Victimology

Karen Yi and Amy Shipley of the Sun Sentinel have a follow-up to their remarkable series on mismanagement in Florida charter schools.

At least seven groups of applicants with ties to failed or floundering charter schools are seeking second chances and public money to open 18 more.

Odds are, most will prevail.

School districts say that they can't deny applicants solely because of past problems running charter schools. State laws tell them to evaluate what they see on paper — academic plans, budget proposals, student services — not previous school collapses or controversial professional histories.

District officials are currently reviewing applications for next year.

Among those vying to open new charter schools, which are privately operated but publicly funded:

• A group that managed three new charter schools in Broward and Palm Beach counties that opened this year — and then shut down on the first day of school.

• The founder of two charter schools that failed in 2007 amid accusations of stolen money, shoddy record keeping and parent complaints, according to state and local records. A state investigation later chastised school directors for "virtually nonexistent" oversight, though prosecutors filed no criminal charges.

• An educator who was banned from New Jersey public schools, then consulted for two schools in Broward and Palm Beach counties that shuttered in 2013. The Palm Beach County school district closed one of the schools because of poor academics and financial difficulties; the Broward school chose to cease operations amid dwindling enrollment, according to school district reports.

The Sun Sentinel also found three applications from leaders at two charter schools that were ordered to close this year for poor academics. Another three proposals came from a director at an existing charter school chided for its deteriorating financial condition. An entrepreneur who has consulted for a handful of failed schools is also listed on an application.

"We're asking ourselves, 'How do we follow the law, yet make professional decisions in the best interests of students?'" said Jim Pegg, director of the charter school department for the Palm Beach County School district.

A Sun Sentinel investigation in June found state law allows virtually anyone who can fill out a lengthy application to open a charter school. If school districts veer too far outside the guidelines to reject applications, they risk having their decisions overturned by the state.

Broward Schools Superintendent Robert Runcie said he might be willing to take that risk given the range of applicants.

"If we have to, we'll deny some applications and bring them to the state and still fight," Runcie said. "We can't continue to go with the bad actors that are out there and have them to continue to operate."

Most of this is familiar territory for our regulars, but there is one aspect that I haven't discussed as much as I should. The education reform movement has gone to great lengths to play up its grassroots aspects but the significant components have always been top-down and technocratic. You often see this kind of local push back, particularly when the proposals coming from the state capital are as bad as this.

Here's one of the cases where a district tried to challenge one of these decisions. Note the result.

Eight hours before students were to report for classes at the new Broward County Charter High on the first day of school this year, Richard E. Durr emailed a Broward school district official saying the school would not open "due to circumstances beyond our control." Durr is a director at the school's management company, American Charter Schools, Inc.

By day's end, two more schools managed by that same company had shut down. One school in Riviera Beach failed to attract students; the other in Delray Beach enrolled only a few, a district official said. The applications for the two Palm Beach County schools were rejected by the school district in 2012, but those decisions were reversed by the state.

...

Yet Durr's company, American Charter Schools, Inc., is listed as the education service provider on applications for four proposed charter schools in Palm Beach County. An education service provider is often referred to as a school's management company.

As we've discussed before, these school closings can be extraordinarily tough on kids. This was a horrible way for the kids who had enrolled in these schools to start the year. It was perhaps even tougher on parents who had spent the weeks before getting their children excited about their new schools only to have to explain to them at the last minute that those schools simply aren't there anymore.

It is even worse when a school closes midyear. Unfortunately, Florida has seen plenty of that as well.

With the costs of failure largely ignored by the powers that be, it's easy to see how those trying to get into the charter school business can have such a nonchalant attitude.

"We are supposed to learn from our experiences," said [Ann-Marie] Manzano, who is applying for two new charter schools. She said that if applicants "haven't done anything intentional and if they have been a victim" they should be given another shot at opening a school.

Manzano has an interesting history -- the key phrase is arguably "declined to prosecute" -- but even if we assume the best of intentions, she was still not good at her job and the victims of her failures were the kids and families that trusted her.

Yes, people are now talking about flipping schools

I don't know that anyone saw this coming though, in retrospect, we should have. One of the recurring elements in a number of reports of the questionable management of many charter schools is the role of real estate, either as a way of turning a quick buck or of influencing local governments.

We've already discussed Florida and Michigan. Now investigative journalist Owen Davis has a remarkable account that add New Jersey to the list (via Edushyster)

Half a year after Newark Public Schools launched an "agenda to ensure all students are in excellent schools," the plan has come under a federal civil rights investigation to determine whether it "discriminates against black students."

The investigation centers on a cluster of school closings in Newark's predominantly black South Ward. Absent a consistent reason why the district targeted these schools - such as poor academics or declining enrollment - activists alleged discrimination. The "One Newark" reform plan, they wrote, would "continue a pattern of shuttering public schools in communities of color."

...

But an in-depth look into the district's ultimately unsuccessful attempt to close one South Ward school reveals how real estate concerns and facilities funding increasingly drive neighborhood school closings and the expansion of privately managed charter schools. By allocating millions of dollars in little-known bonds exclusively to charters while imposing austerity on public facilities, the state has quietly stacked the deck for charters, leaving neighborhood schools to molder in decline.

...

"The school went out of its way to accommodate DeVahna," their mother Jacqueline Choice says. Teachers visited the home to keep DeVahna abreast of material she'd missed. When she returned to school temporarily in a wheelchair, staff and students diligently volunteered to carry her books and bring her lunch.
At Hawthorne, DeVahna and Darius "were finally in a comfortable place," says Choice. "The teachers were very sympathetic to our situation."

A midday text message from DeVahna last December shattered that sense of comfort. "Mommy, they're closing the school!" Choice remembers reading. "I had to call her to find out what was going on. She was in tears."

At the next board meeting, Superintendent Cami Anderson announced publicly what DeVahna had learned from her math teacher: Hawthorne would be handed over to a charter school, TEAM Academy, in a so-called "charter launch." The staff would be replaced. All told, the district's plan would impact a third of Newark's schools.

...
In 2011, came the Booker-Zuckerberg philanthropic blitz and Gov. Chris Christie's appointment of Superintendent Anderson, all aiming to transform the state-run district into an educational free market. That means replacing "failing" district schools with charter schools, which are privately managed, publicly funded and freed from certain regulations.

...

Hawthorne hoped to ride out these reforms unscathed. Since Principal H. Grady James arrived in 2011, the low-income school has seen "an amazing transformation," says a Hawthorne teacher (who asked to remain anonymous). Though it falls short of state averages, Hawthorne posted test scores last year that put it in the 94th percentile statewide in terms of student growth, outstripping all its Newark peers.

"Hawthorne did everything required by the state to stay open," says Choice, including what she describes wearily as "a whole year prepping for testing." That concentration on test scores, though grueling and arguably not an ideal educational focus, bore fruit, in terms of external evaluation of the district. "But once that was done," says Choice, the district "came in and said: 'Well, we're closing the school anyway.'"

The district justifies the move in part by pointing to the roughly 40 percent of South Ward families who sit on the waiting lists for charter schools they've chosen. But on the whole, Hawthorne's parents chose Hawthorne. Families boycotted school applications, held weekly protests and fired off countless letters to state officials. Choice began speaking out at board meetings, eventually joining the civil rights complaint that spurred the federal investigation.

...

Though Newark Public Schools (NPS) claims to use seven criteria for school turnover decisions, "No one question pulled the lever" for Hawthorne, says Gabrielle Wyatt, NPS executive director of strategy. 

But it's clear that one factor played an outsized role: money. Given the state funding landscape, NPS saw moving a charter in as a way to secure pressing building repairs.

Hawthorne's spacious brick schoolhouse is crumbling. Thick layers of paint slough off in the stairwells. A browning hole in the third floor ceiling oozes over a water fountain.

Charters' access to bonds allows them to "improve these community assets" - that is, school houses - "and allows the district to continue to operate. And keeps the district viable." This saves the state, which controls Newark schools, from paying to fix the very schools it let fall into disrepair.

Defining "bad teachers"

One of the many bizarre elements of the wave of anti-tenure litigation is the apparent inability of the litigants to find teachers whom most of us would consider bad. That's not to say there aren't bad teachers out there -- we can all agree that there are -- but there is clearly something else going on here.

When you actually start digging into the details of these law suits, it soon becomes obvious that there is a serious disconnect between the way the people in these organizations think about teachers and the way most of us do. Not only do they hold up what most of us would consider reasonably good teachers as grossly ineffective; they do the same with teachers we would consider extraordinary.

[You'll notice I said 'organizations' and not parents. These initiatives start with well-funded organizations (usually affiliated with one or more billionaires) deciding on the lawsuit they want to file then seeking out parents to serve as litigants and, in some cases, spokespersons.]

We have already discussed Christine McLaughlin, “Rotary’s Pasadena 2013 Teacher of the Year,” Pasadena NAACP’s “2008 Star of Education.” McLaughlin is the kind of teacher that most peers respect and most kids and parents love. She is also, according to the Vergara suit, grossly ineffective.

And consider the standard being used in Wright vs. New York, as discussed here by Valerie Strauss.

Keoni Wright is the lead plaintiff  in a lawsuit organized by Campbell Brown’s education advocacy group that is seeking to overturn New York laws that provide tenure and other job  protections to K-12 teachers. Brown has appeared on a number of television shows explaining her new endeavor, which will involve filing lawsuits in other states, as well, in an attempt to have national impact on tenure laws...

Brown has said repeatedly that she is leading this effort because she  believes it is too hard for school systems to get rid of “bad” teachers and that it is union-negotiated teacher job protections that lead to poor quality education for many underprivileged students. Critics say this is nonsense and that giving teachers due process when they are accused of wrongdoing protects against patronage and other forms of administrative whim. They also note that many students get inadequate educations in non-union states where teachers have no job protections and that tenured teachers can be and are fired, despite conventional wisdom to the contrary.

Whatever you think of job protections for teachers, Wright inadvertently raised a separate issue during an interview he did with Campbell on NY1′s “Inside City Hall with Errol Louis”: What exactly is a “bad” teacher? Some answers are obvious, others less so.

During the interview with Louis, Wright discussed the education his young twin daughters are receiving at a New York public school, saying that one of them had a really good teacher and the other wasn’t so lucky. How did the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit explain this dichotomy? Well, it turns out, he said, that one daughter received homework packets from her teacher while the other daughter didn’t. Why? After talking to the offending teacher, he said he discovered the following:

... She didn’t have the supply, you know they were waiting for stuff to come. Meanwhile this other teacher was using her own money to buy these books to have supplies for her regular kids and an extra set for me.

Translation: The good teacher was spending her own money to buy supplies the school system should have provided to teachers in a timely fashion. The bad teacher didn’t.

Translation: The good teacher was giving homework to young kids. The bad teacher wasn’t.

Wright has said that he began to notice the homework discrepancy as soon as his daughters entered kindergarten a few years ago. One daughter had homework and the other didn’t. The one with homework was doing better academically than the one who wasn’t, he said, the suggestion being that a teacher who assigns kindergartners homework routinely is better than one who doesn’t.

It may well be that the teacher of one of his twins was superior to the teacher of his other twin. Yes, some teachers are better than others (as in any other profession), and, yes, some working teachers should be removed from the classroom because they are inadequate, and yes, teacher education should be continually improved to elevate the quality of America’s teaching force. I don’t know a teacher who doesn’t agree.

But in this interview Wright rested his claims about the value of his children’s teachers on the fact that one was spending personal money for supplies and that the same teacher assigned homework routinely. That’s hardly what you would call dispositive. It doesn’t even make sense.

Teachers shouldn’t have to spend their own money to buy supplies. Schools should have supplies ready for teachers at all times. Inadequate supplies is just one of the reasons that teachers in many schools have a hard time doing their jobs, which isn’t something that gets factored into many blame-the-teacher arguments. Teachers who care so much about their students that they buy student supplies with their own money are certainly dedicated, but no more so than those teachers who care greatly about their students but don’t spend their own money to buy what a school system should be providing.

As for homework in kindergarten, the research isn’t there to show that it helps academically. In fact, most of the research on homework in elementary school suggests that less is more and that reading is the best kind. Kids derive no real benefit from doing homework in kindergarten or, for that matter, up until fourth grade, some homework  researchers say, while others go further and say there is no benefit to homework in elementary school at all.

Strauss goes on to say that Wright sounds well-intentioned. I'm not so sure. He very much reminds me of a type of parent I ran into occasionally, first to complain, last to help.   For most parents, it's the other way around.

Back to the main question. One of the supposedly self-evident truths of education is that we all want better teachers in the classroom, but if we can't agree on what constitutes good and bad, the statement goes from self-evident to meaningless.

Terrestrial Superstation Watch

Yet another thread we've been on a long time. In case you are new to the party, there's a long running debate about the audience size of over the air television and its long term viability. Rajiv Sethi and I took the pro side; almost everyone else took the con.

One of the major points of contention came from the fact that the two major publicly available data sources had wildly different estimates of viewership. Nielsen had 9% and shrinking. GfK had 18% and growing. Back in April of 2013, we had a big debate with Felix Salmon over these numbers. I pointed to Fox's and NBC's then recent decisions to launch terrestrial superstations (the superb Movies! and the inept COZI respectively).

Let's assume Salmon's right and put ourselves in the position of a Fox or NBC executive who has to decide whether or not to create a new broadcast network. We can be reasonably confident that the executives have access to reliable data (particularly the Fox executive if the deal with Weigel included a look at some numbers from ThisTV and METV).

You find, given our premise, that the total over-the-air audience is, say, forty million, the technology is obsolete and entire medium will probably be gone in a few years. At this point, it's hard to imagine you'd proceed with an expensive, time-consuming project that is likely to be an embarrassing failure but the situation actually gets worse.

You are looking at launching an advertiser-driven, English-language station but the OTA market is disproportionately poor and immigrant (I get programming in over a half dozen languages); the maxim relevant audience for your station now drops to maybe thirty million and there's more bad news. You're going to have to share that thirty million with a crowded field of competitors. A major market will have dozens of OTA channels including multiple PBS channels, This, ME, Antenna, Bounce, RTV, three ION channels and various independents.

Given Salmon's assumptions about the size and trajectory of this market, there is simply no way NBC or Fox would have gone ahead with these channels. They couldn't possibly recoup their start-up costs before OTA is phased out. Put bluntly, both NBC and Fox are betting against Salmon's position.

Obviously this is not conclusive, but it's a strong piece of evidence and it's consistent with what we've seen elsewhere. It's also consistent with GfK's numbers. 

What's happened since then?

All of the terrestrial superstations mentioned above appear to be going strong.

Sony launched its own virtual clone of Movies!, GetTV.

And now

Exclusive: MGM Launches Digi-Net The Works

The Big Uneasy

“The best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina”

Arne Duncan

As mentioned before, a lot of people in New Orleans -- parents, educators and students -- are very unhappy with the direction of the city's schools. They complain of draconian policies, firing of popular teachers and discipline policies that border on brutal.

The case that still breaks my heart involved a 14-year-old who kept getting demerits because his uniform shirt was too small and came untucked basically every time he moved. His mother was a veteran, well-educated, and had sold real estate but got divorced and ended up losing her job, and became homeless. They were living with friends and really struggling. The school expelled the child because he’d had three suspensions—the last one for selling candy to try to raise enough money to buy a new shoes and a new uniform shirt. I felt that if the mother went and told her story that the school would understand and wouldn’t hold up the expulsion. She didn’t want the school to know how impoverished she was but I convinced her to do it, so she came and told all of these people what she was going through—about her struggles. I thought for sure the board would overturn the expulsion, not just because her story was so compelling, but because there wasn’t actually anything in the school’s discipline book about selling candy. But they upheld it and it broke my heart that this kid was being put out of school because he was poor.

On the other of the debate, supporters (including the highly respected John Merrow) argue that New Orleans is a model of reform that gets results. They acknowledge that the programs are tough but they point to improving metrics and argue the pain is worth the gain. If we stop here, this would appear to be a classic good-of-the-many argument. Some kids suffer under the new system but if most are better, the system is certainly defensible.

But what if the rest aren't better off, at least not due to the reforms in the system? For years, we've been discussing the ways excessive discipline can distort the results from educational research and Bruce Baker has long questioned just how impressive the test results were. Now Jason France, a well-respected blogger and former analyst with the Louisiana State Department of Education, has made a pretty good case that some of those impressive statistics were the result of large scale fraud.

You see, under Paul Pastorek, Louisiana’s first Reformer de jour of a few years back, Louisiana stopped investigating and auditing data . . . especially data coming from charter schools and RSD [the New Orleans Recovery School District -- MP]. At the department we knew full well that the data was both crappy in quality and dreadful in composition. Incidentally Paul Pastorek is back in Louisiana to start a new education endeavor. At the Department we knew him as Little PP (he’s like 5 feet tall) to Paul Vallas’s Big P (Vallas is 6’5″) or sometimes as LDOE’s Napoleon due to his small stature and imperious nature.
...
When Bobby Jindal met John White I’m told Jindal thought he would have a more pliable and less volatile and willful minion than Paul Pastorek and almost immediately gave PP his walking papers. Fortunately PP went to school with Sean O’Keefe who is the current CEO of Airbus (they went to school together) and Paul was able to land on his feet as a useless random lawyer at EADS, a subsidiary of a European aerospace company.

So what does all this have to with dropouts you might ask? Well Paul had stopped auditing data during his tenure and he left under less than friendly terms. It’s quite likely he did not reveal all the skeletons shoved into LDOE closets. It appears that John White and his staff unwittingly stumbled across a walk-in closet loaded with them.
...
Recently LDOE did a partial audit of exit codes. In particular they were looking at some of the codes often used to hide “dropouts.” In practical terms, a student that does not graduate and stops going to school is a dropout. However, if the student, let’s say, transfers out of state, to a non-public school, goes the homeschool route, or dies. . .well we can’t really hold that school or any school we collect data on responsible for that, can we?

Exit codes were designed for schools to tell the state one of these situations has taken place. When this happens legitimately and is reported to the state in the form of an exit code, the state would no longer keep that student in the numerator or denominator. They are not a dropout. They are also not a graduate. They are a “legitimate leaver” in education parlance. When these legitimate leaver situations take place, records and documentation should take place. When a student transfers to a non-public school or homeschool the parents should fill out some withdrawal papers and the non-public school should make a “request for records.” Homeschooled students and parents also generate subsequent records, and students are required to take tests and provide updates about students’ progress. When a student transfers out of state the “receiving school” should have a record of the student, and that receiving school should make a request for records. These items go in students’ permanent files . . . if those documents are indeed generated, and really exist.

What often happens is this does not take place. What often happens is schools will “fix” their dropouts by simply coding all their dropouts as transferring out of state. They don’t graduate, although some districts simply code students with a graduate code too which really helps them out, but they don’t count against schools. Schools wanting to improve their images or escape accountability sanctions can freely “up code” their students from dropout to even graduates if they really want too, although the most common practice is to simply code them as “transferring out of state.” Historically this wasn’t a major issue, but as accountability has become more important, and as graduate cohort and dropout rates have become factored into as much as 25% of a school’s SPS score the incentive for up coding is enormous, the risk of getting caught or sanctioned very low, and this solution is easy breezy to do with plenty of people along the way able to claim ignorance and protected by plausible deniability if they ever do get caught.

What has happened to Louisiana and especially in RSD and probably charter schools and probably some traditional schools is that more and more schools have discovered the up coding secret and have used it to their advantage more and more every year. John White and LDOE made the mistake of actually doing a preliminary audit of these numbers and publishing them. Their “Reforms” are failures and their success is built upon lies. One of the metrics used to annually evaluate John White is the graduation cohort rate. Once LDOE realized just how bad this audit was his folks knew better than to turn over any more stones. But enough teasing, just how bad was it do you ask?

Try a 100% failure rate for RSD on for size.
I’m not kidding.

I think LDOE really felt all they needed to do was make the point that all direct run RSD schools will be closed this school year so it would finally be okay to release this type of info. Like, “hey, we know this is bad but we’ve released this report after closing them so there’s really nothing anyone can do and you should not waste your time worrying about them anymore.”

Believe me, this is not a one off, this is what all RSD info and stats look like when not masked or filtered. You might think hiding 14 dropout students is not a big deal, and you’re right in a sense. Of course LDOE should consider all students important, but RSD served thousands of students a year. . .what’s 14 out of 1400? The problem is this is just a very small sample that encountered 100% error rate. This is a small fraction of how many student RSD coded as transferring out of state without any documentation from this cohort. What’s more, this was done to make themselves look better than they were for many years, every year they were in existence, and they were always just about the worst in the state even with this help and the numerous instances of cheating I’ve gotten reports of and written about. Feel free to search my blog for examples.

If you have a chance, check out the full post.

The Mulford Act

Charles P. Pierce provides an interesting and timely look at how the politics of gun control have changed.

Once upon a time in California, the police were knocking off black folks with an alarming regularity. In 1967, a black man named Denzil Dowell was blown away by a shotgun wielded by the police in North Richmond, an impoverished, largely black suburban community outside Oakland. According to the official police account, Dowell had been caught while breaking into a liquor store. He had then refused a command to stop and, therefore, was riddled by police who considered themselves threatened by him. Members of the community believed, with some justification, that Dowell had been killed while raising his hands to surrender. At the same time, the Black Panther Party in Oakland had been operating what it called Black Panther Police Patrols. The members of the patrol would listen to police scanners and then hustle to the scene of an arrest, where they would remind the suspect of his legal rights. They also showed up armed, because California then was an open-carry state because, of course, freedom.

This scared the bejesus out of white people, and the cops weren't too enthusiastic about it, either. So along came a Republican state assemblyman named Don Mulford, and he proposed a bill that would ban the carrying of loaded weapons in public throughout California. The Panthers enlivened the debate by showing up at the state capitol in Sacramento while exercising their god-given right to bear arms, which again scared the bejesus out of people. (I think it was the shades and the berets myself.) Speaking in language that today would make Wayne LaPierre cry like a child -- the NRA of the time was curiously supportive of the Act in question -- Don Mulford said he was proposing his law to keep us safe from "nuts with guns," especially the ones who lived in "urban environments." (No, you don't need the Enigma machine to decode that one.) The law passed. Governor Reagan signed it, and that's how history was made.

Well, I'm glad it's not a dispute

A bit more background on the Michigan charter school scandals. As mentioned before both here and in the Monkey Cage, for-profit charter school operators have been caught gouging the state's taxpayers in pretty much every way imaginable. The response from the governor's office has basically been that people shouldn't care about graft and overcharging as long as they are getting quality schools (They aren't -- Check out the Monkey Cage link -- but that's a topic for another day).

It's hard to imagine the "So there's graft. Get over it." political slogan being effective in any context, it seems particularly tone deaf in Michigan these days, in a period of brutal budget cuts on the state and local level. Class sizes in traditional public schools are nearing the breaking point. Even a relatively small unpaid water bill in Detroit can result in a shutoff (an especially heartless policy given the city's unemployment rate).

There are, however, certain clients with very large unpaid bills who have been allowed to skate for quite a while.

From the Detroit Free Press:

So we called DWSD spokesperson Gregory Eno, who tried explaining the discrepancy.

“First of all, the commercial accounts that we’re talking about here are in dispute with … what they believe they should be paying for stormwater runoff,” Eno says. “It’s not about traditional water usage like you and I would use, water in our home.”

Come again?

Eno says: “We have a number of commercial accounts that are in dispute — well, not a dispute — we say they owe such [an amount], they say” they owe a different figure.

Off by just a quarter century

I realize this is a trivial thing, but this paragraph from an article by Thomas Mentel bothers me for a couple of not-so-trivial reasons.

One of Showtime’s very first forays into original programming, it’s hard to believe that Californication only just concluded after a run of seven years and seven seasons. First premiering in 2007, Californication tells the story of troubled New York writer Hank Moody who moves to California and suffers from severe writer’s block. Additionally, his issues with hedonism push his relationship with longtime lover Karen and their daughter to the brink while he attempts change his self-destructive ways.

Even with the wiggle room that comes with "one of," this is still dead wrong. Showtime got into original programming early in the game, starting with Faerie Tale Theatre in 1982. The channel ran literally dozens of dramas and comedies before debuting Californication in 2007 (see for yourself), including some fairly notable titles like Queer as Folk and Gary Shandling's first sitcom.

This is a small mistake in possibly the least important journalistic genre imaginable, but even by that standard, shouldn't we expect at least a little research? It took me all of three minutes to find a list of Showtime's original programs. How can anyone put his name on an article for the whole world to see and not bother to spend five minutes checking his facts.

The other thing that bothers me about this is that it's another reminder of how PR creates reality in the 21st Century. In 2005, there was a major restructuring at Viacom that resulted in, among other things, Showtime becoming to CBS what HBO is to Time Warner. Shortly after that there was a massive publicity push behind the network's shows. When Mentel calls Californication "[o]ne of Showtime’s very first forays into original programming," he means one of the first that a PR department told him about.

Another excerpt from the upcoming ebook

Another education thread that started in March of 2010 and is still going strong is the magic-of-the-markets/power-of-MBA-thinking line. This is one of those issues where I got the direction right but the magnitude wrong (I knew it was bad but I didn’t realize how bad).

The problem was two-fold: for starters, many perfectly sound business methods don’t work well when moved to an educational setting. The conditions, the culture, the objectives and the consequences are simply too different; to make matters even worse, Ben Wildavsky and many of the other reform advocates pushing the markets/MBAs line had a stunningly weak grasp of how business and economic incentives worked. The result was ‘business-based’ approaches that no well-run business would ever try. For example, if you follow the link you’ll find Wildavsky mocking Ravitch’s concerns that unscrupulous operators might use charters to extract “vast riches” from taxpayers.  For the record, competent business people constantly worry about being taken advantage of by contractors. Those who share Wildavsky’s attitude don’t stay in business very long.

To see what happens to Wildavsky’s ideas in the actual marketplace, take a look at my last Monkey Cage post.

Ben Wildavsky writing for the New Republic in 2010.

As for  claim that entrepreneurs see charter schools “as a gateway to the vast riches of the education industry,” that hardly jibes with reality at the most admired charter organizations. As far as I know, nobody at Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, or KIPP, all non-profits, is getting rich from those organizations’ notably successful efforts to help low-income kids learn. But if--if--for-profit charter operators are able to operate good schools, why shouldn’t those educational entrepreneurs get rich? Isn’t the point to make sure kids learn? It is not as if profit is an alien notion in the world of public schools. As Ravitch knows well, a vast industry of contractors, curriculum specialists, and the like was getting rich off public schools long before charters came along. (Ravitch also missed important aspects of the charter movement: its relentless self-examination, eagerness to weed out poor performers, and desire to take to scale those approaches that are really helping kids.)

Addressing Pólya's list

When I first started really digging into the education reform movement a few years ago, it quickly became obvious that, with remarkably few exceptions, my educational philosophy (which was heavily influenced the eminent 20th Century mathematician George Pólya) was sharply different from the prevailing ideas of the movement. I  initially assumed this was just me being out of the loop. After all, it's been a long time since I've taken an education class and even back then Pólya's pedagogical work had been around for decades. I thought that those on the other side of the debate either weren't familiar with Pólya's work on teaching or had examined and rejected the ideas.

The truth seems to be more complicated. As I spend more time in the reform world, I keep seeing ideas and techniques that either seemed to be or explicitly were derived from Pólya's How to Solve It. Normally, I would be pleased to see this but almost invariably there's something off about these examples, as if they had lost something important in translation.  Perhaps even worse, the Pólya-derived ideas never really meshed with the other concepts being presented and often directly contradicted them (try reconciling the methods of How to Solve It with deliberate practice).

After a while, I realized part of the problem: virtually all of these lessons were derived from a tiny sliver of the man's writing, not just a single one of his books but from the inside cover of that one book.

"The list" is one of the best and best-known features of How to Solve It. It is also one of the most problematic. On the plus side, it provides in concise form both Pólya's four phases of problem-solving and a useful collection of "questions and suggestions" that instructors may use either as comments while solving a problem for a class or as hints while helping students individually. Pólya's approach relied heavily on Socratic dialogues. These could be teacher/student, teacher/self (as a running commentary when doing a problem for a class) or student/self (because the end goal is an internalized process). This list can be enormously helpful for teachers when first learning these techniques.

On the minus side, for those who didn't go past the inside cover, the list looked like something it very much wasn't: an algorithm, a series of instructions to be followed in a well-defined manner which would reliably lead to the desired outcome.

Pólya explained explicitly and repeatedly that these were questions and suggestions that could be helpful if used in situations where they fit well and arose naturally.

He made these points frequently and emphatically enough that anyone who actually read How to Solve It (and it is neither a long nor difficult read) could hardly miss them..

Instead of providing a step-by-step approach, the primary purpose of these questions was to shift the focus of mathematics instruction less toward what and more toward why. Pólya wanted the steps we showed students to be not only right but reasonable.

I'll come back to this topic later with some examples of just how completely the reasonable part has been lost in translation.

Checking in with two thousand and ten

As part of a bigger project, I've been going through the first year's worth of posts at the blog (at least the first year after it became a joint venture). I was unhappy with the writing on quite a few but I was reasonably satisfied with analyses and a few actually seem more topical now than they did in 2010.

For example, this was my reaction to a paragraph defending charter schools from the threat of regulation. The passage, not surprisingly, occurs in a Michelle Rhee hagiography that appeared in the New Republic.

This post by Joseph got me thinking. Charter schools are private contractors providing services that were previously provided by the government. Any statement that's true about charter schools should still be true if you substitute in the phrase "some private contractors."

But if you actually make the substitution, you often end up with statements the author would never think of making. Statements like this:

But Mead says ... she’s seen Gray hint that he’d like to more tightly regulate [private contractors]. “We have a law that gives a tremendous amount of autonomy to the [private contractors] but enables them to implement programs that can be effective. If you try to put more regulation on that, if can dissuade people from [privatizing],” Mead says.

Would Seyward Darby normally describe a push for tighter regulation of private contractors as "disappointing"? Would the New Republic normally endorse a candidate because he was against stricter regulation of private contractors? Would everyone take a moment and see if Rod Serling is taking a smoke break in the vicinity?

I strongly believe that there is a place for charter schools in our system, but those schools have to meet exactly the same criteria as other contractors. Two of those criteria are transparency and openness to regulation, and given recent history, it's safe to say that some charter schools are failing these tests.

As noted in this Monkey Cage post, the charter school systems in the states that most pushed deregulation (Michigan and Florida) have devolved a writhing mass of scandals, particularly involving for-profit schools. Things are arguably worse in Sweden where the entire country fully embraced the charter and market forces model.

In 2010, reformers loved Sweden:

Matthew Yglesias again steps up to defend the honor of charter schools with a post on Anders Böhlmark and Mikael Lindahl's paper “Does School Privatization Improve Educational Achievement? Evidence from Sweden’s Voucher Reform” (PDF) from which he concludes:

In effect, Swedish practice is like what exists in American states (Arizona, for example) with lots of charter schools and it’s quite similar to what the Obama administration (and I) are pushing. The big difference is that for-profit operators are allowed to run schools in Sweden, which I’d be for allowing.

There is, however, an asterisk next to the name of the paper. The footnote is easy to miss (you have to click on the 'More>>' button to find it), but it's worth the effort. It reads:

* Their answer? It does in the short-term, but the gains fade. All else being equal I favor more choice, so I’d regard the reform as a good thing but I assume the architects of the reform were hoping for something more.

To see just how badly this turned out, take a look at Ray Fisman's excellent piece in Slate.

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.