Do Charters Make Graduates Richer?

Courtesy of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (and not any kind of education related journal) comes a new piece of headline-generating baloney research built to make charter schools look good.

"Charter High Schools' Effects on Long-Term Attainment and Earnings" comes to us from researchers at Georgia State University, Vanderbilt University, and Mathematica Policy Research (always a reliable source of Gates-funded/friendly research), with funding from the Joyce Foundation, and appears to be a revisit of some earlier Mathematica research-shaped product. Their conclusion, coming soon to a headline near you, is that charters lead to more college attainment and more money.

How, you may wonder, can anybody actually research such a thing. After all, the big problem of any research on human stuff is finding a control. We can say that Chris went to a charter school, then went to college, then got a great job as VP of Widgetary Development at World Wide Widgets. But none of that tells us what would have happened to Chris if Chris had attended a public school instead. And unless we can find an exact doppleganger of Chris to follow along an alternate path, or a means of slipping into an alternate universe, we have no way of knowing. Which means we have no way of knowing.

The researchers acknowledge this by opening their methodology section with the phrase "Determining the impact of charter high schools is not easy..." which is true. It is also the last thing they will say in plain English throughout the entire methodological description. Seriously-- I just spent my lunch hour with Les Perelman's BABEL nonsense generator, and this seems ike it might have come from that same source.

Okay, maybe it's not that bad. They do write this:

The fact that the charter students and their parents actively seek an alternative to traditional public schools suggests the students may be more motivated or their parents may be more involved in their child's education than are the families of traditional public school attendees. 

They probably should have quit right there and called it a day. But they didn't. They tried to correct for selection bias, and here's some of what they had to say about that. Here they are rejecting one method:

Two recent studies (Furgeson et al., 2012; Tuttle et al., 2013) have demonstrated that longitudinal analyses of test score impacts that control for pretreatment test scores can closely replicate randomized experimental impact estimates for the same students. But this approach cannot be used to measure long-term outcomes such as graduation, college enrollment, college persistence, and employment, because those outcomes do not occur before a student's enrollment in a charter school.

They talk about how to generate a strong comparison group, which involves looking at charter eighth graders, because reasons. This creates some external validity problems, but in their opinion, the sacrifice is worth it for increased internal validity. They seem to think this is good because it catches students before the transition to high school. Does this not make sense yet? Well, this should settle it for you:

To further deal with potential endogeneity, we also use a matching approach popularized by Rubin (1977) and Rosenbaum and Rubin (1983). While matching procedures can take many forms, we use a one-to-one nearest-neighbor Mahalanobis matching approach (also referred to as a covariate match) in which we match on observable characteristics to create a control group. We then examine difference in student outcomes between those in treatment relative to this counterfactual control group. 

Also, there is math.

The actual data used came from Florida, which covers both high school graduation and, for anyone who has unemployment insurance records, data about employment earnings. The research centered on four cohorts in eighth grade between 1998 and 2002. So this research should be very meaningful, because, really, not much has changed in education in Florida in the last 15-18 years, right?

I tried to answer that, but much of Florida's charter info only goes back ten-ish years. Florida's modern charter law was passed in 2002 (Jeb! Bush was governor from 1999-2007) replacing the first version from 1996. In the 1998-1999 school year, there were a total of 67 charter schools in Florida, and only 20 of those had an eighth grade. Total charter students-- 9,135. By 2001-2001, charters had ballooned to 176, with over 40K students. But still-- I'm wondering just how large a sample the researchers were able to pull out of that.

On top of that, charters were relatively small potatoes, which means that charter students would have been a not-at-all-average group. I'm not a statistician or scholarly researcher (nor do I play one on TV), but I can't escape the notion that the same kind of parental support and push and resources that would get a student into a charter school (particularly back then) would be the same kind of parental support and push and support that would get a student through high school and into college.

In other words, I am once again inclined to conclude that a lot of very fancy researchers and scholars do a lousy job of distinguishing between correlation and causation.

I will gladly accept input from anyone who is actually a trained statistical design scholar, but until someone I can trust tells me otherwise, I'm going to conclude that this is high-priced baloney served on a silver platter.

Segregation, Choice and Education

The National Education Policy Center just released a research report from William J. Mathis and Kevin G. Welner on the question, "Do Choice Policies Segregate Schools?"

Spoiler alert-- the short answer is "Yes."

A review of the research and literature led Mathis and Welner to conclude that while some choice schools are integrated, charters largely are very segregated. That segregation can be by race, poverty, dual language learners (ELL), and students with disabilities. While black students are generally either under-represented or over-represented in charter schools, the researchers found that poor, ELL, and students with disabilities are under-enrolled in charter schools. Within a choice system, both segregation and the achievement gap grow.

However, before charter foes leap on those results, there is this to be considered:

Even without school choice, America's schools would be shockingly segregated, in large part because of housing policies and school district boundaries. School choice policies that do not have sufficient protections against unconstrained, segregative choices do exacerbate the problem.

In other words, charter-choice systems may be making things worse, but they certainly didn't create the problem. Or to put it yet another way, when anti-charter folks say that charters are creating massive segregation problems, they are correct. And when charter fans say that housing-based choice is creating segregation problems, they are also correct.

There may be valid arguments in favor of some charters in some situations, but the "we will fix segregation and close the achievement gap" argument is not one of them. Charters clearly do neither of those things.

Public schools aren't getting it done, either. But in order to look for real solutions, we need to stop pretending that fake solutions are actually working.

 

Grading Good-faith Gibberish

Les Perelman is one of my heroes for his unflinching exposure, time and time again, of the completely inadequacy of using computers to assess writing.

Perelman and his grad students create BABEL, (the Basic Automatic B.S. Essay Language Generator) a program that can generate brilliant gibberish. Diane Ravitch, education historian and activist, took a stab at using BABEL and got, in part, this:

Didactics to subjugation will always be an experience of humankind. Human life will always civilize education; many for diagnoses but a few of the amanuensis. Myrmidon at absurd lies in the search for reality and the realm of reality. From the fact that denationalization excommunicates the denouncements involved of civilizations, humanity should propagate absurd immediately.

This scored a mere 4 out of 6. Apparently Ravitch, as an older Americam, suffers from being the product of our earlier status quo education system. If only she'd been exposed to the Common Core.

The software that scored her essay is PEG writing, and the site has some lovely FAQ items, one of which Ravitch highlighted.

It is important to note that although PEG software is extremely reliable in terms of producing scores that are comparable to those awarded by human judges, it can be fooled. Computers, like humans, are not perfect.

PEG presumes “good faith” essays authored by “motivated” writers. A “good faith” essay is one that reflects the writer’s best efforts to respond to the assignment and the prompt without trickery or deceit. A “motivated” writer is one who genuinely wants to do well and for whom the assignment has some consequence (a grade, a factor in admissions or hiring, etc.).

Efforts to “spoof” the system by typing in gibberish, repetitive phrases, or off-topic, illogical prose will produce illogical and essentially meaningless results.

In other words, PEG knows it doesn't work. It also assumes a great deal in assuming that students writing pointless essays on boring subjects for baloney-filled standardized tests are "motivated" writers. Can the software accurately score motivated gibberish? Can the program distinguish between frivolous garbage and well-meant garbage?

Probably not. As noted in PEG's response to the question of how the software can evaluate content:

However, analyzing the content for “correctness” is a much more complex challenge illustrated by the “Columbus Problem.” Consider the sentence, “Columbus navigated his tiny ships to the shores of Santa Maria.” The sentence, of course, is well framed, grammatically sound, and entirely on topic. It is also incorrect. Without a substantial knowledge base specifically aligned to the question, artificial intelligence (AI) technology will fail to grasp the “meaning” behind the prose. Likewise, evaluating “how well” a student has analyzed a problem or synthesized information from an article or other stimulus is currently beyond the capabilities of today’s state of the art automated scoring technologies.

PEG bills itself as a "trusted" teaching assistant that can help relieve some of the time pressures that come from having many, many essays to grade. But I can't trust it, and it's unlikely that I ever will.

This is the flip side of Common Core reading, an approach that assumes that reading is a batch of discrete behaviors and tricks that are unrelated to any content. Here we assume that writing is just a series of tricks, and it doesn't really matter what you're writing about, which is a concept so bizarre that I can barely wrap my head around it. Use big words-- even if they have nothing to do with the topic of the essay. Use varied sentence lengths-- but don't worry about what the sentences say. 

PEG, like other similar services, offers as proof of its reliability its closeness to human-rendered scores. But that happens only because the human-rendered scores come from a rubric designed to resemble the algorithm of a computer, not the evaluative processes of a human writing teacher. In other words, you make the computer look good by dumbing down the humans used for comparison.

Pearson's continued fascination with AI-directed education, as well as the news that PARCC will use computer essay grading in four of its six states-- these are Bad News, because computer software is simply not up to the job of evaluating writing in any meaningful way. BABEL is just one more demonstration of how completely inadequate the software tools are.

P.S. My favorite line from my own BABEL efforts:

Charter, frequently to an accusation, might innumerably be grout for the allocution.

How To Promote the Test

As we wade further and further into the testing season, we get to see more and more ham-handed attempts by testocrats to convince parents that the Big Standardized Test is really their friend. For instance, High Achievement New York, an alliance of businessmen and reformsters, produced a flurry of PR spots promoting the test (they might have done their homework-- "Say Yes to the Test" was a slogan previously used to promote tests for chlamydia or HIV).

The campaign was pretty typical in its use of recycled talking points and PR spin (the tests are new! and improved!) as well as some flat out lies (2/3 of high school grads aren't ready for college or career-- and the test will somehow fix that. A double lie). It also appears to have failed miserably.

If testocrats really want to promote the BS Tests, here's the press release they need.

                                                                 ***

A coalition of state and local officials gathered today at the district offices of Upper Baldweasel Schools to celebrate the district's spectacular turnaround.

"It's exciting," said Superintendent Pat Whipsnagle. "And it all started with the test."

Three years ago, when Whipsnagle first saw the results of the federally mandated, state chosen SHNARCC tests, the picture was much more grim.

"We had terrible results. A huge section of our students simply weren't getting it. The scores were terrible, and they put us on notice."

Upper Baldweasel is located in the poorest section Big Urban Metropolis, and the student body is largely minority students. "We knew that there was, you know, poverty out there," said Principal Pat Pzzaltstitz, "But we thought we were doing a great job. We had no idea that so many of our students were actually lagging so far behind. But once we saw the SHNARCC scores, we knew we had a problem."

That was when the state and local alliance sprang into action.

"I got the call from Pat, " said Pennsylsippi State Senator Pat Del Wafflestein, "and I was just rocked back on my heels. I remember turning to a couple of my fellow senators and telling them that we had really failed in our responsibility to support these local districts. And I decided at that moment that we would make sure that UB schools got whatever resources they needed."

Asked if they had considered a new school as an option, Wafflestein continued. "Sure, we could have built a new school and filled it with just the kids who do well on the SCHNARCC. But that would have meant abandoning the rest of them, the ones who showed the most need in those test results. Why start from scratch for just a few students when we can invest in what we already have and serve all students?"

Governor Pat Jones chimed into the conversation. "That was when my office got involved. If the tests are showing pockets of poverty in the state that keep our students stuck behind their wealthier peers, then clearly we need to address the issues of poverty in the state while at the same time addressing the specific resource needs of districts like Upper Baldweasel, as well as long hard conversations about system inequities and, frankly, some of the racist impulses behind those inequities. That meant legislative initiatives, and it also meant turning to our friends in the private sector."

Pat Wallpockets of the Grand Allienace of Totally Economically Secure Businessmen waved off the Governor's praise. "At GATESBiz, we just wanted to help. But we have no expertise in education, so we simply made the resources available to experts like classroom teachers and then got out of the way. These are the trained professionals, the people who devote their whole lives to these kids. If they don't know what's needed, nobody does."

"The test results were so useful to us," said teacher Pat Chalkwhacker. "Those exact and specific results-- I could look right down the row and see the exact questions that each student was missing and what wrong answers they were giving so that I could target test pre-- er, instruction for each student."

State and local leaders, supported by business and philanthropic groups, worked together and within two years had transformed the district into one where the achievement gap was nearly erased and all students achieved higher test scores. District reports indicate that more students are achieving college and career success, including driving nicer cars and marrying more attractive spouses.

"It was all the test," repeats Whipsnagle. "Teachers, administrators, parents, the students themselves- nobody had the slightest clue of how students were really doing until we saw those test results."

"And once we saw them," continued Jones, "we knew what we had to do. We knew that all of us, from government on down to local school boards, had not met our responsibility to provide these public schools with the support we needed, but with test results to hold us accountable, we knew to step up and provide these schools with the support and resources they needed."

                                                                       ***

If reformsters could release that story, they could build some real support for the BS Tests. And they assert and hint constantly that this is the story, even as it is somehow a story they can never tell. After years of test-driven accountability, you would think that they would be able to point to at least one single example of the success of their policies, and yet they never do, for the same reason they never show photographs of magical elves writing the test while riding on the backs of rainbow unicorns.

If someone keeps telling you, "Stand right here and you are going to see the most amazing unicorns jump up and turn water into flowers," and you keep standing there, and you never, ever see a unicorn, you have to wonder if A) they are just slinging baloney at you and B) if they are up to something behind your back while they keep your attention focused Over There.

Until we get the news from Upper Baldweasel, there's no reason to believe that the BS Tests are not a huge waste of our time. We can and should believe that opting out remains the most sensible response to further senseless acts of testing.

PA: Court Upholds Spanking of Philly SRC

Back in February, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that Philadelphia's appointed-not-elected School Reform Commission didn't have most of the powers it thought it had.

It was immediately difficult to determine whether this was good news or bad news-- the SRC had claimed for itself the power to cap charter enrollment, close schools, and unilaterally rewrite/cancel teacher contracts (thereby guaranteeing that the SRC had no friends in Philadelphia's education world).

What the court actually said was that the original act of the legislature that gave the SRC "carte blache" to do whatever the heck they wanted was, in fact, unconstitutional.This was bad news for the SRC, which has discovered, among other tings, that Pennsylvania charter school law lets charters suck a huge amount of blood out of public school systems. They have also discovered that paying teachers costs money (and are busy discovering this year that hiring substitute teachers costs money, too). The SRC can be forgiven for feeling hugely poor-- they are dealing with a very poor urban system in a state that has one of the worst funding systems in the country.

But their dreams of being able to rule over the district like autocratic CEO's are now dashed for good. The PA Supremes considered revisiting their February decision and used exactly one sentence to deny that reconsideration. Philadelphia schools will have to operate under the law, and the SRC no longer gets to make up their own rules and play sheriff in a wild west town.

Dear Michael Magee: I'll Bite

Dear Michael Magee, PhD:

Last week you posted in Education Post to call for a better conversation, and I'm always a fan of conversation. You even used a controlling image of divorcing parents, and I'm a divorced parent myself. So I am going to take you up on our offer. Let's see if this could work.

First, some ground rules

If we're going to have this conversation, you'll need to stop trying to control the narrative. You tried to do that immediately in your piece with this: "Over a period of 20 years, tens of thousands of teachers left our traditional public school systems for new, more autonomous public schools." You just slipped in the highly debatable claim that charters are public schools, which you have to know is a point of disagreement.

Your premise also glosses over the question of the origin of the argument. It takes two people to make a marriage, but it only takes one person to make a divorce. The folks who wanted choice and charters tried to launch their industry by attacking public schools, public school teachers, and their unions. Those of us on the traditional public school side of this didn't start pointing out the problems with choice and charter on some sort of whim.

That said, there's nothing useful about saying, "Hey, he hit me first" if you are older than five. But there is also something non-trust inspiring about someone who punches you in the face and then says, "Hey, let's let bygones be bygones." The best opener when you're the one who started making a mess out of your marriage is not, "Let's start with a clean slate." The appropriate opener is, "I'm sorry. I screwed up." You can trust me on this one.

So let's look at your rules for a conversation.

1) Stop using words that make each other see red.

You offer "union" and "charter" as examples, noting that they mean so many things that they mean nothing. That's fair, though it can also help if, when listening, you hear what the other person is trying to say, and not what you yourself associate with the word. Having a better conversation is about listening, not just word choice.

Word choice also goes back to narrative control-- words have meaning, and it is helpful to a conversation if neither party tries to shade or cheat those meanings as a means of manipulating the conversation. We all understand that controlling the narrative and the language in a conversation equals controlling the outcome (folks at Education Post are, literally, professionals at doing so). A positive conversation requires honest use of language.

2) Put the cards on the table.

You mean, "Be honest"?

Some teachers sign individual contracts and some teachers’ contracts are collectively bargained. Whether that distinction matters is entirely dependent on what those contracts empower teachers to do or restrict them from doing.

No, not really. The contracts also determine how competitive the school will be in hiring my future colleagues. The contracts will also affect my relationships with my colleagues. And they will make a major statement about how fair, consistent, and reasonable management's treatment of teachers will be. There's much to discuss here, but your limited proposal of what matters in the contract only puts two or three cards out of the entire deck on the table.

3) Talk about how schools should be led, managed, and governed.

Who should get to open a public school and under what conditions. This is a conversation I'd be delighted to have. In fact, I've addressed it multiple times on this blog. I am not automatically anti-charter, but I do think the modern charter industry operates under fundamentally dishonest and unfair premises. But it doesn't have to be that way. You may not like my answers to these questions, but I'd be happy to talk about them.

Short answer-- a public school must be directly accountable to taxpayers, fully funded without draining pre-existing public schools, full transparent, primarily devoted to educational concerns (not business concerns), open to all students in the community they serve, and committed to stay open for the long haul regardless of the business picture. Happy to talk about it at greater length.

4) Talk about your feelings.

You specify feelings about how politics have messed with the classroom. Can that include how political maneuvering has fostered, protected and fed the charter industry at the expense of traditional public schools, or how reformsters have used political connections and power to deprofessionalize and disempower teaching? But yeah- I love conversations that focus on the work.

5) Talk about the students.

Sigh. You do understand, don't you, that it's reformsters that created the rhetorical flourish that responded to every concern expressed by teachers with, "You're putting ourselves ahead of the students." And that charter boosters are the ones who keep using the rhetoric of business and investment in the education world.

I mean, yes, definitely, let's talk about the students. But those of us who have spent our whole adult lives in the classroom-- we never stopped talking about the students. Plenty of reformsters have claimed we stopped, but I tell you-- we have never stopped for a single day. We have been talking about the students all along; you are certainly welcome to join that conversation, which would be far more productive than pretending that we're going to start a new one just so that you can feel you've initiated the whole thing.

About that framing metaphor

The choice of divorce as a controlling image is, you realize, another attempt to control the narrative, part of the ongoing spin of treating the charter-choice business as equivalent, partners in a marriage of equals. But from my side of things, a more accurate picture would be of the charter industry as a squatter who broke into public education's home, the home where public education had lived for decades,. The squatter comes in uninvited saying, "Well, you weren't doing it right" and starts helping himself to the silverware and food in the fridge and when they were being pushed to get out, the squatters say, "Well, hey. Let's come up with a reasonable division of the contents of this house."

There may be a better image, one that captures the way that some districts failed in ways that opened the door to "creative disruption," but then we also have to factor in the ways that government failed those schools by starving them of the support and resources they needed to succeed.

But you have picked an image and proposal that elevates the charter industry and minimalizes the degree to which public education has been deliberately undermined.

Granted, the question of "how did we get here" is in some ways moot. But history also speaks to motivations and goals, and past experience is the best predictor of future performance. Agreeing on what actually happened, and what is actually happening, is a good foundation for any productive conversation. We can't change the past, exactly, but it still matters, and how we talk about it and understand it matters. But I get your point-- we are where we are, and that's where we have to move forward from, whether we think we should be there or not.

So feel free to drop me a line, stop by my small town, or otherwise chat me up. As I said, I'm always up for a conversation. We can start by talking about what the ground rules really need to be.

School in a Can: A Bridge Too Far

News of Liberia's plan to outsource its entire public education system has brought attention once again to Bridge Academies, an international privatization business that has perfected the art of school in a can.

Bridge is not new to this business; they've been at this mission of uber-standardization for a while. Jay Kimmelman graduated from Harvard in 1999, launched an edu-business (Edusoft), sold it, and decided to make his mark in education more globally, opening the first Bridge Academy in 2009.

Kimmelman communicates his vision pretty clearly. On his LInkedIN page, the description of Bridge includes this: "Bridge disrupts the education status quo by ensuring that every child, regardless
of parental income, has access to the education he or she deserves." But that word "deserves" cuts several directions, and it raises the question-- who decides what these children deserve?

Whatever it is, they all deserve exactly the same thing. In the NPR piece, the reporter talks to Bridge's co-founder Shannon May (Kimmelman is her husband).

The exact same lesson being taught in this classroom is being taught in every other sixth-grade class at Bridge schools across the country, says Bridge co-founder Shannon May.

"If you were at one of the other 200 locations right now, you'd be seeing the exact same thing," she says. "In some ways, it is kind of the magic of it."

That "magic" of standardized lesson plans changes the role of the teacher. It allows Bridge to hold down costs because it can hire teachers who don't have college degrees.

Bridge's work has drawn press attention before. Both NPR and Wired took a look at Bridge school-in-a-box operations in Kenya back in November of 2013 (NPR covered it as an All Things Considered Social Entrepreneurs Taking on World Problems segment, while Wired's story appeared in its Design section). The Economist did some wholehearted cheerleading for Bridge just last year.

The picture that emerges from these portraits is-- well. I keep worrying about that word "deserves."

On the one hand, Bridge is bringing education into some areas where resources are lower than low and the sheer infrastructure problem of creating and staffing so many schools would be daunting.

On the other hand, I feel certain that Kimmelman and his many wealthy backers (including Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Pearson and some venture capital groups) would never in a million years put their own children in such a school. The privatizing of Kenya and Liberia is the ultimate Other Peoples' Children educational reform. Not my kids and not on my continent. But those Other Kids in those Really Poor Other Countries-- a half-baked educational system will be fine for them.

How half-baked? The backbone of the school is the computer network. On one end of the network is the "teacher," who logs in and follows a the script to the letter. Because the teacher is following the e-script as delivered by networked tablet, central monitoring software knows exactly where the teacher is in the lesson. Sync up fifteen minutes late, says the Wired profile, and a call goes out to see what's going wrong in that particular school. Says May of her "teachers," "They are not content producers."

Bridge's teachers are trained in seven weeks, which is plausible considering that they don't need to be trained in their content knowledge-- just in how to deliver the scripted lessons. From the Wired article:

Bridge’s CEO, a former Silicon Valley entrepreneur named Jay Kimmelman, compares his company to Starbucks and McDonald’s — organizations that offer a consistent experience no matter where in the world you encounter them. Beyond its 212 branded academies in Kenya, Bridge has set its sights on Nigeria, Uganda, and India. The founders intend to be serving half a million children in 30 countries by 2015, and 10 million by 2025. “We’ve systematized every aspect of how you run a school,” Kimmelman says. “How you manage it. How you interact with parents. How you teach. How you check on school managers, and how you support them.” 

As throughout the reformy world, results are advertised in test scores. Bridge has its own battery of in house tests which prove, unsurprisingly, that Bridge does great. They also contract with someone to do a reading and math test every year. Again, they do swell.

Of course, there are other measures of success as well.

The winning idea — basic education as a business — sounds counterintuitive, but it was central to planning for the couple and their cofounder, Phil Frei. For parents hovering around $2 in income per day, a potentially transformative education for their kids was just one of many things they couldn’t afford. The demand, however, remains enormous — the global market for low-cost private education is $51 billion annually. To meet the demand, May says, “we drive the price point low enough so parents can become consumers.”

So maybe the word isn't so much "deserve" as it is "afford." Sure, this isn't much like the kind of school most first-world well-to-do parents would want, but these are third-world poor folks, and if we can make a buck selling them a bargain basement stripped-down knock-off version of an education, why not? And I have to admit-- there's a legitimate argument to be made that as militaristic and below-basic as Bridge schools may seem, they are probably the best alternative available to some parents.

Of course, that raises the question of what could be done to create better alternatives. What hope do Liberians have if their government says, "Aw, screw it. Just let the corporate Americans have the business and then we don;t even have to try to create public education for our nation's children." And if the Chinese came to DC and said, "Look-- for a few million bucks, we will go ahead and handle all the schooling for your poor people," how would that play.

Not everyone in Liberia is keen on the idea of selling off their children's education, either.

International and local experts say such arrangement is not only a blatant violation of Liberia’s international obligations under the right to education, and have no justification under Liberia’s constitution, but will also deny indigents and poor access to quality education.

Many Liberian officials are pushing back. It remains to be seen if they can be successful in resisting this unprecedented move to privatize an entire nation's education system. We will have to pay close attention, because if Bridge is successful in this new endeavor, you can bet that Liberia will not be the last country to take bids on their education system.