A Sham: The Proposed Rules for Return of Takeover Schools

According to a recent news story in NOLA.com, the State Department of Education has prepared a set of recommendations to BESE on the disposition of takeover schools once the 5 year takeover term mandated by state law is completed. The basic recommendation is that those schools that have achieved a school performance score of at least 75 may be turned back to the local school system after two addional years while those scoring below the new state minimum SPS would stay under the control of the State Department of Education Recovery District. But there would also be a stipulation that would allow charter schools to remain independent if their private (non-elected) boards choose to keep them that way. It is pretty clear then that charter schools could remain independent and basically free of public oversight forever under this arrangement. Taxpayer money would continue to be handed over to a private organization without local public oversight. The administrators of these schools could pay themselves whatever salaries they choose (sort of like the city managers in the town of Bell, California) with our tax money. Also, this scheme would apply a different standard of accountability for state-operated takeover schools than was applied to local school systems who were required to surrender those schools to the state in the first place. If a school continued to perform under a score of 75 the state would keep control of it as long as it chose to. Its as though the State Superintendent and his staff are immune to accountability. And as usual, Charter schools seem to always be placed in a favored status whether they are performing well or not. Let's face it: the State Department of Education prefers almost any system to Parish run schools overseen by elected school board members.

On the other hand, if I were a local school board member, I would not be thrilled to get back a school that is still considered failing after 7 years of State Dept. tinkering. Here's why I would be leery of trying to recapture any state takeover schools in the New Orleans area. Local parents and education activists in New Orleans have noticed that a student sorting process occurs between charter schools and those that are directly run by the Recovery District. It seems that some of the charter schools such as the KIPP schools make it very clear to parents and students that they are primarily interested in recruiting highly motivated students that have a strong support system in the home. That's exactly what private and parochial schools have been doing successfully in Louisiana for many years. Its probably the most effective way to create a good school. Recruit good students and you have an advantage in creating a good school. Meanwhile all the leftover students are forced to attend schools with a much less motivated student body. Lance Hill, Executive Director of The Southern Institute for Education and Research who has studied the Recovery District in New Orleans, points out that some relatively good schools in the Recovery District have been created by also creating relatively poor schools alongside those. He has hypothesized that the few acceptable takeover schools can only exist if there are poor schools that serve as a dumping ground for the unmotivated, disengaged and even the special needs students. Statistics show that most charter schools in the New Orleans Recovery district have a significantly smaller percentage of students with disabilities that do non-charters. The Southern Poverty Law Center has filed a complaint to BESE about this possible violation of Special Education laws in the New Orleans area.

Charter school advocates have pronounced the New Orleans charters a major success even though it is clear they are playing by different rules than those required of regular public schools. As a nod to the above complaint, the new State Dept. rules would require them to increase their special needs students to at least 75% of the local average percentage.

With this posting I am warning taxpayers and educators of what I believe are improper changes to our system of public education:

• The turnover of total control of some public schools to private organizations (charters) who can use our tax monies as their personal piggy banks that they can raid at will should not be allowed. Where are the “Tea Party” activists when we need them? No private organization should ever be granted the authority to run a public school without the oversight of locally elected school representatives.
• The State Department of Education should not be allowed to get a free pass from the accountability system. Their so called failing schools should be subject to the same takeover rules as local school board operated schools. Many local school boards have shown that they are better at turning around low performing schools than the State Department of Education. They should be given another chance at taking back some low performing schools from the State Department if they choose to do so.

We can be sure that any rules that are being applied to the New Orleans Recovery District will eventually affect all public schools in the state.

Student Based Budgeting: Another Wave of Reform

A BESE task force studying the possibility of implementing student-based budgeting is again diverting attention from the important issues in Louisiana education. The idea being sold to BESE by a libertarian group, The Reason Foundation of Los Angeles, is really designed to shift the funding for elementary and secondary schools directly to the school principals rather than to the central office bureaucracy. (Click here to see the Advocate story on this) The theory seems to be that if full authority for running education including setting budget priorities is given to each principal and if the principal is then held accountable for producing education results (such as higher test scores) our educational system will finally be successful! This is just the latest example of wave after wave of reforms in education that ignore the real problems in our schools. The following is a list of the latest reforms that are being implemented in Louisiana education, with very little scientific basis for improving education.

Charter schools to replace low performing schools. There are many more failures than successes among these, yet any charter school is apparently preferable to our State Dept. of Education to a school board run school.

College prep for all. This elitist theory of education reform is based on the idea that a more classical education with higher math, English, and foreign language courses will better prepare all students for 21st century jobs even if they do not attend 4 year colleges. The flaw in this theory is that students are different, and many are turned off by a college prep curriculum. Those are the very students who may have been more motivated by a curriculum that prepared them for high tech skills jobs. By the way, workforce authorities tell us that these skills jobs are more in demand than 4 year degree jobs and have less chance of being farmed out overseas.

Teacher and principal evaluations based on student performance. Cash strapped Louisiana is getting set to spend millions on a new bureaucracy based at the State Dept. that will attempt to link educator evaluations to student performance. Eventually the state will find out what local educators already know: Teachers and principals in low performing schools have the least control over the factors affecting student learning. This means that educators who are going to be trashed by this system are often the ones who needed the most support and incentives to work in difficult conditions.

The proposed student based funding is just another ill conceived fad in education reform. Experienced educators are already pointing out to the Commission, that principals are not trained and cannot afford to devote the staff and time it takes to develop site based budgeting. Just at a time when principals will be mandated to fully evaluate all teachers every year, they would be expected to take on a monumental restructuring of their budgeting system all without extra funding!

The primary goal of this new site based budgeting, to raise student test scores, can be addressed more directly by allowing central office based budgeting to target funding to the schools where students need extra help. Actually this is already being done. The one great benefit of our accountability system is that it is putting a bright spotlight on poor performing schools. You'd better believe it that local superintendents are already focusing major efforts on providing extra help to those schools if only to avoid the embarrassment of having a school labeled unacceptable. That's why a greater percentage of schools run by local school boards have improved their accountability status than have the state run Recovery District schools. By the way, many of these Recovery District schools are using a form of student-based budgeting and many administrators in those systems are complaining about the need for central purchasing and control!

Ed-Jobs, Race To The Top Issues

Ed-Jobs Flexibility
One of the major concerns of superintendents and school boards about the use of the 10 billion dollar federal supplement designed to preserve education jobs, is the lack of repeat funding. Suppose a local school system uses the extra funding to hire additional teachers or to avoid layoffs, what will happen next school year when state funding possibly remains frozen, and costs continue to rise and the federal funing is not renewed? Will such school systems be forced to make even more drastic cuts to staff and education programs?
According to a recent story in Education Week, there may be a way to spread the impact of the supplement over a two year period to prevent both over staffing and more drastic layoffs. Apparently the US Dept. of Education will allow school systems to use the federal supplement over a two year period with the final deadline for use of the funds set at September, 2012. For example, if a school sytem estimated that their share of funding would allow the funding and therefore retention of 50 positions for one year, the decision may be to fund 25 positions over a two year period instead. This allows more time for tax revenues to improve or to plan better the ultimate cuts that may be necessary.
Race to the Top Problem:
Its ironic that the very centerpiece of Louisiana's Race to the Top application which was designed to portray the LA Deparment of Education as the most aggressive education reformer in the country probably resulted in failure to win the prize. According to a story in The Advocate, panel members ranking Louisiana's proposal cited a lack of detailed planning for Louisiana's new "value added" teacher and principal evaluation program as a major reason for point deductions in Louisiana's overall score. The judges felt there were not enough  specifics in the rating system as applied to school principals.
My most serious criticism of the new law is that it could wrongly penalize the educators who by their assignments to underperforming schools require the most support from their school systems. Even though the new evaluation law pushed by State Superintendent Pastorek states that certain other factors will be considered along with student scores in evaluating teachers and principals, I believe there is no way to implement the law fairly. That is because schools serving poverty areas are faced with other major impediments to student success than the actual performance of teachers and principals. Often these schools must deal with high student absenteeism, class disruption by uncooperative students, uncooperative or absent parents, drug and crime influences, lack of proper rest and safety of students etc. As I have stated before, such an over-emphasis on student test scores will result in other negative consequences such as teaching the test, or outright cheating. Some students may figure out that teachers can be coerced into easing up on class discipline by threatening to do poorly on the all important tests. (If you don't think kids are capable of this, think again!)
Now that there will be no federal funding for the new evaluation system, critical resources that could be used to address the school problems listed above will instead be used to develop this overly complex system and for extra staff to monitor and link evaluations to student performance.