Usual Suspect Mark Pocan spins a Keyser Soze story on GAO Parental Choice Report

September 16, 2016

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

The American film classic the Usual Suspects (spoiler alert!) features a quick thinking unreliable narrator Verbal (played by Kevin Spacey) who concocts a vivid tale based on material on a bulletin board sitting behind the police officer who is interrogating him. Representative Marc Pocan has used equivalent powers of imagination and a recent GAO report on private choice programs as his bulletin board to spin his own imaginative and deceptive tale.

First the report:

gao

The report is a straightforward description of the nation’s voucher and ESA programs, and deals with primarily with a state of confusion among school districts as to whether they are obligated to provide “equitable services” to special needs students who participate in private choice programs. It’s a fairly dry 49 page read if you go through the report, although it does have the occasional interesting graphic like this one:

gao-1

In any case after a number of pages of descriptive work the report concludes:

gao-4

You are welcome- I waded through this report so you wouldn’t have to!

So from this bulletin board material Rep. Marc Pocanconcocts his tale of woe and destruction visiting down upon the states like Biblical plagues from private choice programs in a piece in HuffPo titled omniously Why You Should be Worried About the Rapid Rise of Private Voucher Schools:

gao-3

In other words, private choice programs are the most vicious gangster in the history of Pocan’s imagination:

These claims have even less to do with the GAO report than Officer Kujan’s bulletin board relationship with the tale of Keyser Soze.  The only “discovery” in the GAO report-districts are confused about whether they are obligated to provide special education services to students participating in private choice programs in the same fashion they do to other private school students, which is to say, not much to begin with. Thus the report recommends USDoE guidance to districts to dispel confusion because the districts retain discretion on whom to serve.

The real discovery here is that Rep. Pocan is willing to spin long-known facts about private choice programs into a breathless but ineffectual attempt at a hit piece. In order-

  1. Teacher prep has always been different between public and private schools and there is approximately zero evidence that traditional certification produces better learning, but hey if you want state certified teachers the public school system is still there as an option.
  2. Some private choice programs require schools to change their admission policies, but many do not. Let me know when you get the GI Bill to require random admission lotteries into the Ivy League and I’ll start to take you seriously on this. No? How about random lottery admissions for open enrollment transfers between district schools, who currently get to pick and choose at will? The total number of seats available may be greater for lighter touch programs and overly meddling with private schools can and has backfired in a lack of seats in high quality private schools.
  3. Money is following the child, lamest claim in the opponent playbook.
  4. Perceived deficiencies in taxpayer-subsidized public schools to students with disabilities is why parents choose to participate in the first place. Satisfaction surveys of special needs choice programs have been off the charts. Private choice programs expand the options for special needs parents.

Sadly, rather than engage in an intellectually honest debate, Rep. Pocan has constructed a boogey-man story and attempted to claim that the GAO told it to him before he started repeating it. They did nothing of the sort, and silly efforts like this is example number 89,623 of why choice opponents willingly surrender their credibility on a regular basis.

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Posted by matthewladner

Texas Special Education Disgrace-“It Was All a Numbers Game”

September 13, 2016

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

The Houston Chronicle has delivered an expose on a covert and “successful” effort by the Texas Education Agency to create a defacto cap of 8.5% on the number of Texas public school students who would receive special education services. Successful gets air quotes btw if you define success as avoiding delivering special education services to hundreds of thousands of kids by keeping them cooped up a Section 504 no man’s land.

The process of identifying children for special education services is conducted by human beings and thus involves all sorts of error- children who do not actually have disabilities are often identified for services, students who do have disabilities do not receive services, students who do have disabilities don’t always receive the correct services. It’s a difficult process. The Texas Education Agency created an arbitrary target for special education enrollment in 2004 of 8.5% of a school population, effectively incentivizing districts to deny services to students. In theory the restraining of services could have come in the category most prone to over-identification: specific learning disability. If that had been the case maybe, maybe there would be a silver lining to this story. Instead the Chronicle found across the board reductions in all disability types. From the Chronicle:

Over a decade ago, the officials arbitrarily decided what percentage of students should get special education services — 8.5 percent — and since then they have forced school districts to comply by strictly auditing those serving too many kids.

Their efforts, which started in 2004 but have never been publicly announced or explained, have saved the Texas Education Agency billions of dollars but denied vital supports to children with autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia, epilepsy, mental illnesses, speech impediments, traumatic brain injuries, even blindness and deafness, a Houston Chronicle investigation has found.

More than a dozen teachers and administrators from across the state told the Chronicle they have delayed or denied special education to disabled students in order to stay below the 8.5 percent benchmark. They revealed a variety of methods, from putting kids into a cheaper alternative program known as “Section 504” to persuading parents to pull their children out of public school altogether.

“We were basically told in a staff meeting that we needed to lower the number of kids in special ed at all costs,” said Jamie Womack Williams, who taught in the Tyler Independent School District until 2010. “It was all a numbers game.”

Perhaps someone could attempt to justify this practice by claiming that Texas schools did a fantastic job educating the 8.5% of students they provided services. Well, not so much:

texas-vs-fl-sped

Having the state effectively punish districts going over an arbitrary cap on the percentage of special education students at a minimum violates the spirit of federal special education law. As flawed as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and the associated practices remain, the unmistakable intent of the law has been to provide special education services to all students who need it. IDEA, warts and all, stands as landmark civil rights legislation for children with disabilities and the practices adopted by unelected officials at the Texas Education Agency must be viewed as an attempt to subvert this legislation at the expense of some of the most vulnerable students.

The reader should note that while the Chronicle article places blame for the 8.5% policy squarely upon the Texas Education Agency, this practice could not have endured for so long without the active acquiescence of Texas school districts. If they had objected to this policy, as was their moral duty, we would not have learned of this a decade after formulation as a part of an investigative report. Texas school districts have long complained however of the costs associated with special education, and that state and federal funds fail to cover the full cost of providing services. Kudos to the school officials who spoke to the Chronicle’s investigators, but the number who quietly went along with this greatly outnumbered those who made any attempt to set things right.

The Florida approach of setting special needs students free to attend public and private schools with their state funding represents a profoundly more humane approach to special education. If the districts resent having to divert dollars from general education to special education, let special needs family seek out a solution with their “inadequate” state dollars. The Chronicle article represents another chapter in the long book of what happens when people are forced to rely upon the goodwill and sound thinking of soulless bureaucrats.

No one enjoys bragging on Texas more than me, but this is nothing short of disgraceful and needs to be made right.

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Posted by matthewladner

Math Gains by State Charter Sector

September 9, 2016

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

So just for fun I decided to calculate the cohort math gains for states and state charter sectors in NAEP. Note that on the charter side there are considerable sampling issues in deriving an estimate for a relatively small group of students, making it a really great idea to check a secondary source of data rather than accepting an 8th grade NAEP score for charter students as written on a stone tablet by a higher power.  Various other caveats also apply- high gain scores are not the same as high scores, for instance. The number one gainer below (MN charters) does not have an especially high average 8th grade math score, and in fact lags about ten points below the statewide average for Minnesota. The opposite is true of the number two gainer (AZ charters) which have significantly higher overall scores than their statewide average and high scores overall. Charter sectors dominated by lots of new schools getting their sea legs full of students taking an academic hit getting used to a new school can create an optical illusion in a snapshot, such as those provided by NAEP. Many of these sectors may be on their way to improving in other words as ineffective/undesirable charters close, new ones open and survive, etc.

While NAEP has sampled the same cohort of students as both 4th and 8th graders, they are not of course testing the same students. Students move around, both between states and between district and charter schools. I don’t expect that many states are losing their high performing math students at high rates and having them replaced by low performing math students. In other words, at the state level kids moving around probably does not amount to much because things average out in the aggregate. I’m less confident of this being the case at the charter sector level. There are other caveats that could be dwelt upon, but that would start to violate the Prime Directive.

So okay you’ve been warned- each of these gain scores needs to be viewed in a broader context- far more context than I am going to be able provide here. Having said all of that:

math-gains-for-states-and-charter-sectors

Charter sectors cover both the top and the bottom of the chart- 7 out of the top 10, and the top four overall gains.

Down at the bottom of the chart alas we see the bottom five spots covered by charter sectors. So, Pennsylvania charters, we need to talk.  The NAEP listed your 2011 average 4th grade math score as 241, and your 2015 average 8th grade score as 249. I **ahem** double checked the numbers just to be sure I hadn’t made some mistake. The district numbers for Philadelphia in the TUDA- 225 for 2011 4th graders, 267 for 2015 8th graders.  Both of those scores are catastrophically terrible, but the second one is at least meaningfully higher than the first one. Something goofy with these NAEP numbers? PA charters dominated by dropout recovery programs? Who let the dogs out?

As stated above, no hard and fast conclusions should be drawn from this little insomnia driven exercise, but PA charters might want to turn up the water pressure:

6 Comments | charter schools | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

The Education of High Performing Students

September 6, 2016

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Fordham released an interesting report last week making the case for including high performing students as a subgroup in state accountability systems. Like most of you who spend your time reading obscure blogs written by wonks on a continuing mission to entertain themselves, I am sympathetic to the needs of high achieving students. In fact, recently a person who served as an official in the administration of Janet Napolitano when she was Governor of Arizona told me that gifted education was THE issue when they took office in 2003. The parents of gifted students were up in arms that there was very little to nothing to meet the needs of their children, and elected officials were hearing about it non-stop.

Then, I was told, the parents discovered BASIS charter schools. Things quieted down.

Arizona had badly over-exposed testing items in those days, and the dreaded worksheets drilling to those over-exposed items were too much in evidence once students reached the 3rd grade (the first year of state standardized testing). I experienced this first hand as a parent, and have heard the tale repeated many times in conversations with other parents during the sad, dying days of the AIMS exam. We called it “the 3rd grade wall.”  One of the priorities for those concerned with the education of high achieving students should be to maintain the integrity of the state testing system (aggressively curtailing item exposure and excessive district test prep) imo.

So anyway, I don’t have a problem with including high-achieving students as a subgroup, but I also don’t see it as strong tea.  The NAEP seems to suggest likewise. I ran cohort gains on 4th (2011) to 8th grade math (2015) for a relatively generic group of relatively high performing students- non-FRL eligible students in the general education program. Fordham identified four states as leaders in high-achieving subgroup accountability: Arkansas, Ohio, Oregon and South Carolina.

Math general ed non FRL

So putting on my social science cap, let me note that I have no idea what drives these numbers. One can certainly speculate with some confidence that socio-economics has something to do with it. Massachusetts and New Jersey top the list for instance, and just happen to be two of the four states with an average family income for a family of four in the six figures. DC also did well, but remember this is a very select slice of DC- the part that is knocking the ball out of the park. To the extent that policy has an impact on this (unknown) we should expect lags, etc. so try not to get too excited.

It’s hard to draw many conclusions from this, other than Arkansas’ dead last ranking seems to indicate that states need to do a great deal more than put high-achieving students in as a subgroup. My advice for Arkansas from the Cactus Patch (we are nipping at the heels of MA and NJ despite being much less wealthy and spending far less per pupil than either state btw) is, ah, see about passing some strong choice programs. Also, get BASIS on line one, stat.

 

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Posted by matthewladner

CFB Rocks the Opening Weekend

September 5, 2016

Swoopes

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

After botching last year’s playoff with an ill-advised NYE experiment, College Football came roaring back with a fantastic opening to the 2016 season. Houston puts an exclamation mark on its application to the Big 12 with a convincing win over Oklahoma, Aggy fans get set up for their usual soul-crushing disappointment with an early win, LSU athletic director friends Tom Herman on Facebook after stepping on a bear trap with a “neutral site game” against Wiscy @ Lambeau Field, Alabama looks like the 1985 Chicago Bears (again) while picking their fangs with USC, solid Clemson/Auburn, Georgia/NC matchups. Oh, and Texas defeats No. 10 Notre Dame in double overtime.

No that’s a true freshman throwing that ball, not Tom Brady.

 

I promise- it only looks like Tom Brady.

Did I miss anything? Oh yeah Arkansas had a dramatic one point victory over a directional school from Louisiana. Borderline necrotic….or something.  Oh wait, I know, Ole Miss and Florida State will be playing tonight. So the playoff has seemed to change the incentive structure for out of conference games. The playoff selection committee does not prize victories over tomato can opponents, so some of the big boys are lining them up and playing big match ups- which is great for the fans.

Opening weekend a’int over yet!

5 Comments | college sports | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Ready Player One

September 2, 2016

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

So I am 9 chapters into Ready Player One by Austin Texas uber-geek Ernest Cline and I can already tell you that this is basically the Forrest Gump for Gen-X, only waaaay better since it is about us instead of those tedious Baby Boomers.

If you were a teen in the 1980s, played tons of Atari 2600 video games, saw it as your purpose in life to put the high score on your favorite arcade game, played Dungeons and Dragons, were a film geek and listened to lots of Rush, then this book is a missing piece of your soul.  Cline wrote this book just for you, and Spielberg is currently filming the silver screen version.

If not, well you don’t know what you were missing.

Download now, read later, thank me after that. You are welcome in advance.

 

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Posted by matthewladner

Stop or My Florida Charter Mom will Shoot!

August 15, 2016

Move aside Tallahassee- let me show you how to do this!

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

To take a bit of liberty with the Bard:

Sweet are the uses of brutality,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.

So it turns out Florida parents are every bit as ruthless as Arizona parents in shutting down charter schools into which they do not care to enroll their children. The average years of operation for a closed FL charter was a mere 3.71 years (compared to 4 in Arizona) with an average of 113 students enrolled in the final year of operation (compared to 62 in Arizona).

Oh and just a reminder- Darwinian brutality practiced by parents towards schools seems to have worked wonders for the overall effectiveness of the Florida charter sector:

Florida charter 2013 NAEPFlorida charter reading scores NAEP

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Posted by matthewladner

Arizona Parents Put Charter Schools Out of Business Early and Often

August 12, 2016

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

I was examining data on charter school closures in Arizona between the years 2000 and 2013, and noticed a pattern in the data. The vast majority of schools on the closure list did not operate very long and tended to be very light on enrollment in the last year they operated.  I averaged the available data and found that the average closed school had operated four years, and had an average of 62 students enrolled in their final year of operation.

Mind you that Arizona’s charter law grants 15 year charters, and that something unusual would need to occur in order to have authorities intervene before such time.

So a couple of notes before discussing the main implication since Arizona grants 15 year charters, the first of them would not have come up for renewal until 2010 or so, and it would have been a bit of a trickle at first. Currently however you’ll have a group of schools up for 15 year renewals every year.  The data examined above end around 2013, and has missing data.

The state publishes a list of school closures, and if you examine it, you’ll see a large number of “voluntarily surrendered” or “problems with facility” type explanations, very few “charter revoked.” This leaves a lot of grey area whereby schools give up the ghost perhaps to save themselves the embarrassment of not being renewed- like this charter set up by the University of Arizona College of Education that closed in 2013- but with it also being possible that other factors were going to sink them regardless. The official “charter revoked” explanation almost certainly understates the current role of the authorizing board imo.

Now, back to the heart of things- Arizona parents seem extremely adept at putting down charter schools with extreme prejudice. Arizona parents detonate far more schools on the launching pad compared to the number we see bumbling ineffectively through the term of their charter to be shut by authorities (or to give up the ghost in year 14 in an ambiguous fashion). Both of these things happen, but the former happens with much greater regularity than the latter. Having a vibrant system of open enrollment, charter schools and some private school choice means that Arizona parents can take the view that life is too short have your child enrolled in an ineffective institution.

States have different circumstances and different political cultures. The circumstances in Arizona when the charter law passed in 1994 involved a crushing level of enrollment growth and a district system with a very low level of average performance. No one was going to want to adopt hyper-cautious authorizing when the state was bankrupting itself to build new (usually low performing) district facilities.  “Educators are willing to open new K-12 spaces without facility funding and they shut down if they don’t cut it? Hand me the dice!” said everyone in Arizona with any sense in 1994.

By the way- Darwinian competition can work wonders academically over time:

Arizona Mercury 2

AZ Charter 2015 NAEP 8m

Open lots of new schools, let parents put them down, if and when a school you think is a stinker survives the wrath of the parents you can not renew the charter if you have that sort of confidence in your own judgement being superior to that of the parents (careful with that).  If you feel a compulsion to intervene best to do it on the back-end in my view, as it seems like getting large numbers of new schools to start represents a key to success.  I fully agree with Jay’s reasons for trepidation on such a substitution, but also can’t embrace throwing renewals (which are for 20 years in Arizona) around like:

I’ll try to look at the success and/or failure of the parents in other states in closing charters in the future.

 

 

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Posted by matthewladner

AFC video on the Need for Choice among Native American Children

August 11, 2016

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Just in case you need a reminder about just how horrible the federal government has been in education (and to Native Americans more generally) this new video serves as a helpful reminder. The American Federation for Children created the below video on Arizona Senator John McCain’s federal efforts and Arizona State Senator Carlyle Begay’s efforts to expand options for reservation children. I am rooting for America’s Underdogs:

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Posted by matthewladner

But that was 30 years ago when they used to have a show

August 11, 2016

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Barry Manilow’s classic song Copacabana is a very catchy upbeat tune with a sad underlying story about a person living in the past:

Her name is Lola, she was a showgirl
But that was thirty years ago, when they used to have a show
Now it’s a disco, but not for Lola
Still in dress she used to wear
Faded feathers in her hair
She sits there so refined, and drinks herself half-blind
She lost her youth and she lost her Tony
Now she’s lost her mind

For reasons that may become apparent if you read it, this column responding to one published by myself and Lisa Graham Keegan in the Arizona Republic brought the unfortunate image of Lola to mind. Our opponent’s column is a pretty standard recitation of anti-choice talking points, but there is an underlying sadness to it in my opinion.

Arizona lawmakers passed charter schools in 1994 and the first private choice program in 1997.  So thirty years ago districts were effectively Arizona’s only show. We had parental choice back in those days, but it was the old-fashioned kind. If you could afford to buy a house in Scottsdale etc. or to pay for the tuition at Brophy Prep, you had choice in the lost near monopoly era of Arizona K-12. Otherwise, it was unfortunate to be you.

I’ve written on this blog previously just how awful the results were from this era. The NAEP gave us state level data from 1992 and 1994 before our policymakers began any effort to broaden the ability to exercise choice. Only 28% of Anglo 4th graders read proficiently in, er, English in 1992. Arizona still has a lot of work to do, but at least has been trending in the right direction.

I’m not going to bother to point by point this column, but rather to simply focus on a few faded feathers in its hair. Approximately 3,000 children participate in the Arizona Empowerment Scholarship Account program, and the majority of them are children with disabilities. Arizona has a great many individual high schools with more than 3,000 students, and yet in the fever dreams of opponents these kids should be made into scapegoats for all the problems of public education. It’s sad.

Arizona has been leading the nation in 4th to 8th cohort gains on NAEP, but rather than celebrate this fact and seek more, some would rather wallow in learned helplessness, convinced that they can’t do better unless they receive money that the state does not have. It’s sad.

Part and parcel of this complaint is to claim that districts take “all comers” while charter do not. Arizona charters however must conduct admission lotteries while district open enrollment decisions are left entirely to the schools. Fancy district schools are open to “all comers” if you can afford to purchase housing in their attendance zones, otherwise they all to often resemble Aspen vacations or shiny new German sports sedans- wonderful things if you can afford them. We started the process to democratize the opportunity to choose, but some prefer to keep choice as a privilege for the few rather than the birthright of all. It’s sad.

Charter schools have been in operation in Arizona for over twenty years. Some district educators have taken up the challenge to compete and I admire them for it. Others spend their time complaining about charter schools non-stop.  Charter school students score like a New England state on NAEP with a majority minority student population and show even an even larger advantage in the state exam, but….lawmakers didn’t include them in a seldom-read auditor general report, so ah they must be evil.

Some (not all by a longshot!) spend their efforts yearning for a near monopoly era that is never coming back.  In my youth growing up in the South I can remember a few old people who would babble about the “War of Northern Aggression” and whatnot. It’s a bad look to live in the past. There are real and very deep issues to debate when fashioning choice policy but to engage in them seriously one must broaden beyond stale talking points. Quite frankly Arizona districts deserve better advocacy strategies than complaining about the disco ball while yearning for what was more of a stone than a golden age. This “strategy” is unworthy of the dignity of the great many outstanding educators working very hard in Arizona’s improving district school system.

It’s time to lose the faded feathers.

 

 

 

8 Comments | charter schools, Education Savings Accounts | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

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