Andrew Coulson at Cato writes about his appearance on John Stossel’s special on problems with public education:

Tomorrow night at 8:00pm, Fox Business News will air a John Stossel special on the failures of state-run schooling and the merits of parental choice and competition in education. I make an appearance, as do Jeanne Allen and James Tooley.

Now, here’s the part that grabbed my attention:

News of the show is already making the rounds, and over at DemocraticUnderground.com, one poster is very upset about it, writing:

When will these TRAITORS stop trying to ruin this country?

HOW can AMERICANS be AGAINST public education?

Stossel is throwing out every right-wing argument possible in his namby pamby singsong way while he “interviews” a “panel” of people (who I suspect are plants) saying things like preschool is a waste of money and why invest in an already-failing system….

I hate Stossel and I hate all of those who think the way he does.

Now, the DU poster’s rhetoric is (what a shock) a little lot over the top.  But it’s not a whole lot different from the “if you’re not with the current public education system, exactly as it is (except a lot more money) then you’re against the children!” meme from the likes of MN2020, which ends up being something like “school choice is fine, unless it questions the current teachers union, adminstrative establishment and educational academy in any way, in which case it’s the same as sending six year olds directly to a homeless shelter”.

Coulson gets this:

What this poster–and many good people on the American left–have yet to grasp is that critics of state monopoly schooling are NOT against public education. On the contrary, it is our commitment to the ideals of public education that compels us to pursue them by the most effective means possible, and to abandon the system that has proven itself, over many many generations, incapable of fulfilling them.

Or to paraphrase that great sage Linda Richman; “What if public education doesn’t educate the public?  Discuss amongst yourselves”.

I’m getting farklemt.

Taking down MN2020 has become a higher-concept version of what fact-checking Nick Coleman used to be; a rhetorical gravy train for regional bloggers.

I was going to go after our old friend John Fitzgerald’s piece on the effect of state aid cuts on the Waseca school district; they switched from permanent plastic lunch trays to disposable styrofoam ones, cutting six dishwashing jobs in the school’s cafeterias.

Fortunately, Craig Westover beat me to it.

And it’s not pretty:

As a conservative I mourn the loss of the traditional plastic lunch tray, cast on the ash heap of history with the once-indispensible slide rule and the ubiquitous pink “While you were out …” phone pad. It’s always sad when great traditions, like having a class valedictorian, die. Don’t we all miss the songs of happy field hands harvesting crops in the dark of night before greedy farmers replaced migrant workers with mechanized equipment?

Indeed, that miserly attitude is precisely what is rearing its ugly head right in Waseca public schools, according to the ever-vigilant Fitzgerald.

Remember – according to John Fitzgerald, the main advantage of district schools is their “accountability”, via their elected boards.

So we finally get accountability – cost savings in tough times – and…what?

Sure, washing trays requires “personnel, chemicals, water, heat and electricity to run 100 loads a day. At the junior high, a three-sink system has replaced the electric dishwasher to hand wash pots, pans and miscellaneous utensils with a wash, rinse, sanitize procedure.”And OK, switching to #6 Styrofoam trays means no more paper boats or cups or wax paper sheets needed, making the total garbage output smaller. Even with throwing the trays away, there is one less sack of garbage each lunch at the junior high. But six people are going to lose their jobs.

Such drastic cuts – reducing expenses and cutting waste — would not be necessary, says Fitzgerald, had not state cut Waseca school funding by an inflation-adjusted 14 percent. Without those cuts, there’d be money in the budget for benevolent hiring. But noooo. Fiscal accountability has, in a district like Waseca, made cutting jobs to save $30,000 in the budget “a big deal.”

Of course, this isn’t for yuks:

OK, time to get serious, because a person losing his or her job is serious. But from Fitzgerald’s article it is clear that putting resources into the six specific jobs lost at Waseca was consuming more of society’s wealth than was being produced. Fitzgerald wants the moral high ground because he can point to six specific (probably low-income) people who lost their jobs, but the economic reality is because the school is providing the same lunch service at less cost more resources are available for more productive uses. Somewhere, albeit unseen, someone will have a job that otherwise might not exist. (Maybe even a diversity counselor.)

Producing more for less is always better for the overall economy. What Fitzgerald seems to be saying is it is too bad the Waseca schools weren’t flusher so they could continue to operate without having to worry about doing things more efficiently and effectively. It’s too bad the school district can’t do a little benevolent job creation at public expense. It’s too damn bad that wishes aren’t horses.

And we wonder why the government-run public education system has become a money pit?

More on this later this week.

I’ve taken my share of flak from public-school-uber-alles advocates for saying that the best way to resuscitate K-6 education is to abolish it.

“Certainly our public school systems can be revived”, they – “they” being people who usually don’t have kids in inner-city public school systems – protest, “rather than destroying them and starting over”.

Perhaps, in the sense that “perhaps I’ll be squiring Scarlett Johannson around town for Valentine’s Day”.  We have no evidence of this, of course; the performance of most large urban school districts is poor, and deteriorating, even as we pump more and more money into the systems.

With – as  Secretary of Education Arne Duncan notes – one huge exception.  As noted in this space in recent months, the New Orleans Public School system was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.  Already worse than most urban school districts in terms of performance, achievement gaps and graduation rates, the NOLA public schools were quite  literally blown away.

And Secretary Duncan has observed that that’s been a good thing:

ABC News’ Mary Bruce Reports: Education Secretary Arne Duncan said today that Hurricane Katrina was “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans” because it gave the city a chance to rebuild and improve its failing public schools.

In an interview to air this weekend on “Washington Watch with Roland Martin” Duncan said “that education system was a disaster. And it took Hurricane Katrina to wake up the community to say that we have to do better. And the progress that it made in four years since the hurricane, is unbelievable.”

The Education Department confirmed the quote to ABC and Duncan released the following statement in response: “As I heard repeatedly during my visits to New Orleans, for whatever reason, it took the devastating tragedy of the hurricane to wake up the community to demand more and expect better for their children.”

The American Educational/Industrial Complex (I credit the term to my friend, leftyblogger Erik Hare)  – the confluence of unions, administrator, bureaucrats and educational academics that are married to the current system – has got to be going to red alert over this statement – the first from a high-ranking Federal official that the best way to save public schools is to destroy the system and start over.

Especially since, as noted in this blog, one of the vital keys to this improvement seems to be the proliferation of charter schools in New Orleans.  Charter schools – schools chartered by the local district and operating with each student’s slice of the district’s tax money, but sponsored by an eduction-related entity and controlled by a site board directly accountable to the school’s parents and staff – are controversial; the educational-industrial complex desperately wants them eliminated, resorting to serial hatchet-jobbery in states like Minnesota, where the state government is controlled by a DFL (Democrat)-majority legislature more in bed with the Teachers’ Unions than Elliot Spitzer was with Ashley Duprè, despite the fact that when one compares apples with apples, charter schools perform better.

As they’re discovering in New Orleans, loud and clear enough that even a bureaucrat can figure it out.

This is actually a political post.  But you gotta be just a little patient.

Back in my senior year at college, I was sitting in the Philosophy “department” (my college had one philosophy prof; I was waiting for him in his office), reading one of the academic philosophy administration’s trade mags (sorta like Variety or Radio and Records, only advertising job trends for post-structuralists and help wanted ads for Nietscheans).  And I happened upon an article that explored a trend (or “trend”) of people applying to medical school with Bachelors’ in Philosophy (as well as, y’know, degrees in Chemistry and/or Biology, to boot).  The piece touched heavily on the worth of, and need for, doctors who could see beyond the numbers in the test results (as important as they are) to the larger values and ethics of the field.

And in twenty-odd years of dealing with doctors (mostly pediatricians), I’ve seen there’s some merit to this; while medicine is at its core a scientific field, most of them still have to not only deal with people, but with people who are frequently under immense stress, undergoing some of the most miserable traumas in their lives.  The best doctors do it very well; the worst are terrible.

The  Minnpost last week had a post on the subject:

Do you have the personality to be successful in medical school?

A recent study, co-authored by a University of Minnesota psychology professor, has found that certain personality traits may be a better predictor of success in medical school than MCAT scores — particularly during the latter years, when students are out interacting with real patients.

As medical students become “more involved with patients and applied work, personality becomes more and more relevant and predictive” of how well they do in their coursework, said Deniz Ones, professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota and one of the co-authors of the study. I talked with her about the study on Thursday.

In other words, the real predictors of success in medicine are not the grades a student gets in high school, college and med school, or the half-decade of test scores leading up to medical school. 

It’s the personality.

The study, which was published in the November issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology, looked at five personality traits (neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness), each with six different sub-traits.

The one trait that remained consistently important throughout the seven years of medical training was conscientiousness (competence, order, dutifulness, achievement striving, self-discipline, deliberation), said Ones.

“This is the dimension that is particularly found in education achievement because it’s related to effort and hard work,” she said. “It’s been shown to be related to college performance in other graduate settings as well.”

In medical school, however, conscientiousness became doubly important, said Ones, because attention and diligence is not only essential for good study habits, but also for diagnosing and treating patients.

But there’s a surprise; extroversion is the other apparently-dispositive trait for predicting success.

But another personality trait that showed up among successful medical students did surprise Ones and her colleagues: extroversion (warmth, gregariousness, assertiveness, activity, excitement-seeking, positive emotions).

“At the beginning of medical school, this trait was actually negatively related to performance,” said Ones. After all, extroverted students are more likely to spend their time socializing rather than hitting the medical texts.

“But over time, if they managed to hang on, this liability became an asset,” said Ones. “This is the dimension that allows them to talk to patients, to have an interest in them and care about them.”

Of course, we’ve all run into doctors who lacked any human-interaction skills whatsoever.  I’m willing to bet that the resident who presided over the early labor before my daughter’s birth, a dour Hindi woman with the people skills of the west end of an eastbound lawn mower, got really good grades in high school, college and med school.

“Most of education is geared toward the acquisition of knowledge and skills. That’s what MCAT assesses,” she said. That’s OK, she says, but, as this study and other research shows, how smart someone is often fails to predict how successful they’ll be at a specific profession — particularly one like medicine, which requires such strong people skills.

Of course, it goes well beyond doctors.

I read this study, and I’m reminded of the concentrated snootiness that the left – the “party of the people” – focuses on politicans who, for whatever reason, did things with their early lives other than playing the paper chase.  Sarah Palin’s an obvious example – and too current, really.  A much better one – Reagan.  Reagan was an adequate high school student, went to a very obscure college (Eureka), got further adequate grades…

…and pretty much ended his academic career. 

During Reagan’s political career, some razzed him for not having had a more distinguished academic career – as if he’d have done a better job of reviving the economy, restoring America’s mojo and peacefully toppling the Soviet Union if he’d started his adult life as an insufferable Ivy Leaguer.

Indeed – as the survey of medical students shows – he’s have likely not done nearly as well.

Think about it; the people who get into either medical school or the Ivy League based purely on their high school grades (let’s leave out legacy admissions for now) did so because they were among that thin film of high schoolers who were motivated from Junior High onward to do one thing; get grades.  Not develop social skills; not diversify their personalities; not develop all the soft skills that go along with having to deal with people and navigate real life.

What do you get with a doctor or a politician whose highest pre-adult achievement was getting straight A’s, thereby getting into top-ranked schools?  Someone whose entire formative experience is focused on the academic skills – reading, regurgitating facts on command, kissing ass – and who may or may not have the faintest interest in or empathy for you, the patient/voter.

And someone who may have put grades, if not in the back seat, at least in the shotgun position? 

Well, the article above explains the results with doctors.

So do you think things are different for everyone else in the real world?  Say, with the leader of the free world?

Saint Paul Schools officially have a superintendent:

The St. Paul school board on Tuesday unanimously approved a $180,000 salary and a three-year contract with its new district superintendent, Valeria Silva.

Silva, who most recently served as the district’s chief academic officer, was chosen over two other finalists after a five-month search for the job of overseeing the state’s second-largest school district.

“Chief Academic Officer?”

The Saint Paul Schools have among the worst achievement gaps of any major-city school in the country.  The graduation rate is hovering around 50%.  The minority graduation rate is much, much lower.

What exactly did  Ms. Silva do?

 The district has 38,000 students, 6,000 employees and an annual budget of more than $600 million.

Which means the actual budget is just south of $16,000.  Which is 50% more than a charter school student gets.

But here’s the part I love (emphasis added):

“Now I can get down to the work of leading St. Paul Public Schools for at least the next three years while we all continue our work of providing a premier education for every student,” Silva said.

Read another way: “I am now on the Celebrity Superintendent train!  Whooooooooo!  Three years ’til Denver!  Three more years I’ll be in Chicago!  All abooooooooooard!”

Nick Coleman, longtime disparager of blogs and “buh-LAW-gers”, is leaving comments on blogs.

Of course, it’s not like he’s venturing into dangerous territory; it’s only David Brauer’s  Braublog at MinnPost – an excellent blog, of course, even if overtly left-leaning and also a cruel joke on any German speakers who click in thinking they’re going to find a blog about beer.  It’s a safe place for Coleman, sorta – Brauer seems to be among the mass of news people who, for whatever reason, think Coleman is a fantastic, truth-to-power-speaking, afflicted-comforting-and-comfortable-afflicting gumshoe reporter with a (former) column.

Anyway – Nick’s working for a think tank these days.   I’m not sure what the job is, but as we noted a few months back, it seems to involve doing surface rewrites on MN2020 talking points.

As I noted in the most recent episode of my examination of Tony Kennedy’s Strib piece on charter school bonding, David Brauer’s been doing a decent, seemingly fairly dispassionate job of fact-checking the Strib’s assertions.

Coleman got involved in a comment thread at Braublog, opening with this bit here (emphasis added):

To avoid mention of [Twin Cities Federal Bank]’s top honcho Bill Cooper — who is a former chair of the MN GOP Party and still a player in conservative string-pulling strategies — in any discussion of charter school problems is difficult to do. But perhaps the better part of valor. Cooper’s “Friends of Education” sponsors 17 charter schools in Minnesota, including St Croix Prep. Seventeen!!??

Yep – seventeen.  Check them yourself.  They actually had eighteen, but they shut one of them down due to financial management issues.  If only public disticts and governments had that kind of integrity.

Cooper has become a walking argument for the case for a cap on the number of charter schools.

Coleman has a longstanding beef with Cooper – the whole story’s right here, here and here for those who care – tracing back to an incident in 2004 where the Strib got its knuckles rapped for defaming my friend and former NARN colleague, Power Line blogger Scott Johnson.  More on that later.

But I’m less interested in resurrecting blog history (even if it was a staggering blogging victory over the sclerotic mainstream media) than in poking at Coleman’s claim that Cooper’s schools are a “walking argument for the case for a cap on the number of charter schools”.

But charter schools are an areas where I, ahem, “know stuff”.

We’re going to take a head-to-head look at the competition between every Friends of Education school for which “No Child Left Behind” statistics exist (two of the school are too new to have them yet) and the public district in which they are located.

In the tables below, the columns mean the following:

• Took Math/Reading Test: Number of students in school or district that took the associated test.
• Math/Reading % Prof: Percent of students with “proficient” results.
• Low Income/Special Ed/ESL/Mobile:  The percent of students taking (respectively) the Math and Reading tests that were low-income, were receiving Special Education services, were English as a Second Language students, or had moved in the previous year.

Before we start, one observation:  In my three years’ experience in charter schools, I’ve noticed a few categories of students and parents who actually go to charters:

1. “Lifeboat Seekers“: Parents who are disgusted by their public school’s performance as a group.  These are the masses of Afro-American, Indian, Latino and immigrant parents who’ve observed the public schools’ dismal graduation rates, reprehensible achievement gaps and the contempt they feel for parents, and decided to move elsewhere.  They populate many of the inner-city charter schools, including the Friends of Education schools in Minneapolis and Saint Paul.
2. “Motivated Shoppers”: Parents who are motivated  by what they see as the low standards and factory mentality of huge public schools, and are looking for a better educational experience for their kids – smaller institutions, more-challenging or more-responsive curricula, more-motivated teachers and staff and any number of other factors.
3. “Damage Fixers”: Parents whose kids individually floundered in the public system for whatever reason, from difference in learning styles to frustration with bureaucracy to simply desperately seeking a school experience that works for their kids.  As I’ve noted, I’m one of those.

So let’s compare Friends of Education schools with district schools, one by one.

Our first stop is Columbia Heights, with the Academy of BioScience:

This is an odd example; while the Academy of BioScience’s results are mixed compared to the district (better at reading, a little lower at math), it’s interesting to note that the Columbia Heights district’s numbers are so bad even for a first-tier suburb. Many of the school’s families are “lifeboat seekers”, looking for a better experience for their kids.

BioScience is a fairly new school; it’ll be interesting to see what the next few years bring.

Now, Plymouth – where Beacon Academy and the Beacon Prep school square off against the long-troubled District 281, a very large district covering Robbinsdale, New Hope and Plymouth

The Beacon schools get fantastic results – considerably higher than the local district.  The low-income numbers are lower than the district as a whole, but not dramatically so.  The Beacon schools attract the “Motivated Shoppers”; middle-class families of all ethnicities who are looking for a better school experience than the big-box warehouse schools give them; the numbers show they succeed.

Next, Anoka, where Cygnus Academy goes up against the state’s third-largest district, Anoka/Hennepin:

Cygnus’ numbers are significantly lower than that of its district.  But look at the Special Ed and “Mobile” numbers; Cygnus is a middle school that attracts kids who have trouble in the public system, the kids that the public system has trouble reaching.  The kids who’d be shunted into an “Alternative Learning Center” in the big districts, mostly to get them off the books – and then forgotten about.  It’s a small school, that catches difficult kids at a very difficult time in their lives; comparisons are difficult.

But Cygnus also points out why so many parents across demographic lines are as fanatical about school choice as they are.  One statistic that is not available anywhere is “how do charter school kids individually do over time?”  It’d be interesting to follow Cygnus’ kids’ individual arcs.  If only we had a media that could tackle a job like that…

Next, Eden Prairie.  Eagle Ridge Academy – a pseudo-Catholic school that, in the interest of full disclosure, I’ll note is a former advertiser on my radio station, AM1280 –  caters to the “Motivated Shoppers”:

Eagle Ridge’s scores are about even with Eden Prairie – ostensibly one of the best districts in the state.  It also includes quite a few students who’ve had trouble in other districts (this I know from personal conversations with Eagle Ridge parents).  Of course, not everyone at Eagle Ridge is actually from Eden Prairie; it’s the destination for many “motivated shopper” families from many other districts – which is true for many, many charters.     I have no stats on Eagle Ridge’s “footprint”; my kids’ Saint Paul charters (none of them affiliated with “Friends of Education”) draw students from Forest Lake, Prior Lake and Hastings; Eagle Ridge, with its excellent academic reputation, is likely at least as widely popular.

Now, into the city of Minneapolis – where three Friends of Education charters face off against the state’s largest district.

The other charters have numbers that are broadly similar to the district at large (Long Tieng, a brand-new H’mong-centered school, had only one student of age to be tested this past year, so it’s a bit of an outlier).

But check out the poverty and ESL numbers – they’re sharply higher than in the public distsrict.  These are lifeboat schools;  reading between the lines of New Millenium and Long Tieng’s mission statement, they deal with a lot of H’Mong kids who’ve slipped between the public system’s cracks which, for minority kids, are often yawning chasms; it’s replete with education-speak references to kids in gangs; these are the schools that parents go to because the public system has failed them completely.  Minneapolis Academy is a “back to basics” institution drawing motivated parents who want a better, higher-content learning experience than the Minneapolis public schools offer, one less likely to shunt their kids down through the cracks that swallow so many “urban youth”.

Next, Saint Paul.  Saint Paul is already crowded with charter schools, many of them focusing quite capably on “lifeboat seeker” and “damage fixer” families; there are large, excellent charters serving H’Mong, African-American and Latino families.

Friends of Education’s two charters in Saint Paul cater to the motivated shoppers, and the numbers show it:

The performance numbers at Nova – a traditional/”classics” school – and Yinghua, a Chinese-language-immersion charter school – are spectacular.  Now, I can see a pro-public school demigogue jumping on the fairly low low-income and special ed numbers as a sign of discrimination – it’s a meme among charter school detractors that charters can pick and choose their students, which happens to be untrue.  Many Saint Paul charter schools, and schools in the immediate area, like Tariq Ibn-Ziyad and General Vessey, two very different non-FoE schools in the south ‘burbs that have very different models but cater to many inner-city parents, cater to the “lifeboat” and “damage repair” families (I can recommend some excellent ones from personal experience).  And the huge low-income numbers in the Saint Paul schools are at least partly a result of all the parents that have either pulled their kids out of the district (to charter, parochial, private and suburban schools), or moved their families out completely.  Saint Paul’s district is intensely dysfunctional.

It’s also a fact that Nova and Yinghua offer programs that are a bit outside the mainstream; Nova‘s program is rigorously classical, focusing on grammar, logic and rhetoric; Yinghua is a chinese-immersion program.  They cater almost by definition to the “discerning shopper”.

And what’s wrong with that?  We have a problem with choosing academic success?

Next, Rosemount/Apple Valley/Eagan:

The big public district is one of the better ones in the metro; Paideia Academy’s test scores don’t differ significantly.

Friends of Education has a school in Saint Cloud:

STRIDE Academy is as stark an example as I can find of the effect of a small, motivated educational community on a charter school; while STRIDE’s low-income numbers are sharply higher than the St. Cloud public district, the achievement numbers are sharply better.

Next, Bloomington:

Seven Hills beats Bloomington.  Now, the now-income numbers are lower; a “classics” education (see Nova, above) is a hard sell for a lot of mainstream parents.  But the next time you see some charter-school opponent saying “charter schools can pick and choose their kids”, ask them for proof.  Watch them squirm.

More or less the same holds true in Stillwater:

Again – St. Croix prevails over one of the state’s higher-scoring, best-regarded public districts.

“But there’s no comparing the numbers!”, the charter opponents will holler.  That’s true; that’s part of the point.  While there may or may not be a link between class size and achievement, there almost certainly is with school size.  A school where the principal knows all the students is going to be a lot harder to get lost in that one where the principle hides from the student body behind armored doors, and the superintendent has a driver to whisk her between meetings.

Coleman takes a whack at Cooper, whose mission at Friends of Education is to foster experimentation:

He isn’t “experimenting.” He’s building a rival education system, at taxpayer expense, that is draining resources from traditional public school districts…

Yes, it’s a rival system.  And by any rational measure, the rival does a better job, certainly with a population with whom the public system is failing.

And it’s “draining resources”, to an extent – but it’s also draining students.  And it’s draining students much faster than resources; charter students get about $10,000 a year, and no local public bonding.  Now – divide the budget at the Saint Paul Public Schools by the number of students:  a $500,000,000 budget divided by 38,000 comes to about $13,000 per student.  The public districts hypothetically profit $3,000 for every student they lose to a chater…

…and pushing a conservative “values” agenda that closely mimics his own conservative Catholic beliefs.

And it works.

Need we say more?

Avoiding mention of him is like avoiding the 800-pound gorilla at the tea party. You don’t want to piss him off. I know: Cooper canceled a TCF advertising contract at the STRIB a few years back when he was displeased by a column I wrote…

Right.  Nick Coleman’s a victim, doncha know.

But I don’t want to get back into that; I’ve had my fun with Coleman, and frankly charter schools are more important to my family and I than any of Coleman’s agenda-driven prattle.

But when Coleman, and the “think” tanks he parrots, say “Bill Cooper is a case study in the need to cap the number of charter schools”, you are now equipped to respond “no – he’s a case study in the need to abolish the public system and go all-charter”.

 As I was digging in for a long bout of reporting to dig into some of the numbers behind Tony Kennedy’s piece in the Strib last week, I noticed that David Brauer at the MinnPost had already done the job.  Read the whole thing; it finds, as I’ve always found in digging through think tank material on charter schools, that there is a lot of carefully-jiggered context and punctiliously-selected facts.

One example:  the Strib piece trumpeted a “3600 percent increase in lease aid”.  Brauer added a helpful bit of context (and I’ll add some emphasis):

Given the front-page headline (“Junk bonds fuel a building spree …”), readers could be forgiven for assuming that charter construction was the big factor behind lease aid soaring 3600 percent in 15 years.

But the building boom had little to do with the spending boom. Here’s what did:

“Charter lease aid sees fast rise in use” because charter enrollment is rising fast. Since 2004, lease aid has been capped at $1,200 per pupil unit. (The state weights pupils based on their grade level; kindergarteners lower, high schoolers higher.)

Though a few schools are grandfathered in at a higher amount, the $1,200 cap hasn’t budged since ‘04, and you can see the impact on average per-pupil aid:

Unfortunately, when it comes to owning infrastructure, “economy of scale” becomes an issue.  It’s one of the reasons that the big public school districts have consolidated rural schools and abandoned neighborhood schools in the cities; it’s cheaper, in some ways, to run one building for 1,200 students than six buildings for 200.  As the administrative overburden on schools increases, there’s been an inexorable push to centralize more schools, build more, bigger buildings…

…which, I maintain, has been a huge problem for public education.  While the link between large classroom sizes and academic performance is arguable at best, I strongly suspect (but am unaware of any hard data at the moment) that big schools breed huge problems.  The anonymity of huge schools (like Saint Paul’s Central High, with around 2,000 students) makes it easy for a student to get lost in the shuffle, to feel disconnected and uprooted (I’m writing from the experiences of at least one of my children, here). 

One of the programs that public school supporters constantly bring up in support of public schools is the “International Baccalaureate” (IB) program.  IB programs do indeed get good results.  Part of it is that they focus their efforts on the kids who do excel at the “sit your butt in the chair, do what you’re told when you’re told to do it, and spend your evenings doing homework” model of education.  Not everyone works well in that kind of system – I’d have floundered – but the other key factor is IB programs are smaller.  At Central, the IB is a “school within a school”; all the staff know all the kids, and vice versa; it’s the rough equivalent of a smaller neighborhood school, substituting an intellectual “neighborhood” (the “elite” nature of the IB student base) for a traditional neighborhood. 

Which is one of the beauties of the charter system; when my ex-wife and I pulled our kids out of the Saint Paul schools, they ended up at charter schools with less than 200 kids each.  All the staff knew all the kids, and most of the parents; the parents largely got to know each other and many of the kids.  Most importantly, the kids felt they belonged to a larger group – something kids seek out instinctively. 

They certainly seek it out at the big factory-model schools; if the school or an athletic team or a church group doesn’t provide it, they’ll find it in the form of “the wrong crowd”; gangs, or whatever social circle is convenient; in a huge school, which is almost purpose-designed to alienate kids who don’t get with the program, there are plenty of alienated, disaffected, “dropped-through-the-cracks” kids to fall in with.

After dealing with that, a charter school was a blessed respite of sanity.

So when a school opts to try to build itself a permanent home base, through the thin loophole allowed in state law, by affiliating with a construction company, several things happen.

1.  The school floats a bond issue.  Since the bonds are for a small organization, they are not rated by Moody 0r Standard and Poor – hence, they’re called “Junk Bonds”.
2. Being “Junk” bonds, and because a charter school can’t pass a tax levy to make the payments, the interest rates are higher. 
3. Since the interest rates are higher, there’s an imperative to get more revenue through the door, to buff up the cash flow. Since “lease aid” is capped at $1,200 per student per year, that means that to have enough revenue to both build the buiding and service the debt, they’ll need to get more students into the building, to get more of those $1,200 allotments.

Which drives up class sizes.

To lure the investors they need for new buildings, some educators are abandoning the intimate campuses their founders envisioned and are building large schools that look more like the conventional institutions that some families are fleeing. Some charter school advocates say the build-your-own trend could undermine an education movement built on small class size and parental involvement.

“It destroys the intent and initial purpose behind all of it,” said Paul Simone, director of the Math and Science Academy charter school in Woodbury, a National Blue Ribbon award winner under the No Child Left Behind Act.

But the problem isn’t “the charter school movement”.  The problem is the laws under which charter schools have to operate.  They are public schools in every way except their individual “corporate” governance; they use public money, but are controlled by a site-elected board. 

But when it comes to real estate, they are hamstrung by the unintended consequences of a law that not only puts them at a big economic disadvantage to public schools, but to private and parochial schools as well.  Public schools, being big public entities backed by big taxing authority, can float bonds at very advantageous rates; parochial schools operate with the tax advantages, as well as demographic strengths (and weaknesses) of a faith community; private schools can charge whatever tuition the market will bear, are less restricted in terms of fundraising, and the big ones can build endowments.

So why not allow charters to piggyback onto public bond issues, to build their buildings at the vastly lower interest rates that this would allow? 

Or why not allow charter schools to lease vacated public school buildings from their local districts?  Policies on this vary from district to district; some allow it, others don’t.

Why not, indeed?

For purposes of the Strib’s “investigation”, and the non-profits like MN2020 who have charter schools in their crosshairs, it’s because the goal isn’t to make charter schools viable; it’s to kill them off.

Friday: Coincidental similarities?

Tony Kennedy, writing in the Strib last week, addresses the latest charter school “crisis”:

Minnesota’s charter school movement, which sparked a national rethinking of public schooling nearly two decades ago, has been infected by an out-of-control financing system fueled by junk bonds, insider fees and lax oversight.

“Out of control”.

Interesting bit of hyperbole, there.  One might almost say it’s “unjournalistic”.

The vast majority of Minnesota’s charter schools putter away, doing their workadaddy hugamommy job of teaching kids, in rented quarters around the state.

Given the cost of rental property, especially in the Metro area, many charter schools gravitate toward low-rent warehouse, industrial and “incubator” space.  The western part of the Midway – full of low-rent office and warehouse buildings – is home to many charter schools; half a dozen are clustered within a few blocks of Fairview and University.  The rental space is affordable and up to code, generally – although if you’re used to public school spaces, to say nothing of showcases like Saint Paul’s Arlington High School, it’ll feel like you’re at a school set up in the garage.

And so some charter schools look for a home of their own, if you will, for reasons not a whole lot different than renters become homeowners; to have a secure home base; to be able to plan without the wacky exigencies of leasing; to have a “home”.

So some charter schools have found a way to own their own buildings.

It took some doing, of course – because state law forbids it, at least directly:

State law prohibits charter schools from owning property, but consultants have found a legal loophole, allowing proponents to use millions of dollars in public money to build schools even though the properties remain in the hands of private nonprofit corporations.

That’s one of those “tomayto-tomahto” things.  Another way to phrase it – arguably more fair and accurate – would be “state law prohibits charter schools from owning property, but they have found a legal loophole, allowing proponents to, in effect, rent their own schools from shadow corporations they set up to build and operate the property”.

The key to making it all work is the state’s lease aid program, which was created 11 years ago to help spur competition in public education by offering rental assistance to groups promoting alternatives to district schools. In the beginning, many charters were located in dumpy strip malls and received no real-estate grants.

But the once-obscure program has snowballed into one of the fastest growing expenses in the state, with building projects receiving little of the vetting that typically accompanies other public works.

It works like this:  the charter school’s governing board starts or affiliates with a company that, on the one hand, supervises construction and, on the other hand, floats a bond issue to pay for the building. 

Now, when a public body – say, the City of Minneapolis – floats a bond issue, they go into it with a certain amount of collateral; the city owns snowplows, artistic drinking fountains, computers, police cars, City Hall and other things that can be hocked to make the payments on the bond.  More importantly, they have taxing authority, meaning that if things get tight they can jack up taxes to make sure the payments get made. 

Big corporations, likewise, have collateral to put up against bonds they might float.  Not “taxes” per se, which is why corporate bonds are a little less popular and secure – a lot less secure in the case of, say, General Motors, after the Obama administration overturned contract law to make sure the unions got paid ahead of bondholders. 

But I digress.

Now, if you’re a tiny little entity – say, a barber shop – you can float a bond issue, presuming you jump through a few legal hoops.  Of course, most people won’t invest in your bond, since you have no collateral other than a Barbasol jar and some chairs, and you can’t raise taxes.  But entities somewhere in between the barber shop and GM can float bonds.  They have less revenue and fewer assets than Fortune 500 corporations; they have more than the corner barber shop; they can’t raise taxes on anyone.  So the bonds are a little, maybe a lot, secure an investment than a municipal or big-corporate bond.  Hence bond buyers expect more interest.

Now, the problem is that since the eighties, and the Michael Milken scandal (which, in those innocent days before Enron and Bernie Madoff, was considered a big scam), these bonds have had a name; a very pejorative name.  A name that the media uses for them as a sort of shorthand – perhaps not understading what it means, or perhaps understanding it perfectly but shooting for that whiff of pejoration that they need to sell the papers (and, perhaps, fulfill the mission that the story’s sources intended fulfilled):

In the past decade, 18 charter schools have been built with $178 million in junk bonds, with financing costs on some projects chewing up nearly a quarter of the funds raised. Twelve more charter schools have taken steps to buy or build facilities, and the state projects annual spending on lease aid to reach $54 million in 2013, up from just $1.1 million in 1998.

“Junk bonds”. 

The technical definitino of “junk bond” is a bond that isn’t rated by any of the big ratings services – Moody’s or Standard and Poor.   It doesn’t mean – to someone in the bond business – that a bond is bad, or good for that matter; merely that it’s un-rated.  Of course, rated bonds are generally considered safer than unrated ones – which is why the unrated, “junk” bonds have to pay higher interest. 

In a sense, “Junk Bonds” are no different than subprime mortgages; they are a way for a group that can’t ordinarily float a bond issue to get financing; the interest is higher and the terms are worse than the more-secure bonds – municipals and the like – but that’s how the market deals with getting financing to less credit-worthy people and organizations.  The only major difference is that nobody is requiring the Federal Government to pay for “junk” bonds that default.

But to “the American street”, the term “Junk Bond” has a corrosive connotation.  Now, I’m not sure if the Strib’s Tony Kennedy knew this – but I’m going to suggest that whomever his “sources” are on this story do. 

It’s not only unwarranted, but it paints charter schools with a brush that slops plenty of paint over onto regular schools, transit districts, water and soil commissions, and municipal governmetns.  Joe from Como Park – a person with considerable in-depth professional knowledge of how local government and bonding works, and who wrote to me under an assurance of anonymity – emailed me about the article:

…look at any small-town municipal bond for a fire station or sewer plant or for that matter, any school district building bond.  Local governments routinely pay hefty fees to financial consultants to help them with the bond process, people like the Ehlers firm mentioned [in the Kennedy article].  Bond financing is a highly regulated jungle of red tape and the people who know how to navigate it are worth their hire.  Criticizing charter schools for paying the same sort of consultant fees that school districts routinely pay for the same services is sheer gall.

People who know how bonds work, know that.  Most of Kennedy’s audience are, unfortunately, not part of that particular “in” crowd.

So why the concern?  Besides the money I mean?

Well, here’s one reason:

State lawmakers are frustrated by the building boom. Since 2000, at least 64 public school buildings in the metro area closed because of declining enrollment. Charter schools are responsible for recruiting away some of those students.

Voila; it’s the competition.  Charter schools are an example of “school choice”; parents are choosing; the district systems are losing.  The establishment sees that parents are fleeing; their response is to try to put a bookhself in front of the escape hatch.

“When district schools are closing, should we allow charter schools to build new buildings?” said Rep. Jim Abeler, R-Anoka, who was cleared in 2001 of legislative ethics charges for voting to boost lease aid even though he personally received the funds from a charter school he helped start. “These are being built with 100 percent state moneys, but who is minding the store on using that money well?”

More importantly, and disturbingly, Abeler was one of two members of the “Override Six” cleared by voters for voting to overturn Governor Pawlenty’s Tax Bill veto.  I don’t know Rep. Abeler’s voting record as re charter schools, but I’m going to guess from his statement above that he’s doing his best to stay nice ‘n tight with the Minnesota Federation of Teachers (please correct me if I’m in error). 

“Out Of Control” and “Junk Bonds”; that’s two inflammatory, almost disinformatory terms used so far to describe the charter school building boom in this piece.  Why not go for the trifecta?

Jim Markoe, a board member of both St. Croix Prep and the building company, said the insider payments were cleared by bond lawyers involved in the deal.

“Everybody has done everything morally, ethically and legally, and I’ll stand by that until the day I die,” Markoe said.

Sen. Kathy Saltzman, D-Woodbury, chair of the Minnesota Senate Subcommittee on Charter Schools, said lawmakers had no idea charter school insiders were taking such large fees on building projects.

“If they have enough lease aid to do bond deals that pay salaries or one-time bonuses to insiders, obviously they are getting more lease aid than they need,” Saltzman said.

“Insiders”.

It has such ugly connotations these days.  It was “insiders” that brought us the Savings and Loan collapse, the Enron debacle, the “backdating” scandal at local corporate giant United HealthGroup, and on, and on.

And the fees involved?  Issuing bonds is complex – as complex as a hundred mortgage closings all in one deal.  Attaching assets, taxes and collateral to what amounts to an otherwise-unsecured IOU – which is basically what a bond is, whether it’s issued by the United States Treasury or Kickapoo Creative Arts Charter and Construction – takes some fairly critical, and rare, expertise, both financial and legal.   Like getting a smooth house closing, or sueing a corporation, it’s not something that can be left to chance, or amateurs; professionals cost money.

On Wednesday, we’ll finish going through Mr. Kennedy’s piece.

And on Friday, we’ll take the concept of  “insider” a step further, and try to discuss Mr. Kennedy’s sources for this story, and their motivations.

One of the basic rules one must always follow when dealing with government is this: anything government does, for whatever reason, will have unintended consequences.  These consequences will pretty much always be as bad as or worse than whatever problem the original action was supposed to rectify.

When Minnesota legalized “charter schools” – publicly-funded schools run by site-elected boards rather than the city/district board, under a “charter” from the district – they barred charter schools from using district money directly to buy school buildings.  The stated reason was to keep charters out of the real estate business. 

The consequence was that charter schools had to rent space.  And in a busy real estate market (like the Twin Cities were) or in a small town (especially like the many Indian reservation charter schools), it can be hard to find a space that’s suitable, or even up to code, to use as a school space for 50-300 or more kids. The state provides, as part of each charter student’s funding allotment, a certain amount ($1,200/year) of “lease assistance” – which is in fact part of the roughly $10-11,000 per student that charters receive in the Metro.

Regular “district” public schools get a huge advantage in this area; they can use public bonding and tax levies to build their buildings.   While both involve the inconvenience of having to convince voters and/or governmental bodies to float the bonds, once that’s done the schools have it fairly easy; having a big school district or city behind your bonds makes bonding a relatively inexpensive proposition – or at least gives the district plenty of size and time to hide and amortize the costs.

But charter schools aren’t allowed to use public funds to buy buildings.  Being relatively tiny entities, they aren’t usually big enough to float any kind of meaningful bond issue themselves.  But there’s a loophole; a charter school can found or affiliate with a separate construction company, which can float bonds and build a building for the school.  Many schools are doing exactly this, including at least one Saint Paul charter.

But since the schools and their affiliated companies are small, their bonds aren’t backed with the kind of infrastructure and collateral that support bonds for cities, counties and school districts.  A

The DFL establishment in Minnesota – and few things in Minnesota are more “establishment” than the Minnesota Federation of Teachers – hate charter schools.  Via their proxies in various “think tanks” like MN2020, they’ve been trying to cap and, eventually, kill charter schools for quite some time.  Last summer, I joined with a number of charter school advocates to flense a MN2020 “report” that grossly distorted a series of Department of Education findings about Charter school accounting practicices – but the endless drip-drip-drip continues.

 Via Speed Gibson, the Strib’ s Tony Kennedy wrote a piece earlier this week exposing issues with the practice of issuing “Junk Bonds”.  It covers the facts, more or less, while missing a much larger subtext.

And while I started out doing a garden-variety fisking, this is actually a much bigger story than that – and needs more than one impossibly-long blog post to cover. 

So I’m going to address the article – and, no doubt, the political motives behind the article – in one of my patented several-part series, starting Monday.

Last week, I wrote about the U of M Department of Education’s plan to screen Education majors – aka “future teachers” – for political purity.

I was going to write a detailed fisking last week, but as expected, FIRE – America’s foremost academic freedom group – beat me to it.

I’m excerpting pretty lightly – it’s a big article, but an excellent read:

The college promises that it will begin using “predictive criteria” to make sure that future teachers will be able to develop an acceptable level of “cultural competence”-apparently, those who do not pass the political litmus test and seem too set in their beliefs will never get admitted. This is far worse than what Columbia Teachers College does with its own “dispositions” requirement, and far in excess of what the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) has ever mandated.

Fortunately, there is still time for the college to change course. A new set of “Phase II” task groups was established in October 2009 for the purpose of “moving forward on structural dimensions” of the plan. This year’s applicants are already being warned about the possible changes, but the new “[d]ispositions assessment” is not scheduled to occur until next summer.

It gets better:

Here’s the kicker: The college even realizes that its efforts to impose such a severe ideological litmus test may be unconstitutional. Here’s the plan for summer 2010:

Dispositions assessment for new candidates approved (includes consultation with UMN general council) [sic]

Indeed, the university’s general counsel ought to be weighing in really soon. If the Race, Culture, Class, and Gender Task Group gets what it wants, the result will be political and ideological screening of applicants, remedial re-education for those with the wrong views and values, and withholding of degrees from those who fail to comply.

FIRE is sending a letter to the U’s administration.

FIRE is deeply concerned about new policies at University of Minnesota-Twin Cities proposed by the College of Education and Human Development. According to documents published by the college (see http://blog.lib.umn.edu/cehd/teri), it intends to mandate certain beliefs and values-”dispositions”-for future teachers. The college also intends to redesign its admissions process so that it screens out people with the “wrong” beliefs and values-those who either do not have sufficient “cultural competence” or those who the college judges will not be able to be converted to the “correct” beliefs and values even after remedial re-education. These intentions violate the freedom of conscience of the university’s students. As a public university bound by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, the university is both legally and morally obligated to uphold this fundamental right.

This is going to get interesting.

This is a piece I originally published in April of 2005.  Some minor updates and copy-edits have been added.

———-

When I hear blowhards like Nick Coleman ranting about how Republicans want to “abolish the public school system”, I get a chuckle. I grew up in the public schools – Dad was a high school teacher, and a great one. As far as conservatives go, I was long in the “we can fix the public schools” camp.

Of course, a huge percentage of the biggest proponents of mandatory public school for all – Coleman, Jay Benanav, Clinton, and on, and on – are either private school products or have their children in private schools.

As my kids wended through the school system – and, finally, are getting toward the end of it all – I got more depressed every year with the way schools in general – but especially the public schools – do their job.

In Saint Paul, the budget breaks down to over $17,000 per student – but there’s never enough money.  The graduation rates are lower than Chris Coleman’s tax increases, but there’s still not a crisis.  The achievement gap is the worst in the nation, but the schools still noodle around with unfunded PC mandates more than they actually bother with teaching.  Parents are leaving the public school system faster than a Vanilla Ice Fan Club reunion, but the only solution the ruling Democrats can think of is to gut school choice options.

And at the end of the day, our kids aren’t getting an education.

There’s an obvious, and I suspect workable, solution out there. It’s inexpensive, and, best of all, tens of thousands of years of human experience shows that it works.

Let’s abolish elementary school.

The more I watch schools, and the more I read about the history of the public schools and the assumptions on which they are built, the more convinced I am that elementary school in particular does more harm than good. I’m talking specifically about the “Sit your little butt in the chair for six hours a day and learn what we grownups tell you to learn” model of education.

Let’s be blunt; Elementary School is a bad idea for several reasons.

• It’s unnatural
• It turns everything about human psychology on its head.
• It’s unamerican.

Let’s start at the top.

———-

Let me throw out a couple of parallel ideas here:

• Language is one of the most complex functions of the human brain. It involves a level of logic that the most powerful computers are only able to ape in the most comical fashion. Next to learning language, things like the scientific method, critical thinking and logic are child’s play, so to speak. And yet nearly every child in the world is functionally fluent in at least one language by age five, with no more help than mere untrained, uncredentialled parents, family members and friends to help. Indeed, when my son was in Kindergarten I sat, agog, as I watched a five year old H’mong classmate of his at a parent-teacher conference, interpreting the conversation between his parents and his teacher.  Fluently.  Without the aid of a “H’mong as a first language” class of any kind. 
• Barring profound mental and physical problems, it’s nearly impossible to keep a kid from learning languages, to say nothing of every other thing that they can get their little fingers on. Reading? Pffft. Nothing to it, in comparison; it’s just assigning symbols to the sounds that the child has already learned to associate with the ideas that their little brains have been busy compiling since shortly after birth. You have to wonder – if kids do that well with something as wondrously, gloriously, impenetrably complex as language with mere parents, siblings, extended family and playmates to help them, imagine how well they would do if they had experts with PhDs in cognitive development to help them…!
• …like they do with reading, for example. How is it that the same kids who learn one of the most complex cognitive processes known to mankind with almost no difficulty then toddle off to school and spend the next six, even twelve, years struggling and often failing the relatively simple tasks of reading, writing, adding, subtracting and simple arithmetic?

Imagine if your children were taught (by force of law, mind you!) to speak by professionals, rather than the way they’ve learned to speak for all of human time; imagine, further, that they were taught speech the same way they’re taught reading, math and history, by being herded into a room, plunked at a table, told to LEARN SPEECH NOW and don’t you dare go to the bathroom without raising your hand and getting a travel slip first. What’d happen? We’d have a boom market in speech pathology professionals, national concern about “why Johnny can’t speak”, academic programs dedicated to special speech problems, and demands for more money to solve our nation’s speech education crisis.

 Absurd, right? And yet that’s exactly where we are now.

Kids below age 12 would be better off out of school than in it. Note that this has nothing to do with the classic “school problems”, or with “problem schools”.  Even if you leave drugs, crime, and all the other highly-publicized dangers of our time out of the picture (and if you live in the inner city, you know that you can’t), and assume that all teachers are literate, caring, inspired practicioners of a noble craft, and that all administrators are boundlessly capable and unfettered by the pinheaded impedimenta of a system that, like all systems, is more concerned with self-perpetuation than mission.

Question: Where is the scientifically-valid evidence that a child who sits through six years in a classroom is any better “educated” than a child who spends six years just being a kid, learning what he or she needs, learning responsibility and reading and manners and math the way kids always have – by doing?

Start looking. I’ll help you out. There really is none.

I have a few friends and acquaintances who are involved in various alternative school systems; Sudbury, Waldorf, Montessori – and more that homeschool their kids. The literature on the Sudbury system – which, essentially, lets kids learn whatever their curiosity drives them to learn, coupled with a strong dose of individual responsibility for maintaining their obligations to others – is fascinating. Nobody tells the children at a Sudbury school “now is the time we learn to read” – and yet they all do. Nobody says “You will all learn math” – but when they decide they want to learn it, they frequently learn the math that takes kids six years in a classroom, in a matter of weeks.

My homeschooling friends tell the same story; if they leave the door open for their kids’ own fascination to drive them to learn…whatever, it will not only get learned, but learned at a pace that dazzles the parents, most of whom came up through the traditional public system.

———-

So what’s wrong with school?

What could be wrong with an institution that:

• Strictly breaks up the day into learning time and play time, conditioning a child to know, forevermore, that learning is drudgery. The message to the kids is crystal clear; unlike all the learning they’d done so far in life – learning how to talk with Mom and Dad, learning how to stack blocks with big sister, learning how to walk and throw and joke and climb, this sucks!
• Imposing an external schedule on learning. Rather than letting them follow their own rhythms and attention spans – which happen to be the ones they actually learn by – we force kids to cut short the stuff that actually benefits them, and then jam their little butts into seats, pretty much arbitrarily, to shift gears and do something completely different. We try to set student’s mental agendas for them, telling them the subjects they “should” care about, regardless of what interests them, and when, and where.  And for some students, that works, to be sure; some naturally take to that kind of education; others learn to go along and get along.  Others never do.
• Setting arbitrary standards that mean nothing to students (and, judged empirically, mean even less to grownups). 
• Plop a kid into a system where they’re at the bottom of a complex, arbitrary hierarchy – teacher’s aide, teacher, principal, union, superintendant, school board – with them, all pretty talk aside, way down at the bottom of the pile. If you have to go to the bathroom, you have to ask permission. You stand in long lines for food, water, the rest room, recess, field trips, to see the nurse, the principal, to get out of the f*****g building after the whole miserable day is over! You move when the bell tells you to move; you sit when the bell tells you to sit; you repeat the process for twelve years, like an assembly line – only you’re the product, with the unionized factory workers bolting on little bits of knowledge at pre-programmed points on the line, regardless of whether that’s where your brain is at the moment.   And if you, the child, don’t feel like keeping your twitchy seven-year-old butt in that hard friggin’ chair, you get labelled “ADHD” or “special ed”. And you’d damn well better show up, or have an excuse that’s acceptable to that arbitrary and unreasoning authority, or you will be shunted into the “bad kid” track, and even into the fascistic, niggling cousin of the criminal justice system, which will make damn sure you keep your ass in that chair, at the risk of criminalizing yourself and your parents. If such a system were applied to adults, they’d call it prison. If it were a nation, it’d be North Korea. If it were an employer, every TV station in town would be bum-rushing the place with hidden cameras. And yet that’s where we send our kids.
• You are a part of a group; you travel with the group, stand on line with the group whenever you leave your chair, are punished and rewarded as a part of the group, until such time as you learn to play the paper chase game well enough for the system to reward you – not so much for your learning, as for learning to play the system to your benefit. Those kids will go far. For the rest? Labels, concerned shrugs, and eventually a resigned sigh; “they fell through the cracks, even though they had so much potential.  If only they’d have colored inside the lines”.
• Your education is separated from your “real life”. Even some of your crustier elders, in unguarded moments, will say it in as many words; “Wait’ll you get out in the real world”. School is totally unreal; the experiences and knowledge are all diluted through external filters; textbooks, teachers, state-approved curricula. The economics are diluted; it’s “Free”, so the children get no sense of the opportunity cost that goes into their education, nor of their responsibility toward those paying the cost (qualifying them to be DFL legislators, anyway).
• Worse, the kids’ lives – and the lives of their families – are geared toward the rhythm the institution demands; up at 6:30, to school by 8, keep your hyperactive little ass in the chair until 3 with a couple of dingy, pre-approved breaks (if you behave, and if your school hasn’t been swept up in the “no recess” bandwagon), get dinner eaten by 6, do two hours of homework, be in bed by 9AM to repeat the process the next day, ad infinitum, for 12 years. There’s a meteor shower or an Aurora Borealis late at night? Don’t wake the kids, for crying out loud, they’ll be tired for their spelling test!
• Which might be worthwhile, if there were any validity to the idea that it does kids any more good than the alternative – no school at all.

The question shouldn’t be “what’s wrong with the system”. It ought to be “what’s right?”

———-

Let’s go back to the “North Korea” bit.

When De Tocqueville came to the US in the early part of the 19th century, he found a population that was staggeringly literate by world standards. What was the “system?” There was none. People learned to read, write, do math, and function in society by any means necessary – at church, at community schools, from neighbors or siblings, or any way they could. They did it because, to participate in our democracy, they had to. And they did.

It’s useful to note that the current model for public schools – the government monopoly with the professional teacher caste and a huge, self-feeding academy – is a product of the past 100 years or so, when people realized that in a nation awash in immigrants, we’d damned well better make sure that all our children are learning the same things. Exactly the same things, lest those filthy immigrants corrupt our society…

And so we have a system of elementary education better suited to the Department of Corrections, or the Prussian military (indeed, Horace Mann modeled many of his ideas upon the Prussian state education system, which introduced the magic element, compulsion, to the mix).

And so, in a system that purports to value individual responsibility, we send our children to “learn” in a system that systematically strips responsibility away (as long as you stay in line, you’re fine!). In a system that purports to value critical thinking, we entrust our children to a system that regards the very discipline as forbidden fruit. In a nation that claims to value the integrity, choice and value of the individual, we send our kids to schools that destroy all three.

“But what about universal literacy?” It’s worth noting that our society is little more functionally literate, in a practical sense, than it was 100 years ago; the ability of adults to read, write and figure has remained nearly static among adults for the past century, unbudged by changing educational theories, vast increases in education funding, and national fretting on the subject.

“But hey”, comes the next response, “I came up through the system. It’s not that bad”. That’s called “Stockholm Syndrome”. You owe it to your kids to do better. Saying you “survived” six years of elementary school is hardly a recommendation; saying “I survived it, my kid sure as hell will” isn’t education, it’s ritualized abuse.

———-

So what exactly do we lose if we abolish elementary school? Say, start kids in school at age 12?

We gain, instantly, a generation of kids who haven’t learned to equate “learning” with “misery”.

We gain, over time, children who grow through their most formative years free of the distortions to their identity and self-respect that are a part of the canonical tradition of elementary school, undivided into “jocks” and “geeks” and “brains”.  They could get to the brink of puberty – the most awful time in life – without piling all that awful baggage on top.  They could spend six or seven years as humans, rather than as parts on an assembly line.

As part of that, they would be free to develop the skills that children develop more or less naturally; to think, to analyze, to tear things apart, on their own terms, without having an adult tell them “you’re wrong, do it my way” at every turn.

It goes without saying that they’d be free of the suffocating idiocy of too much of the educational/industrial complex – the rotating theories and methods and ideals that at best are just more turd-polishing, and at worst (see Carol Gilligan and the gender theorists) actively, and after a certain point maliciously, harmful. They’d grow up regarding learning as both an opportunity and, most importantly, their own responsibility. Which is, we’re told, the American way.

Inevitable response: “What about kids in lousy situations? Or where both parents work?”

So we take the $10-15K per student that we currently spend in the metro, and spend it on community centers, or daycare, or anything but elementary school. I don’t care if the idea saves not a nickel over what we’re already spending (although it inevitably will, in direct spending to say nothing of the social costs of our failing system); it’ll be better than what we have now, even for the vulnerable kids, the poor kids from the lousy neighborhoods. What could be worse than being a poor kid from a lousy neighborhood? Being all that, and having any possible love of the learning you’ll need to get out out of that rut beaten out of you by age eight.

It’s not just about the survival of our educational system.  It’s about the survival of our nation, our culture, and most importantly our children.

Abolish it.

Need any more reason to get your kids the hell out of the public school system?

“America Last” is going to be a matter of academic doctrine – at least, at the U of M.

Katherine Kersten – the single best columnist working in the Twin Cities today –  takes it down:

Do you believe in the American dream — the idea that in this country, hardworking people of every race, color and creed can get ahead on their own merits? If so, that belief may soon bar you from getting a license to teach in Minnesota public schools — at least if you plan to get your teaching degree at the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus.

In a report compiled last summer, the Race, Culture, Class and Gender Task Group at the U’s College of Education and Human Development recommended that aspiring teachers there must repudiate the notion of “the American Dream” in order to obtain the recommendation for licensure required by the Minnesota Board of Teaching. Instead, teacher candidates must embrace — and be prepared to teach our state’s kids — the task force’s own vision of America as an oppressive hellhole: racist, sexist and homophobic.

Now, in a sense Kersten (and the U of M) are behind the curve; the Education academy has long been a hive of Fabians who see themselves as social artists and the school system as their canvas, on which to create a whole new, “better” America, without all that “America” in it.

The task group is part of the Teacher Education Redesign Initiative, a multiyear project to change the way future teachers are trained at the U’s flagship campus. The initiative is premised, in part, on the conviction that Minnesota teachers’ lack of “cultural competence” contributes to the poor academic performance of the state’s minority students. Last spring, it charged the task group with coming up with recommendations to change this. In January, planners will review the recommendations and decide how to proceed.

The report advocates making race, class and gender politics the “overarching framework” for all teaching courses at the U. It calls for evaluating future teachers in both coursework and practice teaching based on their willingness to fall into ideological lockstep.

In other words, education will be even less culturally diverse – in the mainline public schools – than it already is.  That’ll take some doing.

The first step toward “cultural competence,” says the task group, is for future teachers to recognize — and confess — their own bigotry. Anyone familiar with the reeducation camps of China’s Cultural Revolution will recognize the modus operandi.

Read the entire, nauseating column.

Now, on Twitter yesterday the MNPost’s David Brauer noted that Kersten doesn’t link to the report – apparently unaware that we bloggers have been bagging on the Strib for the better part of a decade over exactly the same practice; I suppose it makes sense that David Brauer (to whom I give props for having never adoped even the faintest pretense of detachment from politics in his writing) notices it with Katherine Kersten after years of the Strib treating online columns like print columns.

Here’s the U of M report in question.  I’ll tear into it tomorrow (or maybe Wednesday).

But dont’ wait up for me or anything…

It should go without saying that Hurricane Katrina caused nearly unprecedented problems in New Orleans.

Of course, problems can lead, if one is lucky, to opportunities.  One problem/opportunity to befall New Orleans was the  complete destruction of the New Orleans public school system.  Although given the system’s performance before the hurricane, “destruction” was a pretty relative term:

According a New York Times report, New Orleans public schools were “among the most abysmal in the nation before the storm”. In the 2004 Louisiana General Exit Exams (GEE) for high school students, 96 per cent of New Orleans public school students scored below “basic” in English and 94 per cent scored below “basic” in maths. The public school district was corrupt and debt-ridden.

The NOLA Schools, presented with an unprecedented “clean slate”, literally had to start over.  One of the key initiatives was to allow, indeed promote, the formation of charter schools.  These schools are public schools,  funded with each attending student’s share of public money allotted to them, which are “chartered” by the local school board or the state department of education or some other governing body depending on the state’s charter school law 

 Five years later, PBS reports on the experiment; this is a transcription of a “NewsHour” piece by PBS’ John Merrow.

In March, President Obama sent Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to New Orleans, which some consider the national laboratory of the charter movement. Leading the city’s charter transformation is Recovery School District Superintendent Paul Vallas.

PAUL VALLAS, Superintendent, Recovery School District: Well, I’m a believer in schools having the freedom and autonomy to make decisions that are in the best interest of the children. And so I support charter schools, because charter schools are a vehicle for achieving that type of freedom.
 
As principal of a charter school, you are responsible for everything. I make sure instruction is in place, and its effective, and its aligned with the state standards. I make sure that the budget is balanced and that we have money for payroll.

The report touches on one of the big advantages of charter schools; notwithstanding the slanders of some of their critics; the accountability loop between student, parent, teacher, principal and board is usually within one building, and decisions happen almost immediately, as opposed to the months (and sometimes years between School Board elections) at the sclerotic public districts.  Parents are not only a simple phone call from their locally-elected board members – they are much more likely to be on the board than at any big public district, especially at a big, politicized urban district.
 
The change has been immense:

 SHARON CLARK, Principal, Sophie B. Wright Middle School: As principal of a charter school, you are responsible for everything. I make sure instruction is in place, and its effective, and its aligned with the state standards. I make sure that the budget is balanced and that we have money for payroll. I make sure that we continue to register kids and that our attendance works.

JOHN MERROW: Principal Clark has used her power to make some significant changes.

Where are the boys?

One of her first decisions was to separate the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades into single-sex classes.

MALE STUDENT: At this age, boys get distracted. So by us being all boys, we’re more focused on our work.

FEMALE STUDENT: When you have boys in your class, you got to be, like, trying to impress them, but if you just in school with some girls, you’re just not worrying about it.

Try to pull that off in a public school without having to tangle with a big, Union-owned, “elected” city-wide board, a dozen special interest groups (who only tangentially have the kids’ interests at heart, if at all); you’ll be wrangling with lawyers until your kids’ grandkids are in school.

But it was the right thing to do.  It got done.  And the kids are better off for it.

FEMALE STUDENT: At the beginning of the year, I was going to Marshall. And it was like the principal couldn’t control his students. There was fighting. So I told my mama I didn’t want to go there.

When I came here, I felt like it was much better. The teachers were showing you a lot of attention, make sure you understand your work.

This parallels my experience almost perfectly.

Remember the debate on “merit pay” for good teachers, to encourage great staff to do great work, and which the Teachers Unions have bottled up and delayed, in every case, since I was in high school?

Done deal!

JOHN MERROW: Principal Clark rewards her best teachers with bonuses of up to $5,000. Darlene Rivers teaches math.

DARLENE RIVERS: With my first year with the test, my fifth-grade students scored the highest in the district. Your test scores have to be in the 90th percentile, and you get a monetary award, and I have received that. Yes, I have, I received that, and it really came in handy.

JOHN MERROW: Principal Clark does all the hiring. And if it doesn’t work out?

SHARON CLARK: If they don’t have the mission that we have in mind as part of their mission, we are free to what I call freeing up a teacher’s future.

JOHN MERROW: She means she fires teachers who don’t measure up. Clark’s authority seems to be making a difference.

SHARON CLARK: Our school is performing in the top 10 of the city. We are actually performing higher than some of the magnet schools that have selective admissions, and we don’t.

JOHN MERROW: In fact, 9 of the 10 top performing schools in the district are charters.

Amazing what a little actual empowerment, local control, and reward for effort as opposed to mere seniority can do.

There are, of course, downsides; charter schools are excellent places for the vast majority of students.  But they are frequently very small, working with very low budgets; they don’t have access to local education levies, and they can’t float bonds for facilities (at least in Minnesota), so rent comes out of most schools’ allotments.

And that means some of the services that some parents counted on in the big, public districts are harder to come by:

 JOHN MERROW: National studies support Branche. Although there are many outstanding charter schools, reports show that overall charter success is mixed. [Although you need to make sure you’re comparing apples and apples]

Branche has further reason to be wary: She says some charter schools are being unfair to disadvantaged children.

CHERYLLYN BRANCHE: Parents are seeking places for their children who may have physical handicaps, mental or emotional handicapping conditions, and they’re not being accepted by charters. I get referrals from specific principals of charter schools. “Go to Banneker. Tell Miss Branche I sent you. Go to Banneker.”

JOHN MERROW: It’s what school administrators call “dumping,” transferring those with special education needs or just kids who are behaving badly to other schools.

You’re getting kids who are being pushed out of charters…

CHERYLLYN BRANCHE: Correct.

JOHN MERROW: … more special-ed kids than you…

CHERYLLYN BRANCHE: Correct. Yes, exactly right.

JOHN MERROW: So the charter movement is hurting you.

CHERYLLYN BRANCHE: It is hurting children.

Well, no.  A bureaucratic practice is hurting some children, children who are by definition both outliers and who are also, currently, incredibly-badly-served by traditional big public schools.  Something does need to be done to try to reach these students…

…but they are, again, by definition, exceptions to the rule.

The whole thing is worth a read, provided you remember it’s written with the skin-deep attention to fact that you get with TV reporting, even from PBS.

The Strib editorial board, writing about the Saint Paul School Board’s perennial search for the flavor of the month in Superintendants:

Given the challenges faced by the district, the schools need a collaborative, inspirational CEO who has had success in improving student achievement. The district needs a strategic thinker who can build relationships, heal morale problems and be a strong, respected advocate for schools within various constituencies.

Er, no.

:Advocating for constituencies” is what got the Saint Paul Public Schools into the mess it’s in now.

The SPPS is paralyzed by “constituency” politics; watching a School Board meeting is like watching film of 1960’s Comintern meetings, with endless streams of apparatchiks solemnly declaiming their district would meet its quota of desk chairs or eggs or iron ingots in support of the glorious Five Year Plan.  Only instead of eggs or desk chairs or ingots, or even students, the apparatchiks principals and program directors and staff members would solemnly swear that they were meeting their goals for “diversity”.

And yet the SPPS’ achievement gap is the worst of any major city.  The schools’ budget is bigger than that of the City of Saint Paul, but the graduation rate is south of 50% and falling. Over an eighth of Saint Paul’s parents have hit the lifeboats (myself included), bailing out for charter, private and parochial schools, or schools in the ‘burbs, or homeschooling (and that was as of two years ago; the numbers have no doubt accelerated).  And for all that – with increasing budgets and declining enrollments – the SPPS threatens to cut teachers, programs and schools every budget cycle (although never laying a finger on the grotesque bureaucracy at 360 Colborne).

What the Saint Paul Public Schools needs is someone with experience in arresting failure.  The district needs the educational equivalent of Red Adair.

What the district will get, with its current all-DFL, mostly-Teachers-union-member board, is what it’s had for the past twenty years; a principal who is adept at being politically correct; one who carefully massages the various constituencies (and I’m not just talking ethnic groups, here) on the one hand and plays them against each other on the other hand.  One who will sit quietly aside while the School Board, as concentrated a bloc of far-far-far left DFL ideology as you will find in this state, babbles on about diversity and barring recruiters from schools and abolising JROTC and handing out condoms and supporting constituency support programs that happen to employ their non-profit cronies…

And beyond those qualifications, the district’s next leader must be committed to staying on the job long enough to make meaningful change.

And given the dynamics in the “market” for big-city superintendents – with an endless parade of school boards bidding up salaries and benefits ever-higher in an endless game of institutional musical chairs that essentially ensures the power of the radical left in big-city education – that “committed” leader will ride in on a pink unicorn.

The market for superintendents – paid for with an ever-rising pool of taxpayer money – is a scam designed to jack up the power of “elected”, invariably liberal school boards.  It turns the Superintendant into basically a temp employee.

Or a well-tended lapdog who isn’t too bummed about having to spend half of his/her term looking for the next, higher-paying job, for a position that will pay better and be of even less consequence.

The basketball program at Minneapolis Community and Technical College is on the chopping block.

The program has grown from a run-of-the-mill junior college program into a national powerhouse among two-year colleges, under the leadership of coach Jay Pivec.  He’s got plenty of experience turning obscure colleges into basketball powers; if memory serves, he came to MCTC in ’89 or ’90 from (I hope I remember this correctly) Havre, Montana – whose college he also took to the bigs.  And before that, he coached my alma mater, Jamestown, turning it’s hoops program into an improbable success.  Jay also coached my one phy-ed class – Tennis, I think – where our only real subject in common was Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes.  We have more in common now, of course; his wife, MLP, writes the excellent blog  Casual Sundays with Mr. Curry; his sister-in-law, Katie McCollow, ran the late, lamented Yucky Salad With Bones.

At any rate – MCTC’s basketball program is to college hoops what junior/community college is supposed to be for college; a place for students who are late bloomers or who slipped off “the rails” in high school to get their act together and move on to “regular” college, or at least down some path with a better education.  Unlike so much in public education, MCTC’s program (actually programs – the women’s program does the same thing), it works:

Most MCTC players lacked grades or money. Some of the players live at home to save money; some have kids of their own. Lindahl said he holds practice between 6 and 8 a.m. because he knows his players have other responsibilities, and Pivec and Gates are widely known for salvaging the careers, if not lives, of at-risk players…Last year, the men’s coaches helped Cortez Wallace land a scholarship at Western Missouri. Pivec and Gates found Wallace, who dropped out of high school in the 10th grade, playing AAU ball. They pushed him to get his GED, recruited him and gave him a future.

“Coach Gates and coach Piv have done so much for me, helped me get jobs, helped me get work-study,” said women’s player Natalye Horne. “Coach Piv and coach Gates especially treat me like a second daughter. This program is like a family, and now they’re breaking it up.”

Guard Sondra Jones said: “For a lot of people, this is a stepping stone to something bigger. But the administration looks at this as an option instead of a priority.”

Freshman point guard Freddie Burton could have left the program once he found it was doomed but said, “I’ll just try my luck here. I like the program. I really don’t know what I’m going to do next year.

“Damn that Pawlenty and his LGA cuts!”

Well, no – it was a fairly capricious-looking decision by the MCTC student senate – the DFLers of tomorrow:

Last year, the school’s Student Senate and Student Life Budget Committee decided that basketball was not a high priority, and school President Phil Davis accepted the recommendation to withdraw funding for the program. That silly process — letting students who will spend a maximum of two years on campus decide the fate of a traditionally powerful program run by two dedicated lifelong coaches — leaves the Mavericks renowned yet doomed.

The crazy part? The program is excellence on the cheap:

While some players are circulating petitions to fund the programs, Davis has made it clear that the program would have to be financially independent, requiring $118,000 a year.

$118K?

There are Twin Cities’ corporations for whom 118 large is a week’s philanthropic giving.  Given the amount of money society as whole saves – I’m saying this with absolutely no intention to condescend – on future social costs for the people the program turns around – it’s a bargain.

There are Timberwolves players with $118,000 under the seat cushions in their Bentleys.

You’re going to tell me someone out there can’t cover that?

If there’s a race that’s as important as the Saint Paul Mayor’s race this year, it’s the Saint Paul School Board.

Three endorsed Republicans – Pat Igo, John Krenik and Chris Conner – made it through the primaries, along with the usual pack of DFLers.

And one “independent”, Jean O’Connor.

Or…is she?

Jean was endorsed by the teachers union. They told John krenik they don’t endorse republicans.

That might be damning enough all by itself.  But there’s more:

She was endorsed by the St. Paul Chamber of Commerce. She’s stated that George Latimer recruited her  to run. He’s listed on her lit piece as the chair of her committee (www.occonnellforstpaulkids.org).

[Billy Mays] But wait! [/Billy Mays off]

Amy Filice is her treasurer. She’s Dr. Greg filice’s wife.
He was on the board for years, Ann Carroll was his protoge, then he lost in 99? but she won. He was on the Board of Health Start, the system of clinics in the schools and it was in 99 that they introduced the idea of condoms being handed out in the schools.
Now parents supposedly sign a form saying they do or don’t want that.

That doesn’t sound very “independent” – or “fresh”, “new” or much of a “change” – at all!

Of course, not all is well in the DFL camp:

Vallay Varro has a glossy taboid out. Latimer has a quote on p.3 supporting her and his picture. But in the back, p.4, there’s a sample ballot and it shows all the names but just the endorsed DFL’ers names filled in, Jean’s blank.

She’s upset because she’s  one of them, but Latimer has played a big trick on everyone. Now in St. Paul we have 3 political parties – DFL, Dfl-light, just call yourself an independent and you’re a fresh, new voice, and Republican.

And make no mistake about it – in Saint Paul, the DFL is no “fresh voice”.  The Saint Paul Public Schools spend more money than the city itself does.  But their graduation rates are well down under 50%, and for all the district’s barbering about diversity, the achievement gap is one of the worst in the country and heading south.

The district does, however, excel at spending lots and lots of money playing “pick the celebrity Superintendant“.

Anyway – don’t be fooled, Saint Paul voters.

Does being an Ivy-Leaguer endow one with an intellectual reach that exceeds one’s grasp?

Case in point, the storied chaps at Harvard bet their billions that they were smarter than the market: Wrong

Harvard University’s failed bet that interest rates would rise cost the world’s richest school at least $500 million in payments to escape derivatives that backfired.

Further, Barack Obama bet that his Harvard-acquired education and billions in taxpayer dollars “invested” under the guise of economic stimulus would be enough to lead a nation and create millions of new jobs: Unsurprisingly, wrong.

Data published Thursday showed contracts from the $787 billion economic stimulus created or saved 30,083 jobs…

And finally the highly respected Harvard graduate Matt Birk, who many thought would finish his NFL career with the Minnesota Vikings, left in favor of a substantially similar offer from the Baltimore Ravens earlier this year. Birk ostensibly bet his chances of winning the Super Bowl would be greater in Baltimore: Surprisingly, wrong.

MINNEAPOLIS – As Steve Hauschka’s potential game-winning kick sailed wide left, nearly all of the Ravens on the sideline dropped their heads in unison, feeling another last-minute punch in the gut in a season that continues to veer off course.

It just goes to show a Harvard education is no guarantee of success. In the now legendary words of Forest Gump’s momma: “stupid is as stupid does.”

Six-year-old Cub scout brings scout knife/fork/spoon doodad to school…

Six-year-old Zachary Christie was so excited to become a Cub Scout that he brought his camping utensil to school. The tool serves as a spoon, a fork and a knife, and Zachary wanted to use it at lunch.

…and gets treated as a terrorist (emphasis added).

What Zachary didn’t know was that the gizmo violated his school’s zero-tolerance policy on weapons. And now the Christina School District in Newark, Del., has suspended the first grader and ordered him to attend the district’s reform school for 45 days.

I’ve been through this sort of self-lobotomized administrative cretinism myself.
Question:  How many intelligence and ethics tests does one have to flunk to be a school administrator these days?

When people ask me “how do I make it as a blogger?” (which, admittedly, doesn’t happen every day – but it does happen, pinky swear), my response is always some variation of “write something every day”.  Get into the discipline of writing something – a big magnum opus on your favorite topic, pictures of your cat, a quickie fisk of something you disagree with – anything.  The discipline is what brings the improvement – not the other way around.

With that in mind, I direct you to one of the great unsung bloggers in the Twin Cities – and when I say “unsung”, that’s misleading, because Speed Gibson has an audience of discerning consumers, largely but not exclusively on the subject of education.

Sunday, he had a S reminder for everyone on the right; there are still surprises out there:

We on the right might be hidebound ourselves in thinking the media will always wear the union label. But many of these reporters and editors have kids in school themselves, and must face some union reality themselves. Regardless, they’re generally good people. The lack of results despite decades of promises and billions in targeted programs may have finally left them with no other conclusion.

Who is he talking about?

Read the article.

Which is the whole point of this article…

In my various skirmishes with the Minnesota left’s various anti-charter school advocates, I’ve brought a lot of evidence to bear that a) charter schools are a vital component in school choice, and b) most of the “evidence” against charter schools is partisan baked wind.

But if the public-school advocates had brought this to the table, I might have changed my mind.

Oh, I’m being sarcastic. It’s a bunch of elementary teachers leading their kids through a song praising Barack Obama.

Did I say “Praising?”

Barack Hussein Obama
He said that all must lend a hand [?]
To make this country strong again
Mmm, mmm, mm!

Barack Hussein Obama
He said we must be clear today
Equal work means equal pay
Mmm, mmm, mm!

Barack Hussein Obama
He said that we must take a stand
To make sure everyone gets a chance
Mmm, mmm, mm!

Barack Hussein Obama
He said Red, Yellow, Black or White
All are equal in his sight
Mmm, mmm, mm!

Barack Hussein Obama
Yes
Mmm, mmm, mm!

Barack Hussein Obama

[switch to the tune of “Battle Hymn of the Republic”]

Hello, Mr. President we honor you today!
For all your great accomplishments, we all [do? doth??] say “hooray!”
Hooray Mr. President! You’re number one!
The first Black American to lead this great na-TION!
Hooray, Mr. President something-something-some
A-something-something-something-some economy is number one again!
Hooray Mr. President, we’re really proud of you!
And the same for all Americans [in?] the great Red White and Blue!
So something Mr. President we all just something-some,
So here’s a hearty hip-hooray a-something-something-some!
Hip, hip hooray! (3x)

It occurs that linking to this video might make me a racist, so I should just stop right now.

That’s what we are telling our kids when President Barack Obama addresses the nation’s schoolchildren in his upcoming address. Be there, listen, take notes and we will talk about it when you get home.

At the same time, I respect parents that are pulling their kids that day a hell of a lot more than those that are neutral on the issue, or aren’t even aware of it.

This is a teaching, parenting moment.

Some parents have cried “Leave the parenting to us, not the President!”

But guess what, a lot of you are really crappy parents.

Some are absentee. Others are uninformed, lazy or disinterested. Many are physically present but not active; wealthy but won’t invest time. A lot of our nation’s ills can be traced back to a lack of focus, leadership and discipline on the part of parents, fathers especially, coupled with the increasingly fragmented family unit.

If there is one thing to recognize Barack Obama for, he seems to be a pretty good Dad and I think its fair to say it’s a harder job than being President, and certainly while being President.

If the President is true to his mission for this address, it could be of value. The nation’s first African-American President, addressing millions of children, many of whom are without a father, telling them to stay in school, dream big, and make the American dream your dream is good for all of us.

At the same time I understand the disdain many parents have for the President’s address. This is in part due to its timing, amidst a controversial and highly unpopular push for a government takeover of our health care system, soaring deficits, and the predicted bloating of the federal government.

But I also think it can be tied to a growing awareness that the President really hasn’t been the agent of systemic change that he told us he would be; that the actions he and Congress have taken to stimulate the economy have more likely made things worse; and the growing list of broken campaign promises.

A lot of people don’t trust Obama any more and aren’t exactly looking for his advice, especially to their children.

My kids know that we are conservatives, but they also know why. They know we don’t blindly follow or discount a politician of any particular party – my kids also know I’m not a George Bush fan and why. They also know that I am not a Barack Obama fan, but not because he isn’t like us, rather because I don’t agree with his politics. That is not to say that there aren’t things we agree on, and that will purportedly be the agenda for his address.

…and if the President strays into political or ideological territory, my kids will spot it from a hundred yards.

I don’t want my children to blindly follow in my ideological footsteps. I want them to form their own beliefs and philosophies. I want them to own them so that no one can take them away without a fight.

And that is why I want them to watch the President with respect, and with an open but discerning mind.

Being wired as they are – as hive creatures – liberals want the soothing balm of firm-but-benign authority inserted into every conceivable crevice of not only their own lives, but those of everyone around them.

And so they want President Obama to address America’s grade-school kids next Tuesday.

It’s not the dumbest idea this administration’s had, but it’s right down there:

With just four days left until the first day of school for most students, school administrators spent Thursday fielding angry phone calls and e-mails. Some parents and community members are pressuring schools not to show the telecast, arguing that it’s an attempt to advance the president’s political agenda through the public schools.

Here’s your Minnesota tax dollars in action:

“Some parents are calling their superintendent and saying they’re not going to have their kids go to school,” Education Minnesota President Tom Dooher said at a Thursday afternoon news conference. Dooher urged superintendents to show the broadcast anyway, for its educational value.

“The education of our students shouldn’t become a partisan pawn for those who are trying to score political points against the president,” he said.

Dooher – whose job is all about scoring political points (as the head of Minnesota’s most powerful, and most relentlessly DFL-leaning, union – is, of course, being disingenuous.  As is the Strib, for not telling the less-politically-savyy reader that Dooher heads a union whose main function is to tell the Democratic Party when to “jump”, and off what.

But it’s a moot point.  This speech is illegal.

We all know that for many liberals – even many of those that profess some sort of organized religious faith – that liberalism is a substitute for religion, eliciting much of the same zeal that it does among the faithful (and, among the fringe extreme, even some of the same creepy excess).

This was accompanied by plenty of considered religious imagery during Obama’s campaign; his wife said his purpose was the save the nation’s soul; the point was not lost on a fawning media:

So presenting Obama’s speech violates the Separation Clause just as surely as broadcasting the Pope or the Dalai Lama to our kids would.

How can you tell when MN2020’s John Fizgerald is talking gibberish about charter schools?

His fingers are moving over a keyboard.

His latest piece, “What Do The Metro Gang Strike Force And Charter Schools Have In Common”, continues the pattern of casual, ofay group slander he started earlier this summer with his series on supposed financial mismanagement at charter schools. As I had a phalanx of other charter school advocates showed, Fitzgerald wrenched facts and context beyond recognition, inflated piddling accounting errors (that had largely been corrected) into capital charges, and turned specific incidents of malfeasance into a general attacks on the institution of charter schools.

Now that we have an incident that appears as if it could include genuine corruption?

Well, do you think Fitzgerald is going to let a pattern like that go away easy?

The connection between the strike force and charter schools is simple: They both have very tenuous allegiance to an elected body.

As we’ll note below, this is absurd. A charter schools is inseparable from, and utterly accountable to, its elected board.

This tenuous connection can lead to inappropriate and ill-advised actions among officials.

The connection is simple; also utterly specious.

Let’s continue.

The 34-member Metro Gang Strike Force has been implicated in misconduct and is being investigated by the FBI after a scathing report by the Office of the Legislative Auditor in May. Allegedly, Strike Force employees conducted improper seizures of property then took home seized property for personal use. Oversight for the Strike Force is conducted by the Minnesota Gang and Drug Oversight Council, which has broad responsibilities for drug task forces and gang strike forces throughout the state, and the Metro Gang Strike Force Advisory Board which selects and supervises the strike force’s commander, reviews the strike force’s operations and approves its expenditures.The OLA report stated that “Neither the Minnesota Gang and Drug Oversight Council or the Metro Gang Strike Force Advisory Board oversaw the financial practices of the Metro Gang Strike Force, allowing the strike force’s commander to determine how the strike force would operate. Those practices put at risk the strike force’s ability to safeguard and account for seized assets and maintain the integrity of criminal evidence.”

Neither group’s membership is elected. Members are appointed by their various city counsels and county commissions. Therefore, the strike force’s chain of command is muddied and responsibility for Strike Force actions does not go directly to elected officials.

And when you’re talking about a body that has the search and seizure power, and the power to investigate people, and in extreme situations has special dispensation to use lethal force with vastly different consequences than for civilians, that’s a real problem.

With a school?

That same lack of oversight exists among Minnesota’s nearly 150 charter schools.

That, of course, is baked wind.

The Gang Strike Force’s overseers checked out of the process. They abrogated their duty.

But for the odd cast of malfeasance, Charter Schools’ accountability is present, active and effective. A charter school’s accountability loop is pretty much in the same building as the school itself.

It just isn’t tied as closely to the state, its bureaucracy and the Teacher’s Union. Which is, of course, the part that bothers MN2020.

By state law, charter school oversight is provided by three entities: the school’s sponsor, the school’s board of directors and the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE)…A charter school’s board of directors is comprised of teachers and parents elected among the school’s teachers and parents.

This, by the way, is a good thing, driving control and responsibility down to the individual school level. Like any responsibility, people may or may not live up to it – but the charter school board system means any mismanagement or irregularities are much more difficult to hide than they are in a system like, say, Saint Paul,
That board hires the executive director who, unlike public school superintendents, is not required to meet the stringent state laws for administrative licensure.

“Stringent laws” which not only have nothing to do with education, but – if you’ve paid attention – don’t necessarily ensure competent administration either.

The executive director serves at the board’s pleasure.

The Department of Education is charged with holding charter schools responsible to state law and provides help when the schools run afoul of any laws.

To sum up, charter schools – which receive roughly $10,500 of state taxpayer money per student (roughly $1,000 more than traditional public school students)

But not, as Fitzgerald continues to disingenuously omit, any local or district bonding or special levy money, which drives the public school expenditures per student well over the charter schools’ level.

– undergoes oversight by sponsors that are not required to be active overseers, boards that are elected by members only, and a bureaucracy with only a tenuous tie to one elected official, the governor.

Against that, Fitzgerald prefers the “accountability” and “access” of the district school board – which in Minnesota’s biggest, most expensive and most troubled districts is elected in the same sense that the Iranian presidency is an elected job; in one-party cities like Minneapolis and Saint Paul, the School Boards are DFL sinecures, their members accountable in reality only to the teachers union (of which most of them were members) and the Party; they are “led” by superintendents that they hire to serve in their own image (and who live by public sector standards a rock-star life, with money and perks that’d be the envy of many mid-level CEOs), who change jobs so frequently that accountability is an even bigger joke than it is among the boards themselves.

Indeed, look at the major school districts – Saint Paul, Minneapolis, Duluth. The memberships on the boards, and the specific butt sitting in the Superintendent’s chair, may change -but the overarching principles behind the Boards and Administrations in one-party cities never change. The only real change is the perpetual free-fall of graduation rates and achievement – and the spiking numbers of people like me who’ve pulled our kids out of the festering nightmare and put them in the charter schools that Fitzgerald wants to kill off by any means necessary.

This next paragraph nicely encapsulates the creaking illogic not only behind this piece, but behind MN2020’s entire logically vacuous attack on charter schools. You will be excused if you need to read it twice; I sure did:

That’s why the chain of command is so terribly important. That’s why officers and deputies need to answer to elected county commissioners and city council members through their sheriffs and chiefs, not to non-elected multi-jurisdictional boards. And that’s why charter schools should be responsible to elected officials through licensed administrators, not to members of their own charter schools, sponsors that may or may not be involved in the school or a statewide commissioner answerable only to the governor.

Did you catch that?

Police need to be accountable to an elected body with power to enact changes as close to their level as possible.

Which, as it happens, is exactly what charter schools do. A school of 200 students and 12 staff and teachers will report to a director and board whose only administrative job is to deal with the affairs of the school. Not forty schools and thousands of employees via a bureaucracy of hundreds of unionized worker bees, mind you; one school. One staff, all of whom they know by name. One checkbook.

While there are some charter schools doing a good job managing their finances, proper oversight is imperative. If it doesn’t exist, then rules must be changed to provide it before people do the irrational, ill-advised things people sometimes do.

Spectacular failures in accountability – like the Gang Strike Force and the embezzlement at the Heart of the Earth charter school – obscure the larger, but vastly less-sexy and headline-grabbing, issue.

Look at the “chain of command” for the schools that are almost universally floundering, the big urban districts; all of them report to huge administrations that are (let’s be a bit pollyannaish) “accountable” to school boards that serve entirely as DFL power incubators and teachers union power reservoirs and, if you’re a parent and taxpayer, your “representative”, provided you agree with them on every agenda point (because nothing is going to change!). On a financial and curriculum level they are “accountable” to the Minnesota Department of Education, and thence on many issues to the US Do’E.

That’s not accountability. That’s bureaucratic overburden; a maze of red tape and gibberish that serves largely to swallow up and digest any real notion of “accountability”.

If public schools’ responsibility loops were pushed down to the individual school level, as charter schools’ are, they’d stand a chance of actually working.

In my years of fisking Nick Coleman, it’s easy to pick his worst work.  It’s his hackery immediately after the 35W bridge collapse.

But if I could say anything for the guy over the years, it was this; he may have been a hack who was in bed with the local establishment, but at least he was his own hack.

Nowadays?  Ew.

His latest “column” at the Strib lacks the one thing that distinguished Coleman; he’s apparently turned to slathering his own brand of incoherent, un-fact-checked, prejudicial, and almost-always wrong bilge onto other peoples’ press releases.

Coleman attacks charter schools.  Or, should we say, his masters at his current gig would seem to have told him to attack charter schools.  We may never know.

But that’s what he’s doing – and as usual with a Nick Coleman column, he’s full of it.

Back-to-school supplies are on sale and the annual report on schools that are not making adequate progress is due out any day (expect another rise in falling performance), so this is a good time to look at the performance of Minnesota’s charter school movement, which was going to lead us all into a bright 21st century for better, smarter public education.

Oops. Not doing so great there, either.

Charter schools give parents a choice – and in the city, it’s a choice we’re taking by the thousands.

Which is, after all, the only reason private-school graduate Coleman cares.

Improving learning outcomes for students of color? Nope.

Well, actually, yep.

Outperforming traditional public schools on achievement tests? Nope.

Actually, when you compare apples and apples, yes.  Remember – charter schools…:

1. …don’t have an Alternative Learning Center system to get all the “problem” kids off the books
2. …have disproportionately high numbers of poor kids, non-native english speakers, and the kids that the traditional school system is failing in droves. Which is why we’re leaving the public system in droves.
3. …actually give parents who don’t have the money to go to a private or suburban public school  – or who live on one the Indian reservations, where the public schools are an even bigger disgrace than the urban public systems – a choice. And some hope.

But other than that…?

It would be easy to argue that the charter school movement has fallen flat, and I have said as much before.

And we all know how reliable Coleman’s predictions have been.

But the charter school crusade has grown too large and expensive to dismiss.

Which is just absurd.  Charter schools cost less per student than the public schools.

Coleman is, of course, reading note-for-note for the MN2020 report on charter schools – which a slew of charter school supporters pretty roundly debunked two months ago.  In other words, he’s using out of date and inaccurate information in pursuit of an agenda. That’s bad enough.

Next he swerves into just making things up:

It is eating into severely limited funding for education and has blurred the lines between church and state (and not just at one Muslim school, but among many charters loosely basing their educational approaches on religious values whose adherents think they should get public tax dollars to inculcate them).

Coleman is referring to Bill Cooper’s “Friends of Education” schools, which borrow many aspects of Catholic education without actually teaching Catholicism.  Their results are, by the way, uniformly excellent; each and every one of the Friends of Education schools outperforms any public school district in the state (go here and look up schools run by “Friends of Education”).

In the meantime, they’ve been in operation for years.  If there had been any violations of the Establishment Clause at any of them, in a state full of intrepid gumshoe reporters teachers union monkeys like Nick Coleman, I suspect we’d have heard about it.

Nothing.

But Coleman surely probably knows that. Why would he attack Friends of Education with nothing but a scabrous innuendo?

Personal history, perhaps?

More than that, charter schools have created a huge tax-supported playpen where entrepreneurial start-up schools have been loosely supervised and unscrutinized by education officials who are accountable to the approval or rejection of taxpayers.

Leave aside Coleman’s clumsy shot at being a D-list Studs Terkel knockoff.  Leave aside the blatant misinformation (charter schools are supervised by the same body that supervises public schools).  Let me just ask Coleman, my fellow Saint Paul taxpayer; what “accountability” do you think the Saint Paul district has to you and I?   And if you say “the school board”, then you are obviously more comfortable with untrammeled, partisan, one-party systems than I am.

Minnesota was the first state to allow charter schools (in 1991), which were designed to overcome the limitations of an education system that had become a sacred cow. Today, you can’t find a holier cow than the charter school movement. Any questions can get you branded as a stooge for unionized teachers, big gummint and mandatory euthanasia for free thinkers. Guilty, guilty, hmmm … maybe!

If only there were a website where I could just link to instant descriptions of some of Nick Coleman’s lazier flights of rhetorical fancy.

Nevertheless, it is clear that Minnesota’s charter schools (almost 150 of them now, with 28,000 students) are as much a part of our educational problem as they were supposed to be a solution. Many charters have been beset by management problems, undertrained staffs and a lack of adequate financial controls. The furor over TiZA, the troubled Muslim charter school in Inver Grove Heights, is only one example of a much broader mess: Too many charter schools do not get adequate oversight, especially from one system that works — elected school boards that answer to voters.

And here, Coleman assumes that you either are completely unaware of reality, or is trying to make sure you stay that way.

What are the graduation rates at the Minneapolis and Saint Paul public school systems?  Less than half.  How about for minority students?  Less than that. What do they cost?  Vastly more than the state averages per student, and getting worse, and they’re both still constantly on the brink of financial catastrophe and begging voters to pass supplemental levies (which charter schools never, ever get).

And who controls those systems?  DFL and Teachers-Union-dominated elected school boards.  The elected school boards have utterly failed, and still fail to provide any faint shred of accountability, much less rectifying the disaster in any way.

After nearly two decades of “experimenting,” charter schools need to be held to stricter financial controls, educational performance standards and public accountability. It is also past time to put a cap on the number of charter schools, and the present 150 is more than enough. The urgent need now is not for more charter schools, but better ones. And that requires shutting down the bad ones.

Excelent, Mr. Coleman.

Can we hold public schools to the same standard?

More than 80 percent of charter schools were found to have serious financial or management problems during 2007, according to a review of state records done by the liberal think tank Minnesota 2020. That group’s executive director, John Van Hecke, finds it ironic that charter schools, built on a promise to make education more responsive, have avoided the scrutiny traditional public schools must face.

Quoting John Van Hecke?

Oh, please.  Go ahead.  Make my day.

“When they were launched, the battle cry was, ‘We’ll be better than traditional public schools,'” he said. “Now it’s, ‘Don’t hold us to the same standards as traditional schools.’ But the public clearly is demanding more and more accountability over how its money is spent. And the answer is more and more oversight, from the Education Department and the Legislature.”

No, Nick and John.  The public is asking for more charter schools – and, more to the point, more school choice.  1/8 of Saint Paul parents have left the SPPS; even more have left the Minneapolis system.  They’ve decamped for suburban districts using the state’s open enrollment system, to private and parochial schools, and for charter schools.

So  look for MN2020 and Nick Coleman to propose repealing open enrollment any time here.

One might surmise, by this point, that Coleman knows nothing about the subject that he’s not told by others – that he’s reading off of MN2020 talking points. That Mr. “I Know Stuff” might be just vamping it, like a marionette being twirled about by a giggly master; like a monkey.

And you’d be right:

In addition to millions spent on per-pupil aid for charter schools, up to $1,200 per pupil is spent in state assistance to help buy or rent charter school space (this at a time when public enrollment is shrinking and surplus education buildings stand vacant). These “lease aid” payments will balloon by 23 percent this biennium, to a whopping $85 million, and much of that total is going into a muddled mess where payments continue even after buildings are paid for and tax-paid real estate winds up owned not by the public but by the charter schools themselves.

Really?

The property is “owned by the charter schools themselves?”

Interesting.

Because charter schools are not allowed to own property.

They can not own their buildings.

Wow.  I guess he doens’t “know stuff” after all.

Nick Coleman is a senior fellow at the Eugene J. McCarthy Center for Public Policy & Civic Engagement at the College of St. Benedict/St. John’s University. He can be reached at nickcoleman@gmail.com.

I’d love to see the crap their “junior fellows” put out.

UPDATE:  I’ve been corrected – charters can own buildings, they just can’t buy ’em with public funds.  Which was what Coleman was talking about, so it doesn’t impact my point in any way.

On the one hand, I support charter schools.  They are the only real form of school choice available to people who don’t have the money to send their kids to private schools.  They are the only alternative to the failed inner-city public school systems for most low-income students.

On the other hand, charter schools are supposed to follow rules – and in the case of Tarek Ibn Ziyad Academy (in Blaine and Inver Grove Heights), there have been credible allegations that TIZA broke a big one, the Establishment Clause.  Charter schools use public money – each student’s allotment of state ed money – to operate; the law says that money can’t support religion.  Other charter schools in the state use the parochial school model to get excellent results, while scrupulously leaving actual religious instruction for times and places outside school; TIZA may not have, and may have reacted poorly to the allegations.

On the third hand, TIZA gets the kind of results that many charter schools, and all urban public schools, should envy.  With a student body that is 80% low-income and 2/3 of whom speak English as a second language, TIZA gets math and reading test scores that shame most schools of all types, everywhere in the state (and nationwide).  They are obviously doing something right.

On the fourth hand, they are allegedly doing something wrong; the American Civil Liberties Union took TIZA to court.

On the fifth hand, the first of the ACLU’s three suits got dismissed last week.

On the sixth hand, TIZA is counter-suing the ACLU:

“TiZA was forced to take these steps because of the tortuous interference the ACLU has caused one of the state’s best public charter schools,” said Erick Kaardal , TiZA’s legal counsel. “The ACLU’s claims are meritless as TiZA has followed state and federal regulations. TiZA hopes the court will prevent the ACLU from inflicting further interference and defamation with a permanent injunction.”

TIZA is suing the ACLU for “an amount exceeding” $300,000 for defamation, interference with the contract between TIZA and its students’ parents, and screwing with their ability to hire teachers.

So who do you root for?  The Establishment Clause (allegedly), or anyone who’ll cut the ACLU down a notch?

Both?