Snake Oil

PHOTO BY TROY FIELDS

Dan Patrick

The Reveal
In late August, state Sen. Dan Patrick, a Republican from Houston who makes his living as a conservative talk radio host and has quickly become the leader of the Texas Senate’s tea party vanguard, rounded up a few of the nation’s best and brightest school choice advocates to testify before the Senate Education Committee.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, the country’s biggest advocate for carving off public money for online, private and charter schools, couldn’t make it, so the job of selling the committee on expanded school choice fell to Matthew Ladner, who works at Bush’s foundation and is a senior fellow at the industry-funded Texas Public Policy Foundation.

For the last 20 years, a legislator has introduced a voucher bill just about every legislative session. And every session the bill or bills have been shot down. This time around, though, Dan Patrick is vowing to change that. With a neat little trick of pre-session messaging, he’s bumped vouchers—and school choice, generally—straight to the top of the Legislature’s education agenda next year.

At last month’s hearing, Ladner—a native Texan who’s done work for a who’s who of national conservative groups, Heritage and ALEC—spent 45 minutes on a pitch for Florida’s McKay Scholarship program, which provides private school vouchers to special-needs students. He credited the program for improving test scores even for special-needs students who remained in public schools, and said it’s spurred the growth of new private schools to shoulder the new demand. After Lander deflected a few critical questions about the program, Sen. Kel Seliger asked him to describe what kind of criticisms had met Florida’s voucher scheme. Ladner paused for what felt like an excruciatingly long time, before pivoting away from honestly answering the question. “I would invite you to Google ‘McKay Scholarship problems’ and you could probably find people like that,” Ladner said. (Invitation accepted—the first hit I got was a June 2011 Miami New Times feature, “McKay scholarship program sparks a cottage industry of fraud and chaos.”) It was a close call—Ladner nearly got lured off his talking points and into actual human conversation.

In the eight-hour hearing, none of Patrick’s invited guests offered a critical take on vouchers. Each played their parts as wise men sent from afar to share the empowering message of school choice. Some said vouchers are great because they save the state money, while others said they let special-needs kids get the school that’s just right for them. No two kids are the same, they said, so why should the schools be? Uninvited guests from the public, who hadn’t been given public notice of the hearing until just beforehand, didn’t get their chance to speak till almost quittin’ time, in a hearing that started at 9 a.m. By then they’d enjoyed an hours-long performance of something like democracy, and the message was clear: If you’ve got a problem with education, these smart folks have your answer: public money for private schools.

The Setup
Voucher advocates have come a long way from 15 years ago. San Antonio mega-donor James Leininger waged a ham-fisted voucher campaign back then, bankrolling pet candidates for the Texas House—and even the State Board of Education, before realizing the board had no say in the matter. The last direct campaign contribution he’s made was $25,000 in May to try and re-elect state Rep. Sid Miller, who carried last session’s only voucher bill. But he still gives to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which provides the intellectual support for the scheme. Tim Dunn, the oilman who runs a Christian school in Midland, also supports the voucher cause through his strong-arming advocacy group Empower Texans.

It’s a decades-long tug of war, with the same old arguments enthusiastically dusted off every few years as if they were new. You can trace vouchers back to 1955, when Milton Friedman wrote “The Role of Government in Education.” The tradition lives on in Texas as “Taxpayer Savings Grants,” a deal backed by free-market and tea party groups that they say will save Texas $2 billion over the first two years.

Arguments this time around from school choice opponents—teachers’ groups, parents’ groups and the Democratic establishment—will look about the same as in the past. “The more money you siphon away for these various profiteering schemes, the less money you have for the public schools,” says Texas State Teachers Association spokesman Clay Robison. There’s a more basic criticism of school choice: private schools, like charters, can pick the students they want and send the ones they don’t want—kids who cost more to educate, the ones who are more trouble than they’re worth—back to traditional public schools. In a voucher program, there’s even less accountability for that money than with charter schools.

And of course, the best private schools cost far more than the state would offer students in a voucher plan. If your parents can’t cover the difference, you’re not going to St. Mark’s or St. John’s or any other saintly house of college prep. You’re simply going to hope your state leaders were right when they promised the private sector can give you more education for less money.

As with school choice programs generally, research on vouchers is mixed—if you feel strongly one way or the other, big studies have been done that’ll back you up. A Brookings/Harvard study released last month shows how these are usually received: researchers claimed they’d found huge gains in college enrollment for African American students in New York City who’d gone to private schools with  a private voucher program. The news was widely reported as proof of vouchers’ success. Then the National Education Policy Research Center, which takes a critical look at school choice programs nationwide, pointed out serious flaws that undercut the study’s most basic claims.

Each session voucher debates are colored with quotes from the latest research, but no great proof that vouchers improve education. They’ll resurface with a new twist, as a little pilot program, or as a grant for kids with special needs, and some have nearly passed. A voucher bill in the House came up just one vote short in the House in 1997.  The Austin Chronicle covered one new scheme under the headline, “Vampire vouchers rise again!” That was 2005. Late that session, House Republican leadership tried to tuck a small voucher program for urban students inside the much larger Texas Education Agency sunset bill.

The Twist
Next year, the more extreme political climate could help Patrick turn history on its head. Five years ago Patrick danced around on the Senate’s far right fringe hoping for some attention; now he anchors the upper chamber’s hefty, vocal tea party contingent. The critical votes in past voucher fights have been rural Republicans, who don’t much care for vouchers because their districts don’t have private schools. Rural hard-liners could be pressed to either vote their ideology, for freeing the public ed market, or vote with their district where vouchers won’t help.

But the other big change this time around is the national momentum behind vouchers. Though even Democratic opposition to vouchers is shakier these days. Someone like Dan Patrick, who wasn’t in office for the nastiest voucher fights of the ‘90s and ‘00s, could look at the rest of the country right now and ask: Why not in Texas?

Vouchers dedicated to special-needs kids are one promising avenue for the school choice crowd. At a TPPF event last fall, Patrick said he had 4,000 autistic students in his district who weren’t getting the education they needed in public schools. “I would beg all teacher associations to let us give vouchers to students with autism,” he said. “We need to get the adults out of this. We need to get the hateful bias against vouchers and charters out of this.” Clay Robison at TSTA calls foul: “If Senator Patrick were so concerned for special needs kids, he wouldn’t have voted to cut 5.4 billion from public schools last year. Those special needs kids suffered from those budget cuts,” he says. “The ultimate beneficiary of the money is not the kids and the families. It’s the private school operators.”

From Florida, which has the country’s best-established voucher programs, other states have launched their own programs of varying sizes, including Arizona, Utah, Ohio and Georgia. Vouchers may not have gotten much traction here in Texas, but they’re gaining momentum nationwide.

In Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal shepherded through what could be the largest voucher program in the country—if only more kids would sign up. Since it launched this year, it’s been criticized for its lack of oversight, the oddball things it’s paying for kids to learn in private schools, and even for the shocking realization that the religious schools it supports include Muslim ones, too.

The Payoff
At the Republican National Convention the week after the Senate hearing on school choice, Patrick told reporters that education—specifically, his pet notion of state funding to opt out of public schools—is the “civil rights issue of our time,” which gives you a sense of where his head is. You could be forgiven for thinking that civil rights are the civil rights issue of our time. (Patrick also used that line at the TPPF event in January.) Lieutenant governor David Dewhurst—still smarting from his U.S. Senate runoff loss to tea party darling Ted Cruz—quickly agreed that he’d back a voucher bill next session too.

Old opponents, like Diane Patrick, the Arlington Republican rep who was first elected on a promise to fight school vouchers, have said they’re on guard again for whatever voucher backers have in store. Sid Miller may be out of the picture, after losing his reelection bid, but the House still has members who’d be all too glad to make public education a private enterprise. Along with any number of voucher variations we might see, there’ll be a strong effort, as in last session, to eliminate or raise the statewide cap on charter schools, which is now at 215.

And school choice backers will find even more creative ways to push their cause. In late July, Weatherford Rep. Phil King told a crowd hosted by the Texas Public Policy Foundation that the public education system. “I am by no means an expert, but I do understand business…and I think this 40 year experiment of having the state and federal involved in running public education has really been a failure,” he said. The solution he and TPPF were peddling: an obscure, never-used option in the state law that lets local school districts turn themselves into charter schools. And next session, the House will be the less extreme of the two chambers.

At last weekend’s Texas Tribune Festival, Rick Perry declined to come out and say he’d make vouchers an “emergency” item next session, but Patrick’s maneuvering ensured they’ll at least be important business in the Senate.

“Legislatively, it’s very shrewd. Start early, and treat it as a priority,” says Kel Seliger. an old-guard Senate Republican from Amarillo who, like Patrick, is a top contender to chair the Senate Education Committee next session. Seliger says the fight is going to depend on the voucher scheme’s details—how much the state will spend on how many students, and what strings are attached to the money—not pure ideology. “It is going to be a longer discussion than some people think.”

Patrick Michels

Panelists at UT Monday night: Angela Valenzuela, Linda McNeil, Tom Pauken, Rep. Jimmie Don Aycock, Todd Williams and David Anthony

Maybe you’ve heard. There’s a tremendous backlash spreading across Texas—and from here to the rest of the country—against the high-stakes testing regimen we rely on in the state’s accountability system.

More than 776 school boards, covering 85 percent of the students in the state, have passed resolutions calling for a more nuanced, less punitive approach to student and school assessment in the last few months. And that’s after the state began rolling out the new-and-improved testing system known as STAAR.

During its last session, the Texas Legislature faced an angry mob that railed, in vain, against a budget that cut billions from public education. A whole new mob, even more pissed-off than the last, is forming around the issue of over-testing, and could force lawmakers to make some testing and accountability reforms.

There are some serious differences of opinion, even among folks who agree the system needs to change. Last night on the University of Texas campus, five such leaders got together to share their ideas—a preview of the arguments we’re likely to see next legislative session. A few hundred teachers, activists, students and legislators turned up for the panel, which was hosted by the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs.

To begin, a pair of university researchers simply called for an end to the high-stakes system we have today, in which students’ test scores are used as the basis for judging schools and teachers. Angela Valenzuela, a UT professor of cultural studies in education, said it’s a battle she’s been fighting for more than a decade in Texas, because the pressure to test well—at the expense of a well-rounded education—falls disproportionately on Hispanic and black students.

Rice University’s Linda McNeil, a critical writer about standardized testing’s effects on schools, really brought the heat, calling out the “big money interests” profiting off the way we run our schools. With statistics she said came from a legislative staffer, she offered a chart that said Texas spent $39 million on testing in the 2000-2001 school year, but will spend $93 million on it this year. “Public tax dollars need to go with public education. You have a lot of people seeing education tax dollars as their opportunity to get rich,” she said.

Texas Workforce Commissioner Tom Pauken has been an omnipresent advocate for career and technical training, which he says Texas has neglected in its zeal to boost college graduation rates. Monday night, Pauken called the current system a “trap” for kids whose ambitions don’t include college. “We’ve almost denigrated the value of working with one’s hands,” he said. Pauken warned of looming shortages in practical trades. “The average age of a master plumber,” he remarked, “is 56.”

David Anthony, from the education group Raise Your Hand Texas, said, like Pauken, that he’s supported bills to create “multiple pathways” to graduation in the past, and his group plans to do so again next January. “There is honor and quality of life in all work. Not just work that uses math and science,” Anthony said. “Texas is selling our students a dream that is not based in current reality.”

As evidence, Anthony quoted a pretty damning statistic from this first year of STAAR testing—that of the students who failed their STAAR tests last year and took remedial classes over the summer, just 20 percent passed their retakes. “You tell me which path those kids are on,” he said. “They’re already behind on their exams and they’ve only got 13 more to go.”

Todd Williams, education adviser to Dallas mayor Mike Rawlings and founder of a school reform group, Commit!, said he sees a particular problem in the way STAAR and TAKS scores are sliced to fit the needs of districts or the Texas Education Agency, and how hard it is to get meaningful test data. Parents might be heartened to hear their kid passed a state test, then be shocked to find out her “passing” score was under 50 percent. Of the 8,000 schools in Texas, he said, 93 percent of them were rated “acceptable” or higher by the state.

State Rep. Jimmie Don Aycock, a Killeen Republican who has a good shot at chairing the House Public Education Committee next session, struck a broad, conciliatory tone. He said he doesn’t think it makes sense to judge students, teachers and schools by a single test, but he asked for people to share specific ideas about, say, how to save money on testing. He said his mind was open, and that he’s focused on making positive change, with concrete ideas that can survive in the Capitol. Perhaps without meaning to bring down the party, Aycock underscored why the most likely outcome is no change at all, or very little.

“Simply saying ‘I don’t like what we’re doing’ doesn’t give us a bill,” he said.

Tutors With Computers, by far the best paid No Child Left Behind tutoring company in Texas, has ties to NCLB architects like Rod Paige and Sandy Kress

As the number of “failing” schools balloons according to the less and less sane demands of No Child Left Behind, so too grows the market of students eligible for outside tutoring, paid for with federal and state money. Last year tutoring firms got $50 million to serve just under 48,000 kids in “failing” schools.

No Child Left Behind has fattened a whole new industry with its provision of free tutoring, without a provision that the tutoring be any good. The program puts a thousand-dollar price tag (or more) on every eligible student, and entrusts students and parents with the choice of providers.

Two weeks ago, Texas announced its plans to apply for a federal waiver from No Child Left Behind. True to form, the state won’t go down the easy waiver route the Obama administration has laid out—which comes with some major strings attached—insisting instead on just getting the feds’ hands off its schools. So this waiver is no sure thing.

But you might wonder: free of federal requirements about how that money is spent, could this waiver mean an end to No Child Left Behind tutors? Could it actually free up those tens of millions a year for Texas’ public schools? Could it shut off at least one spigot of public money for education profiteers?
Illinois and Delaware have proposed cutting the tutoring program altogether, while other states that have already received or applied for waivers, like Florida and Maryland, are looking at ways to continue the private tutoring, after heavy lobbying from the tutoring companies.

Texas pioneered this kind of public funding for private-sector tutors, starting with then-Gov. George W. Bush’s statewide mini-version of No Child Left Behind. TEA spokeswoman DeEtta Culbertson told the Observer last week that Texas’s waiver application would include its own plans to “turn around” failing schools. “How that will play out and how that will develop with the [tutoring] providers, I’m not sure,” she said.

Take a look at who’s making money off that tutoring in Texas, though, and you can pretty well guess.
For at least three years, a company called Tutors with Computers has enrolled far more students than any other. (We’ve posted the last three years’ worth of total payments to tutors, according to TEA data.)

Tutors with Computers is based in Austin, and offers a self-paced online program with live help over the phone. The $11.8 million they made from Texas’ No Child Left Behind tutoring last year is more than double what the next company got. In 2009-2010, according to TEA, their take was more than $18.8 million.

Their board chairman is Rod Paige, the former Houston ISD superintendent and U.S. Secretary of Education when No Child Left Behind passed. In 2010, the Houston Chronicle ran a story critical of the tutoring program’s lack of accountability, and Paige penned a vigorous defense, which ran without mentioning his stake in the industry. (The Chronicle’s story even included Houston ISD’s complaints that Read and Succeed—a sister company to Tutors with Computers, under the same board of directors headed by Paige—was handing out cash to students who recruited their friends.)

At the Capitol, Tutors with Computers’ lobbying muscle is no less than Sandy Kress, the godfather of No Child Left Behind who still holds tremendous sway in Austin. He’s helped secure a $500 million testing contract for another client, Pearson, while the state cuts school spending everywhere else.

In a state led by folks so captivated by the thought of cutting spending, this tutoring program is on some shaky ideological ground. Some tutors charge $15 an hour for each student. Others charge $157. It’s not school choice, exactly, but proponents of the tutoring use similar arguments, saying it offers learning options to kids who don’t thrive in the one-size-fits-all model of public schools.

Providers can be nonprofits or school districts, but most are for-profits for whom the program is an amazing deal—pretty simple to get on a state-approved list, and exceedingly difficult to get kicked off. As of this summer at least, the Texas Education Agency hadn’t removed even one tutor.

Which is kind of jaw dropping considering the program’s history is rife with complaints about recruiters who’d hang around outside schools or local drug stores to sign up students, promising free laptops or iPods as enrollment bonuses. Sometimes parents never hear from them again after that—some kids don’t even get their iPods. Sometimes providers bill school districts for students who never took an hour of tutoring. When kids do get the tutoring they’ve signed up for, the quality—and their success rate on the next year’s test—varies dramatically.

Dallas ISD has been caught in a battle with TEA because it’s refusing to pay tutoring providers it says never delivered on the services they promised. A district analysis of TAKS scores in 2010-2011 found “no statistical difference between tutored and non-tutored students.” On the sixth grade math TAKS, students who were eligible, but didn’t get tutoring, outscored students who did get tutored by 21 points.

Lots of school districts, like Dallas, think they could get much better results from that kind of money, but TEA has insisted the district refer more of its students to those private providers. While covering the inter-agency spat in April, the Dallas Morning News reported that tutoring providers have raked in $200 million statewide since 2007.

Some states might use their freedom from No Child Left Behind to cut off this poorly regulated industry and put the money back into the classroom—but Texas, where this profiteer party first took off, probably won’t be one of them.

The number of schools failing to meet federal accountability measures is skyrocketing these days, mostly because No Child Left Behind is simply a system set up to fail. Congress hasn’t agreed on how to fix the law, so 44 states have applied for a waiver from the law’s sanctions instead. On Thursday, Texas announced it’s fixin’ to be number 45.

“The lack of NCLB’s reauthorization in a timely manner has created an obsolete system that does not adequately reflect the accomplishments of the state’s schools,” said Texas’ new education commissioner Michael Williams (pictured at left).

It was probably bound to happen sooner or later, but the announcement carries extra significance because Texas is where this tough test-based accountability movement began. Gov. Ann Richards oversaw the creation of Texas’ system in 1994, and George W. Bush expanded it before heading to the White House and taking it nationwide.

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has been trying to sell Gov. Rick Perry on a particular kind of waiver crafted on Duncan’s terms, an olive branch that offers an easy path out of the federal sanctions if Texas agrees to go along with major Obama administration priorities. Those include adopting the Common Core curriculum standards meant to streamline what’s taught in the nation’s schools (we’re one of just four states that hasn’t signed on), and tying teacher pay to students’ test scores.

Instead of playing by the Obama administration’s rules, Williams announced that Texas would be crafting its own waiver application—one that isn’t likely to include signing on to the Common Core standards, for one thing. The only other state that’s applied for a waiver without agreeing to Duncan’s terms is California, which objects to tying its teacher pay to test scores. The Education Department hasn’t yet announced its decision on their waiver request.

In his letter last week, Williams struck a familiar note: Thanks very much, but we’re doing just fine here in Texas without you meddling feds. “Texas has developed and begun full implementation of a statewide system that surpasses the [federal] requirements,” Williams wrote, sounding very much like the Railroad Commissioner who used to rail against federal overreach. Along with the new STAAR test, Texas has a new statewide accountability system rolling out next year.

When Texas submits its waiver application in January or February next year, it’ll generally ask for more leeway in how it spends federal money, to free it from federal guidelines that reward improving schools or give extra support to high-poverty schools.

Under No Child Left Behind, failing schools face a series of increasing sanctions for every year they miss the federal target—students can transfer to a high-performing school instead, or get afterschool tutoring from private companies paid for with federal money. That’s created a huge new market for after-school tutoring paid for by the federal government. Ultimately, schools could be restructured, with their principal or faculty replaced, or converted to a charter.

In its waiver application, Texas will propose a new system of interventions and sanctions for struggling schools, said Texas Education Agency spokeswoman DeEtta Culberston. “How that will play out and how that will develop with the [tutoring] providers, I’m not sure.” Students who’ve transferred out of “failing” neighborhood schools won’t necessarily be returned to their old school if Texas gets its waiver, she said, but it’s just too soon to tell. She said TEA staff is in the process of working out just which school turnaround strategies it’ll want to include in a new beefed-up accountability system run only by the state.

“We can craft the waiver request more to our specific needs and our specific plans,” Culbertson said. “It will make it a much stronger system with more consistency.”

Michael Williams photo credit Christopher C. Leonard/Wikimedia Commons.

Patrick Michels

Education Austin vice president Montserrat Garibay speaks at the Capitol Wednesday.

All summer, state comptroller Susan Combs has been on a barnstorming tour around Texas—from Allen to Waxahachie, Cypress Creek to San Angelo—armed with pie-chart poster-boards to describe the coming financial mess if we keep spending like we do on health care and schools.

Her message, in short: We’re spending more and more of our budget on those two items, and we can’t keep it up. Combs, who’s probably running for lieutenant governor in 2014, billed the events simply as budget-themed town halls—but there was a scary message about the “big red” threat of rising Medicaid costs.

She’s made dozens of these stops, sometimes a couple in a day, in rural towns and far-out suburbs. Here’s how she put it in Waxahachie, according to the Daily Light:

“I’m a big fan of public education, but I want all of the money in the classroom,” Combs said. “What that means is that we’re going to probably have to be more creative and innovative, because of the pressures on the national debt and the pressure from Medicaid.”

So here in Austin Wednesday morning, a coalition of healthcare and education groups gathered at the Capitol to try and beat back the idea that Texans have to choose between paying for schools or our growing demand for Medicaid. Texas Forward, a kind of public interest supergroup with dozens of members, organized the policy party, featuring bona fide lab-coated doctors side by side with teachers and union reps.

Combs, of course, wasn’t the only state official they’d come to debunk. Gov. Rick Perry announced way back in April that he wanted to see the Legislature find more ways to cut back on spending. As Forrest Wilder here at the Observer wrote over the summer, austerity has become a way of life that’s seeped into every budget decision here in Texas.

The group argued Wednesday that Medicaid is plenty efficient, and just as crucial as education, and we can pay for them both if the Legislature wants to. No longer, the group said, should we be turned doctor against teacher to fight over scraps from the state.

“It is wrong to mislead Texans into thinking they have to choose between health care and education or any other public service,” said Montserrat Garibay, vice president of the local teachers’ union Education Austin and a bilingual pre-K teacher. “Don’t let anyone tell you that the resources aren’t there to restore funding for both healthcare and education. The Legislature will have the wallet if it has the will.”

The comptroller has also projected Texas could have a revenue surplus of more than $5 billion, and Texas’ Rainy Day Fund is projected to reach about $8 billion after 2013. The Legislature still has $4.8 billion in Medicaid deferrals to cover next session, and $2.3 billion in school funding it’ll have to make up too. Then there’s the structural deficit of up to $5 billion that greets the Legislature every session. Adding all that together, budget watchers figure we just might come out about even when the next session starts.

Which is where the folks Wednesday made their big reach: that maybe, you know, it’s time to raise a little revenue. That kind of talk has been a long shot for years at the Legislature, but with Perry’s mandate to cut and a far more conservative Senate it’ll be an especially tough sell.

“What we’re asking collectively is that we move away from looking at cuts and more cuts to make our ends meet, and to really look at some revenue options,” said Texans Care for Children CEO Eileen Garcia. “During hard times, our Legislature says it’s time to tighten our belts. During good times, it’s still time to tighten those belts. It just becomes about how we move forward as a state…We’re there at the bottom of the barrel with poor states, and we’re not a poor state.”