There’s just not enough time in the day to deal with all of the absurdity out there right now and to do so in any thorough way. So, here are a couple of quick replies to what I’ve seen in the past week.

1. Cato released They Spent What? http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa662.pdf in an attempt to show how much more public school districts in any one location spend than “private schools.” So, Cato took total expenditure data (all capital outlay, etc.) for urban public school systems for 2009 and divided it by enrolled students to get a maximized total expenditure figure for public school districts. Then, they compared this maximized public expenditure figure to a “median” (not mean, or mean weighted by actual # of students served, but a deflated, school level median) tuition level from a national sample of private schools (about 2,300) from 2003-04 and rather arbitrarily assumed that tuition from 2003-04 represents 80% of total expenditures and that private school tuition rose by $347 per year between 2003-04 and 2009.  Note that even at the region level (not the city level used by Cato) the Schools and Staffing Survey includes relatively small samples of private schools. Further, Cato provides little justification for either the 80% or $347 figure – except to refer to their own “expert” on the topic (and some location specific reports). For a better analysis of actual private school spending with detail on samples and data sources, see: http://epicpolicy.org/publication/private-schooling-US (note that I make one similar inappropriate comparison in this report where I used operating expenditures for Wash DC in the discussion section. Other than that, this report compares totals to totals and based on actual financial documents of private schools).

2. Much has been made in recent days of the closure of about half of the Kansas City Missouri Public Schools. Some have compared this event to Central Falls firings – Taking a hard line on “failing urban schools in need of reform.” Wow… that’s a stretch. Others have casually thrown around rhetoric of $2 billion dollars wasted on social engineering in Kansas City, in reference to desegregation litigation that extended from the 1970s through 2003. For a more precise history of what actually went on during the desegregation litigation, see: http://law.bepress.com/expresso/eps/1213/

Also, note that in 2006 (2007?), the Missouri legislature passed a law which allowed the remaining predominantly white residential corner of Kansas City Missouri School District to vote itself out of KCMSD and into a neighboring predominantly white district (since the deseg case was over, apparently this was okay). This resulted in the transfer of a large share of children and a handful of school facilities to Independence, MO. As a result of this and other factors (including increased charter school enrollment), KCMSD now serves about half the number of children it did when I first lived there about 12 years ago.  While I’m unaware of the specific reorganization plan to be implemented, it would seem that some reorganization might be warranted. But, it should also be acknowledged that the State of Missouri has, since 1995, continuously pulled back financial support for KCMSD while advancing policies that leave KCMSD with a more needy, albeit smaller, student population to serve. More on this at a later point.

3. New Jersey’s Governor has proposed a constitutional amendment placing a cap on both local property tax growth and on state expenditure growth. It would appear that the proposal would allow for local referendum to override the cap, but it is a cap nonetheless and one based on an arbitrary constraint of 2.5%. What do we know about such “Tax and Expenditure Limitations,” or TELs? In short, they are generally bad policy which do not lead to “economic growth” (“private” sector growth) and which often lead to decreases in a) the quality of public school teachers and b) student outcomes.  That is, hard caps on state expenditures and/or local property taxes tend to harm public service quality – specifically public education – and really don’t provide other economic growth benefit. Colorado’s TABOR is a particularly striking example. The local override option would result in significant inequities across municipalities and school districts which have widely varied capacity to achieve an override. Link to analysis of Massachusetts’ Prop 2 1/2.

4. Finally, the NCLB Blueprint (http://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/blueprint/blueprint.pdf) was released by the Dept. of Ed. The Blueprint contains only this short reference to “equity,” and seems to emphasize the district responsibility over the state responsibility – in part by the sequence of their reference, but also by reference to “comparability” which is terminology specifically related to within district allocations and Title I aid.

Greater equity. To give every student a fair chance to succeed, and give principals and teachers the resources to support student success, we will call on school districts and states to take steps to ensure equity, by such means as moving toward comparability in resources between high- and low-poverty schools.

As I’ve noted many times before, the greatest disparities between higher and lower poverty schools are those that exist between, not within districts, largely because few districts have both high and low poverty schools. Rather, there are higher and lower poverty districts. I will post more on this topic when my forthcoming article on within versus between district disparities comes out in the near future.

Apparently, we now have a national initiative underway to replicate the Central Falls, Rhode Island drama across poor urban and inner urban fringe schools and districts. This national initiative places blame for school failure directly on school principals (who, by necessity must be replaced if reform is to happen) and on at least 50% of each failing school’s teachers. Once again, there is no attention paid to whether or not the STATE has, in fact, fulfilled its obligation to provide (or ensure) equitable and adequate financial resources for the district or schools under fire. None – no mention of it whatsoever. Clearly, it must be the principal’s and teachers’ fault if a school fails, regardless of the resources available to that school or host district???

Few locations nationwide provide more stark examples than Duncan’s home state of Illinois for why this “blame the school,” “blame the teachers,” “blame the central district office” perspective is so deeply problematic.

To date (assuming Pennsylvania continues to follow through on its finance reforms), Illinois maintains the most regressive state school finance system in the nation. What I mean by this is that Illinois maintains a system whereby higher poverty school districts – and higher minority concentration school districts – receive systematically less state and local revenue per pupil than lower poverty ones. And the disparities in Illinois are far greater than almost anywhere else in the country.

Here, for example, is the relationship between the relative level of state and local revenue per pupil (2007-08) and district shares of low-income children for school districts in the immediate Chicago region. 1.0 on the vertical axis represents the average state and local revenue. A value of less than 1.0 indicates less than average state and local revenue in the region. As poverty increases, relative state and local revenue decreases. There are no fancy cost adjustments applied here. This is just straight up, state and local revenue – the bulk of school funding.

So – why does this matter? The reality is that these much higher need districts require more, not fewer resources if we expect them to approach comparable outcomes. On the one hand, they need more resources in order to provide greater staffing intensity (staffing quantities) to provide the level of services needed to overcome background differences of the children they serve. In addition, it is increasingly well understood that to recruit and retain comparably qualified teachers into higher poverty, higher minority concentration settings requires a higher wage than in surrounding districts which happen to have more desirable working conditions. In short, higher need districts require a greater number of comparable teachers, who come at a higher price per teacher. That gets expensive.  So, even if these higher poverty districts had comparable state and local revenue, they’d be in a bind.

Here’s a map of district composite test scores expressed as standard deviations from the mean of districts serving comparable grade levels (because proficient rates tend to shift by grade level). Deeper brown colors are the “low performers” and darker blue colors are the “high performers.” We can quickly identify a few good candidates for whipping out the Central Falls playbook! There they are – in Deep Brown… the failures… who must be reformed… replaced…!!! And of course, it’s their own darn fault! Mismanagement. An abomination. Our kids deserve better!!!!! How dare these adults treat them so poorly!!!! (in this map, purple dots indicate majority Hispanic schools and red dots, majority black schools).

Okay, enough of that. Note above that most of these low performing districts are also districts with majority black or Hispanic schools. Here’s the same map but with school poverty represented as circle size. Notably, these low performing districts also have very high poverty schools.

Now let’s go back to the scatterplot of relative state and local revenues, but focus on the highest poverty school districts:

Our very low performing, high poverty districts are also very low in state and local revenue per pupil relative to their surrounding districts! Again, this graph includes no fancy attempt to adjust the value of state and local revenues for the different costs and needs faced by these districts.

But, this map does!!! Here, I have estimated a statistical model to determine the relative costs in each district of achieving state average composite scores, and from that model I have calculated just how much more (or less) each district would need to spend per pupil in order to be able to achieve state average outcomes (if it did so at average efficiency).Districts in the deepest red color would need over $5,000 more in per pupil current operating spending in order to have a shot at achieving average outcomes. Districts in blue have well more than what they need in order to achieve averageness.

Each of our Central Falls candidates is in deep red here. Each has well less than it would need in order to achieve average outcomes. And that deficit is a function of inequitable and selectively inadequate state funding for local public school districts.

Should we really be blaming, exclusively, the teachers and principals in these schools and districts for their failures? Does adequate and equitable state and local funding of these schools and districts have absolutely no place in the current policy discourse? How can two guys from Illinois take such a stand and do so with a straight face?

Isn’t the state at least partly to blame for which schools and districts are failing under the STATE’s accountability system and under the STATE’s approach to financing schools? Do we really think that we can fix these schools and districts by dumping half the teachers, firing the principal and giving them a one time infusion of federal funding without ever addressing the systemic failures of the state’s education policies?

I’m not trying to argue that these schools and districts actually do have great teachers who should be considered untouchable. They may not. They may have among the least qualified teachers available on the local labor market. It might even actually be a good idea to replace some or many of them. But, replacing these teachers with “better” teachers will require appropriate sustained resource levels – not a one shot infusion of federal bailout, or a constant churning of cadres of eager, well-educated and well-meaning volunteers.

Pundits have been tweeting and blogging the Central Falls Rhode Island High School story this week, with many cheering the bold “turnaround” strategy of firing all of the school’s teachers. Essentially, the district Superintendent has dismissed all teachers in the school with the option for them to re-apply. The reason for the dismissal is that the school has performed very poorly in recent years on state assessments and when teachers were asked to work extra time, their union resisted – or so the reports go.

Pundits seem to think this is a great idea: http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-02-24-all-educators-fired_N.htm

But Joe Williams of Democrats for Education Reform, a political action group, says: “This is what real political cover can do for public education. You see very clear signals coming from Washington that the Obama administration is serious about turning around our worst schools.”

Central Falls has long been one of the worst-performing in Rhode Island. Just 7% of 11th-graders tested last fall were proficient in math and 55% were proficient in reading. In 2008, 52% of students graduated within four years.

And: http://www.southcoasttoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100224/NEWS/100229948

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan applauded the plan, saying students only have one chance for an education.

“When schools continue to struggle we have a collective obligation to take action,” he said in a written statement.

The U.S. Department of Education does not play a role in deciding which model schools choose and did not know Wednesday whether Central Falls was the first to opt to get rid of its teachers, said Sandra Abrevaya, a department spokeswoman.

The decision won praise from Republican Gov. Don Carcieri, a former math teacher who supports Gist.

“We can no longer stand by as our schools underperform,” Carcieri said in a written statement. “While we have some excellent individual teachers, our students continue to be held back by a lack of a quality education and by union leadership that puts their self-interests above the interests of the students.”

So, according to the above cast of characters, the way to fix low performing schools is simply to shake them up, get rid of the status quo current crop of teachers and others will be anxiously waiting in line to fill their shoes and fix these schools with the same or fewer resources and the same kids who’ve been there for years. I often point out that getting rid of your current teachers can really only lead to improvement if you are able to replace them with better ones. Are there 74 better teachers waiting in line outside Central Falls HS?

That issue aside, let’s take a look at where Central Falls fits in among Rhode Island High Schools in terms of a) student characteristics, b) spending per pupil and c) outcomes (based on 2006 data – which hasn’t shifted much over time). First, let’s look at the relationship between school level free/reduced lunch rates and combined (summed) proficiency rates across RI HS:

Yes, Central Falls is in tough shape – very high poverty and relatively low performing. But, not really off the trendline (above it, if anything) for performance given its poverty level and better than other high schools of similar poverty.

Now lets look at Central Falls performance with respect to school site spending from Rhode Island’s IN$ITE database:

Central Falls spending is somewhat above average. But again, its student needs are far greater than average – in fact, they are on the outer edge of the entire distribution. So, it is unlikely that “somewhat above average” per pupil spending is going to fully compensate for their high needs.

Here is an oversimplified, but still ugly enough statistical model of the relative costs, given student populations, economies of scale and current outcomes, of Rhode Island High Schools in 2006 (I had run this previously with 2003 to 2005 with similar results):

Admittedly this is no way to do “real” rigorous research. This is a single year of data on 30 high schools and too many covariates for the data. But, these data do reconcile with the model of the previous 3 years. I should also note that such analysis – those that try to pin down the relative efficiency of school district performance and/or cost – are generally unstable/unreliable. All that fun stuff aside, we have this crude model that tells us that at constant outcomes, per pupil costs are higher in higher poverty high schools and high schools with more special education children. And the model can produce for us an indicator of the extent to which each high school spends more or less than expected for the outcomes it receives – that is, the relative efficiency of the school. For the other stat geeks who might be reading, in this particular case, the estimates from the Stochastic Frontier Model and from the OLS regression model were identical.

Here’s the “relative efficiency” of Rhode Island High Schools with respect to cost, from lower to higher poverty high schools.

As it turns out, the relative efficiency of Central Falls HS stacks up pretty well with other Rhode Island High Schools. That is, the actual spending per pupil in Central Falls is not far off from the predicted amount to achieve their current outcomes, with their current population.

Here’s the above data, rescaled (from the OLS version of the model), and with the relative efficiency measures sorted from lowest to highest per pupil spending. The “0” line is the line where the district spends what it is predicted to spend to achieve its current outcome levels given its current students. Central Falls actually spends less than it is predicted to spend given its students and current outcome levels.  Many other high schools spend far more than expected, given their students and current outcomes.

This seems like a fairer comparison than simply casting stones at Central Falls teachers for their miserable test scores.

This is not to excuse low performance or to simply set a lower bar for this school because it serves a very high need population. But it is to point out that given their resources and their kids, they are doing as well as can be expected and better than many other Rhode Island high schools.

This analysis is far from definitive, but is illustrative. If it turns out, through more rigorous multi-year analyses, that Central Falls is efficiently producing its current (miserably low) level of outcomes at its current (relatively inadequate) spending level (at least by comparison with all other Rhode Island High Schools), then one answer here might actually be that Central Falls needs more resources to achieve better outcomes. Why is there no talk of this possibility?

The figures above suggest that Central Falls is doing as well with what it has as any other Rhode Island High School, after accounting for student needs. Where is the outcry over the amount Westerly High is spending to achieve its current outcomes (far less efficient that even Central Falls, in this quick analysis)? Yes, Westerly gets better outcomes, but with a much less needy student population (under 20% free or reduced compared to over 80%) and nearly $1,000 per pupil more in spending.

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Here’s the position of Central Falls based on my previous 2004-05 analysis. The overall cost inefficiencies are higher because the high schools were included in a model with middle and elementary schools (but with a dummy variable identifying them as high schools). This model included math outcomes only (language arts outcomes were non-significant). Again, Central Falls is not the standout inefficient school (Higher up in the graph is less efficient).

I read with curiosity today, the Fordham Institute’s new report on “Private Public” schools, or elementary schools where fewer than 5% of children qualify for free or reduced lunch and middle or secondary schools where fewer than 3% qualify. Not a bad idea on their part, but some of the numbers just didn’t match up with my reasonably sound knowledge of the NCES common core Public School Universe data.

For example, on Page 6, State Findings, the report indicates 70 private public schools in Illinois, and on page 7, the report indicates 402 such schools in New Jersey. These are two states where I have used the most recent available 3 years of NCES CCD data quite often. While the New Jersey numbers seem close to reasonable, the Illinois numbers are undoubtedly low – and quite honestly, wrong.

First, here’s my tally of total schools by grade level in Illinois and New Jersey:

|                 schlevel08
state_name | 1-Primary   2-Middle     3-High    4-Other |     Total
———–+——————————————–+———-
Illinois |     2,562        777        788        203 |     4,330
New Jersey |     1,547        453        425        158 |     2,583
———–+——————————————–+———-
Total |     4,109      1,230      1,213        361 |     6,913

(sorry for the messy layout)

Next, here’s my tally for total schools by grade level with less than 5% free or reduced lunch in 2007-08:

. tab state  schlevel08 if  pct_freereduced08<.05

|                 schlevel08
state_name | 1-Primary   2-Middle     3-High    4-Other |     Total
———–+——————————————–+———-
Illinois |       281         89         65          4 |       439
New Jersey |       273         98         94          7 |       472
———–+——————————————–+———-
Total |       554        187        159         11 |       911

And again in 2006-07:

. tab state  schlevel08 if  pct_freereduced07<.05

|                 schlevel08
state_name | 1-Primary   2-Middle     3-High    4-Other |     Total
———–+——————————————–+———-
Illinois |       302         90         60          3 |       455
New Jersey |       194         74         73          6 |       347
———–+——————————————–+———-
Total |       496        164        133          9 |       802

In either year, and many other years, Illinois has far more than 70 elementary schools alone (280 to 300) under 5% free or reduced price lunch. The New Jersey numbers, while close, can’t be reconciled that easily either.

Fordham includes a footnote which suggests that schools reporting no children qualifying for free or reduced lunch were dropped on an assumption of non-reporting/non-participation. This is likely an incorrect assumption and one that should be checked across multiple years.

For example, here is a map of district level low income rates (background shading, based on state data source) and schools reporting “0” Free Lunch children (to NCES CCD) in North Shore areas near Chicago. Note that most of the “0” flags by schools are in very low poverty districts. These likely are “Private Public” schools by the Fordham definition, but were inappropriately excluded by their count method:

Here are some New Jersey “0” values for free or reduced lunch, against a backdrop of median family income. The “0” value schools here are in Franklin Lakes and Saddle River. I suspect that those “0” values for kids in poverty are real – not errors in the data.  There were likely better ways to handle these values than to simply exclude all “0” values. For example, checking across multiple years, or identifying “0” value schools in districts that show higher versus lower U.S. Census poverty rates (not subject to district level reporting). “0” values in low poverty districts are more likely to be correct where as “0” values for schools in high poverty districts are more likely reporting error.

• Note: I just ran a quick test of this latter approach using Census Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates. About 198 of 341 Illinois “0” value schools are in districts with less than 5% poverty. About 303 of those 341 are in districts with less than 10% poverty – using Census poverty tabulations. These schools likely should have been included as “Private Publics” rather than excluded outright.
  

===== On a related note:

I should also point out that Fordham is among those organizations that has frequently pointed the finger at school districts as being the primary causes of persistent inequities, and not state education systems. Fordham does not point out in their report that  almost invariably, these private public schools are clustered in private public school districts. The low poverty schools are in low poverty districts often immediately adjacent to high poverty schools in high poverty districts. That is, the inequity the authors reveal in this report is largely a between not within district inequity and one that cannot be resolved by reshuffling resources within districts, as many of their previous reports have argued (most notably Fund the Child).

Here’s a fun map of New Jersey Private Public Schools in the Newark metro area:

Data for NJ and IL available on request.

Just for fun, here are a few maps of New York City traditional public, special public and public charter schools. Charter schools are indicated with an asterisk. School level rates of children qualifying for free lunch are indicated by circle color.  Deep red circles have free lunch shares over 83.6%. Blue circles have very low free lunch shares. Free lunch shares and school locations (lat / lon) are from the National Center for Education Statistics Common Core – Public School Universe 2007-08. Note that as with my previous NJ charter slides, NYC charter schools tend to serve somewhat lower shares of children qualifying for free lunch than are served by many of the surrounding traditional public schools.