The Conflict Between Money and Principles

There is much talk today about principles. We just got through an election cycle where every candidate told us how principled they were, or how their principles guided their decisions.  Having principles is not restricted to the political class. Business leaders also have guiding principles. Henry Ford, an early example of business success, believed that a business’s goal was in serving people. “Money chasing is not a business,” he said.  His principles (see chart below) guided him to developing a company where the worker not only had a right to labor as a “moral fundament of life” but also shared in the business’s success.  

Ford's business principles from his book Today and Tomorrow published 1926

Confusion comes when we mistake values for principles. We tend to take for granted the statement that someone is a person of principles to mean that they share our values. We assume the business actions of someone we admire are based on our values or ones we would agree with without first asking what principles (rules of conduct) guided their decision process. This can lead us to admire not necessarily the wrong person, but the wrong actions for the wrong reasons.

Take our local business success, Rex Sinquefield.  His is the ultimate rags-to-riches story, a boy who grew up in the St. Vincent Orphanage who went on to create the first index funds which made him wildly wealthy. Because we live in America he is able to use that money to fund any group or individual that he chooses. We can look at St. Louis Biz Talk to see which groups his foundation funds and make some assumptions about what his principles and values are.  The problem is that we apply our own bias and values in making those assumptions, which has made Rex the subject of much public scorn as groups, who though they knew him as a Republican conservative, discovered him funding groups and causes with a notably more liberal bent.  Teach For America is one example.

The Sinquefield Foundation actively supports education reform. We can only guess at the reasons why the foundation has decided education is so important.  Sinquefield values the education he received at St. Vincent’s Orphanage and may credit it with putting him on the track to success. He says he wants great teachers in all classrooms and, given what he said in this video, we can probably safely assume that he believes the great teachers at St. Vincents are the reason for his success. He is a man whose principles tell him to back his values with hard cash and his Foundation’s website says he has a commitment to paying it forward so that others can have access to a great education regardless of their socio-economic background, just like he did.  This explains the more than half a million dollars a year and has donated to the Archdiocese’s Today and Tomorrow Foundation for many years. (Did Ford influence the name?)

But principles are professed rules of action or conduct.  You can value good teachers, but choose a host of different ways to get them. Sinquefield’s investing principles (who and what he chooses  to fund) are far more molded by his business experience than by his experience with the nuns of St. Vincent’s. You don’t get rich always betting on the underdog, though that may earn you a few extra points at the pearly gates.  A quick glance at the various organizations that The Sinquefield Foundation supports should be considered more as an investment strategy than a good housekeeping seal of conservative approval.

·       The Today and Tomorrow Educational Foundation (TTEF)

·       Children’s Education Alliance of Missouri (CEAM)

·       Voices for Children

·       St. Vincent Home for Children

·       Mizzou New Music Initiative

·       Teach for America

·       Chess Club and Scholastic Center of St. Louis

·       Special Learning Center

Keeping in mind that it is business principles which guide the foundation’s investments, and not just values, it is a little easier to explain why it supports something like the CEAM who in turn supports Common Core Standards. Good business investment requires the investor to follow market trends and place their money strategically to maximize their returns. It is no secret that education is the next market bubble. Common Core will not only fix a moving target in terms of what product to supply, but it will also provide an instant guaranteed consumer base from all the schools who will be forced to use it in Missouri (and 25 other states) because our State Board of Education and DESE have signed them up for it. If you are an investor, this makes Common Core a great investment.

The same principles explain an interest in Teach For America. TFA's business model requires them to select from the cream of the crop, recognized leaders at major colleges and universities, to find talent to put in public schools. But the model didn’t stop there. It was expected, and their own statistics prove out, that those leaders would then graduate out of the teaching side of the model and into the public policy side where those great minds will be hard at work influencing education policy.  Only governments have the power to grant monopolies (they cannot exist in a true free market) so if you want a monopoly you are going to have to influence the government.  Who better to do that than top secondary education graduate leaders who can also claim time in the classroom?

And here in lies the problem with people like Rex Sinquefield and Jeb Bush who pay lip service to free markets and competition as the best means to provide the optimal public education. Most of what they are promoting is the opposite of competition. Where is the competition in quality standards if there is only one group writing them for the whole country? Where is the competition in a great k-12 education if all public schools and charters are required to use these standards, and private schools are waylaid into them because they need to show parity between their program and the public one? Where is the competition if textbook publishing giant Pearson has a hand in writing the assessments and no other publisher sits at that table? Where is the global competition if, as the UN envisions, these academic standards become the global standard?  How do US graduates compete with workers from other countries who were taught the same things in the same way? 

Competition requires product differentiation. Where is the competition if every teacher is forced to teach the same process at the same time in order to meet the assessment targets? If every child is taught the same content and there is no room in the day (oops except for the 15% time rule for non CCS content) for teaching things that might give our students an advantage, or even programs developed for providing challenges to more advanced students, how will that make our students more globally competitive?

The answer to all of these questions is that Common Core won’t provide the promised competition, but it sure makes a heck of a good short term investment if you have the money.

That brings us to the principled dilemma of all the political candidates who have benefited from Mr. Sinquefield’s largess, especially the Republican ones in Missouri. How will their principles (rules of conduct) tell them to handle the party plank that says “As Republicans, we reject Jimmy Carter’s U.S. Department of Education and vow to eliminate the department. Also, we reject President Obama’s Race to the Top and Common Core Curriculum to establish a national curriculum,” a plank that was approved unanimously at the June Republican convention, if their benefactor favors Common Core?  This is rather a dilemma.

I suggest they go back to Mr. Sinquefield and make him demonstrate where there is competition in this model, and how this model will allow Missouri to differentiate our graduates so that they may be more globally competitive.  Ask him to provide proof that these standards are everything they claim to be; internationally benchmarked, tested and superior. Lastly, they should ask him if his conviction about the superiority of these standards is strong enough for him to fund the heavy price of their implementation so districts don’t have to place such a heavy burden on their tax base to implement an entirely new set of standards and assessments.  If we need to, as everyone says, better invest in education, who better to ask for investment advice than the inventor of the index fund?

Why the Republicans Don't Want Common Core Rescinded.

You are invited to the educational reform party masqueraded as Common Core and School "Choice"

Common Core allows State Longitudinal Data Systems to share information.  The information does not only include state wide assessment scores and educational data, it will include invasive personal data on students and families.  This data will be used to track children from birth into careers.  This data will be supplied to various Federal agencies and private researchers/companies determined by the DOEd.  Why is it agreeable to Republicans to gather this information and disseminate your personal information for workforce development?

The party won't address Common Core and the power taken away from states because there's a lot of money to be made in these assessments and data.  We've written about Scott Joftus and referring to education as the "Wild Wild West" and an enormous amount of money to be made in education.  It's not about the kids; it's about the ed tech bubble and fortunes to be realized.  

From gigaom.com:

As I wrote last week in a story about LearnSprout, another quickly growing San Francisco startup tackling the same issue, data integration is a major headache for schools and developers. Accessing student data — from attendance records to grades to addresses — can currently be a weeks-long, labor-intensive, error-prone process that discourages schools from working with ed tech companies.

“Moving and managing data is one of the biggest things holding education back today,” said co-founder Tyler Bosmeny. The company’s traction, he said, shows how badly developers and educators need tools that integrate and normalize student data.

Some of the schools integrated with Clever include large charter school networks like KIPP, ASPIRE, and Green Dot, but the company said 50 percent of its schools are in traditional districts. Clever charges over 30 software companies, such as Mastery Connect, TenMarks, Sokikom, for access to its API so that those software companies can process student data and charge school districts for their educational services.

The company, which was founded by Bosmeny and two Harvard classmates, Dan Carroll and Rafael Garcia, was inspired by Carroll’s experience in education. After completing two years with Teach for America, Carroll managed technology and innovation for a Denver charter school and “lived this problem” with data, Bosmeny said.

Clever’s growth not only speaks to the current issues facing schools and developers, it indicates the founders’ desire to show the potential of education startups. While K-12 education has, more recently, attracted investment, investors have historically eschewed the field. To their knowledge, Clever’s founders said they think they’re the first K-12 startup accepted to Y Combinator.

“We really want to show that education can be a valuable business if you approach it the right way,” said Bosmeny. “We hope we can take away the barrier and prove that education is a real market and there’s a lot of room for innovation in this space.”

What this TFAer took away from his experience was not how to teach kids, but what was needed on the business side of education: the gathering and posting of data.  This Harvard graduates has a first hand knowledge of what data needs to be gathered, not how to educate children.  He "lived with the problem of data".  Did he "live with the problem of educating a child"?

When you hear legislators extoll the value of TFAers, remember that many of them do their two years, leave the profession and apply their business degrees to figure out how to make money from the educational machine.   

Common Core standards (written by private companies) have mandated this enormous data retrieval.  The mandates have created  a niche for private companies to compel states to spend money on these systems.  The states have to provide the data; the private companies are delighted to supply this need.   THIS is why the Republicans are loath to rescind the standards.  If there are no standards, there is no vehicle/mandate to require this data.  No data means no private start ups to gather the data.  It doesn't matter to the Republicans that these private start ups are using Federal and state money for their "entrepreneurial" ventures.

 From gettingsmart.com:

The drought is over and capital is flowing to innovators in K-12, postsecondary, and consumer learning. That’s the conclusion of a report from GSV Advisors including industry veterans Deborah Quazzo and Michael Moe. They examine the “near spontaneous explosion of entrepreneurial activity in education.”

...With more capital flowing, GSV points to four remaining challenges the primary obstacles to scale can be classified as the following:

• People: New talent is being attracted to education but there is still a short supply of management and engineering talent.
• Product: There are limited early adopters to support product evaluation and iterative development.
• Potential: Education is a huge segment of the economy but strangled by layers of policy and bureaucracy, and anti-market bias, and inefficient decentralized procurement.
• Predictability: Traditional political and budget vagaries have been exacerbated by the Great Recession, disruptive technologies, and new philanthropies.

How did the spontaneous combustion occur? Page 10 of the report is the “Magic Chart” that summarizes the coalescence of four change forces: advancing technology, maturing markets, innovation friendly education policy, and improving human capital. I would add a global overlay; the doubling of education expenditures in India and china is building demand for new learning tools, and viral apps quickly develop a global presence.

The "challenge to Potential" is being addressed and answered by Arne Duncan's policies and the Republicans' support of Common Core mandates and LDS.  The standards, assessments and curricula are becoming quite centralized, cutting out those pesky standards for education (which are state powers, not powers delegated to a centralized bureauracy) that are impediments for these education venture capitalists. 

The "Magic Chart" needs the innovation friendly education policy (school "choice") and the improvement of human capital.  The companies don't care how children are educated or what they learn, the companies just need to show improvement on the assessments these educational venture capitalists have fashioned.  Human capital are widgets.  Your children are pawns in a money making scheme masquerading as education.  The Republicans touting themselves as constitutionalists are masquerading behind the education reform mask as well.

Republicans don't want this business segment to disappear.   Common Core allows this private segment to tap into taxpayer dollars.   This is the reason you hear Republicans clamoring for school "choice".  It's "for the kids" is secondary or non-existent. 

McGhee Needs a Little Education About Education

Mike McGhee has been a Republican Representative in the Missouri legislature in District 122, which is in the middle of the state but closer to the western side than the eastern, for the past eight years.  He is currently running for the Missouri Senate in District 21.  In an article in the Richmond News, McGhee shared his thoughts on education. Of note:

• He’d rewrite funding directives to take all the money earmarked for education and divide it by the total number of children in Missouri schools. Everybody gets the same,” saying that after criteria is set, the money would be spread out equally “to educate the children.”

• He considers children the most valuable resource in the state.

• He believes Missouri teachers are underpaid.

These first three are right out of the progressive handbook and should be a red flag to anyone who calls themselves a conservative.

Dividing the money completely evenly is one way to define "equitable." It is also the way a communist or Reverand Al Sharpton would define equitable distribution. It is extremely simplistic and at its core contains the assumption that money is the problem in education. If that were truly the case, then the children in St. Louis who receive $16k/student, compared to $10-12k for many suburban districts, would not only be getting a better quality education, but would also have the higher test scores to prove it. Neither of those is true. Changing the way the money is divided up will not improve education for anyone in the state, and may very likely decrease the quality of education in some areas.

Anyone who refers to people as human capital or children as a resource is highly suspect. If children are a resource then they are no different than our state's lead supply and can be just as easily exploited. Children are a family's legacy, a spiritual vessel into which they pour their culture and knowledge. The state should be there to help with the transfer of knowledge aspect of child rearing, not take it over for its own purposes.

Teachers salaries in Missouri, in terms of pure dollars, ranks us 41 in the nation. But then, who would expect our salaries to be anywhere near those of teachers in New York or California where the cost of living is so much higher.  If you look at the Teacher Portal's ranking of states on their Comfort Score, Missouri ranks 16. The Comfort Score examines average salaries (both starting and overall) and compares that to the cost of living. Our closest neighbors on the scale rank as follows: Kentucky-15, Nebraska-17, Oklahoma-18, Mississippi-19, Louisiana-20 and Kansas-21. Doesn't make us look so out of line especially considering that their economies are doing better than ours.

McGhee further thinks, 

• Better schools would entice families to move to Missouri rather than to reject an opportunity because they fear the schools are substandard.

This is one of those political phrases that sounds really good, until you stop to think about it. Families need a job first to be enticed to come to the state. In tough economic times people will not turn down a job because the schools are less than ideal. The census showed that people are moving out of the state to follow the jobs into our neighboring states whose school systems are statistically similar to ours. Right to work, tax changes and tort reform would entice businesses to come here. Like it or not, a great school system is fairly far down on a business's list of considerations when choosing where to locate. People will move where the jobs are and worry about fixing the schools once they get there.

When asked where his interest in education came from, McGhee stated that when he and his siblings graduated from the Kansas City school system, none of them were able to read or write. He believes things are no different today.

He quotes another line right out of the education reform playbook when he says that, "Kids need to be educated first so they can do the jobs when they graduate.” This is birth-to-job training of people for the workforce of tomorrow. It sounds really good to the average parent, because one of their missions in life is to raise children who will be self sufficient and a big part of that means getting a job. But if schools become training grounds for jobs, they will only teach what corporations tell them they want their future workers to know. Why waste time on things like history or the arts? Where in this scenario does the local community get to say what they want their children to learn?

The McGhees live on a farm between Odessa and Bates City where he raises cows and horses.  If school is, as he stated, where you learn your career skills, I wonder which public school in Kansas City taught him to raise farm animals. He also somehow managed to start a business at 22 without having learned to read and write in public school. Maybe he learned some of those skills from his family, or in 4-H or Boy scouts which he is still actively involved in. Somewhere there is a disconnect in his thinking about the role of public education in a person's success in life.

From the rest of the Richmond News article Mr. McGhee sounds like a very nice and caring man. But if you are going to go out and speak about, or worse actively pursue a policy change in, education you need to educate yourself on both the current facts and also history.

Republicans are Supporting the Federal Takeover of Education. How to Register Your Displeasure with the Republican Leadership.

This picture of Obama, Arne Duncan and Jeb Bush illustrates the bipartisanship present in the current educational reforms pushed by the current administration.  

We keep asking the question: Why are Republicans backing the federal centralization of education?  Aren't Republicans supposed to be the party of small government and individual liberty?  Haven't we heard the Republican politicians on the state and national level state decry Obamacare because of the mandates impinging on individual choice?  Aren't Republicans supposed to be from the party not aligning itself with increased centralization?  What's the difference between the takeover of healthcare and the takeover of education?


Why are Republicans such as Jeb Bush wrapping themselves in the educational mandates in Race to the Top or the Educational Reforms Formerly Known as Race to the Top?  These mandates are from Arne Duncan and are nothing but the Federal Government directing public education on all levels to the point where local school districts are ruled impotent and useless.  This impotence and uselessness of legal institutions and officials reminds me of the current stance of state legislators.  They state, "Oh, it's all the Board of Education's doing.  Oh, it's all the governor's fault.  Oh, it's not OUR fault we have mandates the state can't afford.  Oh, we think centralization is a good thing, don't you worry about it, it will all be fine".  

They refuse to act on not implementing the standards or refuse to fund unconstitutional programs that plunge us into more debt.  They look at voters and shrug their shoulders.  I'm thinking we might as well have mandates to do away with the state legislature since it can't apparently have any influence or power in standing up against federal regulations and mandates.  Taxpayers might as well save the money paying state legislator salaries as they aren't apparently interested in protecting the state constitution from federal intrusion.

Many of our legislators want to expand charters and expand Teach for America which will take school decisions out of local districts' hands (and taxpayers) and give them to private companies and DESE.  Once again, public money is being used to fund education via agencies and companies unaccountable to the taxpayers.  Are you feeling good about this scenario?  Why aren't the legislators on the state level acting to keep us out of debt and increased federal control? 


This lack of action has been noted by a former teacher and writer in California.  Doug Lasken has written a great piece calling Republican politicians to task for their refusal to confront this educational nightmare head on.  It's time to call these politicians to task for supporting this administration's disastrous educational policy:

Stop the Department of Education’s Power Grab

***************

Doug  Lasken

Here’s my bio: I am a retired LA Unified teacher of 25 years, currently coaching debate at a private school (I also teach writing in Korea each summer through the UCLA Writing Project) and I have consulted for a number of research institutes, including Fordham, Pioneer, and WestEd .  I have been politically active in the “education wars” for many years, starting in the 80′s when, as a classroom teacher, I was told never to teach English to Hispanic students (per so-called “bilingual education”), never to teach grammar, spelling or phonics (per Whole Language), and never to use direct instruction for science (per “constructivist” philosophy).  I have freelanced many articles across the county on these subjects and am now engaged in opposing the Common Core standards, a colossal cash cow that will do virtually nothing for American education..  This petition represents my current level of frustration with the GOP for not acting as the opposition party it is supposed to be against Obama’s corrupt and ill-advised education initiatives..

Best, Doug Lasken

We the undersigned do not agree on all things, but we are in close agreement on education, and in particular these five propositions:

1.  The federal government is barred by the United States Constitution from imposing academic standards and public school curricula on the states, the very thing it is attempting to do through the Obama administration programs Race to the Top (RttT) and the Common Core Standards(CCS).

2. In addition to imposing standards and curriculum on the states, RttT mandates that states collect extensive and detailed personal information on students, and that this information be submitted to the federal Department of Education, from which it will be available to other agencies.  We oppose this on Constitutional grounds.

3. The national price tag for CCS is estimated at $30 billion (and perhaps as much as $210 billion) most of which cost is to be borne by the states. This money will enrich special interests- publishing and testing empires- but will do virtually nothing to save America’s bankrupted public schools. The undersigned believe that spending $30 billion on standards is like painting a car before junking it- good for the painters, a useless expense for the car owner.

4.  The news media has decided that since conservatives object to spending money, and since conservative views are represented in the Republican party, then people who object to RttT and CCS must be represented by the Republican party.  The undersigned have found, however, that the Republican party, as distinct from individual candidates, does not represent those seeking sound education policy.  Time and again, at all levels from local to federal,the undersigned have encountered ignorance and indifference regarding RttT and CCS from the Republican party and the people it has helped to achieve office.  Republicans as much as Democrats have been seduced by the $30 billion and slick sales talk into acquiescence to RttT and CCS.  The news media is oblivious to this.

5. Therefore, we the undersigned here state that the Republican party does not represent our views on American education, that the Republican party is in fact aligned with the Democratic party in pushing through wasteful and highly problematic Democratic programs, and that we therefore disavow allegiance to and support of the Republican party in its policies towards education, and we ask that the media acknowledge that this diminution of Republican support has occurred.

If you would like to sign this petition, write to Doug Lasken at dlasken514@aol.com