Snake Oil

Patrick Michels

Patterson courts voters at the Republican Party of Texas convention in June.

Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson surprised a lot of people in July when the School Land Board—that’s Patterson and two other guys—voted not to shave $300 million off the Permanent School Fund to help fund Texas’ starving schools.

One reason the Legislature cut $5.4 billion from public education last session, and not $5.7 billion, is that lawmakers expected the General Land Office to throw that $300 million into the schools’ general funds if Proposition 6—the ballot measure that would free Patterson’s office to transfer the money—passed last November.

The Permanent School Fund is a $26 billion trust meant to ensure long-term stability for Texas’ school system. School districts use it to back their bond issues, which helps keep their interest rates low. Proposition 6 made it easier for the General Land Board to move the fund’s money directly into the schools budget, and somewhere last session, lawmakers got the idea that Patterson would throw in $300 million.

State Rep. Rob Orr, R-Burleson, told the Texas Tribune’s Morgan Smith that he “was told that there would be $300 million going into the Available School Fund. Everything was put in place to allow to that to happen.” Patterson denied making any such deal and couldn’t find any record of anyone in his office doing so either. He said he simply decided the smarter play was to hold onto that $300 million for future investments.

So on Friday, the Austin-based group Progress Texas launched a letter-writing campaign to the GLO, under the headline “Jerry Patterson Hoards $300 Million from Texas Students.” To help you get the idea, they photoshopped Patterson’s nearly neckless head onto a guy holding a huge pile of bills, with a school boy passed out on his desk next to that. “Let’s tell Patterson to stop playing political games and release the $300 million to public schools we already approved in last November’s election,” the site says.

By Monday morning, the group’s director Matt Glazer said 3,200 people had unloaded their form emails into Patterson’s inbox. “I get what his point is. His point is that the Legislature should’ve done something. But the thing is, there’s no reason why they need to be holding Texas school children hostage to make a political point,” Glazer said. “This is one of those things we’re gonna keep working on until he does the right thing.”

But Patterson, a Republican running in a packed race for lieutenant governor in 2014, saw an opening to call out the group in epic fashion, which is just what he did Wednesday afternoon.

In a two-page letter meant for folks who took part in the Progress Texas campaign, Patterson begins by upbraiding them for their amateurish method of civic engagement.

“Dear Concerned Texan,” he begins. “Thank you for clicking ‘TAKE ACTION’ on www.progresstexas.com and emailing the auto-generated letter to me. I appreciate your interest in public education finance.”

Patterson goes on to detail the reasons why he kept that $300 million in the Permanent School Fund. Among them: It’s called the Permanent School Fund for a reason, and there’s a constitutional limit on how much can be paid out each year. “Were this not the case, past legislatures would have long ago depleted the fund so that they could brag about how they didn’t increase your taxes,” he writes. “Spending the school kid’s savings to cover today’s bills is irresponsible.”

Even if we are talking about covering the school kid bills with the school kid’s savings. Patterson points out that none of the lawmakers that happily avoided drawing down the Rainy Day Fund last session had any qualms about asking him to fork over a slice of the Permanent School Fund—even though his fund’s investments have outperformed the Rainy Day Fund by 22-to-1. It’s a complicated issue, and Patterson carefully defends his reasoning, point by point.

He also peppers his letter with gleeful little digs at Progress Texas’ work, pointing out factual errors in the sample letter they generated, calling it a “‘slacktivist’ campaign” and the emails it generated “erroneous, misguided, and pointless.”

At the state Republican Party convention this year, Patterson spent almost the entire weekend next to his vintage truck, shaking hands and meeting folks. He was by far the easiest to reach if you had something on your mind. But “pointless” is a pretty strong word for a few thousand critical emails, even ones that took about as much work as signing a petition.

Patterson isn’t alone in questioning how effective this kind of campaign can be. Just last week, documents surfaced showing that Insurance Commissioner Eleanor Kitzman had been intentionally blocking a mass email campaign organized by the consumer group Texas Watch.

Progress Texas said it still wouldn’t call off its campaign, though they agree Patterson’s right to be critical of the shell games lawmakers used to let themselves off the hook last session. “We agree with Jerry Patterson that Governor Perry and Republicans in the Texas Legislature who control the budget do a terrible job funding our schools. Patterson must stop insulting Texans and stop jeopardizing the education of millions of Texas school children.”

In an email, Glazer said all the effort Patterson has devoted to fighting back just shows his group’s campaign has struck a nerve. “This isn’t about it being effective or not, it’s about creating an excuse to ignore folks,” Glazer said. “When he doesn’t like what Texans tell them, he undermines them and calls them names. Classy.”

In an Austin courtroom Tuesday, District Judge John Dietz allowed a group of charter school advocates to remain part of the massive school finance suit against the state, rejecting a challenge from another group in the case.

It’s the first time someone’s been allowed into a school finance suit in Texas to argue for control over how well districts spend the money they get—all while opening a back-door challenge to the limit on charter schools in the state. The decision ensures that the October trial over school finance will feature a motley crew of lawyers arguing, sometimes, for more money, smarter distribution or lower property taxes, plus charter school and business groups who want tighter strings on the money and more corporate-inspired reforms.

Known as the “efficiency intervenors” for short, the group includes a handful of parents under the umbrella of a group called Texans for Real Efficiency in Education, backed by former House Public Education chair Kent Grusendorf, and joined by the Texas Association of Business. The group filed its much-anticipated fifth school finance suit back in February, arguing (a) that school districts should be less wasteful with their spending, and (b) that if we had more charter schools, models of smart spending that they are, the entire school system would be more efficient.

TREE had more details about their cause at their website, but now the site says it’s been “suspended.”

The first four suits, which had already been combined and set for an October trial, are all from school districts and parents arguing the state’s school finance system is unfair and inadequate. That combined suit already includes more than two-thirds of the state’s school districts, all of which would take issue with the suggestion that they run bloated, wasteful operations.

A sixth group, led by the Texas Charter School Association, also wants to scrap the charter school cap as a means to make Texas’ school system more “efficient.”

In court Tuesday, David Hinojosa, the lead attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), which filed one of the initial suits, squared off against Craig Enoch, the former Texas Supreme Court justice leading TREE’s legal team.

In the past, Enoch argued, justices have suggested there’s a place in school finance litigation to discuss how smartly school districts are spending the money they get—that there’s more to an effective school finance system than deciding how the money is raised and divvied up around the state. If school districts are the only ones involved in the case, he suggested, there’ll be no incentive to look critically at how they spend.

“If one thing’s clear through all of the Edgewood cases, it’s been that money’s not the only answer,” Enoch said.

Judge Dietz, who also tried the last round of school finance suits eight years ago, nodded his head at that and offered a rare interruption: “Structural changes,” he agreed.

Hinojosa argued, though, that TREE’s arguments don’t have a place in a constitutional challenge to the school finance system. Texas’ cap on charter schools, and its policies about district spending are all questions for the Legislature, he argued, a distraction from an outside group with a separate agenda. In the past, he said, courts have avoided prescribing particular policies or laws—but that’s exactly what the TREE group is asking for now.

“It’s all about making public schools more like public charter schools,” Hinojosa said. “That leaves us with a slippery slope. Where do these challenges end?”

After a quick break for the slapping of backs and shooting of the breeze among the two dozen lawyers gathered in the courtroom, Dietz read a written statement saying there was, indeed, a place for TREE to challenge the “qualitative efficiency” of the school finance system.

“This case is distinct of voucher intervenors in Edgewood IV, who asked the court to order the Legislature to implement a voucher system,” Dietz said, referring to an attempt by school choice advocates to join the school finance suit in 1995. (It’s a sign of the times that charter advocates have replaced the pro-voucher crowd making this argument today—even if vouchers are making a comeback.)

As for the Texas Association of Business’ attempt to get in on the fun too, Dietz said, “The court can certainly concede that Texas parents and business owners are and will be injured by a public school system that fails to achieve a general diffusion of knowledge.”

That simple goal, the “general diffusion of knowledge” the state constitution requires, is about all that unites these groups—the charters, the business folk, rich districts, poor districts, urban and rural, big and small—as they gear up for their October 22 trial. But they’ve got some wildly different ideas about how to get there.

Since we covered the string of complaints about financial funny business and religious messages at San Antonio-based charter school Shekinah Learning Institute last month, you’ve probably found yourself lying awake at night, wondering just when the Texas Education Agency would release its audit of Shekinah, and how hard they might drop the hammer.

To recap: TEA has been investigating Shekinah for the past couple years, following complaints that its leaders were mis-spending state money and running their schools in conjunction with churches. WOAI-TV’s Brian Collister reported in May 2011 that Shekinah superintendent Cheryl Washington was using school money to cover extravagant travel expenses.

Americans United for the Separation of Church and State filed their own complaints with TEA after learning that some of Shekinah’s schools share space with similarly-named churches. One Shekinah school outside Dallas offered in-school prayer and chapel service, and another publicized a graduation speech entitled, “God’s Exciting Plans For YOU.” And Washington, who does not have a doctoral degree but still likes to use the title “doctor,” has said: “He has given me jurisdiction to operate with Dominion in San Antonio.”

On August 7, TEA sent Washington the results of its investigation into her schools, and if you’ve just been reading the headlines, you might think the agency came down very hard indeed. The San Antonio Express-News covered it under the headline “Audit says charter school’s operator broke law.” WOAI’s headline was about the same.

But inside the audit report, there’s little or no mention of nearly all the most publicized complaints against Shekinah. “All in all, Shekinah felt the report was positive,” the school’s lawyer Joseph Hoffer told the Express-News. The most damning piece of the audit focuses on Shekinah’s 2008 purchase of a former church building to house one of its schools in Universal City. The next day, Washington signed an agreement to rent out part of that building on behalf of the church where she’s also a pastor, Shadrach Temple International.

“The superintendent’s decision to represent SLI to secure financing for the purchase ofthe Day Star campus, as well as her decision to execute and sign the rental agreement between SLI and Shadrach on behalf of the church, not SLI, the day after the purchase was finalized, violates” Texas law, the audit found.

And that’s the worst of it. There were other allegations of real estate deals that weren’t quite done at arm’s length, and places where church and school resources were combined. But even with the one finding that Shekinah broke the law, TEA isn’t asking too much from the school to put things right. Its four requirements for the school: “establish policies”; “seek reimbursement”; “review the agreement in place…to ensure that a true arm’s length transaction exists”; and finally, “take the necessary steps to comply with the local, state, and federal competitive procurement policies and regulations.”

“My concern with the report is that it focuses very specifically on contracting regulations and the minutiae of state law,” says Greg Lipper, an attorney with Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, which has filed complaints with TEA about Shekinah. “As a taxpayer-funded school it also has to comply with basic constitutional requirements. And the report doesn’t really address that.”

Lipper says he knew TEA had been investigating the school before his group started filing complaints about church-state issues.

“There is a couple of reasons why charter schools are particularly susceptible to this kind of thing. They’re taxpayer funded institutions, but because charter schools are off the grid in a sense, everyone involved doesn’t necessarily feel like they’re public schools.”

Shekinah’s lawyer even offered that point as an explanation for the prayer groups at the school near Dallas, which have since been discontinued. “Many of the parents thought they were actually at a private Christian school,” he told the Express-News.

Because Texas charter schools aren’t eligible for facility funding from the state, Lipper says renting space to or from a church ends up being a popular way to get by.

Americans United will keep gathering details on how Shekinah’s schools seem to blur church-state lines, Lipper says, and he says the audit raised some more interesting questions about purchases Washington’s school and church made together, and how they shared their space. But the new report also suggests Texas may not be too keen on investigating his group’s concerns.

“The broader issues of having classes taking place at churches, schools with the same name as churches,” Lipper says, “it seems to us like TEA isn’t all that interested in that.”

The latest federal ratings for Texas schools came out Wednesday, and the results sure don’t look good. More than 70 percent of the school districts in Texas, and almost half the individual school campuses, couldn’t make the federal government’s grade this year.

It’s a tune we’ve gotten used to hearing.

Each time, it’s more dire headlines and hand-wringing about about the plight of Texas’ schools. The Laredo Morning Times summed up the gloom and doom this time around, with a story titled simply “Schools’ Failure.” (The rest of the story’s behind a paywall, so it’s a good thing the headline says it all.)

Free-marketeers smell blood, using the news as just more evidence that our public school system is a mess—and that charters and vouchers are the only way out.

But there’s a problem with reporting the latest federal ratings as news, and not the inevitable result of our getting closer to 2014. That’s the year by which, under No Child Left Behind, every school in the country must accomplish a handful of miracles at once: get every student to take the state tests, earn a passing score in both reading and math, and then graduate from high school. The closer we get to that supremely unrealistic target, the less seriously we can take these “failures” on the federal report card.

At this point, the scores have far more to do with policy decisions made a decade ago than what students did on a test last year. Each state got to plan out its annually rising targets on the way to that perfect 100 and, like most states, Texas saved its most dramatic gains for the last few years before 2014.

You can see how it played out in the chart below: Before 2008, the “passing” bar for Texas schools rose gradually and most schools made the cut. After that, though, the required passing rate for math and reading shot up on a much steeper trajectory toward 100 percent. At first, more schools still hit those targets, but only because the state was using something called the “Texas Projection Measure” to inflate their scores. The state did away with that little sleight of hand last year, and since then the number of “passing” schools has dropped. Fast.

What the federal report cards show us at this point isn’t a measure of “failing schools” at all, but public schools doing what public schools do: educating every single student who shows up.

A 100 percent pass rate is such a silly thing to plan around—but if the No Child Left Behind law doesn’t change, the consequences are serious. At this rate, by this time next year all but a handful of Texas schools will fall under federal sanctions, a six-year mea culpa that can lead to major restructuring, staff overhauls, or even conversion to charter schools.

It takes two years of “failing” to reach the first stage of school improvement, which requires schools to mail letters to parents explaining just how badly they’ve blown it, and what happens if they keep it up (which, at this point, they will). This year more than 1,100 schools hit Stage 1, up from less than 100 last year.

Stage 1 schools are in light red above. Each shade darker is another stage of improvement. As schools advance, their students are eligible for extra tutoring, then to transfer out to another school, and eventually to that Stage 5 overhaul. Some schools in Texas have already been in Stage 5 for years—so decide for yourself just how well these school turnaround strategies are working.

“The simple truth is that Texas’ alleged school ‘accountability’ system…was designed to fail,” Rita Haecker, president of the Texas State Teachers Association, said in a statement Thursday. “The governor and the legislative majority have spent too much time focusing on a high stakes test while cutting the resources our teachers and students need to succeed.”

By now, nothing about these “failing” scores is a surprise, but Texas—the model for George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law—is still clinging to the misguided law it inspired. That’ll be fine by the private education companies that get millions in federal money to tutor students in Texas’ “failing” public schools.

Thirty-three states have already excused themselves from the mess with waivers from the Obama administration. Those waivers usually come with other strings attached, though, like adopting a standardized system for rating teachers and national curriculum standards. (The latter of which would set off another round of secession talk.)

Given the no-win scenario under No Child Left Behind, Texas’ leadership might have to face reality and apply for a waiver too. Just yesterday, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan told the Quorum Report that Texas had just under a month to make up its mind.

Congress could also bail Texas out. With a little hand-holding and cool-headed negotiation, Washington might finally find a reality-based solution to replace No Child Left Behind’s Doomsday scenario of 2014.

For now, though, it’s a game of chicken between Congress and our state leaders—and Texas’ school kids are stuck in the middle.

Dallas ISD/Flickr

New superintendent Mike Miles is Dallas ISD's way into the vanguard of today's popular reforms.

New Dallas ISD superintendent Mike Miles rode into town this summer on a wave of big promises: that he’ll lure the nation’s top teaching talent to Dallas, pay his teachers more and prepare far more students for jobs and college. By September 2020, according to his plan, Dallas will, quite simply, be the best urban school district in the country.

It’s a very Dallas sentiment, full of the world-class aspirations that the city’s upper class eats up. And it’s a welcome change in tone, after a few years in which the district made its biggest news by grossly mismanaging its budget, closing schools or laying off teachers.

But the biggest miracles Miles has delivered so far have come to his “cabinet,” a select and well-paid few officials. They include his chief financial officer Kevin Smelker, hired for $220,000 a year, Jennifer Sprague, his communications director who’ll make $185,000 a year, and 29-year-old Chief Talent Officer Charles Glover, who spent the last four years running the Dallas branch of Teach for America and will make $182,000 at DISD.

The local press went wild when those salaries were announced in June, and teachers’ groups said it was a sign Miles’ leadership looked like just administrator focused on rewarding top officials and their friends. Even some DISD board members who’d been solidly on Team Miles said the pay seemed a little high.

But Miles, a former Army Ranger and Soviet intelligence adviser, stepped right up to the fight. By cutting the number of top administrators, he said, his arrangement still saved money. If Smelker’s pay seemed high, well, he’d more than make up for it in the millions of savings he’d find in the district budget. And as for Sprague, 31, who was paid $100,000 less in her last job as Miles’ spokesperson, Miles took the press to task for their outrage: “If Jennifer Sprague were an ugly, slightly older male with 20 years of experience who had won all these national awards would any of you make a story of it if he received the same salary?” As the Dallas Morning News reported, DISD will pay her more than the White House pays spokesman Jay Carney.

“It’s just kind of outrageous to me… Everybody’s sacrificing except the top people,” says local NEA president Angela Davis. The district’s janitors just took a 10 percent pay cut to avoid having their jobs outsourced, she says. And the school board has promised to try raising teacher salaries 2 percent in the 2013-14 school year, it’s not clear where the district will find $15 million to do it. “He’s coming in like a tornado and just twisting things up,” Davis says.

Mike MacNaughton sits on DISD’s Citizens Budget Review Commission and founded the Dallas Friends of Public Education. Over the last few years, he’s advised the district on where to cut costs and how to keep teachers’ jobs. He agrees the district can use some shaking up, but he he’s hearing too many buzzwords from Miles and company, and not enough about curriculum and systemic fixes. He also doubts Miles and Smelker can find another $2 or $3 million to save in the district’s budget. “We have cut pretty much all we can cut. In fact in the first year, we made mistakes and had to hire people back because we cut too deeply,” MacNaughton says.“It’s not so much we need the Mike Miles and Michelle Rhees of the world to come in and say let’s do things differently. What we need is to do things right.”

MacNaughton has helped start a blog where teachers can vent anonymously about their concerns. He remains concerned about what Glover’s hiring signifies too, worrying that entry-level Teach for America recruits fulfilling a two-year teaching commitment will be prized over classroom veterans. “We don’t really need to bring in as many brand new TFA teachers in my opinion as experienced teachers who can immediately move the needle on student achievement,” he says. He’s also concerned about putting someone with no traditional H.R. experience at the top of such a big workforce.

But Glover points out that there’s precedent for his hiring—Houston ISD chief human resources officer Ann Best was a regional TFA director before joining her district. “A lot of the characteristics, traits and qualities that we see in scaling organizational effectiveness are the exact same thing that we want to be applying in this situation,” he says. And while Glover’s new position in the district is all about big-picture strategy, he says he’s in the midst of cleaning up more mundane workflow problems too. The goal, he says, is “excellence in every single position that we fill.” He says he’ll be leaning on Jamal Jenkins, a new hire with traditional H.R. experience, while he guides the hiring and recruiting strategy. (Like Miles, Jenkins is a product of a Broad Center leadership program.)

“The question becomes for us now not why we cannot do something but how we will do it,” Glover says. And that’s the mindset and the paradigm shift that’s going to come under my leadership and that of Mr. Miles, and everyone that we’re bringing on board right now.”

Skeptics of Miles’ approach so far point out that while there were about 10,000 students in his last school district, he oversees 10,000 teachers in Dallas. He’s taking over a tough urban district where teachers haven’t seen a pay raise in three years. Miles speaks often of the coming “paradigm shift” to a “student centered” way of life. He’s launching a leadership academy with a call for teachers and principals with the “hero characteristic.” He’s discussed bringing the very hip Harlem Children’s Zone model into troubled West Dallas schools, and wants to implement a performance pay system like the one he launched in his last district, in Colorado Springs.

Miles built his national reputation in large part for masterminding that pay structure and implementing it in Colorado Springs’ Harrison School District Two, under a reform plan he called “Destination 2016.” (If that sounds familiar, it could be because his plan for Dallas is called “Destination 2020.”) By doing away with automatic pay bumps for longevity, cost of living, or earning additional degrees, Miles made teacher pay dependent on combination of classroom evaluations by principals and student test scores. Each piece counts for one half of the teacher’s score under the plan, which Miles launched in fall 2010. Teachers start at $35,000 and can earn up to $90,000. Miles and his staff took great care to allow flexibility in how teachers are scored, to make it easier to advance through the system’s first levels and make it harder for a teacher’s salary to go down in the first few years. Even in a district with about 700 teachers, it was an incredibly complex plan.

In Dallas, one of Miles’ goals is to have nearly all the teachers and staff on a performance-based pay system within a few years. Already the school board has ceded much of its authority over setting teacher pay to Miles.

To the Dallas ISD board, the new superintendent is a ticket onto the reform bandwagon sweeping the country with millions in foundation money and slick P.R. The local business community, which took a sudden financial interest in last year’s school board elections, is on board, too. The Dallas Regional Chamber rented seven billboards around town to welcome Miles to Dallas.

Miles has one more telling explanation for his inner circle’s high pay. Teachers and principals should be heartened, he’s suggested, to see that under his watch, great performance warrants great pay. “Professionals who make a big impact on kids should be paid a decent salary,” Miles told the Morning News. “Maybe we need to start changing the paradigm.”

So teachers and principals can look forward to big raises too, assuming there’s enough left over.