What I said at the Budget Meeting

The second Parkrose Budget budget committee meeting was Wednesday night.  The budget passed, 6-4.  I voted against it with a few short statements:

• The people that have made the greatest sacrifices were the students.  Your sacrifice was minor compared to theirs.
• Many of the people that spoke about the budget did not mention students or if they did they only mentioned them tangentially.
• There is a trade-off between class size and days of school.  I'm not sure we have the right balance of the two that is best for students.
• The one teacher - one class model is broken.  We need a system with very large classes, one teacher and several specialists.  Some of those specialists can be educational assistants, some can be specialized teachers, but we have to stop with the one-size-fits-all approach to teaching.

Time to explain.

Last year our 3,500 students gave up five days of eduction each.  That is 17,500 days of eduction that they will never get back.  Staff gave up ten days of pay, 4,000 days.  You can get that back by earning money elsewhere for ten days.  

From what I see, the student sacrifice was greater by a factor of four.

I surprising number of speakers didn't mention students.  Some of the people that didn't mention students should know better.  Some have barely mentioned students in a year. Not talking about students misses the point of a school district.  We provide education to students.

The school board and the district is not interested in anyone's job. We are interested in what is good for students and student performance.  Jobs are a side-effect of achieving that goal.  If you want to argue for a position, start by telling me about the incremental benefit to students of that position and how the incremental benefit is larger than another position.

You make your argument by talking about the incremental effects on students -- not fairness or your needs.

The big choices are class-size and school-year.  With a fixed amount of money you can decrease class size by by shortening the school year and you can lengthen the school year by increasing the class size. It is a simple, mostly, linear relationship.   That is the financial trade-off.

The performance trade-off is that student performance goes down as class size goes up and student performance goes up as school year increases.

With a fixed budget, increasing the school year results in better student performance from the school-year effect and at the same time larger class sizes result in worse student performance from the class-size effect.  The trick is to find the combination of class size and school year, that you can afford, that maximizes student performance.  

Those of you that have taken an economics class will see this as ac classic choice theory example.  The two goods are class-size and school-year and your 'utility function' evaluates those two goods to give student performance.   If we had the right information about that utility function, we could find the best combination.  

There are a bunch of studies on that relationship, some are good, some are not science.  From what I can see from the better ones, class size is not the end-all-be-all.  It is frequently swamped by other factors, like teacher quality, and the changes in student performance are often lumpy.  This means student performance is about the same for a wide range of class sizes and then will suddenly get worse or better.

School year tends to have a more uniform impact.

I think larger class sizes is better for our students than 20 cut days.

Finally, I am not an education traditionalist.  Just because you have been doing the same thing for a very long time does not make it the right way or the best way.  We thought that emptying our bed pans in the street, bleeding patients with fevers, and that the Earth was the center of the solar system were all good and true ideas.

The fact that idea has stuck around for a long time just means it hasn't yet killed you.

Our classrooms are for the most part, one-size fits all. If there is a performance problem, add a generalist teacher.  You want PE, add a generalist teacher but make sure they have a certification.  

Here is the rub, teachers do a lot of things, but there are some things ONLY a teacher can do.  They spend relatively little time doing those things, like diagnosing a reading problem and putting together a plan to correct it, and a lot of time doing things that someone else could be doing, like implementing that plan.  

We are missing teachers' productivity and loosing their most valuable contribution, that advanced training and knowledge.

We have been thinking of teachers as the line worker, rather than the planner and supervisor of educational assistants and the person that calls in specialists.

I'm not the first one to come up with the idea.  There is a nice popular press article on the idea, "The Numbers Game: Why Class Size Mandates Miss the Point".  In that piece, Frank introduces the idea of the No Max school.  Please read it.  As, Frank says, 

Imagine a school with no maximum class sizes whatsoever. Let’s call it No Max School. No Max School breaks a lot of rules and does a lot of things that are considered difficult or even undesirable in a one-teacher classroom world. For example:

• Students are organized into grade-level teams of the largest size feasible.
• Student desk work lasting longer than 10 minutes is supervised by a Teaching Assistant (TA)—not a teacher—and in the largest workable grouping of students.
• A TA proctors all tests and sits with students whenever they write an in-class essay; All lectures or explanations lasting more than 15 minutes are given only in the largest group size manageable.
• No Max School has extensive computer and foreign language labs with the best available software where all students spend a portion of each day learning with no teachers whatsoever.
• Every week, there are school-wide town meetings, field trips or performances lasting several hours; teachers are excused from attending these activities.

In a school like that, teachers can focus on what has the largest impact on student achievement and students can get more personalized attention.

Transportation Block Grants for Oregon Schools

One of the ideas on the table for reducing the costs of K12 education is changing the way we pay for transportation.  I have written about these problems in the past and created a solution to the problem.  The summary is that the current funding system, a cost sharing system, provides few incentives to reduce costs.  The solution I provided was a way of inducing school districts to compete with each other through something called yardstick competition.

There is another alternative that has better political legs, block grants.  Here is the way the implementation is working out --  you get what you get now.  You will get a little more or a little less if your student population changes.  There is no cost sharing.  If you save a dollar you get to keep it; you don't have to give $0.70 back to the state.

It sounds like a great idea.  All the incentives to save on costs are there, but there are a few catches.

First, you get what you get now.  That means that places like Lake Oswego, that have a waiver to provide more transportation than the law allows, busing kids within a mile of school, will continue to get more per student.  Districts like Portland Public Schools will continue to get less per student because Trimet service is so good, they have a waiver to not bus High School students .

Second, fuel increases and other uncontrollable expenses are all out of the district's pocket.  That means you can get a surprise if fuel prices go up.  This is pretty relevant give oil prices recently.

There is fix to some of this.  What I have proposed is that the costs be recalculated and reset every five years. As you have come to expect, this is something right out of the economics of regulation.  It used to get used in natural gas price regulation.

Here is why the reset is important.  Since the districts get what they get now, they get to keep every dollar they save and use it in district programs.  This provides great incentives to reduce costs and find cheaper ways to transport students.  Every five years the state recalculates your costs over the last few years and changes the amount you receive to this new amount.  The new amount should be lower since you have had the time, and the incentives to implement all those cost reductions.  All those cost savings get dragged back into the state's general purpose fund and can be allocated to the other school districts.  Over time, we get equalization.

So. the pattern is to freeze, give incentives to reduce costs, watch the costs get reduced, and then drag back the cost reductions after a few years to use them in other areas.

I'm for transportation block grants but only with a five-year reset.

Parkrose Dance #1 in State. Two Years in a Row

In case you have not seen this. There is one hell of a volunteer organization behind this, fundraising, fabricating and transporting all that material.

Missed the Education Summit? Watch it here!

I promised video of the Multnomah County Education Summit. Those videos are linked below. Watch that fishbowl! My daughter is in there and there is some feet to fire action.

Missed the Education Summit? Watch it here!

Education Summit 2011 - Fishbowl from Mayor Sam Adams on Vimeo.

Salman Khan: Let's use video to reinvent education

This is an odd coincidence. I usually end my term teaching with a debrief of the class. I tell the students what didn't work from my point of view, tell them about the new ideas I tried out on them, get their feed back on what worked and didn't work from their point of view and collect ideas on how to fix it all.

I tried a bunch of things this term, like using youtube videos to give feedback on paper drafts and crazy stuff like that. By the way -- students loved that.

This term, students started giving me few lists of things they wanted me to make videos about. It was stuff like, how to read the results of a linear regression, how to interpret coefficients, all sorts of things. Their reason is that didn't want to waste class time on that kind of rote material but they wanted it in a verbal and visual form.

Khan gets this and explains why in the video.

Yes for Parkrose Promo

This is the short version of the promo video.

K12 Funding Formulas: The Testimony that Didn't Happen

Representative Betty Komp asked me to produce a quick video on K12 funding formulas.  It turned out she didn't get a chance to use it -- but I hate to waste video.

Parkrose Work Session Feb 14, 2011

I'm sick so I will be sitting at a separate table for this one. We will be getting some updates on the High School and Prescott.  There isn't any material in the board packet on this, so I don't know what it is about.

We do have some extensive information on the regional soccer center.  We should have:

• Dave Carboneau – President of Portland City United and Board Member – PGE Foundation
• Rod Huschka – Project Manager – St. Johns - Theodore Roosevelt Athletic Complex Stadium Field
• Dick Spies – Principle – Group McKenzie Design
• Nick Fish – Portland City Commissioner and Soccer Fanatic
• Antonio Zea – VP of Soccer Division – Adidas America

There for an extended discussion on how to get the fields funded and set up.  This represents a significant increase in recreation opportunity for the area East of 82nd.  In honor of the Timbers donation.  Here is the sunflower goal, last goal, last game, a win for the USL-1 Timbers.