Doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results is a classic definition of insanity. Thinking it will be different because you changed localities is nothing more than hoping for a geographical cure. Neither is very healthy. But if the true motive behind it is profit, then people might just say anything to make it work.

Rep. Rob Bryan and Sen. Chad Barefoot just outsourced a bunch of our kids. They literally are giving our students and our taxpayer money to out-of-state, for-profit charter school operators within an Achievement School District (ASD) – all in the name of helping kids.

That would be true if helping kids means lining the pockets of people out-of-state.

They are taking kids out of their communities’ care and putting them in the hands of entities who simply want to make a profit from them. And the money these charter school operators receive will be purely profit, because their academic success is already guaranteed. Why? Because they don’t really have to show academic success; they are measured differently, just look at HB 242, championed by Sen. Jerry Tillman.

Neither Barefoot or Bryan could never really explain the “how the ASD will work” or the “why it will work”. They are simply appealing to their authority. They just tout that it will work in spite of all the results of past experiments and implementations ASD districts in multiple states, especially Tennessee whose model Bryan originally looked at to create the NC ASD proposal.

Lack of specificity is a tactic in making arguments. It hopes that people will get lost in the ambiguity of an explanation and simply rely on the speaker as being more equipped to make a decision because of a title or office held.

But lack of specificity is also a sign of not really knowing the answers. It’s like when you ask a question of someone and what he doesn’t say speaks as loudly as what he does say.

Take for instance the explanations given by Sen. Barefoot when pressed for specificity in a meeting for HB1080 (the ASD bill) chaired by Sen. Tillman as reported by Billy Ball (http://pulse.ncpolicywatch.org/2016/06/24/senate-committee-approves-controversial-charter-takeover-of-low-performing-schools/).

Barefoot calls the ASD model for NC an “innovative solution.” But when others in the meeting bring up that there really have not been positive outcomes from other ASD implementations, Barefoot just says that we will make it work because we are NC (the geographical cure).

But several Democrats and public education advocates who spoke Friday decried the bill as advancing an unproven reform.

“We would ask that you not send North Carolina down this road with an experiment which has been shown to not be effective in other states,” said Leanne Winner, director of governmental relations for the N.C. School Boards Association, a statewide group that represents local boards of education.

Barefoot, however, countered multiple times that North Carolina’s version of achievement school districts will differ from other states such as Tennessee. When pressed on the claim, Barefoot said other states “flood” schools in the achievement school district with money to middling results.

That’s a non-answer. No specifics. No details. He just said that we wouldn’t invest the same amount of money in them. That’s also odd because many teachers in our state wouldn’t mind having a bit of a “flood” in money coming their way to help in resources and maintenance. But “flood” is a subjective word. What might be a flood in the eyes of people like Barefoot and Bryan may actually be nothing more than a trickle.

Barefoot also made mention that “The bar is so low in these schools, anything that makes an impact that’s considered by this state has to be considered a good thing.”

Really? Then why not allow our own state to make that impact through funding turn-around teams that our own edcuators have put into place, but that the General Assembly will not fund adequately? Ball reports,

Opponents of the bill have also pointed out that state-run turnaround efforts in the school, through the Department of Public Instruction’s Office of District and School Transformation, yielded improving dropout rates. Additionally, the office says, more than 80 percent of the schools where it intervened with professional development and additional resources were lifted from the bottom 5 percent of schools in the state.

Yet, due to limited funding, the office claimed this year to have only been able to step in to 79 of the nearly 600 low-performing schools in the state.

Also, when it seemed that Barefoot was caught in a web of inexplicable pseudo-facts, Sen. Jerry Tillman came to the rescue with a gauntlet of non-truths rooted in confirmation bias.

Advocates like Tillman said charter operators will run the schools more successfully.

“They will make great growth,” declared Tillman. “That’s a fact.”

This is from the man who said that one math teacher could teach two different math courses in one classroom at the same time to a group of students that may reach over 35 because the state will not help fund schools so that classes can actually be capped (https://www.ednc.org/2016/06/09/senate-moves-state-one-step-closer-split-high-school-math-tracks).

The truth of the matter is that there is not much to really tout about ASD’s and the handing over of money to for-profit charter operators. Just follow the money and one can see that it really is about profits. Ball’s report makes reference to that.

As Policy Watch has reported, support for the bill was financed by a wealthy Oregon businessman who runs a network of charters, and has been promoted as a salve for long-time struggling schools by ALEC-affiliated groups like the Education Freedom Alliance out of Oklahoma.

Looking at Ball’s original posting on NC Policy Watch referenced earlier will give you the links to those news bits.

The cruel irony here is that this is all in the name of helping kids and offering them choices and opportunities, except here choices have been removed from the very communities who raise these kids. And the money they pay in taxes is actually helping to outsource their own kids’ education, one that will not be measured in the same ways as others who attend traditional schools.

And that’s wrong on so many levels.