Even Union Run Charters Suck

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

The State University of New York’s (SUNY) Board of Trustees is voting today on whether or not to close the UFT Charter School in East New York, Brooklyn.  UFT Charter School, which is run by the New York Teachers union (UFT) with UFT President Michael Mulgrew on its board of trustees, has been charged with a number of academic, financial and management failures, the New York Post reports.

SUNY reviewers recently concluded that the school’s overspending has resulted in a $2.8 million deficit. Despite their overspending, staff members have complained about chronic textbook shortages and the K-12 school’s performance at the middle grades has been poor. However, the reviewers left open the possibility of renewing the school’s charter because their test scores at the K-5 and high school levels were good. The school has also been accused of violating the Open Meetings Law for discussing budgetary and school status issues privately and for violating the rights of special-education students.

While labor activists have criticized the typical anti-union approach of most charter schools and had high expectations for the UFT Charter, critics are looking at its failures as proof that a unionized workforce is not beneficial to students. However, the failures of UFT Charter School are due to mismanagement, not the fact that the teachers are unionized. Any administrator or boss can be incompetent, autocratic and secretive, even if they have union credentials or backing.

Furthermore, the very context and rules for charter schools encourages the kinds of problems of which UFT Charter has been accused. Because they do not have to follow many of the rules governing traditional public schools (including reduced oversight by their districts) and because they have been anointed by so many politicians and reformers, some charter school administrators and managers are no doubt emboldened to push their authority even further than already permitted. Yet despite their glorification, charter schools are also under scrutiny (by investors, regulators and critics) and hence pressure to prove that they are more successful than traditional public schools. This can lead to cheating, pushing out (or not accepting) students who might lower their test scores (e.g., English language learners, special education and low income students) and other abuses.

Finally, as most critics of charter schools know, charter schools perform no better, on average, than traditional schools, while many perform much worse. This is likely due to a number of factors, including the competency of the schools’ leadership and their educational philosophies and structures. However, the single most significant factor influencing students’ academic success is their socioeconomic backgrounds, not their schools or teachers. Therefore, a charter school like UFT Charter, with its large numbers of low income students, has a challenging (if not impossible) task, regardless of who is at its helm.

Ultimately, the UFT Charter case tells us nothing about the pros and cons of having a unionized charter school. The teachers are not to blame for the school’s failures. What this case does tell us is that inept/corrupt leadership comes in all shapes and styles (including union-made) and even competent leadership, alone, is insufficient to solve that nation’s educational problems, so long as the socioeconomic factors influencing student achievement continue to be ignored.

Rocketship’s National Plan to Jettison Teachers

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is not true.

This common sense adage ought to prevent intelligent people from falling for costly scams. Yet otherwise smart people continue to get suckered at an alarming rate. This is particularly true in politics and education “reform,” where people seem to prefer the fantasy of a quick, magic bullet “fix” to social problems, than having to do a little research or critical analysis to determine if the proposal has any merit.

Consider John Danner, former school teacher and Silicon Valley entrepreneur, who claims to have found the solution to the academic achievement gap with his Rocketship charter schools. Rocketship’s students, who are predominately poor and Latino, have recently outscored the county and state averages on standardized exams, making Danner and Rocketship extremely popular within the Ed Deform movement as it has seemingly overcome the intractable negative effects of poverty on educational outcomes.

Danner now wants to take his Silicon Valley model on the road and expand it to 50 cities by 2020. Cities across the U.S. on jumping on the bandwagon, begging Rocketship to set up shop in their districts, while the Obama administration has put up $2 million to facilitate its spread. Milwaukee has approved the opening of Rocketship schools, as have New Orleans, Nashville and Indianapolis. It also has approval to open another 20 schools in the San Francisco Bay Area.

For the Kids or the Bosses?

What really makes the Rocketship model popular among the Ed Deformers is not its seeming success at educating lower income students. This is certainly a great selling point and way to increase public support and startup donations. However, what the Ed Deform movement is really after is the billions of taxpayer dollars that are still nominally under public control. Charter schools are, of course, one of their favorite tools to accomplish this. And a charter school that can quickly wean itself from philanthropic donations and become self-sufficient or start turning a profit is like gold to these vultures.

Here is where Rocketship has done some magic. Like other charter schools, Rocketship receives public funds, but is liberated from many of the limitations of traditional public schools, like having to hire unionized teachers and paying union wages. However, Rocketship doesn’t just slash wages—it slashes jobs, replacing teachers with computers and low-paid clerks and volunteers. Superintendent Maria De La Vega, of East Palo Alto's Ravenswood City School District, who opposed Rocketship moving into her district, was quoted in Palo Alto Online calling the Rocketship model ". . . a business design, not an educational program design that is constructed to promote literacy and academics. . ."

According to the Washington Post, students spend 2 hours per day in front of computers, cutting labor costs by 25%, allowing the schools to “extend the school day to eight hours [and] pay higher salaries to its nonunion teachers.” The computer labs are monitored by volunteers who have “experience with children,” according to Education Next, but no teaching credential (nor even bachelor’s degree) is required.

It should be emphasized that the “higher salary” does not translate into a higher hourly rate. Rather, teachers work longer hours (about 25% more to accommodate the longer school day) at a slightly higher yearly salary (10% more, according to the Post) that does not fully compensate them for the longer work day.

Additionally, 75% of its teachers come from Teach for America (TFA), which places teachers in the classroom after only 5 weeks of training. TFA teachers have a higher attrition rate than certificated teachers (69% quit within their first two years, while 88% leave within three years). Theoretically, this should result in a higher turnover rate, though the Post says that Rockeship’s rate of 25% is in line with the national average for low income schools (though not necessarily for low income schools in Silicon Valley). Even if their turnover rate is typical, their tendency to hire predominantly inexperienced TFA teachers still allows them to trim labor costs, since the pay scale is based on years of experience and they keep replacing low wage TFA teachers with other inexperienced teachers.

Even though Rocketship is considered a “nonprofit” charter school, it still helps facilitate the transfer of wealth from the taxpayer to private businesses. The emphasis on computer technology, for example, is a cash cow for tech giants that not only get to sell more hardware to the schools, but also software and service contracts, which can lock the schools into long term financial commitments. The replacement of unionized, credentialed teachers with poorly trained, nonunionized TFA novices and volunteer monitors contributes to the deskilling of the teaching profession, which undermines union strength and drives down wages (see here and here), not only for teachers, but others in the region. Danner, who is not a teacher or a principal at any of his schools, still skims off $150,000 per year in salary, according to the Post.

Higher Test Scores—The Jury is Still Out.

Rocketship currently has only 5 schools up and running, two of which recently completed their first years and lack test score data. Thus, all the excitement over their ability to close the achievement gap is based on very limited data, with only nominal reproducibility. And even one of their “successful” schools had a recent decline in test scores.

It is also questionable whether Rocketship’s study body accurately represents the full range of lower income students. Unlike traditional public schools, which are required to accept all students and cannot kick them out unless they have committed serious infractions, charter schools can exclude students for things like insufficient parental involvement. Indeed, Rocketship requires parents to attend monthly meetings and volunteer 30 hours each year. Even if these requirements were not strictly enforced after the fact, they would still likely cause some lower income families to avoid enrolling in the first place, thus skewing the demographics and test data.

Furthermore, like many other charter schools, Rocketship enrolls fewer students with learning disabilities, which also skews their data. According to the Post, only 6% of Rocketship’s students have learning disabilities—roughly half the rate of the traditional public schools in the area.

High Tech Vs. Health, Thinking and Independence

Considering that Rocketship is currently only in the K-5 business, its heavy reliance on computers should give pause. The American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended that young children spend no more than 2 hours in front any type of screen or monitor, including television, videos and computers, as it promotes obesity, sleep and behavior problems, and can even impair academic performance. More screen time also means less active, creative play and learning, and less time to develop healthy social relationships with other children and adults.

Even if Rocketship did limit screen time to 2 hours per day, its students are still returning home after school and most likely spending more time in front of the television and computer. However, Danner has predicted that his students could spend up to 50% of their school days in front of computers as he develops better software.

On a final note, it is important to consider how a school is being judged as successful. Rocketship, like all schools nowadays, is being deemed a success by its test scores. In order to boost its state test scores, it compels its students to take numerous internal exams throughout the year to prepare them for the official exams and to provide the staff with data. Thus, Rocketeers (as Danner likes to call his students) are losing meaningful instructional time with well-trained teachers to test prep and practice tests, in addition to the time lost in front of computer screens.

The Sky is Not Falling After All: US Schools Rank High Internationally

It is commonly believed that public education in the U.S. is in miserable shape, with terrible teachers causing high dropout rates and worse educational outcomes than our trading partners. There are test scores (PISA) that confirm this, with the U.S. ranking lower than countries like South Korea, Finland, Japan and Hong Kong. And Ed Deformers have glommed onto such data as proof that the system needs a dramatic makeover and use the data to justify everything from privatization schemes to the dismantling of teachers’ unions.

A new analysis of international data by Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution suggests that the U.S. may not be as far behind their counterparts as previously thought, according to U.S.A. Today.

The rankings tend to be given in raw numbers such that countries with statistically indistinguishable scores appear to have different rankings. Thus Hong Kong (607) and Singapore (599) were listed has 1^st and 2^nd place for fourth-grade math scores in 2007. This is misleading, as their scores were virtually indistinguishable statistically. By grouping together in first place, all the other nations would move up in rank.

Loveless examined the scores and rankings more closely and grouped nations together that had statistically indistinguishable scores. By doing so, Hong Kong and Singapore were grouped together as tied for 1^st, while Netherlands (535), Lithuania (530), U.S. (529), Germany (525) and Denmark (523) were grouped together in fifth place.

Jindal’s Louisiana Privatization Orgy

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

Under Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s new privatization plan, virtually every student in the Monroe City School System and those in almost 50% of Ouachita Parish Schools would be eligible for vouchers to attend private schools, the News Star reported this week. Experts warn that the number of eligible students could far exceed the available spaces in existing private schools.

Jindal's plan provides “scholarships” for low income students currently attending poorly ranked schools, exploiting the popular mantra that poor kids shouldn’t be relegated to lousy schools. Like most Ed Deformers, he ignores the fact that virtually every low performing school in the nation is disproportionately filled with low income students and that it is primarily poverty—not the schools or teachers—that causes the low test scores and graduation rates. Rather than desegregating the schools so that all schools have similar wealth distributions, or providing poor schools with greater resources, or working to reduce or end poverty, Jindal, like his greedy cohorts elsewhere, is ignoring the causes of poor academic achievement and using the consequences to justify the redistribution of tax dollars from public schools to private ones.

Jindal’s plan uses a definition of poverty that includes far more students than those currently receiving free and reduced lunch. While there are no doubt many poor students who are either ineligible for free or reduced lunch or who fail to apply for the program, Jindal’s redefinition is most likely a cynical attempt to exploit poor families to facilitate the transfer of state tax revenues to private for-profit schools.

Give the People What They Want—Educational Snake Oil and Teachers to Burn!

Burn, Teacher, Burn! (Image from Flickr, cdrummks)

A recent poll by the Los Angeles Times and University of Southern California has found that a majority of California voters want teacher evaluations made public and student test scores used in their reviews.

So what?

Does the public necessarily get or even deserve what it demands? Do we make employee evaluations public for nurses, doctors, firefighters, police, receptionists, retailers, insurance sales reps?

Teachers are already one of the most scrutinized, regulated and manipulated professions out there (most regulated, according to Assailed Teacher). They get reprimanded and sometimes even fired for “transgressions” in their private lives, like having political bumper stickers on their cars or posting  work-related gripes on their private Facebook pages, which is not much different than in the old days when they got fired if they got pregnant. Teachers have been reprimanded for expressing controversial comments or sharing controversial content with students despite their supposed academic freedom.

Unlike the above examples, teachers have very little control over student test scores, which are correlated far more with students’ socioeconomic background than with the quality of their teachers. Evaluating teachers based on their students’ test scores is like evaluating doctors on their patients’ blood pressure and blood sugar. In both cases, lower income people are much more likely to have undesirable results and the professionals who work with them are much less likely to be able to help them.

Another relevant question is what would the public do with this information? Demand the mass firing of all teachers at low income schools because their test scores were too low?

This would conflict with another recent public demand—supported by an ACLU lawsuit and court mandate in Los Angeles—that teachers at low income schools be exempt from layoffs.

If we did fire all teachers at low income schools or anywhere that test scores did not make the required arbitrary improvements, would the public then demand higher wages and an influx of funding for teacher training programs in order to recruit and retain “good” teachers, or would they accept the inevitable mushrooming of class sizes to 40 or 50 students?

Of course rather than demanding that “bad” teachers be fired, parents could use the data to pull their kids from schools with too many “bad” teachers, just as they might use similar data to avoid “bad” doctors. However, they can already pull their kids from “bad” schools and they already know which schools these are: the low income ones that tend to have the lowest test scores. Linking teacher evaluations to these test scores and publishing teacher evaluations does nothing to make this any easier or more effective.

The hysteria over “bad” teachers has the same source as the hysteria over “bad” schools:  fear mongering promulgated by the test publishers, educational management organizations, tutoring industry and other businesses that hope to capitalize on testing, accountability and the resulting punishments. The teacher witch hunt is further exploited by politicians and the wealthy who hope to distract the public from the major cause of the achievement gap—poverty and the growing wealth gap—problems the OWS movement is now shoving in their faces more effectively than the teachers unions ever did.

It is worth considering that simply dumping what you don’t like (e.g., “bad” teachers or traditional public schools) does not necessarily get you what you really want and can result in something much worse. Consider the Egyptians who dumped their dictator and got a military junta that has been slaughtering them in the streets for the past week. What are we getting when we dump the “bad” teachers and schools: elitist charter schools that loot school districts of scare resources while squeezing out minority, special education and low income students, and a growing achievement gap.

It is important to have an accurate understanding of what the problem actually is and a valid critique of its causes before an effective solution can be proposed. Since the data overwhelmingly shows that poverty is the biggest influence on the achievement gap, low test scores and low graduation rates, simply firing teachers and giving away the public schools to private educational management organizations cannot end the achievement gap, get all students to graduate on time or attain the status of Finnish and South Korean schools.

Tying teacher evaluations to student test scores will result in declining numbers of teachers, exacerbating the problems of overcrowding and student access to quality teachers. Many good teachers will lose their jobs simply because they were working with low income students. Others will refuse to work in low income schools because it could jeopardize their careers.

Making teacher evaluations available to the public serves no public good and could result in great harm, not only to teachers, but students, as well. Too many bad evaluations at one school could result in a mass exodus of those families with the time, resources and knowledge of the system to get their kids into other schools. This would result in some schools becoming even more segregated, even more concentrated with poor, immigrant and low-achieving students.

On a more sinister note, if the public is not satisfied with schools’ response to bad evaluations, witch hunts and vigilantism against teachers could result.