Yet Another Core Apologist

At this point, Common Core fans are kind of like those legendary Japanese soldiers who came stumbling out of Pacific island caves long after 1945, unaware that the war was over and they had already lost. Well, the analogy would work better if Pacific island caves were like clown cars, because not only Core fans clueless, but it seems as if there's always just one more.

This week it was Douglas Holtz-Eakin. Holtz-Eakin was an economic and budgetary advisor for Bush II, so of course he is (like all economists) highly qualified to discuss education policy. Holtz-Eakin was also economic advisor to the 2008 McCain campaign. He's from "suburban Pittsburgh" and half of his hyphenated name is the maiden name of his first wife. He was on the "Say no to Obamacare" circuit in 2010. If you want him to come talk to you, you can book him through Leading Authorities for just a cool five figures (depending on travel). And, of course, he is the head of a right-leaning thinky tank, American Action Network, as well as running a related superPAC.

This week, Holtz-Eakin was in US News arguing that there is "A Hidden Benefit to Common Core," which I suppose is the next logical argument to make, since there is no obvious or visible benefit. We'll jst keep rooting around our cave. There must be a benefit here somewhere that we just can't see.

He starts with the premise that the cost of college is a problem these days, though he cites some of his own thinky tank's research that suggests that it's college aid that is making college costs blow up. That seems like a tough bridge to build, but the research showing that college is now too expensive for too many people is certainly out there.

But we're breezing past that conversation so that we can land on the old favorite-- college remediation. Students are arriving at college and taking remedial courses. That's its own discussion; it's not entirely clear what remedial course enrollment tells us. Are colleges seriously loosening entrance requirements in order to fill seats and make bank? Are colleges jamming students into remedial courses to run up some more charges and raise revenue? Are placement tests crap? Holtz-Eakin doesn't want to have that conversation-- remedial classes equal inadequate readiness.

It's a bold argument to make, since the current crop of college freshmen are the students who have been Common Cored through their entire high school careers. So what's the benefit of the Core again?

Holtz-Eakin is going to make another bold move here, and use the NAEP (the Nation's Report Card) as a measure of student achievement. And he's going to drag in some research from his thinky tank that shows that if NAEP scores were higher, the economy would currently be awesome.

Here We Go Again

The American Action Forum finds that had average NAEP math scores been 10 percent higher in 2003, then by 2013 individuals would have benefited enormously. There would have been 14.6 million more adults with a high school degree and 10.3 million more with a bachelor's degree. It also translates into better economic performance, with 12.4 million additional jobs and $1.27 trillion in additional economic growth. 

Also, if we could get people to eat more margarine, there would be fewer divorces in Maine. Don't believe me? Check the data:

If we follow the link to the American Action Forum research (released just the day before Holtz-Eakin's piece), we find not so much "research" as "claims." And we find, once more, Erik Hanushek. Hanushek has made a career for himself pushing the baseless baloney that good teachers will make students grow up to be richer; Hanushek is sort of a cheap Raj Chetty knockoff, stitching together a bunch of baseless correlations, weak suppositions, and unproven baloney. Rich kids do well on tests. Rich kids get well-paying jobs as adults. Therefor, good test scores lead to well-paying jobs. SMH. When AAF says that they based their analyses "on the methods employed" by Hanushek et. al, that's really all we need to know.

I could spend all day poking holes in the classic Hanushek claim that a better first grade teacher will result in more adult income, but let's just look at the assertion before us-- higher NAEP scores in 2003 would have resulted in a better economy in all fifty states in 2013. I don't know. Can anybody think of anything that happened between 2003 and 2013 that had a huge effect on the economy, personal earnings, employment and wealth, that had absolutely nothing to do with scores on a standardized test? Anybody?

How To Tell An Economist from an Educator

Clearly, better educational achievement should be a priority.  

An economist is a person who thinks that you get to that sentence by setting up a whole bunch of specious research to show that higher test scores will yield financial and economic benefits. An educator is a person who believes that providing a better education is a premise, not a conclusion you have to create an argument for. An economist is a person who thinks they need to create research-based data-driven case for the economic benefits of kissing your spouse. An educator is a person who kisses their spouse because they want to because some things really don't require fancy arguments.

The Baloney Gets Deeper

Holtz-Eakin will now demonstrate how many things he does not know.

The most effective way to improve achievement is to utilize educational standards.

Is there any proof that this is true? Any at all? No, there is not. (Also, one point off for using "utilize" which is a fancy doily of a word, unnecessary as long as we have the word "use" in the language).

Holtz-Eakin notes that No Child Left Behind called for standards and tests. But having laid out in the last paragraph that standards are a list of "what students are expected to know and be able to do at specific stage," he now adds another requirement. NCLB let states pick their own standards and  "As a result, the rigor of the standards was as varied as the individual states, and there was essentially no ability to make cross-state comparisons." He is going to skip right over the question of why cross-state comparison is useful, necessary or in any way efficacious. It's a good question to skip, as there is no reason to believe that cross-state comparison in any way improves education.

In Holtz-Eakin's story, folks noticed that state test scores and NAEP scores didn't match up. I would suggest that's because America's Report Card makes a lousy benchmark, but  Holtz-Eakin smells declining rigor, and so...

A state-led effort, the Common Core standards were drafted by experts and teachers from across the country. They genuinely demanded that schools meet sensible metrics and provided parents and policymakers a way to check the quality of their schools against those in other states.

Only intense loyalty and a decade in a Pacific island cave could lead someone to declare that the standards were any of the above. Not state led. Not drafted by experts or teachers. No reason to think that being able to compare your child to a child a thousand miles away was important, necessary, or useful.

Holtz-Eakin also defines the Core as standards "that have been shown to be more rigorous and effective." That link he includes is a ballsy choice, because it leads to the Fordham Institute study of Core standards, paid for by Bill Gates, one of the Core's top sponsors. If Bill Gates hires a firm to compare Microsoft Windows and Apple OS, what result do you think we can expect? Particularly if the firm hired has more expertise in PR and marketing than in computers. And given all of that, look at the report and see that Fordham found some states actually already had better standards than the Core.

None of this is news. Only in a Pacific island cave would this have been news.

Chicken Littling It Home

Holtz-Eakin wants us to know that rolling back the Core will be bad for the country and hurt us all economically. This would perhaps be more compelling if he could show one shred of evidence that the Core has been helping. But of course timing is not on his side as this week also saw the release of the lackluster-- actually, they were bad enough that we could call them suckluster-- results of the latest round of NAEP scores. Just look at this story about stagnant scores. Oops! Sorry-- that story is from 2014. Try this one about the drop in NAEP math scores. No, sorry. That's from 2015. Here we go. Here's the newest bad news. Carry on.

Lowering or eliminating standards will harm economic growth. It will reduce the attainment of educational degrees. But most harmful, it will exacerbate the trend toward under-prepared college students, lengthened time to completion and inflated tuition costs for families.

Did having the Core help economic growth? Did it increase attainment of educational degrees? Did it decrease the amount of remediation at college campuses? Because it seems like answering those questions would be a critical part of Holtz-Eakin's argument. But instead, Holtz-Eakin's argument rests on some "research" claiming that if test scores had been better in 2003, life would have been better in 2013. The proof of his argument rests in some alternate dimension, some parallel universe that can only be accessed by a portal in some mysterious location, like a cave on an island somewhere in the Pacific.

ICYMI: Here Come May Flowers

Let's kick off the month of May in fine reading style.

How To Ruin Children's Play

Peter Gray once again shows up at Psychology Today advocating for small children. Here's another reminder for grown-ups to take a deep breath and back the heck up.

North Carolina Needs To Stop Lollygagging and Invest in Teachers

From the News & Observer, a call for NC to get its act together.

Who's Behind the High Achievement New York Curtain?

A breakdown of who pulls the strings for just one well-connected reformster group in NY

Why Every Company Needs a No-Bozos Policy

Not, strictly speaking, about education. But you will recognize some of the staffing issues here.

One Neighborhood School's Struggle in the Era of "Choice"

Sara Lahm, one of the Progressive Education Fellows, presents an up-close-and-personal look at how one community school found itself targeted by charters.

Exposed-- KIPP Efforts to Keep the Public in the Dark

The Center for Media and Democracy takes a painfully detailed look at how KIPP schools have avoided accountability, even as they have enthusiastically gone after stacks and stacks and stacks of that sweet taxpayer cash.

Holding Back To Get Ahead

Jennifer Berkshire calls this one of her most important interviews ever, and I can see why. Researcher Joanne Golann was embedded in a strict charter school, and she has the scholarly substance for what we've always known-- that training children, particularly non-wealthy non-white ones, in a no-excuses high-compliance environment develops in  them exactly the wrong qualities needed to succeed.

Affordable College Going, Going...

The University of Pennsylvania, working with Vanderbilt and the Higher Education Policy Center, has just released the 2016 College Affordability Diagnosis for the US, and the doctor thinks we'd all better sit down before she gives us the news.

Losing Ground

Joni E. Finney, Practice Professor at Penn, says the picture is just not pretty. Here are some bullet points to shoot straight through your heart.


* College is less affordable than it was in 2008, even in the best-performing states.

* Most full-time students cannot work their way through college any more.

* Low- and middle-income families face significant obstacles to attending college, including the need to climb the highest peaks of Mount Debt.

If we look at states that have a "high concentration" of families making less than $30K, the picture is just ugly. In Louisiana, a public two-year school would take 46.9% of a family's annual income (that is after they have received state and federal financial aid). If we look at a public four-year non-doctoral school, the worst state is South Carolina, where school for an under $30K family will cost a whopping 73.3% of their annual income. Alabama and Mississippi follow close behind with above-70% numbers. And that is, again, after aid has been factored in.

We can crunch numbers other ways to get different, and yet still ugly, pictures. For instance, instead of looking at states arranged by low income, let's look at states with high college attendance. If we rank states that have at least 40% of students enrolled in public two-year schools, we find the bottom of the barrel is Minnesota, where the bottom income quartile will spend 61.5% of their annual income to pay for school. For families making between $75K and $110K, the percentage ranges from 17% down to 8.7%. In other words, for wealthy families, two year school is barely a blip in the family finances, while for poor families, school costs eat everything.

Public four year schools? Same thing. Among states with at least 25% four year college enrollment, New Jersey is the worst, with 76.3% of annual income required of the folks at the bottom. The best of the lot is Alaska, with a still-significant 38%.

Is there more? Is it bad? Yes, and yes. We've so far talked only about public schools. If we shift the attention to private schools, it's-- Wait! What? Damn!

If we're talking private four-year non-doctoral school, we have seven states in which school costs for the under $30K families amounts to over 100% of their annual income.

And the Rest of Their Lives...?

The researchers also looked at other expenses in peoples' lives. So, for instance, we can say that for the under $30K crowd, housing uses about 59% of annual income. And for those of you who want to be all scoldy, we can also note that those folks spend 1% of income on alcohol.

Bottom Line

If college is supposed to be the gateway to social mobility, well, it's at the very least pretty rusty and at the very worst, rusted solid and padlocked as well. The report makes it clear that for middle and lower income folks, college for the kids will mean borrowing money out the wazoo. Getting a job and working your way through college is not a reasonable plan any more.

You may or may not be a fan of the Bernie Sanders Free Community* College For All plan, but somehow, we have to address the inaccessibility of college to a large chunk of the population. It's doubly necessary because our whole plan for Lifting Them Out Of Poverty is that we'll get them all college and career ready through K-12 and then they'll go to college and get really good jobs and-- voila!-- no more poverty. There are many problems with that plan, but this is the most obvious. Our plan right now is to get every kid a nice pair of running shoes so that they can run in a race that has a thousand dollar entrance fee-- but they've only got fifty bucks to their name. This is a dumb plan, a thoughtless plan, a plan that is self-evidently doomed to failure.

Time for a new plan.



*I originally understated Sanders' ambition here.

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.