Trump Won't Appoint Anyone at U.S. Department of Education

After President Donald Trump appointed school privatizer Betsy DeVos to be the U.S Secretary of Education, despite the fact she had never spent a day teaching a kid or leading educators, there was a great uproar over her lack of qualifications and other issues (including her inability to comprehend the difference between how well students do on tests vs. how much better they are doing on tests).

Since then, people have generally turned away from the Department and focused on other things.

However, in what has become a pattern with Donald Trump's administration, there has yet to be a single Assistant U.S. Secretary of Education appointed to the Department. In fact, only one other appointment has been made by the President to take any senior leadership positions at the Department. There are more Obama era holdovers than Trump appointees. Of 31 senior positions, only 2 are occupied by Trump appointees. Obama holdovers occupy 7 and the remaining 22 are vacant. That's right. There is a 71 percent vacancy rate in senior level positions at the U.S. Department of Education, which is responsible for overseeing the education of roughly 74 million American kids.

Here is the list of senior level positions, as listed by the Department:

 So, what does this mean that only the Assistant Deputy Secretary and Director, Office of English Language Acquisition has been thus far appointed by Trump?

It means the Department is all Betsy DeVos. That's it. No sharing of responsibility or authority. No subject matter expertise. No collaborative decision making. It's simply Donald Trump, Betsy DeVos, and a handful of Obama era holdovers.

That's it.

For years now Republicans have made the Department of Education their favorite bureaucratic elimination target.

Even Rick Perry remembered he wanted to eliminate the Department during his infamous "Oops" moment during the 2012 debate season.

It appears that Trump has decided to let the Department wither on the vine, consolidate the power in the hand of a single person who is historically under qualified for the position and (like his comments on Obamacare this week), just let the Department die.

While I have certainly disagreed with federal interference in education policy over the years, I believe there is a role for the Department to play, especially when it comes to funding. Many areas of the country fund their education systems less effectively than others. The federal government can help equalize that difference to a great degree so that all Americans, regardless of where they live can achieve the American Dream.

Head Start has done some really good things for many kids. Title I has generally helped rescue public education funding in many areas of the country, though its overall success is mixed. The IDEA has revolutionized the way we educate special education kids and the expectations we have on educators to meet their needs.

The department's refusal to recognize the serious problems it's had on charter schools and other education reform efforts has somewhat tempered their successes. But I would never say that the federal government shouldn't have any role to play in American education policy. Especially when every other industrialized nation involves itself this way. The inherent Balkanization of American states is what led to the death of the Articles of Confederation, after all.

Clearly, Trump is trying to consolidate power in as few hands as possible. And when those hands are as uncertain as Secretary DeVos', what you have is, by default, the President running federal education policy.

I'm not sure that's a good idea.

House GOP Won't Move Voucher Expansion -- Trump's Signature Ed Policy Initiative

A House Subcommittee yesterday declined to move forward President Trump's proposal to invest $1 billion in private school vouchers -- a longtime policy darling of his Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and the only real Education Policy initiative President Trump has discussed. He announced the $20 billion plan last year at a then-poorly rated Cleveland Charter School.

The House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies reported out a bill that did eliminate teacher support programs at the U.S. Department of Education -- a really bad outcome that will have long-term consequences for kids. But it did not head the nation down the road Ohio took 20 years ago.

Last school year, Ohio taxpayers sent about $568 million to private, mostly religious schools in the form of private school vouchers, busing, administrative cost reimbursements and auxiliary services. This despite the fact that several new studies show that kids who take vouchers do worse on achievement tests after they take the voucher than they did before taking it.

We at Innovation Ohio examined our state's voucher program recently and urged lawmakers to back off from more widely implementing these programs here and across the nation. While it looks like the subcommittee took heed of the mountains of evidence that demonstrate these programs hurt kids who take the vouchers and kids who don't because of the large sums of money these program eliminate from the public system, the bill still has a ways to go.

And the subcommittee did increase funding by about 8 percent for the department's Charter School Program (CSP), which in Ohio has not been very successful at expanding better educational options for kids.

Here's what we found in the report we did at www.KnowYourCharter.com last year:

• Of the 292 Ohio charter schools that received $99.6 million in federal aid, $30 million went to 108 schools that either closed or never opened
• Of those that failed, at least 26 Ohio charter schools that received nearly $4 million in federal CSP funding apparently never even opened and there are no available records to indicate that these public funds were returned
• The charter schools that have received CSP funding and received State Report Card grades in the 2014-2015 school year had a median Performance Index score that was lower than all but 15 Ohio school districts and would have been graded as a D

One very telling detail of the subcommittee meeting yesterday, though, was this final line from the74.org's account:

"Members did not discuss the school choice plans during the meeting."

What Happens if Trump Blows Up USDOE? Folks in Trump Country get Hammered.

Now that we have to contend with a President Trump, I thought it might be useful to look at one of his only concrete policy proposals: Eliminating the U.S. Department of Education and replacing the funding with a voucher program.

Killing off the USDOE has long been a dream of the conservative movement, with Texas Gov. Rick Perry remembering he wanted to eliminate it, even as he famously stumbled over the other agencies he wanted to whack.

But what would this mean for local communities? What would it mean for Ohio's school districts?

Well, it would not be good if federal funding disappeared. Every district in Ohio but 5 received federal funding last year. The largest recipients are urban districts. But the most disproportionately impacted are the poor, white, rural districts in communities that overwhelmingly voted for President Trump.

That's because they have the least amount of local tax revenue to make up for the lost federal funding, and they have among the lowest incomes in the state. Below, you will see the top 25 Ohio School Districts that would need to have residents sacrifice the largest percentages of their incomes to pay for lost federal revenue. While Youngstown, Warren and East Cleveland are the top 3, about 1/2 are from the rural, red counties that overwhelmingly put a guy in office who would force them to consider serious income tax increases to keep their schools going. The districts best able to withstand a federal funding loss? You guessed it -- the state's wealthy, suburban districts.



Overall, Ohio school districts received $1.5 billion in federal funding last year, which would force districts to seek an overall property tax increase of about $220 per $100,000 home.

While I have certainly disagreed with federal education policy, especially when it comes to some of the competitive funding it's come to be defined by, Title I, IDEA and other federal programs have sought to bring equity and adequacy to our nation's most struggling schools. The evidence that these programs help kids is pretty clear.

Will Trump eliminate these programs that improve kids lives while keeping property taxes down in communities that can least afford to raise them? We'll see.

But elections have consequences. And if one of this election's consequence is the elimination of federal education funding, it appears that those who made Trump president will suffer among the worst outcomes.

When an F isn't an F

Yesterday, I posted about how Donald Trump was visiting a Cleveland charter school that received an F on the state report card for student growth -- a grade I called "failing" in several press accounts. And, in fact, I found it curious that Trump would visit a Cleveland charter with such a poor student growth grade given that Cleveland is the only area of the state where there are several high-performing charters.

I suggested that it was because Ron Packard -- a notorious political operative in the education space -- ran the for-profit company that operates the school. And, right on cue, Trump shouted out Packard at the beginning of his speech. I'm willing to bet that a Packard donation will show up in Trump's next campaign finance report.

Anyway, some charter advocates, especially Aaron Churchill at the Fordham Institute, pushed back against my characterization of the Cleveland charter as "failing" because it's only based on one year of data. And the previous year, the school performed well.

As I've said before, I really respect Aaron, but he's trying to do a do-over here on Ohio's accountability system -- a system he and Fordham pushed to have in place.

Fordham and Aaron championed our state's switch to an A-F report card system because "The A-F grades provide a clear and transparent way of reporting whether a school is academically strong, weak, or somewhere in between." This is also the same group that announced that the drop in state scores last year for many schools due to the PARCC exams and tougher Common Core standards was a better indication of how the students (and schools) "actually performed." (I vehemently disagreed with that assumption, by the way.)

Unless, it appears, Donald Trump decides to visit a charter school with an F in student growth. Then they'll make excuses.

Look, you're either for tougher standards and what the fallout from those standards entail, or you're not. You can't be saying that the tougher standards show us how kids are really doing, then claim they really don't in a school you'd like to see perform well. You can't say the A-F report card gives Ohioans a more transparent way to understand how schools are serving kids, then say the report cards don't in a school you'd like to see perform well.

I've said repeatedly that basing performance solely on test scores, as Ohio (and the country) currently does, is folly and wholly unfair to schools whose performance shouldn't be judged on how kids do during a few hours of testing when they spend more than 1,000 hours in school. But we have this high-stakes system in place. And it is there in no small measure due to the shaming of our public schools, which has been perpetrated by Fordham and others over the years.

And under the system Fordham and other reformers have trumpeted for years, the charter Trump visited yesterday failed to grow student learning as effectively as the Cleveland Municipal School District. And, in fact, the school got an F, which is a failing grade in anyone's book.

Fordham and others in their camp don't get to suddenly adopt a nuanced approach to school performance just because the schools they like failed.

I welcome the more nuanced approach and understanding of school performance. And I'd be less skeptical if Fordham and other education reformers hadn't spent the last 20 years trying to get the no excuses, un-nuanced system we have in place today.

In the words of Mike Brady from A Very Brady Sequel, "Caveat Emptor."

Trump Makes Point that Charters are Better Options by Visiting Poor Performer

Donald Trump has told the African-American community that "your schools are a disaster", so he has said Charter Schools are the answer. He's trying to demonstrate that today when he visits the Cleveland Arts & Social Sciences Academy in Cleveland.

Here's the thing. The school Trump is visiting received an F on the state report card for student growth -- the most important measure to most charter school advocates. Cleveland -- an urban district Trump has derided collectively -- received a C on the same measure. Visit www.KnowYourCharter.com to find all of the school's performance metrics.

Oh, and the state pays the charter school more money per pupil than Cleveland ... for worse student growth measures.

What's sad is that Cleveland is the only place in Ohio where a case can credibly be made that charters are in any significant way living up to their promise. The Breakthrough Schools and ICAN schools are performing very well. As charter school advocates have noted, that's in stark contrast to the rest of Ohio where 40% of its charter schools are in "urgent need of improvement."

So why would Trump visit a school with an F in the most important performance metric when he had plenty of much higher performing options? Perhaps it's because the school he's visiting is run by a for-profit company called Accel Schools Ohio. Accel is an imprint of Pansophic -- a charter school firm started by K12, Inc. founder Ron Packard. Packard has an infamous reputation for political gamesmanship.

If I wanted to make the point that charters can give kids hope where none before existed, I wouldn't go visit an Accel School. I'd visit a Breakthrough or ICAN school. However, if I wanted to make hay with a potential political contributor with experience in education politics, I would visit Ron Packard's school.

However, this choice doesn't surprise me given Mr. Trump's clear ignorance of the state of education policy.

Donald Trump Acts Like the Last 30 years of Ed Reform Never Happened

I've deliberately tried to stay out of the wild and wacky 2016 presidential race here. Primarily because education policy has been largely buried underneath the pile of mess that has become the daily 2016 campaign grind. However, Education Week put out an interesting blow-by-blow of Donald Trump's most recent comments about education. The conclusion?

He's big on school choice.

In fact, he spoke in Milwaukee this week and clamored for more school choice -- in the city where school vouchers began. Milwaukee has had choice for two generations of students. And Trump didn't see any irony when he decried the struggles of Milwaukee's schools, despite two generations of choice.

But what really struck me was when Trump told the Wisconsin audience:

"On education, it is time to have school choice, merit pay for teachers, and to end the tenure policies that hurt good teachers and reward bad teachers. We are going to put students and parents first."

It's time we have school choice?

Huh?

We have had school choice in America since the late 1980s -- 1968 if you include the magnet school movement. We have a $37 billion charter school industry that makes its money off school choice. Charters are in 43 states and D.C. We even have an entire major urban school district -- New Orleans -- being nothing but a choice/charter district. We've had school choice so long in America that we're able to study the long-term economic impact they have on kids and communities -- which has been primarily a negative one. And the returns on charter school performance are not good, especially in Ohio.

What is Trump talking about?

And merit pay for teachers? We have that in several districts right now. And it's not working out so great, especially when the issue goes to voters. When Ohio Republicans passed Senate Bill 5 in 2011, teacher merit pay was the core of the issue. Ohioans voted against merit pay by nearly a 2-to-1 margin. The early returns on merit pay's successful improvement of student outcomes is also not good. And even the free market bastions at the Harvard Business Review say merit pay doesn't work, no matter the system, even in the private sector.

And eliminating teacher tenure? Again, not a new idea. Once again, there's little to no evidence that ending tenure improves student achievement. As the Brookings Institute pointed out in a 2014 study, the years prior to teachers getting tenure (usually 4-5 years depending on the state) tend to weed out the vast majority of struggling teachers. The researchers found that "in the fifth year of their careers, only 27 percent of the bottom quarter of teachers, in terms of their value-added, remained employed at the school where they began" -- the lowest retention rate of any teacher performance tier. We can debate the effectiveness of judging effective teachers by student test scores, but the Brookings study demonstrates what teachers already knew -- really struggling teachers tend to leave before they ever get tenure.

While I'm not shocked that Trump has taken these positions, I am shocked he's speaking like they're new, or we don't have them. He also said in Detroit that Detroit needed school choice. Detroit has abundant school choice. Yet Trump acts like there isn't any?

What's clear to me is that Trump probably doesn't know what he's talking about, but even if he does, the ideas he's articulated for education are nothing new, exciting or especially innovative.