PA: Judge Cuts School Funding

Here in Pennsylvania, we've had a potentially game-changing ruling come down that could create all new problems for school districts and their funding. This story has many moving parts, so you'll have to stick with me for a bit here.

The short version of the story is this. The Lower Merion School District raised taxes. Somebody sued them. The judge (Senior Judge Joseph A Smyth) in the case ruled that the tax increase was unnecessary and excessive, and he revoked it.

Arthur Wolk, retired lawyer, has fun new hobby

As the president of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association put it, ""I've never heard of this happening before . . . a judge substituting his/her judgment of financial needs of the district in place of locally elected school board members."In other words, this may be one not-large school district, but the ruling could be a very large deal.

So let's unpack some of the details.

School Taxes in PA

As part of Pennsylvania's ongoing work to crush public education promote fiscal responsibility, for the last decade we've had the bi-partisan fiscal straightjacket that is Act 1, which declares that schools may not raise taxes above a certain index without either a voter referendum or state-level permission. Lower Merion has allegedly been going the state exception route for the last ten budgets by claiming a projected deficit that would affect pensions and special ed. Here's how the district put it in response to the decision:

In Lower Merion, recent enrollment growth has exceeded projections and the impact on staffing and facilities planning has been significant and unexpected. Additionally, the District faces increasing unfunded and underfunded state-mandated costs, including retirement and special education. Without the ability to plan ahead for its financial needs and maintain adequate reserves, the District will lose critical flexibility during a time of uncertainty and growth. The implication for school programs is enormous.

That's not an unusual claim in Pennsylvania. Districts are climbing up a mountain of pensions debt, a huge series of balloon payments on pension liabilities that have been accumulated by a decade of bad choice sand exacerbated by the financial collapse back in 2008 (thanks a lot, Wall Street). How bad is it?

For the next decade, school districts will have to make pension fund payments equal to a full third of their total budget.

Lower Merion's Finances

Facing that kind of looming payment, lots of districts have adopted a policy of squirreling away as much money as they can. Maybe that's what is happening here, but Lower Merion is also one of the wealthiest districts in the Philly area, spending a whopping $22K per pupil and just dropped $200 million on two new high schools in 2009 and 2010.  

And it would seem that Lower Merion may have the worst budget process ever. The lawsuit and the ruling both leaned on what appear to be some serious mistakes in the predicted outcome of the year:

For instance, in 2009-10, the district projected a $4.7 million budget hole but ended the year with a $9.5 million overage. In 2011-12, it anticipated a $5.1 million gap but wound up with $15.5 million to the plus side.

Lower Merion business manager Victor Orlando testified that the district has between $50 and $60 million in the bank. This is in itself requires some of the aggressive accounting that the lawsuit complains about-- Pennsylvania also has laws about how much money a district can park in its general fund.

So the answer here may be that the buttload of money is in designated accounts, set aside for capital improvements or future gut-wrenching pension payments. The district has been voluble and public in asserting that it has been transparent, followed proper budgeting behavior, and has managed resources for maximum flexibility. They've got a whole response on their website, and while it is forceful and unapologetic, it also skips over any sort of specific explanation of why the district appears to be essentially making millions of dollars of profit every year.

(Side note: If Lower Merion seems vaguely familiar, that's because this is the district that got sued for using their students' webcams to surveil those students.)

The Plaintiff

Lord knows the world is filled with people who want to sue their school district because they think their taxes are too high. Who is this guy who actually did it?

That would be Arthur Wolk. (Wolk's co-plaintiffs are Philip Browndeis, Lee Quillen, Catherine Marchand, and Stephen Gleason). Wolk is an attorney who has made a name for himself in aviation law, scoring some big-payday lawsuits against companies on the behalf of victims of various plane crashes. Wolk is semi-retired, seventy-two, and called in this profile article a " pugnacious pit bull." And when it comes to detractors, Wolk has a reputation for libel lawsuits (you can get a pretty good picture of that image from this blog post entitled "Has Arthur Alan Wolk Finally Learned That He Cannot Sue Every Critic?" Wolk is clearly neither shy nor backward-- you can read more about him on his wikipedia page, which was set for him by the marketing company he hired to give him more web presence.

Wolk's two children did not attend school in the district, but he has a big house there and pays more taxes than he thinks he ought to. When the district's superintendent released a letter accusing Wolk of trying to establish public schools as lesser than private schools by choking off taxpayer support, Wolk replied with a letter of his own (referring to himself in third person).

There was no need for a tax increase this year or any year in the last ten according to audited statements. We have the highest paid teachers, highest paid administrators, and too many of them, and the most expensive school buildings and the highest per student cost of any place in the nation. Our school performance is on par with districts that spend half of what LMSD spends which means that the administrators have failed in their jobs and the people supposed to provide oversight, the Directors, have done nothing.

He also brings up senior citizens on fixed incomes who are afraid of losing their homes, because no discussion of school taxes in Pennsylvania can occur without bringing up the spectre of senior citizens afraid of losing their homes. I am not sure exactly who in Wolk's uber-rich neighborhood could be worried about losing their home over taxes.

Wolk has been explaining himself on the subject for months. In May he wrote a letter to the editor complaining about the district's wild spending way, creating debt by building "two Taj Mahal high schools" along with bunches of busing.

Wolk's critics (and he has plenty) repeatedly accuse him of advocating a two tier system, with just the basics for public school students. Here's an oft-quoted excerpt from his lawsuit.

Public school education means basic adherence to the minimum requirements established and imposed upon school district by the State Board of Education, Public education is not courses, programs, activities, fee laptop computers and curriculums that are neither mandated nor normally part of a public education standard, and are normally provided only by private institutions at larger expense to individual patrons who prefer to afford their children education and opportunities that are neither required, nor offered, nor appropriate for public education paid for by the taxpayers.

Well, that's pretty clear. Some nice things are only for private school students, and taxpayers shouldn't have to pay for anything except the basics.

So what do the plaintiffs actually want?

We seem to be pursuing two different arguments here. On the one hand, the argument is that the schools are spending money wastefully on things they don't need. On the other hand, the argument is that the district is collecting more money than it spends and that extra money is the problem.

A poster under the name "John Q. Public" posted a short video/slide show to lay out the remedies sought by the plaintiffs. You can see it for yourself, but here are some of the highlights according to John Q.:

* They want their $55 million back
* They want the board stripped of authority and the district put under control of a court-appointed trustee
* They want the court to return the district to "basic public school" levels
* They want a higher teacher-student ratio (low ratios are for private schools)
* Pay teachers less, and provide cheaper benefits
* Remember the webcam lawsuit? They want everyone fired who knew about the webcam stuff.
* And they don't want the district to communicate with taxpayers unless the district also boosts the plaintiff's signal to the community as well.




So, basically, they would like to see the end of local control for the district and instead have the district run like a company by The Right Sort of Person, the kind of person who understands that public schools should be spare and simple and cheap.

Where does the suit stand?

The judge said the district had to roll back their proposed and budgeted tax increase. The district has appealed. Wolk in his public responses since the ruling has been talking as if the tax increase was the only issue he ever wanted to address. 

Oh, and one other thing. As he promised form way back at the beginning of all this, Wolk has been beating the drum to start “Dump the Lower Merion School Directors,” through which he and others intend to “run a slate of responsible independent candidates whose mission it will be to restore honesty and integrity to the district.” Reportedly taxpayers have also been treated to bot-flavored e-mail on the issues.

Is there more to this story?

Some local friends of public education have been looking hard for a connection between Wolk and any of the many reliably reformy folks that can be found in the Philly area. And since Wolk clearly walks and talks and advocates austerity measures and wants to destroy local control like a duck, it seems reasonable to see if he hangs out with any of the other reformy ducks.

Wolk lives in Gladwyne, a community on the main line in Philly that was, in 2011, ranked the 7th richest zip code in the US. That makes Wolk neighbors with many of the finest rich folks in the region, but I live in a town where some residents have been arrested for dealing drugs and if you use that to suggest I'm a drug dealer. I'll object. In 2014 he represented families suing over a plane crash that killed Lewis Katz, co-owner of three Philly media outlets--the Inquirer, the Daily News, and Philly.com.

Philly.com's coverage of Wolk has certainly been friendly; the post-lawsuit profile is framed by discussing how he loves puppies and wrote a book about his last beloved pooch. So far, it appears that philly.com has not felt the need to either profile the school superintendent's pet preferences nor provide a platform for him to explain his position on the suit.

But as I'm sitting here right now, I have to say that while we seem to be playing a familiar game, none of the usual players are immediately apparent.

(Also, just to be thorough, I can tell you this much about the judge. Joseph Smyth has been a judge for over thirty years, who was for the most recent part of his career in juvenile court.  He started a behavioral court, grew up in Norristown, decided not to pursue an athletic career. Some sources, including ballotopedia, have him retiring in 2015, but here he is.)

The Implications of This Lawsuit

Despite all the twists and turns and layers in this story, the biggest possible implication here is the one sitting right on the surface-- if a judge can step in and supersede a local school board's judgment with his own, school districts in Pennsylvania could be looking at some serious, serious trouble.

That's the one new part of this story. Rich guys who think elected school boards should be done away with are, sadly, old hat at this point, as are rich guys who believe they shouldn't have to pay taxes to run a school for Those Public School Children. Okay, there's a slightly new wrinkle here because in the case of Lower Merion, Those Public School Children are mostly white and wealthy. So perhaps a few more people will wake up when they notice that this is an attempt to disenfranchise taxpayers and voters who aren't poor urban black folks.

And come on-- when your budgeting process appears to be $15 to $20 million dollars off, you have got to know that you need to explain yourself to the public, because people are going to get cranky if they think they are taking money out of their bank account just so you can park it in yours. Sure, charter and private schools can do this sort of thing and nobody has any way to know. This is precisely why financial transparency is a good idea-- it lets the public know what is going on. But it also gives the district a responsibility to let the taxpayers know what's going on (and no-- saying "Well there were budget meetings and if you had bothered to come, you would know" is not an acceptable communications plan).

This is also a reminder of what helps drive the privatization of education. Because as sure as some folks looked at those numbers and thought, "Well, damn, my taxes are too high," there were other folks thinking, "You mean they cleared $15 million in profit in just one year??! We have got to get into this business."

I have no idea what's going to happen next in Lower Merion schools, but I'll be paying attention, because this story is going to have plenty of implications for all of us.

Testing Still Incentivizing Cheating

Yesterday out of Texas we have a new version of an old story-- a school that found a creative-ish new way to cheat on the Big Standardized Test.

This is a predictable and, at this point, oft-noted phenomenon. If you take a bunch of numbers and tie them to high stakes, people will look for ways to manipulate those numbers. Which is kind of the point of making those numbers high stakes. But some people will manipulate the numbers with legitimate okay-by-the-rules, and some people will find other ways to do it. If a plant manager is told that everybody's bonus depends on low injury-on-the-job numbers, there are many ways to keep those numbers down, and only some of them have anything to do with making the workplace safer. Refusing to let anyone report injuries will work, too.

So NCLB ushered in the era of high stakes testing, and within a few years, the cheating began. With 2014 as the deadline to get 100% students above average, American schools were being steadily divided into two groups-- schools that were failing and schools that were cheating. It is of course particularly tempting to cheat when it's impossible to win by legitimate means.

Some cheaters were caught and suffered huge consequences, like the Atlanta teachers who had their lives and careers trashed. Some large cheating scandals, like the one in DC under former honcho She Who Will Not Be Named, don't seem to affect anyone's reputation in the slightest. And those are just the obvious examples. Other schools find less obviously-naughty ways to game the numbers, from the widespread charter practice of pushing out low scoring students (Success Academy got-to-go list, anyone?) to the many public schools that decided to spend less time on education and more time on test prep. Heck, we can go all the way back to the Texas Miracle under future Bush Secretary of Ed Rod Paige was actually a fraud (my personal favorite technique-- holding a potentially low-scoring student back for one year, then leapfrogging two year ahead so that they skipped the testing year entirely).

This story out of Texas is a new variation-- cheating with a side of privacy violation and abuse of data. The plan was actually pretty simple. In fact, I'll guarantee you that the Cora Kelly School for Math, Science and Technology is certainly not the only school to think of it, and probably not the only school to do it.

They just used the data to identify students whose numbers were probably going to be bad on the BS Test. Then they called those families and reminded them that they have the right to opt out of testing. Three dozen parents did so, helping the school skew its numbers a little higher.

The only nice thing you can say on the school's behalf is that nobody has popped up to try to justify this, which is appropriate because not only is straight-up cheating, but it's also using testing data to single students and their families out for not-so-nice special treatment. I have no quarrel with opting out, which is every parents' right and just generally a good idea because there are no useful benefits in the BS Tests. But to target some families like this is very Not Cool.

You will never hear me speak in support of cheating. You will never hear me say that the odious and indefensible BS Tests justify cheating. But while high stakes testing does not justify cheating, it certainly incentivizes it.If you tell your child that you'll give them fifty dollars for a rose, thinking that will encourage said child to start a garden and plant a rose bush and learn how to care for and water it, even though you live in a land frozen tundra-- well, you can't be surprised when your child goes and snags a rose from a greenhouse instead of teaching themselves horticulture.

One of the foundational theories of reformsterism is that rewards and punishment will incentivize the desired behavior in schools. By choosing a bad proxy (BS Test scores standing in for actual student achievement) they've created a system of perverse incentives. This doesn't make cheating okay, but you would have to be an idiot to be surprised that the system spawns cheaters.

Leave Those Kids Alone

Pre-K is the growth sector of the privatized school industry. There's no existing institutional structure to sweep aside, and there's near-universal agreement that a good Pre-K foundation is important for all future success, coupled with research indicating that many of our children are already behind on the first day of kindergarten.

Unfortunately, "good Pre-K foundation" is a phrase that has been interpreted in some not-very-helpful ways by not-very-clever people with a not-very-deep understanding of what is developmentally appropriate for a four-year-old. Google "kindergarten is the new first grade" and you get over 5,000 results. Because some folks are just certain that what three- and four-year-olds need is academic preparation, direct instruction, and, of course, tests that let us measure the outcomes.

The research on the effectiveness is a huge muddy mess (made more muddy by the continued absence of a reliable and meaningful measure of school effectiveness in general). Some of the research has been rather alarmingly headline-generating, like the Stanford study that suggests that delayed kindergarten enrollment reduces the possibility of developing ADHD.

Now the folks at Defending the Early Years have published a short piece by Lilian Katz that provides a useful framework for explaining and understanding why some approaches to early childhood education are not useful.

Lilian Katz is professor emerita of early childhood education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as well as principal investigator for the Illinois Early Learning Project. Her study of and advocacy for early childhood education is extensive and spirited.

"Lively Minds: Distinctions between academic versus intellectual goals for young children" is a four page report with one page of cover and another one of endnotes-- so we can cut to the chase pretty quickly and easy. I've read it, but you should probably go ahead and read it, too.

First, Katz establishes what the goal for early childhood ed must be beyond a mix of free play and formal instruction:

In the early years, another major component of education (indeed for all age groups) must be to provide a wide range of experiences, opportunities, resources and contexts that will provoke, stimulate, and support children's innate intellectual disposition.

And then, as the title suggests. Katz distinguishes between academic and intellectual goals.

Academic goals are centered on "mastery of small discrete elements" usually connected to reading; these skills are subject to worksheets, drill, and other exercises aimed at literacy goals. "The items learned and practiced have correct answers, rely heavily on memorization, the application of formulae versus understanding, and consist largely of giving the teacher the correct answers that the children know she wants." So all the sit in your desk, do the tasks assigned, perform behaviors that please the teacher.

Intellectual goals "are those that address the life of the mind in its fullest sense (e.g. reasoning, predicting, analyzing, questioning, etc.) including a range of aesthetic and moral sensibilities."  This is about children making sense out of the world and pursuing their own curiosity.  Asking questions. Figuring it out. Analyzing and understanding ideas. This is about learning how to be fully human, how to be in the world.

Katz is not arguing that academics have no place in the early ed classroom. But she quickly and succinctly puts them in their proper place.

An appropriate curriculum in the early years is one that includes the encouragement and motivation of the children to seek mastery of basic academic skills, e.g. beginning writing skills, in the service of their intellectual pursuits.

I've talked about this for years-- one of the major problems of the modern reformy era is that it turns schools upside down. Students are made to serve the school instead of the other way around. Students must master skills and properly perform on tests because the school needs them to produce the "outcomes" that will allow the school to survive. Katz reminds us that it's supposed to be the other way around-- that the school serves the student by providing them with skills that the student can use to become her best, truest self and to carve out a place in the world. The purpose of teaching students this stuff is not so the student can perform for the school's benefit, but so that the skill and knowledge can benefit the student by helping the student create a life.

Katz follows up with a couple of other important points.

First, while it may be true thatstudents from poor backgrounds may lack early exposure to certain academic skills, it does not follow that "they lack the basic intellectual dispositions such as to make sense of experience, to analyze, hypothesize, predict." Even if they haven't been read to at home, Katz says, it is still reasonable and helpful to assume "that they too usually have lively minds."

Second-- well, second is a really a two-fer. Intellectual disposition can be damaged by "excessive and premature formal instruction," but it's not going to be strengthened by mindless or banal activities (she cites a year-long sharing time built around teddy bears). Do meaningful stuff. Or as we like to say in my family, children may be young, but they aren't dopes. They're just tiny human with fewer skills and less live experience.

Katz next looks at short- and long-term effects of early academic instruction. She notes that while there is research to support the notion that early brain stimulation is good for early brain development, there is no real reason to believe that academic instruction qualifies as brain stimulation. The differences that show up in research about the long-term effects of early education seem to Katz to be linked to what kind of instruction we're talking about.

Short term "benefits" can be shown from formal instruction aka basic test prep; more test prep = better test results-- oops, I mean, of course, "increased student achievement." So short term this sort of crap-- oops, I mean, this instructional model-- looks like it's working, but in the long term, not so much. In other words, the damage isn't evident till later.

Also-- and this was a surprise-- it appears that early formal instruction is in the long run more damaging to boys than to girls. This could be neurological (girls brains grow faster) or social (girls are more often taught to be compliant and passive). We don't really know yet.

Katz' recommendation is brief and clear:

Early childhood curriculum and teaching methods are likely to be best when they address children's lively minds so that they are quite frequently fully intellectually engaged.

Katz makes a lot of sense, and while she's a specialist in her particular field, I can't help noticing that much of what she says here about four-year-olds also applies to the sixteen-year-olds that enter my classroom every day. 

Can Evidence Improve America's Schools?

That's the question asked by Mike Petrilli (Fordham Institute) asks over at the Fordham blog.

The piece harkens back to Chester Finn's 1986 book titled, unironically, What Works. And the piece also ties into Petrilli's ongoing series about how to drive change in education. After noting that nothing from Finn's work has ever really gotten traction, Petrilli bemoans our benighted edu-state.

Education remains a field in which habit, intuition, and incumbency continue to play at least as large a role as research and data analysis.

Petrilli has, as is his wont, stacked the deck from the first framing of the issue. He could as easily have written that education is a field in which experienced and trained professionals continue to rely on their own judgment rather than the kibbitzing of non-professionals outside the field. But absent the framing, I'll allow him this-- not a lot of outside research makes much of an impression on how schools function.

So the first question is why not? And Petrilli has a list of answers from Vivian Tseng (W.T.Grant Foundation), Tom Kane (Harvard Center for Reformy Education Policy Research) and Michael Barber (Overlord of Pearson's World-Conquering Data-Hungry Corporate Monstrosity).  The list is interesting, albeit not exactly on point.

Limited supply. Maybe there's more research than there used to be, but there are still many educational questions for which there are no research-based answers.

Too much junk. "Education is awash in a deluge of reports, journal articles, emails, tweets, and news stories" that all make claims to research-based pronouncements. And yet, much of it is junk.These two supply issues already raise some points for debate. Petrilli says that v"rigorous studies have made a big impact on teacher evaluation (for better or worse)" and I'd be inclined to argue just how rigorous the studies were that gave us VAM. There's also a certain irony in this observation coming from a guy at Harvard Ed Policy, arguably an advocacy group masquerading as a think tank masquerading as a university department. That kind of multi-mask mummery has given us an unending supply of marketing baloney masquerading as research.

Add to this the growing recognition of a problem in the sciences in general and education research in particular-- the paucity of research replication. Beloved long-held research findings are dropping like flies, to the point that some science is being called broken.  Bottom line-- there may be even more junk than we realize.

Poor Dissemination. School administrators don't check the What Works Clearing House very often. Research outlets do a bad job of pushing out their works of blinding genius.

Ideology. Damn ed college professors. "They’re fundamentally opposed to the reform agenda, measuring schools via student outcomes, and hard-nosed quantitative analyses." Petrelli's tongue is in his cheek here, but the list does touch on something important-- part of the reformy stance has been not so much "here's a technique for better education" as it has been "your entire map of the world is wrong." Most of us remain unconvinced.

Habits and Practices in schools and districts. So maybe we're just not open to new research. Maybe we're tired of the "reform of the month." Maybe (and this is me talking now) reformsters sound like that guy in the old joke-- "Are you going to believe me, or your own eyes?"

Because what's going on daily in schools is not just habits and practices. It's research and data collection. I start a new lesson. I scan the faces of my students, looking for signs of reactions, in particular reactions that signal understanding or confusion, engagement or cutting out. I ask some questions. I gauge the answers. I hand out a practice sheet. I watch  them work at it. We correct it, and I collect to check for particular patterns of understanding or confusion. That's ten minutes of my class, and I've already collected a ton of data and tested a mountain of techniques. I do that all day, every day. When some guy shows up to say, "I've never done your job, and I've never watched you do your job, and I don't know your kids, or your school or your community or you, but I would like to tell you how you should totally change what you do based on one flawed piece of research with ten bits of data, and by the way, I'm hoping to make a ton of money by selling this to you--" Well, that's just not a pitch I'm buying. I'm an education researcher every day of my professional life.


So the list of reasons is a little incomplete. What does Petrilli propose as possible solutions?

Book it. Basically, publish your research in book form so that people who read books will find it. "Develop evidence-based book that might have an impact." And I was almost nodding along with this one, but then he tossed out Doug Lemov's odious Teach Like a Champion as an example, which is kind of like using Art of the Deal as an example of a way to teach economics.

Get together. Again, he's onto something in noting that most teachers get techniques and ideas from people that they personally know and trust. But from there he jumps to the notion that folks with ed ideas to plug should "do a better job partnering" with groups that already exist, and that's not false, but the problem there is also not knew-- it is hard to "partner" with people when your idea of "partner" is "I'll talk and you'll listen. I'll sell and you'll buy. You'll scratch my back, and I'll help you scratch my back." He also likes the ideas of maybe forming new networks which-- come on. Reformsters have been trying to form new grass roots networks from the top down for the past several decades, from the Center for Education Reform to StudentsFirst. Surely we already have enough astroturf.

Go small. Again, not an entirely bad idea. Petrelli suggests that instead of broad global big scale studies, why not small-scale studies that give us information about very specific, very focused situations. Which-- let's be honest-- is what many education researchers have been producing without admitting it. After all, how much education research is there that applies only to small groups of sophomore from one specific university. A great deal of research does only apply to small, narrow situations-- researchers just haven't been willing to admit that they haven't found the solution for everyone everywhere.

Look, as I said above, evidence improves America's school every single day. Every half-decent classroom runs on evidence that the teacher-researcher gathers and processes constantly, often with several replications of the study in a single day. We try new things and we immediately find out how well they work. We share what our research has uncovered (at least, we do in schools where our job security and don't depend on "beating" our colleagues) and we pick up ideas from our larger web of connections (our Personal Learning Networks, as the current jargon puts it).

The problem with much of what Petrilli and Finn before him call "evidence-based" is that the evidence sucks. We are stuck right now in a period when a bunch of influential people actually imagine that the scores from a narrow, badly-constructed test taken by disinterested students is somehow evidence of anything at all. I can't say this enough times. The scores from the Big Standardized Tests are not evidence of a single damned thing.

Meanwhile, the evidence I collect in my classroom is immediate, actionable, and directly impacts instruction and my students' achievement. The kind of research and evidence and growth and development that teachers do every day is the lifeblood of pretty much every school where the process hasn't been choked to death by some lousy administrator or a dopey CMO that that already thinks it knows everything and need not listen to teachers. The real question Petrilli is asking is, "Can we tap into that, inject our own stuff into the bloodstream, and somehow get the process to move in the direction we want it to?" But if we're going to inject it into the heart and soul of the school, it had better be something other than lumpy, clotted junk.

Virtually Teaching

"Teacher Shortage Crisis Forces Districts To Innovate"

I get emails, often from folks who are thrusting their PR releases blindly into the blogosphere. Somebody or something told them I'm an education blogger, and so they add me to a mailing list, and mostly I don't pay attention. But the subject line that appears above caught my attention, and so I read my email from Shelly Smith, PR Manager for Proximity Learning, Inc., and consequently got to learn about one more way people are trying to make a buck or ten in the edu-biz.

By virtually teaching.

Proximity Learning might be one of the more ironic names out there, because what they actually deal in is what we used to call distance learning. I'll tell you more about how they work in a moment, but first, let me introduce you to the guys who came up with this outfit.

Andrew Polito is co-founder, COO and Vice President of the company. He has an edu-pedigree as the son of famed Tuscon edu-gadfly Sam Polito. He has a background running IT for a district, teaching ESL oversees, and generally getting involved in China Stuff. His undergrad work was in liberal arts and East Asian Studies.

Polito's co-founder is PLI CEO is Evan Erdberg. Erdberg is listed as a co-founder, but his LinkedIn account shows him as CEO since 2014, though the company says it was founded in 2008. Anyway, before PLI, , Erdberg worked in sales for Teachscape, a company specializing in "human resource management" that I once described as a place where the manufactured crisis in education meets the opportunity to make money from it. He also spent six years with Knowledge Delivery Systems, where one of his accomplishments was developing "a strategy to enter three new market verticals with our existing products that increased revenue by 25% and expenses by only 5%." Prior to that-- marketing, marketing and more marketing. His education-- a BA in Marketing and Management (Franklin and Marshall) and an MBA in Organizational Leadership (University of Edinburgh).

In the whole management team, there are two managers (Human Resources and Teacher Effectiveness) with actual teaching in their background. The three lead teachers include one elementary teacher and two whose background is in teaching Chinese.

That fits the PLI origin story, which says that PLI was founded (as TCG Global) in 2008 to meet the new crisis in world language instruction. Since then, they have expanded their offerings. But their basic format remains the same-- using the internet for virtual teaching.

See, everyone used to be short Chinese teachers and American Sign Language teachers, but nowadays, everyone is short all kinds of teachers, and the folks at PLI smell opportunity. Via e-mail, here's how Erdberg explained it to me:

Each student has access to a computing device such as a Chromebook, Laptop, Ipad, Tablet, etc. When they come into class they log in to our online software and they actually see our teacher.  Our teacher will then also see them through the webcams on there computing device.  Our teacher will then lead class in the same way a teacher physically there would.  In every classroom there in a sub/facilitator/parent etc. that assists with classroom management.  Our teacher also adopts the schools curriculum, using there books and lesson plans, there grading policy, and we set up the classes to the bell schedule of each school we work in.  Students can raise there hand during class to ask questions, be called up to the "whiteboard" by the teacher to show work, etc.  All assignments are done online in our Learning Management system along with grading etc.  We are effectively able to find and hire fantastic teachers and deliver them to students that would otherwise have a substitute or an unqualified teacher. 

And here's what that looks like in action...




Erdberg was happy to answer other questions as well. School districts hire PLI on a per-class basis, with an allowance of up to thirty seats per class. And when I asked him about costs to the district, he told me

The cost to hire one of our teachers is about 25% lower than hiring a full time teacher since they are not paying healthcare, pension costs, taxes, union negotiated wages, 401k, etc. They only pay a set fee to us.

I wondered exactly who PLI would hire to teach-- after all, working teachers are, well, working when these courses need to be presented. Erdberg says they hire a large number of teachers on maternity leave as well as recent retirees-- folks who want to stay in the game, but prefer working part-time and/or from home.

I imagine the technical issues are legion. I wonder how extensive a lab there would be in the PLI teacher's kitchen, and the production values and camera work have to be an issue as well. In the example video above I was dying to have control over camera position, because the chosen angle made it challenging to see what the teacher was trying to show. And PLI teachers are supposed to adopt the hiring school's curriculum, but if the school doesn't have someone teaching that course (hence the need to hire PLI) I have to wonder just how useful the curriculum is.

I can see the value of PLI's original mission, perhaps because I work in precisely the kind of school district that could never offer something like courses in Chinese unless it was through this kind of distance learning arrangement.

But I am reminded of the mission creep of Teach for America, an enterprise that started out with the noble mission of filling empty teaching positions but eventually, flush with Big Money and Important Friends, became a way to replace and supplant actual existing teachers.

PLI is currently in California, Virginia, Kentucky, New Jersey and Texas (they are based in Austin); here's the list that Smith sent me of participating districts (here's a newspaper story about the Greenville, MS district)

• Richmond City Public Schools, (Capital of VA)
• Kansas City Public Schools (Largest City in MO)
• Columbus City Public Schools (Largest City in OH)
• Cincinnati Public Schools (3rd Largest City in OH)
• San Antonio ISD ( 2nd largest city in TX) 
• Garland ISD (12th Largest City in TX)
• Stockton USD (13th Largest city in CA)
• Greenville Public Schools (Located in the deep south of MS)
• Bibb County School District (The 4th Largest district in GA) 
• Clovis Municipal Schools (10th Largest district in NM)
• Quakertown Community School District, PA
•  Ecorse Public Schools, MI
• St. Helena Parish Schools, LA
• Mainland Regional School District, NJ

Are these districts that have all been forced to "innovate" in the face of a teacher shortage, or are we working on innovative ways to avoid actually hiring full-time, benefit-receiving, pension-funding teachers? Does this help solve the "teacher shortage," or does it make it less necessary to even think about it? The usual reformy players are not in evidence with PLI (it may involve too many actual trained teachers for their tastes), but I'm always a little leery of any chance for folks to say, "Hey, look! We don't actually have to hire real teachers any more!" Of course, distance learning has been around for a while, offering some real benefits but failing to gain traction. And I have my doubts about the technology's ability to interest or engage digital natives. But this is a thing that is now out there in the world. Watch for a virtual teacher coming to the classroom next door. A little less human, but at least more cheap.

Mother Jones: Black Teachers Matter

I usually save my reading recommendations for Sunday, but if you read one article this week, it must be "Black Teachers Matter" by Kristina Rizga at Mother Jones.

Rizga addresses the all-important question of why we're missing so many black teachers in this country (and she does it far more thoughtfully than the folks at Brookings) by focusing on one school in the Philadelphia district. It is a sad and frustrating tale, and it shows how black teachers have become the canaries in the educational coal mine. The lack of black teachers is a problem in and of itself, a problem that needs to be addressed-- but it is also a symptom of the larger disease of education reform.

Rizga has done her homework. Some of the data points are familiar, like the huge drop in black teachers in some urban settings-- 18.5% in Philly, 40% in Chicago, and a whopping 62% in New Orleans.

And some of the details were new to me-- the Boston Consulting Group estimates that every child who attends a charter school adds $7,000 to district expenses.

This is the story of how Broad Academy graduates like Hite of Philly are trained to "right-size" districts, how reformers have prioritized charters over integration, how the destruction of schools has become part of the destruction of the inner city.

Most of all it's a clear, direct look at how cutting schools out of a community slices right through the heart of those community's ties. Why are we losing and missing so many black teachers? Because like most schools in the country, inner city schools, non-wealthy schools, non-white schools get many of their teachers from the pipeline that runs right from the heart of their own community, and when you cut the school's ties to the community, you sever that pipeline. And if that doesn't do enough damage, you then replace that community based school with a school that is either colonial in nature, with outsiders coming to impose their view on the community school (because, you know, Those People aren't really fit to educate their own children), or you scare the school that hasn't yet been shut down, scare it into submitting to the imposed agenda just to stay alive.

Chris Emdin, an associate professor of education at Columbia University and the author of For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood...and the Rest of Y'all Too, told me that many black educators leave because they are forced to become the kind of teachers they resented when they went to urban schools. "They want to teach in urban spaces because they want to undo that damage that they've experienced," Emdin, a former teacher, told me. "They say, 'I hated school. I want to teach math, English, science in an engaging way.' And the minute you try to be more creative, the principal says, 'Nope. You gotta do more test prep. You gotta follow the curriculum.' At every turn they are being told that they can't do what they know in their spirit and heart and soul is the right thing to do. It's causing teachers to leave, students to fail, and it's making these schools factories of dysfunction."

Another piece of research I wasn't familiar with-- a Center for American Progress study that shows that urban schools spend far more time on test prep, because they have so much more riding on the results.

This is an important story, fully researched and well-told, that simultaneously gives a clear and nuanced picture of one particular school, but also pulls back focus to show the larger pattern of what is happening to our schools and our communities. You will see the link to this story in many of your social media spaces, and you should follow the link when you have a few minutes to read the whole piece. This is required reading for anyone remotely connected to education.

Read this article.

Chester Finn, the Death of Democracy, and Opposites Day

So today, conservatives hate tradition, and democracy is increased by taking away the vote.

Behind the paywall at Wall Street Journal, Chester Finn (honcho emeritus of the Thomas Fordham Institute), Bruno V. Manno (Walton Foundation), and Brandon Wright (Fordham) are happy to announce the death of one more piece of democracy in this country.

The trio reports that charter schools are spearheading a "quiet revolution" in local control. Because, like Reed Hastings (Netflix), they are happy to see the local elected school board die.

Oh, the elected school board was fine back in the day. "This setup functioned well for an agrarian and small-town society in which people spent their entire lives in one place, towns paid for their own schools, and those schools met most of the workforce needs of the local community." But this set-up does not work for a "country of mobile and cosmopolitan citizens." Not with money coming from the state and feds, and not when "discontent with educational outcomes is rampant." What does that mean? Where is the evidence? What do you mean?! Didn't you hear him? The discontent is rampant! Rampant, I tell you!

Also, they want you to know that some school districts are really, really big. So big that elected boards are no longer "public spirited civic leaders" but are now a "gaggle of aspiring politicians and teacher-union surrogates." Because gaggles of aspiring politicians are far worse than gaggles of aspiring financial masters of the universe. Hedge fund managers are known for their altruism (remember how altruistic Wall Street was back in 2008). Not that these guys are going to mention that the folks behind the great charter revolution are mostly hedge funders and money changers.

So, on opposites day, conservatives like Finn, Manno and Wright are opposed to one of the oldest democratic traditions in this country. But wait-- the bulletins from Bizzaro World are still coming in.

Yet far from undermining local democratic control, these new schools are reinventing it...

Well, yes. Kind of like Jim Crow laws tried to reinvent freedom for black folks.

Because these boards function more like nonprofit organizations than political bodies or public agencies, their members need not stand for election. Being generally union-free, they don’t have the headaches of collective bargaining.

"Function like nonprofit organizations" is weasel wording of the highest order. I live in the shadow of UPMC, a nonprofit healthcare giant that turns huge profits and employs some of the highest paid executives and board members around. We need to get past the notion that nonprofits can't be as  money-grubbing and rapacious as for-profit companies, because they absolutely can.

And with freedom to engage and deploy principals and teachers, and to adjust budget, curriculum and instruction to do their students the most good, charter schools are attracting to their boards selfless citizens and community leaders who see a plausible chance to promote change.

Which is a pretty way to say that the unelected operators of the school district can do whatever the hell they want to whomever the hell they want to do it to, and not have to answer to anyone. That's the dream here-- no answering to unions or taxpayers or damned government busybodies-- just the sweet freedom to rule over your domain as an all-powerful CEO.

The boys also talk about "confederations" of similar schools, by which they mean big business charter chains. And they take a moment to whinge about how charters get fewer government monies and so must depend on the kindness of philanthropists and "entrepreneurial energy" aka investors.

Established education interest groups—always more attentive to adult jobs than to kids’ learning—fight them relentlessly, as do a few civil-rights groups aligned with the unions. Some charter leaders and board members have been guilty of self-dealing and corrupt behavior.

Yes, those damned unions, trying to take away power from the rightful Masters of the Universe. And here comes another favorite charter cheerleader refrain-- These are a new species of public school, "open to all comers, paid for by taxpayers, and licensed by the state." Well, two out of three ain't bad.

What accountability do charters face? If they fail to meet standards of academic performance or fiscal soundness, charters are "supposed to be closed or restarted with fresh leadership." And that's absolutely it, because this section started with the phrase "But that's where democracy comes in," but now a paragraph later, democracy is a no-show. Voters don't get a say. Taxpayers don't get a say. Charters resist transparency vigorously. And if you are a parent who's unhappy with some aspect of the school, you can vote with your feet-- that's it. Any other kind of vote is off the table.

We've seen it over and over. Check out just this single report from NBC News, profiling how the closing, turning over, or general charterizing of schools is invariably accompanied by a loss of voting rights and voice for non-wealthy, non-white communities.

Of course, privatizing means the death of democracy for the sorts of people who don't read the Wall Street Journal. But the old kind of local control (sometimes known as democracy) is obsolete. What the world really needs is for elected officials to be replaced by boards composed of our Betters, the rich and powerful folks who need to run things without interruption from the Lessers who keep yelping and squawking and demanding some kind of voice or vote. Democracy, as these guys define it, is enhanced by giving fewer people less say. Because on opposites day, the fewer votes you get, the more democracy you have. As long as only the Right People, the Betters, have most of the money, most of the power, and most of the votes, well, then, democracy is thriving. At least on opposites day.