Re: Missouri Virtual Counterfeit Schooling and Gresham's Law

[Csubstance@aol.com]

In a message dated 3/5/06 5:58:56 PM, crumpenator@gmail.com writes:

<< I don't know that this will qualify as a charter school. It's

definitely intended to be a limited alternative, only for those

students whose circumstances and interests make it a viable choice. >>

3/6/06

Friends:

There is no generalized answer to the question of how a state should approve 
(and, I assume regulate) a "virtual" public school. The question really flows 
out through all of the levels and realities of public schools and has to be 
addressed at each of those.

1. From pre-k through the early elementary level grades, it would probably be 
droll but irrelevant to propose a "virtual" school. What would a "virtual" 
school look like for a four-year-old? How would a "virtual" kindergarten be 
organized? What would the youngest pupils do, watch Sesame Street, Dora the 
Explorer, or Dragon Tales? If so, how would the "teacher" communicate to figure out 
whether the child "knew" the "Letter M" or had correctly moved through the 
latest maze in Dora?

2. By the middle grades, most children could navigate a keyboard, and some 
are learning to type. But, once again, the question arises as to what is being 
taught by whom to whom on what basis, and how is "achievement" being measured, 
reported, and approved. Given the fact that "accountability" is already 
mindlessly using the wrong instrument (standardized tests) to close the promotion 
gate at third grade, we're assuming that the irrational system we critique here 
really has meaning and can be transferred into a virtual world as well. 

3. By the middle school years, there becomes more specialization and it 
becomes more important to be able to measure what a child has learned (or not 
learned) not only in some almost irrelevant general ways such as measured by 
national NRTs ("reading" and "math" scores really don't measure the broad range of 
children's abilities in reading -- let alone writing -- or math, but certain 
much narrower abilities on multiple-choice, psychometrically designed so-called 
"standardized" tests). By this point in schooling, these things get really 
important, but we're now in the middle of a 20 year orgy of nonsense about how to 
measure the reality of schooling, and only in the USA could we be having this 
discussion. (Most places on the planet ask someone to sit down with a child 
and ask the child to read and discuss a book, with no bubble sheets in between. 
Our system here was designed for teacher bashing, union busting, deregulation 
and privatization, and it does that at the expense of ignoring -- or worse, 
denigrating -- the professional competence of millions of teachers...).

The real fun, as Ken has noted most specifically, begins when you get to 
"high school" (which means, roughly, the years between 13 or 14 and 17 and 19 in 
this country today). 

For more than a century, we're measured high school learning by the use of 
"credits." A certain number of weeks in a classroom receiving instruction from a 
certified high school teacher results in a grade, which is then recorded in 
the form of a credit. Those credits, added up, lead either to a high school 
diploma or to an incomplete high school career. 

On this one, I'll avoid the word dropout. I'll yield to Steve Orel of the WOO 
and just say the person who has not gotten all of the required credits as 
having an "incomplete" transcript and as not having received a diploma. Those are 
the two things we are looking at here. Whether the person "dropped out," 
moved out, or wound up dead becomes irrelevant here. Fact is, that young person 
has not completed enough "credits" to have received a diploma, and until she (or 
he) does, she (or he) will not be certified as a high school graduate in this 
state (since as far as I know, ultimately all of these certificates are 
issues under the legal authority of the state).

Now the issue becomes less abstract. Let's look closely at the high school 
credit, how it is measured and awarded, and how a certain number of them results 
in the high school diploma. In order to discuss a "virtual" school, I have to 
focus on something like this because we have a historical definition of the 
amount of learning (usually, 20 or 40 weeks in a classroom for between 40 and 
60 minutes per day with a certified teacher who is working under the 
supervision of a certified administrator) required for a young person to be awarded a 
"credit" (or half credit) in a particular subject. 

And these subjects and awardings had better be meaningful at some point, 
because they can have enormous consequences in the "real" world. If, for example, 
we awarded credits in "airline piloting" and allowed our high school students 
to pilot  commercial airlines based on these, we'd suddenly see why we want to 
know whether the credit is meaningful or not. 

But for the past 25 years or so (roughly from the beginning of the attack on 
public schools that begins with the first Reagan administration and continues 
through "A Nation at Risk", the Goals 2000 stuff, and most recently "No Child 
Left Behind") we have faced an unprecedented attack on the public schools 
whose goal was really the deregulation of education and the privatization of as 
much of public education as possible (ultimately, to the profit of educational 
entrepreneurs). 

Deregulation is only possible when the rhetorical climate exists to claim 
that the original regulations were somehow wrong, obsolete, or otherwise socially 
no longer useful. All regulation has some valid (or perceived) real 
historical roots. The thing that we regulated throughout the 20th century as a society 
was the high school credit, which had to be awarded by a certified teacher 
working under the authority of a certified principal. There was a vast social 
contract behind each of those realities, and enormous training and credentialing 
operations to achieve some semblance of rationality in the entire structure. 
It was, like most real human institutions, imperfect. And, therefore, these 
imperfect institutions were always vulnerable to an organized propaganda attack 
from a force that was proposing the Perfect World as an alternative. This, by 
the way, is the way in which the rhetoric attacking public schools -- 
"government schools'' -- has been since before "A Nation at Risk". Before "A Nation at 
Risk" became a dishonest manifesto of the right, these abstract theories were 
out there, at least among fringe "market" economists like Milton Friedman and 
the nut cases who ran the economics department at my alma mater, the 
University of Chicago. But, of course, the perfect "market" they promoted never had 
existed in the real world, never could, and was therefore invulnerable to 
critique. Although their bible (Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations") admitted this 
fact, they ignored that. Even when they were in power through fascism, as in 
Chile (or in any of the crony and kelpto capitalist stuff since the collapse of 
Communism), they continued to pretend that their "market" silliness was an 
embodiment of a theory made flesh. For reasons which are not clear, they have 
only succeeded in promoting these crackpot theories successfully in certain 
public school systems (usually, those serving mostly poor children of color) and, 
as noted, in fascist dictatorships (the "Chicago boys" in Chile). 

But I digress from the deregulation, privatization, and marketization forces 
now trying to obscure the reality lurking behind an entrepreneurial attempt to 
legislate to allow "virtual" schools. This attempt is taking place not only 
in Missouri, but everywhere they can as fast as they can before their moment in 
the sun runs out, which with the collapse of George W. Bush is happening, 
even in the face of the cowardice and incoherence of the Democrats. 

So now let's move a bit north and east from Missouri to Illinois, and 
specifically to Chicago. Chicago now has the oldest ongoing experiment in test-based 
corporate "school reform" in the nation's major cities (Mayor Daley became 
dictator of Chicago's schools courtesy of a Republican state government -- both 
houses of the legislature and the governor) in 1995 and has been "CEOing" us 
ever since. Most recently, we've expanded urban charter schools at a near record 
pace (Kansas City and, now, New Orleans are higher in percentages, but we 
have more charter schools with more kids in them at this point; and that's about 
to grow). 

And now, finally, we have a "public" virtual charter school, brought to us by 
the descendants of the man (William Bennett) who once called Chicago's public 
schools "America's worst."    

The Chicago Board of Education recently at its January meeting) approved a 
charter to K-12 to begin a virtual school here. K-12 is the outfit that was run 
by William Bennett until he was forced out for effectively advocating the 
sterilization of black people. When the K-12 people initially brought their 
proposal to the school board at the time of the orgy of charterization in November 
and December, they were deferred because the Bennett stuff was still too hot. 
Last meeting (February) they passed the proposal without discussion.

So K-12 now has the power to teach virtual courses and, I assume, to issue 
virtual school "credits" in the name of Chicago.

Now the problem with this is not only in the "virtual" arena. Locally here 
(and, I suspect, in most other places with semi-regulated or even completely 
unregulated charter schools) it is the question of who gets what for doing what. 

For the past three months, I've been raising the question of a "Gresham's 
Law" of high school credits. I've raised this question in my reporting, and 
recently at the school board meetings. Three members of our seven-member Board of 
Education are bankers (down from a high of five three years ago), and some 
times you can make an educational point that even they can understand, although 
always reluctantly and a bit obtusely. (They hate you more when you continue to 
point out to them that just because they are millionaires they aren't geniuses 
-- just lucky or ruthlessly devoted to the accumulation of wealth... Anyway, 
that's another story). 

If two "high schools" are both issuing credits, but one isn't requiring a lot 
of work and the other is, how many teenagers are going to attend the "harder" 
high school, given the choice between partying and studying? In fact, that 
reality is now confronting every teacher and high school in Chicago, despite 
efforts to cover it up. And the results of the deregulation of Chicago's public 
schools (which, along with privatization is what corporate "school reform" here 
is really about) is the looming collapse of the integrity of the high school 
diploma here in Chicago.  

Once Chicago began chartering strange and unusual high school thingies, 
allowing them to conduct classes with strange and unusual teachery people, and then 
award grades and credits based on the assurance of equally strange and 
unusual high school "administrators" this rather droll crisis was inevitable. 

And now we have these teachery people issuing strange and unusual high school 
credits as a result of the proliferation of charter schools. So the problem 
of counterfeit high school credits (and, eventually, counterfeit high school 
diplomas) has begun growing here as much as the problems of debased precious 
metal coins was first noted by Sir. Thomas Gresham in the 16th Century in 
England.  

High school teaching has always been rough. No matter how nice the kid, 
sometimes he or she really hasn't learned enough to "pass" the class. So one of the 
things we do is issue the "F" grade. No credit. Take the course over. I did 
it hundreds of times during my 28 years in Chicago classrooms, while passing a 
comparable thousands. It was always clear what the child had to do to "pass" 
(with a D or C), or really pass knowing the stuff (with an "A"). As a result of 
that, you can usually count on the value of my grade (especially in English, 
which was my college major). And you can Google some of my former students 
(names available upon request) who are now very successful in some challenging 
fields (not investment banking or some other shell game) like clinical 
psychology or medicine and ask them about the value of all that work.

The same is true for millions of high school teachers going back generations 
in the USA. We were trained, certified, supervised, and we made teenagers work 
to earn credits.

Now there were always alternatives. I once worked on the investigations that 
exposed a Chicago high school principal (James Moffat) who awarded credits in 
exchange for sex with students. He eventually went to prison. And less 
dramatically, there were teachers who would cut corners. We used to joke that in some 
schools, the easiest way to be a poor teacher was to never give a kid an "F". 
If a principal were overwhelmed with work, the loud screams that came with 
failing grades would never reach her when teachers never gave "F" grades.

That was before "small schools," "campuses," and a proliferation of charter 
schooly thingies here in Chicago.  

Rumor on the street here in Chicago is that it's easy to cop a credit if you 
know where to shop. So the kids are faced with a terrible choice. Bust their 
asses in traditional classrooms or cop cheap. Since learning something is now 
longer what matters (test scores are supposed to go "up" to make our mayor look 
good, and if you ask -- not too carefully -- Chicago propagandists will have 
charts showing "up" just like Enron's executives did before that fraud 
collapsed). 

With the massive proliferation of charter high schools here, there has been 
no comparable oversight of what is taking place before a credit is issued. 

It's not as easy as it looks when we move from the oversimplifications of the 
public renditions of "school reform" to the real world of what you've learned 
and what you haven't learned. 

Take the case of calculus, which my 16-year-old son Danny is taking this year 
at Chicago's Whitney Young High School. In order to get half a credit, he 
just worked very hard. He spent 20 weeks in class, did homework almost every 
night, attended almost all his classes (even when somewhat sick) and participated 
in class discussion. He eventually wound up with a "half credit" on his grade 
sheet and transcript. In June, if he keeps working as hard, he will have 
another half credit called "calculus." Last June, Danny had some advanced work for 
calculus by taking a three-week course at Stanford University in physics, and 
he continued to do some math all summer. He also earned a credit in 
"statistics" last school year, and proved he knew something about the subject by scoring 
a "5" on the advanced placement statistics exam, which he took in May 2005.  

That is what most of us meant in the days before "reform" when we talked 
about "taking a course." You worked hard under a teacher who knew a subject very 
well, and you "earned" a grade based on the quality (and quantity) of that work.

That's no longer true about most high school credits in Chicago. You can cop 
them cheaply, especially now that we have proliferated deregulated charter 
schools with uncertified teachery people in front of their sort-of classrooms.

I raised it at a meeting of the Chicago Board of Education and got angry 
stares from the bankers and millionaires who currently run our school system. 

So I asked people at the Chicago Board of Education's Office of 
Communications what oversight there was for charter schools that are issuing high school 
credits in Chicago. After a bit of time, Mike Vaughn got back to me and told me 
that the people in the Board's charter school office said that the annual 
scores on the state achievement test (for our high schools right now) the Prairie 
State, or PSAE, was the "oversight."

The young lady who answered the question didn't even understand the question.

It used to be that every year, auditors checked the transcripts of high 
school students and made sure that they were all valid. From time to time, there 
would be major scandals because principals (or, in one case I knew, a student 
using white out) had manually changed grades for students without consulting 
teachers.

Now the whole thing is truly up for grabs. There is no oversight and no 
audits are being done of the charter schools. 

It will take us decades to repair the damage these reformers are doing to the 
integrity of learning. And that's if we start now. But since we are still in 
the opening acts of this vast and noxious tragedy, stay tuned.

In future issues of Substance, we'll be reporting the more exotic examples of 
the various ways our children in Chicago will be earning credits for various 
high school subjects. Meanwhile, Google James Moffat + Anne Burke and see if 
you find anything, and we'll talk about that later.

George N. Schmidt
Editor, Substance
www.substancenews.com