BREAKING: BIPPS Offers Good Advice to School Boards on Superintendent Vetting

It's been a while since the Bluegrass Institute has issued any kind of advice for school board members - or anyone else for that matter - that wasn't dripping with bias, obfucation or thinly veiled political motivations.

But today BIPPS released tips for school board members who are looking for new superintendents, and they are worth considering. I only found two places where BIPPS allowed their biases to slip in. That's pretty good for them.

Superintendent hiring: Advice to school boards

• Tip #1: Understand that some will hide problems – but information is out there


• Tip #2: Research before hiring a search firm


• Tip #3: Make some phone calls yourself


• Tip #4: Check the newspapers


• Tip #5: Resumes are critical – check out everything


• Tip #6: Beware of Secrecy


• Tip #7: Ask informed questions – be respectful, but understand that softball questions won’t help you


• Tip #8: Never forget, this is YOUR responsibility, not a search firm’s, not the public’s


• Tip #9: Consider other resources


• Tip #10: Other considerations


• Tip #11: NEVER FORGET: The focus is on student preparation for college and careers

BIPPS says,

Included are pointers on how to use the Internet to find out about an applicant’s past performance, along with ideas on how to use media sources and suggestions on informed questions to ask candidates to help determine what education reforms they have successfully undertaken.

Richard Innes, the institute’s education analyst, says a lack of due diligence on the front end of a hiring process can lead to embarrassment, and even resignations, later on.

Innes is exactly correct about this. In fact, BIPPS and KSN&C worked pretty well together, in 2007, when the Kentucky Board of Education locked in on hiring Barbara Erwin despite emerging evidence of an impending trainwreck. The Board believed Ray & Associates, their search firm instead of certain prophets of doom and it turned out that the prophets were right.

Here's the postmortem on the Erwin affair from C-J.

A subsequent state board had a similar problem in 2009, but followed one of Innes's tips. When a board member asked a certain blogger I know to look into a rumor about Commissioner finalist Dennis Cheek, that blogger was able to help the board avoid a substantial political problem.

Used

One of the problems with being a moderate is that one tends to take flack from both sides. Another problem is that from time to time, the wrong people agree with you.

Such is the case with this week's misinformation from the Bluegrass Institute.

A post by Tabbitha Waggoner at BIPPS asserts on scant evidence that charter schools are needed and would thrive in Kentucky.

Her evidence: People like choice.
Granted. So what?

Her argument: WKU's Gatton School exists. EKU's Model Lab school exists. She wheedles, saying they operate "essentially as charters" - and therefore they are? The Gatton School's students do well on the holy ACT. Wouldn't it be nice to have a Gatton School in your neighborhood? All you have to do is push for choice. Along the way, she attacks strawmen and uses a few magic words: "teacher-union policies," "bureaucratic practices"... you know the list.

Yes, the Gatton School exists - by specific legislation. But No, it does not have a state charter.

The Model Lab School is a much older design, is funded jointly by EKU and the Madison County BOE and follows state policies. It is not now and never has been a charter school. This has been pointed out to the Bluegrass Institute several times before, but one assumes that since the facts don't support their narrative, they continue to deliberately misinform the public. What this think tank mostly thinks about is politics.

If BIPPS's idea of charter schools is Gatton, then Kentuckians should be prepared to oppose a right-wing charter law that will cream off the best students and send them to schools mirroring Gatton's model of a highly selective, and inherently disequalizing series of offerings. All the rhetoric is about choice for poor families. But the realities are much more suburban.

What Waggoner really does is underscore the powerful impact of adequate funding and a select student population on a school's student achievement scores. But she comes nowhere close to describing how charters would thrive or produce the worthy goal that "all Kentucky students should have equal opportunity to a quality education."

KSN&C is evoked as support for this notion. Waggoner sees my disagreement with Helen Mountjoy's assessment, that Kentucky doesn’t need charter schools because Kentucky offers school based decision making councils, as some kind of admission.

Kentucky education blogger Richard Day admits he’s “been having a hard time seeing how (the SBDM argument is) likely to help.”

In a recent blog on the issue, Day reported that he spoke with John White, U.S. Department of Education press secretary, who indicated that SBDMs would not be an acceptable substitute for charter schools, especially if the commonwealth wants to compete for the education stimulus funds tabbed for release later this fall.

“If Kentucky was not open to welcoming these educational entrepreneurs, that would certainly hurt your chances,” White was quoted as saying on Day’s blog, Kentucky School News and Commentary. “It’s a competitive grant, and other states are welcoming them.”

There is no moral high ground in seeking charter schools for middle and upper class Kentuckians. There is federal money and Kentucky should not be so entrenched as to be shut out. But once the department of education issued its guidelines for Race to the Top grants and it became clear that Kentucky would only lose a few points in the application process, some of the steam came out of the issue.

When I was still a principal, I wanted to convert my school to a charter, to off load some state regulations that I saw as counterproductive to our school's success. But my motivation was selfish. I was only concerned with my 500 kids. What we are discussing now is a state law and that has to work for every neighborhood.

The evidence strongly suggests that charter schools perform roughly as well as public schools. They comprise a highly localized set of good schools and bad schools. Their best feature is also their worst - if a charter school fails, it can be closed quickly. That's good, but it also reinforces the appetite for quick change artists who marginalize the importance of high quality instruction in favor of this year's game plan, and perhaps gaming the accountability system.

Kentucky should discuss a charter school law, but it must be done with a lot deeper thought than we find in BIPPS's argument. Allowing charter schools to tailor their student populations, as some have proposed, would do a great disservice to Kentucky students as a whole. But a charter law that allowed private efforts to improve the education of students in areas where the public schools have failed repeatedly over time ought to be given a good look.

BIPPS has Faith in School Choice - and Creationism

This week the Bluegrass Institute came out in favor of both creationism and Kentucky's school reform - and then compared the two in terms of faith.

BIPPS Communications Director Jim Waters undertook the curious task of rationally comparing the relative amounts of faith required to believe in creationism versus believing in school reform in Kentucky. Waters writes,

You might be surprised to know it takes even more faith for a creationist like me to expect the current bureaucracy to reform Kentucky’s public-education system than to believe the earth, universe, humankind and all life forms happened by accident.

And it takes nearly as much faith to believe Kentucky’s schools will improve without giving parents power where it counts — the right to determine which school gets their children to educate and tax dollars to operate.

To Waters, creationism makes good sense.

Having a localized organizational system of school districts does not.

I wouldn't normally comment on someone's faith - but he brought it up.

I must confess, this position surprised me. I have always taken folks at their word when they described their own political inclinations. Foolishly naive, perhaps. But I had it "on good authority" that BIPPS was a "libertarian think tank." In Waters hands, BIPPS is cast as a faith-based neo-con political effort that would eliminate school distirct organization and move public money into private hands - all while promoting a religious agenda and removing control from local officials. I was immediately suspicious of Water's motives - but perhaps there is another explanation.

Waters finds it "outrageous" that local elected officials are being empowered by state law to decide if and where school attendance boundaries should be allowed to exist - in favor of his proposal that would impose a free-for-all on every local community in Kentucky.

"Parents may send their children to the public school of their choice."

Forget school districts. Forget school board authority. Parents can just send their kids wherever they want.

This dangerous and highly inefficient proposal may sound good to the selfish, politically connected and well-heeled, but consider for a moment how that plan would utterly fail to work in real life.

Imagine a young couple selecting their new home right around the corner from the best school in their community. They have children who grow to school age only to be locked out of their neighborhood school because folks from the next county over have filled the school to capacity. I think I know how those parents would feel. Tough luck, Junior. Where should we move now? Such scenarios would happen repeatedly across the state.

One can only imagine the hostility school officials would face from angry displaced local taxpayers. But Waters seems not to care. They're merely "bureaucrats" after all. Maybe that's why BIPPS also likes the idea of guns on campus. Perhaps such disputes could be settled according to the code of the west.

But we should all appreciate Waters for clarifying where BIPPS stands on issues related to religion and public schools. For all of BIPPS's posturing as small-government libertarians, one may have drawn a wrong conclusion about the neo-con aspirations of the Bluegrass Institute if it weren't for Water's clarifications.

Thankfully Waters offered his readers an alternative way to think about his motives in the form of Hanlan’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

Bluegrass Institute Shifting from Tea Parties to School Choice?

Having gathered a few central Kentucly crowds at recent "Tea Parties," it was surprising to learn today that David Adams of the Bluegrass Institute wants to change the Tea Party name (due to the press' use of an objectional homoerotic slang term involving tea bags) and shift to a new issue.

So Soon?

I've been watching the Tea Parties with a bemused mixture of interest and skepticism:

• Bemused - because of the strange juxtaposition of establishment types, more than a few of whom would have favored police clearing the streets of all protesters in bygone days, now carrying placards;
• Interest - because it is prudent for all Americans to worry about deficits now approaching 70% of GDP; and
• Skepticism - because if Tea Parties were a principled effort they should have started during the Bush administration rather than waiting for Obama.

As it is, Tea Parties smack of partisan free-marketers looking for a new angle that might validate - after the fact - an approach toward unregulated free enterprise that nearly crippled us - and clearly has cost America many years of full productivity.

Curiously, Adams suggests a new strategy and a new issue as early as May.

One wonders if Tea Party organizers sense that the sustainability of such protests is just not there and organizers don't want them to be remembered as an idea that simply fizzled. Otherwise, if it is indeed a strong growing movement - why deflate it now?

Most folks don't know what to believe about toxic assets, credit default swaps and other arcane financial instruments that should have been illegal, but weren't. But Americans did see both Presidents Bush and Obama stand up and tell us that the problem was so bad, that if we didn't stimulate the economy, the whole system could collapse.

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure I saw America flinch.

BIPPS selection of school choice as the new focus for grassroots activism is interesting. I wonder if BIPPS will be able to generate the same amount of passion for school choice from the smaller segment of the population directly impacted by K-12 education. On the other hand, the Obama administration has certainly given them a platform, and perhaps a level, to go after charter schools in Kentucky - and as far as I can tell nobody in the education establishment wants to talk about it.

Finally, Adams recently complained that the Courier-Journal should not stoop to homoerotic slang in describing the Tea Party protests. He's right.

Perhaps, if the Bluegrass Institute did less name-calling and had a better track record of correcting it's own errors it would stand on higher moral ground when expressing its outrage toward others.

BIPPS Corrects Errors

It took a while, but in a note attached to yesterday's weekly audio blast, Bluegrass Institute Communications Director Jim Waters corrected errors pointed out by KSN&C in last week's audio.

A Bluegrass Audio commentary released Monday contained the incorrect date for implementation of the Commonwealth Accountability Testing System (CATS). House Bill 53, which established CATS as the state's testing system, was passed into law by the Kentucky General Assembly in 1998. Also, schools no longer receive funding based on CATS scores.

Waters stopped short of admitting that, as a result, his conclusions were all wrong.

He had used some factually incorrect information...

"KERA...gives money to schools based on their test scores. The higher its students score on CATS the more money the school gets."

as a basis for an argument...

"Therefore, schools have focused class content solely on CATS material."

The conclusion was 180 degrees wrong -not solely because it was based on faulty information - but partly because Waters formed his conclusion before he gathered his data. It's what researchers call pseudo-science.

In fact, the only schools to receive assistance were those that were not performing well on the CATS.

Schools have focused largely on CATS material because a strong state accountability system had put great pressure on schools to produce better numbers. Since school principals were unable to control for serious problems - like insufficient funding to deliver enhanced instructional services or the fact that too many students' home lives negatively affected school performance -they were left with the only tools they had - "motivation" of teachers.

Of course, that system is now gone.

It is only because we had an accountability system that we knew a lot of schools weren't going to make the grade. That prompted some administrative folks to panic and wade into instructional areas with broad "solutions" that they might not have implemented otherwise. They ratcheted up the pressure on teachers to perform at higher levels as measured by the test.

As for BIPPS, factual mistakes and other errors can happen in any human endeavor. It is only proper that Waters made the corrections.

But those errors when added to BIPPS's prior exaggerations of research data - threaten to place BIPPS on the very edge of credible scholarship. And BIPPS uses its role in scholarship as partial justification for its 501 (c) 3 tax-exempt status. If BIPPS is going to claim that its work is based on scholarship, then we are owed at least one more retraction.

On the other hand, If BIPPS is simply a political group expressing its opinions without any particular adherence to the principles of good science - as seems more likely - fine. But claiming to be one thing while acting like another is inherently dishonest and should be guarded against.

Yesterday's retraction is a step in the right direction.