PA: Another Bill To Take Down, Sort Of, Cyber Charters

Rep. Curt Sonney is a GOP top dog in the Pennsylvania Education Committee, and he's never been known as a close friend of public schools. But he represents Erie, a district that has been absolutely gutted by school choice, so maybe that's why he has spent the last couple of years nipping at the heels of Pennsylvania's thriving cyber charter industry.

Harrisburg just had hearings on his latest proposal, a bill that he first announced last October and which has something for virtually everyone to hate.

Pennsylvania cyber schools are an absolute mess, barely covered by laws that never anticipated such a thing and protected by a massive pile of money thrown both at lobbying and campaign contributions.

The cybers do offer a service that is useful for some students (I personally know of one such case). But they also provide a quick exit for parents who don't want to deal with truancy issues or other disciplinary problems. Their results are generally very poor (none have ever been ranked proficient on the Big Standardized Test), and state oversight is so lousy that many were allowed to continue operating for years without ever having renewed their charters.

But what really has drawn the wrath of even people who don't pay much attention to education policy is that they are expensive as hell. Because the charter laws didn't really anticipate this cyber-development, cyber-charters are paid at the same rate as a brick-and-mortar charter. So an individual student may bring in $10-$20K, but costs the cyber charter the price of one computer, one printer, and 1/250th of an on-line teacher. The profit margin is huge, but so is the cost to local districts, with poorer districts in the state being hit the worst.

A year ago, there was a bill floating around Harrisburg to change the game-- if a local district opened a cyber-school, then any families that wanted to send their kid to an out-of-district cyber would have to foot the bill themselves.

The bill (HB 1897) is a bit involved, and we'll go digging in a moment, but the two headline items are this: all cyber-charters will be shut down, and all school districts will offer cyber education. Now, to look for some of those devilish details.

The timeline is nuts. The bill requires districts to have a full cyber education plan developed and submitted to the state by November of 2020. This pretty well guarantees that the plans will be a rush job for some districts, though many already have some sort of cyber-learning thingy in place. I appreciate the need for speed, but this is the kind of process that guarantees that some districts will be submitting paperwork-satisfying plans that don't necessarily have anything to do with reality. But all of that can be brought up at the public hearing required locally within 60 days of submitting the plan.

In addition to their own cyber-school, districts must also "provide provide students with the option to
participate in at least two alternative full-time cyber education programs." Those two programs must be provided by a third-party vendor. Why? Well, the cynical answer would be that this throws the cyber-charter industry a bone in the hopes that its lobbyists won't descend in numbers that blot out the Harrisburg sun. "Yes, I know we shut down your school, but there are now 500 districts that must hire cyber-providers for 1000 programs, so, you know-- ka-ching, and you're welcome." In fact, buried further down the bill, is explicit permission for the dissolved cybers to go ahead and do that.

There is a student-teacher ration requirement-- 25:1 for elementary and 30:1 for secondary. The state may waive this if the secretary is convinced that a higher ratio "will not adversely impact the academic quality of the program." Okay, question-- does that mean that if the program is lousy, it can have a waiver because a 150:1 ratio won't make it any lousier? Just asking.

All staff have to be properly certified-- an excellent protection for students in the program.

If a district pulls 20% of its students into cyber-education, it shall establish a cyber-school. It has the discretion to do this even if it doesn't meet the 20% mark.

It lays out the items that may be included in those third-party vendor contracts, which sets those vendors up to have at least some level of transparency. And those contracts will be available to the public (as are all such records in a public school system) and not kept secret (as in a charter school).

If a student is habitually truant, that student will be bounced out of the cyber-progam and not allowed to re-enter for two years.

Students can't be required to enroll in the cyber.

The department will offer some guidelines and "best practices" stuff to help districts set this all up. And there will be a state cyber-advisory committee. Those third-party vendors get a rep on this, but not anyone from an actual district.

And then the part about all cyber-charters being dissolved. They would be done at the end of the 2020-2021 school year.

Cyber-schools and cyber-student parents are freaking out about this, deploying op-eds wit varying degrees of accuracy and half-truthiness. But cyber charter operators are being offered a sweet market of captive customers. My numbers earlier were not exaggerations-- Pennsylvania has 500 school districts, so the law would call for 1,000 cyber-education programs to be run by third-party vendors. And seriously-- who but the companies that have been running cyber-charters will be ready to operate as third-party cyber-vendors within a year? Okay-- fun wrinkle, universities and other school districts are allowed to be third-party vendors, too. But cyber-school management companies will still have a leg up.

So what is there for the cyber-charters not to like? They will be forced to work with public school districts instead of around them, and they'll be forced to operate with more transparency than they're used to, and they'll have to hire more staff, and they will probably have to give up some of that tremendous profit margin they enjoy (although the bill is not super-clear about the money side of things). So, okay-- plenty.

For public schools, the biggest head scratcher is the need to offer three cyber-education programs.

Will this be the bill that finally does something about cyber-charters in Pennsylvanmia? Maybe, maybe not. It is one more sign that legislators are understanding more and more that cyber-charters have a huge funding and accountability problem. Let's see what they come up with next.

PA: Partial Testing Pause

This week Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf signed the bill that will delay using the Keystone Exams (our version of the Big Standardized Test for high school students) as a graduation requirement. Though we've been giving the test for a few years, it will now not become a grad requirement until 2019 (postponed from 2017). That's certainly not bad news, but there's no reason to put the party hats on just yet.

First, as (unfortunately) always, it's worth noting that this happens against the backdrop of our leaders' absolute inability to fulfill their most basic function- as I type this, Pennsylvania is on its 221st day without a budget. We are right on track to have the governor preparing next year's budget while this year's budget is still not fully adopted. It is entirely possible that Harrisburg is populated entirely by dopes.

Second, the idea is to have officials go back to the drawing board and come up with better ideas for BS Testing. This is akin to feeling great pain because you're hitting yourself in the head with a hammer and saying, "Hmm. Well, maybe if I turn the hammer sideways it won't hurt so much." It's akin to eating a terrible, vomit-inducing meal of liver and pineapple and rotted fish parts covered with chocolate sauce and saying, "Well, maybe if we put the chocolate sauce on first rather than last." This is about re-aranging deck chairs rather than examining the premise.

Third, while high school seniors will not be required by the state to pass the Keystones to graduate, the state still plans to use the Keystones to evaluate schools and teachers. So our professional fates are still tied to a BS Test that students have no reason to take seriously or care about. Great.

Fourth-- well, many DO have a reason to care about the test, because in anticipation of the state's BS Test grad requirement, many school districts have already made passing the Keystone a local graduation requirement. We do that in PA-- the state sets a grad requirement minimum, and local districts can require over and above that. So for many local students, the postponing of the Keystone grad requirement will make zero difference-- they still have to pass the test or an alternative assessment (known in my district as the Binder of Doom) in order to graduate.

So this is good news in the sense that it would be worse if the state had gone ahead with its original plan to require Keystones as exit tests right now. But it's bad news in the sense that we aren't really trying to fix anything or figure out what we really ought to be doing. And it's bad news because the decisions are still in the hands of the most expensive, most incompetent state government in the country.

PA: Budget Fluffernuttery Threatens Schools

We have a budget problem in Pennsylvania. You could call it a budget "crisis," but that makes it sound like it just sort of happened, like a hurricane or male pattern baldness. You could call it a budget "impasse," but that suggests two grown up sides that can't find a compromise. Perhaps budget "screwup" or budget "failure so stupid it is raising the collective blood pressure of the entire state."

If it seems like we've been budget fiasco for a long time, that's because we have. Today is Day 168 of the ongoing budget not-done-on-time event.

There was a time when I would have agreed with a bi-partisan assessment. In the early stages, the GOP controlled PA House and Senate wanted to act as if the previous GOP governor had not been decisively kicked to the curb. Newly-elected Governor Tom Wolf, whose previous work experience is running a successful family business, did not initially seem to grasp that he is not a CEO who can order the legislature around as if they are his minions.

But many of the parties got on a learning curve and seemed to make progress.

At first it seemed like a manageable catastrophe. After all, we're used to this-- we've had five late budgets in ten years.

True, there was fallout. You may remember that the Chester Upland school district, underfunded by the state and sucked dry by charters, had to ask its teachers to work for free when the state missed its first subsidy payment. Ha. Those were the days, when the budget baloney was only fifty days old.

Meanwhile, many other districts turned to loans, lines of credit, or simply ate up whatever savings they had in the banks.

As the clock ticked, Wolf and the Senate GOP worked out a deal. Each gave up some features that they had wanted in the budget, but that's what happens when grown-ups negotiate. But as that budget gathered steam, it became evident there was still a major obstacle-- the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. Noted for their lack of leadership, the House GOP could not get its act together. Or, I should say, cannot get its act together, because as of today, their act is still not together.

By this time, the state should have paid out almost all of its school support money. At this point, it has paid out $0.00. The school districts of Pennsylvania are collectively billions of dollars short.

They can get parts of their act together, including the part that allows them to double take-over some more Philly schools. Philadelphia schools were taken over by the state decades ago, but the state has incredibly failed to magically transform them, so the state would now like to take them over from the state (you can read more about that foolishness here).

Now some schools, including a few districts just up the road from me, have decided they may just stay closed after Christmas break rather than borrow more money and incur more fees and interest.

Only--ha!-- the joke is on them because the Associated Press now reports that Pennsylvania's budget snafu is so spectacular that school districts may not be able to borrow money even if they want to!

"While we consider school aid to be a priority state expenditure, the budget stalemate has led us to conclude that Pennsylvania's state aid payments are no longer a reliable and stable source of funds," Standard and Poor's wrote.

The final icing on the cake? Believe it or not, it is now time for school districts to begin working on their budgets for 2016-2017. Yes, the state's convoluted system requires school districts to declare soon if they want to raise taxes above the index, although that presumes funding based on property taxes, which is one of the bones of contention in the budget and of course schools right now as I type this have no idea how much money they're eventually getting from the state for THIS year, let alone where they will stand going into NEXT year.

Will the House budge? At last count the House GOP was about half a billion dollars and a few ideological points away from the Senate GOP, and while many Pennsylvanians are ready to move past wringing hands to wringing necks, there are also folks cheering the House on for "standing firm." Note that Pennsylvania is a spectacularly gerrymandered state, to the point that while Democrats win more votes, Republicans win more seats. But gerrymandering invariably means that politicians must play to their base, and many House Republicans are doing just that.

It is hard to follow the unfolding mess because so much of the action takes place in back rooms. But there is literally no sign that this is going to be resolved any time soon. In the meantime, however, there is the real possibility that the incompetence of House politicians may actually bring education in Pennsylvania to a stumbling, gut-wrenching, collapsed-in-a-heap halt.

PA: Tenure Attack Renewed

HB 805 -- a bill to #protectexcellentteachers -- just passed the Senate Education Committee by a vote of 6-3. #HB805 #PAbudget

— StudentsFirst in PA (@PAStudentsFirst) December 4, 2015

And while the latest round budget attempts was stirring up dust, that's about as much attention as anyone was paying this week when the Pennsylvania Senate Education committee sent this direct assault on seniority in Pennsylvania back out into the world.

I last wrote about this bill back at the end of June after the PA House passed. You can skip back and see what I said back then, but here are the highlights.

The bill takes aim at two main portions of the laws regarding teacher employment-- temporary (pre-tenure) teachers, and the business of getting rid of a teacher. As I said in June, there is a large-ish amount of strike-out and new language in this, and you are encouraged to go sift through the whole thing yourself. I've read it, but you probably ought to, too.

The Small Potatoes

Pre-tenure employment used to be two years. More recently it was upped to three years. The new bill says that temporary teachers become professional employees after completing their third year. Yes, I know what I said and read before (four years), but I'm looking at the proposed language and it says that for anybody hired after June 30, 2015, "Whose work has been certified by the district superintendent to the secretary of the school district during the last four (4) months of the third year of such service ... as being satisfactory shall thereafter be a 'professional employe' within the meaning of this article."

However, the superintendent may extend that for a fourth year of temp-ness if it somehow seems that there's something to be learned about the temp teacher in a fourth year.

The Big Enchilada

The more serious issues with the bill are in the section dealing with getting rid of teachers, specifically the Why and the Who.

The bill adds another reason to jettison a teacher. The old standards were declining enrollment, cut programs, combined schools, and combined districts. Now add to that "economic reasons."

Let that sink in. It would be okay in Pennsylvania to cut teaching positions, even if everyone knows and acknowledges that such cuts are not educationally defensible. Let's also note that, given the ongoing huge problems that come with Pennsylvania's school funding system (called the most inequitable in the country) and that fact that today marks the 158th day late for our budget (supposed a deal has just been struck, but I'll believe it when I see it), the list of school district suffering economic distress in Pennsylvania includes pretty much all of them.

Now for the who.

Pennsylvania currently operates with the traditional First In Last Out system. This bill will end that. When teachers are let go, under this bill, such decisions must first consider teacher ratings from evaluations.

The bill proposes using the most blunt-instrument form of the evaluation. IOW, rather than tossing teachers based on, say, a five point difference in evaluation scores, only the category is considered. PA only has four -- crappy, needs work, pretty okay, and super-awesome. So if teachers must go, the crappy ones go first, then the needs work group, and so on. Within the groups, we revert to FILO. Also, callbacks work the same way, in reverse.

There are some fine details to go with this. The district can't suspend anybody with a super-awesome rating for economic reasons. And you are generally well-protected if two of your last three annual ratings are super-awesome (though nobody is supposed to get super-awesome ratings regularly-- we "live" in pretty good and only "visit" super-awesome). If you dump teachers because of enrollment shrinkage, you must dump an equal percentage of administrators (unless you only have five, or you get a special note from Harrisburg, etc etc).

Oh, and the bill expressly forbids districts from dumping teachers because they make too much money, which practically speaking means that districts are expressly forbidden to say out loud that's what they're doing.

Baldfaced Baloney

Practically speaking, this is a bill that reflects the baldfaced foolishness of groups like StudentsFirst. It starts with the presumption that districts are harboring large groups of terrible crappy teachers, either because principals weren't doing their jobs during the teacher pre-tenure temp period, or because awesome teachers are being thrown into the street while crappy ones keep their jobs. And as always, it rests on the fiction that administrators lack the power to get rid of teachers who can't do their jobs, and so those teachers are still there in the classroom.

It's worth noting that the folks pushing this bill have failed to come up with compelling tales of excellent teachers thrown into the street. The bill's sponsor, when he first started pushing this, resorted to a letter filled with made-up faux statistics. I'm just going to cut and paste from my earlier piece:

Here you can see a letter written by the bill's chief sponsor, Rep. Stephen Bloom, back in February. It contains several fine slices of baloney, including this statistic thrown out without any references:

Research demonstrates that under a seniority-based layoff system, the more effective teacher is dismissed roughly four out of five times. 

What research? How is it demonstrated? And why haven't we heard about this before like, say, during the Vergara trial's work of destroying tenure and seniority in California? Those guys were clearly willing to bring up anything they could think of to make their point-- but I don't believe they mentioned this. So I kind of suspect this is not an entirely fact-based statement.

Who will be affected? 

In fact, the last round of teacher evaluations found that 98.2% of PA teachers were rated Pretty Good or Super Duper-- the highest percentage ever.

The total number of teachers rated unsatisfactory in all the public schools in Pennsylvania-- 289. In charter schools-- 803.

Why do we care, anyway? 

This is a foot-in-the-door bill, a bill that throws out the idea of tenure and seniority and resets the whole teacher employment model around a teacher's ability to get good test scores out of her students. Because remember-- teacher evaluations are based on one chunk test scores, one chunk school rating (which are 90% test scores), and small chunk of things over which a teacher has no control.

At the moment, this may seem like a not-big-deal; after all, it draws a target mainly on 289 public school teachers. But just imagine what would happen if legislators later say, "This isn't accurate enough. Instead of basic rating, let's set job security based on each teacher's precise rating score."

At that point we get Teacher Thunderdome, and that's not just a problem for teachers. It's a problem for schools. When teachers must compete for every small numerical advantage for job security, teachers will face a real dilemma-- share a teaching strategy that will help students, or hold onto it so that you have better odds of being able to feed your own family?

And for tough schools, underfunded schools, troubled schools, the very schools that we all want to see improved filled with the students have been most underserved and neglected-- how do you recruit a teacher to a school where it's so hard to get the numbers she needs to keep her career alive?

So if you're in Pennsylvania, it's time to email your Senator to suggest that HB 805 is a bad bill that should die a quiet death. Granted, he's probably busy not getting a budget passed and doing terrible things to our pension at the same time (but that's another story). Still, it would be huge bad news if this bill somehow slipped through during the larger drama. This does not "protect excellent teachers." It just attacks the profession, forcing teachers to treat their colleagues as enemies and their students as obstacles. This bill should never, ever become law.

PA: Testing Good News & Bad News

This week the Pennsylvania House of Representatives voted to postpone the use of the Keystone Exam (Pennsylvania's version of the Big Standardized Test required by the feds) as a graduation requirement. The plan had been to make the Class of 2017 pass the reading, math and biology exams in order to get a diploma. The House bill pushes that back to 2019.

The House measure joins a similar Senate bill passed last summer. The only significant difference between the bills is that the House bill adds a requirement to search for some tool more useful than the Keystones. The bills should be easy to fit together, and the governor is said to support the two-year pause, so the postponement is likely to become law. And that is both good news and bad news.

Good News 

The Keystone is a lousy test. It is so lousy that, as I was reminded in my recent Keystone Test Giver Training Slideshow, all Pennsylvania teachers are forbidden to see it, to look at it, to lays eyes on it, and, if we do somehow end up seeing any of the items, sworn to secrecy about it. But because I am a wild and crazy rebel, I have looked at the Keystone exam as well as the practice items released by the state, and in my professional opinion, it's a lousy test.

So it's a blessing that two more rounds of students will not have to pass the tests in order to graduate-- particularly as the feds bear down on their insistence that students with special needs be required to take the same test as everyone else, with no adaptations or modifications. The year the Keystones are made a graduation requirement is the year that many Pennsylvania students will fail to graduate, even though they have met all other requirements set by their school board and local district.

That will not be a good year.

Bad News

The tests will still be given, and they will still be used for other purposes. Those purposes include evaluating teachers, and evaluating schools.

Pennsylvania's School Performance Profile, looks like it based on a variety of measures (some of which are shaky enough-- PA schools get "points" for buying more of the College Board's AP products) but at least one research group has demonstrated that 90% of the SPP is based on test scores (one huge chunk for a VAMmy growth score and another for the level of the actual score).

So we will continue to have schools and teachers evaluated based on the results of a frustrating and senseless test that students know they have absolutely no stake in, and which they know serves no purpose except to evaluate teachers and schools. Get in there and do your very best, students!

Bonus Round

Of course, some districts tried to deal with that issue of getting student skin in the game by also phasing in a pass-the-test requirement as a local thing. So now a whole bunch of students who have been hearing that they'll have to pass the Keystones to graduate-- they'll be hearing that the state took that requirement away, except then someone will have to tell them that their local district did NOT take the requirement away. This should open up some swell discussion.

So How Do We Feel?

State Board of Education Chairman Larry Wittig (a CPA who was appointed to board by Tom Corbett) is sad, because he thinks the whole testing program is awesome and well-designed. Wittig's reaction is itself a mixed bag. On the one hand, he thinks that the testing system is "well-crafted" and beneficial to students, which is just silly, because the test is neither of those things. On the other hand, he also said this:

If I'm a teacher and in part my evaluation is based on the result of these tests and now the tests are meaningless, I'm going to have a problem with that.

And, well, yes. "Not stakes for students, high stakes for schools and teachers" kind of sucks as an approach.

And really, is there anyone in Harrisburg who wants to articulate the reasoning behind, "We don't have faith in this test's ability to fairly measure student achievement, but we do have faith in its ability to measure teacher achievement." No? No, there doesn't seem anybody trying to explain the inherent self-contradiction in this position.

Perhaps the House-sponsored search for a Better Tool will yield fabulous results. But in the meantime, we've already signed Data Recognition Corporation, Inc, to a five-to-eight year contract to keep producing the Keystone, even if we don't know what we want to use the tests for.

The good part of this news is undeniable. Two more years of students who will not have to clear a pointless, poorly-constructed hurdle before they can get their diplomas. That's a win for those students.

But to postpone the test rather than obliterate it, to keep the test in place to club teachers and schools over the head, to signal that you don't really have an idea or a plan or a clue about what the test is for and why we're giving it-- those are all big losses for teachers, for education, and for all the students who have more than two years left in the system.

From the Vault: PVAAS in 2009

In one of my many side jobs, I'm a columnist at a local paper. After some of us were sent off for training in PVAAS back in October of 2009, I wrote this piece. This is where Pennsylvania was with this business six years ago.

(News-Herald, October 22) This week I was schooled by the state about more awesomeness that is Pennsylvania’s System of School Assessment (the PSSA tests). This latest big vat of coolaid was served up, ironically, in the Hemlock Room at IU6. When the state lowers itself to send consultants to instruct the poor hicks who toil in local school districts, there is always lots to learn.

For those of you still following the PSSA’s, we are down to the crunch. Remember, No Child Left Behind mandates that in four years, every single American school child will test above average. Since this is only slightly more likely than pigs flying out of Ed Rendell’s nose, the ever-benevolent state has leapt to the rescue with—more statistical tools!

The number crunching is called the Pennsylvania Value-Added Assessment System. “Value Added” is a useful term from the manufacturing world. Simple explanation: If I take a ten cent piece of sheet metal and turn it into a two dollar widget, I’ve added a buck ninety’s worth of value.

What that principle has to do with testing or educating students is not clear, unless the state means to suggest that students are the same as sheet metal and widgets. I was prepared to argue that point, but it turns out that the state’s meaning is something else; words mean whatever they want them to. And I can call my bicycle a stealth bomber.

PVAAS uses a thousand points of data to project the test results for students. This is a highly complex model that three well-paid consultants could not clearly explain to seven college-educated adults, but there were lots of bars and graphs, so you know it’s really good. I searched for a comparison and first tried “sophisticated guess;” the consultant quickly corrected me—“sophisticated prediction.” I tried again—was it like a weather report, developed by comparing thousands of instances of similar conditions to predict the probability of what will happen next? Yes, I was told. That was exactly right. This makes me feel much better about PVAAS, because weather reports are the height of perfect prediction.

It was hard not to well up with that sort of sarcasm during the indoctrination. We were there to copy numbers from websites onto papers, as if the zillions of tax dollars had suddenly crumped out before the developers could add the capability of printing reports. The consultant veered between trying to bludgeon us with jargon-filled gobbledegook and patronizing us with explanations of words like “excelling” and “improving.” And assurances that if we just taught what the state wants us to, everything will be great.

The fallacy at the heart of the PSSA remains. A bunch of multiple choice questions are a lousy measure of the reading skills of live humans. (The PSSA, we were told, is not a standardized test. Okay. I’ll think about that while I pedal my stealth bomber to the store.) You can run numbers through statistical models all day, but if the numbers are near-meaningless to start with, a massage doesn’t improve them.

The intent of the state has not changed much since they first launched the PSSA’s—Harrisburg wants to write the curriculum for every district in the state. What has changed is their tone. Ten years ago they were still trying to gently con us; now their contempt for local districts is beginning to shine through. They are really tired of talking to all these yokels; they would just as soon simply roll right over us and whip us into shape.

So prepare next for the proposed Keystone Exams. Students currently in 7th grade may face ten exit exams in order to graduate. And because the state wants to wield a big hammer, the exams will count for a full third of students’ final grades.

The process remains a two-handed slap in teachers’ faces. On the one hand, we’re treated as if we are the problem and that schools need to be rescued from us by brave bureaucrats and consultants. On the other hand, we are pushed to do things that we know are professionally unsound. Imagine suits going into hospitals and telling doctors, “You are making all these people sick. Stop using pointy scalpels and start operating with shovels.” High stakes multiple choice tests are bad education.
And the final indignity is that after these sorts of sessions, one on one in the hall, many of these consultants will freely admit that they’re selling poisoned punch, but hey, they’re well paid and they’ve gotten used to the taste.

PA: Sub Privatizing Bombs

Philadelphia schools joined the ranks of school districts that figured they could save a buck by sub-contracting their substitute teaching work to a private company. Then, Philadelphia schools joined the ranks of school districts that found out they'd made a mistake.

Philly gave the contractor a $34 million contract, and then-- well, back before school started, they had barely 10% of the bodies they needed. I didn't run the story at the time because it was before the start of school, and sub rosters always grow once people decide they really aren't getting a job this fall. But now the school year is started, and Philly still has a measly 300 subs on the roster. The company says it has maybe 500 in the pipeline. The school district says once the year gets going, the demand is in the neighborhood of 1,000 per day.

The district hired the company after only being able to get a "fill rate" of about 66%. The company is not even close to that-- and if they don't hit 90% by January, it will start costing them money. They are mystified. Reporter Kristen A Graham quotes one of the honchos

"We've hired a good number of district originals, and many of them are just not accepting jobs," Murphy said. "Frankly, we're a little unsure why."

Source4Teachers is the outfit, and they already handle about 200 districts. Operating out of Cherry Hill, NJ, their chirpy website includes some darkly ironic rotating headlines.

We need tomorrow's teachers today. 

We need them today because we didn't find out about the absence till today. The company has complained that they don't get enough lead time on what needs to be filled, though they've certainly got plenty of lead time on the 99 unfilled teaching jobs, or the maternity leaves, or the long-term illnesses. If all other Philly teachers could plan their illnesses ahead of time, that would be very helpful.

They also need tomorrow's teachers because if they get more people who aren't actually teachers today, it will help fill the ranks with people who don't mind that this outsourcing has pushed sub jobs out of the union.

Begin a great teacher career. Or resume it.

Retirees who subbed in Philly used to make $242.83 per day. Now they make less than half that. Not that $110 is peanuts, but did Source4Teachers really think that a 53% pay cut wouldn't cause some retirees-- who don't actually have to work-- to rethink subbing?

In fact, all Philly subs took a pay cut. Source4Teachers thinks the old scale was too high and that the new rates ($75-$90 for uncertified, $90-$110 for certified) are closer to the going market rate. That may be true, but all pay being roughly equal, subs start looking at other factors that make subbing at a school more or less attractive.

And beginning a career? It's true that subbing was once a way to get your foot in the door, but I can't help noticing that Philly can't even fill the positions it has. And that many other states (the ones that aren't as actively starving schools to death as Pennsylvania is) offer ample opportunity to begin a career.

In today's classroom, there's no substitute for experience. Especially yours.

There may not be any substitute for experience, but Source4Teachers is certainly looking for it, looking hard for any sorts of warm bodies to grab some clearances and get in those classrooms. And while there may be no substitute for experience, as we've already seen, that doesn't mean they're ready to pay for it.

So, what lessons here?

This seems like a pretty straightforward lesson in how the free market works. You can't find people to fill a job. You must make the job more attractive. Source4Teachers and Philly schools have, in fact, made the job less attractive.

That's particularly problematic for substitute teaching, a job that is difficult to use as a real means of support because the work is low-paid, irregular and unpredictable. If a district really, really wants dependable sub coverage, the solution is simple-- hire permanent building subs. But that would mean a real salary with benefits, and the real problem is that districts want to have a solid, dependable stable of subs without having to actually pay for it.

With its move to sub-contract, Philly wasn't looking to get a better stable of substitute teachers-- they were looking to get a cheaper one. Now they get to learn one of the oldest lessons in the book-- you get what you pay for.
 

PA: Districts Now Short $1.18 Billion

Last Thursday, schools started to feel the impact of our elected legislators' perennial inability to get their job done.

Thursday was the day that $1.18 billion-with-a-b in subsidy payments were supposed to go out to school districts. But they can't. Because Pennsylvania still doesn't have a budget. The Pennsylvania Association of School Business Officers surveyed 171 districts and learned that 83% of those will be dipping into their reserve funds. 60% may delay vendor payments, 53% may delay maintenance work, and 29% may put off filling positions. Other districts are looking at the necessity of borrowing money, which means that for some districts, Harrisburg's failure will translate into real dollar-amount costs for local taxpayers.

Of course, the most notable impact is being felt in Chester Uplands School District, where the lack of a payment Thursday meant that the district could not meet their payroll. District teachers and staff voted to work without pay as long as "individually possible."

Does Pennsylvania do this a lot? Well, "Pennsylvania Budget Impasses" has its own Wikipedia page. In the last decade, we've been stuck in this place five times (2007, 2008, 2009, 2014, and 2015). Back in 2003, the fight dragged on until December.

The process is always grueling and tense, because those of us who are mere citizens in the commonwealth never know what the heck is going on (unless we want to believe the various battling press releases that emerge from the back rooms of Harrisburg).  We know the basic set-up this time; Tom Wolf wanted to write a budget as if he had won an overwhelming victory that signaled voters' utter repudiation of the Tom Corbett budgetary approach, and Pennsylvania GOP legislators would like to budget as if Tom Corbett were still governor. According to a recent poll, 54% of Pennsylvanians blame the legislators for the impasse, and 29% blame Wolf.

Meanwhile, 100% of public schools are facing effects of the government's halt. And more subsidy payments are due to schools in September, October, November and December.

Our legislators have the second-highest pay in the country, and Pennsylvania has the second-largest legislature in the country, which means we have the most expensive legislature in America-- and that's before you figure in how much this budgetary blockade is costing us. Safe to say that we are not getting very good bang for our buck. Folks have many suggestions. Dock the legislatures pay. Shut down the capital cafeteria and get Harrisburg restaurants to refuse to serve our elected representatives until they get their damned job done. Cut their pay $5K for every day they're late with the budget.

Pennsylvania's education funding has huge problems. This is not helping. We can only hope that Harrisburg gets its act together before it has to miss its next education payment.In the meantime, if you're a Pennsylvanian, I suggest you find your elected representative, contact him, and tell him to do his job.

PA: Teachers Agree To Work For Free

Its financial recovery plan rejected by the state, Chester Uplands School District now faces the grim reality that it cannot meet its payroll. The cause is simple-- obscenely profitable charter schools are bleeding the public system dry.

And (fun fact) the three charters in question--  Chester Community Charter School, Widener Partnership Charter School, and the Chester Charter School for the Arts-- none of the three enroll high school students (though CCSA is "growing" a high school program year by year).

The Chester Uplands District, long financially strapped, already has a state receiver (it was the state that proposed the financial rescue plan that the court rejected). There aren't many options left, and so the teachers have taken the ultimate hit for the team-- they have agreed to work without pay. Otherwise the public school system will not open. The district has been pushed to the wall before (here's news from 2012 that seems familiar).

That's over 300 employees. Teachers and support staff met Thursday and after hearing from the state-appointed receiver about just how dire things are, resolved that they “will work as long as they are individually able, even with delayed compensation, and even with the failure of the school district to meet its payroll obligations, in order to continue to serve the students who learn in the Chester Upland School District.”

The financial problems are further complicated by the lack of a state budget. Now over fifty days behind, the legislature in Harrisburg has failed to get their budgetary house in order, an almost-yearly ritual in Pennsylvania that results in all manner of state-funded enterprises, departments, and employees being strapped for cash as they move into the fall. Many school districts are, at this moment, dipping into reserves or taking out loans while waiting for our elected officials to decide how much money schools will get (though, of  course, school budgets were due to the state a while ago) and then sending it to them. Thanks a lot, elected officials. (And that's before we get to their negative state subsidy situation.)

Some districts can weather the budget storm. CUSD, sucked dry of money by charter schools, cannot. So while the state's elected officials cannot get their jobs done for pay, Chester Upland teachers and staff will get their jobs done for free. Tell me again about how teachers and their unions are the big obstacle to education in this country.

PA: Charter Vampires on the Loose

In Pennsylvania, opening a charter school, particularly a  cyber-charter, has long been just like printing money in your garage (only you won't get in any trouble for it).

The current plight of the Chester Upland School District highlights just how screwed up the whole mess is, and how charters are set up to suck the public system dry. Yesterday's news roundup at Keystone State Education Coalition has most of the best coverage of the story, but let me pull up some highlights for you.

I'll remind you that before CUSD ever started to get in trouble, the state of Pennsylvania has been distinguishing itself by some of the most inequitable funding in the country. This is a bi-partisan screwing of public ed. Democratic Governor "Smilin' Ed" Rendell used stimulus funds exactly as he wasn't supposed to, as a replacement for regular state funding of education, and his successor Republican Tom "One Term" Corbett slashed education on top of the auto-slashing that occurred when those stimulus funds went away. Bottom line-- funding of our poorest schools is in free-fall, because they get very little from the state.

As it turns out, CUSD gets negative support from the state. That's because the hugely generous payment formula for charters has resulted in CUSD losing more money to charters than they get from the state of Pennsylvania.

Each school district pays charters based on their own per capita costs per student. That's right-- what the charter collects has absolutely nothing to do with what it actually costs to educate the student. Perhaps that's how it's possible to pay the six top executives at cyber monster K12 a grand total of $16.4 million. Perhaps that's how Vahan Gureghian, King of the Keystone Edupreneurs, can end up building (and now selling) an $84.5 mansion in Palm Beach (not to be confused with the 30,000 square foot manse he built in upscale suburban Philly).

Gureghian operates one of the largest charters in PA, located right in Chester County. So it's only a mild stretch to say that Chester Upland Schools are in danger of being shut down so that Gureghian can live large. But like many charter operators in PA, Gureghian has friends in high places. Here's a fun story-- one of Gureghian's schools was in trouble for test cheating, but the school was allowed to investigate itself.

Chester Uplands is a perfect example of how students with special needs have become the cash cows of the charter biz in PA. This is a special kind of creaming. Francis Barnes is the receiver for Chester Upland schools, and he's a pretty frustrated man these days as witnessed by this open letter he sent to many media outlets. He outlines how the profitable selection process works.

The key is that while all CUSD students with special needs come with a hefty $40K for a charter school, they are not all created equal. Students on the autism spectrum are expensive to teach; they make up 8.4% of CUSD special ed student population, but only 2.1% at Chester Community Charter School, and a whopping 0% at Widener and Chester Community School of the Arts. Emotionally disturbed students are also costly; they make up 13.6 % of special ed at CUSD, 5.3% at Chester Community, and zero at the other two. Intellectual disabilities make up 11.6% for CUSD, 2.8% for CCCS, and zero for the others.

Speech and language impaired, however, are pretty inexpensive to educate. CUSD carries 2.4% of the special ed population in this category, but the three charters carry 27.4%, 20.3% and 29.8%.

That is the charter trick. Get the students for which your paid the most, but which cost the least to educate, and ka-ching! you are off to your gigantoc mansion.

New Governor Tom Wolf is trying to fix the system, but due to PA's super-duper budgeting process (the budget is due at the beginning of the summer, but our elected leaders don't generally get it passed till Halloween) that is stalled. The state tried to get special relief for Chester Uplands, but the judge said no.

You cannot swing a cat in Pennsylvania without hitting a school district that has had to close a school building because of financial problems caused by bloodsucking charter schools (combined with our seriously messed-up pension situation, but that's another day). But Chester Uplands is poised to become the first entire district in Pennsylvania to be shut down entirely by charters, leaving a few thousand students to go... well, who knows what happens to them when the public school system has to close its doors. The charters certainly don't want all those unprofitable poor kids with special needs.

This is what it means to say that charters save only some kids, only the kids they choose, only the kids they deem worthy (aka profitable), while abandoning the rest of the students to a public system that has been stripped of resources. This is why I don't support charters as currently practiced-- because they violate the spirit, history, and purpose of public education which is to serve all students, not just the ones that help you finance a big mansion. And there is no laying this at CUSD's door-- no amount of responsible financial management would have saved them as long as the system is twisted and tilted to favor the vampires that drain public schools dry.

PA: Legislator Misunderstands School Costs

Not just any legislator. Today we're talking about Mike Folmer. Folmer is the Vice-chair of the Education Committee, a businessman (seems to mostly have worked in sales) who was first elected in 2006, one of the many "reform" candidates swept in after Pennsylvanians snapped under the final straw of the legislatures infamous late night Give Themselves A Raise shenanigans (an event infamous enough to get its own wikipedia page).

Folmer had a bout with non-Hodgkins lymphoma a few years back (not as scary as some of the big-name cancers, but damn, it does suck), which may or may not have something to do with his passionate support for legalizing marijuana (it's "part of God's creation he has given us.") Beyond that, he has been a reliably conservative lawmaker; just a couple of years ago, he had a hand in the plan to empower universities to disempower local voters and taxpayers by chartering schools. Folmer loves him some choice. Yup. Vice-Chair of the Education Committee.

So here comes Folmer with a piece that ran first on his own web page and then was picked up by the Patriot News site. It's worth a look to understand some of the misconceptions running around the state capital.

Folmer opens with a bunch of numbers, but his basic point is "OMGZ!! We are spend so many of the moneys on schools! Soooo much!!!!!" He is particularly concerned that, as much as we spend, now Governor Tom Wolf wants to spend more.

Folmer cites (as he often does) the line from the state constitution about education: “The General Assembly shall provide for the maintenance and support of a thorough and efficient system of public education to serve the needs of the Commonwealth.” And the he arrives at his point:

The current system is far from efficient:  for each dollar invested in education, just 37 cents goes into classrooms. Most of the money -- 62 percent -- goes to the salaries, healthcare, continuing education, pensions, and other benefits of the adults in education.  How many of us would support a charity where just 38 percent of the monies collected go to the purpose of the charity while 62 percent goes for overhead?

I've run into this misunderstanding before with people from the business world. I once listened to one of my own board members, who owned a concrete business, express absolute astonishment that such a high percentage of the school budget was personnel costs. 

Folmer and others like him are failing to understand how costs break down in a sector that provides a service. Schools don't make anything; they don't spend big money on raw materials, or marketing, or equipment to turn the raw material into a finished product.

Folmer's contention that just 37 cents goes into the classroom is just wrong. The "adults in education" also go into the classroom. Every cent spent on a teacher goes straight into a classroom. 

A school is not a charity, and teachers are not "overhead." A school provides a valuable service, and teachers are the people who actually do the work. A sports team that wants to be successful-- either in terms or winning or in drawing fans and making money (all of which are, of course, linked)-- does not try to build success by cutting its personnel costs to the bone. The Yankees do not list A-Rod as an overhead cost.

After bemoaning how people react poorly to him when he cites his "facts," Folmer wraps up with this:

To me, education should focus first – and always – on students.  However, in the current debate over education funding, students are used mostly to demand more and more money – because:  "it's for the kids."

As vice-chair of the education committee, Folmer is surely aware that Pennsylvania has the worst spending gap between rich and poor schools in the nation. Well, maybe he's aware of it. Folmer is the former head of the ed committee, and he wrote about what he learned in that position. He is disappointed in the teachers unions, and he likes to talk to bright, sparkly students. He knows that the PA pension is a mess, and he expects that people will want to spend more money on schools. And to fix all this....well, nothing. But to address the funding gap will, in fact, require a bunch of money; if he doesn't think so, Folmer needs to explain what other solution would address the issue. If he thinks PA should embrace its spot at the bottom of the heap proudly, then he needs to go ahead and make his case for that.

Finding the political will to deal with PA's education problems is going to be hard. Right now we're stuck in our annual budget stalemate. Our new Democratic governor unseated a one-term incumbent, which has happened before pretty much never, but our GOP would like to govern as it never happened this time, either. We have huge financial problems, and it will take billions-with-a-B to fix them, and nobody is going to love the solutions for where that comes from. It's going to take politicians with guts and vision to pull this off. Oh, and it will also take politicians with a basic understanding of how school costs really work.

PA: Assault on Public Ed Advances

You may recall that State Senator Lloyd Smucker has been trying to sell the idea of an Achievement School District, and that he even brought some charter-choice advocates to town to help push the idea. Well, his initiative has made it out of the concept-and-hearings stage and is now an actual bill.

Senate Bill 6, the Educational Oppportunity and Accountability Act, would amend the school code to establish an Achievement School District, a state-run body that would take over local school districts. If you're wondering if this process would be politicized, here's how the seven ASD board members would be selected-- One by the Governor, two by President Pro Tempore, two by the Speaker of the House, one by Minority Leader of the Senate and one by Minority Leader of the Senate.

The ASD board would appoint an executive director who would have the power to "transfer an eligible school" to the ASD as well as the ability to authorize a charter school.

It gets worse.

The ASD has the power to convert any school under its jurisdiction to a charter school. It has to establish criteria for such conversions "consistent with national standards" which-- what? What national standards? Exactly what national standards for public-to-charter school conversion are we talking about here?

Every year the ASD must do at least one of the following to at least five (but no more than fifteen) schools in its jurisdiction:

     * Replace the principal and at least 50% of the staff
     * Contract with a nonprofit or for-profit management entity to operate the school
     * Convert the school to a charter
     * Close the school and transfer the students to some high-performing school
     * Open a new charter school and give priority to students in the area

How can schools become "eligible" for this great treatment? Three ways:

     * Ranking in the lowest 1%  SPP rating for two consecutive years starting in 2013-2014
     * A school that qualifies as an "intervention" school for three straight years starting 2013-2014
     * Or 50% of the parents can pull the trigger

The first is particularly tasty, because there will always be someone in the bottom 1%. Pennsylvania could have the most awesome schools in the world, and there will still be a bottom 1%. Ka0ching, charter operators! And for those of you non-Pennsylvanians, the SPP rating is a tasty goulash of test results, VAM-soaked baloney, and fun pay-for-play features like Number of Students Who Take the SAT. If you do the math, though, the SPP is about 90% test results, and could easily be replaced by simple running the poverty numbers for the district.

Pennsylvania School Boards Association put out a position paper at the beginning of the week. They have a pretty good grasp of the situation:

PSBA strongly opposes Senate Bill 6. Not only does it entirely remove the elected school board from operational decisions of a district school, but it requires the district to pay the bill for charter tuition costs for resident students that are transferred to new privately-operated charter schools converted or created by the ASD.

Yes, Smucker's legislation privatizes everything except the bill for all this privatizing poopfest-- that bill is still delivered directly to the taxpayers who no longer have any say over what happens with their tax dollars or their school system. But if the ASD sets up a charter in their town, they still have to pay for it even as they have no say over how that charter operates.

Smucker ran a construction company before entering politics and heading to Harrisburg. Some of what he's said about the bill doesn't match up with the official summary-- most notably he's said that help and resources would first be available for the bottom 5% of schools, which matches up with the 5% number popular with ASD fans.

This is privatization at its most naked, an undisguised plan for removing local control and replacing it with taxpayer-funded profiteering. This bill should offend lefties (corporate profiteering and abandoning commitment to public education) and righties (complete loss of local control). It's just bad.

As of June 15, the bill has been passed by the education committee and has been re-referred to the Appropriations committee. Feel free to contact Senator Smucker, and if you are PA resident, please contact your elected representative. This bill is a direct assault on public education, and it should never, ever become law.

PA: The Big Bucks

Can you guess who the highest-paid educator in Pennsylvania is?

It's Abington School Superintendent Amy Sichel, who on July 1 will see her salary rise to a healthy $319,714. 

Sichel may or may not be worth it. Okay, no-- nobody's worth that kind of money. But Sichel is also not the standard issue shiny bump-and-run superintendent that we see in so many districts. She has spent her entire career in the Abington School District (north of Philly), and she has held the superintendent job for fifteen years (which is roughly 143 in superintendent years).

A profile from 2012, when Sichel was tapped to lead the AASA (the school superintendents association), included praise from the teachers' union and from the school board:

“Amy is a tough cookie and a strong personality. When she comes into the room, you know she’s there,” Debra Lee, president of the Abington Education Association, says. “She’s a no-nonsense person. She expects the most of everyone, but she also gives us the most. She is a wonderful leader, someone you want to follow.”

“She doesn’t beat around the bush with good news or bad news,” [Board President Raymond] McGarry adds. “She has no hidden agendas. She tells you what she expects in terms of behavior and achievement. I appreciate that. There is nothing worse than a leader with unclear goals.”

She has made some gutsy choices, like eliminating all but college-bound tracks. But I give her points for making her changes and then sticking around to see them through. This puts her in a different class than superintendents who make some program changes and stick around just long enough to add those changes to their resume.

Sichel actually testified before Congress about rauthorizing ESEA-- in 2011. In that testimony she made seven recommendations based on the secrets of her own success:

1) Use a standards based model driven by assessment
2) Use a growth model to measure success
3) Make the growth model variable by individual students
4) Base ESEA on realistic and attainable goals
5) Encourage programs based on research on what works
6) Look to districts that are succeeding
7) Put locus of control at state and local level

There are other secrets of her success that she didn't list. For instance, I'll bet dollars to donut holes that she has benefited from having been in the district her whole professional career, thereby knowing the people and the history of her school and community. Building relationships and knowing the territory take time; the average curriculum cowboy riding in on a suprintendency steed cannot easily or quickly master those aspects of the job any more than you can get the person you just met this morning to marry you by tonight.

Another secret is her district itself. Abington School District does have some free and reduced lunch students, but they also have a median family income around $70K (the state and the nation median family income both come in around $49K). The district handles a bit over 7K students and employs about 550 teachers. They have one high school, one junior high, and seven elementary schools. It strikes me as a nearly perfect size and configuration for a school district. It is the kind of district that tells a new superintendent, "We want, during your tenure, for this district to be highlighted on the local, state, and national level" and doesn't balk at doing one-to-one computing for a few thousand students.

In other words, it may well take a village to raise a successful superintendent. I have no doubt that Sichel leads well (I have seen what happens in districts that have all the tools but no actual leadership), but it's also clear that where she is has contributed to her success. Nor is shy about saying she's earned her salary which (remember, this is where we started) the highest in the state, and comes loaded with various performance and retention bonuses on top. It's a huge pile of taxpayer dollars, but the whole story underline how much that rich school districts can do that poor districts cannot

PA: Huffman Sells Snake Oil

As i wrote earlier this week, some Pennsylvania legislators have been looking at an Achievement School District for the Quaker State. This is a great idea if you are interested in converting public education into a system of private schools that make investors and operators rich. If your goal is to actually educate children, an ASD is probably not your best shot-- the process disenfranchises local voters and taxpayers and hands their schools over to charter operators.

Kevin Huffman has thrown in his two cents. Huffman is a former Chief for Change, a lawyer who managed to become Tennessee's education head on the strength of two years with Teach for America and plenty of fine connections. He eventually slunk away from that job, but since reformsters seem to only fail upwards, he's still working the circuit, pitching reformsters programs.

That pitchmanship brought him to PA, where he "testified" in favor of the ASD and penned a lovely op-ed for PennLive.

In that piece, he notes that "additional funding is key," which may seem like a violation of the reformster mantra that throwing money at public education is a bad idea. But throwing money is actually an approved reformster idea-- as long as you throw the money at the right people.

Huffman outlines his two-step program for turning schools into healthy investment properties around.

First, we created an Achievement School District (ASD) - a district that has the authority to remove chronically low performing schools and manage them outside of the home school district.

Second, we empowered local districts with district-run Innovation Zones in which schools are given more autonomy to select staff, run different programs, and change the school-day schedule to improve performance.

So first, strip local school boards and voters of authority over their own schools. Second, allow a mixture of innovation and stripping teachers of job security and pay. The stated plan in Tennessee was that the bottom 5% of schools would move into the top 25% within five years. Doesn't that all sound great? But hey-- how is it working out in Tennessee?

That depends (surprise) on who is crunching which numbers, but even the state's own numbers gave the Tennessee ASD the lowest possible score for growth.

In fact, Huffman forgot to mention the newest "technique" proposed to make ASD schools successful-- allow them to recruit students from outside the school's geographical home base. This is the only turnaround model that really has been successful across the nation-- in order to turn a school around, you need to fill it with different students.

Meanwhile, Tennessee is just starting to digest the news of this year's magical increased test scores. Could these be inflated for political reason? Well, duh. You didn't think that cut scores are set by some sort of sound pedagogical process, did you?

Huffman has been known to say Dumb Things. He once claimed that students with disabilities lag behind because they aren't tested often enough. He uses his special Dumb Thing skill to wrap up his op-ed.

When I spoke with Pennsylvania state senators last week about school turnaround work, one senator asked me directly, "When you created the Achievement School District, were you worried that it was too risky?" I responded, "The greatest risk would be to do nothing."

Pretending that any senator actually answered that question, the answer is still dumb. Your child is lying on the sidewalk, bleeding and broken after being struck by a car. A guy in a t-shirt runs up with an axe and makes like he's about to try to lop off your child's legs. "What the hell are you doing?" you holler, and t-shirt guy replies, "Well, the greatest risk would be to do nothing."

Doing Nothing is rarely as great a risk as Doing Something Stupid. Achievement School Districts are dumb ideas that offer no educational benefits and run contrary to the foundational principles of democracy in this country. They are literally taxation without representation. Huffman should move on along to his next gig and leave Pennsylvania alone.

PA: Another Charter Boosting Plan

Pennsylvania is joining the list of states contemplating an Achievement School District. This is a great mechanism for replacing public schools with charters, disenfranchising taxpayers, and wasting a ton of money, but the push is coming from Sen. Lloyd Smucker, the Lancaster Republican who chairs the Senate Education Committee even though he is no friend of public education in PA.

Smucker is proposing the bottom performing 5% of PA schools be given a choice-- either "transform" themselves by turning charter or "contracting with outside providers" and fix things in three years, or the state will take them over and then turn them into a charter or hire an outside provider to run them. So, hey-- actually, no choice at all! Schools that fall under this category will also get to scrap union seniority rules. And Smucker would like to include a parent trigger rule as well. So a veritable smorgasborg of corporate profit opportunities educational transformation.

Of course, the beauty of the 5% rule is that there are always schools in the bottom 5%. Theoretically, you could eventually end up converting a considerably larger percentage of your total schools.

The proposal frames this as a state takeover, and that's a bit odd since it presumes that the folks in Harrisburg apparently know the secret of educational success and they've just been holding out on us all these years. But it's not really a state takeover-- it's a state handoff, in which the state takes control of the schools away from local voters and taxpayers and hands that control over to charter operators. That's the beauty of the ASD.


If you are unfamiliar with the term, here's a quick primer:

Reformsters love how things worked out in New Orleans. A major disaster hit the city, crushed its public school system along with everything else, and cleared the ground for the installation of an all-charter system, the Recovery School District. That system allows the state to install a management board that serves as the maitre d' at a big, ole school buffet, giving various charter operators the opportunity to step up for their big fat slice of the tax dollar pie. Arne Duncan famously called Hurricane Katrina "the best thing that happened to the schools in New Orleans" and reformsters sat at home quietly dreaming of natural disasters obliterating all public schools across America.

But there's just never a natural disaster when you need one, so in most areas refomsters have had to settle for the slow-motion man-made disasters of funding cuts and "failing" scores of Big Standardized Tests. Combined with reformsters in charge like Tennessee's Kevin Huffman (the first TFA grad to be put in charge of an entire state's education system) man-made school disasters opened the door for Achievement School Districts.

The principle of an ASD is the same-- in theory, the state takes over some schools and lumps them together in a state-run school district. In practice, the state hires charters to come in and run the schools. An ASD is simply another mechanism for privatizing public schools.

How's it working? Well, New Orleans is now a charter paradise, with no public schools left at all. This means no neighborhood schools; every morning students travel back and forth across the city in a crazy quilt of bus routes to get to their schools. Local taxpayers have been completely disenfranchised, democratic local control of schools is gone, and families are pretty much at the mercy of schools that get to pick and choose their students ("school choice" it turns out to mean "school's choice").

As far as academic results go, there are mixed opinions. It's the opinion of everyone who's making money from the charter system that it's doing great. It's the opinion of everybody else that it's not. The failures of the RSD have been extensively documented by bloggers Mercedes Schneider and Crazy Crawfish, among others.

The ASD of Tennessee has produced similar results, converting a chunk of Memphis schools to charters with no improvement to show for it, despite claims that it would "catapult" the bottom 5% of schools into the top 25%.

So why are we considering this, exactly...?

Top reformster ronin Mike Petrilli (of the privatization-loving Fordham Institute) stopped to offer his well-paid opinion, and it offers the argument for an ASD.

It starts with the premise that "failing schools are, by and large, a creation of dysfunctional school districts." Here's Petrilli's explanation of how ASD's make everything All Better:

The genius of the Recovery School District and the Tennessee Achievement School District is that they pluck failing schools out of their dysfunctional districts and give them a new lease on life. They pump new blood into these schools with new staffing arrangements. They get rid of the sclerosis of the arteries by cutting through the red tape of overbearing central offices. But they also bring accountability—and a willingness to pull the plug if, despite heroic efforts, the patient still isn’t getting better.

It's a picturesque way to put the argument. It sounds so much better than "We take away local control, fire all the teachers and replace them with low-cost temps, and install a new bureaucracy that isn't accountable to anybody but owners and investors. But charters will totally retain the right to close up the school (even in the middle of the year) if they decide the business just isn't working for them."

Petrilli also trots out a Fordham study that purports to show that having your school closed and getting yourself booted to some other school is awesome. This study is not very convincing. It is even less convincing coming from the guy who has said that charters exist to save worthy wheat while leaving the chaff behind.

ASD vs Philly (and about those civil rights)

Currently, a big chunk of those bottom 5% schools are in Philadelphia, which makes this extra Kafka-esque, because that means the proposal is that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania should take control of the schools away from-- the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

But launching the ASD in Philly would keep one aspect of these turnaround plans consistent-- from New Orleans to Holyoke to Nashville, the rescue efforts consistently involve taking local control away from non-rich, non-white citizens. Because school reform involves overdoses of irony, the "civil rights" issue of our day involves taking away community schools and a democratic voice in running them from poor, Black Americans.

Comments?

Mike Wang is executive director of Philadelphia School Advocacy Partners, a group that advocates for charter expansion through the usual use of highly selective/inaccurate data, thinks this sounds awesome and claims it has worked in other states, which is true if by "worked" you mean "made some charter folks a ton of money." He says, "It seems to be really grounded in empowering local school districts to address their lowest-performing schools." Which is true is by "empowering" you mean "stripping of all control over their own schools."

Donna Cooper of Public Citizens for Children and Youth calls the proposal "a diversion and a smokescreen," which I think is a little unfair, since it's actually pretty clear what the proposal is about, if you just look.

But thank God for the ranking Democrat on the Senate Education Committee, Senator Andrew Dinniman, who according to Philly.com "said that although he had not seen the proposal's details, he believes there cannot be a conversation about how to adequately deal with consistently low-performing schools without a serious discussion about the impact of poverty on education."

So if you're in Pennsylvania, you might want to take a moment to let Dinniman (and Smucker, too, if you have a taste for brick wall head banging) know that this is, indeed, a terrible idea designed to dismantle public education and sell off the scraps.

PA: York Schools To Remain Public

In what was not exactly the surprise ruling of the century, the Pennsylvania courts have finally put an end to the drive to privatize York city schools.

York was poised to be an exemplar, a public school that had already reached the end of its ability to withstand the Pennsylvania public school starvation diet. That led to a state-appointed overseer. Last December, Tom Corbett's lame duck administration tried an 11th hour attempt to put York schools in receivership. The receiver was to be David Meckley, the same businessman who had already been serving as York's minder and who had all-but-inked a deal with Charter Schools USA to take over the whole system.

This plan appealed to absolutely nobody in York, but it fit the pattern of privatization-- starve a district of resources until it fails, then declare it a failure, declare that the students must be rescued, and bring in the charters. Essentially, reform by arson (because you just can't count on hurricanes to come in and do the work for you everywhere).

The local challenge to the takeover initially did poorly, with the courts ruling that it was legally irrelevant whether the state intended to do something stupid or not. The state then tried to argue that since the school board had been stripped of power, it did not have the power to appeal being stripped of power (because someone in Harrisburg has invested heavily in the use of the word "Kafkaesque" and was trying to prop up the market). The courts said stop being ridiculous, and the clock continued to run out on Corbett as new governor Tom Wolf, who had been rather sphinx-like on the subject of charters and whose home town is York, came out on the side of public schools.

Using his best wall-reading skills, David Meckley resigned his Post de Privateur a little over a month ago.

Now comes word that the court has cleared away the last of the issues surrounding the appointment of a receiver, which makes sense since there is nobody in Harrisburg or York arguing in favor of receivership or charterfication. The district still has a recovery officer, and like virtually all school districts in Pennsylvania, it is in huge financial trouble, but the recovery officer is somebody from education, not business, and its financial issues still belong to the public.

In short, York still has a tall mountain to climb. The new governor's proposed budget will help, but it won't perform miracles-- and that's only if it gets past the GOP legislature. The people of York and their school leaders will have some tough struggles ahead-- but at least those won't include watching a profit-making charter operation strip-mine their city schools for fun and profit. For the rest of us, this little tale is a reminder of what the end game looks like, and that it's not an unbeatable, unavoidable fate for public schools.

Seniority and My Wife

From Students Matter to Campbell Brown, reformsters have been working to erode teacher job security and end the use of seniority in furlough decisions. The current system, they say, is unfairly hurting great young teachers. I have some thoughts about gifted teachers at the beginning of their careers, because I'm married to one of them. This debate, for us, is intensely personal.



My wife and I teach in two different districts in Pennsylvania, and like all districts in Pennsylvania that don't mainly serve rich folks, our districts are caught in big financial vise. Now in budgeting season, both districts are looking (once again) at some serious cuts. But my wife and I are in different situations; I am at the top of my district's seniority list, and she is at the bottom of hers. She and two co-workers have already had The Meeting-- the one where an administrator tells you that your future with the district does not look good.

My wife is good. Really good. Before she landed this full-time job, she was the go-to sub for maternity leaves, the sub always requested by teachers at all levels. She has been hugely successful with her first graders-- creative, loving, gifted, inspiring, and hugely dedicated. I know this not just because I'm married to her, but because people who work with and around her tell me, often. She does all the things you hear about dedicated elementary teachers doing-- spending tons of money on supplies, working a sixth day in the classroom every weekend, going the extra mile to get her students the support they need. If there were ever a teacher who deserved to have a job, my wife is just such a person.

Co-workers have said many things to her in attempts to be supportive. One such comment is "If only we could just find three teachers who don't deserve to be here and just fire them instead."

We've talked about this. "How would that even work," is her response to Just Fire the Worst. She wondered who would make such a decision, and how. I allowed as how lots of reformsters like the idea of doing it based on teacher ratings, but of course in a K-6 school, some of those are based on test scores and some are based on the yet-to-be-fully-explained SLOs, with a helping of school performance ratings and VAM sauce. I've yet to meet anybody in my wife's position who thinks they'd be more secure under such a system of randomly assigned test-based student-dependent numbers.

My wife also notes that the stack-rank, fire-the-bottom-5% model is for lazy managers. "They don't ever have to try to raise anybody up. They just sit in their office and wait. And if they want to get rid of somebody, they can just refuse to help make them better." How would that help a school improve?
And what about building morale. If you're competing with the teacher across the hall for a job, how do you justify lending them the great teaching idea you just came up with? My wife works at a great school, and one of the marks of its greatness is the collaboration and teamwork among the staff; how does that survive a Thunderdome fight for survival?

Morale always takes a hit from furloughs. Just the idea that they are now That School, where people can lose their job because bureaucrats and politicians can't manage finances, is depressing, stressful. My wife is living with uncertainty, sadness, strain (while still doing a kick-ass job). How would it affect a building if every budgetary crisis meant that every single teacher in the building had to live with that uncertainty?

Some PA legislators are once again trying to float anti-seniority laws that would let school districts under financial hardship handle layoffs based on teacher ratings. They would also, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "permit school districts to furlough teachers based on the economic needs of the district."

This is exactly the sort of law that would conceivably save my wife's position. Ironically, it would probably end mine. For a district in economic hardship, the most attractive layoffs would be to axe the most expensive teachers. Under an "economic hardship" rule, my career would have ended a decade ago. So in state like Pennsylvania where the legislature has been systematically underfunding schools, either my wife or I are vulnerable to furlough.

I asked her what she thought about devoting herself to a career in which every step up the ladder of success would mean one step closer to being fired. She responded with some NSFW language (my wife is quite the sassmeister when she wants to be). And that's the thing about non-seniority rules. Under the current system. it's hard to get a lifelong teaching career launched and safely under way. Under anti-seniority systems, it's impossible. The world needs more teachers like my wife, and my wife is not a dope. How do you recruit and retain her by saying, "You can have a short-term job in teaching, but you will never have a career."

Look, nobody has to tell me that the way this is working sucks. Sucks with a giant suckness that could out-suck the suck of the biggest darkest suckingest black hole in the universe. But as much as this sucks, every alternative proposed by reformsters sucks even more. Pennsylvania schools should be properly funded. My wife should be in a classroom for the rest of her life, and all present and future students deserve to have a teacher of her caliber and dedication. That's the world we ought to be living in; destroying seniority gets us further away from that world, not closer.

Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats