Snake Oil

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.

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.”

With the unveiling of the San Antonio redistricting court’s interim maps Tuesday came a little clarity on the fate of Congressman Lloyd Doggett, one of the main characters in this partisan brawl from the very beginning.

For Doggett, these new maps look an awful lot like the old ones passed by the Legislature early this year—the ones that drew Doggett into the court challenge we’ve been enjoying all these months. His current district, CD-25, has been ooched west a bit and stretched up to Tarrant County, a rural and heavily Republican district he’d be hard-pressed to win.

As Dallas attorney and redistricting guru Michael Li points out, these maps still need to be precleared for Voting Rights Act violations by either the Department of Justice or a federal court in Washington. But with time running short to file for races, candidates are making decisions assuming these maps will hold up.

The best choice left for an Austin Democrat like himself is CD-35, a new district that starts in Austin and runs south down its eponymous Interstate for a skinny stretch a mile or so wide, to its anchor in San Antonio. (Somehow, nobody’s come up with a nickname for this one that’s really stuck yet.)

“As an effective advocate for schools, veterans, health care and retirement security, my service fits well with the neighborhoods that have now been joined from South San Antonio to North Austin,” he said in a statement Tuesday.

Because it’s been drawn as a minority opportunity district, with mostly Hispanic voters, Doggett’s back in the position he was in last fall—arguing that even though he’s white, his experience and his track record make him a better advocate for the district than a Hispanic candidate from San Antonio.

For a sense of what that outreach looks like in practice, look no further than this unfortunate shot from the San Antonio Express-News last year: Doggett paired awkwardly at a campaign event with a mariachi band.

Still, there’s a huge difference in this race today—and his name is Joaquin Castro. The state representative who’d lined up to challenge Doggett at first has since found a clearer path to Congress in CD-20, where Charlie Gonzalez has announced his retirement.

The road ahead is a little kinder to Doggett now, with Castro happily landed next door. Patrick Shearer, a San Antonio commercial real estate broker, said today that “he didn’t enter this race to run against” Doggett and would probably bow out. But Doggett will still have challengers.

Bexar County Tax Assessor-Collector Sylvia Romo and former Congressman Ciro Rodriguez have both been registered to run in CD-35 for months, and back in November the Houston Chronicle even went so far as to call the two “Democratic heavyweights.”

Romo, who served two terms in the Texas House in 1993 and 1995, wasted no time Tuesday afternoon announcing that she was still very much running in the district, even with Doggett lined up against her.

“For every single candidate for Congress in Texas, the last few months have been a roller coaster ride of many emotions,” her spokesman Vince Liebowitz told the Observer Tuesday. “As far as Sylvia is concerned District 35 is where her heart is, and District 35 is where her base is.”

“I feel quite certain that many people believe that a district that’s so heavily anchored in Bexar County needs a representative from Bexar County,” Liebowitz said. Romo’s campaign has long pointed out that should she win, she’d be Texas’ first Latina representative in Congress.

While they may be pretty close ideologically, Liebowitz said the manner in which Romo plans to do to her job in Congress sets her apart from Doggett. “Sylvia’s someone that’s most interest in persuading others to her viewpoint than she is in scoring political points.”
He said they’ve been “contacted by a large number of former Castro supporters” for the district who are interested in helping Romo’s cause. Plenty of folks are still unhappy about these maps, but Liebowitz said he’d just spoken with Romo, and she agreed that it’s time to get down to business now.

“We’ve been waiting for the court to rule, we’ve been waiting for this day for a while,” he said. “Sylvia is excited. You can hear the excitement as well as the relief in her voice.”

Former U.S. Rep. Ciro Rodriguez, who was bumped out of CD-23 by Republican Quico Canseco in 2010, is a little less zen about the latest maps. “The congressman is really disappointed with the interim maps. They still don’t reflect the minority growth in the state of Texas,” spokesperson Irma Gutierrez told the Observer today.

Rodriguez said as much this afternoon, in a press conference with LULAC lawyers in San Antonio at a corner where Districts 20, 23 and 35 all intersect. “Our democracy must be representative of its people and reflect the diversity in our country. These maps do not reflect that nor do they begin to give adequate representation to Latinos or African Americans,” he said in a statement issued shortly after.

Rodriguez is still running in CD-35 for now, Gutierrez said, but he might jump into his old CD-23, where he still lives, and try to wrestle it back for the Democrats. “He is going to look at the numbers and make a decision in the next three or four days,” she said.

Update March 1: Maria Luisa Alvarado, a Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor back in 2006, also announced Tuesday that she’d get into the CD35 race. ”In 2006 my decision to run for office was in part to oppose the don’t-give-a-hoot-about-public-education-Republicans. On their watch our Texas children have been denied the education needed to allow their access to the middle class,” she said in a statement.

At a ceremony in far East Austin Tuesday, Austin ISD announced a deal with seven local charter operators for a “collaboration compact,” funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, meant to usher in a new era of warm cross-district relations.

The partnership represents “a more formal and explicit way to share their ideals,” said the Gates Foundation’s Director of U.S. Education Vicki Phillips. The deal will open a channel for charters to share working models with traditional public schools, Phillips said, which was, after all, the rationale for the nation’s charter school experiment in the first place.

Austin becomes the 16th city with a Gates-backed deal like this one, and the second district in Texas after Spring Branch ISD. This partnership ties Austin ISD to KIPP, Harmony Public Schools, IDEA Public Schools, NYOS Charter School, Responsive Education Solutions, UT Elementary School and Eden Park Academy. Texas Charter Schools Association’s Chris Busse said his group helped select the charter partners, looking for diverse missions from college prep to dropout recovery. “What we did not want to do is sort of default to KIPP and IDEA,” he said.

The Austin American-Statesman had the story Tuesday morning, but the ceremony at KIPP’s Austin headquarters was a chance for the leaders involved to shake hands and say their piece, backed by (mostly) well-behaved kids in uniform from the schools involved. (To that one inveterate nose-picker whose photo I have not included here: you’re welcome.)

The idea behind the photo op: “They’re all our kids,” as Busse put it. “Too long we’ve been in competition mode.” When one kid falls backwards off the rafters, the rest of them need to be there to help him to his feet. (It happened yesterday, an unscripted but instructive moment: “See, they’re innovating already!” Phillips joked.)

Austin ISD and the charters get $100,000 from the Gates Foundation to cover the basics of this collaboration—setting up meetings and routines for the partnership, or identifying goals. But for passing this initial friendship test, Austin ISD is eligible now for $7 million more in Gates grants. Phillips mentioned off-hand that a grand total of $44 million was on the table for Austin now that it had agreed to play nice with charter schools.

Austin ISD, and its superintendent Meria Carstarphen, have already drawn flak recently from some parents and teachers who say they’ve been a little too welcoming to one charter in particular, for handing over the keys to South Texas-based IDEA Public Schools to turn an East Austin elementary school into an in-district charter.

“There was a time in our legacy where we haven’t been as strong in this area,” Carstarphen said. She said it’s time to recognize how the education world is changing around public schools, that teachers aren’t spending three decades in the same school anymore, and learn to adapt. Around 30 charters operate in Austin today, with 6 percent of the district’s kids. This deal doesn’t explicitly include new deals for more in-district charters, though it certainly brings a handful of charters cozier with the district.

“I hope to see more kids in Texas… graduate on time, ready for a career and life in this rapidly changing world,” she said. “It everyone could really get re-centered on that, we could really rock this thing.”

Carstarphen said Austin ISD had plenty of lessons to share with its new charter partners, like expanding bilingual education, and maintaining efficiency as they get bigger. “There’s going to be a lot of easy wins” for charters, she said, in streamlining their facilities and data management based on lessons from Austin ISD.

Being in a district-charter partnerships like this will help raise more money, particularly from a federal government that smiles upon those who work with charters when passing out grants. “You have to really be in collaboration to get a bigger bang for your buck,” Carstarphen said.

And then there are lessons Austin ISD can learn from charters about its classrooms and its existing cash streams. “There’s a lot that we can rethink about how we do tax revenue generation,” she said. “There are ways for us to be smarter about how we spend.”

A handout on the collaboration draws the point even finer, saying “the strained financial landscape in Texas, along with the increasingly high academic standards expected in schools” necessitates a partnership like this. “School choice messaging” and shared recruiting are listed as “key priority areas.” “The Compact will create efficiencies in the use of scarce public dollars,” the handout reads.

That language of “efficiency” coupled with charter schools is starting to sound awfully familiar these days. Last Friday school choice advocates filed a fifth school finance suit against the state, arguing for the same things—news that also drew support from the Texas Charter Schools Association.

Austin ISD has long since joined another school finance suit for more funding, one that doesn’t have much to say about “school choice” or efficient spending. The district sounds a little more enthusiastic about those ideas, though, with Gates money on the line.

Gates Foundation Director of U.S. Education Vicki Phillips speaks at the ceremony in Austin Tuesday.

Former NFL star Deion Sanders’ new charter schools in Dallas and Fort Worth begin accepting applications from students later this week, opening the two-month window before a lottery picks the 1,500 lucky students who’ll attend Prime Prep Academy next fall.

Last week, Sanders led Prime Prep leaders in a P.R. blitz to drum up interest in the schools, making the rounds of Fort Worth and Dallas newspapers, morning shows, evening news and radio, which helped spread the word that he’s “making the move from the locker room to the classroom,” and “tackling education.”

“All our lives we’ve struggled and tried to get out of the ‘hood. What’s wrong with the ‘hood? Let’s make the ‘hood good,” Sanders told Smooth 105.7 personality K.J. Midday. He said Prime Prep’s Fort Worth and South Dallas schools would be about building kids’ self-esteem and giving them tools they don’t get in their neighborhood schools, like laptops and a computer-based curriculum. “And it cuts time down on the teachers, because the teacher spends her whole day or his whole day on Saturday grading papers. Now it’s great, electronically, it gives them more time to focus on the babies.”

Thursday night, in a chapel at the South Dallas campus they plan to take over this fall, Sanders and his business partner D.L. Wallace promised hundreds of prospective parents and students that what they’re offering is simply “the best” of everything, for free.

Despite those good intentions, Sanders and Wallace told the crowd they’d been through hell the last three years just trying to get this school approved. “I’m not moving. You can’t impeach me,” Sanders said. “Everything in this program is blood-stained because of what we’ve gone through.”

They might have been alluding to the ongoing suit filed against the pair by one of Wallace and Sanders’ former business partners; the Austin-American Statesman report in November that an early draft of their charter application included a consulting contract that would pass profits to Prime Prep officials; or our December report that companies listed on their charter application as having pledged thousands of dollars to the school had no knowledge of doing so. The Texas Education Agency says everything in their application is kosher now.

But Sanders and Wallace framed the criticisms simply as an attack on their vision for inner-city students.

“I want you to know what people say,” Wallace told the crowd. “They say we can’t do this. They say the inner city can’t come together and do great things for their children.”

Along with its potential as a high school sports powerhouse, Prime Prep’s plans are worth watching because its fundraising depends so much on Sanders’ star power and endorsement deals—relying on outfits like Under Armour and the NFL for support, not the Gates or Walton Family foundations that so many other charters rely on.

On a night focused on the school’s academic plans, though, Wallace was the night’s real star. He worked the crowd with a ShamWow salesman’s humor and grace, led rounds of applause for questions from parents and glowingly endorsed the new online curriculum they’ve bought for the school, which will replace a homegrown online homework portal they’d initially planned to use.

The new curriculum will come from Florida-based VSCHOOLZ, Inc. That’s “V” as in “virtual.” The company, backed by Miami entrepreneur H. Wayne Huizenga bills itself as a “fully hosted, customizable solution for schools to be able to launch their own virtual school”—or a “blended” online/classroom hybrid, in Prime Prep Academy’s case. It includes content from publishing giant Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and the Science Screen Report video series.

“Teachers still have to do their jobs. This is a tool to make their jobs easier,” Wallace said. VSCHOOLZ cuts paper-grading time by 75 percent, Wallace said. VSCHOOLZ is “uniquely and completely aligned with the STAAR’s requirements,” Wallace told parents, referring to Texas’ controversial new testing regimen that’s rolling out this year. He said Prime Prep will be the program’s first school in Texas.

“Today’s times mean that we [parents] may not be in a position to teach our kids the things they need to know,” Wallace said—but with their web-based curriculum, Prime Prep students can keep learning on their home computer, and parents can check their progress online, no matter how late they get home from work.

Wallace offered up just a taste of the VSCHOOLZ experience, playing a clip from a math lesson about using a number line to solve a problem. When the clip finished, Wallace was beaming.

“Now wait a minute, that’s something I wouldn’t be able to teach my children,” he said. He pointed out the name of the guy who designed the lesson, and the word “professor” in front of his name. How often do your kids get taught by a professor in public school? Wallace asked parents.

While Prime Prep will probably have between 18 and 22 students per teacher, Wallace said thanks to VSCHOOLZ, they could handle many more than that.

“If you give the teachers the tools effectively, they can teach 25 kids,” Wallace said. “It’s about your commitment to the classroom.”

The meeting was mostly about academics—to avoid recruiting violations, there wasn’t much talk about sports. (The school will debut against 3A competition next year.) But Sanders said leadership training would be built on his TRUTH sports programs, where kids are taught to be confident around pro athletes like, say, Deion Sanders.

“We have kids that aren’t enamored when they meet someone of stature and start asking for autographs,” Sanders said.
Carl Dorvil, the vice chair of Prime Prep’s board, said he’d be lining up entrepreneurs to talk to students and keep them motivated. “We know and understand that all kids are impregnated with potential,” he said. “But they’ve got to labor to get that out.” A delicate lesson to impart in a state where abstinence-only education rules.

“I’ve heard all the hoopla,” Arlington parent Kim Thompson told me after the meeting. Her son’s enrolled in private school today, but he’s been in TRUTH programs, and was lobbying her to enroll him at Prime Prep. “I wanted to know the academic piece tonight, and I was impressed,” she said.

Another parent, Knasha Dawson, said her son has been in TRUTH sports programs for three years. She was impressed by the e-books and laptops Prime Prep will have in the classroom—one laptop per student—“because most schools are still, you know, with the books.”

“This is not about us,” Sanders said near the end of the meeting. Then, he told prospective students he had a stake in making sure they graduated like winners: “My name is on this, so there’s no way I’m gonna let you take my name to the ground.”