Skyrocketing Realty Rates, Singing Opponents Make Complex School Site Search

Roxbury Prep wrapped the site at 361 Belgrade Ave in Roslindale with an image of the school building it hoped to construct there.

In April, an email from a Boston charter school ended a three-year saga.

“After much consideration, Roxbury Prep has decided to step away from the 361 Belgrade Ave site at this time,” Roxbury Preparatory Charter School wrote to its affiliates last spring.

The announcement ended the charter school’s quest for a new high school building in Roslindale, a neighborhood in southwest Boston, after Roxbury Prep encountered stiff resistance from parts of the community and some government officials. The site, 361 Belgrade Avenue, would have been home to just over 560 high schoolers.

Roxbury Prep, which began as a middle school in 1999, was one of Boston’s first charter schools. In 2010, the charter school partnered with Uncommon Schools, a non-profit charter management organization that oversees 57 schools in the Northeast. Both Roxbury Prep and Uncommon have high profiles in the education-reform world: Roxbury Prep co-founder John King served as President Obama’s secretary of education, and the Uncommon Schools board includes Laura Blankfein, whose husband Lloyd was CEO of Goldman Sachs. The school was one of the Boston charter schools whose effectiveness in boosting student achievement was studied by an MIT professor, Joshua Angrist, who won the 2021 Nobel prize in economics.

Since 2010, Roxbury Prep has expanded, and in 2020 enrolled 1,568 students, split among three middle schools and two high school campuses. The prolonged and ultimately unsuccessful effort for the Roslindale site aimed to unite students at the high school, now divided between a former parochial school and converted office space five miles apart.

Charter schools are tuition-free public schools whose management has more autonomy than traditional district-run public schools. That can sometimes work to the advantage of students. When it comes to facilities, the autonomy can cut both ways. Charter schools may have freshly painted or carpeted buildings while public schools lack air conditioning. But while traditional public schools benefit from local tax and bond revenues to pay for new buildings and maintenance, many charter schools have to resort to more creative funding measures when they look for buildings or campuses to call their own. And while district schools have been on existing sites for decades, charter schools have to navigate approval processes for new buildings or to convert old ones. The space challenge is one reason that charter growth nationally has slowed, despite strong academic performance overall (see “Why Is Charter Growth Slowing?” features, Summer 2018).

When it comes to space, charter school leaders have to be “real entrepreneurs,” according to David Umansky. Umansky is the founder and CEO of Civic Builders, a non-profit charter school developer and lender addressing what the organization calls the “immediate need for charter school facilities support.”

Roxbury Prep co-founder John King served as Secretary of Education in the Obama administration.

That need has been on display in Boston. While thousands, residents included, supported Roxbury Prep’s site search in Roslindale, some neighbors opposed the project at 361 Belgrade Avenue, citing concerns over increased traffic and the size of the school. The fight over the site also got caught up in the city’s long-running racial tensions. Roxbury Prep’s students are 56 percent African-American and 40 percent Hispanic, according to state data. Advocates made a racial justice-related case for approving the site: “If black lives matter, city would hold a hearing for Roxbury Prep,” was a headline over an opinion piece by the high school’s founder, Shrada Patel, that ran in CommonWealth magazine, an online journal that covered the issue closely.

While Roslindale is 54 percent non-white, according to the 2020 census, 361 Belgrade Avenue was near a concentration of white households on the border with West Roxbury. Most of Roslindale’s Black and Hispanic residents live farther north and east in Roslindale, closer to the borders with Jamaica Plain, Mattapan, and Dorchester. In Mattapan, Dorchester, and Roxbury (where Roxbury Prep was founded), white Bostonians make up less than 30 percent of the populations.

It’s certainly possible that some of the opposition to Roxbury Prep was racially motivated. A September 2021 football game was cut short and police were called after Roxbury Prep players said they were racially taunted by an opposing team from a town north of the city. But a racial justice argument did not prove successful as a tactic to win approval for the Roslindale site.

After months of community outreach, in May 2018, Roxbury Prep filed a letter of intent with the Boston Planning and Development Agency to demolish the old car dealership on the site — which is zoned for a school — and replace it with a 96,000 square feet high school, designed for more than 800 students and complete with classrooms, a cafeteria, and a gym.

Six months later, the charter school filed a proposal for a much smaller school: just under 50,000 square feet for 562 students.

Finally, in April 2021 without a hearing before the Boston Planning and Development Agency, Roxbury Prep withdrew its proposal entirely. The average wait time for projects to come before the board was 83 days, according to a review Roxbury Prep conducted. Instead, the charter school waited for over 600 days.

City officials offered no explanation for the delay. Bonnie McGilpin, the director of communications at the Boston Planning and Development Agency, wrote in an emailed statement that the agency is “continuing to engage with the school” and that the agency remains ”committed to helping them find a permanent home that meets the needs of their community.”

The agency’s delay—and then-mayor Marty Walsh’s unwillingness to intervene—was likely the path of least resistance for the Boston government: a hearing would mean the city would have to declare a winner in the battle over 361 Belgrade Avenue. With tensions running high around the project, a decision either way would have provoked outrage. By not acting, the Boston Planning and Development Agency essentially forced an outcome—Roxbury Prep ultimately folding on the Roslindale site—while minimizing the political cost to Walsh, who is now the U.S. Secretary of Labor.

“Roxbury Prep is working in earnest to find a facility that our high school students deserve,” Uncommon Schools spokesperson Barbara Martinez wrote in an emailed statement. “We will announce our progress as soon as it is appropriate.”

Martinez declined to comment on a report from earlier this year that Roxbury Prep was looking into renting space from the Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology, a local non-profit college. Charter school site searches do sometimes fail, but Roxbury Prep’s effort in Roslindale took longer — and seems to have cost more — than most. The charter school had already sorted through more than 60 sites before settling on 361 Belgrade Avenue, Roxbury Prep reported. It hired two media consultants, including Dot Lynch, who had served as top spokesman to former Boston Mayor Thomas Menino. It hired, as a permitting consultant, the proprietor of the website bostonpermitting.com. It hired local counsel, a civil engin­­eer, an architect, a landscape architect, a transportation planner, and an environmental/geotechnical engineer.

The tax return for Uncommon Schools shows that in 2020 it paid the property developer working with Roxbury Prep more than $550,000.

Even without holding a formal hearing, the Boston Planning and Development Agency collected over 2,900 pages of comments, the vast majority positive.

“My child can dream about college. But before that, we are all dreaming about the high school facility these kids deserve,” one Roxbury Prep parent wrote in an op-ed.

As of last year, 45 states and the District of Columbia offered some form of financial support for charter school facilities. Dozens of states now have provisions where charter schools have free or below-market-price access to vacant public school facilities. About a dozen states also have recurring direct per-pupil allocations for facilities. Many more have some form of grant or loan program, although several are dependent upon varying legislative appropriations. Federal programs, like the new markets tax credit, have also proved instrumental for charter school buildings.

The Center for Education Reform’s 2021 National Charter School Law Rankings & Scorecard includes a rank for facility funds and financing, with five points available total. Only the District of Columbia, Tennessee, and Minnesota have ratings above two. Twenty-eight states have a rating of zero. The District of Columbia, Tennessee, and Minnesota stand out because of their robust annual allowances, loan funds, and grants that go beyond just offering charter schools deals on empty buildings and access to tax-exempt financing. Massachusetts has a rating of one for its per-pupil capital needs allowances (included in regular per-pupil tuition revenue), and tax-exempt bond financing, direct loans, and guarantees for capital projects.

Charter schools have to track costs, transportation options, proximity to the neighborhoods they want to serve, play and exercise space, and quality of the school space when they conduct site searches. A principal at a traditional district-run public school will never have to worry about all of these details, let alone construction, Umansky, of Civic Builders, explained.

Robert “Bob” Baldwin, the managing principal of QPD, a real estate consulting firm in Massachusetts specializing in charter schools and nonprofits, said the first thing he does with a charter school is conduct a feasibility study. Baldwin goes through finances, real estate needs, and school governance with his client before looking at sites.

To make sure sites are sustainably affordable, Baldwin said he weighs the costs of the project as well as the school’s revenue streams from a per-student perspective.

“At the end of the day, you don’t want to put them in a building where their annual occupancy cost exceeds an affordable threshold,” he said. “In the city of Boston, and pretty much all Massachusetts, we use as a benchmark not going over 15 percent of the public tuition dollars. If in Boston a school got $20,000 per student, I would not want to see them paying debt service of more than $3,000 per student.”

As for capital costs, Baldwin said his benchmarks have risen, especially with rising real estate costs across Boston.

“I personally feel a little uncomfortable when I get over $60,000 per student in capital costs, or even over $50,000 to tell you the truth, but I’m kind of kidding myself these days if I think I can get under $50,000 in Boston,” he said. “We used to use $30,000 as a benchmark. But things change.”

Baldwin added, “It’s been really hard to find sites lately. What I might have paid a million dollars for 10 years ago I’ve got to pay 4 million for today.”

MIT Professor Joshua Angrist won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics. Roxbury Prep was one of the Boston charter schools whose effectiveness in boosting student achievement Angrist studied.

Residential real estate prices nationwide were up 13.6 percent in September 2021 over September 2020, according to Redfin, a real estate brokerage. The climbing prices delayed site searches as charter schools struggled to find affordable land, though the pandemic-related decline in demand for office space may work in schools’ favor. If charter schools found sites that fit their budgets, they still faced further delays from pandemic-related disruptions in construction and the supply chain.

Once a charter school finds a fitting site it can afford, it has to win governmental approval. In Boston, Baldwin said he almost always finds himself before the Zoning Board of Appeal in addition to the Boston Planning and Development Agency. The combination of the two, he said, means school operators need to plan for a six to nine month period of uncertainty “before you really know whether you can build something there.”

Charter schools also have to finesse municipal and neighborhood politics. Lots of people don’t want a school in their neighborhood because of the added traffic, Umansky said.

Baldwin put the traffic issue bluntly: “If you can’t stand up with a straight face in front of a skeptical crowd and try to tell them that, ‘We really do have a good plan for managing our people coming and going,’ then you should probably look for somewhere else,” since it’s the charter school’s job to propose and implement traffic plans.

Race and socioeconomic status also undergird debates over charter school sites, Umansky added, with discourse often beginning with “our kids” versus “their kids.”

All charter schools need to be prepared to “fight it out,” or work hard to educate communities by empathizing with local stakeholders, he said. When Civic Builders works with a charter school to find it a home, Umansky said he doesn’t try to call out the opposition but build strong enough relationships around the site search with neighbors, local leaders, and government officials to “get to a yes.”

Umansky called the practice “relational” instead of “transactional.” Yet, despite all of that work, charter schools often get told “no,” he said.

After that, charter schools “have to go right back to the drawing board,” Baldwin explained.

“I have clients say, ‘Well, we just spent 150 grand on design, can’t we just pick it up?’ No. No. Every place is different. You lose virtually all of your money to spend and you really do have to start all over again,” he said. The high sunk cost of a failed site search, both in terms of money and time (it takes years to get a new campus up and running from scratch), often pushes schools to keep working on impossible sites, Baldwin added.

Regardless of how heartbreaking a loss might be, charter schools have to move past it to the next opportunity.

In Boston, that’s where Roxbury Prep is right now: moving on. But it’s tough.

Mel Hines has three boys enrolled at Roxbury Prep — two juniors and one senior. She’s been a parent at the school for the past three years. I met her on the sidelines of a Friday night football game. The home team, the Randolph Blue Devils, had stands full of fans. Across the field, a handful of Roxbury Prep families cheered from two sets of bleachers. Even though none of Hines’ boys were on the field, she jumped up to cheer at every pause in our conversation.

“We need a building. All students need to be in one facility leaning on each other and learning together,” Hines said. “It’s unhealthy to have so many buildings to me, being a parent.”

The current high school set-up, with ninth and tenth graders on one site and the juniors and seniors at another, is less than optimal, she said.

“I wish they had more support,” Hines continued. “We go through a lot being a diversely mixed school, whether it’s from the games and being racially profiled or trying to keep the kids safe despite them being on separate campuses. If we had them in one place we wouldn’t have to worry about that. We need that kind of safety and community. We need more people advocating for us.”

Alfonza, a junior at Roxbury Prep and Hines’ son, said the campus divide affects student life, including the football team.

“There are people at both campuses so we aren’t one unit. Football has freshmen through to seniors but they can’t work together except at practice,” Alfonza said. “Some people [at the lower campus] feel that they’re alone. They don’t have people to lead them there.”

Keon, a senior at Roxbury Prep, agreed: “We’re more divided when we don’t have a building together. We’re just young Black kids trying to get out, but we’re getting pushed into Dudley [Street in Lower Roxbury], back into the ghetto. I just want people to know we’re good kids from good families and great homes.”

Yet, even as Hines lamented the school separation and the lack of amenities, she expressed gratitude for, and confidence in, Roxbury Prep. The high school, she reminded me, “has a great success rate.” (Roxbury Prep sent 98 percent of its inaugural high school class off to four-year-colleges or universities with $1.3 million in scholarships. That is light-years ahead of the comparable figure for Boston Public Schools, which says 52 percent of class of 2018 seniors who answered a survey planned to attend four-year colleges.)

“They send so many kids out with four-year college scholarships,” Hines said. “It’s bad not to have a building and not to be together, but if you make it to the end you could have a 4-year scholarship out.”

Hines hasn’t abandoned hope in Roxbury Prep’s site search either, which is actively on-going.

“What can you do if you give up?” she said. “You have to keep faith. Without faith what do you have?”

Cara Chang is a student at Harvard College concentrating in history.

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The Education Exchange: Press Is Offering Crucial Race Theory a Free Pass, a New Research Study Finds

The director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, Rick Hess, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss the critical race theory debate, and how the media has covered the subject.

“Misleading Media Coverage Has Made Critical Race Theory Debate Angrier and Less Honest,” a report by Hess, is available now.

Follow The Education Exchange on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or here on Education Next.

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Blaine Fights Back

The Hile family is among those suing, seeking the ability to use their Michigan 529 savings plan to pay tuition at a private Christian school.

In June 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court seemingly dealt a deathblow to Blaine Amendments—provisions adopted by 37 states to prevent government funding of parochial schools. In Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, the court held that states could not use these amendments to discriminate against religious parents or religious schools by excluding them from a “generally available” government benefit. Yet despite this ruling, a number of Blaine Amendment cases are still working their way through the courts.

Perhaps the most interesting one, Hile v. Michigan, was filed in federal court in September 2021. In Hile, five families acting with the support of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a free-market think tank, challenged the state’s decision to prevent them from using their 529 savings plans for tuition at private religious schools. Authorized by federal tax law but sponsored by individual states, 529 plans allow individuals to invest after-tax income in accounts where the money grows tax-free and can be used for education expenses. Initially, these plans were allowed only for higher education, but in 2017 the Tax Cut and Jobs Act extended the program to K–12 expenses, including costs at private and religious schools.

Despite the change in the law and the court’s ruling in Espinoza, Michigan refused to extend this benefit to private-school parents because the state’s Blaine Amendment forbids using public funds “to aid any nonpublic elementary or secondary school,” and “tax benefits” are one of the prohibited forms of aid. Michigan’s position is that because all private schools, not just religious ones, are constitutionally excluded, the state’s policy does not constitute religious discrimination.

The parents in Hile have offered several arguments against the state’s position. Most important, they argue that the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause prohibits any government action motivated by religious animus. Two cases in particular suggest that the courts might conclude that such animosity is in play in the Hile circumstances. In Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. City of Hialeah, the Supreme Court held that a town ordinance passed solely to exclude the Santeria Church from locating in Hialeah, Florida, violated the Free Exercise Clause’s requirement that government be neutral toward religion. Similarly, the court ruled in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission that the blatant hostility expressed by members of the commission toward a religious believer violated the government’s “high duty” of neutrality.

Michigan’s Blaine Amendment, the Hile plaintiffs claim, has at most a veneer of neutrality. The amendment was added to the state constitution in 1970 in response to a proposal for the state to provide $150 in assistance to each private-school student. At the time, nearly all of the state’s private-school students were attending religious schools, most of them Catholic. In what became one of the most unsubtle choices in American politics, the primary sponsor of the amendment called itself the Council Against Parochiaid. In fact, opponents of the state funding simply called the money “parochiaid.” The group explicitly asked its supporters to “contact all Protestant Church ministers and Jewish Rabbis in your area asking them to sermonize against Parochiaid and encourage their congregation to vote YES” on the amendment. Another supporter of the amendment, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, bluntly stated, “More than 90 percent of all parochiaid funds go to schools owned by the clergy of one politically active church.”

The Hile plaintiffs also argue that even though all private schools are excluded from the 529 plan, Michigan still treats “comparable secular activity more favorably,” because the state allows public-school students to transfer to a different district if the family pays tuition—and parents can use their 529 savings in these instances. Moreover, the plaintiffs argue that Michigan is forcing families to “divorce” themselves from religious control or affiliation as a condition of receiving a government benefit, in violation of Espinoza.

Because of the unusual facts behind both the 529 policy and the Blaine Amendment, there is a chance that Michigan’s decision could survive judicial scrutiny. However, some justices on the Supreme Court have clearly wanted to use the bigoted history behind Blaine Amendments as justification enough to declare them unconstitutional. For instance, Justice Samuel Alito’s concurring opinion in Espinoza documented the anti-Catholic bigotry motivating Blaine Amendments and contended that that history shows that the amendments are inherently discriminatory and, thus, unconstitutional. One newspaper warned its readers about Catholicism and in particular Catholic education, saying, “Popery is the natural enemy of general education. . . . If it is establishing schools, it is to make them prisons of the youthful intellect of the country.” The court, Alito asserted, should directly consider that history. But so far, following Chief Justice John Roberts’s minimalist disposition, the court has not done so. In Hile, though, lower courts will not be able to avoid a direct consideration of that history, nor will the Supreme Court, if the case makes it that far. One cannot simply sweep a label like “parochiaid” under the historical rug.

Joshua Dunn is professor of political science and director of the Center for the Study of Government and the Individual at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs.

The post Blaine Fights Back appeared first on Education Next.

By: Joshua Dunn
Title: Blaine Fights Back
Sourced From: www.educationnext.org/blaine-fights-back-michigan-families-sue-seeking-ability-529-savings-accounts-private-religious-schools/
Published Date: Tue, 23 Nov 2021 10:00:54 +0000

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The Education Exchange: Charter School Registration Leaps by Nearly a Quarter Million Trainees, a New Study Finds

The president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, Nina Rees, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss a recent report by the National Alliance which shows an increase in enrollment in charter schools across the country in the 2020-21 academic year.

The report, “Voting with Their Feet: A State-level Analysis of Public Charter School and District Public School Enrollment Trends,” is available now.

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Nursing home workers ON STRIKE for a fair contract

Health care workers across this country put their lives on the line to get us through this pandemic. They deserve dignity on the job and to be paid a decent wage. I’m proud to stand in solidarity with SEIU 1199 nursing home workers in New York on strike for a fair contract.

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We must reduce defense spending & INVEST in the working class.

Congress says in this moment, when it comes to working families’ needs and the very habitability of our planet for future generations, we can’t afford to act.

But when it comes to finding more money for war, there’s hardly a debate. Our priorities have become horribly distorted.

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There is no 'labor shortage' in our nation today.

Are we seeing a real ‘labor shortage’ in this country? No, I do not think so. What we have is a situation in which workers all across this country are saying, ‘you know what? I don’t have to work for starvation wages, I am a human being, I deserve to be treated with dignity.’

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We must keep our promise to our veterans.

We must commit ourselves to keeping America’s promise to our veterans and servicemembers, just as they kept their promise to us.

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Teacher Robert Reich on the second Gilded Age

“Justice Louis Brandeis said, ‘America faces a choice. We can have great wealth in the hands of a few, or we can have a democracy, but we can’t have both.’ His words are equally applicable to the second Gilded Age we are now living in.” – Professor Robert Reich

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Households Are Utilizing New Kid Tax Credit for K-12 School Costs, Census Shows

US President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris arrive for an event to mark the start of monthly Child Tax Credit relief payments, in the White House complex, July 15, 2021.

The American Rescue Plan Act of March 2021 expanded the Child Tax Credit for tax year 2021, resulting in more families receiving an increased monthly payment for each child they have, ranging from $250 to $300 a month, based on family income and child age.

Families can use their payments for any number of purposes—e.g., paying for food, debt, housing or even putting the money into a savings account. So it’s particularly interesting to learn that many parents or caregivers are choosing to invest in their children’s education. A Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis of Census Bureau data collected in July, August, and September 2021, as the school year approached, found 40 percent of low income families (defined as making less than $35,000 per year) using payments for education costs covering books and supplies, tuition, after-school programs, and transportation for school.

Some of these expenses may be for adults’ own education, as about 5 percent of adults in low-income households with children are enrolled in school, other Census data show.

Data were collected over five weeks from July 21 to September 27 using the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, sent to more than 1 million adults every two weeks. It provides near real-time data on how the pandemic is affecting Americans’ lives.

How does the credit work?

Anyone living in the U.S. earning less than $75,000 as a single person or $150,000 filing taxes with a spouse, receives $300 monthly for every child under six years old or $250 monthly for every child six or older, totaling $3,600 a year for every child under six and $3,000 a year for every child six and older.

Those making more than $75,000 as a single person or more than $150,00 filing taxes with a spouse get less money.

The child must be 17 years-old or younger as of December 31, 2021, be claimed on an individual’s taxes as a dependent, have lived with the claimant for at least half of 2021, and have a social security number.

Monthly payments are sent between July 2021 and December 2021, with the balance of the credit received when filing 2021 taxes.

The money can be used by parents in any way that meets their needs.

According to the IRS, about 35 million eligible families are receiving the advance payments.

Adults at all income levels reporting that they received a child-tax-credit payment were asked a question about how they had spent the money, allowing multiple choices from rent to groceries. A majority of respondents reported spending their dollars on more than one thing.

Several choices were school-related expenses, including books and supplies, tuition, tutoring services, after-school programs (other than tutoring and child care) and transportation to or from school.

Three in 10 families overall receiving the first three monthly payments (July to September) reported spending them on school expenses, with one in four families with young children using them for child care costs, according to the Census Bureau.

About 1 in 10 households reported using the child tax credit to help pay for child care.

The pattern of spending varied by the child’s age.

“Families with at least one school-age child were more likely to spend the CTC on school expenses than families with only children under 5 years old,” the Census Bureau said. “But families that only had young children were much more likely to spend it on child care—one in five in late July and one in four from early August to late September.”

The increase “may be linked to the beginning of the school year and parents’ work,” the Census Bureau said.

There was no difference between the shares of households that spent their tax credit on school expenses in late August and early September. By late September, adults in households that received the child tax credit were less likely to spend part of it on school-related expenses than early in the month.

Non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic families reported using the child tax credit for school expenses “in much higher proportions than non-Hispanic White households,” the census said. “By late September, an estimated 4 in 10 Black families (42 percent) and 3 in 10 Hispanic families (31 percent) used the CTC for school expenses, compared to about 1 in 4 non-Hispanic White families (26 percent).”

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis, the finding that some not insignificant portion of CTC payments are used to cover education costs are consistent with evidence from Canada, where parents—particularly those with low incomes—spend their child allowances on essentials and education expenses.

Finally, a caution. These data are suggestive, not definitive. They rely on what the roughly 6 percent of people who responded to the government survey chose to tell the government about how they spent the money. The data collection was at the start of the school year, and the survey asked about a limited number of spending options. It’s early in a family spending process that will last at least one tax year—perhaps longer depending upon current Congressional negotiations on President Biden’s spending proposals. We should not rush to any final conclusions regarding longer term patterns of parental spending of federal cash assistance.

Even with all those important caveats, however, what the data suggest is potentially of great significance for education. An explicit proposal to channel an additional $60 billion a year in federal spending to households earning up to $150,000 a year to use for K-12 tuition, tutoring, and after-school programs might have met fierce resistance from both political parties for well-known reasons. Yet if the Census data and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis is to be believed, a similar result is being obtained through the expanded child tax credit. The press and education policy establishment perhaps haven’t fully realized it yet. What the Census data suggest, though, is that parents seeing money in their bank accounts sure are figuring it out.

Bruno V. Manno is Senior Advisor for the Walton Family Foundation’s K-12 Program.

Additional Education Next coverage of the child tax credit:

“How a Turbocharged Child Tax Credit Could Electrify School Choice,” Frederick Hess, Fall 2021

“Should Congress Make the Expanded Child Tax Credit Permanent?” Forum, Fall 2021

The post Families Are Using New Child Tax Credit for K-12 School Costs, Census Shows appeared first on Education Next.

By: Bruno V. Manno
Title: Families Are Using New Child Tax Credit for K-12 School Costs, Census Shows
Sourced From: www.educationnext.org/families-are-using-new-child-tax-credit-k-12-school-costs-census-shows/
Published Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2021 10:00:52 +0000

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Beyond Moneyball: Data-Driven Education Boosted by Observation and Judgment

Field officer Imisi Olu-Joseph of Bridge International Academies conducting observation at Oba-Ovonramwen Nursery and Primary School in Benin City, Edo State.

When I worked for Bridge International Academies, the largest network of elementary schools in the developing world, gee, did we have a lot of data. We had testing data from five different countries, each with its own national curriculum and practices. (Kenya, for instance, administers standardized tests not only in math and English but also in science, social studies, and Kiswahili.) We had data on teacher observations, parent satisfaction, peer tutoring, and even parent-teacher conferences. It was a huge amount of material, even for a data nerd like me.

As chief academic officer, part of my charge was to sort through and make sense of all this quantitative information, with the end goal of improving instruction and student outcomes. Bridge operates both low-cost private schools, somewhat akin to American inner-city Catholic schools, and public-private partnership schools, similar to Obama-era turnaround schools. More than 800,000 students are enrolled in 2,026 schools in five countries. When I talk to friends who run charter management organizations or school districts in the United States, the question they always ask me about Bridge is: “How did you use the data?”

I start my reply with a word of advice: When taking on a new education venture that you intend to evaluate, reach out to top-notch economists who can measure your results through a randomized controlled trial. That will give you solid information on whether you’re actually helping kids make significant gains, and it will help you avoid the very human tendency to “believe what you want to believe” when you look at achievement data.

Then I pitch them a curveball. The way to improve fastest at scale, I tell my U.S. friends, is not by data crunching alone but by also employing people like Imisiayo Olu-Joseph, or Imisi, as everyone at Bridge calls her. Her job at Bridge, in Nigeria, was to visit schools and observe teachers and students in action—not in a “gotcha” kind of way, but in a manner aimed at honestly reporting what was going on and helping teachers handle roadblocks and problems: observation aimed at concrete improvement in the classroom.

My wonky friends—you know who you are—often wave their hands dismissively. “Observation? Anecdotes? They’re not reliable,” they say. But people like Imisi, Bridge’s field officers, are the reliable yin to the yang of the numbers crunchers. Yes, there is risk in using human observation as an evaluation tool, but not more risk than in relying on data alone.

I caught up with Imisi recently, and asked her to describe a typical day as a field officer.

Imisi Olu-Joseph

“I wake at 5 a.m. and dress down for safety,” she says. “T-shirt and jeans. Cabbage-and-egg sandwich for the road. Umbrella, laptop, phone, teacher computer, backup power bank, water bottle from the freezer. And wipes. Lots of wipes, for my face. It gets dusty out there. I don’t want to look like a crazy person.”

Imisi’s husband drives her from their home in Okota, in the Nigerian state of Lagos, to the nearby town of Isolo. She then climbs onto a 16-seat minibus for her journey to the city of Ikotun, population 1.8 million.

There, amid a welter of honking, shouting, bus brakes, traffic-police whistles, the scent of rice stalls, and motorbikes everywhere, Imisi tries “to walk confident, almost unladylike.” She looks around for a driver of a motorcycle taxi who “looks careful. He asks where I’m going. I ask where he’s going—you don’t want to reveal your destination until you know his preferred direction. I’ll pay the price for two. I don’t want a second rider seated behind me.”

They negotiate, settle on a fare, and take off. “Sometimes louts try to stop the bike and collect ‘tolls,’” Imisi tells me.

The taxi arrives at a smaller bus station, Igando. There Imisi will hire a second bike for the final stage of the journey, to the school at Dare Olayiwola.

The school manager is “attending to parents,” when Imisi arrives. “I won’t chat him up,” she tells me, “just say good morning, smile, and pass. I want to stay in the shadows. I’m here to observe for several hours.”

What does Imisi observe today?

Much of it is related to how the scripted lessons, or teacher guides, are used in class: In grade 6 math, the first example given by the teacher was unclear. The grade 5 English class teacher tried to cover way too much material, and the kids were confused. The grade 1 teacher got tripped up in the science guided practice.

Also: One class was short on math textbooks, so the teacher had to write the examples on the board; more books were delivered to her shortly thereafter. A field team observer rated a recent parent-teacher night a 7 out of 10, when an earlier version had earned a 4 out of 10. The school staff thinks it went better this time because teachers led with a personal anecdote about the child rather than launching straight into an explanation of grades.

It’s mostly “little stuff,” but it adds up.

There is also an experiment underway at the school, using an MIT-validated technique in which students from various grades are regrouped by skill level. Imisi is closely watching how students seem to feel about being with older or younger classmates. Does anyone look intimidated? Or ashamed?

Imisi watches a class of 20 students, in which every child except one can do the lesson. The teacher gets frustrated and raises her voice. Here, Imisi steps out of the shadows and models a patient approach. “I’d seen that girl succeed in another class,” Imisi tells me. “The teacher just needed scaffolding, instead of rushing from point 1 to point 10.”

Back at Bridge International Academies offices in Nairobi, in Hyderabad, and in Cambridge, Massachusetts, directors gobble up the intel, smiling at tiny victories—problems they seem to have fixed—and working to address the many obstacles that remain.

To give students access to good fiction, Bridge has experimented with the WorldReader, a tablet loaded with books and stories.

The View from the Ground

Every CEO, every general, every school superintendent needs to know: What is really happening on the front lines?

When a top official visits a classroom or a school, people notice the Big Cheese and change their behavior. When an official asks for information, the answers are often what the respondent thinks the official wants to hear, rather than an account of what is really going on. This phenomenon is not exclusive to schools. For example, it’s the dominant theme of David Halberstam’s The Best and Brightest, about the Vietnam War, a time when JFK and LBJ were unable to hear the true story.

In the Western world, the K–12 sector usually tackles this puzzle in two ways.

In the UK, there are “inspectors.” They arrive with long checklists and good intentions, and fan out to classrooms. “Does the teacher show high expectations?” Inspector raises head from notebook to watch Ms. Smith. Ms. Smith calls on a student. The child doesn’t know the answer. Ms. Smith quickly moves on. Inspector etches a red mark to indicate low expectations. The report eventually goes to the school leader, who often scolds the teachers. (Sometimes, of course, the inspector misinterprets the scene. “If I persist with questioning that particular child in front of his peers,” Ms. Smith might have said, “experience tells me he’s going to blow up in anger. If the inspector had waited, he’d see I helped this particular boy after school. That’s our agreement.”)

The other prominent K–12 effort to grasp what is really happening in a classroom is teacher evaluation, common in the United States. This approach nudges principals out of their office chairs to show up in class and watch, then write up feedback. Despite the best of intentions, this policy effort hasn’t gone as planned. Principals don’t want conflict. The observations take time. And principals are not that good at the business at hand. The Gates Foundation Measures of Effective Teaching Project found that students, using a simple survey developed by Harvard economist Ron Ferguson, were two to three times more accurate at rating teachers than principals were. Principal evaluations were dangerously close to having no correlation with student learning gains.

Sometimes the principals just validate their own style of teaching. Other times they reluctantly fill out scorecards, which tend to focus on teacher actions, not student learning. This is a common failing in education, rating the inputs instead of the outputs. It would be as if you rated a baseball batter on swing aesthetic—does it look pretty?—rather than on-base percentage or runs batted in. It’s misleading and irrelevant. I recall a teacher at a Boston charter school who was known for a terrible “aesthetic.” He never seemed to be trying, defying all the observation rubrics. He just sat there while his students read books. Yet his kids made large gains on the English exams.

Imisi isn’t out to verify any theories. Her approach to classroom observation differs from the traditional kind in four main ways.

First, instead of sending her out to validate a hypothesis that headquarters hopes is true, Bridge sends her there to reject a hypothesis. She goes in assuming the lessons are failing, that often students are daydreaming, that the pacing is off target. In the United States, many classroom observers in public schools describe feeling pressure to say things are going well. Imisi and her colleagues are nudged in the other direction: there is a ton to be fixed; please go find it.

Second, the Bridge brass doesn’t just want Imisi to fill out a rubric—they also want her overall judgment, her big-picture take on things. On a scale of 1 to 10, to what extent is a lesson or a pedagogical approach or a tech tool succeeding with students and teachers? By contrast, officials in the United States seldom ask the big-picture questions; the observations are all forced into preexisting categories.

It’s fine, even desirable, for Imisi to focus on the little unglamorous things. For example, at two minutes and 54 seconds into the lesson, the teacher’s instruction to the kids to break into small groups was confusing, so they just stared at each other. A set of three math problems was meant to take five minutes, but even the speediest kids needed 12. That messed up the timing of the whole lesson, and as a result, the teacher didn’t get to the quiz.

(Timing is everything. Back in 1992, one of my first jobs was working as a gofer for a Broadway theater producer. I recall a rehearsal—I think the show was Guys and Dolls—in which Jerry Zaks was directing Nathan Lane. They were fixing a line that had flopped in previews. “Pause after you say it for five seconds, not two,” Zaks told Lane. That was it. The next night, the laughter started to build around the four-second mark, and it killed. In the United States we like to argue about the lofty questions of rigor, when often what makes or breaks a lesson is pacing.)

Third, Imisi’s “target” is different. School districts commonly use inspections as a way of critiquing teachers. Imisi is not inspecting teachers; she is collegially critiquing the senior officials—the directors of training, instructional design, technology, and operations. They are not allowed to “blame implementation,” a common phrase in ed reform, which essentially says, “I think I created a magical tech tool or lessons or coaching, but geez, our teachers just mess it up.” That doesn’t fly. The tools, training, and lessons are designed to be used by mere-mortal, typical teachers. If they aren’t using these resources well, or they’re rejecting them, it’s “on you,” the senior official at Bridge. Do better. As Yoda said, “There is no try.”

Imisi serves up helpings of forced humility to senior officials on the team. She is unsparing. She might rate a lesson a 3 out of 10. That stings a curriculum director who worked hard on it. But maybe, over time, with a fail-fast mentality, the director will manage to improve the lessons and earn a 4 and then a 5, perhaps eventually reaching an exalted 6 out of 10. Imisi acknowledges that the kids are “getting” it, that the lessons are more or less working, but they are far from masterpieces.

This stands in sharp contrast to some curriculum efforts I’ve observed or been part of in the States. For example, at one midwestern charter school, I saw a class I’d describe as a 3 out of 10. The school had just adopted a new Common Core curriculum, so the low score was understandable. When I shared this with a friend back at the curriculum company, she blamed the teachers. (“Yes, we often see low expectations from teachers; it’s sad,” was the response.)

Fourth, the relationship between headquarters and the Bridge field officers is dynamic; information flows both ways. Based on Imisi’s reporting, someone at headquarters might ask her: Tomorrow, can you zoom in on this nuance, shoot video of that detail, ask teachers their view on this possible new direction?

Sixth-grade students tutoring 1st graders in Kenya. In the pilot project, Bridge analysts found that the tutoring drove learning gains in math but not in reading.

Reverse Moneyball

Data nerds love Moneyball. In the 2011 movie, Brad Pitt plays Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland A’s. It is fall 2001, the team has just lost to the Yankees in the playoffs, and Beane has to rebuild his roster as he faces the imminent loss of three superstars. His payroll budget is slim compared to the financial-powerhouse Yankees and Red Sox. How to win? Beane, a former player himself, begins to reject the wisdom of his veteran scouts and even his own knowhow.

Cognitive bias, he learns, leads to misperception. Chad Bradford looks like a bad pitcher because he throws underhanded. But he’s actually great at getting hitters out. He’s worth a lot in terms of generating wins, but so far, nobody realizes it, so he isn’t paid much. Beane picks him up at a bargain rate.

Beane meets a brilliant Yale economics grad, played by a sweaty Jonah Hill in a polyester navy blazer, and hires him to lead a data-analytics revolution at the baseball franchise. Cold numbers replace hot human opinions, and newer, more consequential numbers replace outdated ones.

Old-timers resist Beane’s new approach. The head scout quits. The manager accuses Beane of sabotage. But data eventually triumphs. (The A’s lost in the 2002 division series, but they won 20 consecutive games in the regular season, setting an American League record.)

Data analytics soon swept through pro sports: Theo Epstein and the Boston Red Sox, Stephen Curry and the Golden State Warriors, Bryson DeChambeau and his data-driven path to professional golf excellence. Data haven’t entirely conquered sports, but they have secured a place alongside human judgment and experience—sometimes weighted a little more and sometimes less.

In the realm of American ed reform, George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy arguably ushered in the Moneyball era in 2001 with No Child Left Behind. Some seemingly bad schools were actually good, if you accounted for student starting points. The teachers helped their students learn more than similar kids were learning in other schools. Some apparently good schools were not, if you took a careful look at the performance of “subgroups”—poor kids, minority kids, special ed kids.

Ed-reform analytics caught on quickly. Old-timers resisted. But in this battle, data lost. “Data-driven instruction,” data-validated Common Core curriculum, data-driven leadership, school turnarounds, and teacher prep: by and large, they have not worked. Yes, there are worthy exceptions. Some charter schools, perhaps the D.C. public schools for a while, have achieved data-driven success. These outliers were supposed to be the Oakland A’s, in the vanguard. If you build a better mousetrap, it’s supposed to be copied.

That hasn’t happened in any meaningful way in America’s public schools. Academically, poor kids are more or less where they were 20 years ago.

Some critics think “data-driven reform” isn’t the A’s or the Red Sox; it’s the 2017 Houston Astros. It’s cheating. So of course things haven’t improved.

Some reformers think they’ve been defeated by sheer political power, that no matter how convincingly the data speak for a particular success, the powers that be are always moving the goal posts, and the winning ideas are not allowed to spread. And many observers think that a lot of the people who run school systems value votes over student achievement gains.

I have a different take, or maybe an additional take: In the United States, analytics work in ed reform just hasn’t been that good. The numbers crunching has added up to . . . meh. It’s missing something.

Bridge International Academies is Moneyball in reverse. In the K–12 world, data are already omnipresent, but they are mostly misunderstood and misinterpreted, mangled and misused. Bridge’s unsung field officers provide human judgment. Putting that alongside big data is the secret sauce. That, I believe, is the something that has been missing.

We need a new breed of human judgment in schools—not the old intuitive kind of judgment, as in wise elders proclaiming, “I am experienced, and here is what I believe and feel.” We need trusted neutral observers, wise to be sure, but simply and consistently narrating what is going on rather than instilling their pet beliefs, and willing to have their own narratives critiqued and evaluated. Such observers are not expected to solve the problems themselves—that might motivate them to see what they want to see. Instead, these observers can constantly fine-tune the information provided by big data, and the data can, in turn, guide further observation.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me describe Bridge’s two all-beef patties, lettuce, cheese, pickles, and onion on a sesame-seed bun. Then we’ll get back to the special sauce.

Bridge

I worked for Bridge International Academies from 2013 to 2016. I remain involved as an adviser. Notwithstanding the many imperfections of Bridge, including and especially my own errors, I believe overall the organization is a good thing, even a remarkable thing. My wife and I are close with four Bridge alums—Natasha, Grace, Josephine, and Geof, all of whom are now scholarship students at American colleges. In fact, I am dictating these words as I drive to Bowdoin College to pick up Geof to hustle him to Boston’s Logan Airport tomorrow so he can return to Nairobi for the first time in two years. Seeing those four kids thrive and flourish has been a great joy; they’ve seized the opportunities they’ve been given. It makes me wish so hard there were a way to unleash all that latent potential in all of Bridge’s 800,000 children, and the hundreds of millions more in the developing world. Failure to do so is an epic waste.

Bridge is akin to a charter management organization combined with a turnaround organization. In its low-cost private schools, parents pay about $100 a year for tuition. (Schools like these serve hundreds of millions of children around the world. See “Private Schools for the Poor,” features, Fall 2005.) It also works with “turnaround” public schools, in which the government contracts with Bridge’s parent company, NewGlobe, for instructional materials, training, and expertise. These schools are not called Bridge academies, but it’s the same academic team participating.

Operating in Kenya, India, Nigeria, Liberia, and Uganda, Bridge is larger than the 10 biggest American charter management organizations combined. It’s organized as a for-profit company with a public-good mission and is backed by a number of “double bottom line” investors, including Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.

Bridge presents as an ed-reform inkblot test.

If ed reform makes you think attrition, expulsion, colonization, teaching to the test, privatization, and treating teachers badly, you probably won’t like Bridge.

If you tend to like charters, choice, and “parent power” of various types in the American context, you might lean into Bridge.

My purpose here isn’t to persuade you that Bridge is good or bad. My purpose is to tell data lovers that we dramatically underinvest in the companion field of observation and, as
a result, don’t have the big helpful effect on schools that we might.

In Edo State, Nigeria, the field team examines a Bridge experiment aimed at transforming static parent-teacher conferences into back-and-forth conversations.

The Developing World Context

If all you know is American education, here’s some perspective.

The United Nations take on education in the developing world was, until recently, that not enough kids were in school.

More recently, the consensus is shifting toward a different problem: learning outcomes have always been poor, and they seem to be getting worse.

Beyond the sticky problem of getting children into schools lies the challenge of getting teachers to show up and persuading them to stop using corporal punishment. Lant Pritchett, a development economist, has written, in reference to Indian schools, that even when teachers do show up, they might not bother to do their jobs.

“Less than half of teachers are both present and engaged in teaching on any given school day,” Pritchett wrote, “a pattern of teacher behavior that has persisted despite being repeatedly documented.” What’s more, Pritchett noted, a survey of Indian households “found that about 1 out of 5 children reported being ‘beaten or pinched’ in school—just in the previous month.” The study also found “that a child from a poor household was twice as likely to be beaten in a government school as was a child from a rich household.”

Entrepreneurs Jay Kimmelman and Shannon May, who opened the first Bridge academy in Kenya in 2009, jumped on those challenges. Their low-cost private schools had high teacher attendance compared to competing nearby schools. They fired teachers who used corporal punishment (even though some parents liked it).

Pritchett also wrote of an Indian study in which observers visited classrooms to look for “any of six ‘child-friendly’ pedagogical practices,” such as “students ask the teacher questions” or “teacher smiles/laughs/jokes with students.”

“In observing 1,700 classrooms around the country the researchers found no child-friendly practices at all in almost 40 percent of schools—not a smile, not a question, nothing that could be construed as child-friendly engagement,” Pritchett reported.

This one is more complicated.

For years, USAID and agencies in other countries spent huge sums to train teachers in the developing world. Yet careful empirical evaluations rarely found that training efforts alone would raise student achievement.

It was Benjamin Piper who cracked the code for changing teacher behavior. Piper is a longtime doer and scholar at the Research Triangle Institute, or RTI International. His USAID-sponsored projects have sparked big changes in elementary education in certain developing nations.

Piper realized that training alone couldn’t change teachers, because they themselves had attended schools where teachers relied solely on lecturing and rote call-and-response pedagogy. So they had developed a strong inclination to teach that way, too, notwithstanding any professional development from Western do-gooders.

Only scripted lessons—which blocked teachers from their default practice of lecturing even small children for very long durations—seemed to change the classroom dynamic. The scripted lesson or teacher guide is a coercive tool used for a liberal end, essentially forcing teachers to say something like: “Now I am going to stop talking, and you students are going to . . .” read, or write, or talk with one another.

Once Piper had these teacher guides in place, he could layer in highly focused training on how to succeed with this particular style of teaching. Resources mattered, too: students needed real books to hold and read (not an easy thing to provide in many corners of the world).

Those three things—scripted instruction, focused training, and essential resources—added up to Piper’s Primary Math and Reading (PRIMR) program, and later one called Tusome (“Let’s read,” in Kiswali) in Kenya and Tanzania. The student learning gains arising from these programs are impressive (see Figure 1).

The teacher guides are an understandably touchy point. An Atlantic article about Bridge (and not about Piper) is headlined “Is It Ever Okay to Make Teachers Read Scripted Lessons?” Author Terrance F. Ross wrote that the uniformity of the lessons “all but guarantees consistent results,” but:

. . . by its nature, this approach stymies individuality and spontaneity. Dynamic educators who are adept at innovating on the fly and creating unique classroom experiences don’t necessarily exist in the Bridge system. They are eschewed in favor of teachers who can follow instructions well. Bridge’s argument seems to stem from a utilitarian philosophy: Based on Kenya’s dismal public school statistics, it’s better to give all children a basic, reliable education than hope for talented teachers to come along.

There’s great merit to the notion of teacher freedom, but the teaching in non-Bridge, typical Kenyan schools is not based on classroom interactions that spur imagination or critical thinking. Far from it. The incumbent method in the developing world is rote teaching (teachers talk, kids sit, occasionally repeat, and occasionally copy from the board).

Bridge used an approach similar to Piper’s, deploying teacher guides, training in using those guides, and affordable textbooks in classrooms that had often had nothing before.

Bridge also gave teachers electronic tablets on which to access the scripted lessons. The tablets doubled as a way to send data back to headquarters, which became a key part of the strategy.

And then the special sauce: observers like Imisi and Olu Adio in Nigeria, Gabe Davis in Liberia, Faith Karanja in Kenya. Hidden figures. It’s these field officers plus big data, working together, that help Bridge figure out which new ideas to try.

Bridge fails often (fast and slow) but ekes out and stacks up small, aligned wins in curriculum and other areas and walks away from ideas that don’t work out. (See Table 1 for examples of ideas that Bridge has tried, and to find out which ones have worked—and which have not.) The external evidence on Bridge suggests that the learning gains are real and large. I believe future external evidence will bolster these claims, perhaps in a jaw-dropping way.

* * *

Imisi Olu-Joseph comes from a family of educators. She wanted to be a doctor, but her father, who runs schools himself, wanted her to be a teacher. “I majored in microbiology,” she says. “That was the closest thing to medicine he would allow. I started out by teaching in one of his schools. This field-team job is freedom for me. The motivation is seeing the improvements, little by little, and the boys and girls who make noticeable leaps from one visit to the next.”

Imisi was recently promoted at Bridge. She now leads all the school network’s field officers around the world. “I look for exceptionally intelligent people who can appreciate data and think deeply about complexity, how each thing affects another. Oh, and I need to avoid opinionated people, with strong preferences on instructional design. That type sees what they want to see.”

Mike Goldstein is an adviser to Bridge International and the founder of Match Education in Boston.

The post Beyond Moneyball: Data-Driven Education Boosted by Observation and Judgment appeared first on Education Next.

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