That’s Right Nate

Dennis Bakke is on top of the education world.   As the CEO of Imagine Schools, he oversees the fastest growing brand name in the education business with over 36,000 students at 74 schools in 12 states and the District of Columbia.   He is rightfully heralded as one of the leaders of the education reform movement.   The Washington Post lauded Mr. Bakke and his wife Eileen for winning a lawsuit to force Maryland to increase their funding for charter schools by over 60%.   Jason Botel, who directs KIPP charter schools in Baltimore, is one educator who knows what the Bakkes have accomplished. “Their funding of advocacy efforts has helped make sure that . . . charter schools like ours can provide a great education for children in Maryland,” he said.

Bakke has done quite well for himself and for other charter operators.  In fact, last year he donated $20,000 to Republican politicians in his own name.   He’s a member of The Family, a Christian organization that was recently in the news following several sex scandals.  What does Bakke owe his success too?  He sums up his philosophy in two words, “have fun”, which is a philosophy that has served Bakke well over the years.   In fact,  he wrote a book on it called “Joy at Work” which was a very successful publication.   The Bakkes say parents are attracted to their schools in part because of the emphasis on character. “We talk to the kids from Day One,” Eileen Bakke said. “What does it mean to be responsible? What does it mean to have integrity?”

One trick that Imagine Education has used was just revealed in the Saint Louis Post Dispatch in the form of a leaked email from Bakke to his top executives at Imagine Schools.  The email explains several tricks for picking the executive boards of Imagine Charter Schools carefully to avoid board members who feel, “ownership of the school. Many honestly believe it is their school and that the school will not go well without them steering the school toward “excellence”. They believe they are the “governing” Board even if that adjective to describe the board has never been used by an Imagine School person.”

The board members probably get this idea from local laws that usually require local residents govern the charter school.  There is an excellent article in the November 1st Fort Wayne Journal Gazette that shows how the entire charter process was manipulated by Bakke and Imagination Schools in opening up 4 chart schools in Fort Wayne Indiana.  The paper concluded that the advisory board makes no decisions and gives no advice, “Not the $87,510 a year to operate school buses. Not $114,871 to run a lunch program. Not which teachers are hired or whether to hold summer school, or even whether to borrow more than $1 million for operations.”

So how much money is Imagination Schools making on the for profit education game?  In Indiana the local contract required the schools there to give the parent company 12 cents on every tax  dollar they took in.   This seems to be a fairly standard contract for the company.   If they have 36,000 students and states are giving them on average about $6,000 per student simple math comes out to about $26 million tax free.   That’s good, but let’s face it you can barely pay the salary of one power hitting third baseman for that.    Fortunately, you can’t beat real estate for generating profits.

The Dallas News explained how Imagine’s real estate works.   The real estate arm of Imagine Schools is called Schoolhouse Finance:

In Nevada, the state awarded 100 Academy of Excellence in North Las Vegas a charter, and the school hired Imagine to run its educational services. Schoolhouse Finance, the Imagine subsidiary, paid for the school’s property and building construction. Schoolhouse Finance then leased the property to the charter school for $1.4 million a year.

Next, Schoolhouse Finance sold the $8 million property to a real estate investment trust, Kansas City, Mo.,-based Entertainment Properties Trust. The trust then leased the property back to Schoolhouse Finance at a lower rate than the charter school pays.

Money remaining after Schoolhouse Finance pays its lease to the trust goes to Imagine Schools Inc. This tiered lease system has led to 10 percent returns on investment for owners and investors in the two companies.

A principal in Indiana and another one in Las Vegas were fired after complaining to Imagine about rent that cost them approximately 40% of their operating budget.   Most charters pay 10-15% of their operating budget for rent if they don’t own the property outright.  This leaves the schools with very little money for things like books and teachers.    From May of 2008 until November of this year, Imagine went from 51 to 74 schools.   Yet, this year the teachers at the Imagine Charter School in Weston, FA were hit with pay cuts of up to 22 percent.

OK, I had to do another serious education story and yeah, it’s kind of dry with all the money talk.   Sometimes, outrage does overtake my desire for satire.   The point here is that in the world of for profit education, expanding is everything.   Whether you’re talking about KIPP, UNO, or any of the other charter school groups with multiple schools you have to follow the money.   Tax dollars that should be going to the children of this country, in too many cases are going to companies like this.   Is this really reform?  Is opening up more schools like this really a race to the top?

Previously, I have posted about the wonderful work done by basketball player turned educator Arne Duncan in Chicago.   Tonight, we  look at the dynamic young go getter who is  saving the Washington DC public schools.  Her accolades are many with education luminaries like Oprah and George W. Bush singling her out for praise.

Michelle Rhee began her teaching career where it ended at Harlem Park Community School in Baltimore from 1992-1995.  According to her official biography, Rhee was praised in the Wall Street Journal and on Good Morning America for her success as a classroom teacher.   Unfortunately, when the Daily Howler did a search they could find no record of any Good Morning America appearance or writeup in the Wall Street Jorunal.   This is a shame as I am sure they were amazing.  Her claims of huge gains among her students also couldn’t be substantiated, but I’m sure they were likewise amazing.  We were able to find one newspaper article that praised the cleaner hallways at the school, but I am not sure if she actually had anything to do with the cleaning detail.

Michelle Rhee’s recent comments on her teaching career are even more inspiring.   Rather than being the educational wunderkind of her official biography, Rhee struggled in the classroom at least  initially.   In the recent article on her in Time Magazine, it states, ”Rhee suffered during that first year [of teaching], and so did her students. She could not control the class. Her father remembers her returning home to visit and telling him she didn’t want to go back.  She had hives on her face from the stress.”

That really doesn’t matter.  What matters is that somewhere in her second two years of teaching, Michelle found the secret to being an outstanding teacher and immediately left the classroom.   It’s a very good thing she did  because had she stuck around in the classroom, her teaching experience would have disqualified her from most positions in education reform leadership.  After leaving the classroom, Rhee went into teacher recruitment before being hired in 2007 to be Superintendent [Chancellor--see comments] of DC Public Schools.

Rhee represents the new thinking in education reform that believes that the biggest impediment to education is teachers who have different concepts of how a classroom actually works than business people and politicians do.   These people believe that the main reason companies outsource production overseas is not because they can pay employees 17 cents an hour, but because our schools are not as good as Haiti’s or Sri Lanka’s.

In the second part, I’m going to look at the way Michelle Rhee has found to get rid of older teachers and replace them with more energetic new teachers who as a bonus also cost the district less money.

[Click here to read part 2]

Nate Peele: I’m here with Tony Federko who is a Chicago Public Schools teacher.  I wanted to get his thoughts on Obama’s proposal to extend the school year and school day.

Tony Federko: Thank you Mr. Peele, but when you asked if we could have a conference, I expected that you wanted to talk about your daughter Emily.

NP: Well, she’s doing fine–isn’t she?  She loves your class and I think she’s really learning a lot so far this year.

TF: Yes, but…

NP: Good, now how do you agree with the liberals or conservatives on education?

TF: I don’t really see a difference honestly.   Newt Gingrich and Al Sharpton are currently promoting the President’s education reforms.

NP: Really?  I wasn’t aware of that.   What do you think of the President’s idea to expand the school year?  He says we’re falling behind other countries because we don’t spend enough time in school.

TF: He’s wrong.  Don’t get me wrong I voted for him…

NP: Oh really?

TF: Anyway, Obama said that he wants our children to go to school as much as they do in Korea.   An American eighth-grader gets about 1,150 instructional hours per year while a South Korean would get 923.  Our kids have more instructional time than Taiwan, The Phillipines, and Japan who score higher than us on aptitude tests.

NP: Right, because we have teacher’s unions.

TF: Most of those countries do too.  The difference is we have a third world rate of child poverty and a third world medical system where children are forced to go to school sick and malnourished.   We also count everybody on our tests, but they only count citizens.   We do better on these tests than most developed countries like Germany and England.

NP: Germany and England are socialist countries you know.  Still, education reform is a good thing.   Don’t we need to run schools like a business?

TF: Business isn’t doing too well right now.  Maybe we should run businesses more like schools.   If we wanted to run it like a successful business, we’d start with the employees who are in the trenches everyday.  Instead, reform seems to stem from corporations who want a chance at all the money in education.

NP: Liberals are like that with social programs.

TF: It isn’t just liberals.  The very people who attack the Heritage Foundations of the world on Health Care and demand a public option are the same people joining forces with the Heritage Foundation on education to push for more charter schools.   Charter schools do the same thing insurance companies do and do not always take the students with pre-existing conditions like behavioral issues or learning disabilities.  Despite all that, test data shows that the charters don’t do as well as the regular schools at educating kids.

NP: Don’t you think that the school day should be longer?   I’d love to have a job like yours where I get out at 3:00

TF: Before we talk about adding more hours to the school day, maybe we could talk about paying teachers for the hours they already work.   Georgia has started furloughing teachers and states like California are hemorrhaging jobs.  I work a 10 hour day of which I get paid for 6 hours and 15 minutes.   Even if I was paid for an 8 hour day, they couldn’t afford it.  You know I always tell people who say they’d love my job, that they should go to school and become teachers–or go to a charter school where you wouldn’t even have to take education classes to teach.

NP: I think I’d be a great teacher.   I have a way with kids you know.   Don’t you think we need to have tougher standards for teachers though?

TF: With charters, we’re actually making the standards lower, but here’s the problem.   If you have 1000 apply for 1000 job openings, you can’t be selective.  In the wealthy school districts and the schools where they have new computers and good security they can hire good teachers.   In inner city schools some good teachers are working hard, but sometimes they have to scrape the bottom of the barrel.

NP: So how would you improve schools?

TF: First, I’d pay teachers more for working at those inner city schools.   Then, I’d try and reduce class size.   People who say that it doesn’t make a difference haven’t taught.  I’d give teachers more preparation time because many of us work almost as many unpaid hours as paid hours.   I’d keep tenure because  due process is important in this type of job, but I would make it easier to terminate somebody who was obviously not doing their job.  I’d focus more on public education and only allow charters that did creative or experimental curriculum that could be studied and possibly implemented in the public schools.  Doing those things would give you a better pool of candidates for teaching jobs.  Then comes the next two big steps:

I’d search out successful people in business, sports, the arts, you name it and I’d ask them what was it in school that helped make them successful and I’d try and reproduce it.   Everything is so geared for tests now and I don’t believe those are the most important things.   Then, I’d pass very strong health reform with a public option and I’d make childhood poverty a major focus.

NP: So is it too late to get my daughter transferred to another class?

TF: I’m afraid so.

NP: OK, well thanks.

During a speech last week, Barrack Obama reminded us that South Korean students go to school a month longer than our students do.  After looking up the statistics, I learned that they are also scoring better on standardized tests than our students even though we have a higher percentage of students scoring in the highest category.  I decided that we need to look at what it will take to replicate the South Korean educational miracle.

First, we need the kind of quality teachers that they have in South Korea.   First, all teachers in this country should get a 75% raise so that they are equal to South Korean teachers in salary as a percentage of GDP.   I’m not thrilled about this aspect of things either because a teacher who is currently overpaid at $40,000 a year would now make $70,000.  Wow!  OK, let’s just skip this step.

One thing that South Korea has that we need is hagwons.  Hagwons are private tutoring schools that students go to after their regular school day is completed.  South Korean families spend 7 percent of their income on their children’s education and that’s for students in public school.    Student days in South Korea are much longer with both school and hagwon taking up time.  It isn’t unusual for students to catch up on their shut eye in class.  The saying in Korea is, “Sleep 5 hours and fail.  Sleep 4 hours and pass.”  Especially in high school, students routinely begin school at 6 a.m. and spend the day in classes until midnight.  This schedule lasts 7 days a week.

Students in South Korea know that they have a lot pressure to succeed and unfortunately, there is an abnormally high suicide rate among teens and children in South Korea.  However,  the schools know that if they need to instill discipline they still can.  80% of schools in South Korean still employ corporal punishment.  There was one famous story in 2006 when a teacher hit a student 200 times for being 5 minutes late for class.  You can be sure that student was on time the next day.  This iron willed discipline allows Korean teachers to use a curriculum that features far more rote memorization than are children can handle.

Some may argue, that this kind of approach is too costly or that it saps children of their childhoods.  However, what is the effect of a childhood on a country’s economy?  We need to start working to get our students capable of competing with the hard working automotons of South Korea.

Merit pay would encourage firemen like these to get out and fight fires instead of clowning around.

There’s an old song by the Pink Floyd that goes “We don’t need no education.”  I’m not quite sure what the song is, but those lines always stuck with me.  Teachers for years have been riding the educational gravy train in this country and we need to stop it.  Today, Barrack Obama laid out his plans to make teachers accountable and it is about time.  I may be one of Obama’s harshest critics, but I think his proposal is a good start.  Obama called for tying teachers’ pay to students’ performance and expanding innovative charter schools Tuesday, embracing ideas that have provoked hostility from members of teachers unions.

Obama also called for us to emulate the South Korean school system where students go a month longer than kids in this country do.  I applaud Obama for not looking to Canada which has the second best school system in the world behind only Finland, but which remains a hotbed of liberalism and socialized medicine. According to the Mathematics Association of America,  “Most of the top countries pay their starting teachers a salary equivalent to about 95% of national GDP per capita. South Korea pays 141%. In the United States, average starting salaries for teachers are at 81% of national GDP per capita. With avergae ntional GDP in the US currently at $46,000, 81% means an average starting salary of a bit over $37,000. To raise starting salaries to 95% of US GDP per capita, this would have to rise to almost $44,000″ and 141% would be over $60,000 to start, but we’re America and if we can’t get a first class education for third world wages, we might as well just give up now.  I would also hope we can avoid South Korea’s huge teen suicide epidemic which is often blamed on high stakes testing.

Now, Obama wants to increase funding for teacher salaries, but he is wisely tying this increase to merit pay.  I really love this idea because it assures us of getting what we pay for.  The problem with education is how lazy so many teachers are.  They sit at their desks all day sipping their expensive coffee and not paying any attention to what theri students are doing.  What about the lazy cops who hang out in the doughnut shop or the lazy firemen who don’t want to run into a burning building though?   Let’s face it teachers aren’t the only lazy government workers on easy street.

Which is more valuable to a city–The cop who sits in his comfortable car all day or the one who is busting his back writing speeding tickets?   Is the city getting its money’s worth for the fireman who sits around the station watching televsion all day or the one who is putting out fires?  These people should also be put on incentive pay.  Let’s allow cops to keep 20% of all ticket money they raise.  Let’s give our firemen $100 for every burning building they enter.  That’ll get them off their behinds.  In the unfortunate event that you had to go to a public hospital, wouldn’t you want to know the doctor’s salary was being tied into his patients’ survival rates?  Let’s truly make this a merit based society.  For once, Obama and I seem to agree on something.

There have been several people mentioned for Barrack Obama’s selection as Secretary of Education.  Whoever takes on this job will have a daunting task in continuing to dismantle public schools in this country in favor of for-profit charter schools, remove useless classes from our public school curriculum, and continue to punish those lazy union teachers in all ways possible.  The first big challenge is No Child Left Behind’s reauthorization–a brilliant program that works by using testing to single out struggling schools and punish them. I have heard several people mentioned for Secretary of Education and I thought I’d handicap them:

Arne Duncan – A basketball player in Australia before being tabbed by Chicago’s Mayor Daley to lead the city’s schools.  A childhood friend of singer R. Kelly, Duncan has helped Chicago usher in a host of new charters schools which let the free market take control of large chunk of Chicago’s public schools.  These charters appear are the future of universal public education  as they are able to have more rigorous standards than public schools that must admit everybody.

Paul Vallas – Arne Duncan’s predecessor in Chicago he is responsible for turning around the Chicago Public School System before Duncan.  He then went on to create the educational miracle that is Philadelphia and the soon to come miracle in New Orleans.

Inez Tennenbaum – I do not like her at all.  Back when South Carolina was #50 in ISAT scores she clashed with John Stossel.  Her scores went way up to #18 as she had said they would, but I think Stossel was onto something.  The big reason she should be eliminated is that unlike the other candidates she’s a former teacher which to me is a conflict of interest.   If you’ve been in the teacher’s union, how are you going to be expected to crush the unions.

Linda Darling-Hammond – Totally in the pocket of the unions.  How can we impose reform on them if they have the Education Secretary on their side?

Joel Klein – Has been responsible for the New York Education miracle.

Michelle Rhee – Has been head of Washington D.C. schools for a miraculous year.