December 11, 2019

School Insecurity

Originally published in Democracy Journal on December 11, 2019.
——–

In September, in a small school district located in the Missouri Ozarks, computer printers started mysteriously shooting out ransom letters. The pages instructed their recipients to send an email in exchange for a code, which would then show that hackers had taken control of their files. The district would have to pay up, the hackers said, to get the data back.

That same month, a small school district located in the Pocono Mountains of Northeastern Pennsylvania was hit by a different ransomware attack, forcing schools to close and the district’s 3,000 computers to shut down.

The damage from these attacks turned out to be relatively limited, but it came on the heels of bigger cybersecurity breaches this past summer, like when computers in the Syracuse City School District—one of the largest in New York—were also crippled from a ransomware attack. The school district was locked out of its own computer system, and ended up paying the hackers a $50,000 insurance premium to get back in. The same month, Louisiana’s Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards declared a state of emergency after a malware virus attacked several schools, knocking out their computers. This declaration enabled the state to pool experts and resources from the Louisiana National Guard and the Louisiana State Police, among others.

Cybersecurity attacks on schools are new, coming with increasing aggression and frequency, and schools’ ability to withstand them varies dramatically across the country. Sometimes it’s criminals looking to make easy cash or simply inspire fear—capitalizing on schools’ lack of sophisticated defenses. Sometimes it’s members of a school community carrying or causing the data breaches themselves.

The risks presented are not just mild inconveniences. Recognizing schools’ dependence on computers and Internet access, administrators have grown acutely aware that their institutions are now extremely vulnerable to lengthy closures, crippled operations, and costly litigation. According to the K12 Cybersecurity Resource Center, U.S. schools reported 122 cybersecurity incidents in 2018, resulting in the theft of millions of taxpayer dollars, stolen identities, tax fraud, and altered school records. Experts believe this figure significantly understates the real number of attacks, as many incidents are not even reported publicly.

“Is it as bad as it sounds?” said Lee McKnight, a cybersecurity expert and professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. “It’s worse. It’s a complete mess, and anyone in IT who hasn’t been hit is not sleeping well because they know there’s a target on their backs.”

While the available data is not great, experts know the problems have grown even more severe in the last twelve months. Doug Levin, president of EdTech Strategies, and author of the K12 Cybersecurity Resource Center report, told me when I spoke to him in September that he’s already tracked more than twice as many incidents this year as compared to 2018, with a particular increase in third-party vendor breaches and a spike in ransomware attacks.

When it comes to the risk of a mass shooting in school, politicians and the media have been known to greatly exaggerate the chances of future attacks. Despite the wall-to-wall panicked coverage, particularly following the horrific Parkland, Florida massacre in 2018, a study released this year from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found multiple-victim school shootings are still extremely rare events, accounting for less than 2 percent of all youth homicides in the country.

But that’s not the case with school cybersecurity attacks.

Amelia Vance, director of the Education Privacy Project at the Future of Privacy Forum, a D.C.-based think tank, agrees the “risk is definitely not exaggerated.”

Vance started working on student privacy issues about six years ago, and says she observed a real shift in the school cybersecurity conversation around fall 2017, when rural school districts in Iowa, Montana, Texas, and Alabama were all attacked by an international cyberhacking organization called The Dark Overlord. A few months earlier The Dark Overlord earned national attention for releasing forthcoming episodes of “Orange Is The New Black,” a popular Netflix show, after Netflix refused to pay their ransom demand. The Dark Overlord took to Twitter after this incident to suggest other television networks would face similar fates. “Oh, what fun we’re all going to have,” it wrote.

By autumn, the international cybercriminals had moved on to public schools. Parents in the Johnston Community School District in Iowa suddenly began receiving threatening text messages, sent by the hackers who had stolen student data. Examples of texts included “I’m going to kill some kids at your son’s high school” and “Your child is still so innocent. Don’t have anyone look outside.” Other texts sent to the parents went further, citing their children by name and school.

Nobody knew who was behind this harassment at first, and the Johnston school district shut down the following day. One day after that The Dark Overlord claimed responsibility for the attack on Twitter, and dumped student names, addresses, and telephone numbers online so as to make it easy for “any child predator to easily acquire new targets,” they claimed. The data had been compromised by a third-party vendor that worked with the school district.

Around the same time in Montana, more than 30 schools in the Columbia Falls School District closed after data was stolen, with parents again receiving graphic threats on their phones. The hackers demanded $150,000 in bitcoin in a seven-page ransom letter, and told a local reporter that they attacked the school district to rouse fear and make the government look bad. “The quaint, small, backwoods region of the US like yours is prime hunting grounds,” The Dark Overlord said. “This incident is the last thing you will expect to happen here.”

Their motivation for this particular attack appeared, in part, to be an effort to punish the FBI. “We’re escalating the intensity of our strategy in response to the FBI’s persistence in persuading clients away from us,” a Dark Overlord hacker told the Daily Beast at the time.

Like in physical kidnappings, the FBI discourages schools and other institutions from paying ransom in response to cyberattacks, noting it’s no guarantee an organization will even get its data back, and it can embolden other criminals to target more places. But sometimes school districts feel they have no choice but to pay up in order to resume operations.

Levin of EdTech Strategies has worked in education technology for upwards of the last 25 years, doing jobs like helping connect schools to the Internet, developing digital textbooks and tests, and serving as executive director of the State Educational Technology Directors Association, which represents technologists working in state education agencies. “Cybersecurity never came up,” says Levin. “in the 1990s and 2000s, not at all.”

“I used to talk to superintendents and they’d say, ‘All we have is student names and email addresses, and how children scored on this quiz, nobody cares about that information,’” added Vance.

“They’d think because they didn’t have credit card numbers, or Social Security numbers, nobody would try and steal it. That attitude has changed dramatically.”

Keith Krueger, the CEO of the Consortium for School Networking, a national nonprofit that represents technology leaders working in U.S. public schools, agrees. “We’ve administered a national survey to district technology leaders for the last seven years and cybersecurity was never on the list of top priorities,” he tells me. “About three years ago it became a number 3 priority, last year it became number 2 priority, and this year it was the number one stated priority.” For people in charge of technology in schools, Krueger stressed, “Cybersecurity has become front and center, and is no longer seen as something we should maybe do, but something we have to address.”

Levin started noticing more local news stories about school cyberattacks near the end of 2016—stories like hackers posing as superintendents and sending phishing emails to business office staff. The fake superintendents would claim there had been an emergency and that they needed to be sent a PDF of all the school employees’ W-2s as fast as possible.

Levin grew more curious, and soon he realized there was no comprehensive data available on how common these attacks actually were. He started to compile the incidents he could find in the news and other public sources, and today he manages an interactive map of nearly 700 reported cybersecurity-related incidents dating back to January 2016.

While international cybercriminals tend to generate headlines, unknown actors cyberhacking for malicious purposes actually comprised just about a quarter of all the data breaches Levin tracked. By contrast, in 2018, he found that just over half of all digital data breach incidents in public schools were directly carried out or caused by members of staff or students in the affected schools.

“Mostly when staff are involved it’s because they made a mistake, but occasionally it’s because they have an axe to grind, like sometimes you have disgruntled employees who were fired so they release or take data they shouldn’t,” he says. “Sometimes you have more sophisticated hacking from students, who break in to access, review or change student records.”

Levin thinks what he has tracked is much lower than the actual number. Local news coverage has declined dramatically, and even if school districts report an incident to a state agency, that doesn’t mean that incident is ever reported publicly. In North Carolina, for example, Levin noticed that the state’s Department of Justice had released a report on 2017 data breaches and its figure was ten times greater than what he had counted in the news. But when Levin’s colleague filed a Freedom of Information Request to learn about the other incidents, they were largely stonewalled.

In the last two years, Illinois, Texas, and Missouri have passed laws requiring states to notify parents if there has been a school data breach, but most states don’t have such disclosure mandates.

Despite a growing recognition that cybersecurity is a real issue, addressing cybersecurity concerns is not so easy—particularly for strapped, small school districts.

“If you look at this issue over time, hospitals were getting hit by ransomware several years ago,” said McKnight of Syracuse University. “You don’t hear about that so much anymore. You know who has money to improve their security systems and has the funds to hire and train staff? Hospitals.”

Schools, by contrast, are typically much more constrained in how they can afford to respond. This basic reality is also what makes schools such easy targets for hackers looking to make a quick buck, even if schools may be less likely to have the kind of credit card information that cybercriminals typically go for. “School districts are often a city’s largest employer, and many times they lack technical expertise while managing a lot of staff and data,” said Krueger. “In a lot of ways schools are just low-hanging fruit,” adds Vance.

The challenges are particularly acute for smaller districts, most of which lack the funds to hire an individual or a team of experts dedicated to cybersecurity. Nearly two-thirds of U.S. school districts serve fewer than 2,500 students.

Another challenge is simply getting tiny, rural districts to accept that they, too, could be attacked. “Why this little school in Akron, Ohio?” asked Kelly Kendrick, the technology director for the Coventry Local School District, after its schools closed in May due to a malware virus. “It has really opened my eyes to how data of any kind is marketable, sellable.”

This realization Kendrick describes is key, Vance agrees. Yes, a criminal might not be able to run off with your bank account information if they hack a school district server, but “a lot of information is private because we don’t want our neighbors to know it,” she said. “Like maybe I don’t want my friends to know that I have trouble reading, or back in the second grade I slapped someone.”

Could part of the problem be that schools just have too much data? Is our data-driven policy culture leaving schools overly and unduly exposed?

It’s certainly true that schools, under real pressure to be innovative and forward-thinking, often adopt new education technology tools that some families fear are too invasive, or too vulnerable to hacking. For example, some schools use e-Hallpass, which digitally tracks student visits to the bathroom, the nurse’s office, and elsewhere. The company emphasizes that it is a more sanitary and efficient way to administer hall passes, that it is committed to student privacy and does not use GPS or other locating tracking services. But those assurances haven’t put everyone at ease.

Some parents have been organizing across the country to stop states from sharing personal student data with for-profit data-mining vendors. The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy was founded in 2014 by two parents in New York and Colorado, and advocates have since written letters to Congress to strengthen federal student privacy rights, disseminated resources to parents, and developed student privacy principles for schools, education agencies, and third-party vendors.

Yet while student privacy concerns around ed tech tools add more complexity to the cybersecurity situation, experts say they are overlapping but distinct issues. Even with strong student privacy laws and enforcement, and even if schools cut down or eliminated the use of apps that store chat logs and other student data, school districts would still have serious cybersecurity concerns to deal with.

“I don’t think it’s an issue of collecting too much information,” says Eva Vincze, a faculty member in the cybersecurity and police and security studies programs at George Washington University. “It really just goes back to that issue of people thinking we’re not big enough for anyone to care about us, because we’re small.”

That’s not to say there aren’t safer measures schools can take with the data they collect. Cybersecurity experts like McKnight say there should be basic “cyber hygiene” such as data backups and storing information on cloud servers.

“Data collection is important, but schools should only be collecting the information that they need to answer particular questions, and some of that is mandated by federal law,” says Vance. “Basically schools should figure out what data is so sensitive that they shouldn’t have it at all, figure out at what point data should be deleted, and figure out who in a district should have access to what information.”

Another challenge is figuring out how to get the right advice. It’s not easy for districts to attract and retain skilled cybersecurity experts, since those professionals can usually earn much more money out in the private sector. “It’s not unusual for technology leaders to cut their teeth in education and then go get a better paying job elsewhere,” said Levin.

And even if all districts did somehow find the funds to hire cybersecurity experts at top dollar, there aren’t actually enough trained people in the country to take those jobs on. “We’ll never have a Chief Technology Officer for every school district, the private sector can’t even do it,” said Levin. “It will have to be some sort of coordinated response, sort of like what Louisiana did this summer but not as an emergency.”

“Not every district needs a cybersecurity expert,” Vance agrees. “What is needed is useful resources and templates and almost like plug-and-play supports that outside organizations and the government can provide.”

Lan Jenson, CEO of Adaptable Security, a nonprofit, is trying to be part of that plug-and-play vision. She founded her organization in 2017 with the goal of helping governments, schools, and small businesses navigate cyber-threats without breaking the bank. Unlike the school IT specialist who then goes to work for the private sector, Jenson started her career handling cybersecurity for a well-heeled financial institution.

“But financial companies have major resources, and governments and small businesses and schools are left behind,” she explained. So Jenson and a group of similarly motivated experts started Adaptable Security with the hope of providing assistance to more vulnerable institutions. “A lot of these leaders have some money, but they don’t have so much money, and they are trying to figure out what it would look like if we pool our resources,” she said. “They are willing to do something bigger, something shareable, and even though they may have that vision, everyone is so busy and wears multiple hats, so they don’t have anyone to be the coordinator. We’re trying to be that.”

So far Adaptable Security is working with 12 counties and a few core cities in the Bay Area, and Jenson hopes to scale the public-private model up nationally if it proves effective. In early October, her group sponsored the second annual Cybersecurity Symposium for Smart Cities, a free-to-attend, volunteer-led conference hosted in San Jose for school districts, small businesses, nonprofits, and local governments. Last year 250 people turned out, and this year more than 500 did—reflecting the growing awareness and concern.

McKnight of Syracuse University thinks public-private partnerships are the best way to move forward, especially since federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security are not the most popular with all communities across the country.

“We need more federal investment, but in partnership with nonprofits,” he said. “This is a democracy issue, a civil society issue. Things have to change because there’s no way every little school district will be able to do it on their own, and there’s no way to channel help from the federal level directly down everywhere—you need some new pluralistic entities to come in the middle.”

And there has been recent movement on the federal level. In the fall of 2018, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer called on the Department of Homeland Security to investigate the more than 50 New York school districts that were hit that year with a type of cyberattack known as Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS). These attacks caused Internet outages within schools by overloading the systems with traffic, though no information was actually released.

In June, House lawmakers passed a bill—the Department of Homeland Security Cyber Incident Response Teams Act—to establish a permanent team of security specialists that agencies could call on when their technology gets hacked. A Senate version was approved in late September. Senator Schumer, who backed the bill, also recently called on the FBI to help school districts and local governments better respond to attacks. “It’s time to hit ‘control-alt-delete’ on ransomware and take a megabyte out of hackers,” he said in a particularly corny statement.

Also in September, the Consortium for School Networking submitted public comments to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), requesting a change to the Schools and Libraries Program, more commonly known as E-Rate. At nearly $4 billion annually, E-Rate is the biggest federal subsidy program to help public schools and libraries manage the cost of connecting to the Internet. But cybersecurity is not among the list of eligible E-Rate discounted services, and the Consortium for School Networking argues that the requirements and limitations of E-Rate heavily influence how schools then deploy basic cybersecurity tools.

The organization told the FCC that while the federal government should not be expected to cover all aspects of cybersecurity, “several simple changes to the E-Rate program would have a very profound impact on the ability of school systems to protect and defend their networks and systems from cyberattacks.” For example, the Consortium for School Networking requested an expansion in the range of firewall services that can be reimbursed through E-Rate. Right now schools can reimburse for “basic firewall” services, but that category excludes a number of features typically found under the banner of “standard firewall” services—like anti-virus and malware protection, and data loss prevention.

As school districts move forward, leaders will have to be on guard for security grifters who are looking to sell expensive, ineffective products that capitalize on communities’ growing fears.

“There will always be markets for that, and there are always security services out there to scare you or just to convince you to buy things,” says Vincze of George Washington University.

“My fear is that without real leadership support, without IT staff with capacity, these security tools will probably not be put to their best use, and will be expensive,” says Levin.

While cybersecurity experts have been stressing that the problems are serious and demand action to mitigate risk and damage—at the end of the day, they say, no school should expect to be completely risk-free.

“Bad things happen,” says Vance. “We need to be humble. If Target and Wal-mart and big credit card companies can be hacked, so can a school district.”

Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged bitcoin, cybersecurity, hacking, public schools, ransomeware, schools
1 Comment

January 27, 2018

St. Paul Companies Are Spending Their Tax Breaks on Super Bowl Sponsorships. Teachers Are Crying Foul.

Originally published in The Intercept on January 26, 2018.
———

With more than a million people headed to the Twin Cities over the next 10 days for the Super Bowl, local corporations, St. Paul school district officials, and civic leaders are bracing for what may be a public relations nightmare: the first teachers strike in St. Paul in over 70 years.

The St. Paul Federation of Teachers, nine months into its contract negotiation, authorized a strike vote for January 31. The move comes amid the union’s unconventional strategy of linking declining school funding to corporate tax cuts and narrowing in on local companies on the Super Bowl Host Committee as a potential source of funding for the cash-strapped school system.

The argument the teachers are making in their contract negotiations is straightforward. Cuts, they say, are not the answer. The school district’s financial situation can never really improve until corporations start paying their fair share. In particular, teachers are focusing on the companies that make up the founding sponsors of the Super Bowl Host Committee – companies the union says have avoided paying $300 million in state income taxes over the last five years alone.

The companies say they have made up for some of that with donations, but the generosity has limits. According to a public records request filed by the teachers union, only seven of the 25 Super Bowl Host Committee founding partners donated to the St. Paul public school district last year – for a total of $1.1 million. All 25 companies, by contrast, paid $1.5 million to be founding Super Bowl partners.

Nick Faber, president of the St. Paul Federation of Teachers, stressed that the 3,700 educators in his union do not want to go strike. What they do want, he said, is to see the school district commit to supporting changes to the state tax code, under which corporations have enjoyed massive breaks in recent decades.

Last March, the St. Paul Public Schools announced that it faced a $27 million budget deficit, necessitating staff and program cuts to a district that had already been slashing art, music, and gym, with nurses, librarians, and social workers in short supply. It’s a familiar, vicious cycle – the state reduces its funding for public schools, which also lose revenue when students leave for charters, and districts suffer even more cuts and budget strain.

Minneesota-executive-total-compensation-1516908237-e1516918770646-1024x623.jpg

December 2017 report: SACKED: How Corporations on the Super Bowl Host Committee Left Minnesota’s Public Schools Underfunded and Under Attack.
Chart: St. Paul Federation of Teachers

The wealthiest Minnesotans have seen their taxes decline over the last four decades. Back in 1977, they paid 18 percent in state income taxes. Over the next 36 years, the legislature reduced that top rate to 7.85 percent. In 2013, the state legislature bumped it back up to 9.5 percent, a move strongly opposed by the state’s influential business leader coalition. With the decline in income taxes has come a drop in real per-pupil state aid, which remains “significantly below” what districts received in 2003. While some of the major local corporations make voluntary philanthropic donations to public schools, the teachers union says those contributions have never come close to the amount the businesses have saved in reduced taxes.

Chart: North Star Policy Institute

To try and shift the conversation around public education, the St. Paul Federation of Teachers has been highlighting tax havens, loopholes, corporate subsidies, and executive compensation. For example, in a report it published in December, the union noted that 3M – a technology company headquartered in St. Paul – holds $1.4 billion in offshore tax havens, including in places like Hong Kong, Panama, and Switzerland. Likewise, the union said, UnitedHealth keeps over $700 million in overseas havens like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands, citing a 2017 report by the Institution on Taxation and Economic Policy.

Minnesota-income-tax-chart-1516908243-e1516918737197-1024x696.jpg

December 2017 report: SACKED: How Corporations on the Super Bowl Host Committee Left Minnesota’s Public Schools Underfunded and Under Attack.
Chart: St. Paul Federation of Teachers

Kathryn Wegner, an education studies professor at Carleton College and a parent of a student who attends Groveland Park Elementary in St. Paul, has been active in supporting the union’s efforts to highlight corporate tax avoidance. She has joined teachers for rallies outside of banks downtown and been educating other families and community groups about the fiscal situation.

“At my kid’s school, we lost the kindergarten teacher aides, then a librarian, then the music teacher, and our four kindergarten classes went down to three, bumping up class sizes,” she told The Intercept. “Parents are getting upset and wondering how to make sense of it, and understanding the historical context around corporate tax rates has been really useful to grasp the disinvestment.”

The teachers union has been asking corporate leaders to meet with them since October, and finally last week, they had the chance to sit down with representatives from EcoLab and U.S. Bank. At those meetings, the union asked for the companies’ partnership in pressuring state lawmakers to adequately support public education – specifically the state’s unfunded special education mandates.

“They said no,” said Faber. “The only way the state could really close the gaps would be to tax them more.”

U.S Bank did not return The Intercept’s request for comment.

Mesa Denny, an Ecolab spokesperson, told The Intercept that the company does not consider the situation “to be a dispute,” and it is “merely trying to correct the inaccurate and untrue information” promulgated by the teachers union.

“Ecolab believes that strong public schools are vital to a healthy community, and that’s why we have supported the St. Paul Public School System for more than 30 years,” Denny said. “Over the last five years, the Ecolab Foundation has provided more than $3.6 million to the St. Paul Public Schools, supporting strategic imperatives outlined by the school district leadership. Given that we are headquartered in St. Paul and many of our headquarters employees live in St. Paul, we are happy to devote our foundation dollars to these efforts.”

But those donations, Faber said, are not enough to bridge the school funding gap that was created in part by tax cuts. “Given how much school funding has declined, philanthropy just can’t have a real transformative change when we’re so underfunded on a basic level,” he said. “We can’t just accept little grants from corporations; we have to start thinking differently.”

The teachers want the school district to join them in pressuring local corporations to pay more. So far, they say, district officials have refused. Laurin Cathey, human resources director for St. Paul Public Schools, did not return The Intercept’s request for comment.

To address the budget deficit, the school district has proposed that teachers agree to applying to “Q Comp” – a voluntary state program established in 2005 that theoretically could bring up to $9 million to St. Paul schools. But even if St. Paul did apply, the state already distributes all the money it has allocated for the program, so no money would flow to St. Paul unless the legislature decided to appropriate more money. And even if the state did bump up funding, 22 Minnesota charter schools and school districts are ahead of St. Paul in line for the money.

Tyler Livingston, acting director of school support at the Minnesota Department of Education, told The Intercept that St. Paul would not be allowed to jump ahead of the other districts waiting for money if it applied for Q Comp. “The law says explicitly that applications are treated in the order they’re received,” he said.

The union says it is not holding its breath that the state will increase Q Comp funding, especially not during an election year. “The money just isn’t there,” said Faber, “and even if it were, Minneapolis is a Q Comp district and they have a budget shortfall about the same as ours or greater, so obviously Q Comp isn’t going to really address this problem.”

In addition to corporations, the union wants to see wealthy nonprofits, like local colleges and hospitals, pay their fair share in taxes. According to St. Paul’s mayor, a third of the city’s properties are exempt from property tax.

One option is to establish a so-called Payment in Lieu of Taxes, or PILOT, program – something that exists in more than 200 cities, towns, school districts, and counties across 28 states. PILOTs are essentially initiatives to induce tax-exempt institutions to make voluntary payments to the cities in which they’re based. A civic task force formed last year to explore the idea and released a report in September, emphasizing that PILOTs “cannot – and should not – be viewed as a ‘solution’ to St. Paul’s significant budget gaps or long-term financial challenges.” A representative from Citizens League, the Twin Cities public policy group that published the report, did not return a request for comment.

“It’s really frustrating to our members that while HealthPartners” — a local health care provider and insurance company — “avoids taxes and doesn’t want to talk to us about PILOTs, they’re charging us through the roof for our health insurance,” said Faber.

The potential upcoming teachers strike would be the first since 1946, when the St. Paul Federation of Teachers went on strike for six weeks – the first organized teachers strike in U.S. history. The union also voted to strike in 1989, but ended up reaching a last-minute agreement that mooted the strike.

The St. Paul teachers union is considered among the most progressive teacher locals in the nation. Since 2013, it has joined with other progressive unions to organize under the banner of “Bargaining for the Common Good.” Inspired by the Chicago Teachers Union strike in 2012, unions like St. Paul’s have taken a different approach to their contract negotiations, partnering with local organizations to bring a wider range of community-oriented demands to the bargaining table.

Last spring, the union released a report to evaluate how much progress it had made toward reaching the goals it set for itself in 2013. While highlighting some real accomplishments — including reducing student-teacher ratios for low-income students and expanding full-day pre-K programming — the SPFT acknowledged that without more sources of revenue, it would be impossible to really tackle its agenda.

The report helped form the demands the union has since been pushing for in its contract negotiations. The union’s very first proposal is in line with its pre-Super Bowl campaign: a commitment from the school district to push major local corporations and nonprofits to increase revenue for St. Paul Public Schools and support “changes in state tax policy to make these contributions sustainable over time.”

“We’re hoping to see some movement from the school district so we don’t have to take the next step,” said Faber, meaning the strike. Faber says the district can continue to accept corporate charity, but it needs to push them to also “be better neighbors.”

That’s a very different kind of pressure, he said, “and that’s hard work, but I don’t think we have any other choice.”

Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged 3m, corporate tax cuts, ecolab, executive compensation, Football, Minneapolis, Minnesota, public schools, St. Paul, strike, Super Bowl, tax avoidance, tax havens, taxes, teacher unions, teachers
Leave a comment

November 30, 2016

The Right Way to Assess Charter Schools

Originally published in The American Prospect on November 30, 2016.
—-

On November 8, Massachusetts residents went to the polls not only to cast their vote for president but also to weigh in on a hotly debated question regarding charter schools. The ballot initiative—which proposed lifting the state’s cap to allow establishing up to 12 new charters or expanding existing charters annually—had generated a heated battle for months, with voters inundated by mailings and advertising from both sides. About $34 million was spent on these efforts, making them easily the most expensive ballot initiative campaign in state history. Teacher unions provided nearly all the money to fight the measure, while out-of-state donors and Boston’s business community shelled out most of the money in support.

The debate mostly went like this: Supporters of the ballot measure, known as Question 2, argued that charter schools in Boston have proven extremely effective for disadvantaged students. They pointed to research studies that show students who attended Boston charter schools, compared to students in Boston’s traditional public schools, were more likely to graduate high school in five years, more likely to attend and complete college, and less likely to enroll in remedial education. In addition, researchers found attending Boston charters led to significant gains in state tests, AP tests, and the SAT.

Supporters of charter expansion also pointed to long charter school waiting lists as evidence that families, especially poor families, desperately seek better school options. If the ballot measure failed, proponents insisted, it would be because wealthy white suburbanites were too selfish, or short-sighted, to let low-income African-Americans escape their failing public schools. Polls conducted throughout the campaign did reveal higher support for charter school expansion among black and Latino voters.

Critics of the charter school ballot initiative challenged the legitimacy of the waitlist figures that supporters wielded—pointing to evidence that the stats were substantially inflated. Critics also pointed out that the research on charter school effectiveness was dramatically less impressive outside of Boston, and this statewide ballot measure would impact schooling all over Massachusetts.

But the most salient argument critics levied—and one that Question 2 supporters never figured out how to overcome—was that the ballot measure might expand opportunity for some students, but would ultimately drain money and resources from those students who remained in traditional public schools. Supporters tended to dismiss these concerns, saying that per-pupil dollars would “follow the child” so there would be no real negative impact on other students who didn’t attend charters. But a number of experts, including Boston’s chief financial officer, said the fiscal strain would be tremendous. This became the rallying point for Question 2 opponents—and the primary reason the ballot measure failed 62 percent to 38 percent, with cities all over the state, including Boston, voting in opposition.

Throughout the campaign, many Massachusetts voters said that they found the news coverage confusing. Someone would make an argument, a new report would come out claiming the opposite, so-called experts would go back and forth about it, and the media would often do little more than cover the “he says, she says” discussion—leaving residents unsure of what the truth really was.

Today, the Economic Policy Institute is publishing a report by Bruce Baker, a national expert in state school finance, charter schools, and teacher and administrator labor markets, that he hopes will help improve the level of public discourse the next time residents and political leaders are asked to make such high-stakes education decisions.

Baker’s report looks at the fiscal impact of charter school expansion—an area that has received surprisingly little academic attention, despite the charter sector’s 25-year existence, and the growing public awareness that this is a critical issue to understand.

I covered the topic back in June, and at the time the only real research study available on the issue was one published in 2014 that documented the negative fiscal impacts that traditional public schools in Buffalo and Albany had experienced from charter schools proliferating. Since then, David Arsen, an education policy professor, published research finding that the biggest drivers of fiscal distress across Michigan school districts were declining enrollment and revenue loss, particularly where school choice and charters were most prevalent. Moody’s Investor Service, a bond credit rating agency, has also been sounding the alarm about the severe financial distress a growing number of school districts face as charter schools expand.

For Baker, the debate over whether charter schools are seen as good or bad was for a very long time “one-dimensional”—based on whether charters produced marginal increases or decreases in students’ standardized test scores. The debate over whether to lift Massachusetts’ charter school cap, Baker says, was more “two-dimensional,” in that people talked about both academic impacts and some fiscal tradeoffs. But still, the parameters of the fiscal conversation were limited, and Baker says he hopes his new report will provide a framework for a more “multi-dimensional” discussion of tradeoffs going forward.

So what does a multi-dimensional discussion look like?

“If we consider a specific geographic space, like a major urban center, operating under the reality of finite available resources (local, state, and federal revenues), the goal is to provide the best possible system for all children citywide, given the resources available,” Baker writes. “That is, resources should be used most efficiently and equitably to achieve the best possible system of schools for all children.”

Baker suggests moving the conversation away from the individualistic, consumer-choice narrative that market-driven reformers have promoted over the past two decades, and towards one that centers public education as a collective responsibility for communities to provide as efficiently, and equitably, as they can.

In an interview with the Prospect, Baker emphasizes that we need a far better understanding of all the costs and benefits associated with running multiple, competing school systems in a given space—public policy questions that are surprisingly ignored on a regular basis. He cites transportation costs as one example that rarely gets attention when leaders decide whether or not to open more charter schools.

“If we’re saying that driving kids two hours here, and one hour there, is creating liberty of choice, which some people simply like as a policy, and we’re also getting some marginal test score gains—well, we have to be clear about how much we’re spending to get those things,” he says. “We have to ask, could we be getting similar test score gains, and similar favorable public opinion for a better price for more students? We’re not even bothering to take those measurements and to ask those questions.”

Baker says that before leaders decide to open new charter schools, they should take into account the inefficiencies created from having multiple transportation systems, duplicative administrative overhead costs, additional financing fees associated with alternative capital investments, and any transition costs that arise from creating new school systems. Baker wants to see leaders wrestle with whether it’s possible to achieve comparable gains by investing in programs and services in existing public schools. Do the gains of charter expansion outweigh the costs? Is it possible to design a more equitable and efficient system by other means?

Economic Policy Institute president Larry Mishel says he hopes this report will lead to greater attention paid to the impacts of unbridled charter school expansion, especially under Donald Trump’s presidency.

“We would like the focus to be on what really matters—giving the students the support they need to make great learning possible, which involves their homes, their families, their neighborhoods—and to integrate those concerns with schooling,” Mishel says. “We’ve had a 25-year history of being distracted by issues of governance. We see charters as an evasion of the core questions.”

Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged charter schools, charters, education, education reform, public education, public schools
Leave a comment

June 6, 2016

Charter and Traditional Public Schools Fight Over Money

Originally published in The American Prospect on June 6, 2016.
—-

Last month, a teachers union-funded study in Los Angeles sparked a furor when it reported that the city’s charter sector—which educates 16 percent of L.A.’s public school students—drains upwards of $500 million a year from the district’s school budget.

In a brief accompanying the report, the teachers union and its allies charged that L.A.’s charter school explosion “limits educational opportunities” for more than 500,000 public school students, and “imperils the financial stability” of the district. Education reform advocate Peter Cunningham shot back in a blog post that the study’s premise that charters siphon money from traditional public schools “is like arguing that a younger child deprives an older child of parental attention.”

Such school budget fights are not just happening in Los Angeles. In cities all over the country—from Massachusetts, to Missouri, from Florida to Pennsylvania, from Washington state to Maryland—charters and local school districts are clashing fiercely over who gets what funding. Districts say charters steal their money, leaving them unable to properly educate the students who remain at their schools—very often those who are the most expensive to educate, like children with disabilities.

Charter advocates counter that districts’ financial woes began long before charters came on the scene, and students who seek alternatives shouldn’t have to suffer just because districts and unions face budget and organizational crises. Money should “follow the child” school choice supporters say, meaning per-pupil tax dollars should be directed towards whichever school system a student wishes to attend.

Charter school policy discussions often devolve into political battles that pit advocates armed with competing research studies against one another in arguments over academic impact. In some cities, like Boston and New Orleans, students attending charter schools have demonstrated significant test score gains. In others, the academic results have been no better than those in traditional public schools. And in some cases, charters have yielded worse results than the district schools.

The research examining charter schools’ academic effectiveness will continue indefinitely, but it is concerns about their fiscal impact that are becoming increasingly charged. As the pressure to expand charter schools continues to mount, and the budgetary health of local districts continues to decline, teachers, administrators, parents, and activists on both sides of the charter school divide are facing off over a dwindling resource: money.

Intensifying the heated political clash between charter schools and traditional school districts is that overall spending on public education, for all schools, has fallen. In 2015, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank, found most states provide less financial support for public schools than they did before the Great Recession, and in some cases, much less.

“Even as we’ve come out of the recession, heels are dug in, and nobody is really considering putting in additional funds,” says Bruce Baker, an expert on school finance.

Funds are not only shrinking, but districts are hard pressed to manage costs that are “fixed” or “stranded” when students leave to attend charter schools, experts warn. Charter advocates say that as money follows the child, districts should figure out how to adjust to new fiscal realities. But it’s not always so easy to reduce certain expenses, at least right away, say researchers who have studied education funding. The cost of heating a building, for example, is the same for a classroom of 15 students as it would be for one of 18 students.

Similarly, a district that has lost only a few students from each grade can find it difficult to reduce the number of school employees. In 2013, Moody’s Investor Service, a bond credit rating agency, released a report which concluded that a small but growing number of school districts face severe financial stress as charter schools proliferate, specifically because these districts can’t reduce their costs as quickly as they lose revenue. This has forced already struggling districts to make further cuts to programs and services, and in some cases, to shut down schools entirely.

In 2014, education policy experts Robert Bifulco and Randall Reback co-authored a paper on the fiscal impact of charter schools, noting a dearth in existing research on the topic. They looked at Buffalo and Albany, two cities with relatively large concentrations of charter schools, and with public school districts facing stagnant, and shrinking student enrollments. The two concluded that charter school expansion produces negative fiscal impacts for school districts, yet that such harm can be somewhat mitigated by better coordination between charters, districts, and states. Bifulco and Reback found that, in general, closing schools can be the most effective way to manage some of the fiscal strain produced by charter growth, but that such closures are “politically contentious undertakings.”

Still, given that research shows money matters a great deal in education, many charter critics believe it is neither wise nor ethical to gamble that cost cuts will wind up improving student learning.

Still other academics suggest tight budgets may actually help boost student achievement. Ron Zimmer, an education researcher at Vanderbilt University, has said it’s possible that fiscal strain on district budgets could spur competition, potentially helping all students. Still, given that research shows money matters a great deal in education, many charter critics believe it is neither wise nor ethical to gamble that cost cuts will wind up improving student learning.

When the charter school expansion first started to take off, some states freed up transitional funds to help school districts cope with declining enrollments and fiscal fallout as students left for charters. Such transitional aid began “as a sort of compromise” between charters and district schools says Reback. Yet many of these compromise measures were reduced or eliminated once the recession hit.

For example, in Illinois, state law once provided a three-year, declining payment to districts to help them manage their budgets as charter enrollment grew. According to Kasia Kalata, the external affairs manager at the Illinois Network of Charter Schools, the state offered impact aid to support school districts with declining enrollments, but phased out the policy in 2009.

Similarly, in 2007, Michigan began to provide some categorical funding to districts with declining enrollments. But these allocations were never fully funded, and by 2012, the state eliminated them altogether. Michigan also lifted its charter school cap in 2011, leading to rapid charter growth.

“Right now you could open a charter school, for almost any reason, in any location, regardless of what that will do to district schools,” says Peter Joseph Hammer, a law professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. He says Michigan’s charter law, and the elimination of the state’s charter cap, has just been “devastating” to traditional public school finances. While the categorical grants that Michigan once offered provided some help, Hammer says even those measures were always “very small relative to the need” and mostly enacted to quiet critics.

Pennsylvania used to reimburse local districts up to 30 percent of their charter school costs, but in 2011, the state’s Republican governor eliminated these partial reimbursements. This was a loss of more than $240 million across the state, including over $110 million for Philadelphia alone.

Laws governing pension participation for charter school employees vary from state to state. Charters, though, have generally not been around long enough to accumulate their own unfunded pension liabilities. The question now is: do charters share responsibility to help pay down the pension legacy costs of area school districts?

Monique Morrissey, a pension expert at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, says there is no reason to exempt charter schools from paying unfunded liabilities that are no more the public schools’ fault than they are the charters’. “In fact, I would say that even if charter schools are allowed to opt out of a pension system, they should be required to help pay down the legacy costs to maintain a level playing field,” she says. “Otherwise it creates a downward spiral, where every public school has an incentive to convert to a charter and/or every family has an incentive to choose a better-funded charter school, leaving fewer and fewer students—and less and less funding—in the regular school system to cover the legacy costs.”

In Morrissey’s view, the legacy costs are owed by taxpayers, not students in either regular public schools or charter schools. Thus, she says, “if funding is supposed to follow the students, legacy costs should be taken out of the equation and considered part of the overall budget, not something owed by certain schools and not others. Otherwise, students in regular public schools are effectively provided with less education funding than those in charter schools.”

There have always been disagreements between charters and traditional district schools, but Susan Spicka, the interim director of the advocacy group Education Voters of PA, says that losing those charter reimbursements in 2011 greatly exacerbated tensions between the two sectors. “We support the charter reimbursement and we think it’s a valid argument that, yes, you do have some costs you can’t get rid of right away just because you have fewer children,” Spicka says. “There should be some type of compensation [for districts] to handle those costs.”

Not everyone agrees. Such academics as Marguerite Roza and Jon Fullerton say that policies designed to help districts cope with the effects of shifting student enrollments “weaken the incentives that should drive change and adaptation.” Roza and Fullerton question the idea that schools have all these “fixed costs,” and argue that districts should think more seriously about cheaper alternatives like online schooling, defined-contribution plans, and modified tenure systems. Only by “adopting more nimble expenditure structures,” they have written, can districts feasibly adapt to a changing landscape.

Other “fixed costs” that tend to receive far less attention in conversations about the fiscal impact of charters are the billions of dollars owed by states and districts in pension obligations—and what effect the expansion of charter schools means for local districts saddled with these payments.

Unfunded pension liabilities are the estimated value of benefits earned by employees minus the assets set aside to pay them. Unfunded liabilities can arise because required contributions have not been made in full, or because actuarial assumptions have not been met. States and districts with large unfunded liabilities are now scrambling to find the dollars to pay up, resulting in painful cuts in other areas, including salary reductions for current teachers.

While some unfunded pension liabilities are due to market fluctuations, including sharp stock market declines in 2002 and 2008, leading economists say the most severe cases are due to politicians’ failure to keep up with employers’ share of pension payments over many years (most public-sector workers also contribute toward their own pensions). Instead of setting aside money for future retirees, political leaders opted to defer their responsibilities, borrowing against the next generation of public school students and taxpayers.

Though some education reform advocates have dismissed the idea that districts can’t sufficiently downsize when students leave for charters—they chalk the problem up to bureaucratic recalcitrance—many people acknowledge that such expenses as pension commitments simply cannot be scaled back when student enrollment shifts. “Lifetime health benefits and defined-benefit pensions, sometimes guaranteed decades ago, have created ongoing costs for districts that are unconnected to revenues and enrollment and cannot be easily reduced,” Roza and Fullerton write.

Others disagree.

“The approach of the incumbents—the unions, the administrators—is to chain new teachers to the Titanic because they don’t want to let anyone escape,” says Michael Podgursky, a school finance researcher at the University of Missouri. “These young teachers, charter school teachers, TFA teachers, are cross-subsidizing the pension plans, so [the incumbents] don’t want to let anyone escape.”

He acknowledges that leaving districts to handle those costs alone as charters expand might make things more difficult for traditional school districts. But he says charters “didn’t make this mess.”

Josh McGee, a prominent pension reform advocate at the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, also thinks it would be wrong to ask charters to help pay down legacy costs, though he says it’s true it could be “cumbersome” if local districts have to pay the bulk of those pension liabilities alone. “But charter schools didn’t contribute to that legacy debt, nor can they raise funds from local taxpayers,” McGee says. “Charging charters for the unfunded liabilities that they weren’t around for is just a way to tax them and reduce their state aid.”

McGee says there is an argument to be made that local taxpayers should bear some of the pension costs, but suggests that states pick up the bills in order to mitigate any financial harm to school districts. Currently, according to Keith Brainard, the research director for the National Association of State Retirement Administrators, the source of the employer contribution varies across the country, ranging from local districts paying the full cost, to states paying the full cost, to “everything in between.”

Still, Brainard says, it would be fairly unusual for states that don’t currently pay the employer contribution to absorb those costs back from districts, as McGee suggests, though they could increase aid in other ways. In some places where states do currently pay the pension costs, like in Illinois, legislators are even trying to unload their pension obligations right back onto the backs of local districts. (The only district Illinois does not pay the pension contributions for is Chicago Public Schools.)

Some charter operators have begun to explore how they might extricate themselves from their state pension plans. “Charter schools are a cash cow for the pension plans, and once you’re in, it can be hard to get out—which is what a lot of operators face now,” says Podgursky. “As the costs are going up and up and up, many are saying ‘hey, we want out of here’—though generally escaping is hard.” In an effort to avoid adverse selection, pension plans do not typically allow individual schools to opt out.

As a result, some charter operators are turning to the courts. In 2013, charters in Georgia argued to the state supreme court that they shouldn’t be responsible to help pay down debt they didn’t create. Georgia’s high court agreed, and ruled that charters cannot be asked to share in the burden of paying down unfunded pension liabilities.

To complicate things still further, the question of whether charter employees should be eligible to participate in state pension plans remains unsettled. “They’re private employees for some things, like collective bargaining, but public for other things, like pensions,” notes Podgursky. Since 2011, the Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department have been scrutinizing this issue, and working to determine whether private charter teachers are “governmental” enough to participate in state plans. Asked to check on the status of this guidance, the IRS told The American Prospect that, five years later, it still has not been finalized.

For districts saddled with pension payments, the consequences can be severe.

“If the total payroll of the pension plan is slower than expected, by virtue of slow growth in the number of employees or slower growth in salaries, then there are fewer dollars available to fund the plan,” explains Brainard. Essentially, if charter schools do not participate in their state plan, either by not contributing to it as employees or not helping to pay down legacy costs, then there are fewer available dollars to pay down existing debts—obligations that cannot be “downsized” through layoffs or school closures.

In the absence of increased state and federal funding, tense battles over school spending are likely to be handled in piecemeal—and controversial—fashion. In 2015, for example, the Philadelphia School Partnership, a local philanthropic education reform group, offered to pay the Philadelphia School District $25 million in order to take the issue of stranded costs “off the table.” Partnership leaders wanted to push for more charter schools, without having to contend with school district worries about their fiscal impact. But the school district said the group’s offer was too low—generous, but insufficient to cover the yearly stranded costs they’d bear if more students were to leave for charters. Local advocates also protested the organization’s offer on democratic grounds.

“It would be a terrible mistake to take the money,” Susan Gobreski, the former executive director of the Education Voters of PA, told Newsworks at the time. “We cannot let benefactors make decisions like that. I’m very concerned about how much pressure is being put on the district to make decisions that are not in the best interest of the district or most of the kids in Philadelphia, and certainly not in the interest of Philadelphia as a community. This is ideology gone wild.

Tensions surrounding funding for the charter and traditional public school systems are not going away, and indeed are likely to grow more serious over time. While Bifulco and Reback offer some policy suggestions for ways to help mitigate financial stress as charter schools expand—such as constraining when students may enroll in charters in order to help districts plan their budgets more systematically—right now ideological divisions have left the two sectors at a stalemate. Charters market themselves as ways to “escape” failed school districts, touting their autonomy and independence. Traditional school districts resent charters for wooing away their students, and now fear charters are hollowing out their budgets. The bitter divide between education sectors has blocked cooperation and solutions. As the bickering over money continues, more and more public school students will likely cram into overcrowded classrooms, studying in schools without basic resources like textbooks, computers, teachers, and guidance counselors. With fewer and fewer dollars to go around, the price for policymakers’ impasse will invariably be paid by students.

Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged budgets, charter schools, charters, education, education reform, fiscal battles, pensions, public education, public schools, unfunded pension liabilities
Leave a comment

September 11, 2015

Outsourcing Substitute Teachers in Philadelphia Gets Off to a Bad Start

Originally published on The American Prospect’s Tapped blog on September 11, 2015.
——
Last spring, officials from the Philadelphia School District announced plans to contract out substitute-teaching services, saying they could not effectively manage the responsibilities in-house. At the time, approximately 60 percent of substitute teaching jobs were filled daily, and officials said a private vendor would be able to fill more open positions. Naomi Wyatt, the chief talent officer for Philly public schools, said they paid more than $18.6 million annually for substitute teaching expenses, including reimbursement costs for traditional teachers who fill in when subs cannot be found.

The announcement effectively meant that the district would seek to use non-unionized substitute teachers that they could pay at “market-rate.” It eventually hired Source4Teachers, a New Jersey-based company that provides schools with substitute teachers, substitute paraprofessionals, and substitute support staff. The company works in nearly 200 districts throughout the U.S. and dozens locally, but Philadelphia School District is its largest client.

Though the cash-strapped urban district denied they were contracting out to save costs, the pay differences for substitutes between last year and this year are substantial. Source4Teachers pays between $75 and $90 per day for uncertified substitutes, and $90 to $110 for credentialed ones. By contrast, the district had paid $126.76 for uncertified substitutes, and $160.10 for credentialed ones. The biggest difference is for retired substitutes: the district had paid retired subs up to $242 daily, depending on their educational degrees and college credits; under Source4Teachers, retired educators receive the same rate of pay as all other teachers.

“They assured the teachers that their pay would be ‘similar’, that was the word they used,” said retired teacher Kenneth Schamberg to The Philadelphia Inquirer in July. “Since when is a 61.9 percent pay cut similar?”

The new academic school year started this week, and The Inquirer reported today that Source4Teachers is off to an embarrassing start. On the first day of school, it had filled only 11 percent of open substitute teaching positions, which meant 477 city classrooms did not have teachers. The rate and number of vacancies were roughly the same on Wednesday and Thursday, too.

Owen Murphy, a spokesperson for Source4Teachers, said they hope their “learning curve will soon go away” and that they will produce more teachers fast. So far, the firm has just 300 workers credentialed and ready to take on substitute teaching jobs, but Murphy says hundreds more are currently in the midst of applying. He also said he expected far more substitutes who worked for the district last year to apply to work with Source4Teachers, but so far that hasn’t happened. They hope to eventually have a pool of 5,000 substitutes ready to call on for work.

Wyatt said that other big urban districts like Baltimore, Cleveland, and Detroit also outsource substitute-teaching services.

The president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, Jerry Jordan, suggested that district officials intentionally manufactured a substitute teaching shortage in order to outsource the jobs. He referenced a 2012 Boston Consulting Group report that recommended privatizing the positions. Jordan told The Notebook, a non-profit education news site in Philadelphia, that he knew of qualified substitute teachers who were not called in to work.

“It’s unclear how much money this move will save the School District. But we have no doubt that this will have a tremendous negative impact on educator morale, which is already at an all-time low in Philadelphia,” Jordan wrote. “These are the kinds of actions that, in the long run, will severely compromise the ability of our educators to create positive learning environments for our children.”

Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged #Phled, education, funding, Philadelphia, public schools, teacher unions, teachers, unions
2 Comments

August 6, 2015

A New Course: Larry Hogan wants to change Maryland’s unique charter school laws and bring in more charters, but will kids suffer?

Originally published in Baltimore City Paper on August 5th, 2015.
__________

Baltimore City Paper cover story

At the end of 2014, just weeks after Larry Hogan won a surprise victory in the gubernatorial race, the governor-elect announced that he would push to expand Maryland charter schools once in office.

“We shouldn’t be last in the nation in charter schools,” Hogan declared—referring to Maryland’s spot in the state ranking system designed by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS), an advocacy organization that promotes charter schools around the country. According to NAPCS, Maryland has the nation’s “worst” charter law. The Baltimore Sun editorial board, echoing NAPCS, has said Maryland boasts one of the “weakest” charter laws in the United States.

In late February and early March, legislators in Annapolis listened to testimony related to charter reform bills that Gov. Hogan introduced in the House and Senate. Supported by the Hogan administration, a coalition of charter school operators, and national education-reform advocates, the bills met fervent opposition from teachers, principals, and community members.

“I don’t care what the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, a lobbying group out of Washington, D.C., has to say about the charter school law in Maryland or where they rank Maryland relative to their own biased standards. Neither should you,” testified Megan Miskowski, a speech language pathologist at Patterson Park Public Charter School. It’s Maryland’s strong law, she argued, that explains why Maryland charters have never wrought the level of fraud and abuse so prevalent in places such as Minnesota and Louisiana—states that receive high marks from NAPCS. “Who are they to define what is best for Maryland children?” Miskowski asked. “We do not answer to them.”

The Maryland Charter School Act passed in 2003 and the first state charter schools opened their doors in 2005. A decade later roughly 18,000 students attend 47 Maryland charters—34 of them concentrated in Baltimore City. A version of the Public Charter School Improvement Act eventually passed, but it was substantially watered down from Hogan’s original proposal, and many believe he’ll push a stronger law again next year. The heart of the debate centers on competing visions for the future of public education, and whether one believes Maryland has the best charter law in the country or the worst.

The publicly funded but independently managed schools known as charters have grown significantly since the first one opened in Minnesota 23 years ago. Today more than 6,700 charters exist in 42 states and Washington, D.C. and their numbers are climbing. Albert Shanker, then-president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), first proposed the charter school idea in 1988; the influential union leader imagined a new kind of school that could serve as a laboratory for innovative and experimental education practices. The hope was not only to serve kids within charters who might benefit from alternative educational models, but also to carry newly discovered best practices back into traditional schools for all students to enjoy. In Shanker’s vision, charter teachers would still be unionized district employees, but certain labor regulations would be relaxed to promote greater innovation.

Maryland’s charter culture sets it apart from most other states in several ways. First, under the law all Maryland charter teachers are considered public school employees and represented under their district-wide collective bargaining unit. While this actually most closely resembles what Shanker had imagined, few states today adopt this particular model. According to the Center for Education Reform (CER), just 7 percent of all charter school teachers nationwide are unionized.

Another distinctive characteristic of Maryland charters has been a general commitment to innovate within the district, as opposed to outside of it. In other states, the law may allow for multiple charter authorizers, such as churches, universities, or nonprofits. In Maryland, however, only the local school board can authorize charter schools. “I’d say the strong desire [of Maryland charters] to work within the school district is fairly unique,” says Joceyln Kehl of the Maryland Alliance of Public Charter Schools, a newly formed coalition of charter operators around the state. “Maryland is hugely pro-union and Democratic, so that’s just our context,” she adds.

Additionally, Maryland charters must comply with a greater number of state and local regulations than charter schools in other states. While detractors of Maryland’s law argue that this creates an inflexible environment for the independent schools to operate in, supporters point out that Maryland has not had any of the kinds of problems related to fraud, abuse, and mismanagement that charter schools in states with decreased regulation have had. “It is true that Maryland charter school law provides more oversight than many other states,” testified Deborah Apple, a charter school teacher at the Baltimore-based Wolfe Street Academy. “It is also true, however, that our charter school system is more effective than most.”

A stronger level of oversight, a close relationship with the school district, and unionized charter teachers illustrate the uniqueness of Old Line State charters. The vast majority of schools are considered “mom and pop” charters, meaning parents or former local educators founded them, as opposed to some of the larger national charter management organizations (CMOs) that have developed presences in other cities. According to an Abell Foundation report released this year, many high-performing CMOs have expressed reticence or disinterest in coming to Maryland given the conditions in which they’d have to operate. While the Maryland charter law has facilitated the growth of strong schools with little to no fiscal and academic issues, the question is whether such growth is sufficient, and whether the state’s law should change in order to entice more CMOs to expand into Maryland.

Baltimore’s 34 charter schools educate 13,000 of the district’s 84,000 students. Bobbi Macdonald, co- founder of the City Neighbors Charter School, is one of Charm City’s veteran operators. City Neighbors was one of the first charters to open up in 2005, and since then Macdonald has opened two more schools. Reflecting on the evolving dynamics between Baltimore charter operators and the district, Macdonald describes years of intentional relationship building. “I don’t believe that school systems are made out of steel, they’re made out of people,” she says.

In 2004, after the charter law passed and before the first schools opened, Baltimore’s new charter operators formed a coalition to organize and advocate for their collective interests. This coalition grew increasingly formalized as the years went on. “The work of the coalition became really focused on defending our autonomy and the rights of children in charter schools,” says Macdonald, who served as the coalition’s co-chair for the first six years.

Many charter operators spoke favorably, even nostalgically, of Dr. Andrés Alonso’s six-year tenure as city superintendent, which ended at the end of 2012-2013 academic year. “Dr. Alonso had a clear vision of wanting to provide a portfolio of school options for families, and to create opportunities for innovation and then replicate those practices,” says Allison Shecter, the founder of the Baltimore Montessori Public Charter School, one of the city’s most popular charters. “I think when Dr. Alonso was here we had a really strong relationship and participated in a lot of ways on many different levels,” says Macdonald.

Since Alonso’s departure, the relationship between charter operators and the district has grown more strained. “I’d say it’s a challenging relationship. It’s not a partnership unfortunately,” Shecter says. “We’d like it to be a partnership but in order for it to be a partnership there needs to be consistent and ongoing communication back and forth around policies that may impact charters.” Many operators say they feel the district is neither accountable nor transparent, which fuels growing levels of distrust.

One issue charter operators repeatedly raise is that they believe the district short-changes them when it comes to per-pupil funding. Under state law, the district must provide “commensurate” funding between traditional schools and charters. Currently, the district allocates $7,300 per traditional school student, and $9,400 per charter student—which is supposed to take into account that Maryland charters have to pay for the cost of their facilities, programming, salaries, and other school-level costs, which the district pays for in traditional schools. However, the formula that the district uses to come up with these amounts is unclear, and operators are convinced that what they’re getting is too low. Charter operators believe that they should be getting closer to $14,000 per pupil. Debates around these dollar amounts grow very charged.

Not everyone at charters agrees the district is shirking its funding responsibilities. “Charters still receive more per pupil, even after those extra costs are covered,” says Matthew Hornbeck, the principal at Hampstead Hill Academy, a charter located just south of Patterson Park. “Everyone, with the exception of some of the charter operators, knows that.” Hornbeck, who has served as his school’s principal for 12 years, has been outspoken about what he sees as a district funding formula that unfairly favors charters.

“I was a charter operator and I absolutely knew we were getting more than traditional public schools,” adds Helen Atkinson, the executive director of Teachers’ Democracy Project, a local organization that helps teachers engage in public policy and develop more social justice curricula.

Jon McGill, the director of academic affairs for the Baltimore Curriculum Project, the city’s largest charter operator, describes the relationship between charters and the school district headquarters on North Avenue as “overall harmonious” but says he does wish the district would be more transparent about how about how exactly it spends its slice of per-pupil funding. He thinks charters “lose the PR game” because the public sees them as always asking for more money. One reason the funding issues get so heated, McGill suggests, is because some operators have taken huge personal risks to open charter schools, and feel they need more reassurance that the district truly supports their efforts. “Some people have 30-year mortgages to worry about,” he says.

While for the past decade the story of Baltimore charters has mostly been an intra-district struggle, Gov. Hogan’s rise to power signified a turning point for the Maryland school-choice movement.

The legislation Hogan introduced would have dramatically changed the charter law passed in 2003. His proposals included provisions to exempt charter school employees from the district bargaining unit, as well as from many state and local requirements such as teacher certification. Hogan’s bill would have enabled charter schools to compete against traditional schools for state public construction money, and the bill would have required districts to explicitly define “commensurate funding” to mean that charters should get 98 percent of the per-pupil amount that traditional public school students receive, leaving 2 percent left over for district administrative expenditures.

“It did take us by surprise,” says Kehl. “As a charter sector, we were not expecting legislation this year, and we’re grateful that Governor Hogan finally wanted to cast an eye on the charter sector.” While charter operators around the state met with legislators and held school meetings to discuss why they supported Hogan’s bill, Kehl acknowledges that their advocacy “wasn’t as robust an effort had we been really prepared for it.”

Once news of Hogan’s charter bill went public, Maryland charter teachers began to organize together in new ways. In Baltimore, teachers convened and decided to form the Baltimore Charter School Teacher Coalition. Educators broke up into committees to strategize and implement an organized political response to the bill.

Corey Gaber, a sixth-grade literacy teacher at Southwest Baltimore Charter School who was active in the coalition, says part of the reason they formed their group was because they were dissatisfied with the pace and quality of the Baltimore Teachers Union’s (BTU) response. “We felt like we needed to reach out and inform teachers about what was going on and we didn’t feel like the union was doing it effectively,” he says. Gaber acknowledges that among Baltimore charter teachers there exists a “constant contradiction of feelings”—in some ways they are dissatisfied with the current union leadership, but on the other hand, teachers are proud to be being unionized district employees and deeply value their protections. With fellow charter teacher Kristine Sieloff, Gaber wrote an Op-Alt for City Paper (“The injustice of a two-tiered education system in Baltimore City,” March 31) and Gaber created and helped to circulate a petition that garnered hundreds of signatures from both charter and traditional public school teachers.

“The interests of traditional teachers in charters and public are exactly the same right now,” says McGill, who thinks the proposed bill would have created deep divisions between Baltimore educators.

The BTU helped circulate another petition for charter teachers and charter educational support personnel, roughly 740 people in total, and more than 90 percent of eligible petitioners signed. “I spoke with every teacher I know, teachers were universally against [the legislation],” Gaber says.

In addition to local educators who worried about losing their collective bargaining rights and allowing non-certified teachers to work with kids, other leaders pushed back against what they saw as a deeply inequitable funding structure embedded into Hogan’s legislation.

“Charter advocates rely on the premise that as money flows from a regular school to a charter school, the costs of the regular school go down proportionately. Sounds good; it’s just not true,” wrote David W. Hornbeck in a Baltimore Sun op-ed published in February. Hornbeck “recommended the approval of more than 30 charter schools” while serving as Philadelphia’s superintendent of schools from 1994 to 2000, and he now believes he made a grave mistake. Hornbeck, who also served as superintendent of Maryland schools from 1976 to 1988 (and is the father of Hampstead Hill principal Matt Hornbeck), pointed out that Pennsylvania’s charter law is ranked much higher than Maryland’s and “yet its charter growth is contributing significantly to a funding crisis that includes draconian cuts to teachers, nurses, arts, music and counselors in Philadelphia.”

Bebe Verdery, the director of the Maryland ACLU Education Reform Project, also submitted testimony against the bill, arguing that the proposed funding formula would result in severe cuts to traditional schools. “Simply put, students without any special needs would get funding the state formula intended for others,” she said. Verdery also objected to a provision that would have allowed public capital repair funds to go toward private buildings that housed charter schools, saying, “this would further strain an already insufficient pool of state resources for addressing the state’s $15 billion school repair and construction backlog.”

Hogan’s legislation said “commensurate funding” should mean that charters get 98 percent of what traditional public schools receive because a 2005 State Board of Education ruling determined that districts needed only 2 percent of per-pupil funding to cover central administrative costs. But when the Department of Legislative Services (DLS) surveyed local school systems later on, it found that administrative expenditures make up closer to 10-14 percent of per-pupil spending. Critics argued that if 98 percent were legally guaranteed for charters, but necessary administrative work still had to be done, then money would be taken from traditional public school students, potentially leading to increased class sizes, special educators with enormous case loads, or cuts to after- school programming, gym, and art.

Local charter operators insisted that their goal was not to bankrupt the district, but simply to fight for parity. “We believe strongly that we can achieve this without harming funding for other schools,” testified Ed Rutkowski, the executive director of Patterson Park Public Charter School.

The watered-down bill that Hogan ultimately signed was a grassroots victory for some, and a major disappointment for others. The Center for Education Reform, which hired several lobbyists to push for the bill’s passage, was so dismayed with the final result that it actually urged the governor to veto it, insisting that this would be a step back for Maryland school choice, not one forward.

The final bill ended up removing mostly all provisions that had generated controversy. It grants greater autonomy to charters that have demonstrated five years of success, and it provides for increased flexibility with student enrollment. The bill also authorizes the Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE) and the DLS to complete a study by the end of October 2016 to determine what a more appropriate figure should be for districts when it comes to commensurate funding.

“The law that passed was more subtle and more evolutionary rather than revolutionary,” said Hampstead Hill’s Hornbeck. “It did not trash a good law, like the governor’s proposal tried to do.”

Given that the governor still had support from MarylandCAN, a pro-charter advocacy organization that helped to craft the original legislation, Hogan went ahead and signed the bill into law. It’s an imperfect bill, but it creates “the pathway” to expand charters and it grants more flexibility to existing ones, said Keiffer J. Mitchell Jr., Hogan’s special adviser on charter schools.

“As the state with the most restrictive charter law in the country, these small steps forward, while welcomed, are not enough,” said Jason Botel, the executive director of MarylandCAN, in a statement. “They must be the start, not the end, of our work to dramatically reform charter school policy in our state.”

Kara Kerwin, the president of CER, believes MarylandCAN is mistaken to think that they can just go back and improve on the new law later. She points out that the new law clarifies that only the local district board—not the Maryland State Board of Education—can authorize new charters, and that online charter schools are now explicitly prohibited from operating within Maryland.

In an interview, Kerwin describes online charters as “one of the biggest innovations right now that’s helping so many students who aren’t brick and mortar types.” However, several studies have found that online charter schools tend to provide a lower-quality education than traditional schools, and a 2011 New York Times investigation found that K12 Inc., one of the nation’s largest online charter school operators, “tries to squeeze profits from public school dollars by raising enrollment, increasing teacher workload and lowering standards.”

Most people interviewed for this story do not believe the new law will lead to an expansion of Maryland charter schools, one of Hogan’s top policy priorities. “The final bill that passed was very limited in scope, it doesn’t have a whole lot of changes,” Macdonald says. “But it’s a step in the right direction.”

So what does this all mean for the future of Maryland charters?

“I have no doubt that this was round one and [the operators] are going to try again as long as Hogan’s governor,” Gaber says. “We’re going to keep fighting. We started this teacher coalition knowing that this is a long-term fight and we need to be organized and ready before the next time comes.”

Kehl thinks that the Maryland Alliance of Public Charter Schools, which just officially emerged as a statewide group in July, will focus on building a more unified policy voice and cultivating a stronger presence in Annapolis. “Our charter sector has matured,” she says. “If you believe that schools shouldn’t be one size all, then you have to create a system that supports that. I don’t see how you can make change if you keep everything the same.”

Whether new legislation will be introduced next year is an open question. Kerwin of CER thinks such an effort would be futile, even if they tried. Todd Reynolds, the political coordinator for Maryland’s American Federation of Teachers, says some legislators might decide it makes sense to wait until after the new MSDE/DLS study is completed.

While the emerging landscape appears fraught with tensions between the district and the charter sector, there still remains a possibility that Maryland charters will chart a different sort of future than that of other states.

Even though Macdonald of the City Neighbors Charter School supported Hogan’s legislation, she acknowledges that some parts made her feel ambivalent. While she feels strongly that Maryland charters need more autonomy and bureaucratic relief, she also wants to preserve collective bargaining rights for charter teachers. “I feel like Maryland is so unique in our stance,” she says. “I haven’t yet seen the bill I would really fight for.”

In a few months, on Oct. 22, the Teachers’ Democracy Project will be hosting a big meeting between teachers, charter operators, politicians, union officials, and school board members to try and figure out a way forward that doesn’t require another heated legislative fight. Atkinson believes the current law is good, but that Baltimore teachers—charter and non-charter alike—should be organizing for more money for all schools. “We’re going to try to hold an open conversation about what people’s concerns are,” said Atkinson. “The operators are reasonable, they’re not right-wing, they’re not trying to get charters to take over the world. Their main frustrations are with the union contract and some of the ways the district controls things.”

McGill thinks that a more collaborative push for charter reform from the district, teachers, and charter operators “would be the ideal” solution but worries things are growing too polarized for that to materialize. Gaber, however, says that the Baltimore Charter School Teacher Coalition has also discussed how they want to stand for something, and not just against reform. “I think it would be a good idea for us to be more proactive,” adds Reynolds of the AFT. “We should get back to what charters were intended to in terms of offering innovation that can then be brought into traditional schools.”

The question of whether some of the larger CMOs would be interested in setting up schools in Maryland remains uncertain. Kehl says it’s important to help facilitate more attractive operating conditions because “there’s a certain point where you tap out your local leadership” and if you “can’t attract national talent” into Maryland, then you’ve just closed the door on quality options for kids.

Others see luring CMOs as a less urgent priority, especially given how the state increasingly underfunds public education. In his latest budget, Hogan increased state education funding by 0.4 percent, but cut Baltimore City’s funding by 3.3 percent. Attracting those CMOs—which would likely be into Baltimore—might mean redirecting funds toward charter facility expenses or pushing harder to restrict collective bargaining. Maryland might also experience some of the financial strain that rapid charter growth in other states has placed on traditional schools.

Testifying last spring, CEO of Baltimore City Public Schools Dr. Gregory E. Thorton said Hogan’s bill would work “to the benefit of large out-of-state charter organizations—to the detriment of Maryland’s most vulnerable student populations.”

While the Baltimore City School District might need to work harder to collaborate with its local charter sector, and the teacher unions may need to re-examine some provisions within their contracts, it’s not yet clear that Maryland’s unique charter culture is headed out the door.

State law currently allows charters to negotiate waivers and exemptions from certain aspects of the district-wide collective bargaining unit. That’s how Baltimore’s KIPP charter school was able to extend its school week; KIPP had to agree to pay its staff more money for the increased number of working hours. Theoretically charter operators could sit down with union leaders to discuss some of their most pressing concerns around staffing, innovation, and autonomy. “It’s not meant to be a one-size-fits-all situation,” says Reynolds. “You can sit down with the union and negotiate a Memorandum of Understanding. We have done that, and I think that’ll continue.”

“I think it would be amazing to sit down with the union and really roll up our sleeves,” says Macdonald. “I do think it’s really important for teachers to be unionized, to collectively bargain, and to get paid well, but I also think if we want to innovate and serve the children of Baltimore, we really have to allow [for] some more flexibility.”

Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged accountability, Baltimore, Center for Education Reform, charter schools, charters, collective bargaining, education, education reform, educators, k-12, k-12 inc, Larry Hogan, Maryland, National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, online charter schools, public schools, teacher certification, teachers, transparency, unions
Leave a comment

Rachel M. Cohen

Tag Archives: public schools