What If Our Schools Looked Like This?

In New Jersey, we are currently in the midst of our "testing season." Opting Out (refusals) is the story of the day. Parents are pushing back on a system that has become largely impersonal and very standardized. 

While opting out is one way of expressing extreme displeasure of what our schools have become, the reason is because we have to have a new conversation -- one that includes teachers and parents and students -- about what schools should be like. 

I have no doubt if you asked a hundred people what they think it should be, you'd get a hundred different answers. However, I think you'd also find some very basic common threads in those answers. Fully funding all public schools. High quality pre-school for all children. Student-centered learning. Teachers who are well trained and can continue to hone their craft as their careers progress. Clean and safe physical environments. Field trips. Hands-on learning experiences. Unique learning experiences. Opportunities for students to demonstrate what they've learned. Authentic, teacher-driven assessments. Parent and community participation. Transparency. And, all of these attributes are for everyone. 

The Willow School would be a great example for many of these qualities. 

✔ Well-funded
✔ High quality pre-school
✔ Student-centered learning
✔ Well-trained teachers
✔ Clean and safe environment
✔ Field trips
✔ Hands-on learning experiences
✔ Students demonstrate what they’ve learned
✔ Authentic, teacher driven (not standardized) assessments
✔ Parent and community involvement

What is The Willow school? Well, it's a private independent school here in New Jersey, located on a 34 acre campus. Its founder is the New Jersey State Board of Education President, Mark Biedron. 

"At The Willow School, children discover who they are, the joy of learning, and the wonder of the environment around them." 

Sounds pretty great, right? 

The Head of School has this to say about student experience:  

"At Willow, our shared dedication to academic excellence thrives on the constant development of the intellectual capacities of our students. Academic preparation, without the intellectual muscle to think independently, deprives students from fully engaging in the challenging future awaiting them. Academic excellence at Willow means that our learning objectives not only include the mastery of content needed for the next level of academic challenge, but also includes conceptual understanding in the broader world, and the rich connections to our school culture." (emphasis mine)

This is from the overview of the school's curriculum:

"The integrated curriculum allows students to learn material in great depth as well as to see the connections that naturally exist among subject areas. The primary device for integration of the curriculum is the development of communication skills using the English language. Parallel to that usage is the study of French or Spanish from kindergarten through eighth grade, with Latin introduced in sixth through eighth grades. While the disciplines of mathematics and science, and of language and social studies, are often connected at The Willow School, it is also important for children to learn, for instance, how scientific and technological advances have shaped the ways humans relate to each other or how the use of mathematics determines the design of music and architecture. All learning is spiral; the child returns to skills and subject matter that becomes increasingly complex and challenging." (emphasis mine)

Ok, sign me up. I want to go this school. 

The teachers. What about the teachers? Who are the people guiding these students as they develop "intellectual muscle?" Take a browse through the teacher profiles. Mark, I have to give you mad props for your team. Masters degrees. Many years of both teaching and heading up similar schools. Not a TFA member in sight. 

One of the teachers answered a short, get-to-know-you Q&A on his profile page. I highlight these two questions and answers because every parent wants this, and I am sure every teacher does as well. 

What do you love about being a teacher at Willow?

I feel as though Willow affords me the opportunity to be flexible with my curriculum to create something new with my students every year.  Learning doesn’t happen in the same way for all children and Willow allows for changes to be made that benefit all types of learners in each class.  Willow inspires me to make learning come to life because I’m allowed to teach and learn with students among various themes/topics with a curriculum that I am truly passionate about.

What satisfies you the most about your work at Willow?

Being able to see examples of student actions and work that reflect deep and connected learning is the pinnacle of my teaching experience at Willow.

What about the physical environment? The Willow School has a long list of accolades. You can read all about them here. They have been recognized for their green buildings, earning the highest awards for USGBC LEEDS-certified buildings. I'm going to make a wild guess here and say you won't find lead in their drinking water, mold or peeling paint, rodents, or broken heating/cooling systems in those buildings. 

As you would expect, the price tag is pretty steep, like college tuition steep. The middle school grades are just shy of $30k a year. It is interesting though, that their pre-k program demonstrates what "choice" ought to be. You can send your 4-year-old to school for five half days, or five full days, or a combo of half and full days. 

Why am I telling you about this school? Mark Biedron and his cohorts are fully supporting PARCC as the testing requirement for graduation in New Jersey, beginning with the class of 2021. (I say "the," but really it's SIX PARCC tests to graduate.) He fully supports, at least publicly, Common Core State Standards and the aligned testing. Given the tenets of his school, CCSS and the aligned testing are for everyone else's children. Not for his. And not for the students at his school. 

I don't doubt that The Willow School's price tag is commensurate with what those parents are getting for their children. Heck, the 34 acres alone would be expensive to maintain. 
What I want to know is, why isn't Mark fighting like mad to have every school in New Jersey look more like his? He clearly believes very strongly in that kind of an education. It's a spectacular example of opting out of a standardized education. The disconnect is astonishing, and remarkably disappointing. 

On May 4th, the State Board of Education is having their monthly meeting. It's also one of the rare times when open public comment is allowed. I encourage beg you to attend and tell Mark what you want your children's education to look like. Sign up to attend here. 

Pay for Success Coming to New Jersey

This is truly one of those moments when I wish I hadn't called it, but here comes Pay for Success. John Mooney at NJSpotlight posted this story this morning. State Senator Ruiz has introduced two bills to pay for a new pre-school initiative. 

One involves the dedication of $103 million of state money. Read the full text of the bill here. The other bill is called “Early Childhood Innovation Act”. I love the names given to these things. Anyway, it's a "loan pilot" program. Let's call it what it is: Social Impact Bonds aka Pay for Success. You can read the full text of the bill here.  

I'm not going to go into all the reasons of why Social Impact Bonds are a terrible "solution" for New Jersey. I've already written about and testified against it. You can read all of it here, here, and here.

Keep private money out of public education. Do we need high quality preschool in New Jersey? Yes. Absolutely. What we don't need is Wall St. paying for it with the promise to earn that money back on the backs of our youngest and most vulnerable citizens. 

We ALL deserve better than that. 

Edited to add: Revised bill S973. 

The End of Special Education Part IV

This is really Social Impact Bonds (SIBs), aka Pay for Success, part 2. 

It seems that NJ Senator Teresa Ruiz, Chair of the NJ Senate Education Committee, thinks that SIBs may be a way to pay for the Committee's vision of Pre-K in New Jersey. Tuesday morning I heard a clip of Senator Ruiz on WBGO's news report. My jaw dropped.

Senator Teresa Ruiz says one recommendation is establishing a five-year pilot program allowing the private sector to pay for expanding early childhood education and then receive a portion of the state savings from that investment.

“It allows for programs to really develop more quickly because the funding is there, and certainly, later on, what we can look for is we will save money because we won’t have to have early-intervention programs and classification and wrap-around services because we did the work early on.”

Just. No. 

I wrote about SIB's here, but let me recap. Goldman Sachs funded a SIBs program in Utah. They claim a 99% "success" rate. In other words, 99% of the 3- and 4-year-olds who went through their funded program did NOT require remedial help or special education classification. Goldman Sachs received $260,000 in payment for those 109 out of 110 students. And will continue to receive payment for every year those students are NOT classified for special education. 

You know there are going to be questions, really basic ones, when you see "results" like that. Presumably, Senator Ruiz heard about those results and did not look further into the inevitable questions about the validity of those claims. 

What was the starting criteria for those students? What tests did they use? Medical history? Demographics? How many students would have likely had to have special education if they didn't have the "high quality" Pre-K experience? How many would they expect to classify even with the experience? What is "high quality" Pre-K? What does "high quality" Pre-K cost? How much does Utah spend on Pre-K? What is the threshold that has to be met for Goldman Sachs to earn its money back?

The NY Times DealBook took an unusual and distinctly skeptical look at the program.

A few weeks ago, Senator Ruiz held a hearing on Pre-K. All of the usual associations were there to provide testimony. All agreed that "high quality" Pre-K is essential to a good start in elementary school. It is even more important for children from certain demographics to have these experiences. 

A Rutgers professor of economics, Steven Barnett, testified that "high quality" (he put great emphasis on that) Pre-K could mean as much as a 50% reduction in the need to classify for special education, BUT that most studies show a 10-20% reduction. That is considered to be very good. In this context, 99% is not even statistically possible. 

So, how much did Goldman Sachs spend per student? A measly $1700, not even enough to cover part-time costs of daycare. Pre-Ks used in successful studies spent 4 to 5 times that amount. Again, what exactly is "high quality" Pre-k? Sounds like Goldman Sachs got off cheap.

Goldman Sachs also only had to achieve a 50% reduction to in order to make back their investment, plus 5%. What's unclear and I haven't found out yet is, who would have picked up the tab if the program "failed" and only achieved a 10% reduction? Would Utah have been on the hook for that? Or, would Goldman have simply written it off? Can we please acknowledge that no Wall Street firm is going to enter into a deal like this if they didn't expect to make money?

I'm also not sure what the point of bringing in Wall Street was. Utah, previously, had no Pre-K program. They didn't really even know what the costs are. Usually in Pay for Success, you're trying to show a savings on the government side...which is why in places like Texas, this kind of program has not worked with daycare. You simply can't show great savings if you're not spending any money on it in the first place. 

Now for New Jersey. What is Senator Ruiz attempting to achieve? Her statement, "we won’t have to have early-intervention programs and classification and wrap-around services because we did the work early on" is naive at best and potentially destructive at worst.  

"High quality" Pre-K is not a magic bullet. Students with disabilities will not be magically cured by attending preschool. It sounds too good to be true because it is. New Jersey's classification rate is about 14.5%, higher in low-income districts where this program will take place. 

Will preschool help decrease the percentage of students who need special education services in those districts? I have no doubt that it will. The research supports that presumption. 

Are you going to end the need for Early Intervention, classification, and wrap-around services? No. You aren't. There will always be students who would have been classified no matter how much preschool they had. There will always be students who need wrap-around services because we, as country, much less as a state, are doing nothing to address the poverty that creates the need for these services.

Big picture here is, Goldman Sachs is going to make money on students NOT being classified. RtI is going to become the framework for K-12, delaying as long as possible the identification and classification of students with disabilities. And the Special Education Ombudsman position the Senator is trying to create (because constituents have been begging for help) will work for the NJ Department of Education. 

This does not look good for the students with disabilities in New Jersey. Parents, it's going to be a really interesting (read: ugly) ride while all of this plays out. We don't need a system that further works against students and their families. Find another way to pay for preschool that doesn't involve a negative outcome on our most vulnerable students.

The End of Special Education Part III

Social Impact Bonds, aka Pay for Success. Both terms sound so innocuous. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In the special education world, everyone, including Goldman Sachs (yes, that Goldman Sachs), is trying to reduce the number of students who are formally classified with a learning disability. As we have just celebrated 40 years of IDEA and its success at requiring all children have a free and appropriate education, programs like Pay for Success, are especially heinous.

While there are a fair number of studies on the impact of high quality pre-school on the number of students who later do not need special education services. The range of success is varied, but still a 10-50% reduction is really big. It does makes sense to support high quality preschool. What doesn't make sense is for Wall St. to fund those pre-school programs with the aim of making money off students NOT being classified.

This has already been done in Utah. Goldman Sachs claimed a 99% reduction in "at risk" students being classified. 99%. That cannot possibly be correct. Even if you only use, say, NJ's average of a 14.68% classification rate, that 1%  rate is simply not possible. Goldman Sachs got paid for every single one of the 99% AND they will be paid every year those students are not classified.

Does anyone think, even for a second, that Goldman would enter into a contract where they did not expect to make money? I can't wait to see the long term outcome on this. How many of those kids will actually need services later because they were sold out in pre-school?

Look, I get the public-private partnership idea. In some cases, it may make sense. However, when public education is involved, in our current climate of selling it off to the highest bidder, while looking for some magic pill to "fix" everything, literally selling out our special needs (any!) kids is not acceptable.

And yet, Pay for Success may be here to stay because it is included in the rewrite of ESEA. We've been given about 48 hours to review the entire document before it goes to a vote in Congress. The very first thing I did was a search for the Pay for Success term. And, sure enough, it's in there.

Let me channel my inner Nancy Reagan: Just say NO to ESSA.

We need time. We need educators and parents to weigh in on the rewrite. We need to be sure that this law is supporting public education for all children in this country, not Wall St. firms, not charter school companies, and not testing companies.

Our children deserve so much better than this.