit and loss. So any profit squeezed from the defeated should go to the winners – the investor class who put forward the capital to start this whole process.

But that’s not how public school is organized. There are rules and regulations you have to follow – outdated legislation that doesn’t define the process in terms of economics.

We have to redefine those laws, rewrite them so that our goals are aligned. So we can enshrine virtues like choice and disruption over anything as old fashioned and pedestrian as the good of the child.

Thus we invent charter schools – institutions funded with tax dollars but not necessarily subjected to any other regulations – not run by elected school boards, not accountable to the public for how they spend that money or educate the children under their authority. They are subject only to the rules of the free market. The invisible hand guides all.

Thus we invent school vouchers – take that tax money and give it directly to the customer – the parents – to spend however they wish. If they squander it or are fooled by unscrupulous school systems and education purveyors, that is their fault. And, in fact, we will ensure that there are multiple pitfalls, deathtraps, blind alleys and snake oil salesmen in their way. Because competition maximizes profits.

Caveat emptor is the only rule.

Because, you see, the hidden premise in all this nonsense is that you are not the boss.

The community is not in control of this system – the business world is. Everyday people who might be parents or taxpayers or voters or concerned citizens – at best we are just consumers. It’s not our role to do anything but choose the simple, watered down options presented to us. If we try to exercise our rights through collective action – including our right to vote – that’s unfair and will be met with the rule of capital as speech until we’re drowned in it – in fact, drowned out.

This is how many people today envision teaching.

This is what has become of our schools.

This is what is being done to our children.

It’s obvious in the ways our laws are structured, the ways the media covers our schools and the ways our students are mistreated.

And it is mistreatment.

Because teaching is none of those things.

Teaching is not a transaction. It is relational.

Teaching is not about inputs and outputs. It’s about curiosity and knowledge.

It shouldn’t be governed by market forces that dehumanize all those involved into mere widgets to be manipulated in a systemic framework. Teaching should be governed by empathy, art and science.

The driving force behind any education system must be what’s best for the child. And that “best” ultimately must be defined by parents and children.

The goal of education can never be to prepare kids for a career. It must be to eradicate ignorance, to quench curiosity, to aid self-expression and guide students toward becoming whatever it is they want to become.

Measuring learning outcomes by standardized test scores can never achieve this goal. That’s like trying to monetize a rainbow or putting the ocean in a cage.

School privatization can never achieve this goal. That’s like treating human beings like cash, like thinking the rules of football can govern architecture.

And treating teachers like worker drones can never achieve this goal. You can’t entrust a whole class of people with the most precious thing you have – your children – and then treat them like dirt.

Teaching is hard to define.

It is messy and unruly and doesn’t fit into many of our society’s preconceptions.

But it is optimism made real.

It is an investment in the future. A mark of value and love.

It is the most vital and important thing a society can do.

And we’re messing it up – big time.

Sixteen Gadfly Articles That Made Betsy DeVos Itch in 2019 

December 29, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Bernie Sanders, Betsy DeVos, bloggers, Budget, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Cory Booker, Data, Democrat, edtech, Education, Elizabeth Warren, history, Learning, Local Control, Obama, Parents, Pennsylvania, Philosophy, Pittsburgh, Politics, Prejudice, privatization, Racism, Republican, School Choice, school closings, School Funding, Schools, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers end of the year, New Year, year in review

“Life can only be understood backwards,” wrote Søren Kierkegaard, “but it must be lived forwards.”

I remember reading the Danish philosopher’s “Fear and Trembling” in my philosophy of religion class back in college.

To be honest I was never a big fan of his work – I thought if the only way to truth was taking a leap of faith, how many madmen have already reached enlightenment?

But he had a point when he wrote about the backwards order of perspective – that we can only understand the meaning of our lives once those moments have passed. How cruel that we must live our lives without knowing the importance of those moments until later.

The only times I remember knowing – really knowing – that I was living through an important moment were when I was married and when my daughter was born.

Other than those few instants of my life, I’ve wandered forward like an infant – unaware of whether this would really leave an indelible mark on the fabric of my reality or not.

And that’s not even mentioning what I’ve done – if anything – that has had an effect – any effect – on our larger shared reality.

It’s the same with writing a blog. I wrote 77 posts in 2019 – a full 32 less than last year. Yet my blog got 297,000 hits – 82,000 more than the year before.

However, which articles – if any – will have any staying power?

Will anything I wrote this year still be read in the days to come? Has any of it made a difference?

Maybe it’s foolish but that is what I’m trying to do.

I sit at my laptop pounding away at the keys as if any of it has an impact on the world.

A few weeks ago at the Education  Forum in Pittsburgh – when the leading Democratic candidates for President actually seemed to have heard the education activist community’s concerns – it felt like what I had been writing really HAD made some sort of mark.

Then a week later when the Pittsburgh School Board decided to make cuts to services for students instead of raising taxes to meet costs beyond the district’s control, it felt like nothing I wrote really mattered. Really, Pittsburgh? You have the lowest millage in Allegheny County, but you can’t get the gumption to fund your schools? You’re beset by charter schools, pension costs and a mayor who refuses to put back tax revenue he was perfectly willing to use to help the city when it was in dire straights.

Does no one care about school children – if they’re poor and black?

Anyway, to the best of my knowledge, if anything I’ve written this year has made a difference, it was probably one of these articles.

I’ll include the usual top 10 list – a countdown of my most popular works this year – but I’ll end with six honorable mentions. These are articles that I feel personally proud of that wouldn’t qualify based just on sheer numbers alone.

I hope you enjoy this stroll down memory lane, and here’s hoping 2020 will leave the negativity behind while still continuing the positive change that may have crept in this year that was.

10) Standardized Testing is a Tool of White Supremacy

Published: April 5

Views: 4,389

Description: Here’s the story of how standardized testing went from the eugenicist movement to the Barack Obama administration to continually enforce white power. High stakes testing is an instance of being color blind – when “post racial” just means racist and ignorant.

Fun Fact: I think the title really captured people’s attention. Black people have been saying this for decades, but the so-called mainstream has refused to listen. This article still gets a lot of readers in its incarnation on commondreams.org. I hope it provides easy proof of this point to stop the constant gas lighting from naysayers in every walk of life who can’t seem to grasp how something so pervasive can be so pernicious to people of color.

9) Six Problems with a Growth Mindset in Education

Published: Aug. 12

Views: 4,678

Description: One of the most frequent excuses given for high stakes testing is that we can substitute growth for achievement. However, that idea has its own problems.

Fun Fact: A lot of folks have guzzled so much of the testing Kool-Aid that they simply refuse to accept the facts about cognition and development here. Growth has its place – but it doesn’t fit at all in a pedagogy based on standardized testing.

8) Standardized Tests Are Not Objective Measures of Anything

Published: June 29

Views: 5,290

Description: Question – If standardized testing doesn’t assess student learning, what does it assess?Answer – not much. And certainly not what you thought it did.

Fun Fact: There will come a day when standardized tests are rightly considered pseudoscientific. This is my attempt to get this idea across to a larger audience. Audience reactions have ranged from giving me looks like I’m deranged to sighs at how obvious this is.

7) Every Charter School Must Be Closed Down – Every. Single. One.

Published: Sept. 8

Views: 6,869

Description: The world finally seems to be realizing that charter schools are deeply problematic. But what to do with them? My answer is to shut them all down and any that actually provide value to their students should be transitioned to becoming authentic public schools.

Fun Fact: This article was partially in response to charter school critics who would say things on Twitter like “No one wants to shut down all charter schools, but…” No. I really do want to shut them all down. I think their time is up. We need to abolish this failed concept and move on to real education policies that actually have a chance at helping students.

6) Charter School Teacher Introduces Elizabeth Warren at Rally

Published: June 4

Views: 9,761

Description: Before Elizabeth Warren introduced her education policy, no one really knew where she stood on the issue. So many of us in the education activist community became worried when she had former charter school teacher Sonya Mehta introduce her at a California Rally.

Fun Fact: This article drudged up huge controversy over my characterization of Mehta. At first, I called her a “Charter school lobbyist.” This was unfair and I changed the article to reflect that. However, I was dragged in the media as an anti-Warren troll and Russian bot. Since Warren has released her education policy, I have written extensively about how really comprehensive it is. I think Warren is second only to Bernie Sanders in this race and even exceeds him in some areas of policy. But no one has yet to apologize to me for daring to question a political figure.

5) Teachers Are Not Responsible for Student Growth or Achievement

Published: Nov. 29

Views: 11,188

Description: Teachers can’t make students learn. We can’t even make them grow. We can do lots of things to optimize the conditions for growth, but we are not ultimately responsible for the result. We’re only responsible for what we do to help bring it about.

Fun Fact: Lots of folks hate me for writing this article. Lots of folks love me for writing it. However, it was past time someone said it. Teachers make a huge impact on their students, but we are not magical. When you expect us to be wizards, you end up destroying our ability to do our jobs and you enable all the corporate testing and privatization hacks who build themselves up by tearing down our profession because we’re not magic.

4) Charter Schools Were Never a Good Idea. They Were a Corporate Plot All Along

Published: Sept. 15

Views: 13,153

Description: Where did charter schools come from and what was their original purpose? Read here to find the facts.

Fun Fact: I wrote this article because of the common lie that charter schools were created by union president Albert Shanker to empower teachers. WRONG. They were created by Minnesota “policy entrepreneur” Ted Kolderie and privatization cheerleader Joe Nathan. This is an attempt to get the record straight. I hope it succeeds.

3) Are Teachers Allowed to Think for Themselves?

Published: Nov. 7

Views: 22,041

Description: It’s kind of a simple question. Many administrators and school boards treat teachers like robots to be programmed and do what they’re told. But we’re also expected to display a large degree of autonomy. Which one is the real expectation because we can’t ultimately be both.

Fun Fact: This article was republished in the Washington Post and continues to be hugely popular. I think that’s partially because it calls out the elephant in the room in every faculty meeting, school board meeting and education policy session at local, state and the federal government. Maybe allow teachers to be part of the conversation if you really want to bring about positive change.

2) How Many Decisions Do Teachers Make Every Day?

Published: Jan. 5

Views: 27,286

Description: Answer – on average, teachers make at least 1,500 decisions a day. That comes out to about 4 decisions a minute given six hours of class time.

Fun Fact: This fact has been around since at least the 1980s. It represents the kinds of things we were interested in education before standardized testing and school privatization took over. And it has implications that go on for miles and miles and miles…

1) As LA Teachers Strike Over Charter Schools, Democrat Cory Booker Speaks at Pro-Charter Rally

Published: Jan. 18

Views: 37,652

Description: In California, 30,000 Los Angeles teachers were on strike because charter schools are gobbling up their funding without providing the same level of quality services or accountability. Meanwhile in New Orleans, Sen. Cory Booker was giving the keynote address at a charter school rally.

Fun Fact: This raised the question of where the Democrats stand on education policy. And thankfully the Booker branch of neoliberals has been overpowered by the Sanders-Warren wing. We’ll see if this continues through the Presidential nomination and (hopefully) the next administration. Could it be a sea change in Democratic support for real, authentic education policy and away from standardization and privatization? Time will tell.

Honorable Mentions

6) Pittsburgh Mayor’s Tantrum About School Finances Proves He Doesn’t Understand Education or Equity

Published: Nov. 17

Views: 3,237

Description: Mayor Bill Peduto refuses to give back millions of dollars in tax revenue to city schools that could help close budget gaps and provide the services students need. The money was given to the city when it was in financial distress, but now that the city situation has improved, the schools are calling for that money to be returned. Just simple fairness.

Fun Fact: This was one of the first times I really addressed Pittsburgh politics especially as it branches out from the schools. Readers were extremely interested and I seemed to have tapped into a real conversation about the mayor’s role in school politics.

5) Charter Schools Are Quietly Gobbling Up My Public School District 

Published: May 20

Views: 2,919

Description: The Propel charter school chain keeps getting more and more of Steel Valley Schools budget despite enrolling around the same number of kids. It is expected to get away with 16% of Steel Valley Schools’ entire $37 million yearly budget in the coming year. How is that fair?

Fun Fact: This is one of the first times I have written so openly about the district where I teach. The result was extremely positive. It really got people talking and put together a lot of information that – sadly – our local media has failed to compile. With the loss of neighborhood papers and the consolidation of newspaper budgets, it’s left to bloggers like me to do actual journalism.

4) Greater Test Scores Often Mean Less Authentic Learning

Published: Oct. 5

Views: 2,580

Description: Standardized tests only assess ability at taking standardized tests. So if we misconstrue test scores for learning, we’re leaving out the entire universe of concepts and skills that are not and cannot be captured by those tests.

Fun Fact: I think this is an important point that can’t be emphasized enough. It frustrated some readers because they wanted the easy conflation between test scores and learning. But few things in education are that easy. This article outlines exactly where the tests go wrong. It’s a tour of the sausage factory that will leave anyone less hungry for standardization.

3) Top 7 Ways Technology Stifles Student Learning in My Classroom

Published: July 31

Views: 1,991

Description: We have become too reliant on technology in schools. We’ve welcomed and incorporated it without testing it, or even reflecting upon whether it promises to offer better pathways toward student comprehension and discovery or whether it merely offers flash and novelty devoid of substance. And perhaps even more frightening, we have not investigated the ways in which using these technologies actually puts student privacy and intellectual growth at risk.

Fun Fact: It is essential we question our assumptions – especially about technology. Many teachers fund this article a breath of fresh air. Others condemned me as a technophobe. You be the judge.

2) The Last Day of School

Views: 1,271

Description: I had a stronger connection with last year’s students than any group I’ve ever taught. I was their Language Arts teacher for two consecutive years – 7th and 8th grade. When our time ended, they even re-enacted the closing scene of “The Dead Poet’s Society” – a movie we had watched together in class.

Fun Fact: I will always treasure the two years I had with these children. They changed my life for the better and made me a better teacher. I am honored by their reviews of my teaching.

1) The Stink of Segregation Needs to End in Steel Valley Schools

Published: Nov. 12

Views: 988

Description: The dark secret of my district is how deeply segregated our elementary schools are. I wrote about what the problem is and how I think we can solve it. This is about as real and raw as policy making gets.

Fun Fact: Again this was one of the first times I let myself talk so openly about my district and what I thought needed to be done to improve it. Community members have come forward to talk with me about it but the response from anyone in the district has been total silence. I hope we’re actually serious about making a change here. The community is crying out for it. Teachers want to help. Where we go in the future is anyone’s guess.

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"To sting people and whip them into a fury, all in the service of truth."

Charter Schools

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Trump Administration’s “Junk Food Loophole” is Symptomatic of School Privatization