The mother from School #6 who came to the microphone at Saturday's superintendent selection forum was angry. She was angry that School #6 was being closed, angry that their school based planning representative never came to meetings, angry that their school liaison never visited, angry that the school had been labeled as failing, angry that their school community would be scattered to the winds. Her words were met with silence.
School #6 is in a hard neighborhood - one where somebody is shot regularly and where families struggle with the consequences of what feels like a war zone. In this neighborhood, School #6 exists as a safe zone with the Jordan Medical Center attached to it, and is a place where children can be nurtured, at least during the day. Good things happen at this school although not always the same kinds of good things that we might find at schools where children are more reliably safe, well-fed, and unburdened by unrelenting family tragedy. School #6 is defined by being surrounded by crisis and this demands different evaluative lenses than are used for schools in more stable neighborhoods.
When we use low student scores as a basis for closing schools in crisis locations, that’s as non-sensical as saying, “Let’s use the fact that patients aren’t doing well in war zones to shut down war zone hospitals because their patients don’t compare well to patients in other hospitals.” I don’t mean to imply that students are like patients but highlight that there are parallels in educational and medical human services worth considering. A hospital’s goal is to help its patients thrive and gain health at whatever stage and degree of need they’re in. Learning goals need to be similarly differentiated and are especially challenging at schools in difficult neighborhoods because of the extra stressers in children’s lives. Using testing as the main criteria for judging a school’s purpose, value, and “success” amounts to policy that’s used to destabilize children further.
Any parent whose school community is dismantled because of unjust evaluative criteria would feel like saying what this mother said on Saturday. One devastating thing she shared was that when the children heard their school labeled as failing, they thought of themselves as “almost smart”... not able to make the grade. This kind of thought poisons young learners. Who can justify education policies whose labeling and school closures destroy students’ self-esteem and the very networks that are foundational to any student’s success? That mom’s words remind us of how our last superintendent’s corporate reform legacies continue to affect our children and why we cannot stand for more of the same in our next one.
I’m not arguing to keep every school open no matter what, but ask that we become more creative than simply shutting schools with struggling students. Here are a few ideas. Protect institutions that serve as scarce resources in fragile neighborhoods. Broaden evaluative lenses about what school success can mean and ask the teachers who work in them for improvement ideas. Help children maintain and deepen their relationships with caring adults so that communities are strengthened. And to the board, please design public structures that allow you to respond and interact with speakers in real time. Parent outrage won’t entirely disappear, but it will shrink and become more constructive through two-way discussion and responsive moderators.
Published in Rochester City Newspaper, Dec 7, 2011
Thursday, December 8, 2011
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Cuomo’s Denial: Urban School Districts’ Disaster
A letter to the NY Times editor re: 11-29-11 NYT article
by Dr. Fred Marshall, University of Rochester
Dear Sir/Madam-
I have re-written your recent editorial, entitled Germany’s Denial: Europe’s Disaster, changing some of the dramatis personae, but cleaving closely to the structure and often the actual words of your piece. I acknowledge that this is likely too long for your consideration, but thought you might enjoy (and agree with) the parallelism of the argument:
Each day our urban school districts inch closer to full meltdown, but Governor Cuomo of New York is still blocking what is needed: a real bailout of New York’s poorest districts by their richer neighbors and the wealthiest New Yorkers who enjoy endless extensions of their tax cuts.
Mr. Cuomo and his team have had more than fair warning of the disaster to come, including the possible loss of a generation New York’s urban and rural public school students, who will lack the capacity to successfully compete for jobs in a globally competitive 21st century market place. And it should be utterly clear that no New Yorkers – including the wealthy financiers of Westchester County and Long Island, or the down-to-business suburbanites of our decaying upstate cities – are immune. If we cannot provide an educated work force, we cannot attract business, and everybody loses.
The State has been compelled to sweeten the pot to get businesses to locate here by offering tax breaks and economic development dollars in desperate efforts to attract “job creators”. The crisis is now spreading, with more and more rural districts lacking the resources to offer a sound basic education. The tax-payer funded prison industry has been one of the only growth industries in upstate communities for more than a decade now, and the flow of prisoners from downstate communities to upstate prisons is the single biggest reason there was not an even larger loss of upstate population in the last census.
New Yorkers have clearly figured out that a meltdown of urban and rural public education imposes an enormous human cost. But the governor and state officials are still insisting that these underprivileged communities need to pay for their sinful ways (through draconian school closures and staffing layoffs) – and that New York’s virtuous “job creators” (the wealthiest and most privileged citizens and communities) will not be made to foot the bill. Until recently, New York’s leaders argued that they could quell the crisis with stiff austerity policies imposed on poor districts to re-establish their worthiness. But New York’s families are unpersuaded, and the crisis keeps spreading. New York City schools actually won a court battle mandating equitable state-funding, but the state has failed to fund the district, and massive layoffs and inadequate schools are the result. Within a mile or two of the Lauder estate on Park Avenue (see NYTimes Sunday Cover 11/27/11), that multi-billionaire has poor neighbors whose public-school children must share text-books that are torn, defaced and decades out of date.
A lot more money is needed to finance districts that lack the resources to provide a sound basic education. Urban and rural districts have had little luck in their efforts to improve schools by cutting staff and resources to the bone, and there is little data to suggest that the for-profit private sector (or the not-for-profit charter school movement) is solving the crisis.
What makes this even more absurd is that New York has the resources – if Governor Cuomo would drop his objections. New Yorkers with means – like the denizens of Wall Street, Westchester, the Hamptons and numerous other “outer-ring” suburbs, whose own children enjoy some of the finest public and private schools in the United States, need pony up only a tiny fraction of their wealth to fully fund our urban and rural districts currently incapable of funding themselves. In the long-term interest of the state as a whole, Albany must take responsibility for distributing resources where they are desperately needed. That would insure excellent educations for all of New York’s children, who will in turn become magnets for global business in search of the best educated work-force.
Instead, Mr. Cuomo’s idea to restore “market confidence” is to call for the forced expulsion of 99% protestors and continue to protect the tax advantages of the 1% -- to perpetuate unsustainable state mandates on local districts and fail to comply with previous court orders calling for adequate funding of poor districts to insure a sound basic education for all our children.
Urban and rural districts must be brought into balance over the long term. And New York’s schools will need much more fiscal coordination to survive. But right now, the only way to stem the crisis is to give weak communities more cash and room to recover. More than a generation into our education crisis, it should be obvious that forcing poor districts to keep slashing their budgets will only make things worse – tipping them into deeper privation and educational austerity that makes it even more difficult for our urban and rural communities to grow, raise living standards, attract employers, and ultimately pay for themselves.
New Yorkers have the resources to bail out our weakest districts and thereby save our cities and hamlets – and ultimately our suburbs and wealthiest enclaves. What we cannot afford is another lost generation.
by Dr. Fred Marshall, University of Rochester
Dear Sir/Madam-
I have re-written your recent editorial, entitled Germany’s Denial: Europe’s Disaster, changing some of the dramatis personae, but cleaving closely to the structure and often the actual words of your piece. I acknowledge that this is likely too long for your consideration, but thought you might enjoy (and agree with) the parallelism of the argument:
Each day our urban school districts inch closer to full meltdown, but Governor Cuomo of New York is still blocking what is needed: a real bailout of New York’s poorest districts by their richer neighbors and the wealthiest New Yorkers who enjoy endless extensions of their tax cuts.
Mr. Cuomo and his team have had more than fair warning of the disaster to come, including the possible loss of a generation New York’s urban and rural public school students, who will lack the capacity to successfully compete for jobs in a globally competitive 21st century market place. And it should be utterly clear that no New Yorkers – including the wealthy financiers of Westchester County and Long Island, or the down-to-business suburbanites of our decaying upstate cities – are immune. If we cannot provide an educated work force, we cannot attract business, and everybody loses.
The State has been compelled to sweeten the pot to get businesses to locate here by offering tax breaks and economic development dollars in desperate efforts to attract “job creators”. The crisis is now spreading, with more and more rural districts lacking the resources to offer a sound basic education. The tax-payer funded prison industry has been one of the only growth industries in upstate communities for more than a decade now, and the flow of prisoners from downstate communities to upstate prisons is the single biggest reason there was not an even larger loss of upstate population in the last census.
New Yorkers have clearly figured out that a meltdown of urban and rural public education imposes an enormous human cost. But the governor and state officials are still insisting that these underprivileged communities need to pay for their sinful ways (through draconian school closures and staffing layoffs) – and that New York’s virtuous “job creators” (the wealthiest and most privileged citizens and communities) will not be made to foot the bill. Until recently, New York’s leaders argued that they could quell the crisis with stiff austerity policies imposed on poor districts to re-establish their worthiness. But New York’s families are unpersuaded, and the crisis keeps spreading. New York City schools actually won a court battle mandating equitable state-funding, but the state has failed to fund the district, and massive layoffs and inadequate schools are the result. Within a mile or two of the Lauder estate on Park Avenue (see NYTimes Sunday Cover 11/27/11), that multi-billionaire has poor neighbors whose public-school children must share text-books that are torn, defaced and decades out of date.
A lot more money is needed to finance districts that lack the resources to provide a sound basic education. Urban and rural districts have had little luck in their efforts to improve schools by cutting staff and resources to the bone, and there is little data to suggest that the for-profit private sector (or the not-for-profit charter school movement) is solving the crisis.
What makes this even more absurd is that New York has the resources – if Governor Cuomo would drop his objections. New Yorkers with means – like the denizens of Wall Street, Westchester, the Hamptons and numerous other “outer-ring” suburbs, whose own children enjoy some of the finest public and private schools in the United States, need pony up only a tiny fraction of their wealth to fully fund our urban and rural districts currently incapable of funding themselves. In the long-term interest of the state as a whole, Albany must take responsibility for distributing resources where they are desperately needed. That would insure excellent educations for all of New York’s children, who will in turn become magnets for global business in search of the best educated work-force.
Instead, Mr. Cuomo’s idea to restore “market confidence” is to call for the forced expulsion of 99% protestors and continue to protect the tax advantages of the 1% -- to perpetuate unsustainable state mandates on local districts and fail to comply with previous court orders calling for adequate funding of poor districts to insure a sound basic education for all our children.
Urban and rural districts must be brought into balance over the long term. And New York’s schools will need much more fiscal coordination to survive. But right now, the only way to stem the crisis is to give weak communities more cash and room to recover. More than a generation into our education crisis, it should be obvious that forcing poor districts to keep slashing their budgets will only make things worse – tipping them into deeper privation and educational austerity that makes it even more difficult for our urban and rural communities to grow, raise living standards, attract employers, and ultimately pay for themselves.
New Yorkers have the resources to bail out our weakest districts and thereby save our cities and hamlets – and ultimately our suburbs and wealthiest enclaves. What we cannot afford is another lost generation.
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Central Office Accountability
The topic of accountability ranks high these days. I suggest the board look at three areas: streamlining central office operations, improving teacher hiring and professional development, and soliciting goals that reflect the interests of those most directly involved in the district — the students, families and teachers.
Central office accountability means providing district enrollment information and placement decisions on the same timeline as neighboring districts. It means sending out transportation and class schedules two weeks, not two days, before the first day of school. It means ensuring that Parent Engagement and Student Placement offices are staffed with knowledgeable employees who answer the phone. It means consolidating snail-mailings to households and having an exceptionally friendly website.
Accountability means encouraging local collaborative networks between the Rochester Teachers Association and schools of education that use peer-led professional development to improve instruction and curriculum. It means valuing student-teacher relationships and programming by ending the disruptive practice of laying teachers off in June and re-hiring them in August.
The board will gain public trust only when it settles on a superintendent who can set improvement goals by seeking partnerships, observations and ideas from its most important stakeholders: students, families and teachers.
Published in the Democrat and Chronicle, September 3, 2011
Central office accountability means providing district enrollment information and placement decisions on the same timeline as neighboring districts. It means sending out transportation and class schedules two weeks, not two days, before the first day of school. It means ensuring that Parent Engagement and Student Placement offices are staffed with knowledgeable employees who answer the phone. It means consolidating snail-mailings to households and having an exceptionally friendly website.
Accountability means encouraging local collaborative networks between the Rochester Teachers Association and schools of education that use peer-led professional development to improve instruction and curriculum. It means valuing student-teacher relationships and programming by ending the disruptive practice of laying teachers off in June and re-hiring them in August.
The board will gain public trust only when it settles on a superintendent who can set improvement goals by seeking partnerships, observations and ideas from its most important stakeholders: students, families and teachers.
Published in the Democrat and Chronicle, September 3, 2011
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Save Our Schools weekend
In case you missed it, the same weekend Congress tortured us with an eleventh-hour default standoff, thousands of parents, teachers, and education leaders gathered for a call to action on educational policy. Organizers of the Save Our Schools weekend met over four days for events that included workshops, a congress, and a march of about 5000 people. We came to address not just an education crisis, but current government policy that shows a profound lack of judgment about and respect for the field of education.
No one argues that public schools are fine the way they are. What's being protested is how policies like "No Child Left Behind" and "Race to the Top" are attracting privatization monies that systematically demonize teacher unions and shut out parent and teacher voices in tackling what should be our shared goal of improving schools. (Read about the co-location sagas playing out in New York City schools under mayoral control. Watch the newly released film "The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman" that is a response to the "Waiting for ‘Superman'" film that recently swept the country.) As David Cohen, a teacher from California, writes: "Would you force reforms on the military and ignore the opinions of career officers? Would you try to change practices in hospitals but ignore the input of nurses and doctors?" Taxpayers beware: educational policy must be smarter than this.
"Race Over the Cliff" threatens our public schools by using high-stakes testing to aim shrinking resources toward corporate charters, whose testing results are just as variable as those of public schools. Current reforms invite educational profiteering and such simplistic actions as replacing staff with cheaper, barely trained Teach for America young people. If what we want are highly qualified teachers, we won't get this by dismissing experienced teachers for new ones whose training consists of five-week crash courses before being placed in their first jobs. Would you want your children - especially if they had learning challenges - to serve as guinea pigs for well-meaning but highly inexperienced and unqualified teachers?
These reform examples are hypocritical "solutions" to problems that deserve deeper, more sustained kinds of work than that.
On that sweltering weekend in Washington, parents, teachers, and educational leaders came together to remind policy makers that quick-fix reforms are no substitute for quality change. If Americans want to get serious about improving schools, then we must recognize that there are no shortcuts. It takes time to build a quality teaching force and time to cultivate deep student learning. Let's work together to make all schools great and available to all.
To get a taste of the weekend, sample this link: http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2011/07/save_our_schools_rocks_the_cap.html?cmp=ENL-EU-VIEWS2
A version of this op-ed appeared in Rochester City Newspaper, August 23, 2011
No one argues that public schools are fine the way they are. What's being protested is how policies like "No Child Left Behind" and "Race to the Top" are attracting privatization monies that systematically demonize teacher unions and shut out parent and teacher voices in tackling what should be our shared goal of improving schools. (Read about the co-location sagas playing out in New York City schools under mayoral control. Watch the newly released film "The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman" that is a response to the "Waiting for ‘Superman'" film that recently swept the country.) As David Cohen, a teacher from California, writes: "Would you force reforms on the military and ignore the opinions of career officers? Would you try to change practices in hospitals but ignore the input of nurses and doctors?" Taxpayers beware: educational policy must be smarter than this.
"Race Over the Cliff" threatens our public schools by using high-stakes testing to aim shrinking resources toward corporate charters, whose testing results are just as variable as those of public schools. Current reforms invite educational profiteering and such simplistic actions as replacing staff with cheaper, barely trained Teach for America young people. If what we want are highly qualified teachers, we won't get this by dismissing experienced teachers for new ones whose training consists of five-week crash courses before being placed in their first jobs. Would you want your children - especially if they had learning challenges - to serve as guinea pigs for well-meaning but highly inexperienced and unqualified teachers?
These reform examples are hypocritical "solutions" to problems that deserve deeper, more sustained kinds of work than that.
On that sweltering weekend in Washington, parents, teachers, and educational leaders came together to remind policy makers that quick-fix reforms are no substitute for quality change. If Americans want to get serious about improving schools, then we must recognize that there are no shortcuts. It takes time to build a quality teaching force and time to cultivate deep student learning. Let's work together to make all schools great and available to all.
To get a taste of the weekend, sample this link: http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2011/07/save_our_schools_rocks_the_cap.html?cmp=ENL-EU-VIEWS2
A version of this op-ed appeared in Rochester City Newspaper, August 23, 2011
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Let’s Talk about Race, Class, Arts, and Equity
A sound adequate education means that children receive the tools they need to be productive members of society. Equitable education means that we work to minimize the ways some children are more disadvantaged than others. What are some tools that children need for the 21st century and how do those needs relate to growing school inequities?
The public expectation that students focus primarily on basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills has led most urban school districts to focus on improving test results in mathematics and English language arts. Rather than narrowing the gap between richer and poorer students however, these assessment goals actually increase inequities between them. Let’s look at why.
While no one would suggest we get rid of teaching standard basic skills to students, we can certainly argue that in today’s world, the means by which ideas are communicated reach far beyond text-based literacy and math proficiency. This has always been true as evidenced by works of art that have had great influence over history (think of Lange’s Migrant Mother, Kaufman’s Laramie Project, Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land, Park’s American Gothic, D.C., Robbin’s Dead Man Walking, Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial as a few examples in visual, performing, and literary arts).
The ability to write persuasive argument may call for one set of skills, but the ability to create image-&-sound-rich media stories, advertisements, and powerful non-verbal or non-narrative statements calls for other skills at least as important as the first. An adequate education today requires a fourth ‘R’, the arts, where students receive grounding in the language of image, sound, gesture, space, and character. Such learning is neither fluff nor necessarily a career path, but becomes a tool for helping students develop voice beyond the text, beyond the test.
What’s happening in our schools? A new study released by the NEA shows that less than half of 18-year old high school graduates have received any arts education at all. Further data unpacking reveals a shocking inequity between races/cultural groups. Across the last 25 years, white children's access to arts education has remained steady at about 60% while Hispanic children have experienced a 40% decline, and African-American children have experienced a 49% decline. Only a fourth of these children receive arts in schools.
This is happening in Rochester right now, with questionable decisions being made about what will not be protected in a shrinking budget. While middle class families can always buy access to arts lessons privately, poor families cannot so the loss of arts teachers in public schools leads to widening gaps between what educational tools are accessible to the Haves and Have Nots. Future generations of children will be shaped by these shortsighted curricular decisions... are we willing to allow these inequities to grow in our community?
An edited version of this essay appeared as a Speaking Out article in the April 10, 2011 issue of Democrat and Chronicle.
Monday, April 4, 2011
Schools and Markets: An Educator and An Economist Chat
Liz (University of Rochester) invited Dan (World Bank) to discuss the logic of school privatization...
DAN: Very often policy makers want to enlist the power of the market to make things run more efficiently. "Markets," they say, "can operate rapidly and efficiently to allocate resources where they need to go." Think about something like making a tuna-fish sandwich. What if you hired a bunch of bureaucrats to coordinate catching the fish, growing wheat and vegetables, making the mayonnaise, preparing the food and shipping it to your local cafeteria. It would probably cost a whole lot more than letting the market work where millions of transactions by millions of people based on the relative prices of various goods drive the process. If there is one thing capitalist markets have demonstrated in the last couple hundred years it is that they are great at generating a lot of wealth in a very efficient manner. Why not harness the power of the market mechanism to make our social services work better? For example, our school system.
LIZ: We need a definition of 'efficiency' here. Efficiency for lowering prices? Efficiency for quick provision of service? Efficiency for generating wealth? And in the case of schools, why would we be generating wealth for traders when that is not the goal of education?
DAN: Efficiency means you are producing as much as possible with the given resources. Whether you are producing goods (like apples or airplanes) or services (like education or haircuts) it is the same thing. You maximize efficiency when you are getting as much out of your resources as possible. Compared to any other system, a market-based system is the most efficient. That doesn't mean there aren't market failures -- one example is dealing with externalities (i.e., things external to the transaction -- for example people buying paper and people producing paper in a market system will get us the most efficient ways of producing paper, but it might cause a lot of pollution. But since that pollution is outside "or external" to the paper selling=buying transaction it leads to a market failure and overproduces pollution so we need think about things like fines for polluting to correct for the market failure).
LIZ: OK, so I think I understand that efficiency means traders are getting as much out of resources as possible within a closed system, but since schools are not closed systems, what about those complicated things that impact their quality – like variable teacher training, programming, school leadership, family inputs, poverty, disabilities…?
DAN: Well, before we start touting the wonder of markets -- and I do believe they are incredibly powerful and useful mechanisms -- we have to be very clear about what markets do. First, for a market to work well there has to be perfect information. All the people involved need to have good information about exactly what they are getting and what they are giving up in a transaction. If that doesn't happen, then we won't get the best allocation of resources (think about Wall Street!). That's easier when buying a tuna-fish sandwich than an education - but with oversight and analysis and transparency we can probably do fairly well in that regard. If not, then the people with the better information will do better at the expense of others.
LIZ: I’m not convinced that some schools do better than others simply because they have better information... doesn’t this have to do with other factors besides efficiencies around delivery of service? The production factors that Fed Ex deals with, for example, may pale in comparison to the schooling factors involved with delivery of quality teaching and learning in schools. Schools are not simply factories run by good information that help streamline finite products and enable ‘exchanges’ to go on.
DAN: The point about information is that the more accurate information all participants in a transaction have, the closer to an optimal outcome we get. If parents -- for example -- don't know about the schools and the educational programs and what is known about their effectiveness and suitability then they can't make choices that lead to the best possible outcomes. For some, goods or services information is easy to come by. For others it can be very hard. Health care is the most often cited example -- especially since information is asymmetric. That is the producers (doctors, drug companies, hospitals) have much more information about your health, the range of treatments, their effectiveness, their side effects, etc than you do. Because they have more information they can create prices and procedures that benefit them at your expense. For a market system to work (optimally) information must be available to everyone.
But second, we have to think about what economists mean when they say markets are "efficient." or "optimal". You hear that all the time. Markets lead to "optimal" outcomes. With a clearly defined product, no barriers to competition, and perfect information, markets DO lead to an optimal outcome. But by optimal, economists mean "Pareto Optimality." That is a situation where it is impossible to make one person better off without making someone else worse off. In other words, there is no "dead weight loss." Let's say we are distributing apples and cookies to a bunch of kids. Some of them love apples, some love cookies, some like a variety. A distribution of apples and cookies is Pareto Optimal if there are no longer any gains to trade. A market will lead to a relative price of apples to cookies (let's say one apple for five cookies) so that no one with an apple would feel better off trading it for five cookies or vice versa. The fact that markets can do this on their own without any kind of managerial process is actually quite an amazing outcome.
However, there is an important catch. They say nothing about the endowments people start off with. Pareto Optimality is a positive thing because it means you’re not wasting resources, but there are many Pareto Optimal situations. The one we end up at depends on initial endowments people bring to the marketplace. If you value equity as well as efficiency, you have to make a decision about how to combine the two goals. Economists tend to like the way markets create efficiency, so they tend to like solutions that affect the endowments that people bring, rather than the outcomes. That is, fund things like scholarships and set up things like earned income tax credits, etc., things that help people in a disadvantaged position come to the market with more resources. Then let the market drive things towards an efficient outcome that will be more equitable because you’ve made resources that people brought to the market more equal. Making things equal on the back end (e.g., making laws that say "equal pay for equal work" to eliminate wage disparities between men and women) tends to create inefficiencies that reduce the size of the pie.
Take an extreme case. There are two kids. One has 100 apples and 100 cookies and the other kid has nothing. Well, that is a Pareto Optimal allocation. It is impossible for the children to trade anything in a way that makes them both better off (assuming that the rich kid doesn't care about the poor kid). Pareto Optimality says nothing about the distribution of goods between people. If some people come to the market with lots more stuff than someone else they'll leave better off. Now, it is possible for a market to make the poor person have a bigger improvement in well-being than the rich person's improvement, but there is nothing about a market that guarantees this.
So if you don't want a market based system to re-enforce or expand inequalities you have to do something to even out what people bring to it. That is why more liberal economists usually suggest things like not just setting up charter schools but giving vouchers to poor people so that they can compete in the market on more equal terms with richer people. And as for people voting with their feet on which school is best, you have to look at the full price of going to that school -- which includes the time and expense of transportation. If the schools people want to go to are in the rich section of town then there is an implicit price on poor people for sending their kids there. Without something to subsidize those extra costs it isn't really a free market because everyone is not paying the same price.
LIZ: So, how can a free market model claim to account for other inequities beyond the ‘transaction’? It would be literally impossible to make sure all families had perfect information with which they could make choices. Looks like a market model would automatically favor those who can get information easily, so it would seem to be the worst thing possible for families/students who are already struggling for access to quality education...
DAN: This relates back to the externalities thing I was talking about. The classic example is pollution. People buying and selling gasoline don't adequately take the social impacts of pollution into account when they buy and sell gasoline (or the political ramifications vis a vis Iran, for example) -- so they lead to an efficient production and allocation of gasoline in terms of energy production but not pollution production. What needs to be done -- in econo lingo -- is to "internalize the externality". That is somehow get the costs of the pollution into the transaction. One solution in this instance would be to have a gas tax. The gas tax raises the cost of buying gas and reduces its profitability so less gets produced -- but, it will still lead to an efficient allocation of gasoline because the market will drive the allocation. So you can get an efficient outcome that takes into account the social costs of gasoline (assuming you figured out a gasoline tax that adequately captures the social costs of burning gasoline). This is better than trying to tell everyone how much gasoline they should be using. That is the theory behind all this carbon pricing stuff you here on the news. The world determines how much carbon we should be burning -- but then lets the market decide who gets to burn it.
School choice is complicated because of the way public schools are funded via property taxes and because of the impact of parental involvement and the benefits of going to school with kids who value school. So being forced to go to your local school can lock in inequalities that already exist because of what is happening in the housing market. School choice can allow kids from crummy districts to go to schools in richer, better districts. Of course, richer kids have more money so they can afford better schools. That is why people want to give vouchers to poor kids so they can compete better with rich kids. Or have a per capita system where whether you are rich or poor you bring the same resources to the market.
There is some logic to this... but I think there are problems. First, rich kids can opt out of the system by going to private schools. This not only takes resources out of the school system but starts to undermine political support for public schools. Second... like I said before... even in a per capita system there are different costs for these kids. Transportation costs (time and money) and transaction costs (learning about what schools are best for you) can still drive a wedge between rich and poor kids, in my opinion. Now one way to try to even things out is to give more resources to schools in poorer areas, but that doesn't happen with per capita budgeting.
LIZ: That’s the Weighted Student Funding idea being proposed in Rochester…
DAN: With per capita budgeting schools that are seen as underperforming will lose students -- and money. Those students who remain will be the ones who probably faced the largest costs of changing schools (or were less able to handle those costs) or who had worse information (maybe because their parents were too busy to get that information) and so they will end up going to a shrinking school. Why should the "initial endowment" of a financially stressed parent be allowed to hurt a kid in a public school system? Even if it is because the parent doesn't value education, I would still argue it is not right for the child to have that sad situation re-enforced by a public school system.
LIZ: Are those who tout market approaches to schools concerned about market limitations as applied to real school systems? I find the use of market language to talk about public schools disturbing because it frames everything as an exchange rather than addressing the learning process as well as the deeper issues around access. Teaching and learning is not a simple ‘transaction’ and students are not ‘products’. Quality student learning is dependent on having time for and variety of teaching approaches that lead to the widest number of students' success in knowing and understanding content. Metrics for quality would be dependent on the kind of learning taking place, not simply on the demand for it. Efficient use of public money is important, but if a market model for public education doesn’t guarantee distribution for all children then it cannot be the entire answer. I'd like to see improvements, but I'm spooked by the haphazard actions that are being rolled out in Rochester.
DAN: Trying to harness the power of markets sometimes makes sense. But it is important to remember what conditions are necessary for them to lead to optimal outcomes (perfect info, everyone faces the same price, no barriers to competition, fairly homogeneous product) and what exactly is meant by "optimal" -- and to what extent public policy should be concerned about the distributional issues that markets do not address. My point is that while markets have great aspects, you have to think about endowments, information, externalities, and other types of market failures or limits of markets. You have to set up a system that takes advantage of what markets do well but acknowledges their limitations.
LIZ: We need a definition of 'efficiency' here. Efficiency for lowering prices? Efficiency for quick provision of service? Efficiency for generating wealth? And in the case of schools, why would we be generating wealth for traders when that is not the goal of education?
DAN: Efficiency means you are producing as much as possible with the given resources. Whether you are producing goods (like apples or airplanes) or services (like education or haircuts) it is the same thing. You maximize efficiency when you are getting as much out of your resources as possible. Compared to any other system, a market-based system is the most efficient. That doesn't mean there aren't market failures -- one example is dealing with externalities (i.e., things external to the transaction -- for example people buying paper and people producing paper in a market system will get us the most efficient ways of producing paper, but it might cause a lot of pollution. But since that pollution is outside "or external" to the paper selling=buying transaction it leads to a market failure and overproduces pollution so we need think about things like fines for polluting to correct for the market failure).
LIZ: OK, so I think I understand that efficiency means traders are getting as much out of resources as possible within a closed system, but since schools are not closed systems, what about those complicated things that impact their quality – like variable teacher training, programming, school leadership, family inputs, poverty, disabilities…?
DAN: Well, before we start touting the wonder of markets -- and I do believe they are incredibly powerful and useful mechanisms -- we have to be very clear about what markets do. First, for a market to work well there has to be perfect information. All the people involved need to have good information about exactly what they are getting and what they are giving up in a transaction. If that doesn't happen, then we won't get the best allocation of resources (think about Wall Street!). That's easier when buying a tuna-fish sandwich than an education - but with oversight and analysis and transparency we can probably do fairly well in that regard. If not, then the people with the better information will do better at the expense of others.
LIZ: I’m not convinced that some schools do better than others simply because they have better information... doesn’t this have to do with other factors besides efficiencies around delivery of service? The production factors that Fed Ex deals with, for example, may pale in comparison to the schooling factors involved with delivery of quality teaching and learning in schools. Schools are not simply factories run by good information that help streamline finite products and enable ‘exchanges’ to go on.
DAN: The point about information is that the more accurate information all participants in a transaction have, the closer to an optimal outcome we get. If parents -- for example -- don't know about the schools and the educational programs and what is known about their effectiveness and suitability then they can't make choices that lead to the best possible outcomes. For some, goods or services information is easy to come by. For others it can be very hard. Health care is the most often cited example -- especially since information is asymmetric. That is the producers (doctors, drug companies, hospitals) have much more information about your health, the range of treatments, their effectiveness, their side effects, etc than you do. Because they have more information they can create prices and procedures that benefit them at your expense. For a market system to work (optimally) information must be available to everyone.
But second, we have to think about what economists mean when they say markets are "efficient." or "optimal". You hear that all the time. Markets lead to "optimal" outcomes. With a clearly defined product, no barriers to competition, and perfect information, markets DO lead to an optimal outcome. But by optimal, economists mean "Pareto Optimality." That is a situation where it is impossible to make one person better off without making someone else worse off. In other words, there is no "dead weight loss." Let's say we are distributing apples and cookies to a bunch of kids. Some of them love apples, some love cookies, some like a variety. A distribution of apples and cookies is Pareto Optimal if there are no longer any gains to trade. A market will lead to a relative price of apples to cookies (let's say one apple for five cookies) so that no one with an apple would feel better off trading it for five cookies or vice versa. The fact that markets can do this on their own without any kind of managerial process is actually quite an amazing outcome.
However, there is an important catch. They say nothing about the endowments people start off with. Pareto Optimality is a positive thing because it means you’re not wasting resources, but there are many Pareto Optimal situations. The one we end up at depends on initial endowments people bring to the marketplace. If you value equity as well as efficiency, you have to make a decision about how to combine the two goals. Economists tend to like the way markets create efficiency, so they tend to like solutions that affect the endowments that people bring, rather than the outcomes. That is, fund things like scholarships and set up things like earned income tax credits, etc., things that help people in a disadvantaged position come to the market with more resources. Then let the market drive things towards an efficient outcome that will be more equitable because you’ve made resources that people brought to the market more equal. Making things equal on the back end (e.g., making laws that say "equal pay for equal work" to eliminate wage disparities between men and women) tends to create inefficiencies that reduce the size of the pie.
Take an extreme case. There are two kids. One has 100 apples and 100 cookies and the other kid has nothing. Well, that is a Pareto Optimal allocation. It is impossible for the children to trade anything in a way that makes them both better off (assuming that the rich kid doesn't care about the poor kid). Pareto Optimality says nothing about the distribution of goods between people. If some people come to the market with lots more stuff than someone else they'll leave better off. Now, it is possible for a market to make the poor person have a bigger improvement in well-being than the rich person's improvement, but there is nothing about a market that guarantees this.
So if you don't want a market based system to re-enforce or expand inequalities you have to do something to even out what people bring to it. That is why more liberal economists usually suggest things like not just setting up charter schools but giving vouchers to poor people so that they can compete in the market on more equal terms with richer people. And as for people voting with their feet on which school is best, you have to look at the full price of going to that school -- which includes the time and expense of transportation. If the schools people want to go to are in the rich section of town then there is an implicit price on poor people for sending their kids there. Without something to subsidize those extra costs it isn't really a free market because everyone is not paying the same price.
LIZ: So, how can a free market model claim to account for other inequities beyond the ‘transaction’? It would be literally impossible to make sure all families had perfect information with which they could make choices. Looks like a market model would automatically favor those who can get information easily, so it would seem to be the worst thing possible for families/students who are already struggling for access to quality education...
DAN: This relates back to the externalities thing I was talking about. The classic example is pollution. People buying and selling gasoline don't adequately take the social impacts of pollution into account when they buy and sell gasoline (or the political ramifications vis a vis Iran, for example) -- so they lead to an efficient production and allocation of gasoline in terms of energy production but not pollution production. What needs to be done -- in econo lingo -- is to "internalize the externality". That is somehow get the costs of the pollution into the transaction. One solution in this instance would be to have a gas tax. The gas tax raises the cost of buying gas and reduces its profitability so less gets produced -- but, it will still lead to an efficient allocation of gasoline because the market will drive the allocation. So you can get an efficient outcome that takes into account the social costs of gasoline (assuming you figured out a gasoline tax that adequately captures the social costs of burning gasoline). This is better than trying to tell everyone how much gasoline they should be using. That is the theory behind all this carbon pricing stuff you here on the news. The world determines how much carbon we should be burning -- but then lets the market decide who gets to burn it.
School choice is complicated because of the way public schools are funded via property taxes and because of the impact of parental involvement and the benefits of going to school with kids who value school. So being forced to go to your local school can lock in inequalities that already exist because of what is happening in the housing market. School choice can allow kids from crummy districts to go to schools in richer, better districts. Of course, richer kids have more money so they can afford better schools. That is why people want to give vouchers to poor kids so they can compete better with rich kids. Or have a per capita system where whether you are rich or poor you bring the same resources to the market.
There is some logic to this... but I think there are problems. First, rich kids can opt out of the system by going to private schools. This not only takes resources out of the school system but starts to undermine political support for public schools. Second... like I said before... even in a per capita system there are different costs for these kids. Transportation costs (time and money) and transaction costs (learning about what schools are best for you) can still drive a wedge between rich and poor kids, in my opinion. Now one way to try to even things out is to give more resources to schools in poorer areas, but that doesn't happen with per capita budgeting.
LIZ: That’s the Weighted Student Funding idea being proposed in Rochester…
DAN: With per capita budgeting schools that are seen as underperforming will lose students -- and money. Those students who remain will be the ones who probably faced the largest costs of changing schools (or were less able to handle those costs) or who had worse information (maybe because their parents were too busy to get that information) and so they will end up going to a shrinking school. Why should the "initial endowment" of a financially stressed parent be allowed to hurt a kid in a public school system? Even if it is because the parent doesn't value education, I would still argue it is not right for the child to have that sad situation re-enforced by a public school system.
LIZ: Are those who tout market approaches to schools concerned about market limitations as applied to real school systems? I find the use of market language to talk about public schools disturbing because it frames everything as an exchange rather than addressing the learning process as well as the deeper issues around access. Teaching and learning is not a simple ‘transaction’ and students are not ‘products’. Quality student learning is dependent on having time for and variety of teaching approaches that lead to the widest number of students' success in knowing and understanding content. Metrics for quality would be dependent on the kind of learning taking place, not simply on the demand for it. Efficient use of public money is important, but if a market model for public education doesn’t guarantee distribution for all children then it cannot be the entire answer. I'd like to see improvements, but I'm spooked by the haphazard actions that are being rolled out in Rochester.
DAN: Trying to harness the power of markets sometimes makes sense. But it is important to remember what conditions are necessary for them to lead to optimal outcomes (perfect info, everyone faces the same price, no barriers to competition, fairly homogeneous product) and what exactly is meant by "optimal" -- and to what extent public policy should be concerned about the distributional issues that markets do not address. My point is that while markets have great aspects, you have to think about endowments, information, externalities, and other types of market failures or limits of markets. You have to set up a system that takes advantage of what markets do well but acknowledges their limitations.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Report Card on Brizard's Portfolio Plan
The Rochester City School District has a poverty rate of more than 80% as measured by the number of students eligible for free lunches. Superintendent Brizard has chosen a “portfolio school district” approach that is a new way of addressing the poor graduation rates and lack of college-readiness that usually accompanies high poverty. Although the portfolio approach is an idea whose success rate has been variable across the country, it would seem reasonable to try something new when old solutions are not working. Surprisingly, however, Brizard has veered away from the portfolio idea’s basic tenets around research-based decision-making, so we are not off to a good start.
What is a “portfolio school district” approach? The portfolio idea is similar to asset management in the investment world. The manager (in this case, the superintendent) has a collection of assets that are constantly changing because he/she can add favorable ones and dispose of unsuccessful ones. In education portfolio strategy, this translates to assuming that schools are contingent rather than permanent. That is, if schools are successful they will be retained and expanded. If they are not they will be closed or replaced.
Aside from the problem of how realistic it is to expand or merge successful schools, let’s examine the core premises of a portfolio approach that seeks improvement through “broad experimentation with many possibilities, careful tracking of results, and constant adaptation in light of what appears to work” (http://www.crpe.org/cs/crpe/view/csr_pubs/295). The literature describing district management of school portfolios emphasizes the importance of supporting existing schools that serve students well, helping schools that are struggling, and eliciting promising ideas from groups both inside and beyond the immediate school system.
Such an approach would rely upon excellent data tracking and positive environments for the sharing of ideas. The first element, a focus on data, requires both collection and analysis for school improvement. Data is only as useful as the humans who understand and design and implement a rational plan of action based upon it. The second element, known in education lingo as “professional learning communities”, is key for the dissemination of good teaching ideas. Many leaders of successful schools understand that the best way to improve teaching is to provide supportive in-house group structures in which teachers can discuss practice and problem-solve with one another. At its core, the professional learning community is a collegial approach to improvement. You can find this dynamic approach in many fields, including medicine, science and business. It is 180 degrees away from traditional top-down school improvement approaches such as assessment of teachers “performance” by supervisors (1:1 and unidirectional), or the common district-designed menu style of professional development offerings taught by experts whose need was dreamed up by central office bureaucrats.
Let’s step back and take a look at how we’re doing with Brizard’s implementation of the portfolio plan in the Rochester City School District. Such a plan calls for:
1) Broad experimentation with many possibilities
2) Careful tracking of results
3) Constant adaptation/adjustment in light of what appears to work
4) Supporting existing schools that serve students well
5) Helping schools that are struggling
6) Elicitation of promising ideas from groups inside & beyond the school system
1) Broad experimentation is something that Brizard is certainly on track with. Last year one new school opened and this year six more opened, each with an outside institutional partner*, some of which have no track record of mentoring new schools, some for which there is no data yet on their ability to raise graduation rates, and some of which have no reported measures for improving student learning (http://education.cgr.org/policy-reviews-of-rcsd/). Is this a reason to cheer or to tremble? That’s not yet clear. Experimentation is by nature… well… experimental, so we should accept that for what it is. It’s possible that the new schools will be more successful than those that haven’t worked in the past. It’s also true that good asset managers will choose experimental options whose failure would not threaten to destroy the rest of the portfolio. In a school system’s case, destroying the portfolio could happen either by extreme loss of money or extreme loss of public confidence. Brizard needs to pay special attention to both of these areas.
2) Careful tracking of results has been launched under Brizard’s School Performance Analytic (SPA) systems tool. He has hired the eVerge Group to integrate all of the district’s data and launch at full capacity sometime late in the 2010-2011 academic year. No doubt this is the data-management panacea for improving the nine major information systems (Chancery, Datacation, DataMate, Gradebook, SharePoint, Acuity, Datamentor, IEP Direct and Avatar) that already burden central office by not properly interfacing. Could streamlined data increase the efficiency and navigational capacity of the district? Yes. However, proof of its worth will not be found in the purchase and installation of yet another a system without the training and support of staff who can successfully connect analysis of data to all teaching and professional development in the district. Without investment in human capital, technological investment is literally useless. Taxpayers should be aware of this data initiative, monitor its implementation, and be alert for signs of coma.
3) Brizard’s constant adaptation in light of what appears to work, is not evident in light of his most recently announced initiative, Equitable Student Funding (ESF). Elsewhere this budgetary approach is called Weighted Student Funding (WSF) because it assigns a dollar amount of base weight per ‘type’ of student for special education, English language learners, and gifted and talented students to receive more money than do general education students. Proponents claim it is a way to achieve equitable services across school districts. They also believe that it increases the size of school budgets so that principals can have financial autonomy to choose extra services or programming in their buildings after they have paid for mandated services. Assessment of WSF around the country, however, shows that it doesn’t work during times of budgetary austerity. There are other concerns too. To date, the weighted formula assigned to students has been uneven and subjectively determined in different cities, with variable results. The literature raises concerns about school incentives to mislabel students in order to gain the extra funding attached to special populations. Those few positive responses to WSF may be due to the fact that its proponents have evaluated its implementation mainly during times when budgets were stable or growing (Baker, 2009 http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=EJ835083&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=EJ835083; Education Resource Strategies, 2010 http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED502615&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED502615; Ladd & Fiske, 2009 http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=ladd+and+fiske%2C+weighted+student+funding&btnG=Search&as_sdt=0%2C33&as_ylo=&as_vis=0; Snell, 2009 http://reason.org/news/show/weighted-student-formula-yearb; Picus & Odden, 2009 http://www.schoolfundingmatters.org/files/default.aspx; Shambaugh, Chambers & DeLancey, 2008 http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED502615&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED502615). When the unit of funding is based upon the student rather than the program, professional educators lose leverage to adequately support quality programs that demonstrably work. Since principals across RCSD have decried the imposition of this opaque formula, argued their lack of autonomy due to inadequate funding, and expressed great uncertainty around declining monies across the state, Brizard should take the concept of constant adaptation in light of what appears to work to heart. It is surely foolhardy to press forward with WSF at this time. Let’s save this particular initiative for review in better economic times.
4) Supporting existing schools that serve students well is the simplest yet most overlooked goal within Brizard’s portfolio strategies. It does not take 10 different database programs and a surfeit of central-office employees to figure this one out. City parents already know about the existing schools that serve students well. They are easy schools to identify because they are the most sought out and oversubscribed in the district (primary: 12, 15, 23, 46, secondary: 58, Wilson Academy, School with Walls, School of the Arts, and public charter: Eugenio Maria de Hostos and Genesee Community). As Brizard’s strategic plan states, the district will support “homegrown innovation” by naming them “autonomous schools” and giving them some further measure of freedom from central office. They would be presumably expected to continually improve as they were held up as explicit models for the district to replicate. So where is that official acknowledgement of the successful schools that already exist, and why hasn’t Brizard turned to these schools for at least a few ideas in his portfolio of new schools? How about replicating the successful HOLA program in several other schools, or opening two more Arts and two more International Baccalaureate schools elsewhere in the district? How about copying the excellent professional development model that is used by teachers in the Genesee Community Charter School? Good ideas already exist locally. The best reasons for start-up partnering of new schools with successful homegrown ones are that this would be much less expensive than outside partners, the public buy-in for these choices would be immediate, and the increased scrutiny would undoubtedly mature their work further.
5 & 6) The last two, helping struggling schools and eliciting promising ideas from groups both inside and outside the district are only partially evident. Brizard shut down rather than helped several schools, and he has sought out promising ideas primarily from those outside of the school district, often through expensive consultants whose fees have raised many eyebrows.
Remember that many great ideas can come from teachers - which was the original intention of charter schools before so many of them were corporatized by for-profit funding. One excellent internal way to achieve school improvement is to cultivate professional learning communities in every building. Move away from top-down administrative approaches and embrace dynamic collegial structures by encouraging regular groups of teachers to share their work with one another. That is much more cost effective than hiring outside consultants or adding yet more administrators to do ‘deep dives’ into data interpretation for his zone chiefs (See http://www.ustream.tv/channel/rochester-city-school-district-broadcast-channel, “Superintendent Brizard addresses Central Office staff”, 3/25/11).
Since this post is so lengthy, I’ve designed a simple report card that summarizes my evaluation of Brizard’s progress with the Rochester City School District portfolio approach to date.
Little to No Evidence
|
Evident with Reservations
|
On Course
|
Early Signs of Excellence
|
Excellent
| |
Experimentation
|
X
| ||||
Data tracking
|
X
| ||||
Adaptation/Adjustmt
|
X
| ||||
Support of Good
|
X
| ||||
Helping Struggling
|
X
| ||||
Elicitation
|
X
|
In a nutshell, Brizard scores high on experimentation, low on actions based upon data analysis, fiscal accountability, and community dialogue.
Since this is a formative assessment rather than a summative one, let’s hope that Brizard will pay attention to these benchmarks by moving toward more evidence-based research and collaborative input on improving schools. The future of our children and the Rochester region’s long-term economic prospects depend on it.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Brizard's "Equitable" Student Funding is Misguided and Harmful to Students
An Open Letter to Members of the Rochester City School Board
This year, school principals in the Rochester City School District Charlotte High School a 43% cut, at Monroe
One obvious explanation would be that, somehow, students at SOTA and other programs incurring deep cuts in their proposed budgets this year, have been receiving an unfairly large proportion of resources in past budgets. But, in fact, that has NOT been the case. On a capitated or per-student basis, SOTA actually falls somewhere in the middle of the pack with respect to student spending as do the other schools I mentioned. As our city-wide parent group looked into this further, we quickly began forming a new, and somewhat disturbing conception of the process.
To understand how an “equitable” student-funding initiative could possibly result in drastic reductions in funding of programs that were already being funded at a level no higher than other schools in the district, we needed to review some history. Bear with me here, as the devil is very much in the details.
The first thing to note is that, much like the “double speak” in Orwell’s famous dystopian novel, 1984, the term “equitable student funding” is a term found virtually no-where else in the country on Google searches or detailed educational data-base searches done through the Warner School’s library at the University of Rochester. Rather, the term “equitable” represents Mr. Brizard’s re-branding of a broader concept in district budgeting more widely known elsewhere as “weighted” student funding. This model goes by several names, including “results-based budgeting, student-based budgeting, or “back-packing”. In all cases the meaning is the same: dollars, rather than staffing positions based on programs, follow students into schools. These resources are weighted based on the individual needs of the student. While this may seem reasonable from the high-altitude of central-office theory, in practice it has resulted in grave distortions at the level of curricular programs in schools. Obviously, how the board chooses to “weight” resources is critical to understanding the adverse impact on many of our district’s most successful programs. In this year’s process, SPED and ESL students are weighted at a higher rate ($5,826) than other students ($3,682). As a result, with shrinking resources overall, school principals are racing to enroll as many SPED and ESL students as possible (I know of one mother of a SPED student who has already received several phone calls soliciting her child’s enrollment for next year).
Where does the push for converting from a program-formula for budgets to a weighted-student-budgeting formula come from? Largely, this is a massive initiative underwritten by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation out of Los Angeles Detroit America
What is the direct connection between the Broad Foundation and Rochester New York City with a master’s degree in education (the same basic requirement that virtually all city school district teachers meet) is a graduate of the Broad Foundation’s Superintendent Academy Broad Superintendents Academy
So….it certainly sounds as though our superintendent has somebody tracking his achievement and performance….and it is not you, the members of the Rochester City School District School Board, or us, the parents of kids whose educations as literally on the verge of being flushed down the tubes…No, it is the director of the Broad Foundation’s Superintendent’s Academy in Los Angeles California – funded by the good folks who brought you AIG.
But, rather than sink into the mire of an ad-hominem argument against the purveyors of weighted student funding, or quibbling with the doublespeak entailed in the very term “equitable” as applied to the complex formulas being thrust on school principals across the district, I want to grapple with some of the deep flaws underlying the logic of the superintendent’s budgeting formula.
To do this, let’s look at the literature promulgated by Broad’s own paid exponent, author Lisa Snell, in her “Weighted Student Formula Yearbook, 2009” (http://reason.org/files/wsf/yearbook.pdf). This document outlines five key principles underlying student-based budgeting (another term of art for “weighted-student-funding”). (By the way, Ms. Snell is herself not an educator, but has a degree in communication):
- Funding should follow the child, on a per-student basis, to the public school that he or she attends
- Per-student funding should vary according to the child’s need and other relevant circumstances
- Funding should arrive at the school as real dollars – not as teaching positions, ratios or staffing norms – that can be spent flexibly, with accountability systems focused more on results and less on inputs, programs or activities.
- Principles of allocating money to schools should apply to all levels of funding, including federal, state and local dollars.
- Funding systems should be as simple as possible and made transparent to administrators, teachers, parents and citizens.
While all of these principles seem reasonable enough on the surface, there are key ways in which they have not been realized adequately in even small pilot programs, and cannot be realized adequately in the full-roll-out precipitously called for by Mr. Brizard across the entire district. Particularly laughable is point 5, above. This has, in fact, been perhaps the least transparent budgeting formula in the history of the district.
Lets use Ms. Snell’s own “school empowerment benchmarks to see why.
The argument used by Mr. Brizard and the Broad Foundation/AIG group is that if schools receive budgets based on dollars related to per-pupil funding, it gives school principals the money that each student generates and allows principals to more efficiently allocate revenue and staff. But the structures currently in place in the Rochester City School District
It is like the captain of the Titanic suddenly insisting that his first-mates take control of the helm just as the ice-berg comes looming up out of the fog. In this analogy, the first-mates are school principals, and Brizard is the captain of the titanic.
In order for student-based budgeting to improve outcomes for students, families need to be able to choose between schools, and school themselves need to have access to sufficient discretionary funding to be able create meaningfully diverse curricular offerings. In such an environment, less popular schools would have both an incentive and the potential means to improve in order to attract and retain families. The theory goes that school choice would show district officials which schools hold the most value to customers. According to the theory the majority of schools will show improvements once principals control school budges and public schools begin to compete with one another, and if some schools cannot improve they can be merged with higher performing schools or they can be closed. In this utopian theory, school choice is an accountability mechanism that reveals which schools are serving students effectively, by giving dissatisfied families the right to exit to a higher performing school.
All of this would be fine, except for the fact that city students and parents actually have very little choice, and none of the principals will have access to sufficient resources to allow meaningful development of attractive new curricular options for students. At SOTA, for example, there is simply not room for more students to enroll. So, even though it has the highest graduation rate in the district, the highest proportion of kids going on to college (indeed, one of the highest rates for African American and Hispanic males in New York state), the limitation of space and staff mean that no more district children can be enrolled there than already are. How ironic, then, that this, one of the true bright spots in education for the entire district, will be forced to gut its arts and advanced placement programs under the new budgeting formula. Indeed, for parents of middle-class means, once these programs are gutted, there will be an exercise of school-choice: kids whose parents can afford it will be sent to private schools or suburban schools whose arts and academic programs are not being eviscerated. For the vast majority of low-income students, that will not be a choice they have. Thus, rather than replicating our most successful programs across the district, the funding initiative decapitates them.
According to the theory, principals must be able to make decisions about how to spend resources in terms of staffing on programs, including hiring. But, in reality, principals were asked to grapple with huge budget cuts – forcing them to axe virtually any of the non-core programs that might have meaningfully differentiated one school from another.
Unlike an evidence based approach to allocating district resources, focused on identifying which actual programs work and replicating them across the district, Mr. Brizard’s inequitable funding program distains research into effective education strategies to set spending levels. His model, like all per-student funding initiatives, provides no guidance on how to insure resources are adequate and directed to activities that improve student achievement.
In other words, it moves away from evidence-based strategies that improve student performance, and toward financial formulas that, on the alter of their seeming simplicity, actually decimate programs that have been demonstrably successful. At SOTA, for example, the Arts and Advanced Placement Programs – features of the curriculum tightly linked to the school’s overall successful graduation rates and college-placement rates, will be gutted if the new budget formula is utilized to allocate resources.
In cities beyond Rochester , the Broad Foundation has placed other graduates of its Superintendent Academy
In the end, as Members of the Rochester City School District School Board, you must choose whether or not to support Mr. Brizard’s theory. I have tried to show why his theory cannot work in our setting of limited resources and limited school choice. It may sound nice, but it has not yet worked elsewhere, and cannot work here.
I want to close with an analogy from biology. As you know, Darwin Harley Schools
In the end, the AIG-inspired free-market of schools with budgets transparently linked to student-enrollment, and the unrestricted free-flow of student-capital can only work when peoples’ basic needs are already being met. Mr. Brizard is like Marie Antoinette ensconced in some Versailles
Sincerely,
Fred Marshall, M.D.
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