Detroit is in turmoil, as reform arrives. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of teachers don’t know if they have a job.
The reform plan closed a bunch of schools and opened another bunch of schools.
That’s reform.
Open some, close some, see if it works, start over.
Sort of like an old game called 52 Pick-up, where you throw all the cards in the air and see where they land.
A reader informed me that CNN deleted all comments on Randi Kaye’s interview with me for the second time.
Here is the link if you are inclined to try for a third time to leave a comment:
Education Week has an article by the always well-informed Alyson Klein that speculates about Romney’s possible choice for Secretary of Education.
The possibilities include:
Jeb Bush, former Florida governor, who shaped the Romney agenda for privatization of the nation’s schools;
Tom Luna, the state superintendent in Idaho who is known for his allegiance to online corporations and his efforts to increase class size;
Joel Klein, the former chancellor of NYC, now selling technology for Rupert Murdoch, another supporter of privatization and opponent of unions, seniority and tenure;
Michelle Rhee, leader of a national campaign to remove all tenure, seniority and collective bargaining fromt teachers;
Chris Cerf, acting commission in New Jersey, who is leading Chris Christie’s push to privatize public schools in that state;
Here is the big surprise:
Arne Duncan, who is seen by Republicans as compatible with Romney’s agenda and, as the article, says, eager to stay on.
There are other names, but it is interesting to realize that at least four of the six listed here are allegedly, nominally Democrats.
A reader remembers that when David Halberstam used the phrase “the best and the brightest,” it was not praise. It was an ironic reference to the seemingly brilliant Harvard graduates at the State Department, the National Security Council, and the think tanks who got us into the war in Vietnam.
You often hear education reformers, including President Obama, talk about how we must have the “Best and Brightest” from the most elite schools enter the teaching workforce to improve education.
I always want to say to say to them, the phrase “Best and Brightest” doesn’t actually mean what you think it means.
When David Halberstam used the phrase “Best and Brightest” for his book on the Vietnam War, he used it ironically to show how these so-called geniuses from the so-called elite colleges took the nation down the path of an insane policy that cost many lives. Even when it became apparent the policy wasn’t working, they continued to double down on it, throwing more soldiers and more money into the conflict, rather than admitting they had been wrong about the whole thing to begin with.
The parallel between the geniuses, the so-called Best and Brightest, in the Kennedy and Johnson administration who brought us the Vietnam War and the Best and Brightest in the Bush and Obama administrations, in the think tanks and non-profits who bring us education reform is striking. It is true that lives are not being lost due to the failed ed policies the reformers continue to pursue, but lives of students certainly are being worsened by these policies, futures, minimized. And as with the Vietnam policy, the reformers refuse to admit when the policies fail – merit pay doesn’t work, sure let’s try it again anyway! Teacher evaluations tied to test scores is untested – sure, let’s give that to the whole country even though we don’t know how it will play out!
I think you can extrapolate the “Best and Brightest” comparison to the rest of the culture and society as well. It is the “Best and the Brightest” that our so-called elite universities have to offer who have brought us such wonderful innovations such as collateralized debt obligations,securitization, Too Big To Fail Banks and all the other things that helped bring about the ’08 collapse (and will undoubtedly help bring about the next one too.) The Best and Brightest have brought us the idea that GMO is the way to feed the world, monocropping and corporate farming is the only way society can grow its food.
Frankly I think we need fewer “Best and Brightest” in our society and more people with the humility to say, “You know, maybe I’m not as smart as I think I am, maybe I shouldn’t hoist my untested policies upon the entire nation.
Residents of Bridgeport, CT, will soon vote in an election for members of their school board.
For reasons to complicated to get into here, the previous unelected school board was declared illegal by the state’s highest court, which ordered a new election.
If you read Jonathan Pelto’s blog, you will get the full story of how an illegal board was put in charge of the district, hired Paul Vallas to be a superintendent for $229k a year at the same time that he runs a consulting business on the side.
Now as the election approaches, one of the members of the illegal board is running for the elected. Although he is a Democrat, he declares that he favors vouchers, which is a historic Republican plank. He favors vouchers even though the money to fund them will decrease the funding of the public schools he want to oversee.
This election will test the residents of Bridgeport. That is, unless the electoral process is not corrupted by an infusion of big money from the Wall Street hedge fund managers who seem to grow on trees in places like Darien, New Canaan, and Greenwich.
The latest evaluation of the Florida voucher program showed that students in voucher schools made academic gains similar to their peers in public schools.
I am old enough to remember the old rhetoric:
Vouchers were going to “save” poor children from “failing” public schools.
Vouchers were going to “close the achievement gap.”
Vouchers were a panacea, all by themselves, for producing high academic achievement.
None of that is true.
If you read very, very carefully, you could find some tiny gains, but no panacea; no closing of the achievement gap.
When does all the high-flown rhetoric end?
Imagine if all those millions had been used to improve the public schools and to unite communities in common purpose.
This is from the report:
Test scores of program participants, 2010-11:
● The typical student in the program scored at the 45th national percentile in reading and
the 46th percentile in mathematics, about the same as in 2008-09 and 2009-10. The
distribution of test scores is similar whether one considers the entire program population
or only those who took the Stanford Achievement Test in the spring of 2010. The
Stanford Achievement Test is the most commonly administered test and is the test most
directly comparable to the FCAT.
● The mean reading gain for program participants is exactly 0 national percentile ranking
points in reading and -0.9 national percentile ranking points in mathematics. These mean
gains are indistinguishable from zero. In other words, the typical student participating in
the program gained a year’s worth of learning in a year’s worth of time. It is important to
note that these national comparisons pertain to all students nationally, and not just lowincome students.
● Test score gains for program participants are virtually identical to those of income-eligible non-participants remaining in Florida public schools. Participating students
gained slightly relative to comparable public school students in 2010-11, though this
difference is not statistically significant. It is important to recall that the participating
students differ from the income-eligible public school students in important ways – their
incomes are substantially lower and their previous test performance in public school
tended to be substantially lower. These differences make direct comparison of gain scores
more problematic. Because families can choose whether to participate in the program, it
is inappropriate to consider the differences in test score gains between FTC Program
participants and their public school counterparts to be caused by program participation.
It is, therefore, best to consider the fact that test score gains are extremely similar
between the public and private sector to be suggestive evidence of little difference in
average performance across the sectors, rather than causal evidence of differential
performance. That said, in past cohorts for whom there existed sufficient data to estimate
the causal consequences of program participation, there was evidence of positive effects
of participation in the FTC program, especially for math. Little has changed in terms of
test scores or factors influencing program participation across cohorts, indicating that one
might infer, albeit with caution, that positive effects found in prior cohorts continued to
the most recent application cohort.
● Recent statistical research has shown that the FTC Program has improved the
performance of Florida public schools to a modest degree. Therefore, the correct
interpretation of the findings in this report are that students participating in the program
have kept pace with the improvements in the public schools associated with the FTC
Program.
Stephen Dyer has prepared this analysis of the Cleveland Plan for the blog at my invitation. The plan has been endorsed by Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson and Ohio Governor John Kasich. Dyer is in a good position to review the proposal because he is the Education Policy Fellow at Innovation Ohio, progressive think-tank, and was previously chairman of the committee in the Ohio House of Representatives that oversaw the redesign of the state’s education funding formula. Before that, he was a journalist, which makes him ideally suited to explain what is happening in the city of Cleveland.
As a former legislator, I tend to roll my eyes whenever someone declares they are doing something “bold”. I’ve heard it used for so many different policies that the word has lost nearly all its meaning for me.
So when I heard that a “bold” plan had been devised for public education in the City of Cleveland, I have to admit I was a bit skeptical. Then I read it. Our report on its strengths and weaknesses is located here at Innovation Ohio’s website. Many of the recommendations in our report were taken by the folks in Cleveland. Many were not.
In short, while the plan represented an attempt to address some much needed programming in this deeply depressed and racially segregated city, the plan struck me as a lot like shifting the deck chairs on the Titanic given the budgetary iceberg that has struck Ohio’s educational system recently. As I have said repeatedly, despite some of the plan’s good attributes, without money, they won’t happen.
The plan is designed as much to help pass a massive local property tax levy to offset massive state funding cuts as it is to reform education.
Most of the plan is right out of the free market reform handbook. It closes “failing” schools. These are defined purely by test scores, as if demographics or any one of a host of other issues don’t cloud those results. It offers up more innovative school designs available for a few children rather than improving innovation for all children. It uses test scores to judge teachers.
The plan also expands the importance of Charter Schools, which in Ohio has a whole different meaning than any other state (I’ll discuss that later), though it created slightly more local oversight of Charters than communities in Ohio previously had. The non-financial portions of the plan dealing with Charters should help create better Charter-Public collaboration. And that’s a positive step, especially in Ohio.
There are some really good ideas, like universal pre-school for all 3 and 4 year olds and early childhood academies to potentially help younger pupils with wraparound services, not to mention some necessary flexibility for the district on disposition of property and other non-academic issues. And the teacher provisions were improved when Cleveland’s teachers were finally consulted. The plan was initially introduced without their input, but, importantly, it has since gained their support.
Missing from the plan’s development, though, was the serious input of the parents of the more than 40,000 Cleveland school children. The plan was driven, instead, by consultants and, primarily, economic panic.
The greatest flaw in this whole plan was nothing done locally, really. It was this: even though the state’s leaders, led by Gov. John Kasich and the Republican General Assembly, lauded the plan (Kasich signed it surrounded by Cleveland school children) and hailed it as a blueprint for future Ohio education reform, they refused to put even a penny into it. There was about a $250 million budget surplus at the state this year, by the way.
Worse than that, the state significantly cut education in Cleveland, and everywhere else, in the most recent biennial budget. Ohio is the only state in the country without a funding formula thanks to this General Assembly, and money for education funding was slashed by $1.8 billion over the previous budget. Cleveland got cut by about $84 million.
So this “bold” plan is once again dependent upon local property taxpayers boldly voting to increase their property tax bill, this time by 50%. That would raise $77 million, about $7 million less than the state cut in this budget. The median income in the Cleveland Municipal School District is a bit more than $22,000, by the way. And these residents are now put in the position of raising their taxes or seeing the wholesale dismantling of their children’s education.
For if the levy fails, the district says, “the schools will face a $50 million deficit next year … will … cut another 700-800 teachers and staff … and will go into fiscal oversight and could be taken over by the State and run at minimum standards.” In addition, a newspaper story said that “the district will also shorten its school day through eighth grade by 50 minutes next school year and cut the number of music, art, library and gym classes for those students as part of the shuffling of staff to handle the layoffs.” The state cuts have forced some Ohio schools to send their Free and Reduced Lunch children home at 1 p.m. with box lunches.
While some may dispute the effectiveness of the Cleveland Plan, I don’t know of anyone who would dispute that a levy failure would do anything but decimate opportunities for Cleveland’s children.
Gov. Kasich said if he lived in Cleveland he would vote for it. However, as Governor, he makes about 7 times Cleveland residents’ median income and doesn’t live in Cleveland.
In order to understand the foundational problem with the Cleveland Plan, it’s necessary to look at Ohio’s education funding history.
The Land Ordinance of 1785 set aside sector 16 of every Ohio township (and future American townships) for a “public school”. The idea was so remarkable that Alexis De Tocqueville mentioned in the early 19th Century that “The originality of American civilization was most clearly apparent in the provisions made for public education.”
About 50 years after Ohio became a state, its constitution was written, which charged the state government with establishing a “thorough and efficient” system of public education. About 150 years after that, Ohio’s Supreme Court ruled four times that it was the state, not the local school board or mayor (only Cleveland is under mayoral control in Ohio), that bears the responsibility of providing an education for the state’s children.
And it declared four times that the way the state was funding schools violated this constitutional principle because it relied too much on local property taxes (which account for about 60% of Ohio’s non-federal education funding) and didn’t calculate the true cost of education.
Yet despite all this rich history of state responsibility for public education, Ohio’s leaders have worked hard to shirk it. Since the state began the Cleveland voucher program in the mid 1990s, Cleveland Municipal School District has lost more than $1 billion to vouchers and Charter Schools, neither of which have, in general, provided better outcomes for students than the Cleveland Municipal School District. There are pockets of excellence in Cleveland’s Charter Schools, but they are dwarfed by the failures.
Regardless of qualitative issues, in Ohio, Charter School funding is particularly troubling, due to the politically, rather than reform, motivated establishment of Charter Schools in Ohio, which is well-documented in the Akron Beacon Journal series Whose Choice? The largest individual political contributors to Ohio Republicans are Charter School Operators like David Brennan and William Lager.
As a result, the state funding is highly skewed toward Charters. They are funded by taking the per pupil amount it would take to educate a child at their public school of residence, then transferring it to the Charter School, even though Ohio Charter Schools pay teachers, on average, about 60% of what the Public Schools do, don’t bus kids and don’t have to adhere to about 200 different regulations that public schools do.
Meanwhile, the state deducts how much a school district can raise locally from how much the state says they need. So if the state says it costs $10 million to educate your children, but you can raise $5 million locally, the state will only pay you $5 million. Charters, meanwhile, get the full $10 million, ostensibly because they can’t raise local revenue.
This overpayment has meant that statewide, Ohio’s public school children who are not in Charter Schools receive 6.5% less state revenue than the state says they need simply because Charter Schools remove so much money ($771 million last school year) it cuts every other child’s per pupil state aid. In Cleveland, the percentage drop is much less severe (about 1%), yet Cleveland students receive a total of $3 million less every year because of this per pupil cut.
To be fair, a panel of Charter and Public school advocates agreed unanimously in 2010 that children should be funded where they attend school, not through the above-described transfer. But that plan is as dead as a Dodo at this point, given the current state leadership team, which has shown little interest in Charter-Public School collaboration.
The Cleveland Plan, though, allows a limited number of Charter Schools (mostly successful ones that are working collaboratively with the district) to collect local revenue for the first time in Ohio. However, they will do so without any cut in their state revenue, which every public school district has to accept. If applied statewide (a real likelihood given what happened in Cleveland and the current state leadership), Charter Schools would not only receive twice as much per pupil state revenue as public schools, they would receive local revenue on top of that, with no compensatory reduction in state money, like every public school has to take. Think the financial deck isn’t stacked against traditional public education in Ohio?
What’s most amazing is two years ago, Ohio had a new funding model that funded elements of an education we knew from objective, peer reviewed articles would have a positive impact on students. And it committed the state to reduce the need for property taxes in Ohio by about $400 for every $100,000 home.
And what kind of commitment would this have represented by the state? Putting aside a little more than 1% of the state budget each year for 10 years for education.
Cleveland would have received $158 million over the next decade from the state to fund smaller classes in K-3, tutors, all-day kindergarten and other elements we know positively impact students. That’s more than double what Cleveland’s November Levy would raise. Here’s a question: Would Cleveland be doing the Cleveland Plan if the state had followed through on this financial and reform promise? Doubtful.
And that is the test of whether the Plan is a function of reform or desperation.
So while Cleveland’s easy embrace of the “Portfolio” design, which has little objective, peer reviewed evidence behind it suggesting it helps kids, is concerning, it’s important to recognize that in Ohio, school districts like Cleveland have to resort to desperate acts to maintain any sort of public education system for its mostly underprivileged children. They would prefer the imperfect system to none at all.
For in Ohio, they will receive little funding assistance from the state. Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson knew this, which is the reason he gave for why he didn’t even ask for any state property tax relief to help defray costs. How sad is it that one of the state’s largest school districts won’t even ask the state for financial help on a major reform package when the state’s constitution says it’s the state’s responsibility to educate children?
To pour more salt in the wound, even when districts pass levies, they aren’t safe from financial strain in Ohio. There is a provision in Ohio law that allows citizens to overturn a local property tax levy, permitting the anti-levy forces a do-over, if you will. A fringe right-wing group is trying to undo a recently passed levy in Westerville this November, with a promise to expand the tactic across the state, if they are successful.
Westerville happens to be the home of Gov. John Kasich, who said he’d vote for Cleveland’s levy.
I wonder whether he’ll support his?
Now that would be bold.
Stephen Dyer is the Education Policy Fellow at Innovation Ohio, a progressive think-tank in Columbus, Ohio.
Prior to joining IO, Dyer was the Chairman of the Ohio House of Representatives committee that oversaw Ohio’s 2009 Education Funding reform, which received the 2010 Frank Newman award from the Education Commission of the States. He remains the only legislator ever honored with a leadership award from the Ohio group that sued the state over its unconstitutional school funding system.
He was an award-winning reporter with the Akron Beacon Journal from 1997 until he joined the Ohio House in 2006.
Three charter schools want to open in St. John’s County in Florida, which is the state’s highest ranking county.
Some of the state legislators, including one of the state senate’s most avid supporters of charters, are surprised. They thought that charters were supposed to rescue students in failing schools, but St. John’s County is known for its excellent public schools.
If approved, the charters will siphon almost $13 million out of the public school budget, requiring at least 200 teacher layoffs. School officials are alarmed. The excellent public schools of St. John’s County won’t be quite so excellent in the future. This is the kind of competition that Jeb Bush put into place, which he wants to replicate across the nation.
Two of the charters would be run by a for-profit charter chain that is already collecting $158 million in revenues from South Florida charters, which includes an annual profit to the firm of $9 million. It’s a very good business indeed.
A reader who runs a charter school wrote a week or so ago and insisted that charters are not deregulated; he asked for examples of state laws and regulations that charters are not required to meet. Here are some that apply in Florida, according to this article:
I asked for news about Detroit.
Detroit is one of the trying grounds for corporate reform.
It is a petri dish for reformers to try out their theories.
The district has an intense concentration of racial segregation and poverty and low test scores.
For reformers, this toxic combination suggests that what is needed is school reform, meaning, charter schools run by private management. No part of the reform plan addresses racial segregation and poverty.
We previously learned that the emergency manager decided to create many new privately managed charters. And he imposed a new contract that laid off teachers and will allow class sizes to soar in K-3 to as high as 41 and in 6-12 to as high as 61.
We also noted that charter leaders in Detroit are compensated with higher salaries than public school leaders.
Here is the latest report from Detroit Free Press columnist Rochelle Riley. The “reform” plan abolished a small school for the deaf, probably because it cost too much. The parent of the profoundly deaf student in this article has been told that her daughter should go to school in Flint, not Detroit, or should be mainstreamed.
And inexplicably, a teacher rated effective, who happens to be one of the few black male elementary teachers in the city or state or nation, doesn’t know if he will have a job. Hundreds of teachers are waiting to hear if they have a job when school starts in a few days.
In short, as Riley observes, “Detroit schoolchildren are caught in a chaos of power, lawsuits, lack of staff and major confusion.”
As a general rule, chaos is not good for children.
This study of the “scalability” of no-excuses charter schools was written by Steven Wilson, who is a supporter of this approach.
The no-excuses teachers agree that test scores are the most important outcome of schooling and the best preparation for college readiness.
He examined the education backgrounds of the teachers in several very successful charter schools in Boston.
83% were graduates of very selective colleges.
These teachers typically work 9-10 hours daily and are on call at any time to assist with homework.
They burn out and leave with frequency, because of the demands of the job and because they have other career ambitions.
This made him wonder about the scalability of the model.
To scale up to have a significant effect, he found, would require that half the graduates of elite universities enter teaching for at least two years, which doesn’t seem realistic.
He assumes that anyone who graduates from a selective college or university will make a better teacher.
Given the limited supply of elite graduates, he concludes that what is needed is tight and specific instructional systems, like the one he is involved in.
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