Quite a lot for the money

As a reader of my blog, you know that I spend considerable time on my volunteer role to which you helped elect me – Trustee of the Houston Independent School District. You probably also know that the HISD Board has placed a large bond referendum on the ballot. And if you’re like me, you would want to have the information necessary to weigh the costs of this bond against the benefits. Please send this link to anyone you think could benefit from knowing more about this important referendum.

I’m writing today’s post because I believe this bond is extremely important to the future of our city, and is a fantastic value to taxpayers. You know me – I like to put all the facts out there so that you don’t have to do a whole lot more research once you read one of my lengthy posts ? – and this time, I’ve also provided some links for additional information – some of which are TV news stories that will let you see the schools in question.

Briefly, the passage of this bond will enable HISD to build or substantially replace 38 aging schools, including 28 high schools.

The last three bonds (1997, 2002, and 2007) dealt with critical safety and firecode needs and were focused, for the most part, on replacing outdated elementary schools. Meanwhile, Houston’s high schools have for the most part continued to be patched as they grow more outdated and, often, overcrowded.  High schools are much larger and more expensive than elementary schools, and dealing with our high school facilities issue has awaited a bold bond referendum of its own – and this is that bond.  In fact, if this bond passes, every high school in the HISD will have been built or substantially replaced since the year 2000, propelling Houston from one of the oldest inventories of high school facilities in America to the newest.  This bond is not profligate – in fact, its goal is to match regional standards for square feet per student and cost per square foot – but the results will be remarkable for our children.  Here are just a few examples that will be especially compelling to you and your neighbors:

• A state of the art High School for Performing and Visual Arts (“HSPVA”), located downtown near the theater district, where students will be able to learn and observe from the masters in their field.  Take a trip to Dallas if you want to see what kind of amazing arts education is possible when a new performing arts high school is built in the heart of a theater district.

• A brand new DeBakey High School for Health Professions, to be built on the best part of the old Shamrock Hilton site on Holcombe.  The land will be donated by the Texas Medical Center, whose chairman, Dick Wainerdi, considers DeBakey crucial to our city’s ability to develop a homegrown pipeline of young people from all socioeconomic backgrounds to feed the world’s largest medical center.  Like HSPVA, DeBakey’s location is central and on major transit lines with immediate access to TMC’s shuttle system, and adjacent to A&M, UTMB, and HCC.

• Complete replacement of Lamar High School, with retention of the architecturally important North building façade and theater, along with construction of a parking garage with matching federal funds that will relieve enormous parking strain on the surrounding neighborhood, as well as free up significant green space to expand athletic fields so that female athletes have on-site playing fields.

• Complete replacement of Lee High School, now a national model for successful inner city school reform due to the results of the Apollo 20 program.  The original Lee building has developed irreparable foundation issues over the years and barely avoided emergency closure 18 months ago with a temporary foundation repair.  The new building would replace the existing building as well as the numerous temporary buildings currently taking up green space.

• Complete replacement of Bellaire High School (except for recently built science wing) and, pending approval by Bellaire City Council, a sorely needed parking garage.  Bellaire is the smallest property in HISD among comprehensive high schools but has the largest enrollment of any HISD school.

• Complete replacement of historic high schools including Jeff Davis, Austin, Milby, and Yates, among others.  A complete list of schools can be found here.

In addition to high schools, there are several middle schools, K-8s and elementary replacements and completions in the proposal, including

• Grady Middle School (completion)
• Pilgrim K-8 (completion)
• Wharton K-8
• Mandarin Chinese K-8
• Garden Oaks Montessori K-8
• Wilson Montessori K-8
• Dowling Middle School
• Askew Elementary
• Condit Elementary
• Parker Elementary Performing Arts Magnet
• A Relief school to deal with overcrowding west of Briargrove

This bond is big and bold – and will clearly deal with our most pressing facilities needs and change the face of education in Houston. That is not to say this deals with all our facilities needs – HISD’s total stock of 300 campuses would cost perhaps $8 billion to replace – but we believe, as a board and Superintendent, that this package is the right size to deal responsibly and equitably with the most urgent needs citywide. Had the amount been significantly smaller, I can tell you public support would be have been far lower because we would be failing to address urgent needs that are clear to residents around the city.

But is the bond too large? Let’s look at the numbers. While $1.89 billion is a large number, Houston is a large (and healthy) city. I have said before that if HISD orders ham sandwiches, it will be the biggest ham sandwich order in Texas. So the discussion should be not about the nominal size, but about the effect on individual homeowners, weighed against the benefit to those citizens. In this case, as you will see from the email I have forwarded to you below, the total tax rate increase phased in over five years will be 4.85 cents per $100 valuation, which equals an increase of $70 per year on an average home – about the cost of a tank of gas. And for that, as you can see from the list above, homeowners throughout Houston will benefit from new, state of the art facilities which are no longer overcrowded. This is why I, and many others, believe this bond represents a tremendous value to taxpayers.

Some people, alarmed by dysfunctional borrowing in Washington and major cities around the US, are rightly concerned about the overall level of indebtedness and taxation here in Houston. Fortunately, due to the fiscally conservative management of HISD for many years, HISD has the highest bond rating of any district in Texas (AA+), the same rating as the State of Texas itself, and higher than the City of Houston (AA). And this bond rating is despite the fact that HISD has by far the lowest property tax rate of any of the 21 school districts in Harris County. In fact, even after the full $0.0485 per $100 tax increase over five years, HISD will still have the lowest tax rate in Harris County. And so while we probably all feel our property taxes are too high – there is no doubt that HISD’s property tax rate is quite low, and will stay that way after this bond.

This bond is financially responsible for another reason: every new building in this bond package will be built to LEEDS standards, resulting in lower operating costs, lower environmental impact, and a learning environment that will foster environmentally responsible thinking among our students.  HISD’s last bond, in 2007, was also all-green; the 23 new buildings built in that bond, which is now in its final phase of completion, was built to LEEDS standards, making it the largest LEEDS building program in US history, and making the HISD the #2 school district in the US in terms of LEEDS registered schools.  The new bond on this year’s ballot is almost twice the size, and therefore twice as green.  A vote for the HISD is a vote for financially and environmentally responsible building on a scale that literally sets a new standard of leadership for the rest of the country.

The list of organizations endorsing the bond has been as strong as I’ve ever seen. So far, the Houston Chronicle, Greater Houston Partnership, Central Houston, Houston Association of Realtors, and a huge number of elected officials have endorsed the bond, with many more coming in the next two weeks. Many of these endorsements can be found here.  In addition, numerous leading Houston arts, cultural, medical, educational and environmental organizations have written strong letters of support.

But we are not taking this strong momentum for granted – there are those who will be opposed to this bond, and those who are not aware of the facts surrounding it – and so I ask you to forward a link to this post to anyone whom you think could benefit from it. I really appreciate your taking the time to read this and get to know more about this referendum which is all about our city’s future and its educational opportunities.

I have not focused today on how much the HISD has improved in the last several years, in part because that has been the focus of my posts in the past. I have also dealt with those issues in posts on my facebook page and twitter feed. So please check there for what you are probably already aware is significant progress, in some cases unprecedented among large urban districts in the US.  Here is just the latest of many such accomplishments, an announcement from earlier this week of an increase of 41% in the number of students scoring above a 500 on the Math SAT over the last three years.  You may have also heard about the increase in the number of graduates from HISD schools, which is up about 20% in the past five years.

I do hope you consider helping to spread the word about this important bond.

Houston public schoolchildren will have the opportunity to learn the world’s most spoken language in a new school that opens August 2012.

The new magnet school will follow HISD’s nationally recognized and highly successful model of dual language immersion, with new students taught nearly all their subjects in the foreign language by expert teachers.  As the students progress through grade levels, the percentage of time spent immersed in the foreign language drops from 80-90% in kindergarten and first grade until 4th or 5th grade, when the students are taught roughly half in the foreign language and half in English.  National research as well as HISD experience has shown that, once fully bilingual, students taught in this manner outperform their peers not only in the foreign language but in other subjects, too.

The state of foreign language instruction in America is poor – and the timing of this problem could not be worse in a rapidly changing multicultural world.  While over 2/3 of the world’s population speaks two or more languages, most Americans are in a shrinking minority who can’t communicate with anyone that doesn’t speak their own language.  And while English is still the world’s pre-eminent language for business and technology (and in my opinion always will be), leadership and success in the 21st century require effective communication and sharing of ideas with others.  A declining percentage of American elementary schools offer foreign language instruction, dropping from 31% in 1997 to only 25% today – despite an overwhelming body of research showing that foreign language fluency improves achievement in a student’s primary language and in other subjects.  Learning a second language makes you smarter.

America’s lack of bilingualism is not just a problem for those of us who want to be successful in the 21st century – it’s a matter of national security.  A 2007 report from the National Academy of Sciences warns, “The pervasive lack of knowledge of foreign cultures and languages threatens the security of the United States and as well its ability to compete in the global marketplace and produce an informed citizenry.”

For most Texans, fluency in Spanish is a wise and practical choice, given Texas’ geographical and economic position as America’s gateway to Central and South America.  But just as America trades with many other countries that are outside the Spanish-speaking world, we must offer our children other important world languages as well.

Mandarin Chinese is the most widely spoken language in the world by far.  Chinese, in several dialects, is spoken by 1.5 billion people in China and an additional 800 million outside China, making Chinese an excellent choice as a foreign language for students wanting to gain an edge in a highly competitive world. And while almost 300 million Chinese are learning English at this moment, only 56,000 Americans are learning Chinese. The opportunity to be one of those rare Mandarin-speaking Americans offers truly extraordinary advantages in a competitive college and workforce environment.

Fluency in Mandarin Chinese is also beneficial for another reason.  The United States has become the most popular country in the world for a very interesting group of immigrants – Chinese millionaires.  According to a study of 980 Chinese with assets of more than $1.6 million which was cited in the Wall Street Journal last month, 60% of Chinese millionaires are either considering emigrating from China to another country or already have done so. The most popular destination is the US, where 40% of Chinese prefer to emigrate.   According to the study, the reasons they are emigrating are first, education quality for their children, and second, security of their assets.  The fact that such a huge percentage of China’s most successful people want to bring their families and their assets to America presents a great opportunity for both countries – and frankly, reminds us of what America is – a melting pot based on freedom and opportunity.

Texas happens to be a primary beneficiary of these trends. China is Texas’ 2nd largest export market, responsible for over $10 billion in exports in 2010.   This enormous figure is increasing at a fast pace.  In the last ten years, Texas’ exports to China have increased almost 7 times faster than exports to the rest of the world. Children who learn the Chinese language will have a rare and valuable skill in the 21st century, and we intend to make HISD a leader in these opportunities.

Can this effort produce significant results?  We need only look back twelve years, when Robert Davis, now Executive Director of Chinese Language and Culture Initiatives for the College Board, approached Chicago Public Schools Superintendent Paul Vallas to suggest it was unacceptable that the world’s most spoken language was not taught anywhere within the nation’s third largest school system.  Vallas agreed and hired Davis to start a Chinese program.  Twelve years later, Mandarin Chinese is taught in 43 schools in Chicago (with 30 more on the waiting list to add programs); and on any given day, over 13,000 students in Chicago are learning Chinese.  In fact, almost a quarter of the 56,000 Americans learning Chinese are in Chicago public schools. Houston can and should follow that example.

We should do so because it’s good for kids to learn a foreign language fluently.  That means not only offering opportunities like the new Mandarin Chinese immersion school, but expanding and changing the way we teach foreign languages in all schools.  Children easily learn a foreign language as long as quality instruction starts at the earliest grade levels, and provided every day.   We have to make room for foreign language if we value it, which will mean looking at our school day and the other ways we spend our time – and have a serious discussion about priorities.

But for today, at least, we are focused on one thing – expanding HISD’s highly effective and very popular dual language immersion schools into a new language.  And starting next Fall, Houston children will be able to say “Nihao!” to a wide new world of opportunity.

This op-ed originally appeared in the Examiner Newspapers.

Related Posts:

Remarks and Powerpoint Slides from HISD Summit December 2, 2011 The Case for Teaching Mandarin Chinese

HISD-TV Story on the Summit:   HISD Considers Chinese Language School

The actual formula is elusive…

“Everyone has their theory – a longer school day, a little more discipline – but nobody knows the actual recipe.”  A true statement, well laid out by Gareth Cook in his column today.  Those of us who have been working at improving schools for years are continually chagrined by the various “silver bullets” supported by members of the status quo who want to change one thing that benefits, or at least doesn’t threaten them.  Thus the endless calls for smaller class size without honest discussions about what studies have actually proven, or without comparing the cost of class size reductions with the costs or relative benefits of other reforms, mayoral control by certain reformers who have never been able to explain why school reform would be more stable when it hinges on a single elected official rather than on several elected school board members (sure didn’t work out that way in Washington DC!), or across the board raises on the theory that paying the same people more money will result in higher public regard for teachers and better learning for children.  If we’re honest and really focused on results for children, we know that solutions are nuanced but they all involve hard work, and personal and professional responsibility.

Harvard researcher Roland Fryer exhaustively researched the many factors behind the success of the Harlem Children’s Zone in order to develop a research-based “recipe” for school improvement, which he has worked with the Houston Independent School District to implement last year in a program called “Apollo 20″.  Cook’s column investigates what Fryer has learned in his search to define the recipe for better education.

Education’s coconut cake problem

By Gareth Cook, Globe Columnist, December 18, 2011

HARVARD PROFESSOR Roland Fryer has made a discovery with the potential to transform public education. To understand it, though, it helps to first hear a story about the conundrum of the coconut cake.

Fryer’s grandmother makes an astounding coconut cake, a magical confection of sweetness and air he’s loved since he was a kid growing up in Florida. Fryer wanted to learn to make the cake himself, but every time he pressed for a recipe, she gave him directions like “use a good amount of sugar, a little flour but not too much, and just a bit of baking powder.’’

She wasn’t hiding anything. He’d seen her make it, and the truth is that she works her kitchen by intuition, grabbing what she needs and pouring in what feels right. The secret of grandma’s coconut cake, it seemed, would follow her to the grave.

But Fryer had a thought. A few Thanksgivings ago he watched her while she made the cake, writing down everything she did. Every time she was about to drop an ingredient into the bowl, he stopped her and measured. It drove her a bit crazy, but he ended up with the recipe, and a piece of family history he can share with his own grandkids some day.

By day, the 34-year-old Fryer is a brilliant economist – among the youngest scholars ever to earn tenure at Harvard – who studies schools. And education, he realized, has its own coconut-cake problem. There are public schools that are performing near miracles in deeply troubled urban districts, but nobody, not even those who run these schools, can say for sure what makes them work. Everyone has their theory – a longer school day, a little more discipline – but nobody knows the actual recipe.

So Fryer went to New York City and measured the ingredients. Working with Harvard’s Will Dobbie and a team at the Harvard EdLabs, Fryer collected an unprecedented amount of information from a diverse group of 35 charter schools – everything from test scores and spending per pupil to educational philosophies and videotapes of classroom instruction. Then, using rigorous statistical techniques, he compared differences in student achievement with all the other variables, extracting five principles that the star charters all share.

These principles are themselves a major stop forward: what is on the list, and particularly what is not on the list, is quite surprising. But here the story takes an amazing turn. Fryer worked with the superintendent of Houston’s public schools, Terry Grier, to apply the five principles to a group of failing schools.

The results have been positive. In just one year, kids in one of their schools went from 40 percent proficient in math on a standardized test to 85 percent proficient; high school seniors were 50 percent more likely to enroll in a four year college. Overall, reading scores have moved up only modestly, but math scores have climbed dramatically and the experiment has only just entered its second year. And all this has been accomplished in ordinary public schools, without converting a single one into a charter school; no students were kicked out.

So what is this magic recipe? It turns out to be remarkably straightforward: Give frequent feedback to teachers, use loads of data on individual students to guide their instruction, employ heavy tutoring, increase instructional time, and maintain very high expectations. All of the very best performing charter schools in his New York sample did these things aggressively, according to a paper Fryer released last month, and this is what turned around the Houston schools.

The other things you hear about improving schools – such as smaller classes and spending per pupil – do not appear to be important. This seems to defy logic, but not for Seth Andrew, founder of the Democracy Prep charter schools in Harlem. He uses larger classes because this means fewer teachers lecturing at any given time, and the free ones can do tutoring, professional development, and other essential activities. He spends less money per pupil than at other schools because the administration is lean and careful. Last year, his class of black and Hispanic 10th graders outperformed students from wealthy Westchester County.

The next steps are clear. Massachusetts, and every state that allows charter schools, should require all their schools to submit to the kind of analysis that Fryer does. With data from thousands of schools, we will have a very precise picture of what works. Meanwhile, as Fryer has shown in Houston, there is no reason we can’t start turning around schools now.

Excellent urban public schools are an artisanal product, the handiwork of a few geniuses who, like Fryer’s grandmother, arrived at their recipes through intuition. It’s time to move to mass production. There are a lot of desperate kids out there, hungry for the real thing.

Click here for the original article

Houston ISD Superintendent Terry Grier and Board of Education Trustee Harvin Moore hosted over ninety community leaders to discuss a proposal to create a dedicated dual language Mandarin Chinese immersion school.  Held December 2, 2011, one week prior to a Board vote on a proposal to open such a school in August 2012, the summit featured presentations by Dr. Grier, Trustee Moore, Asia Society Chairman Charles Foster, College Board Vice President Robert Davis, and Edward Park, Principal of the highly acclaimed Barnard Elementary Mandarin Chinese Magnet School in San Diego Unified School District.

An excellent news story about the summit can be viewed here.  In addition, I have posted here the video of my presentation “The case for Mandarin Chinese language instruction in American public schools.

And below, I have posted the original powerpoint presentation. Please feel free to share this post with others, and you may also share my presentation, but I ask that you retain the original citations and credits.

Why Am I Here?

Last week, the HISD joined a lawsuit against the State of Texas following the largest funding cuts to public education in the history of Texas.  It’s the second time in ten years such a lawsuit has been filed: the last time, school districts prevailed when the Texas Supreme Court declared the school finance system unconstitutional.

Why must our children count on the courts to get a quality education?

A BAD YEAR FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION
2011 has been a disappointing year, not only because of the unprecedented reduction in State education funding – a cut of $530 per student per year, or the equivalent of more than $13,000 per classroom per year – but because these cuts were unstrategic, unnecessary, and voluntary choices by the Texas Legislature.

EDUCATION WAS CUT DUE TO POOR LEGISLATIVE DECISION, NOT THE ECONOMY
While legislators claimed the reason for cuts was a sudden economic downturn, the fact is that the vast majority of the cuts were due to poor decisions made by the Texas Legislature in their two previous sessions.  As described in part 3 of this 4 part series, the largest single reason for the current shortfall was the use of $12 billion in federal stimulus money to paper over a State deficit two years ago.  This included $3.3 billion of federal money that was earmarked for public education – but then used instead to supplant State funding that biennium.

The second biggest reason for the current budget shortfall was the 2006 “tax swap”. This swap lowered property taxes by one-third, promising that a new business margins tax would make up the difference – but it never has.  The permanent shortfall to overall State revenues as a result of this ill-advised tax swap is a recurring $4.6 billion every year.  Those two items alone account for most of the cuts the 82^nd Legislature made to public education this year.

But it is perhaps most disappointing of all, however, to hear State leaders proudly saying they passed a budget that “ensures our schools live within their means” and face the “new normal”.  And it’s downright incredible to read comments from some leaders stating they actually increased education funding – when, as I will make clear, they absolutely did not.

HOW BIG REALLY WERE THE CUTS TO PUBLIC EDUCATION?
In its 2011-2013 budget passed this summer (the Legislature meets once every two years and passes a “biennial” budget), the Texas Legislature cut $4 billion from the “Foundation School Program”, which is the basic per student formula that determines how much the State pays to districts.  This was not a cut in growth rates, as is often the case in federal budgets – this was a real cut in current per student education funding – and a huge cut at that.

In addition to cutting our already low public education spending (Texas ranks 47^th in education spending per student), this is the first time in 60 years that the State has failed to fund student growth – in essence meaning no funds were allocated for the roughly 85,000 new students that are added to Texas public schools each year.  By not funding student growth, our Legislature, in essence, decided that each child is now worth less.

In addition, the State cut $1.4 billion from education programs and grants (including pre-kindergarten, technology, and dropout prevention programs) that are not a part of the basic formula.

Finally, the State shifted the entire monthly payment of $2 billion from August 2013 to September 2013 so that it wouldn’t count as an expense for the current biennium, which ends August 31, 2013.  There is no guarantee that this payment will be made, and no funding source with which to make it, so that accounting trick is nothing more than an additional cut that will have to be faced in the next legislative session.

But even without considering the accounting trick, the 82^nd Legislature cut $5.4 billion from public education for the biennium, or about $2.7 billion per year, at a time when the demands and challenges on public education are rightfully larger than ever.

STANDARDS HIGHER THAN EVER AND RISING
Admirably, the Texas Legislature has increased academic standards significantly in recent years.  This year, we begin the use of a new test, called STAAR, and college readiness-based end of course exams.  These tests are difficult and the majority of Texas adult population, including many if not most well educated persons, probably could not pass all of these tests without significant study and review.  Cutting funding at the same time as significantly increasing standards is not a good idea.  The Texas Supreme Court actually cautioned the Legislature in 2005 that additional requirements would need additional resources.

DID TEXAS REALLY NOT HAVE MONEY?
Sometimes people don’t pay their bills because they simply don’t have the money to do so.  Did Texas have the money to fund its obligation to public education?  Yes.  As the Legislature made their decisions over the past five years to lower public education’s revenue sources, and to use federal education dollars to balance other parts of the state budget, money was building up in another place – the Texas Economic Stabilization Fund, also known as the “rainy day fund”.  As described in detail in my 2^nd article in this series, the rainy day fund was marketed to voters, who approved it in 1998, as a way to set aside a stream of oil and gas production taxes to maintain services in the event of an economic downturn.

The legislative decisions to redirect education spending to fill budget gaps in other areas essentially transferred education spending to rainy day fund savings.

But despite the fact that the State, not local property taxpayers, had failed to pay its share of public education costs; and despite the fact arguably one reason there is so much money in the rainy day fund is because of the Legislature’s decision two years earlier to use federal education dollars to balance the budget by supplanting State spending, the Legislature this year refused to use any rainy day funds for the current biennium.  This left over $6.3 billion in the fund (projected to grow to $7.3 billion by the end of the biennium).  This decision was made despite calls from the business community, including the Greater Houston Partnership, to use $4 billion of those remaining funds for education and healthcare.

THE STATE SHIRKS ITS CONSTITUTIONAL RESPONSIBILITY
Education funding in Texas is a State responsibility laid out in the original Texas Constitution, and discussed at length in part 1 of this series.  Historically, the State has shared the cost of public education equally with local taxpayers.  Because of the way the funding formulas work, any reduction in State funding shifts the funding burden to local property taxpayers.  The State share of funding began slipping in the 1990s until 2005, when the Texas Supreme Court declared the entire State public school finance system unconstitutional.

The Texas Legislature unfortunately responded to that ruling not by restructuring school finance to ensure its future stability and constitutionality, but instead with a “patch” that  briefly increased the State share of the overall cost of public education.  Immediately the State share began declining again, and just five years later, the State now pays only 28% of the total cost of educating a student statewide.  That is a failed partnership, and it is patently unfair to students and to property taxpayers.  It’s also unconstitutional, which is why hundreds of school districts – including HISD – have joined lawsuits against the State this Fall.

HOW CAN LEGISLATORS SPEND LESS ON EDUCATION BUT CLAIM THEY SPENT MORE?
But what about the claim, made by the Speaker of the House and others, that there was no cut to education funding, but in fact an “increase”?  How can anyone claim that the largest education cut in Texas history didn’t happen?  With some very careful – and misleading – wording.

As explained above, the 81^st Legislature chose in 2009 to use $3.3 billion of federal education stimulus dollars to supplant its share of education funding that year, so that $3.3 billion of State “General Fund” money that would otherwise have been spent on education could be spent elsewhere (and saving legislators from having to spend $3.3 billion of rainy day funds to balance the budget).

Since the federal stimulus money was a one-time payment, this trick only works once, and the next Legislature had to figure out a way to use the General Fund – this time without a federal bailout – to fund the $3.3 billion hole they created in education funding.  Well, they didn’t figure it out – they restored only $1.9 billion, resulting in a $1.6 billion net reduction – but they call it a $1.9 billion “increase” by comparing it to the General Fund dollars they spent last time!  That’s not an increase – it’s a cut.

Can you imagine if your boss cut your salary by $2000 one month because he knew you won that much in the lottery, and then the next month restored just $1000 of the pay cut while asking you to thank him for giving you a $1000 raise?  That’s what the Legislature is asking you to do.

Also, recall how the Legislature essentially said that each child is worth less.  The State funded student growth by reducing the amount appropriated per student.  When you look at what it would take to maintain the previous per student funding levels, taking into consideration the 85,000 new students per year, the State underfunded the commitment needed to maintain its legal obligation by about $4 billion.

So the strange claim that state education funding was actually increased is not true in any useful sense.  This kind of crafty wording does not serve the public well.  The bottom line is that the Legislature cut $2.7 billion dollars a year from public education and made no provision for Texas’ rapidly increasing enrollment.  Claiming that the state raised its public school spending on public schools is misleading and irresponsible.  There is no question that the 82^nd Legislature made massive cuts to public education.

IS INCREASED EFFICIENCY THE ANSWER?
Legislative leaders said that school districts could make up for these huge funding cuts with increased school district efficiency.  Is that a reasonable statement?

As I discussed at length in my last column, there are indeed aspects of public education that can be improved significantly.  HISD has been a leader in some of these areas in recent years, including closing extremely small and inefficient schools, outsourcing or eliminating some functions, and increasing teacher quality through better evaluation and hire/fire decisions.

But HISD has room for improvement in efficiency, as all organizations do.  For example, one area HISD has hardly touched is integrating technology to significantly change the learning environment, while reducing costs and increasing student engagement and learning (this concept, pioneered by some very successful charter schools, is called “blended learning” and I have begun pushing for changes like these in HISD).  So claiming public schools, or any large organizations, for that matter, can and should be more efficient is true.

But make no mistake; efficiency is neither the problem, nor the solution to the structural problem with school funding in Texas.  Strategic leaders should incorporate efficiency into their funding formulas – not simply use the term as rhetoric, as largely happened during the 82^nd Legislature.

WHY HASN’T HISD RAISED YOUR TAXES SO YOU CAN PAY WHAT THE STATE WON’T?
The Legislature’s drastic education cuts reduced HISD’s funding by $78 million this year (the 2011-2012 school year), and by about $122 million next year.  As mentioned, reductions in State funding shift the burden for paying for education from the State to local property taxpayers.  It would have been possible for HISD to make up for the State’s failure to pay its share of public education, at least in the short run, by significantly raising your local property taxes.  Indeed, many legislators counted on that happening, and some districts have done just that.

Why did the HISD not increase property taxes?  I believe it is absolutely unacceptable for the State to choose to abrogate its responsibility to fund its share of public education and shift that responsibility to property taxpayers, who already pay excessive taxes due to past failures of the legislature to do its part.  Instead, we chose to make whatever cuts were necessary for the time being to keep the district in sound financial shape (cutting far less from the classroom than most other districts), while simultaneously pursuing relief through the judicial system for this unconstitutional practice.

In the end, HISD will make the hard decisions that are in the best interests of our students, but simply raising property taxes rather than actually fixing the broken state funding structure would not solve the problem and would lead to additional property tax increases far into the future.

What the citizens and children of Texas deserve is for the structurally unsound school finance system to be fixed permanently – and not to be continually patched and defunded.

TIME TO GET SERIOUS
We have to get serious about public education in Texas.  Not just serious about pointing out its inefficiencies, but serious about improving it.  While most children in the US have seen little improvement in their schools in the past thirty years, those in states and school districts willing to make very tough child-based decisions have fared far better.  HISD is one of those districts, and we should be as encouraged by our progress as we are determined to attain far more progress in the future.  A resurgence of national passion for public education, and a flowering of successful non-traditional education ideas, like charter schools and performance-oriented teacher evaluation, have marked Houston as a leader in this area.

Public education needs enormous changes to meet the needs of our diverse society and its enormous achievement gaps, as well as the increasing needs of exponentially developing technology and a highly competitive global economy.  If we are serious about improving public education, then, no matter how convinced we are that public education can be more efficient – and it can– we should not meet this challenge with massive cuts to education funding.

TOO HARSH?
Some will say these are harsh words for the Legislature.  And of course, the Legislature is not a single person with a single mindset, but 150 Representatives and 31 Senators from all across the State.  Many legislators on both sides of the aisle did an outstanding job of rising to this occasion to argue against education cuts, encourage use of State rainy day funds to repay what is clearly a State obligation, and to fix permanently our broken and unconstitutional system.  Unfortunately, those legislators did not prevail, because far more legislators chose to punt.

Numerous legislators told me and others that they preferred to leave the system broken and wait for districts to sue so that the courts could make the tough decisions – so our lawsuit is more of a relief than a surprise for most legislators.  But there is an innocent party in this struggle – Texas’ children – who define our future prospects as a society.  I believe the citizens of Houston and Texas deserve adequate and fair education funding, and should use their power at the ballot box to insist on it in the future.

***

This op-ed originally appeared in the Examiner Newspapers. It was the last in a series of four articles on the Texas State education finance crisis.  My previous columns, written during the Legislative session, focused in more detail on the subjects summarized in this final article.

Click to view my first op-ed, entitled State Education Funding: A Failed Partnership?

Click to view my second op-ed, entitled It’s Raining in Texas – Should the State Use Your Umbrella?

Click to view my third op-ed, entitled Can Efficiency Solve Texas’ State Education Funding Crisis?

Click to View Video

Jerry Martin, the General Manager of Houston’s NBC-TV affiliate, KPRC Channel 2, took to the airwaves today with a short, sweet, and hard-hitting editorial that took aim at the Texas Legislature for making the largest public education funding cuts in Texas history.   After pointing out Texas’ changing demographics and low educational attainment, he asks “Can we really affford to be taking money away from the schools when they are more crowded than ever, teeming with the future leaders of our state and nation?”

“Remember, ” Martin continues, “these are the officials who decided not to dip into the State’s rainy day fund because we were not in a deep enough crisis.”

He closed by urging viewers to keep this year’s legislative actions “in mind next year when you’re casting your vote . . .  Let your voice be heard.”

Whoa!  It’s on.

They're both important

Rick Hess has been a articulate and forceful voice in the education reform scene for more than ten years, and has written many highly acclaimed articles and books, and speaks widely on what makes some teachers and some schools better than others.  He is highly respected for his passion and considered viewpoints that are usually more nuanced than the more low-level, black-and-white type reasoning that is unfortunately so common in education policy – and public policy in general – today.

In this article in the most recent issue of National Affairs Magazine, Rick argues that the very justifiable focus on closing achievement gaps has gone too far – to the point where public school systems and the public debate in general are ignoring the needs of advanced students, with a number of resulting harms, including a loss of American competitiveness among high-achieving students, and the loss of the support of the middle class, who want not only to see lower-achieving students improve, but to see their own children thrive as well.   Hess quotes Frank C. Worrell, faculty director of the Academic Talent Development Program at the University of California, Berkeley, who says “We have focused on bringing up the bottom, but we have failed to recognize that by ignoring the top, we are creating another problem.”  This is a concern held by many people right here in Houston, and should be taken very seriously.  When parents see already poorly funded art, music, and magnet programs suffering budget cuts while millions of new dollars are devoted to a small number of at-risk schools, they are justifiably anxious.  If the extra millions for at-risk schools did not come at the expense of other schools, this would not be nearly as contentious an issue, but Rick’s article gives numerous examples where that is in fact the case.  I hope the debate sparked by this brave article can help education policy in general become more nuanced and thoughtful.

Here is the article’s introduction, followed by a link to the original article, an opposing viewpoint, and Rick’s response to the firestorm he has created:

‘A decade ago, the No Child Left Behind Act ushered in an era of federally driven educational accountability focused on narrowing the chasms between the test scores and graduation rates of students of different incomes and races. The result was a whole new way of speaking and thinking about the issue: “Achievement gaps” became reformers’ catch phrase, and closing those gaps became the goal of American education policy.

Today, the notion of “closing achievement gaps” has become synonymous with education reform. The Education Trust, perhaps the nation’s most influential K-12 advocacy group, explains: “Our goal is to close the gaps in opportunity and achievement.” The National Education Foundation has launched its own “Closing the Achievement Gaps Initiative.” The California Achievement Gap Educational Foundation was launched in 2008 to “eliminate the systemic achievement gap in California K-12 public education.” Elite charter-school operator Uncommon Schools says its mission is running “outstanding urban charter public schools that close the achievement gap and prepare low-income students to graduate from college.” Education Week, the newspaper of record for American education, ran 63 stories mentioning “achievement gaps” in the first six months of this year.

The No Child Left Behind Act’s signal contribution has been this sustained fixation on achievement gaps — a fixation that has been almost universally hailed as an unmitigated good. Near the end of his presidency, George W. Bush bragged that NCLB “focused the country’s attention on the fact that we had an achievement gap that — you know, white kids were reading better in the 4^th grade than Latinos or African-American kids. And that’s unacceptable for America.” Margaret Spellings, Bush’s secretary of education, said last year, “The raging fire in American education is the achievement gap between poor and minority students and their peers.”

Indeed, at the elite level, there is bipartisan consensus on this question. President Obama has echoed Bush, terming education the “civil-rights issue of our time” and explaining that his agenda is intended to address “the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.” Obama’s secretary of education, Arne Duncan, repeated the familiar formulation last year at the National Press Club, declaring: “The achievement gap is unacceptable. Education is the civil-rights issue of our generation.”

Such sentiments are admirable, and helping the lowest-achieving students do better is of course a worthy and important aim. But the effort to close gaps has hardly been an unmitigated blessing. In their glib self-confidence, the champions of that effort have refused to confront its costs and unintended consequences, and have been far too quick to silence skeptics by branding them blind defenders of the status quo (if not calling them outright racists).

The truth is that achievement-gap mania has led to education policy that has shortchanged many children. It has narrowed the scope of schooling. It has hollowed out public support for school reform. It has stifled educational innovation. It has distorted the way we approach educational choice, accountability, and reform.

And its animating principles — including its moral philosophy — are, at best, highly questionable. Indeed, the relentless focus on gap-closing has transformed school reform into little more than a less objectionable rehash of the failed Great Society playbook.”

Read the entire article here.

And, following a firestorm of objections from commentators who disagreed with Rick, he published this further commentary on his own blog.

I take a break from my usual education commentary and recommended articles to show you a really heartwarming video.  I was at the White House yesterday for Obama’s announcement about the No Child Left Behind Act.  There were three kids in front of me, and as Obama finished, we found ourselves behind a row of adults wanting handshakes.  So I said “Go up! This is your chance, go!” and luckily they did; Obama stopped and shook all three hands and chatted with them for a moment.  Look how excited they were!!   I especially love the way the little boy stares at his hand that shook Obama’s as if he’s never going to wash it.   A photograph of these three children was the White House Photo of the Day for September 23, 2011.  The White House website doesn’t have URLs for individual photos, so I have posted the photo here with the original caption:

Young guests listen as President Barack Obama delivers a statement on the need to provide states with relief from key provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act, during a statement in the East Room of the White House, Sept. 23, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Lee High School Principal Xochitl Rodriguez-Davila in Lee's College Center. Photo: Houston Chronicle, R. Clayton McKee / HC

This excellent article appeared in today’s New York Times online.  The article features Houston ISD’s largest reform effort, the “Apollo 20″ program, in which nine middle and high schools, plus, one year later, eleven elementary schools, are changing radically – and looking a lot like the most successful charter schools.  (click to hear Geoffrey Canada talk about Apollo)  It’s an expensive program, costing about $19 million its first year, but the money goes not for silver bullets but largely for the cost of hundreds of well-educated tutors, recruited in a way akin to the Peace Corps or Teach for America.  School days and years are far longer, and the intense, personal attention to students is making a difference – a significant difference in just one year at some schools.

This program is going to need improvements and adjustments (the first, a switch in reading curriculum, occurred after the first year), but many people are calling Houston’s Apollo 20 program one of the most promising school reform efforts in America.

A School District Mimics Charters, Hoping Success Will Follow

By SAM DILLON

Published: September 2, 2011

HOUSTON — Classrooms are festooned with college pennants. Hallway placards proclaim: “No Excuses!” Students win prizes for attendance, and pore over math problems with newly hired tutors. They start classes earlier and end later than their neighbors; some return to school on Saturdays.

If these new mores at Lee High School, long one of Houston’s most troubled campuses, make it seem like one of those intense charter schools, that’s no accident.

In the first experiment of its kind in the country, the Houston public schools are testing whether techniques proven successful in high-performing urban charters like those in the Knowledge is Power Program, or KIPP, a national charter chain, can also help raise achievement in regular public schools.  Working with Roland G. Fryer, a researcher at Harvard who studies the racial achievement gap, Houston officials last year embraced five key tenets of such charters at nine district secondary schools; this fall, they are expanding the program to 11 elementary schools. A similar effort is beginning in Denver.

“We can’t sit idly by and let parents think that only the quality charter schools can educate poor kids well,” said Terry Grier, Houston’s hard-charging superintendent. “If you see something good, why not try to replicate it?”

When first conceived 20 years ago, charter schools — which are publicly funded but independently operated — offered two distinct promises: to serve as an escape hatch for children in failing schools, and to be incubators of innovation that, through market forces, would invigorate neighborhood schools. There are scores of examples of the former, but almost none of the latter. Instead, years of bickering have ensued among charter advocates, school boards and teachers’ unions.

“One of the rationales for charters was that they would figure out practices that could be adopted by school districts,” said Grover J. Whitehurst, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and former federal education official. “I hope Roland succeeds because if he does it’ll be a very important demonstration that bad public schools can be fixed.”

Houston is an apt laboratory. It is the birthplace of KIPP as well as home to 105 charters that compete with the district’s 300 schools for students and tax dollars. Texas is also a right-to-work state, which means school districts often have more leeway in managing teachers’ work than elsewhere.

The experiment, which is known as Apollo 20 and cost $19 million in its first year, has had mixed results: Lee High School saw double-digit gains on state tests last spring, moving to “acceptable” on the Texas school report card system after many years of being rated “unacceptable.” But four of the nine Apollo schools remained on the unacceptable list, and some saw the percentage of students’ passing state tests dip.

Dr. Fryer, an economist and head of Harvard’s EdLabs, a research group, has gained national attention in recent years as the architect of incentive programs that offered students cash for improved performance, including one in New York City that was discontinued after being deemed ineffective. In recent years, he has visited scores of charter schools nationwide — “some should be closed down this afternoon,” he said, but others have virtually erased the achievement gap between poor minority students and their white peers.

In 2009, Dr. Fryer identified five policies common to successful charters, including those run by KIPP and the Harlem Children’s Zone: longer days and years; more rigorous and selective hiring of principals and teachers; frequent quizzes whose results determine what needs to be retaught; what he calls “high-dosage tutoring”; and a “no excuses” culture.  He then set about trying to find a public schools superintendent willing to embrace them. Neither Joel I. Klein in New York nor Michelle Rhee in Washington bit; officials in Omaha decided the political risks of copying charters were too high.

But in February 2010, Dr. Fryer spoke by phone with Dr. Grier, who had been on the job in Houston for six months. As a superintendent in eight other districts over 25 years, Dr. Grier had won plaudits from some educators for trying things like pay for performance and teacher bonuses. “How soon can you get down here?” Dr. Fryer recalled him asking.

Over the next six months, the two men selected the Apollo schools, hired several new principals and scores of new teachers, and recruited and trained some 200 math tutors. In the process, the district paid $6 million in severance to 100 teachers who chose to retire rather than participate, and agreed to pay others for working extra hours (something charters often do not do). The Houston Federation of Teachers, the city’s largest union, took no formal position on the project.

The preparations were intense: half an hour before Dr. Fryer’s wedding in June last year, Dr. Grier called his cellphone to review some details.

“Literally, I said, ‘Terry, I gotta go, I gotta get married. I’ll call you back,’ ” Dr. Fryer recalled.

One of the people watching the experiment closely is Mike Feinberg, who co-founded the first KIPP school here in 1994, and now serves on the program’s national board and runs its 20 Houston-area charters. Mr. Feinberg sees Houston’s education marketplace as akin to when FedEx emerged to challenge the United States Postal Service. The result: Priority Mail.

“They’ve been trying to fix Lee High School for 20 years,” he said. “But up until now, there’s been no competitive pressure for them to really get crazy and do transformational things.”

One of those transformational things at Lee High was hiring 50 full-time math tutors, who are paid $20,000 a year — under $14 an hour — plus benefits and possible bonuses if their students do well.

“I don’t get this,” Jennifer Martinez, a junior wearing an “I love boys” bracelet, told her tutor, Gerald Frentz, an engineer, one day last week.

They were talking about integers. Mr. Frentz, 56, retired from the Navy in 1986 and has since worked at Wang Computer and been a Tae Kwon Do instructor and substitute teacher. Jennifer’s puzzlement visibly faded as he explained how negative 7 and positive 7 have the same absolute value — definition: distance from zero — but are separated by 14 ticks along a number line.

“It’s an addictive experience,” Mr. Frentz said of the tutoring.

Lee High’s new principal, Xochitl Rodríguez-Dávila, described a torrent of challenges, including the exhaustive review of transcripts and test results to organize class schedules and tutoring for 1,600 students; persuading parents to sign KIPP-style contracts pledging that they will help raise achievement; and replacing about a third of Lee’s 100 teachers.

“Teachers by far have been the biggest struggle,” said Ms. Rodriguez-Davila, 39, who previously had been a middle school principal.

In faculty meetings, she said, some people insisted that Lee’s immigrant students would never master biology or physics. Other veterans, though, told the complainers to stop belly-aching and get on with the turnaround.

Dr. Fryer, who has made 17 trips to Houston over the past year, is watching not only the Apollo schools but a parallel control group of other Houston schools with similar demographics and prior test results, to rigorously analyze the effectiveness of the three-year experiment.

Even without the formal study, Dr. Grier knows that the mimicking of charter practices is, at best, partial. The nine Apollo secondary schools started Aug. 15, a week ahead of the rest of the district — and the same day as KIPP. But even with Apollo’s lengthened days, KIPP students had still more instructional hours last year: about 1,735, compared with about 1,435 at Lee High School.

“We got close, but we didn’t get there completely,” Dr. Grier said.

See the original article here

Twelve years ago when Taylor Mali (of National Poetry Slam fame) first wrote this “poem” (which appears in full below) – and performed it so well on the stage, there really was a fairly longstanding lack of appreciation for teaching among many in society – he struck a chord.  While there still are, and always will be, people who don’t appreciate or understand the teaching profession, that has changed for the better, and continues to do so.   But in the last 18 months, there has been a big spike in union-led charges of  “teacher bashing reformers” – but this is untrue.  When reformers point out the fact that teacher effectiveness varies widely (which it does), but is not measured or used as part of evaluation (which it is not in any real sense), and that children are the losers (which tragically, they are), that is not teacher bashing.   It is instead a recognition that teachers make the difference.  It’s ALL about teaching – quality teaching.  The existence of large (and growing!) numbers of highly effective teachers even in the most challenging classrooms proves not only that it’s possible to expect effectiveness on a large scale basis – but it confirms just how important teachers are!

When reformers talk about “teacher quality” and “teacher effectiveness”, they are acknowledging that the teacher is the most important factor in student learning – period.   Fortunately, the intentional recasting of these factual and crucial problems in teaching is failing to get traction – one reason is that the traditional protector of unions has been the Democratic Party, which is now led by a President and Secretary of Education who are as committed to education reform as anyone.  That’s been disorienting for the unions, and very gratifying for those of us who believe education isn’t Democratic or Republican – it shouldn’t be political at all.

In a sense, the profession, and the education system as a whole, caused the gradual loss of respect that occurred over the past several decades, as the makeup of the teaching profession changed (in large part due to the increasing availability of jobs for educated women, among other reasons), and the challenges teachers had to be prepared for increased at the same time.  Fortunately, I believe the teaching profession and educational system is finally making meaningful changes that go to core of what it’s all about – a no excuses attitude that virtually all children can learn, despite the challenges of today’s world.

Teachers today deal with so much more than they ever have before, and society expects far more from teachers than it ever has.  This is hard on teachers, and hard on the existing system, but it’s reality.  We all owe such a debt of gratitude to those who have committed their careers to teaching so that tomorrow’s society can be better than today’s.

Taylor has it right – what do teachers make?  Teachers make a difference.

Here is the text of this fantastic poem:

What Teachers Make, or
Objection Overruled, or
If things don’t work out, you can always go to law school

By Taylor Mali
www.taylormali.com

He says the problem with teachers is, “What’s a kid going to learn
from someone who decided his best option in life was to become a teacher?”
He reminds the other dinner guests that it’s true what they say about
teachers:
Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.

I decide to bite my tongue instead of his
and resist the temptation to remind the other dinner guests
that it’s also true what they say about lawyers.

Because we’re eating, after all, and this is polite company.

“I mean, you¹re a teacher, Taylor,” he says.
“Be honest. What do you make?”

And I wish he hadn’t done that
(asked me to be honest)
because, you see, I have a policy
about honesty and ass-kicking:
if you ask for it, I have to let you have it.

You want to know what I make?

I make kids work harder than they ever thought they could.
I can make a C+ feel like a Congressional medal of honor
and an A- feel like a slap in the face.
How dare you waste my time with anything less than your very best.

I make kids sit through 40 minutes of study hall
in absolute silence. No, you may not work in groups.
No, you may not ask a question.
Why won’t I let you get a drink of water?
Because you’re not thirsty, you’re bored, that’s why.

I make parents tremble in fear when I call home:
I hope I haven’t called at a bad time,
I just wanted to talk to you about something Billy said today.
Billy said, “Leave the kid alone. I still cry sometimes, don’t you?”
And it was the noblest act of courage I have ever seen.

I make parents see their children for who they are
and what they can be.

You want to know what I make?

I make kids wonder,
I make them question.
I make them criticize.
I make them apologize and mean it.
I make them write, write, write.
And then I make them read.
I make them spell definitely beautiful, definitely beautiful, definitely
beautiful
over and over and over again until they will never misspell
either one of those words again.
I make them show all their work in math.
And hide it on their final drafts in English.
I make them understand that if you got this (brains)
then you follow this (heart) and if someone ever tries to judge you
by what you make, you give them this (the finger).

Let me break it down for you, so you know what I say is true:
I make a goddamn difference! What about you?