Caveats

Brad DeLong has been on a bit of a run recently. I particularly liked this:

I think that modern neoclassical economics is in fine shape as long as it is understood as the ideological and substantive legitimating doctrine of the political theory of possessive individualism. As long as we have relatively-self-interested liberal individuals who have relatively-strong beliefs that things are theirs, the competitive market in equilibrium is an absolutely wonderful mechanism for achieving truly extraordinary degree of societal coordination and productivity. We need to understand that. We need to value that. And that is what neoclassical economics does, and does well.

Of course, there are all the caveats to Arrow-Debreu-Mackenzie:

The market must be in equilibrium.
The market must be competitive.
The goods traded must be excludable.
The goods traded must be non-rival.
The quality of goods traded and of effort delivered must be known, or at least bonded, for adverse selection and moral hazard are poison.
Externalities must be corrected by successful Pigovian taxes or successful Coaseian carving of property rights at the joints.
People must be able to accurately calculate their own interests.
People must not be sadistic--the market does not work well if participating agents are either the envious or the spiteful.
The distribution of wealth must correspond to the societal consensus of need and desert.
The structure of debt and credit must be sound, or if it is not sound we need a central bank or a social-credit agency to make it sound and so make Say's Law true in practice even though we have no reason to believe Say's Law is true in theory.

Delving into the pros and cons of positive thinking over at You Do the Math

I've been working on a thread (and possibly an e-book for general audiences) on George Pólya's teaching philosophy. Recently, I've been focusing on the emotional and psychological component. Pólya was emphatic on the importance of self-reliance, and an explicit part of building that self-reliance was building a student's confidence.

The following quote from How to Solve It is indicative:

"If the student is not able to do much, the teacher should leave him at least some illusion of independent work. In order to do so, the teacher should help the student discreetly, unobtrusively." [emphasis in the original text.]

Pólya didn't elaborate that much on the emotional component here. The value of confidence and approaching material with a positive attitude probably seemed to require on defense in 1945. Self-help had not become a major industry (How to Win Friends and Influence People was less than a decade old) so positive thinking didn't trigger the smirks it does today. On the other hand, the field of education hadn't been swarmed by faux tough charlatans dismissing the importance of self-esteem.

These days, any argument for positive thinking needs to spelled out in detail. In the following three posts I work through some of the implications.

Rational students, incentives and expected returns

What role does expected likelihood of success play in the designing of incentives?


The first wall you expect is the last one you hit

Based on my experience and conversations with other teachers, I compare the real and perceived challenges faced by students struggling with math.


The Power and Peril of Positive Thinking

A few common-sense rules for deciding when to go positive (and when to proceed with caution).

More Michigan corruption and an LA-based observation

As mentioned before, the Detroit Free Press recently ran an extraordinary series on on the growing number of scandals surrounding Michigan's two decades of aggressive school privatization. I've got something bigger coming up on this and I don't want to spend too much more time nickel-and-diming the subject by posting various outrages, but I do want to take a moment and share this pattern I've come to recognize.

First devastating cuts are made to essential parts of kids' education with the rationale that things are tough all over. Then people in the same system (often the same people -- see Deasy, John) will spend extravagantly on their pet projects (see iPads, John Deasy's billion dollar), often enriching themselves, associates, friends and/or relatives. When someone criticizes the profligacy, the inevitable reply is to insist they only want kids to have the best.

Remember this story from an earlier post?

Detroit Public Schools EM shifts funds from classroom
By Dr. Thomas C. Pedroni

Many of us are shocked to learn that DPS plans to cut costs in the coming year by further increasing class sizes. Already at an unmanageable target of 38 per classroom in grades 6 through 12, Emergency Manager Jack Martin’s fiscal year 2015 budget allows class sizes in those grades to expand to 43.

With that in mind, check out this article from Jennifer Dixon, part of the Free Press series.

Glenn Clark, president of Detroit Merit Charter Academy and a founding member of the board, said he didn’t know the amount “off the top of my head.” But he said it was justified as a “made-in-heaven arrangement in that corner of the city.”

Detroit Merit subleases its building from NHA. The building is clean and orderly, but it lacks a cafeteria or gym, so students eat in their classrooms. With more than 730 students, the school is packed. Clark said “every seat is taken” and there isn’t enough classroom space for specialty areas of instruction.

On a Free Press visit to the K-8 school last year, a writing coach worked with her students at desks tucked under a school stairwell, a handful of students played their drums in another stairwell, and saxophonists practiced in a hallway.

The band room had been carved in half to make room for art classes, with filing cabinets separating the musicians from the painters. A third of the kitchen had been converted into a small math classroom, with refrigerators and other appliances dividing up the area.

Melvin Rusher, president of the board of Fortis Academy in Ypsilanti, declined to say how much the school was paying in rent — just over $1 million — until checking with the rest of his board. He did not return subsequent phone calls. Board presidents at Regent Park Scholars, Flagship Academy and Legacy Charter Academy, all in Detroit, also did not return calls.

Rent increases pushed schools into the million-dollar club in the 2013-14 school year: South Arbor in Ypsilanti, Ridge Park and River City Scholars, both in Grand Rapids. The Free Press could not reach board presidents.

Plymouth Scholars is another school in the NHA million-dollar club, but neighbors in Plymouth Township say it doesn’t look like a million.

Built in 2012, it is two stories and rectangular. Residents of the neighborhood, where some houses are on the market for upwards of $500,000, say it looks like a warehouse.
...
Charter Development Co., an affiliated company that is based in the same offices as NHA, paid $700,000 for the land, according to township assessor records. NHA declined to say how much it spent on construction costs, but told its authorizer that it would invest approximately $7 million.

The school’s annual rent is $1.16 million.

Based on those numbers, local developer Jim Jabara said NHA is getting a 16% rate of return on its investment, which he likened to the goose that lays the golden egg.

“It’s a hell of a return for the people who own it, and the school pays a premium for it,” said Jabara, who owns commercial and industrial property in the area.

William Watch, president of First Commercial Realty & Development Co., in Southfield, which owns, leases, manages, develops and builds commercial and retail projects, said the rate of return for free-standing drugstores like Walgreens and Rite Aid, with long-term leases, is typically 7%-9%.

...

Carl Berry, a member of the Plymouth Scholars board until late January, called it “an ugly building” but said, “What goes on inside is the most important.” The school is too new to be ranked by the Michigan Department of Education.

How does one evaluate evidence in complex circumstances

So this is Joseph, the rarely appearing co-blogger and I wanted to comment on an evidence question.

There has been a lot of discussion about a recent DC court of appeals case (Halbig).  The essence of the argument is that there is a sentence in the law that could be read as only allowing state exchanges to offer federal subsidies.  I think it is pretty clear everyone agree that this isn't the pinnacle of clear and artful writing.  Either it failed to make a major piece of the law obvious (people buying policies on Federal exchanges would want to know if this was intended, as would states like Oregon considering switching from a state to a federal exchange) or it was a sloppy sentence.  If that was the end of it then it probably would not be bloggable.

What was interesting is what people are holding as the standard of evidence.  Scott Lemieux argues that, due to previous federal law giving deference to how federal agencies interpret law, that the standard is:

The challengers don’t just have to show that their interpretation is plausible; they have to show that it’s the only possible reasonable interpretation.

and

We still have essentially everyone responsible for drafting, voting on and/or implementing the legislation at the federal and state levels (not to mention the Sebelius conservative joint opinion) assuming that the federally established exchanges were intended to work, and a consultant making a bare assertion with no explanation that the federally established exchanges weren’t intended to work. It’s pretty obvious which is more significant, particularly since the next decent explanation for why Congress would bother to create a federal backstop that couldn’t actually function would be the first.

Megan McArdle, whom I think it is well know is not a fan of the affordable care act, proposes a different standard.  She argues:

The thrust of this outrage is that obviously no one ever intended to restrict subsidies only to state exchanges, because that is now endangering the whole program, and obviously, the law’s architects did not mean to endanger the whole program.

But unless this is some sort of elaborate hoax, I think this definitively puts to rest the notion that none of the bill’s architects could possibly have thought or intended that the law would have this effect. Gruber thought the law would have this effect -- and if anyone would know, he would. 

Now I am not a lawyer, but I like talking about standards of evidence.  The first is a standard that you need to show that the law cannot be interpreted in the proposed flexible manner that an agency wants.  The second is to focus really tightly on the exact text of the bill and come up with the most literal interpretation.

Now these are very different ways to thinking about evidence.  McArdle's approach is very frequentist.  Here we create a specific standard of evidence based on one piece of the whole family of possible errors (e.g. random variation for the statistician, text only for the lawyer) and use that as the main decision making element (with some soft text about possible bias).  Lemieix's approach seems more Bayesian -- the analogy to priors is looking at the totality of the evidence, including but not limited to the law's text.

Ironically, I am like Noah Smith in science and kind of like frequentist approaches.  I certainly use them in 95% of my scientific papers.  But this is really highlighting, in an area (law) where the frequentist approach isn't like a second skin for me, that these differences can matter a lot.  I'm also not going to say which side I think is correct here, merely that I am seeing appeals to two very different kinds of evidence.  In real life I have a paper where I called an estimate with a p-value of 0.0504 non-significant (yes, those of us who take the rules seriously see these things happen).  But in the context of a family of associations where everything else was significant and known bias cutting against the association, I wonder if I could have been more sophisticated.  Or would that be less principled.

So now I think I have something to ponder.  But it does highlight that this type of debate about standards of evidence, like all entrenched debates, is complicated.

This not an outlier; this is a business model

You may have this recording a customer made while trying to cancel his Comcast service. Here's a sample:

Block: We’d like to disconnect please.

Comcast rep: Why is it that you don’t want the faster speed? Help me understand why you don’t want faster internet.

Block: Help me understand why you can’t disconnect us.

Comcast rep: Because my job is to have a conversation with you about keeping your service, about finding out why it is that you’re looking to cancel the service.

Block: I don’t understand …

Comcast rep: If you don’t want to talk to me, you can definitely go into the Comcast store and disconnect your service there. 

And it goes on and on and on.

Comcast has since issued an apology that's more telling for what it doesn't say:

“We are very embarrassed by the way our employee spoke with Mr. Block and are contacting him to personally apologize. The way in which our representative communicated with him is unacceptable and not consistent with how we train our customer service representatives. We are investigating this situation and will take quick action. While the overwhelming majority of our employees work very hard to do the right thing every day, we are using this very unfortunate experience to reinforce how important it is to always treat our customers with the utmost respect.”

You'll notice that, for all that talk of doing the right thing and showing respect, the statement doesn't say anything about the representative refusing to cancel the account.That was what made the customer angry but Comcast can't apologize for that because it plans to continue making cancellation inconvenient and unpleasant. That, along with pumping up rates, is their business model.





P.S. I'm running ahead on my posts so I scheduled this to run a few days after I wrote it. In the meantime, more horror stories have been popping up including one that's fairly similar to my experience with Verizon (make a mistake on the bill then sell the account to a third party), along with this very good story by the Verge that confirms beyond a doubt that bullying customers to stay is a fundamental part of the industry's business model.

Here are a couple of the more outrageous examples:

“I called to cancel my Comcast service. It turned out to be in my deceased husband’s name. I told them he was recently deceased. I was told I could not cancel the service; only my husband could! I reiterated that he was no longer living; the person again said it could only be closed by my husband. This went on for about five minutes till I gave up. I tried again the next day and got the same response — finally, a supervisor told me I could take his death certificate into the office in Foster City. I took it into the office, and the person there was horrified that I had been asked to do that and to hear of my past phone conversations. I never used Comcast again.”

and

“They did the same thing to me [as they did to Block]. At one point the guy says, ‘$50 isn’t going to take food off your table.’ I was a single mother receiving no child support, living in the Bay Area, living paycheck to paycheck, and spending an average of $150 a month on food. YES, it was taking food off our table! I didn’t think it was any of their business why I couldn’t afford cable. After telling him I was canceling because I couldn’t afford it, he said, ‘Well how do you think WE pay for all these upgrades?’ 

I started to go with "arsonists decry fires, call for more kerosene" but that didn't capture the full disconnect

Perhaps I just haven't spent enough time in the trenches, but I don't think I've ever seen a response to a corruption scandal quite this. As the Detroit Free Press lays out in painful detail, over the past few years, the cash-strapped state of Michigan appears to have lost hundreds of millions to overcharging, mismanagement and plain old graft in the charter school sector.

This is largely the result of initiatives pushed through by Gov. Rick Snyder and former Gov. John Engler, two Republicans with a bent toward privatization. A Democratic governor, Jennifer Granholm, served between Snyder and Engler and took a sharply different approach.

The following quotes are from Detroit Free Press Education Writer David Jesse:

Engler signed the law creating charter schools in 1994.In 2002, in Engler’s last year and just before Granholm took office, Michigan’s auditor general found repeated conflicts of interest among those running charter schools. A legislative committee recommended tightening laws and oversight, but no action was taken.

Granholm was the governor when 2009 legislation laying out transparency requirements for all schools — including charters — was passed. She signed the act into law. However, many companies and organizations running charter schools say many of those requirements don’t apply to them.

She also signed a law allowing limited expansion of charter schools in Michigan.

In 2011, Snyder signed a law abolishing the limit on charters.

2011 was, by the way, Snyder's first year in office.

The result (as shown in this Free Press graphic) has been striking:

 Combine this with lax oversight and it's not surprising that companies are cashing in on a massive scale. For example, one company, National Heritage Academies, appears to have overcharged the state tens (possibly even hundreds) of millions of dollars on rent alone.

How do Gov. Rick Snyder and former Gov. John Engler respond to the apparent problems with their initiatives?

Both Republican governors told the Free Press that other questions are secondary, including how transparent charter schools are with taxpayer dollars, how much money management companies make, whether the state’s oversight of charter schools is sufficient. What matters, they said, is academic growth.

“The real issue is not for-profit companies — it’s (are) there good outcomes?” Snyder said. “Are the students college ready? That’s the long-term goal and how we should judge not only charter schools, but also traditional schools.”

“The focus should be on what happens in the classroom,” Engler said. “Who provides it matters less than the education they are providing. ... The bottom line is, how are children doing? Are they learning?”

There are at least two layers of weird here. The first is the assertion that taxpayers in the middle of a fiscal crisis shouldn't care about being robbed blind as long as they were happy with the service provided. The second is the implication that the taxpayers should be happy with this service.

Of the charter schools ranked by the state during the 2012-13 school year, 38% fell below the 25th percentile, meaning at least 75% of all state public schools performed better, according to a Free Press review of data published by the state. This includes charters operated by for-profit and nonprofit companies, as well as self-managed schools. That compares with 23% of traditional schools below the 25th percentile.

This indicates an extraordinary level of denial. To understand where that comes from it helps to dig deeper into the interview:

Engler and Snyder both said charter schools need improvement but are educating students well.

Engler: “I talk to Doug Ross (founder of University Preparatory system of charter schools) and I know they are. ... As a result of the competition, more kids are learning. Are they improving enough? There’s still work to be done. There’s no question you could answer the question the same with traditional public schools.”

Snyder: “They are educating students. That’s one area we could use more work on, not just the charter schools, but also the (traditional) schools. That led to the creation of EAA” — the Education Achievement Authority that has assumed responsibility for many poor-performing traditional Detroit schools.
...
“The oversight is ultimately the parent, just like it has always been,” Engler said. “The parent moved if (the traditional school) wasn’t working, but that was limited economically. It’s a question that misses the broader point: What goes on in schools should be the focus. The whole focus should be on education. ... The structural questions, frankly, are missing the point.”

Gov. Engler sees choice and markets as the solution to all of education's problems, while Snyder, when confronted with corruption and scandals in the charter school sector, calls for greater scrutiny of traditional schools. You have here the two primary articles of faith that made this crisis possible – – market magic and the evils of the public sector. These are deeply held and like all true articles of faith, they do not yield to experience and reason.

My notes on Khan Academy's SAT prep at You Do the Math

This is a work in progress so we should cut the Khan Academy some slack. Even with that in mind, though, I'm seriously underwhelmed by the SAT prep materials up so far. I know their heart is in the right place, but from the skimpy selection to the low wattage instruction, there's just not that much here.

I address the subject in more detail at the teaching site, You Do the Math, but I don't hit the bigger concern that I keep running into with these online learning ventures. As far as I can tell, no one has thought through this problem in terms of this medium. What we're seeing now is usually the pedagogical equivalent of a filmed play. If you simply set up a camera to cover the stage, you invariably end up with something unwatchable no matter how strong the original presentation was. The same basic principle applies to instruction.

You don't just film a play; you adapt it, making something new and distinct from the original. Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder and Rope come to mind. So far, I don't think that most of the people doing online instruction have thought deeply about the problem of adaptation. I'm afraid many haven't even realized that it's a problem at all.

One quote that tells you everything you need to about Florida's culture of charter school oversight

From the Sun-Sentinel's previously mentioned profile of Steve Gallon III [emphasis added].

The schools’ financial team began to caution the boards against overspending, flag certain payments, and raise concerns about Gallon’s seemingly unchecked authority.

“I started warning board members,” said [Katrina] Lunsford, the financial manager.

She also said: “He, from an overall standpoint, just started taking charge and taking over.”

Records show the boards at times responded with indifference or hostility to issues raised by Lunsford and the accountant she hired to help her with the schools, Jim D. Lee.

When Lunsford requested documentation for a $625 bank transaction on Sept. 25 from Dorothy Gay, the board president for the Palm Beach County school, Gay provided it — along with an indignant email:

“Let the record reflect the following, which I will make perfectly clear this one time only and never again question me about any ‘funds’ or state to me, ‘show documentation’...”

Florida charters and the not-so-hidden costs of creative distruction

We've been spending a lot of time on the shady characters who were uncovered by what had damned well better be an award winning series by the Sun Sentinel. We haven't spent enough on the damage they do.

As we've discussed before, the underlying assumption behind Florida's approach to charter schools is that the combination of lots of ideas, minimal regulation and unchecked creative destruction will produce transformative innovation. [All quotes from the Sun Sentinel story by Karen Yi and Amy Shipley]

State law requires local school districts to approve or deny new charters based solely on applications that outline their plans in areas including instruction, mission and budget. The statutes don’t address background checks on charter applicants. Because of the lack of guidelines, school officials in South Florida say, they do not conduct criminal screenings or examine candidates’ financial or educational pasts.

That means individuals with a history of failed schools, shaky personal finances or no experience running schools can open or operate charters.

“The law doesn’t limit who can open a charter school. If they can write a good application … it’s supposed to stand alone,” said Jim Pegg, director of the charter schools department for the Palm Beach County school district. “You’re approving an idea.”
...
Charter-school advocates say the complexity of the application, which can run more than 400 pages, weeds out frivolous candidates. But school officials in Broward and Palm Beach counties told the Sun Sentinel some applicants simply cut and paste from previously approved applications available online.

There are a number of issues with this approach. There's the problem of adverse selection -- the lack of a background check makes the process more attractive to people who couldn't pass a background check and those people tend to crowd out better applicants. There's the misalignment of incentives --  even a failed school can produce a decent pay-off. And there's the high cost of failure borne almost entirely by taxpayers, teachers, parents and children.

Every time a charter school closes, dozens of children are displaced — in some instances, mid-month. Many return to their neighborhood schools where some struggle to catch up because their charters did not provide required testing, instruction in basic subjects or adequate services for those with special needs.

“This isn’t just a regular business. This isn’t a restaurant that you just open up, you serve your food, people don’t like it, you close it and move on,” said Krystal Castellano, a former teacher at the now-closed Next Generation charter school. “This is education; this is students getting left in the middle of the year without a school to go to.”

Next Generation, an elementary school in Lauderdale Lakes, sometimes had no toilet paper, soap or paper towels in the student bathrooms during the 2012-13 school year, teachers said. Students sometimes ate hours after their designated lunchtimes, often from fast-food restaurants. A parent complained of a revolving door of teachers.

“Things were horrible,” said Cynthia Hazlewood, who helped build the school’s curriculum and has worked at other charter schools. “One day FPL came in and shut the lights off.”

The school shuttered weeks before the last day of school.

To be hammer blunt here, this reveals a hugely hypocritical contradiction that runs through the reform movement. The justification for eliminating even the most basic job protections for teacher is that keeping an incompetent teacher harms a student. There are real questions about whether eliminating tenure improves overall teacher quality, but putting those aside, the damage done by having a bottom-of-the-pool teacher is a fraction of that done by this kind of creative destruction. From the lost instruction time to the emotional and social toll of having their lives disrupted to the disillusionment of learning the truth about that wonderful new school, this is a horrible price for kids to pay. No doubt, it was made worse by by the Florida state government's incompetence and endemic corruption in the education sector, but a large part of this suffering is intrinsic to the try-fail-try approach. Even when it works as intended, some kids have to pay a high price so that the system can be healthy.

Of course, the Florida system didn't work as intended; it was a train wreck and here are a few of the casualties.

As students showed up for class, parts of the building remained under construction. Classrooms had not undergone required fire inspections and sometimes lacked air conditioning, district documents show. The iGeneration charters bused their high schoolers on unauthorized daily field trips because they didn’t have enough seats at the school, records show.

On one trip, they lost a student. Though she was found four hours later, district officials immediately shut down the schools.

Because of the quick shut-down, the iGeneration charter schools were overpaid nearly $200,000, according to the Palm Beach County school district. The schools have not returned the money.

The company that founded the iGeneration charter schools, InterVisual Education, blamed the schools’ demise on the management company it hired to operate the schools months before they closed.

“What was supposed to get done, never got done,” said Stephanie Velez, manager of operations for InterVisual Technology, the parent company of InterVisual Education. “There was nothing we could do at that point.”

InterVisual founded and managed another school in Immokalee. That school also was shut down by the Collier County school district last December. District officials cited the school for employing uncertified teachers and failing to submit required financial reports, documents show.

InterVisual will open another school this fall in Davie, but company officials have no plans to manage it.

“We’ve had our taste, and we didn’t like it,” Velez said.
...
A former teacher at the Ivy Academies stored her classroom supplies in the trunk of her car. Every morning, she’d wait for a phone call to find out where classes would be held that day.

“I would never know where we [were] going,” said teacher and former middle school dean Kimberly Kyle-Jones. “It was chaotic.”

The two Ivy Academies lasted only seven weeks.

The schools, managed by Trayvon Mitchell of Oakland Park, opened in 2013 at the Signature Grand reception hall in Davie.

Evicted over a bounced check, the schools relocated to a Fort Lauderdale church that did not have enough classrooms.

That’s when the daily field trips began.

On some days, students went to the Miami Seaquarium or local museums. Other days were spent at Holiday Park in Fort Lauderdale.

The schools then moved to a second church a few miles away.
...
A handful of South Florida charter schools that failed in the past five years owe a total of at least $1 million in public education money to local school districts, records show. The actual amount may be much higher. Districts struggle to track spending at troubled schools.

Charter schools, which receive public money in monthly installments based on student enrollment, can be overpaid if they overestimate their expected attendance or shut down abruptly.

State law requires that furniture, computers and unspent money be returned to the districts, but when officials attempt to collect, charter operators sometimes cannot be found.

“We do know there have been a few [charter schools] … where hundreds of thousands of dollars were never spent on kids, and we don’t know where that money went,” said Pegg, who oversees charters in Palm Beach County. “As soon as we close the door on those schools, those people scatter … We can’t find them.”

When a Broward school district auditor and school detective went searching for Mitchell at the Ivy Academies in September 2013, he left through a back door, records show. District officials said they have yet to find him, or to collect the $240,000 in public money the schools received for students they never had.

When I say anyone can run a charter school in Florida...

I'm afraid I may be spending too much time on the rogues' gallery of the Florida charter school scandals. It's an entertaining aspect but its importance is primarily as a symptom of flawed assumptions and a badly designed system. These sharp operators are flocking to the state because the incentives that encourage good behavior are misaligned and the checks that prevent bad behavior are missing.

Functional systems don't hire people with resumes like that of Steve Gallon III.

From the Sun-Sentinels exceptional series on Florida's charter schools:

New Jersey authorities banned educator Steve Gallon III from working in their public schools. Five months later, three South Florida charter schools welcomed him.

The struggling schools gave Gallon’s company $500,000 in taxpayer dollars over two years, allowing him to give jobs and double payments to his cronies, a Sun Sentinel investigation found.

Records obtained by the newspaper reveal questionable decisions at the schools as their finances unraveled, providing a rare look into the perils of Florida’s loosely regulated charter-school industry.

Florida has more than 600 charter schools, which are independently operated but funded with tax dollars. Because they face less regulation, charter schools have more freedom to innovate.

State law gives oversight of these schools to individual volunteer governing boards, rather than the district’s school board. But such boards sometimes fail to monitor public money and control the private companies they hire, the Sun Sentinel found.

The governing boards for three charter schools in Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties hired Gallon and his company, Tri-Star Leadership, in June 2011.

The boards were undeterred by Gallon’s troubles as a school superintendent in New Jersey, where back-to-back investigations prompted the governor and police to get involved. Gallon had been accused of hiring unqualified friends and then lying about their residences so their children could attend schools outside their district.

In the next 18 months, documents show, the South Florida charter school boards stood by as Gallon:

• Hired two associates who, along with Gallon, had been arrested and banned from working in New Jersey schools. One became principal of the Palm Beach County school at a salary of $80,000 a year; the other was paid $60,000 a year for consulting work.

• Made payroll decisions without prior authorization from the charter schools’ governing boards, drawing rebukes from the schools’ financial consultants.

• Hired a $40,000-a-year consultant who listed her residence as a Georgia home owned by Gallon.

• Launched a business venture with one of the volunteer board members responsible for overseeing Gallon’s work for the charter schools. The venture was later deemed a conflict of interest by Miami-Dade school district investigators.

At least three consultants contracted by the governing boards warned their bosses of inappropriate actions under Gallon, records show. Yet Gallon stayed on as those who complained quit — or were fired.
...

Both traditional public schools and charter schools receive public dollars based on their enrollment, and don’t charge tuition. Administrators at traditional public schools are accountable for every penny spent. But the private companies hired by many charter school governing boards don’t have to open their books.
...

Plainfield, N.J., schools hired him as superintendent in 2008, paying him $198,000 a year to oversee the central New Jersey district of about 7,000 students.

The back-to-back scandals quickly erupted.

Soon after his arrival, Gallon brought on three colleagues from Miami at six-figure salaries. Investigators from the New Jersey Department of Education concluded that two lacked proper state certification and one of those two lacked a required degree.

To address the issue, Gallon recommended hiring them under different titles that did not require certification.

Gov. Chris Christie then stepped in, calling for New Jersey’s education commissioner to take action, according to news reports. A day later, the School Board fired the pair, Lalelei Kelly and Lesly Borge.

Less than a month later, in May 2010, police arrested Gallon, Kelly and Angela Kemp, the third Miami hire. The state Attorney General said Gallon falsely claimed the women lived at his address in South Plainfield — a school district in which they neither lived nor worked.

The trio’s lies, prosecutors said, enabled both women’s children to attend South Plainfield schools illegally and cost taxpayers $10,500 over four months. The women later paid back the money, records show.

In January 2011, Gallon and the two women agreed to serve probation and never again work in New Jersey’s public schools. In exchange, the charges were dismissed.

The following year, the three reunited — in Florida’s charter-school system.
...

[Tonya] Deal said she believed his version of the New Jersey scandal — the story was overblown by the media — and urged the schools to hire him.

Gallon fully disclosed his past to the boards, said another board member, Lewis. She told the Sun Sentinel she believed Gallon’s arrest had nothing to do with his official duties in New Jersey, and noted that he had not been convicted of any crime.

Gallon got the job. He was hired as a $135-per-hour consultant in June 2011. His mission: improving student performance at the three schools.


...
By the end of 2012, the boards for the charters declared states of fiscal urgency. Though the Miami-Dade school would recover in the coming months, the end was near for the Broward and Palm Beach county schools.

Attendance at both schools fell dramatically from the prior year, in part because of moves to new facilities, dropping from 202 to 92 at the Palm school and from 241 to 88 at the Broward school. Because the schools receive public money based on their student population, the drop in enrollment resulted in a plunge in school income.

The two schools also were crumbling academically — the area Gallon had been hired to improve.

The Broward school showed no evidence of a reading program, English language instruction for non-native speakers or services for students with disabilities, district officials reported. The school also provided false information about teachers, the officials said.

The Palm Beach County school lacked a science teacher and did not offer core courses, district officials reported. A state administrative law judge found the school lacked reading lesson plans, study guides or even textbooks; “neglected” biology and math; and “failed in its most basic duties to educate its students.”

More on Florida and the looting phase of education reform

This basically picks up where the post, "We couldn't even afford one Mercedes Benz at Next Generation," left off and continues detailing the Harold Hill aspect of Florida's charter school scandals.

One of the fundamental assumptions of the charter school movement is that choice and accountability make regulation superfluous.  Michigan bet heavily on that principle. Florida even more so. In the Sunshine State, there are almost no barriers to entry, The attitude has been "let everybody in and let the market decide who gets to stay." Unfortunately, the market only getss to make that decision after some very large checks have gone out.

From the previous mentioned and absolutely essential Sun-Sentinel series:

Unchecked charter-school operators are exploiting South Florida’s public school system, collecting taxpayer dollars for schools that quickly shut down.

A recent spate of charter-school closings illustrates weaknesses in state law: virtually anyone can open or run a charter school and spend public education money with near impunity, a Sun Sentinel investigation found.

Florida requires local school districts to oversee charter schools but gives them limited power to intervene when cash is mismanaged or students are deprived of basic supplies — even classrooms.

Once schools close, the newspaper found, districts struggle to retrieve public money not spent on students.

Among the cases the newspaper reviewed:

• An Oakland Park man received $450,000 in tax dollars to open two new charter schools just months after his first collapsed. The schools shuttled students among more than four locations in Broward County, including a park, an event hall and two churches. The schools closed in seven weeks.

• A Boca Raton woman convicted of taking kickbacks when she ran a federal meal program was hired to manage a start-up charter school in Lauderdale Lakes. [That would be our old friend from the earlier post -- MP]

• A Coral Springs man with a history of foreclosures, court-ordered payments, and bankruptcy received $100,000 to start a charter school in Margate. It closed in two months.

• A Hollywood company that founded three short-lived charters in Palm Beach and Collier counties will open a new school this fall. The two Palm Beach County schools did not return nearly $200,000 they owe the district.

South Florida is home to more than 260 charter schools, many of them high-performing. Some cater to students with interests in the performing arts, science and technology, or those with special needs.

Like traditional public schools, charter schools are funded with tax money. But these independent public schools can be opened and operated by individuals, companies or cities, and they are controlled by volunteer governing boards, not local elected school boards.
...
State law requires local school districts to approve or deny new charters based solely on applications that outline their plans in areas including instruction, mission and budget. The statutes don’t address background checks on charter applicants. Because of the lack of guidelines, school officials in South Florida say, they do not conduct criminal screenings or examine candidates’ financial or educational pasts.

That means individuals with a history of failed schools, shaky personal finances or no experience running schools can open or operate charters.

“The law doesn’t limit who can open a charter school. If they can write a good application … it’s supposed to stand alone,” said Jim Pegg, director of the charter schools department for the Palm Beach County school district. “You’re approving an idea.”
...
Charter-school advocates say the complexity of the application, which can run more than 400 pages, weeds out frivolous candidates. But school officials in Broward and Palm Beach counties told the Sun Sentinel some applicants simply cut and paste from previously approved applications available online.

Not surprisingly, this system has attracted some interesting characters such as Trayvon Mitchell.

A former teacher at the Ivy Academies stored her classroom supplies in the trunk of her car. Every morning, she’d wait for a phone call to find out where classes would be held that day.

“I would never know where we [were] going,” said teacher and former middle school dean Kimberly Kyle-Jones. “It was chaotic.”

The two Ivy Academies lasted only seven weeks.

The schools, managed by Trayvon Mitchell of Oakland Park, opened in 2013 at the Signature Grand reception hall in Davie.

Evicted over a bounced check, the schools relocated to a Fort Lauderdale church that did not have enough classrooms.

That’s when the daily field trips began.

On some days, students went to the Miami Seaquarium or local museums. Other days were spent at Holiday Park in Fort Lauderdale.

The schools then moved to a second church a few miles away.
...

State law requires that furniture, computers and unspent money be returned to the districts, but when officials attempt to collect, charter operators sometimes cannot be found.

“We do know there have been a few [charter schools] … where hundreds of thousands of dollars were never spent on kids, and we don’t know where that money went,” said Pegg, who oversees charters in Palm Beach County. “As soon as we close the door on those schools, those people scatter … We can’t find them.”

When a Broward school district auditor and school detective went searching for Mitchell at the Ivy Academies in September 2013, he left through a back door, records show. District officials said they have yet to find him, or to collect the $240,000 in public money the schools received for students they never had.

A bit of context for the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 conspiracy theories

Over at the New Republic, Julia Ioffe has a fascinating piece on the Russian media's treatment of the downing of MH17:

Did you know Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was full of corpses when it took off from Amsterdam? Did you know that, for some darkly inexplicable reason, on July 17, MH17 moved off the standard flight path that it had taken every time before, and moved north, toward rebel-held areas outside Donetsk? Or that the dispatchers summoned the plane lower just before the crash? Or that the plane had been recently reinsured? Or that the Ukrainian army has air defense systems in the area? Or that it was the result of the Ukrainian military mistaking MH17 for Putin’s presidential plane, which looks strangely similar?

Did you know that the crash of MH17 was all part of an American conspiracy to provoke a big war with Russia?

Well, it’s all true—at least if you live in Russia, because this is the Malaysia Airlines crash story that you’d be seeing.

As the crisis surrounding the plane crash deepens and as calls for Vladimir Putin to act grow louder, it’s worth noting that they’re not really getting through to Putin’s subjects. The picture of the catastrophe that the Russian people are seeing on their television screens is very different from that on screens in much of the rest of the world, and the discrepancy does not bode well for a sane resolution to this stand-off. 

This reminded me of a conspiracy theory I've considered blogging on partly because it uses such bad statistics to make much of its case, but mainly because it is so incredibly weird. Forget von Däniken and Velikovsky; this is the hard stuff. From Wikipedia:

The New Chronology also contains a reconstruction, an alternative chronology, radically shorter than the conventional chronology, because all ancient history is "folded" onto the Middle Ages. According to the revised chronology, the written history of humankind goes only as far back as AD 800, there is almost no information about events between AD 800–1000, and most known historical events took place in AD 1000–1500.

The main mover for this is Russian mathematician Anatoly Fomenko and he has put in an incredible amount of effort making sure everything fits his theory, including some things that are difficult to ignore:

The Great Pyramids naturally fit in the epoch of the monumental constructions, which blossomed in the XIV-XVI cc. all over the Empire. They are: 1) The Great Wall of China, 2) the magnificent cathedrals of Western Europe, 3) the indomitable Kremlins and fortifications in Russia-Horde, 4) the massive Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, aka (according to our reconstruction) – The Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem = Czar-Grad, 5) the Great Sphinx, [actually "a very familiar Christian Cherubim." Who knew? -- MP] 6) the Great Pyramids and temples of Egypt 7) the great pyramids and temples of Central America, in particular Mexico, 8) gigantic constructions of Baalbeck (Lebanon).

That part about the Russia-Horde is important. (All remaining quotes from Wikipedia):

Central to Fomenko's New Chronology is his claim of the existence of a vast Slav-Turk empire, which he called the "Russian Horde", that played the dominant role in Eurasian history before the 17th century. The various peoples identified in ancient and medieval history, from the Scythians, Huns, Goths and Bulgars, through the Polyane, Duleby, Drevliane, Pechenegs, to in more recent times, the Cossacks, Ukrainians, and Belarussians, are nothing but elements of the single Russian Horde. For the New Chronologists, peoples such as the Ukrainians, Belarussians, Mongols, and others who assert their national independence from Russia, are suffering from a historical delusion. 

That might explain this:

Despite criticism, Fomenko has published and sold over one million copies of his books in his native Russia. Many Internet forums have appeared which aim to supplement his work with additional amateur research. His critics have suggested that Fomenko's version of history appealed to the Russian reading public by keeping alive an imperial consciousness to replace their disillusionment with the failures of Communism and post-Communist corporate oligarchies.

I don't know enough about Russia to even start speculating about the larger question of conspiracy theories in today's Russia. That's a question for people who know what they're talking about. I will, however, note that, if nothing else, Fomenko's New Chronology shows why chess masters might not make such formidable Bond villains in real life.

As we were saying about 'that's where they keep the money' -- more from the League of Women Voters

Diane Ravitch's blog has an extraordinary article by Patricia W. Hall, chair of the League of Women Voters Education team in Hillsborough County, Florida. It draws heavily on the League's one-year study of charters across Florida. Good government advocates should read the whole thing but it was the deals of Ryan Construction that particularly caught my eye.

Although charter schools must, by Florida law, be overseen by a non -profit board of directors, there are many ways in which for-profit organizations have begun to highjack the charter school movement. For-profit management companies frequently provide everything from back office operations including payroll, contracting with vendors for food services, textbook, etc., to hiring principals and teachers and curriculum control; so what was sold to parents and children as a local public education innovation now looks more like national charter-chains, the “Waltmartization” of public education. According to education expert Diane Ravitch, “nearly half of all charter school students are enrolled in a charter chain school” in the United States. The top four charter operators in Florida for 2011-2012 were Academica (72), Charter Schools USA (37), Charter School Associates (20), and Imagine Schools (23). These are not the small, locally run experimental schools envisioned by the original legislation.

The real profits, however, are not in the operation of the charter school, but in the real estate development. After receiving a variety of grants, loans and tax credits for building a charter school, the for- profit chain charges ever escalating rents and leases to the school district, paid by tax-payer education dollars. The for-profit then reaps the profits when the building is sold in a few years. Meanwhile the properties with high, non-taxable, values based on claimed “commercial” revenue streams from public tax-payer dollars are leveraged to borrow additional funds to build more school buildings.

Our shining local examples in Hillsborough County are owned by Charter Schools USA. My first glimpse of Winthrop Charter School in Riverview in November of 2011 was during a scheduled visit with then Rep. Rachel Burgin. When told the two story brick building was a charter school, I was mystified. The site on which it was built was purchased from John Sullivan by Ryan Construction Company, Minneapolis, MN. From research done by the League of Women Voters of Florida all school building purchases ultimately owned and managed by for-profit Charter Schools USA are initiated by Ryan Construction. The Winthrop site was sold to Ryan Co. in March, 2011 for $2,206,700. In September, 2011 the completed 50,000 square foot building was sold to Red Apple Development Company, LLC for $9,300,000 titled as are all schools managed by Charter Schools USA. Red Apple Development is the school development arm of Charter Schools USA. We, tax payers of Hillsborough County, have paid $969,000 and $988,380 for the last two years to Charter Schools USA in lease fees!

The big prize purchased by Ryan Co. at the same time, March of 2011, was the 58,000 square foot former Verizon call center on 56th Street in Temple Terrace for $3,750,000. Ryan Co. made no discernible exterior changes except removal of the front door, added a $7,000 canopy and sold the building as Woodmont Charter School to Red Apple Development for $9,700,000! Who would not love a $6 million dollar boost in 6 months? Lease fees for the last two years were $1,009,800 and $1,029,996! Are we outraged yet? Woodmont made headlines in the Tampa Bay Times this spring as an “F” rated (FCAT score) school advertising for new students and a fired teacher reporting that out-of-field teachers and uncertified teachers were on the faculty.

...

We discovered that Ryan Construction Company, in collaboration with Red Apple Development and the Florida Development Finance Corporation, secured a mortgage and loan agreement for multiple sites with Regions Bank in Tallahassee for $55,800,000 tax-exempt series (the “Series 2012A Bonds”) and $3,520,000 taxable series (the Series 2012B Bonds ). This transaction was November 1, 2012. Red Apple Development had secured a mortgage from Church Loans and Investments Trust dba CLI Capital in Texas for $9,841,000 for the Woodmont Property in late 2011; they paid off the nearly $10,000,000 mortgage in 16 months (January of 2013) by virtue of the $55,800,000 “windfall”.

From The Tampa Bay Times opinion editorial April 1st, 2014 “Another area where the distinction between public and private is blurred for the benefit of for-profits is the issuing of bonds. Although Florida law prohibits charter schools from issuing bonds, Charter Schools USA has found a way. When naming Jon Hage as Floridian of the Year, Florida Trend in December 2012 contended that Charter School USA is the largest seller of charter school debt in the country. “It will sell $100 million worth of bonds this year (2012-13), Hage says. . . The bonds come with tax-exempt status because they are technically held by the non-profit founding boards that oversee the schools.”

The League of Women Voters weighs in on Florida's charter school scandals

Diane Ravitch has the announcement. Make sure to check out the conflict of interest list at the end:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 27, 2014

Contact:
Deirdre Macnab
LWVF President
Email: floridaleague@earthlink.net
Phone: (407) 415-4559
League of Women Voters Releases

State-Wide Study on School Choice

Tallahassee, Fla — Twenty percent of the state’s charter schools close because of financial mismanagement or poor academic standards, according to the League of Women Voters of Florida after a year-long study of charter schools in 28 Florida counties.

“Charter schools could fill a niche in Florida’s educational spectrum, but for many, their biggest contribution may be to corporate bottom lines,” said Deirdre Macnab, President of the League of Women Voters of Florida.

With over 576 charter schools in the state, the League of Women Voters of Florida conducted a study in order to better understand the oversight, management, accountability and transparency of charter and private schools in Florida.

The study found that:

Approximately one-third of charters are run by for-profit management companies. Many screen students, then drop those who are not successful, which public schools are prohibited from doing. Charters also serve particular socio-economic groups, increasing segregation in schools.

Although charters tend to be smaller than traditional schools, there is no consistent difference in achievement for charter school and public school students.

Many charters blur the distinction between religious and non-secular schools. Some churches receive as much as a million dollars in lease payments annually for their facilities from charter schools.

In areas with declining enrollments, neither the charters nor regular public schools are large enough to adequately provide support for staff like nurses or counselors. Retaining teachers is also a problem; most charters offer lower salaries and benefits than public schools.

The League’s study produced several recommendations:

Charters should be limited to those that fill unmet needs in identified local school districts.

Stronger local management oversight and disclosure policies are needed.

Financial mismanagement issues must be addressed, as too often the privatization of schools leads to financial abuse.

For more information, including further findings and recommendations, please see the state-wide study, along with the individual studiesconducted by eighteen local Leagues across Florida.

###

The League of Women Voters of Florida, a nonpartisan political organization, encourages informed and active participation in government, works to increase understanding of major public policy issues, and influences public policy through education and advocacy. For more information, please visit the League’s website at:http://www.TheFloridaVoter.org.

FLORIDA LEGISLATORS WITH A DIRECT INTEREST IN CHARTER SCHOOLS:

Conflict of Interest Concerns

 Senator John Legg Chair of Senate Education Committee is co-founder and business administrator of Daysprings Academy in Port Richey.

 Senator Kelli Stargel from Orange County is on board of McKeel Academies. She is on the Education Committee and sponsored the Parent Trigger Bill.

 http://www.theledger.com/article/20130429/EDIT02/130429282

 House Budget Chairman Seth McKeel is on the board of McKeel Academy Schools in Polk
County.

 Anne Corcoran, wife of future House Speaker Richard Corcoran has a charter school in
Pasco County. http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/k12/pascos-classical-prep- charter-school-delays-opening-for-a-year/1276912. Richard Corcoran is Chair of the House Appropriations Committee.

 Senator Anitere Flores of Miami is president of an Academica managed charter school in Doral.

 Florida Representative Erik Fresen is Chair of the House Education subcommittee on appropriations. Representative Fresen’s sister is the Vice President of Academica and is married to the president.http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/the-buzz-florida- politics/content/ethics-commission-clears-miami-rep-erik-fresen-alleged-voting-conflict.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/12/14/2545708_p2/company-cultivates-links-to-

lawmakers.html

 George Levesque, Florida House lawyer cleared Erik Fresen of conflict of interest
concerns over charter schools. He is the husband of Patricia Levesque, former Jeb Bush Deputy Chief of Staff and currently Executive Director of the Foundation for Excellence in Education which promotes school choice. http://www.truthabouteducation.org/1/archives/01-2010/1.html.

 Representative Manny Diaz is Dean of Doral Academy, an Academica managed school. He is the leader for the new statewide contract bill in the Florida House. Doral College was cited by the Florida Auditor General for a $400,000 loan from Doral Charter High School. Conflict of Interest and procurement for Charters with federal grants:http://floridacharterschools.org/schools/taps/conflictinterest_att.pdf

"We couldn't even afford one Mercedes Benz at Next Generation"

Bigger story coming up on charter school corruption. One of the major sources will be this stunning series from the Sun-Sentinel. Florida, like Michigan, has long been on the cutting edge of the charter school movement, not just in terms of funding but with freedom as well. Both states bet heavily on the idea that regulation of charters would hinder innovation while school choice would make close oversight unnecessary. 

One result has been a number of charters run by characters with rather interesting backgrounds. From the Sun-Sentinel, Karen Yi and Amy Shipley describe a notable example.

It’s unclear how Next Generation spent the nearly $1 million it received in tax money before closing down in April 2013. The charter school failed to file several required monthly financial reports and a mandatory end-of-the-year audit. Records show the school owed more than $2 million to creditors and $55,000 to the Broward school district.

Two management companies separately operated the school during its eight-month tenure.

Cory MacNeille founded Next Generation and created the first for-profit company to operate it. She then hired her mother, Judy Perlin, of Boca Raton, to join her in managing the school, records show.

In the previous decade, state investigators repeatedly had cited the two with misusing federal money under a program to provide meals for low-income children in South Florida, state public records and court documents show. The two ran Riverwood Youth Opportunities, Inc., a nonprofit.

In 2004, state officials found Perlin’s nonprofit improperly used federal dollars to lease two Mercedes Benz vehicles for her and her daughter; pay for lodging and meals at a Club Med; and purchase two airfares and lodging for travel to Garden City, N.Y. The organization was ordered to repay the state.

In 2005, the state health department said Perlin, the nonprofit’s CEO, let her daughter use federal dollars to advertise a personal business. The state temporarily barred both from the meal program.

In 2010, Perlin pleaded guilty to bribery charges related to the meals program and admitted taking $40,000 in kickbacks. She was ordered to pay a $3,000 fine and placed on two years’ probation.

Once Perlin and her daughter departed, the board hired a new management company, headed by Trayvon Mitchell.

Teachers said the school continued to decline, failing to prepare students for required state tests and neglecting students with special needs.

The school shut its doors weeks before the last day of school.

Mitchell could not be reached for comment. MacNeille and Perlin did not respond to specific questions about the state’s findings against them or the school’s finances.

“I think charter schools are very difficult, and I think they are underfunded,” MacNeille said.