Whose job is it to advertise a school?

This post isn't really about charter schools, although it's going to seem like it at first.  It's about market forces--what they're supposed to be, and what they actually are. 

As I understand it, the thinking behind schools of choice are that parents will choose to send their students to the schools that best educate their children.  As parents put their children in schools, they will send their money to the best districts.  The worst districts will gradually die off as students move away from it, leaving them without enough money to fund them.

This doesn't quite go far enough, because traditional public schools have a deeply entrenched history of unions.  Unions have a warping effect on free-market forces, because they prevent money from flowing naturally.  They prevent the tough decisions being made, they stifle innovation, they engulf schools in red tape.  Enter charter schools(1), which I suppose could unionize if they chose, but in practice almost universally choose not to.  Enter right-to-work laws, meant to uproot unions from the bottom up (2).  In the name of improving education outcomes, and in no small measure, in the name of making it cheaper.

This line of thought, as best I understand it, begins in a neoclassical understanding of free markets.  (Among the many things that I'm not, the top two things on the list are an economist and a houdun priest.)  In the neoclassical model, the three base assumptions are that a.) people act rationally, b.) individuals act to maximize their ability to fulfill needs or wants and firms act to maximize profits, and c.) people act independently based on good information (3).  This is only a model; approximately nobody really believes that this is the way the world works all the time.  They just assume it works close enough to this to make it worth pretending.

I'd like to take a swing at applying each of these to the education world as it exists in Michigan.  Bear with me, and feel free to chime in.

The first assumption is that people act rationally.  Their decisions make sense as best they understand it.  They rarely act randomly or against their own interests.  In this model, parents and students will choose the best schools.  I have no beef with this particular assumption.  It stands in direct contradiction to the notion of community schools, but so do a lot of other things I believe in (like racial and economic diversity). 

The second assumption is much more interesting.  Individuals act to maximize their ability to fulfill their own needs or wants.  This suggests that, within the confines of acting rationally, parents and students will pick the schools that will get them into the best college.  Or the one that has the best educational outcomes, or the one where the parents don't hate the principal, or the one that has the best football team, or the one where their kids don't get picked on, or whatever it is they think they want.  This raises the questions of what it is parents want from schools.  What we're told parents want is good education outcomes.  As my flurry of questions suggests, though, it's more complicated than that. 

But the third assumption is the one that troubles me most.  In order to act rationally and maximize utility, consumers need good information.  What "good information" is, largely depends on what people want.  If what they want is a winning football team, it's easy--just look at the win/loss ratio of the football team.  If they want a football team that will make their kid a better football player, that's a tougher question, and requires a different kind of information and a greater sort of statistical analysis.  Now imagine they want a football team that will teach their kid the value of teamwork and dedication and tenacity, and that playing is more important than winning.  We almost don't have the questions for that, much less how to find the answers; all the data that we have runs counter to that line of inquiry.  The only way those consumers could find out if any given product is the one they want is to enroll their students in the program and see what happens.  The quality of information is less than optimal, and there's no clear way towards making it better.

This same sort of confusion exists in learning, only worse.  We don't really know what we expect from schools, except that we know we want our kids to be better upon leaving than they were when they entered.  They should also get better, faster than they would get on their own.  Other than that, the objective of schools is a little ambiguous.  Do we want to train good people or effective people?  If we have to choose, which do we prefer?  If we have to pick one, do we pick inquisitive, which could lead to rebelliousness, or obedient, which leads to being easily duped?  Critical thinking is my go-to skill; what does society want me to do when a student's critical thinking tells her that she shouldn't be sitting in school?  And the information that we do have--grades, standardized test scores, behavior grades on report cards, parent-teacher meetings, phone calls from the principals--don't really answer which schools do the best.  Schools that give the best grades might not have a difficult curriculum.  Schools that fail all their students probably have no idea what they're doing.  Schools that have a perfect bell curve are most suspect of all.  Standardized tests mostly assess a student's ability to take standardized tests.  Parent-teacher meetings can either become gab-fests, with no information of substance, or sessions of passing the buck.  So with a lack of information, and no good way of clarifying it, parents are unable to make good decisions. 

Enter the ad campaigns.

Since the invention of capitalism, we've been making life-altering decisions with not much information.  And the way we do it is by ads.  Ads can raise awareness of a new product and they can inform consumers of what products are the best.  In practice, however, they end up playing on emotion much more heavily than they do on information. And they're absolutely crucial to the way we decide what to buy.

And so we apply these same ideas to school.  We have no good information, no good way of finding out what the information is, and by the time we find out what we need to know, it's too late.  So we turn to advertising.  Parents need to send their students to schools, and the ones with options will do their best to get them into the best schools (4).  It is now incumbent upon schools to convince parents that they are the best.  Since we're all still guessing what parents want, that's kind of a neat trick. 

Now we get back to the present.  I work at a small district with a declining enrollment--not because we're the worst school--quite the opposite, in fact.  Our ACT scores are best in the state, we consistently have among the highest MEAP writing scores, our special ed test scores are almost knock-your-socks-off good, many of our students go on to prestigious colleges, and many more find satisfactory work in the skilled trades.  Since sports appear to be important to parents, it's worth noting that our football team has been in the state semifinals most years and has 11 state championships; our cross and track teams are outstanding; we can count on our women's basketball and volleyball teams being district champs.  To all appearances, we're exactly what everybody should be looking for in a school district. 

And yet. 

The population of the county is decreasing and getting older.  It's a problem for all of our county's district, as it is for many places in the state.  We're one of the least-well compensated school districts in the county, and in the 25th percentile in the state. 

Our latest step increase is tied to student enrollment.  This suggests that we have some responsibility in recruiting students.  It is my position and that of my colleagues that it is our job to teach students, and administrators' jobs to get students into our door.  And when our administration thinks otherwise, then what?

(1) We'll ignore the general practice of cronyism that we're experiencing with charter schools.

(2) We'll ignore the political ramifications of destroying the most powerful mobilizing force on the side of the Democrats.

(3) This is paraphrased from Wikipedia.

(4) We'll ignore the classist assumptions that all parents are able to make these choices.

Morning musings

I have a sub this afternoon, so I should be writing my sub note.  Plus my cereal is getting soggy.  But we talked about the declining student count all over our county at our staff meeting last night, and I wanted to know more about it.  So without further ado:

Number of Public School Districts in Michigan, 1976-2012

In the '70s, Michigan had 579 Local Educational Authorities.  I'm not sure, but my guess is that that means school districts.  In the '80s, there seems to have been a mild push for consolidation, since by 1992, there were 559 school districts.  This number was fairly stable, and for the next 20 years, we have lost 10--in 2011-12, there were 549 school districts.

In 1993, the first public school academy / charter school opened in Michigan.  They have grown since then, often bumping up against state-mandated caps in their early years.  In 2011-12 there were 256, up nine from the previous year.  This growing effect means that the state of Michigan has increased the number of school authorities since the 90's to a total of 862 different local school authorities.  (Charter schools and public schools operate with different administrations.  For that matter, they play by different rules.)

Since the 1970's, Michigan has had a student population decrease of almost half a million students or 25%.  We used to have over 2 million kids, now we have a little over 1.5 million.  So to a certain extent the consolidation of public schools, while tragic for us in the teaching industry, is understandable and necessary. 

How this jives with increasing the number of school entities and spreading increasingly rare resources even more thinly truly escapes me.

UPDATE: Stanford charter school study

Earlier I wrote about this CREDO report on the effectiveness of charter schools in Michigan, with the headline, "Charter Schools More Effective."  Today my MEA e-newsletter sent me this gem from the Great Lakes Center for Education Research, which links to a review of the study by somebody else.  (I believe this is why people refer to the self-sustaining nature of bureaucracy.)  That person, one Andrew Maul of U Colorado Boulder, writing for the Think Twice Project (not a project I'm familiar with), suggests that there is almost no difference in performance between charter school students and public education students.  The effect of charter schools was responsible for a performance improvement of .1%, considerably less than the effect of having a teacher that knows how to use compare-and-contrast charts effectively.

Caveat lector: I still have not read the original CREDO study, nor have I read the full Maul report.  I pass this along as a summary of news, not as a position.  However, clearly this new summary of other people's research matches more neatly with my biases than the summary of the original report.

Stanford: MI charter schools more effective

Just a quick note to promise more analysis later.  I am against charter schools for a wide variety of reasons.  One of them was, until this afternoon, that all evidence indicated that charter schools are less effective than public schools.  This afternoon, I saw a report released today by Stanford University (download page here; click on Michigan).  The conclusion they draw is that Michigan charter schools produce better educational outcomes in students than comparable public schools.  I clearly have my doubts, but it seems likely that the researchers at Stanford would have taken these into account.  More from me after I actually read the report.  I mostly didn't want to feel like I'd neglected information I find inconvenient.

Duncan on "Face the Nation"

Secretary of State Arne Duncan spoke to Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation on Sunday.



He gets a lot of it dead right, I think, and says a lot of the things that a Secretary of Education ought to say.  I like particularly that he made a point of praising the national union heads for their efforts in education reform.  As always, the charter school thing is niggling at me.  He likes them, I don't understand them.  He explains them thus: "I'm not a fan of charter schools, I'm a fan of good charter schools."  What does that mean?  Schieffer says that charter schools don't have some of the restrictions of other public schools.  Really?

But from the premise that charter schools drive innovation, a premise that I think is at best unfounded, he says a lot of things that sound really familiar to me.  And I like the idea of a government official helping other people to do what everybody knows works.

Insufficient answers to pressing questions

Bob Herbert describes extraordinary results in a charter school (2 charter schools, actually--a middle school, and a high school that they made in response to their initial success in the middle school). 48 of 48 students in the graduating class are going on to college. All of these students face the difficulties educators point to--poverty, first to attend college, etc.

Eduwonk (hat tip for the article) frames this as the reason to have charter schools.

But my fundamental question remains unanswered--why can't we do this with public education? Why don't we? I think Eduwonk would say "Teachers' Unions! Vested Interests! Education Lobbyists!" Is my industry so politically powerful? Is it so short-sighted that we'd betray our professional principles and destroy our credibility?

At the same time I write this post, I happen to be listening to a Smithsonian Folkways podcast about labor movement folk songs, and it occurs to me that I toe the Union line pretty strongly. So let me clarify: I, of course, celebrate the success of all the students of Gaston Prep Middle and the high school (unnamed in the article). I honor the tremendous effort and sacrifice, and admire the professional dedication, of Tammi Sutton and Caleb Dolan, the educators responsible for creating and driving the schools that have helped this graduating class. I look forward to continued success from these schools. I don't question that in another educational setting these students would not have met anywhere near the same degree of success. I look forward to continued success from these schools.

What I question is, why wouldn't these students have had the same degree of success in their local public schools? What did this school do that public schools don't do? Why don't they do it?

The heart of my criticism of charter school is this: Charter schools and similar reform efforts are based on the notion of competition between education providers. The theory runs thus: as charter schools show their worth, non-charter schools will have to reform and improve student services, or parents will choose schools that will do the best job by their students. "Free and open market forces" will decide the distribution of limited resources--the victors will survive, the failures will dissolve. With the failure of just a few schools, we'll achieve a much higher degree of educational efficacy in education. And maybe that's the case.

But we already have a system of distribution of limited resources. It's called the "public education system." It is not immune from criticism: It is a near-monopoly; it's a bulky bureaucracy with many share-holders whose objectives sometimes work at cross-purpses; change is nearly impossible; every rule change has a million unintended consequences. Public schools fail a huge number of students, and these students are disproportionately the ones who most need help from the public sector--minorities and special-needs students.

But, and here's the rub of it, I think, charter schools and other competitive systems of education reform seek to dilute pools of limited resources, in effect robbing Peter to pay Paul. This inevitably leads to incentivizing "trade secrets," which is the opposite of what we want. If a school finds something that works that nobody else is doing, we want people standing on the rooftops screaming about it. We want successful teachers to be rock stars, the subjects of articles and TV specials, teacher educators, article-writers. We want their techniques studied, spread, maximized. To that extent, anything that charter schools can do to make us better, I'm all for it. I remain extremely sceptical, however, that diffusing the nation's education resources is the best way to do that.

Duncan want charter. Duncan SMASH!

Arne Duncan and Lamar Alexander write in Commercial Appeal. They say that more charter schools are better than fewer.

Why, again, is one charter school better than one public school? What fundamental structural flaw in public (non-charter) is repaired by constructing from scratch a parallel, competing system from the same, already-overstrained budget?

On charter schools

David Brooks on charter schools: "He [Obama] will reward states that expand charter schools, which are drivers of innovation, so long as they use data to figure out which charters are working."

Well, that's why people support charter schools, I suppose. They drive innovation. Huh.

How's that working out for us?

Obama's speech on education

I'm not exactly liveblogging this, because the speech happened hours ago. But I'm typing as I watch the video replay-at least the edited version on CNN. I'll try to slap some coherence on at the end.

1.) "Show me a plan to improve early childhood education to prepare students for grade school, get grant money (pending Congress approval)." Probably there's no systemic change that would help education more than a high-quality pre-K education program. All in favor of it. Education spending in the US (and probably everywhere else) is backwards--we should be spending huge amounts on pre-K--2 education. It would push the standards of the rest of the grades forward to sprint off the line.

2.) Encourage better standards and assessments. "Children can, and they must, and they will meet higher standards in our time." For a second, it sounded like he was talking about national education standards. But no, he just meant that states need to be doing a better job about setting their own. (Did he say something about an interstate education consortium? An organization for planning standards across state lines?) Not sure entrepreneurship is a 21st-century skill. High expectations across the board--no excuses--along with teachers equipped to teach them, would go a long way towards effective instruction. If everyone buys into it.

"...by not only making sure that schools and principals are getting the money they need, but that the money is tied to results." This sounds EXACTLY like the original intent of NCLB--do well, get money. Don't do well, don't get money. It was precisely this aspect of NCLB that got it in such trouble with teachers in the first place. The only way this isn't a return to the worst aspect of NCLB is if he means that some sort of federal "blueprint for success" or some such comes free with every million dollars' grant money. Money to invest in innovation in the school district.

"Provide teachers and prinicpals the information they need...." I thought this was going to talk about a "blueprint for success," again. But it seems to be a call for a central database for keeping track of students' progress. It sounds like a pretty good idea, and sheds some light on my "information-gathering" post from weeks ago (or is that the one that Blogger ate?) (He cites Huston and Long Beach; Florida's state tracking) "Major investment to cultivate a new culture of accountability."

3.) Democrats are guilty of opposing "rewarding excellence"; Republicans are guilty of opposing "investments in early education". So, we're going to throw money at both. "Time to start rewarding good students." "New pathways to teaching and new incentives" to get teachers where we need them. Teacher pay; more supports to teachers; "move bad teachers out of the classroom."

"I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from its consequences."--The unions are going to have a field day with this. This sort of sounds like a head-on assault on teachers' unions; it sounds like a right-wing talking point against teachers' unions. I don't work in a big school district, where an administrator can shuffle an underperforming teacher from school to school for years before anything bad happens.


4.) Changing the calendar: I am entirely in favor of increasing the length of the school calendar. In my particular school district, it would be expensive. Teachers cannot and should not increase their calendar time without due increases in compensation--indeed, it's the only thing we have to bargain with. There's no money for raises, so student-contact time (to the extent admissible by state law) is the only thing left to talk about. However, we clearly need the modifications he calls for here. More school time, after-school programs, longer school days into the summer, etc. All good. Now, and I say this in the least petty way possible, show me the money. I truly can't afford to do it for free. And if it's worth doing, certainly it's worth paying for. (This is going to lead to a discussion of education finance reform, very quickly. So I'll back away from the precipice slowly.)

And for sheep's sake, can we please disconnect sports from schools? Can we please stop acting like a 2-hour-long basketball practice is more important than getting homework done? (More about homework some other time. Baaack awaaaaay slooooooowly....)

According to the White House Blog, this is where he talked about charter schools. But I didn't hear anything about them. I know Obama supports them, though, so here's my piece. I agree that schools need major reform. But I reject the premise that charter schools are anything but a short-term fix. Nobody's ever explained to me what charter schools are supposed to do that public schools aren't already doing. If someone can do that, maybe I'll stop believing that they're union-busting techniques in the guise of improving student achievement. Let me put it this way--if you're in a sinking ship, you'll hop onto any dinghy, sailboat, inflatable life raft, or chunk of flotsam that passes by. But you don't want to sail across the sea in it, you want another ship that isn't going to sink. The way I see this, public schools are the ships. Charter schools are the life rafts. Probably better than nothing, but not much, and not for long.

5.) Student responsibility--I'm reminded of a quote from the director of New Teacher Academy, quiting from somebody else. "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. But you can salt the oats." I think if schools were doing a better job, students would be more likely to stay in. If education were perceived as more valuable, students would be less likely to drop out. This is one of those "rising sea raises all ships" things for me. Better schools make for better students, etc. It ties into the "higher standards" thing he was talking about, too. On the other hand, I can't get my students out of bed on time to catch the bus for them. So he has a point here, too.

All in all, it sounds like Obama's listing pretty hard to what is traditionally the right side of this argument, except he's talking about throwing a lot of (or at least some) federal dollars behind it. I worry about what would happen to all of these great ideas the next time we elect a deficit hawk, anti-federal-government-spending president. I can only hope that the reforms prove so valuable that cutting their funding would be laughable, and there would be no political will for it.