This horror story written by a parent of a child at BASIS San Antonio deserves to be read in its entirety. I don't know enough about the daily education at BASIS charters to write about the curriculum, pedagogy or atmosphere at the schools, which is why I stay away of those topics in my posts. I'm presenting this narrative without comment. People can read it and draw their own conclusions. As always, people who have personal experiences at any BASIS schools should feel free to comment, in agreement or disagreement, and add experiences of their own.

The narrative is on Gene Glass' blog, Education in Two Worlds. Glass is a Regents' Professor Emeritus from Arizona State University and a staff member at the National Education Policy Center (NEPC). I linked to a few narratives on his blog about BASIS charters in Phoenix in an earlier post.

I recommend you read the entire narrative, but here are a few excerpts.

Our son is a 6th grade student. His education at BASIS included Chemistry, Physics, Algebra, Art History, World History, Biology, Physical Education. Every night starting the first day of school, he was assigned between 3-5 hours worth of homework. Throughout the school year, he gave up all extracurricular activities in order to complete the homework requirements. By the end of the school year, he would come home at 4 pm, open his books and go to bed at 9 pm only stopping to eat dinner. If he did not have his homework completed 100% by the next school day, he would receive a zero on the homework assignment. The homework assignments and projects were also required on Saturday and Sunday.

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The Star's Sunday editorial proclaims that TUSD should close more schools. Superintendent H.T. Sanchez disagrees — in the immediate future, anyway.

Sanchez begins his May 30 Team Member Update with the headline, "No Schools Closing — Rather, Schools Opening!" He acknowledges the school closing recommendation in the Efficiency Audit report created for the district by Gibson Consulting Group, but he says that's only one of the options suggested by the study. "There is no need for any staff member or parent to fear that their child’s school will not open next year. Our goal is to build enrollment and be the best option in Tucson." He pointed out that the district is moving in the other direction by reopening Brichta and Schumaker schools as early childhood education centers for children aged two to five.

It's important to note, Sanchez only made the guarantee for next school year. No matter how aggressively TUSD pursues enrollment growth, it's going to be a gradual process at best, and the issue of school closings will continue to be on the table. My recommendation to the district and the board is, now is the time to think about strategies to put unused space in schools to work in ways that will serve the children and the community. Sanchez showed he's willing to think outside the box by creating the early education centers. That's a very good start, but more needs to be done.

You can read Sanchez's entire statement below.

Gene Glass, a Regents' Professor Emeritus from Arizona State University, is a staff member at the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) and writes a terrific, informative blog, Education in Two Worlds. He's recently written two posts which contain first person accounts of two brushes with BASIS, one from a parent who tried to enroll her child in BASIS Scottsdale in the 7th grade and another from a woman who attended an informational meeting about a new K-4 BASIS opening in Phoenix. I've pulled out a few excerpts.

First the parent who tried to enroll her child in BASIS Scottsdale as a 7th grader. This is a very good student who had taken advanced classes in Scottsdale Unified schools, but she was discouraged from enrolling him because he would be too far behind.

[I was told] it would be very, very difficult for my child to enter BASIS. At the tender age of 12, my child would be "too far behind." The "double advanced" math class in which my child skipped 6th and 7th grade math and entered 8th grade pre-algebra was the absolute lowest, remedial class BASIS offered. Missing two years of Latin was another problem. Basically, the message was, if you didn't start in 5th grade or at the very least 6th grade, BASIS doesn't want you. If there are parents stating that BASIS seemed to not want their child with special needs or who struggles in a particular subject, well, I would believe it, because they didn't want my Principal's List, National Junior Honor Society, gifted child.

She noted that the amount of classroom space allotted for students at each grade level shrinks as students move up the grades. The diminishing number of students at higher grade levels is built into the school's plans. She compared the pared-down classes, which begin with a self-selected high ability group of children and become even more selective with the passing years, with a similar cadre of capable, motivated students at a Scottsdale public school.

I can promise you that if you took the group of kids in my child's double advanced math class and compared their scores with that of BASIS, we would be on US News and World Report’s top ten list. If our public schools were allowed to only submit the scores of its brightest, most motivated students, we wouldn't have a nation obsessed with the notion that charter schools are doing a better job of educating our young. If our high school was allowed to systematically weed out students year after year until only the most hard-working, brightest remained, I am quite sure you would find a group of students with a 100% passing rate on their AP exams and some spanked SAT scores. In fact, to that end, I would be happy to work with my contacts at the district to provide for you the aggregate test scores, AP rates, etc. of Chaparral's top 35 students. I think that we will find commensurate test scores along with a group of well rounded students who were also exposed to sports, clubs, and students from all walks of life and teachers who were dedicated career teachers that produced those results year after year.

Ann-Eve Pedersen looks at the theft of half a million dollars by an employee of the STO, Arizona School Choice Trust (ASCT), in a segment of our cable access program, Education: The Rest of the Story. "STO" is short for School Tuition Organization, an organization that uses tuition tax credits, aka backdoor vouchers, to pay for students' private school tuition.

What makes this theft of taxpayer money noteworthy is that ASCT is run by members of the Goldwater Institute, an organization whose six-figure-salaried spokespeople scream about waste and mismanagement in the public sector. Yet a half million dollars of taxpayers' money was stolen from under their noses over a number of years, and nobody noticed. Watchdog, watch thyself.

[Headline Correction: Lucy Caldwell, Communications Director for the Goldwater Institute, contacted me requesting that I correct some "factual inaccuracies" in this post. She noted that the Arizona School Choice Trust is not a "Goldwater Institute-Run STO" as I stated in the headline. She is correct. Clint Bolick, Vice President for Litigation at G.I., is the Chairman of the ASCT board, but he does that on his own time. I regret the error. Caldwell also said it was factually inaccurate for me to write that "ASCT is run by members of the Goldwater Institute." She maintains I should not have written "members," since Bolick is the only G.I.-affiliated board member. In this instance, I am going to stick with my original statement. Another current board member is Matthew Ladner. He was G.I.'s vice president of research, mainly dealing with educational issues, until he left to work at Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education. However, Ladner is still listed as a Senior Fellow on the G.I. website, meaning he has not severed ties with the Institute. Also worth noting is that Darcy Olsen, President and CEO of the Goldwater Institute, served on the ASCT board from 2006 through 2009, which means three people who are part of G.I. have been board members of ASCT.]

[Odd Request For Further Correction: Lucy Caldwell emailed me again, writing that part of my correction above is incorrect. I mentioned that Matthew Ladner is listed as a Senior Fellow on the G.I. website, which is correct. However, according to Communications Director Caldwell, the information communicated on the website is incorrect.

Matt Ladner is not a senior fellow at the Institute. We disbanded our senior fellow program a long time ago. The fact that he has a bio that you can find on our site is a bug of our current site (which is under a major redesign) by which you cannot delete a person's bio without deleting everything they ever wrote/authored.

Matthew Ladner wrote an email confirming the dissolution of the Senior Fellow program.

I remember it distinctly as we were sent an thoughtful wall plaque thanking us for our service along with a letter explaining the dissolution of the program.

It's beyond me why it's taken the Goldwater Institute, with its multi-million dollar annual budget and its many six-figure salaried employees, this long to make a stab at fixing a portion of its website which has been wrong for quite awhile. Maybe they've all been too busy going after all those public sector folks who, they say, can never get anything right.]

The world hasn't been the same since Reading Rainbow was cancelled. The critically acclaimed children's television series last aired in 2006, but was revitalized as an educational interactive book reading and video field trip app for the Kindle and iPad. That might change.

Levar Burton and his Reading Rainbow team need your help to bring the series back  using Kickstarter. Burton needs to raise $1 million dollars to bring the show back for children and teachers to use at no charge. Burton plans on making the program web based so it can be implemented in over 1500 classrooms at no cost to the schools.


The rewards are pretty unbelievable to say the least. Have you ever wanted to have dinner with Geordi La Forge while wearing his sweet shades? You can make it happen, and then some. Incentives include signed posters, headshots, thank you letters, customized voice message greetings and exclusive comic-con interactions. $350 Twitter follow from Levar Burton has to be the best reward.

Burton has 34 days to raise $1 million dollars, and we are running out of time:


Click here to help save the children. Think of the children, Rangers.

UPDATE:

I can't believe it, but they did it. 22,729 people raised $1,000,212 in less than 11 hours. Here's Levar touching reaction to the the news.

Here's a line you rarely see, from a New York Times article, Unlikely Allies Uniting to Fight School Changes: "Conservative lawmakers also sponsored a bill, co-written by the teachers union . . ." Things are getting weird in Education Land.

The article should be required reading for journalists who write about education. Any reporters who have fashioned simplistic political dichotomies around the Common Core — you see a lot of this in Arizona reporting — that the far right hates it but moderate Republicans and Democrats love it, end of story, need to look deeper.

Here's the rest of the paragraph I quoted from earlier.

During the most recent legislative session in Tennessee, conservative Republicans, including Mr. Womick, joined the teachers union in supporting a bill to delay the administration of a standardized test aligned to the Common Core. Conservative lawmakers also sponsored a bill, co-written by the teachers union, that overturned a State Board of Education policy tying decisions about teacher licenses to student test scores.

The more common linkage between the far right and progressive educators is one where the right despises the Common Core standards themselves while progressives dislike the high stakes tests more than the standards, but sometimes it gets more complicated than that, like in Tennessee. And in Oklahoma,

[T]eachers unions gave strong support to a bill, sponsored by Republicans, that would overturn a law requiring third graders to be held back simply on the basis of the results of one standardized test.

The National Education Policy Center (NEPC) is a treasure for those of us who see "educational studies" touted in the media, often by reporters who don't know enough to evaluate the quality of the research. NEPC scholars take a careful look at those reports and point out what are often sloppy research practices, sometimes intentional, sometimes unintentional. They also publish valuable research of their own.

Every year the NEPC gives out Bunkum Awards for the shoddiest education research of the year. David Berliner, who is a Regents' Professor Emeritus and former dean of the College of Education at Arizona State University (a few of the NEPC folks have ASU connections) presents this year's awards. ALEC, Students First, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Brookings Institute all get their comeuppance.

(Suggestion: Sign up for the NEPC Publication Alerts if you want to learn the latest on both the best and worst education research out there.)

A couple of education profs out of University of Illinois maintain that math achievement of students in public schools, meaning schools run by school districts, is higher than the achievement of similar students in private schools. (Note: The article is in Education Week which is subscription only, so the link may not bring up the complete article.) The profs, Christopher and Sarah Lubienski, wrote a book on the subject, The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools.

The same study found that district and charter schools are about equal.

Is it true? As would be expected, pro-privatization scholars have disputed the findings. Here's the definitive answer on which side is right: Who the hell knows? Every education study is suspect because children aren't lab rats, every classroom is a universe unto itself, and different scholars can slice and dice the same data to come up with wildly different conclusions. So all "results" from educational studies should be taken with heaping helpings of salt.

That being said, every reasonable study I've seen has concluded there's about a dime's worth of difference between the achievement of similar students in district, charter and private schools, and that dime gets passed around to different types of schools depending on the grade level of the students, the subject matter and the nature of the study. This goes all the way back to the George W. Bush administration, where his Department of Education tried to prove private and charter schools were better than district schools and ended up with the conclusion that one scored higher in one area, another scored higher in another area, but the whole thing came out as a wash. Bush's folks were so frustrated with the study, they ran it again a few years later and got the same results.

How do "open enrollment" charter schools end up with selective student bodies? Watch the CharterLand video and find out. (You can download the game board here.)

It's a huge swing. Courtesy of yesterday's landslide recall election, Sunnyside School District has gone from a 3-2 majority supporting Superintendent Manuel Isquierdo to a 4-1 majority which is likely to scrutinize his every move, and maybe get rid of him early. But after the much-deserved victory celebrations are over, it'll be time for people to take the stars out of their eyes and realize change is going to be a long, slow, expensive haul. Let's have high hopes for the new board, but let's also have reasonable expectations.

Isquierdo has little credibility left in the district or the community. The new board would probably be wise to get rid of him and look for someone who is less of a self-aggrandizing salesman and district bully and more of a solid educator with vision and integrity. But getting rid of Isquierdo won't come cheap. It's going to cost over half a million dollars for the district to buy out the remainder of his contract.

Is it worth it? He's got two years left on his contract. That's two years of board-superintendent pitched battles and gridlock. And it's probably two more years of voters denying the district a much-needed bond override. It's going to be hard to make positive change when the district has to cut millions from its budget. Should they give Isquierdo a half million dollar check to get the district back on track sooner rather than later? It's a tough call. The new board will take flak no matter what it decides.