Learning on the Job: When Business Takes on Public Schools
Steven F. WilsonHarvard University Press2006
Learning on the Job: When Business Takes on Public Schools
Steven F. Wilson
Harvard University Press
2006
If author Steve Wilson were as good a businessman as he is a writer, Advantage Schools might still be in operation today. Learning on the Job is the story of six education management organizations (EMOs) and KIPP. Wilson writes as a scholar, policy wonk, and entrepreneur-he founded and ran Advantage Schools-but it's the journalistic detail that makes his book so worthwhile. The first chapter alone is worth the price of admission. In it, Wilson chronicles the two earliest experiments in private management of public schools-Boston University's tumultuous Chelsea project, and Education Alternatives' meteoric rise and fall-before profiling the seven organizations and their idiosyncratic founders. What's striking is how different the seven players are in style, educational approach, and business strategy. Little more needs to be said about the most visible of the crew-Chris Whittle and his Edison Schools. The undisputed hero from Wilson's perspective is National Heritage Academies (NHA) and its humble founder, J.C. Huizenga. While Whittle was busy attracting the ire of educrats and union hacks (along with hundreds of millions of dollars in investment), Huizenga quietly built one of the largest, most academically successful, and possibly most profitable of the education companies. NHA's genius was in developing a successful school and facilities model, and then replicating it carefully within a confined geographic area. This kept costs low and quality consistent, and it made profitability possible. Though it discusses each organization's educational approach, this work is first and foremost a business book. While Wilson pulls no punches in ridiculing the industry for over-promising and under-delivering financial returns-though the go-go climate of the late 1990s venture capital markets demanded such bravado-he still believes that it's possible to run schools successfully, both as businesses and as education enterprises. You can order this fine volume here.
Stretching Minds and Resources: 20 Years of Post Secondary Enrollment Options in Minnesota
Joe Nathan, Laura Accomando, and Debra Hare Fitzpatrick
Center for School Change
December 2005
Twenty years ago, Minnesota enacted the nation's first initiative to allow high school juniors and seniors to use state funds to take university courses and earn university credits. The Post-Secondary Enrollment Options (PSEO) program gives high-achieving high school students a taste of college, and it provides them with the more-advanced instruction many of them crave. But does the program get students ahead? Are PSEO participants more likely, for example, to matriculate to college and graduate with a degree? Are Minnesota's citizens and PSEO participants satisfied with the program? The Center for School Change at the University of Minnesota conducted a statewide poll of 625 registered Minnesota voters, surveyed PSEO participants, interviewed state higher education officials, and worked closely with officials at Minnesota's Department of Education. It found that PSEO enjoys strong support, both from participants (86 percent would participate in PSEO again) and from Minnesota residents (82 percent support PSEO). PSEO participants also reported the program had a positive impact on their educational development (94 percent). The report does note that PSEO participants are "disproportionately female and affluent," and that the program could do a better job recruiting interested males and minority students. Overall, the authors portray PSEO as a success, but their examination is far from exhaustive, relying mostly on surveys and anecdotal evidence, rendering its conclusions unconvincing. Nonetheless, it gives a good summary of the program and provides some commonsense suggestions for improving it. You can check it out, here.
Test mess
The College Board, the Educational Testing Service, Pearson Educational Measurement, and the rest of them should be ashamed of-and held accountable for-the recent spate of screw-ups in SAT scoring, as well as the less-visible but recurrent delays and glitches in state test scoring and reporting. (One wonders how much of this has never been reported.) They are big, rich organizations that are as culpable for flaws in their products as Guidant is when its pacemakers kill people, or Ford was when its Pintos were catching fire. These education behemoths can afford to solve these problems, and they should be shown no mercy until they do
Testing will never be error-free, but, as with any other high-stakes process that we depend on-for the cleanliness of our food, the efficacy of our drugs, the safety of our airplanes, the purity of our water, the fire-resistance of our toddlers' pajamas, the veracity of corporate stock offerings, the integrity of bank accounts-it's got to be mighty damn close to perfect; close enough that we can trust it. And if government is going to deploy tests as part of its public policies, which is happening all over the land, the more so thanks to NCLB, government has a responsibility to ensure that they work as intended and are vulnerable to no more than the rarest of glitches.
There are umpteen ways of doing this, and they all require quality control measures that inevitably cost money. Conceivably, the testing industry can police itself, particularly if government requires properly "policed" tests before it accepts their results. Self-policing is always preferable to the heavy hand of government bureaucracy, but it doesn't always work. And when it doesn't, government must take a more direct role, creating the testing equivalent of an FDA or SEC. That's costly and intrusive, yes, but if Washington can send meat inspectors into virtually every slaughterhouse in the land, it can send test inspectors into state and local accountability systems and college entrance-test groups. (Tom Toch's recent report has some good ideas on this front worth considering.)
"Experts" have a role to play here, too. They spend gobs of time and energy on esoteric testing issues such as reliability, alignment, comparability, and validity. They sometimes attend to test security (how to minimize cheating and fraud). But in my experience, they pay scant heed to whether the scores are accurate. They should. Test scores need auditing-and generally accepted rules by which to audit them-just as much as corporate books and school expenditures.
Of course, the testing companies should already be doing this, checking and double-checking, submitting to independent reviews and audits, spot-checking individual score sheets, running them through twice (and through different machines), and insisting that human beings eyeball them for defects and peculiarities, just as egg inspectors and underwear-wrappers do.
I'm sure some of that already goes on. But obviously, there isn't enough. Testing firms are out to make a buck, too. Yes, even those that fly the "non-profit" flag need to accumulate surpluses to finance R & D and expansion, and to make up for deficits in other parts of their operations. They are all out to hold down costs, too, not least because the competitive bidding process that underlies much of their work rewards those who charge the least. (That's something else state and federal officials need to attend to.) In the world of college entrance testing, charging too much means some kids may not even be able to apply-or cannot afford the second and third rounds of re-testing that might boost their prospects of getting into Brown or CalTech.
Lack of competition in the testing industry makes all this worse. College applicants have at most two tests (and test suppliers) to choose between. States developing NCLB tests or high-school exit exams can turn to only a few firms. Near-monopoly, combined with penurious customers, combined with little transparency and less oversight, is a wicked blend. Drink enough of it, and sooner or later you're bound to trip and fall.
It doesn't help that the testing firms won't own up to their shortcomings. They always insist that they're on top of the problem-if they even acknowledge one-but then the problem recurs. And they make absurd excuses. In this latest round, the cake was taken by the corporate spokesman who said rainy weather had caused test papers to swell, thus throwing off the test-scanning machines and leading to lower scores. (Does dry weather cause scores to rise?)
This problem needs solving, and fast. Unsolved, it jeopardizes the entire regimen that we know as standards-based reform and results-based accountability. You can already see the threat. The anti-testing crowd is having a field day, saying, "I told you so. This is what happens when you put too much faith in tests, you wreck kids' lives for spurious reasons, you can't even trust the blasted things to be scored correctly-even if they did measure anything important, which they don't."
Yes, I paraphrase. But you get the point. The testing baby could be discarded along with the soiled bathwater that a few careless firms have allowed to accumulate-then excused away or belittled. I can hear the politicians scribbling bills, amendments, and stump speeches. Shame on them, too.
Shame on the greedy, smug, secretive firms. Shame on their customers. Shame on the experts. And shame on the government.
Unschooled parents
There's more than one way to skin a Badger. So when the Wisconsin Education Association lost its initial legal battle to close the state's first cyberschool (the WEA said the school violated Wisconsin charter and open enrollment laws) it took another tack. In a suit filed in 2004 against Wisconsin Virtual Academy, the teachers union claimed the school depended too heavily upon parents, and not state-certified teachers, to educate their children. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Ozaukee County Circuit Judge Joseph McCormack ruled that Wisconsin Virtual Academy's parent-teacher partnerships fall within the broad authority of school boards to decide what's best for students. Moreover, nothing in the law requires teachers to spend a set amount of time in the same room with a student. Though only a lower court ruling, supporters of cyberschools are confident McCormack's words will aid similar schools popping up across the state. "It can't be illegal for a parent to be too involved," said the school's attorney. "If parents had to be certified to engage in any activity that might be considered teaching, that would make illegal much of the activity that goes on ... in conventional schools." The WEA's next move? Why, unionize parents, of course!
"Ruling supports virtual schools," by Katharine Goodloe, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, March 17, 2006
How Bill Gates could really boost competitiveness
Memo to Bill Gates:
Bill, I heard you speak a few weeks ago at Davos, when you told a large audience that education is the biggest challenge for the future. You are right about that. You pointed to the 1,500 or so small high schools that the Gates Foundation has funded as evidence of your commitment to make a difference. If you are worried about our nation's future competitiveness, I am not so sure you made the right investment.
Small schools are not always the best answer to low achievement. Sometimes they are, sometimes not. Poor academic results can be found in large schools and in small schools. Great academic results can be found in schools of any size. Success is the result of a solid curriculum, dedicated teachers, a strong principal and students who arrive in high school with the skills and motivation to succeed.
There is another investment that you could make that would be far more effective in raising student achievement than churning out another thousand or so small high schools. As the chief executive officer of the largest software company in the world, you have a certain competitive advantage. Your company really knows how to use advanced technology to teach people almost anything.
If you took what you do best and turned it into curriculum and instruction for our schools, it would have a revolutionary effect. You could take your knowledge of software and develop amazing programs to teach mathematics, science, languages, history, literature, and the arts.
American students are accustomed to using computers and getting instant answers. Yet, when they open their textbooks, they find wooden prose. Instead of inspiring them to dig deeper into their studies, the textbooks more often than not simply turn them off. The medium itself is a problem, especially when compared with what they are used to doing for themselves on a computer. Textbooks have never been known for their sparkling prose, but today more than ever their obsolescence is apparent when they compete with new technologies.
The textbooks in most schools today are the result of political negotiations. [Read all about it here.] The textbook publishers must bring their products to certain states-especially California and Texas-and ask the state Education Department to approve their contents. If the publishers don't get that approval, the districts in the state can't use public funds to buy their books. The department holds public hearings, and all sorts of pressure groups step forward to demand changes. The publishers of science textbooks tread warily around the issue of evolution, and the publishers of history textbooks avoid details that might offend various religious, ethnic, and cultural groups, regardless of factual accuracy. Even mathematics texts must go through the political gantlet.
How can our students be well-prepared for college or for life in the 21st century when their basic learning materials in school have been revised and in some cases censored to pacify pressure groups?
Most teachers will tell you that the textbook is the curriculum, so the quality of the textbooks matters a great deal. Many states have been reluctant to specify their K-12 curriculum on a grade-by-grade basis and have left the all-important matter of what students learn to be decided by the textbook publishers.
Thousands of schools would jump at the opportunity to use your technology to teach their students mathematics or science. I can envision children in the first grade, the second grade and every subsequent grade learning far more than they do today if they were to have access to an exhilarating technology-based program that makes the relationships and ideas in mathematics and science real to them.
If students started in elementary school and learned from the best technological applications year after year, our high-school students would have the motivation, skills and knowledge that so many are now lacking, and many more of them would be prepared for science, mathematics, and engineering in college.
I can foresee a history curriculum that introduces students to the great events, ideas and people of history, as well as the debates about what really happened and what it really meant. All this can be done so much better with the wise use of film, as Ken Burns has demonstrated time and again, especially in his unforgettable television series about the Civil War.
One of my grandchildren recently told me that he was doing his history homework, and it was "really boring." His assignment was to read about immigration, a potentially fascinating subject, but the textbook had made it as dull as reading the telephone book.
If you take my advice, you have the chance to transform the education of 50 million students by doing what you do best. You have the power to create the most valuable learning tools ever known in American schools. These tools would work in large schools and in small schools. They would work in rural districts, in inner-city districts, and in suburban districts. They would dramatically level the playing field for children of every background, in every neighborhood and region.
This is a contribution to American education that would be worthy of the largesse of the Gates Foundation.
This article originally appeared in the March 9, 2006 edition of the Seattle Times.
CEOs see the need for standards
National standards and tests are no longer desired by just a select group of policy wonks-some of the country's most powerful business leaders are on board, too. State Farm Insurance CEO Edward Rust, for example, can't understand why there isn't one set of expectations for American students. "The laws of physics apply equally here in Illinois as in New York," he said to Bloomberg reporter Paul Basken. Intel chairman Craig Barrett agrees: "Ultimately, the competitiveness of your kids ought to prompt people into action." It's no longer a secret that states are dumbing down their tests to shield their schools from NCLB's sanctions. "These issues must become more of a priority," said Texas Instruments CEO Richard Templeton. We spot the signs of a growing consensus.
"Intel, State Farm Heads Say Easy Tests Sap U.S. Education," by Paul Basken, Bloomberg News, March 23, 2006
A tale of three cities
Charismatic Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is ready to shake up his city's beleaguered schools, and he's looking to Chicago and New York for lessons. He even took a field trip to the Big Apple this week, meeting with Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein to explore the potential and perils of mayoral control of schools. We hope the New Yorkers gave Villaraigosa the straight dope. As Chicago's Mayor Daley has learned, getting control of the schools is only the first step-then you have to figure out what to do with them. While Klein and company have had some success trimming the bureaucracy and expanding charter schools, their love affair with progressive educator Lucy Calkins has led to a pedagogical disaster of epic proportions. And it's hard to argue that those folks Bloomberg called "powerful entrenched interests" are significantly less so in either the Windy City or N.Y.C. Here's your homework, Mayor V: articulate a political plan to empower the system's consumers, especially poor and minority families, and then develop an education plan to actually address their needs. We suspect you'll find that mayoral control is part of the blueprint-necessary but by no means sufficient.
"Chicago Schools Offer L.A. a Cautionary Tale," by Joel Rubin, Los Angeles Times, March 20, 2006
"Mayor Gets Takeover Tutorial in New York," by Duke Helfand, Los Angeles Times, March 21, 2006
"A is for accountability," Los Angeles Times, March 20, 2006
Pi gaffe
Fifteen-year-old Gaurav Rajav will not be receiving an Xbox 360 video game console this month. That's because the high school student, who hoped to recite 10,790 digits of Pi, and whose parents promised him the Xbox if he met that goal, could muster only enough intellectual stamina to correctly recite 8,784 numbers. "I'm kind of disappointed," he said, "but I guess I did OK." Sure, Gaurav, you did OK-if your goal was to remember 8,784 digits. But it wasn't, and there's a pretty large difference between 8,784 and 10,790. We doubt, for example, any of our subscribers would think it OK if Gadfly missed its publication goal by only 3,000 words. Or if, say, Congress missed balancing the federal budget by $3,000. Inexcusable. There's hope for Gaurav, though. His mother Seema offered to buy the video game system despite her son's mathematical meltdown. The young man refused, and he vowed to try again in May. Gadfly (who generally sticks to Pie-eating contests) wishes him well.
"This guy from Salem High does a number on pi," by Marquita Brown, Roanoke Times, March 15, 2006
Stretching Minds and Resources: 20 Years of Post Secondary Enrollment Options in Minnesota
Joe Nathan, Laura Accomando, and Debra Hare Fitzpatrick
Center for School Change
December 2005
Twenty years ago, Minnesota enacted the nation's first initiative to allow high school juniors and seniors to use state funds to take university courses and earn university credits. The Post-Secondary Enrollment Options (PSEO) program gives high-achieving high school students a taste of college, and it provides them with the more-advanced instruction many of them crave. But does the program get students ahead? Are PSEO participants more likely, for example, to matriculate to college and graduate with a degree? Are Minnesota's citizens and PSEO participants satisfied with the program? The Center for School Change at the University of Minnesota conducted a statewide poll of 625 registered Minnesota voters, surveyed PSEO participants, interviewed state higher education officials, and worked closely with officials at Minnesota's Department of Education. It found that PSEO enjoys strong support, both from participants (86 percent would participate in PSEO again) and from Minnesota residents (82 percent support PSEO). PSEO participants also reported the program had a positive impact on their educational development (94 percent). The report does note that PSEO participants are "disproportionately female and affluent," and that the program could do a better job recruiting interested males and minority students. Overall, the authors portray PSEO as a success, but their examination is far from exhaustive, relying mostly on surveys and anecdotal evidence, rendering its conclusions unconvincing. Nonetheless, it gives a good summary of the program and provides some commonsense suggestions for improving it. You can check it out, here.
Learning on the Job: When Business Takes on Public Schools
Steven F. Wilson
Harvard University Press
2006
If author Steve Wilson were as good a businessman as he is a writer, Advantage Schools might still be in operation today. Learning on the Job is the story of six education management organizations (EMOs) and KIPP. Wilson writes as a scholar, policy wonk, and entrepreneur-he founded and ran Advantage Schools-but it's the journalistic detail that makes his book so worthwhile. The first chapter alone is worth the price of admission. In it, Wilson chronicles the two earliest experiments in private management of public schools-Boston University's tumultuous Chelsea project, and Education Alternatives' meteoric rise and fall-before profiling the seven organizations and their idiosyncratic founders. What's striking is how different the seven players are in style, educational approach, and business strategy. Little more needs to be said about the most visible of the crew-Chris Whittle and his Edison Schools. The undisputed hero from Wilson's perspective is National Heritage Academies (NHA) and its humble founder, J.C. Huizenga. While Whittle was busy attracting the ire of educrats and union hacks (along with hundreds of millions of dollars in investment), Huizenga quietly built one of the largest, most academically successful, and possibly most profitable of the education companies. NHA's genius was in developing a successful school and facilities model, and then replicating it carefully within a confined geographic area. This kept costs low and quality consistent, and it made profitability possible. Though it discusses each organization's educational approach, this work is first and foremost a business book. While Wilson pulls no punches in ridiculing the industry for over-promising and under-delivering financial returns-though the go-go climate of the late 1990s venture capital markets demanded such bravado-he still believes that it's possible to run schools successfully, both as businesses and as education enterprises. You can order this fine volume here.