Fordham hides from facts

UPDATE: Fordham has now published our comment on their site, for which we are grateful. See the comments to this article for their explanation.

The Fordham Foundation, one of Ohio's more vocal charter school boosters, has a post on their website defending the high number of failing charter schools. The piece is written by Aaron Churchill, someone we have observed stretching facts and the truth before (Fordham loses its bearings). Like his previous piece's error addled analysis, his latest defense of failing charter schools goes to great lengths to obfuscate hard truths using indefensible "statistical analysis".

Rather than write a post here on JTF, we tried to leave a long comment pointing out just some of the errors in the post. Fordham has decided they would rather that comment be hidden and not be published, so we are publishing it below, in response to a Fordham reader asking us to

Aaron states "The chart shows that a nearly equal number of charters reside in the state’s bottom 111 schools"

Let's just assume that is correct. What if utterly fails to recognize is that there are orders of magnitude more traditional public school buildings than charter schools - so the fact that so many charter school buildings appear in the bottom 111 should be disturbing to everyone, not glommed onto as a point of false equivalence. As an overall percentage of school buildings charter schools dominate the bottom rankings.

Let's look at another claim made by Aaron...

"The fact of the matter is that taxpayers spend less on each child in a charter school then is spent on their district peers."

That claim is contradicted by the Ohio Department of Education (link here:http://www.scribd.com/doc/117636411/ODE-Analysis-of-Per-Pupil-Cost-of-Charters-and-Publics).

"The average of total expenditure per pupil for public districts is $10,110.72.

The average expenditure per pupil for community schools is $9,064. When broken out: For e-schools it’s $7,027. For non-eschool community schools it’s $10,165.

So only when one combines the cost of the laughably cheap (and ludicrously underperforming) e-schools do Ohio's charters look inexpensive - and that's using ODE as a source.

Aaron did a good job, as all charter school boosters do, of obfuscating the facts - which is that the vast majority of Ohio's charter schools deliver a poor quality education at an inflated cost.

Let's close them down and concentrate our energy on the schools that 95% of Ohio's students go to, and maybe learn some things along the way from the few charter schools that are getting it right, instead of this constant non-debate and excuse making about the terrible charter schools we all know exist in very high numbers.

Fordham likes to hide behind their advocacy for charter school accountability and quality, but whenever they are pressed on this, they obfuscate the difficult facts and revert to defending the rotten and the failing. They may talk a good game, but in the end they are no less a charter school booster as White Hat owner, David Brennan. Mr. Churchill's post and decision to avoid a discussion on it are further proof of that.

Fordham losses its bearings

The Fordham Foundation, despite their pro corporate education agenda can often be depended upon to at least present their case in a fair and honest manner. That is until their animosity towards education unions is put on display, as was the case with their support of SB5. But, few posts on their website have lost their bearings quite as much as a post titled "Unionized teacher salaries", by Aaron Churchill.

In this piece, the author seeks to compare the salaries of union teachers in 2 Springfield City elementary schools to a charter school in the same city. Cherry picking 3 schools from Ohio's thousands is a suspect endeavor to begin with, but even with that, the results go awry quite quickly.

First let's take a look at the 3 schools presented to us

Type	Charter	District	District
Name	Springfield Academy of Excellence	Fulton Elem.	Perrin Woods Elem.
% White	16.5	40.8	26
% Black	61	43.3	53.1
% Hispanic	10.9	8.2	2.7
Rating	Academic Watch	Academic Watch	Academic Watch
PI	77.9	79.5	76.8

I’ve selected these schools because of their similar demographics and academic performance (table 1).

Pretty similar: SAE, Fulton, and Perrin Woods all have a majority Black and Hispanic students in their school. (These represent 3 of the 4 elementary schools in Springfield that have a majority minority population.) In addition, table 1 indicates that they had nearly indistinguishable academic results for the 2011-12 school year. All received an “Academic Watch” rating from the state and they all had performance index scores—a weighted proficiency rate—between 77 and 80 (the state goal is 100).

So, that's the rationale for selecting these schools. We're perplexed why racial demographics were the primary matching criteria chosen, especially when they aren't even that similar at all. We're certain it is not racism, as what difference does the racial makeup of the schools matter? So is the author using racial demographics as a proxy for poverty in this analysis?

If one were to look directly at the poverty levels of these 3 schools (which is in the ODE spreadsheet just one more column to the right!), these cherry picked schools suddenly don't seem similar at all. Let's add that data point in.

Type	Charter	District	District
Name	Springfield Academy of Excellence	Fulton Elem.	Perrin Woods Elem.
% White	16.5	40.8	26
% Black	61	43.3	53.1
% Hispanic	10.9	8.2	2.7
Rating	Academic Watch	Academic Watch	Academic Watch
PI	77.9	79.5	76.8
Percent Economically Disadvantaged	85.1	95.4	91.7

As you can see, the traditional schools have up to 10% more poverty than the charter school they are being compared to. Nothing highlights the all too common situation of charter school selection leading to traditional schools being left with more disadvantaged students than this. But the dissimilarities don't end there. Let's add another important indicator into the mix that the author omitted - students with disabilities

Type	Charter	District	District
Name	Springfield Academy of Excellence	Fulton Elem.	Perrin Woods Elem.
% White	16.5	40.8	26
% Black	61	43.3	53.1
% Hispanic	10.9	8.2	2.7
Rating	Academic Watch	Academic Watch	Academic Watch
PI	77.9	79.5	76.8
Percent Economically Disadvantaged	85.1	95.4	91.7
Percent Student with Disabilities	7.1	20.6	17.5

Clearly then, the traditional schools have far larger populations of students with disabilities. Why would anyone be surprised that teachers in schools with higher levels of poverty, and disabilities be more seriously challenged?

The problems with the Fordham piece goes even deeper, and becomes more troubling than simply looking at very bad analysis. Fordham must of intentionally cherry picked schools to use for their performance/salary comparison. Fulton and Perrin Woods are not the only elementary schools in Springfield City.

Why did they not use Lagonda Elementary School, for example, in their analysis? When we add that schools data in, the answer becomes obvious

Type	Charter	District	District	District
Name	Springfield Academy of Excellence	Fulton Elem.	Perrin Woods Elem.	Lagonda Elem.
% White	16.5	40.8	26	67.3
% Black	61	43.3	53.1	14.9
% Hispanic	10.9	8.2	2.7	4.7
Rating	Academic Watch	Academic Watch	Academic Watch	Excellent
PI	77.9	79.5	76.8	90.4
Percent Economically Disadvantaged	85.1	95.4	91.7	87.4
Percent Student with Disabilities	7.1	20.6	17.5	11.4

A school with a similar poverty and disability levels as the charter school selected, but it is obvious why no attention was drawn to Lagona Elementary school - that school is rated excellent. It's hard to argue that teachers are somehow overpaid when your comparison falls down on the criteria of quality and true meaningful demographics.

Before we move away from school demographics, we do want to chastise the author for this nasty, and incorrect comment

This wage premium is nice for unionized teachers, but not so nice for the district they work in—or for the students they (purportedly) educate.

"Purportedly". If the piece he wrote had been dripping in less bile and contempt for unionized educators, he might have noticed that both these traditional schools he erroneously choose to use for his analysis, met their value add - that is - the teachers in these schools didn't "purportedly" educate their students, they simply did.

Mr Churchill owes an apology to these hard working teachers for suggesting they are not educating their students adequately.

But let's address the salary comparisons directly.

The author points out that the traditional school teachers in these 2 elementary schools earn more than their charter school counterparts (which even he characterizes as "pitifully low"). This is true, it's one of the reasons why corporate education reformers want to attack unionized teaching forces, they want to maximize their own profits by underpaying teachers for their work. If quality were a genuine concern surely the argument would be to increase teacher pay in disadvantaged schools in order to attract high quality educators. You will never see a corporate education reformer make this argument.

That aside, Mr Churchill once again fails to compare apples to apples. While teachers in all 3 schools he selected have bachelors degrees, only 10.2% of teachers in the charter school have a masters, whereas 33.3% in Fulton and 42.3% in Perrin Woods have advance masters degrees. Is Mr. Churchill arguing that employees with more advanced educations should not receive higher pay? This flies in the face of all economic theory.

Indeed, Mr. Churchill goes even further

Second, I’m struck by the considerably higher salaries of Fulton and Perrin Woods’ teachers relative the local median income. 22 out of 24 of Perrin Woods’ teachers make more than 1.5 times the local median; and 13 out of 23 of Fulton’s teachers make more than 1.5 times the local median.

You know who else is paid more than their community median - Fordham employees who make over $90,000 a year for part time work, but that aside, are we being told that the median education in the Springfield community is a masters degree? Or is Mr Churchill arguing that everyone should be paid the same in a community regardless of education, experience and the job they are performing? It's a very strange economic argument being made.

We should also consider, as Mr. Churchill tries to pit the Springfield city community against its teachers, that in just 2011, voters of the city overwhelmingly supported their school levy with 67.1% of the vote. That doesn't sound like a community dissatisfied with their teachers or their pay. Quite the contrary.

But finally, what this Fordham piece does demonstrate, beyond the obvious ideological agenda, is a total lack of understanding of how salaries are negotiated. They are not negotiated at the school level, between teachers and the principal, instead they are negotiated at the district level with the democratically elected board. So one should look at the district performance as a whole to make serious judgments as to the quality of education being delivered by Springfield City Schools and its teachers.

Springfield City Schools, despite its many demographic challenges is rated Effective.

Packed Virtual Classrooms

Later today, Apple will unveil its plans for digital textbooks.

Steve Jobs described textbooks as an '$8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction', in conversations with his biographer Walter Isaacson.

Given how much dead tree weight students have to carry around, and how expensive textbooks have become, this is an area ripe for a solution. But as Apple lays out its plans for capturing some of the profits to be had from education, likely with an innovative technology based solution, corporate education reformers have set their sights on using technology to capture profits in an altogether different way.

The Fordham Foundation recently released a paper titled " Creating Sound Policy for Digital Learning, A Working Paper Series from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. The piece begins

Online learning, in its many shapes and sizes, is quickly becoming a typical part of the classroom experience for many of our nation’s K-12 students. As it grows, educators and policymakers across the country are beginning to ask the question: What does online learning cost? While the answer to this question is a key starting point, by itself it has limited value. Of course there are cheaper ways to teach students. The key question that will eventually have to be addressed is: Can online learning be better and less expensive

At that point the paper descends into the usual rote corporate ed stuff, using anecdote to try to capture the costs and quality of virtual education. The total lack of innovative thought is captured in their first graph.

You will clearly note that it is not technology driving the savings, but instead the slashing of spending on educators. The entire difference between a traditional model and virtual model is in the category of faculty and admin expenditures. Stephen Dyer, at his new blog "10th Period", points out that actual e-school spending in Ohio follows this exact model

Over at Innovation Ohio, I helped write and research a report that pointed out Ohio pays these major eSchool operators enough money for them to provide 15:1 student:teacher ratios, $2,000 laptops and still clear about 30% profit.

However, they don't do that. On average, they have 37:1 student:teacher ratios. Ohio Virtual Academy (run by the infamous, national for-profit K-12, Inc.) has a student:teacher ratio of 51:1, if you can believe it. Anyway, of the $183 million Ohio's taxpayers sent to these eSchools last school year, the schools spent a grand total of $27.5 million on teacher salaries, or about 15% of its money.

E-schooling as envisaged by corporate education reformers doesn't rely upon any technological innovation as a means to deliver high quality education, they use the virtual nature of the model to obfuscate the fact that class sizes can become huge. It's hard for a parent to know their child is crammed in to a packed class with 50 other students if he is sat alone in his bedroom. What you don't see, won't hurt, right?

It's never explained how a teacher can deliver quality to such large classes, in a situation where the virtual nature of the classes already make it naturally more difficult and challenged.

We know from facts certain that Ohio's e-schools are appallingly bad. Even the Fordham Foundation itself found e-school to be terrible

Perhaps before we even begin to consider cost, we ought to sort out the very serious problems we have with quality. What does it matter how cheap something is, if it is not fit for purpose? One might even argue, with tongue not so firmly planted in the cheek that Ohio's e-schools are breaking consumer laws

In common law jurisdictions, an implied warranty is a contract law term for certain assurances that are presumed to be made in the sale of products or real property, due to the circumstances of the sale. These assurances are characterized as warranties irrespective of whether the seller has expressly promised them orally or in writing. They include an implied warranty of fitness for a particular purpose, an implied warranty of merchantability for products, implied warranty of workmanlike quality for services, and an implied warranty of habitability for a home.

Two steps back

When a major aspect of your mission is to promote the potential benefits of charter schools and corporate education reform ideas, having to write an accountability report titled "Two steps forward, one step back" was likely a painful prospect. But that is the title of the Fordham Foundation's annual report.

As we detailed in our highly read series "Fordham Exposed" (part I, part II), Fordham sponsored charters have not performed well.

With the results being difficult to spin, especially with the added scrutiny corporate education reformers are now starting to receive, Fordham's report decided to make their results appear more robust via comparison to other large charter sponsors.

By creating a graph that put Fordham at the top of the pile however, it demonstrates how poorly the other large authorizers are performing. If Fordham has taken one step back, their peers have taken two, or even three.

A significant part of the education reform debate revolves around the cost of delivering a high quality, universal education. So it is disappointing to note that Fordham's report does not address the cost of the results they have produced. One can only surmise, by the decision to omit this data, that those results are not flattering either. We would call upon the Fordham Foundation to publish cost data in its annual reports going forward.

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Fordham’s 2010-11 Sponsorship Accountability Report

Fordham Exposed Part II

In part I of Fordham Exposed we introduced you to the conservative corporate education reform organization running some Ohio charter schools, and two of its biggest boosters, Terry Ryan and Michael Petrilli. Now let us take a closer look at this Foundation.

You can see the list of Fordham's charter schools here. We knew a short while ago that Fordham was publicly talking a good game, but playing a weak one, when the Ohio Department of Education released the ranking of charter sponsors. Of those 38 ranked sponsors, Fordham was down in a lowly 24th position. You don't rank that low by running quality schools and delivering quality education to students.

This view was further confirmed when ODE released their preliminary school rankings in mid November. The following table is the performance of Fordham's Ohio charter schools from that ODE report, the ranking is out of 3456 schools, and sorted with best first.

2011 RANK	SCHOOL NAME	SCHOOL CLASS TYPE	2011 LRC RATING
1792	Columbus Collegiate Academy	Middle School	Effective
2661	Sciotoville	High School	Cont. Improve.
2687	Phoenix Community Learning Ctr	Elementary School	Effective
2716	Dayton Leadership Academies-Dayton View Campus	Elementary School	Cont. Improve.
2840	Sciotoville Elementary Academy	Elementary School	Cont. Improve.
2977	KIPP: Journey Academy	Middle School	Effective
3052	Springfield Acad Of Excellence	Elementary School	Academic Watch
3188	Dayton Leadership Academies-Dayton Liberty Campus	Elementary School	Cont. Improve.

Almost 2,400 students are in Fordham charter schools that rank in the bottom half of all of Ohio's schools. Why hasn't Fordham been able to translate SB5 like tools into educational success in the many years they have been sponsoring these charters?

They are unencumbered by unionized teachers, state mandated regulations, all the things that should add up to a corporate education reformer's brightest dream. Yes their results are poorer than the majority of Ohio's traditional public schools, who allegedly are held back by unions, bad teachers, and outdated rules.

How can Fordham possibly have any credibility on the issue of education reform when their corporate reform ideas when implemented are delivering such real world lackluster results? When their performance is worse than the majority of traditional schoold they would seek to supplant.

It surely cannot be on account of money. The Fordham Foundation spends an inordinate amount of money on education reform. According to the latest publicly available tax return - their 2009 IRS form 990 from Guidestar, Fordham has over $37 million on hand, and spends over $4 million a year on its programs and advocacy.

Indeed, in 2009 alone, according to the same document, Fordham spent $485,000 on management of its Ohio charters, $745,000 on "National reform efforts", $163,000 on Ohio specific education "reform efforts" and a further $571,000 on Ohio legislative lobbying and what even they deem as "provocative analysis".

But lobbying and "provocative analysis" aren't the only largesse that Fordham spend their vast resources on. As employees of Fordham such as Mr. Ryan and Mr. Petrilli rail against education associations and teacher pay they have both been significant recipients of the Foundation's generosity.

Name	2007 (link)	2008 (link)	2009 (link)
Mr. Terry Ryan	$73,905 for 20 hours per week	$83,700 for 20 hours per week	$91,100 for 20 hours per week
Mr. Michael Petrilli	$73,905 for 20 hours per week	$83,700 for 20 hours per week	$91,100 for 20 hours per week

Their annual increases, for this part-time work, represent 13.2% and 8.8% up to 2009. One can only imagine what these two gentlemen are earning in 2011 for the part-time work of railing against teachers and their unions. But when you're earning almost twice that of the average Ohio teacher, and doing so for part-time work, all the while receiving up to double digit increases in pay, year on year, these kinds of comments are hard to swallow.

And to be sure, you can find examples of unions—of police, firefighters, even teachers—who have agreed to freeze wages or reduce benefits in order to protect the quality of services or keep colleagues from being laid off. But they are the exceptions that prove the rule.

They hare hardly the exception to prove any rule, real or as is the case here, imagined. Ohio public employees, especially teachers, have been responsible for saving taxpayers over 1 billion dollars in wage and benefit concessions.

So where does all this leave us? It leaves us wondering why an organization that espouses corporate education reform ideas cannot successfully implement them in their own lackluster schools, and why they biggest and most vocal boosters think the gravy tastes better on their plate than on any others. It is this then, that is the pure essence and purpose of corporate education reform.

If education quality actually mattered to Fordham they would expend more energy figuring out why their schools are under performing so as to use those lessons to actually benefot the debate over educstion reform. Instead what we have is "provocative analysis" to defend failing ideas while attacking public school teachers and their union, who in the majority are producing far high quality results at a fraction of the cost.

Fordham Exposed Part I

Since the blistering repudiation of SB5 by Ohio's voters last week, supporters of the extreme measure have wisely fallen silent. Whether it's the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, NFIB, Ohio CPA's, or even the legislative architects themselves, all have decided that the best course of action after this stinging rebuke is to instead return to silently seeking ways to undermine working people.

That is, all except one. The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a conservative corporate education reform organization.

In one post on their website, only a day after the election, their Vice President for Ohio Programs & Policy, Terry Ryan proclaimed "You’d be crazy to see SB5’s defeat as a defeat for Ohio school reform". He is of course talking about corporate education reform - the very thing voters rejected the day earlier.

Mr. Ryan tries hard to minimize the loss, and pass all credit to safety forces for causing the rejection of SB5. But even while mentioning the $30 million spent, he fails to recognize that teachers and education support professionals contributed over 1/3 of the campaign funds used to defeat SB5, provided thousands of the volunteers who made calls and knocked on doors, and featured in a number of widely broadcast ads, ads such as this one

You'd be crazy to believe voters didn't reject corporate education reforms.

The Fordham Foundation has decided to double down on its undemocratic opining, with a new article from Michael J. Petrilli their Executive Vice President. This new article, designed to be incendiary is titled "Dealing with disingenuous teachers unions: There are no shortcuts". Despite being an uncharacteristically offensive piece of writing published by the Foundation, it's also disgraceful in its call for voter nullification. As if voters had not rejected SB5 by a wide enough margin, Mr. Petrilli pushes further to join with the far right tea party in his calls, perhaps even betraying the cause of his organization.

So where do reformers go from here? One option is to be even more radical: To go after not just collective bargaining but school boards too. Make all of the key decisions at the state level. Negotiate with the teachers around a statewide approach to pay and benefits, the whole kit and caboodle. (Marc Tucker’s “New Commission” made such a proposal several years ago.) That’s an attractive long-term strategy, but voters—averse to big, sudden changes—will need some time to get used to the idea.

Indeed. The push to eliminate collective bargaining has been going on since 1958, and voters are still rejecting the idea overwhelmingly. Mr. Petrilli might have a very long wait.

Perhaps these petulant responses from a conservative organization immediately after such a big loss should be expected, but this is not what surprises us.

What surprises us about the Fordham Foundation's response to SB5 is the simple fact that of all the supporters of SB5, they have always been in a position to prove its merits, but have failed to do so.

You see the Fordham Foundation sponsors 8 Ohio charters schools.

Here at JTF we have posed the question to charter operators and SB5 supporters many times - if you believe SB5 and its education reform tools are so effective at producing quality educational outcomes, why is it that charter schools in Ohio that already have all these tools at their disposal fail, consistently, to produce these results today? We have yet to receive an answer.

Join us in part II of Fordham exposed as we take a look at the failures SB5 like policies have had at Fordham sponsored schools and the hypocrisy of its most vocal boosters.