At least among the school leaders, who are desperate to pass a new millage to build new schools:

Since voters approved a millage increase in 2003, the Springdale School District has opened eight new schools.
The district continues to grow, however, and administrators are concerned they may be reaching their limit on funding new schools with existing resources, Assistant Superintendent Allen Williams said.

Therefore, district administrators are beginning to discuss asking voters for a millage increase to build new schools, he told parents and staff Monday at the patrons shelf meeting.

“We’re looking at plans,” he said.

The district probably needs at least one new elementary school to start the 2011-12 school year, and probably a new middle school and junior high after that. It’s possible the east side schools may need portable buildings again if growth continues, Williams said.

Note that all this discussion of new taxes for new schools comes in the wake of Springdale sending six out of seven school board members and several superintendents down to Little Rock to argue against a perfectly good charter school proposal from an organization with a track record of success in Oklahoma.

A new charter school would have been free to Springdale; no new millage would have been needed. But Springdale school leaders lobbied against a free school.

To be sure, a new charter school would be “free” to Springdale only because Arkansas deprives charter schools of local funding (charter schools have to depend almost entirely on the $5,905 in state foundation funding). But unless that inequity is someday rectified, there’s no excuse for Springdale school leaders to oppose a good charter school one day and then beg for more tax money the next.

The Arkansas Times blog recently posted a legal brief in which Chris Heller argues against a proposed charter school that would serve black boys — oblivious to the perversity of using desegregation as an excuse to block educational opportunity for black children.

Heller faults the proposed charter school (along with an existing charter school, Academics Plus) for failing to pay for transportation. He then makes this claim:

Charter school advocates have made the false claim that charter schools do not receive funding for transportation. In fact, charter schools receive the same amount of transportation funding as traditional school districts. Charter schools, as well as traditional school districts, receive a set amount of money per student known as ‘foundation funding.’ . . . Of this amount, $286.00 was designated as transportation funding. . . . In fact, many school districts, including LRSD, spend more than $286.00 per student on transportation. in 2007-2008, the LRSD spent $623.96 per student on transportation; KIPP Delta College Prep spent $907.83 per student on transportation.

This ignores one very basic fact: Little Rock schools and the KIPP Delta school have much more money per year to work with than just the mere $5,905 that the state provides.

Specifically, in 2007-08, KIPP Delta spent $8,911 per student — $3,000 more per student per year than the state provides. Little Rock School District managed to spend fully $11,168 per student, or nearly twice as much as the state foundation funding.

The Academics Plus charter school — which Heller sneers at for failing to provide transportation — spent a mere $5,985 per student, far less than KIPP or LRSD. By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, if Academics Plus had been given the same funding as Little Rock School District, it would have had an extra $1.97 million in 2007-08 alone. Just going out on a limb: I’d bet that Academics Plus would have little problem providing transportation — and doing quite a few other things for the impoverished children that Heller is so worried about — if they had an extra $1.97 million per year.

If Heller thinks that new charter schools should be providing transportation, he should urge that the state start funding charter schools more equally, rather than handing them thousands of dollars less per student. Indeed, if charter schools are to be expected to provide transportation, they should be given more money than regular public schools, which can do it much more economically. That is, regular public schools serve a circumscribed attendance zone, in which it’s fairly easy to send a bus down the street stopping at every block. Charter schools can serve anyone from anywhere, and it’s much more expensive and time-consuming to send a bus to pick up a handful of students scattered across a metropolitan area.

Indeed, Heller is basically admitting to an unspoken belief that charter schools are incredibly more efficient and competent than the other public schools. After all, Heller expects charter schools to do all the things that LRSD does, but with millions of dollars less to work with. Clearly charter schools couldn’t do this unless they were overwhelmingly more efficient and competent than LRSD.

Fayetteville High School students are participating in an annual ritual to raise money for less fortunate families in the district.  Here is the announcement from the district blog:

The annual FHS Student Council Homeless Vigil will be held on Thursday, December 3, beginning at 5 pm. The fund raising goal for the 2009 vigil is $11,000, and all proceeds go to help families in need in the Fayetteville School District. The students will sleep outside in makeshift shelters, warming themselves by a fire in a barrel. Donations of cash and non-perishable food items are greatly appreciated and may be dropped off at the vigil, which will be held in front of the FHS gym on Stone Street.

These students slept outside in the frigid temperatures last night and continue their vigil today.  The students had raised $6,400 toward their goal of $11,000 as of 10 am this morning.

These same students are also assisting with the blood drive at the high school today.

If you live or work in Fayetteville, please consider stopping by the high school to show your support for these kids and their causes.

UPDATE: FHS students raised $14k+!

One wonders what those of us here in Northwest Arkansas have done to deserve so much attention from charlatans lately.  In the last year we have been visited by Eva Klein and Associates, Tony Wagner, and now Sarah Palin.  Unfortunately, the community coughed up money to be wooed by Eva Klein and Tony Wagner.  Palin is at least coming for free, unless you count the cost the English language is incurring by losing any non-ironic use of the word “rogue” henceforth.

The latest sum of money the community will be parting with–$36,000 to be exact–is going to pay Phi Delta Kappa for conducting a curriculum audit of the Fayetteville School District.  Like Eva Klein & Associates did for Fayetteville (for $150,000), Phi Delta Kappa came into town  for a few days and held focus groups with community members to hear their ideas.  In February they’ll provide us with a nifty presentation that summarizes what community members told them.  The modus operandi of these types of consultants is well-known. Dilbert has been lampooning them for years.

To be sure, the report that Phi Delta Kappa comes up with won’t look exactly like the same ideas the community gave them.  They’ll be re-written in such a way that any resemblance or lack of substance will be obfuscated by consultant-speak gobbledy-gook.  For example, when the Rogers School District hired Phi Delta Kappa to conduct an audit, one of the recommendations they received was:

Develop and implement a comprehensive curriculum management system that delineates short- and long-term goals, directs curriculum revision to ensure deep alignment and quality delivery, and defines the instructional model district leaders expect teachers to follow in delivering the curriculum.

Translation: Establish a system to set and achieve goals. And make it a good one.

Here’s another recommendation from the Rogers audit:

Research, identify and implement strategies to eliminate inequities and inequalities that impede opportunities for all students to succeed.

Translation:  Do what you and every other school district has already been doing (or should have been doing) for decades.

I’m willing to bet Fayetteville’s audit will contain many of the same recommendations given to Rogers.  These types of consultant groups have stock boiler-plate language that they recycle time and time again.  I also expect to see some of the views of the community rewritten in consultant-speak.  Here’s some of the comments and concerns the Northwest Arkansas Times picked up from teachers and parents at one of the focus groups:

I got this list from the newspaper, which cost me fifty cents–a whopping $35,499.50 less than Phi Delta Kappa is going to charge for repackaging these ideas in consultant-speak.

I don’t know exactly why organizations pay money to outside consultants, like when the city paid Eva Klein & Associates to tell us that the University was one of our strengths, and that the perception that Fayetteville was anti-business was one of our weaknesses.   Don’t we already elect and pay people to think about these things and have a vision for what we need to do?  So why are they sub-contracting out their duties?

Still, I don’t want to prejudge the Phi Delta Kappa report too much, and I am hopeful that when the report comes out it will be useful.  But my concern and my prediction is that some form of the goals written above, re-written in consultant speak, along with some more generic goals, like the ones in the Rogers report, are going to make up the bulk of what Fayetteville receives.

We’ll come back to this in February when we finally get our hands on the report, at which time we’ll translate it into English and check my predictions.

Last Monday the Obama administration announced a new, largely privately funded, initiative which aims to “improve the participation and performance of America’s students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.” The administration is calling the campaign “Educate to Innovate.” You can check out the White House blog post here and the New York Times article here. The campaign is being supported by several media and technology companies as well as scientific societies across the nation. The administration kicked-off the campaign by announcing five public-private partnerships as its first steps:

1. Time-Warner Cable, Discovery Communications, Sesame Street, and other partners will get the message to kids and students about the wonder of invention and discovery.
2. National Lab Day will help build communities of support around teachers across the country, culminating in a day of civic participation.
3. National STEM design competitions will develop game options to engage kids in scientific inquiry and challenging designs.
4. Five leading business and thought leaders (Sally Ride, Craig Barrett, Ursula Burns, Glen Britt, and Antonio Perez) will head an effort to increase private and philanthropic involvement in support of STEM teaching and learning.

While this announcement may not be earth-shattering, it represents a significant shift in the way science and math will be treated on the national stage. It is my opinion that President Bush’s obvious disdain for science* (and intellectuals in general) had a significantly negative impact on the way the general public viewed scientists and their work. And I believe that having a President who celebrates scientists can have a similar positive effect. Here are a couple of good Obama quotes from the NY Times article:

“If you win the N.C.A.A. championship, you come to the White House,” he said. “Well, if you’re a young person and you’ve produced the best experiment or design, the best hardware or software, you ought to be recognized for that achievement, too.”

“Scientists and engineers ought to stand side by side with athletes and entertainers as role models, and here at the White House, we’re going to lead by example. We’re going to show young people how cool science can be.”

There are, however, a couple of problems I can see with the President’s plan to celebrate scientists as we do athletes.  First science is inherently messy.  Unlike athletic competition, the arena of ideas often does not produce clear cut winners. In science, ideas generally undergo years of scrutiny and revision before they are adopted. Unless we engage in some type of Monty Python style competition between scientists (see video below) it will be difficult to determine who the winners are, at least in the short term.

Second, anytime the President speaks about a topic he brings a lot of political baggage with him. It would be difficult for the President to host any particular scientist without sparking a firestorm of debate about the scientists character or the validity of her work. His celebration of science could and would be construed as an endorsement of a specific person and her ideas.

I think the most consequential portion of the administrations campaign is bringing real-live scientists to kids in their classrooms and homes. This type of interaction with scientists and their work could make celebrities of our nations scientists, and encourage kids to explore these fields in ways their teachers and parents may never have been able to.

I would like to see local school districts and the University develop a partnership to bring real people working in science (both social and hard) and math into the classroom. Seeing these people and hearing about the work they do could be truly inspiring. Having a research university so close is a tremendous resource, and it’s time we started making better use of it.

*If you need some evidence of President Bush’s mistreatment of science, take a look at some of the articles referenced in this Wikipedia entry.

Brian and I had an op-ed about the State Board of Education and their handling of charter school applicants in Sunday’s Democrat Gazette.  Here is a link.

UPDATE: For those of you who do not have a Dem Gaz subscription, Jay Greene’s blog has reprinted an excerpt here.

Yes, as an academic, and as someone interested in the well-being of schoolchildren across the state, I am thankful for the cacophony of voices entering the education policy discussion in NW Arkansas and beyond.

I know that this is not a universal view.  Many of our friends and colleagues working in Arkansas public school districts may not share my rosy view.  Those working in local school districts or at the state level may not be too thrilled that our “genius little bloggers” or faculty in the Department of Education reform are injecting themselves into important policy discussions related to racial integration, school millages, charter authorization, or so-called “21st Century” learning.  I have heard it said that some of the Ed Reform group or our blogger friends are obstructionists to local schools — of course, I think they are wrong.  Disagreement is NOT obstruction.

In fact, they should be thankful for the interest and involvement of outside researchers and observers.  This is the work of the University; indeed, the motto of the U of A is Veritate Duce Progredi (in Latin).  In English, the motto is “To Advance with Truth as our Guide.”  In that spirit, faculty at the University (along with our genius little bloggers) should continue to examine data, evaluate programs, conduct research, rigorously address policy questions, and share our views with the public.  Anything less would be shirking.

And sometimes our (faculty, researchers, bloggers, etc.) view of the truth may not be the same as that of our friends in Little Rock, local school districts, or anywhere else.  And that’s OK.  Everyone engaged in the discussion with an interest in the well-being of our schoolchildren has an equal right to air our views and let the public decide which ideas are best.  Arguments over ideas are good for our democracy and good for Arkansas.  (Indeed, we should work to keep the focus on ideas and avoid personal attacks in these heated debates.)

Those employed by our local school districts do not have a monopoly on caring about children and education.  Sure, many of our school leaders have a deep faith in the importance of public schools and have dedicated much of their professional lives to leading these schools.  But this does NOT mean that they are always right.  They’re not.  And it is unfair to dismiss the views of any opponents of school leaders as “against public education.”

All of us who care deeply about kids and education do not need to think the same way.  In fact, our kids and our schools will all be better off if policy discussions can benefit from a diversity of views.  We can all learn from each other, we can all have the same ultimate objective of a well-educated Arkansas, and yet we can all still be individuals!

Happy Thanksgiving!

We’ve had some lively debates here at mid-riffs and in the community at-large about the quality of school buildings. While those debates have often been heated and full of disagreements, we ought to be thankful we live in a place that respects and encourages  a diverse set of viewpoints.

The situation in China is far worse. Chinese activist Huang Qi just received a three-year prison term for blogging about the quality of school buildings (or lack of) in the aftermath of the May 2008 earthquake that killed more than 87,000 people in China.

Of course Qi wasn’t officially charged with “illegally blogging.”  He was charged with “possessing state secrets” and was dealt a prison term in a hearing that lasted ten minutes. His wife said: “They still won’t say what the specific charge is, not even at the verdict. They just spoke of documents related to a certain matter.” She said it was clear the punishment related to his work after the earthquake. “I think it was revenge for the earthquake, and his other work. But the court would not even give me a copy of the verdict,” she said.

The Chinese government is bad, m’kay? You can read more about it here.

Diane Ravitch has a new post full of criticisms of charter schools. Unfortunately, the arguments are unsupportable and contradictory.

1.   Ravitch has gone to the NAEP website and downloaded snapshots of how students in public charter schools scored compared to students in other public schools. She then concludes, “Overall, public schools continue to outperform charter schools.”

No, no, no. You cannot tell anything about how a given type of school is “performing” just by looking at a cross-section of its students’ test scores — without even attempting to take into account the students’ backgrounds and previous test scores. And as I point out below, charter school students tend to arrive with somewhat lower test scores than average.

2.  Immediately after having praised other public schools for supposedly outperforming charters in student test scores, Ravitch pivots 180 degrees and criticizes charter schools for drawing off the “most successful” students and “disabl[ing]” the public schools!

My beef with charter schools is that most skim the most motivated students out of the poorest communities, and many have disproportionately small numbers of children who need special education or who are English-language learners. The typical charter, operating in this way, increases the burden on the regular public schools, while privileging the lucky few. Continuing on this path will further disable public education in the cities and hand over the most successful students to private entrepreneurs.

It’s just not convincing to say with one breath that public schools are “outperform[ing]” and in the next breath that they’re being “disable[d],” or to criticize charter schools for serving the “most successful” students just after having claimed that charter students don’t score well on national exams.

3.  Besides being contradictory, Ravitch’s argument is wrong. Charter school students may be “motivated” in some sense, but that certainly doesn’t mean that they are all academically successful. Quite the contrary: parents whose children are doing well in the public schools often tend to stay put, while it is precisely the parents whose children are struggling who may tend to seek alternative schools (whether through vouchers or charters). Painting with a broad brush, many charter school and voucher parents have said, “Gee, little Johnny isn’t doing so well, maybe I should check into a different school.” Such “motivation” doesn’t give rise to some sort of huge charter school advantage.

Some evidence for this point: Zimmer et al.’s October 2009 paper analyzing data from locations representing 45% of the charter schools in the nation. They find NO evidence that charter schools are cream-skimming. To the contrary, “in all but one case (Chicago reading scores, which are virtually identical to the district-wide average), students switching to charter schools have prior test scores that are BELOW district-wide or statewide averages.”

For another example, take Texas, which is home to over 450 charter campuses, about 10% of all the charter campuses nationwide. In Texas, charter schools that serve predominantly students identified as “at risk” can be rated under an alternative accountability system. In 2007-08, 43.3% of charter schools in Texas qualified to be rated under that system, compared to a mere 3.3% of public school district campuses in Texas (see page 147 here). No doubt, most of the parents of these “at-risk” youth could be described as “motivated” — motivated to find something, anything, that would help their children learn and stay in school. But this is not obviously an advantage for the charter schools’ academic performance.

Incidentally, people often make the same accusation about private schools generally, i.e., that they just skim off all the best students.  To the contrary, Derek Neal and Jeffrey Grogger found that “there is evidence of negative selection into Catholic schools. Relative to their public-school counterparts, urban whites who attend these schools appear to possess unmeasured traits that inhibit attainment.” They add this footnote: “Evidence of negative selection is common in this literature. Coleman and Hoffer (1987), Evans and Schwab (1995), and Neal (1997) all report evidence of negative selection into Catholic schools. A common hypothesis concerning this result is that some parents send their children to Catholic schools seeking a remedy for existing problems with discipline and motivation.”

The Northwest Arkansas Times had an editorial today about the Arkansas Board of Education and their stance on charters. Something tells me they’ve been spending some time here at mid-riffs. It’s nice to see them enter the debate.

A few thoughts:

1. The editorial uses circular logic to defend the actions of the board. First the editorial says the board must be highly selective because the charter school cap limits the amount to 24. The editorial then closes by saying we actually don’t need a cap because we have a highly selective board.
2. The editorial makes the same tired argument that charters must be innovative to gain approval, while simultaneously pointing out the innovative techniques proposed by the charter school applicants that were denied.
3. The editorial writers should have taken a close look at the Arkansas charter law before accepting and endorsing the board’s reliance on “innovation” as the ultimate test of a charter applicant’s worth.  How charters become approved isn’t up to the Northwest Arkansas Times or the State School Board.  It is up to the state legislature who wrote the law.  As we have pointed out before, nothing in Arkansas’ charter school law can reasonably be construed as to empower the board to reject charter applicants for lack of innovation.
4. The editorial literally says “It is the board’s job to identify charter schools that try something new that might lead to education reform, not just do the same thing as well or only slightly better.”  Really!?! They honestly believe “better” isn’t something that was paramount in the legislature’s intent when they wrote the Arkansas Charter Law? Really!?

I have a question for the editors of the Times and the state board members who have arbitrarily decided that “innovation” is the test for approval. What exactly is it? Let’s stop this whole song and dance and just get on with it. They must know what it is, because they claim to know what it isn’t. So, just tell us: Exactly what is the innovation a charter school applicant needs to incorporate to get approval?