The Magnification of Corruption in AZ Charter Schools

It's common knowledge depending on how cynical you are that the only reason most people are on boards of public schools is to steer favors and money towards their allies in a glorious journey to finding the magic proportion of funding that actually needs to go to education to keep the scam from collapsing altogether. Far from correcting that, it seems that AZ's aggressive charter school program has accelerated the trend of rampant corruption even within its nonprofit schools, which raises a number of questions. To what degree is this level of systemic corruption responsible for bringing the system into crisis in the first place? It seems to me that along with tying funds to local property you have a recipe for magnificent dysfunction. How can charter schools claim to be a solution if fundamental issues like this aren't at the heart of the proposed reforms?

I think I follow the rest but could you unpack this a bit? People are on the boards (like, county school boards, or some individual board for each school?) in order to steer favours and money (to... certain schools, if you mean county boards?) And the scam that's being kept from collapsing is... the scam of public and private mixed schemes, or?

Each member of each tier of boards, depending on the level of transparency and oversight in the state, gets a substantial say in contracts. So they steer favors and aim contracts using who the contracts benefit as the primary criteria, although in many cases the form of bidding is maintained if not the integrity of the process. In my old school district, there were examples of both the old model and newer models of corruption, but the charter schools were still in the shiny and clean larval stage of their integration into the system. The traditional model only comes to public attention when someone corners the contracts and tries to roll over the tiers of handouts with grand-scale corruption, at which point people start snitching and action is sometimes taken. But most of the time the endemic corruption is just taken as a given, and indeed adapts to modern conventions such as with some recently built schools and expansions where something like LEED certification or a new grade database contract turns into a veritable flood of incredibly good fortune for people that know someone who knows someone.
What I'm saying is that the charter school systems proposed in many places, such as AZ, have the potential to make this kind of thing more legal (and, indeed, rationalized by the big picture corruption of the measurements being designed by people with the profit motive) rather than correct it.

Gotcha.

I recall while growing up in northern Idaho that my best friend's father was on the local school district's board. I can honestly say that he was beyond reproach and did it out of a genuine desire to try and make the schools that his kids were going to better places. Of course, then his daughter got hit in the head with a rock someone tossed in the hallway of the junior high, and so his kids ended up going to private school for 7th-9th grades. The most he stood to personally gain from his work on the board would have been to improve the schools enough that he wouldn't feel the need to pay private school tuition for his own kids.

I still remember the district was shopping around for a school lunch program because my father got involved as well and the two of them drove around to all the nearby districts to do actual research on what was and wasn't working. In the end it didn't matter at all, because the district awarded the contract to one of those companies that microwaves processed garbage food at a central location, trucks it to the schools, and then sells it to the kids at ridiculous profit margins. I seem to recall some sort of cronyism was involved, as my father bitched quite a bit about how messed up the situation was. As you might imagine, the bidding process and part where actual debate and discussion about best practices occurred was a sham, and what they ended up doing had been predetermined before they even began running through the motions. I'm pretty sure my best friend's dad quit the board not long after that, because there was nothing he could do about it as much as he wanted to - they would have needed to somehow get a majority of people who actual cared onto the board at the same time, and those people would have had to have put a lot of work with no expectation of getting anything out of it. Sadly, the nature of the situation is that those positions generally only attract the kind of people who do see a way to get something out of it for themselves.

This exact same process is currently happening in the UK. Private education companies lobby the shitheels in government to change the law so they can take over 'failing' schools and buy up school property on the cheap and, after a few large donations to the party coffers, they get what they pay for.

Our government recently even fucked over a cohort of students by arbitrarily changing exam grade boundaries midway through a year. It was all done very carefully at arms length but it doesn't take a genius to notice suddenly changed grade boundaries would cause more schools to be labelled as failing just in time for the new tougher criteria determining what counts as failing. The end result? A bonanza for the big government donors in the private education companies and another generation of kids getting fucked over for someone's bottom line. It happens at a local level as in LK's link and a national level and, broadly speaking, not enough people care to stop it.

Education is one of the last great frontiers of privatisation in the western world and our governments are hopelessly ineffective at fighting organised attempts to plunder it. I mean the forces arranged against public education are rich and ideological enough to fund several hollywood movies purely to attempt to push their agenda.

Another thing that really winds me up about the process is the half-arsed attempts that these privatisation advocates make to try and cover up their schemes. Like the classic bait and switch that you almost always see of having a 'non-profit' company/organisation control the running and ownership of the actual school. Seems great right? Keeping the evil profiteerers out of our schools no need to investigate further. Except these non-profits are often just tools/arms of a larger for profit conglomerate and they are charged with sending all the schools tax money out to the profit making parts of the company through for profit sub-contracters - supplying buildings, textbooks, equipment, curriculuums and soon teachers too. Basically anything that can be subcontracted out and sold to a school for a profit will be, until the very idea of a 'non-profit' school is a joke.

The non-profit is just a fig leaf, a funnel for directing tax money from the government into the hands of private corporations and billionaires. Other mendacious manipulations include school 'vouchers', 'parent run' schools and 'free' schools (the opposite of a free school must be like a prison right?).

Obviously the solution is to get government out of education. Duh.

I mean the ideal situation would be one where a principal chosen by parents and teachers handles the money for the school in question, with funding raised locally. That way there's a direct linkage between money, performance and "customer satisfaction" and no incentive toward malfeasance in an attempt to win more "magical" money. You could get that effect in the public or the private sector.

The less than ideal system is the one we have now, where multiple layers of bureaucracy get to make spending decisions without being held accountable to the parents or teachers of the schools they are failing because there's really no freaking way to tell which of them fucked what chicken where that caused the failcascade). With a single accountable principal, you can fire that fucker if the school performs like shit.

Then there's the whole property tax is fate issue for schools, where we have a truly 'brilliant' system that ensures school funding automagically adjusts to population movement. This is part of why local sourcing of school funding isn't viable without federal/state top up funds that once again make the whole thing vulnerable because each level has to be accountable to the prior one. Accountability is functionally a veto over spending decisions.

I'd be surprised if the bottom half of the income distribution parents are able to assess educational quality any better than health care outcome quality. At a level other than "absolutely terrible" or "absolutely great" what are they going to say?

My experience is quite the opposite. Parents I've known in the "bottom half" of income distribution are often keenly aware of educational quality, e.g. many immigrants. They have little power to change the situation, but they're savvy about getting the best out of what is available.

To elaborate, it's pretty easy to tell 1) "my school sucks compared to that rich district over there" or 2) "my school sucks compared to that other poor district." Anything more granular than that requires an awful lot of skills and educational expertise to tease apart.

None of the educational reformers are talking about anything that would possibly impact #1, so it's really #2. And how, exactly, are they going to evaluate that given the overwhelming number of problems that result in misleading gross outcomes?

Right now a lot of people seem to think "charter schools are better" because they're easily fooled by the cherry-picking effect, for one.

No, not really, it just takes a bunch of legwork and talking to other parents. Not necessarily easy and the time can be hard to find, but it doesn't require "lots of skills and educational expertise".

Frankly, you don't know what you're talking about, I'm guessing because you don't have kids and so all your information comes from reading rather than actual experience.

For example it's fairly easy (though time consuming!) to visit schools and/or talk to other parents and figure out:
- What classes are offered.
- What the class size is.
- How well teachers relate to kids.
- How key math and science subjects are handled.
- Whether give teachers teach their subject well, or you have people who think "math is hard" teaching math.

How do people feel about teacher pay being set as a function of peer reviews?

Tangent to that question, given that political polls that asked who voters expected to win were more accurate than polls where the same voters were asked who they were planning to vote for/supported/wanted to win, would it be more effective to conduct peer reviews by asking what peers thought the conclusion of the review would be and why?

Fuck, I want to know that right now!

Let me elaborate again. At a very high level education looks like:

Inputs
Student quality when they show up.
Dollars per student spent
"Outside of class" influences like parental income, neighborhood crime rates, etc.

Efficiencies
What methodology do they use?
How effective and efficient is their administration?
How effective and efficient are their teachers - after adjusting for pay and skills?

Outputs
Student quality when they leave

Going through your list:
Inputs: What classes are offered is dominated by available money.
Inputs: Whether give teachers teach their subject well, or you have people who think "math is hard" teaching math. Dominated by teacher quality and education level, which is just a proxy for student spending.
Inputs: What the class size is. Dominated by available money.
50/50: How well teachers relate to kids. Inputs in terms of teacher starting quality, but efficiency in terms of how good they work with what they've got.
Efficiency: How key math and science subjects are handled. This is a very good one, but it's also very very hard to measure even for professional experts.

Out of 5 data points you gave, 3.5 are not measures of educational quality. They're just proxies for "spend more money." This is what I mean by evaluating educational quality is hard; it's non-trivial to tease apart resources vs. what gets done with it, even before you get to stuff like massaging the data.

The obvious solution is to buy yourself a house in one of those well off neighborhoods where the local property tax enables the local school to be objectively awesome in the way that only throwing money at a problem can solve.

I guess this is sort-of the 'privatisation of education' thread. The process is continuing apace in the UK. Sadly there appear to be few defenders of public education left in the media or politics as both have become increasingly re-dominated by the privately educated. It is depressing but sadly inevitable as there is no-one left in politics with any interest in fighting it. The only remaining concern is how exactly to do it inch by inch so that the wider public doesn't notice until it is far too late.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/04/education-capitalist-command-economy

http://www.theatlantic.com/national...gnoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/

butbutbut Michelle Rhee is dreamy

That article is pretty old (2011) by the way, but for some reason it has floated near to the top of the 'most popular' pile on the Atlantic today.

STILL GOOD THOUGH.