Snake Oil

Patrick Michels

Yesterday we posted our first feature from December’s Observer: the story of one tragic wreck outside Victoria in 2010, and worker safety in the oft-overlooked armored car industry.

The company involved in the wreck, Triple D Security, isn’t a big industry player—like better-known Brinks, Garda or Loomis—but it does have some serious Austin brass at the top of its organizational chart.

Ken Armbrister, Rick Perry’s director of legislative affairs, has been a general manager with Triple D since just after its founding in 1984. Armbrister made headlines most recently for spreading gossip that Perry was planning a run for another term in 2014. Before he was one of Perry’s top aides, though, Armbrister was a longtime state senator—Texas Monthly included him in its 1989 list of worst legislators, noting he’d won the nickname “TMT,” for “Too Much Testosterone.” The story noted his early attempt at passing  a concealed carry law—six years before Jerry Patterson got ‘er done—as well as a joke Armbrister told one female lobbyist at a dinner table: “Do you know why God created women? Because sheep can’t type.”

Armbrister was also a captain in the Victoria Police Department before he joined Triple D. He’s a general manager with Triple D today, the company’s top officer outside the Lack family (of Lack’s Furniture fame) that founded the outfit.

Armbrister never returned a call for our story, and Triple D’s lawyers at Haynes and Boone passed along a note that, because of a pending lawsuit surrounding the 2010 wreck, nobody at the company would be able to comment. The family of Ray Wauson, who was killed in the wreck, argues that his van wouldn’t have blown a tire and flipped if it hadn’t been loaded to almost twice the weight it was rated to carry. (The state trooper investigating the crash agreed: “I find the main causative factor in the single vehicle fatal crash to be the weight of the Triple D Security white Ford armored van,” he wrote.)

Armbrister handles security training for new Triple D officers—he signed Wauson’s paperwork personally—but he wasn’t part of the decision to send out Wauson’s van overloaded. Former workers I spoke with also raised general concerns about the company—practices the Wauson family blame founder Jay Lack, and Armbrister, for allowing to continue.

The company has faced a few lawsuits from employees complaining it refused to pay overtime. Former employees say vehicle maintenance was a constant concern. They told me about thick exhaust smells piping into the truck cab, and doors—on supposedly secure armored vehicles—that wouldn’t latch shut, and tires in lousy shape. One overworked mechanic, they said, handled all the Triple D vehicles in Victoria. (Triple D also has branches in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Corpus Christi and Austin—for the first time, we noticed one of their vans cruising past the Observer‘s offices yesterday, in fact.)

Read the whole story from the December issue here: “Too Heavy to Bear”

Patrick Michels

Texas Education Commissioner Michael Williams speaks at the Texas Charter Schools Association's annual conference.

The Texas Charter Schools Association’s annual conference is wrapping up this afternoon in downtown Austin, with almost 1,200 in attendance (by the official count), covering topics as varied as competitive procurement laws and how to teach students to build airplanes. But more than anything else, convention-goers have been getting lessons in how to talk to lawmakers, community members and people in nearby school districts—in other words, to sell what they do.

Charter school enrollment is growing in Texas, but “the movement”—as charter promoters refer to it—would like to speed things up. And so they have a “wish list.” First they want the state to raise or lift its cap on charter operators, which stands at 215 today. They want money for facilities—which they don’t get today, per the initial bargain that first created charters in Texas in the mid-90s. They also want to the movement be known for the best of its schools, not the low-performing or fraud-plagued ones that tend to hog headlines—and spark protests.

For tips on selling the movement to lawmakers, the group invited a few state reps, and even new Education Commissioner Michael Williams, to offer their suggestions Tuesday.

Williams, just three months on the job, was deferential to a crowd he said knew details of school operations better than he did. “You can’t join a church on Wednesday and expect to preach on Sunday,” he said. He spoke in broad terms about running a regulatory agency (he’s the former chair of the Texas Railroad Commission, which oversees the state’s oil and gas industry), and the need to be “customer-friendly.”

The most important thing charter schools can do, he said, was to tell lawmakers what they need for their schools. “The opposition has learned how to talk about what they believe about what you do and who you are, and how much money you take out of public schools,” Williams told the charter operators, “even though you’re a public school.”

Williams said charter operators need to police their own, to help prevent charters from failing, while the state starts cracking down harder to close charters that need to close. “Even though we’ve got to shut down poor-performing schools, the fact that we had to do it is a black mark against everybody,” Williams said.

To help develop a support network for charter schools, the Texas Education Agency announced earlier this year that it would contract with TCSA and a regional Education Service Center in Fort Worth. The two will split $500,000 a year from the state to answer questions from charter operators, run training sessions for new school officials and conduct site visits. As state Rep. Mark Strama (D-Austin) noted later later in the day, it’s an important job TEA just couldn’t handle on its own. “We cut TEA’s funding every biennium, so they literally don’t have the capacity,” he said. “Which I think is why they outsourced to you guys.”

Strama was part of a panel of lawmakers asked to share tips on how charters can make their case to the Legislature, along with Paul Workman (R-Spicewood) and new state Rep. Marsha Farney (R-Round Rock), a former State Board of Education member. Don’t haul little kids into the Capitol like puppets, they suggested, and don’t mount a letter-writing campaign over the course of a couple days.

Workman said he planned to file a bill this session to raise the cap on charter schools—as he did in 2011—and both Farney and Strama said they’d support it if he did.

Strama said he hasn’t forgotten that one of the reasons charters were created was to spread lessons from the charter school movement into the larger public school system. “At some point, we have to translate the success of charter schools into schools that parents didn’t choose,” he said. He said he’d like to see folks running successful charters go back and try being principals and superintendents in neighborhood schools. “If you can solve those kids’ problems, solve it for all of them.”

Patrick Michels

Amanda Austin, middle, walks in an Occupy AISD protest outside the Texas Charter Schools Association's annual conference in Austin.

Hundreds of charter school leaders and teachers are in Austin today for the Texas Charter Schools Association’s annual conference, where they’ll share notes from the front lines of education reform. Many of the administrators here are school leaders convinced their ideas will help turn around a struggling school system. The teachers are smart folks who put in long hours for their students.

So imagine their surprise Monday afternoon when they arrived at the Austin Convention Center and were greeted by a couple dozen protestors. “No more Walmart schools,” their signs read, and ”Keep public schools public.” The demonstration was organized by Occupy Austin ISD, an offshoot of the local Occupy group that’s kept the heat on the Austin school district for agreeing to hand over two neighborhood schools to the charter organization IDEA Public Schools.

Patrick Michels

Anger over the way the district handed those schools to IDEA helped unseat a handful of Austin school trustees last month. On Monday night, the new Austin ISD board considered reworking its agreement with IDEA. Mike Corwin, a veteran of the Occupy Austin camp who organized Monday’s protest, said that while charter schools continue to expand in Austin, he was encouraged by the local outrage over that deal.

Corwin and other Occupiers shared concerns with teachers and retired teachers at the protest, that charters are siphoning students away from neighborhood schools, drawing an unfair funding advantage from groups like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and benefiting from misleading P.R. campaigns at the expense of traditional public schools. “There’s a lot of confusion about charters,” Corwin said, “and it’s not by accident.”

The conference-going crowd Monday was slim—just a few work sessions were scheduled for the first conference’s first day. While the Occupy crowd passed around protest signs at the convention center, the charter group’s all-day golf tournament was just wrapping up at southwest Austin’s Grey Rock Golf Club.

Patrick Michels

Those who did run into the protest were generally amused by the prospect of their work being protested. Some agreed they didn’t like the sound of IDEA’s deal in Austin, at least the way the demonstrators described it. David Dunn, executive director of the Texas Charter Schools Association, stopped by to share a light-hearted chat with Corwin and other protesters—he wasn’t used to being the one protested against, he said.

But discussions broke down at the convention center just like they do in major policy debates and online comment threads—friendly as they were, the two sides were speaking different languages. The protesters complained charters hurt public schools; “But we are public schools,” charter teachers said. Protesters complained charters get a funding advantage—along with money from the state, they get millions from philanthropies. The charter school crowd said they get even less than traditional schools, because the state doesn’t fund their school buildings.

At one point a town car pulled alongside the protest, and a window rolled down. “What’s a ‘Walmart school’?” asked a confused woman in the passenger seat. It’s an out-of-state charter organization, someone explained, that comes into town and pulls students away from the local public schools. “Well, I don’t know any Walmart schools,” the woman said, and then let out a pretend cackle. “I work at a charter school!”

One of the least popular bits in Texas’ new testing regime is the “15 percent rule,” which requires that part of a high school student’s grade in a class—15 percent of it, to be precise—be tied to their score on the STAAR end-of-course exam given by the state.

The rule was meant to raise the stakes for students taking the new standardized tests, but parents and school districts complained it would raise them too much—especially in the first year of an unproven test. So in February, even before ninth graders got their first taste of STAAR, then-Education Commissioner Robert Scott offered a one-year waiver from the rule. Since then, parents’ and districts’ calls for more fundamental testing reforms have only intensified, and the future of the 15 percent rule was one of the big looming education fights for the next Legislature.

In a matter of days, though, that looming fight has been defused.

Yesterday, Gov. Rick Perry said he wanted the Texas Education Agency to defer the 15 percent rule another year. Education Commissioner Michael Williams—who Perry appointed to the job in September—told the Austin American-Statesman that Perry’s request was “under review.”

It was a quick review. In a sign of how smoothly things run when everyone’s on the same team, Williams announced just this morning that he would, indeed, defer the rule another year.

“Deferring the 15 percent rule for this school year relieves some of the pressure being felt in Texas districts as we continue the transition to a more rigorous accountability system,” Williams said in a speech at the Texas Assessment Conference in Austin Friday.

As the Statesman‘s Kate Alexander detailed, state Sen. Dan Patrick has already filed a bill that would let school districts decide how much of a student’s grade should be tied to STAAR scores—in other words, a permanent waiver from the rule. Perry’s statement on Thursday included praise for Patrick’s plan.

The waiver Williams announced today is a win for testing reform advocates, but it leaves plenty more to fight about next session. For Perry, Patrick and Williams, the big issue here is the state dictating how districts handle their business. ”While we must continue to adhere to our state’s accountability system, we must also recognize the importance of local control,” Perry said in his statement yesterday.

For now, anyway, that accountability system Perry’s talking about still includes the 15 percent rule. Now that’s up for negotiation. And reformers will try to strip away more of the testing system.