Daniel Wolff's Blog - Posts Tagged "lincoln"
How Lincoln Learned to Read
There are lots of different “reviews” a book gets.
Yesterday, the Christian Science Monitor’s website had a “newspaper” review of How Lincoln Learned to Read where Brad Knickerbocker said,
“This is a terrific book. It’s compact (25 pages or so per individual) but rich and thought-provoking. It draws heavily on each character’s own writing, mainly letters and diaries. It gave me new insights into great Americans I thought I knew pretty well, and it taught me much about those I’d barely heard of before. Broad in scope, peppered with detail, insightful, it could be the basis for a classroom or book club review of American history from our founding as a nation through the 20th century.”
(Of course, the Monitor switches this week to only internet publication. I kinda wonder if I killed the paper version?)
I’m delighted in the response and hope readers, respecting CSM’s reputation, will want to get hold of the book.
Then there are the reviews you get from people you know, family and friends. Danny Alexander and I have been having a conversation about education and how it does and doesn’t work for many years now. He’s a teacher for pay and a student out of a fierce desire to learn. On his blog, Take Em As They Come, he talked about the first third of Lincoln:
“Though I am a teacher, a member of a teacher's union, and I will fight for our rights whenever they are threatened....
I think the teacher should never quit striving to heal thyself. There are some serious sicknesses going around in our educational system, and I don't think they have much to do with the liberalization of the curriculum but rather the aspect of school that is all about teaching the institution and teaching the status quo. A past that is quickly dying used to say that we held the keys to our students' futures. We have long declared that our curriculum is essential to worldly success. But the lie in that statement is akin to all that wishful thinking down on Wall Street. What we need to do is begin seriously talking about what it is that we do have to offer.
I think we do valuable things in the classroom. I feel extremely lucky to get to teach everything I know about writing to students who could use the insights, and I know it works for a sizable number of them. But I also know we've got a lot of work to do, particularly getting over ourselves. How Lincoln Learned to Read is an extraordinarily useful compass to set us in the right direction.
At least the first third is...”
And then there’s a guy I haven’t met, yet, who had heard of me and wanted to read the book. It’s something more like a cold reading and yet another kind of review. He emailed me:
“There are turns in the prose, for instance-- those 180s you do--that made me laugh out loud... just the syntax, I mean. It's funny, in a way the prose seems perfect and proper--not a false note anywhere--and it is, but at the same time it seems there's an anarchist smiling behind it who just might pull back the curtain at any moment with a sort of malatoff cocktail of language lit in one hand--, and I found that tension exhilarating. I think that may be a way of talking about soul....”
How Lincoln Learned to Read was written not so much to offer answers but to ask questions, to maybe broaden perspectives on an on-going conversation about learning and democracy. All these reactions – and the ones to come – help contribute to that. And I’m grateful for them.
Yesterday, the Christian Science Monitor’s website had a “newspaper” review of How Lincoln Learned to Read where Brad Knickerbocker said,
“This is a terrific book. It’s compact (25 pages or so per individual) but rich and thought-provoking. It draws heavily on each character’s own writing, mainly letters and diaries. It gave me new insights into great Americans I thought I knew pretty well, and it taught me much about those I’d barely heard of before. Broad in scope, peppered with detail, insightful, it could be the basis for a classroom or book club review of American history from our founding as a nation through the 20th century.”
(Of course, the Monitor switches this week to only internet publication. I kinda wonder if I killed the paper version?)
I’m delighted in the response and hope readers, respecting CSM’s reputation, will want to get hold of the book.
Then there are the reviews you get from people you know, family and friends. Danny Alexander and I have been having a conversation about education and how it does and doesn’t work for many years now. He’s a teacher for pay and a student out of a fierce desire to learn. On his blog, Take Em As They Come, he talked about the first third of Lincoln:
“Though I am a teacher, a member of a teacher's union, and I will fight for our rights whenever they are threatened....
I think the teacher should never quit striving to heal thyself. There are some serious sicknesses going around in our educational system, and I don't think they have much to do with the liberalization of the curriculum but rather the aspect of school that is all about teaching the institution and teaching the status quo. A past that is quickly dying used to say that we held the keys to our students' futures. We have long declared that our curriculum is essential to worldly success. But the lie in that statement is akin to all that wishful thinking down on Wall Street. What we need to do is begin seriously talking about what it is that we do have to offer.
I think we do valuable things in the classroom. I feel extremely lucky to get to teach everything I know about writing to students who could use the insights, and I know it works for a sizable number of them. But I also know we've got a lot of work to do, particularly getting over ourselves. How Lincoln Learned to Read is an extraordinarily useful compass to set us in the right direction.
At least the first third is...”
And then there’s a guy I haven’t met, yet, who had heard of me and wanted to read the book. It’s something more like a cold reading and yet another kind of review. He emailed me:
“There are turns in the prose, for instance-- those 180s you do--that made me laugh out loud... just the syntax, I mean. It's funny, in a way the prose seems perfect and proper--not a false note anywhere--and it is, but at the same time it seems there's an anarchist smiling behind it who just might pull back the curtain at any moment with a sort of malatoff cocktail of language lit in one hand--, and I found that tension exhilarating. I think that may be a way of talking about soul....”
How Lincoln Learned to Read was written not so much to offer answers but to ask questions, to maybe broaden perspectives on an on-going conversation about learning and democracy. All these reactions – and the ones to come – help contribute to that. And I’m grateful for them.
HOW LINCOLN LEARNED TO READ in NEW ENGLAND, Part One
To drive up through New England – past the Merrimac River, past Lawrence and Lowell – is to think about Thoreau and all the factory girls whose names were once known to friends and family and are now considered nameless.
This isn’t the green New England of summer or the blazing of fall. It’s early spring, and there’s only the first reddish blush on the tips of the maples. Through the bare limbs, farms stick out on the tops of knobby hills, highways cut through pink granite, boarded-up ice cream shacks wait for warm weather and the first tourists.
It’s hard to picture the wilderness that settlers broke, but they did – right here – and almost as soon as they had, started hiring teachers and establishing schools to pass on … what? Wisdom, although who ever knows exactly what that is? It’s more like they were passing on tradition, establishing old benchmarks of knowledge in a new land.
As important as cutting down the big trees and wrestling the roots out of the rocky soil was making sure that books were available and a little time for kids to learn. That was a kind of seeding, huh, after the plowing of the land? And this second and third growth forest, these asphalt roads, those condominiums, are the results of that planting.
**
Up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire – a harbor town – there’s the protection of the breakwaters and an old lighthouse off in the distance. But beyond that a kind of wild loneliness. And that loneliness seeps inland, among the salt marshes and the mud flats. Docks have been built in the thin channels, lobster boats tied to them. They exist because of a whole encyclopedia of knowledge having to do with tides and weather, ropes and wood-working: a mostly unwritten encyclopedia, passed on and learned firsthand.
**
Highlights of the discussion at the RiverRun Bookshop on Congress Street.
The mother who stops at the edge of the crowd, listening, not sitting, till she finally speaks. She came in to buy her daughter a book ‘cause she’s been having trouble learning how to read. She stopped not because the book’s called How Lincoln Learned to Read, but because of the conversation, the Q and A. Her daughter, she says, is great at other things: the training wheels came off first day, for example, and she’s biking all over now; and she’s a wonderful dancer. Why should school define her by the thing she isn’t good at: reading?
A retired college football coach. He talks about sitting at faculty meetings and realizing he and his staff might be the best teachers in the place. Why? Because they listen to the kids and watch them and come to understand that some learn by memorizing the playbook, others need to run the plays over and over, others want to talk it out with their teammates, but all can learn – and have to – for the team to win.
The pretty young mother whose children had been going to a Waldorf school but now has to shift to public education because of the economy. She’s eager for them to get out of the “bubble” of private education, she says, but scared it means a shift from learning to learning how to take tests.
The retired history teacher who says his best classes were when he didn’t say, “Open your texts” but listened to the kids talk. And eventually, one would say, “Hey, is this stuff in Chapter Six true?”
Finally, the young woman who says her father was a factory worker and had no formal schooling, but always pointed out how the world worked: how spiders made webs or the stars turned. She never liked school that much but was always curious, liked learning. She ended up with a double major in anthropology and religious theory. Today, she’s one of the local cops in town. Do those majors help her on the job? Of course! In her police work, she doesn’t just ask what people have done but why.
**
This isn’t the green New England of summer or the blazing of fall. It’s early spring, and there’s only the first reddish blush on the tips of the maples. Through the bare limbs, farms stick out on the tops of knobby hills, highways cut through pink granite, boarded-up ice cream shacks wait for warm weather and the first tourists.
It’s hard to picture the wilderness that settlers broke, but they did – right here – and almost as soon as they had, started hiring teachers and establishing schools to pass on … what? Wisdom, although who ever knows exactly what that is? It’s more like they were passing on tradition, establishing old benchmarks of knowledge in a new land.
As important as cutting down the big trees and wrestling the roots out of the rocky soil was making sure that books were available and a little time for kids to learn. That was a kind of seeding, huh, after the plowing of the land? And this second and third growth forest, these asphalt roads, those condominiums, are the results of that planting.
**
Up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire – a harbor town – there’s the protection of the breakwaters and an old lighthouse off in the distance. But beyond that a kind of wild loneliness. And that loneliness seeps inland, among the salt marshes and the mud flats. Docks have been built in the thin channels, lobster boats tied to them. They exist because of a whole encyclopedia of knowledge having to do with tides and weather, ropes and wood-working: a mostly unwritten encyclopedia, passed on and learned firsthand.
**
Highlights of the discussion at the RiverRun Bookshop on Congress Street.
The mother who stops at the edge of the crowd, listening, not sitting, till she finally speaks. She came in to buy her daughter a book ‘cause she’s been having trouble learning how to read. She stopped not because the book’s called How Lincoln Learned to Read, but because of the conversation, the Q and A. Her daughter, she says, is great at other things: the training wheels came off first day, for example, and she’s biking all over now; and she’s a wonderful dancer. Why should school define her by the thing she isn’t good at: reading?
A retired college football coach. He talks about sitting at faculty meetings and realizing he and his staff might be the best teachers in the place. Why? Because they listen to the kids and watch them and come to understand that some learn by memorizing the playbook, others need to run the plays over and over, others want to talk it out with their teammates, but all can learn – and have to – for the team to win.
The pretty young mother whose children had been going to a Waldorf school but now has to shift to public education because of the economy. She’s eager for them to get out of the “bubble” of private education, she says, but scared it means a shift from learning to learning how to take tests.
The retired history teacher who says his best classes were when he didn’t say, “Open your texts” but listened to the kids talk. And eventually, one would say, “Hey, is this stuff in Chapter Six true?”
Finally, the young woman who says her father was a factory worker and had no formal schooling, but always pointed out how the world worked: how spiders made webs or the stars turned. She never liked school that much but was always curious, liked learning. She ended up with a double major in anthropology and religious theory. Today, she’s one of the local cops in town. Do those majors help her on the job? Of course! In her police work, she doesn’t just ask what people have done but why.
**
HOW LINCOLN LEARNED TO READ in NEW ENGLAND Part 3
The drive across New Hampshire into Vermont is almost all through low woods of pine and white birch. These are the Green Mountains, and it seems like the wind and cold and thin soil must keep the growth down. Around a corner, there’s a rushing white river or a black pool of winter with a marshy, yellow fringe. The granite, blasted open for the highway, shows pink or iron-gold. In these sharp hills, 18th century settlers scratched out a living: felled trees, pulled stumps and then rocks, put up houses against the weather.
Today, both large settlements I stop in – Burlington and Bennington – are neat, liberal towns with their brick mills turned into coffee shops. There are educational institutions here and what are known as education people. I check the bookstores, and they don’t have How Lincoln Learned to Read. Too bad, because it might be part of this conversation over what our ancestors tried to build in these mountains. And what they actually built. And what they left us.
In Williamstown, twenty or so people fill the Water Street Bookstore: the majority grey-haired and retired. In a college town, the crowd includes ex-professors, students, writers, and others.
After I go over W.E.B. DuBois’ childhood (he grew up not far from here in the Berkshire Mountains), we talk some. A retired engineer discusses his need to have technical training – a schooling that could give him the facts and skills he needed. What DuBois would have called a practical education.
Asked how he learned what he needed to know, a writer says he learned in defiance of what he was taught at home – both parents wrote.
There are requests: please read that letter from John Adams about each generation’s education moving them farther from war, closer to peace and art. Someone asks what happens at the end of the chapter on Rachel Carson, what did she need to know? People have read and are comparing different sections of the book.
Afterwards, a teacher at Williams explains how he has to keep “tricking” his students. They play the game of education so well that if he reveals what he wants from them, they’ll provide it – without necessarily learning anything.
A woman talks about her two children, saying the youngest is “outside the box,” the elder “inside the box.” Meaning the first is finding his own way through middle school and not doing all that well in class, and the other works through the system, joining clubs, making friends, succeeding on the school’s (and society’s?) terms. It’s like fitting in or not to one of these small New England towns, I think, with its history and its unspoken but powerful rules. Like fitting into one of those 18th century frame houses built by a stream.
Later, this same woman starts talking about New Orleans and Katrina and the great sad lesson it taught and is still teaching. She’s from there originally, moved to New England, but went back often to visit family. The thanksgiving after the floods, her 70 year old father died of a heart attack. She has no doubt it was hurricane-related; she describes the cause as “stress” from the upheaval and the struggle to rebuild. And then adds that though her two kids (in- and out-of-the-box) have always lived here in the Berkshires, their connection to New Orleans and their sense of what was lost there continues to affect them. Sets them apart from their classmates in a way. Teaches.
Today, both large settlements I stop in – Burlington and Bennington – are neat, liberal towns with their brick mills turned into coffee shops. There are educational institutions here and what are known as education people. I check the bookstores, and they don’t have How Lincoln Learned to Read. Too bad, because it might be part of this conversation over what our ancestors tried to build in these mountains. And what they actually built. And what they left us.
In Williamstown, twenty or so people fill the Water Street Bookstore: the majority grey-haired and retired. In a college town, the crowd includes ex-professors, students, writers, and others.
After I go over W.E.B. DuBois’ childhood (he grew up not far from here in the Berkshire Mountains), we talk some. A retired engineer discusses his need to have technical training – a schooling that could give him the facts and skills he needed. What DuBois would have called a practical education.
Asked how he learned what he needed to know, a writer says he learned in defiance of what he was taught at home – both parents wrote.
There are requests: please read that letter from John Adams about each generation’s education moving them farther from war, closer to peace and art. Someone asks what happens at the end of the chapter on Rachel Carson, what did she need to know? People have read and are comparing different sections of the book.
Afterwards, a teacher at Williams explains how he has to keep “tricking” his students. They play the game of education so well that if he reveals what he wants from them, they’ll provide it – without necessarily learning anything.
A woman talks about her two children, saying the youngest is “outside the box,” the elder “inside the box.” Meaning the first is finding his own way through middle school and not doing all that well in class, and the other works through the system, joining clubs, making friends, succeeding on the school’s (and society’s?) terms. It’s like fitting in or not to one of these small New England towns, I think, with its history and its unspoken but powerful rules. Like fitting into one of those 18th century frame houses built by a stream.
Later, this same woman starts talking about New Orleans and Katrina and the great sad lesson it taught and is still teaching. She’s from there originally, moved to New England, but went back often to visit family. The thanksgiving after the floods, her 70 year old father died of a heart attack. She has no doubt it was hurricane-related; she describes the cause as “stress” from the upheaval and the struggle to rebuild. And then adds that though her two kids (in- and out-of-the-box) have always lived here in the Berkshires, their connection to New Orleans and their sense of what was lost there continues to affect them. Sets them apart from their classmates in a way. Teaches.
HOW LINCOLN LEARNED TO READ in the Northwest Part 2
Mid-day, we drive up into the Columbia River Gorge, just outside of Portland. It rains hard, off and on. Great strands of white waterfalls tumble off the basalt walls on the Oregon side of the river. They pull tourists in: parking lots and asphalt paths let us walk right up, throw back our heads, and try to see the source high in the mist. It’s wet on wet: drizzle and mist watering ferns, little maples, beds of lush moss.
Farther upriver is the Bonneville Dam: an astonishing testament to the species’ ambition, ingenuity, stubbornness. The Columbia rages past, white and black from a season of rain. It easily takes down huge Douglas firs and whips them away, but humans have somehow forced it to pass through this massive concrete structure. It’s beyond me how the first abutment was laid, never mind the turbines and gates rising out of the boil.
Homo sapiens, seeing the power of the water, felt the urge to use it, to tame it. And learned the skills to do so. It’s a giant, roaring library, this dam – storing all kinds of knowledge, good and bad.
Meanwhile, in the basement of its visitors center, through thick plate glass, you can make out the shapes of steelheads and Chinook salmon, fighting their way upstream against the fierce yellowish current (or, up the fish ladder, really). They seem to be all muscle. Which is all desire. Which is all instinct, we’re told. The drive to spawn.
That drive doesn’t involve learning, right? Just checking on how we view the world from the basement of a huge, man-made impediment: an electricity maker that the fish have to swim around. What the steelheads feel as an urge to get upstream is not what humans feel seeing the rush of the Columbia, right? Our impulse to harness the energy, to do something with it, is a thought, right? Not an instinct? Not a drive up against the force of the world?
**
The reading that night at the University Bookstore in Seattle is on University Avenue, which has a string of bars, Vietnamese restaurants, tattoo parlors, and students on bikes. My audience is older: 40 and up.
There’s a couple in their sixties out of South Carolina who took two buses across Seattle to get here this evening. They checked How Lincoln Learned to Read out of a local library and decided to keep it, paying the cover cost. Later, they talk about a radical past – an involvement with the civil rights movement when it was dangerous for Southern whites to take that stand. They’re reading Lincoln as a kind of instruction manual: studying history to learn how we messed up and, maybe, can make things better.
A woman in her 40’s asks questions based on her research of the Seattle school system. She cites its history of busing and private schools, the exodus out of the city and out of public education, the high incidence of home-schooling.
An older guy who listens hard says he picked this reading over a city school board meeting that was also tonight. At the meeting, they were voting on a new teaching method, Discovery Math, which he clearly thought was bogus. He’d rather be here, trying to get some larger perspective on the issues, than seeing whatever adjustments the system was making to curriculum. I hope Lincoln helped.
And there was a grandfather whose “extended family” was doing a lot of home-schooling, and it made him curious about how and where we learn. A home-schooled niece had just put on a student version of the musical, “Wicked,” from scratch. When he declared she seemed to be getting a good education, another woman in the audience said recent statistics were showing home-schoolers excelling in all areas.
There’s a definite feel out here in the Northwest that to ask the question Lincoln asks – how do we learn what we need to know – is to enter the discussion of alternative education, of kids learning from parents and other kids outside of formal school. I haven’t heard nearly as much about that in the Northeast.
**
There are only a couple of people waiting in the funky bookstore in Olympia, Washington. I talk anyway, trying to describe how the history of learning that Lincoln traces includes a history of how we treat the environment: from New England farmers “mining” the soil with corn crop after corn crop to Rachel Carson’s childhood in the industrial Allegheny River valley and her need for nature as a kind of curative.
The store clerks love it, and both buy a copy! I sign a handful of others. It seems like a silly pursuit in a world full of burning issues: talking to a couple of people on a cool, damp evening in a little college town off Puget Sound. The orange-brown Douglas Firs stacked on the loading docks seem more important – more solemn, certainly – than the thin, wood-pulp pages of a book.
On the other hand, driving the wet valley between Portland and Seattle, I heard an interview on the radio with Pete Seeger; it’s his 90th. He declared all real change came about through a series of small, incremental shifts and adjustments. If so, mebbe this little bookstore and the few people inside are part of that. I fly home the next morning.
Farther upriver is the Bonneville Dam: an astonishing testament to the species’ ambition, ingenuity, stubbornness. The Columbia rages past, white and black from a season of rain. It easily takes down huge Douglas firs and whips them away, but humans have somehow forced it to pass through this massive concrete structure. It’s beyond me how the first abutment was laid, never mind the turbines and gates rising out of the boil.
Homo sapiens, seeing the power of the water, felt the urge to use it, to tame it. And learned the skills to do so. It’s a giant, roaring library, this dam – storing all kinds of knowledge, good and bad.
Meanwhile, in the basement of its visitors center, through thick plate glass, you can make out the shapes of steelheads and Chinook salmon, fighting their way upstream against the fierce yellowish current (or, up the fish ladder, really). They seem to be all muscle. Which is all desire. Which is all instinct, we’re told. The drive to spawn.
That drive doesn’t involve learning, right? Just checking on how we view the world from the basement of a huge, man-made impediment: an electricity maker that the fish have to swim around. What the steelheads feel as an urge to get upstream is not what humans feel seeing the rush of the Columbia, right? Our impulse to harness the energy, to do something with it, is a thought, right? Not an instinct? Not a drive up against the force of the world?
**
The reading that night at the University Bookstore in Seattle is on University Avenue, which has a string of bars, Vietnamese restaurants, tattoo parlors, and students on bikes. My audience is older: 40 and up.
There’s a couple in their sixties out of South Carolina who took two buses across Seattle to get here this evening. They checked How Lincoln Learned to Read out of a local library and decided to keep it, paying the cover cost. Later, they talk about a radical past – an involvement with the civil rights movement when it was dangerous for Southern whites to take that stand. They’re reading Lincoln as a kind of instruction manual: studying history to learn how we messed up and, maybe, can make things better.
A woman in her 40’s asks questions based on her research of the Seattle school system. She cites its history of busing and private schools, the exodus out of the city and out of public education, the high incidence of home-schooling.
An older guy who listens hard says he picked this reading over a city school board meeting that was also tonight. At the meeting, they were voting on a new teaching method, Discovery Math, which he clearly thought was bogus. He’d rather be here, trying to get some larger perspective on the issues, than seeing whatever adjustments the system was making to curriculum. I hope Lincoln helped.
And there was a grandfather whose “extended family” was doing a lot of home-schooling, and it made him curious about how and where we learn. A home-schooled niece had just put on a student version of the musical, “Wicked,” from scratch. When he declared she seemed to be getting a good education, another woman in the audience said recent statistics were showing home-schoolers excelling in all areas.
There’s a definite feel out here in the Northwest that to ask the question Lincoln asks – how do we learn what we need to know – is to enter the discussion of alternative education, of kids learning from parents and other kids outside of formal school. I haven’t heard nearly as much about that in the Northeast.
**
There are only a couple of people waiting in the funky bookstore in Olympia, Washington. I talk anyway, trying to describe how the history of learning that Lincoln traces includes a history of how we treat the environment: from New England farmers “mining” the soil with corn crop after corn crop to Rachel Carson’s childhood in the industrial Allegheny River valley and her need for nature as a kind of curative.
The store clerks love it, and both buy a copy! I sign a handful of others. It seems like a silly pursuit in a world full of burning issues: talking to a couple of people on a cool, damp evening in a little college town off Puget Sound. The orange-brown Douglas Firs stacked on the loading docks seem more important – more solemn, certainly – than the thin, wood-pulp pages of a book.
On the other hand, driving the wet valley between Portland and Seattle, I heard an interview on the radio with Pete Seeger; it’s his 90th. He declared all real change came about through a series of small, incremental shifts and adjustments. If so, mebbe this little bookstore and the few people inside are part of that. I fly home the next morning.
Speculating on Education
The Charter Schools Gamble [originally at counterpunch.org:]
By DANIEL WOLFF
"We’re not speculators. We’re investors.” So says the CEO of a real estate trust that recently sunk some $170 million into 22 charter schools.
Which got me wondering: why charter schools? How do they end up looking like sound investments?
It turns out the buyer, Entertainment Properties Trust (EPR), buys real estate nationwide, with its total portfolio worth about $2.6 billion. Over half of that is in megaplex movie theaters. EPR’s stated goal is to be "the nation's leading destination entertainment, entertainment-related, recreation and specialty real estate company."
So why charter schools?
According to EPR's website: "We understand that education is among the most vital experiences of life. Movie theatres and charter schools are very different in many ways, but they are alike in this respect: People choose to patronize them. Our experience in financing specialized real estate enables us to capitalize on properties that people choose to visit."
Huh?
EPR, based in Kansas City, Missouri, consists of sixteen full-time employees. David Brain, President and CEO, says his favorite part of the job is: "solving problems and crafting a deal, and creating something really new." The deals that EPR crafts follow corporate policy: their tenants must sign a long-term mortgage or something called a triple-net lease where they (the tenants) pay "substantially all expenses associated with the operation and maintenance of the property." EPR’s charter schools have these triple-net leases. EPR is the landlord; the tenant pays for maintaining the buildings and running the classrooms.
In this case, the tenant is a charter-school operator called Imagine. Founded in 2004, it now runs 74 schools from New York to Arizona involving some 36,000 students. Imagine says its goal is “giving the families quality educational choice” by establishing “independently operated public schools.”
Charters are public schools in that the funding comes from state and local school taxes. Imagine gets a certain amount of money for each of its charter students based on the home district’s per-student expenses. The more kids Imagine enrolls, the more money it gets (and the less goes to traditional public schools.) Over the last few years, charters have been successfully attracting more and more students: in central Ohio, for example, Imagine’s budget doubled in 2005-06 and doubled again the next year.
The money pays for teachers, supplies, maintenance, etc. But the problem charter schools have is getting the capital to buy or lease buildings. The vice-president of policy for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools calls it “the biggest challenge.”
What Imagine did was start a real estate arm: Schoolhouse Finance LLC. In central Ohio, for example, this financial arm purchased a building for $1.5 million with a $4.6 million mortgage. But tying up their money in property ends up limiting how much charter schools can expand. So Imagine turned around and sold its buildings as part of a larger sale-lease transaction with a company called JER Investors Trust Inc. This brought in $5.6 million over Imagine’s original purchase price.
Imagine did a similar deal in Indiana, where its real estate arm made $2.6 million on an old YWCA it bought for $1.9 million. In fact, real estate plays a key role in Imagine’s charter school operations: its investments in buildings went from $19 million in 2005 to $297 million in 2008 -- suggesting that charter schools can turn the challenge of finding classrooms to their advantage.
But why does a company like JER think charter school buildings are a good investment?
JER’s founder, Joe Robert, made his killing in the savings and loan fiasco of the 1980's. Through his connections with the Federal Savings and Loan Association, Robert was awarded the largest contract ever at the time ($120 million in assets) to manage and sell the government’s “troubled” properties. He cleaned up, moving from there to handling assets for himself and other investors. By 1986, he was managing a portfolio worth some $7.5 billion.
Soon, JER was working with Goldman Sachs and the Blackstone Group. Its profits only increased with the various mortgage and investment arrangements that helped create the real estate bubble. As a Washington Post reporter put it, "In those days … it was not unusual for Robert to double and triple his money, sometimes within a matter of months."
A high-flying investor, then, who spent some $77.5 million buying into charter schools. A November 2008 story from Las Vegas helps explain why.
Imagine ran a Nevada school called the 100 Academy of Excellence, which -- based on the local per-student cost -- received about $3 million from the state each year. Half of that, the story reports, went to running the school and half went back to the operator, Imagine. Of the $1.5 million Imagine got, it paid almost all of it -- $1.4 million -- to Joe Robert’s company to cover its lease.
That’s an enormous percentage of your budget to pay for classrooms. (And Imagine has high leases in other schools, like Fort Wayne’s MASTer Academy.) But Imagine is a start-up company. It needs classrooms to draw students -- to expand its brand name until it can become truly profitable.
Meanwhile, it added up to a first-rate investment for JER. The tenant (Imagine) had a dependable source of income through school taxes – and, in the Nevada case, was willing to use most of its revenue to pay the lease. The only catch in the formula is the charter has to educate its students on about half what the state spends per-student.
Imagine makes clear on its website how it expects to deal with this. The corporation demands what it calls “economic sustainability” from all its schools. “Each school must spend less each year on school operations than it receives in revenue from the government and other sources.”
But if the district determines how much it costs to educate a child – and sends money to Imagine based on that formula -- how can the charter school do it for less? In the case of the 100 Academy of Excellence, the principal told a state official that money was saved by letting go veteran (read expensive) teachers and increasing class size (read cost saving).
That guaranteed that the rent got paid. But it didn’t guarantee the quality of the education. 2006-07 test results from the 100 Academy of Excellence fell below national standards and put it on the state’s “Watch List” for failing schools.
The academy’s landlord, JER, didn’t need to bother about such matters. Or about Imagine’s profitability. In fact, though Imagine brought in $131 million in the 2006-07 school year, it ended up losing $2.3 million. But JER hadn’t bought Imagine; it had bought the real estate: the school buildings with Imagine as the tenant. As long as the tenant lived up to its lease, JER had a sweet deal.
It might have continued, except the real estate bubble burst. In two years, JER’s publicly traded stock went from $23 a share to zero – and was “delisted” from the New York Stock Exchange. Robert started selling off his assets, including the charter school buildings. That’s when Entertainment Properties stepped in, buying the properties complete with triple-net leases.
“The charter public schools,” says EPR’s David Brain, “offer lenders/leaseholders a dependable revenue stream backed by a government payer. It’s a very desirable equation.”
So it has been. Nationally, the number of students choosing charter schools has quadrupled in the last decade. In EPR’s words, “people chose to visit them” -- just like mega-theaters. That will continue as long as parents are disappointed in traditional public schools, and operators like Imagine successfully market their brand of “quality” education.
But what if charters don’t provide better test results (as some recent studies have shown)? What if families decide they don’t offer a better choice? Then the numbers will decrease, and the per-student revenue stream will start to dry up.
Other scenarios could also affect revenue. What if tax-payers revolt against their money being used to make a profit for private companies? What if the economy doesn’t recover quickly? Or, using less drastic possibilities, what if the states’ educational funds continue to be strapped: what a director of the National Education Association calls the current “lack of funds overall”? Even with the current stimulus money, many school districts are having to tighten their budgets. And that stimulus money will soon disappear.
It’s easy to imagine what happens once charters fail or start to shrink. The flow reverses: public schools are flooded with returning students. But now veteran teachers have been driven from the system. Young educators working with over-sized charter classes have burnt out. Plus, having shrunk their physical operation, public schools will suddenly have to find classroom space.
If the recent failure of the economy has taught us anything, it’s that all investment is speculation. We’ve seen the supposedly guaranteed income of everything from retirement funds to home prices collapse. In the face of these kinds of reversals, investors like EPR could probably recoup some of their losses (as JER did) by selling off their school buildings.
But should the speculation that is charter schools fail, where does that leave the nation’s educational system? And our kids?
Daniel Wolff lives in Nyack, N.Y. His newest book is How Lincoln Learned to Read. His other books include "4th of July/Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land." He is a co-producer of the forthcoming Jonathan Demme documentary about New Orleans, "Right to Return."
By DANIEL WOLFF
"We’re not speculators. We’re investors.” So says the CEO of a real estate trust that recently sunk some $170 million into 22 charter schools.
Which got me wondering: why charter schools? How do they end up looking like sound investments?
It turns out the buyer, Entertainment Properties Trust (EPR), buys real estate nationwide, with its total portfolio worth about $2.6 billion. Over half of that is in megaplex movie theaters. EPR’s stated goal is to be "the nation's leading destination entertainment, entertainment-related, recreation and specialty real estate company."
So why charter schools?
According to EPR's website: "We understand that education is among the most vital experiences of life. Movie theatres and charter schools are very different in many ways, but they are alike in this respect: People choose to patronize them. Our experience in financing specialized real estate enables us to capitalize on properties that people choose to visit."
Huh?
EPR, based in Kansas City, Missouri, consists of sixteen full-time employees. David Brain, President and CEO, says his favorite part of the job is: "solving problems and crafting a deal, and creating something really new." The deals that EPR crafts follow corporate policy: their tenants must sign a long-term mortgage or something called a triple-net lease where they (the tenants) pay "substantially all expenses associated with the operation and maintenance of the property." EPR’s charter schools have these triple-net leases. EPR is the landlord; the tenant pays for maintaining the buildings and running the classrooms.
In this case, the tenant is a charter-school operator called Imagine. Founded in 2004, it now runs 74 schools from New York to Arizona involving some 36,000 students. Imagine says its goal is “giving the families quality educational choice” by establishing “independently operated public schools.”
Charters are public schools in that the funding comes from state and local school taxes. Imagine gets a certain amount of money for each of its charter students based on the home district’s per-student expenses. The more kids Imagine enrolls, the more money it gets (and the less goes to traditional public schools.) Over the last few years, charters have been successfully attracting more and more students: in central Ohio, for example, Imagine’s budget doubled in 2005-06 and doubled again the next year.
The money pays for teachers, supplies, maintenance, etc. But the problem charter schools have is getting the capital to buy or lease buildings. The vice-president of policy for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools calls it “the biggest challenge.”
What Imagine did was start a real estate arm: Schoolhouse Finance LLC. In central Ohio, for example, this financial arm purchased a building for $1.5 million with a $4.6 million mortgage. But tying up their money in property ends up limiting how much charter schools can expand. So Imagine turned around and sold its buildings as part of a larger sale-lease transaction with a company called JER Investors Trust Inc. This brought in $5.6 million over Imagine’s original purchase price.
Imagine did a similar deal in Indiana, where its real estate arm made $2.6 million on an old YWCA it bought for $1.9 million. In fact, real estate plays a key role in Imagine’s charter school operations: its investments in buildings went from $19 million in 2005 to $297 million in 2008 -- suggesting that charter schools can turn the challenge of finding classrooms to their advantage.
But why does a company like JER think charter school buildings are a good investment?
JER’s founder, Joe Robert, made his killing in the savings and loan fiasco of the 1980's. Through his connections with the Federal Savings and Loan Association, Robert was awarded the largest contract ever at the time ($120 million in assets) to manage and sell the government’s “troubled” properties. He cleaned up, moving from there to handling assets for himself and other investors. By 1986, he was managing a portfolio worth some $7.5 billion.
Soon, JER was working with Goldman Sachs and the Blackstone Group. Its profits only increased with the various mortgage and investment arrangements that helped create the real estate bubble. As a Washington Post reporter put it, "In those days … it was not unusual for Robert to double and triple his money, sometimes within a matter of months."
A high-flying investor, then, who spent some $77.5 million buying into charter schools. A November 2008 story from Las Vegas helps explain why.
Imagine ran a Nevada school called the 100 Academy of Excellence, which -- based on the local per-student cost -- received about $3 million from the state each year. Half of that, the story reports, went to running the school and half went back to the operator, Imagine. Of the $1.5 million Imagine got, it paid almost all of it -- $1.4 million -- to Joe Robert’s company to cover its lease.
That’s an enormous percentage of your budget to pay for classrooms. (And Imagine has high leases in other schools, like Fort Wayne’s MASTer Academy.) But Imagine is a start-up company. It needs classrooms to draw students -- to expand its brand name until it can become truly profitable.
Meanwhile, it added up to a first-rate investment for JER. The tenant (Imagine) had a dependable source of income through school taxes – and, in the Nevada case, was willing to use most of its revenue to pay the lease. The only catch in the formula is the charter has to educate its students on about half what the state spends per-student.
Imagine makes clear on its website how it expects to deal with this. The corporation demands what it calls “economic sustainability” from all its schools. “Each school must spend less each year on school operations than it receives in revenue from the government and other sources.”
But if the district determines how much it costs to educate a child – and sends money to Imagine based on that formula -- how can the charter school do it for less? In the case of the 100 Academy of Excellence, the principal told a state official that money was saved by letting go veteran (read expensive) teachers and increasing class size (read cost saving).
That guaranteed that the rent got paid. But it didn’t guarantee the quality of the education. 2006-07 test results from the 100 Academy of Excellence fell below national standards and put it on the state’s “Watch List” for failing schools.
The academy’s landlord, JER, didn’t need to bother about such matters. Or about Imagine’s profitability. In fact, though Imagine brought in $131 million in the 2006-07 school year, it ended up losing $2.3 million. But JER hadn’t bought Imagine; it had bought the real estate: the school buildings with Imagine as the tenant. As long as the tenant lived up to its lease, JER had a sweet deal.
It might have continued, except the real estate bubble burst. In two years, JER’s publicly traded stock went from $23 a share to zero – and was “delisted” from the New York Stock Exchange. Robert started selling off his assets, including the charter school buildings. That’s when Entertainment Properties stepped in, buying the properties complete with triple-net leases.
“The charter public schools,” says EPR’s David Brain, “offer lenders/leaseholders a dependable revenue stream backed by a government payer. It’s a very desirable equation.”
So it has been. Nationally, the number of students choosing charter schools has quadrupled in the last decade. In EPR’s words, “people chose to visit them” -- just like mega-theaters. That will continue as long as parents are disappointed in traditional public schools, and operators like Imagine successfully market their brand of “quality” education.
But what if charters don’t provide better test results (as some recent studies have shown)? What if families decide they don’t offer a better choice? Then the numbers will decrease, and the per-student revenue stream will start to dry up.
Other scenarios could also affect revenue. What if tax-payers revolt against their money being used to make a profit for private companies? What if the economy doesn’t recover quickly? Or, using less drastic possibilities, what if the states’ educational funds continue to be strapped: what a director of the National Education Association calls the current “lack of funds overall”? Even with the current stimulus money, many school districts are having to tighten their budgets. And that stimulus money will soon disappear.
It’s easy to imagine what happens once charters fail or start to shrink. The flow reverses: public schools are flooded with returning students. But now veteran teachers have been driven from the system. Young educators working with over-sized charter classes have burnt out. Plus, having shrunk their physical operation, public schools will suddenly have to find classroom space.
If the recent failure of the economy has taught us anything, it’s that all investment is speculation. We’ve seen the supposedly guaranteed income of everything from retirement funds to home prices collapse. In the face of these kinds of reversals, investors like EPR could probably recoup some of their losses (as JER did) by selling off their school buildings.
But should the speculation that is charter schools fail, where does that leave the nation’s educational system? And our kids?
Daniel Wolff lives in Nyack, N.Y. His newest book is How Lincoln Learned to Read. His other books include "4th of July/Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land." He is a co-producer of the forthcoming Jonathan Demme documentary about New Orleans, "Right to Return."
HOW LINCOLN LEARNED TO READ in and out of Chicagoland
A week in the mid-west, doing readings and having discussions, reconfirms that this is the real pay-off from writing a book: the talk that follows, the agreements and disagreements, the issues raised. It’s like the book continues to be written – in public – person by person.
There was the school teacher, a veteran of twenty-plus years in the public system, who asserted (grey hair, pink cheeks, thick glasses: the picture of the teacher you remember): “Schools were designed to create factory workers. And there aren’t any factory jobs left.”
There was the quiet in Winnetka, a rich suburb north of Chicago, when I’d finished a talk on Abigail Adams and John Kennedy: how they illustrated that America’s wealthy have always been able to buy a “better” education. Quiet, and then one woman asked what my qualifications were for writing “How Lincoln Learned to Read.” Good question. My qualifications are mostly curiosity but include having been a student and the parent of students and a citizen. But her larger question was really what we need to know to discuss education. Do people need to be schooled to discuss school? And if we’re trying to have a democracy, where does that leave the “unqualified” -- who are, after all, the majority of us?
There was the drive south to Springfield, Illinois to speak at the Lincoln Museum. Mile after mile of yellow-white corn with the occasional green John Deere reaper, the occasional orange sugar maple. It was as man-made a landscape as any city block. It made me think of Emerson’s declaration: “The farm the farm is the right school.” These farms were hundreds of acres cut into squares, further divided into straight rows, then planted with a single crop to be harvested by men in machines. So when I arrived and spoke about Lincoln to a large, eager crowd -- his hunger to learn, to stop being a hunter/farmer and settle down -- it was colored by this glimpse of what we’ve settled into. The 21st century farm is the right school for what? Teaches which values? And what are the consequences to the family, the land?
There was the evening class full of adults trying to get back into the educational system – most of them black, all of them low income. They started raucously debating what a “good” education might be. Whether the “best” schools taught you how to survive in South Chicago or the tough sections of Madison, Wisconsin. Where and how books fit into a life of single mothers, food stamps, and working at McDonalds. We went from shouting to laughing: the question of what we need to know hot and personal.
There was the early morning University of Wisconsin lecture hall – three hundred undergrads – being asked why they were here: what did they expect to learn? How they looked up sleepily from their laptops and grinned. It struck them as a funny question: asked in the middle of a recession, in the middle of a term, in the middle of a class that would segue into the next and eventually turn into a diploma. Then they talked about the maze of college, what sustained them, the music they loved. And later – at a local bookstore – the U of W education majors who wanted to talk about alternative schools and seemed to bloom at the idea that we might learn what we need to know both in and outside of the classroom. How to set up an educational system that recognized and somehow credited that? How to hash out the implications on a local level?
There was a quick chat after a reading in Hyde Park, where a middle-aged white man described dropping out of college and spending a season on the ore boats in the Great Lakes. Then coming back to school and for the first time in his life being hungry for knowledge, needing to know how the world worked.
I’m leaving some out: the radio interviewer describing how he tries to give his five year old time to just wander around, to look at rocks and flowers, and how hard that is – how strongly he feels the pressure to “educate” her instead. The discussion about how schools fit into present day capitalism: that they offer the Horatio Algier hope that education can help anyone (everyone?) succeed! And how people don’t much want to hear if that’s not true.
And then there was the “failed” reading in Milwaukee: a single, elderly woman surrounded by empty chairs. And her explaining that both her boys had dropped out of high school. And how she attributed it to the elementary school teacher who had refused to hang her son’s drawing because he’d made the grass red, not green. “He never forgot it,” she said, not bitter. And both sons are doing fine, thanks.
It was a great pleasure to meet these people, introduce them to W.E.B. DuBois, Lincoln, Rachel Carson and others from “How Lincoln Learned to Read,” and then listen to the dialogue – no, the debate really; the wrestling match – that followed.
How Lincoln Learned to Read Twelve Great Americans and the Educations That Made Them
There was the school teacher, a veteran of twenty-plus years in the public system, who asserted (grey hair, pink cheeks, thick glasses: the picture of the teacher you remember): “Schools were designed to create factory workers. And there aren’t any factory jobs left.”
There was the quiet in Winnetka, a rich suburb north of Chicago, when I’d finished a talk on Abigail Adams and John Kennedy: how they illustrated that America’s wealthy have always been able to buy a “better” education. Quiet, and then one woman asked what my qualifications were for writing “How Lincoln Learned to Read.” Good question. My qualifications are mostly curiosity but include having been a student and the parent of students and a citizen. But her larger question was really what we need to know to discuss education. Do people need to be schooled to discuss school? And if we’re trying to have a democracy, where does that leave the “unqualified” -- who are, after all, the majority of us?
There was the drive south to Springfield, Illinois to speak at the Lincoln Museum. Mile after mile of yellow-white corn with the occasional green John Deere reaper, the occasional orange sugar maple. It was as man-made a landscape as any city block. It made me think of Emerson’s declaration: “The farm the farm is the right school.” These farms were hundreds of acres cut into squares, further divided into straight rows, then planted with a single crop to be harvested by men in machines. So when I arrived and spoke about Lincoln to a large, eager crowd -- his hunger to learn, to stop being a hunter/farmer and settle down -- it was colored by this glimpse of what we’ve settled into. The 21st century farm is the right school for what? Teaches which values? And what are the consequences to the family, the land?
There was the evening class full of adults trying to get back into the educational system – most of them black, all of them low income. They started raucously debating what a “good” education might be. Whether the “best” schools taught you how to survive in South Chicago or the tough sections of Madison, Wisconsin. Where and how books fit into a life of single mothers, food stamps, and working at McDonalds. We went from shouting to laughing: the question of what we need to know hot and personal.
There was the early morning University of Wisconsin lecture hall – three hundred undergrads – being asked why they were here: what did they expect to learn? How they looked up sleepily from their laptops and grinned. It struck them as a funny question: asked in the middle of a recession, in the middle of a term, in the middle of a class that would segue into the next and eventually turn into a diploma. Then they talked about the maze of college, what sustained them, the music they loved. And later – at a local bookstore – the U of W education majors who wanted to talk about alternative schools and seemed to bloom at the idea that we might learn what we need to know both in and outside of the classroom. How to set up an educational system that recognized and somehow credited that? How to hash out the implications on a local level?
There was a quick chat after a reading in Hyde Park, where a middle-aged white man described dropping out of college and spending a season on the ore boats in the Great Lakes. Then coming back to school and for the first time in his life being hungry for knowledge, needing to know how the world worked.
I’m leaving some out: the radio interviewer describing how he tries to give his five year old time to just wander around, to look at rocks and flowers, and how hard that is – how strongly he feels the pressure to “educate” her instead. The discussion about how schools fit into present day capitalism: that they offer the Horatio Algier hope that education can help anyone (everyone?) succeed! And how people don’t much want to hear if that’s not true.
And then there was the “failed” reading in Milwaukee: a single, elderly woman surrounded by empty chairs. And her explaining that both her boys had dropped out of high school. And how she attributed it to the elementary school teacher who had refused to hang her son’s drawing because he’d made the grass red, not green. “He never forgot it,” she said, not bitter. And both sons are doing fine, thanks.
It was a great pleasure to meet these people, introduce them to W.E.B. DuBois, Lincoln, Rachel Carson and others from “How Lincoln Learned to Read,” and then listen to the dialogue – no, the debate really; the wrestling match – that followed.
How Lincoln Learned to Read Twelve Great Americans and the Educations That Made Them
How Lincoln lives!
http://weturnedoutokay.com/006/
In which D Wolff is interviewed re. "How Lincoln Learned," home schooling, etc.
How Lincoln Learned to Read: Twelve Great Americans and the Educations That Made Them
In which D Wolff is interviewed re. "How Lincoln Learned," home schooling, etc.
How Lincoln Learned to Read: Twelve Great Americans and the Educations That Made Them
