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On for-profit education, what motivates a reporter

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On December 16, 2011 in Charter Schools, General, Online learning, Technology and Innovation

If it feels to the education reformer that The New York Times and The Miami Herald have made grand attempts to gore the growing presence of for-profit education providers, it’s because they have. But there are many false assumptions that lead the critic to suppose these are the transgressions of the “liberal media.” If choice advocates and education entrepreneurs want to overcome this adversity, it’s important to know what factors lead to headlines like “Cashing In On Kids.”

It first helps to survey a typical newsroom, and I don’t mean a survey of the political inclinations of its inhabitants. In many ways, the liberal-conservative chasm is irrelevant to what sparks investigations like we saw of K12 Inc. in the Times. Consider the newsrooms that shaped Times reporter Stephanie Saul — The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss., The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and Long Island’s Newsday. The traditional “beat” structure of these newsrooms and their “City Desks” has remained largely unchanged for decades, and it is centered around the coverage of public institutions — public schools, city councils, police departments and statehouses.

Now Saul is no “beat” reporter, but most daily and metropolitan newspapers employ an education reporter, and that means those reporters invariably cover their local school boards, whether they’re in New York City or New Baltimore, Mich. These reporters generally spend many days of the week in school district offices, talking with superintendents and scanning the e-mail correspondence of school board members. If they’re doing their job right, these reporters are applying a healthy dose of skepticism to every message they hear or read from these sources. But that is beside the point. They are immersed in issues and developments that are in the public interest and they are writing from public institutions.

In this world, for-profit education providers are nothing less than an insurgence into what is traditionally considered “public.” Their operations are, naturally, opaque, whereas newspapers demand sunshine — if not for their stories then for the public for whom they claim to write. This conflict informs a bias that is nearly absolute among reporters: A profit-making school or university is concerned primarily with making a profit; the education of its children is secondary.

I suffered from this bias myself when I was a reporter covering education for nearly 10 years at newspapers in Michigan and Florida. I was hardwired, just like all my colleagues, to examine any public policy or proposal that had the ultimate effect, however insignificant, of putting profits in someone’s hands. So, of course, the burgeoning sector of for-profit higher education opened several avenues for inquiry: Who was attending these schools, and how were these colleges recruiting these students? How much of the college’s revenues came from publicly backed student loans, and what was the institution’s loan default rate? And, perhaps the juiciest question: What were these companies paying in campaign contributions to elected officials?

I chased stories of students who filed lawsuits against these schools because they couldn’t transfer the credits they earned to more traditional institutions. I covered attorney general investigations that found heavyhanded recruitment of underqualified students and that these colleges overpromised the return on the students’ investment. This is the prism through which I viewed for-profit education and its unprecedented growth. And I was not alone.

This does not condone the worst of Saul’s reporting of K12. The Times story suffered from a striking lack of balance, and there was little that took the reader to the ideal path toward greater accountability and higher standards in online learning. But it does show that as for-profit companies increase the size of their footprint by investing in charter school management and online education, the scrutiny they face will be heightened for the ages of the children they serve and for the sweep they bring into primary and secondary education.

I have since left newspapering to help develop the policy and communications initiatives for a Florida program that administers a publicly funded private school option to 38,000 low-income children, and I have learned to exercise more nuance and sophistication in our expanded universe of public education. It is unfair to assume that children are being treated with malice by schools that keep one eye on the bottom line, especially when these schools must follow the regulations required of all private providers in any given state. But it is difficult to imagine that the culture in any newsroom will soon be superseded by one that considers how for-profit schools could help us find greater educational innovations with efficiency. So in the meantime, our education entrepreneurs would do well to understand what motivates an enterprising reporter. It may not be the partisan motivations we assume.

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On next-generation funding

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On December 7, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, Funding, General, Technology and Innovation

Writing in Education Week, Paul T. Hill, the director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, says today’s school funding arrangement developed haphazardly, a product of politics and advocacy, not design:

Simply put: Our current education finance system doesn’t actually fund schools and certainly doesn’t fund students. Rather, it pays for districtwide programs and staff positions. Much of it is locked into personnel contracts and salary schedules—and most of the rest is locked into bureaucratic routines. It’s next to impossible to shift resources from established programs and flesh-and-blood workers into new uses like equipment, software, and remote instructional staffing. Yet to foster and maximize technology-based learning opportunities, we must find ways for public dollars to do just that—and to accompany kids to online providers chosen by their parents, teachers, or themselves.

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Another Florida district goes virtual

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On November 29, 2011 in General, School Choice, Technology and Innovation, Virtual Education

This recent Gainesville Sun article provides another example of how public education is expanding to include private and home schooled students. The Alachua County School District, where the University of Florida is located, will soon be offering online middle and high school courses through a partnership with the Florida Virtual School. According to the article, “The eSchool will begin in January and is open to all students — public, private and home-schooled students.”

The district is hoping to recoup lost market share and revenue through these new course offerings: “One positive for the district, officials said, is that money paid by the state for student enrollment, also known as full-time equivalent funds, will come to the district instead of going to the Florida Virtual School.”

Even small school districts in Florida have now concluded the old distinctions between public and private education no longer exist. It’s a new world.

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Ruling like it’s 1968

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On September 15, 2011 in Charter Schools, General, Technology and Innovation, Unionism

A former member of the Buffalo Teachers Federation named Lynn Seagren Bass took to the pages of the The Buffalo News today to berate the union’s longtime leader, Phil Rumore, a man whom Bass identifies as “the ultimate guardian of the toxic status quo, a broken system that hurts children.” Bass’ moment of clarity came in 1996, she says, when she became a parent in addition to a veteran school teacher of 14 years. She joined a school-based management team that she says eventually eroded her early idealism as she watched union representatives “openly prioritizing their contract over progress.”

That was due to a culture, Bass writes, nourished by a union chief who executed a “doublespeak strategy” of publicly embracing innovations while fueling “distrust and adversarial relationships.”

[Rumore] seems to think it’s still 1968. According to him, his organization is blameless and system failure is always someone else’s fault. In reality, no miraculous “educational partnership organization” can possibly succeed with the unreasonable constraints of the current contract …

… In 2006, I gladly escaped to become principal of Tapestry Charter High School. Our second graduation was June 27. Our graduates represented every Buffalo ZIP code and had 61 percent free and reduced lunch rate. Nineteen percent had special education accommodation plans and our population was 63 percent African-American and 6 percent Hispanic. Our graduation rate was more than 90 percent. We’ve created a positive school community with a dedicated group of professional educators. Parents are given a valued voice.

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The value of online learning

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On April 7, 2011 in Customization, General, Technology and Innovation, Virtual Education

The New York Times’ feature Room for Debate has brought several educators together to talk about whether and how students benefit from virtual instruction. It’s nice to hear from educators on this subject, including this refreshing argument from teacher Gary S. Stager on the contribution online learning makes toward public education:

Learning is no longer bound by artificial schedules, random teacher assignments or age segregation. Students feel more connected than in “school” where talking is the No. 1 infraction and teacher access is severely curtailed. When work is public, peers learn from it and support reciprocal growth. Everyone is a teacher and learner all of the time. The quality of work benefits from the extra time, collaboration and expertise.

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Charter network leader Moskowitz on class sizes

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On March 28, 2011 in Charter Schools, General, Teacher quality, Technology and Innovation

“Obsession with class size is causing many public schools to look like relics,” Success Charter Network founder and CEO Eva Moskowitz writes in the Sunday Washington Post. Small class sizes are no guarantee of success, and a “19th-century school can be transformed into a well-managed 21st-century school by adding just two students per classroom.”

 As an example, she cites the makeup of the network’s crown jewel, the Harlem Success Academy Charter School:

… we’ve gotten some of the best results in New York City … some classes are comparatively large because we believe our money is better spent elsewhere. In fifth grade, for example, every student gets a laptop and a Kindle with immediate access to an essentially unlimited supply of e-books. Every classroom has a Smart Board, a modern blackboard that is a touch-screen computer with high-speed Internet access. Every teacher has a laptop, video camera, access to a catalogue of lesson plans and videotaped lessons.

Public schools are spending so much to reduce class sizes that there isn’t enough left to ensure the development of the teachers they hire, Moskowitz writes. What’s worse, she says, human capital is getting more expensive while better technology and intellectual property are getting cheaper.

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The federal role in education

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On March 11, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, Technology and Innovation

Most barriers to innovation in education occur at the state and local level, Tom Vander Ark writes today at edReformer, but there are a few at the federal level. They include:

1. NCLB picked criterion-referenced testing over growth models; that probably set back competency-based learning a bit. Growth models are being approved state by state.

2. The feds retain the historical bias/restrictions against private enterprise; e.g., excluding private enterprise from stimulus funding (compared to massive private investment in energy).

3. Input-oriented programmatic funding (exacerbated at the state level)

4. Inadequate Investigator driven research funding rather than DARPA-like strategic funding

Also, RiShawn Biddle has some good historical context on the role federal funding has played in education.

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A public-private accord in Florida with jaw-dropping implications for online learning

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On February 23, 2011 in Customization, Education and Public Policy, General, Technology and Innovation, Virtual Education

A Florida House committee was treated Tuesday to a high-level discussion of digital learning that included the likes of former West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise and national education reformer Tom Vander Ark, but the showstopper came from a different duo with a jaw-dropping accord. The policy director for the nation’s leading public virtual school and the president of a leading private virtual education company told lawmakers that competition is the best way to give students new online opportunities.

No, we’re not making this up.

Sitting around that committee room table were Holly Sagues, chief policy officer for Florida Virtual School, and Barbara Dreyer, president and CEO of Connections Academy. Florida Virtual is far and away the nation’s most successful public virtual school, whose 213,926 courses last year represented three times the rate of the next closest state. Dreyer and one of her own private competitors, K-12 Inc., have found common ground with Florida Virtual on a plan that would introduce statewide private providers for all forms of online learning.

They have agreed to a plan that is animated by two basic objectives. First: “To provide students throughout Florida with as many quality online education options as possible and to make those options available to every student regardless of where they live or whether they attend a district school.” Second: “To bring more consistency in the qualifications, funding, and accountability applied to all public and private providers.”

House K-12 Innovation Chairwoman Kelli Stargel is showing clear interest, and substantial legislative groundwork has been laid. Some two dozen online advocates worked collaboratively over the past eight months around those objectives and were able to avoid the acrimony and division that has characterized previous efforts. Their product could make Florida a national model in the arena of online education and includes:

  • Authorizing the state Board of Education to select private companies meeting certain standards to provide online courses or fulltime online education statewide – in direct competition with Florida Virtual School.
  • Bringing consistency to the qualifications, funding and accountability applied to all public and private providers. Some districts currently contract with private companies to provide fulltime virtual programs, and there is currently wide disparity, particularly in funding.
  • Removing the mandate on school districts to provide fulltime programs themselves and letting students choose from Florida Virtual or the private providers.

The implications for legislation in this state this year are obvious, but the example being set by the Florida Virtual School is something that deserves its own form of awe. This is an innovative public school that has developed markets in other states and nations, and it is showing a disarming level of institutional confidence. At a time when many public educators are conditioned to see private options as an assault on their turf, Virtual School president and chief executive Julie Young is saying, essentially, bring it on. Maybe her real savvy is simply to make sure they all play by the same rules, but her moxy is something to behold.

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Getting beyond left and right in education reform, a rally from an unlikely source

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On January 21, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, School Choice, Technology and Innovation

Soon after redefinED launched in late November, contributor Jon East commented on Jeb Bush’s call for bipartisanship  in developing “meaningful, child-centered” education reform during the former Florida governor’s National Summit on Education Reform in Washington, D.C. As Jon noted then, “this is not to be dismissed as idle happy talk,” and he should know. Jon covered education policy for more than two decades when he was an editorial writer for the St. Petersburg Times, and recalled that “Bush achieved much of his own sweeping education agenda in Florida from 1999 to 2007 through taut partisan muscle …”

This week, Reason.tv released its interview with Bush at the National Summit, exploring mostly Bush’s interest in transformative and disruptive technologies in the classroom. But in the closing seconds of the 6:30 minute video, Bush returns to the theme of bipartisanship and reminds his interviewer of the liberal heritage of school choice:

I think a liberal can support systemic change. School choice in the 60s was a creature of the left, not of the right. It makes no sense for me to think you have the left supporting an unsustainable system and the right not focusing on rising student achievement as a high priority but just kind of focusing on local control being the dominant feature. We need to get the debate beyond that, and I hope to play a role in that.

Here’s the full video:

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Robinson: New education paradigms require a transformation of public education

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On January 12, 2011 in General, School Choice, Technology and Innovation

The Cooperative Catalyst team this morning introduced the uniquely creative mind of Ken Robinson, whose animated presentation on new education paradigms made its way on YouTube in October and has since enjoyed more than 2.4 million hits. 

Calling for a radical rethinking of public education today, Robinson argues that we’re “educating people out of their creativity” in an education system “modeled on the interests of industrialization, and in the image of it.”

“Schools are still pretty much organized along factory lines — ringing bells, separate facilities, specialized into separate subjects,” Robinson says in his presentation. “We still educate children by batches, we put them through the system by age group. Why do we do that? Why is there this assumption that the most important thing kids have in common is how old they are.”

To paraphrase, we still falsely assume that children have identical needs, and we assume one school works for all students. A top-down, assembly line model. The critique is similar to one made by sociologist James S. Coleman 50 years ago in The Adolescent Society:

The same process which occurs among prisoners in a jail and among workers in a factory is found among students in a school. The institution is different, but the demands are there, and the students develop a collective response to these demands. This response takes a similar form to that of workers in industry …

Author Zoe Weil, in her post on Cooperative Catalyst, takes Robinson’s arguments one step further and proposes five solutions to develop new education paradigms. As Coleman did decades ago, Weil calls for a reassessment of the way schools are financed and structured so that education can flourish in an environment of choice:

Restructure how schools are paid for and create real school choice for every family; public funding for schooling based on zip code is inconsistent with our core values. Providing equal and adequate funding for every child that can travel with the child to any school will provide opportunities for creative school approaches to flourish and a variety of teaching and learning styles to meet the needs of each child.

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