Snake Oil

Charter schools have historically been sold as places to try out innovative, low-cost education—a way to give poor kids a chance at a good education outside a failing local school. But some rich folks in San Antonio are trying out another idea.

All this one takes is a cool $50 million from wealthy donors to help a few charter school chains come to town and grow like crazy. The plan is named “Choose to Succeed,” which sounds agreeable enough. It’s a well-manicured proposal, a triumph of branding and public relations-speak, like the charter schools it supports.

Victoria Rico, chair of the San Antonio-based George W. Brackenridge Foundation, is leading this effort. With the money she raises, she imagines building 145 new charter schools with room for 80,000 students in San Antonio. That’s in addition to the charter schools in place today. More than a quarter of the students covered by the San Antonio Independent School District, for instance, are in charter schools already, the ninth-highest charter-school enrollment in the country. (SAISD is just one of 17 San Antonio school districts.)

The foundation’s pitch to donors advertises the opportunity as “for a very limited time” only and appeals to discriminating potential donors with the promise of results. “Billions of philanthropic dollars have disappeared into public school districts with no aggregate impact,” the pitch says, noting the “highly bureaucratic and politicized nature of districts run by elected boards.” Elections! What a drag.

Not to worry, though—Choose to Succeed has the answer. First, donations would help expand KIPP and IDEA, two Texas-based charter school chains that already have campuses in San Antonio. The money would also help lure four out-of-state charter chains with strong national buzz: Rocketship Education, BASIS Schools, Great Hearts Academies and Carpe Diem Schools.

Charter schools, you’ll recall, get public funding based on the number of students they enroll. So these private donations would pay for building construction and other costs of starting a new school. After that, the group says, student education is “sustained completely by public funds.”

Choose to Succeed says it has raised $18 million so far, and its first two recruits, Great Hearts and BASIS, recently won state approval to open their first schools in San Antonio next fall. It will be Great Hearts’ first foray outside of Arizona, where it operates a dozen schools. In its home state, anyway, Great Hearts schools in Arizona make it clear to parents that their donations are what keep the school running, as University of Texas education professor Julian Vazquez Heilig has pointed out.

At most charter schools, parents usually can’t afford to give a school $1,500 or more a year. Great Hearts is different. Most of its Arizona schools are in wealthier communities with mostly white and Asian students, and do very well on state tests. Great Hearts’ track record is less impressive in more diverse communities.

Great Hearts operates 15 schools in Arizona, built on a “Great Books” curriculum that will sound familiar to anyone acquainted with St. John’s College in New Mexico and Maryland. (Great Hearts Chief Academic Officer Peter Bezanson is a St. John’s grad.) Three of Great Hearts’ campuses are recent additions, but the Arizona Department of Education does have performance and demographic data for 12 of its campuses.

Seven of the Great Hearts schools earned an “A” rating from the state, the highest possible, in the 2011-2012 school year. Three earned “B” ratings and two got “C’s.” But of those dozen schools, only one had any students with limited English proficiency or from low-income families (measured by enrollment in free or reduced lunch programs). In all but one Great Hearts campus, the student body’s racial makeup is at least 70 percent white or Asian. The lone outlier is a school called Teleos Prep, with a vast majority of Hispanic, African American and low-income students, that earned a “C” rating from the state last year.

In Nashville, concerns that the schools foster segregation led school trustees to reject a Great Hearts expansion this year, over the strong objections and threats from state leaders.

By operating that inner-city campus, though, Great Hearts has been eligible for a windfall of private funding from the Charter School Growth Fund, a national philanthropic venture capital fund for underserved students in charters.

It’s not hard to imagine Great Hearts taking a similar tack in San Antonio, fueled by the generous funding from Choose To Succeed. Great Hearts’ application with the Texas State Board of Education requests five school campuses in San Antonio, a city full of opportunities to serve low-income, limited-English and minority students.

The application asks where, specifically, the campuses would be located, and Great Hearts is a little more specific: Alamo Heights and Monte Vista, wealthy enclaves home to just the sort of folks San Antonio’s enthusiastic school reformers are hope to hit up for cash.

Choose to succeed, then, by all means. But you’ll have to pay up first.

Patrick Michels

From left, Justin Yancy of the Texas Business Leadership Council, Texas Association of Business president Bill Hammond, and Texas Institute for Education Reform Chairman Jim Windham explain their plan for adjusting Texas' school testing and accountability system.

There is great unrest over testing in Texas schools, and a few Texas business leaders have some opinions about what we should do.

Until today, Texas Association of Business President Bill Hammond has been the STAAR testing regimen’s staunchest defender, meeting every new round of criticism with calls to hold fast, to stay the course, to never surrender.

If you’re wondering why the business community is trying to call the shots about school testing, well, you must be new here. The business community wants its measurables, and it will have its measurables. Two years ago, Hammond wanted the Legislature to pass an accountability system for pre-K, because employers need to know their little pencil-pushers of the future will master pushing those crayons first.

So this morning at the Capitol, Hammond announced his group was doubling down on its commitment to tough school standards… by cutting two STAAR exams and creating new graduation paths requiring even fewer tests. “HB 3 quite honestly overdid it a little bit,” Hammond said, referring to the 2009 measure that created today’s testing program.

“We still believe that those core principles [behind the original STAAR program] are intact,” explained Jim Windham, who chairs the Texas Institute for Education Reform. “Some modifications that may assist with the implementation of this plan.”

The new plan would create four high school diploma tracks: humanities, business and industry, STEM (that’s science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and a new, lighter “foundation” diploma. All but foundation would keep the “4 by 4″ requirement that graudates take four years of math, English, social studies and science. Depending on the pathway, a student would need to pass between eight and 10 end-of-course exams to graduate—way less than the 15 required of all students today. Their plan includes a scaled-back phase-in term when students would need to pass even fewer tests. The STAAR program for grades three to eight would remain as-is.

But Hammond said he’d tolerate no further whining about students being knocked off the graduation track by because they failed an end-of-course STAAR exam. “They’ve already been given a reprieve,” he said, because it takes as little as 37 percent to pass some of the tests.

Windham called this new plan the “post-secondary readiness gold standard.” He and Hammond said the plan was the result of months of travel and meetings with lawmakers, and it reflects lawmakers’ enthusiasm for new alternative graduation path that respects career, not college, readiness—an approach that’s sure to draw critics wary of creating a system that “tracks” some students with lower expectations than others.

“We simply are not improving quickly enough in the competitive world we live in,” said Justin Yancy of the Texas Business Leadership Council.

The new plan would also completely eliminate the new end-of-course exams in world history and geography.

“U.S. history is minimally acceptable, we believe, for a Texas graduate,” Windham explained.

“If we could get ‘em past the Civil War,” Hammond said, “we’d be doing pretty good.”

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.”