Category Archives for Charter schools

UofA + KIPP = Lies: More Rhetoric in the Absence of Evidence

There is a disturbing but predictable formula when you combine the University of Arkansas (and dig a bit to the Walton money funding the Orwellian-named Department of Education Reform) and Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) charter chain that results in, at best, careless misinformation or, at worst, brazen deception.

Let’s start at the ironic end to a 2 August 2017 press release on the relationship between UofA and KIPP:

“KIPP helped me to not only be adaptable, but to stay motivated,” she said. “I think an excerpt from Robert Frost’s poem, ‘The Road Not Taken’ best describes my KIPP experience,” Walton said. ” ‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.'”

The irony is that the sentiment ascribed here to Frost’s poem is a common misreading that parallels how KIPP and charter advocates impose their ideology onto what we know about KIPP/charter schools in the service of the brand and not the students (noting here how this press release allows the former KIPP student* to do all the heavy lifting).

Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” in fact, is illustrative here, but not in the way intended.

Misreading and mis-teaching this iconic poem fail in one extremely important way: ignoring that the speaker in Frost’s poem repeatedly notes that the two roads are the same: “as just as fair,” “Had worn them really about the same,” and “And both that morning equally lay.”

The poem actually stresses that making choices is mostly unavoidable and certainly builds everyone’s fate, but the poem is also a satire about regretting choices, as Orr explains:

Frost had been inspired to write the poem by Thomas’s habit of regretting whatever path the pair took during their long walks in the countryside—an impulse that Frost equated with the romantic predisposi­tion for “crying over what might have been.” Frost, Thompson writes, believed that his friend “would take the poem as a gen­tle joke and would protest, ‘Stop teasing me.’” 

Therefore, Frost’s much mangled poem offers us two lessons missed by the UofA/KIPP agenda: (1) there is almost no difference between or among types of schools (charter v. public or private v. public), and (2) the claims made by KIPP and other charter advocates are far more complex than they seem on the surface (as is the poem).

The grand claims of KIPP have now drifted toward how well students attend and graduate college, but KIPP has done as all the other charter and choice advocates have by constantly changing what they claim their form of education reform achieves.

Press release rhetoric falls apart, however, once the claims are carefully examined. Here are just a few examples of KIPP and charter exaggeration and deception:

KIPP is correct that schools that only count students who complete 12th grade will have inflated scores compared to KIPP that counts students who complete 8th grade.  But what KIPP doesn’t mention is that the fairest way to make a comparison to the 9% number is to start counting at 5th grade.  KIPP actually has a pretty big attrition between 5th and 8th grade so the true ‘gold standard’ is really not used by anyone.  All the numbers are inflated.  KIPPs might be inflated less than the others, but it still is so they can whine that the others are cheating worse than they are on this statistic, but they should admit that they are doing it too, though to a lesser degree.

This most recent press release from UofA/KIPP is yet another example of how charter advocacy and the entire education reform agenda are awash in misinformation, steering the rampant misreading of these reforms by politicians and the public.

I fear that like the satirized speaker in Frost’s poem, “I shall be telling this with a sigh/Somewhere ages and ages hence”: When you see “miracle” claims that are too good to be true, well, they are not true.

Shame on UofA and KIPP for continuing to traffic in such lies.

* NOTE: Certainly, two important points must be made about this student’s experience: (1) Everyone can fairly celebrate her success and pride in that success, while (2) an anecdote based on one person’s experience cannot prove or disprove any sort of generalizations. Thus, this student ascribing her success to KIPP in no way makes that true, even though she genuinely feels that way.

For Further Reading

Innovative Deception: The Charter Scam Chronicles Continue

Hiding Behind Rhetoric in the Absence of Evidence

Buying the Academy, Good-Bye Scholarship

On Misreading: The Critical Need to Step Back and See Again

You’re Probably Misreading Robert Frost’s Most Famous Poem, David Orr

Innovative Deception: The Charter Scam Chronicles Continue

The school choice movement has its roots in mid-twentieth century, and was bolstered by some ugly truths about racism in the U.S. during the Civil Rights movement and public school integration.

While school choice advocacy has maintained some foundational catch phrases such as “innovation” and relied on appeals to uncritical faith in market forces over “the damned government,” school choice has also maintained two key patterns: (1) promises associated with school choice advocacy have mostly failed, and thus, (2) “choice” has morphed repeatedly into new versions to stay ahead of all the bad news about outcomes falling short of those promises.

The last decade, however, has revealed a school choice gold mine in the charter school movement that appears to blend the public’s support for public schools with the allure of parental choice.

However, on balance, charter school advocacy has proven to be mostly rhetoric and absent evidence in ways similar to the larger school choice movement.

Public and charter schools, for example, are currently plagued with rising segregation, and both embrace policies that can fairly be labeled racist and classist—leading the NAACP to maintain a strongly skeptical position about the credibility of charter schools.

And when charter schools appear to succeed where public schools do not, a careful analysis nearly always reveals that what is too good to be true is, in fact, not true.

School choice innovation, including charter school innovation, actually has little to do with education and more to do with keeping ahead of the evidence in order to maintain political and public support for finding yourself in a hole and continuing to dig.

For a glimpse into how the charter movement seeks mostly to keep itself afloat, often at the expense of children and their families, consider Paul Bowers’s Erskine College’s new role as charter school gatekeeper could change landscape of public education.

Bowers hits a key point in the following:

Across the U.S., the National Association of Charter School Authorizers has been sounding the alarm about a trend it calls “authorizer shopping,” which it calls “a growing threat to overall charter school quality.”

“Authorizer shopping happens when a charter school chooses an initial authorizer or changes authorizers specifically to avoid accountability,” the group said in a 2016 report. “A low-performing school may shop for a new authorizer to avoid closure, or reopen under a new authorizer after closure.”

Also important to highlight is, as Bowers notes, how this new phase of charter expansion linked to less or no accountability is appealing to the least effective forms of charter schools:

Two of the first schools to express an interest in the new public charter school sponsor, the Charter Institute at Erskine College, are the S.C. Virtual Charter School and Cyber Academy of South Carolina. The two schools enrolled more than 4,000 students combined in kindergarten through 12th grade last school year.

The hard truths about educating children in a free society in order to create a more perfect union, to reach and sustain an equitable democracy, are that public education has mostly failed the children who need it most because the U.S. is plagued by political cowardice and that schemes labeled “education reform” are mostly even worse alternatives (including school choice and charter schools) to the mismanaged public system.

Near the end of his life, Martin Luther King Jr. called for addressing poverty directly and thus eradicate related social inequities and empower public institutions:

In addition to the absence of coordination and sufficiency, the programs of the past all have another common failing — they are indirect. Each seeks to solve poverty by first solving something else.

I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income. …

We are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished. The poor transformed into purchasers will do a great deal on their own to alter housing decay. Negroes, who have a double disability, will have a greater effect on discrimination when they have the additional weapon of cash to use in their struggle.

King’s plea has been repeatedly justified since the claims that education is the great equalizer never materializes. For example, in Equal Pay Day for African-American Women, By the Numbers Emily Crockett confronts:

African-American women only earn 64 cents to every dollar earned by non-Hispanic white men, according to the NWLC analysis; the figure for women overall is 77 cents. That’s based on the average earnings of female and male full-time, year-round workers taken from Census data.

The pay gap for Black women varies based on age and industry. Older Black women have it the hardest—the pay gap is only 82 cents on the dollar for 15-year-old to 24-year-old Black women compared to white men, but the gap widens to 67 cents and 59 cents, respectively, for Black women ages 25-to-44 and 45-to-64.

As for industries, Black women working as physicians and surgeons—a high-wage and male-dominated occupation—make only 52 cents for every dollar paid to their white male counterparts. Black women fared slightly better in lower-paid occupations, making 86 cents on the dollar in male-dominated, mid-wage construction industries and 85 cents on the dollar working as low-wage, mostly female personal care aides. …

The fact that Black women are overrepresented in low-wage jobs doesn’t help, the analysis said. Black women make up 14 percent of low-wage workers and 6 percent of the overall workforce.

Education levels don’t make much of an impact on the high wage gap between Black women and non-Hispanic white men. While more education corresponds with higher wages for both Black women and white men, Black women still make between 61 and 66 cents on the dollar compared to their counterparts at every education level [emphasis added]. African-American women have to have at least a Bachelor’s degree to make as much as white men who didn’t finish college.

This equity gap along race and gender lines is a lingering and powerful fact in the U.S.

Education reform, then, especially under the guise of school choice/charter schools, is once again failing to address directly the root causes of why we believe public education needs reform in the first place.

The only real innovation among the charter school advocates is how many ways they can avoid the hard truths about reforming schools and the impotence of education to overcome social inequity and injustice.

Hiding Behind Rhetoric in the Absence of Evidence

Having been extensively cited in recent news articles on education, I have received the typical responses, both by email and an Op-Ed (High expectations lead to achievement).

What is notable about these disgruntled responses can be seen directly in the headline above—a dependence on soaring and idealistic rhetoric to mask a complete failure to either discount my evidence or to provide any credible evidence for the counter arguments.

A recent email argued that I was causing more harm than good for emphasizing the impact of racism on literacy education and achievement by students; the rebuttal, however, was peppered with “I believe” and not a single effort to rebut the dozens of research studies I provided on both grade retention and racism/sexism.

While I pressed that point in a few replies, the offended person only ever produced as some sort of evidence a TED Talk, an unintended confession that his world-view depends on whiz-bang showmanship and seeing in any outlier example a confirmation of his biases—what Maia Szalavitz identifies as “’fundamental attribution error’. This is a natural tendency to see the behavior of others as being determined by their character – while excusing our own behavior based on circumstances.”

The emails were almost entirely rhetorical, like a TED Talk, and then divorced from any sort of empirical evidence.

The Op-Ed reflects in a more public way this same disturbing pattern. William W. Brown, founder and chairman of the board of Legacy Early College, holds forth in defense of the charter school’s “no excuses” approach to educating poor and mostly black/brown students, an ideology and set of policies that I have rejected for many years as inherently racist and classist.

While Brown quotes a few of my comments from a news article and then suggests he aims to rebut them, he merely slips each time into restating the ideology of the charter school, the rhetoric of high expectations.

Early in the commentary, Brown notes: “However, Thomas does not acknowledge that a college education is the single most reliable way to lessen the effect of systemic racism and end poverty.”

Here is the exact strategy employed by Arne Duncan throughout his tenure as Secretary of Education: make a grand rhetorical claim that most people in the U.S. believe (education is the “great equalizer”), and then offer no evidence it is true while hoping no one calls you on it.

The truth is hard to swallow, however, because education can be shown through ample evidence to have very little impact on erasing inequity driven by racism and sexism. For just a few of many examples, please consider the following:

Whites with only high school completion earn more than Blacks/Hispanics having completed 2 years of college. (Bruenig, 24 October 2014)

White men with no high school diploma have the same employment opportunities as black men with some college completion. (Closing the Race Gap)

Race and gender remain powerful sources of inequity despite educational attainment. (Access to good jobs)

Brown also cites this: “He goes on to say, ‘Successful people in the United States tend to be white and come from privilege and they’re not necessarily working harder than anybody else but they have incredible advantages.'”

And then makes no effort to address why he believes my comment is “problematic.” Perhaps he could consider the following:

The best way to nab your dream job out of college? Be born rich

Why rich kids do better than smarter, less advantaged kids: ‘opportunity hoarding’

 Black unemployment is significantly higher than white unemployment regardless of educational attainment | Economic Policy Institute

Abstract

Racial discrimination in labor markets is a critical process through which organizations produce economic inequality in society. Though scholars have extensively examined the discriminatory decisions and practices of employers, the question of how job seekers try to adapt to anticipated discrimination is often overlooked. Using interviews, a laboratory experiment, and a résumé audit study, we examine racial minorities’ attempts to avoid discrimination by concealing or downplaying racial cues in job applications, a practice known as “résumé whitening.” While some minority job seekers reject this practice, others view it as essential and use a variety of whitening techniques. When targeting an employer that presents itself as valuing diversity, however, minority job applicants engage in relatively little résumé whitening and thus submit more racially transparent résumés. Yet, our audit study shows that organizational diversity statements are not actually associated with reduced discrimination against unwhitened résumés. Taken together, these findings suggest a paradox: Minorities may be particularly likely to experience disadvantage when they apply to ostensibly pro-diversity employers. These findings illuminate the role of racial concealment and transparency in modern labor markets and point to an important interplay between the self-presentation of employers and the self-presentation of job seekers in shaping economic inequality. (Whitened Résumés: Race and Self-Presentation in the Labor Market, Sonia Kang, Katy DeCelles, András Tilcsik, and Sora Jun)

One other tactic I experience is the subtle and not-so-subtle effort by the “no excuses” crowd to turn charges of racism toward those of us calling out the racism of “no excuses” practices: “If you believe the zip code where you were born should determine your educational outcome, you basically believe that some people aren’t built for success, which is — to put it bluntly — racist.”

Two aspects of this strategy are important to highlight. First, Brown here and others must misrepresent my claims (I have never and would never embrace or suggest that we ask less of any child or that some group of people have less ability than others because of inherent deficiencies; in fact, my scholarship and public work directly reject deficit ideologies).

Second, this rhetorical slight of hand is designed to point anywhere other than the person making the claim.

This second part of the move is important for charter advocates and the “no excuses” crowd because evidence is not on their side.

The Legacy Charter school endorsed by Brown has three consecutive years of “below average” state report cards (2012-2014, the most recent since report card assessments have been suspended in SC until this coming fall).

And my analysis of two years of data on SC charter schools has shown:

  • Using 2011 SC state repost cards and the metric “Schools with Students Like Ours,” charter schools performed as follows: 3/53 ABOVE Typical, 17/53 Typical, and 33/53 BELOW Typical.
  • Using 2013 SC state repost cards and the metric “Schools with Students Like Ours,” charter schools performed as follows: 2/52 ABOVE Typical, 20/52 Typical, 22/52 BELOW Typical.

The “high expectations” movement, again mostly aimed at black/brown and poor children, has some serious flaws because the rhetoric is discredited by the evidence.

In short, education is not the “great equalizer” in the U.S. And committing to “high expectations” for children living inequitable and overburdened lives suggests their struggles are mostly their fault because they simply are not working hard enough.

That is a calloused and racist/classist lie.

As I detailed above, success in the U.S. is mostly about advantages, not working hard.

Brown concludes with a flurry of rhetoric: “You could burn the world down as it is because it’s too hard to fix systemic injustices, or you could build it up to the sky because you know in your heart that’s where we belong. Keep your matches. I’m grabbing a hammer and a ladder.”

What should disturb us is how easily the winners (even those claiming good intentions) in the U.S. are willing to throw up their hands when challenged to address systemic racism, classism, and sexism.

In fact, this admission is awash in excuses and absent the exact resilience needed to address inequity that these adults demand of children, who must somehow set aside their lives each day they walk through the doors of school and behave in ways the adults refuse to do.

School Choice Advocacy Exposes Political Cowardice

It has become fashionable for pundits to argue that fake news has created a post-truth America; however, mainstream media, in fact, carry the brunt of the responsibility because too often journalists are trapped in press-release journalism and traditional expectations of objectivity.

Evidence of this can be found in how the media routinely cover education and education reform—even when good journalists with good intentions seek to be objective and fair by covering a topic.

Paul Hyde’s Advocates tout the benefits of school choice (25 January 2017) represents the ultimate failure of covering what advocates claim instead of confronting whether or not those claims are credible.

Regularly, the public is bombarded with school choice advocacy and proposals that school choice can somehow address the historical and persistent problems we rightfully recognize in South Carolina’s public schools. These arguments are compelling for a public in the U.S. that believes in choice and idealizes parental choice.

But here is the problem: The evidence rejects that market forces (through vouchers, tuition tax credits, charter schools, and even public school choice, which is in place in South Carolina’s Greenville county) are effective but indirect methods for education reform.

School choice is an ideological argument that exposes political cowardice (let the Invisible Hand do what political leaders refuse to do), and it ignores that public institutions should make choice unnecessary (think about why we do not privatize the judicial system, the police force, roads and highways).

First, the problems with our public schools are primarily strongly connected to large gaps in outcomes among identifiable groups of students by race, social class, special needs, and home languages.

All across South Carolina, for example, and notably along its Corridor of Shame, schools serving low-poverty populations have strong outcomes while schools burdened with high poverty and high percentages of students with special needs and English language learners have weak outcomes.

What we must acknowledge is first that struggling schools and students are not struggling because of a lack of choice, and then, all choice models for reform are indirect ways to make the changes that should be accomplished by public policy directly.

Here is the fact that political leaders are avoiding by abdicating their responsibilities to address inequity: Between 60-80% of measurable student outcomes are connected to students’ lives outside of school—home income, access to medical care, food and living security, and stable and well-paying jobs for the parents.

If public policy were to address these social inequities directly, student outcomes would improve with no in-school reform at all.

But our current schools also require direct reform, some of which could correct the negative consequences of choice—increasing segregation, creating unnecessary shuffling of student populations, diverting funds from public schools for charter and private schools that do not have better outcomes.

Too often, public school practices reflect and perpetuate the exact inequities in society that are overburdening our schools.

Instead of hoping that market forces create equity (and they will not), new direct policy should confront the following: vulnerable populations of students are assigned disproportionately new and un-/under-certified teachers, tracking and selective programs (Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate) benefit advantaged students while vulnerable students are often barred, discipline practices and consequences perpetuate inequity, and too often school facilities and materials reflect the socioeconomic status of the community.

Ultimately, mainstream media failing to provide a critical response to school choice advocates allows yet more political cowardice.

School choice—from vouchers to charter schools to public school choice—over the past 20-30 years has never produced the miracles advocates promise. Despite public perception, charter schools and public schools do not have higher outcomes than public schools when adjusted for the characteristics of students served.

Types of schooling simply do not make a difference, but practices do—although no in-school practices have yet to overcome the influence of out-of-school influences beyond the scope of teachers and schools to control.

Allowing powerful people with vested interests to advocate for failed policy without any media, political, or public challenges is cheating our schools, our students, and our democracy.

The weight of evidence does not validate school choice advocacy, but more important than that, we know what needs to be reformed to insure better opportunities for all students.

We need politicians themselves to embrace choice, choosing direct action instead of continuing to hide behind the political cowardice of hoping parents-as-customers can force schools to accomplish the impossible.

The Tone-Deaf Politics of Denying Racism, Excusing Segregation

Let’s connect the dots, which is challenging because, if those with power had their way, it would be white dots on a field of white.

Rick Hess, whose tagline is “Education policy maven Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute [AEI] think tank offers straight talk on matters of policy, politics, research, and reform,” blogging at Education Week makes this claim:

Some deem this a healthy and long-overdue development, believing that social justice demands that education be understood through the prism of race and inequality. They believe that tackling deep racial inequities is the measure of one’s commitment to educational improvement, and view measures like the DREAM Act and affirmative action as inseparable from elements of that work. Thus, they tend to see an inevitable overlap between school reform and the pursuit of progressive policies regarding housing, immigration, policing, health care, and much more.

Others of us think that viewing education primarily through the lens of race is unhealthy and divisive, fueling a destructive hypersensitivity and race-based grievance. We’re concerned that it undermines the unifying possibilities of democratic schooling, especially when foundational virtues like personal responsibility and patriotism get dismissed as culturally oppressive remnants from yesteryear. We fear that it turns schooling, potentially one of our great common endeavors, into something very different, political, and partisan.

Keep in mind the dichotomy of “some” and “we.”

Next, a review of an AEI report on charter schools reveals:

The reviewers find that the report presents charter school de facto segregation as a benign byproduct of parental choice. In fact, the review finds that the original report actually acknowledged that this type of stratification was part and partial of a “properly” functioning charter sector – one in which parents get to choose the type of school their children attend.

“Some” who “[believe] that social justice demands that education be understood through the prism of race and inequality” are being, according to Hess, “political” and “partisan.”

And AEI finds segregation “benign” because it is just what parents choose.

With those dots detected and connected, consider this Tweet from Charles Blow:

What is at play here, and linked by AEI, includes an ends-justify-the-means ideology paired with Social Darwinism (masked as “parental choice”)—all of which is bereft of any sort of ethical grounding, any acknowledgement that “some” (the ellipsis of race, and thus, people of color) are making pleas for being heard to create a more just and equitable education system and country.

The ends justify the means for the winners because they have no personal experience with the devastating impact of the means—think the pyramids of Egypt to the economy of the South and the entire nation during U.S. slavery.

The Masters must keep pointing at the outcomes and must find ways to silence the enslaved, the oppressed.

The Masters must control what is normal, objective, and non-partisan/non-political (their way) while casting everyone else as the “other”—biased, partisan, political, radical.

Hess and AEI are peddling the inexcusable in a time now dominated by the deplorables.

None the less, these are calloused claims, and nothing can justify denying racism or embracing segregation.

Don’t Buy Bluster from Teacher Quality VAM-pires

The responses are predictable online and through social media any time I address teacher quality and policy focusing on teacher evaluation such as my recent commentary on Charleston adopting value-added methods (VAM).

How dare I, some respond, suggest that teacher quality does not matter!

The pattern is exhausting because most responding in indignation first misrepresent what I have claimed and then make the most extreme arguments themselves in order to derail the conversation along their own agenda, usually linked to the charter school movement grounded in teacher bashing and making unobtainable promises.

So let me state here that the central elements of what we know about teacher quality and efforts such as VAM-based teacher evaluation is that teacher quality is not an independent variable (any teacher may be effective for one student and ineffective for another, for example) and, since student high-stakes testing is not designed to measure teacher quality and is more strongly linked to out-of-school factors, VAM is both a horrible technique for identifying teacher quality and, ironically, a guaranteed process for devaluing the importance of teachers.

Teacher quality is unparalleled in importance in terms of student learning, but it is also nearly impossible to measure, quantify—especially through student scores on high-stakes standardized tests.

Teacher quality VAM-pires, then, often have agendas [1] that are masked by their bluster about teacher quality.

Trying to measure and quantify teacher quality is a mistake; linking any evaluation of teacher quality to student test scores lacks validity and reliability—and VAM discourages teachers from teaching the most challenging populations of students (high-poverty, special needs, English language learners).

Focusing on simplistic and inappropriate measures reduces teacher impact to 10-15% of what high-stakes standardized testing measures; in other words, VAM itself devalues teacher quality.

My informed argument, based on 18 years as a public school classroom teacher and 15 years as a teacher educator and scholar, then, is that we must recognize teacher quality is impacted by teacher preparation, teaching/learning conditions, student characteristics, and dozens of other factors inside and outside of schools—many of which are beyond the control of teachers or students.

As well, we must address the teacher quality issues that political and administrative leaders can control: class size, school funding, and most important of all, teacher assignment.

Just as decades of research have revealed that teacher quality accounts for no more than 10-15% of student test scores, decades of research show that affluent and white students are assigned the most experienced and certified teachers while poor and black/brown students are assigned new/inexperienced and un-/under-certified teachers.

The charter school crowd’s bluster about teacher quality is pure hokum because charter schools increase that inequity of teacher assignment by depending on new and uncertified teachers such as candidates from Teach For America.

No one is saying teacher quality does not matter—I clearly am not saying that—but dishonesty about teacher quality does lay at the feet of the edu-reformers and the VAM-pires who wave their collective arms any time we call them on their failed policies and their political agendas.

[1] See the evangelical urge of Broad-trained acolytes, the resume building and cut-and-run patterns of edu-reformers, and the post-truth practices of turn-around and charter advocacy.

The Self-Fulfilling Prophesy: Failing Public Schools

Everything you need to know about the post-truth demonizing of public schools and false promises of charter schools is in these two paragraphs from Education Week, the queen of misinforming edujournalism:

At their best, the most innovative charter schools provide convincing evidence that there are better ways to educate students (especially disadvantaged ones) than now prevail in most traditional district schools. In fact, these pioneering schools bring together most of the innovative policies and practices needed to transform the nation’s traditional schools into the most successful in the world.

And yet, most traditional school districts either ignore or actively resist innovation. And their processes are so ingrained that one significant alteration would inevitably lead to systemic change or even a total redesign. Few public educators can imagine, let alone undertake, such dramatic change.

Edujournalism has been for decades a harbinger of the current threats to democracy posed by, not fake news, but post-truth journalism, the sort of enduring but false claims that drive mainstream media and remain unchecked by the public.

I recently detailed eight post-truth claims about public education that have fueled over three decades of baseless and harmful education reform; we are now poised for a resurgence of school choice schemes as the next wave of more unwarranted policies unsupported by research and not grounded in credible analyses of education failures.

The paragraphs above traffic in very predictable nonsense—”innovative charter schools” and public schools and educators who actively resist change—that resonates only with those who have no real experience in public education.

This nonsense is driven by the self-proclaimed innovators, few of whom are actual educators, and embraced by the public, most of whom have been students in public schools, and thus, believe they know the system.

Let’s here, then, unpack the nonsense.

First, I can offer a perspective that includes gaining my teaching certificate in a traditional program in the early 1980s before teaching public high school English for 18 years in the rural South, a small-town high school in a moderately impoverished areas.

Significant also is that my teaching career began the same year that South Carolina’s accountability system kicked into high gear; SC was an early and eager adopter of the standards and high-stakes testing movement that has driven K-12 public schools for over three decades.

I also have now taught in higher education for the past 15 years, as a teacher educator having one foot still in public schools (and the bureaucracy that controls it) and another in a much more autonomous profession as a tenured professor.

The Great Lie about charter schools versus public schools is very complex. The lie begins with the hollow use of “innovation,” a term that means nothing except in the sort of pyramid-scheme reality now promoted by Trump and newly minted Secretary of Education DeVos.

The lie then falls apart when you unpack the claim that innovative charter schools will save public education; we must ask, if bureaucracy and mandates are crippling public schools, and freedom to be innovative is the key to charter schools, why not just release public schools from the bureaucracy and mandates so that all schools are free to innovate?

The answer reveals the circular and misleading logic of the Great Lie that is charter innovation: For decades, school choice advocates have struggled against the public remaining mostly against school choice, mostly in favor of their local public schools (even when the public holds a negative view of public schools in general). How, then, could the public be turned against public schools?

The solution has been relentless and ever-increasing mandates that guarantee the self-fulfilling prophesy of public schools.

From SOE DeVos to the EdWeek narrative above, relentless education reform has resulted in creating public schools and teachers trapped in mandates and then criticizing them for not being innovative.

If innovation is really the solution to the problem facing public schools (and I suspect it isn’t), teachers need autonomy.

Yet, education reform has systematically de-professionalized teaching, systematically made teaching and learning less effective, and systematically overwhelmed schools with impossible demands so that the public sees only a failing system, one that the innovator-propagandists can smear as resisting change, refusing to innovate, and doomed to failure—with only innovative charter schools to save the day.

When we peel back the post-truth rhetoric, evidence fails to support claims of charter school success, and five minutes in a public school reveal that schools and teachers are not incapable of “imagin[ing] dramatic change,” but are blocked from practicing their professional autonomy by the exact forces accusing them of being against reform.

Public school teachers have never had professional autonomy, and most cannot even go to the restroom when they need to.

Spitting in the face of public school teachers as the paragraphs above do is the worst of post-truth journalism.

I have now spent about the same amount of time as an educator in K-12 public schools and higher education.

The professional autonomy gulf between the two is stunning.

K-12 public schools and teachers are scapegoats in a ridiculous political charade that depends on post-truth journalism and a gullible public.

There is nothing innovative about that.