I read so much school reform industry marketing malarkey now that I have a request for reformers. Read a book. Find a new word. I am bored silly with “our failed and failing public schools.” There are other words one can use to discredit and defame public schools. “Failing” isn’t your only option. If you must do this, and you must, because you’ll never get all those public schools properly privatized and profitable without “our failed and failing public schools” swallowed whole and repeated by dopes, switch it up a little. My suggestions are “deficient” or “unsuccessful.”
Speaking of deficient, let’s check in with the latest school reform scam which is how charter operators have manipulated state law to create new statewide appointed boards to authorize charters. Charter schools in Indiana were barely regulated under the old laws, but the operators found even that incredibly lax regulatory environment too burdensome, so they set up an appointed state board to rubber stamp whatever they feel like doing when they drop into a new market:
The legislation that created the Indiana Charter School Board two years ago received only one Democratic vote – from Rep. Mary Ann Sullivan, a self-proclaimed education reformer. That’s because school reform is about politics, not students. All of northeast Indiana’s GOP delegation voted to approve the state board, a poorly disguised end-run around the stricter standards now being used by Ball State University and the Indianapolis mayor’s office in their authorization reviews.
total deregulation is working as intended:
If charter schools don’t perform well, they will be closed, supporters of Indiana’s charter school law claimed. Well, not so much: ¬Meet the Indiana zombie schools. Try to shut them down for poor performance and they just keep going.
Gary’s Charter School of the Dunes is among the seven schools whose charters have been revoked by their authorizer, Ball State University. The charter school filed an appeal, with a hearing set for April 24, but the Times of Northwest Indiana reported last week that Calumet College of St. Joseph will take over as sponsor of the school.
Got that? Ball State acting as state regulator revoked the charter. So what does a charter operator do? He simply relies on the new state law he wrote and goes to a private entity for a new charter.
Meanwhile, Timothy L. Johnson Academy, a Fort Wayne charter also tapped for closing, has made a pitch to the East Allen County Schools board to grant a charter. Imagine Schools Inc., the for-profit company that runs two schools in Fort Wayne and two in Indianapolis, had three of its charters revoked. But the company now is “actively looking for another entity to grant it new charters.”
Imagine filed paperwork with the Indiana secretary of state’s office to establish an Imagine Academy for Boys Inc. and an Imagine Academy for Girls Inc., both at the current address of the Imagine Indiana Life Sciences Academy West in Indianapolis.
Charter School of the Dunes is another school that seems to be more about real estate than education. In spite of its faltering achievement record, the school somehow secured financing to build a new $13 million school, according to StateImpact Indiana’s Kyle Stokes.
Another Gary charter slated for closing, LEAD College Prep, got the go-ahead from a Lake County judge to lease a vacant Gary Community Schools building for $1 a year.
How do lawmakers justify ordering a public school district to lease a building to a competitor with a lower achievement record? It’s certainly not about accountability, but the reformers no longer talk about accountability – now it’s all about choice.
The charter supporters clearly saw that they weren’t going to be able to keep charters open and establish more under the terms of the original charter bill. The law granting independent colleges and a statewide charter board the authority to grant charters gives the zombie schools the breath of life, at taxpayers’ expense.
Bill Gates wrote an op ed recently where he was very upset about how his ideas on standardized testing and teacher evaluation were being misinterpreted by state lawmakers. The thing is, I no longer give a shit if his abstract intentions were good. Time to look at reality.
some guy
bust the unions? check.
use ideological curriculum provided by wingnut think tanks? check.
profit? check
Va Highlander
Applies to most everything he’s done, really.
BGinCHI
Education reform will get serious the day people start looking at all the causes for deficiencies in the process: funding models, family participation, a culture that devalues the labor-intensive process of education in favor of quick-fixes and illusions of something-for-nothing.
Education is hard. Being for reform is easy.
weaselone
You can’t actually expect them to do work. Real work is hard and there’s a good chance they wouldn’t end up with a sack full of the public’s gold at the end. Scams and graft are much more efficient.
Kay
@Va Highlander:
It’s not even honest. One of his non profits backed an Indiana law that mandated testing of gym teachers. He’s backing off his own law. They’re probably so big by now they don’t know what the hell they back, and in which state.
Zifnab
One of the authors of No Child Left Behind actually spoke at my graduation ceremony (apparently, our year drew the short straw). He gave a very heart warming “The world as it is now wasn’t what we intended. It got misinterpreted, and now you’ve got to fix it!” speech. I don’t think I’ve ever been so underwhelmed by a public speaker in my entire life. :-p
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI: But, but, but the market will fix it.
OT: I got my bike on the road yesterday. 10.3 miles both yesterday and today. My legs are feeling it a bit.
Kay
@Zifnab:
I just can’t believe we’re doing this again, with Jeb Bush. Honest to God, are they really going to sell Jeb Bush based on education scams, like they sold George W Bush based on education scams? It’s the same voters. They don’t even wait for a number to die off.
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: I’m doing a big ride on Sunday after a winter in the gym. We’ll see how the work paid off (or not). It’s the local version of the Paris-Roubaix and it will be tough.
Thank Bieber for ibuprofin.
Glad to hear you’re getting out there. Hoping to get up your way for a few rides this summer.
LesGS
Why are there any students in these charter schools? Do their parents have any say in whether their kids are enrolled in these schools or not? This is a real question. I don’t know the answer.
My kids, now in their 20s and in college, did high-school in a not-for-profit home-study charter school here in San Diego. If I had not been happy with their education and progress, we would have gone elsewhere.
the Conster
Maybe this Atlanta cheating cock-up is the best thing that’s happened to school “reform”, because of the scale of it, and the buzzwords like “reform” and “standardized testing” has real potential of setting off alarms everywhere. Or not. We’ll have to wait and see.
Kay
@LesGS:
No one really knows the demand because they’re deregulated and fragmented. One of the ways GWB cooked his education books was counting students who said they planned to get a GED as “graduates.”
The industry trumpets wait list numbers, but they found out that Chicago operators (at least) were pulling the numbers out of their ass.
dr. bloor
I’d opt for “brutally underfunded” myself, although I don’t suppose they have much interest in Truth in Advertising.
Kay
@the Conster:
The reporting is much better locally, because they don’t try to be “education reporters.”
They just report it as a straight public funding issue/graft/transparency/local control. They can also figure out the complex real estate deals, which are a whole ‘nother segment of the reform industry, because in smaller cities and towns reporters know all the local real estate players.
srv
Kay, I got into an argument with someone on public funding for charter schools and they were insistent that fed/state/district funds are not provided in any equivalent to public schools.
Would you have a link for a state-by-state comparison of how charters are funded? Or just some macro data?
Redshift
I’ve always thought that the impetus of well-intentioned “school reformers” (as opposed to the increasingly-common grifters) is that if you’re an elected official or a wealthy person, it’s a near-certainty that you went to good schools, and your first real exposure to substandard schools comes when you get into a position of real power. Given the lack of self-awareness of most people to their own privilege, their reaction is not “these other schools suck; boy was I lucky!” but the ever-present “schools have undergone a shocking decline since my day!”
“Failing public schools” is right up there with “spiraling crime rates” as a tool whereby well-meaning people get played to screw over people who are already getting screwed.
mclaren
The function of K-12 education in America is to crush the creativity and individuality and imagination and enthusiasm out of the students, the better to create a society of craven serfs.
As we can see from the Balloon-Juice commentariat, it works.
Trollhattan
This would have never happened on a private school bus; Michelle Rhee told me so. Also, too, pensions=bad.
fresnobee.com/2013/04/05/3244585/phoenix-police-man-left-ammunition.html#storylink=omni_popular#stor…
Kay
@srv:
No, I don’t have a comprehensive list. IMO, they benefit from the fragmented nature of state law because they can make any claim and it’s true somewhere.
That’s also funny because that’s their new argument, that they’re underfunded. All of their new arguments are the same as public school supporters have been using for years: “we’re underfunded, our students are needy” etc.
It’s just amusing to watch, because this completely contradicts their OLD arguments, which is they would do it better and cheaper. Remember ‘throwing money at schools”?
Now we’re apparently in the “choice” part of the marketing cycle, now that they’ve abandoned “accountability”, “cost saving”, and “better results”. CHOICE, all by itself, is the GOAL.
Trollhattan
@mclaren:
Do go on. And may I subscribe to your newsletter?
Also, too, which sunshiny nation is it with a public school system that nurtures creativity and fashions armies of engineers we keep hearing we lack? I’m not up on these things.
the Conster
@mclaren:
Oh fuck you. My daughter and the group of teachers she works with are doing remarkable, creative, exciting things with their 3rd through 5th grade students who are from 22 different countries and every religion there is, in a lower middle class working class school district, and a lot of the parents barely speak English. She spends hundreds of dollars of her scant income to make sure they have what they need, so fuck.you.
Kay
@Redshift:
That really isn’t true, based on national test scores. I’m less generous than you, though. I think it’s ego. My father is really funny on this because he rejects all generational claims of “we were BETTER and SMARTER” and he would benefit from them, because he’s ancient.
He says “the greatest generation wasn’t all that great. I was there. Are you kidding me? Horrible, stupid people, many of them.”
Amir Khalid
America is the country I’ve ever heard of where the private sector fucks with K-12 education like this.
@mclaren:
(Rolls eyes.)
Jebediah
@BGinCHI:
Cheeses, if it’s even a pale shadow of the real thing “tough” will be quite an understatement. Good luck, have fun, careful on those cobbles!
Omnes Omnibus
@Jebediah: One wonders where there are enough cobblestones in Chicagoland to make it work. Is the whole ride in Old Town?
Redshift
@the Conster: I wouldn’t count on it. It’s getting plenty of publicity because it was so big, but since it was a major organized conspiracy (allegedly), rather than a teacher fudging to save his/her job, it seems to be getting covered more as “look at these bad people” rather than “look at what happens when you base everything on high-stakes testing.”
Trollhattan
@BGinCHI:
Jeez, sounds brutal. Do be careful–those reflexes might not be in mid-season shape, apart from your conditioning.
I barely (scant inches) avoided being taken out by an opening pickup driver’s door this a.m., and credit my good luck to having commuted through winter. It was over before I had time to think. {shudder]
Jebediah
@Omnes Omnibus:
Maybe they make them go back and forth over the same ones for a few miles?
SatanicPanic
@mclaren: Oh I get it, Ted & Hellen has the day off and you decided to take up the cause of telling BJ commenters how stupid they are. Please proceed.
YellowJournalism
@mclaren: I’m with Trollhattan, here, in saying that I’m genuinely curious as to what you consider the alternative to the American K-12 education to be. Do you suggest all families try to unschool or homeschool their children? If not, what education models do you have in mind? It’s not fair to drop a bomb like that and not address the complaints and concerns in your statement, which seems to be based on watching too many teen comedies from the 80’s. How much direct experience do you have with the American educational system?
Trollhattan
@Omnes Omnibus:
Old Sacramento is half cobbles and back in the days of the Coors Classic, we had a criterium stage there. I forget how many laps it was, but was able to watch La Vie Claire (both Lemond and The Badger) from this far away [partly extends arms].
Lots of wheel changes.
Redshift
@Kay: Oh, I know it’s not true, that’s why I put it in a similar category with scare tactics like increasing crime, which is also the opposite of the truth.
I think there’s a mix of a lot of things. “These kids are no good compared to our generation” definitely drives a lot of it, like it drives almost any conservative return-to-the-mythical-past idea. But there’s definitely also a strain that kids these days are capable of a lot, and are not being well-served.
The whole thing has some strong parallels to the gun debate, I think. There are strong special and institutional interests demanding that we start the discussion by putting out of bounds the obvious biggest problem (a stupid funding model that ensures the students who start with the biggest challenges have the least resources), which ensures that it will focus mostly on lesser problems and deliberate distractions.
YellowJournalism
@Kay: Unfortunately, most adults, including parents of children currently in the system, do not understand that their children are exposed to a wider variety of information and higher expectations than generations past, not to mention they’re doing so under higher levels of stress both in and out of the classroom. Amazing still is the fact that these expectations are moving down into the younger grades, all the way into early learning in ways that do not match up in developmentally appropriate ways.
MikeJ
@BGinCHI:
That’s funny. I was going to make a Paris Brest and that may be tough. I never did master pâte à choux.
? Martin
@YellowJournalism:
True, but there are other elements that are missing. Not necessarily from the classroom but from the overall experience. Students really struggle to apply what they’ve learned to new situations. I don’t know if it’s too much ‘teach to the test’ or not enough practical problem solving experience at home (building things, working with tools, etc.) but we have remarkably high test scoring students that are completely lost when you give them even a simple open-ended task. A decade ago, a lot of students with lower test scores would have breezed through these things. It’s a legitimate problem, but I’m at a loss what the source is or how to solve it.
Lee
Surprisingly Texas just voted to not allow state funds to any private schools (they killed vouchers)
Link
Morzer
@Zifnab:
“Sorry we all done screwed you. Now, work your asses off to fix our fuck-ups.”
Which is, essentially, the standard GOP stump speech, plus a bonus apology.
Morzer
@SatanicPanic:
I fear that Teddy Goatfucker was ‘active’ in other threads quite recently.
Roger Moore
No, failure is not optional; it’s mandatory.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
Sure. Saving money is only a goal as long as they’re trying to get their foot in the door. Now that they’re sufficiently entrenched that it would require nuclear explosives to get them out, it’s time to ramp up funding. It’s possible that some of it might even be spent on something other than increased profits.
Kay
@YellowJournalism:
I have this weird family, because we have two older and two younger, all in one system, so I really can compare over an appreciable length of time. I can absolutely agree they’re ratcheting it up every year. The good part of having the weird family is I also have listened to several fads and seen them come and go :)
When my oldest was in grade school there was this big emergency because NO ONE COULD WRITE!
Now NO ONE KNOWS S.T.E.M!
I don’t know if they ever learned writing, or if we just moved on.
I take these things with a huge grain of salt.
I also have the kind of personality where if they tell me I SHOULD BE PANICKING I go the other way, immediately, so I’m resistant to what I consider fake-panic. I have never encountered a situation where running around crazy was a good approach, to anything.
Kay
@Lee:
Texas is completely fascinating on school reform. That’s where the standardized test craze started, and that’s where it’s going to end.
Maybe rural schools killed vouchers in Texas.
They aren’t at all popular here, because public schools really are the center of just about everything. I cannot imagine closing some of the smaller districts here, like they did with the neighborhood schools in Chicago. People would be out with pitchforks. It’s just central to their identity as a “place”.
gelfling545
@srv: They sure get public funds here in NY AND they get to keep all the money even if they kick the kid out half way into the year and s/he returns to the public school which, naturally, has had its staffing cut because the money (and, in theory, the kid) was going to a charter.
mellowjohn
the old saw about teachers is:
those who can, do.
those who can’t, teach.
and now there’s a corollary:
those who can’t teach, write rules about how to teach.
Morzer
@Kay:
Plus the annual panic about how America is ‘no longer’ number one in education.
Despite the fact that it never was.
marshall
This is Bill Gates you are talking about. The man does not have good intentions in the same way that midnight in January does not have sunshine.
Walker
@Redshift:
For many of the alums of my university, if they were to apply today with their credentials back when they were accepted, they would have never gotten in.
What we have seen over the years is a massive separation in student quality between the top students and the average students.
Walker
@Morzer:
Depends on what you mean by this. The top universities in the US are still considered the top universities anywhere. The problem is that saying we are “number one in education” is an incredibly vague statement. What is the metric?
Kay
@Morzer:
I couldn’t do it. I hate the build-up of the panic and the fear-based appeals and the bandwagon jumpers-on. I would find that an unbearable work environment.
It happens in juvenile law-rehab, too. I knew boot camps were going to be a disaster, for example. Amazingly, after 20 years of finding gimmicks and doing stupid shit that only made things worse, they found out that rehabilitating juveniles is really hard work and listening to them works a lot better than screaming at them and hitting them :)
Roger Moore
@Kay:
Yeah, if they closed down the local school, they might close down the football team, and then where would you be? I mean this only semi-facetiously. I really think that schools, especially school sports, are a major factor in local social cohesion, probably even bigger than church. In a lot of small towns, the social role of local schools may be the glue that’s holding the place together, and even people who don’t care much about education are going to fight like hell to protect the schools because of it.
Morzer
@Kay:
My mother worked in that field for about 20 years, and she would agree with you completely. As a nation, we are vastly wasteful of our citizens and human potential.
Morzer
@Walker:
The ‘top’ university metric depends in part on how well Cambridge (and occasionally Oxford) are doing. But in this context, we are talking about education before college. America has never been first in that metric, despite conservative appeals to the usual fake nostalgia.
The Fat Kate Middleton
@Kay: As a survivor of both the inhuman services and teaching, all I can say is: This. Just listen to the kids. You might be amazed at how damn smart and sweet they are.
PanurgeATL
@Kay:
I knew boot camps were going to be a disaster, for example.
Yeah, but Hippies Must Lose, so here they came. Boot camps weren’t even about money, much less how best to rehabilitate juvenile offenders; it was part of the War on the ’60s, ultimately.
socratic_me
@? Martin: “Students really struggle to apply what they’ve learned to new situations. I don’t know if it’s too much ‘teach to the test’ or not enough practical problem solving experience at home (building things, working with tools, etc.) but we have remarkably high test scoring students that are completely lost when you give them even a simple open-ended task. A decade ago, a lot of students with lower test scores would have breezed through these things. It’s a legitimate problem, but I’m at a loss what the source is or how to solve it.”
As someone who graduated roughly a decade ago and remembers what my peers were like, I call shenanigans. The students I teach today remind me an awful lot of the students I went to school with.
As a teacher, I will add that techniques in the classroom (especially at middle and high school) have changed very little if at all in most places. In the places where they have changed, it has been toward a more problem-solving, guided-discovery and investigation approach. This approach has been fought tooth and nail by back-to-basics traditionalists who want more drill and less critical thinking in order to somehow produce better critical thinkers with great problem solving skills.
So yeah, I don’t actually believe that students today are worse critical thinkers than back in the late 90s and early 00s. In fact, I think you might learn a thing or two on this matter from Kay’s dad.