Jim Dowd's guest post

We have this thing in the tech industry called "vaporware." A project is considered "vapor" when the people selling it get beyond the realistic expectations of what they are creating can provide. I think this is an apt comparison for what is going on with the charter school proposal right now.

You won't believe the kind of crazy crap that gets passed off as serious tech once it hits the vapor realm. Actually you would:
Remember "Clippy" the tremendously annoying paperclip in Windows Office from 1997-2003? Clippy, which is now considered the greatest failure in the annals of programming history, started from noble origins, Bayesian algorithms, and the idea that the computer should do the technical stuff and the people should only have to add the content. Somehow, though, it got sold as the thing that would allow every person on Earth to easily use a computer regardless of proficiency, age or language barriers, something that Bayesian algorithms could never, never do. In the end it wound up sucking worse than anything had ever sucked, not because it didn't do what the engineers who designed it expected, but because somebody (I'm looking at you here, Melinda) over-promised then spectacularly failed to deliver.

Another great example is the Segway, which was kept as a secret project of Dean Kamen, noted inventor. They merely promised before it was released that whole cities would be redesigned around Segways and that their product would change the way we work, live, play and love. Ok, not the last one, but you get the idea. They sort of pushed the envelope. A lot. In the end it was a three thousand dollar dorky scooter. I actually worked on some of the initial marketing of the Segway, after the disastrous launch. Even once it was crystal clear that beyond airport cops and meter readers there would never ever be a large market for it, they kept telling us how amazing it was, and blamed us for not getting the public to share in this view. There is nothing harder to deal with than true believers refusing to face the brick wall of reality.

But there is also nothing more fun than selling vapor at the early stages. It is all good times. You don't have a price, you
don't have any limitations, you don't have what we in the industry call "speeds and feeds." Everything is pure, high-grade potential.

Q: "Does it work underwater?"

A: "You bet it does! It's at its best underwater, unless you are using it on land, where it also overperforms!"

Q: "Will it be able to interface with our legacy systems, which were written by drunken Eskimos who broke into our server farm and coded everything in a language that we think they made up on the spot?"

A: "What's amazing about this product is that it seems to naturally understand intoxicated Aleutian Islanders as if they were having some kind of mind-meld...."

You get the idea. Man, it's fun selling stuff that hasn't been made yet. It solves all your problems, doesn't cost but instead makes money, works in both good economies and bad, shines the floor while doing your taxes...

The proposed Gloucester charter school has sailed hard into the fog of vaporware. The promises the founders and advocates are making at this point are way beyond reasonable. Think of what the founders of this school are promising to do, and see if you might detect a whiff of vapor: They claim they are going to stop people from choicing out, even though the people who are leaving are going to established, well-funded schools in rich nearby towns with real track records, not a risky charter school with no definable outcomes. And school choice kids take 1/2 of what a charter school student takes from the budget. Not exactly apples to apples.

I heard one of the founders promise that the charter school would make people move to Gloucester because we will become "an educational beacon" to the rest of the Commonwealth. Vapor talk. I used to hear it every day- pure, unhinged vapor talk. We're in the midst of a significant economic downturn, housing prices have cratered, local industries here are laying off people by the hundreds and we're losing the fishing industry. I don't think, "Gloucester has a nifty charter school, let's move there!" is going to motivate anyone before some of those other factors are taken care of, even if the charter reaches significant levels of niftiness.

The list of promises is long. I heard actual testimony that the charter school is going to rebalance the unequal opportunities given to kids from richer neighborhoods and less well-off ones. We already did a lot of that in the Public Schools with the districting, but to take them at face value you have to assume that numerous families from less well-off households will want to send their kids to an "arts focused school" with no athletics and where their friends don't go. Why does my Spidey sense tell me that when you advertise your school programing as inviting students to create performances and plays merged tightly with the Gloucester Historical Museum and the paintings of Fitz Hugh Lane, you are going to wind up with kids from richer, college educated households, probably with NPR as a radio preset in the imported family wagon? Just an instinct, there, not data based.

My favorite particular strand of this vapor sale has been watching the charter school adherents talk about their ideas to "save the district money." I have heard more than once as a response to "Umm, it sounds like this charter school proposal of yours will wind up costing crazy amounts of money..." the reply:

"Don't worry, Peter Van Ness has some great ideas on how to save the district using quantum-efficiency techniques he learned studying advanced management theory at a Lamaist monastery in Himalayan Bhutan" [paraphrasing]. Peter Van Ness may be a smart guy, he may be a good guy overall, I don't know, but I can assure you he is of mortal-kind. A lot of very smart people work on the district budget, not just from inside the public school system, but people who used to work at Bell Labs, people who do budgets for huge government institutions. There simply isn't some big pile of cash sitting in budget waiting to be redistributed. But a classic problem with vaporware is that it gets mixed-up with big personalities. Kamen is a smart guy, a genius, even. But the Segway was never more than a scooter and a really freaking dumb idea to drop on the general public (hence the multi-million dollar losses).

Which brings us to outcomes. Projects that come out of vapor are typically, on the merits, worthwhile in the end. One just has to greatly re-calibrate realistic expectations from the hype. If you have trouble walking, or are a mall cop who just doesn't get enough ridicule, the Segway is the device for you. And the backsystems that made up Clippy have gone into making user-interfaces better overall, just without the annoying cartoons. Neither wound up as the panaceas they promised, but both were useful technology at the core.

The charter school is probably the same way. It would end up as a reasonably useful thing to a very narrow slice of Gloucester students. The question then becomes, is it enough of a useful thing to risk the developments and improvements we're trying to make in other areas?

When one really looks at the realistic possible returns from a charter school, by looking at other similar charter schools and what they've been able to accomplish, the answer is simply no. Not now, not with the budget the way it is, not with the limited scope of the innovation they are proposing.