MA: How To Gut Schools, Boston Edition

QUEST is an organization that has dogged Boston Mayor Marty Walsh and his reformy friends for quite a while, and they have recently shaken loose, after long attempts via FOIA, the McKinsey BPS Operational Review Steering Committee Working Draft (turns out that when the government buys something with taxpayer dollars, even stamping "Private and Confidential" on it doesn't necessarily keep it under wraps). While a version of this plan was released in December of 2015, the original document is considerably more detailed.

So now, over a full year later, we can see what McKinsey thought the Bostonian Powers That Be should be doing with their school district. McKinsey is one of the biggest management consulting firms in the world, and long intertwined with the education reform movement; Sir Michael Barber was a partner there before he went to run Pearson, and David Coleman worked as a consultant at McKinsey before he spearheaded the Common Core. McKinsey has also plucked some employees from the world of Eli Broad-- a McKinsey manager was in the first class of the Broad Academy. McKinsey actually pre-dated Broad in the practice of embedding their own people in the Los Angeles school district.

Boston itself has been solidly in reformster cross-hairs, with everyone from MA Secretary of Education Jim Peyser to the Center for Reinventing Public Education floating a plan for "remaking" the Boston schools in a new, charterier image.

So what did the super-secret consulting plan have to say?

The plan notes that it is a draft, not a final, exact product. The items are not necessarily for factual true. This is just for starting discussions. My friends and colleagues in Boston will remember all the open, transparent conversations that Mayor Walsh has held about the future of BPS. The plan is over 200 pages long, and I have no intention of dragging us through the whole thing. But just by glancing at the executive summary, I think we can get the gist of their drift.

The overview lists some of the "opportunities" that exist in BPS. They include

Right Sizing the BPS Footprint

If there is ever a doubt that these guys are corporate money guys and not educators, their language choices make it clear. The plan suggests that BPS can right-size by "consolidating" 30-50 schools.

It is so worth noting that this report is dated March of 2015, which would roughly nine months before Boston Mayor Marty Walsh was whining about all the dirty liars accusing him of wanting to close 36 Boston schools-- exactly what the McKinsey plan calls for.

Yay, Inclusion!!

Special education is really expensive (they figure about 11-18% of total BPS budget, depending on how we figure). Also, though they don't quite say it directly, McKinsey appears to believe that there are too many students with special needs and that probably a whole bunch of them aren't special at all. McKinsey sees an opportunity to just stop doing special ed. Inclusion for everybody. Phase in inclusion, mainstream all those students with special needs, outsource some paraprofessional supports, and just generally get rid of the whole expensive business.

Make the Little Buggers Walk

Whenever I encounter a McKinsey report, I'm always impressed at the thoroughness. McKinsey sees an "opportunity" to raise bus stop distances from 0.16 miles to 0.25 miles. They predict a savings of $6 to $19 million per year. Also, students with stronger legs and a hike in regional shoe sales.

Let Them Eat Something Else

"Target meal participation to improve revenues" is the opportunity here. So, more lunch advertising? Force students into the lunch line? Publicly shame brown baggers?

Also, centralize food preparation, which in my experience means cook all the food in one place and then send it out by van to various schools, so that each student has the chance to eat a sort of warmish meal. I'm not sure how this helps you target meal participation.

Outsource

Subcontract maintenance and night work to an outsourcey company.

Reorganize

This encompasses several "opportunities," and as always, "reorganize" actually means "whack away with a machete." McKinsey sees a chance to cut central office staff, and of course closing all those school buildings will also allow lots of reorganizing.

Trivia and Other Departments

As I said, we're not diving into all 200-and-some pages today, though there are interesting pieces of trivia (21% of BPS teachers have no evaluation on file??!!) as well as data that are...um... likely to prove to be counterfactual, like the continued assertion of 93,000 available seats in Boston. The report is certainly worth digesting, but I'm drawn to something at the very beginning.

An Important Gutting Principle

Ultimately, improved student outcomes is the goal of any effort to reduce cost and inefficiency and reallocate those funds where they can do more for students.

Were I inclined to see shifty plans behind these sorts of maneuvers and business plans, I might see this as a pretty clear statement of the ju-jitsu behind a public school system takeover, particularly in a place like Massachusetts where some folks are agitating so very hard for increased charter school numbers.

First, start with a premise that many of us have asserted over and over again in the face of people who argue that we can offer charters and choice for, basically, no extra cost:

Premise: You cannot effectively run two, three, four, or more schools for the same money you spent on one.

Step One: Open a bunch of charter schools.

Step Two: Watch as many schools collapse and fail because they lack sufficient resources to do the job.

Step Three: Declare loudly, "Why, this is terribly inefficient, and some of these schools are doing a lousy job. Let's reduce cost and inefficiency, and let's reallocate those funds to where they will do the most good."

Step Four: Close the "bad" schools. You may have to sacrifice a few charters, but mostly the public schools will be the failing ones. Close them in the name of educational efficiency. (Note: you can build some charter cushion here by rounding up investors and contributors for your charters to tide them over until their public competition is shut down and they can have the market to themselves).

I'm not saying that this plan is for factual true. But we can certainly use it for discussion purposes. Good luck, Boston.

NC: More Charter Shenanigans

North Carolina's Attorney General Roy Cooper has decide to try to recover money lost to a failed and possibly fraudulent charter school.

The lawsuit has been filed against the managers of the long-troubled Kinston Charter Academy. In August of 2013, Kinston collected $666,000 from the state. That sum was based on a projected enrollment of 366 students, and was supposed to keep the school flush through October. The school only had 189 students (K-8). And it closed its doors for good at the beginning of September, leaving the state out two-thirds of a million dollars AND having to fund the education for those students-- again.

The failure was spectacular enough that it was the subject of a state audit in 2015. That audit turned up a variety of problems, though many had been long known. The charter opened up in 2004 and was immediately in financial trouble, almost closing up shop in 2007. CEO and principal Ozie Hall and his wife/dean of students/chairman of the board of directors Demyra McDonald-Hall were also found to be hiring unqualified relatives for various posts.

By the spring of 2013, the school had stopped paying some of its staff's benefits and retirement, but Hall told the state that the school would soon be refinancing its mortgage and that would make it flush again. Apparently, not so much. Some payroll obligations weren't met in the fall upon opening, and on Friday, September 6, the school closed its doors for good, leaving many parents stuck.

While that may have surprised the parents, it was not such a surprise to the state. Kinston had been on the "citations for financial deficiencies" list every year starting in 2008. If the state knew that the school was a financial mess, why did it keep giving Kinston money? WFAE education reporter Lisa Miller had the short answer for that:

The bottom line is they didn’t have a choice.  As long as the school is open, the state has to give them that money. 

Hall attempted to fight back, and you can find a series of videos on Youtube in which he alleges that the Self Help Credit Union is part of a criminal conspiracy to take the school building, and the state held up money that the charter was entitled to. He has many theories, though none seem to explain how he came to claim twice as many students (and therefor twice as much money) as he actually had. He has also responded to the lawsuit:

“The allegations in the complaint filed by the Attorney General and Gubernatorial candidate Cooper are frivolous, motivated by political ambition, and made in retaliation for my civil rights work in making complaints of discrimination against the state,” Hall wrote. “The lawsuit will be defended vigorously.”

Hall has been a busy man. This link finds him as Reverend Ozie/Ozzie Hall, Jr., President of the Pitt County Coalition for Educating Black Children. His facebook page shows him graduating from De La Warr High School in 1976, and traveling to Japan as a member of the U.S. Delegation for the U.S.-Japan Police Community. He marks his graduation from Central Michigan University in 2003, and the getting his graduate degree from CMU in education in 2010, then started at Mount Olive College for Business Administration in 2011.

But Kinston is not Hall's first venture. Back in 1987, the New York Times was profiling Hall as a founder of the Juvenile Awareness Education Program, a program aimed at getting young people off the path to jail. Hall landed a $480,000 grant from the Department of Labor and Health, in part inspired by his own story-- first arrested at age 13, he went to prison in 1977 for armed robbery. In prison he studied, became "something of a jailhouse lawyer," and upon release in 1980, joined a community action agency in Wilmington, Delaware, leading to his founding of the JAEP in 1982. That program was given some modest credit for helping keep the streets of Wilmington a little less violent. In 2010, he was a commencement speaker for a NC Department of Corrections Commencement ceremony.

Nor has the fate of Kinston slowed him down-- Hall was almost immediately connected to another charter operation.

All along the way, Hall has been vocal in his criticism of racism, and was considered, at least by folks on the other side of the table, an advocate for reparations.

So what the heck is going on here. Is Hall a con artist who thought a charter school scam would be a good way to score some money? Is he a black activist whose attempt to do good work was ultimately brought down by a racist government that could pull some strings just to kill his school and take the building? Or is he a guy who meant well but was such a financial and educational amateur that he simply was in too far over his head to ever succeed?

His reported nepotism and bad math certainly suggest an answer to those questions, but given what I can find on line, I don't really know, and neither do you, and most especially neither does the state of North Carolina, whose charter oversight is so sloppy, loose and largely useless that they can't really tell the difference between a crooked charlatan, an unqualified incompetent, and a helpless victim of other peoples' malfeasance.

The only positive outcome of this mess is that a democrat and a republican in North Carolina were able to agree that their charter oversight rules are crappy and useless and therefor a menace to taxpayer dollars. When your regulations can't tell you anything except that something is wrong (and has been wrong for five years) and that you have no power to either stop it or explain it, then your regulations are beyond bad. A charter system this sloppy and just plain bad serves nobody-- not even the people who like charters.

Teacher Pay Decay

WRAL in North Carolina has created a documentary looking at the state of pay in the state of North Carolina. It's not great. Once you correct for inflation, North Carolina teacher pay since 1999 has dropped 13%. But even if you aren't that interested in North Carolina, stick around-- there's news here for everyone.

Not a huge surprise. North Carolina, since its great conversion from a progressive state to a aggressively regressive GOP stronghold, has worked hard to make teaching unsustainable as a career, as well as chopping the daylights out of teacher pay, to the point that even when they're trying to look like they're increasing pay, they're still shafting a whole lot of teachers (in particular, the life-long career folks). As WRAL reports, back in 2001-2002, NC ranked 19th in nation; today, they rank 47th.

And if you like anecdotes with your data-- two weeks back I was in Raleigh for the NPE convention. While there, I was contacted by a former student who now lives there. My wife and I joined my former student, her husband, and two other couples at supper. Of six grown young adult professionals, three were former North Carolina teachers. They all seemed like nice folks-- but they had had enough.

The WRAL story is of interest to everyone because in the process of whipping up an interactive graphic based on National Center for Education Statistics, they came up with a map that shows how every state has fared over the past decade-and-a-half.

I recommend that you look for yourself, but here are some highlights.

Teacher pay nationally has, adjusted for inflation, dropped 1.8%

Nine states have seen teacher pay drop from 6.5% to as much as 13.7%.

That "top" 13.7% drop belongs to Indiana. Congratulations, hoosiers.

The biggest growth was 21% in Wyoming.

A total of twenty-four states have seen average teacher salary drop since 1999.

Every "dropping" state is touching at least one other-- except Texas. It's proudly isolated in its teacher pay cutting. Maryland and Kentucky are growth states completely surrounded by drop states. Connecticut would be completely isolated as the only drop state in New England except for that tiny little spot where it kind of touches Delaware.

Granted, these are state average figures which allow a huge amount of variation from place to place. But still, in general, teachers in almost half of the nation would be better off partying like it's 1999.

It was kind of a jolt to see these figures. Teacher pay has not been the kind of broad issue in education it was back when I started teaching; generally it's brought up by fans of merit pay, performance pay, and other plans focused on paying a few teachers more and most all other teachers less, or by teachers who work (or used to work) in the bottom tier of teacher pay states. Clearly, in some states, inflation has hidden the steady march backwards. But go look at the map-- while we've been talking about Common Core and testing, teacher pay has been eroding in many states. Add that to your list of why teacher program enrollments are down in colleges across the country.

TN: Test Failure Complete

For the Big Standardized Test in Tennessee, once a reformster's paradise, it has been a rough year. And it just got worse.

The TNReady was supposed to be an on-line computerized test. That failed. So the test was going to be shifted to paper and pencil old school BS Test. That also failed-- Measurement, Inc. delivered incomplete tests, missing materials and just plain failed. Would there be a delay? A moratorium? A hold harmless?

All that, and a big fat firing as well.]

Word came today that the state has fired Meassurement, Inc.

“Measurement Inc.’s performance is deeply disappointing," Education Commissioner Candice McQueen said in a statement. "We will not ask districts to continue waiting on a vendor that has repeatedly failed us.”

The test is now optional. Take it, or decide that you've already wasted too much of your school year on this foolishness.

Gov Haslam tossed in a "Yeah, this sucks, but at least we still have super-awesome standards."

But at least, finally, accountability for one of the test manufacturers trying to get rich from education reform. Meanwhile, so sorry, teachers and students of Tennessee, for all the time and effort wasted this year. And good luck to Tennessee's education bosses on selling testing next year. Now let's see what the feds have to say about a state that flat-out fails to make its 95% testing quota.

TN: Discrimination Just Getting More Bizarre

So Governor Bill Haslam of Tennessee today signed a law that allows mental health counselors to refuse patients based on the therapist's religion or personal beliefs.

That means that a Christian counselor could refuse to see a Muslim, or an atheist, or a pastafarian. That means a Southern Baptist could refuse to see a Catholic. That means an anti-abortion person could refuse to treat a woman who's had an abortion. A staunch conservative could refuse to treat someone struggling with infidelity in their marriage. A racist can refuse to see anyone who's not white. That means a counselor could turn away a woman who's wearing too short a skirt, or holds down a job outside the home, or who uses birth control. That means a republican therapist could refuse to treat a democrat, or vice versa-- and both could refuse to treat a socialist. And of course, anybody can refuse to see an LGBT patient.

I am imagining someone who's hit a rough patch trying to find a counselor, looking through the yellow pages for a Jewish vegan feminist republican counselor who believes in attachment parenting. Presumably some folks, like the Green Party gay pro-gun Wiccan, would just have to drive to some other state.

Granted, when you're going in for counseling, you don't really want a counselor who's unsympathetic to your point of view. But shouldn't that be your choice?

One wonders how far Tennessee is willing to go. Will doctors someday get to treat only the sick and injured people they approve of? Will teachers be able to turn students away from their classroom for their faith, heritage or well, anything? Will it some day be legal to refuse any kind of service to someone just because he's the governor of a backwards state like Tennessee?

Where Reading Improvement Comes From

Recently on multiple platforms, Robert Pondiscio talked about reading on his way to standing up for Secretary of Education John King. We disagree about his praise of King for making all the correct word noises, but he's made a point worth repeating about the improvement of reading.

Every teacher of low-income children and English language learners has had this moment: You’re sitting with a student, working line by line through a text, grappling with what should be fairly simple comprehension questions.

“Did you read it?” you ask. “I read it,” the child replies. “But I didn’t get it.”

This is what reading failure often looks like in a struggling school. A child can read the words on a page in front of him, but he can’t always make sense of them.

I would tweak this a bit-- you don't have to teach low-income and ELL students to have this moment. But the rest is absolutely familiar, and I think the insight he applies is also valid.

Pondiscio argues that the traditional response-- more reading instruction, harder-- is not useful. And under the Big Fat Standards movement, we have pushed in exactly the wrong direction. Common Core and its mutant siblings all emphasize reading as a set of discrete skills, somehow existing in a vacuum separate from any content. This is rubbish. Reading never happens in a vacuum, and the reader's relationship with the material, which in turn is based on reader interest and reader knowledge, is always critical. Or as Pondiscio puts it

Children’s ability to understand what they read is intimately intertwined with their background knowledge and vocabulary. If a child is not broadly educated, he won’t be fully literate.

When a student doesn't know the words or the context or the background of what she's reading, reading is hard. If you give someone who has never heard of Harry Potter ten pages from the end of the last book to read, all the reading skill drills in the world will not help that person make sense of what's on the page.

Pondiscio is a member of the E. D. Hirsch fan club, and I half agree with him-- in order to read well, you have to Know Stuff. Hirsch just happens to have a particular view of what stuff everyone needs to know, and that Master List of Stuff is highly debatable, regardless of whose list we're looking at.
When we talk about standardized tests being biased, this is what we're talking about-- what stuff the test-taker already needs to know in order for the test to make sense.

Here's a classic example from the Archive of Terrible SAT Analogies:


RUNNER: MARATHON ::
A) envoy: embassy
B) martyr: massacre
C) oarsman: regatta
D) referee: tournament
E) horse: stable

Embed this batch of vocabulary in a reading selection; we don't have a reading problem, or even a vocabulary problem. We have a "what's your community culture of origin" problem, aka a "what have you actually experienced in life" problem.

Particularly at my level (high school), the solution to supposed reading comprehension problems is rarely context clue skills or decoding skills or the fabled "passage reading skills." The most useful skill at my level is discussion. We read a selection last week that led to a question about collective bargaining, and my students were largely stumped, and it was nothing as complicated as some set of reading skills or attack strategies. They has just never heard of collective bargaining before and had no idea what it was, and so I picked the approach of discussion, probing to see what experience and background knowledge they had that I could connect to the idea of collective bargaining (because the best way to explain something unknown is to connect it to something known) and they could ask clarifying questions of their own and, in this case, even argue a little bit about the issues related to the concept. None of that was reading instruction as we currently understand it, but nothing else would get me better results on the "reading comprehension" questions dealing with "collective bargaining."

The new round of calls for a more rounded education are correct for so many reason (even if some, like King, are undercutting their own words even as they speak), but at a bare minimum, even with the modern reform narrowed view of reading and math as the be-all and end-all, a well-rounded education matters because the more you know, the better you read. Common Core has been denying that for years. As Pondiscio puts it:

There’s a surface plausibility to the idea that nothing matters more than reading, but we’ve followed this well-intentioned idea off a cliff.

If we could stop perpetuating the failed concept of reading as a content-free skills, it would be a huge service to all our students.

Work

It has been a Very Medical couple of weeks. My father-in-law experienced a pair of strokes, and my father is currently doing the hospital shuffle as a quick-and-simple pacemaker lead replacement turns into a bit more complex. Oh, and somewhere in there my wife's aged grandmother doing a swan dive on a nature hike and lacerating her head and smooshing some vertebrae and walking herself out of the wilderness to go find help from some poor ranger who must have thought he was meeting some cast of the Walking Dead. She's in the hospital, too. And my colleague next door is trying to get his missing-day ducks in a row in anticipation of the arrival of his second child next week. Lot of medical.

What I keep noticing through all of these family adventures is the degree to which work rules our world. Yes, if there's a family emergency you should definitely get there to help. You should rush to your family's side.

Just make sure you have your employer's permission first.

We celebrate the human connections, push all the feels buttons to sell everything from mouthwash to Presidents, but still, always remember-- before you act on any of your human feelings, make sure you have your employer's permission first.

We love our national holidays, and in particular share traditional warm images of families gathered around dinner tables, sharing special gathering time. And yet, family holidays have become a mark of socio-economic class, because if you are still stuck in the minimum-wage economy, you probably don't have the whole day off for Memorial Day or Thanksgiving or Christmas. Your employer needs you, so that beats any of the rest of it.

I am not a fuzzy-headed anarchist. I believe in hard work, a good job, the value of exchanging your sweat, blood, skill and work for the money you need to make a life. I'm just old enough to remember the folks who said we should drop out and stick it to the man were often in no danger of actually running out of food, clothing or shelter. I totally get that an employer deserves to get what they pay for, and that it makes no sense nor serves any sense of justice for me to receive a full paycheck if I'm running home every other day to make sure my kitten's pillow is properly fluffed. I'm not saying that I should get a full day's wage even if I had to go home because I was feeling a little verklempt.

But it does say something about us as a culture and country that of the following statements, only one is automatically considered an excuse, an obligation that can only be broken with someone else's permission (unless you are highly enough placed to be a permission-giver).

       1) My family needs me right now.
       2) My aging mother just called.
       3) I have to go be with my spouse today.
       4) I have work.

And we're just talking crises and semi-crises here. I couldn't even seriously include "it's my birthday" or "it's our wedding anniversary" on the list. "I have a family thing" is open to negotiation, or a sign that you're Not Serious about your work. "I have work" is the stopper, the conversation-ender, the immovable non-negotiable reason for the choices you make.

We've let this Work Uber Alles philosophy infect school. School is these children's job, and so is homework, and any whining about how you couldn't get your homework done because of family stuff is just a sign that you are Not Serious about your education.

That's nothing new. What's new is the installation of College and Career Ready as the be-all and end-all of education. We have transferred the work imperative to school, replacing all other reasons for getting an education (good citizen, better human being, more fulfilled individual, fully realized self, etc) with just the one-- you need to do this so that you can work. You need to get ready to work. You need to have useful skills that make you an asset to work.

I know that I'm making an old point, an oft-made point. I also know that I'm not exactly the prime person to make it, because I've been a borderline workaholic my whole life. And I know this borders on cliche-- but when you're watching part of a family scramble around trying to take care of the rest of family-- well. You know. Is work important? Sure. Is it everything? No.

Have we constructed a society in which the rights of people who pay other people to do work have been given primacy over the rights of those workers to have an actual human life? I suspect we have. And I also suspect that the college-and-career-ready crowd is trying to extend that primacy, to say that the right of the people who might some day hire those students to do work-- those future bosses' rights have been given primacy over the rights of our children to have a full and rich education that serves their own needs. "It's on the test" is a bad enough reason to cover certain material in school, but it's even worse when that is just a smokescreen to hide "one of your future employers might want you to be able to do this."

Talking about the work-life balance has many implications. It implies that your work and your life should carry equal weight, that your work is at least as important as the rest of who you are and what you do. It implies that you should not get so wrapped up in having a life that you forget work. And most of all, it implies that life and work are two different things.

Work is eternal. It will always go on, and when you finally step away from the wheel, someone will step in to take your place. Your family is just for right now. Take care of each other. Just sayin'.