Snake Oil

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.”

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.

Patrick Michels

This time last month, I was finishing up a story for the magazine about the outrageous cheating scandal Lorenzo Garcia orchestrated in El Paso ISD. At the time, community members were irate because other than Garcia—who was superintendent during the years children were “disappeared” to boost the district’s test scores—no other EPISD officials had lost their jobs over the affair. The district leaders who talked about moving on from this sordid episode were, in some cases, the same ones who made it happen.

Less than a week after we put the story online, it looked like that was finally starting to change. Texas’ new Education Commissioner Michael Williams visited El Paso in October and told the district it had better start cleaning house, though he wouldn’t say how long he’d give them before levying more sanctions on the district, on top of its “probation” status with the Texas Education Agency.

On October 30, the El Paso Times reported the resignation of Jesus Chavez, former principal of Bowie High School, which became a model of the sneaky fixes Garcia espoused. Later that week Myrna Gamboa, the former director of the district’s Priority Schools Division (which included struggling schools like Bowie) bowed out rather than let the school board fire her.

Two assistant principals and a counselor at Bowie were also put on leave early this month. “It was either that or go in front of the school board and let them terminate me,” Johnnie Vega, one of the assistant principals, told the Times. “They want to look good for TEA so they’re not going to stop. Right now, it’s like a witch hunt.”

But if it is indeed a witch hunt, trustees are missing the biggest targets, says Steve Lane, a former high school principal under Garcia who retired in 2011 after refusing to take part in the scheme. “Instead of starting at the schools, they need to start at the top and work their way down,” he says. “The people they convinced to retire or kinda drove out of Bowie, those people are just pawns.”

One of those “pawns” was Kathy Ortega, the district’s former director of guidance services who retired in early this month. Many have blamed Ortega for not acting on a complaint from Bowie counselor Patricia Scott, who had questioned why school officials were erasing credits from her students’ transcripts.

Lane says Ortega is a great example of a mid-level player who was intimidated by Garcia and his top staff. After the TEA and the U.S. Department of Education had already cleared the district of wrongdoing, Lane believes if Ortega had passed Scott’s complaints to her superiors, she would only have brought critical attention to Scott. “Ortega, I guess could’ve tried to go to TEA or DOE again, but that lady was in a no-win situation. She was trying to protect Pat Scott. But nobody knows what to do, because who are you supposed to go to? Even though the evidence was overwhelming.”

If TEA’s threats don’t do the trick, there are two more pressure points that should worry those who enabled Garcia’s scheme. First is the ongoing FBI investigation that led to Garcia’s arrest—Garcia’s indictment included mention of “six unindicted co-conspirators” who still haven’t been named. Second is the state-mandated audit El Paso ISD had contracted out to the Austin firm Weaver and Tidwell (whose $580,000 bid was the only one EPISD received for the job).

There’s no telling how long the FBI investigation will last, but the district’s audit is expected to wrap up in February. Lane hopes one of them will finally force the district to go after the big fish nobody has the stomach to target so far.

“I wish they would, instead of going after the little people,” Lane says, “go after the corrupt people that caused all this.”