The idea of doing away with public school as a public good, a service provided to all citizens, funded and managed by some combination of federal, state and local government, and replacing it all with an unregulated free market of education services in which families had to find their own way with their own resources– that was never going to be a winner.
Replace a promise to provide every child with an education with a promise to just let everyone fend for themselves– not a popular idea. Even school vouchers–Friedman’s idea of a gateway to the future he really wanted to see–were never popular.
So they needed allies. The first batch of allies–segregationists who wanted school choice so they could choose not to send White kids to school with Black kids– were not terribly helpful from a policy standpoint.
The big obstacle–people really like and believe in the idea of public schools.
So the Reagan administration gave us A Nation At Risk, a manifesto masquerading as a research report that aimed to chip away at that public support for public schools. “Burn it all down” was still a fringe notion, but the Overton window was shifting, and the repeated assertion that public schools were failing was the crowbar used to shift it.
By the turn of the millennium, a partnership had emerged, between choicers (we need more options because competition will help), reformsters (we need standards and tests and incentives to force teachers to suck less), neo-liberals (the private sector can do this better), technocrats (let’s be data driven), accountability hawks (make schools prove they’re doing a good job), social justice fabulists (better education will magically erase poverty), and folks who had real concerns about real issues in education.
Overall, this patchwork alliance had the outward appearance of a bipartisan team-up, and that was just perfect for the Bush-Obama years and the sham that was No Child Left Behind
But what the alliance didn’t produce was results. Choice did not provide a sudden lifting of all boats, despite some data-torturing attempts to show otherwise. Data-driven instruction didn’t improve the data generated by either students or teachers. Underserved communities that were supposed to be rescued from failing schools by charters and choice too often had education policies done to them rather than with them. And then there was the gross miscalculation that was Common Core, which drew attack from all across the political spectrum.
By the mid 2010s, the deal was splintering. Robert Pondiscio was one of the first to publicly talk about it– the social justice wing of the choice movement was demanding more focus on actual education results, and the free market wing that was more committed to the idea of choice as an end in itself, whether it improved educational outcomes or not.
The alliance probably would have fallen apart under the simple force of gravity, but Trump arrived like a sledgehammer to bust it up. The social justice wing of reform bailed immediately, and the free market wing– well, Jeanne Allen typified the speedy shift from “I don’t want my issues coming out of his mouth” to much love for MAGAland.
The installation of Betsy DeVos signaled the rise of what I guess we can call Christianist Friedmanism. Friedman was always stuck arguing that a free market approach to education was just better, because reasons. But the DeVos wing of choicers have a better explanation– the unregulated free market approach to education is better because it is what God wants.
DeVos could never quite go full DeVos during her tenure–she even made it a point to make nice with charter fans even though, for her, charters are just a way to get to the full voucherism she favors. Still watching that Overton window.
Then COVID-19 came and set fire to the side of the house the Overton window is set in.
Culture warrior stuff was in. Pandemic response crazy-pants reactions made anti-government, anti-institution, anti-qualifications, anti-smarty-pants-with-all-their-book-learning sentiment Great Again. Frustrated activists like Chris Rufo and the Moms For Liberty founders, who had already been trying to break through with an anti-public school message for years suddenly found themselves with all sorts of traction. Jay Greene, who had worked as a school choice academic at the University of Arkansas, took a job with the christianist right wing Heritage Foundation, and from that new perch he announced the new alliance– “Time for the school choice movement to embrace the culture wars.”
So here we are, with the new alliance driving the school choice revolution bus. And like all the other alliances over the past seventy-some years, this one has some fault lines.
There’s certainly a difference of style. Educational dudebros like Rufo, Corey DeAngelis and Ryan Walters are pretty abrasive and aggressive, sometimes in ways that might strike some of the old guard as unseemly. In the days of the earlier alliance, reformsters caught on to the idea that belittling teachers and treating them as the enemy was not a useful way to get policies fruitfully implemented. Of course, one does not need to build lines of communication across a bridge if one’s goal is to just burn the bridge down.
That’s part and parcel of the biggest fracture line in the current choice movement, which is that the different factions have different goals.
The free market wing still argues for some sort of free market of education, with some combination of private and public (if they’re a little more reality based) choices for families with, perhaps, some sort of taxpayer subsidy to even the playing field a hair. You might even find one or two who believe there should be some guardrails, some accountability and oversight for such a system.
But their current allies from the culture war world are quite clear that they don’t actually like choice at all. Parents Defending Education, a piece of kochtopus astro turfing, has been clear, as with their recent piece warning that in some states taxpayers are being required to help fund LGBTQ charter schools! Moms For Liberty has been clear that some books should not be an available choice for students in schools, regardless of what those students’ parents might want.
In Georgia, the legislature is considering a Don’t Say Gay law to restrict teaching about gender identity in private as well as public schools. Neal McClusky has popped up reliably to argue that, no, real school choice means you can’t outlaw the choices you don’t like, but the culture panic MAGA christianist nationalists aren’t listening. Their goal is not a robust system of public and private choices for a wide variety of viewpoints, but a system, public or private or whatever, that reflects only their values. In short, the opposite of school choice.
I’m not sure how long the alliance will hold up, particularly since the traditional reformsters are, at best, minority partners here. This year’s CPAC, the annual conservative rant-o-pallooza, seemed to have plenty to say about making schools adhere to proper values, but hardly anything about actual school choice. Trump promised school vouchers, but only in the context of a promise to “restore God to His rightful place in American culture.”
Meanwhile, Chester Finn is trying hard, repeatedly, to stand up for the notion that maybe the culture wars and even free market affection are obscuring the goal of providing American children with a good education, and that some accountability and oversight might be useful, even as he waxes nostalgic for the days of bipartisan accomplishments that made the education system better.
Like many long-time reformsters, Finn fails to see how their brand of reform set the stage for today’s scorched earth attacks on public education (and, to be fair, public education’s failure to address some of its own issues also opened some doors as well). When Chris Rufo asserts that the path to universal school choice requires universal distrust of public education, he’s simply taking the arguments laid out in A Nation At Risk to their natural scorched earth conclusion.
There is perhaps another way of viewing the fissures in the current movement. On one side, reformsters who still have a bit of conservative-style love for institutions; on the other, those who would simply trash it all, right down to the concept of inclusive public schools. The former had a line, a point past which they felt one shouldn’t go because that would just be destructive. The latter are not concerned with any such line.
I don’t think it’s any mystery that we’re at this moment right now. The new shape of school choice both rising out of and pushing aside the old education reform movement sure seems to parallel the way MAGAthauritainism pushed aside the traditional conservative project and yet is also somehow rooted in it.
Or we can parse the fissures one other way: The movement today has three main threads:
* People who want to see better schools and think that school choice gets us there.
* People who see free-market based choice as a worthy end in itself
* People who want to see education delivered in different tiers according to class, but in all tiers delivered in alignment with a single set of christianist values, and see choice policies as a tool to get there
Time will tell, I guess, which group will do the best job of using the other two as a tool for achieving their own goals.
This article, from 2017, is by Curmudgucation (retired English teacher Peter Greene), and is a great summary of the actual results of the Common Core movement. He reprinted it today (12/29/2023).
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I’ve said often that the Common Core failed in its creators’ central goal– to establish a set of national standards followed “with fidelity” by every school from Maine to Alaska. Every school would follow the exact same set of learning goals so that a child who left Iowa to attend school in Florida could make the switch without missing a step. The standards would be set in cement (remember the rule that a state could only add 15% additional Stuff) and we would all march together in lockstep into a fully-standardized perfect education future.
But the Core was revealed as both political kryptonite and amateur-hour educational junk. It entered the Bad Policy Witness Protection Program and took up residence in many states under an assumed name. Also, states took about five minutes to realize they could go ahead and rewrite, alter and add anything they damn well felt like.
David Coleman’s dream of fifty states all yoked to his vision was dead.
But something else was not dead, and is, in regrettable fact, very much alive.
Once upon a time, school districts would plan curriculum, the whole scope and sequence and pedagogical approach as well as the actual content– they would do all of that by consulting the experts that they had already hired. Maybe a curriculum director if they had one, or some other administrator if they didn’t. Certainly an assortment of their actual classroom teachers. Those folks might consult some other reliable sources as well as using their own professional judgment to develop the district’s educational plan.
But that was once upon a time.
Now the goal is standards-based curriculum.
Instead of curriculum conversations that begin with “What do we believe a graduate of our school district should know?” we now get conversations that begin with “Let’s take a look at the standards.” And then schools use them as a checklist. Let’s work our way down the list of standards and make sure that we have something written into the curriculum that allows us to check off each one so that we can say it’s “covered.” And let’s be double-certain when it comes to the tested standards.
Here are the questions that are not answered (and sometimes not asked) in attempts to build standards-based curriculum:
Where did these standards come from? Who wrote them, and is there some reason to believe that they know better than our own trained professionals what students in our district should learn? Are the standards based on any sort of research, and is that research valid and trustworthy?
What is not covered by the standards? Are the standards strictly focused on skills while ignoring content (spoiler alert: probably)? Are there areas of our course of study that we, in our considered professional judgment, consider vital, but which the standards do not address? And if there are any, given a finite school year, can we discuss setting aside some of the standards in order to make room for content and material that we consider important?
When the Common Core wave passed, it had swept away the notion that actual teachers and administrators are experts in education. Instead, the standards-based school district now assumes that nobody in the school system actually knows what should be taught, and that the most they can be trusted with is to “unpack” the standards and create a checklist-certified list of education activities that will meet the standards’ demands. That’s the best-case scenario. In the worst-case scenario, the district doesn’t believe that trained education professionals can be trusted with even that much, and should just be handed materials that dictate the teacher’s every move, throwing aside their professional judgment and replacing it with the judgment of some bureaucrat or textbook publisher.
Worst of all for the long run, this approach has infected schools of education who prepare their few remaining future teachers to accept this, to envision for themselves a diminished role as content delivery specialists or instructional facilitators or classroom coaches.
Common Core was pitched against a definite enemy– the teachers who insisted in teaching things in their own classroom just because they thought those things were worth teaching, the teacher who insisted on using her own professional judgment, the teacher who wanted to function as an autonomous individual. Ironically, even though the Common Core did not conquer the nation’s school districts as it had hoped, it did manage to deliver a serious defeat to its chosen enemy. We now understand in (too many) districts that we must adhere to the Standards, which have descended manna-like from some mysterious, magical higher power. They are not to be argued with or contradicted, nor will there be any discussion of the educational wisdom (or lack thereof) behind them. They are to be treated as our compass, our grail, our North Star. Teachers should sit down, shut up, and start aligning.
And that defeat of professional educators, that clampdown on teacher autonomy– that’s the one victory that Common Core State (sic) Standards can claim.
Peter Greene does a wonderful job in explaining why ‘value-added measurements’ for teachers are complete nonsense. I am reprinting the whole thing, because, as usual, he has hit the nail right on the head, and done it in a more complete and thorough manner than anybody else, most definitely including me.
VAM: Why Is This Zombie Policy Still Around?
by PETER GREENE
NOV 20
It was a bit of a shock. I picked up my morning paper, and there was an article on the front page touting our school district’s PVAAS scores, the commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s version of VAM scores, and I was uncomfortably reminded that value-added measures are still a thing.
Value Added Measures are bunk.
We used to talk about this a lot. A. Lot. But VAM (also known as Something-VAAS in some states) has departed the general education discussion even though it has not departed the actual world of education. Administrators still brag about, or bemoan, their VAM scores. VAM scores still affect teacher evaluation. And VAM scores are still bunk.
So let’s review. Or if you’re new-ish to the ed biz, let me introduce you to what lies behind the VAM curtain.
The Basic Idea
Value Added is a concept from the manufacturing and business world. If I take a dollar’s worth of sheet metal and turn it into a forty dollar toaster, then I have added thirty-nine dollars of value to the sheet metal. It’s an idea that helps businesses figure out if they’re really making money on something, or if adding some feature to a product or process is worth the bother.
Like when you didn’t fix the kitchen door before you tried to sell your house because fixing the door would have cost a grand but would allowed you to raise the price of the house a buck and a half. Or how a farmer might decide that putting a little more meat on bovine bones would cost more than you’d make back from selling the slightly fatter cow.
So the whole idea here is that schools are supposed to add value to students, as if students are unmade toasters or unfatted calves, and the school’s job is to make them worth more money.
Yikes! Who decided this would be a good thing to do with education?
The Granddaddy of VAAS was William Sanders. Sanders grew up on a dairy farm and went on to earn a PhD in biostatistics and quantitative genetics. He was mostly interested in questions like “If you have a choice of buying Bull A, compared to Bull B, which one is more likely to produce daughters that will give more milk than the other one.” Along with some teaching, Sanders was a longtime statistical consultant for the Institute of Agricultural Research.
He said that in 1982, while an adjunct professor at a satellite campus of the University of Tennessee, he read an article (written by then-Governor Lamar Alexander) saying that there’s no proper way to hold teachers accountable for test scores.
Sure there is, he thought. He was certain he could just tweak the models he used for crunching agricultural statistics and it would work great. He sent the model off to Alexander, but it languished unused until the early 90s, when the next governor pulled it out and called Sanders in, and Educational Value-Added Assessment System (EVAAS) was on its way.
The other Granddaddy of VAAS is SAS, an analytics company founded in 1976.
Founder James H. Goodnight was born in 1943 in North Carolina. He earned a Masters in statistics; that combined with some programming background landed him a job with a company that built communication stations for the Apollo program.
He next went to work as a professor at North Carolina State University, where he and some other faculty created Statistical Analysis System for analyzing agricultural data, a project funded mainly by the USDA. Once the first SAS was done and had acquired 100 customers, Goodnight et al left academia and started the company.
William Sanders also worked a North Carolina University researcher, and it’s not clear when, exactly, he teamed up with SAS; his EVAAS system was proprietary, and as the 90s unfolded, that made him a valuable man to go into business with. The VAAS system, rebranded for each state that signed on, became a big deal for SAS, who launched their Education Technologies Division in 1997.
Sanders passed away in 2017. Goodnight has done okay. The man owns two thirds of the company, which is still in the VAAS biz, and he’s now worth $7.4 billion-with-a-B. But give him credit, apparently remembering his first crappy job, Goodnight has made SAS one of the world’s best places to work– in fact, it is SAS that influenced the more famously fun-to-work culture of Google. It’s a deep slice of irony–he has sustained a corporate culture that emphasizes valuing people as live human beings, not as a bunch of statistics.
Somehow Goodnight has built a little world where people live and work among dancing rainbows and fluffy fairy dust clouds, and they spend their days manufacturing big black rainclouds to send out into the rest of the world.
How does it work?
Explanations are layered in statistics jargon:
Using mixed model equations, TVAAS uses the covariance matrix from this multivariate, longitudinal data set to evaluate the impact of the educational system on student progress in comparison to national norms, with data reports at the district, school, and teacher levels.
Sanders’ explanations weren’t any better. In 2009, several of us were sent off to get training in how to use PA’s version (PVAAS) and among other things, I wrote this:
This is a highly complex model that three well-paid consultants could not clearly explain to seven college-educated adults, but there were lots of bars and graphs, so you know it’s really good. I searched for a comparison and first tried “sophisticated guess;” the consultant quickly corrected me—“sophisticated prediction.”
I tried again—was it like a weather report, developed by comparing thousands of instances of similar conditions to predict the probability of what will happen next? Yes, I was told. That was exactly right. This makes me feel much better about PVAAS, because weather reports are the height of perfect prediction.
The basic mathless idea is this. Using sophisticated equations, the computer predicts what Student A would likely score on this year’s test in some alternate universe where no school-related factors affected the student’s score. Then the computer looks at the score that Actual Student A achieved. If Actual Student and Alternative Universe Student have different scores, the difference, positive or negative, is attributed to the teacher.
Let me say that again. The computer predicts a student score. If the actual student gets a different score, that is not attributed to, say, a failure on the part of the predictive software. All the blame and/or glory belong to the teacher.
VAAS fans insist that the model mathematically accounts for factors like socio-economic background and school and other stuff. Here’s the explanatory illustration:
Here’s a clarification of that illustration:
“This is stuff we made up to pretend we can predict one kid’s test scores”
So how well does it actually work?
Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, a leading researcher and scholar in this field, ran a whole blog for years (VAMboozled) that did nothing but bring to light the many ways in which VAM systems were failing, so I’m going to be (sort of) brief here and stick to a handful of illustrations.
Let’s ask the teachers.
Clarin Collins, a researcher, college professor and, as of this year, a high school English teacher, had a crazy idea back in 2014–why not ask teachers if they were getting anything of value out of the VAAS?
Short answer: no.
Long answer. Collins made a list of the various marketing promises made by SAS about VAAS and asked teachers if they agreed or disagreed (they could do so strongly, too). Here’s the list:
EVAAS helps create professional goals
EVAAS helps improve instruction
EVAAS will provide incentives for good practices
EVAAS ensures growth opportunities for very low achieving students
EVAAS ensures growth opportunities for students
EVAAS helps increase student learning
EVAAS helps you become a more effective teacher
Overall, the EVAAS is beneficial to my school
EVAAS reports are simple to use
Overall, the EVAAS is beneficial to me as a teacher
Overall, the EVAAS is beneficial to the district
EVAAS ensures growth opportunities for very high achieving students
EVAAS will identify excellence in teaching or leadership
EVAAS will validly identify and help to remove ineffective teachers
EVAAS will enhance the school environment
EVAAS will enhance working conditions
That’s arranged in descending order, starting from the top item, with which over 50% of teachers disagreed. By the time we get to the bottom of the list, the rate of disagreement is almost 80%. At the top of the list, fewer than 20% of teachers agreed or strongly agreed, and it just went downhill from there.
Teachers reported that the data reported was “vague” and “unusable.” They complained that their VAAS rating scores whipped up and down from year to year with no rhyme nor reason, with over half finding their VAAS number way different from their principal evaluation. Gifted teachers, because they had the students who had already hit their ceiling, reported low VAAS scores. And while the VAAS magic math is supposed to blunt the impact of having low-ability students in your classroom, it turns out it doesn’t really do that. And this:
Numerous teachers reflected on their own questionable practices. As one English teacher
said, “When I figured out how to teach to the test, the scores went up.” A fifth grade teacher added,
“Anything based on a test can be ‘tricked.’ EVAAS leaves room for me to teach to the test and
appear successful.”
EVAAS also assumes that the test data fed into the system is a valid measure of what it says it measures. That’s a generous view of tests like Pennsylvania’s Keystone Exam. Massaging bad data with some kind of sophisticated mathiness still just gets you bad data.
But hey–that’s just teachers and maybe they’re upset about being evaluated with rigor. What do other authorities have to say?
The Houston Court Case
The Houston school district used EVAAS to not only evaluate teachers, but factor in pay systems as well. So the AFT took them to court. A whole lot of experts in education and evaluation and assessment came to testify, and when all was said and done, here are twelve big things that the assembled experts had to say about EVAAS:
1) Large-scale standardized tests have never been validated for this use. A test is only useful for the purpose for which it is designed. Nobody has designed a test for VAM purposes.
2) When tested against another VAM system, EVAAS produced wildly different results.
3) EVAAS scores are highly volatile from one year to the next.
4) EVAAS overstates the precision of teachers’ estimated impacts on growth. The system pretends to know things it doesn’t really know.
5) Teachers of English Language Learners (ELLs) and “highly mobile” students are substantially less likely to demonstrate added value. Again, the students you teach have a big effect on the results that you get.
6) The number of students each teacher teaches (i.e., class size) also biases teachers’ value-added scores.
7) Ceiling effects are certainly an issue. If your students topped out on the last round of tests, you won’t be able to get them to grow enough this year.
8) There are major validity issues with “artificial conflation.” (This is the phenomenon in which administrators feel forced to make their observation scores “align” with VAAS scores.) Administrators in Houston were pressured to make sure that their own teacher evaluations confirmed rather than contradicted the magic math.
9) Teaching-to-the-test is of perpetual concern. Because it’s a thing that can raise your score, and it’s not much like actual teaching.
10) HISD is not adequately monitoring the EVAAS system. HISD was not even allowed to see or test the secret VAM sauce. Nobody is allowed to know how the magic maths work. Hell, in Pennsylvania, teachers are not even allowed to see the test that their students took. You have to sign a pledge not to peek. So from start to finish, you have no knowledge of where the score came from.
11) EVAAS lacks transparency. See above.
12) Related, teachers lack opportunities to verify their own scores. Think your score is wrong? Tough.
The experts said that EVAAS was bunk. US Magistrate Judge Stephen Smith agreed, saying that “high stakes employment decisions based on secret algorithms (are)incompatible with… due process” and the proper remedy was to overturn the policy. Houston had to kiss VAAS goodbye.
Anyone else have thoughts?
The National Association of Secondary School Principals issued a statement in 2015 and revisited it in 2019:
At first glance, it would appear reasonable to use VAMs to gauge teacher effectiveness. Unfortunately, policymakers have acted on that impression over the consistent objections of researchers who have cautioned against this inappropriate use of VAMs.
The American Education Research Association also cautioned in 2015 against the use of VAM scores for any sort of high stakes teacher evaluation, due to significant technical limitations. They’ve got a batch of other research links, too.
The American Statistical Association released a statement in 2014 warning districts away from using VAM to measure teacher effectiveness. VAMs, they say, do not directly measure potential teacher contributions toward other student outcomes. Also, VAMs typically measure correlation, not causation: Effects – positive or negative – attributed to a teacher may actually be caused by other factors that are not captured in the model.
Most VAM studies find that teachers account for about 1% to 14% of the variability in test scores, and that the majority of opportunities for quality improvement are found in the system-level conditions. Ranking teachers by their VAM scores can have unintended consequences that reduce quality.
They cite the “peer-reviewed study” funded by Gates and published by AERA which stated emphatically that “Value-added performance measures do not reflect the content or quality of teachers’ instruction.” This study went on to note that VAM doesn’t seem to correspond to anything that anybody considers a feature of good teaching.
What if we don’t use the data soaked in VAM sauce to make Big Decisions? Can we use it just to make smaller ones? Research into decade-long experiment in using student test scores to “toughen” teacher evaluation and make everyone teach harder and better showed that the experiment was a failure.
Well, that was a decade or so ago. I bet they’ve done all sorts of things to VAM and VAAS to improve them.
You would lose that bet.
Well, at least they don’t use them to evaluate teachers any more, right?
Sorry.
There’s a lot less talk about tying VAM to raises or bonus/merit pay, but the primary innovation is to drape the rhetorical fig leaf of “students growth” over VAM scores. The other response has been to try to water VAAS/VAM measures down with other “multiple measures,” an option that was handed to states back in 2015 when ESSA replaced No Child Left Behind as the current version of federal education law.
Pennsylvania has slightly reduced the size of PVAAS influence on teacher and building evaluations in the latest version of evaluation, but it’s still in there, both as part of the building evaluation that affects all teacher evaluations and as part of the evaluation for teachers who teach the tested subjects. Pennsylvania also uses the technique of mushing together “three consecutive years of data,” a technique that hopes to compensate for the fact that VAAS scores hop around from year to year.
VAAS/VAM is still out there kicking, still being used as part of a way to evaluate teachers and buildings. And it’s still bunk.
But we have to do something to evaluate schools and teachers!
You are taken to the hospital with some sort of serious respiratory problem. One afternoon you wake up suddenly to find some janitors standing over you with a chain saw.
“What the hell!” You holler. “What are you getting ready to do??!!”
“We’re going to amputate your legs with a chain saw,” they reply.
“Good lord,” you holler, trying to be reasonable. “Is there any reason to think that would help with my breathing?”
“Not really,” they reply. “Actually, all the medical experts say it’s a terrible idea.”
“Well, then, don’t do it! It’s not going to help. It’s going to hurt, a lot.”
“Well, we’ve got to do something.”
“Not that!”
“Um, well. What if we just take your feet off? I mean, this is what we’ve come up with, and if you don’t have a better idea, then we’re just going to go ahead with our chain saw plan.”
VAM is a stark example of education inertia in action. Once we’re doing something, somehow the burden of proof is shifted, and nobody has to prove that there’s a good reason to do thing, and opponents must prove they have a better idea. Until they do, we just keep firing up the chain saw.
There are better ideas out there (check out the work of Jack Schneider at University of Massachusetts Amherst) but this post is long enough already and honestly, if you’re someone who thinks it’s so important to reduce teachers’ work to a single score, the burden is on you to prove that you’ve come up with something that is valid, reliable, and non-toxic. A system that depends on the Big Standardized Tests and a mysterious black [box] to show that somehow teachers have made students more valuable is none of those things.
VAM systems have had over a decade to prove its usefulness. They haven’t. It’s long past time to put them in the ground.
When I was teaching I noticed that new standards, objectives, goals, and buzzwords, goals, objectives and standards got rolled out every few years or so, only to be abandoned, deprecated, and forgotten shortly thereafter.
“Mr Fitz” is a good observer of a lot of the craziness in American education today. This long strip is about the nutty idea that educational Standards are the one and only thing that can save American education, and hence save the world.
I had been also thinking (but did not write down) that the tide would turn, and that teachers and schools themselves would no longer be seen as the whole cause of poverty or brilliance.
Instead, I feared that racists would once again become free to loudly and publicly blame black and brown people for their own poverty, just like they did from the end of Reconstruction 147 years ago, right up through the anti-Civil Rights backlash of the 1960s and 1970s.
In 1983 the essay (disguised as an objective report) called “Nation At Risk” (NAR) jump-started an Education Reform drive that was truly bi-partisan, and had scores of billionaires both liberal (eg Gates) and conservative (eg Waltons) willing to fund it and push politicians to back it. Presidents Clinton, Bush2, and Obama and their secretaries of education all embraced it.
If you hadn’t noticed, this reform movement failed completely.
By its own terms (that is, test scores).
Despite having ‘edu-reformers’ in charge of every single large public school system in the nation.
But it took a while for those failures to become obvious.
At first, only a handful of writers such as Gerald Bracey pointed out the errors in that study and in the reformers’ steamroller. When the report first came out, I was teaching math to 7th graders in a very poor region of DC, and felt embarrassed that so many of my students there (100% Black) did so poorly in school, despite my efforts and those of my colleagues.
Some teachers from East Asia warned me not to believe the hype surrounding NAR. They said the model of education that exists in China, Japan, Korea and so on was NOT one that should be emulated by the US.
But I did believe the myth.
Later, I read some columns by Bracey and others and began to have doubts.
Then the amazing fraud Michelle Rhee was given control of DC’s entire public school system in 2007, less than two years before I retired.
I had never heard of the woman before, but upon her being named Chancellor of DCPS, I heard that she claimed to have performed educational miracles in a low-income, all-Black public school as a 3rd and 4th grade charter school teacher in Baltimore. She wrote in her resume: “Over a two-year period” in the mid-1990s she “moved students scoring on average at the 13th percentile on national standardized tests to 90 percent of students scoring at the 90th percentile or higher.”
When I read that sentence in herresume, I seem to recall my jaw literally dropping open.
If you have ever been around kids and looked at their test scores, you would realize that this feat would be the equivalent of landing a triple axel in ice skating, while also sinking a three-pointer in the NBA, and running a marathon in under two hours.
Simultaneously.
If this really had happened, it would have been front-page news in every single publication that dealt with education.
(Sounds like George Santos took lessons on fake resume claims from Michelle Rhee!)
Of course, there were no such articles. So I scratched my head and wondered.
After I retired, someone pointed me to where the fairly detailed Baltimore test scores could be found. I looked at them, and found that she had mythologized a small bump in test scores into the greatest educational achievement ever accomplished, anywhere. And nobody had called her on this lie.
I suspect that the bump can be attributed in large part to the fact that over one third of the students at her grade level, at that school, in that year, had scores that were so low that they weren’t counted!!! I wrote a few posts on my blog about it, and even did a call-in on an NPR interview with her, asking why she lied so much, in particular about those scores. She just giggled, as if to imply that I was just being an idiot for trying to call her on such a small technicality, when she was still working miracles.
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From theDaily Howler: “In the 1994-1995 school year, the seven schools run by EAI were under enormous pressure. During and after the previous year, major disputes had broken out about the low test scores of the EAI schools; by the fall of 1994, everyone knew that the pressure was on, that the plug might be pulled on the program. (As a simple Nexis search will show, all these matters were being discussed in the Baltimore Sun.) Do we possess three brain cells among us? If any school in the EAI group had an educational miracle occurring, this glorious fact would have been shouted to the skies by EAI’s corporate leadership. Trust us: The teachers involved would have gained acclaim in the national media—the kind of “acclaim” Rhee used to say she had attained, before she realized she had to stop saying it. It’s absurd to think there was some large group of third-graders “scoring at the 90th percentile or higher,” but their test scores somehow never came to the attention of the UMBC researchers.”
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Apparently nobody else with any knowledge of basic, elementary statistics and probability had previously bothered to compare those actual scores with her extraordinary claims. So I wrote what I found, with a fair amount of fury at the fact that such an amazing, world-class fraud and liar could be in charge of education in my home city, Washington, DC, the very seat of national government and so on. I got my 15 minutes of fame, but while Rhee did retire in disgrace, she has unfortunately never been indicted for fraud, even though she clearlysuborned all sorts of cheating and erasing of bubble marks on students’ tests, and gave prizes and awards to one of the most prolific cheaters, a principal in my own neighborhood. (see here for some details.)
As I have recently feared, but did not put into writing, the really scary part now is that right-wingers and racists are using the failure of this billionaire-led disruption of public schools to get rid of the very idea of public education as a public good. They applaud the self-segregation.
My former math colleague Betsy James compiled this graph. It appears that at some of the best-known charter organizations, such as Rocketship, DCI, ELHaynes, Achievement Prep, Richard Wright, and St Colletta’s, the highest executive salaries are literally off the chart.
She wrote, on Twitter , “I think it’s right to be suspicious of DC charters wanting all of the benefits of teachers unions while none of the responsibilities. But I also feel for charter teachers caught in the middle. Pay the teachers & show the receipts.”
In the wake of testimony this springabout charters needing, and deserving, the monetary increase that DCPS teachers fought for (and won) through their union, this blog post aims to be an outline of some basics of charter school funding and expenditures in DC as well as public accountability behind both.
The bottom line is that accounting of DC charter finances is disaggregated, incomplete, inconsistent, and sometimes purposefully obfuscating, and lacks any meaningful democratic governance and guardrails. As a result, true public oversight is almost impossible for the finances of the publicly funded schools that educate nearly half of DC’s students. This landscape represents a real danger to good use of taxpayer funds and, consequently, proper financing of all of DC’s publicly funded schools.
Each year, DC charter schools receive $1 billion from DC taxpayers (about the same as DCPS receives) by way of the uniform per student funding formula (UPSFF). That public money for charters (apportioned to each on the basis of student population and characteristics, as it is to DCPS) goes directly to the individual, privately run nonprofits that operate each of DC’s 69 charter LEAs.
A separate funding formula is used to provide charters with facilities funds from DC taxpayers. Those facilities funds are apportioned based on the number of students in each LEA, with a set amount per student. The total amount of facilities funds slated forcharters for FY24 is about $175 million. Though the idea is to ensure charters have funds specifically for facilities (something that DCPS does not have to pay for itself), DC charter facilities funds can be used for anything and are entirely untracked and unmonitored by DC.
While those two funding streams from DC taxpayers constitute the majority of each DC charter school’s annual revenue streams, DC charters can also receive federal and local grants from the office of the state superintendent of education (OSSE) as well as philanthropic and other (private) grant revenue.
To better outline charter finances, how they are reported, specific problem areas (reserves, audits, facilities funds, and philanthropy), and what all this means for DC democracy, I have organized this blog post in the following broad categories:
I. The Current Landscape II. Problems With The Current Landscape III. Reserves IV. Audits V. Facilities Funds VI. Philanthropy VII. Solutions
I am happy to include more and correct what is here as you, my readers, may advise–including adding more solutions to what is an annual $1 billion anti-democratic mess.
I. THE CURRENT LANDSCAPE
To account for their spending, DC charters provide to the public charter school board (PCSB, their authorizer) annual 990s as well as annual budgets, annual audits, and annual reports.
In addition to publicly posting all of that, PCSB provides its own annual financial analysis reports and annual at risk funding reports, while posting the deputy mayor for education’s annual per pupil funding analyses (which look at a high level of per pupil funding in charters). The financial analysis reports are created by PCSB to analyze the fiscal health of individual charter schools, while at risk funding reports are compilations of what individual charter LEAs report of their planned use of at risk funds.
Between all of these, there is a lot of financial information—which sounds good except for its inherent disaggregation and resulting lack of meaningful and connected detail:
—annual reports of charter schools outline minimum, maximum, and average teacher salaries and also list “salaries of the 5 most highly compensated individuals in the organization, if over $100,000” for the prior school year. There is no requirement for donations to be outlined, and while listing the top five salaries is perhaps sufficient for a small LEA, it doesn’t work well for a large LEA like KIPP DC, whose latest annual report outlines top five salaries ranging from $216K to $359K (by comparison, the DCPS chancellor makes less than $300K, while DC’s mayor makes $220K). Moreover, each annual report is done by school year, not fiscal year like the financial analysis reports, annual budgets, and annual audits.
—annual budgets (done by fiscal year) appear to have more finely outlined details than annual reports, but again do not outline who donated what and do not outline all executive salaries, individual teacher salaries, specific grants and donations, and specific facilities costs and expenditures.
—annual audits are also done by fiscal year, but a year prior to the budgets, making alignment of the information between publicly available financial sources difficult (not to mention that some of the audit information is frankly out of date by the time of its posting). The audits appear to outline federal grants; contracts; lease activities; and real estate obligations as well as loans and other fiscal obligations. They also outline donor restrictions on funds. But as with the annual budgets, there is no outline of who donated what; all executive salaries; individual teacher salaries; all grants and donations; and clear delineation of facilities costs and expenditures as well as actual real estate holdings. As with the annual reports and budgets, the reporting is dependent on what the school itself provides to the auditing companies they hire for this purpose.
—990s for each DC charter LEA are publicly available on websites other than PCSB’s (for instance, the IRS website, guidestar, and pro publica’s nonprofit explorer)–but all are literally years behind the current year. (For example, the latest form for DC Prep is for 2019 on both PCSB’s and pro publica’s websites, dating from 2020, while guidestar has a 2018 form dating from 2019.) The 990s are the only place I have seen where some charter LEAs indicate that they have engaged in lobbying. The 990s also list the highest paid salaries, contracts, and fundraising expenses as well as contributions in excess of $5000—but without any donor information (i.e., just 5 individuals gave KIPP DC $14 million as reported on its 2019 990—but who they are is publicly unknown).
—financial analysis reports are created by PCSB based on information in the audits and data submitted directly to PCSB by charter LEAs. The financial analysis reports put that information into more readily understandable categories. The reports contain the days of cash on hand and percentage of DC and grant funding for each charter. The reports use this data among others to present “report cards” on each LEA’s fiscal strength.
—at risk funding reports before FY23 are collections of aspirational wishes and actions, not only because charters have not been required to report how their at risk funds are used, but also because the reporting is (perhaps obviously) highly variable. That will change slightly starting in 2024, when charters will report both their budgeted and actual at risk expenditures. But the variability of use will likely continue, as at risk funds in each charter are not mandated for any specific uses, unlike in DCPS.
II. PROBLEMS WITH THE CURRENT LANDSCAPE
As outlined above, the public has a lot of available fiscal information around our charters–but it is not easily or even directly related to the most basic questions of accountability with respect to public money.
Setting aside clear and direct fiscal mismanagement, here are the problems:
1. There are no truly independent audits of DC charters, whether for attendance (which is directly related to DC’s school ratings and payments) or taxpayer funds. Charters’ annual audits are done by companies hired by individual charter businesses.
2. There is no forensic accounting, or tracking, by DC government of any charter money, including randomized tracking of taxpayer funds and money following students from charters to DCPS after count day. This is important inasmuch as DCPS sees an influx of students from charters every year—but the money cannot follow those students because there is no tracking of it OR of students. It is also important because all publicly available information on DC charter finances originates with the charter nonprofits themselves, incentivizing obfuscation. (More on that under “audits” below.)
3. There are no rules on reporting specific charter expenditures for teacher pay and facilities. As noted above, the facilities funding is completely untracked and without any mandate for its use. As a result, public reporting on these and other areas of charter spending is entirely voluntary, incomplete at best, and publicly untransparent.
4. There is no required disclosure of donors and their donations to charter schools. While donations do not constitute a large percentage of DC charter revenue as far as I can see, for some charters donations are sizable and constitute a powerful tool in their operations. Moreover, the way in which philanthropic revenue is accounted for is less than clear, with literally unbelievable reporting of $0 in philanthropic revenue for some LEAs. (More on that under “philanthropy” below.)
5. There are no mandated charter reserves or limits on reserves.
6. There are no rules for investments, or use, of charter reserves, which are mainly DC taxpayer funds. This represents a boon for the financial sector, essentially transferring public dollars to private hands without any way for the public to have a direct say in that investment and a direct benefit from it.
7. Although there is public reporting of charter contracts, it is completely disaggregated (see the PCSB website here), with charter 990s the only other source of this information (where it is truncated and years behind the present). This means there is no way for anyone outside the LEAs themselves to know what contracts any given LEA has at any given moment.
8. No elected or appointed DC official with any oversight of DC charters has knowledge of individual LEA charter donors, use of reserves, teacher pay, per pupil expenditures, facilities expenditures, contracts, or use of at risk funds, so oversight of DC charters by officials directly accountable to the public is necessarily limited.
As a result of this weak and publicly unresponsive governance, several things are apparent with respect to DC charter finances:
–Every LEA has different methods, different desires, and different uses for its money. While the central tenet of DC charters is their independent governance, those different things are not accounted for anywhere clearly or unambiguously. In fact, if revealed at all, that information is disaggregated such that meaningful public oversight is nearly impossible.
–At no point can anyone outline basic financial issues in charters, such as which LEA pays teachers the best or even the most consistently (i.e., is there a minimum and a maximum salary for teachers and administrators); what return on investment LEAs have for their investments; and what hundreds of millions in facilities funds are used for.
–Many charter executives have large-scale pay that is revealed explicitly only in the LEA’s 990s—and thus disaggregated from all teacher pay in all public accounting and not up to date. But when plotted against charter teacher pay (see here if that link isn’t working), the disparity is jarring—especially as at least 10 charter executives are currently making more than DC’s mayor, despite no charter LEA having as many students as DCPS, which the mayor herself is nominally in charge of.
The bottom line: There is no way for anyone in the public sphere to understand where that annual $1 billion investment in our charters actually goes and how much is being directly invested in our kids.
Below are a few areas of charter finances where the lack of public sunshine is very problematic.
III. RESERVES
Per FY21 guidelines (the most recent available) for PCSB’s financial analysis reports, PCSB recommends that schools have “at least 45 days of cash on hand. Fewer than 30 days of cash on hand may be cause for concern.”
But the median of cash on hand for charters, per the FY21 financial analysis report, is 165 days. It is not clear what level, if any, is actually required (as opposed to recommended)—and certainly there is nothing about what a maximum should be.
At the March 3 oversight hearing, starting at the 4 hour and 55 minute mark of the video, at large council member Christina Henderson asked the PCSB executive director about cash on hand, noting one school with 24 days of cash on hand while another school with about 700 days. Henderson mused that if charter LEAs have all that cash, why not just pay their teachers more?
In response, the PCSB executive director and the PCSB director of finance noted that refinancing or saving for mortgages may be a reason a school has small or large reserves, respectively.
A few minutes later in the same hearing, Ward 3 council member Matt Frumin noted that if cash on hand is being banked for expansions, it’s getting ahead of the issue. He also noted that charter cash on hand goes up annually by $50 million.
Unfortunately, it’s not clear how to account for that annual growth.
For instance, the FY20 financial analysis report showed $351 million in “unrestricted cash” for DC’s charter schools.
But the FY21 financial analysis report showed that “unrestricted cash and cash equivalents” amounted to $419 million.
So: what is “unrestricted cash” versus “unrestricted cash and cash equivalents”? It is not defined clearly anywhere.
Moreover, annual growth in cash reserves appears to be different for each LEA, without any clearly delineated and publicly specified reasons for that growth, such that it is impossible for any DC officials or taxpayers to know if the growth is due to investments, better use of money, or something else (layoffs of staff, reorganizing, etc.).
Possibly the only deduction one can make around the annual growth of DC charter cash reserves is that it is mainly money paid by DC that is not going directly to students now or (possibly) ever, because most funding to DC charters comes directly from DC taxpayers.
When I mentioned last year to the PCSB director of finance this obscured public view of charter spending because of the obscurity around cash reserves, he noted that not only do PCSB staff check in with charters regularly when they see large reserves (or lack thereof), but that charter review and renewal reports show “patterns of cash” that elucidate their operation.
The trouble is that the public is not privy to PCSB staff conversations on that subject—not to mention that those charter renewal reports occur only every 5 years, which for the sake of public clarity and accounting is an eternity.
DC Prep provides an excellent example of these problems.
A year ago, at its May 2022 board meeting, DC Prep’s board discussed investing almost $30 million in cash reserves. That amount represents more than 10% of the LEA’s annual operating budget with about 2000 students. Shortly thereafter, DC Prep advertised for an investment manager (see the notice in the charter school section of the DC register, 69/26, dated 7/1/22).
As a staffer noted at minute 39 of the May 2022 meeting video, DC Prep has seen an extra $4 million in its coffers annually, mainly due to “healthy increases in per pupil funding.”
Not surprisingly, given that the school receives almost 90% of its revenues from DC taxpayers, at the 56 minute mark of the video of that May 2022 board meeting a DC Prep board member worried about the “optics” of a publicly funded charter school having an investment strategy for tens of millions.
But housing developer and board member Terry Eakin had a different view. At 58 minutes in the video, Eakin noted that “donors have given us over $36 million since the beginning [in 2003]. If we were investing in the stock market monies from the taxpayers, I think it would be different.” Eakin also noted (boldface mine) that “in the unlikely event we were to make a major investment and lose all of [the invested cash], it wouldn’t be monies we had gotten from DC. I would earmark it as monies we received from donors. . . . the way I look at it, we’re just trying to get a better return for our kids.”
At that same May 2022 board meeting, DC Prep’s board declined to give permanent raises to staff—even though teachers there are paid on average less than $70,000 per year; the school struggles with staff retention (that topic alone took up almost half of the May 2022 board meeting discussion); and the school’s top administrators have recently been paid more than the mayor.
Let us put all of this into perspective:
DC Prep’s most recent publicly available audits show that between 2014 and 2021, DC Prep got an average of 82% of its revenues directly from DC taxpayers. Each audit makes this statement: “DC Prep receives a substantial portion of its revenue from DC.” The school also has a fairly high debt load—something that the FY21 financial analysis report noted.
So we know that
–Terry Eakin’s statement regarding DC Prep’s cash reserves as given (mainly or wholly) by donors is incorrect; –DC Prep’s teachers are not well paid relative to its administrators; and –Despite troubles with staff retention, relatively low pay for teachers, and a high debt load, DC Prep’s board avoided using the LEA’s extra millions in cash to address any of it, declining to raise salaries overall or to offer (as detailed at minute 31 of the board video) a “substantial bonus” or “money” to discourage mid-year staff departures.
Upshot:
Even though charter cash reserves largely come from DC taxpayers, the purposefully weak governance structure of DC charters ensures that DC taxpayers (and the elected and appointed officials representing their interests) have NO control or say in any of it, even though all of it is central to the operation of those LEAs and the mission of teaching our kids and constitutes hundreds of millions transferred from the public to private hands.
IV. AUDITS
As noted above, DC charters’ annual audits are conducted by companies charters themselves hire and then provide with statements about the schools’ accounting. In addition, those audits and individual LEA reporting are the basis for PCSB’s financial analysis reports, which analyze and report on the fiscal health of charters.
But even while they appear to be extensive, charter audits have two glaring problems.
1. Charter business dealings and investments are not entirely (or at all) clear in the audits.
For instance, both KIPP DC and DC Prep own property that is not as far as I can see currently used or rented. As a result, I could not figure out how that is reported in the audits, because it is not specifically mentioned.
In December 2019, DC Prep bought 1619 Frankford St. SE, a decrepit residential property with a large lot, as a location for a future middle school. In the wake of public protest, DC Prep promised to sell the property if it got another location for its middle school. (See p. 79 of the transcript of the PCSB November 18, 2019 meeting here: “If we can secure an alternative site for our permanent location, we will resell the Frankford Street site.”)
But DC Prep still owns the property in 2023, despite being awarded in 2021 a huge site by DC for its middle school. How DC Prep’s ownership of 1619 Frankford is accounted for in publicly accessible documents is unclear–even when the school owes property taxesand accrued penalties on it.
In early 2017, KIPP DC bought 12 wooded, undeveloped acres behind Gainesville St. SE, in Hillcrest, and days later proposed to build a 900 seat high school there. While that proposal was defeated by community opposition, half a decade later KIPP DC still owns that land. The tax rate and assessed value is very low, amounting to a tiny fraction of KIPP DC’s expenditures and assets—but how this is accounted for, including the millions used to purchase the land and what KIPP DC’s future plans are for it, remain publicly obscured.
And that is not mentioning DC charters that also operate in other jurisdictions (i.e., Friendship and Eagle). Those operations are unaccounted for in publicly available documents for DC charters, even though those operations outside DC could affect the financial health of the LEAs’ DC operations.
2. Audits are delayed relative to other charter financial information, and this ensures poor information for the public while vitiating meaningful oversight.
Perhaps the most obvious example of that is the recent revelation that $2 million was embezzled from KIPP DC—which was (incredibly) not the only OR largest recent fiscal impropriety of KIPP DC.
KIPP DC’s $2 million embezzlement took place from April 2020 through August 2021, a relatively long period. But the school’s most recent publicly available audit, from June 2021, doesn’t mention it. That may be because KIPP DC was reported to have found the problem only months after that June 2021 audit, “during a routine internal review in December [2021].”
That said, the embezzlement did not become public knowledge until nearly a year after KIPP DC’s reported discovery of it, after the feds filed a lawsuit for civil forfeiture in August 2022.
In other words, but for the feds suing 8 months after KIPP DC said it discovered the $2 million embezzlement, we the DC public might STILL not know about any of this. As it is, the lawsuit was filed months after multiple spring oversight hearings in 2022 by the DC Council, hearings in which none of this was raised.
In addition to that embezzled $2 million, more than $5 million around construction contracts and commitments was in the last 2 or more years underreported by KIPP DC (see p. 42 in the June 2021 audit).
The most recent PCSB financial analysis report, from FY21, came out sometime after September 15, 2022–in the wake of reporting around the federal forfeiture lawsuit around the embezzlement at KIPP DC. The analysis of KIPP DC in that FY21 report gives the LEA a good rating for fiscal health, but also notes the $2M embezzlement AND the $5M underreporting. The financial analysis report goes on to note that it didn’t believe the underreporting was related to the embezzlement, but that the LEA will take “further corrective actions.”
So: what are those “further corrective actions” and when will we taxpayers hear about them?
In an early September 2022 story about the embezzlement, PCSB was reported to be holding a public hearing later in that same month to “highlight the steps it has taken and will take in the future to prevent other incidents of fiscal malfeasance in the charter sector.”
It never happened.
Then, in October 2022, when I spoke to him about the embezzlement, the PCSB director of finance said PCSB was “continuing to gather information and review it” and expected to have a “robust conversation” in November or December [2022] about it.
If that conversation ever happened, it certainly was not public.
That said, the charter board recently held a closed session on April 24, 2023 to discuss KIPP DC’s finances (remember: three YEARS after the embezzlement started and about two YEARS after the underreported $5 million). That 4/24/23 Monday morning meeting was publicly noticed only 72 hours before, on a Friday (April 21) in the DC Register.
And this is not even getting into the confusing information provided to the public about the $2 million that was embezzled.
For instance, the federal lawsuit specifically says this:
“Between July 1, 2019 and June 30, 2020, KIPP DC received approximately $1,372,412 in federal grants, and between July 1, 2020 and June 30, 2021, KIPP DC received approximately $3,426,314 in federal grants.”
One would thus conclude that the embezzled $2 million constituted federal grant money that the federal government is seeking to get back.
Yet in 2022 public reporting in the wake of that lawsuit filing (see here and here), a KIPP DC spokesperson said the embezzled funds came from “KIPP DC’s financial reserves and from a single private grant.”
So which is it: “private” money kept as cash reserves OR money the federal government is entitled to?
Now, three years after the embezzlement started, and two years after the underreporting of $5 million, we don’t know
whose money was taken; what the misreporting means for the public; when any missing money will be returned and how; and why none of this was ever publicly reported by KIPP DC and/or PCSB directly and unambiguously.
In fact, not one syllable about any of this was uttered at the recent spring 2023 oversight hearings at the council.
V. FACILITIES FUNDS
DC charter LEAs are granted facilities funds that provide a set amount per student each year, without any specification about how those funds are to be used. In addition, there is no tracking of them by any DC entity. In the last decade alone, DC charter LEAs received more than $1 billion in facilities allocations.
In a recent letter about charters wanting to have more money as a result of the DCPS teacher contract, the PCSB executive director noted that charter facilities funds must cover both capital expenses as well as maintenance for DC charter schools.
But that is in fact incorrect (as C4DC noted in its own correspondence on the subject): The UPSFF is meant to cover charter maintenance costs—which it in fact does in DCPS.
At the March 3 hearing, after noting that DC charter facilities allocations are about $25 million less than reported occupancy expenses in the sector, Ward 3 council member Matt Frumin said that $50 million of charter occupancy expenses are for maintenance. Thus, he noted, one might conclude that the facilities allowance for charters is $25 million too much!
Unfortunately, the accounting here is not good. For one, no one is tracking facilities funds. For another, facilities funds are given without regard for need. And for yet another, as a result of both of those things, no elected or appointed officials can exercise any oversight whatsoever.
It’s not just a blind trust—it’s needlessly anti-democratic and inevitably wasting public money.
Consider that in 2019, Rocketship applied to open a Ward 5 campus. Its application noted that eventually, the total facilities costs for all three of its DC campuses would amount to $6.5 million per year, for about 2112 students. The application noted that that comes out to about $3068 per student–which is less than what the school would expect to receive in per student charter facilities funds (in FY20, that was $3335 per student).
VI. PHILANTHROPY
Until sometime after 2017, philanthropic revenue in DC charters was reported unambiguously as precisely that: philanthropic revenue. (See, for example, the chart here for 2017, from the financial analysis report for that year.)
But sometime after 2017, PCSB stopped reporting philanthropic revenue clearly, eventually removing the term “philanthropy” entirely and changing the years of reporting, such that it is now practically impossible to know what, exactly, each charter has for philanthropic revenue.
Here’s what happened:
This document is a sequential compilation of screenshots of the FY18-FY21 financial analysis reports for exhibit 10, which starting in FY18 purportedly showed philanthropic revenue in DC charters.
In the FY18 report, this exhibit 10 table is titled “philanthropic revenue by school.” But unlike the 2017 table (where the column reporting this data is labeled “philanthropy”), here the values for individual LEAs are put into a column labeled “FY [X year] grants and contributions.”
As OSSE can and does give grants to charter schools, this is a bit confusing: what grants and what contributions? It’s not said. But if one looks at the 2017 table, and compares the 2017 values to the values reported for FY2017 on the FY18 table, it seems like they are the same values.
But while we can thus deduce (at least for the few LEAs I checked) that “grants and contributions” for 2018 = philanthropy for 2017, this is not explained anywhere.
For the FY19 financial analysis report, this information is reported differently yet. Instead of labelling the columns in exhibit 10 “FY [X year] grants and contributions” (as was done for the prior year’s report), the FY19 financial analysis report labels all of them with a 2-year span—for example, “2018-2019 total grants and other contributions.”
So: Is that a fiscal year? A school year? A calendar year?
Again, it is unexplained—but again, one can deduce that these are likely the same values as shown in the same exhibit for the same years in the FY18 financial analysis report.
That is, the “FY2017 grants and contributions” reported in the FY2018 financial analysis report for exhibit 10 (“philanthropic revenue by school”) appear to be the same as the “2016-2017 total grants and contributions” reported in the “philanthropic revenue by school” (exhibit 10) in the FY2019 financial analysis report—at least for the few I checked. The totals certainly add up to the same numbers.
But who will check from one year to the next to see if the reporting changed at all, in the event that these are in fact *not* intended to be equivalents, as no explanation is provided?
For the same exhibit in the FY20 financial analysis report, the labelling appears to be the same for the columns as in the FY19 financial analysis report—but the entire table is titled differently, as “grants and other contributions by school.”
Thus, with the FY20 financial analysis report, we have entirely lost any mention of philanthropy or philanthropic revenue!
As with the FY19 financial analysis report, exhibit 10 in the FY20 financial analysis report labels the columns with a year spread—for instance, the column with the most recent data is “2019-2020 total grants and contributions.”
In the latest financial analysis report, for FY21, exhibit 10 is different yet again, with the entire table being labelled “grants and other contributions by LEA” and columns being labelled thusly: “FY [year] total grants and other contributions.”
For all the exhibit 10 tables contained in the FY18-FY21 financial analysis reports, it appears that the column with the most recent data has the same values as a column outlining grants and contributions by LEA in those reports’ exhibit 9, which outlines sources of revenue by LEA (including total revenue, federal revenue, grants, and other (unspecified) income). The column in each report’s exhibit 9 that appears to be identical to that exhibit 10 column is titled “total grants and other contributions.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, each report’s exhibit 9 and all their columns, including the ones outlining grants and contributions, doesn’t mention philanthropy at all.
Thus, back in October, to better understand where philanthropic revenue figures in this reporting, I spoke with PCSB director of finance Michael Bayuk. He told me that the exhibit 9 column for the FY21 financial analysis report (“total grants and other contributions”) is state and local grants and philanthropy. He told me that “we didn’t think it” worthy of including philanthropy separately as a category.
He then noted that a “large part of these funds” (i.e., in that column of total grants and other contributions) is philanthropy. (I discovered, however, that this last bit is not true, at least for FY21—read on.)
As far as OSSE grants go, Bayuk noted that sometimes OSSE is a pass-through for federal money, so in that case, if an OSSE grant to a charter is federal money, it gets counted as federal for this table. The column in exhibit 9 titled “other income” is activity fees, interest income, rental income, and anything that doesn’t fit into the other columns. He noted that it is variable; it is certainly not forthcoming in terms of defining, or breaking out, where the money is coming from.
To better suss out philanthropic revenue in DC charters, in October 2022 I requested by FOIA from PCSB the source files for the column on exhibit 9 of the FY21 financial analysis report titled “total grants and other contributions,” broken out in terms of state, local, and other grants; philanthropy; and whatever else is contained in that column for each school.
Therein ensued nearly 6 months’ worth of obfuscation including unlawful delays; creation of documents specifically for me that were not what I requested; incomplete production; and document manipulation such that dates were obscured. (You can read the whole sorry saga here.)
But by March 2023, I had in my possession (finally!) what I think (and hope and believe) is a complete set of what are most likely original source files for this information. They consist of spreadsheets with an actual line item called “income from philanthropy.” Here’s a link to all the different folders and files, produced over a period of more than a month.
That line item, income from philanthropy, is separated out from grants and is apparently what DC charters report each year directly to PCSB. By compiling the FY21 income from philanthropy line items for each charter and comparing them to the values shown for each charter for grants and contributions on the FY21 financial analysis report, I discovered a few things:
1. PCSB collects information every year from DC charters specifically on their philanthropic revenue. But because there is no required reporting of philanthropy in DC charters other than this, the only measure we have is what PCSB gets—and it is available to DC taxpayers only by FOIA and until such a time as PCSB decides not to request that data from charters.
2. For the most recent year of grants and contributions in the FY21 financial analysis report, the values shown for that in exhibits 9 and 10 are identical—but in most cases not the same as “income from philanthropy” as reported on the documents I received via FOIA.
3. For only a relatively small subset of schools (12 out of 66 by my count), philanthropy constitutes the vast majority of grants and contributions.
4. For other schools, the majority of their grant and other contribution income appears not to come from philanthropy. For some of these, however, the utter lack of philanthropic revenue reported is mystifying. How is it that KIPP DC doesn’t have any philanthropic revenue for an entire year? (See this webpage for KIPP: “KIPP DC relies 100% on private donations to fund growth efforts to reach more students and operate critical programs like KIPP Forward and the Capital Teaching Residency.”)
5. For yet another subset of schools, there is nothing–no philanthropy and/or no grants—which appears to highlight disproportional outside funding in DC charters.
Notwithstanding that lack of clarity around philanthropic revenue, the sheer amount in charter “grants and contributions” is astonishing. In that short period starting with FY18, for instance, the total grew thusly:
All of that begs the question: what was/is behind that growth? Federal money in the pandemic? Something else? The point appears to be that no one knows—least of all DC taxpayers.
And this analysis of PCSB reporting shows that obscurity is purposeful.
VII. SOLUTIONS
All of these issues—the obfuscation, the lack of data, the impossibility of oversight, and the lack of budgetary guardrails and basic guidelines—make clear that there is no way for anyone in the public sphere to understand where DC taxpayers’ annual $1 billion investment in our charters goes and how much is directly invested in our kids.
This isn’t about the ever-mentioned “outcomes,” whether test scores, graduation rates, or post-secondary career or college achievement. It is, literally, about where the money DC taxpayers provide is going. Simply put, such “outcomes” are meaningless metrics without understanding where OUR money is actually going–and where it isn’t going.
So let us look at what we CAN and SHOULD do better regarding public accountability in charter finances:
–Track students so money follows them.
–Require teacher minimum pay in charters, along with full disclosure of all charter teacher salaries as in DCPS.
–Require documentation from individual LEAS that all their charter teachers receive increases as a result of any cash the charter sector receives as a result of DCPS teacher wage increases from union contracts.
–Disclose all donors and the amount they donate to all DC publicly funded schools.
–Hold regular investigative, independent audits of all DC charter businesses.
–Make DC—not private businesses or the financial institutions they choose to enrich—the reserve holder for all charter reserves, in amounts proportional to the percentage of taxpayer funds received. DC would be responsible for investment of that money and would pass the investment proceeds only to charter LEAs that have demonstrated need of it. This underscores that DC charter businesses are not mere nonprofits–they are chartered entities that are chartered for a specific public purpose and do not exist to profit from (or to profit others in) that public purpose.
–Enact a maximum pay limit for charter executives and administrators.
–Decouple all efforts to specifically increase charter teacher pay from increases in DCPS teacher pay. The two sectors are separate and governed differently, and teacher pay is purposefully different in each. If DC charter teacher pay is inadequate at any given moment, that is an issue solely to be addressed by the charter sector–not coupled to anything in DCPS.
–Disclose all charter school business deals and assets explicitly and directly, naming each.
–Have a website for all charter contracts per LEA at all times.
–Have explicit disclosure of, and tracking for, all facilities funds to charters, and apportion facilities funds based on demonstrated need and without regard for maintenance costs, which are included in the UPSFF.CommentLikeYou can also reply to this email to leave a comment.
Gene Weingarten has been described as a ‘national treasure’. I agree – he’s the funniest, insightful writer alive that I know of. Better even than the great Mark Twain, or the hilarious Dave Barry, or any of the exceedingly funny stand-up comedians I’ve seen. Too bad we don’t have George Carlin or Lenny Bruce around any more.
After the Washington Post canceled Weingarten, and also the Style Invitational weekly word joke contest, and their monthly “Skywatch” feature on astronomy, I despaired.
I seriously thought of canceling my subscription to WapPo. But as a former newsman myself, many decades ago, and and having delivered the Washington Daily News every weekday afternoon all through junior high, I want daily newspapers to continue. Plus, the paper itself gets plenty of use for avoiding messes when doing projects of any sort. So I didn’t, but I also really missed reading GW.
Today was my lucky day: I was reminded by something, somewhere, that GW is available in something called ‘substack’, which I had avoided investigating until now. I finally decided to look up “Gene Weingarten Blog” and found it. He is still funny, but if you want to read it regularly then you have to pay an additional $5 per month. Fooey. It was certainly cheaper for me to have it be part of my monthly WaPo subscription (even though that cost has risen dramatically, with the almost complete collapse of advertising. Look at a microfilm image of any newspaper or magazine of 50 years ago with their counterparts today, and you will see an amazing difference. I would estimate that the majority of the actual printed space on the pages of most newspapers or magazinwere *mostly* consisted of advertising. And the advertisers have mostly jumped on-line, so entities like Facebook or Google mostly are advertisers)
A treat awaits you if you go there: a cleverly-edited clip of Tucker Carlson seeming to apologize for all those lies. Here is the
link. I hope it works for you. Let me know in the comments if it doesn’t work.
Here in Michigan, the Democratic legislature just re-affirmed our state’s longstanding commitment to working families by removing anti-laborprovisions from state law. The move doesn’t apply to teachers and other public employees, because the conservative U.S. Supreme Court sideda few years back with Right-wing activists in their efforts to hinder contributions to public sector unions, but it’s still good news for the labor movement overall.
And I wanted to use their effort—alongside Republican efforts in other states to threaten teachers for what they say in classrooms—to make a simple point.
We need teachers unions. Other folks more prominent than me, like AFT’s Randi Weingarten, have made this pointrecently too. But I wanted to add my own voice as someone who has not been a union member, and someone who—although I’ve appeared with Randion her podcast and count many union members as friends—has never been an employee or even a consultant.
If you want to talk dollars, The Walton Family Foundation once supported my research on charter schools to the tune of more than $300,000. Arnold Ventures supported my fundraising for a research center at Michigan State–$1.9 million from them. And the US Department of Education awarded my team more than $2 million to study school choice—while Betsy DeVos was secretary.
Think about that when I say school vouchers are horrific. And understand, I’m getting no support from teachers’ unions.
Instead it is I who supports them.
I’ve been studying teacher labor markets almost as long as school vouchers. Mostly my research has looked at teacher recruitment and retention. But I’ve also written about teachers’unionsspecifically. There’s a debate among scholars on what unions do and whether their emphasis on spending translates into test score differences. In the “rent seeking” framework economists use, the concern is that dollars spent on salaries don’t have direct academic payoffs.
There is no question that spending more money on public schools has sustained and generational impacts on kids. Research has “essentially settled” that debate, according to today’s leading expert on the topic.
But I want to branch out from dollars and cents and test scores to talk about teacher voice.
And I want to do that by raising a few questions that I’ve asked myself over the last couple years:
Why should the voice of a billionaire heiress from Michigan with no experience in public schools count for more than the voices of 100,000 teachers in my state’s classrooms every day?
Why should the simple fact that they work with children made by other people mean that teachers surrender their own autonomy and judgment not just as professionals but as human beings?
Why should educators have to work under what amounts to gag orders, afraid to broach certain topics or issues in the classroom? Some states are setting up hotlines to report on teachers as if they’re parolees, and a bill in New Hampshire would essentially give the fringe-Right Secretary of Education subpoena power to haul teachers in front of a special tribunal for teaching “divisive concepts.” This, after a Moms for Liberty chapter put out a bounty on New Hampshire teachers who were likewise divisive on an issue. Read: an issue of race or gender.
It’s not just threats to teacher employment. We know this. There are threats to teachers’ lives. How many teachers have died alongside their students—other people’s children—over the years in school shootings?
Why does the Right claim to trust teachers enough to arm them with gunsin response to those shootings, but not enough to let them talk about race, gender, or any other “divisive concept?” Even some conservative commentatorshave worried publicly that we’re asking teachers to do too much. Why are we asking them to be an armed security force too?
‘In her recent history of “The Teacher Wars”, The New York Times’ Dana Goldstein noted that teachers formed unions, and fought for teacher tenure, to protect themselves not just professionally but personally. For free speech. To prevent harassment from supervisors—then as now, teachers were mostly professional women—and to keep from being fired for pregnancy or marital status.
So really, attacks on teachers are nothing new. Instead, teachers seem to be one of the few professions that it’s still acceptable in political conversation—even a mark of supposed intellectual sophistication in some circles—to ponder the shortcomings of the educators who work with our kids every day.
There’s nothing sophisticated about attacking hardworking, thoughtful, and dedicated people. And the only result of doing so will be the further erosion of our public, community schools. And that’s really the point. Just a few days ago, we learned that the big data that I and many others have gotten used to working with finally caught up to the on-the-frontlines warnings of educators everywhere: teachers are exiting the profession at unprecedented rates.
I’ve taken no money from teachers’ unions for any of the work I do. I’ve never been a member of a union—teachers’ or otherwise. Until now. Because after writing this today, I made a donation to my state’s primary teachers’ union and became a general member: a person “interested in advancing the cause of education…not eligible for other categories of membership.”
There’s a word for that in the labor movement. You hear it a lot here in Michigan, where I grew up and now teach future teachers in a college of education. That word is Solidarity.
Do you realize how DIFFICULT the problems are on today’s 7th-grade PARCC-style standardized tests?
Take a look at this handful of questions, and feel free to look at others. If you compare these to the typical 7th-grade standardized test items from 30 or 40 years ago, you will have to conclude that these items asked these days are **much** more difficult than the ones from the past.
I strongly doubt that the folks who wrote these items, and those who are putting these items on the tests that nearly every 7th grader in the USA has to take, could have solved these when they were 7th graders?
And how many of my readers can solve these now, as adults?
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