When Chemists Attack

I’ve heard it said that spending money on public education is “throwing money at the problem” (as if the solution to an aging bus fleet is to spend less money on buses). I generally do not agree with that assertion, because it’s pretty obvious that a lot of the problems facing our public schools are connected to funding. Education isn’t cheap!

Having said that, there does seem to be one area where South Carolina seems to be “throwing money at the problem” – charter schools. Have a look at this Greenville News article about Restoring the Minds Math and Business Academy, one of South Carolina’s less-than-successful charter schools.

One-third of the 43 groups in the state that have received grants of $20,000 to plan one of these publicly funded independent schools never opened, costing taxpayers at least $280,000, according to the state Department of Education.

Now that’s throwing money at a problem. What have we gotten for our $280,000? We could have gotten buses or teachers. But we didn’t.

But let’s look at one of the charter schools that did open – Restoring the Minds Math and Business Academy.

Some charter schools that do open, such as Restoring the Minds Math and Business Academy, draw from a $200,000 start-up grant but go out of business before they finish a school year.

That giant flushing sound you just heard was your tax money, which could have gone for for more buses and more quality teachers, going down the toilet.

This particular charter school was run by Martha Evans, pastor of Resurrected Treasure Ministries. This church also runs a private school using the ACE curriculum, a holy-roller curriculum that’s a combination of bad pedagogy and bad science.

Why did their charter school close? Their charter was revoked for many reasons, according to the the Greenville county school board. They accuse the school of

(1) Material violations of the conditions, standards, and procedures provided for in the charter, as demonstrated by these failures:

• Failure to operate according to a year-round calendar
• Failure to provide single-gender classes
• Failure to utilize school uniforms
• Failure to comply with State curriculum standards
• Failure to comply with provisions for special education teacher
• Failure to follow employee grievance and termination procedures
• Failure to follow student discipline procedures
• Failure to implement innovative ideas, techniques, and methodologies
• Failure to implement interdisciplinary learning

(2) Failure to meet or make reasonable progress toward pupil achievement standards identified in the charter application, as demonstrated by the following:

• Failure to comply with State curriculum standards
• Failure to assess and implement individualized academic plans

(3) Failure to meet generally accepted standards of fiscal management, as demonstrated by the following issues:

• Failure to maintain records of financial transactions or receipts of bills paid
• Failure to comply with routine procedures and standards for compensating employees
• Inflation of enrollment numbers
• Failure to comply with SASI reporting procedures
• Failure to secure payment for out-of-district students

(4) Violations of provisions of the law from which the charter school was not specifically exempted, as demonstrated by the following:

• Failure to submit proper reports, conduct manifestation determinations, handle discipline, comply with IEP’s, provide compensatory education, and provide instruction from a qualified teacher in violation of IDEA, section 504, and the ADA
• Failure to employ certified teachers for at least 75% of the school’s teaching staff in violation of section 59-40-50(B)(5) of the South Carolina Code
• Failure to test and provide instruction to students with limited English language proficiency in violation of the fourteenth amendment, title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974
• Failure to comply with audit procedures and requirements in violation of section 59-40-50(B)(3) of the South Carolina Code
• Failure to comply with student attendance requirements in violation of section 59-40-50 (B)(2) of the South Carolina Code

I’ve highlighted a few things above. It looks like the school already had corruption problems (shady handling of funds and inflation of enrollment numbers) and quality problems (lack of certified teachers and substandard curriculum). This is what we’re pulling money away from our public schools to fund?

Something to think about …

That report from the Department of Education turns out to be pretty interesting – especially when you look at a few comparisons between public schools and private schools.

One interesting point is the fraction of students in the public schools with either learning disablilites (LD) of some kind or who are learning English as a second language (ELL). These students are more difficult to teach (in terms of time and money) than a non-disabled student who is from an English-speaking home. The data below was for fourth grade reading, but the percentages are similar for the other groups the study examined.

So the next time someone says that private schools seem to have a lower average cost per student (and they must therefore be running much more efficiently as a result), remember that they’re educating different students. They simply don’t take the more costly students!

Here in South Carolina, we’ve got a bunch of small private fundamentalist religious schools. The Department of Education report breaks these apart from private schools in general in a few places. Here’s the money quote:

For math scores,

the initial difference between Conservative Christian schools and all public schools was substantially smaller (5.1 points) and not significant. The average difference in adjusted school means between Conservative Christian schools and all public schools was -7.6 points (i.e., a higher average school mean for public schools) and was significantly different from zero.

In other words, fundamentalist schools don’t do a significantly better job at educating students in math even if you don’t recognize the fact that they don’t have as many LD/ELL students. When you do account for student factors, you see that these fundamentalist schools do demonstrably worse than the public schools.

So why is it that we want vouchers here in South Carolina, again?

There’s a new Senate bill generating some buzz on the news: S.3682, sponsored by Alexander Lamar from TN (search for it at thomas.loc.gov or try clicking here). The bill looks like it’ll provide vouchers for “low-income” kids to go to private schools – presumably on the basis that transferring poor kids from public school to private school will help them do better.

This premise appears to be flawed. The National Center for Education Statistics has released a report that says sometihng like this. While private schools appear at first glance to produce students who score better on assessments of reading and math than public school students, this difference disappears (and even reverses in some cases), when differences among ethnicity, family income, etc. are taken into account. In other words, it’s not that private schools are necessarily better at educating, it’s that they can and do select their own students.

I fail to see the great need to funnel students out of public schools (which are accountable on some level to taxpayers) to private schools (which are largely unaccountable to taxpayers), when it does not appear that the private schools will do any better a job at educating these students than the public schools do.

But even if you accept that school vouchers are a good idea, if you are into quality science education this little provision in S.3682 should give you a bit of indigestion. While schools

participating in a project under this Act shall not discriminate against an individual participant in, or an individual applicant to participate in, the project on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin

, all bets seem to be off if the school is a religious school. In particular,

if a school […] receives funds made available under this Act for an eligible student as a result of a choice made by the student’s parent, the receipt of the funds shall not, consistent with the first amendment of the Constitution–

(A) necessitate any change in the school’s teaching mission;

. So, while public schools are required (for good reason) to teach accepted science, the fundamentalist religious schools can slurp up those sweet, sweet taxpayer dollars while teaching kids nonsense like creation science on religious grounds.

(Edited – fixed thomas link and corrected bill number)