Tenure Is a Civil Rights Issue

I keep trying to write this out, and I keep getting bogged down in the many intricacies and side issues. I'm going to try once again to lay out how the people who insist that getting rid of tenure is a great leap forward for civil rights get things exactly backwards.

First, it's not even close to impossible to fire bad teachers.

Do you want to fire bad teachers? Okay-- how will you identify them, and just how bad do they have to be in order to be fire-worthy? How many people have to agree that they are bad? Remember, in the Vergara case one student's example of a terrible teacher who didn't deserve tenure was a woman who was named Teacher of the Year in her district.

The "solution" proposed by reformy types is to define teacher effectiveness (teacher goodness or the lack thereof) by looking at how well students learned. But "how well students learned" really means "how well students scored on the big state tests."

Keep in mind that the Big State Tests often test only math and reading. Do you think you can judge the quality of an eleventh grade phys ed teacher by the tenth graders' scores on a reading test?

Also keep in mind that multiple studies show that scores on those tests correlate directly to the amount of poverty in a school. Poor, urban, and/or minority students will predictably score lower on the big state tests, which means whoever teaches them will automatically pull low evaluation scores, which means volunteering to teach in high-poverty schools is volunteering to have a low (and potentially fire-worthy) effectiveness score. What do you think would be the best way to recruit teachers for those jobs?

But aren't there Value Added Measure formulas that can correct for all that? The short answer is, no, there are not. There is not a shred of evidence that those formulas do what they're supposed to, and plenty of evidence that they do not.

Which means that, despite all the noise about tenure repeal reform being a civil rights issue, the types of due process derailing being promoted will (by design or not) directly attack the quality of the teaching staffs in the schools that can least withstand these attacks. Linking teacher job security and pay to student test scores makes it harder to recruit and retain teachers for the urban schools already socked in by poverty and suffering from the instability that comes from steady staff churn.

These are also the schools in which teachers have to fight for their students, and fight hard, for everything from getting books for the classroom to speaking up about big-district policies that are unfair to the students, policies created and implemented by leaders who couldn't find their way to the school in question unless it was with a chauffeur and a GPS.

You build up any school by recruiting and retaining teachers, by building a staff that provides stability and security for the students there. You do not recruit teachers for high-poverty, low-achievement classroom jobs by saying, "Come work here. We'll chase you out the first time we get the chance, or the first time you annoy us." You recruit and retain teachers by saying, "We are investing in you for the long haul. We will work with you if you need help, and we will give you the support you need to do the job. We've got your back, and we're committed to you for the long haul. We promise that, barring actual malpractice,  you'll keep this job as long as you wish, even when we find you annoying. We hope you'll think of this school as your home for decades to come."

You build up any school by committing to a relationship with the people who work there, not by letting them know that you'll only keep them around as long as they're useful to you. If you want to protect the civil rights of the poor and minority students in this country, you protect the rights of their teachers.

Burden of Proof

We Americans have uneasy relationships with many of our most cherished laws and traditions. For instance, that pesky First Amendment-- can't we just limit freedom of speech to people who aren't stupid and wrong?

We also have trouble with the whole "innocent until proven guilty" thing. We all agree that you shouldn't jump to conclusions, but, man, when you just know that somebody is guilty, why should we have to bother with all this convoluted due process crap?

The framers had a pretty good idea how quickly things can go south without the presumption of innocence. Because when you presume, guilt, the whole focus, the whole purpose of the process completely changes.

Remember pressing? You might remember it from the case of Giles Corey, one of the Salem residents accused of witchcraft. Corey would not confess to witchery, and so the authorities tried to get a plea out of him by simply piling more and more slabs of rock on top of him. Instead of confessing, Corey died.

See, if we start with the assumption that a person is innocent, then the process involves figuring out the truth, whatever it might be. But if we start with the assumption that the person is guilty, then the process is about getting him to admit it, and since we already "know" that he's a guilty, guilty Bad Guy, anything we do to get a confession out of him is okay. Tricks? Sure-- we're trying to "catch" him being guilty, not find out what actually is going on. Torture? Doesn't matter-- it's just a down payment on his punishment. In a system that presumes guilt, we may never get at the truth, because we aren't even looking for it. We just head directly into the punishment phase.

It's all about burden of proof. If we assume that I'm innocent until we know otherwise, then you shoulder the burden of proving that I'm not. If we assume I'm guilty, then I have the burden to somehow prove that I'm not.

The attempt to change teacher evaluation in this country doesn't just represent a change in focus or technique. Some reformsters are trying to shift the burden of proof. "More than half the students in New York State failed the Big Test," exclaim Campbell Brown et al. "That means that more than half the teachers in New York State must suck." And so we set out to design a system in which teachers are assumed to be incompetent until they can prove otherwise. And that means a gotcha system, a pressing system, a system that is not interested in getting an accurate picture of what is going on in the classroom. "Accurate picture?" scoffs CBET. "We have an accurate picture-- crappy teachers are everywhere and they're stinking up the joint. Now, prove you're not one of them."

I believe some reformsters believe that student test results are actual useful data (they're dead wrong, but they believe it). But I also believe that some reformsters like using test data because it will give them the results that they already presume are true. They already know the "truth" (public school teachers are terrible), so a "good" evaluation system is one that "proves" what they already "know."

This shifting the burden of proof to teachers blinds the system, because we're no longer trying to find out what's actually happening in classrooms. We're just trying to catch teachers being "bad."

Worse, the same attitude trickles down through the system. American students are all terrible, right, because they're trapped in failing schools. We alllllll know that, right? So when, for instance, New York claims that almost three quarters of NY students are failures, reformsters don't leap up and say, "What the hell! Are you sure that's right?" and demand a more careful look at where those figures came from. No, it just confirms what they already "know" to be true. If somebody (say, one of the students who was just labeled a failure) wants to prove they're not a failure, the burden is on the student.

This is the essence of bad assessment, particularly for young children. Part of the idea of authentic assessment (for you young folks, that's an approach to assessment that was just gathering steam when No Child Left Behind came along and stabbed it in the heart) was that for teachers to approach assessment by asking, "What would be the best way for me to allow the student to reveal what she knows or can do?" High stakes standardized testing says to the child, "Prove to me that you're not a loser."

As I said, particularly rough on small children. Barring any kind of abusive home life, it has never occurred to a seven-year-old that she sucks, let alone that she should be prepared with an affirmative defense to prove she doesn't.

For a small child, the idea that the world sucks and she also sucks is serious news. But for children of any age, establishing that they're in an adversarial relationship with an education system that considers them broken and stupid unless they can prove otherwise is not helpful for anyone. Nor is it useful to employ a system of tests designed to "reveal" as much failure as possible. It's teacher 101-- success experiences create more success.

Tell students that they're failures over and over and over again and many will buckle under the heavy burden of proving that they aren't. And in the crazy world of reformsterism, reformsters speak as if they understand the importance of expectations, and then support a system that says plainly to students, "We expect most of you to fail."

A justice system that puts the burden of proof in the wrong place will collapse under its own badly distributed weight. It will fail to do its job, fail to find the truth, fail to support the innocent. An education system that makes the same mistake will yield similar results.

Test Prep Texts

Reformsters like to claim that the new generation of standards and tests have moved us beyond test prep. "No more rote memorization," they'll say. "Now we'll be testing critical thinky skills and depth of knowledge."

They are wrong on several counts. First, there are no standardized tests for critical thinking. Nor do I believe there ever will be. Let's consider the challenges to create a single such test question. We'd need to

1) design a deeply thinky, open-ended question that will play the same for every child from Florida to Alaska that generates

2) a million potentially divergent answers in a million different directions but which

3) can still be consistently mass-scored by a computer or army of low-skills test scorers. Plus

4) all this must be accomplished at a low cost so that whatever company doing it doesn't go broke.

Nothing that the testing industry has done in the history of ever would suggest that they have the slightest clue how to do this successfully. So what we get is a bunch of workarounds, cut corners, and plastic imitations of critical thought, such as questions where students must bubble in the correct piece of evidence one must be guided by, or more commonly, the one correct conclusion a good critical thinker must reach. Pro tip: if you expect every one of millions of human beings to answer your question with the same answer, it's not an open-ended question, and you aren't measuring critical thinking skills.

No, what we've got now is new tests that require more test prep rather than less. Here's why.

In prehistoric slate-and-charcoal tests, we would give the student a question such as "4 + 2 = ?" Because we had learned the conventions of that simple set-up, the student knew exactly what was being asked, and exactly how to answer it. The only test prep required was making sure that the student knew what you get when you add two and four.

The modern test problem is exemplified by a student I was once supervising in a test prep academic remediation class. He was working on a popular on-line test prep teaching program, and he had stopped, stared at the screen, typed, entered, stared some more, typed again-- rinse repeat, finally with lots of staring. I stepped up behind him; he was frustrated. "Do you need a hand with this problem?" I asked.

"No," he said. "I know what the answer is. I just don't know exactly how they want me to say it."

Meredith Broussard captured the issue masterfully in her Atlantic article last summer, "Why Poor Schools Can't Win at Standardized Testing." She concluded that the very best way to get students ready for the Big Test is to get them textbooks written by the same big three corporations that are producing the tests.

The most important test prep is getting students used to A) how the test will ask the questions and B) how the test wants students to answer the question. More complex (excuse me-- "rigorous") items just mean multiple ways to ask the question (and multiple ways to interpret the question that you ask) and multiple ways to answer the question.

So teachers are spending lots of time teaching students "When they ask X, what they're looking for is Y" as well as "When the want Y, they want you to say it like this." We practice reading short, context-free crappy excerpts, and then we learn what sorts of things the questions are rally looking for. We are doing more test prep carefully focused aligned instruction than ever.

If you're fortunate enough to be studying out of a Pearson text, you'll be test prepped educationally prepared for the Pearson test. If your students are studying out of some Brand X textbook, they won't be learning the Right Way to ask the question nor the Right Way to answer it. And what Broussard also revealed is that many large urban school districts (she was looking at Philly, but there's no reason to believe they are hugely unique in this respect) do not have the money to put the proper test prep books in front of their students.

It's just one more way that poor school systems get the shaft. Or if you're more conspiratorially minded, it's one more ways that large urban systems are set up for failure as a prelude to letting charter and private schools get their hands on all that sweet, sweet cash.

And even in less poor districts, test prep texts are a challenge. Remember-- if your books are more than about four years old, they probably aren't giving good test prep properly aligned with the tested standards. You need to replace them all, even if you're on a seven or ten year book replacement cycle.

Test prep is not only alive and well. It is more necessary, and more profitable, than ever.

Lend a Blogging Helping Hand

I read many education blogs. Many education blogs. There are so many people doing this work, and my blog list over on the right-hand side of this blog gets longer and longer. I'm writing today to enlist your assistance for one of my faves.

Most of the help you can give bloggers is cost-free. Don't just like; share, repost, retweet. If you like the word, spread the word. These just take a few extra seconds, and they are hugely appreciated.

Few of these blogs generate income for their writers, but most of us still have our day jobs, so it's not a big deal. Some folks will occasionally try to draw the false equivalency between the sides of the debate about the fate of public education, but the fact is, on one side you have outfits like Education Post that get $12 million in start-up money from reformsters and on the other side you have guys like me, who blog before the sun gets up or after the papers are graded at night or over our duty-free lunch.

But those of us who sacrifice a little sleep or more leisurely chewing sacrifice is small potatoes to someone like Jennifer Berkshire, who doesn't blog in addition to her job, but instead of getting a real revenue-enhancing job.

Berkshire is the brains behind Edushyster, a blog that is wickedly funny in a way that I deeply enjoy. But beyond being wickedly funny, Berkshire also does the work of a real journalist. She goes places, and talks to people, and consequently sees and hears things that nobody else does. She's been doing on this for two years, depending on the kindness of strangers and the forbearance of the man to whom she is, apparently, technically married. Now she proposes to try a little something else, but that requires her to get a little more than a couch to sleep on in some strange city.

She is proposing to take a look at some fairly big issues in education and gentrification as they play out in Chicago, and she's doing it through a sort of crowd-sourced independent journalist platform called Beacon. And the crowd-sourcing part is where we can help.

Follow this link. Look at the pitch. And chip in. Help support a valuable voice in the debate over public education.

TFA vs. Harvard Students

Valerie Strauss reports an exchange between the TFA mother ship and members of the Harvard chapter of United Students Against Sweatshops. Strauss presents the letters from this back-and-forth in their entirety, and you should click on over there and read them. It's worth noting that both sides are extraordinarily polite and civil. But I want to highlight just a couple of details from the TFA missives.

In reply to the USAS charge that TFA no longer follows its original mission of relieving a teacher shortage:

To your question about shortages, our program exists to meet local demand for teachers and long-term education leaders. In many of our partner districts, this demand stems from a severe shortage of available candidates for low-income schools generally. In others, the shortages are specific to certain subject areas or grade levels. In some, we serve as an additional source of teaching talent for principals to choose from.[Emphasis mine]

So, note that the program has as its stated purpose creating long-term education leaders. The teaching thing is just a training program for future edubosses, edupreneurs, and edubureaucrats.

The TFA writer also notes that TFA only applies for open positions, which is probably wise because back when I was job-hunting, I found that applying for occupied positions wasn't very helpful. The writer does not make any particular distinction about how those positions became open (say, through mass firings instituted so that the position could be filled with TFA members). And then we revisit the point made above:

We believe that students are best served when principals have access to the most robust possible talent pipeline – whether through our program, other alternative certification routes, or the schools of education that continue to prepare the vast majority of our nation’s teachers. We aim to be one small part of a well-trained, supported and celebrated national teaching force.

So-- it's not that there's a teacher shortage, or even (per the newest iteration of TFA) a teacher of color shortage. It's that principals need more choices, because what's coming through the traditional pipeline just isn't good enough. It's as straightforward a TFA statement as I've ever seen saying, "We fully intend to beat out new teacher school graduates for these jobs. You don't need us because there are too few teachers. You need us because there are two few teachers who are as awesome as we are."

After a USAS response, the next TFA letter comes from co-chief Matt Kramer. Kramer offers this interesting statistic:

Compared to first year teachers in general, they [TFA bodies] are more likely to teach a second year.

Not clear how he figures this one. While the USAS letters come with footnotes for their allegations. Kramer just says stuff. He also addresses the TFA Just Passing Through criticism by saying that the problems of education are larger than a classroom teacher can fix so he deplores the idea of judging any teacher based on student test results. Ha! Just kidding. He says that since these problems are too big for classroom teachers, many TFAers do education the favor of becoming "principals, community activists, district administrators, policy makers, elected officials and parent advocates." Thanks, guys!

The whole thing is an eye-opening exchange, particularly in the ways USAS find to say gently, firmly and politely, "You are full of it. Here are the facts. Stop lying." But totally civilly and respectfully. I could probably learn a lesson or two from them.

Jeb's National Education Summit

It's almost November and that means it's time to start making our plans to attend Bush III's National Education Summit, brought to you by your friends at Jeb Bush for President 2016 Foundation for Excellence in Education. It's a giant reformsterpalooza. (For some great stories from previous summits, read here and here.)

This year's theme is Unlocking Student Achievement: Choice * Accountability and it provides a great template for how we can peddle all of the regular reformster wares even as we completely scrub them of any reference to the Common Core. Bush III has been scrubbing all of the royal presidential educational advocacy materials lately, having noticed that being a Common Core Adorer is not winning him big love from the conservative wing of the GOP. Note this fundraising letter that completely avoids any mention of Bush III's previous policy BFF.

The national conference may be Common Core Free, but it is still stacked tall with reformy baloney. Here are the sessions you can expect to enjoy if you attend, and to save you time, I'll go ahead and predict the takeaways for each right now.

After Bush III's opening keynote (still working on a title, I guess), will be followed by these strategy sessions:

Measurement 2.0: Elevating students by testing what you teach

"States are adopting more rigorous academic standards" is about as close as we get to acknowledging that the Core exist (though if we're talking in present tense "dumping and distancing themselves from" might make a better sentence middle here).

But add to your stack of 1001 Statements That Prove CCSS and Tests Cannot Be Decoupled this sentence:

A standard without accurate measurement and strong accountability quickly becomes optional.

You can't kill the tests without killing the standards, and don't think for a moment that reformsters don't understand that. At any rate, this session focuses on the search for a super-duper test that is impervious to test prep and rote learning, and which measures critical thinking and depth of understanding. We will hear from four states about their search for this mythical test. Since the four states are Kentucky, Idaho, Mississippi and Florida (Pam Stewart will be there, perhaps to explain why tests should be administered to dying children), so I think we can cut to the chase, which is that nobody yet has the slightest clue how to create this mythically awesome tests.

Autonomy vs. Accountability: The right mix for school choice programs

We're talking about private school choice programs here. Michael McShane will be leading the panel, which includes leaders from FEE, Step Up for Students, and Alliance for School Choice.  Let's go ahead and predict that the right mix is "Let them do whatever the hell they want."

Communicating Reform Part 1: Crafting e-messages people will read and watch

Given the short life and sad demise of the "Learn More. Go Further" PR campaign that Bush and Friends launched. complete with sad sponsored teacher twitter accounts, I'm not sure FEE is the group to give advice about this. But somebody must because " we are confronted by an organized and well-funded opposition dedicated to maintaining the status quo." All I can say is-- somebody had better cough up my share of this well-fundedness, because I am clearly not getting a cut of the money that is buying other public education advocates their summer homes and fancy dijon mustard on their fancy ham sandwiches. I am literally sitting here at my desk in pajamas with a toasted bagel perched atop my desk mess, and shortly the dog is going to demand to go poop in the back yard and I will have to take him myself. I wonder if Jeb Bush has to take his own dog to poop in the back yard. I wonder how all of these reformsters dogs will cope when their owners are all in DC for two days.

In short, "organized and well-funded," my ass.

But @TeacherFaye is going to be here on the panel, so I'm pretty sure the takeaway will be, "Yes, go on and use the twitter on the interwebs, and the young persons will see your message and become convinced by the twitness."

Education Begins with K-3 Literacy: If kids can’t read, they can’t graduate

"because we won't let them" should probably be the rest of the title. FEE has beaten this drum since the first national convention in 2010, and the short form is simple-- flunk all third graders who can't pass your state's standardized reading test. The panel includes Mississippi State Senator Tollson and  Ohio Superintendent Richard Ross; if you are expecting to hear the slightest lick of research por evidence that this test and punish retention plan is a sound and helpful idea, you should just go wait in line with the people waiting to see Sasquatch riding a unicorn across the Bridge to Atlantis.

Takeaway: we should flunk third graders who flunk the state test because eight year olds need to be whipped into shape. Uphill, both ways.

Innovation in the Certification Process: Rethinking teacher licensure

"Rethinking" is a great word. I am rethinking taking my dog out to poop because my wife is now up and if I rethink it long enough, I might get out of doing it. While I do not mean to compare teacher licensure to dog poop, I think the rethinking process is similar. The panel also seems to be interested in rethinking tenure and FILO. It includes John King, so you know this will totally not be about how to rethink your way to an easily managed, low paid, non-licensed teaching workforce.

Making Schools Better Instead of Just More Expensive: How to make your education dollars count

"Despite all evidence to the contrary, there is still widespread belief that school success is tied to school funding," begins this description. "So this panel will discuss how they cut the budgets of high achieving schools in rich neighborhoods down to level of low-achieving schools in poor neighborhoods because it shouldn't make any difference." Ha! Just kidding. This panel is led by Chester Finn. This panel will discuss how to "direct funds where they will do the most good" or, as I read it, how to rewrite funding rules so that generating good test scores gets you funding, because directing funding away from struggling schools so that they can be declared failures and closed is bad education, but damn fine business.

The Next Chapter in Educational Choice: Education Savings Accounts

aka "Maybe If We Try Legislating Vouchers This Way, We Can Finally Get Them Past the Courts."


Not Your Daddy’s Woodshop: Career and technical education in the 21st century

Possibly not stupid-- somebody has noticed that we have a problem filling high skills blue collar jobs. Since we haven't yet figured out how to make jobs like, say, welding as low-skills as making fries, we'll have to come up with a way to train these peoples. "This is definitely not your daddy's woodshop," they say, stopping just short of "And of course your mommy would never take wood shop because, no penis." The head of the US Chamber, heavy promoters of Common "Everyone Has To Go To College" Core will head this panel, so I hope he's taking his cognitive dissonance pills.

Accountability Works Workshop: A-F school grading

Another Bush III fave with no actual facts to back it up. Presumably we'll skip the unit on How To Tweak the System So You Don't Embarrass Your Charter School Friends.

Day II Starts with:

The Civil Rights Issue of Our Time: Access to a Quality Education

This general session is moderated by famous civil rights activist and educational expert Campbell Brown. Since she's only the moderator, presumably she will not deliver her speech on "How to squash uppity black ladies who try to horn in on your civil rights lawsuit action."

For actual panelists we get Andrew Malone of Harlem Success Academy, Rev. Samuel Rodriguez of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference and Patrick Dobard or the New Orleans Recovery School District. The blurb suggests that this will be a demonstration of how to appropriate the language of civil rights to promote your business interests as you cash in in the education sector.

Communicating Reform Part 2: Delivering effective messages

Marketing strategy. This is about "how to effectively reach your target audiences with tailored messages." So I'm expecting an update of the classic Charter Messaging Bible.And it should be a good one-- one of the panelists is Felix Schein, president of RALLY, the PR firm that created the successful astroturf group Students Matter for David Welch. Expect some practical branding and messaging advice here.

Bridging the Access Gap: How to bring the best courses to every student, in every state

I last encountered this idea in Michael McShane's walk-and-talk video-- why voucherize entire schools when you can really unbundle and voucherize by individual classes. Charter operators, you should attend this session so that you can understand that when some reformsters look into the future of education, they don't see you.

Building Trust in the Classroom: Protecting student data privacy and security

The big question is why this is not entitled "Doing the Right Thing: Protecting student data and privacy." But in reformsterland, data security is a PR problem, not an actual problem. This session promises to address all the data security issues except the main ones. We're going to talk about securing your on-line gradebook, but apparently not for the wholesale collection, sharing and selling of the data gathered from high stakes testing.


And there you have it

The confab runs from early morning, Thursday, November 20, through Friday afternoon, thereby guaranteeing that the doors will not be darkened by anybody who actually works in a public school classroom. Registration for the event is $499, though you can apply for a scholarship. The conference will be held at the Washington Marriot Wardman Park, so, fancy.

But the organizers want you to know: "Attendees leave the National Summit armed with the knowledge and networks to advance bold education reform in their states." They call it an "uncommon conference" which is kind of hilarious because they have scrubbed every reference to certain common thing, so it is literally un-commoned. At any rate, it "serves as a catalyst for energizing and accelerating the reform movement across the nation. Be there or be left behind."

I would love to be there to watch and learn and write down things I could blog about in a well-funded and organized way later, but I actually lack the funding and I am using my personal days this year to visit my soon-to-be-newborn grandson. Also, somebody has to be here to take the dog out to poop. Priorities, you know.

Charter Wolves in Public School Clothing: Buffalo Edition

The Alliance for Quality Education and Citizen Action of New York have released a report that shows in impressive detail how one school board member is raking in money in the charter biz.

Carl Paladino runs Ellicott Development, a large property develop company in the Buffalo area. Ellicott does a big chunk of business with charter operators in Buffalo, having worked with "the private operators of at least five Buffalo charter schools. His preferred money-making technique appears to be either flipping properties back to the operators, or "leaseback" deals.

The report also suggests that Paladino makes money indirectly from properties near new charters, which are now more valuable because the neighborhood has been improved. In one particularly sweet deal, Paladino bought up twenty-two properties on Buffalo's East Side, turned two of them into charter schools, and then started developing the other nearby nineteen as apartments.

Paladino ran for school board on the assertion that he would recuse himself from charter school votes. But the report notes that he has instead acted as "the most vocal proponent" of charters.

It reminds me a bit of the old westerns where the wily politician grabs himself a chunk of land and then colludes with the railroad company to run the new tracks through his property.


Paladino's interest in charter schools is not in dispute-- not even by him. On the question of making money from working with charters, the Buffalo City News quotes him:  "If I didn't, I'd be a friggin' idiot."

The News sat down with Paladino after the report was released and gave him an opportunity to respond. His argument appears to boil down to:

* Charters are only a small fraction of Ellicott's business.
* His investments in charters are crazy risky and yield a paltry 10% ROI, but he's a charter believer.
* Ellicott is a private company and he's not opening his books.
* He'll recuse himself from votes in which he has direct financial interest, but that's it.

The News also found at least charter founder who found Paladino to be an angel. These testimonies include schools in which Paladino is the sole investor; I am thinking they know how to treat that feeding hand.

The report gets into the specifics of how some of these arrangements work. The leaseback is particularly tasty. For those of you who don't play games with money for a living, here's how it works:

* Chris buys a building.
* Pat leases the building from Chris for a buck ($1.00)
* Chris leases the building (which he actually already owns) from Pat for a buttload of money.

Why would anybody even do that? Why pay a buttload of money to lease a building you already own? At least two possibilities come to mind.

1) In some regions, you may get tax breaks on lease payments that aren't available if you outright own the place. If you make the lease "include" features like custodial services and utilities, you can get breaks for basic overhead.

2) It gives a plausible cover for any large sum of money that Chris wants to give Pat without having to explain it. It can also be a way to hire and pay someone to fix your building up-- you could say that one is leasing back the improvements on the property. Of course, it all gets much more interesting if Chris and Pat are business partners-- or the same guy. Like, say, a not-for-profit school operator who still wants to pocket profit-like money.

I don't know what's going on in Paladino's case. He has scarfed up something like $685 K in tax breaks from sales and mortgage tax. Whatever he is, he is not a friggin' idiot.

Paladino may not be a generally shady operator at all-- at least no shadier than the average developer. Much of this likely falls within SOP for developers, and what Buffalo is simply witnessing the predictable shenanigans that come when you turn education from a public trust into a private enterprise. Paladino spent much of the article clarifying and supporting his business practices, but there was not a word about the quality of the charter schools that he has profited from.

The real shame here is that Paladino is on the school board, that he has basically been given a voice in how to run his business's main competitor and the oversight for his charter business. The conflict of interest here is huge, and anybody who says that charter interests and public school interests aren't directly opposed is smoking something. This is like giving a major leadership role at Coke to somebody with a major financial interest in Pepsi. It is like putting a wolf in charge of shepherding.