Tag Archives: education reform

Charged with Firing Teachers for Organizing, a Chicago Charter Network Settles

Originally published in the American Prospect on January 12, 2016.
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The National Labor Relations Board finalized a settlement agreement this week between Urban Prep Academies, an all-male charter network in Chicago, and more than a dozen Urban Prep teachers who were fired abruptly back in June. The firings came less than a month after a majority of teachers at Urban Prep voted to unionize with the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff (ChiACTS). Urban Prep will pay over $250,000 in back wages and severance to 13 fired teachers, and two of the fired teachers were able to return to work on Monday. The others, who already had taken new jobs elsewhere, waived their right to reinstatement and settled for back pay.

Back in June, the union responded to the firings by filing two unfair labor practice charges with the NLRB. One alleged that Urban Prep fired three teachers for their union activism; the second charged Urban Prep with failing to bargain with the union over all the teachers’ terminations. Educators, parents, and community members organized protests, urging Urban Prep to rehire the teachers.

Urban Prep’s COO, Evan Lewis, said earlier this summer that “the suggestion that anyone was fired as a result of their organizing activity is both wrong and offensive. … We respect and support the right of our teachers to choose a union as their exclusive representative. … Many of the teachers returning next year were active in the effort to organize, and we look forward to continuing our work with them.”

However, the NLRB launched an investigation into the situation, and on November 20, the board issued a complaint, finding that one teacher was fired for union activity and that Urban Prep failed to meet their legal obligations by not bargaining over the teachers’ firings. The NLRB scheduled a hearing for January 13, which has now been cancelled since Urban Prep decided to settle.

“We’re glad we were able to settle the charges rather than having to continue a long legal fight, because if Urban Prep had lost at the hearing they could have appealed,” says Carlos Fernandez, an organizer with ChiACTS. “These kinds of charges can take years to settle, so [resolving this] in just a little over six months is pretty good.”

The teachers at Urban Prep have been meeting regularly with their employer since September to work out the terms of their first contract; the union says they’ve made “significant progress.”There are currently 29 other unionized charter schools in Chicago, and a growing number nationwide.

The total amount that Urban Prep has agreed to pay—$261,346—marks the largest unfair labor practice settlement for charter teachers to date. Back in June, the I Can charter network, based in Ohio, had to rehire four teachers and give seven teachers back pay for firing them during their 2013-2014 union drive. That settlement totaled $69,000.

“It’s unfortunate that these publicly funded schools often react so poorly when their teachers choose a union, and it’s even worse when they’re able to waste so much time and money union busting, something well outside the scope of the work the people of Chicago pay them to do,” says Brian Harris, a special education teacher in Chicago and the president of ChiACTS. “We often hear from charter operator groups that they’re ‘not anti-union but pro-teacher.’ One would assume that the ‘pro-teacher’ part would kick in after a mass illegal firing. Nonetheless, we’re very happy that we can move forward and finally begin to work on what is most important: making Urban Prep a better place to teach and to learn through empowering teachers.”

 

The Charter School Business

Originally published in The American Prospect on December 22, 2015.
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Rutgers University professor Bruce Baker is a longtime expert on charter schools, which are in the crosshairs of a nationwide debate over school performance standards. Recently, Baker, and his colleague Gary Miron, authored a study about the ways in which individuals, companies, and organizations profit through laws and regulations governing the charter school sector. In an interview with The American Prospect, Baker discusses some of the most egregious policy problems, and steps that governments could take to fix them. What follows is an edited transcript.

Rachel Cohen: Your report explores what you call, “The Business of Charter Schooling.” Has this been studied much before?

Bruce Baker: I don’t think it’s been systematically studied because I don’t think there are many unified data sources for this information—it’s more like investigative reporting. I had been repeatedly asked to look into charter school real estate deals and things like that but getting good data just isn’t easy. This was really just a first cut at summarizing the business practices and financial transactions occurring in the charter sector, and what policy structures encourage or permit these things to happen.

RC: You say that current laws and policies governing charters are increasing the privatization of public schooling. What do you mean?

BB: I want to be careful on this issue of ‘privatization’ because I don’t think the intent of our report was to say that public policy is promoting privatization, or that privatization is necessarily bad or good. But there is a long line of case law that carefully parses under what circumstances, and in what settings, certain activities of charter schools are public or private. I’ve coauthored law review articles where we discuss extensively how the charter school industry claims it is “private” when dealing with questions of employee rights, student discipline policies, student handbooks, or contracts, and “public” in other respects.

The idea put forth in our report is that there are certain policy structures, and in some cases lack of policy controls, that are permitting more extensive degrees of privatization in some states. Sometimes it just makes business sense for charter operators, good or bad, or it affords them a way to do something more quickly or cheaply. But I think that some actors in the charter world such as Imagine Schools, White Hat, and Charter Schools USA, are taking advantage of these opportunities in ways that are self-enriching and not in the public interest.

RC: What are some examples?

BB: Sometimes charter providers take actions that are illogical and inefficient from a public policy standpoint, but it might simply be what they have to do to get by. For example, sometimes charter providers create third-party entities, and then pay rent for the school facilities to these new entities. Since charters can’t directly purchase land themselves, these third-party entities allow them to take advantage of tax incentives and to carry revenue-bond debt to purchase property. Unfortunately, because they’re doing this through revenue bonds, they’re getting a crappier interest rate than a district might get and they have to spend a greater part of their operating funds to get facilities. That’s one example of how policy basically backs a charter school into engaging in inefficient activities.

In other cases, charter providers may engage in ethically suspect, but perhaps not illegal, behavior. For example Imagine Schools runs its own property acquisition arm, Schoolhouse Finance. Similarly, Charter Schools USA, a for-profit company, runs Red Apple Inc., and acquires properties to lease them back to the charter school. And in some cases it does actually become illegal. In Kansas City a court ruled that Imagine Schools went over the line with self-dealing, because they overcharged themselves so much in lease payments. [These leases are being paid for with public dollars.]

RC: You note that many public school districts have privatized services for years. What makes what’s happening in the charter sector different?

BB: The modern era of privatized contracted school management started out in the 1990s, as traditional school districts would engage in contracts with private organizations to run schools. But in these cases, the contracted manager works for a local board of education, and is paid through a district budget. So at least at the top level of the organization, the district and the board of education know the details of that private contract.

Whereas if you look at some states, sometimes it may be private entities that actually authorize charter schools, and charters are established through boards of private citizens who then might contract a private company to run their school. The opportunities to shield disclosure, at multiple levels of the hybrid, publicly funded, privately managed and governed system, are dramatically increased in the charter sector.

RC: You note that school districts, many of them starving for cash, have been selling off their public assets—such as school facilities and land—to the charter sector. If one day, the public sours on charter schools, and wants to return to traditional public education—might this not be possible?

BB: Yes, the turnaround would just be too expensive. Maybe 15 years down the line it will be different, but as it stands now, the case for spending sufficiently on a system of public schooling is just not strong. Despite the economic turnaround, most states are still spending less and less on schools.

If you start thinking how much short-run expense would be required to even acquire new urban land to educate students, and then to develop suitable facilities—well, it’s very high. And in some cases, the land and buildings that are being used by charter operators are actually owned by for-profit real estate investment trusts. They’re certainly not going to sell land and buildings back to cities below market value just to support the public good.

I think we do need to be paying more attention to the capital available to educate the children we’re responsible for educating. If we sell it off, and change our minds about charters down the line, we are screwed.

RC: You recommend instating far greater financial reporting requirements. How would this help?

BB: Any entity, private or public, engaged in the delivery of school services should have to report their expenditures. Right now we have to go fishing through IRS 990 forms—if the manager is nonprofit—and it gets very messy. I’d like to see charter financial data reported into a publicly accessible system. Some states do a much better job of this, but you really have to fish for these little pieces of information here and there to try and pull it all together. There’s got to be better accounting for the overlapping financial relationships, so that people can understand how money is being passed between interested parties.

RC: People often talk about charter networks like KIPP, but it seems like there are far bigger networks that slip under the radar. Your research suggests that these networks come with more problems or ethical concerns.

BB: There are certain charter schools we hear about in the media—like KIPP, Uncommon Schools, and Success Academy. And I have my own concerns about the pedagogy and compliance with students’ rights issues at those schools, but when you start looking nationally, what we see is that the dominant players operating charter schools in many states are Imagine, which has found itself in court for self-dealing, White Hat, which was just involved in an Ohio Supreme Court case, National Heritage Academies, Mosaica, Charter Schools USA … and in many states, and nationally in the aggregate, these are much bigger than KIPP or Achievement First, etc.

These networks are not the names we hear about when we hear about the next big study to show how well charters are doing. These are not the networks we hear charter advocates saying we need to expand. Rather we see advocates saying that if we just remove caps and deregulate we’ll see a lot more networks like KIPP. That’s not the case. It hasn’t been the case. And it won’t be the case.

RC: School choice advocates often say that more money is able to “get down to the classroom level” in charter schools, because we do away with large district bureaucracies. This was a common theme in Dale Russakoff’s recent book, The Prize. Is it true?

BB: It’s a complete mischaracterization. It’s one of those cases where the public rhetoric and the research that’s been done really over quite a long period of time are entirely at odds. There are numerous studies that have looked at the administrative overhead expenses of charters and found them to be very high. The vast majority of charters have relatively low total classroom instructional expenses, and studies have consistently found that the proportions spent on administration and other centralized expenses are much higher in charters.

My graduate student, Mark Weber, wrote about the misuse of data in Dale Russakoff’s book.

RC: What recommendations in your report do you expect to garner the most opposition?

I would expect to get significant pushback from the various types of private entities that have enjoyed their current opportunities to shield disclosure.

We also make the case for a centralized, publicly governed authority to manage facilities, or perhaps even all capital resources. Allocating public space to charter operators both reduces the potential for inefficient expense by charter operators and maintains the public’s interest in its public assets.

Some public school advocates, who are fairly anti-charter, have been opposed to the idea of “co-location” which is where a charter and a district school share space within the same building. It has led to some problems, but when I look at the big picture, it’s a hell of a lot better for the public to maintain the public facilities and allow charter operators to use them, rather than sell them off.

I fear this report is going to be seen as us saying all charters are evil, or bad, or money grabbing. What we’re saying is there are good charters but also bad ones, and the bad ones are bigger than you think. Charters represent a significant portion of our public school system system and we’ve got to figure out how to make them work better for the public interest.

Can Teachers Unions Help Online Charter Schools?

Originally published in The American Prospect on November 27, 2015.
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In a major win for the movement to organize charter schools, a California state labor board recently ruled that teachers working for the state’s largest online charter network could form a union.

Teachers for the network, known as the California Virtual Academies, have been battling since April of 2014 with administration officials who refused to negotiate. That’s when more than two-thirds of the so-called CAVA network’s teachers voted in favor of unionizing.

Roughly 15,000 students attend CAVA’s 11 campuses across the state. CAVA administrators had argued that teachers at those disparate campuses should form their own individual unions instead of organizing a single union that would represent them all.

In a 77-page legal decision, the California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) rejected this argument—setting the stage for CAVA teachers to move forward with their network-wide union. The California Teachers Association (CTA), a state affiliate of the National Education Association, will serve as their exclusive bargaining representative.

To teachers who have been agitating for a union, gaining the leverage to improve working conditions is a key first step to boosting student performance—something the online charter sector greatly needs. The teachers’ labor victory comes on the heels of several recent reports concluding that online charter schools are performing extremely poorly. Some 200,000 students take online classes through such institutions nationwide.

“Academic benefits from online charter schools are currently the exception rather than the rule,” stated researchers in a report released by the Center for Research on Academic Outcomes on October 27. It was one of three different research studies released last month that arrived at similar conclusions.

Earlier this year, the progressive group In the Public Interest, which focuses on contracting and privatization, issued a report that looked specifically at problems within the CAVA network. It found evidence of poor academic outcomes, financial conflicts of interest, and insufficient supports for teachers, among other things.

CAVA is managed by K-12 Inc., a publicly traded company based in Virginia that made $55 million in profits last year. The K-12 Inc. schools offer classes to some 14,500 students across the country.

K-12 Inc. officials diputed the methodologies behind the critical reports. But the CAVA teachers who have been organizing for a union said the findings did not surprise them.

“I think those reports actually helped us because they just reinforced what we were already seeing with our own students,” said Stacie Bailey, a CAVA teacher on the organizing committee.“We’ve been trying to push the school to focus more on instruction for a long time.”

Bailey actually spent several years working as a CAVA administrator, until she grew so frustrated with how things were run that she went back into teaching.

“Personally, I joined the union drive because I just see that teachers do not have a voice at our school,” said Bailey. “It’s too top-town. I tried to give teachers that voice while working as an administrator, but I was not successful.”

Working for an online charter school poses some unique challenges for teachers looking to organize. “We engage in the workplace from our own homes, we are isolated, we do not see each other,” said Jen Shilen, a high school history and economics teacher who worked at CAVA from the fall of 2012 up until this past summer. “The process of building rapport with colleagues can be challenging.”

CAVA teachers say they grew interested in the idea of forming a union when their workloads and responsibilities spiked dramatically beginning in the fall of 2013—particularly when they were asked to perform more clerical duties. More paperwork meant less time to work directly with students, teachers say. Organizing talks kicked off at the end of 2013, and CAVA teachers soon approached the California Teachers Association for assistance.

“Some of us used to work for union protected schools, so we knew who to talk to,” explained Shilen. CTA helped the 700 teachers fan out across the state to coordinate with one another; helped them with press outreach, and connected teachers with legislators.

The union vote took place in the spring of 2014. “It was rather surprising that it was as successful as it was,” remarked Bailey. “We had to call every teacher, and send them a petition and they had to print it, sign it, and mail it back to us. That’s a lot to ask of someone, and we ended up getting a super majority voting for the union.”

But CAVA administrators rejected the petition, insisting that the teachers did not constitute one legal entity. “CAVA’s argument was that CAVA does not exist,” said Shilen, wryly.

What came next was a protracted legal battle, including five days of hearings in a state administrative court in February and March, with lawyers filing their legal briefs in May. In June, 16 teachers filed 69 complaints against CAVA on a variety of grounds, including violations student privacy laws, misuse of federal funds, and inadequate services to students with disabilities. CAVA’s senior head of schools, Katrina Abston, dismissed the complaints.

Teachers have waited since mid-May for the decision from the state Public Employment Relations Board, which arrived on October 30. “We were hoping the decision would come in July, about six weeks after the lawyers turned in their briefs,” said Bailey. “It took five months.”

CTA President Eric Heins praised the PERB decision in a statement and urged CAVA administrators not to appeal this “historic ruling.” Now, Heins stated, “teachers can begin to address the problems that are hurting their students, such as insufficient time spent on instruction, high teacher turnover, and too much public money going out of state.”

The CTA’s support for CAVA teachers has raised some eyebrows, particularly since the union has staked out some anti-charter policy positions over the past decade. As I reported in The American Prospect in June, the relationship between charter teachers and unions is evolving and complicated.

CAVA administrators, who did not return The American Prospect’s request for comment, have moved to appeal PERB’s decision.

“The ruling states CTA may seek collective representation of all teachers at all CAVA charter schools, notwithstanding that CAVA is not itself an established public school employer,” Abston told the San Bernadido Sun this month.

But CAVA teachers are unfazed.

“Even if they’re going to appeal, we’re still a union; it doesn’t stop our forward momentum,” said Bailey confidently. “We’re not worried about it.”

 

Tensions rise at City Council discussion of charter-school funding

Originally published in Baltimore City Paper on October 8, 2015.
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A large crowd of charter advocates convened at City Hall last night wearing orange T-shirts that read #SAVE THE CHARTERS BMORE. The City Council was discussing a resolution to withdraw a charter funding proposal that had already been withdrawn. The district’s proposal, introduced on Sept. 8, was scrapped on Sept. 22. Councilman Bill Henry, vice chair of the council’s education committee, introduced the resolution on Sept. 21.

Henry’s resolution called upon the school district to “reconsider its inequitable proposed public charter funding formula to ensure that adequate funds are allocated to all Baltimore students in accordance with state law.”

“All members of the Baltimore City Council co-sponsored this resolution,” said Henry at Wednesday’s meeting. “If we all sign onto it, it can’t be that controversial.” He went on to say that he recognized the proposal was already withdrawn, so “in a very basic but important way we already won.” His hope was to use the meeting as an opportunity “to step back” and think these issues through.

Earlier in the afternoon, before the City Council meeting began, Gregory Thorton, CEO of Baltimore City Public Schools, sent a letter out to families and staff with a district update on the charter-school funding situation. While Thorton expressed a commitment to working with the charter coalition, he said that when the district had originally withdrawn its proposal, it did so under the impression that the charter operators would withdraw their lawsuits too. The district believed this would allow “discussions between us, to be facilitated by former Mayor Kurt Schmoke . . . held publicly, in a spirit of collaboration, and with open dialogue not constrained by pending legal action.”

However, Will McKenna, executive director of Afya Baltimore Inc., an organization that governs charters, challenged the district’s assertion in his testimony last night, saying that none of the charter litigants ever suggested they would drop their lawsuit. “It feels dishonest to have to hear that,” he said.

Councilman Brandon Scott asked the district what evidence they had to suggest that charter operators ever intended to drop their lawsuit. As Dawana Sterrette, the district’s legislative liaison, tried to formulate an answer, parents from the audience tittered. “Honesty is the best policy!” one hollered. “Transparency!” shouted another.

Finally, Sterrette answered that there was “an intermediary” between the school system and the charter representatives, who informed them that the charters would drop their lawsuit if the proposal were scrapped. Sterrette did not name names or provide more concrete details, which was unsatisfying to the crowd.

When I spoke with Bobbi MacDonald, the executive director of City Neighbors Foundation, a few days ago, she told me the litigants had no intention of dropping the lawsuits, but would possibly consider putting their cases on hold.

Kate Primm, the founding principal of the Green School of Baltimore, testified at Wednesday’s meeting, reiterating that the nine operators involved in the litigation had no plans to drop their cases.

The audience was packed with people, mostly charter supporters, but just a few signed up to speak. Several-charter school parents gave speeches, as did a Patterson Park Public Charter School fourth-grader. Kim Truehart, a longtime citizen activist, also offered testimony, pushing the crowd to think more seriously about equity for all of Baltimore’s children.

When I approached Truehart after the meeting, she said she felt the whole evening was just “a publicity stunt” because the mayor, not the council, holds the real power over these issues. Truehart said it “shocked the heck out of her” when Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake decided to intervene in the charter dispute given how hands-off she’s been with education issues generally.

It’s not clear where this all will lead, but several takeaways were evident. One is that the charter advocates aimed to send a message that they believe North Avenue is mismanaging money, which hurts both charter students and traditional students. While everyone acknowledged the need for more state funding, the charter leaders suggested there was more district officials could be doing to efficiently manage their money and get more funds down to the classroom level.

The mediation, led by Kurt Schmoke, will not be binding, but Alison Perkins-Cohen, speaking for the district, said they want it to be a public process, in a public setting, given the funding formula’s impact on the broader community.

It’s not yet clear what the terms of the mediation will be. It was not clear, based on last night’s testimony, whether public mediated talks are a major priority for the charter operators. It is also not clear how having litigation open at the same time as the mediation will impact the parties’ ability to be transparent.

“I don’t understand how Baltimore City Public Schools can be expected to negotiate in good faith with this lawsuit hanging over our heads any more than I can see how Baltimore charter schools can call themselves public schools without paying their fair share of public school costs,” said Ben Dalbey, a city schools parent.

Given that the charter funding formula impacts all district students, and considering that the charter operators are calling for a greater culture of accountability and transparency, finding a way to ensure that the mediation is open to parents, community stakeholders, and reporters seems to be a wise condition for any future effort.

On New Philanthropy, Education Reform, and Eli Broad’s Big Plan for L.A. Schools

Originally published at The American Prospect on September 22, 2015.
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The Los Angeles Times published a confidential document yesterday, which seems to confirm earlier reports that the Broad Foundation wants at least 50 percent of L.A. public school students educated in charter schools over the next eight years. Currently, 16 percent of students in L.A. Unified attend charters, and according to the report, getting to 50 percent would require creating 260 new schools, for 130,000 students, at a cost of $490 million.

“Los Angeles is uniquely positioned to create the largest, highest-performing charter sector in the nation,” the report stated. “Such an exemplar would serve as a model for all large cities to follow.”

Hmmm. That sounds familiar.

Earlier this month, veteran Washington Post journalist Dale Russakoff published a new book, The Prize, which explores education reform efforts in Newark from 2010-2015. Her book details the goals, mistakes, and challenges reformers encountered as they tried to “transform” Newark’s struggling school system—largely through expanding charters, closing “failing” schools, and implementing new teacher pay scales. The political drama and backroom dealings led by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Newark Mayor Cory Booker, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg offers humbling lessons to all those working to improve public education, no matter where one comes down on the policy specifics.

Like Eli Broad’s vision for Los Angeles, a key goal for Newark education reformers was to make the city a model for the rest of urban America. Booker wanted Newark to be transformed into “a hemisphere of hope” and repeatedly told Zuckerberg that their goal was not just to fix local education, but to develop the “high impact programs and best practices” that could fix education in all major cities. Booker believed that if he could succeed within a difficult district like Newark, then he could succeed anywhere. He emphasized that Zuckerberg’s investment could help lead to the “blueprint for national replication across America’s urban centers to transform its youth.”

This month, HistPhil, a blog that explores the history of the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors, has been running an excellent series on philanthropic involvement in education. Their effort is well timed: As billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Eli Broad continue to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into education reform, the need to understand what’s historically new, and what’s not, is more important than ever.

Sarah Reckhow, a political scientist and author of Follow the Money: How Foundation Dollars Change Public Schools, contributed to the HistPhil series by looking specifically at Mark Zuckerberg’s experiment in Newark. Reckhow notes that there exists a “perennial drive” for philanthropists to create national reform models. She points to the Ford Foundation’s Gray Areas program in the 1960s, an effort that philanthropists had hoped could serve as a national model for urban policy. “The fallacy of the national replication model—at the expense of truly listening and understanding local circumstances—is a lesson that philanthropists must relearn time and again,” Reckhow says.

Other cities experimenting with education reform are similarly interested in “scaling” their efforts. Many point to the academic gains seen in New Orleans—the urban district with the highest percentage of charter schools in the country—as reason to implement their reforms elsewhere. “We don’t know if similar efforts can be replicated in other cities,” argued Neerav Kingsland, a prominent New Orleans reformer. “But we owe it to the children of this country to try and find out.” Tulane economist Doug Harris, who has conducted the most rigorous research on New Orleans reforms to date, says it’s questionable whether their model would work in other cities given the unique economic and political conditions present in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

OK, so reformers and philanthropists are drawn to ideas that can scale—and apparently have been for a long time. Still, how should we be thinking about Eli Broad’s plan to “charterize” L.A.? Is there anything new about today’s crop of philanthropists? Several contributors to the HistPhil blog argue yes.

Sociologist Robin Rogers says that the ideas held by modern philanthropists reflect those commonly seen in the venture capital world. She cites an influential article from 1997 in The Harvard Business Review that encouraged philanthropists to pursue social change using tactics commonly employed in the business sector. “Considered to be more muscular than traditional approaches to philanthropy, the new philanthropy appeals to many men who made money in tech or finance sectors,” Rogers writes. “These (primarily) men have great faith in the tools and techniques that they used to disrupt the old economy and usher in the new one.”

While modern philanthropists share some similarities with their rich predecessors, Rogers argues that today’s bunch are far more likely to focus on “institutional pressure points” rather than provide support for a diverse set of projects. (She points to the Gates Foundation’s involvement in promoting the Common Core standards as an example, as well as dogged support for expanding charter schools).

Jeffrey W. Snyder, a postdoctoral research fellow in education, philanthropy, and advocacy at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University, also wrote a HistPhil post exploring differences between “old” and “new” philanthropy—specifically in terms of their priorities and philanthropic methods. For one thing, Snyder finds that “new foundation granting in recent years far surpasses the total given by old foundations.”

Source: Jeffrey W. Snyder, HistPhil blog

Source: Jeffrey W. Snyder, HistPhil blog

He also says that newer foundations do indeed have different priorities compared to older ones. The latter tends to give substantially to university-based programs and research that aims to improve existing educational systems, while newer foundations donate heavily to charter schools and other organizations that push for more radical change.

We don’t yet know what’s going to happen with Eli Broad’s plan to “reach 50 percent charter market share” within Los Angeles public schools. And it wouldn’t be fair to assume he’ll behave just as Mark Zuckerberg did in Newark, or as other billionaires have elsewhere. Still, paying attention to historical precedent is important, and there seems to be sufficient reason to be wary. As The Washington Post’s art critic Philip Kennicott wrote just days ago, Eli Broad “is a self-made man…who has also built and burned bridges all across [Los Angeles]. Ask around, and no one seems to like him, though many call him effective…They admire his brilliance, covet his money, fear his power and lament his character, which is described as imperious, egomaniacal and relentless.”

Unionized Charter Teachers in Chicago Reject Merit Pay

Originally published on The American Prospect’s Tapped blog on August 17, 2015.
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Last week, unionized teachers at three schools operated by Civitas—a subsidiary of the Chicago International Charter School network—negotiated a new contract that no longer has merit pay in it. This means 31 out of 32 unionized Chicago charter schools have now rejected merit pay. And the one unionized charter that still has it—Rudy Lozano Leadership Academy—is currently negotiating a new contract and teachers hope to remove it there as well.

Merit pay, a policy that ties teacher salaries and bonuses to student standardized test scores and evaluations, is one of the most controversial tenets of the education reform movement. The idea has been tossed around for decades, but has never really gained steam. Most teacher salaries are tied to their level of education and the number of years they’ve been teaching.

Michelle Rhee, former chancellor for Washington, D.C., schools, says merit pay is needed to create the kind of culture “where excellence is rewarded.” Proponents believe that this kind of policy would incentivize high-quality teachers to enter the profession. The Obama administration’s $4.3 billion Race to the Top program encouraged states to implement merit pay systems within their schools.

While teacher salaries are notoriously low, many teachers have generally opposed merit pay because they do not think the system in which they’d be evaluated could ever really be objective or fair. They also worry that it could have unintended consequences, like incentivizing cheating or teaching to the test.

Brian Harris, the president of the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff, said that when his school unionized in 2009, they first tried to improve their “really awful” merit pay scheme by negotiating more objective metrics into their evaluation system. Teachers aimed to reform merit pay, not remove it.

Over time, according to Harris, teachers began to feel increasingly frustrated with even their new-and-improved merit pay system. When I spoke to Harris in April as I was reporting my When Charters Go Union piece, he had told me, “the opposition to merit pay at my school has grown insane.” Four months later, it’s now gone.

I asked Harris if anyone in his union wanted to keep merit pay and he said he has no idea. “Nobody has been brave enough to tell me to my face that they like merit pay.” He did note that some who like the idea of paying teachers who work really hard more money, acknowledge that it is really difficult to do so fairly. “Even a lot of people who were evaluating us acknowledged that this stuff was unfair,” Harris said.

About eight months ago, their union released a document with guiding principles for contract negotiations. Beyond killing merit pay, other contract goals include advocating for smaller class sizes, increasing teacher voice, and securing protected time during the workday to grade, plan, and collaborate.

It will be interesting to see if the momentum that unionized charter school teachers have created in Chicago motivates other non-unionized charter teachers who are dissatisfied with merit pay to consider unions of their own. It will also be interesting to see if this creates any pushback from the public—a majority of public school parents say they support the idea of merit pay.

The Growing Movement to Restore Voting Rights to Former Felons

Originally published in The American Prospect on August 7th 2015.
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Rachel M. cohen

SEIU 1199 

Rachel M. Cohen

       

On August 6, the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, dozens of Baltimore ex-felons rallied and marched alongside community members to protest their disenfranchisement. In May, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan vetoed a bill which would have granted ex-felons the right to vote when they return home from prison, rather than making them wait until after their probation and parole sentences have been completed (some sentences can last for decades). Holding up signs that read, “We Want Taxation with Representation!” and “End the New Jim Crow!” protestors made clear that they understand the racial implications of the status quo. Had Hogan signed the bill into law, 40,000 more Maryland residents—a majority of them black Baltimoreans—would have been able to cast a ballot in the next election. “Override! Override! The veto! The veto!” protestors shouted together as they marched down the street.

The crowd, well over 100 people, eventually gathered around a statue of Thurgood Marshall, not far from Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. “We picked that spot because he’s one of the greatest symbols of justice and fairness,” explained Perry Hopkins, an ex-felon who now works as an organizer with Communities United, the social justice group that planned Thursday’s rally. Fifty-four-year-old Hopkins has never voted.

While Baltimore has made national headlines this year for its police brutality scandals and its spiking murder count, the gathered crowd recognized that these issues cannot be separated from the societal exclusion African-Americans experience every day.

One woman who came to the rally was Robinette Barmer, who has had two children and one grandchild locked up in jail. Barmer has been fighting for ex-felon voting rights all year, and traveled to Annapolis last spring to push for the bill’s passage. “I try to tell ex-cons that their voices do still matter,” she said.

Greg Carpenter, a 62-year-old black man who served 20 years in prison for an armed robbery, also has a 20-year parole sentence. Although Carpenter has been out of jail for 12 years now, he worries he won’t ever get to vote again in his lifetime.

Governor Hogan said that requiring ex-felons to finish their parole and probation sentences before voting “achieves the proper balance” between repaying one’s obligations to society and restoring citizens’ rights. Ex-felons point out that they are both working and paying taxes within their communities, and thus should also have the right to vote.

Social science research suggests that removing voting restrictions would provide positive benefits to both ex-offenders and society at large. The American Probation and Parole Association also says there is no credible evidence to suggest that disenfranchising people who have returned home from prison serves any legitimate law enforcement purpose.

According to the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice advocacy group, there are roughly 5.85 million disenfranchised American citizens with felony convictions, and 2.2 million of them are black. That’s one out of every 13 African-Americans.

The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965 to end discriminatory voting barriers but the courts have disagreed on whether the VRA should apply to felon disenfranchisement laws. Maryland activists aren’t waiting around for the courts, though. At Thursday’s rally, organizers prepped the crowd for next year’s legislative season where they hope to push for an override. “We need you to show up and come out with us to Annapolis,” said Nicole Hanson, an ex-offender who works with Out4Justice, a group that politically mobilizes ex-offenders. “There’s only 90 days of [the legislative] session, so we’ll need you to make some sacrifices.”

Eighteen states considered loosening ex-felon voting restrictions this year, up from 13 states in 2014. But passing legislation, as Maryland activists witnessed first hand, is difficult. Only one state—Wyoming—ended up successfully loosening its restrictions.

Still, there has been demonstrable progress. The Sentencing Project estimates that nearly 800,000 citizens have regained the right to vote through voting reforms enacted between 1997 and 2010. Last month, President Obama even said that, “If folks have served their time, and they’ve reentered society, they should be able to vote.”

“This is a very peaceful rally, but this issue is personal,” Hopkins said in an interview. “We’re going to flip power, and we’re going to empower. We’re going to show the governor who’s the boss. We’re the boss! We’re the people.”

Rachel M. Cohen

Perry Hopkins at the podium                   

A New Course: Larry Hogan wants to change Maryland’s unique charter school laws and bring in more charters, but will kids suffer?

Originally published in Baltimore City Paper on August 5th, 2015.
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Baltimore City Paper cover

Baltimore City Paper cover story

At the end of 2014, just weeks after Larry Hogan won a surprise victory in the gubernatorial race, the governor-elect announced that he would push to expand Maryland charter schools once in office.

“We shouldn’t be last in the nation in charter schools,” Hogan declared—referring to Maryland’s spot in the state ranking system designed by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS), an advocacy organization that promotes charter schools around the country. According to NAPCS, Maryland has the nation’s “worst” charter law. The Baltimore Sun editorial board, echoing NAPCS, has said Maryland boasts one of the “weakest” charter laws in the United States.

In late February and early March, legislators in Annapolis listened to testimony related to charter reform bills that Gov. Hogan introduced in the House and Senate. Supported by the Hogan administration, a coalition of charter school operators, and national education-reform advocates, the bills met fervent opposition from teachers, principals, and community members.

“I don’t care what the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, a lobbying group out of Washington, D.C., has to say about the charter school law in Maryland or where they rank Maryland relative to their own biased standards. Neither should you,” testified Megan Miskowski, a speech language pathologist at Patterson Park Public Charter School. It’s Maryland’s strong law, she argued, that explains why Maryland charters have never wrought the level of fraud and abuse so prevalent in places such as Minnesota and Louisiana—states that receive high marks from NAPCS. “Who are they to define what is best for Maryland children?” Miskowski asked. “We do not answer to them.”

The Maryland Charter School Act passed in 2003 and the first state charter schools opened their doors in 2005. A decade later roughly 18,000 students attend 47 Maryland charters—34 of them concentrated in Baltimore City. A version of the Public Charter School Improvement Act eventually passed, but it was substantially watered down from Hogan’s original proposal, and many believe he’ll push a stronger law again next year. The heart of the debate centers on competing visions for the future of public education, and whether one believes Maryland has the best charter law in the country or the worst.

The publicly funded but independently managed schools known as charters have grown significantly since the first one opened in Minnesota 23 years ago. Today more than 6,700 charters exist in 42 states and Washington, D.C. and their numbers are climbing. Albert Shanker, then-president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), first proposed the charter school idea in 1988; the influential union leader imagined a new kind of school that could serve as a laboratory for innovative and experimental education practices. The hope was not only to serve kids within charters who might benefit from alternative educational models, but also to carry newly discovered best practices back into traditional schools for all students to enjoy. In Shanker’s vision, charter teachers would still be unionized district employees, but certain labor regulations would be relaxed to promote greater innovation.

Maryland’s charter culture sets it apart from most other states in several ways. First, under the law all Maryland charter teachers are considered public school employees and represented under their district-wide collective bargaining unit. While this actually most closely resembles what Shanker had imagined, few states today adopt this particular model. According to the Center for Education Reform (CER), just 7 percent of all charter school teachers nationwide are unionized.

Another distinctive characteristic of Maryland charters has been a general commitment to innovate within the district, as opposed to outside of it. In other states, the law may allow for multiple charter authorizers, such as churches, universities, or nonprofits. In Maryland, however, only the local school board can authorize charter schools. “I’d say the strong desire [of Maryland charters] to work within the school district is fairly unique,” says Joceyln Kehl of the Maryland Alliance of Public Charter Schools, a newly formed coalition of charter operators around the state. “Maryland is hugely pro-union and Democratic, so that’s just our context,” she adds.

Additionally, Maryland charters must comply with a greater number of state and local regulations than charter schools in other states. While detractors of Maryland’s law argue that this creates an inflexible environment for the independent schools to operate in, supporters point out that Maryland has not had any of the kinds of problems related to fraud, abuse, and mismanagement that charter schools in states with decreased regulation have had. “It is true that Maryland charter school law provides more oversight than many other states,” testified Deborah Apple, a charter school teacher at the Baltimore-based Wolfe Street Academy. “It is also true, however, that our charter school system is more effective than most.”

A stronger level of oversight, a close relationship with the school district, and unionized charter teachers illustrate the uniqueness of Old Line State charters. The vast majority of schools are considered “mom and pop” charters, meaning parents or former local educators founded them, as opposed to some of the larger national charter management organizations (CMOs) that have developed presences in other cities. According to an Abell Foundation report released this year, many high-performing CMOs have expressed reticence or disinterest in coming to Maryland given the conditions in which they’d have to operate. While the Maryland charter law has facilitated the growth of strong schools with little to no fiscal and academic issues, the question is whether such growth is sufficient, and whether the state’s law should change in order to entice more CMOs to expand into Maryland.

Baltimore’s 34 charter schools educate 13,000 of the district’s 84,000 students. Bobbi Macdonald, co- founder of the City Neighbors Charter School, is one of Charm City’s veteran operators. City Neighbors was one of the first charters to open up in 2005, and since then Macdonald has opened two more schools. Reflecting on the evolving dynamics between Baltimore charter operators and the district, Macdonald describes years of intentional relationship building. “I don’t believe that school systems are made out of steel, they’re made out of people,” she says.

In 2004, after the charter law passed and before the first schools opened, Baltimore’s new charter operators formed a coalition to organize and advocate for their collective interests. This coalition grew increasingly formalized as the years went on. “The work of the coalition became really focused on defending our autonomy and the rights of children in charter schools,” says Macdonald, who served as the coalition’s co-chair for the first six years.

Many charter operators spoke favorably, even nostalgically, of Dr. Andrés Alonso’s six-year tenure as city superintendent, which ended at the end of 2012-2013 academic year. “Dr. Alonso had a clear vision of wanting to provide a portfolio of school options for families, and to create opportunities for innovation and then replicate those practices,” says Allison Shecter, the founder of the Baltimore Montessori Public Charter School, one of the city’s most popular charters. “I think when Dr. Alonso was here we had a really strong relationship and participated in a lot of ways on many different levels,” says Macdonald.

Since Alonso’s departure, the relationship between charter operators and the district has grown more strained. “I’d say it’s a challenging relationship. It’s not a partnership unfortunately,” Shecter says. “We’d like it to be a partnership but in order for it to be a partnership there needs to be consistent and ongoing communication back and forth around policies that may impact charters.” Many operators say they feel the district is neither accountable nor transparent, which fuels growing levels of distrust.

One issue charter operators repeatedly raise is that they believe the district short-changes them when it comes to per-pupil funding. Under state law, the district must provide “commensurate” funding between traditional schools and charters. Currently, the district allocates $7,300 per traditional school student, and $9,400 per charter student—which is supposed to take into account that Maryland charters have to pay for the cost of their facilities, programming, salaries, and other school-level costs, which the district pays for in traditional schools. However, the formula that the district uses to come up with these amounts is unclear, and operators are convinced that what they’re getting is too low. Charter operators believe that they should be getting closer to $14,000 per pupil. Debates around these dollar amounts grow very charged.

Not everyone at charters agrees the district is shirking its funding responsibilities. “Charters still receive more per pupil, even after those extra costs are covered,” says Matthew Hornbeck, the principal at Hampstead Hill Academy, a charter located just south of Patterson Park. “Everyone, with the exception of some of the charter operators, knows that.” Hornbeck, who has served as his school’s principal for 12 years, has been outspoken about what he sees as a district funding formula that unfairly favors charters.

“I was a charter operator and I absolutely knew we were getting more than traditional public schools,” adds Helen Atkinson, the executive director of Teachers’ Democracy Project, a local organization that helps teachers engage in public policy and develop more social justice curricula.

Jon McGill, the director of academic affairs for the Baltimore Curriculum Project, the city’s largest charter operator, describes the relationship between charters and the school district headquarters on North Avenue as “overall harmonious” but says he does wish the district would be more transparent about how about how exactly it spends its slice of per-pupil funding. He thinks charters “lose the PR game” because the public sees them as always asking for more money. One reason the funding issues get so heated, McGill suggests, is because some operators have taken huge personal risks to open charter schools, and feel they need more reassurance that the district truly supports their efforts. “Some people have 30-year mortgages to worry about,” he says.

While for the past decade the story of Baltimore charters has mostly been an intra-district struggle, Gov. Hogan’s rise to power signified a turning point for the Maryland school-choice movement.

The legislation Hogan introduced would have dramatically changed the charter law passed in 2003. His proposals included provisions to exempt charter school employees from the district bargaining unit, as well as from many state and local requirements such as teacher certification. Hogan’s bill would have enabled charter schools to compete against traditional schools for state public construction money, and the bill would have required districts to explicitly define “commensurate funding” to mean that charters should get 98 percent of the per-pupil amount that traditional public school students receive, leaving 2 percent left over for district administrative expenditures.

“It did take us by surprise,” says Kehl. “As a charter sector, we were not expecting legislation this year, and we’re grateful that Governor Hogan finally wanted to cast an eye on the charter sector.” While charter operators around the state met with legislators and held school meetings to discuss why they supported Hogan’s bill, Kehl acknowledges that their advocacy “wasn’t as robust an effort had we been really prepared for it.”

Once news of Hogan’s charter bill went public, Maryland charter teachers began to organize together in new ways. In Baltimore, teachers convened and decided to form the Baltimore Charter School Teacher Coalition. Educators broke up into committees to strategize and implement an organized political response to the bill.

Corey Gaber, a sixth-grade literacy teacher at Southwest Baltimore Charter School who was active in the coalition, says part of the reason they formed their group was because they were dissatisfied with the pace and quality of the Baltimore Teachers Union’s (BTU) response. “We felt like we needed to reach out and inform teachers about what was going on and we didn’t feel like the union was doing it effectively,” he says. Gaber acknowledges that among Baltimore charter teachers there exists a “constant contradiction of feelings”—in some ways they are dissatisfied with the current union leadership, but on the other hand, teachers are proud to be being unionized district employees and deeply value their protections. With fellow charter teacher Kristine Sieloff, Gaber wrote an Op-Alt for City Paper (“The injustice of a two-tiered education system in Baltimore City,” March 31) and Gaber created and helped to circulate a petition that garnered hundreds of signatures from both charter and traditional public school teachers.

“The interests of traditional teachers in charters and public are exactly the same right now,” says McGill, who thinks the proposed bill would have created deep divisions between Baltimore educators.

The BTU helped circulate another petition for charter teachers and charter educational support personnel, roughly 740 people in total, and more than 90 percent of eligible petitioners signed. “I spoke with every teacher I know, teachers were universally against [the legislation],” Gaber says.

In addition to local educators who worried about losing their collective bargaining rights and allowing non-certified teachers to work with kids, other leaders pushed back against what they saw as a deeply inequitable funding structure embedded into Hogan’s legislation.

“Charter advocates rely on the premise that as money flows from a regular school to a charter school, the costs of the regular school go down proportionately. Sounds good; it’s just not true,” wrote David W. Hornbeck in a Baltimore Sun op-ed published in February. Hornbeck “recommended the approval of more than 30 charter schools” while serving as Philadelphia’s superintendent of schools from 1994 to 2000, and he now believes he made a grave mistake. Hornbeck, who also served as superintendent of Maryland schools from 1976 to 1988 (and is the father of Hampstead Hill principal Matt Hornbeck), pointed out that Pennsylvania’s charter law is ranked much higher than Maryland’s and “yet its charter growth is contributing significantly to a funding crisis that includes draconian cuts to teachers, nurses, arts, music and counselors in Philadelphia.”

Bebe Verdery, the director of the Maryland ACLU Education Reform Project, also submitted testimony against the bill, arguing that the proposed funding formula would result in severe cuts to traditional schools. “Simply put, students without any special needs would get funding the state formula intended for others,” she said. Verdery also objected to a provision that would have allowed public capital repair funds to go toward private buildings that housed charter schools, saying, “this would further strain an already insufficient pool of state resources for addressing the state’s $15 billion school repair and construction backlog.”

Hogan’s legislation said “commensurate funding” should mean that charters get 98 percent of what traditional public schools receive because a 2005 State Board of Education ruling determined that districts needed only 2 percent of per-pupil funding to cover central administrative costs. But when the Department of Legislative Services (DLS) surveyed local school systems later on, it found that administrative expenditures make up closer to 10-14 percent of per-pupil spending. Critics argued that if 98 percent were legally guaranteed for charters, but necessary administrative work still had to be done, then money would be taken from traditional public school students, potentially leading to increased class sizes, special educators with enormous case loads, or cuts to after- school programming, gym, and art.

Local charter operators insisted that their goal was not to bankrupt the district, but simply to fight for parity. “We believe strongly that we can achieve this without harming funding for other schools,” testified Ed Rutkowski, the executive director of Patterson Park Public Charter School.

The watered-­down bill that Hogan ultimately signed was a grassroots victory for some, and a major disappointment for others. The Center for Education Reform, which hired several lobbyists to push for the bill’s passage, was so dismayed with the final result that it actually urged the governor to veto it, insisting that this would be a step back for Maryland school choice, not one forward.

The final bill ended up removing mostly all provisions that had generated controversy. It grants greater autonomy to charters that have demonstrated five years of success, and it provides for increased flexibility with student enrollment. The bill also authorizes the Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE) and the DLS to complete a study by the end of October 2016 to determine what a more appropriate figure should be for districts when it comes to commensurate funding.

“The law that passed was more subtle and more evolutionary rather than revolutionary,” said Hampstead Hill’s Hornbeck. “It did not trash a good law, like the governor’s proposal tried to do.”

Given that the governor still had support from MarylandCAN, a pro-charter advocacy organization that helped to craft the original legislation, Hogan went ahead and signed the bill into law. It’s an imperfect bill, but it creates “the pathway” to expand charters and it grants more flexibility to existing ones, said Keiffer J. Mitchell Jr., Hogan’s special adviser on charter schools.

“As the state with the most restrictive charter law in the country, these small steps forward, while welcomed, are not enough,” said Jason Botel, the executive director of MarylandCAN, in a statement. “They must be the start, not the end, of our work to dramatically reform charter school policy in our state.”

Kara Kerwin, the president of CER, believes MarylandCAN is mistaken to think that they can just go back and improve on the new law later. She points out that the new law clarifies that only the local district board—not the Maryland State Board of Education—can authorize new charters, and that online charter schools are now explicitly prohibited from operating within Maryland.

In an interview, Kerwin describes online charters as “one of the biggest innovations right now that’s helping so many students who aren’t brick and mortar types.” However, several studies have found that online charter schools tend to provide a lower-quality education than traditional schools, and a 2011 New York Times investigation found that K12 Inc., one of the nation’s largest online charter school operators, “tries to squeeze profits from public school dollars by raising enrollment, increasing teacher workload and lowering standards.”

Most people interviewed for this story do not believe the new law will lead to an expansion of Maryland charter schools, one of Hogan’s top policy priorities. “The final bill that passed was very limited in scope, it doesn’t have a whole lot of changes,” Macdonald says. “But it’s a step in the right direction.”

So what does this all mean for the future of Maryland charters?

“I have no doubt that this was round one and [the operators] are going to try again as long as Hogan’s governor,” Gaber says. “We’re going to keep fighting. We started this teacher coalition knowing that this is a long-term fight and we need to be organized and ready before the next time comes.”

Kehl thinks that the Maryland Alliance of Public Charter Schools, which just officially emerged as a statewide group in July, will focus on building a more unified policy voice and cultivating a stronger presence in Annapolis. “Our charter sector has matured,” she says. “If you believe that schools shouldn’t be one size all, then you have to create a system that supports that. I don’t see how you can make change if you keep everything the same.”

Whether new legislation will be introduced next year is an open question. Kerwin of CER thinks such an effort would be futile, even if they tried. Todd Reynolds, the political coordinator for Maryland’s American Federation of Teachers, says some legislators might decide it makes sense to wait until after the new MSDE/DLS study is completed.

While the emerging landscape appears fraught with tensions between the district and the charter sector, there still remains a possibility that Maryland charters will chart a different sort of future than that of other states.

Even though Macdonald of the City Neighbors Charter School supported Hogan’s legislation, she acknowledges that some parts made her feel ambivalent. While she feels strongly that Maryland charters need more autonomy and bureaucratic relief, she also wants to preserve collective bargaining rights for charter teachers. “I feel like Maryland is so unique in our stance,” she says. “I haven’t yet seen the bill I would really fight for.”

In a few months, on Oct. 22, the Teachers’ Democracy Project will be hosting a big meeting between teachers, charter operators, politicians, union officials, and school board members to try and figure out a way forward that doesn’t require another heated legislative fight. Atkinson believes the current law is good, but that Baltimore teachers—charter and non-charter alike—should be organizing for more money for all schools. “We’re going to try to hold an open conversation about what people’s concerns are,” said Atkinson. “The operators are reasonable, they’re not right-wing, they’re not trying to get charters to take over the world. Their main frustrations are with the union contract and some of the ways the district controls things.”

McGill thinks that a more collaborative push for charter reform from the district, teachers, and charter operators “would be the ideal” solution but worries things are growing too polarized for that to materialize. Gaber, however, says that the Baltimore Charter School Teacher Coalition has also discussed how they want to stand for something, and not just against reform. “I think it would be a good idea for us to be more proactive,” adds Reynolds of the AFT. “We should get back to what charters were intended to in terms of offering innovation that can then be brought into traditional schools.”

The question of whether some of the larger CMOs would be interested in setting up schools in Maryland remains uncertain. Kehl says it’s important to help facilitate more attractive operating conditions because “there’s a certain point where you tap out your local leadership” and if you “can’t attract national talent” into Maryland, then you’ve just closed the door on quality options for kids.

Others see luring CMOs as a less urgent priority, especially given how the state increasingly underfunds public education. In his latest budget, Hogan increased state education funding by 0.4 percent, but cut Baltimore City’s funding by 3.3 percent. Attracting those CMOs—which would likely be into Baltimore—might mean redirecting funds toward charter facility expenses or pushing harder to restrict collective bargaining. Maryland might also experience some of the financial strain that rapid charter growth in other states has placed on traditional schools.

Testifying last spring, CEO of Baltimore City Public Schools Dr. Gregory E. Thorton said Hogan’s bill would work “to the benefit of large out-of-state charter organizations—to the detriment of Maryland’s most vulnerable student populations.”

While the Baltimore City School District might need to work harder to collaborate with its local charter sector, and the teacher unions may need to re-examine some provisions within their contracts, it’s not yet clear that Maryland’s unique charter culture is headed out the door.

State law currently allows charters to negotiate waivers and exemptions from certain aspects of the district-wide collective bargaining unit. That’s how Baltimore’s KIPP charter school was able to extend its school week; KIPP had to agree to pay its staff more money for the increased number of working hours. Theoretically charter operators could sit down with union leaders to discuss some of their most pressing concerns around staffing, innovation, and autonomy. “It’s not meant to be a one-size-fits-all situation,” says Reynolds. “You can sit down with the union and negotiate a Memorandum of Understanding. We have done that, and I think that’ll continue.”

“I think it would be amazing to sit down with the union and really roll up our sleeves,” says Macdonald. “I do think it’s really important for teachers to be unionized, to collectively bargain, and to get paid well, but I also think if we want to innovate and serve the children of Baltimore, we really have to allow [for] some more flexibility.”

Will Students Soon Be Tested for ‘Grit’?

Originally published on The American Prospect Tapped blog July 7, 2015.

The National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP)—nicknamed “the Nation’s Report Card”—is the largest nationally representative assessment that tests what American students know and can do in different subjects.

Curiously, it was recently announced that beginning in 2017, NAEP plans to start measuring so-called “non-cognitive skills” like motivation and grit in the background surveys they issue to all test-takers. Additionally, according to Education Week, questions about “self-efficacy and personal achievement goals may be included on questionnaires for specific subjects to create content-area measures.”

Though schools won’t be judged based on these NAEP measures, the article says, “other such tests for accountability purposes may be on the horizon.” A coalition of seven districts in California are reportedly developing an accountability system that will evaluate schools in part by including measures of “growth mindset, self efficacy and self-management, and social awareness.” These are supposed to be in place next year.

The odd thing about this NAEP announcement is that very recently psychologists Angela Duckworth and David Scott Yeager published a paper in the journal Educational Researcher arguing that while emerging findings on character skills are promising, existing research is not ready to be incorporated into accountability assessments. Angela Duckworth told NPR that she feels “enthusiasm” for these measures “is getting ahead of the science” and that wanting to use these skills for evaluation would be gravely premature.

In April I published a long piece on the rise of grit fervor in education reform, which looked at the ways in which current tools to measure grit and other character traits are flawed. There are significant limitations to self-reported assessments, and Duckworth and Yeager’s subsequent journal paper echoed these concerns. Researchers haven’t given up on developing improved measures, and they are currently exploring future possibilities like computer simulations.

The intellectual humility Duckworth and Yeager demonstrated in their paper (and this video) is quite impressive, and should not be understated. Why school districts and NAEP are still intent on moving forward quickly with measuring these skills then deserves some further clarification.

Sorry, Walmart: Charter Schools Won’t Fix Poverty

Originally published in The American Prospect on June 30th, 2015.
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Last week, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and In the Public Interest released a highly critical report on the Walton Family Foundation’s K-12 education philanthropy, which ended with a call for increased transparency and accountability in the charter sector. The gist of the report is that the Walton Family Foundation—which has kick-started about one in four charters around the country—“relentlessly presses for rapid growth of privatized education options” and has opposed serious efforts to regulate and monitor fraud and abuse. While the foundation supports rapidly scaling up charter networks that have produced promising results, the AFT and In the Public Interest cite a 2013 Moody’s Investment Services report which found that dramatically expanding charter schools in poor urban areas weakens the ability of traditional schools to serve their students, forcing them to lay off teachers, increase class sizes, and cut programs to make ends meet.

A month earlier, Philamplify, an initiative of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP), published its own report on the Walton Family Foundation’s impact, and found that although they have achieved meaningful results through their environmental philanthropy, “an overreliance on specific market-based vehicles” hinders their ability to create “sustainable and equitable” improvements in education. Philamplify also criticized the Walton Family Foundation for “insulating itself among like-minded peers rather than connecting with the broader field.”

While the Walton Family Foundation did not return my request for comment, Education Week reported that their spokesperson, Daphne Moore, defended their commitment to high-quality schools. Education Week also cites Greg Richmond, the president of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA)—an organization that receives funding from the Walton Family Foundation—who argued that the foundation has long demonstrated a commitment to accountability and transparency.

This discussion is sure to continue over the coming months, but what was particularly striking was something in the Walton Family Foundation’s response to the Philamplify report—a statement that has been reiterated by the foundation many times over the past several years. Marc Sternberg, the foundation’s K-12 program director, said, “Education is the set of work we can support that will most directly end the cycle of poverty and change the trajectory of young people’s lives.”

The notion that education is needed to break the cycle of poverty is a popular mantra of the education reform movement. The problem is, it is simply not true at all. The most direct way to break the cycle of poverty is actually to give poor people more money, something that high-quality educations, even college degrees, do not in any way guarantee. So when it comes to the question of redistribution—an integral component to any comprehensive anti-poverty program—the political work of the Walton family deserves far greater scrutiny.

Waltons, Walmart, and Politics

The Walton family heirs own a majority of public shares in Walmart, the U.S.’s largest private employer, which easily makes them some of the richest people on earth. Today, the Walton family has more wealth than 49 million American families combined. The six Walton heirs together have a net worth of at least $148.8 billion.

The Walton family engages in quite a bit of political work outside of its environmental and education philanthropy—much of it to advance conservative legislative goals. In the 2014 electoral cycle, Walmart spent $2.4 million through its PAC and individual donations, and $12.5 million through lobbying. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Walmart was far and away the biggest big-box retail spender in the election cycle, and has been ranked among the top 100 political donors since 1989. Demos looked at the Walton family’s political contributions between 2000 and 2014 and found that their $7.3 million in campaign contributions heavily favored Republican candidates over Democrats.

Outside of political campaigns, Walmart employs an array of Washington, D.C., lobbyists to advocate on issues like labor, taxes, and trade. Up until May 2012, Walmart was a longtime member of the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which works to promote an ideologically conservative agenda around the country. Moreover Walmart has given millions to the Republican State Leadership Committee, the Republican Governors Association, and other organizations that push right-wing policies.

Their animus towards union and labor is no secret, and Walmart has fought strengthening labor law in Washington, D.C., as well as supporting efforts to expand right-to-work laws in state legislatures. In addition, as veteran labor reporter Steven Greenhouse reported for The Atlantic this month, Walmart “maintains a steady drumbeat of anti-union information at its more than 4,000 U.S. stores”—much of which is patently false.

Beyond their efforts to elect conservative candidates and promote right-wing causes, the Waltons also fight against efforts to promote a greater redistribution of wealth through taxation. According to Treasury Department estimates, closing just two estate tax loopholes that the Waltons use would raise more than $2 billion annually over the next decade—but they have long lobbied against any effort to do so. Americans for Tax Fairness, a coalition of 400 national and state organizations that seeks to promote progressive tax reform, found that Walmart and the Walton family benefit from an estimated $7.8 billion in annual tax breaks, loopholes, and subsidies—much of which stems from the fact that so many of Walmart employees earn meager wages and are forced to rely on public assistance.

After years of worker organizing and public pressure, Walmart recently announced that it would raise its hourly wages to $9 an hour by April and $10 an hour by February 2016. While encouraging, such measures alone are unlikely to mitigate the economic hardship most Americans face—especially when, at this point, many cities are pushing for a minimum wage of $15 an hour.

Economic Inequality and Public Education

The evidence that shows impoverished kids are disadvantaged in school is well-documented—and yet many education reformers insist that despite this, we can still provide every child with a high-quality education so that everyone succeeds. We shouldn’t use poverty as “an excuse,” they say.

The idea that we can redesign education to be excellent and equitable without reducing poverty and economic inequality certainly sounds politically pleasant, but we know it’s just not true. That’s why the education agenda of the Walton Family Foundation has so many internal contradictions. The Waltons say they want to create more high-quality schools to help kids in poverty, but they back candidates who support eroding the already crumbling social safety net and fight against paying their fair share of taxes. And while the Waltons continue to advocate aggressively against unions, the Economic Policy Institute has found that the decline in unionization has mirrored the rise in inequality “to a remarkable extent.”

Not only does poverty hurt one’s chance for success in school, but growing levels of economic inequality also further exacerbate these issues—problems that the Walton heirs do not seem interested in addressing. Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon found that the rich-poor gap in test scores is about 40 percent larger now than it was 30 years ago—though the academic performance of poor students has not declined during this time. He also found that before 1980, affluent students had little advantage over middle-class students when it came to academic performance, but “the rich now outperform the middle class by as much as the middle class outperform the poor.” In other words, growing economic inequality has contributed to disparities in academic achievement across the board, even for those not living in poverty. Other researchers have found that the rich now have much greater access to extracurricular opportunities than the poor. In districts across the country, enrichment programs like art, music, journalism, and athletics are being cut—creating even greater divides between the haves and the have-nots in education.

If we want to reduce poverty and economic inequality—things we know hurt student achievement and life outcomes—then we have to address how the education aims of the Walton Family Foundation are incongruous with their political agenda elsewhere. Closing the achievement gap, as Demos analyst Matt Bruenig points out, will not even reduce poverty; it would merely change the distribution of it. In the education-reform world, unfortunately, grantees are unlikely to criticize foundations because they fear they will be blacklisted or de-funded. This makes sense, as there are incredible power imbalances in the philanthropic sector and money is scarce.

The Walton Family Foundation talks a lot about creating high-quality schools. If Walmart, with its billions of dollars in profits, created high-quality jobs with living wages and benefits, children would be far less likely to grow up in poverty and would perform far better in school. Relatedly, if the Waltons backed candidates who supported a more equitable distribution of wealth and stronger social-welfare policies, then children would be far less likely to grow up in poverty, and perform far better in school. It’s certainly true that every child deserves a high-quality education. How to get there, however, is not rocket science.