How Do Unions Really Affect Schools?

Back in February, Eunice Han at Wellesley College put out a paper entitled "The Myth of Unions' Overprotection of Teachers: Evidence from the District-Teacher Matched Panel Data on Teacher Turnover." Han reaches some really interesting and, perhaps for some folks, counter-intuitive findings, and they're worth a look.

But full disclosure right up front-- I can't really make sense out of her methodology. Han takes sixteen pages just to explain how she did what she did, and it includes all sorts of economist equationing and data mumbo-jumbo that is just plain beyond me. Things like this:

Han has a Ph.D. from Harvard and she has, no kidding, an impressive bucket list. And I can follow the reasoning behind her data crunching, but not the crunching itself. And if her findings seem vaguely familiar, it's because they have been covered elsewhere (check out this interview with Han from Edushyster). But there are some pieces of research that are worth re-blogging about. You say "redundant;" I say "amplifying the message."

So here are the conclusions Han reached with her data crunching.

Union Strength Affects Teacher Pay-- But So Do Other Factors

Much to nobody's surprise, districts with stronger collective bargaining units end up with higher-paid teachers. Generally that "wage premium" is paid for teachers with the most experience.

However, there are other factors that figure in. Districts with a high percentage of minority students pay their teachers more. But teachers who work in districts with a large student population, and teachers who work in districts with a large free/reduced lunch enrollment are paid "significantly less." And of course, where collective bargaining is illegal, teachers get paid less (so those legislators who have stamped out collective bargaining have achieved one of their goals-- congratulations, you cheapskates). As has been pointed out innumerable times, the "right to work" does not go along with the "right to be paid a great wage."

Union Strength Affects the Dismissal of "Bad" Teachers

But not the way you would expect it to. To listen to the rhetoric of the past years, one would think that unions are out there building fortresses around the worst teachers, allowing those terrible teachers to commit professional malpractice, suck the brains out of students, and kill puppies with impunity. Changing the system so that Bad Teachers can be gotten rid of has been consistently raised as one of the great educational concerns of the age, and unions have been painted as the principal obstacle to the bad teacher jettisoning.

Not so, says Han. It's a little more complicated than that.

from Han, The Myth of Unions' Overprotection (2016)

So, high collective bargaining districts fire the largest number of their new, untenured teachers. And schools where there are no collective bargaining rights at all fire the fewest of their new hires before they can become tenured. No collective bargaining schools also fire the largest percentage of tenured teachers.

There's actually an economics rule for this, which basically says that the more you pay for something, the more inclined you are to demand quality. True for toasters, new cars, and, Han asserts, for hiring teachers as well. Districts that pay big-- well, bigger-- bucks are more inclined to make careful use of their tenure system, says Han.

Union Effect on Retention

When it comes to teacher retention, districts with strong collective bargaining do the best job of holding onto their people. Districts with no collective bargaining are most likely to lose teachers through voluntary departure.

Han also notes that voluntary retirement is a U-shaped curve, with most folks checking out either very early in their career or after many, many years. This fits with an assertion many have long made, which is that what mostly happens to Bad Teachers is that within a year or two they look around and decide they want to get out of dodge. While reformsters search for punishments that will drive bad teachers out, the best discouragement for any person is to return day after day to face a roomful of students one is not equipped to teach. Teaching badly is really hard on a person, and very few people can stand to teach badly for more than a year or two.

Union Effect on Quality and Achievement 

Let me lead with the usual disclaimer-- we aren't really talking about teacher quality or student achievement. We're talking about test scores, which is a useful metric for almost nothing. But it's the metric many folks love, so let's see if-- by their metric-- unions have any kind of effect.

Surprise. Teachers in the high collective bargaining schools were 5% more likely to be high quality teachers than those in the no collective bargaining schools. Student test scores are maybe a bit better; unionism seems to have no real effect on the dropout rate.

Restricting Bargaining Rights and Retaining Teachers

Taking away bargaining rights causes many teachers to start looking for greener pastures. We needed an economist to figure this out?

Other Conclusions? 

Han's observation is that strong collectively bargained pay systems do a better job of attracting and retaining teachers than things like merit pay and performance bonuses. Also, a strong union results in less turnover of staff, which provides more stability for the school and students.

In short-- where you find a stronger union, you will find a stronger school district.

Now, I do see some caveats here. Some of Han's data is five years old, which is a lot of time in the current climate. I am also wary that with all these factors flying around, there may be some confusion between correlation and causation. Strong unions may be a symptom of a strong school community, and not a cause.

But that doesn't change one significant part of the findings-- the notion that busting unions will make schools better has absolutely no data to support it. "If we could just get rid of the union, we'd have better teachers in our schools," is bunk without a leg to stand on. Reformsters should welcome one finding here-- Han's work finds one more way to support the notion that schools in poor communities are not getting the best teachers in their classrooms. What reformsters may not like is the notion that one way to strengthen those schools (beside, you know, getting the government to fully fund them) is by strengthening the local union.

Imagine that. Test results come in showing a struggling school, so policy makers and legislators and school leaders put their heads together and say, "Well, we need to call the NEA and the AFT and see how we can get a stronger union in these buildings." Wouldn't that be an interesting new approach to school reform.

Resolve To Be Present

For the next couple of weeks, as the beginning of my school year approaches. I'm going to write to renew my resolve to keep focus in my practice. This is one of that series of posts.

If teaching is about relationship (and I believe most definitely that it is), then it must follow the First Rule of Relationships, which is that the first thing one must do to be in a relationship is show up.

There are any number of reasons that one has not shown up. Stuck in your own head. Distracted by issues from outside of the time and place you're currently occupying. So used to doing something that you no longer think about it, but just go through the motions.

We know some of the cliche versions of absence. The person who is so stuck on either a great or a terrible moment in the past that they fail to move into the present, repeating like a closed loop the tale of either a former triumph or an unreleased wrong. Or the person who is waiting for life to begin ("Once I get through X, I will be ready to really start living.")

The person who just doesn't want to be here, for whatever reason. And so, in their head, they're not here. And for some of us, it's easy to get lost inside our own heads for no particular reason at all.

We make excuses, sometimes without even knowing it. In my first marriage, I somehow had it in my head that having made a commitment in the past, that business was locked down and taken care of. This, it turns out, is stupidly and self-destructively wrong, like saying, "Well, I ate last week, so there's no need to eat this week."

But no-- you have to show up and be present every day. Really listen, look, see, pay attention, and not just as a disconnected observer sitting somewhere in a bunker in the back of your head. You have to bring all of yourself into the room.

This is a tricky balance for teachers. Your classroom is not all about you; you are the least important person in it. Nor do your students benefit from being the porters for whatever emotional baggage you're carrying today. Being present for a teacher means somehow pushing through and beyond ego without simply numbing all sense of self.

When I was starting out, I would do this thing where, if something came up, some question, some issue, whatever, I would basically leave the room to go figure out how to respond. My physical form was still there, but I was not there, and I didn't come back until I'd figured out the right thing to say next. Add that to the fact that I am not by nature a wild and dynamic person, and it was easy for my students to conclude that I was one of those just-going-through-motions teachers. What I have taught myself to do is stay in the room and verbalize. Instead of working it out in another remote headspace, I do it in front of them. "Dang. I don't know. What would be the way to approach that? I remember one example-- anybody ever heard of--?"

That's me. Presence takes different adjustments for different people. Some folks cover their absence with silence, and others cover their absence with noise. But what presence requires is attention and honesty.

I draw the line this way-- at the end of the year, I think my students should have little idea of the specifics of my life, but they should have a good idea of what sort of person I am.

Presence is one more way in which teaching reminds me of performance. I imagine it's similar for athletes. There's a whole world of stuff that we carry around with us, stuff that distracts, that stings, that numbs, but when the lights come up and the show starts, every bit of us is right there, present and focused in that moment. In that moment, what we're doing gets everything we are.

It sounds like a lot of work, I suppose, but there are benefits. One of the biggest is that in those moments in which we are really present, life is more vivid and full and rich and interesting. I teach teenagers, who struggle with the problem of being bored bored bored bored, and I've talked about some version of all of this at some point every year, because I'm convinced that presence is the antidote to boredom. That being where you really are and being all there and all in is infinitely more interesting than wishing that you were somewhere else, or waiting for something to drag you out of yourself into the moment.

All those things we say we want to do-- engage, excite, inspire, inform students-- can be most easily done when we show up, when we are present in the classroom. Not waiting for Saturday or planning for tonight or tuning out Pat's incessant droning or just wandering off in our own heads, but present in this moment and place, focused and purposeful and present.

Always a challenge for me. This is my reminder to me to be there, fully and honestly.

Feds Testing Plan, Part II (Still Clueless)

You may recall that almost a year ago, President Obama and his administration announced that they'd noticed that testing was out of control in schools, and maybe somebody should do something about that. (Actually, if your memory's good, you may recall they had the same epiphany two years ago.)

This led to the announcement of a Testing Action Plan that did not so much rearrange deck chairs as it combed the fringes on the pillows on the deck chairs. The administration position on out-of-control testing has remained--

1) The bad testing is all that other stuff that's going on, not our stuff
2) Big Standardized Tests are still an absolutely crucial part of education
3) Teachers, students, schools, and maybe college teacher prep programs should be judged by BS Tests
4) We have no idea why schools and teachers started acting as if their entire careers depended on test results. We cannot imagine how such an idea got around.

But the Testing Action Plan had seven big guiding principals that were going to get the testing monkey off America's back.

1) Tests must be worth taking.
2) Tests must be high quality.
3) Tests can only take up 2% of the student year.
4) Tests must be fair (aka all students must take the same one)
5) Tests must be fully transparent for parents and students
6) Tests should be used with other multiple measures
7) Tests must be used to improve student learning

In the last year, we've accomplished on #4, which is the item on the list that absolutely shouldn't be accomplished. The rest of these? Bupkus. Zip. Zero. In fact, the only thing that has happened on the list of Things To Improve the Testing Situation is this one

8) Congress will pass a new ESEA that takes away some of the Department of Education's power to be an intrusive, oppressive, test-demanding agency.

And we still don't know how that's going to shake out. Most notably, the new law says that 95% BS Test participation is absolutely required, even though it also says that parents totally have the right to opt their children out of the test. I suppose both could be true. The feds could be saying that parents have a right to opt out and states have a responsibility to punish them for doing so. Keep your eyes on New York, where a concerted state effort resulted in opt out numbers going up last year. Will the feds punish New York? Will New York punish the districts, or the parents and students of those districts? Let's all pay attention. Remember-- a law that nobody has the guts to enforce is kind of like no law at all. And that is how bad laws die.

But I digress. The Department of Education is back, ready to "build on" last October's plan with a new Testing Action Plan sequel. 

As has often been the case, the plan rests on a grant competition (because if something is worth doing, it's really only worth doing a select few-- everyone else can just sit in the winners' dust moping). This year USED will be "focusing on working with states to improve the quality of testing items, ensure effective public reporting of scores and results, and reduce unnecessary testing."

"The President's Testing Action Plan encourages thoughtful approaches to assessments that will help to restore the balance on testing in America's classrooms by reducing unnecessary assessments while promoting equity and innovation," said U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. "This grant competition is the next step as part of that plan, and will help states and districts improve tests to allow for better depiction of student and school progress so that parents, teachers, and communities have the vital information they need on academic achievement."

And that is an impressive mountain of baloney. This is a failed weather person who says, "You know, we've put way too much emphasis on using reading the bumps on toads for our predictions, so we're going to fix that by getting better toads, coming up with new ways to examine the lumps, and typing the predictions in a new font."

A "thoughtful approach to assessment" would start by asking which assessments might best yield useful information; a "thoughtful approach to assessment" would not start with the assumption that such assessment has to take the form of a large-scale standardized test. The Feds are thoughtfully examining everything except their fatally flawed premise-- that a Big Standardized Test is the best way to get a good depiction of students and schools progress.

Pro tip, guys. It's not.

When done well and thoughtfully, annual assessments can provide meaningful information and provide clear, objective and actionable data that can be used to improve academic outcomes and promote equity for educators, families, the public, and students. 

Yeah, I'm not sure that's true, at all. In terms of "actionable data" for "improving academic outcomes," there's probably nothing much worse than a single annual assessment. It is possible it could be used to help "promote equity," but only if it were followed by a useful response ("Clearly this school needs additional resources and support from government-- let's get them the help they need") and not a useless one ("Hey, this school is failing, so let's cut it off at the knees and get some charters in here so that a tenth of the kids can get into a nice private school that helps some hedge fund guys make a buck"). And if you start with the question, "How could we best improve equity in this country," nobody;s first answer would be, "With a standardized test!"

So what exactly will the USED be looking for in this next race to the trough?

The Department will select winners that demonstrate a focus on (1) collaborating with institutions of higher education, other research institutions, or other organizations to improve the quality, validity and reliability of state academic assessments; (2) gauging student academic achievement using a variety of measures; (3) charting student progress over time; and (4) evaluating student academic achievement through the development of comprehensive academic assessment instruments, such as performance and technology-based tools.[numbers inserted by moi]

1) Note "or other organizations," as that opens the field up to test manufacturers like Pearson. Give this credit for being an achievable goal, as making BS Tests more reliable or valid is as tough as making a desert more wet.

2) Well, that's sufficiently vague to mean anything at all. But it probably doesn't. Heck, it could even admit the cool new business of assessing whether or not the student is a good person.

3) More data storage, and like 2, an invitation to competency based education platforms to join the fun.

4) Did I say "invitation"? This is more of a promise to pick CBE up at its apartment and drive it wherever it wants to go.

Applications for the grant are due by late September.

Here's a list of things the administration doesn't know.

1) It doesn't know that an assessment instrument has to be created to collect particular data for a particular purpose, and that if you use the assessment for some other purpose, it's as counterproductive as trying to drive screws with a jigsaw.
2) Creating a large-scale assessment that can just be used for a whole bunch of stuff is like thinking that the only tool you need is a hammer.
3) Saying "we're going to use computerized technology" first and then figuring out "for what" second is backwards, and likely to yield technology that nobody uses.
4) Standardized tests are not useful for measuring anything except a student's ability to take a standardized test (though they can also show socio-economic background).

The grant competition is for a whopping $8.86 million, and maybe I've been reading about too many elections lately, but that seems like chump change once you've divided it up between states. Also, the Department expects to announce the winners in January, 2017, and, I don't know, isn't DC going to busy with a few other issues right around then? I can hardly wait to see where this "test enhancement" falls on the new administration's to-do list.

Education and Profit

Even as many charter fans are backing away from the idea of for-profit schools, last month found US News running this piece arguing that profit-making and education go together like a horse and carriage.

The author is Ian Lindquist, a 2009 graduate of St. John's College (the read great books people), former charter school teacher, and current fellow at AEI. Lindquist wants us to know that the profit motive is completely compatible with sectors that provide public goods. In fact, in response to the criticism that "this profit motive renders for-profit schools incompatible with public education," Lindquist has a simple response:

This is nonsense.

Lindquist's argument would have been better off if he had quit there. But he didn't. Here's the rest of the nonsense paragraph.

Education is not the only sector that provides public goods. Indeed, there are many public goods handled by private companies: hospitals, prisons and transportation systems operated by for-profit providers ensure public health, public safety and public transportation. In none of those cases does profit motive necessarily dispose the company to abdicate its mission of serving the public. In these cases, companies' ability to provide the best product possible is aligned with their ability to make money and pay their shareholders. Far from giving up their social missions to seek profit, they need to serve the public both to accomplish that mission and gain profit. Without mission, no profit. The mission is and must be primary.[emphasis mine]

Um, no. The health care industry in the US has been ranked among the worst in the developed world for a few years now, but if you don't want to have that debate, let's consider a few other points.

Rural hospitals are closing at an alarming rate across the country. This is not because of a lack of customers-- they could certainly continue their social mission if they wanted to-- but because millions of uninsured Americans "who cannot pay when they show up at their local hospital, putting a direct strain on the hospital's bottom line." Even where hospitals have not closed, but have been snatched up by giant health care conglomerates, business affects the care people get. My county used to be served by two local hospitals; it is now served by a single satellite facility bought up by health care giant UPMC, which makes it necessary to travel to Pittsburgh for procedures and care that used to be available here. Why have they been shifted? Because business concerns drive how health care is provided.

And, to digress for a moment, UPMC is a good example of how meaningless the distinction between for-profit and non-profit is in the first place. UPMC is a $12 Billion corporation that is nominally non-profit, but all that actually means is that there are no shareholders to share the multimillion dollar profits with (and that they get sweet tax breaks). They pay their CEO $6.4 million. They make decisions like a business.

Or let's talk about Aetna, making news this week by dropping out of Obamacare in all but four states. While this first looked like s straight-up business decision, because insuring poor, sick people is not a money-maker, the story has developed into something far worse. It would appear that Aetna actually decided to use those poor, sick folks as leverage for a business negotiation, telling the feds that if Aetna couldn't have its way with a merger, they would just dump all those insurance customers. No mention anywhere of their concern about their social mission. (Though their CEO did make $27.9 million last year.)

To claim that health care in this country is not driven, twisted, warped, and in some cases denied to people because of profit-driven concerns is nonsense.

Or let's talk about profit-driven prisons. The feds have announced their intent to phase out all uses of privately-run prisons mostly because the for-profit prisons aren't all that great at their jobs.

“They simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources; they do not save substantially on costs; and as noted in a recent report by the Department’s Office of Inspector General, they do not maintain the same level of safety and security,” [Deputy Attorney General Sally] Yates wrote.

I'm going to give Lindquist a pass on privatized because I don't have the time and space to launch a Uber discussion here. And he's already disproven his point twice.

Lindquist tries to offer some positive examples and lands somehow on Charter Schools USA, a group known in Florida for its artful use of real estate shenanigans to turn a profit. And he does rightly note that both sides of the debate can play Dueling Anecdotes all day. He puts his faith in authorizers and charter contracts to keep charters honest, but that approach is already failing spectacularly in places like Ohio. Sure, it's nice to believe that an authorizer would say, "Well, this charter is making good money for all of us, but it's not doing a good enough job, so we'll shut it down." But there's no reason to believe that's how it works. We already have an example in the cyber-charter sector, where virtually everyone agrees that cybers are doing a lousy job (including bricks and mortar charter fans) and yet somehow they remain untouched, unrestrained, unphased (but not unprofitable).


Look, public education is fundamentally different from a business. If I'm selling widgets, I can increase my revenue by a judicious use of my money. I can upgrade my widgets and charge more for them. I can bring in more customers. I can get more money to flow in.

But in public education, the situation is pretty simple. The government gives me a stack of money, and the only way I can increase revenue is by increasing taxes. Not an easy sell. So I take that stack of money, and every dollar in that stack is either put in my pocket or spent on students. It is the very definition of a zero-sum game. Money I stick in my pocket cannot be spent on students. Money I stick in my pocket will not bring better teaching, better facilities, or better resources. It will just be in my pocket.

A for-profit school is a school in which the students and the operators are in fundamental opposition. Lindquist says that the need to do a good job in order to stay in business will somehow align those interests, but to stay in business and keep making a profit, I don't need to do a great job, an outstanding job, or even a very above-average job. I just have to do a good enough job. And it is in my profit-making interest to do just a good-enough job, because improving my product will not increase my revenue-- it will just put fewer dollars in my pocket.

And for-profit business decisions means there must be winners and losers. It's simple business smarts to serve only the customers who fit your model. We have services like public education and a postal service because private enterprise would dump some customers as being too unprofitable, too costly to serve with too little reward for serving them. "Public education for some" is not the motto we've been following in this country.

The profit motive and the free market has a place in providing some services for schools (I have no interest in single national textbook company), but when it comes to operating the schools themselves, the profit motive is a problem, not a solution. We've already got plenty of evidence; it's time to be done trying to pretend that for-profit charters are a benefit for anyone except the people who end up with pockets full of money.

ICYMI: Mid-August Edition

I'm embarrassed that I haven't been saying this all along, but if you find something on this list that speaks to you, be sure to share it on your own networks. Amplifying voices is important, and you can do that just by tweeting and posting anything you find that you like directly. Don't share this post (not just this post) but share the original post that I've linked to.

Teacher Education and a Call To Activism 

Paul Thomas takes a look at teacher education's self-esteem problem, and the foolish things it has led to. 

There's No Such Thing As a Public Charter School

A spirited op-ed that makes this point one more time.

Useless Testing Gap Analyses (and the Newspapers That Love Them)

Mark Weber is the king of explaining complicated statisticky things in ways that ordinary humans can understand. Here's another great explainer on test result gaps.

Why I Quit My Job, But Not Being a Teacher

Yes, it's another "Why I Quit" letter, but it's well done and makes a statement about how strongly teachers identify with the work.

Teacher Pay, Student Poverty, and Inequitably Funded Schools: A Data-Driven Story From Chicago

A look at how the broke-on-purpose school district of Chicago tilts the field against poor neighborhoods. You should also check out the follow-up post at Jersey Jazzman

The Olympic Celebration of Diversity

What if we narrowed the Olympics down to just seven events?

A Conversation with Nashville School Board Member Amy Frogge

A look inside the recent Nashville school board election, in which reformsters pumped in tons of money and a local Mom still beat them.

Brand New NY Charter Group Has Michigan as Its First Customer

More research from the indispensable Mercedes Schneider, showing how yet another group of reformster consulting profiteers pops up.

Protect Yourself from ASDs

Come for the rundown of what ASDs are, how they spread, and why they're a bad idea. Stay for Chyris Barbic (the pioneer ASD chief) saying that having several states pursue ASDs is problematic.

Following the Money in Washington Primaries

Tracking the dollars that reformsters spread through Washington state in hopes of getting the charter industry more political leverage.

The So-Called Right To Teach 

Nancy Flanagan dissects the newest rhetorical attack on the teaching profession.

PA: Charters Spend Less on Teaching

This week the Pennsylvania School Boards Association released a report looking at what charter schools are doing with all that taxpayer money. Short answer-- spending a whole lot of it on administration, and not quite so much on actual instruction of students. But when have I ever settled for a short answer. Let's stroll through this report and check out the many highlights.

Piercing the Charter Cone of Silence

As it turns out, the first finding of the report is about how hard it is to find findings for the report.

In Pennsylvania, local school districts are mostly the authorizers of charter schools (unless the state has engineered some sort of takeover of the district a la Philadelphia). So you would think that rounding up the information about charter schools and their budgets would be easy enough for the school board association to round up.

But before data could even be crunched, PSBA got a taste of charter attitude. In May of 2015, PSBA filed Right-To-Know requests for charter info. Then this:

Shortly after the requests were sent, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools was quoted as saying, “[t]he Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools has no problem with either transparency or full responsiveness to legitimate RTK requests, but when the law is being used to harass, rather than inform, then the requests should be denied.” Most charter schools ignored this unlawful advice and complied with the law by providing PSBA with access to public records.

And by most, PSBA means a little over 50%. PSBA then filed appeals for the records of the rest. 15% complied once the appeal was filed, another 17% complied once PSBA won the appeal, and 11% still didn't comply even after PSBA won the appeal (another 3% didn't comply for "other reasons"). That accounts for 173 charter schools in PA. And it also accounts for the perception that charters are not exactly transparent and forthcoming about what they do with taxpayer dollars.

All of this comes before we even get to the findings. Once the PSBA had their hands on charter records from both RTK requests and other sources like IRS 990 forms, what sorts of things did they discover?

Income Sources

PA charters get 83.3% of their income from the tuition payments made by the sending district. Because of our set-up, that tuition payment can vary wildly because it's based on the per-pupil costs of the sending district. So while we often cite around $10K as the average, that ranges from a low of $6,865 to a high of $18,750 (that's for "regular" students-- students with special needs carry a higher tuition).

PSBA doesn't get into the implications of that disparity, but I will. First, it means that not all customers are created equal for charter schools, and the worst charter business model would be to try to latch onto students from the poorest districts, who would bring little money with them. Second, it means that students and parents from very poor districts should be shopping for charters with students from rich districts, because that will effectively increase the amount of money being spent on that students-- but conversely, charter parents from wealthy districts may want to watch out that their charter is not bringing in too many poor students, thereby dragging average student spending at the school down.

PA's charter system essentially creates a voucher system where poor students are given tiny vouchers and rich students are given big ones.

This may all be related to another finding of the report. Since 2007-08, the enrollment numbers in charter schools have risen almost 100%. The revenues for charters have, however, increased by 139%. This may suggest that while PA's charter choice system is allegedly aimed at students "trapped" in poor districts, that's not where the charter influx is coming from.

Meanwhile, charter tuition payments make up 5.4% of all school expenditures in the state. That's an average, however, which hides spectacular cases like Philadelphia (26.1%) or Chester Uplands, a district that currently spends a whopping 46.1% of all its expenditures on charter tuition.

$pecial Education

This is pretty simple, so I won't embellish.

In 2014-2015, school districts paid out $294.8 million in special ed supplement money to charter schools.

In 2014-2015, charter schools spent $193.1 million on special ed services.

Charter schools make a hefty profit on special ed students. And that is without even digging down to see how much charter enrollment is tilted away from students with large, difficult special needs and towards students whose special needs are considerably milder. There's a formula in PA that divides students with special needs into three tiers for purposes of state funding. It seems like it wouldn't be such a stretch to apply that formula to charters, too.

What Do Charters Spend Money On?

When it comes to instruction, charters spend a greater proportion of taxpayer money on regular instruction, with very little (or none) going to vocational, special ed, or other special instructional programs. However, as part of the overall budget, charter schools spend less on instruction than public schools do.

If charters are spending less on instruction, then what are they spending their money on? The answer, by a country mile, is administration. The PSBA report crunches this several ways, but I'll just pick two.

Here's a simple one-- on average, public school districts' per-pupil administrative costs are $914. For charters, that per-pupil administrative cost is $1,742.

Here's a charter from the report that shows how this breaks down in a little more detail.

from PSBA Special Report: Charter School Revenues, Expenditures and Transparency

Charter Management, Structure and Advertising Expenditures

PSBA looked at 2013 990 forms to see what charters spent on various subcontractors.

In terms of hiring management, the charters in all spent 11.7% on management services.That figure is a little misleading because a little over half of the charters actually spent 0% on management services (two charters actually spent more than 25% of their budget on management).

Food services, construction, rent, and educational services were the next top four contracted services behind management, though less money was involved. 

Charters across the state spent 12% of their expenditures on occupancy costs. Again, a very wide range is represented from 15 charters that spent $0.00 on that item, while one charter spent over 30% on those costs (that was over $4,000 per pupil). However, mostly what PSBA concluded from this portion of the study is that computing occupancy costs is "incredibly difficult." 

Advertising costs were also difficult to compute, and PSBA tried it both ways, with the responses from charters that complied with RTK requests, and trying to suss out 990 forms. Working from RTK replies, PSBA figured that charters spent about $42 per student, while the 990s yielded a more conservative $26 per pupil cost for advertising. Once again, that's a gross oversimplification of a wide range. According to the 990-based figuring, there are three charters out there that spent over $500 per pupil in advertising. And it's worth noting that in many cases, the advertising figures from RTK and 990 forms just plain didn't match, suggesting that somebody is not being entirely honest part of the time.

However, having noted that PSBA's numbers on advertising are tricky to parse, let me also note that the appropriate amount of tax dollars to spend on advertising a school is $0.00. 

Conclusions and Recommendations

1) Charters need to be held to the same standards of transparency as public schools. Those are tax dollars. Taxpayers are entitled to know exactly where they went.  PSBA repeats the not-really-true line that charter schools are public schools, but in the context of making the point that charters are public schools because they live on public tax dollars-- therefor they should play by the same rules as all public schools. PSBA says the state should hold charter feet to the fire.

2) The current formula "consistently" results in school districts overpaying charters for special ed students. Since 2009-2010, says PSBA, public schools have paid charters $327 million more than charters reported spending on special ed. That is not cool (and not something a public school would get away with if it were taking extra money from the state). The formula should be fixed.

3) A commission should be formed to take a closer look at charter finances. That charter should make recommendations. Those recommendations will probably not be, "Give charters a medal for financial awesomeness."

Charter Reaction

The Pennsylvania Coalition of Public [sic] Charter Schools has treated the report as an attack and responded accordingly, deflecting any recommendations to change how they're managed as picking on children for making different education choices. "We are totally open and transparent," they said, a statement presumably not written by any of the charters that fought to avoid fulfilling Right-to-Know requests. Charter schools make a lot of money in Pennsylvania, and they would rather not have anyone messing with their golden goose.

However, there is no earthly reason that, if they want to call themselves public schools, they can't live by the same rules of financial behavior and transparency as any other school district in the commonwealth. And it seems likely that until that day comes, the school boards of Pennsylvania, who are all becoming really tired of trying to run a school district with financial parasites attached, are likely to keep trying to shed some light on Pennsylvania's lousy charter funding and oversight rules. 

It's partly self-defense. Many school boards are taking heat from their constituents for financial mismanagement when the actual problem is not that they're screwing up, but that they are being drained by charter leeches even as the state ties their hands. Charter proponents have set up laws in Pennsylvania (as in many states) that insure that charter advances must come at the cost of public schools. If you set up a system in which the two types of schools are pitted against each other, you can't really be surprised when public schools decide they don't just want to sit there and take it. 

If you're in Pennsylvania and your local school board members haven't seen this report from their parent body, make sure you send it along. If you want more specific data about specific charters, you can find all the raw materials here.  The first step in solving your leech problem is to shine some light on the little buggers.





  

Do Rock Star Teachers Really Need A Union???

Raymond J. Ankrum, Sr., is a teacher-blogger who put in some years in the Baltimore school system and who now is working a charter gig. And in a recent post, he asks the question that lots of union critics think, but don't always have the nerve to articulate.

The question often comes from people not working in public education-- why do you need a union or tenure or a lock-step pay grid? Isn't all that stuff for the crappy teachers, to protect them from the consequences of their own crappiness? Wouldn't school districts do their best to hold onto super-duper rock star teachers and pay them super well?

That kind of kibbitzing is typical in every field that draws backseat drivers with no experience or expertise ("Doctor, why don't you just prescribe exactly the right dose of exactly the right drug the first time?"). But it's always a little bit of a surprise to hear it coming from teachers. At the risk of sounding like the aged fart that I am, I can't help notice that teachers who pose this rhetorical comment are most often "less seasoned" or "newly minted" or "young." Not that all young teachers have this issue-- the vast majority know better. But some still want to ask this question, so let me try to answer it.

First of all, the question presumes that the rock star teacher works for a rock star principal and a rock star superintendent. This is a large presumption. The rock star teacher may in fact be working for a complete Lawrence Welk administrator, a school leader who hasn't got a clue.

In fact, since school administrators these days turn over at a faster rate than teachers, chances are the rock star teacher is working for someone who had no hand in hiring her. I don't know that anyone has done the research (or could) but it would be interesting to see how many teachers are working for someone that didn't hire them in the first place. I'm going to bet that the percentage is huge. That means that even if the teacher is a rock star and the administrator is a rock star, the teacher was hired as part of a vision of the school that is no longer in play.

Oh, but excellence is excellence and anybody with half a brain knows a rock star when they see one. Sure. That's why all elections in this country are settled quickly and easily and everyone listens to the same music and watches the same movies and tv shows-- because excellence is something that we all totally agree on.

No, sorry, young rock star, but one person's rock star is another person's "Oh my God how can you listen to that dreck!!" Find me any awesome rock star teacher in the country, and I guarantee you-- no matter how beloved and rock starry and awesome that teacher is, we can find ten people who would say, "Yes, if I had the power, I would totally fire that teacher for being so awful." And sometimes those people pursue, and even acquire, that power.

Nor is excellence an immutable category. A rock star teacher may hit a rough patch for any number of reasons, from a person struggle to illness to existential crisis. Should a school help that flagging rock star through that patch, or just dump the teacher the moment she becomes less shiny? And many ordinary mortals are only rock stars a few days a week-- does that count?

And that's just all the disagreement about what constitutes excellence. That's before we even get to bad actors who want a teacher's hide because that teacher refuses to give Junior an A or let Junior start first string on the tiddlywinks team or because that teacher belongs to the wrong political party or the wrong church.

Or let's take the kind of case where a teacher's very rock starriness puts her on a collision course with administration, the case where the school is pursuing a course that is bad for students or a student, and the rock star tries to advocate for that student and is told to shut up or lose her job.

You, young rock star, may feel as if your professional awesomeness is a mighty shield, so powerful and strong that you don't need the protection of anything else. It may be pretty to think so, but history and reality are not on your side. In fact, your awesomeness and go-to-it-ness almost certainly will put you on a collision course with someone-- a parent, an administrator, a board member, or some other random actor-- and bring you to a moment when you'll want to have someone on your side.

The implication that the only teacher who run into trouble are the ones who deserve it is just wrong, like suggesting that Those People wouldn't have been stopped by the police if they hadn't been Up To Something. Sure, there are people who end up in trouble because they Really Screwed Up. But it would be a terrible mistake to assume that those people make up 100% of the conflicts. In this respect, people who argue that we don't need a union are like people who argue that we don't need public defenders for the court system.

The irony of the unions-protect-mediocrity argument is that it's actually the absence of a union that encourages mediocrity. When you're a teacher with no job protections and nobody to watch your back-- well, that's the time to keep your head and down and never, ever do anything that might make you stand out or draw attention. Ankrum winds back around to the idea that he wants teachers who give their all and don't just watch the clock (with the implication that such teachers are most likely found in a non-union charter). But I want teachers who can give their all and use every bit of their professional expertise without having to look over their shoulders every five minutes.


Is the union, particularly in large urban settings, its own sort of monstrous bureaucratic institutional mess? Sure. The union grows into a mirror of the district that houses it, and we end up with a complicated struggle. But to imagine that rock star teachers are so protected by their rock star powers that no unions are ever needed is reckless, foolish, and in some cases, seriously egotistical. Every rock star may not call upon the union (though many will), but the mere fact of the union's existence and the work rules that it supports will make it more possible for the rock star to be a rock star. To imagine otherwise is to be a carousel pony imagining that if you could just get unhooked from the carousel and get this big pole out of your back, you would breeze right past all these other mediocre ponies. Once it happens, you suddenly realize how much you needed the pole to stay upright and moving forward.