Snake Oil

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.

Patrick Michels

President Barack Obama steps onto the stage for a fundraiser at the Austin Music Hall Tuesday.

It’s a little after 4 p.m. Tuesday in downtown Austin and there’s a crowd on the corner, waiting to yell at the president. There’s a guy with a big “Come and Take It” flag with an assault rifle where the Gonzales cannon would’ve been. A woman with a “Hillary 2012” sign circulates petitions.

The air smells like hot trash and horseshit, and the parties responsible for the latter are behind the barricades across the street, six of them with Austin Police officers saddled up. About a dozen more protesters march in from City Hall with a big “We the People” banner and signs complaining about drones and tar sands drilling.

Much of President Obama’s route from the airport is lined with excited well-wishers waving the Stars and Stripes, but this corner by the Austin Ballet, by the press entrance which is blocked in anticipation of the motorcade, is where the boo birds have chosen to consolidate their dissent.

The first signs of approach come after half an hour or so, two white SUVs followed by motorcycle cops, and then two black limos with flags that turn in behind the ballet, without even passing all the hand-painted Occupy flags on the corner. The tea partiers, Paulites, peaceniks and anarchists all turn their heads in unison as the limo cruises out of sight.

“Now because we’re the regular people and we’re the 99 percent, we’re out here and they’re in there,” one woman reasons. The small crowd scatters through downtown, yielding the floor to the fundraiser inside.

Inside the mercifully air-conditioned Austin Music Hall, Jerry Jeff Walker is just wrapping his set before a crowd of more than a thousand. It’s a $250-a-head event, and while some of the crowd is decked out in suits and dresses, others wear the old Austin tuxedo: straw cowboy hats, ratty T-shirts and above-the-knee khaki shorts. The crowd is packed with students, too, who either paid a reduced $50 ticket price or knew somebody with a pass.

It’s the president’s second stop in Texas Tuesday, after another fundraiser in San Antonio. He’ll host a $25,000-a-pair dinner at the Four Seasons later on, for a total take his campaign figures at around $3.5 million. In the music hall, folks have paid extra for a spot on the balcony, or up front on the handshake line. It’s a happier crowd waiting for the president in here, before a now-empty stage decked with seven American flags.

Obama trots in from stage right to his podium, and up go the hands and the cell phone cameras. He’s dwarfed by the enormous flag hung behind him. He talks for more than half an hour, starting with a reflection on the fact that this is probably his last campaign. When he jokes he might come to Austin and run for dog-catcher, the crowd howls. When he concedes that he isn’t perfect, someone up front loudly disagrees. Chants of “USA! USA!” fade quickly into “Four more years!”

He tells the crowd that what Mitt Romney wants to do has been done before. There’s an angry shout of “George W. Bush!” from the crowd, and though he doesn’t acknowledge it, he plays to the sentiment. “I don’t believe that we should try, once again, something that didn’t work,” he says. He says he still believes in the middle class values the country was based on, the chance to work hard, take a little vacation and retire.

He talks about doing some “nation-building at home” now that our wars are winding down. “Let’s rebuild our roads and our bridges. Let’s build broadband lines in the rural communities. Let’s build high-speed rail,” he says. “Let’s invest in the basic research and innovation that have made places like Austin a hotbed of entrepreneurship and invention.”

He saves the biggest applause lines for the end, rapid-fire, touching on immigration, college tuition, Wall Street regulation, access to abortion, access to health care and LGBT rights.

Austin went nuts four years ago to hear him like this, drawing massive crowds to hear all he said was possible. Many of them were in front of the State Capitol four years ago for “yes we can.” Now the paying supporters are energized all over by his invitation to help “finish what we started.”

It all sounds like a good plan to the folks who funnel back out of the music hall onto the street, and they chat about their favorite moments as they stroll, once more, past the dissenters—three women complaining about Obama’s insistence that churches offer health insurance covering birth control, past the InfoWars camera crew interviewing a guy with an “End the Fed” sign, unhappy and passionate, dreaming of a President Romney or just thirsty for the revolution.

Shekinah Learning Institute founder and superintendent Cheryl Washington on the Rhema Gospel Express radio program in January.

If you want to send your kid to a free, publicly funded school with a Christian flavor, you’ve got plenty of options in Texas. There’s no shortage of charter schools in the state with superintendents who double as pastors, or with classroom space leased from churches.

And that’s all totally kosher with the state, so long as they follow the same rules that any other public school must obey: no endorsing any religion over another—no endorsing religion at all, in fact—and the Bible can only be taught as a literary text, alongside supplemental books to put it into context.

But watchdogs say the Shekinah Learning Institute, a 15-campus charter school chain based outside San Antonio, has blown that nuance all to hell, using taxpayer money to fund church operations, inviting speakers with Christian messages and offering religious Bible study and chapel services to students.

In a series of letters to the Texas Education Agency since February, Americans United for Separation of Church and State has complained that even Shekinah’s name—a Hebrew word to describe God’s presence—and its cross-and-shield logo amount to an endorsement of religion.

Americans United publicized its complaints in the June issue of its magazine, and the San Antonio Current picked up the news, noting that the TEA is already investigating Shekinah’s finances. That, in turn, has prompted national media attention from the likes of the Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo.

A Texas Education Agency spokeswoman wouldn’t comment on specifics of the agency’s audit last Friday, saying only that it should be finished in a few weeks. To judge by how long they’ve been working on it, the audit has been quite an undertaking—it’s been more than a year since San Antonio’s WOAI-TV reported that the TEA was investigating how the school’s superintendent had been spending public money.

Whether or not religious complaints will be part of that audit, Shekinah has already responded that the in-school player and chapel service were isolated problems at the Shekinah Radiance Academy Truth Campus east of Dallas. “[Shekinah] did not promote school-sponsored chapel services or other religious activities; did not offer or promote any weekly Bible-study class.” The school said they’d put an end to the practice, which they said had been going on without administrators’ knowledge.

But Americans United isn’t buying the notion this was just some rogue campus. But in a follow-up letter to the TEA in April, Americans United suggested a more pervasive religious conflict with the schools. “Americans United found that six of Shekinah Radiance Academy’s campuses seem to be in buildings that are also home to active congregations, including two churches whose names are almost identical to those of the campuses they house,” AU lawyer Gregory Lipper wrote. “This fusion of education and religion epitomizes a parochial school, not a public institution funded by taxpayer dollars.”

Lipper also mentions the school’s 2010 graduation speaker at the Christian World Worship Center in San Anotnio, who gave a speech entitled, “God’s Exciting Plans For YOU.” According to the speaker’s own promotional site, he “footstomped faith as a fundamental prerequisite to living an abundant life.”

Two of Shekinah’s nine campuses were rated unacceptable by the state in 2011. All of them, though, were on the state’s Alternative Education Accountability measure, a designation given to schools with a large proportion of tough-to-educate students that gives them a lower hurdle to clear.

Cheryl Washington, the New Yorker who moved to San Antonio and founded Shekinah in 1996, hasn’t exactly been shy about her religious motivations. In an amazing appearance on the San Antonio radio program Rhema Gospel Express in January, Washington and the host freestyle for a bit about God, blood and DNA. And then Washington says this: “He has given me jurisdiction to operate with Dominion in San Antonio. … The power that God has given me, not only to call and name things here and put them into operation, He has given me the administrative gifts to manage that garden. And that garden for me seems to be the education system that He has me in.”

Read the Americans United complaints to TEA here, here and here.