The Hijacking of the Charter School Movement, revisited

(The responses were very informative.)

As my handful of fans will recall, several months ago I wrote about how the charter school movement – conceived as an opportunity for teacher empowerment and educational innovation – had been “hijacked” by those who recognized in Pennsylvania’s charter school law an opportunity to make money.

I thought it would be enlightening to also examine some of the responses to that article.

Tellingly, there were two very quick responses (here’s one) from outside our local community, from two men who just happen to be employees of the state charter school industry. It is their job, quite literally, to scan newspapers from across the state each morning, to see if anyone has popped their head up to challenge their highly lucrative business model, and then ‘rapidly-respond’ in their version of whack-a-mole. (In this metaphor, I am the mole.)

The great irony is that you, dear taxpayer, are paying their salaries! (Albeit, indirectly)  This happens because Pennsylvania’s charter school industry makes so much money that they can afford to hire lobbyists! To protect their business model!  One almost has to admire the evil beauty of it.

Now, let me ask: how much of what they said did you understand? I would guess not much, because that’s not the point. Their entire goal is to sow enough confusion so that the average reader doesn’t know what to think. (Well, this guy says “A” and these other guys say “not A”. I’m not an expert, so who am I supposed to believe?) And they live to fight another day.

The other point to be made here is this rhetoric is what our legislators hear every day.  Money, mostly in the form of campaign contributions, buys access. So it should be no surprise that they were able to gut the proposed charter school reform legislation in the final days preceding the vote.

I bring up the third letter of interest mostly for comic relief. It came from our local “I’m against everything,” curmudgeon. (Every community has one.) The irony is that for many years this gentlemen has promoted himself as “the friend of the taxpayer”, so I naively anticipated having him weigh in. Ha!  Apparently, “curmudgeon” carries more weight than “friend of taxpayers.”  

Did you understand a word of what he said, either?  I didn’t think so.

The fourth letter was the most disappointing. Written by the leadership of one of our pretty good local charters, their message was essentially “we would never do that!”; which misses the point entirely. As for what’s happening in the rest of the Commonwealth, our heads are firmly buried in the sand.  But as I pointed out to them, the hundreds of millions of dollars that the charter school chains skim from taxpayers aren’t being used to educate anyone’s children – theirs or ours.  We ought to be on the same side, as advocates of good public policy - but then, they’re also afraid of a disruption to the business model. Don’t rock the boat! 

Well, this boat needs rocking.

The Contradiction of the Keystone exams

“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.”

A column in EdWeekly this summer wisely made this point in regards to the new, incredibly complex, unreliable - yet state-mandated - teacher evaluations, suggesting that we should have first asked the question, “What is it that we're trying to measure?”  Indeed, that question should have been asked before the state Board of Education voted to mandate ‘Keystone exams’ in English literature, Algebra and Biology as high school graduation requirements.

Here’s the essence of the issue, as I see it: the Keystone exams are fundamentally incompatible with the set of knowledge and skills that students need for success in the modern world.  Mandating them as high school graduation requirements only serves to institutionalize a program of education more appropriate for the middle of the last century. It will reduce opportunities for students, who instead of taking electives in their areas of interest, will be required to take remedial courses in order to pass an exam that measures their ability to memorize and regurgitate information they are unlikely to ever need or use.

I often ask, half in jest, how much of high school biology do you remember? Then how important was it?  Do you know the answer to this sample Keystone Biology exam question: which characteristic is common to prokaryotes & eukaryotes?  If not, why do we now require every high school student to know this?

An important insight I gleaned from my time in business school: a business executive doesn’t need to be an expert on anything; rather, he or she needs to know enough about everything to understand what the experts are saying. This strikes me as a pretty good model for education: develop an expertise in one or two areas of passion, but understand the principles of everything else well enough to see the connections.

So, instead of requiring temporary proficiency in the algorithms of algebra, we should make sure that students understand the basic principles - as well as those of statistics, probability, compound interest, and ‘present-value’ - maybe even how calculus ‘works’, even if you don’t know how to find a derivative. (I once asked my sister, who has been a successful civil engineer for over three decades, how often she used calculus at her job. Her answer: once. Once, in over thirty years! – and that was to solve a brain-teaser heard on the office radio.)

In other words, when students graduate high school, they should have a toolbox for solving real-world problems – as well as some actual experience in doing so. That toolbox would include not only knowledge in the core areas mentioned above, but also well-developed communication and research skills, the capacity for critical-thinking and creativity, and the civic skills that come from years of collaborating with others.

Some years ago, when the Partnership for 21st-century skills began asking college presidents and business leaders what their new students and hires were lacking, that was the list they came up with.  Proficiency in Algebra and Biology were not on the list. This is what we should mean when we say “college and career ready”.  It’s what the unfortunately maligned Common Core standards tries to address.  But that’s a column for another day.

Whenever I talk to parents about what they want in their child’s education, they understand this. Why don’t the policy-makers in Harrisburg get it?

The Common Core: good idea, disastrous execution

Most of us in the field of education have come around to the view that it’s no longer appropriate for students to spend the bulk of their time on the memorization of facts and the rote use of math and science algorithms. In  large part, the Common Core standards were an attempt to address this, by refocusing classroom instruction on conceptual understanding and the development of higher-order thinking skills - something the better teachers have always tried to do.

The other rationale for the Common Core is that in a highly mobile society, we should have some measure of consistency from one region of the country to another. The parents of a reasonably successful 5th-grader in Mississippi should not be shocked to discover that their child is reading at only a 3rd-grade level in Pennsylvania. (A recent, true story.) Though far from perfect, and despite the fact that there was almost no input from actual teachers in the development of these standards, the majority of educators are of the opinion that the Common Core reasonably meets these two objectives.

So, what’s the problem?  Well, there are several.

First, the corresponding student assessments are still being developed.  We have no idea how well these assessments will measure what we want them to measure – the tests have yet to be tested!  Plus, how can you assess a student’s  ability to “construct arguments and cite evidence” – key components of the Common Core -  with a standardized,  multiple-choice test? 

Nevertheless, we are already attaching high stakes, such as high school graduation requirements and teacher evaluations, to the results of these untested tests!  In Pennsylvania, the new Keystone exams were developed independently of, and are in many respects, incompatible with, the new “PA Core” standards. Even the Gates Foundation, an early and enthusiastic proponent of the standards, has called for a delay in the implementation of these high-stakes assessments.

In spite of all this, I believe the new standards provide a potentially useful framework for teaching “21st-centrury” skills, and there are good examples of what that might look like: (For an example, see: A Classroom View on Implementing Common-Core Math.)  But they are not a panacea. The key to any new education practice: the teachers. And this is where the implementation fails miserably.

For some teachers, adjusting to the spirit of the new standards will require a significant change in practice. (more ‘coaching’; less ‘sage on the stage’ direct instruction). This is not the sort of thing that can be accomplished in one or two days of ‘drive-by’ professional development. As with any meaningful change, a successful, system-wide implementation will require time and commitment.

Meanwhile, little in the way of resources have been committed at either the national or state level towards helping teachers make this transition. In addition, there are many, many new standards – but no guidance as to which ones should be emphasized. (One consequence of not involving teachers from the beginning.)  Perhaps most astonishingly, many of our teaching colleges have yet to even acknowledge the existence of the Common Core standards.

We’re trying to fly a plane that we haven’t finished building.

Finally, the principals who have the responsibility for administering the new state-required teacher evaluations have not received much more than ‘drive-by’ professional development, themselves. How are teachers supposed to have confidence in this – let alone the other major component of the new evaluations: student test scores, which are a notoriously unreliable way of measuring teacher ‘effectiveness’?  If teachers don’t have confidence in the evaluation model, it’s almost guaranteed to fail.  Ironically, but not surprisingly, PDE’s solution is to have principals use a “check-the-box” approach - which puts us right back where we started, while pretending to have made great progress.

State College is probably ahead of the curve. The District has embraced the Danielson model for effective teaching, and our superintendent has made it clear that our teachers will not be held accountable for things over which they have no control. Even so, this is going to be a challenge.

If we want our students to benefit from the Common Core standards,  we have to disconnect them from the current high-stakes assessments; involve the teachers(!), and take the time to do it right.