Sometimes you have to remind yourself that you're winning

One of the advantages and disadvantages of being an independent blogger is that you can take the quixotic side in as many debates as you want. The good side of this is that, if you find a rich vein of conventional stupidity, it's relatively easy to make valid yet original points and you will never go wanting for a flawed argument to dismantle. The bad side is that this kind of fight can wear you down. Every day you going looking for something stupid to write about and every day you find it. After a while a sense of futility will start to creep up on you.

Under those circumstances, it's easy to miss signs of progress. For example, if you were following the free TV story five years ago, you couldn't help noticing what almost amounted to a press blackout on the subject. Even in stories advising consumers on options to pay-TV, over-the-air television somehow went unmentioned. This was true in the stories themselves. The comment sections invariably had readers pointing out they got their TV through an antenna and were getting more channels in higher definition than they would have gotten from basic cable. The result was a strange situation where the comments were more informative than the articles.

There is still a lot of misinformation about over-the-air television out there, but it is now more or less standard for stories about consumer TV options to have a paragraph like this:

For sports, news and syndicated shows, an indoor HD antenna is a great choice. It will bring you high-definition over-the-air broadcasts from local networks for less than the cost of one month of cable. And you can keep it for years.

What explains the shift? No doubt the showdown between Viacom and Time Warner played a role but cracks were appearing even before then. It could have been word of mouth or information seeping up from the comment section or even journalistic curiosity. Whatever the cause, it's still a sign of progress.

Can ConnCan con Conn?

I apologize for the title -- I just couldn't help myself.

In this Monkey Cage piece (Vergara vs. California: Are the top 0.1% buying their version of education reform?), I talked about how a few CEOs and ex-CEOs influenced that highly publicized trial through subsidized research, cozy relationships with officials and high-priced PR and legal teams. The case provided an interesting and very topical look into the relationship between big money and the education reform movement but it was a small part of the picture.

ConnCAN (Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now) is a powerful movement advocacy group. Their priorities closely follow the big three: privatization; scientific management; and elimination of pretty much all job protections for teachers. After Vergara, they pushed for similar moves in Connecticut despite the fact that, unlike California, Connecticut already has a  tough tenure granting process and dismissal procedures that both teachers and administrators seem to be happy with.

Danbury's Deputy Superintendent of Schools William Glass also said the California ruling won't have an effect on the educational community in Connecticut.

"We have a very effective process for dismissing a teacher with cause," Glass said.

"It takes time and we provide support for a teacher to see if they can improve. But if they can't, we are now down to a 10-month process for dismissal," he said, referring to the new reduction in due process.

Glass also said most teachers who are not a good fit will voluntarily resign.

No one wants an ineffective teacher because the principal, the school and the district all are held responsible for that teacher's ineffectiveness in teaching students, Glass said.

"Accountability has never been as clear as it is now," Glass said. "The days of hiding are gone. It's all very visible."

In California, tenure can be earned after only two years in front of a classroom. In Connecticut, it takes four years to earn employment protection.

Connecticut also recently added language to its tenure laws that allow ineffectiveness -- as determined by new teacher evaluation procedures -- to be a cause for dismissal.

Just to be clear, California's tenure system was, by almost universal agreement, deeply flawed. One of the most pervasive defenses of the Vergara decision was that something needed to be done. Connecticut is, by almost every measure, on the other end of the spectrum. When an organization makes reducing teachers job protections in Connecticut a priority, you have to suspect it's not really about the students.

To get a better fix on ConnCAN's priorities, it helps to look at where the organization came from. Jonathan Pelto, guest blogging for Diane Ravitch, fills in the details:

Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now, Inc. (ConnCAN) was formed in 2004 by Jonathan Sackler, who served as the founding chair. However, the role of ConnCAN’s Board Chairman was then transferred to Brian Olson, the co-founder of Viking Global Investors. Viking Global Investors is a hedge fund which currently manages over $10 billion. In addition to being a long-time member of ConnCAN, Olsen presently serves on the Leadership Council of the Newschools Venture Fund.

Following Olson’s tenure as the Chairman of ConnCAN, the position was given to Will Heins, the former Senior Vice President of Greenwich Capital Markets.

Of the twelve present members of ConnCAN’s Board of Directors, at least nine are or were “hedge fund managers,” including Art Reimers, a former partner and managing director of Goldman Sachs.

Three months after Sackler and his allies formed ConnCAN, they also incorporated Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Advocacy, Inc. (ConnAD), which was originally designed to be the lobbying and public relations arm of ConnCAN. The number two spot at ConnAD went to Alexander Troy, who lists his occupation as “private investor.” Troy worked for the hedge fund, Perry Partners during the 1990s and eventually created his own hedge fund company called Troy Capital in 2003.

There's a particularly rich vein of chutzpah in having a group of hedge fund managers calling for more accountability and performance-based pay. Here's Barry Ritholtz spelling out the context:

The numbers cited above are eye-popping: The average hedge fund is underperforming the S&P 500 by more than 2000 basis points this year alone. That is an astonishingly poor showing. As Saijel Kishan & Kelly Bit point out in the Bloomberg News article, hedge funds have “underperformed the S&P 500 by 97 percentage points since the end of 2008.” The last time the fund industry outperformed U.S. stocks was in 2008. That year, they lost (depending on what industry data you use) somewhere between 19 and 29 percent; the S&P 500 declined 37 percent. Prior to 2008, you need to go back to 1993 to find similar outperformance, when they were up 31 percent versus a 10 percent increase for the S&P.

And how much accountability have we seen? Catherine Mulbrandon of Visualizing Economics (also via Ritholtz) has a handy chart.

Add to that the myriad tricks that these managers use to cook their books, tricks that, not coincidentally, have been showing up in the charter school sector.

Pearl on Pólya

Recently, I've been discussing George Pólya from a pedagogical standpoint. For a philosophical take, check out this paper by Judea Pearl. It's not all that relevant to the the education debate we've been having but it's definitely worth reading just to put things in their historical context.

A How to Solve It primer

I've been mentioning George Pólya a bit recently -- he fits naturally in the education debate and he's a regular fixture of my teaching blog -- so I thought I should provide some background, starting with Pólya's best known book.

How to Solve It is the key work in the two initiatives that, so for as I can tell, occupied the second half of Pólya's remarkable career. The first was to create a practical guide for teaching reasoning and problem-solving, focusing on mathematics. The second was to reintroduce the field of heuristics. From the glossary:

Pólya's intention was to build on the work of Pappus, Descartes, Leibnitz and Bolzano while, in some cases, scaling back their ambition (Descartes and Leibnitz both tended to think big). He was attempting to lay out a framework for a discussion that could be productive but was unlikely to be resolved.

The primary focus was something Pólya called plausible reasoning (a term he used in the title of his first two follow-up volumes). The idea was that while the final product in mathematics is based on rigorously proven statements, the process of getting there is usually a messy combination of induction, analogy and intuition, propped up with informal and incomplete proofs until something rigorous can be erected. In order to be good at their profession, mathematicians need to be (or become) skilled at coming up plausible conjectures.

Pólya's prose is plain-spoken and direct, which has sometimes caused trouble for less careful readers because, though the style may be simple, the ideas are not. Pólya often makes fine distinctions and his assertions often are only valid in their carefully laid out context.

With its heavy reliance on Socratic dialogues and its extensive discussions of philosophy and the history of mathematics (all of which are directly relevant to the main points), How to Solve It does not lend itself to bullet points and executive summaries. Unfortunately those have become very much the language of education today. I have seen a lot of education proposals -- particularly those promising to teach critical thinking and problem solving -- that appear to come from people who saw the bullet points but never read the book. That leads to bad things.

This is what a "danger to the staff" looks like

Though I will admit that those scary turtle faces are intimidating.

Tunette Powell's two young sons kept getting suspended from preschool. She couldn't figure out what she was doing wrong until she started comparing notes with other parents.

My son has been suspended five times. He’s 3.

Just like before, I tried to find excuses. I looked at myself. What was I doing wrong? My children are living a comfortable life. My husband is an amazing father to JJ and Joah. At home, they have given us very few problems; the same goes for time with babysitters.

I blamed myself, my past. And I would have continued to blame myself had I not taken the boys to a birthday party for one of JJ’s classmates. At the party, the mothers congregated to talk about everyday parenting things, including preschool. As we talked, I admitted that JJ had been suspended three times. All of the mothers were shocked at the news.

“JJ?” one mother asked.

“My son threw something at a kid on purpose and the kid had to be rushed to the hospital,” another parent said. “All I got was a phone call.”

One after another, white mothers confessed the trouble their children had gotten into. Some of the behavior was similar to JJ’s; some was much worse.

Most startling: None of their children had been suspended.

After that party, I read a study reflecting everything I was living.

Black children represent 18 percent of preschool enrollment but make up 48 percent of preschool children receiving more than one out-of-school suspension, according to the study released by the  Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights in March.

The one on the right is the dangerous one.

'Rigor' is the new 'wholesome.'

Anyone who has dealt extensively with major corporations knows that corporate culture does strange things to language. I've got a half-finished post sitting on my hard-drive which argues that this process is Orwellian in the sense that if you go through "Politics and the English Language" and the relevant portions of 1984, you will find them remarkably applicable to the way language is used in the business class.

As mentioned before, the education reform movement is the product of business leaders and management consultants and free-market theorists and in most areas it hasn't yet developed a distinct culture of its own. This is particularly true with language. Even the reformers who aren't former management consultants, tend to talk as if they were.

One of the defining traits of this kind of corporate language is the constant repetition of certain words and phrases that are vague but which have strong emotional connotations, especially connotations of quality and/or toughness. Excellent/excellence is the obvious example, but in many ways, rigor/rigorous is an even better one.

'Excellence' is a fairly general term; 'rigor' has a much more specific meaning. Here's what Google says:

rig·or
noun

the quality of being extremely thorough, exhaustive, or accurate.
"his analysis is lacking in rigor"

severity or strictness.
"the full rigor of the law"

demanding, difficult, or extreme conditions.
"the rigors of a harsh winter"

All three of these could reasonably be used in a number of educational contexts (though it should be noted that the third is generally something we want to reduce). They make little sense, however in places we normally see them.

At the same time, we need a frank discussion about the shortcomings of the current system. At the heart of the matter is that CTE [career and technical education] programs need to strengthen their rigor and relevance – and deliver better outcomes for students.

Arne Duncan

For the last four years, the Obama administration has provided funding and incentives for states to help build a teaching profession that is both respected and rigorous.

Duncan again.

What exactly does it mean for a program to have stronger rigor or for a profession to be more rigorous? I'm not sure and I don't think Duncan is either. I don't even think he's trying to make meaningful statements in the conventional sense. 'Rigor' and 'rigorous' are used so frequently (satirized here by Edushyster), because the speakers are trying to build an association between their proposals and the qualities associated with the words (hard work, competence, discipline).

An explicitly Orwellian part of this process is the way words with strong connotations are made increasingly vague so they can be applied to more and more situations.

From the Glossary of Education Reform.

While dictionaries define the term as rigid, inflexible, or unyielding, educators frequently apply rigor or rigorous to assignments that encourage students to think critically, creatively, and more flexibly. Likewise, they may use the term rigorous to describe learning environments that are not intended to be harsh, rigid, or overly prescriptive, but that are stimulating, engaging, and supportive.

And a bit later

One common way in which educators do use rigor to mean unyielding or rigid is when they are referring to “rigorous” learning standards and high expectations—i.e., when they are calling for all students to be held to the same challenging academic standards and expectations. In this sense, rigor may be applied to educational situations in which students are not allowed to “coast” or “slide by” because standards, requirements, or expectations are low.

To strictly adhere to a rule is one of the definitions of rigorous, so 'rigorous standards' are meaningful in the traditional sense, but even here the treatment is somewhat vague. Note the way that the more specific 'thorough, exhaustive, or accurate' are replaced with the more general 'high' and 'challenging.' More to the point, any definition that covers both paragraphs (not to mentions Duncan's usage) would be stretched to the point of nonexistence.

Most of the time, 'rigor' in an education proposal is like 'wholesome' in an ad for a snack cake. The word means almost nothing and the very fact that you're seeing it means someone is trying to sell you something.

Affinity Khan

Back in the late 90s, I produced a series to accompany a college algebra textbook. It was the most god-awful thing you've ever seen but the publisher wanted it fast and cheap and since I was able to deliver on those two metrics, so everyone but me seemed to be happy with the final product.

I was reminded of those videos recently when I reviewed a series of online lectures from the Khan Academy. Though the approaches were in many ways very different (on our tapes the author explained and worked through the problems and I then added the graphics postproduction), the content and format and style were remarkably similar. I would love to claim some kind of influence here but I can tell you with certainty that just did not happen. For starters, very few people saw our video. It was featured in a handful of schools that used this textbook and had learning labs with video equipment. More to the point, it was itself absolutely nothing new.

For a while there (and perhaps to this day is far as I know), every math textbook was expected to have a video supplement. You can find literally thousands of hours of textbook authors, many of whom were not dynamic screen presences, diligently working through problem after problem for the camera. Add to that tens of thousands of hours of taped and filmed math lessons from other sources dating back at least to the 50s and the advent of educational television. Of these, Annenberg probably did the best that I've seen and a few others stood out due to exceptionally strong instruction and clever lessons. On the whole, though, they were pretty much interchangeable and the lessons produced by the Khan Academy definitely fall right along the median.

Of course, there is more to the Khan Academy than just the few videos I've checked out but when you look at the massive amount of similar work that had been done and you consider what was already available on on YouTube and Vimeo and from MIT before Khan started the academy, it is difficult to see where the big innovation is. To be blunt, it appears that Salman Khan's main talents lie not in innovation and execution but in self-promotion and fundraising.

Khan is not a conman but he is very much a salesman. and I wonder if part of his success has to do with affinity. Khan is an MIT grad and a Harvard MBA and a former hedge fund analyst. He's at home with CEOs like Bill Gates and management consultants like David Coleman. He's smart but it's the TED-talk kind of smart that journalists find inviting rather than threatening. In other words, both the people who present the narratives and the people who sign the checks see him as one of them.

I don't want to be too harsh -- for some students, watching the Khan videos is helpful just as, for a lot of college students, watching those supplemental video tapes at home was helpful* -- but there are some bigger issues about the way we debate the issue and make policy. If we don't remember what went before and, perhaps more importantly, what failed, if we focus on the style of press releases rather than the substance of products, if we don't think seriously and clearly about these questions, we are not going to make progress.

For some more thoughts on instructional video, check out my 2012 post, the Eugen Weber Paradox over at the teaching blog and for some sharp criticisms of the Khan Academy, take a look at this article, also from 2012, which ran in the Chronicle of Higher Education.


* The university I taught at in the Nineties had a tutoring center with a set of video carrels for watching these textbook videos. They were a complete failure and the tapes went almost completely unused until we started letting students check out the tapes and watch them at home. The response and feedback were much better.

New Math: revisionist narrative watch

I've been doing some posts for the Monkey Cage. The first was a historical perspective piece on our last big educational reform initiative, the now anachronistically named 'New Math,' a post-Sputnik push for axiomatic rigor in primary and secondary mathematics education. Much of the feedback I got on the post indicated that I had gotten too deep in the weeds and spent too much time on the history lesson and not enough making my points. I'm inclined to agree.

One point I wish in retrospect I would have hammered harder was the way supporters of Common Core are pushing a convenient but false narrative about the initiative, namely that it was a noble effort that failed because most teachers lacked the training and mathematical sophistication to handle the new material. Recently, Elizabeth Green,* the chief executive of Chalkbeat (an organization that receives funding from both Bill Gates and the Walton Family), published a long piece in the New York Times that contains a perfect example.

The trouble always starts when teachers are told to put innovative ideas into practice without much guidance on how to do it. In the hands of unprepared teachers, the reforms turn to nonsense, perplexing students more than helping them. One 1965 Peanuts cartoon depicts the young blond-haired Sally struggling to understand her new-math assignment: “Sets . . . one to one matching . . . equivalent sets . . . sets of one . . . sets of two . . . renaming two. . . .” After persisting for three valiant frames, she throws back her head and bursts into tears: “All I want to know is, how much is two and two?”

Before we go on, you'll notice that the actual cartoon has nothing to do with how the material was taught. Schulz was satirizing bringing in arcane and needlessly complex methods to do simple tasks. In other words, his point was pretty much the opposite of Green's.

It is easy to see the appeal of the "unprepared teacher" narrative for many movement reformers. The reformers were the heroes here, visionary innovators who came up with great ideas but were stymied by the incompetence of the rank and file. As mentioned before, the tension between teachers and reformers is longstanding and can be traced to, among other things, a strong pro-privatization/anti-union faction in the movement and to teachers' understandable reluctance to try unproven approaches like 29-page scripted close readings of the Gettysburg Address.

Of course, the whole narrative falls apart if those 'innovative ideas' of New Math weren't actually that good or well executed to begin with (from the Monkey Cage post):

[George] Pólya was only one of many mathematicians and scientists who publicly criticized the new curriculum. Despite the common perception that “new math” failed because it was too advanced for general consumption, it was often those who understood the mathematics best who had the harshest comments.

Most notable of these may have been the physicist Richard Feynman, who eviscerated reform-era math and science texts in his essay “Judging Books by Their Covers.” Feynman mocked the confusing and overly technical language and complained about the emphasis on obscure mathematical topics, such as doing basic arithmetic in base five or seven (it is worth noting that songwriter and mathematician Tom Lehrer satirized the same topic in his song “New Math”).

Perhaps Feynman’s most cutting criticism was that, after dragging students through painfully rigorous presentations, the textbooks did not get the rigor correct:

The reason was that the books were so lousy. They were false. They were hurried. They would try to be rigorous, but they would use examples (like automobiles in the street for ‘sets’) which were almost OK, but in which there were always some subtleties. The definitions weren’t accurate. Everything was a little bit ambiguous — they weren’t smart enough to understand what was meant by ‘rigor.’ They were faking it. They were teaching something they didn’t understand, and which was, in fact, useless, at that time, for the child.

One of the best summaries of these criticisms came from Pólya, who alluded to the famous, though probably apocryphal, story of Isadora Duncan suggesting to George Bernard Shaw that they should have a child because it would have her beauty and his brains, to which Shaw is supposed to have replied that it could well have her brains and his beauty.

Pólya suggested that new math was somewhat analogous to Duncan’s proposal. The intention had been to bring mathematical researchers and high school teachers together so that the new curriculum would combine the mathematical understanding of the former and the teaching skills of the latter, but the final product got it the other way around.

We could could go back and forth on the place of axiomatic rigor in mathematics education (my position is a firm "it depends"), but in the case of New Math, it is difficult to argue that the initiative was not seriously flawed before it ever got to the teachers, and the last thing reformers like David Coleman want people thinking about is a narrative that includes that inconvenient fact.

* I contacted Ms. Green shortly after the piece ran. I have yet to hear back.

Campbell's law revisited

Toby Lowe writing for the Guardian:

Payment by results is a simple idea: people and organisations should only get paid for what they deliver. Who could argue with that? If your job is to get people back to work, then find them a job dammit.

Plenty of people working in local government and public services are already starting to realise this is nonsense, and a pernicious, damaging nonsense at that. The evidence is very clear: if you pay (or otherwise manage performance) based on a set of pre-defined results, it creates poorer services for those most in need. It is the vulnerable, the marginalised, the disadvantaged who suffer most from payment by results.

Here's why: payment by results does not reward organisations for supporting people to achieve what they need; it rewards organisations for producing data about targets; it rewards organisations for the fictions their staff are able to invent about what they have achieved; it pays people for porkies.

We know that common things happen when people use payment by results, and other outcomes-based performance management systems. There have been numerous studies that show that such systems distort organisational priorities and make organisations focus on doing the wrong things – and they make people lie.

This lying takes all sorts of different forms. Some of them are subtle forms of deception: teachers who teach to the test or who only enter pupils for exams they know they are going to pass; employment support that helps only those likely to get a job and ignores those most in need; or hospitals that reclassify trolleys as beds, and keep people waiting in ambulances on the hospital doorstep until they know they can be seen within a target time. In the literature, this is known as gaming the system.

Some of the lying is less subtle. People just make up results. Last year's scandal with A4e provision of employment programmes is just one in a long line of haphazard outcome measurement.

Gwyn Bevan and Christopher Hood, professors of management at theLondon School of Economics and the University of Oxford respectively,looked at the impact of results targets on the NHS. They concluded that "target based performance management always creates 'gaming' ". Not sometimes. Not frequently. Always.

Two quotes

[The businessman] is speaking a language that is familiar to him and dear to him. Its portentous nouns and verbs invest ordinary events with high adventure; the executive walks among ink erasers caparisoned like a knight. This we should be tolerant of--every man of spirit wants to ride a white horse.

E. B. White on Language 

Or be a ninja...

“Meditation used to have this reputation as a hippie thing for people who speak in a particularly soft tone of voice,” Michaelson says. Not so. “Samurai practiced meditation to become more effective killers,” he says. So too did kamikaze pilots. “It’s value neutral,” [Jay] Michaelson says.
...
A competitive edge, not enlightenment, seems to be driving [Ray] Dalio. “I feel like a ninja in a fight,” Dalio said of his professional equanimity, during a February panel discussion in New York on the benefits of meditation. “When it comes at you, it seems like slow motion.”

To Make a Killing on Wall Street, Start Meditating

Common Core is for the common folk*

If you spend much time following the education reform debate, particularly on the counter-reformation side, you soon notice that a lot of fairly major stories get a lot of play on the state and local level but are largely ignored on the national level, at least by publications like the New York Times.

One of the recurring themes in these stories is the idea of education reform for all but the elite, which, given the make-up of the movement, often comes down to reformers exempting themselves from their own reforms.

From Nashville Public Radio

Lipscomb Academy Chief Advocates For Common Core, But Not At Her School

On an almost weekly basis, Candice McQueen is called on by the state Department of Education to beat back criticism. Last week, it was an Associated Press panel. The week before that, she advocated for Common Core as SCORE released its annual report card. McQueen testified before the Senate Education Committee during a two day hearing on the standards.

She praises the rigor and the benefits to having Tennessee kids on the same page as students in 44 states. So when McQueen assumed a new role over Lipscomb’s private K-12 academy, parents were concerned Common Core would follow her to campus, according to an open letter sent to families.

“Because of my role as the dean of the university’s College of Education some of you have expressed concerns about my appointment and the direction Lipscomb Academy will take as it relates to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).”

McQueen wrote that she Common Core has not been adopted and that she has “not been in any formal discussions” about changing standards at the school, though she has asked faculty to familiarize themselves with the math and English standards.

And McQueen doesn’t plan to stop advocating for Common Core, according to the letter.

“I will continue to be part of the ongoing CCSS conversation. However, this should not be extrapolated to indicate or predict the adoption of CCSS at Lipscomb Academy.”
...
Lipscomb would be unusual if it went to Common Core. Most of Nashville’s private schools blend state and national standards and don’t use the same standardized tests as public schools.

Lipscomb is, particularly for Nashville, a rather expensive and exclusive academy. Here's how much it costs to attend:

Tuition rates for the 2014-15 school year will be $5,000 for the 3 day-per-week Pre-kindergarten, $8,350 for the 5 day-per-week Pre-kindergarten.  In addition to the new tuition rates, Lipscomb Academy Pre-kindergarten students will receive a $1,000 discount off their kindergarten year tuition.  Elementary school tuition will be $10,440 while middle and high school tuition is set at $11,540. Multi-child discounts continue at $400 for the second child, $500 for the third and $600 for the fourth. 

To put that in context, here are some numbers from Wikipedia:

The median income for a household in the city was $46,141, and the median income for a family was $56,377. Males with a year-round, full-time job had a median income of $41,017 versus $36,292 for females. The per capita income for the city was $27,372. About 13.9% of families and 18.2% of the population were below the poverty line, including 29.5% of those under age 18 and 9.9% of those age 65 or over.

* I see that Diane Ravitch beat to the punch on this joke by a big margin.

Self-defeating comment spam of the day

This is probably not the best product to pitch if you have to rely on translation software. From the just possibly pseudonymous Lerry G Leone Leone:

This usefulness of our copy writers makes it possible for us to make available along with produce many products and services along with different types connected with forms. ________  features Tell us from in this article We have now chosen accomplished copy writers from just about all fields of study, and they are efficient at finishing any kind of instructional paper you'll need. Thank you.

"Obviously, he's kept a very low profile"

From Bill Schackner and Mary Niederberger writing for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

When Ron Tomalis stepped aside as state education secretary 14 months ago, he landed what seemed like a full-time assignment in a state struggling to boost college access and curb ever-rising tuition prices.

As special adviser to Gov. Tom Corbett for higher education, Mr. Tomalis was tasked with "overseeing, implementing and reviewing" the recommendations made by the Governor's Advisory Commission on Postsecondary Education.

Despite the state's fiscal crisis, the former secretary was allowed to keep his Cabinet-level salary of $139,542 plus benefits and -- initially, at least -- work from home. At the time, state Department of Education spokesman Tim Eller explained that the newly created job did not require an office, and Mr. Tomalis "is a professional and doesn't need to 'check in' each day."
...
The records produced included a work calendar showing weeks with little or no activity [ click here] ...  [P]hone logs averaging barely over a phone call a day over 12 months and a total of five emails produced by Mr. Tomalis. The state was not able to provide any reimbursement records suggesting Mr. Tomalis traveled the state in support of his work.

Beyond the records, a number of key players in higher education said in interviews they had little or no contact with Mr. Tomalis in his advisory role, for which the state says there is no written job description.

Jennifer Branstetter, Mr. Corbett's director of policy, said she has spoken with the governor and believes he is satisfied with Mr. Tomalis' job performance. "I think the governor is pleased overall with the advice and oversight he has been giving."
...
A copy of Mr. Tomalis' work calendar from June 1, 2013 to June 1, 2014, released by the department, shows a number of weeks and months with little scheduled activity, including 20 weeks that appear to have no work-related appointments.

Phone logs showed 406 calls, of which 57 percent were two minutes or less. The last four digits for all but a handful of the phone calls were redacted.

Asked for his work-related correspondence as adviser, the department produced five emails written by Mr. Tomalis -- the first of which was dated Feb. 24, 2014, nine months after he landed the job.

Two of the five emails involved registering for a conference. Two others dealt with an invitation for a department representative to serve on the governing board of an education and business initiative in India; and a fifth email involved a clarification the former secretary sought about the number of higher education institutions in Pennsylvania.

A brief aside: sometimes the location of the line between professional development and career advancement is debatable. This is particularly true with conferences, which many attendees treat as combination paid vacation and exclusive job fair. Tomalis' sinecure was incredibly sweet but not all that stable. He did next-to-nothing for his six figure salary and a good portion of that next-to-nothing appears to have been finding ways to have the state pay for his job search.

A number of key players in the state's higher education arena said they have not been contacted by Mr. Tomalis since he was named special adviser, including Sen. Mike Folmer a Lebanon County Republican who chairs the Senate Education Committee, and Rep. James Roebuck of Philadelphia, the top-ranked Democrat on the House Education Committee.
...
Among the K-12 issues that Mr. Tomalis handled were charter school matters such as arranging testing sites for cyber charter students. [Acting Education Secretary Carol Dumaresq] said Mr. Tomalis was instrumental in reviving the governor's schools.

Schackner and Niederberger did an excellent job reporting on this story, but if I had been their editor, I definitely would have immediately followed Dumaresq's comments about the governor's schools with these paragraphs which can be found toward the end of the article.

In addition to a lack of activities on his calendar, it appears Mr. Tomalis did not participate in some listed activities, including the Governor's School for the Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University in July 2013.

Barry Luokkala, teaching professor of physics and the school's program director, said Mr. Tomalis was a big supporter of governor's schools but added that he had not heard from Mr. Tomalis since he stepped down as education secretary and could recall no such visit.

Luokkala wasn't alone in his "Ron who?" reaction.

"I am not able to find any information regarding Mr. Tomalis' interactions with anyone at the university in the capacity you describe," said Annemarie Mountz, a spokeswoman for Penn State University.

"There has been no contact between Tomalis and anyone here," said Ken Service, a University of Pittsburgh spokesman.
...
Elizabeth Bolden, president and CEO of the Pennsylvania Commission on Community Colleges, said she was not aware of any meetings held by Mr. Tomalis that involved the commission staff.

Keith New, spokesman for the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency, said he too was unable to find any indication Mr. Tomalis had interacted with PHEAA since becoming the governor's higher education adviser.

Ms. Dumaresq said the governor's office directed that Mr. Tomalis delay discussions with Pitt and Penn State regarding performance funding until the new leadership of both schools was in place.

When told that Pitt and Penn State -- among other key institutions -- reported no dealings whatsoever with Mr. Tomalis, she replied: "I'm not sure how to respond. ... I don't know what is sufficient. I know that none is certainly not sufficient, but again, I can tell you that he has been talking with staff here and working on programs."
...
"Obviously, he's kept a very low profile," she added. "Maybe that should change."
...
While the state could provide no written examples of Mr. Tomalis' work product, Ms. Dumaresq said the initiatives advanced are evidence of Mr. Tomalis' work. 

"The important thing is whether in fact people are working and working hard and producing," she said. "And Ron is."

Lots of familiar elements here, starting with the last line. "The important thing" is one of the standard defenses when looting of the educational till is uncovered. The very fact that you're discussing mere money suggests that you care more about your pocketbook than you do about children. No mention is made of the worthwhile programs in the system that desperately need that money and the apologist never bothers to explain why the contribution of the looter is of any special value.

For some reason, this defense seems far more acceptable in the field of education (especially among movement reformers) than it does in fields like the military, infrastructure and law enforcement. We recently had the current Michigan governor and one of his predecessors tell us that voters shouldn't care about massive looting in their state's charter school industry because those schools are doing good work (despite evidence that Michigan's charters are, on average, doing worse than its public schools).

Perhaps I'm missing some obvious recent counter-examples but I have trouble imagining a similar responses from top government officials if a military contractor or construction company was caught engaging in this level of self-dealing, overcharging, graft and fraud. In the rest of the public sector, the standard responses to scandal seem to be

"Reports are exaggerated."

"We're going to investigate this thoroughly."

"A few bad players..."

"We're really sorry and we'll see that this never happens again."

We can question their sincerity, but in most parts of the public sector, officials recognize the need to at least humor us; "You shouldn't care that you're being robbed blind." is not considered acceptable.

This story also illustrates the bizarre inconsistency of attitudes toward accountability in education. Movement reformers are pushing to deny teachers even the most basic of job security while holding them responsible for things they have almost no control over, but this accountability is inversely proportional to position. When it looked like LAUSD's John Deasy was about to lose his job (after nearly bankrupting the district but before powerful friends came to his rescue), Deasy actually suggested a consulting deal similar to the one Tomalis got.  Keep in mind, Deasy has spent most of his time in office complaining about the hardship of having to reassign certain teachers to clerical duties rather than firing them.

Accountability is for little people.

Management salary apologists need to work up some new material -- college edition

Raymond D. Cotton (a partner in the Mintz Levin law firm [who] represents higher education and other nonprofit boards of trustee and executives) assures us that college presidents deserve every penny of their generous salaries. I particularly enjoyed the third paragraph.

By and large, college presidents are not overpaid in relationship to their responsibilities and the compensation market place.

College presidents today act as chief executive officers of the institutions that they lead and serve. On a day-to-day basis, they often make decisions that affect every aspect of their organizations.

It is also important to keep in mind that presidents do not set their own compensation. Instead, their compensation packages are decided by the board of trustees, which is the highest legal authority in the institution. Such boards currently comprise many members from the corporate world, and they have brought certain business concepts with them, including performance bonuses.

I was tempted to go full snark here, but my better angels won out. I won't sarcastically point out that executive compensation in the corporate world at the very least borders on scandalous. Using this as a defense is laughably tone-deaf.

To put all of this in context, Paul Campos looks at academic salary trends.

Average salary for different categories of employees at the University of Michigan in 1979 and 2013:
Custodian
1979: $34,017
2013: $32,214

Director of Athletics
1979: $173,274
2013: $850,000 base salary (Does not include $100,000 in deferred compensation, and a possible $200,000 bonus).

Full Professor
1979: $107,493
2013: $167,260

Associate Professor
1979: $77,153
2013: $114,071

Assistant Professor
1979: $61,119
2013: $100,048

Dean of the Law School:
1979: $169,075
2013: $420,000

Administrative Assistant/Secretary
1979: $45,985
2013: $43,078

President:
1979: $216,000 salary (other compensation, if any, unknown, although it’s safe to assume use of the president’s house was included.)
2013: $603,357 base salary; $100,000 bonus in lieu of a raise; $100,000 additional annual retention bonus; $175,000 annual deferred compensation, $50,000 annual retirement pay, free use of residence and car.

This is simply remarkable

This is Joseph, the rare co-blogger.  I wanted to pass this on (h/t: Mike).  I don't think anybody will be surprised to see this type of customer service occurring:

Today one of our employees on the business side of TPM got a bill from Verizon for $3,019.95. Now, TPM's phone bill is bigger than your home phone bill because we two offices and about two dozen employees. But it's not three thousand dollars a month. But there's a bigger problem. We're not a Verizon customer.

Right, we use a different company entirely.

. . .

So after a little internal due diligence, someone on staff contacted Verizon basically to ask WTF was going on. Only they couldn't tell us because for security reasons we need to confirm our identity with a number on a recent phone bill? But we can't do that because ... right we're not a Verizon customer.

But can't they infer that we're us because we're getting billing emails to a TPM email address? No comment.

Can Verizon at least tell us whether this service was a service for a company called TPM Media LLC, incorporated in New York State? No, security reasons.

After another hour or so of a TPM staffer being on hold, Verizon comes up with seeming proof. The service was contracted by a person named "Gregory E." (I've left out the last name because Gregory E. may actually exist and he does deserve some privacy.) Only problem: no one named "Gregory E." has ever worked for TPM.

This apparently happened in early 2012. And like most utilities and service providers they totally let you not pay for a service for over two years without cutting it off.

Part of the problem here is one of "efficiency".  By creating distant call centers, you save on costs but you make issues like this one difficult to resolve.  You see the same problem with auto-dialing debt collection calls -- a robot calls a long stale phone number at minimal cost.  You might get some real leads that way that enable debts to be collected.  On the other hand, you annoy a large number of people who are completely unrelated to the debt (as telephone numbers often get reassigned to new people moving into an area).  It also makes issues like "billing the wrong customer" fantastically annoying for the person being billed. 

But it is also a question of competition and asymmetry of power/resources.  Without a regulatory framework to handle these issues, there is no cost to pushing frustration and time loss on to the "customer".  It's not like the company would be billed for the time to access customer service if the bill were proven to be incorrect. 

The standard solution to this is regulation.  This matters even for parts of the market that function well.  The need to regulate food production and sales dates back to the middle ages and remains with us today via functions like health inspectors.  Ironically, despite the potential for regulation to strangle companies with red tape, it can also be a precondition for an effective market.  It's also possible for it to be too lax in one area and too extensive in another (possibility affecting the same transaction).

So I am becoming indifferent to scale as I age, and think that all of the action should be in the efficiency of government and/or corporations.  But this conversation seem to be rarely heard these days.