The Owl Newsletter

SHELTER FROM THE FINANCIAL STORM

Like you, this owl is looking for some shelter from the storm. The winds are high. The rain is hard. And the forecast is scary. To find shelter, I did what many of you do. I conferred with some wiser owls who had seen many storms before and asked their advice. “How is this storm different from the storms you’ve seen?” I grilled them further. “What did you do before to survive? What worked? What failed?”

Every owl I conferred with had experienced at least 30 years of storms. All survived, but not the same way, and the lessons they offered were surprising. The tougher lesson is how to live more wisely when the storm clears. “Necessity is a mother,” one barnyard owl groused. “But it is the mother of invention, you know.” But first things first. What is the nature of the storm we face?

THE NATURE OF THE STORM

The storm we face is not one storm, but three. The biggest is an international economic crisis. Within that storm is another, a distinctly American economic crisis. It combines credit-market uncertainty, industrial decline in sectors like auto, and a realization that we have lost a way to measure what things are worth and how much risk they contain. Then there is the California storm, a peculiar variety of political stubbornness, financial stupidity, and a collective refusal to face the mess we have made in our own nest. Inside the California storm is a doldrum, a deceptively still backwater where educators huddle. Too often, it is here where irrationality rules and unproductive employees have jobs for life. The doldrums are about to be swept into the super-sized storm that will leave nothing the same. Darwin’s laws are at work, and only those who are able to adapt to this new environment will survive and prosper.

Are districts and schools in PI like banks with declining stock values? When confidence in a bank is eroding, this erosion is measurable by the minute. It shows up as a decline in the value of a share of stock. But when confidence in schools erodes, the evidence is visible only to those with the eyes sharp enough to read election results on bond measures and parcel taxes, turnout numbers on school board races. The softer signals – conversations over neighbors’ fences, dispirited students, demoralized teachers who take jobs in other districts – are present, but this owl wonders whether anyone is paying attention.

THE MOTHER OF INVENTION: FINDING SHELTER IN UNLIKELY PLACES

In the current moment of financial distress, necessity requires creativity, invention, and daring. There is not enough shelter to be found in the usual places: trimming sports, restricting bus transportation, cutting music, reducing cleaning schedules, deferring building maintenance, laying off librarians (again). The only shelter you will find that measures up to the size and duration of this financial hurricane are in the fundamentals, especially those related to time and people and productivity.

This may seem odd, but it seems inescapable. Districts spend 80 to 85 percent of their funds on people. The way to find shelter is to create gains in the productivity of people. This means getting more “bang” for the precious bucks you are trusted with. You do not do this by attaining a perfect score on your Categorical Program Monitoring review. You do not do this by keeping all your schools open, which would make your parents, teachers, and principals pleased as punch.

Rather, you do this by asking more fundamental questions about people: which teachers do you hire; which ones do you keep at the moment of tenure; who do you lay off in a cutback (hint—baseball teams don’t get better by trimming their rosters to keep the oldest or youngest players); which teachers do you force out, counsel out, or fire; how do you team them up in schools; what students do you match them to; at what pace do you expect them to teach; and, in particular, how long do they spend with each student and how long does each student spend mastering each subject?

While I’m in a questioning frame of mind, here are another ten questions. Some are big questions and some are small, but each one addresses the productivity of a conventional practice.

Why must all high school students spend four years in school to graduate?
Why are students placed in grade levels that match their chronological age? (Do they all progress intellectually in line with their ages and does learning advance in stair-step increments?)
If some students get to middle school and still cannot read, if a lot of nonreading adolescents get misidentified as “special education” candidates, and if special education students with IEPs cost districts tons of money, why don’t districts invest in making sure each and every kid can read, regardless of their grade level?
Why are schools not closed when fewer than half the desks in those classrooms have students sitting in them?
Why are teachers assigned to just one school, especially those with a special talent in one field?
Why is the expensive incentive to reduce class sizes in grades K-3 still in place after the research findings questioned their effectiveness?
Why does school start at an hour so early that many students (especially high school students) are not awake enough to learn?
Why is the school year 180 days long?
Why are school buildings empty on weekends, after 5 p.m., and during the summer in some districts?
Why is it legal for a school board to approve lifetime health benefits for teachers who work in the district for two years?

Photograph in the window of a Kaplan Score tutoring center
on West Portal Avenue in San Francisco, November 2008

Take a small hint from Kaplan. They advertise tutoring services to parents, and what they offer is productive use of their kids’ time. This poster claims “1.5 grade levels of progress in 45 hours.” If we discount that productivity claim by half and figure it takes 90 hours to attain, we are left with the following brash challenge to conventional teaching. (It assumes that a school day is six hours long and contains roughly four hours of classroom teaching; that a school year contains 180 days; and that a year in school should produce one grade level of progress.)

Kaplan: Attains 1.5 years progress in the discounted equivalent of 22.5 school days. That’s 1.0 years of progress in 15 days.
Public school: Should attain 1.0 years progress in 180 school days
Productivity multiple: Kaplan claims to be 8 times more productive (actually 16 times, but we’ve discounted it by half.)

PROF. HANK LEVIN, A WISER OWL THAN MOST

I’m just a skeptical owl whose attention has perhaps been too focused on California, so I encourage you to take what I say with a grain of salt and turn instead to a brilliant economist who has 35 years of experience researching public schools internationally. He is Professor Henry Levin, the Jedi master of time. He is the father and mother of the Accelerated Schools movement, which solved the riddle of how to bring lagging students up to speed. The movement now has 1,800 schools in 42 states, which makes Prof. Levin a quadruple threat: researcher, educator, author, and practitioner. (Just for good measure, he was also a school board trustee in Palo Alto USD while teaching at Stanford University.)

In a 45-minute dialogue, Prof. Levin offered superintendents seven suggestions for weeding waste from the management of schools and districts. This owl suggests you listen to the audio recording of this dialogue. (57Mb MP3 File)

If you are not inclined to listen, you can read a two-page summary of his recommendations. His suggestions are actionable and range from easy to hard, from tenure to tracking, and from acceleration to time audits.

SEND ME YOUR IDEAS FOR BOLD RETURNS-ON-INVESTMENT

This financial hurricane is certain to be of historic proportions. It calls for leadership to think and act in equally bold leaps. It is a time for solutions outside the box, and not just one built within the limits of laws and policies, or traditional practices.

This old owl is ready to help you look and listen. Start with Prof. Levin’s teleconference dialogue, then look at the following list of recommended readings and send me your suggestions. I’ll be building a list of unusual ideas for unusual times from district leaders—bold ideas and grand productivity gains. Please also indicate whether you would like to have your suggestions published anonymously.

I’ll be publishing this list in January to show the governor and the legislature that district leaders and school board trustees have a few big ideas of their own that are as big as the storm ahead.

REFERENCES

Other words of wisdom on the current crisis are available from our teleconference audio recordings.

David Osborne. “Budgeting for Results (not Cuts) in an Age of Permanent Fiscal Crisis.” Teleconference. May 2008.

Bob Ryan, “Four Unusually Practical Strategies for Improving Learning and Its Measurement.” November 2008.

Books that may guide you in your quest for out-of-the-box solutions.

Levin, Henry M. and Patrick J. McEwan. Cost-Effectiveness Analysis: Methods and Applications (1-Off). 2nd ed. USA: Sage Publications, Inc., September 2001. (328 pages)

Osborne, David and Peter Hutchinson. The Price of Government: Getting the Results We Need in an Age of Permanent Fiscal Crisis (paperback). New York, NY: Basic Books, 2006. (384 pages)

The people who set the standard for clarity in the way that public sector organizations communicate their financial health are the Government Accounting Standards Board. If you’re ready to take a serious look at the higher standards they’ve set, go to their Web site: http://www.gasb.org/index.html

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