Where's the money, Part II

Via Mackinac's Michigan Education Report:

DETROIT, Mich. - LaVonne Sheffield, Detroit Public Schools' chief academic officer, repaid the school district $5,861 in the past three weeks for personal expenditures and purchases without receipts that she billed to the district.

The reimbursements included $1,200 to the Detroit Institute of Arts Founders Society, $846 for a Skymall catalog purchase, $278 to Mario's Restaurant, and $344.60 for flowers she bought for staff.

Sheffield also paid back money for University of Michigan and Wayne State University alumni dues, and $118 for a room at the Luxor hotel in Las Vegas that she canceled to move to a different casino hotel for a district-approved conference. While at that May conference, Sheffield got married to Detroit police Inspector William Hudson.

Sheffield was among top-level administrators who repaid the district after the media requested debit card bills and receipts last month. Those receipts show some of the same misspending and lax bookkeeping for which principals and school bookkeepers were disciplined over the past two years.

District policy prohibits use of school money for "purchases of personal items that benefit school or district staff and their family members."

This happens in school districts across America and provides a clue as to why teachers do not have money for pencils or tissues.

School Choice Saves Schools Money

Brandon Dutcher makes a compelling case for why school choice could help ease the education budget crunch in Oklahoma. His arguments really apply nationwide, as most education budgets are in similar fiscal crisis.

Thanks to the government spending spree of the 1990s, Oklahoma is now experiencing its own fiscal unpleasantness. But consider how much worse the state’s budget crunch would be if private school parents and homeschoolers weren’t saving taxpayers a small fortune. According to the U.S. Department of Education’s 1999-2000 private school survey, 31,276 students attend private elementary and secondary schools in Oklahoma. Informed estimates place the number of Oklahoma homeschoolers at 14,000 to 25,000.

So let’s say there are 50,000 Oklahoma schoolchildren whose parents are paying for their education. What would happen if these 50,000 kids showed up at their local public school tomorrow morning? (“I’m here for my free education, please.”) In order to maintain the current per pupil expenditure of $6,284 (of which 58 percent is state money, 32 percent local and county, and 10 percent federal), politicians would have to come up with a few hundred million more dollars every year. And that’s not counting construction costs. I’ve seen estimates of $15,000 to $35,000 per seat for a child in public school.

Just because the state provides for education doesn’t mean it has to produce all of it. Policy-makers should be glad so many parents are choosing to educate kids on their own nickel. Indeed, they should encourage this behavior by passing a modest tax credit, which would give parents more choices, reduce school overcrowding, and help ease the state budget crunch.

For example, let’s say a child is trapped in a school where she’s not learning to read or do math. There are several philanthropies – K-12 scholarship funds which help kids pay tuition at private and religious schools – which would love to help her, but they can only help a limited number of children. The demand for scholarships far exceeds supply.

Oklahoma policy-makers should allow a tax credit for individuals or businesses who donate money to these scholarship funds. Not only would this allow the philanthropies to rescue more kids, it also would help ease the state’s fiscal woes. An OCPA study released earlier this year (“The Oklahoma Scholarship Tax Credit: Giving Parents Choices, Saving Taxpayers Money”) pointed out that “when tuition scholarships enable students to transfer out of public schools into private ones, the state and local authorities have fewer pupils to educate and can therefore reduce expenditures accordingly. According to conservative projections, this tax credit could be saving Oklahoma taxpayers more than $138 million annually by 2012.”

Unfortunately, educrats always see the glass as half empty and see kids who choose alternatives as lost revenue. Kids who do not choose public schools are never saving the state money but instead costing them tax dollars.

Why Work Harder?

This little vignette from the Education Intelligence Agency makes it clear why teachers have no incentive to perform better.

Unions Win Battles Against Individual Pay Hikes. Back on June 11, 2001, EIA first told the tale of Matthew Hintz, an industrial arts technology teacher hired by the Crete school district in Nebraska for $2,350 more than the district's usual starting salary. Hintz was the only qualified applicant, and that's how much he wanted. The district placed him at step one on the salary schedule, and added a $2,350 "bonus" to cover the difference between base salary and what he had been promised.

The Crete Education Association filed a complaint with the state Commission of Industrial Relations, claiming this arrangement was a "deviation" that violated the collective bargaining agreement. The commission agreed. The district took the case to court and the Nebraska Supreme Court decided 7-0 last week that districts cannot bypass the union to pay teachers more. According to the Omaha World-Herald, the union's attorney "hailed the ruling as a victory for collective bargaining."

Meanwhile, in Arizona, the Scottsdale Education Association filed a grievance against the district for its plan to spend as much as $500,000 on teachers who serve on committees or as club advisers. The union wants the money divided among all the district's teachers.

The truth hurts

Reason's Hit & Run discovers another argument for school choice: teachers who tell kindergartners that Santa isn't real and that the presents come from your Mom and Dad.

Affirmative Action Linking?

Homeschooling blogger Isabel Lyman describes an apparent new trend by edu-bloggers:

Name Game. Dr. Daryl Cobranchi, who runs the "other" homeschooling blog, has a new, politically-correct last name. Here's his explanation: "The Confidence Man on Saturday blogged a story out of the Sunday NYT on the controversy surrounding Rice University's new affirmative action, er, admissions policy. The school is not permitted to base admissions on ethnic or racial background but it somehow manages to do so anyway. Hmm - my mother's maiden name is Suarez. Think I'll start hyphenating my last name; I wonder if Instapundit has an affirmative action linking policy. Daryl Suarez-Cobranchi." Amigo, thanks to you, I am seriously thinking of using my mom's maiden name. How does Isabel Azuola-Lyman sound? Maybe I will get featured in the NYT with that moniker.

Unfortunately, my maiden name is Byrne and my mother's maiden name is Ward. Oh well, I guess I have to rely on gender.

More Special-Ed Hell

Special education teacher Margaret Ann Davis used a small paintbrush to apply Tabasco sauce diluted with water on the hands of an 11-year-old deaf and mute student who constantly sucked her hands. The Tabasco sauce was washed off after about five minutes.

The report said a teacher's aide reported the incident the next morning to the principal, who called police. Casper told police she had informed the student's mother of the incident, and that the mother had asked for assurance that it would not happen again.

Kim at Number 2 Pencil and others have linked to this piece by a special education teacher who describes the blackhole of special education.

One of the most shocking aspects of special education is that school officials continue to pressure parents into signing their kids over to the special education system. After my December Reason special education feature, I had several parents and special education teachers write about their experiences with aggressive special education "recruiters."

When we moved to Palo Alto, my oldest attended 5th grade at Briones [Elementary School]. The very nice teacher wanted to get him extra help. I was at first for it, thinking he would get tutored. But she wanted him in the special ed program! That didn't make any sense to me because he never had a problem at Faria [Elementary School] in Cupertino (the top elementary school in CA!) and tested always at the top. So I started looking into books on gifted children and told the Briones teacher I thought the problem was he was bored! She agreed and let it go. Later, I learned this same experience happened to a friend of mine -- her son transferred into 4th grade and Briones also tried to get him into special ed. She even went through the evaluation process and decided it didn't apply to her son. He is now a sophomore at Stanford! This is education gone amok.

I am a speech pathologist who worked for 25 years in public schools here in west central Florida. It is just as you describe it. I left special ed in disgust over the lunacy of it all. We had to pack the kids in to generate funds for our salary. It was an unwritten law we all followed.

The growth of special education is despicable, especially in light of what happens to many kids once they get labeled.

Abuse of Power

Former Superintendent Delaine Eastin, most-recently known for accusing California homeschoolers of truancy and breaking the law, seems to have broken a few laws herself while in charge of the state's education dollars.

The state Department of Education and outgoing Superintendent Delaine Eastin were slapped Wednesday with a $4.5 million judgment in a whistle-blower case in Sacramento Superior Court.

In an unusual verdict -- holding a high-ranking official personally liable -- the jury found Eastin "acted with malice" and that she should pay punitive damages, which could be millions of dollars more. . . .

Lindberg said he and others were forced to quit or were fired after they discovered the misappropriation of federal funds doled out by the department between 1995 and 2000 to community-based organizations that ran adult-education English and citizenship classes.

Investigations later found cases of embezzlement. Education Department officials were unable to account for $11 million in taxpayer funds.

Lindberg, who worked for the department for more than 20 years, said that after he brought his findings of wrongdoing to Eastin and other department officials, they attempted to "sweep them under the carpet." They demoted him to keep him from telling others, he said.

For a full account of how the California Board of Education and Delaine Eastin have wasted billions in education dollars see this new study by the Pacific Research Institute education team. Their findings are shocking!

Paid Informants

School district administrators in New Jersey will pay parents to turn in out-of district students.

These days, a truant officer's job goes beyond keeping kids in school. Some spend more time keeping out-of-towners out, sometimes by spotting bogus leases or trailing students home.

A few school districts are even going a step further, offering members of the public bounties of $100 or more for information on students who sneak across district lines.

Parents falsify proof-of-residence documents to get their kids into schools for their academic reputations, extracurricular activities or proximity to after-school care. Each illegal student costs a district thousands of dollars.

"I can understand why people might want to do it," said Piscataway, New Jersey, truant officer David Ford, whose district offers a $300 reward. "But it's not right."

It's not right. Children should have free exit and entry rights to schools rather than having to resort to desperate measures to get a higher quality education.

The Price of Financial Aid

Via Reason's Brickbats:

Students Unknowingly Trade Privacy for Aid (12/3)

Students applying for federal aid are revealing their life to the world. Congressional investigators found the Department of Education is sharing applicants' information with the Pentagon, the Selective Service System, the Justice Department, other federal and state agencies, and private companies such as debt collectors.

Hard Times in Riverside County

Here's my new Reason Public Policy Institute commentary on the Indio Charter School's battle with the County of Riverside.

By any reasonable judgment, the Indio Charter School would be considered a success. The school, in the desert of Riverside County, California, offers a four-day week for 300 mostly-Hispanic students in grades K-12. Children attend school from 8 a.m. until 4 p.m. Indio charter school students attend class for 1910 minutes a week versus 1800 minutes in other California public schools. Of the 9 public elementary and 4 public middle schools in the city of Indio, Indio Charter School had the highest average score on California's Academic Performance Index (API). In fact, the school was 20 points ahead of the second-place school. Indio Charter School also had the highest average reading scores in all grades, except 7th, where it was second.

Despite the Indio charter's academic performance, the county of Riverside continues to penalize the school for offering a nontraditional school schedule. A ruling by the Riverside County Superior Court, upheld the state's right to withhold nearly $ 240,000 from the Indio Charter School. The state penalized the school, saying it failed to follow state attendance laws requiring students to attend classes for at least 175 days a year. Indio Charter School officials contend that their four-day week contains more than the required minutes of instruction and that California law allows charter schools more flexibility in their schedules.

Value-Added

Value-added is more than just a trendy phrase. Jonathan Crane from the Progressive Policy Institute, has a very-readable 7-page report on the promise of value-added testing for public schools. The most impressive part of his report is the discussion of teacher quality and value-added testing.

In a study of second to fifth grade students in Tennessee between 1991 and 1995, William L. Sanders found, with all other things being equal, the top one-fifth of teachers raised their students' achievement test scores 39 percentile points more than teachers of the bottom one-fifth. . . . A 39 percentile difference is enormous. It implies that a child who winds up in the bottom one-third of the distribution (say in the 30th percentile) after a year with a poor teacher, might have wound up in the top one-third (the 69th percentile) if they had been lucky enough to get an excellent teacher that year. What's more, these large effects were found in all kinds of classrooms with all kinds of students. . . . They helped struggling students as well as those who were excelling.

Concentrated Competition

Economic research by Caroline Hoxby (among others) has found that in order for charter schools and other systems of public-school competition to have an effect on public schools, the competition must be significant and actually impact specific public schools. This point seems obvious, but most school-choice experiments, including most charter schools, do not have a significant impact on the specific public schools they are competing with. In other words, until public schools feel a loss of students from their competition, there is no incentive to change ineffective school policies. In fact, I would argue that the right of students to exit the public schools (in a feasible manner), is the only reform strategy that will actually lead to real changes in public education.

So, I like the idea of Los Angeles school leaders and philanthropists coming together to create a “shadow” Los Angeles Unified School District through a charter-school network. Education Week reports that:

The Los Angeles Alliance for Student Achievement, the successor organization to two groups that mounted major education reform efforts in the 1990s, is hoping to open about 100 charter schools serving some 50,000 students over the next five years, alliance leaders say.

Plans are for the 2-year-old nonprofit alliance to apply for charters, hire principals, and then run "families" of elementary, middle, and high schools that together would strive to foster college-going cultures in disadvantaged communities. While details of the plan are still being worked out, its ultimate goal will be to leverage higher student achievement in the broader public system, chiefly in the 737,000-student Los Angeles Unified School District.

While this will be difficult to pull off, even with the Los Angeles education elite supporting it, a 100 charter schools in Los Angeles in five years would provide real competition to perhaps the biggest education BLOB of all, LAUSD. And as I have argued elsewhere, even with the Supreme Court decision in favor of vouchers, charter schools are a reform strategy that more closely reflects the tradition of "local" education policy in the United States. With a charter school, the reformers have a much smaller political set of stakeholders to contend with. Not to say that it is easy to convince stakeholders that a single charter school is a good idea, but much easier than convincing say the entire state of California that school vouchers are a good idea. And I truly believe that the way to widespread school choice is to let as many public school alternatives as possible be allowed to prove their viability.

Education Research Enlightenment

E.D. Hirsch Jr. has one of the best articles I have ever read on education research in Policy Review. I can't do it justice so you will just have to read the whole thing.

Special Education's Shame

The October issue of Governing magazine has a feature on "Special Eduction's Dark Secret." Like my December 2002 Reason article, Governing's John Buntin argues that "The number of children with learning disabilities is surging. Some say the real problem is schools' failure to teach students how to read." He writes:

According to Gloeckler, New York's experiences with extending accountability to students with disabilities has been both encouraging and sobering. The good news has been that students with disabilities seem to respond well to higher expectations. "What we found was, once everyone understands that kids need to be included and that access to general curriculum is absolutely essential, we're finding that kids are doing better than people thought they would," says Gloeckler.

But New York's data on the performance of students with disabilities have also highlighted the educational chasm that divides the wealthiest 15 percent of the state's school districts from the state's four largest urban school districts. "We found in the 4th grade particularly, but also in the 8th grade, the special-education students in wealthy districts are outperforming general-education students in the cities," says Gloeckler. In short, by Westchester County standards, almost all inner-city students are learning disabled.

Parental Judgment

The Goldwater Institute has a fascinating piece by former UCLA Dean of Education Lewis Solmon. He found that when Arizona parents graded their charter schools, the grades closely matched state grades for the same charter schools.

Critics of school choice have long questioned the ability of parents to choose the best schools for their children. Critics fear that parents do not have the time, qualifications, or information to make informed decisions about the quality of their children’s schools. New evidence tells us it’s time to put this fear to rest.

Gathering data for the fourth annual Arizona Charter School Parental Satisfaction Survey, I surveyed parents of children attending 239 charter schools in Arizona, and asked them to grade their schools on 21 characteristics. At the same time, the Arizona Department of Education was preparing profiles of 163 charter schools, ranking them as excelling, improving, maintaining, or under performing. The department ranked elementary schools based on Stanford 9 and AIMS scores, and high schools based on AIMS scores and graduation and drop out rates. 112 of the charter schools ranked by the state were included in my parent survey.

Comparing the two report cards helps us answer the all-important question: Are parents good judges of school performance? The data suggest they are.

Across the board, state officials and parents gave nearly identical grades to the charter schools in question. On 16 of the 21 characteristics on which parents graded their charter schools, the highest grades went to Tempe Prep Academy, the one charter school rated “excellent” by education officials.

Moving down the line, the pattern of parallel ratings continues. The lowest-graded schools by parents were the schools most likely rated “under performing” by the state.

Retest

The LA Daily News reports on how California's high school exit exam is working out:

So far, the California high school exit exam seems to be a measurement not of students' learning but the educational bureaucracy's competence.

And the bureaucracy is flunking.

In the Los Angeles Unified School District and elsewhere, due to the year-round academic calendar and other factors, the exam must be administered every eight weeks. The only problem is, it takes 10 weeks to score the results.

Consequently, students who have already passed the test and thus shouldn't have to take it again are left taking it again. Schools then have to find the space to administer the test to students who ought to be studying new material, and finding personnel to monitor the testing sites.

Bathroom Man

Yet another reason for homeschooling, school choice, or perhaps privatizing janitorial services with performance-based contracts that specify outcomes like clean bathrooms.

With upwards of 900,000 public school lavatories in the United States (Keating estimates that as many as forty percent are "horrific"), it's a monumental, never-ending battle. "Everybody knows the problems. What people don't spend time on is suggestions or solutions," says Keating, 61, a self-employed educator based in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia. For Bathroom Man the problem goes beyond empty soap dispensers, cracked mirrors and overflowing toilets—it's a fight against the forces of apathy. "Some school superintendents will say, 'This is a problem that has been around forever and everybody has this problem,'" reports Keating.

Instead of giving in to this failure mentality, Keating started Project CLEAN (Citizens, Learners and Educators Against Neglect) in 1996. He got the idea from his son and daughter, who, along with a lot of other kids, avoided the restrooms at school at all costs. "I would be mowing the lawn and our next door neighbor, Ty, would race into his house to go to the bathroom because he held it in all day," remembers Keating.

In fact, it was the neighborhood kids' unending horror stories that led him to investigate the issues. "I got permission—which took a little doing—to go to a high school in Dekalb County [Georgia] and cleaned toilets for six hours one day," he recalls. "I went back the next day and they were just as bad as they were [before I cleaned them]."

Today, Keating doesn't need to don rubber gloves to be effective. "My job is as a coordinator, facilitator and cheerleader," he says. "I'm trying to get school districts and kids to do what they ought to do."

Life Makes a U-Turn

Robert Holland from the Lexington Institute has a nice synthesis of of all the 2002 happenings favoring school choice beginning with the November 5 elections.

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Jeb Bush's landslide re-election as governor of Florida secures what has become School Choice Central in the never-ending experiment that is American federalism. Arizona is the only other state that comes close to matching Florida in the array of public/private education choices offered families.

In addition, the shift of power in the Senate means Sen. Judd Gregg, New Hampshire Republican, a leading advocate of portability (public money following a child to a school of choice), is likely to take over as chairman of the Senate Education Committee.

Together, Mr. Gregg and House Education Committee Chairman John Boehner, Ohio Republican, could argue effectively that federally aided programs such as the mammoth Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) — currently up for reauthorization — should allow for increased consumer choice as an alternative to mindless bureaucracy.

On the House side, two significant reinforcements for the cause of choice at the level of national policy are Reps.-Elect Trent Franks, who played a key role as a state legislator in passage of Arizona's pioneering scholarship tax credit, and Tom Feeney, who as speaker of Florida's House filed the state's first full-fledged voucher bill in 1990.

Bond Boondoggles

My op-ed on school bonds and public-private partnerships ran in the LA Daily News today. I write about some of the history of school construction waste in California and go on to describe how private builders can build schools more quickly for less money than their public school counterparts. Here's a sample:

The poster child of school-construction nightmares is the Belmont Learning Center, just west of downtown.

The LAUSD poured more than $150 million into the school and then ceased construction -- with it halfway done -- because of environmental concerns. If the school is ever finished, the price tab will exceed $250 million, and it will go down as the costliest school in state history.

Los Angeles isn't the only city that has trouble keeping tabs on its cash.

Records show San Francisco Unified School District used as much as $100 million of bond and tax money to support a sprawling bureaucracy and to finance ill-conceived construction projects that ran far over budget. Most of that money -- as much as $68 million -- was spent on salaries for nonteaching employees, including several officials who are now the focus of corruption investigations, including one who stole more than $850,000 from the district.

And recently the state was forced to appoint a financial expert to monitor the Oakland school district after accounting discrepancies revealed the district was missing millions.

The sheer dollar volume of the new bonds makes the potential for future fraud and waste enormous.

The LAUSD will receive nearly a quarter of the new bond money -- more than $3 billion dollars (in addition to the $3.35 billion approved by local voters with Measure K). Given the district's sad history when it comes to construction, LAUSD officials should focus their attention on educating our children and allow companies actually in the construction business to handle the new school construction projects.

Another State's Standards Bites the Dust?

According to Michigan's Mackinac Center for Public Policy, state school officials are considering lowering state education standards in response to the federal "No Child left Behind Act."

State Board of Education members are debating whether or not to lower Michigan's education standards, in order to keep Michigan schools off federal "failing schools" lists.

New federal regulations, part of President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, require states to set improvement standards for schools and sanctions for underperforming schools. The program developed by Michigan will affect how the state uses federal funds for education.

The State Board is torn between wanting to maintain existing standards and not wanting the sanctions generated by schools listed as "failing." Under current standards Michigan has the most "failing" schools in the nation: 1,513.

"By lowering standards, we increase the flow of federal money into Michigan and protect a significant number of schools," David Plank, a Michigan State University professor who studies K-12 issues told the Lansing State Journal. "On the negative side, we want our kids to achieve higher levels. To scale that back in exchange for money is not a legitimate bargain."

Perverse incentives work. A law where the consequences mean that Arkansas has zero failing schools and Michigan has 1,500 is bound to have unintended consequences--every state strives to be Arkansas.