Snake Oil

This time last year, more than 10,000 people rallied outside the Capitol entreating lawmakers to spare the state’s education system from the harsh budget cuts some had proposed—to Save Texas Schools.

And though the Legislature passed a budget stripping billions from public education, the rally set the tone for months of activism from teachers, students and parents asking for a stronger, fairer system of paying for schools, and for politicians to dip into the state’s Rainy Day Fund to soften the blow to school budgets.

It was also, as Abby Rapoport mentioned at the time, an opportunity to enjoy apple slices, peanut butter crackers and a “positive hip-hop” performance with school leaders from across the state.

Saturday at noon, they’ll do it again. After a long bus ride into Austin, and a short march to the Capitol, school advocates from across the state will gather once again to urge lawmakers not to cut school spending any further—good timing, too, just days after a coalition of conservative groups made their case to keep on cuttin’ in 2013.

The lineup of speakers includes a handful of Democratic legislators, Northside ISD super John Folks, the Texas Association of School Boards’ 2011 Superintendent of the Year (and an Observer Tyrant’s Foe in November), plus Perrin-Whitt CISD superintendent John Kuhn—the man who fired up the crowd last year with this pledge to those who would use poor test scores to justify cutting public education: “I will march headlong into the teeth of your horrific blame machine and I will teach these kids.”

Allen Weeks, the “bookish former track coach” who leads Save Texas Schools (and got the Tyrant’s Foe treatment in May), took a few minutes this morning to chat about what’s changed for the group in a year, and what’s in store Saturday.

This year’s definitely about getting people to vote. Unless we’ve got legislators that strongly support public education, it’s going to be difficult to get anything changed. If anything, the 2013 budget climate if going to be, perhaps, even worse. We really have to get people in there that will fight strongly for public education if we’re going to see funding come back.

We’re nonpartisan, and we kinda keep more general—get out there and be involved in voting—but we’re definitely pointing people to whatever resources are out there to make sure people are informed about lawmakers’ records, more than “I support public schools.”

There’s been a strong backlash against high-stakes testing in STAAR’s first year—how much does all that figure into your message?

That’s gonna be a big part of Saturday—it really does go hand in hand with funding. We’ve seen lots of parents and students really, really upset.

This year they’ll spend an average of 28 to 40 days testing at the average school. Some of our schools are going to see more than 50 days—that’s more than a quarter of the school year that are testing. That’s just unacceptable.

Why are some schools spending so many more days on testing?

It really divides up, in some ways, between rich and poor schools. But schools that tend to always pass, there’s a lot less re-testing, where everybody passes the test. The schools that are more at risk have a lot more benchmark testing, various middle-of-the-year testing, and those schools tend to also be the places where the state does field testing.

It’s going to be interesting to have this rally so soon after some conservative groups got together and pushed to cut spending even more.

It’s great timing that they came out with that this week. It really shows that what they’re about is not just efficiency in public schools, what they’re really about is an attack on public education. I’m not sure if there’s a limit to how deep they would like to see these cuts go.

They’re out on the edge. What we’re trying to find is the Republican and Democratic public officials who are in the reasonable middle. Texas has been wrestling with it for a long time, and it’s going to take good reasonable conversations, not people who say, “Cut, cut.”

Michael Quinn Sullivan at Empower Texans has said 50 percent of the education dollar doesn’t go to the classroom. Well, that other 50 cents includes school lunches, keeping the lights on school buses, libraries, all the extra functions. That’s the fat they want to trim. I guess they want to starve the kids, have them walk to school, have no music, no sports. That’s their vision for education. It’s just not serious proposals.

Saturday, we’re going to have thousands of people there who want to have serious conversations on how to have fair and adequate funding for schools. Texas is just not doing it, and we’re a resource-rich state.

 

Allen Weeks photo from 2011 Save Texas Schools rally by Daniel Setiawan.

It can be tough to measure what the Legislature’s $5.4 billion school funding cut will really cost Texas schoolkids.

Since the new budget took effect in September, anecdotes of woe have popped up all around the state—kids sweeping the classrooms, schools charging for bus rides to school.

In a story published Friday, the Texas Tribune’s Morgan Smith offered a look at how teachers are coping with the bigger classes, when there are suddenly 10,000 fewer teachers around this year, and 100,000 more students. In a word, they’re busier. But they’re still teaching, and students might not mind so much. When the 24th student arrived in one class, Smith writes, kids were just “excited to have a new face.”

But what does the research say happens when classrooms get packed? As Smith suggests, it’s complicated:

Research is mixed on the effect of class size on learning, but many educators agree that adding just two students to an already full classroom can intensify the challenge for teachers. Some worry that increasing class sizes hurts the neediest students most.

There are studies that show kids do just as well in bigger classes—notably the work of Stanford researcher Eric Hanushek, a free-market reformer who also opposes putting more funding into early childhood education. On balance, though, the most thorough studies show young students do better in smaller classes. Last year, for example, the Center for Public Education published a roundup of major studies on the question spanning decades, and found that most studies show evidence there are benefits to smaller classes in early grades, particularly for minority and low-income students:

Even in light of findings that suggest no relationship between class size and student achievement, the preponderance of the evidence supports positive effects and academic gains when class size reduction programs in the primary grades are well-designed and properly implemented.

Texas, of course, is engaged in exactly the opposite sort of experiment. The Tribune says 8,479 classrooms from kindergarten to 4th grade have more than 22 students, according to the Texas Education Agency, up from 2,238 last year. Districts must get waivers from the state to bust through that 22-student cap, and they’re doing it in record numbers.

To get a handle on just what these lean budgets are doing to Texas’ schools, the Texas-based advocacy group Children At Risk has begun a six-month study of surveys, visits to schools and TEA data. The group’s president Bob Sanborn told the Observer they’re hoping to cut through the politics of school funding in Texas.

“We wanted to really look at what’s the real impact, what does the current data say about the impact of the budget cuts in public education,” Sanborn says. “At the beginning of the survey we’re seeing efficiencies develop. We’re seeing schools work to cut down their central office staff, staff outside the education area. And that’s what you want to see, you want to see them take out some of the non-core area type of positions.”

That’s the conservative argument for shrinking the budgets—that these cuts are long overdue, and are only eating away at the bloated bureaucracy that’s built up at district offices.

But Sanborn says those sorts of cuts have been nowhere near enough, and some districts have carved off huge slices of their teaching corps too—like an 11 percent cut in Waco ISD. Fewer teachers, fewer classroom aides and bigger classrooms in early grades are widespread trends statewide.

“If we continue to see the very efficient districts that have gone from six classroom class size waivers to 96, or from 20 to 300 … especially in high poverty schools, you can’t have one teacher to 25 kids,” Sanborn says.

“What we’re not going to be able to do is measure impact on learning, because that’s sort of a longer timeline.”

There’s that same challenge again—finding concrete evidence of just how troublesome these cuts will be for kids.

Earlier this month, state Rep. Mike Villarreal, D-San Antonio, waded into those waters, at least when it comes to the cuts to pre-K.

The state still funds half-day pre-K for kids in “at-risk” populations: kids from low-income families, kids who are still learning English, kids in foster care or whose parents are active-duty military or were injured or killed on duty. But last session, lawmakers eliminated the $200 million in grants it had long offered schools to expand their pre-K from half- to full-day.

Numbers Villarreal got from TEA show that, among economically disadvantaged students, those who’d attended public pre-K outperformed kids who hadn’t, on their third-grade state math and reading tests. While 17 percent of low-income kids without pre-K failed the reading half of the TAKS, the failure rate for those with pre-K was 12 percent—pulling them closer, at least, to the five percent failure rate for kids from higher-income families.

“We now have timely evidence that pre-K narrows the achievement gap in Texas, and that the legislature was foolish to eliminate pre-K expansion grants,” Villarreal said in a statement.

Children At Risk’s preliminary look at the cuts breaks down just how much pre-K staffing has shrunk. “In total, school districts cut 1,132 pre-kindergarten teaching positions by limiting student enrollment, moving from full to half-day curriculums, and/or increasing class size.” Some districts, like fast-growing Cypress-Fairbanks ISD outside Houston, kept their pre-K staffing pretty much intact. El Paso ISD cut its pre-K teachers by almost 93 percent.

“One thing that we’ll see in terms of education is that the research is very clear on pre-K, so when you see a place like El Paso eliminate all those pre-K positions,” Sanborn says, “they’re gonna see some long-term repercussions there.”

Four months after U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder came to Austin to announce a crackdown on heavy-handed voter ID laws across the country—an attack on minority voting rights that he said “goes against the arc of history”—his Department of Justice has rejected the new Texas law requiring voters to show a photo ID at the polls.

The measure was a hard-fought victory for Texas Republicans when Gov. Rick Perry signed it into law last year. But since then, it’s been tied up with the Justice Department—which must “pre-clear” the law under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act—and with a D.C. court, where federal judges are considering Texas’ suit to start enforcing the law right away. Texas is one of nine states where changes to the election law must be federally precleared, because of its history of racial bias.

After the DOJ denied preclearance to South Carolina’s voter ID law in December, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott says the writing was on the wall, which is why he sued the feds over the law back in January. Monday’s decision, he said in a statement, is “no surprise.”

At least until there’s a decision from that federal court—or even the U.S. Supreme Court—Monday’s announcement means you’re still free to carry on your photo-free voting lifestyle. (As always, Dallas attorney Michael Li has a helpful look at the legal particulars. The Texas Tribune has a timeline of the voter ID fight.)

As Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez wrote to the Texas Secretary of State’s office Monday morning, that should be good news for at least 600,000 Hispanic voters Texas counted that don’t have a driver’s license or personal ID card. “According to the state’s own data, a Hispanic registered voter is at least 46.5 percent, and potentially 120.0 percent, more likely than a non-Hispanic registered voter to lack this identification,” Perez wrote.

That wide range between 46 and 120 percent is due to a pair of conflicting data sets provided by the state, one from last fall and the other from January. Texas’ failure to help the DOJ understand the differences between the two, or tell the DOJ which of them is more accurate, is just one of many gaps, as Perez sees it. He points out that Texas never sent any data on whether the law would disproportionately affect African American or Asian voters.

Texas’ voter ID law includes a provision for the Department of Public Safety to issue free ID cards so people can vote—but Perez notes a few problems DOJ sees with the system. First, getting one of those free ID cards requires some other identification; if a voter doesn’t have their birth certificate—the least expensive option—it’ll cost them $22.

When 81 of Texas’ 254 counties don’t have a Department of Public Safety office where voters can get an ID card, Perez says Texas has created an extra burden on Hispanic voters, who are statistically more likely than white voters not to have a car.

Perez also writes that Texas had opportunities to mitigate the law’s impact on Hispanic voters, but didn’t bother. The Legislature balked at extending DPS office hours so voters could get their IDs, and still hasn’t come up with a program to educate voters about the photo ID law.

As in the fight over redistricting, Texas had to show the feds that their plans “have neither the purpose nor the effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race or color or membership in a language minority group,” Perez writes.

As the DOJ sees it, that’s more than Texas could manage.

Patrick Michels

Conference-goers do work between sessions at SXSWedu in Austin.

If you’re an energetic, strat-talking entrepreneur hoping to get your edgy business plan in front of all the right people here in Austin, then of course South by Southwest Interactive is where it’s all happening this week.

But if your vision is aimed at the big and ever-growing education market, SXSWedu was the place to be last week. For the second year now, a mix of teachers, academics, reporters and policy wonks came together to bat around the latest digital education trends, while business owners ran their festival P.R. blitzes on prospective clients. A tournament of start-ups called LAUNCHedu crowned winning business plans in K-12 and higher education.

In one presentation after another, speakers first lamented the sorry state of public education—that teachers are unhappy, budgets are shrinking and American kids are getting schooled in global assessments like the PISA that pit the U.S. against the world.

Then they gushed about technology’s power to disrupt those trends: statistics games that teach and assess kids who think they’re just playing, interactive course materials, sweet gadgets that lure would-be dropouts back into the classroom. There were plenty of teachers who’d come to hear about new tricks and resources for their classrooms, but the culture of the conference wasn’t far from what you find at SXSWi: new tools for social networking, scrappy start-ups pitching big players for scale-up funding.

There was certainly grave talk about fighting poverty, valuing teachers and putting kids on track for a better life, but at its core SXSWedu had all the sweet gooey hype of a startup jam session.

Some conversations centered on what entrepreneurs could do to get noticed or bought up by one of the big fish swimming around the conference. That was the topic of an entire panel hosted by officials from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—their answer was more or less, “don’t call us, we’ll call you.” Grant officers said their job is to seek out promising programs that line up with the Gates education mission. Another business owner asked Pearson chief Marjorie Scardino what entrepreneurs could do to get their projects purchased. 

Pearson PLC, the London-based publishing giant, was everywhere. (The company was the subject of an Observer feature last September, you’ll recall, for their huge role in Texas.) CEO Marjorie Scardino, who grew up in Texarkana, delivered a keynote address. Other officials from the company hosted panels at the conference. And Pearson’s ebook partnership with Apple was widely discussed. It even sponsored the lanyards holding the conference name tags.

Between Pearson’s omnipresence and another talk from U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the conference was a little light on indie cred at the top of the bill. Duncan cheered on the tech business crowd, telling them that in times like these, when school budgets are tight across the country, we need to be “spending smarter”—which is to say, spending on laptops and iPads.

Amid all that hype, Education Week’s Jason Tomassini noted what was missing:

[T]here were far fewer answers, and far fewer questions, at SXSWedu about the balance of private and public interests in education. Zero panels addressed virtual schools or for-profit education and few addressed charters, all subjects that relate to technology, innovation and the role of the teacher. Given the vibrancy of most discussions here, it is a complicated subject I hoped would be tackled.

The forces that make SXSWedu such a compelling idea to its backers are the same ones at work on our entire public education system: a decade-long narrative of failing schools, coupled with unflinching faith in Silicon Valley’s ability to fix anything it touches.

Whether the private sector should be so deeply involved in public schools, and whether Silicon Valley business models are right for our education system too, are both worthy subjects of debate. Those are unpopular conversations to have at a tech industry conference, but they’re crucial to any even-handed consideration of what’s best for our schools. There are venues where those difficult discussions are taking place, but so far SXSWedu isn’t one of them.

Pearson CEO Marjorie Scardino delivers her talk at SXSWedu.

Protestors from Occupy Austin greeted Scardino outside.

Patrick Michels

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan closes out SXSWedu Thursday afternoon in Austin.

South by Southwest’s second annual education conference closed out this afternoon with a cheerleading session led by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. He told a roomful of ed-tech entrepreneurs that they represent our school system’s best hope.

“Products like the ones you are showcasing here hold the potential to transform classrooms,” he said.

Reading from a script, the former Chicago Public Schools chief spoke in broad terms about the power of networked and mobile devices in the classroom, and about a few favorite programs he’s seen in the country’s public schools. A few times, he pointed out that he was preaching to the choir. (At Austin Community College later in the afternoon, the greeting wasn’t nearly so friendly.)

Duncan began his SXSWedu address with a conversion story of sorts—from his analog upbringing to the tech-boostery life on the edge he leads today. “I’ve changed,” he said, “because we all know what happens to dinosaurs.” Now, Duncan said, the “new platform in learning” is technology itself.

“It’s a critical tool to help children learn. It’s a tool to help parents stay abreast of what their children are learning,” Duncan said. “It’s a tool to hold ourselves and each other accountable.”

He name-dropped public school programs across the country that have bet big on tech, from a virtual explosion of virtual schools in Florida, to Mooresville, N.C., where a school district has seen big gains three years after handing out laptops to its high school students.

“The future of American education absolutely includes a laptop on every desk and universal internet access at home,” he said. “But a great teacher in the classroom absolutely makes the difference.”

Duncan’s charter-friendly, test-heavy Race to the Top program has made him a controversial figure, especially among teachers’ unions and the “Save Our Schools” movement who charge he’s putting big ideas (and business opportunities) ahead of teachers’ concerns.

This afternoon, though, Duncan sidestepped a few questions from audience members meant to put him on the spot.

Asked why U.S. schools continue trudging along with test-heavy accountability systems, when new technology is opening doors to teach real-world lessons in classrooms, Duncan pretty much blamed George W. Bush: “I think No Child Left Behind is fundamentally broken,” he said. His office has already issued 11 NCLB waivers to states that have developed their own school reform plans, and Duncan said he’d be meeting with Gov. Rick Perry later this afternoon to encourage him to apply for a waiver too.

What Duncan didn’t mention is that the Obama administration has doubled down on the testing  requirements ushered in by NCLB. Duncan suggested that, even today, there’s not nearly enough good testing going on in schools. “Assessment in education is behind almost every major field,” he said.

Asked what he felt about teachers’ sagging job satisfaction, he said it’s no wonder they’re so unhappy, when so many are being laid off and so many are underpaid. “We’ve demonized teachers. We haven’t given them the respect they need,” he said—a convenient, if ham-fisted plug for his Project RESPECT, which is laced with some of the very measures teachers are revolting against, like tenure limits and performance pay linked to student test results.

“Technology is a piece of the answer to making teachers more efficient, more effective. We as a society have to embrace our teachers, have to lift them up,” Duncan said.

Part of the opportunity lies in making teachers feel less solitary, networking them, opening their jobs to the social possibilities new online platforms provide. In a room powered by private-sector muscle, he had a funny way of describing what he’d like to see, a joke that sailed past quickly as he read his speech:

“We have to continue to de-privatize public education.”