Now that we've all had our turns spanking Mike Petrilli for his bracingly honest take on charter skimming ("It's not a bug. It's a feature."), it's time to move on to the question that he raised-- what about the students who are a disruption in their schools?
Define the Problem
First, I want to acknowledge the precise shading of the problem, because it does have a major effect on what we propose as a solution.
Most charteristas frame the issue as "allowing students to escape failing schools." As a statement of the problem, this has a major shortcoming for charter promoters. If the problem is that some schools are failing, why oh why would we discuss saving some students and abandoning others instead of discussing how to make the school Not Fail? Reformsters have toyed with the recovery model, where the failing school is taken over by charteristas, but that doesn't seem to be a popular approach. At the very least, it requires reformsters to push straight through local opposition to the takeover of public schools.
If the problem is schools that are failing because they lack resources, support and money, the most obvious solution is to give them resources, support, and money. But there's no growth opportunity for charteristas in that.
Petrilli's framing is more elegantly useful. If the problem is Bad Students, then no amount of money or resources is likely to fix the problem. Instead, we must separate the bad seeds from the good, allow the poor but gifted students to depart for more the company of a better class of peers. This is an excellent growth opportunity for the modern charter entrepreneurs.
Abandoning Those People
The problem with this model is that it involves abandoning a whole bunch of live human children, throwing up our hands and warehousing them in what remains of a public system after everything useful and profitable has been stripped from it. I could barely accept this as a "solution" if those charters that did the stripping came with 100-year contracts to stay and do the job no matter how inconvenient or unprofitable it became. Since modern charters commit to stay in business only as long as they're in the mood, the Petrilli solution of Good Student Charter Schools and Those People Public School Warehousing is not an acceptable solution.
On twitter, Petrilli noted that I was "putting a lot on the shoulders of poor gifted kids." When accused of hating "those kids," the disruptive students, he replied, "Alternatively, I LOVE 'those kids'--the low income kids who want to learn." Well, who doesn't.
A colleague once had a student teacher who quit about two weeks in. When told he had to work with all of her classes, he said, "But I only want to teach the smart kids, the kids who really want to be here." Well, sure. But that's not the gig. The gig is to teach everyone. Abandoning the students who are difficult is not the job. It's not the mission. It's not the purpose of public education.
It is absolutely true that in some places, the public schools have failed that mission. It is also true that in some places, that mission is way harder to accomplish than in others. But those are the problems we should be addressing. This proposal is the equivalent of saying that since we have filled up our car's back seat with Burger King wrappers, we need to buy a new car.
Who Deserves Education?
The Petrilli argument seems to be that those students who deserve it should have the choice of a better school. Of course, it's not really their choice, because in this system, it's the school who will decide exactly who deserves the "better" education. Students (or their parents) will have to prove they really want it by displaying the behavior and skills that the charter wants to see-- otherwise, it's back to the public school holding pens with them. I will say one thing for this approach-- it's as complete a repudiation of No Child Left Behind as anybody has ever proposed.
What Petrilli is describing is not choice for students and families-- it is choice for schools, with a big side helping of highly coerced behavior modification.
So What If They Stay?
So if we close the escape hatch, what do we do about the Better Class of Student trapped in a school with Those People?
I have a couple of answers to that.
First, Resources-
Why do we keep looking at schools that are grossly underfunded and completely lacking in basics like building maintenance and books and supplies and acting like this is an unsolvable riddle? It's like looking in your cupboard and pantry and finding no food and saying, "Well, I don't know. I guess we need to move to a new house." Get schools the resources they need. Stop short-changing the schools of the poor and minority families because it's politically expedient to do so. Give them leadership. Give them money. Give them resources. In short, give them all the tools that are used to make the schools of wealthy white kids excellent.
Next, Look at Those People
"Disruptive student" is such a broad category, from the very smart and board to the highly challenged and frustrated. It also includes Students Who Bring Huge Baggage To School With Them. But as Sarah Blaine asks, at exactly what age do you think it's okay to give up on them? When they're old enough to move directly into a jail cell?
Curmudgeonly though I am, I believe some fairly hopeful things about people. One thing I believe is that by and large people do not make a nuisance of themselves for no good reason. A student who disrupts does so for a reason. Find out what it is. Address it. Screaming is a baby's way of saying, "I need something, dammit, but I don't know how to tell you." The improvement over that level of communication is gradual and often takes decades. This process will require somebody to pay attention and it will require flexibility and creativity in the response and if you think I am even trying to imply that I am some sort of miracle worker who can reach troubled youths easily, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
But I do know some things that don't work. "You're a worthless failure. Go sit over there with the other worthless failures," does not help anybody. "Do as I say or I will punish you some more," is also rarely helpful. "This is why you don't deserve nice things," is unlikely to be motivational.
Petrilli also asked, via twitter, "Why put the needs of the most
disadvantaged few above the needs of the also disadvantaged many?" I'd
ask why we have to rank them at all? Particularly if we can't be sure we
know which are which.
Find out what the students need. Help them get it.
What About the Gifted?
Petrilli suggested that leaving gifted students trapped with Those People is hard on them. I agree. Of course, I also think that gifted students can very often be Those People, so I'm not sure his plan is going to help. But lets pretend for a moment that we can reliably sort the goats from the sheep. What do we do?
Variable tracking works. I know tracking is considered Very Naughty. If you allow students a say in their tracks, it works. If you have some course that do not track or which track according to different criteria (phys ed, choir, arts), you can still have a mixed population, and still allow the best students space in which to be best.
And the Special?
Petrilli took some flak for talking about Alternative Schools, but done right, they also work. And designing them is a useful challenge, because it forces educators to ask a really important question that we don't ask often enough-- what needs to happen in order for these children to get an education, and what are we demanding really just to serve the ease of the institution?
Some students bring so much baggage that addressing it is a full time job. Can we educate them anyway? Probably. Do we have to send them to a gulag to do it? No. Do they benefit from having contact with their peers? Yes.
Democracy
Public schools are one of the few places left where citizens (albeit young ones) must still interact with people who are not just like them. Outside schools, we are becoming an increasingly walled-off society, and there are absolutely no signs that this is good for us. We have a huge prison population because our solution for dealing with difficult and different people is to send them away (or, unfortunately, increasingly, shoot them).
It is not so easy to sort the deserving from the undeserving; it is not even so easy to sort those that care from those that don't. But in a varied and mixed community, all can learn from all.
We can do better. We can do better in schools, where we have the chance to impart a basic life lesson-- there are people in the world who are not just like you. I don't subscribe to the Duncan theory that expectations and tests dissolve all functional differences between all students. But I do believe that being around other people, including other people who don't approach the world the same way you do, is humanizing and beneficial. However we are reaching the point where as a culture we are increasingly bad at it.
It may well be that we'll keep going this way, increasingly bellicose in our insistence that we will take care of our own and everybody else can go to hell. The problem is that history suggests that when a large sector of a nation's people are sent to hell, they tend to take large chunks of the whole country with them.
Friday, December 12, 2014
Profiting from Non-Profits
There are days when it seems like the news in education is just the same news, over and over and over again.
People believe in the magic of certain words, like "non-profit." For whatever reason, when people hear the word "non-profit" they think of some philanthropic exercise in austerity and sacrifice. When the term is applied to schools, they think of teachers and administrators plugging away tirelessly, plowing every spare cent back into the work of the school.
Here comes Marian Wang in ProPublica to explain how Not True that is.
Let me start with the usual disclaimers. Not all charter schools are a blight on American public education, and not all non-profits are scams.
But the unregulated world of charters, infused with cash and boosted by politicians who are some combination of paid-for and clueless has given rise to an endless parade of charters created as money grabbing mechanisms. There's plenty of reason, for instance, to believe that Gulen charters are simply a fund-raising operation for their secretive owner-founder. Just last week, the Indy Star ran an piece about a charter high school being set up as basically a recruiting wing of a for-profit college currently under investigation for being one more predatory school (they had better watch out, or the feds might punish them by forcing them to accept a bunch of financial and political aid). You can go to high school and get college credits-- that only count at the for-profit college. I hear that heroine dealers also offer free samples.
Wang's piece is well worth the read-- she describes the practice of "sweeps," arrangement by which a non-profit school turns over as much as 95 or 100 percent of its revenue to a for-profit management company.
While relationships between charter schools and management companies have started to come under scrutiny, sweeps contracts have received little attention. Schools have agreed to such setups with both nonprofit and for-profit management companies, but it's not clear how often. Nobody appears to be keeping track.
There are so many things wrong with this sort of thing, not the least of which is the complete absence of accountability.
Take the case of Brooklyn Excelsior Charter School, another National Heritage Academies school. In 2012, state auditors tried to track the $10 million in public funding given to the school, only to conclude they were " unable to determine ... the extent to which the $10 million of annual public funding provided to the school was actually used to benefit its students." From what auditors could tell, the school was paying above-market rent for its building, which in turn is owned by a subsidiary of National Heritage Academies. They also had concerns about equipment charges.
This is not news. It's only been a few months since Wang wrote about Baker Mitchell, a North Carolina charter operator who sets up these sorts of management contracts with himself.
But in all these cases, the private company enjoys a shield from prying eyes. Once public funds enter this black hole, they could be doing anything from footing the bills for some other enterprise entirely to financing a second house in the Hamptons for the CEO. As Casandra Ulbrich, VP of the Michigan State Board of Education told Wang, "I can't FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] National Heritage Academies."
The practice of using non-profit charters as pass-throughs is too common to be surprising any more. It's a new sort of money laundering, in which any sniff of public interest is stripped from the money, and they become untraceable nuggets of wealth.
One thing is absolutely certain-- every dollar that is spent on actually educating students is a dollar that the management company doesn't get to put in its own pocket. Students are a Good Thing to these charters because students generate revenue, but they are also a problem because educating students drains revenue.
Bottom line-- even if you weren't bothered by the total lack of transparency and accountability, there's still another issue. In a profitable charter arrangement (whatever it's called) the interests of the students are in direct opposition to the interests of the operators. That makes this scam a bad deal for taxpayers, students, the community and everybody else who isn't making a buck from faux non-profit charterdom.
People believe in the magic of certain words, like "non-profit." For whatever reason, when people hear the word "non-profit" they think of some philanthropic exercise in austerity and sacrifice. When the term is applied to schools, they think of teachers and administrators plugging away tirelessly, plowing every spare cent back into the work of the school.
Here comes Marian Wang in ProPublica to explain how Not True that is.
Let me start with the usual disclaimers. Not all charter schools are a blight on American public education, and not all non-profits are scams.
But the unregulated world of charters, infused with cash and boosted by politicians who are some combination of paid-for and clueless has given rise to an endless parade of charters created as money grabbing mechanisms. There's plenty of reason, for instance, to believe that Gulen charters are simply a fund-raising operation for their secretive owner-founder. Just last week, the Indy Star ran an piece about a charter high school being set up as basically a recruiting wing of a for-profit college currently under investigation for being one more predatory school (they had better watch out, or the feds might punish them by forcing them to accept a bunch of financial and political aid). You can go to high school and get college credits-- that only count at the for-profit college. I hear that heroine dealers also offer free samples.
Wang's piece is well worth the read-- she describes the practice of "sweeps," arrangement by which a non-profit school turns over as much as 95 or 100 percent of its revenue to a for-profit management company.
While relationships between charter schools and management companies have started to come under scrutiny, sweeps contracts have received little attention. Schools have agreed to such setups with both nonprofit and for-profit management companies, but it's not clear how often. Nobody appears to be keeping track.
There are so many things wrong with this sort of thing, not the least of which is the complete absence of accountability.
Take the case of Brooklyn Excelsior Charter School, another National Heritage Academies school. In 2012, state auditors tried to track the $10 million in public funding given to the school, only to conclude they were " unable to determine ... the extent to which the $10 million of annual public funding provided to the school was actually used to benefit its students." From what auditors could tell, the school was paying above-market rent for its building, which in turn is owned by a subsidiary of National Heritage Academies. They also had concerns about equipment charges.
This is not news. It's only been a few months since Wang wrote about Baker Mitchell, a North Carolina charter operator who sets up these sorts of management contracts with himself.
But in all these cases, the private company enjoys a shield from prying eyes. Once public funds enter this black hole, they could be doing anything from footing the bills for some other enterprise entirely to financing a second house in the Hamptons for the CEO. As Casandra Ulbrich, VP of the Michigan State Board of Education told Wang, "I can't FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] National Heritage Academies."
The practice of using non-profit charters as pass-throughs is too common to be surprising any more. It's a new sort of money laundering, in which any sniff of public interest is stripped from the money, and they become untraceable nuggets of wealth.
One thing is absolutely certain-- every dollar that is spent on actually educating students is a dollar that the management company doesn't get to put in its own pocket. Students are a Good Thing to these charters because students generate revenue, but they are also a problem because educating students drains revenue.
Bottom line-- even if you weren't bothered by the total lack of transparency and accountability, there's still another issue. In a profitable charter arrangement (whatever it's called) the interests of the students are in direct opposition to the interests of the operators. That makes this scam a bad deal for taxpayers, students, the community and everybody else who isn't making a buck from faux non-profit charterdom.
Charters Break the American Promise
I'm not going to take Mike Petrilli to the woodshed for his horrifyingly honest piece in the New York Times because Sarah Blaine has already effectively voiced the appropriate outrage. You should go read her piece (and her blog should be on your personal blogroll). I'm just going to note that Petrilli reminds us of what we already knew.
Petrilli has always been pretty up front about this; Anthony Cody called him out on it a year ago. The whole point of school choice is so that select parents can get their children away from Those People.
You know Those People. Those Children are unruly, poorly behaved, badly dressed, generally uncouth. They make for a poor school atmosphere. They won't pull up their pants, or get off our lawn. They set a Very Poor Example for the other children. If we could just get our own exemplary children away from Those People, life would be so much better. Well, at least it would be so much better for us.
Schools are always blown along by the prevailing winds of the larger culture, and one of the prevailing winds these days is "I've got mine, Jack." Public education was established as a reflection of the US melting pot mentality, but we've put the melting pot away.
It's not that we want to go back to Separate But Equal. Our goal is Separate But Better.
As many folks have pointed out, school choice is not about families choosing schools as much as it's about schools choosing The Right Kind of Student. This dovetails perfectly with Free Market Forces, because the Free Market always demand that the least profitable, the least attractive, the least desirable customers be dumped.
I'm not going to pretend that all of us who work in public education love every single student who crosses our threshold. Every teacher has had at least one student in one class whose name on the absence list made our day a little bit more pleasant and less stressful. But that never changed our understanding of the public school teacher gig-- to educate every single student that was put in front of us to the very best of our ability. That's the promise of US public education-- that we will do the best we can for every single student that shows up on our doorstep. Public school, like home, is the place that, when you go there, they have to take you in.
Creaming hurts the fabric of society in other ways. Are there students who are brighter, faster, more dedicated than some of their peers? Of course there are-- and public school is a place where they learn to be leaders as they become part of the current that draws their less gifted peers forward. In the charter model, public schools loose their leadership even as they learn that they have no responsibility to anyone but themselves. I've got mine, Jack.
The fundamental promise of US public education is that we will educate every single child for as long as there are children in this country. The fundamental promise of modern charters, as deftly delineated by Petrilli, is we will educate the students we feel like educating for as long as it suits us to do it. That is probably the smallest promise that any culture has made to its children in the history of ever; even elite medieval schools promised to stick around till the job was done. Charters have tried to claim success by redefining success, and their new definition is tiny and unambitious.
This is also emblematic of another forgotten American promise. Modern charters are predicated on the idea that we will no longer try to fix things. They are predicated on the idea of "escaping" bad neighborhoods, bad conditions, bad poverty-- which of course means we have no intention of addressing those issues. We are standing in front of a burning building with no intention of putting the fire out. We're just going to rescue a few kids. The right kids.
Charter fans like to bill them as engines of innovation, cutting edge schools that will lead us on a new path. That's baloney. If you want a big, expansive, ambitious, audacious, bold promise, nothing beats "We will be here to educate every single child in America just as long as their are children in America." There is nothing bold, ambitious, or cutting edge about promising, "We will be here to educate a few select children as long as it's convenient and profitable for us." There is nothing forward-thinking about saying, "If a child is hard to teach, we'll get rid of him."
Petrilli doesn't just reveal that the modern charter movement is ethically empty-- he shows that its stunted, small, unambitious, and a betrayal of the American promise.
Petrilli has always been pretty up front about this; Anthony Cody called him out on it a year ago. The whole point of school choice is so that select parents can get their children away from Those People.
You know Those People. Those Children are unruly, poorly behaved, badly dressed, generally uncouth. They make for a poor school atmosphere. They won't pull up their pants, or get off our lawn. They set a Very Poor Example for the other children. If we could just get our own exemplary children away from Those People, life would be so much better. Well, at least it would be so much better for us.
Schools are always blown along by the prevailing winds of the larger culture, and one of the prevailing winds these days is "I've got mine, Jack." Public education was established as a reflection of the US melting pot mentality, but we've put the melting pot away.
It's not that we want to go back to Separate But Equal. Our goal is Separate But Better.
As many folks have pointed out, school choice is not about families choosing schools as much as it's about schools choosing The Right Kind of Student. This dovetails perfectly with Free Market Forces, because the Free Market always demand that the least profitable, the least attractive, the least desirable customers be dumped.
I'm not going to pretend that all of us who work in public education love every single student who crosses our threshold. Every teacher has had at least one student in one class whose name on the absence list made our day a little bit more pleasant and less stressful. But that never changed our understanding of the public school teacher gig-- to educate every single student that was put in front of us to the very best of our ability. That's the promise of US public education-- that we will do the best we can for every single student that shows up on our doorstep. Public school, like home, is the place that, when you go there, they have to take you in.
Creaming hurts the fabric of society in other ways. Are there students who are brighter, faster, more dedicated than some of their peers? Of course there are-- and public school is a place where they learn to be leaders as they become part of the current that draws their less gifted peers forward. In the charter model, public schools loose their leadership even as they learn that they have no responsibility to anyone but themselves. I've got mine, Jack.
The fundamental promise of US public education is that we will educate every single child for as long as there are children in this country. The fundamental promise of modern charters, as deftly delineated by Petrilli, is we will educate the students we feel like educating for as long as it suits us to do it. That is probably the smallest promise that any culture has made to its children in the history of ever; even elite medieval schools promised to stick around till the job was done. Charters have tried to claim success by redefining success, and their new definition is tiny and unambitious.
This is also emblematic of another forgotten American promise. Modern charters are predicated on the idea that we will no longer try to fix things. They are predicated on the idea of "escaping" bad neighborhoods, bad conditions, bad poverty-- which of course means we have no intention of addressing those issues. We are standing in front of a burning building with no intention of putting the fire out. We're just going to rescue a few kids. The right kids.
Charter fans like to bill them as engines of innovation, cutting edge schools that will lead us on a new path. That's baloney. If you want a big, expansive, ambitious, audacious, bold promise, nothing beats "We will be here to educate every single child in America just as long as their are children in America." There is nothing bold, ambitious, or cutting edge about promising, "We will be here to educate a few select children as long as it's convenient and profitable for us." There is nothing forward-thinking about saying, "If a child is hard to teach, we'll get rid of him."
Petrilli doesn't just reveal that the modern charter movement is ethically empty-- he shows that its stunted, small, unambitious, and a betrayal of the American promise.
Thursday, December 11, 2014
Beware Cost-Per-Student Stats
When the discussion of money and US education comes up, we'll inevitably see cost-per-student tossed around. This is a not-useless way to make district-to-district comparisons, but the statistic has some fairly hefty limitations, and we need to be careful in any discussion that uses the data.
All Dollars Are Not Created Equal
The lion's share of a school district's outlay is going to be personnel costs, and since those are often a negotiated item, they will be driven by the level of the local economy.
I teach in a small town/rural district, and my pay after thirty-some years is unimpressive compared to the ritzy districts in Metro Pittsburgh, which is only 90 minutes away. I get peanuts compared to some of those teachers, but I live in a nice-sized home located on a nice riverfront lot right in town, and that home cost me a tenth of the price for a similarly-sized home on a lesser lot in the Burgh. By state or national measures, I am not a particularly well-paid teacher. By local standards, I'm a well-paid professional in my community. Comparing our local cost-per-student to the cost-per-student in larger districts doesn't really mean anything.
That's nobody's fault. If I taught in a larger urban area, I'd need enough money to buy a decent home in a livable neighborhood as well as covering the costs of commuting (my commute here to school is roughly four minutes). My urban counterparts aren't greedier than I am; they live in more expensive places. And rich districts further skew the numbers because they know an economic truth that somehow never makes it into these discussions-- if you want your pick of the best people, you need to outbid the other potential employers out there, and that means more money on the table.
If we want to make these kinds of costs across international boundaries, it gets even harder to compare true cost of living.
Bureaucracy Costs Money
Conservatives cite these numbers as proof that we shouldn't "throw more money at schools" and then call for more accountability. This is an argument that punches itself in the face, because accountability = more bureaucracy and more bureaucracy = increased spending that doesn't actually reach a classroom.
Giant urban districts seem to have some of the worst cost-per-student bang-per-buck numbers, but giant urban districts have giant layers of bureaucracy, much of it in place simply to manage the largeness of it all. It's a giant bureaucratic accountability machine, and it costs big bucks that don't necessarily land near any students.
Every added layer of accountability costs money and, if you're very unlucky and/or bad at this game, time that could be spent teaching. Accountability too often takes us to the Dilbertesque land where workers can't get work done because they're spending time in meetings about how they can't get work done.
Not All Students Are Equally Costly
The discussion of cost-per-pupil obscures a simple fact-- some students are wildly more expensive to school than others.
Charter operators understand this quite well (just as they understand that personnel costs are their biggest expense), and so charters often specialize in finding and keeping the students who are the least expensive to educate. Those students are the cash cows of the education biz, because every dollar the charter doesn't have to spend on educating a student is a dollar the charter gets to pocket.
Government has complicated the matter by mandating the extra costs. If you have special needs students, you have a list of services that you must provide as determined by statute (and by lawsuit precedents established by lucrative student advocate legal practitioners). Every special thing you have to do for a student is additional cost.
If I were a cynical person, I would guess that this is precisely why Arne Duncan seems bound and determined to switch special ed from a series of mandated program inputs and turn it instead into a system that gives students with special needs nothing but high expectations and the privilege of doing exactly what the other students do (which coincidentally makes special ed stop draining extra funds).
My cynicism might also lead me to think that the reformster reliance on grit and Great Teachers is simply meant to sell the idea that it should cost no more to educate poor urban kids than it costs to educate comfy rich kids in the burbs. Instead, they get those sporadic equity lawsuits that force states to spend more in poor districts, which gets us frustration all around because too few people in the right offices want to have a real conversation about what it would really take to raise up our most disadvantaged students (spoiler alert: not more tests nor insistence that they all just grow some grit nor an influx of magical teachers who will work miracles but cost less money).
Not All Goals Are Equally Costly
Man, I guess I am going on a cynicism wallow today. Because it occurs to me that while educating students to become fully rounded, functional citizens who are prepared to pursue a wide and diverse assortment of goals while acquiring background and experience in a full range of fields so that they can experience the full, rich awesomeness of being human-- well, that shit is going to cost you some money. The cost of coming up with a decent way to assess it alone would hoover up a hunk of hard cash.
On the other hand, training students to pass a standardized English and math test would be cheap. That-- that we can do for peanuts.
It's a tricky balance. Cynicism-soaked me realizes that we don't really want to save the taxpayers money-- that revenue stream has to keep flowing. But once the revenue arrives in the hands of school operators, we don't want them to have to turn around and give it all away. Ed reform continues to be a bi-partisan shuffle. For conservatives, we focus on cutting costs and free-market solutions; for liberals, we focus on how the government is mandating wise and uplifting solutions.
And So
As I said, the cost-per-pupil figures can be useful, but to have a really useful discussion of those dollars, we have to talk about where we're spending them, on whom we're spending them, what sort of bang we're trying to get for our buck, and how we're checking to see if we got what we thought we were paying for. Right now a cynic would suggest that it's in the interests of some reformsters to deliberately avoid having some of those conversation, but without them, talking about cost-per-pupil is a waste of time.
All Dollars Are Not Created Equal
The lion's share of a school district's outlay is going to be personnel costs, and since those are often a negotiated item, they will be driven by the level of the local economy.
I teach in a small town/rural district, and my pay after thirty-some years is unimpressive compared to the ritzy districts in Metro Pittsburgh, which is only 90 minutes away. I get peanuts compared to some of those teachers, but I live in a nice-sized home located on a nice riverfront lot right in town, and that home cost me a tenth of the price for a similarly-sized home on a lesser lot in the Burgh. By state or national measures, I am not a particularly well-paid teacher. By local standards, I'm a well-paid professional in my community. Comparing our local cost-per-student to the cost-per-student in larger districts doesn't really mean anything.
That's nobody's fault. If I taught in a larger urban area, I'd need enough money to buy a decent home in a livable neighborhood as well as covering the costs of commuting (my commute here to school is roughly four minutes). My urban counterparts aren't greedier than I am; they live in more expensive places. And rich districts further skew the numbers because they know an economic truth that somehow never makes it into these discussions-- if you want your pick of the best people, you need to outbid the other potential employers out there, and that means more money on the table.
If we want to make these kinds of costs across international boundaries, it gets even harder to compare true cost of living.
Bureaucracy Costs Money
Conservatives cite these numbers as proof that we shouldn't "throw more money at schools" and then call for more accountability. This is an argument that punches itself in the face, because accountability = more bureaucracy and more bureaucracy = increased spending that doesn't actually reach a classroom.
Giant urban districts seem to have some of the worst cost-per-student bang-per-buck numbers, but giant urban districts have giant layers of bureaucracy, much of it in place simply to manage the largeness of it all. It's a giant bureaucratic accountability machine, and it costs big bucks that don't necessarily land near any students.
Every added layer of accountability costs money and, if you're very unlucky and/or bad at this game, time that could be spent teaching. Accountability too often takes us to the Dilbertesque land where workers can't get work done because they're spending time in meetings about how they can't get work done.
Not All Students Are Equally Costly
The discussion of cost-per-pupil obscures a simple fact-- some students are wildly more expensive to school than others.
Charter operators understand this quite well (just as they understand that personnel costs are their biggest expense), and so charters often specialize in finding and keeping the students who are the least expensive to educate. Those students are the cash cows of the education biz, because every dollar the charter doesn't have to spend on educating a student is a dollar the charter gets to pocket.
Government has complicated the matter by mandating the extra costs. If you have special needs students, you have a list of services that you must provide as determined by statute (and by lawsuit precedents established by lucrative student advocate legal practitioners). Every special thing you have to do for a student is additional cost.
If I were a cynical person, I would guess that this is precisely why Arne Duncan seems bound and determined to switch special ed from a series of mandated program inputs and turn it instead into a system that gives students with special needs nothing but high expectations and the privilege of doing exactly what the other students do (which coincidentally makes special ed stop draining extra funds).
My cynicism might also lead me to think that the reformster reliance on grit and Great Teachers is simply meant to sell the idea that it should cost no more to educate poor urban kids than it costs to educate comfy rich kids in the burbs. Instead, they get those sporadic equity lawsuits that force states to spend more in poor districts, which gets us frustration all around because too few people in the right offices want to have a real conversation about what it would really take to raise up our most disadvantaged students (spoiler alert: not more tests nor insistence that they all just grow some grit nor an influx of magical teachers who will work miracles but cost less money).
Not All Goals Are Equally Costly
Man, I guess I am going on a cynicism wallow today. Because it occurs to me that while educating students to become fully rounded, functional citizens who are prepared to pursue a wide and diverse assortment of goals while acquiring background and experience in a full range of fields so that they can experience the full, rich awesomeness of being human-- well, that shit is going to cost you some money. The cost of coming up with a decent way to assess it alone would hoover up a hunk of hard cash.
On the other hand, training students to pass a standardized English and math test would be cheap. That-- that we can do for peanuts.
It's a tricky balance. Cynicism-soaked me realizes that we don't really want to save the taxpayers money-- that revenue stream has to keep flowing. But once the revenue arrives in the hands of school operators, we don't want them to have to turn around and give it all away. Ed reform continues to be a bi-partisan shuffle. For conservatives, we focus on cutting costs and free-market solutions; for liberals, we focus on how the government is mandating wise and uplifting solutions.
And So
As I said, the cost-per-pupil figures can be useful, but to have a really useful discussion of those dollars, we have to talk about where we're spending them, on whom we're spending them, what sort of bang we're trying to get for our buck, and how we're checking to see if we got what we thought we were paying for. Right now a cynic would suggest that it's in the interests of some reformsters to deliberately avoid having some of those conversation, but without them, talking about cost-per-pupil is a waste of time.
Homeostasis, Tourists, Stability and the Feds
Over at the Fordham, Andy Smarick is expressing concern over three converging threads that signal to him an impending triumph of homeostasis, nature's tendency to snap back to its original position. Or, more specifically, the tendency of large institutions to shake off disruptive influences and return to their original state.
The three trends that concern Smarick are
1) The exodus of many reformster chiefs.
2) The replacing of those chiefs with less-reformy-minded individuals
3) Reform backlash leading to an ESEA rewrite that fails to hold the reformy line
Put them all together, and Smarick fears a return to the bad old pre-NCLB days:
Prior to this period of reform, the K–12 equilibrium was marked by establishment-oriented chiefs, an insufficient focus on student outcomes, state-level insularity, and no federal accountability. Homeostasis may be bringing this heady era of reform disequilibrium to an end.
I'm going to set aside the question of how bad the bad old days actually were. I'm pretty sure I don't believe they were at all the vast disaster that reformsters claim they were, but I am not going to argue it was a land of milk and honey where unicorns danced and played, either. The question of history is a whole other conversation, and an only marginally useful one at that.
Instead, I'm going to argue that what Smarick is noticing is not so much homeostasis as tourism.
The reformsters, from state chiefs and federal bureaucrats all the way down through TFA temp staff, have always been tourists. They've be praised as investors and criticized as colonialists, but they were never really either. With few exceptions, they were just passing through, grabbing and going.
You can see it even in their signature product-- the Common Core. The creators of the Core did not invest time and effort in launching it, nor did they stick around to nurture it, oversee it, and guide it through the early stages of adoption. Before the ink had even dried, they were in the limo being whisked off to their next job opportunity.
The architects of the Common Core simply did not behave like people whose hopes and dreams were that the Core would survive to change the face of education.
Charter operators? More of the same. Charter groups have not committed to bring quality education to communities for the long haul, and in just a couple of years, charters have been evaporating like gasoline. Government bureaucrats like the chiefs? Many of them got their start with TFA, and they have continued to follow that model-- come in, make a mark, rewrite your resume, move on to the next job prospect. We can see their future in the food industries and the military-industrial complex, where folks make a bundle moving back and forth between government offices and corporate boardrooms, back and forth, collecting another pile of money with each spin of the revolving door.
The reformsters did not do the heavy lifting of building careful stable sustainable structures built to last. "I pledge to you-- we are going to create a system that will stand the test of time, I will be right here side by side with you to see it through over the decades ahead," said no reformster ever. This is one of the great frustrations of teachers in this reformy climate-- these guys swoop in, declaim about being agents of change, and make a mess, but in five years they'll be gone and we'll still be here.
If reformsters want to resist homeostasis, the solution is simple. Stay. Create new structures that are built around stability, sustainability, sense, instead of reforms built on flash, impact, and speedy ROI. Build structures that are built to last. Commit to staying and seeing the building all the way through. It's as simple as that.
I asked Smarick on twitter what benefit there could be in federal oversight, and he replied "Accountability for federal funds and focus on the most disadvantaged kids." Those are tricky goals-- "accountability" isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it can mean everything from "make sure states don't spend ed money on beer and pretzels" to "make sure that states spend no more than $1.95 per child per correct answer bubbled in on standardized test of federal choosing."
But what federal and state education leaders can provide, whether infected with reformsterism, or not, is stability. But that quality has been completely lacking from reformsters every step of the way. They did not come to stay, or make a difference, or build a new system that would stand the test of time, or commit to staying in place to really see things through. They just pitched a quick tent and barely pegged it down because they knew they weren't going to be living in it; they cannot be surprised that those of us who do choose to live in it decide to take it back down as soon as they leave.
This has always been the story of education reform. Teachers are out plowing the fields, and some Bright Person will show up and start ordering everyone around and explaining how the fields can best be plowed. They don't ask the people who have been plowing for years, and their "help" takes the form of everything from suggestions to order at gun point. Do they tell teachers, "I am going to put my shoulder to the plow with you, and work beside you until together, we have brought this field to years and years of bounty'? Almost never. Instead, we teachers just bite our lips and keep plowing, knowing that as sure as the sun rises, the Bright Person will soon move on to some other field, and we'll still be here, shoulders still to the plow.
Homeostasis can be viewed as resistance to change, I suppose, but I think of it as simply a clear, natural sign of how much effort it takes to really make a change. Think of it as a free market mechanism. Offering you a penny is not enough to change to homeostatic state of you owning your hat. Nature and the free market demand that I offer enough investment to disturb your hat's homeostatic state. Complaining that your are just too resistant to change because you won't sell me your hat for a penny is dopey.
Reformsters want to change education, but they only want to invest a penny's worth of their lives in doing it. Do not be surprised that those of us who are all in remain unimpressed. And don't try to fix it by using the government to tilt the market in favor of your one-penny buy offer.
The three trends that concern Smarick are
1) The exodus of many reformster chiefs.
2) The replacing of those chiefs with less-reformy-minded individuals
3) Reform backlash leading to an ESEA rewrite that fails to hold the reformy line
Put them all together, and Smarick fears a return to the bad old pre-NCLB days:
Prior to this period of reform, the K–12 equilibrium was marked by establishment-oriented chiefs, an insufficient focus on student outcomes, state-level insularity, and no federal accountability. Homeostasis may be bringing this heady era of reform disequilibrium to an end.
I'm going to set aside the question of how bad the bad old days actually were. I'm pretty sure I don't believe they were at all the vast disaster that reformsters claim they were, but I am not going to argue it was a land of milk and honey where unicorns danced and played, either. The question of history is a whole other conversation, and an only marginally useful one at that.
Instead, I'm going to argue that what Smarick is noticing is not so much homeostasis as tourism.
The reformsters, from state chiefs and federal bureaucrats all the way down through TFA temp staff, have always been tourists. They've be praised as investors and criticized as colonialists, but they were never really either. With few exceptions, they were just passing through, grabbing and going.
You can see it even in their signature product-- the Common Core. The creators of the Core did not invest time and effort in launching it, nor did they stick around to nurture it, oversee it, and guide it through the early stages of adoption. Before the ink had even dried, they were in the limo being whisked off to their next job opportunity.
The architects of the Common Core simply did not behave like people whose hopes and dreams were that the Core would survive to change the face of education.
Charter operators? More of the same. Charter groups have not committed to bring quality education to communities for the long haul, and in just a couple of years, charters have been evaporating like gasoline. Government bureaucrats like the chiefs? Many of them got their start with TFA, and they have continued to follow that model-- come in, make a mark, rewrite your resume, move on to the next job prospect. We can see their future in the food industries and the military-industrial complex, where folks make a bundle moving back and forth between government offices and corporate boardrooms, back and forth, collecting another pile of money with each spin of the revolving door.
The reformsters did not do the heavy lifting of building careful stable sustainable structures built to last. "I pledge to you-- we are going to create a system that will stand the test of time, I will be right here side by side with you to see it through over the decades ahead," said no reformster ever. This is one of the great frustrations of teachers in this reformy climate-- these guys swoop in, declaim about being agents of change, and make a mess, but in five years they'll be gone and we'll still be here.
If reformsters want to resist homeostasis, the solution is simple. Stay. Create new structures that are built around stability, sustainability, sense, instead of reforms built on flash, impact, and speedy ROI. Build structures that are built to last. Commit to staying and seeing the building all the way through. It's as simple as that.
I asked Smarick on twitter what benefit there could be in federal oversight, and he replied "Accountability for federal funds and focus on the most disadvantaged kids." Those are tricky goals-- "accountability" isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it can mean everything from "make sure states don't spend ed money on beer and pretzels" to "make sure that states spend no more than $1.95 per child per correct answer bubbled in on standardized test of federal choosing."
But what federal and state education leaders can provide, whether infected with reformsterism, or not, is stability. But that quality has been completely lacking from reformsters every step of the way. They did not come to stay, or make a difference, or build a new system that would stand the test of time, or commit to staying in place to really see things through. They just pitched a quick tent and barely pegged it down because they knew they weren't going to be living in it; they cannot be surprised that those of us who do choose to live in it decide to take it back down as soon as they leave.
This has always been the story of education reform. Teachers are out plowing the fields, and some Bright Person will show up and start ordering everyone around and explaining how the fields can best be plowed. They don't ask the people who have been plowing for years, and their "help" takes the form of everything from suggestions to order at gun point. Do they tell teachers, "I am going to put my shoulder to the plow with you, and work beside you until together, we have brought this field to years and years of bounty'? Almost never. Instead, we teachers just bite our lips and keep plowing, knowing that as sure as the sun rises, the Bright Person will soon move on to some other field, and we'll still be here, shoulders still to the plow.
Homeostasis can be viewed as resistance to change, I suppose, but I think of it as simply a clear, natural sign of how much effort it takes to really make a change. Think of it as a free market mechanism. Offering you a penny is not enough to change to homeostatic state of you owning your hat. Nature and the free market demand that I offer enough investment to disturb your hat's homeostatic state. Complaining that your are just too resistant to change because you won't sell me your hat for a penny is dopey.
Reformsters want to change education, but they only want to invest a penny's worth of their lives in doing it. Do not be surprised that those of us who are all in remain unimpressed. And don't try to fix it by using the government to tilt the market in favor of your one-penny buy offer.
John King Joins DOPE
Look, let's just stop calling it the Department of Education, because Duncan does not lead a team of educators, and US public education is not their concern.
Let's call them what they are-- the Department of Privatizing Education. DOPE.
John King is just the latest addition, and his entry to the department is emblematic of how the department is now run.
It's not just that he has zero public education experience. It's not just that he was so remarkably awful in New York, with everything from pre-determining the failure rate for NY testing to refusing to meet with parents when they insisted on expressing opinions and speaking even when they hadn't been spoken to. It's not just that he's one more reformster whose clear priority is gutting public education and selling off the parts to privateers. It's not even that he managed to get the union to give him a vote of No Confidence.
This much is just business as usual at DOPE, where appointments are made based, not on educational qualifications, but on business resumes. His hiring represents one more step away from a government model toward a business model.
In government, people fill particular jobs. They need to get approval to fill those particular jobs. And they have a set of duties that go with that particular job. But in business, you can get hired just for being you. When Warren Buffet calls up Bob's Investment Hut and offers some help, Bob doesn't worry about whether he has an opening-- he just hires Buffet for being Buffet. Being hired for just being you also means your track record doesn't matter-- you may have failed at every undertaking you've ever undertaken, but if your cronies believe you're a Good Person from the Right Background, as God is your witness, you will never be hungry again (call it the Rhee Effect).
It is exactly the sort of oversight-free non-accountable model that DOPE likes, where Important People can just hire and fire whoever the hell they like because, hey, they're Important Businessmen. So now, in a move that allows them to skirt any kind of review, discussion, or accountability, they've hired John King to be John King. What will his job be, and how will he be held accountable for doing it (or not)? Shut up, taxpayers-- that's none of your business. Accountability is for peons; Important People should not be tied down by that sort of foolishness.
DOPE is not a government agency. It is not an organization devoted to maintenance and support of a public good. It's a business outpost, and its business is privatizing education. Viewed in its proper light, DOPE's hiring of the clueless, hapless, experience-free, public school unfriendly John King makes perfect sense. Even the use of Shakira as a celebrity spokesperson (yes, that was a thing) makes an odd sort of sense. Duncan's DOPE is only confusing if you expect them to behave like a government agency tasked with preserving and supporting American public education, but that makes as much sense as expecting PepsiCo to behave like a government agency devoted to promoting good nutrition. Just think of John King as the new Special Attache for Fatty Foods.
(Meanwhile, he'll be replaced by the NY regents-- the same folks who gave Ted Morris a charter because his paperwork looked just fine.)
Let's call them what they are-- the Department of Privatizing Education. DOPE.
John King is just the latest addition, and his entry to the department is emblematic of how the department is now run.
It's not just that he has zero public education experience. It's not just that he was so remarkably awful in New York, with everything from pre-determining the failure rate for NY testing to refusing to meet with parents when they insisted on expressing opinions and speaking even when they hadn't been spoken to. It's not just that he's one more reformster whose clear priority is gutting public education and selling off the parts to privateers. It's not even that he managed to get the union to give him a vote of No Confidence.
This much is just business as usual at DOPE, where appointments are made based, not on educational qualifications, but on business resumes. His hiring represents one more step away from a government model toward a business model.
In government, people fill particular jobs. They need to get approval to fill those particular jobs. And they have a set of duties that go with that particular job. But in business, you can get hired just for being you. When Warren Buffet calls up Bob's Investment Hut and offers some help, Bob doesn't worry about whether he has an opening-- he just hires Buffet for being Buffet. Being hired for just being you also means your track record doesn't matter-- you may have failed at every undertaking you've ever undertaken, but if your cronies believe you're a Good Person from the Right Background, as God is your witness, you will never be hungry again (call it the Rhee Effect).
It is exactly the sort of oversight-free non-accountable model that DOPE likes, where Important People can just hire and fire whoever the hell they like because, hey, they're Important Businessmen. So now, in a move that allows them to skirt any kind of review, discussion, or accountability, they've hired John King to be John King. What will his job be, and how will he be held accountable for doing it (or not)? Shut up, taxpayers-- that's none of your business. Accountability is for peons; Important People should not be tied down by that sort of foolishness.
DOPE is not a government agency. It is not an organization devoted to maintenance and support of a public good. It's a business outpost, and its business is privatizing education. Viewed in its proper light, DOPE's hiring of the clueless, hapless, experience-free, public school unfriendly John King makes perfect sense. Even the use of Shakira as a celebrity spokesperson (yes, that was a thing) makes an odd sort of sense. Duncan's DOPE is only confusing if you expect them to behave like a government agency tasked with preserving and supporting American public education, but that makes as much sense as expecting PepsiCo to behave like a government agency devoted to promoting good nutrition. Just think of John King as the new Special Attache for Fatty Foods.
(Meanwhile, he'll be replaced by the NY regents-- the same folks who gave Ted Morris a charter because his paperwork looked just fine.)
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
Profitship! Cashing In On Public Schools
I don't often just post links to other things, but you can spare two minutes of your life to watch this. And good luck to you, Little Timmy. Make sure to watch all the way to the end for Profitship's alternate program.
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