The new Edison strategy and child labor

In October 2002, Edison Schools founder and head Chris Whittle proposed turning to unpaid student labor in his schools as a cost-cutting measure. This immediately provoked outrage and ridicule.

But either he has forgotten, he figures the public has forgotten, or nobody told the authors of the E2 strategy about any of it.

So the E2 Design Sketch resurrects that notion, proposing to "cut lunch aides and custodians by 50%, use students..." Also, "Student prefects would play an essential role in making the independent learning labs successful by assisting IL lab teachers in managing large numbers of students."

The E2 Design Sketch does note that its parallel strategies of relying on student labor and minimally supervised independent learning may not be surefire crowd-pleasers:

Will customers permit students to tutor students, taking over "jobs" that would normally be filled by unionized paraprofessionals? Will they permit students to spend a significant portion of the day in independent learning environments with very different staffing ratios?

Here's an example of the press reaction to the previous child-labor idea, in a (reposted) Oct. 30, 2002, Toronto Globe & Mail look at Edison's problems:

As a final humiliation, Chris Whittle, the company's charismatic chief executive and founder, recently told a meeting of school principals that he'd thought up an ingenious solution to the company's financial woes: Take advantage of the free supply of child labor, and force each student to work an hour a day, presumably without pay, in the school offices.

"We could have less adult staff," Mr. Whittle reportedly said at a summit for employees and principals in Colorado Springs. "I think it's an important concept for education and economics." In a school with 600 students, he said, this unpaid work would be the equivalent of "75 adults" on salary.

Although Mr. Whittle said he could have the child-labor plan in place by 2004, school board officials were quick to say they would have nothing to do with the proposal.

Most of the critics, needless to say, surely approve of giving students responsible tasks and encouraging young people to mentor and tutor their peers. The unabashed proposal to replace paid professionals with volunteer students as an undisguised cost-cutting measure tends to get people's goat, though.

A whole new Edison Schools: the E2 project

An Edison Schools document that landed in our inbox describes a strategy by the once-high-flying school management firm to reinvent itself, heal its battered reputation and make some money. Edison, which calls the strategy E2, claims it wants to educate some children, too.

Edison — the for-profit once hailed as the future of education and then forgotten when its grand promises fizzled — calculates that it can pump up revenues by relying on child labor for a lot of tasks normally done by paid paraprofessionals, by increasing class size, and by making labor-cost-cutting "independent learning" (IL) a significant part of the school day. Younger kids could spend 90 minutes a day in minimally supervised independent learning and high-schoolers as much as half the day, proposes the undated document, labeled "Design Sketch." The Design Sketch references a report dated February 2006; the 47 pages we received give no further clue to its publication date.

Online job postings describe E2 as " a $15 million research and development initiative within Edison Schools charged with establishing the next generation of the company’s whole school design."

In contrast to Edison's former supremely self-confident public attitude, it portrays itself in the Design Sketch as struggling financially, racked by conflicts with clients, political opposition and a poor public image, plagued by low-performing students and unqualified teachers, and eclipsed by the flamboyantly successful KIPP school chain.

"...whole school management is not yet making money," the Design Sketch acknowledges, "and we have not persuaded the market and key opinion leaders that our schools are consistently and markedly superior to traditional public schools. Revenues from our charter schools and district partner schools are declining rapidly (18 percent down from last fiscal year alone), as are gross operating profits (17 percent). The order pipeline for new managed schools is sluggish ...
Historically poor execution is to blame for many of our problems. ...

"The cohort of organizations that followed us — CMOs [charter management organizations] like Aspire and school networks like KIPP — learned from our mistakes and made some smart design choices that permit them to execute with greater ease and deliver more consistent results. For instance, they have, variously, blunted political opposition by organizing as non-profits; simplified ease of execution by operating in one or a few jurisdictions; grown their schools much more slowly; embraced larger class sizes and replaced paraprofessionals with free student 'prefects.' "

What kind of marketing strategy is E2?

We are not considering a "new product" in the sense of entering a new line of business or a new geography, but rather a signficant reengineering of the product we offer in our existing core business of managed schools. ...

The launch of a new design and strong results from our first beta site(s) will re-excite the market and Edison staff, renew and improve relationships with our existing clients (as they convert to the new design), and re-establish Edison's lead position in the market for private managers. ...

And here are the E2 strategies for profitability:

E2 has as its objective to generate after tax income from managed schools of approximately 7 percent of revenues.

... the design [for elementary schools] leverages a combination of

• slightly larger class sizes (+4 students), except for novice teachers
• 90 minutes of daily independent learng time beginnng in grade 2
• students serving as prefects and to perform certain school tasks result in cost savings and revenue enhancements that, even when offset by new costs for dramatically higher principal compensation (+40%), higher teacher pay, and a state-of-the-art technology package, can improve net income by 8 percentage points.

Looking too successful may displease the clients:

There may be limits to what the market will bear in site profitability. Authorizers will see through efforts to disguise site profitability. .... Pressures to reduce our site
profitability could perhaps be met by charging some variable HQ costs to the school —where they arguably should be reflected anyway.

I'll blog more about E2 from the Design Sketch — including the effort to revive Edison's previously ridiculed child-labor idea — in further postings.

Helpful sites for stressed out school shoppers

Here are a pair of websites that will be of interest to anyone in the midst of the SFUSD enrollment process.

The first is a wiki that enables parents to share their information, notes, impression, and opinions about individual schools. Want to know what another parent thought about their visit to Sherman ES? Leonard Flynn ES? Marina MS? Have an opinion you want to share about a school you've visited? Head on over and contribute. Trust me, the act of putting your thoughts into words and publishing them really helps one focus your thoughts. I highly recommend it.
San Francisco School Tours - Your Notes

This site came about as I was touring elementary schools in San Francisco. I noticed that everyone was taking notes, but I had not seen them consolidated anywhere. Also, it is unlikely someone will tour all the schools so this is a divide and conquer site. It has some useful features – You can edit information, add information subscribe to page updates which will get you updated tour notes etc.

The School Tours wiki includes many links to another parent's blog that chronicles her ongoing school search:
The K Files

The K Files is a blog written by a San Francisco mom who is seeking a kindergarten for her four-year-old daughter. The mom’s name is Kate; the daughter’s name is Alice. There’s also a dad, Ryan, and a son, Sam, who is three years old. (These are pseudonyms as are most of the names in this blog.)

The K Files serves as an outlet for Kate, who was becoming overly stressed about the school process. It tells the story of Kate’s search and offers up school reviews.

Years ago, when Caroline and I started the sfschools list, we were on the vanguard of using the web to share school information and organize on-line communities. It is really exciting to see the social networking and publishing technologies evolve, and see new generations of school parents adopt increasingly creative ways of leveraging the web to help themselves and help others.

Public School Enrollment Fair

By all accounts yesterday's SFUSD Public School Enrollment Fair was a big success. My wife and I arrived pretty late in the day in part due to the traffic mayhem in the wake of the anit-war protest that was happening concurrently. The gridlock outside certainly did not keep the crowds away from this incredibly useful event.

By the time these snapshots were taken the event was winding down. But spirits were high and the booths we visited were still going strong. This year we were shopping for a high school for our 2nd child and it is interesting and encouraging to note the positive changes that have happened in the three years since we were looking at high schools for out eldest child. When I look back at how the enrollment process has changed since we made our first Kindergarten applicaiton twelve years ago, it is pretty astounding how much has changed.

Congratulations to everyone who has worked so hard — for so many years — to improve all of our schools and to make this trying process of school enrollment so much easier to navigate.

BOE Meeting of 10/23/07

For coverage of the 10/23 BOE meeting, I belatedly refer you to:

• Kim Knox's Meeting Notes
• SFGTV webcast

Labor peace, orderly accounting... the tranquility that reigns in this BOE is pretty disorienting to some of us. Cool.

Envision Schools again...

An op-ed in today's Chronicle by Envision Schools' chief education officer and founder contains an eye-catching claim:

Consider two charter public high schools in San Francisco: City Arts & Technology and Metropolitan Arts & Technology. Both were founded by Envision Schools to provide underserved students with a rigorous college-performance curriculum, and both boasted the largest test-score gains of any San Francisco public high school in each of their second years. Of course, small schools and large schools are different, but City Arts ranked at the top when compared against similar schools in 2006, and both schools are expected to rank well when the similar-school scores for 2007 are released.

The schools accomplished these results despite the fact that two-thirds of their students tested at a fifth-grade level when they entered ninth grade.

First, these schools, especially CAT, are currently recruiting my daughter and her 8th-grade classmates. So the fact that a significant majority of their incoming students are severely underperforming is quite a concern. Can a school that has to focus so hard on bringing most of its students up to grade level meet the needs of their non-underperforming classmates too?

Second, information on the grade-level performance of an incoming 9th-grader is not part of the API system. So this would presumably be based on CAT's internal assessments. Comparing those results to the students' later performance on an entirely different assessment tool (the state's standardized testing) isn't sound methodology.

Third, what middle schools are graduating students from 8th grade with 5th-grade-level skills, if Lenz' account is accurate? What are the feeder schools for CAT and Metro? I hope the Envision folks who've been posting here can answer some of these questions.

As you know, I'm a charter skeptic, so chances that I'll send my own 8th-grader to a charter high school are pretty remote. But her classmates are certainly open to it. Should kids who are achieving at or above grade level be concerned about attending a school where the vast majority of their classmates will be far below grade level? If not, what do CAT and Metro do to meet the non-low-achievers' needs?

Dumbledore comes out (beyond the grave)

Associated Press, Oct. 21, 2007

With author J.K. Rowling's revelation that master wizard Albus Dumbledore is gay, some passages about the Hogwarts headmaster and rival wizard Gellert Grindelwald have taken on a new and clearer meaning.

The British author stunned her fans at Carnegie Hall on Friday night when she answered one young reader's question about Dumbledore by saying that he was gay and had been in love with Grindelwald, whom he had defeated years ago in a bitter fight. ... The news brought gasps, then applause at Carnegie Hall...

Let them eat organic local artisan-baked cake

A bit off topic:

Today's NY Times Magazine has a pretty riveting account of Alice Waters' teaching a busy working mom of teenage boys to adopt a Slow Food lifestyle.

I know I sound like a major crank, but this story actually ticked me off, though. I love good food and Waters' cuisine, and pluots and the other esoteric delicious items she promotes. But I don't see how it's not sexist and oppressive to guilt-trip a busy working mom (Dad works somewhere afar and isn't around) about owning a microwave.

It's pretty clear that even though the family liked the Waters-approved cuisine, the changes weren't going to stick. But you have to read that between the lines, because the writer gets mealy-mouthed about it, obviously not wanting to bite the celebrated hand that visited her home in person to feed her.

“You don’t tell children what to do and what not to do. Instead, you invite them into an experience in which they find themselves.” ...
And then Waters was in our kitchen. She inventoried the pantry: it wasn’t pretty. “These scare me,” she said, pointing to hot-dog buns riddled with preservatives and the triplicate shakers of Jamaica Me Crazy seasoned salt. She suggested I date the spices and replace them every three months. “The microwave?” she said. “I’d get rid of it.” Microwaves are her spiritual opposite, symbols of speed and soullessness. She insisted that all we needed were a few simple tools: a large metal spatula; a cast-iron skillet; a toaster oven, her favorite appliance because it fosters small-scale cooking; and a Japanese suribachi, a ceramic mortar that is the perfect size for making vinaigrette.

Maybe if I gave up blogging and reading the Sunday New York Times Magazine I could fit in some slow food, and even learn why you need a mortar to make vinaigrette.
Not likely to happen, though.

Cost of private schools

The interesting new blog TheSFKfiles has posted a list of private-school tuitions.

Synergy: $12,250

Adda Clevenger: $16,377

Presidio Hill: $18,040 for grades K–3 and $19,200 for grades 4–8.

Live Oak: Lower School K-5: $18,800; Middle School 6-8: $19,500; also has 60 hour annual volunteer requirement (need to confirm that)

Brandeis Hillel: K-7 $19,550; Grade 8 $20,550; Parent Association dues $50 (per family)

San Francisco Friends School: $20,540

Marin Country Day School: $20,805, goes up after 2nd grade (but "indexed")

San Francisco Day: $21,090

Hamlin: $21,225

Nueva: $22,555 for Kindergarten, goes up every year

Guitar elective: One of Balboa High's assets

My 8th-grader and I attended Balboa High School's open house this evening. It's on our list, and I hope most parents know about the school's many assets.

I wanted to share a new one. I'm a San Francisco School of the Arts band parent, so other parents often ask me questions about SOTA, and one I get repeatedly is whether SOTA has a guitar program. Currently, the answer is no*. SOTA has had a classical guitar program in the past.

But Bal does have a guitar program now — a real, for-credit guitar elective in the curriculum. Loaner guitars are even available. Bal will hold open houses on Nov. 8 and Dec. 4, 6-8 p.m., dinner provided (according to the info I have).

*Those who've seen a guitarist performing with many SOTA bands might wonder about that, but he's officially a student in Vocal.

SFUSD School Times

Late last year a district wide newsletter was born. Now, by accident, I notice that the second edition has been published:

SFUSD School Times, Fall 2007 (PDF)

It is also available in Spanish and Chinese. This issue features articles on the enrollment process as well as "viewpoints" by BOE President Mark Sanchez and Superintendent Carlos Garcia. Presumably this will be distributed in paper form at the school sites, but if your student is anything like mine, parents are not likely to see it.

NYC "merit pay"

You will probably here a lot of news chatter about the new teacher contract in NYC that implements a form of merit pay. It is a big story. But check it out. I bet the media gets it all wrong.

The first word I heard about it was this NYTimes article:

Bloomberg Unveils Plan for Merit Pay for Teachers

The Bloomberg administration and the New York City teachers union after months of negotiations announced an agreement today on a performance-pay plan that would give teachers bonuses based largely on the test scores of students at schools with high-poverty populations.

But that article offers few details about what that means. So I went to the UTF blog, EdWise.org, to get the union side of the story. It is the lead article right now:

Landmark Agreement For Pension Benefits And School-Wide Bonuses Bring Professional Gains To NYC Public School Educators

Sure enough, they put an entirely different spin on the contract and the differential pay component. The first thing that jumps out is that the union leads by talking about pension improvements. When they do get around to talking about the pay scheme, they call it a school-wide bonus plan and contrast it with a merit pay scheme:

SCHOOL-WIDE BONUS PLAN

The school wide bonus plan reflects the core belief and principle of the UFT: students achieve when all the educators in a school work together on their behalf. When we foster teamwork and partnership, when educators learn from each other and share their successful educational practices and strategies, the whole school moves forward and students benefit. Unlike individual merit pay plans, which set teacher against teacher in cut-throat competition, school wide bonuses encourage educators to work together and help each other improve instruction for all students.

Frankly, the union provides a lot more concrete information on the agreement than the Times article does. And it really does sound qualitatively different from, and much more workable than, a simple "merit pay" approach. I still have a lot of questions about the metrics to be used, how the eligible schools will be chosen, etc. But this does sound like a good approach to rewarding high performing schools and rewarding teachers who choose to work in needy schools.

Kids want to ride the bus across town?

I've asked a number of times why Envision Schools chose the Newcomer
High School site for its Metropolitan Arts & Technology charter high
school. Metro is specifically intended to serve low-income students of
color from southeastern San Francisco. It was previously located in a
church in north Bernal Heights. When it needed a new site, SFUSD
offered the Gloria R. Davis campus in the Bayview, in the heart of the
community that Metro is committed to serve. Instead, Envision chose
the Newcomer site at Jackson and Fillmore, firmly ensconced in one of
the nation's wealthiest and most expensive neighborhoods. (They have a
one-year lease, so this is a temporarly location -- the site needs
millions of dollars' work to be legally, permanently used as an SFUSD
school, under the terms of the Lopez settlement.)

It's mystifying.

Someone posted in a comment on this blog that the Metro students were the
ones who were allowed to choose between the two sites, and that
students prefer a school located in a high-end neighborhood, even if
they have to take the bus across town.

This was such an interesting observation in light of the many
discussions about neighborhood schools that I have to share it. Even
though I'm a proponent of SFUSD's all-choice enrollment process and of
encouraging diverse schools, I wouldn't have expected students to
PREFER a faraway school when they could choose to have the same school
located in their own community. Interesting.

... Hmm. While I was posting this blog item another anonymous poster responded that's NOT Envision's strategy and that the kids just didn't want the Gloria R. Davis site. That contradicts the previous post. It's more and more confusing.

Envision Schools scores a PR hit

Envision Schools has a new spin, promoting the fact that its new Metro/Marin School of Arts & Technology hybrid at the old Newcomer High School site is attracting Marin commuters to school in S.F.

Chron columnist Chuck Nevius bit in today's paper.

Envision's two San Francisco schools have been having trouble filling up, so this flattering story right during the season when eighth-graders are looking for high schools is a nice coup for them. It looks great for the funders, too.

Nevius has worked (if not lived) in San Francisco for decades, so it's surprising that he fell for Envision's claim that its current site is in the "inner city" and on the edge of the Western Addition. The site at Jackson and Fillmore is firmly in Pacific Heights, one of the nation's wealthiest and most expensive neighborhoods.

He didn't have enough background to ask the other obvious question. Metropolitan Arts & Technology ("Metro") got its charter based on its commitment to serve low-income children of color in southeastern San Francisco. When it needed a site, SFUSD offered it the Gloria R. Davis campus in the Bayview. So why did it choose a site in Pacific Heights, far across town from the Bayview, instead?

What a surprise -- the press just loves KIPP

KGO-TV is a-gush about KIPP schools:

We examine their remarkable progress in this Focus on Solutions report.

At a KIPP school, you'll see hands in the air and students paying close attention. There are high expectations, strict discipline and long hours. ...

KIPP schools are getting accolades all over the country.

Reporter Jennifer Olney does acknowledge that only half of KIPP's students make it from fifth to eighth grade, and I think this blog gets credit for forcing KIPP to be up front about that. They never mentioned it, and nobody ever seemed to ask, till we crunched the numbers on the California Department of Education website.

But Olney neglected to ask the next question, which was: what if the traditional public middle school down the street could also get rid of half its students, presumably the most-struggling half? Wouldn't its scores soar too?

June Jordan recruitment letter

I just got a recruitment mailer from June Jordan School for Equity (an SFUSD high school), addressed "to the parent or guardian of" my 8th-grader.

Did June Jordan send this mailer out to every 8th-grader in the city? And if so, I wonder how they paid for it and how much it cost. (Actually there's no stamp of any kind on mine. I'm assuming it fell off.)

It seems to me that this kind of puts JJ in contention with its fellow SFUSD high schools, since in a district with dropping enrollment and probably new charters opening to compete further for students, some schools are going to be fighting for survival. Is that cool?

Also, I looked at the mailer to see what it said about San Francisco State University. Previously, June Jordan has claimed that graduates are guaranteed admission to S.F. State. Spokespeople at S.F. State have strongly disputed that and have challenged it when it has appeared in print — I suspect it puts them in some kind of legal jeopardy. The language in this mailer is: "Successful graduates have a streamlined path to enroll at SF State University as college students."

SfSchools, now with Categories!

Observant readers might have noticed, our sidebar has undergone minor renovations.  Now we have a few categories that allow you to see the posts related to: Charter schools, School nutrition, and school photoblogging.  Check it out!

School yard turf war?

Mayor Newsom recently announced an initiative to open up to 14 school playgrounds on weekends:

The city and school district have decided to change that, announcing a pilot program Monday that would allow weekend access at up to 14 school playgrounds.

The idea sounds simple enough: Open the gates, let kids in, and then shut the gates at the end of the day.

But actually putting that into practice is not so easy.

The announcement came before the plan was fully in place, and it raised a lot of questions. Even though the program was announced on the grounds of Dianne Feinstein ES, no schools have been chosen for the program. The mayor promises to work with the principals of the selected schools, but there are few details of how that process will work. Now comes an op-ed reaction to the plan coming from a DiFi parent, Colby Zintl, who writes: What's the greatest value of school playgrounds?

Last Monday, Mayor Gavin Newsom convened a press conference at Dianne Feinstein Elementary School to announce a "facilities sharing agreement" that opens the San Francisco public schools' playgrounds on weekends and holidays to the general public. This agreement is not well-thought out and comes at the expense of our city schools, as it fails to recognize the vital role the school yards play in our school communities. While the plan claims to create more open space for families to enjoy, the fact is that an unsupervised play yard will compromise its integrity and diminish the value of the school facility as a daily resource for the teachers and the school families.

This is an interesting issue. On the one hand it makes no sense to totally lock down some school yard facilities. Many fields, yards, and courts that are locked up now could easily be better utilized and would be a boon to neighborhood kids. On the other hand, Colby and others are right to be skeptical about the assurances that facilities will be protected and yards will remain clean and ready for each school day.

This should be interesting. The announcement was premature. No real plans are in place. Now, with some opposition to the plan springing up in various school communities, it will be that much harder to roll out this pilot.

Stay tuned.

Inflating the resume?

It's troubling to address this, but I've noted two otherwise worthy organizations doing the same thing: listing projects on their websites as done deals when they're actually still in the proposal stages.

The Coalition for Essential Schools is working to start up a new SFUSD high school, the Bayview Essential School of Music, Art and Social Justice. It certainly isn't in existence yet; they hope to get it going in fall '08. That's still not a done deal.

In at least one spot on the CES website, The Bayview Essential School of Music, Art and Social Justice is listed as an existing school begun in '05-'06, albeit with a "care of" Oakland mailing address. In another place, it's listed as scheduled to open in '08, which as I say is still not a certainty.

These could be innocuous clerical issues — plans change and not every part of the website gets updated. But when there are millions of dollars in Gates Foundation money at stake, it looks suspicious. I have been asking the organization about the "'05-'06" claim for at least a year, so it's not that they aren't aware that the misinformation is posted.

In the same vein, the San Francisco organization Urban Sprouts, which runs school garden programs, claims in several places on its website to be operating a program at Aptos Middle School.

Each year we work with over 550 youth at five San Francisco public schools: Aptos, Excelsior & Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle Schools; June Jordan School for Equity (high school); and Ida B. Wells Continuation High School.

I'm in my sixth year as an active Aptos parent, and I had never heard a thing about a garden or Urban Sprouts involvement at Aptos. I asked some knowledgeable people at Aptos and they hadn't heard about it either. When I asked Urban Sprouts, the director said they've been in discussion with three Aptos teachers about starting a program at Aptos.

I'm sorry, but that's not the same as "Each year we work" at Aptos. Urban Sprouts' website even describes the Garden Educator who is said to work at Aptos. Marcus Gallegos, "Garden Educator, Excelsior & Aptos Middle Schools, "enjoy(s) teaching kids in a garden environment about gardening, health nutrition, habitats of living species and Mother Nature" and "find(s)it very rewarding to be a part of an effective program that interacts with children and the earth and the connection we all share." (As far as I know, Urban Sprouts DOES have a garden program going at Excelsior Middle School/June Jordan High School, which share a site.)

I just think it looks dubious when organizations that rely on grant funding — which inherently means impressing the funders with how much they're accomplishing — jump the gun on, or amplify, or exaggerate, or misleadingly overstate, their projects. I admire both of these organizations otherwise, but this raises some concerns to me, and if I were funding them, it would raise more. Disclaimer: I don't know if these claims appear in any grant proposals; I only see them on the websites.

And a further disclaimer: While I admire much about the Coalition for Essential Schools, I have issues with the planned Bayview School and have been publicly asking questions about it, to which I haven't gotten answers.

BOE Meeting - October 09, 2007

For the BOE junkies in the house, here is the Board of Education webcast - October 09, 2007

For those that prefer written notes, Kim Knox's notes are found here: BOE Approves UESF Contract and Jim Dierke National Middle School Principal of the Year

And for fans the School Board Notes reports, we have some bad news from GreatSchools.net's president Bill Jackson:

KC,

Bad news... we are not going to be continuing the School Board Notes service at this point. Our funding ran out a year ago, but we decided to keep doing it anyway for a year. I think it is helpful, but it does cost us thousands per year, and we don’t have a funding stream for it. Looking ahead, we’re going to be developing online community features that might make it easier for parents to share info about school board meetings (and lots more) — I’ll let you know as we launch — we’d love your feedback.

Regards,
Bill

Nicole's School Board Notes have been a great resource during the turbulent times she's been reporting. Now that we have access to the webcasts, and while we are enjoying an outbreak of peace and tranquility on the BOE, I can see why GreatSchools would allow the program to lapse.

Thanks Nicole for all the time and effort that have gone into your reporting. It will be missed.

Why Berkeley students eat better

BeyondChron's School Beat: A Tale of Two Cities--Why School Food is Better in Berkeley

by Dana Woldow‚ Oct. 11‚ 2007

Berkeley students have enjoyed fresher, healthier school lunches in the past couple of years, since celebrity chef Ann Cooper took over their meal program.

San Francisco’s school food has improved in recent years too, but our schools can’t feed kids as well as Berkeley does. The reason is simple: Berkeley has much more money to spend on school food.

The two districts’ lunch menus look similar — pizza, pasta, hot dog, burrito and chicken in various guises, plus whole-grain bread, fresh fruit and milk. Both districts have banished soda, chips and other junk food.

But in Berkeley, every school has a salad bar (organic in high school), hot dogs are grass-fed beef, and meals are freshly cooked in the district’s central kitchens. In San Francisco, only a few schools have salad bars, although 25 will open this year, thanks to a grant from Mayor Gavin Newsom. Hot dogs are USDA commodity turkey, and the food, while healthy, is mostly brought in precooked and frozen, then reheated.

How can one school district afford to feed needy students organic food and freshly cooked meals, while another just across the bay cannot?

The answer lies in an obscure funding stream from a property tax override that some communities approved in the late ’70s, called Meals for Needy Pupils. Only about a third of California school districts get this money; Berkeley’s share this year is $1.27 for every meal served to a low-income student. The San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) receives nothing, because San Francisco did not pass Meals for Needy Pupils when it had the chance. In mid-1978, Prop 13 curtailed the ability of school districts to raise funds in this way.

While this money originally went only for student nutrition, eventually the law was changed, allowing districts to use the funds for any purpose. Most started diverting the money to pay for other educational needs, Berkeley included. Then in 2004, the School Lunch Initiative, a public/private partnership between Berkeley Unified, Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse Foundation and the Center for Ecoliteracy, began an ambitious program committed to “provid(ing) all students with delicious, healthy, seasonal meals made from local, sustainably grown ingredients” (according to their website.) When Cooper was hired to run Berkeley’s nutrition department in 2005, she made her acceptance of the job contingent on Berkeley Unified’s restoring the Meals for Needy Pupils funding to her department.

Today, while SFUSD receives government reimbursement of $2.71 per lunch served to a needy student, Berkeley’s Nutrition Services department gets $2.71, plus an extra $1.27 from Meals for Needy Pupils – nearly 50 percent more than SFUSD. And at breakfast, San Francisco receives $1.83 for each free meal served, while Berkeley gets $1.83 plus the extra $1.27 – almost 70 percent more. Even though only about 40 percent of Berkeley pupils are needy, “Chef Ann” can provide a free breakfast to every child at most schools, with the revenue generated by the needier students covering the more affluent students’ meals. At lunch, Meals for Needy Pupils money helps pay for the salad bars, the organic ingredients, the grass-fed beef and the scratch-cooked meals.

It seems unfair that some children receive better school food than others because of decisions made before some of their parents were even born.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. San Francisco could provide more money for higher-quality student meals. One place to start is with the Public Enrichment Education Fund (commonly known as Prop. H), which authorized the use of city money to help improve the schools. Section 16-123 (e) of the City Charter specifies that money from the third of Prop. H funds allocated for “other support” can be used for students’ nutritional needs. With funding from Prop.H, salad bars could be opened in every SFUSD school, offering all students this healthier fare.

Students shouldn’t have to live in Chez Panisse’s back yard to get a top-quality school meal.

Dana Woldow is the co-chair of the SFUSD Student Nutrition and Physical Activity Committee, and the parent of two recent SFUSD graduates and one current SFUSD student. Contact her at Nestwife@owlbaby.com

Charter advocates tap Larry Craig's support

From Mike Klonsky's Small Talk blog: The Center for Education Reform, the Bush-linked conservatives who are the nation's leading charter lobbying group, has been playing footsie with disgraced GOP congressman Larry Craig.

Disclaimer that I think the Larry Craig situation is really sad, and that he should just embrace life, move here and stroll down Castro on a sunny Sunday afternoon hand-in-hand with his boyfriend. Being an Idaho Republican must be hell on Earth. But that said, I doubt if CER feels the same way, and they're probably wishing they had never wiggled their fingers at him under the stall divider.

Jeanne Allen and her small, but well-heeled group of conservative CER school reformers, may be embarrassed by a recent glossy mailing they just sent out. It features embattled Republican congressman, Larry Craig getting an award from CER. Craig has been the darling of CER for years. Eduwonk’s Rotherham surmises that the mailing, “must have been printed a while ago.” It seems that Craig, when he wasn’t tapping his toes in toilets, was an ardent voucher-ite and school privatization advocate. I had to laugh when I read his speech from last May, accepting an award from CER.

"Today, our youth's competitors may very well be kids from China, India, and other technologically advanced nations," said Craig. "If we are to remain competitive in the world, we need to start thinking outside the box, and charter schools are just one way we are meeting these demands. The Coeur d'Alene Charter Academy is an outstanding example of how we are raising the bar on education and giving our kids a chance to flourish."

That’s flourish—not flush—for those who have trouble with small font size. Makes you wonder what Craig means by “outside the box.” OK, I’ll stop now.

An emblematic charter-school scam

I usually keep the log of charter school scams on a somewhat inconsistently updated page on www.pasasf.org . This story is such a clear demonstration of what can happen when schools are joyously freed from burdensome bureaucratic regulations that I'm posting it here, though. And it was our kids from whom the $12 million was looted, of course. (Yes, I know, this stuff can and does happen in regular schools and districts. But when we free schools from burdensome bureaucratic regulations, oversight, accountability and supervision, we invite much more of it to happen.)

Audit faults charter director

The man who ran Albor school in Santa Ana funneled away $12 million, report says.
By Seema Mehta, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 10, 2007
The executive director of a Santa Ana charter school that left students scrambling when it closed last year funneled more than $12 million in state funds to several businesses owned by him, his supposed wife and their friends, according to an audit unveiled Tuesday night.

Financial irregularities were among several questionable acts at the Albor Charter School, which primarily served Latino immigrants and received $25 million in state funds from 2002 until 2006.

... In 2005, allegations of questionable spending, fiscal mismanagement and conflicts of interest led the district to revoke Albor's charter. A legal battle allowed the school to stay open the next school year. But founder and executive director Emilio Vazquez abruptly closed Albor in March 2006 -- without giving notice to students or staff -- after its state funding was severely reduced by a change in state law that no longer provided funding for students older than 22.

When charter schools close, they are supposed to perform financial accounting that lists their liabilities and assets. Because Albor failed to do so, and because of concern about potential fraud and misappropriations of funds, the county Department of Education called in a state team to perform an "extraordinary audit."

The 118-page report found that Vazquez had delegated administrative operations of Albor and funneled more than $12 million in state funds to MI-Vocational School, a business he also controlled. Some of this money was then given to Vagabond Entertainment, EMPE Inc., A&E Financing Inc. and other companies controlled by Vazquez, his supposed wife, Astrid Reibe, and their associates Pedro Sole, Martin Ramirez and Edgar Villagomez.

... The audit also found that although Albor was purportedly a high school, it appeared in reality to be a vocational school for adults. Brochures mentioned certified nursing assistant, medical assistant and computer technology programs, with little, if any, description of high school classes.

... Additionally, students may have been charged fees to attend, which is illegal at a public school, the report says.

When Albor closed, no transcripts were available to ease student transfers to another high school because no one was around to provide them. Additionally, full credit was not given for some courses taken, since the school was never accredited and the curriculum could not be verified.

"Many students who thought they were at the junior or senior grade level were placed back in ninth grade and given no credit for the classes that were taken at Albor or that were in progress at the midterm closure of the school," the audit says.

... Board member Audrey Yamagata-Noji expressed frustration that, even though the district grew suspicious of Albor's operations, it was largely hamstrung by existing state law from pursuing its concerns.

"It shows the handicap public school districts are in [when dealing] with charter schools," she said.

The Superintendent and the D.A. Speak Out on Truancy

D.A. Kamala Harris and Superintendent Carlos Garcia have written an important op-ed piece in the Chron acknowledging what has been whispered for a long time. Truancy is rampant in SFUSD and concentrated in specific communities.

Absent minded: Consequences of truancy hurt entire community

Kamala D. Harris,Carlos Garcia
Sunday, October 7, 2007

For many of us, the first question asked at the dinner table while growing up often was, "What did you learn in school today?"

The reality is far from that today for many San Francisco children. The reality is that too many of the city's children are failing to get an education, simply because they are not attending school on a regular basis. Chronic school absence is profoundly impacting the future of San Francisco's children as well as the safety of our communities.

We are not talking about playing hooky with friends on a hot day at Ocean Beach. What we are talking about is chronic and habitual school absenteeism - students who have 15, 20, even 80 unexcused absences in one school year.

Although it is a statewide problem, chronic school absence has reached a crisis point in San Francisco. In fact, the city has one of the highest rates in the state - higher than the average rates of California's other major urban areas, including Alameda, Los Angeles and Contra Costa counties.

Last year, nearly 5,500 San Francisco Unified School District students were habitually absent from school. Forty-four percent were elementary school students. At one San Francisco elementary school, 55 percent of the students were chronically or habitually absent last year. One San Francisco third-grader had more than 60 unexcused absences in one school year. One ninth-grader missed 104 days of school last year, out of 180 days. Some students have literally dropped off the charts, having been absent from school for a year or more.

Read the whole thing. It is very encouraging to see both of these leaders standing up and raising awareness of this issue. This is not the first time Harris has spoken out on this issue. About a year ago she and the mayor announced a plan to target 100 individual chronic truants. The article today mentions this and takes credit for a %40 improvement for those students. Sorry, that sounds like a pittance. Only 100 students? Only %40? Nice try, but try again and try harder. Nothing they have done, nothing they are proposing in this article is in any way commensurate with the problem.

Garcia is new. He is promising to lead, and to work with the BOE to target and focus their efforts on key issues. Let's hope this is a signal of more to come. This is a concrete, measurable crisis that should be dealt with. Its hard to impagine a better way to start tackiling the larger issues of minority achievement gaps and graduation rates. The first step has to be to get these at risk kids in class and off the killing streets.

The School Beat goes on...

Here's a pair of interesting BeyondChron School Beat columns for your reading pleasure:

Closing the Achievement Gap

Clearly something has got to change. But before change must come understanding, and understanding the causes of the achievement gap requires accepting and working through some hard truths about American schools and American society.

How a School Transfer Saved our SFUSD Experience

Enrollment tales for San FranciscoÂ’s public schools are like urban myths. Our family has one that includes the characteristics of a good drama — initial hope, disillusionment, then finally success and a happy ending at our new school — Sunset Elementary.

Charter-school critic in the community

After some years of following charter-school issues and blogging to debunk what I see as misinformation, I'm having a cut-to-the-chase moment. I have an eighth-grader and am doing the high-school tours and events.

I'm not out to make public scenes by confronting anyone in person! Charter parents and spokespeople alike can already attest that I don't challenge them in public, raise a ruckus, or harass or embarrass anyone. I blog my opinions and post in relevant online discussions, which seems perfectly within the bounds of decorum.

At a Parents for Public Schools event last evening, the representative for a well-respected charter spoke about its enrollment process. It was not me but one of his fellow panelists who questioned him sharply about why they require a nine-page enrollment application, an essay and teacher recommendations to get into the alleged "blind" "lottery."

That's not inherently a bad thing. A selective enrollment process seems perfectly legitimate to me — as long as they're honest about it. Claiming to get the students to a higher level when they are actually pre-selected for being at a higher level is not honest, though.

One of my objections to that was that I have perceived that this school did a lot of comparing its achievement favorably to SFUSD schools that do not pre-screen. It seems like I'm seeing less of that now, though, and I appreciate it.

Anyway, back to the public decorum — I do plan to tour the charter schools with my eighth-grader, and I won't raise the issue in public when I hear a claim I think is inaccurate. I will blog about it here, though.

NCLB's impact: My bad! Do-over!

Some of the more-thoughtful right-leaning "Ed Reform" types have been questioning the effects of No Child Left Behind — relentless testing, focus on "the basics" to the exclusion of all else.

It's under discussion on Gerald Bracey's national Education Disinformation Detecting and Reporting Agency (EDDRA) listserve:

Jerry refers here to right-leaning public-education critics Checker Finn and Diane Ravitch:

In their book, Beyond the Basics, [it's more of a report, downloadable from the Fordham Foundation] Checker and Diane write this:

We should have seen this coming. We and others who have pressed for higher academic standards in recent years — particularly since the Charlottesville education "summit" set national education goals in 1989 — should have anticipated the "zero sum" problem that it would give rise to: more emphasis on some things would inevitably mean less attention to others. Insofar as we recognized this, however, we naively assumed that school days and years would expand to accommodate more of everything; that teachers would somehow become more knowledgeable; and that state and federal policy makers would insist on a balanced curriculum.

We were wrong. We didn't see how completely standards-based reform would turn into a basic-skills frenzy or the negative impact that it would have on educational quality (p. 6).

Duh. Or to respond more heatedly — a ticked-off teacher posted a response on the EDDRA listserve that I'm reposting with his permission.

Yes, Diane and Checker, YOU were wrong. But many, many of us, who, you know, actually teach in classrooms and work with real children every day, as well as many, many researchers and professors knew you were wrong and you told us all to kiss off and even went so far as to question our academic credentials. I see that you can't let that one go still; I caught the little dig "teachers would somehow become more knowledgeable". Bite me, Diane and Checker. I'm a little short of forgiveness for you at this point; the lives of my Title I students have been irrevocably tainted by the monstrosity that is NCLB and directly resulting from your playing footsie with the conservative politicians who made this happen, from Clinton to Bush. Too late in my book for an "Oops, my bad! — do-over!"

2006 BOE campaign spending revisited

Frankly, its been a slow news period on the SFUSD front. The new superintendent is enjoying a honeymoon period with no signs of discontent on any front. The UESF union has agreed to a contract. The BOE is in a calm period... Not a lot to blog about, quite frankly!

So I decided to reach back to the 2006 BOE election to revisit a post I wrote during the election about BOE candidate funraising. In the two posts I wrote about fundraising, I relied on data compiled on the excellent Transparency in Government Project website. At the time they were keeping data about the BOE campaigns. Now, months later, they are focused on state wide offices and have left the local BOE record keeping to the Campaign Finance Database maintained by the SF Ethics Commission. What follows is the data that I have been able to tease out of their difficult to use search page. I suspect it is massively incomplete. But it is interesting:

Candidate	Raised	Spent
Yes on Proposition A, Let's Rebuild San Francisco's Schools funded in part by a Citizen interested in improving education in San Francisco public schools	$430,350	$387,297
Hydra Mendoza	$55,625	$63,650
Jane Kim	$52,564	$60,988
Bayard Fong	$41,963	$42,591
Bob Twomey	$39,101	$39,982
Kim Knox	$15,886	$16,347
San Franciscans for Quality Education	$12,730	$24,083
Kim-Shree Mufaus	$9,750	$8,385
Dan Kelly	$6,791	$5,511
Mauricio Vela	$6,195	$5,224
Wilma Pang	no data
Boots Whitmer	no data
Omar Khalif	no data
James Calloway	no data
Joel Britton	no data
Roger Schulke	no data
Richard Van Loon	no data

Note that there is no data for many candidates, but I doubt any of these candidates raised large sums that went unreported.

The big news in this table are the two committees that are not affliated with specific candidates. The Prop A committee funds dwarf all other BOE candidate spending. I had no idea. $430,350! Wow.