Fight the Charter School Fraud

There's still plenty of time for the Kentucky General Assembly to slip a charter school bill through while everybody's distracted by hemp. Here are some facts to fight the fraud:

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

I thought this Post article on Michelle Rhee was going to be a total puff piece, but it at least presents some facts that show her claims are never backed up with reality.

“She’s got a very simple message that is highly seductive because it appears to give an answer to our difficult education problems,” said Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a liberal-leaning research group.

It would be great if her ideas translated into good results for kids, Kahlenberg said.

“But, in fact, we’ve got two grand experiments of her theory,” he said. “The first is the American South, where teachers unions are weak and the schools are not lighting the world on fire. The other is charter schools, which are 88 percent non-unionized. In charters, you can do everything that Michelle Rhee wants to do — fire bad teachers, pay good teachers more. And yet, the most comprehensive studies looking at charter schools nationally find mediocre results.”

So Rhee’s premise is faulty, he said. “But it’s a simple idea, and in the media, it’s powerful to have heroes and villains,” Kahlenberg said. “The fact that evidence doesn’t back her up doesn’t seem to prevent her from getting wide notoriety.”

I want our children to get the best education possible. Were teachers’ unions an impediment to that education, I might take Rhee’s arguments seriously. But they aren’t. There’s just zero evidence that Rhee’s policies work. What I see are teachers’ unions telling authorities that students can’t learn when schools don’t have air conditioning. There’s not a single institution in this country more invested in children learning that teachers’ unions. The real problem with education is poverty. But Very Important People don’t want to deal with poverty. As Kahlenberg notes, Rhee provides the media a nice simple message they can repeat without research, thinking, or questioning their own privilege. Unfortunately, our children and our middle class suffer as a result.

Scott Lemiux, also at LGM:

I liked the Frontline documentary on Michelle Rhee a little more than Somerby did. To some extent, I understand why they chose a give-’em-enough-rope approach, and I think they left it pretty clear that Rhee’s approach made the rampant cheating that Rhee refused to investigate inevitable. Still, I agree with Somerby that some of Rhee’s false claims demanded more specific refutation. And I think that the access they had to Rhee was in some way a disadvantage; a documentary that put Rhee’s D.C. tenure in the larger context of the education “reform” movement would have been better.

Also, I’d like to add a point to Erik’s post about the Students First “report card” that many media outlets unaccountably treated as something other than worthless propaganda. The fact that the the criteria the group uses has no discernible relationship to student performance is bad enough. But the crietria themselves give away the show. Consider, for example, one reason why the group ranks Louisiana highly:

Louisiana also recently enabled new teachers to participate in a more portable retirement plan.

Note the Orwellian language here — teachers are being “enabled” by being shuttled into a pension system that transfers risk from the state to them. Amazingly, the methodology being used by Rhee’s grifters gives states a “4″ (the highest score) if they have defined contribution pensions and a “0″ if they have defined benefit pensions. In other words, states get higher rankings for their education systems if they make their pension benefits less attractive! Even more amazingly, pension “reform” is an “anchor” category, meaning it gets three times the weight of some of the other categories that might actually have a clear positive relationship with improving a state’s educational system.

Students First, in other words, can’t even make any pretense that it’s about anything but reactionary policy proposals that have some vague connection to education. Maybe for the next round they can just go all the way and give states better report cards if they cut marginal tax rates and pass new abortion regulations.

But some teachers are fighting back against the anti-education testing regime.

Erik Loomis again:

Much credit to Seattle teachers at Garfield and Ballard High Schools for refusing to give a flawed standardized test to their students.

Laura Clawson:

The MAP appears to be a perfect storm of the problems with standardized testing: put in place through a corrupt, profit-driven process; with an unacceptably high margin of error; not measuring the things students are actually supposed to be learning; and taking needed time away from instructional time in order for students to take a test they don’t take seriously. But while its problems may be especially large, they’re not unique. What these teachers are doing in saying no to the MAP is brave, it’s in their students’ best interests, and it’s yet another demonstration of how badly teachers’ voices are needed in the broader education policy debate.

Teacher refusal to give the tests is a risky but brave and inspiring way to stand up to the forces that seek to turn education into a profit-generating system that sucks the soul out of both students and teachers.

 And finally, this is what happens when you support charter schools at the expense of public schools.