David Brooks' column praising small miracles made note of a new piece of research from Harvard that argues that while carrots may work better than sticks, the best way to use the carrot is to jam it into the horse's eyeball. (h/t to edushyster for the tip, not the carrot)
Our magic term for the day is "loss aversion," which is a fancy term for "people hate to give stuff up." The paper we'll be looking at is "Enhancing the Efficacy of Teacher Incentives through Loss Aversion:A Field Experiment" written by Roland G. Fryer, Jr. (Harvard University), Steven D. Levitt (The University of Chicago), John List (The University of Chicago), and Sally Sadoff (University of California San Diego). Let's learn some stuff, shall we?
Intro
Sigh. We know we're in just great shape when we lead with references to the baloneyfied research that "proves" that a measurable improvement in teacher quality creates the same measurable improvement in student achievement as a decrease in class size (the old "we don't need small classes-- just great teachers" research) and follows it up with Chetty's silly "a good teacher means your kid will grow up to make more money" research. And that's just the first paragraph.
In the second, we get the sideways assumption that VAM is a good measure of teacher quality and that unions make it too hard to get rid of bad teachers. In the third, we lament that merit pay hasn't done any good. "Good" of course means "has students with high test scores." Because when people talk about "good teachers," all they're thinking of is students scores on standardized tests. That's all we want from teachers, right?
On this foundation of sand and jello, our intrepid researchers set out to build a mansion of teacher improvitude.
The experiment (oops-- "field test") was performed in Chicago Heights. Teachers were randomly assigned to one of two groups-- either they were in the Gain group, working toward a possible end-of-year bonus, or they were in the Loss group, receiving a bonus up front which they would lose if their students didn't achieve bonus-worthy results. Bonuses for both groups were the same. Additionally, the researchers used the "pay for percentile" method developed by Barlevy and Neal, which is basically a stack and rank system where there are winners and losers. One would think that might have some significant effects on the field test, but apparently we're just going to barrel on assuming that it's a great idea and not a zero-sum dog-eat-dog approach that might shade the effects of a merit pay system.
Their findings were that there was a significant gain in math scores for Loss teachers' students (the significance was between 0.076 and 0.129, so make of that what you will) and, as expected, no significant affect for Gain teachers' students.
To the library
Part two of the paper is the review of the literature. If you're interested in this, you're on your own.
Program details
Chicago Heights is about thirty miles south of Chicago. They have a 98% free and reduced lunch population in elementary and middle school. The program was implemented with the cooperation of both the superintendent and the union. Of 160 teachers, 150 opted in. Maximum possible bonus pay was $8,000.
Working out the assignments of teachers was hard. So hard that apparently the researchers kind of gave up on tracking the reading side of this experiment and focused on the math. This was further complicated in that the design called for some teachers to be up for bonus on their own, while others were bonusing it up in team fashion.
And while the researchers keep saying that the teachers were assigned randomly, it turns out they were re-randomized with an algorithm that kept swapping teachers based on a set of rules until they were best aligned with the selection rules. So, unless I'm missing something, this was kind of like saying, "We randomly assigned people to groups of people with identical hair color and gender. So, we put all the blond women randomly in one group."
Teachers in the Loss group were given $4,000 at the beginning of the year and signed a contract stating they would give back the difference if their earned bonus came in below that amount. If they earned more, they got more. The tests used were the ThinkLink tests, which are described as otherwise low stakes tests, which again strikes me as a fairly critical factor that the researchers breeze right past.
Data and research design
Basically, these guys went in the back room and whipped up a big kettle of VAM sauce. You know. The same kind of thing that has been so widely discredited that the National Association of Secondary School Principals has come out against using it as a means of evaluating individual teachers. Also, they use some more math to deal with the event of a student having mixed teachers (on Loss group, one Gain group) during the day.
Results
You've already heard the big take-away. Other interesting bits of data include a much higher effect for K-2 students (though, since the VAMsauce depends on data going back four years, I'm wondering how exactly we crunched the little kids' numbers). There is a bunch of statistics-talk here as well, but much of it boils down to fancily-worded "Nothing to see here." There are charts for those who enjoy charts.
Interpretation and pre-emptive kibbitzing
The interpretation is simple. Merit pay will yield better test results if you let teachers hold it in their hands for nine months and threaten to take it back if their students don't do well on the Big Test.
The researchers anticipate three areas that might be used to dispute their results, so they address them ahead of time.
First, attrition. They anticipate the complaint that teachers will find other ways to improve their test scores including getting Little Pat McFailsalot out of their classroom, at least on test day. They tran some numbers and decided this didn't happen to any notable degree.
Second, liquidity restraints. We're talking about teacher money here. Teachers might spend their own money in the classroom to improve their bonus-earning chances, which would be a level playing field if all teachers were wealthy, but in a world where teachers have very little extra money to spend in the classroom (or Wal-mart or anywhere else), an extra $4K in September might tilt the field. In other words, did the group that got a $4K run out and spend it to make sure they kept it? Survey says no. Interesting sidelight-- when asked in March, 69% of the Loss teachers had not cashed their bonus checks yet.
Third, cheating. They decided that wasn't a factor because, reasons. Seriously-- isn't the whole hypothesis here that the bonus will motivate teachers to raise test scores any way they can? I have no reason to believe these teachers were cheating, but if this were my experiment, that would certainly be something I'd look for. What kind of pressure and temptation do you suppose will will be felt by a teacher who has already spent his "bonus" on house payments and groceries?
But it gets better. They argue that the proof that no cheating occurred is that results on the state test-- which had nothing to do with their incentive program-- came out about the same. So, the test results from the incentivized program were pretty much the same as the results that they got with no incentives at all. Maybe that means that test prep for the one test is also good test prep for the state test. Or maybe it means that the incentive program had no effect on anything.
Wrapping it up
I see enough holes in this very specific research to drive a fleet of trucks through. But let's pretend for a moment that they've actually proven something here. What would we do with it?
First, we'd need to convince a school district business office to let teachers hold a big pile of district money for nine months, thereby giving up a bunch of interest income and liquidity. At the same time, we'd have to get the administration and board to budget a merit pay line item for "Somewhere between a small amount and a huge mountain." These are great ideas, because if there's anything business managers love, it's letting someone else hold their money, and they only love that slightly less than starting a year with an unknowable balloon payment of indeterminate size next June.
When school districts talk about merit pay, they talk about a merit lump sum set aside at the beginning of the year so that teachers can fight over a slice of the already-set merit pie. As I've said repeatedly, no school board in this country is ever going to say to the public, "Our teachers did such a great job this year that we need to raise taxes to cover all the well-earned merit pay bonuses we owe them."
Of course, somebody would have to figure out the merit system. How many Harvard grad students work in your district? And how exactly will you figure out the math score bonus for your phys ed teacher?
Districts could manage the financial challenges of this risk aversion model by pre-determining the aggregate merit pay in the district. This, combined with "pay for percentile," would absolutely guarantee open warfare among staff members, who would be earning their merit bonuses by literally ripping them dollars out of colleagues' hands. Boy, I bet teaching in that school would be fun.
The largest thing they haven't thought through
Instituted, this system will not play out like a merit bonus at all. If I start every year with an "extra" $4K (or whatever amount), I've gotten a raise, and every year I don't make my numbers is a year that I get a punitive retroactive pay cut.
In no time at all, this system morphs from a merit pay bonus system of rewards to a bad score DEmerit system of punishments. Rather than a bonus that really lifts up teachers, these folks have come up with a way to make punishment for low results even more painful and effective. A miracle indeed.
Sunday, December 14, 2014
Saturday, December 13, 2014
Ohio Schools Must Get Religion
There are some things that Ohio schools can, apparently, do without. The Ohio state school board did vote to scuttle the 5 of 8 rule; this would make schools free to operate without librarians, nurses, and guidance counselors, for starters.
But then-- why would you need a nurse or a guidance counselor when you have religion and business in the house?
Ohio governor John Kasich has a great program in place to improve school-community connections and to bring mentors into the school to help.
Community Connectors provides $10 million in 3-to-1 matching grants that will help give more Ohio students access to role models who can help motivate and inspire them, as well as help them develop skills that lead to success in school and the workplace.
Kasich even has a few words to add himself:
The power of mentorship holds great promise to help us better connect our communities with our schools, and lift up our educators and our kids. We can show them why learning matters, we can teach them about workplace culture and professional etiquette. We can help them appreciate how important good character is to success in life as well as values like hard work, discipline and personal responsibility—all of which can help motivate and inspire them to find their purpose and to reach for the stars." — Gov. John R. Kasich
There may be some cranky teachers who want to say, "And what did you think we're teaching them, anyway?" But I'd welcome the backup. I can tell my students that things like showing up every day, on time, are important in the workplace, but hearing it from an actual employer definitely gives the message more weight (I am, after all, "just a teacher" and of doubtful authority).
So, great idea, right? Except it comes with a string or two. Although reportedly not spelled out in the legislation, the grants come with a requirement that schools must partner with a business and with a faith-based group. Nobody is really asking questions about the business requirement for the partnership application, but the faith-based requirement needs some 'splainin'" The Cleveland Plain Dealer went in search of that explanation.
Buddy Harris, senior policy analyst at the Ohio Department of Education, is quoted in the Cleveland Plain Dealer saying that faith-based groups are "clearly at the heart of the vision of the governor." He goes on to allay any concerns about that pesky state-church wall being breached.
"We do not forsee any proseletyzing happening between mentors and students," Harris said. "That's not really what we're seeking."
But Kasich's welcome video for applicants to the program is a little more direct:
"The Good Lord has a purpose for each and every one of them (students) and you're helping them to find it," Kasich said on the video.
So, proseletyzing.
In the interests of transparency, I'll just note that my own relationship with organized religion is long and complicated, and I have some clear feelings about the separation of church and state, not the least of which is that the separation protects the church from the state, not just vice versa.
There are plenty of faith-based groups that do good community work without trying to sell their brand. Their are plenty of groups that use the illusion of faith-basedness as a dodge for fundraising. And there are plenty of faith-based groups who do Good Works only because it gives them an opportunity to spread their particular Word. Not all of these groups are going to provide useful mentoring to young people. We could just take all comers, but that's not going to hold up long (I look forward to the first time the Ohio Alliance of Satan Worshippers tries to get in on the mentoring action. Heck, even an Islamic group is liable to create a stink in the Buckeye State). And as soon as we try to have the conversation about which are which, we will find ourselves discussing how a government agency can evaluate the worthiness of a faith-based group (which must also include an evaluation of the faith on which it's based). Plus the coordination needed if we are going to make sure that we don't have an evangelical Christian mentoring a Jewish student, or a Islamic mentor working with a born-again Christian student. So, also a government agency to record and sort and match the religious faiths of students and mentors? This whole mess is not good for anybody.
Kasich had to know this was an issue-- most of his previous discussions of the program skipped any mention of the faith-based requirement. Ten million dollars is a small stack of money, but it's more than enough to buy a small bureaucratic train wreck.
But then-- why would you need a nurse or a guidance counselor when you have religion and business in the house?
Ohio governor John Kasich has a great program in place to improve school-community connections and to bring mentors into the school to help.
Community Connectors provides $10 million in 3-to-1 matching grants that will help give more Ohio students access to role models who can help motivate and inspire them, as well as help them develop skills that lead to success in school and the workplace.
Kasich even has a few words to add himself:
The power of mentorship holds great promise to help us better connect our communities with our schools, and lift up our educators and our kids. We can show them why learning matters, we can teach them about workplace culture and professional etiquette. We can help them appreciate how important good character is to success in life as well as values like hard work, discipline and personal responsibility—all of which can help motivate and inspire them to find their purpose and to reach for the stars." — Gov. John R. Kasich
There may be some cranky teachers who want to say, "And what did you think we're teaching them, anyway?" But I'd welcome the backup. I can tell my students that things like showing up every day, on time, are important in the workplace, but hearing it from an actual employer definitely gives the message more weight (I am, after all, "just a teacher" and of doubtful authority).
So, great idea, right? Except it comes with a string or two. Although reportedly not spelled out in the legislation, the grants come with a requirement that schools must partner with a business and with a faith-based group. Nobody is really asking questions about the business requirement for the partnership application, but the faith-based requirement needs some 'splainin'" The Cleveland Plain Dealer went in search of that explanation.
Buddy Harris, senior policy analyst at the Ohio Department of Education, is quoted in the Cleveland Plain Dealer saying that faith-based groups are "clearly at the heart of the vision of the governor." He goes on to allay any concerns about that pesky state-church wall being breached.
"We do not forsee any proseletyzing happening between mentors and students," Harris said. "That's not really what we're seeking."
But Kasich's welcome video for applicants to the program is a little more direct:
"The Good Lord has a purpose for each and every one of them (students) and you're helping them to find it," Kasich said on the video.
So, proseletyzing.
In the interests of transparency, I'll just note that my own relationship with organized religion is long and complicated, and I have some clear feelings about the separation of church and state, not the least of which is that the separation protects the church from the state, not just vice versa.
There are plenty of faith-based groups that do good community work without trying to sell their brand. Their are plenty of groups that use the illusion of faith-basedness as a dodge for fundraising. And there are plenty of faith-based groups who do Good Works only because it gives them an opportunity to spread their particular Word. Not all of these groups are going to provide useful mentoring to young people. We could just take all comers, but that's not going to hold up long (I look forward to the first time the Ohio Alliance of Satan Worshippers tries to get in on the mentoring action. Heck, even an Islamic group is liable to create a stink in the Buckeye State). And as soon as we try to have the conversation about which are which, we will find ourselves discussing how a government agency can evaluate the worthiness of a faith-based group (which must also include an evaluation of the faith on which it's based). Plus the coordination needed if we are going to make sure that we don't have an evangelical Christian mentoring a Jewish student, or a Islamic mentor working with a born-again Christian student. So, also a government agency to record and sort and match the religious faiths of students and mentors? This whole mess is not good for anybody.
Kasich had to know this was an issue-- most of his previous discussions of the program skipped any mention of the faith-based requirement. Ten million dollars is a small stack of money, but it's more than enough to buy a small bureaucratic train wreck.
Chicago Schools Caught Cooking the Charter Books
Back in September, Chicago Principoal Troy A. LaRaviere used the Chicago Public School systems own MAP test numbers to show that public school students were outpacing charter schools in the same neighborhoods.* The findings were published in the Sun Times, complete with linkage to the CPS website where the numbers were all laid out. The Sun Times conducted and published their own analysis, confirming LaRaviere's findings.
Then a funny thing happened. The numbers changed.
The Administrator’s Alliance for Proven Policy and Legislation in Education (AAPPLE) discovered "at some point between the publication of our findings and the release of school ratings, CPS removed the original file containing school growth data and replaced it with a different version." Fortunately, they had saved the original, so they could see the differences that had mysteriously appeared. You can read their report here. But the basic scoop is this;
The main fiddling occurred with pre-test scores, generally lowering them so that school growth would be more awesome. AAPPLE found that this change was made for "nearly every charter school" while fewer than twenty public schools were affected (yes, I hear you out there hollering "but charter schools are public schools" and all I can say is, do shut up). The altered scores gave some charters growth scores increased by as many as fifty points (the biggest change for the public schools was a whopping two points).
Not all charters were winners. CICS chain charters were big winners in up-scoring, while schools like Shabazz Charter took a negative twenty point hit. AAPPLE notes that the charters that were given the fake growth results were largely in gentrifying areas.
AAPPLE did ask for a meeting with the CPS Accountability Office (another exhibit in the How Accountability Makes Education Way More Expensive display) and got one very quickly, in which the office explained that yes, they did change the scores. They offered two justifications.
First, that charters took the 2013 MAP (the "pre-test" or baseline) in the fall of 2013 instead of the spring of 2013. Why this requires a fiddling of scores is unclear, possibly because there is no earthly reason for it.
Second, students took different versions of the same test, so, adjustments are-- really? The AAPPLE report gives the response to these lines of argument, but the bottom lines, as near as I can tell is that only one of two things can be true here. Either 1) the MAP test and growth model system is such a wretchedly invalid system that a stiff wind off the lake is enough to throw its results into question or 2) CPS decided to cheat in order to make some charters look successful. If there's a third possible explanation, I can't see it.
AAPPLE concludes, with what I would call admirable restraint, that lack of transparency is a bit of a problem, and CPS is not using a level playing field. Since I don't have to work in Chicago, I can go ahead and make my own assessment, which is that this is the kind of lying, cheating bullshit that you can only get away with when you work behind closed doors.
* Personally, I am not inclined to evaluate any schools anywhere based on standardized test scores, but that's the game reformsters choose to play, and I do think it's not unfair to judge whether they are winning in the game they chose under the rules they set.
Then a funny thing happened. The numbers changed.
The Administrator’s Alliance for Proven Policy and Legislation in Education (AAPPLE) discovered "at some point between the publication of our findings and the release of school ratings, CPS removed the original file containing school growth data and replaced it with a different version." Fortunately, they had saved the original, so they could see the differences that had mysteriously appeared. You can read their report here. But the basic scoop is this;
The main fiddling occurred with pre-test scores, generally lowering them so that school growth would be more awesome. AAPPLE found that this change was made for "nearly every charter school" while fewer than twenty public schools were affected (yes, I hear you out there hollering "but charter schools are public schools" and all I can say is, do shut up). The altered scores gave some charters growth scores increased by as many as fifty points (the biggest change for the public schools was a whopping two points).
Not all charters were winners. CICS chain charters were big winners in up-scoring, while schools like Shabazz Charter took a negative twenty point hit. AAPPLE notes that the charters that were given the fake growth results were largely in gentrifying areas.
AAPPLE did ask for a meeting with the CPS Accountability Office (another exhibit in the How Accountability Makes Education Way More Expensive display) and got one very quickly, in which the office explained that yes, they did change the scores. They offered two justifications.
First, that charters took the 2013 MAP (the "pre-test" or baseline) in the fall of 2013 instead of the spring of 2013. Why this requires a fiddling of scores is unclear, possibly because there is no earthly reason for it.
Second, students took different versions of the same test, so, adjustments are-- really? The AAPPLE report gives the response to these lines of argument, but the bottom lines, as near as I can tell is that only one of two things can be true here. Either 1) the MAP test and growth model system is such a wretchedly invalid system that a stiff wind off the lake is enough to throw its results into question or 2) CPS decided to cheat in order to make some charters look successful. If there's a third possible explanation, I can't see it.
AAPPLE concludes, with what I would call admirable restraint, that lack of transparency is a bit of a problem, and CPS is not using a level playing field. Since I don't have to work in Chicago, I can go ahead and make my own assessment, which is that this is the kind of lying, cheating bullshit that you can only get away with when you work behind closed doors.
* Personally, I am not inclined to evaluate any schools anywhere based on standardized test scores, but that's the game reformsters choose to play, and I do think it's not unfair to judge whether they are winning in the game they chose under the rules they set.
Friday, December 12, 2014
Whither Disruptive Students?
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.
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.
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.
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