Will the Shining Citi Becomes the CitiCorpse?

I've had a Citi credit card for a long time, and I have in recent years used it like a free Amex card: buy stuff and pay it off at the end of the month before interest accrues. Recently I got to wondering about all those points I've been collecting, and when I checked, I had enough for a new DVD recorder and a bunch left over.

About 2 weeks after my new player arrived, so did my monthly bill. My interest rate had gone from 7.99% to 14.96%. When I called up and finally got a human voice, I was told the cost of credit has gone up and so, I, a loyal platimum customer, must pay my fair share. When I asked a question that was not among the scripted responses, the poor lady put me onto a supervisor. He told me I could accept the new terms or accept the fact that my card would not be renewed when it expires.

Today's WaPo has a story about a new GAO report that shows that Citi is the leader among the corporate scumbags who set up foreign subsidiaries to evade American taxes. So it looks like now I and everyone else with a Citi Card is paying our fair share at least 4 times: the fees Citi collects for using its card, the increase in interest rates to pay for the tight credit, the taxpayer cash to pay for Citi's 45 billion dollar bailout, and now, extra taxes to pay for the taxes that Citi hasn't been paying for years.

I told the Citi supervisor on the phone that I know it is not his fault that he works for a corrupt bunch of thieves. He did not disagree--in fact, he said Happy New Year. From WaPo:

Most of America's largest publicly traded corporations -- including several that are receiving billions of dollars from U.S. taxpayers to finance their recovery -- have set up offshore operations that could help them avoid paying U.S. taxes on their profits, a government study released yesterday found.

American International Group, Bank of America, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley are among the companies that are getting bailed out by U.S. taxpayers while having subsidiaries in locations where they can avoid paying U.S. taxes, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Of the 100 largest public companies, 83 do business in tax-haven hotspots like the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and the British Virgin Islands, where they can move their income into tax-free accounts.

It is all legal, but it could come to an end, given the dire condition of the U.S. economy and President-elect Barack Obama's campaign pledge to close this popular business tax loophole. The Treasury estimates that it loses $100 billion a year in tax revenue as a result of companies shipping their income off shore, and congressional leaders are vowing to introduce legislation forcing big companies to pay full freight.

The GAO did not independently review company transactions to see if the companies purposely created tax-haven businesses to avoid U.S. taxes. But it said that historically, offshore subsidiaries are used for reducing tax costs and shielding transactions from public view.

Several of the companies are household names, including Pepsi, Exxon, Dell and Dow Chemical. In the list of 100 companies that GAO studied were 63 with major federal contracts, including Caterpillar, BearingPoint, Boeing, Merck & Co. and Kraft Foods.

Legislators gave particular attention to the 14 companies on the list that received bailout money from the Treasury in the recent financial meltdown. Sens. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Carl M. Levin (D.-Mich.) requested the GAO study as a launching pad for their effort to curtail what they call "tax-dodgers."

The bailout recipients on the list include Bank of America, which received $45 billion; Citigroup, $45 billion; American Express, $3.4 billion; and Goldman Sachs, $10 billion, according to the Taxpayers for Common Sense watchdog group.

"This is kind of like economic patriotism," Dorgan said. "Americans were told you have to pony up some money to help these companies. And it's rather infuriating for them to find out now that those companies, when they were profitable, didn't want to pay taxes and found clever ways to hide their money overseas."

Several companies said they are engaged in legitimate business operations around the world, and rejected the premise that they are trying to avoid paying their share of U.S. taxes.

Representatives from two companies reported in interviews that they couldn't say whether their foreign operations ultimately reduced their total tax bill.

"We do business around the globe," AIG spokesman Nick Ashooh said. "It's absurd that we're being accused of using these as tax havens. Now what the net tax impact is, that's extremely complicated."

The GAO found 17 companies with no business in tax-haven locales, including Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, United Parcel Service, Verizon, Lockheed Martin and Northrup Grumman. . . .

Duncan Uses Citizen's Briefing Book to Advance Business Roundtable Agenda

The Obama Team has up a website called Citizen's Briefing Book. According to the site, ideas can be entered, and others can vote the idea up (+ 10 points) or down (-10 points):

Share your ideas on any issue facing the new administration, then rate or comment on other ideas. The best rated ideas will be gathered into a Citizen's Briefing Book to be delivered to President Obama after he is sworn in.

I spent some time on this site, and below are the ideas related to education that were ranked between 910 points to 54,900 points. There are over a hundred other ideas with a lower ranking than 910. And please note that the idea, "Eliminate No Child Left Behind," has 1050 points but is not listed in this grouping of "Popular Ideas." (In order to find it, in fact, you have to search the phrase, "Eliminate No Child Left Behind"). On the other hand, the idea, "Reform No Child Left Behind (NCLB)" has fewer points (1100) and is included in the Popular Ideas. Hmm--those algorithms can be so picky.

The Briefing Book is a great idea if it works to actually affect decision making, and only time will tell that. The NCLB "eliminate" vs. "reform" business just cited does not bode well for a transparent process. But that shortcoming is insignificant in comparison to how the Secretary Designate is using the Citizen's Briefing Book. So far, the Briefing Book has been turned into a scam to promote the Duncan (Business Roundtable) agenda, which has nothing to do with what citizens are suggesting to improve education.

In Duncan's first YouTube comments (see below) on what he is hearing from the citizens who care enough to write down their education ideas, he opens with this as #1:

" First there has been a series of folks who are interested in looking at alternate routes into the teaching profession. That's something I'm actually a big fan of . . . over the past five years, I think we brought 1,200 new teachers into the Chicago Public Schools through alternative certification routes."

Now I can assure you that the "series of folks" interested in alternative routes to teaching are not among those who are writing ideas into the "Briefing Book." I could not find any idea, in fact, on alternate routes to teaching or alternate certification or anything related under teacher preparation that had more than a couple of comments and very few points. Duncan is using the Briefing Book as an entry point to continue the propagandizing for the BR agenda that he began in Chicago under Daley. And with Wendy Kopp's name being floated for a top job with Duncan, it would make sense for him to begin to soften the ground for the cheap solution to the urban teacher issue: a ready supply of non-professional, inexpensive, temporary, issue-ignorant, enthused, malleable, patronizing, and privileged lasses who will not hang around long enough to be overly concerned with benefits or rights.

Duncan's second issue pick relates to an actual idea from the Most Popular List--a greater emphasis on vocational education. Some serious fact-checking is needed, however, on Duncan's claim that at there is a vast shortage of skilled blue collar workers. Perhaps this will prove true if any money from the bailout actually goes to rebuild infrastructure after the banks' stolen cash is replaced.

And the third idea that Duncan pulls is student loan forgiveness, which is a ways down the list from the public's more popular ideas, which are listed here, even though they have escaped the attention apparently of the Secretary Designate, who has much bigger fish to fry and many fewer people to listen to with ideas that are worth a whole lot more.

This is a ranked list rom the most "Popular Ideas" that are related to education:

54,900 An end to the government sponsored abstinence education to be replaced by an introduction of age appropriate sex education

22670 Encourage Trade Schools

12970 Establish a Free Online Educational System for the Working Poor!

9980 Encourage Science and Technology

9850 Healthy Kids Learn Better

9080 Focus on the Art and Creativity

7290 Lost SCIENTISTS and ENGINEERS

7270 Libraries of all types need our support

6940 Limit the cost of student loans

4790 Create an online E-Library

3900 Renew US leadership in education

3730 Return Civics Education to the Schools

3170 Money Management Taught in Public Schools

2900 National Service for College Students

1980 Financial Literacy Programs

1870 A New Curriculum

1690 Reclaiming America's Status as Science and Engineering Leader

1560 Studen [sic] Loan Help

1350 Re-introduce civics as a standard in high school education. Understanding

the constitution is fundamental to enforcing the constitution.

1330 STOP COLLEGE TEXTBOOK PRICE-GOUGING - help our students by reforming system!

1240 Solar and Wind Powered Schools

1210 Invest in Education (teacher pay)

1140 America needs more Doctors, Scientists and Engineers to solve today's and tomorrow's problems.

1140 No Child Left Inside - Promote Environmental Education

1120 Stop the privatization of public works

1120 Green Textbooks

1100 Reform No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB)

1050 Include teachers in educational decision making

1030 Financial Literacy and Budgeting in Education

1020 Public School Gardens

990 Expand Student Loan Forgiveness Programs

950 Foreign languages should be an integral part of American education.

920 Cost of Education

910 Stop Credit card companies from taking advantage of college students

At least a hundred other ideas fall between 910 and 40 in the "Popular Idea" section, which is where I found this, the closest thing I could find that has anything to do with teacher qualification:

40 Teacher Qualifications
No degrees in education as a qualification for teaching. Prospective teachers must have a master's degree in their chosen field. Learning to be an educator is another, further step in the quest to be a teacher.

Finally, I found what is probably the least popular education idea:

-240 Abandoning public education

Too bad that the Business Roundtable, the ed industry, and Arne Duncan don't feel the same way.

Final Ironies in the Bush Sewer

With six days to go in the longest political nightmare in the history of Republic, the final moves, words, and scandals exuding from this Administration represent a perfect microcosm of the crimes, outrages, and base stupidity that have been the hallmarks of the Bush Reign. This week we found out conclusively that perjured racists have been running the Civil Rights Division at the U. S. Department of Justice. And this one, John Tanner, is being funded by the Justice Dept. to help other racists in Alabama to redraw voting districts to water down the black vote. From Talking Points Memo:




And yesterday the NYTimes carried a story of IRS plans to go looking for unpaid taxes at public and private universities. After all, the Feds are cash strapped after replacing all the money that the thieves who have wrecked our economy and stole with impunity as the SEC and other oversight agencies looked the other way. The universities should tell these jokers to go Cheney themselves:

The Internal Revenue Service is considering expanding its scrutiny of colleges and universities to focus on billions of dollars associated with academic research, federal financing and intellectual property, a senior agency official said on Tuesday.

The expansion of an investigation would put pressure on the schools to further disclose their inner financial workings as the I.R.S. undertakes a major effort to learn more about whether academic institutions are improperly using their nonprofit status to avoid paying certain taxes.

The expansion, while not yet certain, “is on the table,” Lois G. Lerner, the I.R.S.’s director of exempt organizations, said in a brief interview.

As part of its current investigation, which began last October, the I.R.S. sent unusually detailed questionnaires to 400 private and public universities and colleges about their executive compensation policies and their business activities.

While the institutions are not obligated to respond, not doing so can potentially lead to an audit.. . .

NY KIPP Teachers Ask for Union Protection

The KIPP chain gang ed model is backed by today's rich and powerful SEPs (social entrepreneurial parasites) as the final solution for urban schooling. Hundreds of millions of dollars are available to propagandize and to supplement the public expenditures on these test-cramming and behavior-mod camps that rob children of their capacity to grow and think as children do who are educated elsewhere. And as children are robbed by a bare-knuckled pedagogy sprinkled with eugenics-inspired positive psychology, so, too, are teachers robbed of any sense of professional autonomy, due process, or decision-making power.

And even though the SEPs make sure that NY KIPP teachers make $10,000 more per year than regular teachers, this incentive has not kept two KIPP schools from now asking for union protection. The teachers' reasons: stress and burnout over long hours, limited voice in school decisions, unfair evaluation systems, and unfair discipline policies. From the NY Times:

The United Federation of Teachers announced on Tuesday that it had organized teachers at two respected New York City charter schools, making inroads in a movement that has long sold itself as an alternative that is not hamstrung by union contracts and work rules.

Union officials said the teachers’ decision was an important step because the schools are part of the Knowledge Is Power Program, known as KIPP, which has 66 schools in 19 states and the District of Columbia and plays an influential role in national education debates. Advocates for charter schools — which are publicly funded but independently operated — expressed concern that unionization could undermine the schools’ effectiveness.

“A union contract is actually at odds with a charter school,” said Jeanne Allen, executive director of the Center for Education Reform, a Washington group that supports charter schools.

“As long as you have nonessential rules that have more to do with job operations than with student achievement,” she said, “you are going to have a hard time with accomplishing your mission.”

Several teachers at the two schools — KIPP Amp, a middle school in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and KIPP Infinity, a middle school in Harlem — said the union organizing drive came about because they wanted a stronger voice on the job and because the demands on them were so rigorous. They also said that they wanted to insure a fair discipline and evaluation system.

KIPP’s teachers in New York generally earn at least $10,000 more a year than teachers at the city’s traditional public schools, but also typically work from 7:15 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, as well as one or two Saturdays a month. Many teachers also give students their personal phone numbers.

Those who run the schools say the extra hours and increased availability are exactly what are needed to boost student achievement — KIPP Amp and KIPP Infinity both earned A’s on their report cards and students had high scores on standardized tests. But several teachers at the two schools said some KIPP teachers were getting burned out and quitting, hurting the schools and student-teacher relations.

“It’s a matter of sustainability for teachers,” said Luisa Bonifacio, who teaches sixth-grade reading at KIPP Amp. “There’s a heavy workload, and people have to balance their lives with their work.”. . . .

The Rumor: Kopp, Rotherham, Schnur Top Picks for Duncan Lieutenants

If this happens, there will be war. From one of the Ed Week blogs:

This was written by Sharon Robinson, the president of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, to education lobbyists and others and passed to me by a source (not Robinson):

It has come to our attention that Education Secretary Designee Arne Duncan has proposed a leadership team for ED that includes Wendy Kopp, Jonathan Schnur, and Andy Rotherham. I do not know the exact position in each instance, but we can safely assume positions such as deputy, under-secretary, and chief-of-staff are strong probabilities.

Significantly, Linda Darling-Hammond, who has directed the education policy team for the Transition, is not on Duncan’s list for any position in the Administration. It is imperative that we act quickly to let the Transition Team know that Wendy, Jonathan, and Andy are unacceptable for these roles. They have evidenced a constant and intense disregard for working with the organized education community, and there is no reason to expect them to behave differently as agents of the Department of Education. In the case of Wendy and Jonathan, their appointments would signal expansion for organizations that promote the revolving door of under-qualified teachers as the best answer for poor children. The proposed team, if appointed, would be a grave disappointment for those of us who are hoping to change the education system in the interest of students. Fast-track teachers, scripted instruction, and lots of testing is not an adequate response for low-income students. That is what Kopp and Rotherham are promoting. This is not just a time to simply offer support for Linda Darling-Hammond. This is a moment when we need to let the Transition Team know that the circulated names of Kopp, Schnur, and Rotherham are not acceptable. . . .

Reified and Refried Reform

Plucked in its entirety from Deborah Meier's website, January 09:

Dear readers,

I kept reminding myself before the election that Obama’s victory—if we were so lucky—was not the end, but just the beginning of our work. But, actually, some part of me was expecting otherwise. I’m getting a wee bit tired of swimming against the stream.

The choice of Arne Duncan came not as a surprise, but a disappointment. I watched the “campaign” as it pitted “reformers” against “the status quo” placing Klein/Rhee/Vallas/Duncan in the former category and folks like Linda Darling-Hammond (Christenson, Walters and, I guess, me) in the latter. At first I didn’t think they could get away with such a starkly biased classification system. But said often enough it probably set the stage for the choice of Duncan—who’s probably the best of the infamous four.

Maybe the story really reflects the way Obama sees the world of education, maybe because he feels comfortable with Chicagoans, maybe because he feels he has to “rule from the center-right” as some argue. Maybe, maybe.

But the mindset that has now been reified as “Reform” is what scares me. It borrows the worst from the market-place world of business. We have much to learn about how to make schools work better on a large scale, but one thing we ought to have learned from the events post-Enron is that the current business-model of accountability is dangerous. And it’s dangerous because it’s built on glorifying greed, and has few penalties for distortion and corruption of data. Instead of tending to the shop, the “business” class now tends to “the data.” At heart it’s a modified Ponzi scheme that’s always promising, but can’t deliver, the real goods. “Goods” are, in fact, now part of the “old economy.”

The data quoted by Obama in announcing Duncan’s appointment is entirely without merit. He didn’t raise scores—except by changing the method of testing and scoring! That’s a fact. On the only reliable measure, even assuming “better” test scores are what we’re seeking, it’s been flat, flat, flat. NAEP scores (the one national test we can use to see real change over time) have remained stable since Duncan took over from Vallas –who had already rescued Chicago. How many knights on a white horse claiming victory can save the same city? (Remember Ron Paige and the Houston miracle?)

Ditto for graduation rates, even if we trust that the Chicago style retention policy hasn’t “disappeared” thousands of youngsters before they even get to high school. (Graduation rates rest on the 9th grade headcount.) And – I have to check this – less than 5% of those graduates who go to college apparently don’t complete a 4-year education. They are, as Mike Rose reminded us, totally “unprepared” for college work—or the work of democracy or decent jobs in the economy. They’ve been prepared instead for taking dumbed-down tests, unless they’re lucky enough to be rich and to go to schools like Chicago’s Lab School or Sitwell Friends in D.C.

There’s a possibility that some of the new small schools are better for kids. I tend to think so regardless of their test scores. And there are more selective schools that have wooed back some of the middle class—but not in ways that benefit the rest I fear.

It’s hard to blame Duncan—and in many ways I don’t. He’s not an educator and he’s just going along with conventional wisdom and the political thrust of the Mayor’s who now control our urban schools. I hear nice things about him “as a person.”

Maybe in a new position, under different forms of pressure he’ll start taking a closer look at what really must be done. Maybe he’ll hire some interesting educators to think through some of these dilemmas. But, these “maybes” probably also depend on the kind of pressure and response he gets not just from educators, but from everyone else who cares—parents, for example, just smart citizens, and employers who know that what they’re looking for won’t be “produced” this way. As for democrats…12 plus years of the kind of compliance thinking that tests reward are a poor prescription for the shaky future of democracy.

Deborah

© 2009 Deborah Meier

Duncan Came to Neither Bury NCLB Nor to Praise It?

Based on the testimony offered at today's confirmation party, Arne Duncan is already deep into his new role in the post-partisan and aggressively-neutral political drama unfolding in Washington: He came to neither bury NCLB or to praise it. What did he come to do?

Libby Quaid, the heir apparent at the AP's education desk to the obsequious stooge, Ben Feller (will he retire with Bush in Dallas?), ascribes to Duncan a plan to "lure more people into teaching." How will he do this?

. . . .Duncan praised an idea unions have resisted, the idea of teacher pay raises tied to student performance. Duncan started a performance-pay program in Chicago with federal dollars from the Education Department.

"That's something that I want to look at, to not just support but also potentially increase," Duncan said. "We can't do enough to reward and recognize ... excellence."

Duncan said he intends to travel the country recruiting new teachers and to take steps to keep teachers on the job.

"Given the tough economic times, that actually helps our chances of recruiting great talent," Duncan said.

Duncan also said kids should spend even more time in the classroom. Kids in 200 schools came to class on Saturdays last year, Duncan said, and he brought 15,000 freshmen back to school a month early on a voluntary basis.

"I think our school day is too short, our week is too short, our year is too short," he said.

There are numerous good and bad reasons that people go into teaching, but longer school days, longer school weeks, and longer school years are not among the reasons--the good reasons or the bad ones. Nor will competent and caring professionals be "lured" into teaching by the prospect of being evaluated and paid according to the results of high-stakes standardized tests. Good luck on the recruiting tour.

Outrage Against Duncan Swells

Black Agenda Report has a lengthy piece, "Arne Duncan and Neo-Liberal Racism," on Arne Duncan just in time for his confirmation hearing. Will any Democrat ask why Duncan is roundly praised by Spellings, Bush, and Rod Paige? Will Duncan repeat the half-truths and lies that he presented on the Hill last summer in his cheerleading testimony for autocratic rule of urban schools? Stay tuned.

by Paul Street

This article previously appeared on Znet.

"NO SCHOOL LEFT UNSOLD"

Educational justice advocates are understandably displeased with President-Elect Obama's appointment of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) CEO Arne Duncan to the position of Education Secretary in the next White House.

As the Chicago public school teacher Jesse Sharkey notes, "In the past couple years, Duncan has been turning public schools over to private operators - mainly in the form of charter and contract schools - at a rate of about 20 per year. Duncan has also resuscitated some of the worst ‘school reform' ideas of the 1990s, like firing all the teachers in low-performing schools (called ‘turnarounds'). At the same time, he's eliminated many Local School Councils (LSCs) and made crucial decisions without public input... Charter schools and test-score driven school ‘choice' have been the watchwords of Duncan's rule in Chicago" (Sharkey 2008). [1]

"Charter schools and test-score driven school ‘choice' have been the watchwords of Duncan's rule in Chicago."

University of Illinois at Chicago education professor Kevin Kumashiro notes that Duncan's Chicago policies have been "steeped in a free-market model of school reform" that feeds the drop-out rate, increases segregation, and does little if anything to increase student achievement. "Duncan's track record is clear," says Kumashiro: "Less parental and community involvement in school governance. Less support for teacher unions. Less breadth and depth in what and how students learn as schools place more emphasis on narrow high-stakes testing. More penalties for schools but without adequate resources for those in high-poverty areas" (Kumashiro 2008). . . .

Sir Ken Weighs In On NCLB

From HuffPo:

. . . . President-elect Obama has said that NCLB was well intentioned, and it was. He's said too that one of the major problems in implementing it has been the lack of federal funding, and it has. But he knows too that the problems with NCLB are much deeper than money. The whole premise of the act is deeply flawed. It's based on the fatal idea that to face the future schools just have to do better what they did in the past: they simply have to get back to basics and raise standards. Schools, and policy makers, should get back to basics. They should aim to raise standards too. Why would you lower them? But what are the basics now, and which standards should apply?

I said that the premise of the act is flawed. Actually there are three flawed premises. First, NCLB promotes a catastrophically narrow idea of intelligence and ability. The result is a terrible waste of talent and motivation in countless students. Second, it confuses standards with standardizing. The result is that schools across the country are becoming dreary and homogenized. And third, it assumes that education can be improved without the professional creativity and personal passion of teachers. The result is that too many good teachers are streaming out of the very schools that urgently need them to stay. All of this is holding America back in a world that's moving faster than ever.

To face the future, America needs to celebrate and develop the diverse talents of all of its people -- young and old alike. It needs to cultivate creativity and innovation, systematically and with confidence, in business, in culture and in rebuilding its post industrial communities. It needs to provide leadership at home and abroad in promoting deeper forms of cultural understanding and cooperation. These are the real basics. Basic to all of them is a different view of human talent and ability, and of the real conditions in which people flourish. . . . .

Boston Globe Escalates Shilling for Charter Movement

The Boston Globe was panting to get to press last week as the ink was still drying on a new non-refereed charter school study paid for by the Boston Foundation, the prime mover and financial backer of the charter school movement in Massachusetts. The Boston Foundation has a long history of supporting good causes, but it is not good that they are now selling their institutional reputation to Business Roundtable ideologues to advance an agenda for the de-professionalization of teaching, the corporatizing of schools, the elimination of unions, and the intellectual sterilization of urban school children, all to be accomplished while collecting dollar-for-dollar tax credits and pats on the back by those who are clueless on the self-serving nature of this new social entrepreneurial movement—where even acts of giving must be self-serving.

So then the Boston Globe has become the carrier of the corporate message of the “bold reformers,” or the reckless corporatizers, depending on your views of the relative importance of renewing the public commitment to public education—as opposed to embracing private entrepreneurial investments at taxpayer expense, all disguised as public giving and philanthropic goodness.

The Globe first ran a big news piece with graphs and stats last Monday ("Charter Schools Grade Highest), followed up with editorials and op-eds heavy with quotes from insiders at the Boston Foundation. In none of these pieces will you find any of the caveats and limitations that the authors of the study carefully detailed to keep respectable news sources and other readers from doing what the Globe has done. I don’t blame Boston Foundation President, Paul Grogan, from pumping his study. And pump he did in, of course, the Boston Globe:

Paul Grogan, president of the Boston Foundation, which funded the research, was more direct. "There is no justification for keeping a charter cap in place that is denying urban, mostly black and brown children the opportunity for a demonstrably better result," Grogan said.

After all, Grogan's non-profit Boston Foundation (with almost a billion dollars in non-profit) paid for the study and has a huge vested, shall we say, interest in removing the cap on charter schools, thus removing the top on the tax credit cookie jar for all those hungry edu-entrepreneurs seeking to do good. But it is unconscionable that the Boston Globe offer such a one-sided presentation of a schooling situation that is anything but one-sided.

So, then, a few observations on the limitations of the study, since it is obvious that the Globe and the folks at the Boston Foundation are trying their best to paint a picture that only exists in the sunny side of the heads of the “bold reformers.” I will leave the statistical surgery for someone more competent, and I will use largely quotes from the authors, themselves.

The study, Informing the Debate: Comparing Boston’s Charter, Pilot, and Traditional Schools is really two separate research designs under the same cover. It can be downloaded at the Boston Foundation website.

The first part of the study is an observational study, and it examines MCAS test score differences among charters, pilot schools (a sort of hybrid with some charter and some traditional characteristics) and Boston Public Schools (BPS). As indicated by the researchers, themselves, the findings of the observational design are easy to fault because of the selection bias background characteristics that are unaccounted for in the study. Besides attracting parents, for instance, who are more eager to seek out opportunities for better academic results for their children, we know that the charter schools in this study have fewer special education students, fewer English language learners, and fewer poor students. No wonder, then, that these charters outperform the BPS schools and the Pilots.

Charter Schools also serve a smaller proportion of special education students, free- and reduced-price lunch students, and English learners than do the traditional BPS schools. In addition, high school Charter students tend to come in with substantially better math and ELA performance on the MCAS than those in traditional BPS schools (.412 standard deviations higher in math and .412 standard deviations higher in ELA) (p.15).

The authors of the study further concede that

students who go to Pilot and Charter Schools are different in important ways from those that do not. We need to take account of these differences before judging the relative effectiveness of these different school models” (p. 18).

In an earlier section the authors entitled “Caveats,” they go further:

Each design is described in detail on page 8. This study is limited by the constraints of our two research designs. The observational study includes all schools but does not control for unobserved differences in background characteristics. The lottery study controls for all differences in students’ background, including unobserved differences, but does not include all schools.

A second caveat relates to the observed control variables used in our study. These include indicators for participation in special education and limited English proficiency. These broad categories may disguise large differences in student groups. Special education students range from those needing intensive all day services to students needing a little extra time in a resource room. English learners may know no English at all or have some proficiency. It is possible that Pilot and Charter Schools serve different proportions of these subgroups. Unfortunately, our state data set does not provide finely detailed breakdowns for these two variables in a manner consistent or comprehensive enough to be useful for this study (p. 6).

The second research design is what the authors call a lottery study. Students who applied for and were selected into pilot and charter schools were compared to students who applied and were not selected to attend. Their individual test scores were tracked over time to compare the effect of charter schools, pilot schools, and BPS schools. Quite ingenious in design, but extremely limited in the sampling—as noted in the Caveats above. What results is a skewed picture based on a handful of the most popular charters compared with pilots with a much more limited lottery selection compared to the BPS who accept any student who walks in the door (remember public schools?).

. . . it's important to keep in mind that while the lottery study uses a stronger research design than the observational study, both the Charter and Pilot lottery results come only from schools and years in which the demand for seats exceeds the number of seats. Our Charter lottery results also omit schools and years for which lottery records are missing or incomplete. These considerations have the largest impact on the sample of Charter middle schools in the lottery study, where the estimated test score effects are largest.

On balance, our lottery-based findings provide strong evidence that the charter model has generated substantial test score gains in high-demand Charter Schools with complete records. On the other hand, these results should not be interpreted as showing that Boston Charters always produce test score gains. In Charter Schools with lower demand and incomplete lottery records, we have to rely on non-experimental results (p. 39).

And the non-experimental results, remember, are the ones from the observational study that the authors told us that we have to take with a big grain of salt. What does this mean? It means that this study, the one that the “bold reformers” are crowing about did not include test data for students from the lower tier of charter chain gangs, where, of course, the scores are most likely to be equally bad or worse than they are in the poorest public schools that the edu-preneurs don't give a damn about. If they did, they would be putting their money where their mealy mouths are.

And what about this lottery business—didn’t this “scientifically-based” study show the charter schools superior in test results than the pilot schools? Well, just like charter schools, not all lotteries are equal. The lotteries for the pilot schools were conducted after all the guaranteed seats were filled, which means that most of the students attending the pilot schools are there not because of a lottery draw but because they live within a guaranteed proximity of the school. Here comes the self-selection bias again, yes, because ALL of the charter school students are there because their parents cared enough to fill out the app to get them into the lottery. Apples to oranges!

And how many charter school kids are we talking about in this earth-shaking study? Well, in the middle schools, where the significant math gains earned a big chart placement in the Boston Globe, the total number of students was 953 students from four (4) charter schools. A pretty meager sample to use in order to build an argument that charters have kicked butt over the pilots and BPS.

But remember, it doesn’t take much when the media hammer the intended distortion until it becomes an all-pervasive meme that is passed from newspaper to TV and back again. After all, it was just one study, and one that could not even cover its own statistical contortions, by another Harvard rock star, Paul Peterson, that launched the urban voucher movement.