It seems like only yesterday that Governor RickSnyder appointed an emergency manager for the public schools of Muskegon Heights, which were running a deficit.
The emergency manager turned the district over to Mosaica, a for-profit charter chain.
But Mosaica didn’t make a profit, instead they ran a deficit, and their contract has been canceled“.
“Muskegon Heights Public Schools Emergency Manager Gregory Weatherspoon said the separation came down to an issue of finances. Mosaica, a for-profit company, was running a deficit budget and not making a profit. School officials said the split is not the result of dissatisfaction with academic progress of students in the K-12 Muskegon Heights Public School Academy.
“Weatherspoon said both Mosaica and the charter district board agreed the separation agreement was necessary.
“They came here to do a service for the children,” Weatherspoon said. “They got the job done, but it didn’t fit their financial model… The profit just simply wasn’t there.”
“At the core of the financial problems were investments into the school buildings, which Mosaica leased from the public school district for $1, as well as higher-than-expected special education costs and lower-than-expected enrollment. As the first charter school district in the nation, school officials have acknowledged there was a lot of uncertainty about costs when Mosaica took on the management role two years ago.
“Mosaica recently has had cash flow troubles that resulted in it seeking emergency advances of state aid in order to make payroll, which had to be delayed earlier this month. The management company, based in Atlanta, fronted $761,000 so that staff could be paid, Weatherspoon said.
The company will be repaid that money with a portion of a $1.4 million emergency state loan that Muskegon Heights Public Schools expects to receive on Monday, he said.
“Mosaica’s contract calls for it to receive about a $1 million annual management fee. It was paid the fee the first year of the contract, but not this year. This year, the company will receive $84,000 split over the next three months, which will help cover administrators’ salaries for the rest of the year, said John Gretzinger, an attorney for the charter district.
What do you say? Job well done? No profits to be found? Try, try again? What next?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Wow. It’s like the profit framework doesn’t work for education or something.
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Education should probably always be non-profit. But saying that doesn’t invalidate the general concept of profit, does it?
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No…which is why my comment is clearly about education.
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Unless you invent a different meaning for the word apart from its narrow definition.
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Not surprising. It’s kind of like establishing a bogus private English conversation schools chain called NOVAlaue, owned by a fly-by night president who spends million dollars for his private VIP room and expensive travels from student tuitions.
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But, what??? Business CAN’T do it cheaper and better??? Absolutely shocking!!!
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“Business is business and business must grow,
Regardless of crummies in tummies you know”
Dr. Seuss (if you didn’t already know)
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You mean THE Dr. Suess, the well known economist and student of business and the economy? Clearly you agree, but clever rhymes don’t guarantee truth. Let’s translate: “Business wants children to go to bed hungry.” Is that your view too? How is the business you are running doing? Is that your view of your economic activity?
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Mr. Underhill,
Businesses do not “want” because they ain’t human, despite what the Supreme Court says (you can’t marry one; someone tried). Business must make a profit and grow “regardless” of other factors. If they don’t, they cease to exist. Some businesses have more ethical practices than others, clearly, depending on the people who run them. Maybe you should ask the relatives of x-Cobalt owners? They would know better than me.
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You are certainly right about the cost vs. people approach of GM before it’s bankruptcy. My sense is that most businesses try to be ethical. What I object to is the universal denigration of “business” and “capitalism” by low level bureaucrats like public school teachers who think themselves better morally. But they are paid by all those people employed by businesses. They have mains sale too. The snobbish self-exemption from the filthy business of getting living is fundamentally offensive, and well, of course, not being true. If you take the Sanhedrin’s money you’re as much a Judas as anyone else, and public schools exist because of people working in business. The superior attitude is deeply offensive, especially when it is couched in socialist and communist terms, because those approaches always lead to tyranny. Hypocrisy plus tyranny, a two for one shot arising from public teaching’s sanctimonious attitude. It’s the new Pharisees and Sadducees. And they squawk about separation of church and state, when they are running their own version of a theocratic state, only the “theos,” their God is the state, a clearly Marxist approach. Dictatorship of the proletariat is STILL a dictatorship. So depressing that so many public school teachers do not realize what they are advocating, or if they do, they don’t care or are corrupt.
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That’s just how the educfracking cookie crumbles … get out of town and leave the suckers to clean up the mess …
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It wasn’t a mess. They delivered results. They just couldn’t make any profit doing right.
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Just because the emergency managers say there were “results” doesn’t mean there were. Lower than expected enrollment leads me to think that there were dissatisfied people who moved their children elsewhere.
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It’s astounding to me that people like Harlan who hate the gubmint so much are always willing to believe government press releases (what’s otherwise known as “news” in this country).
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Harlan, take a look at their budget:
Click to access Muskegon-Heights-Public-School-Academy-2013-14-Draft-Preliminary-Budge-2.pdf
Their management company got their 1.2 million, they spent $90,000 on advertisement, had a $116,000 parent liason(which is how it is spelled on web site also), budgeted for 9 positions that were never hired, did not budget for athletic coaches, were $200,000+ off on transportation costs, only budgeted for half the unemployment comp insurance (for some reason), they even only budgeted $1 for building rent but since there are 4 it is really $4.
This budget shows absolutely NO planning or forethought (accept for the $1.2 million management fee)!
This was a MESS!
You say they delivered results, I say phooey!
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“The charter district ended last year with a $600,000 deficit, solely because of investments in the facilities, Muskegon Heights officials said.
There are still about $600,000 in repairs that are needed to the school buildings, Weatherspoon said. M.L. King Elementary, the district’s lower elementary school, needs $400,000 in repairs and likely will be closed after this school year, he said.”
According to someone(the school, the boogyman – who knows?), the only problem was building maintenance. I think Tim did a better job of reviewing the budget than the Miskegon Heights officials.
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Here is a release by Mosaica just last week. Why cut ties now?http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/04/prweb11774955.htm
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To the simple minded capitalist with a hammer, every issue looks like a nail.
Business today is not about excellence, quality, or serving the customer. It is about making a buck regardless of the means.
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Actually, business today IS about excellence, quality, and serving the customer.
Those bucks pay your salary.
And what would you replace business with, in any case. Rule of the elite by the gun?
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Business is only about excellence, quality and customer service so long as it’s a small, individual or family-owned business. Once the company has grown to the point that it’s sold off to big Wall Street investor types, no one cares any more. Employees aren’t allowed to take initiative (not that they’re invested enough to do so anyway, considering that they’re probably making minimum wage with no benefits). Customer service goes out the window. All that’s left – and which, sadly, is enough to keep customers coming back out of necessity – is low prices. Check out this article about working at “Bullseye”: http://www.thenation.com/article/179516/life-inside-new-minimum-wage-economy
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Better not let Apple or General Electric know about that. The Nation is always interesting for a communist magazine, but seldom right on its economic assumptions.
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What’s so great about Apple? Why are they constantly upgrading so you have to buy whole new products every six months? That’s quality???
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I think Apple is extraordinary. You ask a rhetorical question. What’s the syllogism underlying it? You’ll find that you may not even accept your own major premise.
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Wait a minute. Why is the state advancing money to cover Mosaica’s administrative “losses”? Is it a principal of investment that the profiteers get to keep the profit, but the people cover any loss?
That money belongs to the children.
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Where have you been the last 5 years. Haven’t you heard about too big to fail, or Solyndra, or any of the other government boondoggles where losses are covered by YOU the taxpayer?
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5 years? I’m no Obama fan, but this didn’t start with him, pal. Check out your friend Bush and the bank bail out.
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You are right. Bush started it, but Obama multiplied the crimes.
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They believe in corporate socialism, share the risk and loss, privatize any profits. And just how did they “get the job done” to provide services? A scam by any other name is fraud just the same! Sharpen your pitchforks and find your torches folks, it is time to march!
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Are you preaching (and leading) violent revolution, or just speaking with vainglorious metaphor?
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I am working on a doctoral research project inspired by Diane’s book, Death and Life of the Great American School System (2011). If the public school system–as many of us knew it, at least–is dead or near death, it would stand to reason that public school teachers who remember the system as it was prior to No Child Left Behind (2002) have experienced loss and grief. If you remember what it was like to teach prior to No Child Left Behind, if you feel as if teaching completely changed when No Child Left Behind was implemented, or if you ever felt saddened by some of the changes that resulted from educational reform, then you may be interested in taking my survey.
Professional Loss and Grief in Teachers (a survey)
https://ndstate.co1.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_5nCLnPAFadWZX93
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No doubt when the system you love is betrayed by the government you thought was on your side, the sense of loss and grief must be immense. Wouldn’t the grief arise from a sense of loss of autonomy in the classroom?
Sometimes I grieve for the loss of rationality in public discourse, and certainly NCLB substituted irrationality (thinking one can beat the normal distribution) for reality.
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Diane, Thought you’d like to see these items:
In April, 2014 after the departure in Dec 2013, of former Superintendent Jonathan Raymond (Broad Academy trained??), the Sacramento City Unified School District in Sacramento, CA declined to renew its NCLB waiver.
On April 20, 2014, The Sacramento Bee published a full column opinion piece contributed by Jonathan Raymond claiming that “city schools gave up much more than a federal waiver.” (4/20/2014, p.E5)
Today, April 27, 2014, Patrick Kennedy, the president of the Sacramento City Unified School District Board of Education offered another view with specific plans for district teachers and administration to build “a better system to keep schools accountable for results for kids” with “a new teacher evaluation model to give teachers the support they need to be successful.” (4/27/2014, p. E2)
The Editorial Board of the Sacramento Bee promptly criticized this course of action and supporting the Raymond et al proposed VAM for teacher evaluation as “extraordinarily reasonable.” (4/27/2014 p. E6)
Sacramento teachers will need to not only educate the children but the media as well.
Luanne Clayton
________________________________
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I don’t understand how they make a profit. They have a set amount of money coming in, they don’t set their rates – is that correct?
Spending less than they take in won’t give them a significant profit because I don’t believe there is much wiggle room in per pupil spending in public education so did they invest the difference and those investments didn’t pay off? Maybe they thought there was wasteful spending, but once they took over, it wasn’t the case.
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“Maybe they thought there was wasteful spending, but once they took over, it wasn’t the case.”
That’s what’s amusing about the whole piece. The whole rap on Muskegon Schools was they ran out of money. That’s why we were all directed to kick public management to the curb and embrace the private sector solution.
Looks like the private entity ran out of money too, just as the district did before them.
Maybe… it costs a lot to run those schools? The average income in the area is 20k a year. They are high-need kids when they arrive at school in the morning. They’re poor. Maybe paying teachers less isn’t the magic budgetary bullet Mosaica projected?
It won’t matter. The superiority of private management is a belief system, an ideology. We have a publicly-owned and run electric utility here and every ten years one or another ideologue wants to privatize it. It doesn’t matter that the private electric utility that owns the whole market 60 miles away costs consumers more. Someone always wants to privatize ours.
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In my area, some places have privatized water and the water rates are sky high.
Back to schools, I wonder once they voucherized schools they will just expect parents to come up the the difference – ugh…………….
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“The superiority of private management is a belief system, an ideology..”
NO! It’s not an ideology, it’s an idiology!
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“Last week, members of the PARCC team joined Superintendent Chris Koch for a meeting with the Illinois Business Roundtable, Illinois Manufacturers’ Association, Advance Illinois, and the Illinois Community College Board to discuss Illinois’ leadership in PARCC and the state’s transition to the PARCC assessments. Business leaders wanted to learn more about PARCC’s College and Career Ready Determination and PARCC’s definition of college and career readiness.
Jeff Nellhaus, Director of PARCC Policy, Research & Design, talked about how PARCC K-12 and higher education leaders collaborated on the CCR Determination, gathered public feedback, and are designing research studies addressing college and career readiness. Over lunch, meeting participants had a chance to review PARCC sample items and hear how the PARCC field test has been going in Illinois. Business leaders shared ideas for how they would like to be more engaged in PARCC’s work moving forward and expressed particular interest in seeing research about how the Common Core and PARCC align with Work Keys.”
So Work Keys appears to be an SAT product that employers use.
Does anyone know more about this? How PARCC (and the CC, presumably) “align” with Work Keys?
It’s not really a goal of mine that my 5th grader be primed to “align” with the SAT Work Keys product line, although I very much understand why the Illinois Business Roundtable would like that to be his focus.
http://www.parcconline.org/parcc-meets-business-leaders-illinois-discuss-measuring-career-readiness?utm_source=Updates+2014-04-23+final&utm_campaign=4%2F9%2F2014+Update&utm_medium=email
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Here’s Work Keys:
https://www.act.org/products/workforce-act-workkeys/
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In NC our kids take Work Keys in 8th 10th and 11th grades. It tells them what they will be when they grow up. The suggestions are beyond crazy on how to improve their ACT scores. There is no validity and even poor reliability between the tests. It is the most convoluted score report I had ever seen. My daughter will be a craft person, engineering medical doctor. Why? She likes to make crafts but scored high enough to be an engineer or doctor. I guess I can retire soon.
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Thanks so much. I’ll have to ask at our school. My older kids never mentioned taking Work Keys. I was curious because I know there’s a connection between the SAT and the development of the CC tests, but I also know that the SAT has many product lines. I’ve been reading about the Common Core and the more ambitious proponents seem to be headed toward some “school to workplace” measuring metric that just makes my head hurt.
You wonder if older kids will rebel at some point: “stop measuring and tracking me every second of every day!”
I don’t think “privacy” will be the issue (in terms of protecting data, which seems to be a parental concern, not a concern of kids) so much as just “leave me the hell alone!” I sympathize. It would bug the hell out of me to be questioned and polled and prodded constantly.
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I checked out a few sample problems in the math and reading for information. Both questions related to being a cashier in store. (One was how much change to give, the other was the procedure for ringing up an employee sale.
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Mosaica would get their state aide payment on a Wednesday and not be able to pay staff on Friday– something is rotten in MuskegonHts. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
– First Amendment to the United States Constitution
>
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One thing to look at, in this case, is they took over an entire district …meaning every child…special needs, ELL, kids in crisis, low income,…in other words, the students that the public schools take everyday and all the time…
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. . . and they couldn’t handle it!
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I’d like to see someone investigate the “academic turnaround” mentioned in the article. Was it genuine, or a result of pushing out low-performing students.
Scott
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Looks like the $1 million management fee is a factor in this. Seems that if the company had difficulty making payroll, it should have dug into its own pockets before asking for an advance. SHOULD HAVE. What will they do next month? Or in June?
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The reason that profits are socially useful is that it guards us against destroying value. If an organization is making a loss it is because the value of the inputs used is greater than the value of the output created. We should use the same principle in every human organization, but be mindful that the true costs of inputs are opportunity costs and may be difficult to measure and the value of the output might be even more difficult to get a handle on.
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What is value?
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“We should use the same principle in every human organization, but be mindful that the true costs of inputs are opportunity costs and may be difficult to measure and the value of the output might be even more difficult to get a handle on.”
We should????
Sounds very much like a utilitarian philosophy to me. Hey Granpa is having a heart attack. “Well bye bye you’re going to cost to much to treat, Gramps”.
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My university offers at least two years of classes in a large number of languages. They do it because it is not too costly given that the less popular languages like Wolof because we can use lecturers to teach it. My suspicion is that your high school does not offer classes in a large number of languages because the local school board does not think it worth the expense. What the school board means by “worth” is what I mean by value.
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Profit = value? My cousin’s son has a congenital condition known as Rubenstein-Tabies. He’ll never make a profit for anyone, including himself. In fact, my cousin and her husband, as well as my aunt and uncle, have spent a great deal of their “profit” supporting him. Guess he has no value. Or perhaps a negative value.
People like you scare me.
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In some cases the price of a good or service is the value of the good or service. Remember that prices reflect the aggregated viewpoint of society on the importance of a good.
I am not sure why I should scare you. Do you think it would be a good idea to have the physicians who treat your son working as greeters at Walmart? Those physicians might be the very best greeters in the world, but it is too costly to society to have them doing that job so we want to discourage Walmart from hiring physicians as greeters.
We should not spend time, energy, and resources destroying value. Skilled physicians should heal the sick, not teach Spanish. Costly fossil fuels should be used sparingly and only when alternatives would be only more costly. The goal is not too use as many resources as possible to produce an outcome, but the fewest possible.
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“We should not spend time, energy and resources destroying value.”
I doubt that you meant to do this, TE, but you hit the nail on the head with that comment. THAT is what “reformers” have been doing all along. Destroying value. Not the “children are assets” kind of value, but the value of an excellent, well-rounded education, and the value of human beings as human beings. Not the financial value, but the HUMAN value.
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Actually I do mean “value” to be very flexible, and I certainly agree that people of good will can disagree on what constitutes value.
I do think that simply saying you value “an excellent education” does not get us very far until we think long and hard about what constitutes an excellent education and what students who receive such an education are able to do and be after having received it.
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Worth: [ wurth ] from Bing Dictionary:
1.value in money: the value of something, especially in terms of money
2.amount equaling given value: the amount of something that can be bought for a particular sum of money or that will last for a particular length of time
3.moral or social value: the goodness, usefulness, or importance of something or somebody, irrespective of financial value or wealth.
Value: [ vállyoo ]
1.monetary worth: an amount expressed in money or another medium of exchange that is thought to be a fair exchange for something
2.full recovered worth: the adequate or satisfactory return on or recompense for something
3.worth or importance: the worth, importance, or usefulness of something to somebody
Your definition would seem to fit with acknowledge meanings.
But what is worth/value? Obviously not completely a monetary concept.
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Ask your local school board why they don’t offer Wolof. Their answer is the meaning of value.
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I am working on a doctoral research project inspired by Diane’s book, Death and Life of the Great American School System (2011). If the public school system–as many of us knew it, at least–is dead or near death, it would stand to reason that public school teachers who remember the system as it was prior to No Child Left Behind (2002) have experienced loss and grief. If you remember what it was like to teach prior to No Child Left Behind, if you feel as if teaching completely changed when No Child Left Behind was implemented, or if you ever felt saddened by some of the changes that resulted from educational reform, then you may be interested in taking my survey.
https://ndstate.co1.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_5nCLnPAFadWZX93
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