What I Actually Said

I take responsibility for what I say and write, but not for how I am misquoted on line and in print. This is the statement I actually read at the Feb. 22, 2016, school board meeting:

I would like to explain why I made this motion and why I am voting to end our superintendent’s contract, after this board voted unanimously every year to rate him as “highly effective,” and despite my belief that he has done more for the underserved children of our community than anyone, ever.

I am taking this step solely because a group of people has told us, in person and in writing, that they will never stop until we get rid of him, and — finally — I believe them. There is no chance he can continue to be our educational leader while under siege like this. Those of you who feel so strongly that he must go have demonstrated that you will pursue this end AT ANY COST.

And — by all that is holy — LOOK at the cost! I am not referring to the monetary cost of buying out his legal contract because we want to sever it. No, just look around you. Friends, neighbors, and relatives divided and distraught. A school district’s and a community’s reputation in tatters. Anonymous writers and commenters putting the ugly side of human nature on full display. News media which, as a parent pointed out at our last meeting, “don’t care about us” but that are willing to hype and amplify controversy because it SELLS.

Well, it doesn’t sell our schools or our community. It will take a decade to recover from this, if we ever do. We WILL lose students over the perception created of our schools, which WILL lead to budget difficulties and to staff layoffs. How has that “supported” teachers or students?

The school at the center of the current controversy is suffering. Children do not understand why picketers and police and television trucks are at their school. Teachers are in turmoil, as former employees nag them to choose sides. How can the intensely personal and collaborative profession of teaching work when the staff is divided like that?

We WILL have great difficulty retaining the talented teachers and administrators we already have, because they don’t want to work in such an atmosphere. Who would? We WILL have a hard time attracting high-quality candidates for teaching jobs, for administrative jobs, and for the superintendency, BECAUSE of the rancor and dysfunction here.

The only possible silver lining I can foresee from this utter debacle would be if the quiet, calm servant-leaders of our community step up. We need people to run for this board who can put the needs of our children first, who can commit to improving our practice so that we stop failing so many of them, and who can bring us together to work furiously and with great urgency to do better at what is a society’s MOST important job: raising our young to successfully take over from us one day. Please look into your hearts and see if YOU can advance the schools’ part in this vital work better than this board has been able to do.

When Good Media Go Bad

Lately, I have been using this platform as a means to get school board communications before the public. I did not ask permission to do so (although I did notify my colleagues when I did it), so that any repercussions would fall on me alone. Two recent posts (on Jan. 31 and Feb. 7) were reprints of replies to letters from the public. The original letters had been published elsewhere, so I believed the replies should also be made public.

Other posts, like this one, are all my opinions, speaking for no one but myself. These are the kinds of extended meditations that have no place at a public meeting where we do the district’s business. But I think they can address the quite apparent desire for more extensive communication about what our board does and why.

Today’s post springs from, but is certainly not confined to, how the crude and unrestrained shock-news and Internet free-for-all of this era can distort and undermine public enterprises.

In these times, everyone has more power to publicize their views than the editor of the largest newspaper once had. They have public platforms to say anything they want, with no fact-checking, and can even do so anonymously. They have great power to do harm, as we have seen in our own community.

People who run with every grievance to televised ambulance chasers masquerading as news media have sullied the reputation of our schools and our community for years to come. When an account ends with “Boom!” or (drops mic), you can be pretty sure that its point was to get revenge or to “show” someone. There have been a lot of accounts like this, sharing more heat than light, and the collateral damage has been substantial. We will likely lose students over this debacle, which means we will have to lay off staff.

We will have difficulty getting and keeping great administrators or public-spirited candidates for the school board. Prepare yourselves for a barrage of candidates motivated by anger and personal grievances, rather than a desire to work hard for the benefit of everyone’s children. As with our state legislature and our Congress, we have made the job of school board trustee so distasteful that intelligent people will avoid it. How does this serve our community?

The job of superintendent — if we expect someone committed to the changes necessary to improve children’s life prospects — has become impossible. A small group determined to drive out a superintendent at any cost can succeed. The tremendous good we have done over the past several years for ALL children in our schools has been overshadowed by the perception created by unleashing Internet trolls. And once they are involved, NO ONE WINS. It will take a decade to recover from this damage — if we even survive that long.

Our governor has specifically arrogated to himself all power over and responsibility for schools that federal and state metrics deem to be “failing.” These metrics prioritize “achievement gaps” (defined solely on the basis of annual state tests), including the gap between the top and bottom 30 percents of student scores in a building. In schools with homogeneous student populations, such gaps will rarely exist. In schools with a diverse population — where students vary by socioeconomic status, by English language–proficiency, by disability — such gaps are common. In a gifted magnet school, such a gap is almost inevitable.

Yet we decided, as a district, to beat the odds by changing curriculum, instructional practice, professional development, resources, and support services to apply research-proven techniques to meet every child’s needs. We had never done that before.

One criticism repeatedly leveled at our superintendent and board is that we must be doing something wrong if we keep losing good people. Let me share a couple of stories….

Several years ago, a recent retiree came to a board meeting to scream at us about a personal grievance he had. He was a large and tall man with a threatening demeanor and obscene language. He then slammed his retirement plaque down on the table in front of the board president and stormed out. I had no idea who he was.

The next day, I happened to be speaking to another retiree from the same middle school. She related that he was like that with his colleagues and even with his students. I had had children at that school for six years and wondered how it was that I had never heard of him. “Because we did our best to keep him away from children like yours!” was the reply.

I was horrified by this. My own children had been protected from educational malpractice but other kids were subjected to it for decades?! I’m not blaming the administrators, who did the best they could, but this is unacceptable. Some people do not belong in a classroom. That’s true for abusive people like this man, but it is also true for sweet but ineffectual people who can neither control a classroom nor teach well. Not every staff departure is a loss of a “great educator.”

Decades ago, we became aware that we had what could only be termed a predator in one of our schools. He was put on administrative leave at once and tenure charges were filed. It took several years and more than $600,000 to fire him. We are no longer so constrained.

I was not in favor of the string of union-busting laws foisted upon Michigan public schools in recent years. I believe in collective bargaining rights, and I believe that the give-and-take of bargaining can protect the interests not only of staff but of students. However, when we have had to lay off teachers due to reduced enrollment, being able to consider teacher qualification and skills, and not just time on the job, has been good for kids.

Of course, most of the people laid off, or who have chosen to leave us, or who have retired early in recent years have NOT been poor employees — but a few of them were. We should be relieved that they left rather than mourning their departure. We would never want to heave that sigh of relief publicly or hurt them personally, but can we not agree that it is more important for us to have the best possible teachers for our children than to provide reliable lifelong jobs? We are a school district, not an employment agency.

All of this is not to discount the importance of employee morale. I believe that most teachers — and probably all of the great ones — were attracted to the profession because of the lives they could change. Giving them the techniques and the support to “save them all” (at least in theory) is the best thing we can do for morale. The work itself — not certificates of appreciation or catered lunches — is the reward. They deserve respect, professional support and compensation, and our gratitude, but what they want most is to be saving lives, every day.

Local update: Board response to Mr. Rytman

Parent Richard Rytman wrote to the Board of Education with a number of questions on Feb. 2. At the request of President Mikulski, I replied for the Board on Feb. 3. Later on Feb. 3, he responded to me: “I heard that my letter to the board was posted somewhere or will be in the next paper, not sure if that is true but if so, it was not my intent when I sent it.” On Feb. 4, his letter was printed in The Independent. In order to respond as directly, transparently, and quickly as possible to all who read that letter and share his concerns, I am reprinting the original reply here (with some bold formatting and one word in [brackets] added for clarity). I do not think it appropriate to use Facebook, which limits access to members, as an outlet for such communications.

From: Martha Toth
To: rrytman
Cc: VB Board; Michael Van Tassel
Sent: Wed, Feb 3, 2016 12:27 pm
Subject: Re: Cancellation of Board Meeting/Climate Survey

Mr. Rytman:

As I am retired and President Mikulski is trying to perform his CEO job while dealing with pressing district business, he has asked me to reply on behalf of the board.

Thank you for your letter. One thing we absolutely agree with you on is that this board has done a poor job of communicating, leaving a vacuum to be filled by inaccurate speculation and worse. A serious mistake we made was assuming that the people behind the SavageStrong site, who seem to have a large following, were actually interested in the answers we provided to their 26-page list of detailed questions. Since they have chosen not to share those answers (and in fact keep posting the already answered questions on their site), we will share them with those who write to us. I may not hit every point you have raised, but I will sincerely try to be responsive to your concerns (those raised by you both in this letter and previously).

• Our reluctance to name names or to get into the details of the investigation into the M-STEP irregularities stems from our desire to both protect the due process rights of teachers and shield the district from liability. We believe they also had a right to privacy (abrogated by self-appointed defenders) until the disciplinary process plays out.

• Staff were notified as close to the end of the school day as possible of their administrative leave with pay because they are contractually allowed to leave the premises the minute the children are dismissed. Do you think it would have been preferable to notify them by letter or email, instead of in person? Escorting them out is legally required once they are on leave. Substitute teachers were arranged for their classes beforehand, so there would be no break in continuity of instruction.

• We were unable to note that the problem with statistically impossible or highly improbable jumps in student scores was not a problem with the gifted classes at Savage, without thereby identifying the (now identified by members of the public) other teachers who were under suspicion of improper coaching.

• We still cannot get into the details of the investigative report with you or other members of the public without compromising the disciplinary hearings (or possible future court proceedings) for these teachers. It is also possible that additional interviews or other investigation may be called for, which is why we do not consider the investigation “closed.”

• We do not consider the competence or the professional ethics of our attorneys, who have specific responsibilities as “officers of the court,” to be at issue, and would caution others from doing so in public, as an attorney’s reputation is vital to his profession and will no doubt be defended vigorously.

• As with most sensitive legal documents, the investigative report was not “given” to board members, but rather was available for their inspection at the board office. Not every trustee has made such an inspection, so some are less familiar with the details than others, but in no way was this document kept from the board.

Moving on to Climate Survey….

• This is not the first time we have done such surveys. This is a function of central administration that is not micromanaged by the board and participation in this nationally used version was, indeed, planned as early as last spring. Typically, the board is briefed on the results of such surveys, but we do not involve ourselves in their planning. This is why board members may not have been aware of the plans at earlier meetings. Similarly, we do not micromanage student participation in various anonymous surveys, which are done using guidelines compliant with state and federal law, for such purposes as tracking student use of illegal drugs and other substance abuse or their risky sexual behavior. Such information is never traceable back to individuals and comes to the board only as a report afterwards.

• The board would normally have had a more extended and productive discussion of the survey results at a work-study, but such careful consideration was really not possible in the charged environment of our last meeting.

You wrote: If there is “a positive environment, then how do you explain the exodus of teachers, pending law suits and mounting number of lawyers being obtained?” We respectfully reject all of those premises.

Regarding teacher retention (much of which was already communicated to you previously):

• This is a national problem, after decades of teacher scapegoating and increasingly onerous micromanaging of the profession, coupled with reduced and/or flat compensation. There are 53% fewer people enrolling in teacher training programs (ASCD), an average of 18% of teachers leave the profession within their first five years (U.S. Dept. of Ed.), and 7.6% of teachers move annually between districts (U.S. Dept. of Ed.).

• This is a statewide problem: Legislative changes to teacher evaluation (now to be largely based on student test scores); to employee rights (re layoff, placement, recall, discipline, and discharge — all now prohibited subjects of collective bargaining); to tenure rights (change from “just cause” to “arbitrary and capricious” standard); to health insurance (20% mandatory copay and 3% of salary toward retiree health care); to retirement (reduction of contribution percentage [multiplier] from 1.5% to 1.25%); to establish a so-called Right to Work (meaning that fewer members carry the load of union dues); and to school funding (resulting in reduced total compensation nearly everywhere) have all contributed to a hostile climate and prompted many to leave or to retire earlier than they had planned.

• This is a VBPS problem, mostly due to state-induced financial constraints, but also due to our efforts to achieve high levels of learning for all (including our at-risk population):

⁃ Grade reconfiguration and the closure of a third of our elementary buildings led to layoffs, as we downsized operations to suit our lower student population.
⁃ Some teachers also chose to leave then rather than change buildings or grade levels.
⁃ Starting pay for most teachers is about $34,000, and we can no longer afford regular step increases.
⁃ Reduced funding also forced strict compliance with federal special education rules, leading to increased class sizes.
⁃ As student population continues to decline (largely due to children not being born five or more years ago), so will our staffing levels.
⁃ Staff assignments were changed in summer 2014 to better meet the needs of at-risk children at Rawsonville School; some staff chose to leave rather than be transferred.
⁃ We do expect continuous change and adjustment to new curricula and teaching practices in order to raise student achievement.

• These realities our district faces may certainly lead to teachers looking for work elsewhere, or in another profession entirely, which is a situation we find frustrating, since we want the very best teachers here in our schools and educating our kids. Unfortunately, given our situation as a district and working with the resources we are given, that trend is likely to continue here, as it will in districts across the state, until changes are made at the state and federal level.

Moving to the ongoing issue of “exit interviews”:

We do not see the value in doing the kind of exit interviews apparently desired by some of the public, as the professional literature (Educ. Leadership & Org. Behavior; Socy. for Human Resource Mgt.) recommends against it. In the field of education, staff depend upon good references and are rarely completely open about why they leave. Instead, we do have our own ways of soliciting feedback and have taken steps already to deal with problems uncovered by this feedback. We also offer many opportunities for feedback before a staff member might choose to leave, including weekly staff meetings and the well-established central office lunch tour (where administrators regularly eat with teachers to offer informal opportunities for communication).

• Our exit information process:

⁃ Building Principal speaks with staff members upon their notice of resignation. Discussion is held regarding reasons why and if there was anything the District could have done differently. This information is relayed to Human Resources.
⁃ Human Resource Director speaks with every Administrator to determine reason for leaving the District.
⁃ Human Resources Director discusses with Superintendent the resignation/reason for leaving. Discussion also includes ways to proactively work on issues raised.
⁃ Human Resources/Superintendent’s office send letter to staff accepting resignation and conveying our good wishes.
⁃ Resignation is placed on Board Consent Agenda along with the reason for leaving the District cited by the employee.

• A New Hire Orientation was instituted to better inculcate new employees into our culture; our mentor-teacher program for new hires was improved; and teachers were given specific, research-based training in classroom management.

• A New Hiring Process was developed after we had an unusual number of new teachers who did not meet our expectations for renewal of their contracts. Better screening, a trained interview team, demonstration of model lessons, and in-service for principals on hiring were all instituted and have resulted in stronger new hires.

Finally, we are not supposed to discuss employee departures in any way, or to speculate on the reasons for them beyond that given by the employee and noted in the Consent Agenda — despite one trustee’s persistence in doing so, against board bylaws and procedures that she made the motion to approve some years ago. Under the Open Meetings Act, an employee has the right to be present if there will be discussion related to them at a Board meeting. The employee must be informed of this in advance and be given the opportunity to request that the discussion take place in closed session. The Act strictly prohibits this discussion without employee’s consent and/or knowledge. We break the law if we discuss an employee without this notice and consent.

Returning to your premises above, we do not have any unusual number of lawsuits in progress against the district, and we have not been “obtaining mounting numbers of attorneys.”

I hope this has addressed most, if not all, of your concerns. I am sorry that a board meeting with a large crowd is not a good venue for going into such detail when such issues are not on the agenda. Nearly everything I have written above has been part of an agenda item at a work-study within the past year.

-Martha Toth

Our Intractable Conflict

I imagine I am far from the only one who has been losing sleep over the way our community has been torn apart. My view: people who have wanted for a long time to get rid of our superintendent seized on the M-STEP scandal as “the last straw” in their litany of complaints. I think it is reprehensible to defend what certainly appears to be cheating in order to discredit the person who moved quickly to restore our integrity. Good grief, what message does THAT teach our children?

But let’s put that aside for a moment. Obviously, he is a polarizing figure, with very loyal supporters and very adamant detractors. How is it possible for one person to be viewed so differently? I suggest that it is simply a result of the lenses through which he is viewed. We all filter the information we receive, based on our perception of the accuracy and credibility of its sources. But, most importantly, we filter based on our subconscious emotional judgments. Fascinating, credible, and replicated research has demonstrated that we make up our minds about political candidates almost instantly, and that we rarely change our opinions based upon any subsequent factual information we come across. Thus, for example, people will say of both Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz that they “simply cannot be trusted.” If pressed, they can often come up with rationalizing evidence for their opinions, but — in reality — the opinions came first and are later bolstered and justified with “facts” (put in parentheses because they are often factually wrong).

The same phenomenon operates in this case: both sides made snap judgments, have their opinions, and are mightily resistant to changing them.

Those who see him as The Problem in our district will cite the way they believe certain individual employees or others have been treated by him as the main reason they think he is “wrong” for our community. They may have the facts wrong about some or all of these cases, but that does not matter: they “know” he is a “bully.” Any good that they grudgingly admit he has accomplished is outweighed by the harm they believe he has inflicted. Except for some decades-old personal affront about their treatment as teens (historically not the most reliably detached observers), the harm is generally described in terms of poor treatment of adult employees.

Those who see him as The Change Agent tend to focus more on children — not their OWN children but children who struggle, fail, give up, are lost. They see him as the relentless but passionate nag who reminds us every day that our work literally saves lives — or not — and that nothing could be more urgent than getting better at it, so that fewer children are left behind and lost. If feelings are hurt or people leave because they don’t share in either the urgency or the belief that we can and must do more, then that is a mere side effect, outweighed by the good that is done in aspiring to reach the ideal.

Clearly, from my presentation, my bias is toward the kid-centered rather than the adult-centered point of view. I believe my responsibilities as an elected trustee are (1) to provide the best possible education to our community’s children, (2) to be a good steward of public monies, and (3) to be a humane employer —IN THAT ORDER. When there are conflicts in those goals, earlier ones take precedence over later ones. Thus, when the state legislature adopted an unprecedented cut in per-pupil funding (in order to sustain the $1.7-billion cut in businesses taxes) just before we were legally required to adopt a budget for the following year, I voted for a deficit budget. I knew it would have to be fixed later, but I could not justify the wholesale and precipitous cuts in educational services it would take to balance that budget immediately. It took time and a transparent process (including building closures, redistricting, and negotiation of contracts in conflict with priority 3) to accomplish that.

I would ask everyone in our community to think about their own priorities for our schools, and about how they would resolve conflicts in those priorities. Because that is precisely what I think is at issue here and now.

Tragedy in Belleville

Our community is divided. Personal interactions are ugly and mean. I am so heartsick and upset about this that I do not know where to begin or how to end it. Part of me wants to run away, to literally pull up stakes and leave the community, to abandon the school system I have poured my heart and soul into since I first volunteered for a millage campaign in 1981, shortly after I moved here.

When the realtor who sold us our house the year before told us that the school district was “by no means the worst” in the area, I worried a bit. When a preschool teacher told me my daughter was already reading and advised us to think about sending her elsewhere, I bristled. “No! You don’t run away, you fight to make things better!”

And that’s what I did, for decades, in millage and bond campaigns, in parent and advocacy groups, in thousands of hours as a classroom volunteer, in 25 years as a trustee. For much of that time, it felt like a hopeless crusade. Elections were lost, plunging us repeatedly into five-hour days and endless rounds of layoffs. The most sincere efforts often got no traction in raising student achievement. State micromanaging left us with less and less local control.

But just four years into Supt. Van Tassel’s tenure, I see

• the development and adoption of a comprehensive, research-based curriculum almost completed — for the first time

• the provision of proper resources and training for that curriculum, in nearly all subjects and at all grade levels — for the first time

• the adoption — finally! — of definitions of what, exactly, constitutes high-quality instruction in every curricular area that are so rich and inspiring as to make a parent weep with joy

• attention to balancing building, subject, and grade-level teams by skill set, because no one could be expected to have mastered all the complex skills that constitute true high-quality teaching

• the separation of teacher evaluation (which I believe has been prescribed by the state in misguided ways) from professional development: in-classroom modeling and coaching by the best teachers we know, to help teachers reach every child

• a regular program of inculcation and development of principals into true educational leaders, rather than just cheerleaders and building managers; we now have some of the best administrators anywhere

• an Information Technology Plan that has brought us fully into the 21st Century and provides ongoing updates

• a physical plant that was downsized to adapt to lower student population — including building closures and redistricting — without the acrimony and financially dangerous delay experienced by districts all around us

• the implementation of a long-range facility upgrade program to protect and enhance what previous generations built

• a fund balance that moved from a 10% deficit to an amount that allows us to meet current expenses without short-term borrowing — for the first time in many years

• constantly updated policies, procedures, and handbooks that allow employees to know what is expected of them despite the hundreds of laws passed annually that affect our operations

• clear discipline and anti-bullying policies and procedures, which produced a significant reduction in disciplinary incidents and suspensions

• specialized schools within our comprehensive high school and at the best career technical education center in SE Michigan that offer real choices and opportunities to students; many graduate with transferable college credits from dual enrollment and with job-ready certifications

• a useful assessment program (not the state-mandated one, obviously) that gives teachers timely feedback and demonstrates that achievement growth for our students now regularly bests state averages

• a new system to guide us in using the data from those assessments to truly individualize instruction and short-circuit learning failures before they become ingrained

• thoughtful planning well under way for a student support network to deal with non-academic problems that interfere with academic performance

These are a LOT of balls to juggle at one time! But, in addition, there were extraordinary challenges such as managing the multiyear high school construction project (completed under budget and a year ahead of schedule); dealing with the sudden departure of a finance director; implementing the detailed requirements of the Affordable Care Act; and coping with a fire that destroyed our bus garage, vehicles and equipment — yet none of the balls were dropped.

I hope you can see why I am so impressed with the abilities of our superintendent. In all my decades of paying very close attention, I have never seen anyone achieve so much so well and so fast in our district.

Somehow, this is the same man being portrayed by a segment of our community as the AntiChrist. It both baffles and saddens me. I’m not saying he’s never made a mistake or made someone angry, but this is performance any other community would die for. We have clearly done a poor job communicating all of this, which I regret. We have not supported our leader when he was unfairly attacked — which has happened many times, yet I have never heard an apology from anyone who accused him of things that were later proven to be untrue. And I recognize that I will never be able to change the minds of those who obviously hate him. I wish that those in the community who know and appreciate him had stepped up in his defense before things got to this point — where the damage to our schools and community seems irrevocable.

I can only say, with Joni Mitchell, that “You [won’t] know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.”

Reply to SavageStrong

An anonymous person or persons submitted a 26-page letter of questions to the Van Buren Board of Education in the name of “SavageStrong.” Presumably, these are the same people behind the SavageStrong Facebook page. While that page has not hesitated to publish any manner of wild speculation, it has yet — two days later — to publish the reply to their missive. I can only assume they did not really want the answers they clamor for so publicly. I am, without permission, publishing that reply here. I had planned to link to their letter, but the on-line link to it has expired. EDIT: extracts from their letter are in Comment below.

On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 5:40 PM, Martha Toth matoth@vanburenschools.net wrote:

To the SavageStrong site administrator(s):

Because he is busy at a work-related, out-of-town conference, Board President Mikulski asked me to respond to the 26-page letter we received from you. He has edited and approved this response on behalf of the board. Also, because we believe it is a comprehensive response, he has directed the Superintendent not to produce another response.

Before we attempt to answer your questions — while respecting employee rights to due process, professional legal advice, and our code of ethics — we must remark upon your tactics. Hiding behind anonymity while issuing unfounded criticisms, evoking unwarranted public unrest, and — of all things — accusing this board and our superintendent of a lack of transparency is, at best, duplicitous. None of us have forgotten the similar anonymous website and newspaper ads from a bogus “parent group” that illegally attempted to influence the 2011 school board and Belleville City Council races without filing as a ballot question committee. Nor have we forgotten who the state election authorities found to be behind it. It is difficult for us to respect those who foment disorder from behind a shield of anonymity, and we hope the larger community judges your credibility on the basis of your methods.

We will not attempt to respond point by point to your queries, as several are based on mistaken assumptions. Instead, we will give an overview of where we think we have basic misunderstandings.

First, we, too, noted the incredibly high M-STEP scores from certain classes at Savage School, and immediately knew we were in trouble. Should we have allowed a celebration of this remarkable achievement while knowing the rug would surely be pulled from under it later? You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a “forensic audit” by the state Office of Assessment and Standards entails. THEIR computer programs flag scores that are deemed statistically improbable or impossible, and one of the indications of possible illegal coaching is extended time spent on the testing. The test itself is not, as you noted, time limited. But extended average times coupled with improbably high scores raise a very red flag of suspicion. The details on timing came from the state, not from us, as part of their forensic audit.

In an attempt to get out in front of a scandal that could really hurt the district, our superintendent, as he stated, self-reported our suspicion that something was wrong and asked for direction. In many telephone interactions with OSA personnel, he was told exactly how we should investigate, which directions we followed to the letter. Later, he asked that those directions be reduced to writing, so that no one could question what we had done and why. Any real journalist could easily confirm this with OSA personnel — as opposed to irresponsibly speculating in print that we’d deliberately misled the state (behind the shameful cover of some anonymous “many believe....”) State officials were effusive in their praise of our model investigation and exemplary cooperation — which is the best outcome we could hope for, in a atmosphere so hostile to public educators that teachers and principals have been imprisoned for erasing and “fixing” test answers.

The next step is disciplinary hearings for teachers that the evidence shows may well have illegally coached students. First, they would be put on paid administrative leave. Since, by contract, they may leave the building as soon as students do, this had to be done near the end of the school day, allowing time for the two central office administrators tasked with this to reach all of them before dismissal time.

These teachers have not been tried or convicted of ANYTHING, which is why to this day we will not publicly confirm their identities. They have a right to due process, and simple courtesy demands they be given privacy during this process. YOU are the ones who have trumpeted names throughout the community.

The state is aware that performance averages can be thrown off by a concentration of high-performing students, as are we. Since you have identified the suspended teachers, you will note that none of them teach the gifted magnet classes. We could not point out that the problem lay elsewhere without revealing who the teachers suspected of wrongdoing were.

We are aware that the M-STEP is a new and different test that is not comparable to the old MEAP test. In fact, projections were that students could expect to do about 20 percent worse on it. Doing that much better on it, instead, is suspicious in itself. We were not comparing scores on the two tests. Rather, we were noting that, in three of four tested grades/areas, Savage was suddenly 29–39 percentage points higher than the state average, when it had been at or well below the average before. We have all been working hard to improve student achievement, but that kind of leap — across several non-GT classrooms at a single school — is both unprecedented and highly improbable. And, by the way, ALL our elementary schools have daily 90-minute math and literacy blocks, as prescribed by our superintendent in pursuit of our mission of achieving high levels of learning for all.

We are also aware that NWEA tests (given at any time of year) are not comparable to the M-STEP. Information from them was provided simply as corroborating data that something was “off” about the Savage scores — particularly about the very high percentages of “advanced” scores among non-GT students. Your analysis of NWEA scores for a few clearly advanced students is irrelevant to the anomalous scores for non-GT students. Student performance in other schools not flagged by OSA forensic audit is also irrelevant.

Collins and Blaha [the district’s attorneys who conducted the investigation] are “officers of the court” and bound by professional ethics, which we do not question. Student testimony is not — as you have repeatedly asserted — the only evidence of impropriety. We are unable to answer specific questions about the investigation at this point without compromising teachers’ rights to due process.

Finally, no one except you has suggested that the children themselves “cheated.” Benefiting from alleged coaching in no way fits that definition for third- and fourth-graders. Projecting that, because of these scores being invalidated, “all other scores have been opened up for questioning at any point in their lives” is nonsense, and typical of your exaggerated reaction to a serious problem that we have been trying to deal with as fairly and honestly as possible (consistent with employee rights and our code of ethics).

In your zeal to find or speculate on answers we cannot yet ethically provide, you have been heedless of the lasting damage you are doing to your school and its staff, to your district, and to your community. You have provoked, encouraged, and provided a platform for everyone with the smallest of grievances (and a few who seem unaware of the legal consequences of libel). Because of your irresponsible rush to judgment (and we are aware of the irony), what should have been a measured and sober self-examination by the district of problematic behavior has become a circus of speculation and Internet trolling. Did you think of anyone except your own children and the imagined insult to them? As elected representatives charged with statutory responsibilities and concern for the welfare of all of our children and our employees, we must take a broader view.

Our superintendent, whom we hired specifically to change the focus of our district to student achievement, and whom we have consistently evaluated as highly effective, is relentlessly targeted by a small faction of our community. He has made needed but uncomfortable changes to put us on a path toward serving ALL of our students well — something we have never done. We care deeply that too many of our children have been left behind, if not written off, and we think that is unacceptable. We realize that the parents of those children are not the loudest voices, but they are our constituents, also. Nor can staff concerns over their preferences trump these children’s rights to high-quality teaching, too. We did not run for office to serve the interests of our own children or of yours, but rather everyone’s children. We hope it will still be possible to attract civic-minded public servants to succeed us.

Note that we will not be responding further to any comments made in reaction to this letter on your site, as we have already said everything we can at this time.

-Martha Toth, writing in collaboration with Brent Mikulski

EdTrust-Midwest: The Sky Is Falling!

I have read “Michigan Achieves: Becoming a Top-Ten Education State,” the 2015 Michigan Education Report from the Education Trust-Midwest. (How odd that none of the news articles based on the press release that I have read actually linked to it. Find it at midwest.edtrust.org.) I find the headlines (example: “Michigan May Drop to Bottom in 4th Grade Reading”) unduly alarmist, as the dire predictions are about where they project we may be in 15 years. I do not, however, deny that there is a problem. National Assessment of Educational Progress assessments have shown our students to be, I some cases, losing ground, while those in other states make good progress. The trend is not good.

I am distressed at the selective reporting on both the problems and the potential solutions in this report. It appears that those summarizing it for news outlets have done a cursory skimming, picking out just the most alarming tidbits and the proposals that align with what they already assume to be true. Some important things have been largely ignored, such as “the percentage of Michigan low-income students has climbed steadily, jumping from 36% in 2006 to 47% in 2014,” and “our state currently ranks 42nd of 47 for funding equity, [with] some of the biggest gaps in resources between high-poverty and low-poverty districts,” and “we see similar gaps in how well we pay our teachers in high-poverty schools.” Michigan fell sooner, faster, and farther than most states during the Great Recession. Our public schools suffered with every other sector, we have yet to recover, and that long-standing disinvestment did not allow us to cope properly with our now-needier student population.

In the 1980s, I volunteered for thousands of hours in elementary classrooms. There, I saw a skilled teacher with a master’s degree in reading instruction diagnose and remediate specific problems children were having with reading. It almost looked like magic — but was, of course, expertise. Today, we assume that at-risk children are better off in charter schools, often taught by uncertified Teach for America instructors with just a few weeks of training. It makes no sense to think they would be better at this than someone with expertise borne of training and experience — as, indeed, results show they have not been. Investment in training and supporting professional teachers to continually improve their practice is the obvious solution we have yet to really try here.

The popular reporting on lessons from more successful schools, districts, and states tended to focus on more testing and accountability. The actual report also notes that Michigan has failed to invest in implementation of systemic reforms — we want to punish schools and teachers for not reaching new standards, without investing in training and support to help them do so. The cited states that have had more success have actually invested in implementation; we have not.

There were other under-reported lessons from the Michigan schools cited as successful despite the statewide climate for public education. For example, Brimley Elementary’s teachers are working “to inspire a new generation to love reading.” In fact, “the big reward for good behavior is getting to read for an hour.” Imagine that! Instead of the scripted instruction, rigid “close reading,” and the inflexible ideal of writing pushed by reformers — which threaten to turn off an entire generation to the joys of reading and self-expression — these teachers have produced proficient readers by encouraging and allowing them to love reading. At similarly successful North Godwin Elementary, teachers collaborate, share best practices, and reflect constantly on their own teaching. In other words, they don’t obsess over test scores; rather, they work together as professionals to refine their teaching practices.

We actually know, from research and from experience elsewhere, what works to help students learn better and faster. Most of us agree that teachers are the key — the one aspect of a complex process that we might significantly improve within a reasonable time frame. How to do so, however, is usually seen through a lens of preconceptions. Decades of demanding results, not enabling real change, and punishing perceived failure have NOT succeeded. Education Trust-Midwest documents the ongoing failure of this approach. Respecting and encouraging professional expertise, enabling meaningful professional collaboration, providing adequate resources — and, yes, paying professional wages to those who work in our most challenging communities — are approaches that have worked elsewhere and have yet to be tried here in Michigan.

A Case Study in “Wrongness”

Here I examine a case study in almost everything that is wrong with the status quo in American public schooling. Despite what Michigan’s House Education Committee Chair Lyons* would have you believe, the status quo defenders are not greedy, unionized teachers trying to protect their own perquisites over the needs of children. No, “status quo” is Latin for the “existing state” of things. The state of public education for a generation of children now has been a regime of testing, competition, choice, and punishment — firing of teachers and administrators and closing of schools and entire districts. What passes for education reform in Michigan — and has for some time now — is what John Austin, President of the State Board of Education, has called “a ‘Wild West’ of unfettered, unregulated new school creation, decoupled from the goal of improving learning and student outcomes.”

Amy Biolchini of mlive.com did some great reporting on a new charter school set to open in Ypsilanti in the fall of 2014. This story illustrates almost all that is wrong with our actual educational status quo in Michigan.

Schools fail but get to begin again with new names

The new K–5 school is being opened on the same site by the same owners (Global Educational Excellence) as a failed previous charter school, Victory Academy. That school had operated for six years before its authorizer, Bay Mills Community College (not known for its exacting standards), chose not to renew its charter due to its “financial condition and academic performance.” Financially, the school budget was in deficit. Academically, its final 2010–11 MEAP scores showed one student proficient in writing (4th grade) and none in science (fifth grade). The four-year trends in reading and math scores show volatility in the percentages rated “not proficient,” as one would expect with such small numbers of students, but those percentages of failure were higher (generally much higher) than state averages in all cases:

Accountability measures spelled out by state and federal laws depend upon multiyear data and trends, so the easiest way to avoid failure and sanctions is to cut off those trends and begin from scratch. That is what is happening here, where the same operators in the same location with a similar student population just get a do-over by obtaining a new charter and renaming the school.

Teachers are replaced by devices

"One-to-one computing" and a "digital curriculum" are touted as a more efficient (read: "cheaper") and "student-centered" (meaning "do-it-yourself") way to deliver educational services. I doubt there is a single soul involved in education who does not think that it should be student centered, but there is a yawning gap between the label and the reality. For example, the Education Achievement Authority (EAA), home to “persistently failing” schools in Detroit taken over by the state, provides this allegedly newer and better kind of education. The model cannot possibly work, however, when students must share devices and when the promised digital curriculum is not available. Numerous reports (see the EclectaBlog series for examples) from teachers, former teachers, parents, and students subjected to the EAA allege that only about half the necessary platforms have been available for use and that the touted curriculum often does not exist. This is a particular problem for the many beginning and/or minimally trained Teach for America staff members who are not experienced with developing and implementing curricula themselves.

Adaptive software that offers just the right degree of challenge for each student can be a helpful part of a complete educational program, especially for students who are far behind on basic skills, but a completely on-line education leaves out a lot of important aspects of an excellent education. Calling it “student centered” does not mean that it serves all or even most of a student’s genuine educational needs.

Students work alone, not together; at keyboards, not hands-on

I experienced a very regimented elementary education in the overcrowded classrooms of the 1950s, wherein student participation was tightly limited and controlled. I still managed to learn, but that system worked poorly for a very large percentage of students. By the 1970s, educators had a good grasp of the importance of interactive discussions in class, both in engaging students more completely and in encouraging them to think in complex and evaluative ways. By the mid-1980s, educators knew that hands-on learning was much more powerful and effective than memorization for fostering deep conceptual understanding. By the 21st Century, educators understood the importance of having students work collaboratively on authentic problems in project-based learning. This model helps students to develop the cooperation, communication, and presentation skills they will need to be effective in both college and the workplace. Throughout these decades, more and more students did well in school, achieving higher scores on achievement tests and higher graduation rates.

Using devices to deliver a digital curriculum is simply not enough to provide a well-rounded education and to develop important collaborative and social skills. This model can be expected to fail at least as many students as did the similarly restrictive one of the 1950s. After well over a decade of increasingly prescriptive and decreasingly creative classroom methods mandated by the new status quo, achievement levels have stagnated or receded — but “reformers” refuse to admit to this obvious failure. They have, in fact, created the very crisis they invented to justify their ersatz reforms, when public schools had been on an upward trajectory for many, many years before the test-and-punish regime began with No Child Left Behind.

The educational design is driven by profit considerations, not educational concerns

The fact that for-profit vendors seem to be poised to run the show at the planned new school is also emblematic of something wrong with our new, “improved” educational status quo. Each student at the new school will be assigned an Android tablet “programmed and provided by Amplify, a company that provides devices programmed with classroom-ready curriculum.” Amplify is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Forbes Magazine, a publication not exactly hostile to business, published an article on Amplify last fall. Author Jordan Shapiro reported on what sound like killer educational games, such as Fruit Ninja geometry and Lexica, a role-playing game that includes interaction with literary characters and incentive to read more outside the game in order to do better within it. He did express reservations about the message implicit in the humanities games looking “old-fashioned, antique, and fantastical” while the “science and math games look modern, polished, and innovative.” But I agree with the premise that well-designed games can be a great way to engage today’s students in learning they might otherwise resist or avoid.

But Amplify also won a multimillion-dollar contract to develop Common Core formative assessments, thus ensuring a long-running profit stream from all the schools and districts that will be forced to use them. It can make money on designing curricula, delivering it, and assessing the effectiveness of its delivery. As another Forbes article, “Charter School Gravy Train Runs Express to Fat City,” noted last fall, “dozens of bankers, hedge fund types and private equity investors gathered in New York to hear about the latest and greatest opportunities to collect a cut of your property taxes [at] the Capital Roundtable’s conference on ‘private equity investing in for-profit education companies.’”

Very rich people have jumped into the charter movement not simply out of philanthropic concern, but because it is a terrific way to get even richer. “It’s the tax code that makes charter schools so lucrative: Under the federal ‘New Markets Tax Credit’ program that became law toward the end of the Clinton presidency, firms that invest in charters and other projects located in ‘underserved’ areas can collect a generous tax credit — up to 39% — to offset their costs. So attractive is the math, according to a 2010 article by Juan Gonzalez in the New York Daily News, ‘that a lender who uses it can almost double his money in seven years.’”

The billions of public dollars once spent almost exclusively by non-profit educational organizations are now out there for the picking. What could possibly go wrong, when those in control are motivated by profit rather than by “what is right for kids”?

So, we have a new school rising from the ashes of a failed one, where kids can be taught cheaply by devices rather than people, where achievement is defined strictly in terms of mastering a particular curriculum that includes no collaborative skills beyond role-playing games and no authentic hands-on or project-based learning, by providers who are all guaranteed a good profit no matter how the students do. THIS is today’s educational status quo — and no one has been able to demonstrate that it works well, let alone better than the allegedly “failing” system it is replacing. Yet “reform” proponents — really defenders of the current status quo — keep doubling down on what has patently not been working, as exemplified by this one proposed school. As the old movie admonition goes: Be afraid. Be very afraid.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

* In a recent radio interview, Rep. Lisa Posthumus Lyons said, of critics of the EAA, “We have found that there’s no depths that the defenders of the status quo won’t go to stop innovation and change.”

Dueling Facts about K–12 Funding

This is an election year, so we will continue to hear conflicting stories about how public schools in Michigan are funded. On both sides, the facts are largely correct, yet the conclusions — spending has gone up or has gone down — are opposite. How can this be? Whom are we to believe?

The kind of sound bites we will be incessantly exposed to during a campaign season cannot adequately capture the full story of school funding. Nor can I, in a single blog post. But I will explain some of the reasons the facts and conclusions seem to contradict one another. The bottom line is that, while state spending has increased, the amount of that spending available to traditional public school districts (which I will call “districts” for brevity) for operations has not, when one controls for inflation. The reasons include
(1) tax cuts significantly reduced revenue for school aid;
(2) existing school aid money has been diverted to other uses;
(3) nominal increases in funding were not equitably distributed;
(4) nominal increases were absorbed by mandated retirement contributions;
(5) overall funding has not kept pace with inflation;
(6) Proposal A and the Headlee Amendment constraints will delay recovery of property tax bases for many years; and
(7) funding has not kept pace with the concentration of needier students left in public districts by choice and charters.

For all these reasons, traditional school districts have greater needs and less inflation-adjusted revenue available to actually educate children than since before the Great Recession began. If you consult the Senate Fiscal Agency’s ten-year history [www.senate.michigan.gov/sfa/Departments/DataCharts/DCk12_FoundationHistory.pdf‎] of per-pupil Foundation Allowances for every district and charter in the state, you will see that they are now below what they were in 2006–07, before the recession began. This is why an unprecedented number of districts are in deficit or flirting with deficits.

When Funding “Increases” Equal Decreases

The simple math used to demonstrate “increases” is misleading. In his January 2014 State of the State address, Governor Snyder asserted that state spending on K–12 education (not counting preschool or adult education) has increased $660 per pupil from 2010–11 to the 2013–14 current school year. This is true (although the actual math says it was $666). Total state spending was divided by the official fall student count to produce the figure.

Why is this misleading? People assume that increased state spending translates into more money for school operations — that is, more money in the classroom. It has not, in the aggregate. (It may have for some districts but not others; we are talking statewide averages here.) Nearly all of the increased funding went to the Michigan Public School Employees Retirement System (MPSERS). Due to legislative changes beginning in 2007, newer teachers will never have the kind of traditional pension once enjoyed by their colleagues, but the unfunded liability for current retirees and older teachers is still considerable and grew enormously when invested monies lost value during the recession. This MPSERS liability tends to soak up any alleged increases in funding. This year, for example, the state budgeted a modest increase in the per-pupil Foundation Allowance. Charter schools, almost none of which participate in MPSERS, enjoyed this increase. Traditional schools sent all of it — and usually a bit more — right back to MPSERS. The “increase” translated into an operational decrease in funding for them.

It is difficult to overstate the effect that the rising MPSERS liability has had on traditional public school districts. Remember: they were required by law to participate in MPSERS. Every employee, from kitchen workers to bus drivers to custodians to substitute teachers, had to be part of the system. Yet the state sets benefit levels and districts have no control over the costs. For example, the state offered financial incentives for older teachers to retire — allegedly “saving money” for the schools, which could replace them with younger teachers at lower pay rates. But those incentives permanently increased the retirement pay — and the MPSERS liability — for those retirees. That immediately translated into increased diversion of operating funds to retirement costs. Declining numbers of employees contributing to the system (due to lay-offs, diversion of teachers to charters, cyber schools, and the Educational Achievement Authority; changes to the system for newer employees; and privatization of non-instructional district employees) has exacerbated the revenue constraints — even as participants contribute substantially more to their own and to existing retirees’ pensions and post-retirement health care.

The state annually mandates the percentage of payroll that districts must contribute to MPSERS. Legislation that reformed this system capped the district/employer contribution to MPSERS at 25.8 percent of payroll. That is, for every $100 of salary to the employee, another $25.80 is owed to MPSERS. This has been the driving force behind privatization of all but regular teaching jobs. Most districts now contract with a third party to provide substitute teachers, for example. If the subs are not district employees, then this surcharge is not owed. The same savings can be found through contracting out for non-teaching jobs. (That also means, of course, that the contract employees have lost significant benefits.)

The cap on contributions means that the state pays any amount over it needed to fund the system; in fact, the state has made additional contributions in some years toward the accumulated unfunded liability that was exacerbated by the effect of the Great Recession on MPSERS invested assets. These contributions all come from the State School Aid Fund, though, which means that less dedicated funding has been available for school operations.

In addition to the MPSERS drain, many of the increases in funding on Snyder’s watch have not been rolled into the Foundation Allowance and are or will be disappearing. These include various “performance-based” awards, as well as this year’s one-time “equity” payment for the lowest-funded districts — which presumably can go back to the previous level of inequity next year. All of these disappearing pots of money are experienced as funding cuts on the ground.

Diversions from and Reductions in the State School Aid Fund

The state’s School Aid Fund (SAF) collects earmarked revenues from many sources. The state has historically supplemented the SAF with appropriations from its General Fund, as well. But, in recent years, the SAF has taken major hits from two directions: deliberate reductions in its revenue streams and diversion of its funds to new uses.

About 80 percent of the fund’s dedicated revenue comes from the statewide education property tax, plus portions of the sales and income taxes. The rest comes from lottery profits and several smaller taxes, including real-estate transfer, tobacco, and liquor taxes. Gov. Snyder and the Michigan Legislature eliminated the Michigan Business Tax, which had contributed more than $700 million a year to the SAF. They are also phasing out the Personal Property Tax on most business equipment, for a cut in the State Education Tax and in local school taxes estimated by the Senate Fiscal Agency as another $19.9 million in 2014, $20M in 2015, $44.7M in 2016, and $45M in 2017. Revenue for only partial replacement of the Personal Property Tax has been identified, and the SFA warns that the requirement on the Legislature to make even those appropriations is not considered legally binding.

As the recession deepened, Governor Granholm made an emergency, one-time allocation from the SAF to higher education, which had always been funded through the state's General Fund. Governor Snyder chose to make that a permanent diversion and to double the amount. Thus, some $400 million per year is now unavailable to K–12 schools because it goes instead to colleges and universities.

Expanded preschool programs, which most educators would agree are necessary, took another $65 million from the SAF this year. The governor proposes to double that amount next year, making $140 million per year not available for K–12 needs.

Unaddressed But Increased Needs

The governor’s calculations alleging increased funding do not factor in inflation. Districts must contend with inflationary increases in costs for utilities (especially this winter!), technology, books, materials, buses and fuel, professional services, and so forth. Most district employees have experienced pay cuts and benefit cost-sharing increases since the recession hit, and none have yet regained that take-home pay. Teachers at the lower rungs of the longevity ladder have also been hard hit by freezes in the “step increases” that normally raise their pay as they gain experience. But a desire to fairly compensate their employees is hardly the only reason districts are clamoring for funding increases.

Unfunded mandates are an ongoing problem. New teacher evaluation requirements and the adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) both involve considerable expenses not reimbursed by either federal or state funding. Districts have already invested years of planning in them, and the CCSS requires software and a huge number of computing platforms for its on-line assessment tests. There are also large costs associated with compliance with the Affordable Care Act, in addition to expected annual premium increases for health coverage.

Simultaneously, the need for and cost of purely educational services rises as district student populations change. At-risk students are increasingly concentrated in poorer districts, as other students are diverted to charters and to wealthier districts through “choice.” The state does offer additional at-risk funding, although the level of such supplemental funding does not approach that needed to adequately address the needs. Duncombe & Yinger (2005), in the Economics of Education Review, estimated that economically disadvantaged students would cost 100% more to properly educate. State law offers 11.5 percent more. State appropriations are inadequate, however, so the actual supplement was less than 7 percent last year, according to the Michigan Department of Education.

Special Education is similarly underfunded. Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the federal government mandated an “appropriate” education in the “least restrictive environment” for students with specific learning disabilities, speech or language impairments, intellectual disabilities, autism, or emotional disturbances. It has never, however, come close to meeting its commitment to fund 40 percent of the difference between the cost of educating a disabled student and a general student. Under the sequester, the federal share fell to 14.9 percent, forcing additional costs to come from per-pupil funding for other students. So the districts, which educate a much higher percentage of students with disabilities than do charters, are at a great economic disadvantage in meeting all their students’ needs.

The funding burden is exacerbated in Michigan, which mandates special education through age 26. Keep in mind that 72 percent of Michigan charter school students are elementary (K–5) school students (CREDO, 2013), so this burden would be minimized for them even if they did not serve a much lower proportion of each grade cohort of special education students.

The Bottom Line

The overall-funding-divided-by-pupil-count calculation used to trumpet “increased” education funding is both technically true and deeply fraudulent. This simple average significantly misrepresents how much funding can actually be used to support and improve teaching and learning and vital school operations. Moreover, averages mask significant differences in the actual per-pupil funding received by individual districts or available to them for operations. Unprecedented numbers of districts are in deficit, on the edge of such trouble, or rapidly burning through any fund balances they once used to cushion annual funding volatility. Of all the factors I review above that contribute to this problem, the MPSERS drain is the most severe. Most other states appropriate employee pension contributions separately from direct K–12 spending. When the U.S. Department of Education corrects its data for our diversion of funding to pension costs, it ranks Michigan as 26th in per-pupil spending — a dramatic decline in our ranking since the pre–Proposal A period.

If you believe the “increased funding” line and really think that school districts are crying wolf, I encourage you to speak with your community’s parents, teachers, school staff, and school boards to learn the truth they live with daily.

Lessons for Our Schools from Apple and Microsoft

Let me begin by saying that I am emphatically NOT suggesting we run our public schools “more like a business.” Businesses exist to make a profit, not to provide a service. And manufacturers practice strict quality control over which “raw materials” they allow to pass their doors, unlike traditional public schools, which welcome every child — no matter how poorly equipped, prepared, or supported at home.

I am suggesting, however, that the examples of both great and poor techniques used by two of our largest and most successful companies may instruct us on mistakes we can and should avoid.

First, What NOT to Do

An insightful analysis by Kurt Eichenwald (Vanity Fair, August 2012) called “Microsoft’s Lost Decade” explains how a company that once dominated the tech industry has “fallen flat in every arena it entered: e-books, music, search, social networking, etc.” Again and again, it blew long leads on competitors, and now even its strengths in operating systems and Office are being threatened by the free Google Chrome OS and Google Docs. A single Apple product, the iPhone, had come to produce higher sales than the entire Microsoft Corporation.

How did it come to this?

Eichenwald found intriguing and instructive answers in “interviews with dozens of current and former executives, as well as in thousands of pages of internal documents and legal records.” They might be summarized as (1) emphasizing immediate profits and losses killed innovation and design, and (2) force-ranking employees against one another killed collaboration and actively undermined the core business.

The first change came when a brilliant technical guy, Bill Gates, was replaced as CEO by Steve Ballmer — not a “product guy”" but rather “a businessman with a background in deal-making, finance, and product marketing.” If great marketing could produce more revenue, the products themselves were less important. Everyone started watching the daily stock price, and long-range research and development suffered. Even with huge leads on e-readers and mobile operating systems, Microsoft was left in the dust by competitors.

But the real damage was done by forcing employee evaluations to fit the bell curve of a normal distribution. Microsoft called this “stacked ranking,” and the resulting corporate culture of “self-immolating chaos” nearly sank the company. No matter how good staffers were, only ten percent of each unit could be ranked as excellent, and ten percent would be ranked as poor, with three other ranks between. Not surprisingly, they learned not to collaborate, to withhold vital help and information, and even to actively sabotage one another. After all, they “were rewarded not just for doing well but for making sure that their colleagues failed” — and fail they did. One pernicious feature of the system was that “outcomes were never predictable.” Even achieving all your objectives was no guarantee of a high ranking; crippling your (coworker) competition was the safest way to stay afloat. And “worse, because the reviews came every six months, employees and their supervisors — who were also ranked — focused on their short-term performance, rather than on longer efforts to innovate.”

Sound familiar?

As mandated by the federal Race to the Top legislation, Michigan (and most other states) adopted laws requiring teachers and schools to be similarly “stack-ranked” against one another in a normal distribution. No matter how well they perform objectively, only a few will be designated as top performers, and a steady percentage will be labeled as failures. And such teacher evaluations have proven to be capricious, if not random, from year to year: one year’s “teacher of the year” will be rated as ineffective the next year. Just doing your individual job effectively is not enough to guarantee a high ranking. And the test scores of the moment are The Most Important Thing, crowding out the serious intellectual work it takes to perfect one’s professional craft.

To absolutely no one’s surprise, the “poorest” performers are those who deal with special education, English language–learning, and economically disadvantaged students. These students start from behind, have greater needs and fewer supports, and tend to cluster in the more poorly resourced schools with the least experienced teachers. Ask yourself: if you were a teacher, and your job depended upon how much progress your students made on standardized tests, why would you want to teach those destined to perform more poorly? Sure, there are innate rewards to helping those who most need the help, but you still have a family to support.

Teachers may not sink to actively sabotaging one another, as Microsoft workers did, but will they be inclined to share their secrets, their reliable tricks for helping kids to learn better? Will they actively collaborate to help one another and their schools and districts reach organization-wide excellence? Will they put in the time to study, test, evaluate, and share best practices, getting ever better at what they do, rather than doing endless test-prep for the only measure that seems to count? We had better hope so, but this discredited management system does everything possible to prevent and undermine that vital collaboration and professional development.

Epilog

Microsoft has finally learned better. A few days ago, its head of human resources announced, “No more curve…. No more ratings.” The performance evaluation system had to change in order to foster the teamwork and long-range perspective that once made the company great. “We are optimizing for more timely feedback and meaningful discussions to help employees learn in the moment, grow and drive great results.” Wow. Do you think we could do that in our public schools again? Microsoft had a “lost decade” under this misguided system. It appears we are headed for a “lost generation.”

What TO Do

Apple’s “design wizard” insists that the company will always choose product quality over any strictly numerical measure of it. By that, he means that product specifications are not proxies for how good a product is or how satisfying it is to use. Marco della Cava, in a September 2013 USA Today, profiled Jonathan Ive, “the fertile and detail-obsessed mind behind culture-shaping products such as the lollipop-colored iMacs (1998), the iPod (2001), iPhone (2007) and iPad (2010).” His hardware group and Craig Federighi’s software group collaborated to produce the new IOS 7 and fifth-generation iPhones.

This duo notes that people care more about the quality of photos they take than the megapixels their phone boasts. The price and the screen size are similarly easy to measure but imperfectly aligned with perceived quality. As Ive notes, “There’s a more difficult path, and that’s to make better products, ones where maybe you can’t measure their value empirically. This is terribly important and at the heart of what we do.”

Apply THAT to schools!

Imagine if, instead of focusing seemingly all of our time and energies on “attributes that you can measure with a number,” in Ive’s words, we looked at students — our product — more holistically. Test scores are always a proxy for something else: knowledge, abilities, likelihood of future success, “college readiness.” Because they are simple numbers, they are very easy to compare across nations, states, districts, schools, and individuals. But test scores do not accurately measure nor reliably correlate with those real outcomes. Just as Microsoft found its personnel evaluations unpredictable, test scores vary from one iteration to the next in inexplicable ways. That is because they are actually quite poor measures. Using them to evaluate teachers and schools compounds the error, since the inputs on the child that produced that output included many, many more factors than those controlled by the teachers and the schools.

They don’t measure what we pretend they do, and the measurements are invalid because they vary in ways that we cannot explain. We rely upon them solely because they are numbers and therefore have an unwarranted cachet of “objectivity.” As Apple’s successful designers assert, numbers do not begin to tell the real story. What we really want for our children’s education, for our end “product,” is graduates who know how they learn, know how to find and evaluate information, can acquire skills on their own, know how to find and ask for appropriate help, are intellectually curious, take the initiative and the responsibility in their own learning process, are self-directed and self-disciplined, can work collaboratively with others, are self-confident in their written and presentation skills. Isn’t that what you want in your coworkers, hirees, managers … your own children?

The Apple folks say that they “care about how to design the inside of something you’ll never see, because we think it’s the right thing to do.” At its core, schooling should be about forming and molding the inside of our children, to help them become the top-quality products the world recognizes as the best. I fervently wish we’d catch a clue from the geniuses amongst us on how to do that.

Too Much Power Equals Danger

This post is not directly related to education. It may sound like the whining of an aggravated political partisan, but it is not. I am not necessarily opposed to the laws referred to below, but I do find the PROCESSES alarming. Abuse of power is never a good thing, and concentration of power tends to be corrupting — as demonstrated repeatedly through the millennia of recorded history. It appears that no amount of power is enough for those now in charge of our affairs....

In Michigan, the Republican Party firmly controls all branches of government, but that level of power is apparently not enough. In the legislature, for example, they routinely use voice votes to give immediate effect to legislation, despite their not having anywhere near the super majority required for that, should the votes actually be recorded. This legislature now also routinely attaches a small appropriation to any act it wants to make referendum-proof, to keep those pesky voters from getting in their way.

For example, the people voted a year ago to repeal an emergency manager law (which allows governor-appointed czars to take over municipalities and school districts bankrupted in large part by huge cuts in state revenue supposedly mandated by other laws). That aggravated the legislature, which immediately passed a replacement law, attached an appropriation so that it could not be repealed again, and used a bogus voice vote to give it immediate effect — clearing the way for the Detroit bankruptcy, among quite a few others in process or soon to come.

Another irksome thing has been the way folks keep trying to stop such over-reach through lawsuits, which are first heard by the Lansing-area (read: Democratic) Circuit Court judges. Yes, their rulings can be overturned by Republican judges on the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court, but that slows things down!

Enter the fast-tracked Public Act 164, which moved the Court of Claims (for lawsuits against the state) from the capital’s Circuit Court to a panel of four Michigan Court of Appeals judges, all to be named by the (5:2 Republican) Supreme Court rather than chosen by blind draw. It was, of course, given immediate effect by bogus voice vote, and cases already before the Ingham County Circuit Court were transferred to the new panel.

Interesting side note: the Michigan Judges Association chose not to oppose the new law, as members lobbied that doing so would endanger their hoped-for pay raises: it would be “a suicide mission” while “it’s big boy politics being played.” Sure enough, two days after the law was passed, the long-awaited bill to increase judicial pay was introduced. EVERYONE denies any connection.

Things just have a way of working out for you when you get out of the way of this determined political majority. And vice versa. I don't know about you, but I find the whiff of tyranny in this kind of steamrolling frightening.

Report Cards that Offer Zero Useful Information

Years ago, my niece gave a colorful report on her aggravating and disappointing trip to see the pyramids with the title “I Went to Egypt so that You Don’t Have To.” My trip through the labyrinth to try to understand the new school accountability system was similarly aggravating and disappointing. No, I did not have people trying to pick my pockets throughout, but I ended feeling just as ripped off and disgusted. Here is my report. Do not expect much local color.

In compliance with federal Race to the Top legislation, Michigan has now implemented a new Accountability Scorecard for every school and district, giving them color-coded ratings ranging from red (terrible!) to green (terrific!). The great majority (more than two-thirds) were rated yellow (caution: red is imminent!). This has been confusing to all, since many educational entities appeared to be doing well in every sub-category, yet they did not achieve a green rating overall. How can that be?

The short answer is that the system is rigged to produce failure. And that is exactly what it did.

The system requires 85% of children to become proficient in every subject by the end of the 2021–22 school year, mandating incremental progress toward that goal in every subgroup every year. The subgroups include students with disabilities, English Language–learners, economically disadvantaged students, the bottom 30% (in terms of proficiency), and various ethnic groups (white, black, Hispanic of any race, Asian, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, American Indian or Alaska Native, and multiracial). In addition, there are requirements regarding test participation rate, attendance rate, graduation rate, and compliance with school improvement, educator effectiveness, and other kinds of reporting.

The state’s database lists 5,816 schools and districts to be rated. Of that number, 1,144 (almost 20%) are given no color/rating, mostly because they are too new to have the requisite historic data trail. The lowest, red, rating was given to 692 (14.8% of those given a rating). Another 263 (5.6% of rated entities) were rated orange. A whopping 3,180 or 68% were rated as yellow. None were given the lime green rating. And a tiny 135 (2.9% of the total rated) got the coveted green designation. To summarize, then, more than 97% of schools and districts rated are considered “failing.”

But the news is actually worse than that. Of the 135 green schools, 41 (nearly one-third) got “zero of a possible zero points” — so how is it that they are rated green? Most are so designated on the basis of three-year participation rates (how many children actually took the tests) and “compliance factors” (planning and reporting requirements that earn no points). They have no student test scores because all their grade cohorts are under 30 pupils — a prime indicator that they are likely to be charter schools. Other “green” schools with very low point totals got them for such factors as student attendance. You will note that student attendance, test participation rates, school improvement planning and teacher evaluation reporting are ALL FACTORS THAT HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT.

Looking more closely at the data, the news is even worse. Here is an example: the Jalen Rose Academy is Green on the strength of Student Attendance (2 of a possible 2 points) and Compliance Factors (no points). Its only assessment participation rate is a three-year average for social studies — which made me realize it is just three repetitions of the sixth-grade participation rate they brought with them to this high school. How is that at all relevant to this school?

This exposes the glaring hole in the rating system — and the reason nearly every entity will be “failing” in short order: it requires incremental improvement in student test scores every year, but not all tests are given every year. So, students who were not proficient in social studies in sixth grade are unable to show improvement until they take a social studies test again in ninth grade. Students who were not proficient in science in fifth grade will be unable to show improvement until the eighth grade test. For three years they WILL fail to achieve the required incremental progress. Students who are not proficient at writing in seventh grade will not be able to demonstrate progress for four years, until they take the ACT in eleventh grade. Any one such failure mandates a yellow rating, at best, for the school and district.

The system also requires a steady progress (equal increments over each of the next ten years) toward proficiency targets. The farther away a group is in a particular subject, the larger those increments will be. In the subject in which the state’s students do most poorly overall, science, the improvement targets will be almost impossible to reach. If 15.9% of eighth graders statewide were considered proficient in 2012 (they were), and 85% must achieve proficiency by 2022, then the proficient group must increase by 6.9 points [(85 - 15.9)/10 years] every year. If the target is missed one year, it just gets higher the next. Improvements of that magnitude are almost never achieved anywhere, let alone consistently every year for a decade. If not one of a particular subgroup was proficient in 2012, as was true in many places for special education or bottom 30% groups in science, then their improvement target will be even higher: 8.5% per year — which simply cannot be done for ten years straight. It will be impossible to achieve green status once student achievement data is used for all schools, unless those schools already have elite, selective populations that are universally high-achieving. The only way to guarantee that is to exclude special education, English Language–learning, and economically disadvantaged students — which is exactly what is occurring at charter schools today.

Another wrinkle — or perhaps “monkey wrench” is more evocative here — in the system is that cyber schools can now provide one-third or more of educational classes for grades five through 12, but the home school district will be held accountable for student achievement results. Let me repeat: traditional school districts will be punished for the failures of on-line schools over which they have zero control.

Presumably, the point of the rating system is to give parents the information they need to exercise the vaunted “choice” that is supposed to be making all schools more effective. If the basis for the ratings is so hard to understand, and if all are rated as failing — as they soon will be, how is this helpful to anyone?

Uncommonly Undecided about the Common Core

I am conflicted about the Common Core.

The minority of folks shown by polling to be at all aware of Common Core State Standards probably know little more than that they are controversial. Those who’ve read a bit more may realize that CCSS opponents include some truly strange bedfellows: leftist progressives like Diane Ravitch (I am a fan) who see this as one more ersatz “reform” actually designed to reveal the “failure” of public schools, and rightist, libertarian and/or Tea Party types who see it as Big Government undermining “local control.”

A little background

The Common Core originated with corporate executives, major philanthropists, and state governors, prompted largely by a concern over economic competitiveness. Besides worry on a societal level that we must keep up with competitor nations, fewer manufacturing jobs here mean that our high school graduates need better skills to guarantee their own competitiveness for jobs.

CCS Standards discount rote learning in favor of an encouraging emphasis on deeper understanding, application to problem-solving, the ability to translate knowledge and skills to novel situations, and skills in collaboration and in evaluating information sources. All of these abilities will produce confident, competent young people with both hard and soft skills needed to thrive in today’s college and work environments.

CCSS are also part of a new accountability system to replace the mandates of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Early in the George W. Bush administration, NCLB aimed for all of our children to be proficient in all tested subjects by the end of the current school year. This was an unrealistic goal, and the draconian penalties for failing to make “adequate yearly progress” toward it have failed to produce such universal success. The successor plan to NCLB, called Race to the Top (RttT), allowed states to apply for waivers from the NCLB standards and penalties if they adopted the Common Core and other revised accountability measures, including the evaluation of teachers and administrators on the basis of student academic progress.

This new system restarts the clock, in a way, still requiring most (but not all) children to become proficient by the end of the 2021–22 school year, and requiring incremental progress toward that goal in every subgroup every year. The subgroups include students with disabilities, English Language–learners, economically disadvantaged students, the bottom 30% (in terms of proficiency), and various ethnic groups (white, black, Hispanic of any race, Asian, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, American Indian or Alaska Native, and multiracial). In addition, there are requirements regarding test participation rate, attendance rate, graduation rate, and compliance with school improvement, educator effectiveness, and other kinds of reporting. Because it is so multi-factored and complex, the system is difficult to understand — and its results are difficult to interpret (more about that below). But the aim is praiseworthy: that we expect more from our students and from our educators, and that we help them reach that higher bar.

So, why is this controversial?

The two sides

The left side argues that CCS Standards are so high, and the assessments written for them so difficult, that they are useless for assessing learning — think of giving a middle schooler a calculus exam. Even worse, the resultant low scores will be used to bludgeon teachers and schools, feeding the narrative that both are failing and must be replaced by charters (demonstrably no better than traditional public schools when measured by these tests) or privatized, for-profit options via vouchers (demonstrably worse). A huge and extremely profitable industry has grown up around producing materials and assessments aligned with CCSS, the digital tools and software required for on-line assessment and classroom management, the translation of student growth assessment into teacher evaluation, and even a newly privatized effort to train teachers and to test them for certification. Generally, all that money is diverted from the classrooms where it had been, and should be, more properly applied.

The right side argues that CCSS impose federal control where it does not belong. [I must interject that certain Michigan legislators, who suddenly champion “local control” after passing literally hundreds of micromanaging laws re education, must not have an ironic bone in their bodies.] Much of this opposition appears to be rooted in an unshakeable distrust of the Obama administration, more than anything else. I do not find their arguments nearly as compelling as the left-wing objections.

My fence-sitting

I have seen some of the CCSS “exemplar texts” for primary-grade language arts. My first reaction, as a long-time advocate for differentiated education of gifted children, was to think how much they would love these rich and challenging literary resources. Second thought: would the average student be able to handle them? Frustration level is very important in learning. If something is a stretch for you, you grow in pursuit of it. But, if it is too far over your head, you give up in resignation. Like Goldilocks, we do best when something is “just right” for us. Since we do not fully individualize teaching and learning — yet — it is probably best to err on the side of expecting more rather than less. After all, low expectations are as damaging in their impact on children as low test scores.

In general, higher standards are a good thing, as both teachers and students will strive to meet them. A ton of money and years of effort has already been invested in curriculum redesign; new materials; common assessment development; teacher training; infrastructure, hardware, and software for on-line assessment; and prodigious training and skills upgrades for all the professionals involved. What purpose would be served by throwing out the CCSS assessments at the eleventh hour? What tests would we use for all the federal and state requirements, both to asses student learning and to evaluate staff, as newer laws mandate?

I think we should continue on the CCSS path, but I know that the assessment results will be used unfairly, to malign good people working hard to serve our children and our society’s future.

This has already happened in New York, where scores on the first round of CCSS-related testing made it look as if both teachers and students had been lobotomized: 77.4% of students passed last year's exams but only 31.1% did so this year. To exemplify the absurdity of the new assessments, in one Long Island district where students take algebra early, eighth graders took the traditional New York Regents algebra exam for ninth grade, and 95% passed it. They also took the eighth-grade CCSS-related new test, meant to assess whether they were ready for algebra, and only 39.5% were deemed ready for the course they had already successfully completed. Results like this are simply useless. Even the much-celebrated Harlem’s Children Zone schools, where about three times as much as average is spent per child to provide extended schooling and wrap-around services, did not do well on the new exams. So, they will be used to call students, teachers, and schools failures — you can take that to the bank.

What to do?

I say we adopt and adapt to the Common Core standards and, as much as possible, ignore the testing results. Unless they are deliberately skewed for political reasons, as happened Indiana, they will make us all look pretty bad. This is just what happened with the recently released new Accountability Scorecards [link will download Excel spreadsheet] in Michigan, which rated less than 3% of our schools and districts as green (i.e., good) — and a third of those “green” schools were so labeled after achieving zero of a possible zero points. In all my reading, I have not been able to determine the basis for their good rating. (I am still awaiting a reply from the Bureau of Assessment and Accountability.) Just as this ranking system produces results so uniformly poor as to be pointless, low CCSS scores will be seen as invalid for the purpose of comparing schools. Let’s not waste any more energy or angst on fighting such things. Instead, we should focus on helping both our teachers and their charges to be the best that they can be. This stuff is a distraction from our real work.

It may be that the current “reform” effort, backed by corporations that stand to profit and by billionaire philanthropists who know little about education, has jumped the shark — gone too far and destroyed its own credibility and support. There are so many folks from so many quarters now complaining loudly about the over-reaching and conflicts of interest that the tide is turning.

We’ve experienced tremendous upheaval in public education, producing much less in terms of good results. We have the data to show that so-called accountability measures are really measuring socioeconomic status. They correlate almost perfectly with poverty levels. Instead of applying greater resources to the children who need them most, we have been systematically defunding, restructuring, and then closing their schools. Nowhere have these interventions proven to work better for children.

If we don’t call off this war on kids and teachers soon, it will be over — and both will have lost it. The most important way we can prevent that is to remember, in the voting booth, who has done what to whom.