Fact-checking Poizner and Whitman
Amid all of the arguing over immigration, Goldman Sachs and who’s the phonier conservative, GOP gubernatorial candidates Steve Poizner and Meg Whitman spent only a few minutes talking about education during their hour-long debate in San Jose on Sunday. That may be because both believe that local control and charter schools are the cure to much of what ails public schools.
At least that’s the bumper sticker argument they make.
But their answers to the one question on K-12 schools got me scratching my head. So I did some fact-checking and here’s what I found.
Poizner: The state’s insurance commissioner has abandoned most of the positions he took when he ran for Assembly in 2004 and earned the enthusiastic support of the Mercury News’ editorial page – and mine as well as a member of the board. With his credibility shot, I find myself doubting most everything he says, including his claim, during the debate, that he was a pioneer of the state’s charter movement who helped found “a bunch of” charter schools.
But communications consultant Gary Larson e-mailed me to say that indeed Poizner played an important role. As proof, Larson passed along an editorial I wrote in October 2003, praising the newly created California Charter Schools Association, led by CEO Caprice Young and its board chairman, Steve Poizner. Larson, who was a vice president of the charter association at its inception, clearly has better recall – and a much better filing system.
Larson, who’s not affiliated with any of the gubernatorial candidates, said that Poizner stepped in at a critical moment, bringing warring factions to the table, creating a five-year business plan and a model that led to its rapid growth.
Larson added, “Since then, virtually every other state charter organization in the nation has followed California’s lead and restructured their own state organizations to focus more on quality and accountability – a huge focus of Steve’s.”
I couldn’t document Poizner’s assertion that he helped start a number of charter schools. The campaign didn’t call back.
How much waste and overhead?
Whitman: Her problem isn’t her position – I happen to share her enthusiasm toward charter schools in general – but the facts underlying it.
Whitman’s web site makes the claim – and she repeated it again during the debate – that only 60 percent of money spent on education in California gets to the classroom. The rest is piddled away on “administration and overhead.” I’ve asked the campaign for the citation but have yet to get it. The 40 percent figure is far higher than anything I’ve ever seen. But it has become the rationalization why schools don’t need any more money, despite massive cuts in state aid.
This we know: California is last in the nation in the ratio of librarians and counselors to students. It’s 47th in terms of administrators to students. It’s 37th in the nation in terms of total staff, including support personnel. The one area where it is relatively “fat” is in district staff; it’s 17th in the nation (see Card 26 of EdSource’s 2010 Resource Cards on California Schools). But district office staff still comprise only 6 percent of total district staff, so its high ranking is within a percentage point of average, according to EdSource. And after the last two years of budget cuts, no doubt that ranking will fall.
Whitman couldn’t be talking about state bureaucrats and the State Board of Education, whose spending comprises far less than 1 percent of the $55 billion that will be spent on K-12 education this year. Maybe she’s talking about the one-third of education money earmarked for specific purposes. But most categorical programs, including money set aside for textbooks, special education and class-size reduction, end up back in the classroom, and within the past year, the Legislature has lifted restrictions on many of them.
During the debate, Whitman said she wanted to adopt Florida’s simple system of annually grading every school A to F. She attributed the state’s impressive gains on NAEP, the nation’s report card, to that. The state has gone, in one decade, from scoring below to now exceeding the national average on NAEP. While impressive, it’s not clear that the school grading system, which is based solely on the state’s standardized test results, is the cause – or a full measure of achievement.
Whitman also praised Florida for forcing schools with an “F” three years consecutively to convert to a charter school. But charter schools overall in Florida are performing worse than traditional public schools, according to a massive study of charter schools by CREDO, the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University. “African-American students attending charter schools performed significantly below their traditional public school counterparts in reading and math while Hispanic students experienced no dicernable difference between charter school and traditional public school performance,” the study concluded. That’s hardly an endorsement for forced conversion in massive numbers.
By comparison, CREDO found that poor kids and English learners in California schools did better than their counterparts in traditional schools. But, with few exceptions, independent charter school organizations don’t want to be pressured into taking over failing traditional schools. They prefer to start new schools in low-income areas, often around failing schools, growing one or two grades at a time, while giving parents the choice of sending their children there.
Charter schools need support but not blind faith. And charters, notwithstanding efficiency and flexibility, are facing the same funding crisis that Whitman and Poizner refuse to admit exists.
I noted that a Chronicle story in the last couple of days (probably the one on the debate) said that Poizner had taught in a charter school, clearly referring to Mount Pleasant HS, which isn’t a charter school. Unless an editor messed up the copy, even Carla Marinucci is confused. … Whitman’s claims about the % spent by districts on administrative costs seem oversimplified and ill-informed, aside from the questionable numbers she tossed out. For example, here in San Francisco Unified, these costs are counted as central office expenses in the budget: custodial/maintenance at all schools; security workers at all schools; encroachment of the school meal program on the General Fund, aka feeding kids; special education; and a huge number of arts programs taught by artists-in-residents (technically “consultants”) and funded by the city based on a voter-approved initiative.
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Sorry — artists-in-RESIDENCE.
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Thank you for asking the Whitman campaign about the classroom spending claim. I asked them for a reference about a month or so ago and I also never got an answer. So they seem pretty consistent about not backing up that claim.
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If the state report card system is one that requires the lowest performers (by any measure) to be the D/F schools, it’s a terrible idea. If I give my students a test, should the lowest scoring students automatically earn a D or F? Furthermore, an EdSector report earlier this year found an example of two Florida high schools, one with an “A” and one with a “D” on the state report card, and the graduates of the D school were outperforming the graduates of the A school when the measure was college GPA and staying in college beyond freshman year. So, which is the better school? Business-minded reformers usually seem to propose ideas that will screw up schools, because we don’t operate according the same market forces and principles as businesses. And yet, when I read business/management blogs (like Bob Sutton from Stanford, or a recent post from the WSJ), they talk about how to empower workers, provide autonomy, choices, flexibility, foster innovation, discard outmoded evaluation practices – all sorts of things that would help teachers. If we could have a little more support and encouragement and less in the way of teacher-bashing and schemes designed to punish schools and teachers, we might see better results.
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Like John, I am a fan of charter schools especially if there is effective oversight of them to ensure that less effective charter schools are either closed or overhauled. And, in California, charter schools have been able to achieve about the same results with less state funding. But, one of the biggest barriers to charter school growth in California is the extremely low funding levels that the state provides. Education Sector recently released a report on the scaling up the most effective charter schools in the country.
http://www.educationsector.org/research/research_show.htm?doc_id=1090702
The report documents the large private contributions that allow the rock stars of the charter world like Green Dot, KIPP, and Aspire to implement their programs. A quote from KIPP in the report –
“There are staggering differences in funding in the places we work. It’s not possible to [run the KIPP program on public funding] everywhere we want to be.” Unfortunately for the potential promise of charter schools, California is one of those places where state funding alone without huge private donations would allow the most successful charter schools to operate.
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Thank you for the dose of reality, Rob Manwaring — and that’s based on the sanitized version of the Education Sector report. Lead author (and Education Sector co-founder) Thomas Toch so objected to the alterations made against his will to his original version — to make it less negative about the prospects for scaling up successful charter schools — that he removed his name from the watered-down report. … Debra Viadero’s Education Week blog:
“As hard-hitting as the findings seem to be, the report is at the center of a controversy over whether the final text—released by the Washington think tank on Nov. 24—was watered down.
“The main author, Education Sector co-founder Thomas Toch, asked to have his name removed from the final product. It “didn’t fully reflect my sense of the current conditions or future prospects for CMOs,” he said in an interview. “Charter schools are an important addition to the public education landscape and the best CMOs have produced great results. … But the CMO movement has created only a few hundred schools in a decade, and even with more funding it would be difficult for CMOs to expand much faster without compromising the quality of their schools.” ”
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2009/12/03/14charter.h29.html
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