PA: State High Court Will Hear Anti-School Tax Lawsuit

Can a court overrule an elected school board when it comes to taxation? The Pennsylvania State Supreme Court is one step closer to deciding just that in a lawsuit that has been kicking around for a couple of years now.

I wrote about this case in some depth back in 2016, and I'm going to quote liberally from myself.

Fun fact: One of Lower Merion's most famous alumni

The short version of the story is this: Lower Merion schools raised taxes, and a taxpayer in the district hated the idea enough to sue over it. The initial decision was in the plaintiff's favor, and the judge (Senior Judge Joseph A Smyth) in the case threw out the district's tax rate. This obviously has all sorts of scary implications for school districts across the state, and so the case has been working its way up through the legal system. The district has been losing, but Commonwealth Court stopped the appeals process on a technicality. The State Supreme Court has now sent the case back down, saying the technicality doesn't matter-- just decide the case on its merits. 

Let me recap the particulars of the case because, not surprisingly, this is a case in which nobody is looking like an angel.

It's the state itself that has set the stage for this baloney.

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 choices and 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.

In this climate, stashing a big pile of money in the bank is not an unusual district move. On the other hand, Lower Merion seems to have been pretty aggressive in building up its rainy day fund.

Lower Merion is 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.

But before we throw up our hands and declare shenanigans on the district, let's look at the plaintiff, who is not exactly unfamiliar to the court system.

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. The district's attorney has claimed that he simply jumped past the proper procedure:

“There was another procedure he was supposed to follow, the way it should have been done is through the budget process, and then through the Department of Education, which is the way these things are supposed to be done,” said Putnam.

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. 

The implications here are fairly huge; should Wolk prevail, we'll live in a state where charter, voucher, and other private school parents could sue the public school system every time it even thought about raising taxes, using the court system to help maintain a two-tiered system of schooling. 

And if that wasn't enough, the plaintiff's also indicated in the original suit that they would like the board stripped of authority and replaced by a state-appointed overlord. Of course, we have a system for stripping elected officials of authority-- it's call an election-- but like many reform-minded folks, these plaintiffs appear to object to democracy when it affects their wallets. 

So, the case will be heard and decided, and then the loser will appeal it to the State Supreme Court, and we'll finally see if the court system is willing to override democracy. It's a shameful mess, and shame on the school district for making such an easy target of themselves, and shame on Arthur Wolk for deciding that he should be the arbiter of what students do or don't deserve.

Stay tuned. 

Will Education Suffer (Again) In 2020

I have about as much desire to start working on the 2020 Presidential election as I have to jab pointy sticks covered with habanera sauce into my soft fleshy parts. But I am beginning to suspect that we have little choice.

You can see the problem by looking at the early "favorites" for the Dems.

Consider, for instance, Cory Booker. Booker is charismatic and s already working on his ground game. And he is squarely located in the corporate wing of the Democratic Party. I could pull up a c purple dozen progressive critiques of Booker, but in many ways this piece from the hard right captures the problem pretty clearly. The writer was really upset that Booker was taking a stand against Betsy DeVos as secretary of education because previously Booker had been a huge fan of hers.

Here he is back in 2013, standing before DeVos's organization, the American Federation for Children, forcefully arguing for his pro-school choice credentials.



Just a youthful error, and maybe he has since evolved? Here he is delivering the 2016 keynote address for AFC, praising them and encouraging them to keep doing their great work.



Or there's Beto O'Rourke, who is unlikely to happen in 2020, but whose shimmering star is also instructive. He did campaign against some aspects of education reform, but as the 74 points out, his wife operates a charter school and has been an active advocate for expanding choice in Texas. And as many people who aren't progressive Democrats have noted, his voting record is more conservative than the average Texas Democrat.

The DeVos brand has now become so closely associated with the toxic Trump Presidency, it's easy to lose sight of the broad support she has received for years. Sure, she ended up as Trump's ed secretary, but there were plenty of candidates who would have been happy to point her, including-- at least in the early stages of the campaign-- Hillary Clinton.

By being so spectacularly awful, Trump can potentially create a big problem for education voters in 2020. Let's put it this way-- would you be willing to let Trump have another term because the Democratic candidate doesn't denounce charter schools forcefully enough? I'm pretty sure I won't be. And that, combined with the number of Democrats who are still in the reformy choice camp, is our problem.

"You can't win this election unless you support public education" is not going to be a credible threat. So what do we do? Well, I'm not a trained political strategist, but I have some thoughts, and one of them is that we need to have this conversation sooner rather than later. Here, in no particular order, are some thoughts.

Raise the strategic costs. Chances are that Democratic candidates are going to want to use the pool Trump ceded them by his awfulness. There will be a strategy session about running mostly as a Democrat, but throwing in some more conservative positions to woo GOP v voters who are unhappy with Trump, but reluctant to vote Dem. We need to advocate hard for choice/charter policies NOT to be one of those bones that the Democrats throw to sad Republicans.

Union strength. The NEA and AFT had been on the wrong side of so many reform issues until it was too late, and they made some seriously stupid calls for the 2016 election. It would be really nice if they could avoid a repeat of those botches. We know the way that happens. The unions refused to scold Arne Duncan until membership finally forced them to. The unions were very vocal in their support of Common Core until membership pushback muted that support.

Educate the politicians. The real position of politicians when it comes to public education is "I have no idea." They know what their aids tell them, and their aids know what advocates tell them, and the majority of advocates are in the choice-privatize camp. And politicians are trying to play catch-up on the issue. Education in the not too distant past was still a "safe" issue like apple pie and kissing babies, and many politicians are still trying to catch up to the new reality that education is now a complicated debate that requires you to Know Things and Take Actual Positions. But politicians can learn; Clinton thought espousing choice was a slam dunk (heck, lots of corporate donors told her so) but after moments like being booed by NEA members, she learned to identify some of the problems well enough to panic her pro-choice donors. In short, politicians can be educated about some of the problems with charters, choice, vouchers, and other reformy ideas. And really, we should already be doing this, all the time.

Vote in 2019. Off-off year elections matter. Because they are exclusively local, they happen close to the ground. They send a message about what the grass roots are thinking, so get out there and vote for school board member, county dog catchers, and city councilpersons.

2020 presents us with some real troublesome possibilities. We could end up with a better President and a worse secretary of education. DeVos has been truly awful so far, from favoring the rights of money-makers over anyone else, and going after civil rights with a hatchet. But as much as she loves choice and vouchers, her belief in federal hands off has kept her from dismantling public education as aggressively as someone else might. Imagine She Who Will Not Be Named, former DC chancellor, making a comeback as USED secretary-- and she is nominally a Democrat.

2020 may end our nation's current mess (or it may not), but it seems unlikely that it will bring relief for public education. The minimum preparation we need to do is getting over the fantasy that some Democratic savior will sweep in and make things right. We will need more than the fantasy. We can certainly offer thoughts and prayers, but as always, backing them up with real action would be even better.

[Update: If you want to be really alarmed about Cory Booker, read this piece from earlier in his career.]

For Your Christmas Listening Pleasure

It's family time here at the Curtmudgucation Institute, but for your holiday enjoyment, if you've had enough of the same old same old on the radio, here is a big mixed bag of holiday music for you.

ICYMI: The You're Probably Not Reading This Edition

Yes, we're right in the thick of it, so many of you are busy with a hundred things other than your usual internet diet of education goodies. But the world keeps spinning, so here are some pieces to look at while you're enjoying vacation.

Can Charters Be Reformed? Should They Be?  

Carol Burris offers five reasons that charter schools cannot become a productive part of the education landscape.

Pa Changes How It Measures Schools-- But Will Anybody Pay Attention?   

Pennsylvania will now check to see if schools are Future Ready. One example of the new post-test-centric evaluations under ESSA.

Why Education Policy's Big Listening Moment Doesn't Involve Much Listening

Rick Hess with some reform self-evaluation. Some good points made here.

Top Ed Tech Trends and Stories  

Audrey Watters signs off for her final wrapup of the ed tech stories of this year (which seem a lot like the stories of the previous year).

Cut And Paste End Of Year Letter for Education Advocates 

Rick Hess makes two appearances this week, and this one is good for a chuckle.

Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town Or Not.     

Nancy Flanagan looks at how Christmas lands in the midst of a challenging time this year.

Why Do Keep Falling For School Scams 

A look at the T. M. Landry school scandal, the responses to it, and the reason we'll probably fall for the next one that comes down the pike.



 

8 Reasons Not To Love Personalized [sic] Learning

As we roll into 2019, it becomes increasingly clear that much of the education debate is going to center on Personalized [sic] Learning. I've poked at various parts of PsL at length, but I'm going to respond to someone who just wanted me to lay out the problems in a simple list. Challenge accepted.

First a note on terminology. We're going to have to start distinguishing between Personalized [sic] Learning, which is highly problematic, and personalized learning, which has been a good and worthwhile aim of classroom teachers for decades. The latter is the simple work of a human teacher trying to customize the educational experience to meet the needs and interests of a human child. The sales force for PsL would like you to believe they're selling the same thing. They aren't-- they're selling a adaptive algorithm doling out computer-based education-flavored materials, what is unironically called "mass customization." Here are my reasons for objecting to PsL:

1) The bait and switch. Wouldn't you like to have your child's education customer to meet her specific needs by a caring trained educator? Well, we won't actually give you that, but with this software we can provide sort of almost like it kind of a bit.

2) The lack of evidence. Does this actually work? There's no evidence that it does, though some purveyors are pretzeling themselves int a state by trying to cite things like an old study about tutoring.

3) The destruction of teaching. Personalized [sic] Learning proposes to remove the trained professional persons from the classroom and replace them with "mentors" and tech monitors, leaving students to get their personalized education from a machine.

4) The destruction of schools. If all we need is an internet hook-up, we can not only dismiss with teachers, but we can get rid of the whole "school" thing. We can learn anything from anyone anywhere at any time, which sounds cool until we consider learning cosmology from Bob's Space Stuff School or the Flat Earth Academy.

5) Educational decisions made by tech companies. For the gazillionth time-- software is not delivered by God on a velvet cloud. It comes from humans. If you have educational software created and designed by software engineers, then once again you've got school run by amateurs, a pastiche of biases and prejudices hiding behind the mask of technology. And it will the educational content will be chosen and designed for the delivery system, rather than vice versa-- and that's backwards. Tech companies, for oh so many reasons, should not be in charge of our education system.

6) Data security. These systems must be collectors of massive amounts of data. One of the biggest companies in PsL is Summit, which is backed by one of the biggest social media companies, Facebook, which has spent 2018 showing us all the reasons we can't trust it. From data that's grabbed by shady operators to data that's shared by the companies shady deals, there's an awful lot of data insecurity.

7) More top-downiness. Just like Common Core, PsL flows down from far away places. The computer-centered delivery system is a conduit that flows only one way, with the student being a passive recipient of what the system deals out. You can claim that the system deals materials out based on its careful reading of the student, and even if that weren't a load of baloney, it would still mean that the student is sitting there passively having education done too her.

8) Actually, we've seen this, and it stunk. PsL at its very worst is basically cyber-school, and what we've seen time and time again is that virtual schools don't get the job done. Rocketship Academy didn't change the face of education. Summit Learning is not universally beloved.

There's a great deal to dig through in detail here, and I have and I will, but if you want a quick answer to "Why shouldn't we cheerfully embrace Personalized [sic] Learning, this is it.

The 13th Clown and Best Classroom Practices

Many leading voices of the ed reformist movement have started calling for an emphasis shift from policy to practice. That makes a certain amount of sense; the last two decades provide plenty of evidence that policy can interfere with practice far better than aid it, and ultimately students are educated by classroom practices, not by policy.

But when discussion among edupolicy wonks turns to the use of best practices in the classroom, one complaint inevitably surfaces: "Why aren't more teachers using the proven work of Dr. Wisewhacker on teaching [insert topic here]?" Why is the path from great idea-hood to widespread classroom practice so hard to navigate?

People who ask these questions are rarely actual classroom teachers, nor do they understand just how many people come at classroom teachers with great ideas to market. Yearly, weekly, daily, someone knocks on the classroom door to say, "I've got something for you here that is going to be awesome. You really need this." Sometimes they are ushered to the door by the teacher's boss, or the boss's boss, or the state, or even the feds. Every single one of them claims to be evidence based and research proven. Most of them are lying a little bit; some are lying a lot. Evidence can be a company-run focus group survey of ten people. Research can be a study conducted with a dozen college sophomores. There is enough bad education research in the world to build a model of Kilimanjaro on top of the Grand Canyon, and that's before we even get to all the research that wants to pretend that higher test scores are the same thing as better education (that research is also junk, unless you think the whole point of education is to a high score on a single big standardized test).

Good research that produces solid practices has a 13th clown problem. You may recall the old political observation: if 12 clowns are in a ring slapping each other with herring and falling on banana peels, you can jump into the ring and start reciting Shakespeare, but to the audience, you'll just be the 13th clown.

So how do we filter out and rescue the good stuff?

If the principal walks into a teacher's room and says, "Hey, I've got 143 program and textbook proposals on my desk. Could you go ahead and thoroughly check each one out so we can decide what to get. You know, in your copious free time, " coffee cups will be flying.

Government, at various levels, has tried to take on the job, but that has two major problems. First, the review of practices is invariably done by some non-teacher bureaucrat who can answer questions like "Is this aligned to the standards" but not questions like "Will this actually work in my math class?" Second, the companies that produce materials don't like bureaucrats stepping in to contradict their marketing copy.

And any attempt to get the pipeline flowing smoothly has to address one other issue--cost. Most teachers are too familiar with the experience of gazing longingly at a set of books, a piece of software, or a technique that depends on some pricey gadget, and knowing that there is no hope that they will ever be allowed to buy it.

So is there a working pipeline into classrooms? Sure. The most effective PR for any classroom practice is a trusted teacher saying, "I've done this, and it totally worked." Publishers and other manufacturers of teacher stuff know this; that's one reason that sales forces are filled with former teachers. There is no better source of teacher-trusted research than a classroom. Every classroom is a research lab, and every teacher is gathering data every day--not just columns and numbers but things like how many of which students look lost and which are fully engaged and learning. How does this technique affect the energy in the room? How much confusion persists afterwards? How does it play with the top students? The not-so-top students? Teachers test out techniques every day under authentic field conditions, with actual live students, then tweak and edit those techniques on the fly for maximum effectiveness.

Teachers are the front line experts. Anybody interested in education practices needs to connect with the actual practitioners. Skip the clowns. Go visit the big show.

Originally posted at Forbes   

At The Risk Of Repeating Myself

It can be frustrating to repeat yourself. In a long-running debate such as the one surrounding education, it is easy to find yourself pushing out the same points again and again. Lately, I've heard several folks on the pro-public side (The Resistance, if you like) expressing their frustration (most notably the absolutely awesome Audrey Watters).

I get that. I've put up (checks notes) over 3100 posts on this blog alone, and there's a certain amount of redundancy in there. I'm running out of ways to show that a charter school is not a public school. I feel the repetition in the struggle to write titles for posts-- how many ways are there to say "Florida has done something unspeakably stupid and hostile to public ed"?

Nevertheless, I will continue to repeat myself, and I encourage my compatriots to do the same.
Here's why:

As Educators, We Know the Power of Repetition

"I explained this point to them once, back in September, so I'll never need to explain it to them again," said no teacher ever, unless she was telling a joke. People don't get things in one shot. They need to hear it again and again in order to wrap their brains around it. It's Teacher 101-- you will have to explain the material more than once.

New People Are Entering the Conversation Every Day

It's 2018, and you can still often hear some version of,  "So what's the big deal about that Common Core stuff, anyway?' Education activists suffer from the same problem as any people deeply committed to a particular field of study or advocacy-- spend so much time eating, breathing and sleeping a subject and you can start to forget that the world is filled with people whose daily lives are focused on other things entirely.

The education debates are like an ongoing conversation in which every five minutes a new person walks up and says, "So what are y'all talking about here?' Yes, a recap or new explanation will be redundant for a whole bunch of people who've been there for a while, but news need help working out what's going on.

Repetition Is Important For Messaging

Through sheer dogged repetition, Coke and Pepsi have made themselves the near-universal default for people who want something to drink. They didn't win some debate with a case of RC Cola. They just kept putting their name and their product in front of people all the time.

Why do we think we need eight glasses of water per day? Because we've heard it over and over. Why do so many people believe that the US public education system is terrible? Because we've heard it over and over again.

It may be that educators have trouble accepting this because they are more rooted in the academic world, and in the academic world, you construct your case carefully, articulate it clearly, put it out there once-- and then you move on. You're done. The most repetition you might get is when other people cite your work, but academics do not say, "I think I'll go ahead and rewrite that paper I wrote last month and just put it out there again." That's not how the academic world works.

Politics and PR, however, are a whole other thing. You get your talking points, your key pieces of framing language, and you make sure to get them out there time after time after time. You hire a PR firm or advocacy group to do nothing but put the same points out there again and again and again and again, because that's how you get people to just, say, reflexively think of charter schools as public schools. In fact, in the world of politics and PR, you can get far more "penetration" by repeating a claim than by actually proving it (Exhibit A: The current occupant of the White House).

This is why amplification is so important on social media. The more times we see the same article or essay popping up on our feed, the more we're inclined to believe that the article must be Really Important or Extra Good. Reposting, retweeting, sharing and passing stuff along is a big deal. If you don't, you should.

It's a challenge to repeat the same points, to shout the same alarm into the theater where people mostly ignore your warnings about the fire so that they can watch the rest of the film. Repetition challenges your creativity and your passion for the points you want to make. But it's not a waste of your time; in fact, it may be necessary to get your point across. And you know who understands that really well? All the PR and advocacy experts working for the modern ed reform biz.