Bush/Obama Ed Reform: It All Came Tumbling Down

Education Reform, on the other hand, was a Napoleon-Invades-Russia near-total victory followed by collapse—new teacher evaluation, curriculum, and testing systems were adopted across almost every state, implemented in almost every district, and promptly drove almost everybody crazy—suburban and urban parents and teachers alike—while promised results failed to appear. We are now, it appears, in the “gaunt, haunted French soldiers scrambling westward in blind fear across Poland” stage of the Napoleonic story of recent education reforms. Mass charter conversion, new multi-day online tests, new quantitative test-based teacher evaluation systems—states simply can’t drop the reforms they adopted just a few years ago fast enough. More than a pendulum swing, it has become a panicked rout.

Spotted Toad, Waking From Meritocracy

Over a year ago, just after Toad’s epic article hit, he suggested I write a “single coherent summary” of the education reform era–expand on the glorious extended analogy he uses above. Yeah. And I’d keep it under a thousand words, too.  

And now, the denouement:  It all disappeared. Better yet, it all disappeared because the public hated it.

NCLB/Race to the Top:

Just as the Bush/Obama era began with No Child Left Behind, the 2001 version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) so it ended with the 2015 version of the same law, Every Student Succeeds. All the accountability, controls, and demands that the Republican-controlled 2001 Congress put in, the Republican-controlled 2016 Congress took out. The Department of Education became little more than a bank, so far as K-12 was concerned, leaving states to make their own decisions again while giving them block grants to succeed.

I hope readers of the entire series understands this point, but I meander sometimes.

It’s called the “Bush/Obama era” for a reason. It began with NCLB’s critical failure: the mandate that all students test above average. While No Child Left Behind was unpopular with the very schools it was intended to fix, it might have survived in a toothless form were it not for the deeply flawed assumption at the heart of the policy.  NCLB was built on the assumption that good schools would not have an achievement gap. Alas. All schools have an achievement gap. Therefore, all schools, including all the excellent public schools in the suburbs, failed to meet that criteria, and thus all schools were threatened with  “program improvement” status and a variety of unattractive restriction.

It was this terminal and universal state of restriction that created both the necessity for the NCLB “waivers” and the power the Obama administration had to enforce a new round of reform demands without the messiness of Congressional approval. This gave SecEd Arne Duncan tremendous power to enforce states to commit to value added testing and Common Core adoption. From 2001-2015, the federal government had profound control over state education.

And again: the public hated the results.  Education reformers got almost everything they could conceivably want to convince the public of the value of choice, accountability, and curriculum reform and their nirvana was so despised that every bit of these changes were ripped out and states were given control of their own destiny.

Common Core and  Value Added Metric Evaluations

I devoted four articles to the Common Core meltdown, and if I do say so myself they kicked the crap out of Dana Goldstein’s somewhat mealy-mouthed overview. VAM demanded its own thousand or so words.

Upshot: both rendered largely toothless.

Split in the Reform Movement

Much of the remaining story doesn’t make sense without understanding that the bipartisan reform movement splintered. On the Democrat side, the reform movement began as “neoliberals”, with moderates like Andrew Rotherham, but it’s really impossible to do anything as a Democrat without running into headcounts by race. As the left side of education reform moved away from ex-Clinton policy wonks and towards ex-TFAers, the movement’s whiteness became an issue. I’m not involved enough to know if the movement became progressive because the leaders became increasingly black and Hispanic or if the movement became progressive AND the leaders became increasingly black and Hispanic. Doesn’t matter, I’m just pointing out I don’t know which. But it most assuredly became really left of center.

Robert Pondiscio was, I think, the first person to point out that conservatives were being sidelined in education reform–describing in early 2016 actions that had been going on for a couple years.  Making matters worse for conservative reformers (or reformers working for thinktanks funded by conservatives, at least), is that they were all never Trump or silent on the subject. Hillary Clinton was the friendliest Democrat teachers unions had seen in eight years, so they had no good options. 

And then Trump won. So both sides of education reform were entirely out of power during the Trump administration, even though he appointed as SecEd reform moneybags Betsy Devos who never met a “government school” she didn’t want to raze to the ground. (Note: Devos was useless in K-12, thankfully, but in all other purviews, she did much better than I expected.) Meanwhile, the education reform movement schism grew. 

The progressive side was completely radicalized. Most black reform activists had concluded, as Andre Perry wrote, that the education reform movement was too white to do any good. Many felt sincerely that the obsessive focus on test scores and failure was hurting black kids. Many now openly working for black schools and empowerment:  Chris Stewart, Derrell Bradford, and most notably, Howard Fuller (“I didn’t get into this business to help white kids.”). I say that not in criticism, but it’s a huge shift from the marching orders that traditional reformers had, which was to expand suburban charters to get more white support.

Ironically, these progressive reformers have no institutional support. Teachers unions are back in the heart of the Democrats. So the progressives shat all over the conservatives but their own party is moving back hard against charters.

This split is, I think, permanent. As a result, education reform has been political crippled. The progressive reformers agree with the Dems and unions on everything except charters, so they will be taking a back seat. The conservative ed reformers, particularly those who have 20-30 years in (Hess, Petrilli) are among the few who understand what happened, and aren’t sure what to do about it. The Republican party and non-education reform conservatives are completely clueless as to what happened, but that’s because they get their talking points from The Big Book of Ed Reform Shibboleths, and there’s no  money for a new edition.

TFA

TFA was beautifully positioned to be wiped out by crossfire in the reform split. By 2012,it was targeted for being too much a puppet of the charter school movement, even while it was being feted as the solution to the lazy, union-fed teacher population. Possibly suspecting her charmed existence was ending, Wendy Kopp quit TFA in 2013 and appointed two co-directors. One was a McKinsey consultant who got hired into TFA management. One was a teacher who worked up the ladder. One was a Hispanic woman. One was a white guy. One quit within two years, saying that “we spend a lot of time maintaining alignment, and we often speak in a voice that reflects our daily compromises”. One is still the director of TFA. Guess which one was more radical? (Hint: the resignation letter didn’t mention racism.)

Following Kopp’s departure, applications and cohort size cratered.

 

The organization recovered by emphasizing its diverse student body, but that may have further dimmed its appeal.

I suspected this back in 2014, when I wrote TFA Diversity and the Credibility Gap, about TFA’s much touted diversity push–or, as I indelicately asked, “How the hell can Teach for America have recruited 1000 African Americans?” It’s not that I don’t think a thousand or more could pass the credential tests, but elite black candidates have far better options. I go through the numbers in the articles that give rise to skepticism–but I also point out ways that TFA could scout out candidates, and I suspect they took many of these steps.

The thing is, and here’s another indelicate truth: you can focus on diversity or merit. Not both. Once TFA made diversity its brand, it seemed to become a lot less attractive to elite candidates. 

Significantly, they no longer mention their application or cohort size. It’s difficult even to find their previous announcements, all 404-ed. Moreover, as Rise and Fall of TFA points out, Arizona State University is now a top source of admits. 

 

Charters

Stalled.

Source

Enrollment population is still growing, but charter school growth is becoming polarized, and previously strong blue charter states are slowing or reversing.

2016: Massachussetts voters crushed a proposition to lift the charter cap. 

In 2019,  California enacted a new law allowing school districts to consider financial impact when reviewing charter school applications, a major defeat for choice advocates.

In 2020, New York reached its charter limit and Cuomo hadn’t had any luck in getting the legislature to lift the cap.

In 2021, Newark charter schools,  object of Mark Zuckerberg’s largesse, applied for an expansion and the state slapped them down. 

For all the talk about charters being separate from those pesky union-run public schools, they are just as likely to be closed during covid19 as public schools are, which makes sense. Most charters are in Democrat-run areas, and Dem run areas are more likely to demand CDC guidance, social distancing, and more likely to have non-white parents who are worried about returning to school. Once again, reformers are let down by reality.

Reform advocates will cite New Orleans as a major success, but the scores are still dismal for African American students, and the dropout rate is hard to track but pretty scary.  Besides, go right ahead and say “Hey, the trick to fixing schools is to fire all the black teachers!” and see how far you get. Bottom line, if you think that kids are actually doing better, go buy a bridge in Manhattan. 

I don’t wish to overstate the case. Charters are private schools for free, and there will always be a market for them if parents are given a say. But eventually, the state is given a say, and charters turned out to be more expensive than anticipated. 

New York, California, and New Jersey politics have seen a significant shift away from charters. According to Michael Petrilli, support for charters has declined in many states since 2016, but it’s more popular where white parents can use charters to get away from non-white public schools (my interpretation, obviously, not his). Which…has a limited shelf life, because most white parents like their schools, and they won’t like the diminished funding that comes along with white parents crafting their own private schools on the public dime. Probably. We’ll see. I’m not spiking the football on charters.

Vouchers

Like charters, mostly stalled. Vouchers are popular in the South, where white parents support them for private schools.  The Supreme Court has been very friendly, ruling that vouchers could be used for private religious schools.

But courts can’t mandate vouchers, and for a fascinating look at how fast the public has switched, consider at Douglas County, Colorado.

2011: Voucher program established and instantly blocked by litigation by the ACLU, Citizens for Separation of Church and State (not unions, that I can see, but don’t quote me).

2015: Colorado Supreme Court blocked the voucher program. 

2017: The Supreme Court established that religious entities couldn’t be denied public funds available to similar secular institutions in  Trinity Lutheran and shortly thereafter ordered the Colorado Supreme Court to rethink its 2015 decision.

BUT! also in 2017: a head to head school board election, in which one slate CommUnity Matters, promised to undo all the reform changes of the previous six years and end the voucher program and give more support to teachers, while the other slate, Elevate Douglas County,  promised to keep all the reform agenda. CommUnity Matters stomped Elevate Douglas County and the board rescinded the voucher program and all those lawsuits were for nothing.

Moral: Court decisions can’t get you past the voters.

As with charters, I’m not spiking the football. But vouchers and charters take money away from public schools, and most voters like public schools. 

(Note: I wrote this before the current post-pandemic push for Education Savings accounts, what with the kayaks and tae kwon do lessons, so I was right not to spike the football. Still, reformers always lose, so that’s the way to bet.)

The money folks

Bill Gates has found his education philanthropy very disappointing. School children and teachers everywhere have let him down.

Mark Zuckerberg, humbled by the lack of results in Newark, has decided to listen to his wife, do more small bore stuff, and focus on efforts close to home.

Eli Broad suspended the Broad Prize in 2014, giving no more money to “good” urban districts. Three years later, California’s response to the leaked information about Broad’s plan to double the number of charters in Los Angeles was so hostile the organization was forced to regroup and claim they weren’t focusing on charters. No one believed them, and the anger may have led to California’s decision to give districts more power to deny charter applications (see above). A year later, Broad retired. His successor pulled up stakes from California and paid Yale to give them digs–the pandemic followed. I’m not saying it was a cause, or anything. 

Betsy DeVos learned that writing checks to people who want her approval and trying to make  policy by winning the approval of people who don’t need her money isn’t at all the same thing.

Unions

The 2012 Chicago teachers won their strike and won big, despite the active opposition of  liberal columnists and wonks, in addition to the usual  criticism by education reformers or just conservatives. Obama probably would have supported mayor Rahm Emmanuel in fighting for what were clearly the Administration’s priorities, but he was running for re-election and couldn’t alienate teachers. Yet in the face of all that Democratic establishment support, and the near-complete support of the media, polls showed that over 60% of black and Hispanics, and nearly half of whites, supported the teachers. (I was fascinated by those polls because “an extremely overweight, frowsy, no-bullshit, way the hell left of center black woman virtually coldcocked a younger, relatively good-looking hard ass Democrat mayor who’s best buds with the big O.” Just as had been the case two years earlier, when black voters kicked out Michelle Rhee’s boss so she’d have to be fired, the CTU strike showed the vast gap between the widely bipartisan establishment view of those greedy teachers and the ground view reality of the voters.

Unions lost a number of court cases, but it’s hard to argue it hurt them much. Vergara was overturned. Janus, the victory that conservative have awaited for 30 years,  led to a minor loss of union membership but certainly didn’t yield the desired results.  Almost immediately after the decision in 2018, a wave of red state teacher strikes proved successful. Unions have very little power in these states, and yet wild-cat unauthorized strikes were successful in winning pay increases. Why? Well, parents supported the teachers and it’s a bit difficult to fire all the teachers in an illegal strike if there aren’t any replacements waiting around.

Meanwhile, during the pandemic, conservatives have been shrieking about the corrupt union hold on public schools and how they are keeping the schools closed despite no covid19 risk. Now, this is also nonsense, but leave the details for another article. The larger point is this:  it’s two years past Janus and Republicans are still blaming unions for their money and their power and their chokehold on Democrat policy. Again, nonsense. But what the hell did Janus do, if they’re still bitching? 

Governance

The Tennessee Achievement School District, which took on all the state’s lowest scoring schools to be fixed and sent on their way by miracle worker Chris Barbic, has crashed and burned. (Barbic got out before anyone noticed.) Mark Zuckerberg and Corey Booker’s handpicked superintendent, Cami Anderson, was run out of town by an angry parent population. Joel Klein left his job running NYC schools after everyone learned that the great test score gains of the previous few years had been due to lowered cut scores. He then ran a Murdoch-owned education company Amplify that was a complete failure, and he’s out of education now as well. Quick: what’s the name of the next two NYC chancellors? You can’t remember, can you? (Cathie Black and, when she flamed out after a few months, Dennis Walcott.) Then diBlasio won, and while Governor Cuomo jerked him around with Success Academy, New York City schools have rolled back a lot of the reform movement.

And it’s no use blaming teachers unions money, either. Pro-charter Marshall Tuck outspent both Tonys, Torlakson and Thormond, for California superintendent and lost both times. In 2012, pro-union underdog Gloria Ritz beat  Tony Bennett, literally the education reform idol, for state superintendent in Indiana, despite Bennett outspending her. Then Ritz lost to Republican Jennifer McCormack in 2016–but Jennifer, a special ed teacher, proved very union friendly, siding with the teachers time and again. Meanwhile, Bennett went to Florida to be state commissioner, and was fired in 2013.

It all really did come tumbling down.

Today

Michelle Rhee has, last I checked, completely left education. Wendy Kopp doesn’t have nearly the visibility; her Wikipedia entry ends in 2013. Most of the school “fixers” of the reform era have moved on: Cami Anderson, Christopher Cerf, Chris Barbic, Joel Klein, John King, Tony Bennett. They’re consulting and think tanking,  but not getting their hands dirty, and there’s no new generation of “miracle workers” in part because the media has moved left and is much more suspicious of reform. 

Reformers move on. They’re movers and shakers. They got shit to do.

You know who’s still in the same job?

Randi Weingarten. Michael Mulgrew. Until recently, Lily Eskalen Garcia.

Go back and look at all those glowing articles on TFA and Success Academy and other reform miracles, and see how many of those earnest purveyors of excellence are still teaching. 

Now do the same thing for real teachers, the teachers that the cool people talk shit about.

Remember back in 2010 when the Los Angeles Times evaluated every teacher in LA Unified for their value add, humiliating teachers. Some of those teachers wrote in and protested the entire effort. One of them was Joan Lavery, who was found “less effective than average“. A decade later, Joan’s still teaching with a National Board Certification (which I’m not that impressed by, but hey, she’s still here.) Irma Estrada of Gledhill Elementary got “most effective“. She’s still teaching, too. Rigobuerto Ruelas isn’t teaching, despite a passion that kept him on the job nearly every day for 14 years, but that’s because the LA Times reporting of his “low” achievement impact depressed him to the point of suicide. Yeah, low blow. 

Teachers abide, is what I’m saying. A lot of them do, anyway. We just duck down and wait until you all move on.

************************************************************************************************

And so, dear readers, I come to the end of my history. The pandemic was merely a Chinese whisper when I began, while now we have a vaccine but the schools are still closed. And everyone blames unions.

As I’ve said ad nauseum on Twitter, closures are supported by roughly half of non-white parents and about 1 in 4 white parents, meaning that in diverse school districts (translation: most large cities and almost all blue states), roughly half of parents don’t want to open schools. Democrat governors complicate matters with absurd demands that districts follow CDC guidelines, which force them to act as if there’s no vaccine and kids drop over dead the minute they are infected. Unions, being Democrat-run organizations, naturally oppose schools opening in the name of safety. That did them no good in Florida, Texas, or any other red state. They get what they want in blue states and blue cities because the people want the schools closed. It’s that simple.

But meanwhile, all you folks licking your chops at the notion that this, finally, will be the end of public school dominance: remember your history. Don’t get cocky.

Because at the end of the day, you’re trying to kill what the public means when it says public education. The public might not take kindly to your efforts.

Peace out, peeps.

The History of Education Reform:

Bush/Obama Ed Reform: The Road to Glory

Bush/Obama Ed Reform: Zenith

Bush/Obama Ed Reform: Core Meltdown Came

Bush/Obama Ed Reform: Alex or Gloria?Common Core Assessments

Bush/Obama Ed Reform: Why Didn’t They See Common Core Fail Coming?

Bush/Obama Ed Reform: Core Damage?

Bush/Obama Ed Reform: Victory over Value Add

(and this one)

How The Other Half Learns: The Secret Sauce

Once again, all these articles are just discussions of various aspects of  Robert Pondiscio’s book, which  I highly recommend, even if I disagree with every conclusion he reaches.

As I mentioned in my last piece, Pondiscio focuses far more on the parents than the students. This is consistent with his longstanding conviction that parents are a key determinant in educational success.

His theory, which many reviewers have discussed, is that Success Academy achieves its results by letting parents select themselves their school, and by doing so the children are primed for success:

The common criticism leveled at Moskowitz and her schools is that they cherry-pick students, attracting bright children and shedding the poorly behaved and hardest to teach. This misses the mark entirely. Success Academy is cherry-picking parents. Success Academy is cherry-picking parents. (267)

and again:

[Success Academy] starts with the raw material of a self-selected group of mostly low-income parents who win a seat in the lottery, and then ensures and re-ensures multiple times prior to enrollment that they are sufficiently motivated, attentive, and organized to come to meetings, confirm their interest, get their children fitted for school uniforms, solve transportation logistics, and take other small but non-trivial steps, which test their commitment, motivation, and organizational skills, guaranteeing that the families who choose Success are walking in with their eyes wide open..(page 323-4)

But the data, and Pondiscio’s own observations, don’t support this proposition.

Take a look for starters, at Bronx I’s attrition:

(2011 and 2012 are anomalous; given that Success Academy doesn’t accept new students after 4th grade, it seems they rebuild their numbers by absorbing students from other schools.)

There’s plenty of writing about Success Academy’s attrition, whether it’s better or worse than other charters or other public schools, but I don’t care about any of that.

It’s the attrition itself that’s the problem. The school is hemorrhaging students.  Surely the whole point of selecting parents is to achieve a stable school population?  Why select for parents if you’re planning on dumping up to half the kids?

So if Success Academy is cherrypicking parents, they’re doing a terrible job.

Besides, Pondiscio’s observations suggest frequently that despite all those multiple re-ensurances he describes,  parents are still wholly capable of ignoring procedures.

On both first days of school that Pondiscio witnesses, Bronx I’s principal dedicates a full administrator position to ensuring that any kid out of uniform is turned away.

All those parents walking in with their eyes wide open and still one parent didn’t notice that her kid’s socks were the wrong color. Another brought her kid to school in the wrong shoes. The next year, one kid gets kicked to the curb because his mom didn’t buy him a tie on time, and another has been eliminated from the school permanently for missing dress rehearsal.

All these parents had to go through the same idiotic, insulting, rigid routines to make it to first day, yet they still missed any number of rules that had been restated endlessly. So no school for their kids that day–and in one case, permanently.

Another parent somehow missed the fact, mentioned in every orientation meeting and printed in practically every form she filled out, that she was responsible for picking up her child early on Wednesdays. When she learned of this weekly requirement, she told the school her child just wouldn’t be coming to school on Wednesdays.

One mom made it through all that compliance twice–had two kids at school. She showed up drunk at school at 8 am, asking why her son got a uniform infraction for not knowing how to use a belt–and said she didn’t know how one worked, either. Hilariously, another one was furious because her son’s teacher is gay–the “woke” teachers’ huffy responses make it clear they only want their efforts to benefit parents with progressive values. Less hilariously, another father managed to follow all those rules and get several kids into Success Academy but had no problem beating his older daughter. Pondiscio cites director Eva Moskowitz’s memoir, in which she calls in a student’s grandmother to berate his mother for not complying with the six books a week read aloud. Leaving aside the revolting behavior of both grandma and Control Freak in Charge, this recalcitrant mom also made it through the gauntlet without somehow realizing that she’d committed to read to her kid.

Parents aren’t the secret sauce of Success Academy.

As Pondiscio documents, many parents follow all those moronic rules, convinced that the school that’s got it all together is the school for their child, determined to be compliers, anything it takes–and it’s not enough.

There are hundreds of complaints and news stories on Success Academy nastiness to all the parents that did everything right.  Even some of the compliments don’t sound all that great. The abuse stories are horrible, particularly  Success Academy’s Uber routine–it just ignores the law, confident that the NYDOE will just ignore the problems until an impartial observer comes in and finds both the school and the DOE at fault, forcing the DOE to pay for compensatory tutoring.

The three frequent strategies for dumping the kids on the “got to go” list–or “special friends” as Bronx I refers to the problem students are 1)  endlessly calling emergency services to remove the child, 2) reporting the parents to state protection agencies for failing to put their children in special ed classes, 3) when all else fails, forcing the child to repeat the grade more than once, even if the child passed.

Read all the horror stories and notice that none of them involve parents who refuse to follow procedures.

Pondiscio interviewed a targeted boy’s mother.  Success Academy wanted her son, Adama, out. The school suspended Adama frequently , called 911 to cart him away, and reported the parents for abuse and neglect.  While the schools frequently call parents and demand they show up and monitor their child, Bronx I administrators refused to let Adama’s parents come to monitor, because he didn’t misbehave when they were around.  This was all before Pondiscio began observing. By December of his second grade year, the school had called 911 three times in one week and reported the parents again to ACS. The parents gave up and pulled Adama out of school.

[Adama’s story] fits a troubling pattern of parents who have claimed that they were told that Success Academy does not offer special education services or the classroom settings that their children need; or that suspensions were meted out so frequently that work schedules and routines were disrupted, wearing families down and eventually forcing them to give up and pull their children out. (page 300)

Pondiscio then recounts the almost identical charges that made their way into a complaint filed against the Success Academy schools with the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights:

There is a sameness to the allegations in the lengthy OCR complaint: A Harlem 4 student required to repeat the second grade three times and on multiple occasions. A Harlem 3 student recommended for 12:1:1 special education placement, which the school did not provide. A Bronx 1 student held over in the same grade three times. Staff urging parents to remove their children and enroll them in DOE schools. In nearly every case, the OCR complaint alleges that staffers pressured parents to remove children altogether rather than working with them to develop strategies to help them be successful.

What Pondiscio doesn’t mention is the outcome of the case. Nearly four years later, the case seems to have disappeared entirely–at least, I can find no media reports of its disposition.

You might think the case is simply over, but it took the USDoE nearly four years to respond to a notorious Success Academy FERPA case, in which Eva Moskowitz brutally revealed a students’ entire discipline history in a rather shocking (at least to those of us in the field) privacy violation.  State education monies will be spent funding professional development to be sure that the rest of her very nearly temporary staff knows the laws that Eva couldn’t be bothered to follow.

So perhaps eventually the January 2016 DOE complaint will get an answer. Long after the feds have funneled millions to Success Academy, of course.

I don’t recite all this history to revisit the many claims against Success Academy’s nastiness which, full disclosure, I believe every word of.

I mention it because Drunk Mom’s kids got to stay. The elementary and middle school principals collaborated to help her in order to avoid calling the state protective agency on a woman who is inebriated at 8 am and announces that she doesn’t know how to put on her second kid’s belt. Abusive Dad’s kids weren’t targeted for removal. But Adama, whose parents drank every drop of Success Academy Koolaid, followed every rule,  were shining examples of immigrants who want their children to benefit from our educational sytem, parents who offered to visit often to help the school help their kid learn to behave–he got kicked out.

If you demand that engaged and committed parents send their children to school with the children of disengaged and uncommitted parents, then you are obligated to explain why this standard applies to low-income black and brown parents–and to only them.

Leaving aside the idea that engaged and committed parents deserve more than disengaged and uncommitted parents (like I said, Pondiscio is oddly uninterested in the students themselves), it’s completely untrue that Success Academy is rewarding engaged and committed parents with a good education for their children. In many cases, the schools are kicking out these parents’ kids, and in others, those parents are running away from a school that “has its act together”, odd behavior, given the “guarantee” that they went into the school  with “their eyes open”.

Turn it around and posit that Pondiscio is completely wrong on this point and the data all hangs together nicely. Success Academy isn’t cherrypicking parents. They’re cherrypicking kids, just like the critics say. Kids who have a good chance of scoring proficient get to stay, even if their mom shows up drunk or their dad beats up the kids. Kids who won’t make the cut will get kicked to the curb, no matter how worthy their parents, how eagerly they comply with uniform, homework, and communication directives.

That’s what’s consistent with the data.

But why, the discerning reader asks, would Success Academy come up with all those idiotic rules if they aren’t cherrypicking parents?

A couple reasons.

First, genetics. Success Academy doesn’t seem to be sorting for geniuses, or even inordinately intelligent kids. As I griped, Pondiscio doesn’t give us much of an intellectual sense of the students, but I can’t help but think he’d mention it if any of them were exceptionally bright.

Success Academy’s sweet spot is probably the bubble kids. Slightly brighter than average kid–the Tiffany, in Pondiscio parlance–with ferociously determined, aspirational parents who are willing to do anything to get their kids away from the knuckleheads.  Select for those, and odds are better than average the kids will have enough ability to be pushed up to proficient. And if they aren’t, hey, then dump them.

But those same aspirational parents also make it easier for Success Academy to play what many see as its shell game.

The obedience and compliance demands aren’t the reason the schools get great test scores.  But the obedient and compliant parents who aren’t experiencing rejection are thinking not “god, there but for the grace of god go I” but “Heh. One more kid who can’t cut it. More teacher time for my kid.”

I have no proof of any of this, other than the data, which is manifestly inconsistent with a parental selection strategy, and Pondiscio’s own anecdotes, which clearly show that many parents aren’t meeting the very objectives he says Success is selecting for.

A few years back, I wondered how Success Academy achieved its numbers without cheating. Pondiscio has straightened that out for me, but probably not the way he wanted to.

Charter Schools and Suspensions

The Washington Post buried the lede in its recent expose on the “achievement gap” in student suspensions for Washington area schools.

Across the Washington area, black students are suspended and expelled two to five times as often as white students, creating disparities in discipline that experts say reflect a growing national problem.

Yes, yes, yes, administrators everywhere are racist, I get it. And yes, yes, yes, with a nod to Voldemort, blacks are probably being suspended more because they are more likely to misbehave. And sure, the report is loaded with “coulds” and “appears” like this paragraph here:

Experts say disparities appear to have complex causes. A disproportionate number of black students live below the poverty line or with a single parent, factors that affect disciplinary patterns. But experts say those factors do not fully explain racial differences in suspensions. Other contributing factors could include unintended bias, unequal access to highly effective teachers and differences in school leadership styles.

The experts never get specific, of course. The reporter doesn’t do the math to determine what percentage of the black suspensions are consistent with low income students, naturally. It’s all the usual garbage.

But that’s not the interesting part, which lies in this graph here:

It’s a very fancy, fuzzy graphic, but it’s very clear on one point: DC charter schools, with a headcount over half that of DC public schools, are suspending black students at a higher rate than all but three other school districts, and suspending Hispanics at a higher rate than any other district.

Any public school teachers are nodding vigorously right now, because this is a sore point. Charter schools can suspend, expel, and just make life miserable for any problem students. Public schools can’t. Thus, charter schools, even the ones who don’t deliberately “cream” or “cherry pick”, have far more power to boot misbehaving (or simply high maintenance) students out, back to the public schools, who are legally bound to accept them.

Then the charter schools and eduformers brag about their wonderful results which aren’t that impressive in the first place and are achieved in no small part by ridding themselves of the low ability/low incentive/high impact students. This nifty little feature is often called “attrition”, which implies that the students leave by choice. Indeed, they often do, since charter schools can also make demands of their students that public schools can’t.

So the big story in the Post article is not that blacks are being suspended at a higher rate, but that in DC, blacks are being suspended by charter schools. Maryland’s charter schools are growing by leaps and bounds, and enroll large numbers of African American students. I wonder how much of Maryland’s high suspension rate is being fed by charters?

This would actually be an interesting story, so naturally the Post ignores it in favor of kind-of-sort-of mau-mauing the evil administrative power structure–without getting specific.