Fayetteville voters overwhelmingly approved the proposed change for HMR tax revenues, by a margin of 81% to 19%.  Mayor Jordan was quoted in today’s paper saying that “This will help us in our general fund.”  In the coming months, we’ll keep tabs on general fund spending and spending on park development.  As we have said before, changing the park development portion of the HMR tax was a tradeoff.  It meant that park development funds could be diverted to park maintenance, and as a result general fund revenues could be spent on other things.  Since Fayetteville’s politicians never spelled out what those tradeoffs specifically entailed, it will be interesting when we find out.

The ballot language was horribly misleading.  Taken at face value, it apppeared that one was either voting for park “development, construction and maintenance” or against park “development, construction and maintenance.”  In truth, the only choice being decided yesterday concerned ”maintenance.”  Intentionally misleading?  Almost certainly.  But, I expect it would have passed anyway.

I actually don’t have a lot of knowledge about Fogleman’s career as a judge, so I can’t attest to how good or bad it has been.  But, according to the Dem-Gaz, the length of his career is more important than its quality.

Yesterday the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette endorsed John Fogleman for the State Supreme Court.  The reason?  Well, according to the editorial writers, he’s been around a long time.  In what amounts to one of the worst written editorials to come out of the DemGaz in recent memory, 814 words are used to fill a column space that essentially amounts to one single point:  Fogelman is good because he has been around a long time.  Here’s an excerpt:

For example, it would help if a candidate had long judicial experience. Say, 15 years as a circuit judge in Arkansas. Or, before that, if he had been a prosecuting attorney for 11 years. And a city attorney for 13 years. And been engaged in private practice representing a variety of clients and meeting their needs for 13 years. And if, over the course of his long public and private career he’d worked with law enforcement officers like sheriffs, prosecutors, police chiefs and other judges, a number of whom had come to regard him highly enough to endorse him for the state’s highest court.

We’ve just described in capsule form the legal and worldly experience of one John Fogleman, who’s running for Position 3 on the state’s Supreme Court in Tuesday’s elections. He’s opposed by a candidate who’s been an appellate judge for only a year and, before that, was a Court of Appeals clerk for eight years. In terms of real-world experience in the law, courtroom experience (28 years of it in Judge Fogleman’s case), and contributions in general to the law, there’s really no comparison-except a lopsided one in favor of Judge Fogleman.

And it goes on and on.  Not once does the column mention any case that Fogleman has been a part of, nor are any of his legal philosophies discussed.  The column is just one long exercise of repetition about an essentially  irrelevant point.

The Dem-Gaz ends their article with this:

Nothing beats actual experience in the lower courts, where the law meets the citizen, for preparing an appellate judge. After all, would you want to hire a school principal who’d never taught a class, or, in a field we’re more familiar with, an editor who’d never written a word of copy?

Of course, there certainly are times when a principal who has never taught a class could be preferable to one who taught classes poorly.  And if this editorial was the product of experience…well, you get the point.  It doesn’t matter how long Fogleman has been around if his service hasn’t been particularly exceptional.

The most amazing thing, however, is that the endorsement said nothing about Fogleman’s role as the prosecuting attorney in the West Memphis Three case.  How does one write an 814 page endorsement and not mention that Fogleman played a crucial (and highly questionable) role in the most famous case in Arkansas’ recent history?  Just a few months ago CBS ran a nationally televised hour-long program that detailed how poorly the case was handled, yet somehow nothing about the West Memphis Three case is mentioned in the Dem-Gaz’s endorsement?  A good treatment of Fogleman’s conduct during the case can be found in this Arkansas Times article by Mara Leveritt.

Fogleman isn’t the only person of West Memphis Three fame running for office this year.  Judge David Burnett is running for the Arkansas Senate.  I’ve expressed my feeling about Burnett in a previous post here.   Needless to say, the prospects of either of these guys winning elections bothers me.

As Mara Leveritt points out in her blog, the best way to keep these guys out of office is to show up on election day and vote for their opponents.  Fogleman’s opponent, Judge Courtney Henry, seems reasonable enough.  I don’t know much about Barry Harrison, who is running against Burnett, but I find it hard to believe he could be any worse.

UPDATE: John Brummett says he couldn’t bring himself to vote for Fogleman because of his role in the West Memphis Three case.  He makes some arguments about why a person might consider letting Fogleman off the hook.  However, while the arguments are good, they’re not good enough.

(edited for clarity)

A couple of weeks ago Brian mentioned an Ed Next article we wrote with our colleagues Gary Ritter and Nate Jensen. The article, titled A Closer Look at Charter Schools and Segregation, challenges the methodology used in a study of charter schools and racial segregation  released in February by the Civil Rights Project (CRP) at UCLA. Our article is scheduled to appear in print this summer, but the debate is already in full swing. Today the Ed Next blog is running a response to our original article from the CRP authors, followed by a reply from us. You can find their response here, and our reply here.

In their response it is evident that the CRP staff either misunderstand or choose to willfully ignore the substantive methodological concerns we raised in our article. Instead they simply chose to reiterate their rightness, failing to engage in meaningful debate.

Even though they failed to address the methodological flaws present in their report, it is a greater disappointment that they failed to acknowledge the larger and more damning points we raised in the concluding paragraphs of our article.

In the closing portion of our reply, we bring the discussion back to what we believe are the most compelling arguments for why the CRP report is fatally flawed.

1)    First, neither the traditional public schools nor charter schools are doing a particularly good job at drawing racially diverse student bodies. Those genuinely concerned with the racial segregation in schools should focus their attention on traditional public schools, where the vast majority (97%) of U.S. students are enrolled.

2)    Families that send their children to charter schools are making a choice that best fits what they seek in an educational experience. To compare this choice to the forced segregation that occurred a half century ago is a trivialization of the true oppression that occurred. And to refer to these schools as “apartheid schools,” which implies that families are legally and physically required to attend segregated schools, is nothing more than alarmist rhetoric.  Such charges would be more appropriate if they were leveled at traditional public schools where students in residential boundaries are forced to attend segregated schools.

The Civil Rights Project has a history of seeking justice and we commend that.  But the organization is simply on the wrong side of this issue. First of all, the empirical data do not support the CRP claims.  Moreover, although the group’s leaders have called for regulations to encourage more integrated charters, vocal critics of charters will certainly use the conclusions drawn from the CRP differently.  And, if critics of charters were successful in limiting the growth of charter schools, the educational options available to poor and minority students would be further restricted.  We and the CRP authors would certainly agree that this outcome would not enhance the civil rights of our nation’s disadvantaged students.

(Guest Post by Jay P. Greene via jaypgreene.com)

The City of Fayetteville, like many local governments, is facing a budget squeeze as revenues have declined without a commensurate reduction in expenditures.  In those instances, responsible public officials should explain to voters that either certain services will need to be cut or taxes raised.

We don’t have that kind of public official in Fayetteville.  Instead, our local officials seem to fancy themselves as slick politicians in the minor leagues, honing their skills at the art of public manipulation so that someday they may get called up to the big leagues of deception and lording over other people.

To offset the shortfall in the city budget, Mayor Lionel Jordan and his backers have proposed grabbing money from the hotel, motel, and restaurant (HMR) tax that is currently dedicated for park development so that they can use it to cover park maintenance and then redirect the general operating funds currently devoted to park maintenance to other parts of the city budget.

Jordan and friends are saying they want voters to approve changes in the HMR tax so that the revenue can be used for things other than the development of parks, giving the city more “flexibility.”  This is just doublespeak.  The flexibility they want is the flexibility to reduce park development spending so that they can keep other city operations unchanged.

Personally, I prefer the development of more parks and the cutting of other city services.  Our parks and public bike trails are some of the best things about Fayetteville.  But I could be persuaded that we needed to defer additional park development to avoid cuts in other services if they presented the trade-offs directly and honestly.  Make the case that additional park development is less important than other city services that would be continued.

But no.  Our local public officials refuse to treat us like grown-ups and have to use deception rather than presenting us with difficult choices straightforwardly.  This is the same kind of doublespeak nonsense we saw with the business license proposal. That wasn’t really about “helping promote local business.”  That was about facilitating the taxation and regulation of businesses while helping the Chamber of Commerce effectively compel membership.

And don’t buy the fall-back argument on the HMR tax change that says we are in danger of developing so many parks that the cost of maintaining all of them would be prohibitive.  If this were true, advocates for changing the HMR tax would need to present facts about rising park maintenance costs.  They haven’t.  Park maintenance costs have not been growing at a significantly faster rate than the city budget.  In addition, park maintenance only costs $1.9 million out of a total city budget that exceeds $120 million.  The HMR tax dedicated to park development generates about $2.3 million per year.

And also don’t buy the argument that we are just correcting a “mistake” from when the HMR tax was initially adopted.  It may well be that city officials meant to include maintenance and development as potential uses of the tax, but that’s not what was on the ballot and what voters ultimately approved.  We can’t know whether voters would have approved the measure if it had permitted the funds to be used for park maintenance as well as development.  And voters are under no compulsion now to allow the money to be redirected for other purposes.  If city officials want to convince voters to approve the measure, they need to make the case that those new bike trails we are developing are less important than other uses for the same money.

Update: The NWArk Times is endorsing the tax change (subscription required).  They say a lot, but don’t offer up many good points.   I think the question is simple: If you really want more parks and trails in Fayetteville, and you think there are other places where the city could cut funding before they cut park development funding, then you should vote against this change.–BK

Some of you may have heard that there was a small earthquake in Northwest Arkansas last week.  What you may not know is the reason.  Well, it turns out that earthquakes actually have nothing to do with shifting tectonic plates.  According to an Iranian government official and cleric, earthquakes are women’s fault, specifically women who do not dress modestly (think burqa).

Iranian cleric Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi was quoted as saying “Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which increases earthquakes.”

If you’re keeping up with current science, then you already know that Pat Robertson discovered that gays and lesbians were responsible for hurricane Katrina, and that the earthquake in Haiti was a result of their pact with the devil.  Of course, a major difference is that here in the US we are free to make fun of Pat Robertson-types.  In Iran, these types of lunatics run the government.

Here in the U.S., many women tested Sedighi’s theory by conducting a massive “Boobquake.” News reports claimed that the Boobquake failed to trigger an earthquake.  I guess they failed to notice the small one that hit NWA.

Then again, the local quake could have been our own fault.

In the South Park clip above Cartman takes on a Glenn Beck like persona after being given the responsibility of making the morning announcements.  In the course of the episode Cartman makes many outrageous declarative statements in the guise of questions. Is Wendy Testaburger using your lunch money to buy heroin? How can we know? Cartman claims to be just like other kids except he is brave enough to asks questions.

In his own Beck-like (or Cartman-like) moment, last week U of A Professor Paul Hewitt was brave enough to ask some important questions about charter schools in this Arkansas Times article.  He opens the article with a flourish of questions.

In the popular 1989 movie “Lean on Me,” about a Paterson, N.J., ghetto high school, Principal Joe Clark has all the troublemakers and under-performing students gather on the stage and he then kicks them all out of the school. With only the most serious students remaining, he restores his high school to its once proud position.

The movie, based on a real life situation, reflects pure fiction. Or does it? Is it possible to exclude the undesirable students and just skim off the best students to make elite, selective and even racially segregated schools? Can we, under current law, develop one school system for the “haves” and another system for the “have nots?” If you think this isn’t possible, just look carefully at the charter school movement and its more extreme sibling, voucher schools.

In this introductory paragraph Prof. Hewitt poses some relevant and substantive questions: Are charter schools creaming the best students?  Are charters leading to greater segregation economically or racially?  The problem with Hewitt’s questions, like Cartman’s, is that he primarily indicts by asking questions without really examining the evidence to answer them.

We do not have to wonder about the answers to these questions.  There is a fairly extensive literature that Hewitt fails to address or even acknowledge. Here is some evidence on whether charters cream taken from one of Stuart Buck’s old posts.

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.”

On whether charters lead to great segregation, the best work (studies that use individual student data) on this question, such as that done by RAND in 2009, reveals that since charters generally locate in racially segregated urban areas, the students they attract come from relatively segregated traditional public schools.  In the end, as RAND tells us, students who move into charter schools generally choose schools with racial compositions similar to those of the traditional public schools they exited. My collegues and I have a piece in  the forthcoming summer issue of Education Next that finds a similar result with aggregate data .  Take a look at Brian’s post from earlier this week for a more detailed description of our article.

Hewitt never mentions any of this or other research on the questions he raises.  Instead, he offers information on two individual charter schools.  For example, Hewitt cites racial composition data for the LISA charter school in Little Rock and compares that to other surrounding schools to draw conclusions about the segregating nature of charter schools.

However, one data point does not constitute a pattern. Last fall the Office for Education Policy investigated the effect of charter schools on segregation in Little Rock using student level data, using information from all charter schools in the area, not just one. You can find it here. We have talked about this study many times before. Here is the money quote from the study.

…the majority of student transfers from LRSD traditional public schools to charter schools are actually resulting in students entering into more racially integrated learning environments. Over half of the white students that left above-average white schools enrolled in a charter school that was more integrated (with almost all white students that left integrated schools enrolling in similarly integrated schools). Further, minority students that leave above-average minority schools or well-integrated schools are enrolling in charter schools that are equally or more integrated than their previous school.

In other words, transfers to public charter schools have the net effect of both leaving traditional public schools more integrated as a result of the transfer, as well as increasing the level of integration at the schools they transfer to.

Prof. Hewitt continues with the rhetorical strategy of indicting by questions without examining evidence for answers when he suggests that charter schools discriminate against children with parents who don’t “truly care” or who don’t “monitor (their child’s) education.”

In Arkansas we call privately operated charter schools “open enrollment schools.” In reality, are these schools truly open enrollment? Does every child have an equal opportunity to enroll? The first ingredient is that the child must have a parent who truly cares and monitors his or her education. It is far less likely that children from an impoverished single-parent home will have a parent who is aware of the enrollment hoops they must jump through to enter a charter school. How about the child whose parents are drug addicted or don’t have the capability to enroll them in the charter school?

Are charter schools deriving additional revenue from selling heroin? How can we know?

Hewitt is not really making an argument with evidence by raising questions like this, he is just getting in touch with his inner-Cartman.

To answer these “when did you stop beating your wife”-type questions — Of course, charter schools are open enrollment. Legally they must accept anyone who chooses to attend, and this opportunity is available to all. This is in stark contrast to traditional public schools where attendance is limited to geographic boundaries. Think about schools located in wealthy neighborhoods; they would also fail to be truly public schools by Prof. Hewitt’s standard.  The barriers to entry for these schools are much more difficult to overcome than those required to attend any charter school.  To attend one of these well-to-do public schools, you must first be able to afford housing in the wealthy neighborhood, and I guarantee you this is a much higher bar than any “enrollment hoops” at a charter school.

As an interesting thought experiment, let’s apply the claims made by Prof. Hewitt to traditional public schools.

First, do traditional public schools teach every child? NO. They can and do expel many students every year. Not to mention that in Little Rock, as in many other districts around the nation, we have created magnet schools explicitly designed to recruit only high-achieving students.

Second, does our current system of traditional public schools lead to racial and income segregation? YES. To attend a school you must, by-and-large, live within it’s attendance zone, and if you look at residential patterns in the U.S. you will find we do a pretty good job of segregating ourselves by both race and income. If we are truly concerned about limiting segregation, then we should try to detach schooling from housing, which is precisely what charter schools do.

Later in the article we find Prof. Hewitt bemoaning the student turnover at KIPP saying:

The KIPP Delta College Preparatory Academy in Helena-West Helena reports, according to state Education Department figures, a “student loss” rate in the eighth and ninth grade that is between three and four times that of the Helena-West Helena School District. The “student loss” occurring at KIPP would be a scandal if it took place at a regular public school, but charter schools seem to remain under the radar when it comes to serious scrutiny. This process leaves the KIPP schools with only the most dedicated students and parents, while the rest go back to public schools.

In replicating Prof. Hewitt’s result I found out just how convenient it was that he limit his analysis to the 8th and 9th grades. If we include retention from the 7th grade in the student loss calculation, the story looks a lot better for KIPP.  KIPP has a student loss rate nearly 5 times lower than Helena, with a negative loss rate (or growth) of -1.6% while Helena has a positive loss rate of 0.4%.   Looking only at 8th and 9th grades is inappropriate because it emphasizes the student mobility that occurs between junior high and high school.  KIPP generally gains students, but at the 9th grade transition it loses some students to traditional high schools that offer more intra-mural athletics.

If you would like to replicate my analysis, I used enrollment data from the 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 school years to complete this calculation, and you can find the data here. From what I can tell, Prof. Hewitt’s analysis (and my reanalysis) simply compares enrollment in a cohort from one grade to the next.

In the end Prof. Hewitt asks 11 “questions” in his piece.  He cites virtually none of the systematic research literature and offers only two school data points, one of which is incorrect.

It’s certainly important to raise these questions, but it is even more important to consider them carefully, making use of systematic evidence to answer them correctly .

Josh and I, along with our colleagues Gary Ritter and Nate Jensen, have a forthcoming article in the summer issue of EdNext, which has been released early on their website.  The article, A Closer Look at Charter Schools and Segregation,  checks the facts related to a charter school study released in February by the Civil Rights Project (CRP) at UCLA.  The CRP article calls charter schools a “civil rights failure,” and they support their assertion with a slew of improperly generated statistics.  Upon a proper re-analysis using the same data, we show that their flawed comparison led to improper conclusions.  We also have a guest entry on EdNext’s blog today.  Here’s an exceprt from the conclusion of our article:

Our analysis suggests that these claims are certainly overstated. Furthermore, the authors fail to acknowledge two significant truths.

First, the majority of students in central cities, in both the public charter sector and in the traditional public sector, attend intensely segregated minority schools. Neither sector has cause to brag about racial diversity, but it seems clear that the CRP report points its lens in the wrong direction by focusing on the failings of charter schools. As the authors themselves note, across the country only 2.5 percent of public school children roam the halls in charter schools each day; the remaining 97.5 percent are compelled to attend traditional public schools. And we know that, more often than not, the students attending traditional public schools in cities are in intensely segregated schools. If we are truly concerned about limiting segregation, then this is where we should look to address the problem.

Second, and perhaps more important, the fact that poor and minority students flee segregated traditional public schools for similarly segregated charters does not imply that charter school policy is imposing segregation upon these students. Rather, the racial patterns we observe in charter schools are the result of the choices students and families make as they seek more attractive schooling options. To compare these active parental choices to the forced segregation of our nation’s past (the authors of the report actually call some charter schools “apartheid” schools) trivializes the true oppression that was imposed on the grandparents and great-grandparents of many of the students seeking charter options today.

Update: Here is a link to an NPR interview with one of the authors of the CRP study, Gary Orfield.  NPR’s Michel Martin asks some tough questions, and clearly gets annoyed as Orfield repeatedly dodges them.

This skit is a pretty good follow-up to Stuart’s report on State Teacher Pension Funds.

Courtney Fortson is officially no longer a Razorback. It was announced today that he has signed with an agent and is entering the NBA draft.

That means that out of coach(?) Pelphrey’s 2006-07 recruiting class of six players, only Rotnei Clarke remains (and he was recruited by Stan Heath).  Gone are Fortson, Andre Clark, Brandon Moore, Jason Henry, and Montrell McDonald.  As I’ve said previously, with this many failures, it is hard to have any faith in Pelphrey’s ability to recruit and develop quality players.  The future of Razorback basketball is alarmingly bleak.

I’ve also criticized Frank Broyles for running off Mike Anderson when we had the chance to make him Nolan’s successor.  After another successful season this year coaching at Missouri, Anderson was courted by Oregon.  He ultimately turned them down.  In a semi-related note, Arkansas’ top prospect for next season, 6-foot-8, 240-pound forward Ricardo Ratliffe, recently bailed on Arkansas and will join Anderson at Mizzou.

However, while the speculation about Anderson’s decision concerning Oregon was ongoing, ESPN reported this little tidbit:

“Sources close to Anderson say that if he were to leave Missouri, the job at Arkansas–if open–is one he’d have strong interest in.”

What are we waiting for?

It is obvious to me that consequences and incentives matter.  For example, I had promised to get a blog post up yesterday, but I can’t really be fired from this blog, and I don’t lose or gain anything tangible from writing or not writing on time.  So, since much of my other work is connected to consequences of one type or another, the blog post languished while I completed other more “consequential” tasks.  To stay on topic, therefore, I decided to riff on consequences and incentives …

Incentives in education are in the news  all over the place these days.  Here are a few examples:

1. In Florida, the Republican-led Senate and House passed a sweeping bill that would radically reform teacher pay policy statewide.  If signed, the bill would have limited the job security and tenure of teachers and link teacher pay to growth in student learning (as measured by test scores).  The expressed goal of this legislation was to make it easier for school leaders to identify great teachers, reward great teachers, and – importantly – to get rid of bad teachers.  In other words, this bill would attach all sorts of positive and negative consequences to teacher performance.
2. The teacher groups in Florida, while professing that consequences don’t really matter since they teach only for love of students and not money, simultaneously showed how important they truly believed incentives are.  Their incentive, in this case, was the continuation of  current teacher compensation policies  which provide nearly unmatched job security to teachers and unmatched power to teacher groups.  Leaders of teacher groups worked tirelessly to defeat this bill because, if it became law, it would be harder to treat teachers as if they were all the same and this would dilute the power of their union representatives.  Hundreds of individual teachers worked similarly hard to keep a very valuable component of their compensation – untouchable job security.  Thus, these teachers saw the potential for consequences that they perceived as negative, and worked very hard to avoid negative consequences.
3. While these critics were unable to kill the passage of the bill, they did not give up.  They continued to make their opposition clear in the hopes that Governor Charlie Crist (who had expressed early support for the initiative) might step in and save the day.  Again, consequences DID matter!  Gov. Crist, you see, is locked in a race for a US Senate seat and perceived that the signing of the bill might lead to negative consequences for him, and thus he vetoed the bill last Thursday (April 15).  Crist judged that his support of the bill would have hurt his chances in the general election.  Of course, it now seems likely that his submarining of the bill will kill his chances to run as a Republican ….. some politicos believe he will now run as an independent and hope that he can go back to the teacher groups and seek support.  Since his consequences are based on predictions of the future, time will tell whether Charlie guessed right by shifting left!

In any event, it is clear that consequences mattered quite a bit to the teachers and to Charlie who, ironically, stopped a bill that would have injected some consequences into teacher compensation policy.

However, many have argued passionately for the stance taken by Charlie and the teachers, maintaining that consequences and incentives don’t matter in schools like they do elsewhere.  Who’s right?  When I am not sure about complicated issues like this, I like to check in with the kids.  Fortunately, just last week, a study was released that examined how kids in schools react to incentives.  Here is a quick summary, taken from the Washington Post and mostly Time.  The New York Times Freakonomics Blog even had something to say.  They all suggest that there may be something to this strategy.

1. Harvard economist Roland Fryer Jr. ran a randomized experiment in hundreds of classrooms in multiple cities. He used mostly private money to pay 18,000 kids a total of $6.3 million and brought in a team of researchers to help him analyze the effects.
2. “These are substantial effects, as large as many other interventions that people have thought to be successful,” says Brian Jacob, a University of Michigan public-policy and economics professor who has studied incentives and who reviewed Fryer’s study at TIME’s request. If incentives are designed wisely, it appears, payments can indeed boost kids’ performance as much as or more than many other reforms you’ve heard about before — and for a fraction of the cost.

This study is very interesting and worth reading – take a look at the clip from the Colbert Report above for an entertaining interview with the study’s author.  In any event — the teacher leaders are arguing that incentives don’t matter but acting as if they do while the kids are saying they do.

Whom do you think we should believe?