Pennsylvania Embracing Failure

Albert Einstein is perhaps our most famous theorist. Turns out, the evidence has proven him right. Win.

Lately, I have begun to espouse a new philosophy which is distinctly non-philosophical -- "show me that it works."

Both liberalism and conservatism are replete with theories about the way we should live and run our governments and our societies.

Some theories -- trickle-down economics for example -- have lived long beyond the time they should have been abandoned for the simple reason that have failed to produce the results they promised.

(For my entire adult life, I've been waiting for tax cuts for millionaires to ensure me a comfortable middle class lifestyle. Next.)

Failure of this theory is no joke.

Perhaps nowhere is theory more prevalent these days than in the field of education.

And so, although dubious, I was willing to give school choice a chance under the rubric that if it works, let's go with it.

After all, as someone who is the product of public schools, has a child in public schools and reports on traditional public schools on a daily basis, it was hard to argue that public schools have their problems.

The answer to those problems, we were told, was a new beginning; charter schools; cyber-charter schools; vouchers; starting from scratch.

Although I've always believed its better to fix the car than to buy a whole new car, I acknowledge that sometimes the car can't be fixed, or that fixing it would cost more than the value of the car itself.

So OK school choice, show me this works.

Fail.

As traditional public education advocates have been shouting from the roof tops for the past week or so, newly re-calculated test results that actually compare apples to apples between charter, cyber-charter and traditional public schools show that fewer than 30 percent of charter schools meet national benchmarks.

By way of comparison, at least 50 percent of traditional public schools run by districts met the benchmarks.

Don't get me wrong, I'm no advocate for standardized tests being the only barometer of school effectiveness. They should be a part of a larger assessment.

But its the school choice people who have shoved those test scores in our face as evidence that traditional schools are failing and who used the skewed results as evidence of their success.

Ooops.

So what's good for the goose is good for the charter school I say.

Remember, the state slapped Pottstown High School with the dubious honor of being a "failing school" for missing one math benchmark and otherwise having grades much better than most charters and ALL cyber-charters.

The 'level playing field' Pennsylvania envisioned for comparing traditional public schools and charter schools.

Surely, in the interest of "the level playing field" we all claim to want, that label will now be carefully applied to all 12 of Pennsylvania's cyber-charter schools, none of which made the "Adequate Yearly Progress" required under the federal No Child Left Behind Law.

Surely, in the interest of providing parents with as much information as possible to make informed choices, that label will now be slapped on the 61 percent of the 80 brick-and-mortar charter schools that did not make AYP.

Surely you're joking.

This is Pennsylvania people.

Consider that the reason those scores are new, is that until the feds stepped in and said no, Pennsylvania had one way of calculating scores for charter schools and a whole different (much harsher) way of calculating them for traditional public schools.

In other words, as I wrote about in August, there was a double standard.

Shocking I know.

"How could this happen?" You ask.

It's Pennsylvania people.

The better question to ask is how could it not happen?

Charles Zogby talks about Pennsylvania's pension crisis during a meeting with Digital First Media journalists on Jan. 10.

Well, however it happened in the Byzantine halls of Harrisburg, I feel confident in the belief that just because former Secretary of Education Charles Zogby was subsequently a highly paid executive with a for-profit company with ties to the largest of Pennsylvania's cyber charter schools in no way ensured that a way would be found to make those companies look good and attract more investment.

Because that would be wrong.

By way of a little history, Zobgy served as education secretary under Republican governors Ridge and Schweiker from 2001 to 2003, and as the Director of Governor Ridge's Policy Office from 1995 to 2001.

Before returning to government service as Tom Corbett's budget secretary, a happy coincidence if ever there was one, Zogby, served as the Senior Vice President of Education and Policy for K12 Inc.