Inexperienced Companies Chase U.S. School Funds

[Monty Neill <monty@fairtest.org>]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/10/education/10schools.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/10/education/10schools.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print>

August 9, 2010


 Inexperienced Companies Chase U.S. School Funds


           By SAM DILLON
           <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/sam_dillon/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

With the Obama administration pouring billions into its nationwide 
campaign to overhaul failing schools, dozens of companies with little or 
no experience are portraying themselves as school turnaround experts as 
they compete for the money.

A husband-and-wife team that has specialized in teaching communication 
skills but never led a single school overhaul is seeking contracts in 
Ohio and Virginia. A corporation that has run into trouble with parents 
or authorities in several states in its charter school 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/charter_schools/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> 
management business has now opened a school turnaround subsidiary. Other 
companies seeking federal money include offshoots of textbook 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/subjects/t/textbooks/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> 
conglomerates and classroom technology vendors.

Many of the new companies seem unprepared for the challenge of making 
over a public school, yet neither federal nor many state governments are 
organized to offer effective oversight, said Jack Jennings, president of 
the Center on Education Policy <http://www.cep-dc.org/>, a nonprofit 
group in Washington. "Many of these companies clearly just smell the 
money," Mr. Jennings said.

Rudy Crew, a former New York City schools chancellor who has formed his 
own consulting company, said he was astonished to see so many untested 
groups peddling school improvement strategies.

"This is like the aftermath of the Civil War, with all the carpetbaggers 
and charlatans," Dr. Crew said.

The Obama administration has dramatically increased federal financing 
for school turnarounds, to $3.5 billion this year, about 28 times as 
much as in 2007. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/arne_duncan/index.html?inline=nyt-per> 
is pushing to overhaul 5,000 of the nation's 100,000 public schools in 
the next few years.

New York is to receive more than $300 million and New Jersey about $67 
million. Expenditures on each failing school are capped at $6 million 
over three years.

Under federal rules, school districts can hire companies or nonprofits 
to help, but do not require it, and Sandra Abrevaya, a spokeswoman, said 
the Department of Education did not know how many districts would do so.

"The department is in daily contact with states and districts to provide 
technical assistance so they can make smart decisions and select 
high-quality partners," Ms. Abrevaya said.

Overhauling schools is challenging work, and experts say few attempts 
succeed. Breaking the cycle of failure in a school that has become a 
drop-out factory requires an "extreme reset," said Tim Cawley, a 
managing director at the Academy for Urban School Leadership 
<http://www.ausl-chicago.org/>, a nonprofit group leading several 
turnaround efforts in Chicago. Usually that means installing a new 
principal and a newly committed teaching staff, invigorating the 
school's culture with high expectations and a no-nonsense discipline, 
adopting a rigorous curriculum, and carrying out regular testing to 
determine what has been learned and what needs to be retaught,, Mr. 
Cawley said.

In contrast, many new groups seeking contracts are hoping merely to 
bring in a new curriculum or retrain some teachers, he said.

"We call that turnaround lite," he Cawley said.

Bob and Megan Tschannen-Moran run one of the new groups. Their company, 
LifeTrek <http://www.lifetrekcoaching.com/> Inc., based in their home in 
Virginia, markets life and career coaching sessions to companies, 
churches and schools.

Ms. Tschannen-Moran is an education professor at the College of William 
& Mary, but the couple has never led a school overhaul, Mr. 
Tschannen-Moran said.

A few school districts have hired LifeTrek for strategic planning, he said.

The couple recently founded a Center for Evocative Coaching 
<http://www.schooltransformation.com/>, and this spring, Ohio put the 
center on a list of approved school turnaround specialists. In July, the 
couple changed the name of the center's Web site to 
schooltransformation.com <http://schooltransformation.com>. The center 
can help schools by "facilitating new conversations through story 
listening, expressing empathy, appreciative inquiry and design 
thinking," its Web site says. Much of the training can be done via 
conference call, he said.

Mr. Duncan helped trigger the stampede in a June 2009 speech, saying 
that only a handful of groups, nationwide, had any experience in school 
overhauls.

"We need everyone who cares about public education," he said, "to get 
into the business of turning around our lowest-performing schools.

"That includes states, districts, nonprofits, for-profits, universities, 
unions and charter organizations."

One company that said it had answered Mr. Duncan's call was Mosaica 
Education <http://mosaicaeducation.com/>, which operates charter schools 
in several states and overseas. Five of its 10 charter schools in Ohio 
are in academic emergency, and the company has become embroiled in 
disputes over its management of charters elsewhere. Its chief executive, 
Michael J. Connelly, said Mosaica had built a solid record of raising 
achievement.

In March, the company hired John Q. Porter, a former schools 
superintendent in Oklahoma City, to lead a new subsidiary, Mosaica 
Turnaround Partners. Mr. Porter said he attended a vendor fair at Ohio 
State University 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/o/ohio_state_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org> 
in June that had been organized to introduce dozens of new companies and 
nonprofits to districts preparing school turnarounds.

"It was like a cattle call," Mr. Porter said. "No, actually it was more 
like speed dating."

Pearson, the giant British publisher, also had representatives at the 
fair. With 36,000 employees worldwide, Pearson is known in education for 
textbook brands like Scott Foresman and Prentice Hall.

Last year, it formed the K-12 Solutions Group, and it is seeking 
school-turnaround contracts in at least eight states. Scott Drossos, the 
group's president, said that in recent years Pearson had bought smaller 
companies that built Pearson's capacity to train teachers and could draw 
on its testing, technology and other products to carry out a coherent 
school improvement effort.

In interviews last year, Mr. Duncan said he wanted high-quality, 
nonprofit charter school management groups, like the KIPP 
<http://www.kipp.org/about-kipp> network, which operates 99 schools 
nationwide, to join the school overhaul work.

But Justin Cohen, a turnaround strategist at MassInsight 
<http://www.massinsight.org/stg/>, a Massachusetts nonprofit 
organization, said that most successful nonprofit charter operators 
preferred starting new schools to overhauling failing ones, and that few 
had accepted Mr. Duncan's invitation.

"The vast majority of people getting into the field are not ready to do 
the work," Mr. Cohen said.

Recognizing the risks facing school districts that sign contracts with 
untested groups, the American Enterprise Institute <http://aei.org/>, a 
nonprofit conservative policy group, issued a report last month urging 
that districts require performance guarantees, under which contractors 
failing to meet achievement targets would forfeit payments.

Dr. Crew's new company, Global Partnership Schools, which he formed with 
Manny Rivera, a former Rochester schools superintendent, has signed a 
contract with the Pueblo, Colo., district that is backed by a 
performance guarantee. It stipulates that the partnership will be paid 
its full fee only if it significantly raises student achievement, Dr. 
Rivera said. The partnership has also been awarded contracts with 
districts in Baltimore and Bridgeport, Conn., he said.

Dr. Rivera represented Global Partnership at the June 30 vendor fair in 
Ohio, tending a booth along with 50 other groups.

"It was just like you were selling pencils," he said. "A lot of these 
companies don't have a clue about how to change schools."


--
Monty Neill, Ed.D.; Interim Executive Director, FairTest; 15 Court Sq., 
Ste. 820; Boston, MA 02108; 857-350-8207 x 101; fax 857-350-8209; 
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