Being rich doesn't make you an education policy expert
Philip Derrow's extraordinarily ignorant proposal to split Ohio's largest school district into an unknown number of smaller ones typifies why, in general, CEOs get it wrong on public education.
Look. I appreciate business leaders getting involved in their communities. Their insights are important and valuable. However, too many simply don’t understand that their ability to make money in the private sector doesn’t automatically translate to being an effective public policy analyst. This is especially true in public education.
Public education isn’t a business.
It’s a civic good. No. A civic right.
So applying the principles of money making to a civic right may help in some aspects of the operation, like risk pooling, purchasing, etc. But it’s really misguided in others, like limiting what it takes to provide students what they need to succeed in school and life.
When CEOs insist on applying money making principles be applied to everything in public education, it can be ruinous.
Take Philip Derrow.
What makes his staggeringly ignorant proposal to crack Columbus City Schools into “four or five” separate districts especially galling is that Derrow — a former School Board member in New Albany-Plain Local — should know better.
By the way, the fact he hasn’t thought about this idea enough to settle on whether Columbus and its 41,000 students should be split into 4 or 5 (or more or fewer) districts should tell you a lot.
I was surprised he didn’t choose 6 or 7. Yes. That’s a joke.
I digress.
Here’s Derrow’s argument in a nutshell: Columbus’ academic struggles, outrageous demands for more property tax revenue and gross overspending on administrators means they are a disaster and should be split into smaller districts.
Why?
Because district consolidation and fragmentation has a sterling track record of success?
Not really. Take West Virginia. Between 1990 and 2002, West Virginia closed 300 districts. The result of that ambitious consolidation effort made education more expensive, created the most expensive busing program in the country and led to no meaningful academic improvements — instead making the education experience worse for many students.
Even the Fordham Institute agreed that consolidating districts has “ null or very small positive impacts in both math and English language arts.”
But what about this so-called district fragmentation Derrow is presenting? Well, we know that it leads to greater community and racial segregation, which we also know (and have known ever since Brown v. Board of Education) leads to worse achievement outcomes and widening achievement gaps. (A good roundup of the research on this stuff is located here and here.)
See, Derrow is a Master of the Universe (a movie I am eagerly awaiting, by the way), so he, by extension, knows stuff, I guess?
The appeal to authority he makes, which does lot of heavy lifting for him, is that he served on the local school board of New Albany, the state’s 3rd richest school district ($270,000 average income).
So this qualifies him to definitely know what’s best for the 41,000 kids living in Ohio’s largest district where their parents make, on average, 78 percent less than the parents living in Derrow’s district.
But here’s the kicker: Derrow’s premise — that Columbus is spending too much money on administrators and asking too much of property owners — is based on comparing his district’s experience to that of Columbus.
Need I tell you, Dear Reader, why comparing a district whose students come from among the state’s wealthiest families with a district whose students come from among the state’s poorest families is spectacularly unfair? Families of more than 1 in 5 Columbus students don’t speak English as their primary language, which is the state’s 4th highest rate and nearly double the rate of Columbus’ peer districts. New Albany only has 4.8 percent of their students in a similar situation.
See? Not really similar district profiles.
So what we need to do is compare Columbus with districts most similar to Columbus, which the state actually does do in its annual District Profile Report.
What you’ll see there is that Columbus’ property tax burden is about 10 percent less than similar districts to Columbus.
But yes, Mr. Derrow, you got ‘em. Columbus does spend a higher percentage of their operating revenue on administrators than their peer districts.
Peer districts to Columbus spend 14.6 percent of their operational costs on administrators.
Columbus spends 14.7 percent. New Albany’s? 12.8 percent.
What’s Derrow’s response to a 0.1 percent greater relative expenditure on administrators than its peer districts and not even 2 percent difference from his own district’s rate?
“Admit it. Columbus City Schools is bloated and broken beyond repair,” screams his column’s headline.
By the way, the average administrator salary in Columbus is $122,923. Anyone else find it jarring to hear someone from New Albany bitching about Columbus administrators’ bloat when those same administrators don’t even make 1/2 of what the average New Albany family makes?
I digress.
Does Derrow say similar things about virtual Charter Schools, whose average administrative expense is a staggering 40 percent? No.
What about brick and mortar Charter Schools, whose average administrative expense is a whopping 27.2 percent? Nope.
There are 150 Ohio public school districts that spend a higher percentage of their operational costs on administrators than Columbus. So do they need a radical realignment too? Not according to Derrow.
Importantly, Derrow claims that
“Small, rural districts can benefit from the type of consolidation that eliminates redundant administrative expenses. But Columbus schools’ overstuffed officialdom shows that large bureaucracies can too easily become self-replicating parasites that feed off of and slowly kill the organization that sustains them.”
Ugh.
Let’s set aside Derrow’s overstuffed prose for now.
Ripley-Union-Lewis-Huntington Local — the exact type of small, rural consolidated district (four times; it’s in the name!) that Derrow claims to be the paragon of streamlined expenditure making — spends nearly 50 percent more on administrators (23.7 percent) than the “overstuffed officialdom” (whatever the hell that is) of Columbus (14.7 percent).
Look, does Columbus have academic challenges? Absolutely.
Do they need to do better? Absolutely.
They’re one of the few districts in the state rated as 2 stars — the lowest any district received on the state report card (importantly, they have the same performance rating as the state’s largest virtual charter school and a similar or higher rating than more than 1/2 of all charters, but I digress).
These state performance measures Derrow and others cite, though, are all based on standardized tests, which are notoriously better at measuring a school district’s poverty level than they are at measuring student success.
Let’s look beyond those numbers.
Wanna know something? On many student opportunity measures, Columbus mostly outperforms their peer districts and straight up outperforms New Albany.
Meanwhile, New Albany mostly underperforms their peer districts on these measures.
For example, even though New Albany boasts the state’s 3rd richest community, on their overall test-score ratings (again, largely determined by community wealth), they only rank as the 4th-highest performing school district … in Franklin County!
So let’s look at some of these student opportunity measures.
50.3 percent of Columbus’ high school students participate in a physical education or wellness course. Only 27 percent of New Albany high school students do.
56 percent of Columbus high school students are enrolled in a career-tech course — higher than its peer districts. Only 5 percent of New Albany high school students are enrolled in career-tech options — a far smaller percentage than the 18.9 percent average among New Albany’s peer districts.
88 percent of Columbus middle school aged students and 78.2 percent of their high school students are taking co-curricular activities — well above their peer districts’ rate. Only 65.3 percent of New Albany middle school students and 55.3 percent of their high school students participate in co-curricular activities — far below New Albany’s peer districts, lower even than Columbus’ peer districts.
When New Albany outperforms Columbus, they mostly do not outperform their peer districts. For example, New Albany has a lower percentage of its students participating in AP, CCP and IB courses and middle school world languages. Columbus outperforms its peer districts in the same categories.
And while 77.4 percent of New Albany’s graduates are considered college, career or militarily prepared, Columbus’ rate of 64.7 percent ain’t far behind and is pretty damn impressive given its far more challenging student profile.
Let me ask you a question, Dear Reader: Do you think granting students these opportunities gives them a better overall educational experience? If you answered, “yes” to that question, then I think it’s fair to suggest that kids in Columbus are more likely to have these better overall educational experiences than kids in New Albany, despite New Albany’s overwhelming demographic and funding advantages.
Quite a different description of public education in Columbus than what Derrow suggests, don’t you think?
This is not to say that New Albany is failing or needs broken back into two districts or anything. But the data suggest they could do more, especially as the state’s third-richest district.
For example, New Albany’s local tax effort is about 1/3 that of Columbus’ residents’ and (importantly) less than 1/2 of their peer districts’1.
One the fiscal side, let’s not discount the fact that the state sends privately run schools in Columbus nearly twice the amount of state aid they send kids in Columbus’ public schools (much of it going to private schools whose kids were never in the Columbus City Schools to begin with).
The state provides privately run schools taking New Albany kids about 22.4 percent of the money New Albany kids receive in their public schools. Still way too much. But the economic impact isn’t even in the same ballpark as the impact on Columbus.
In addition, while the state last year funded privately run schools for 144 New Albany students — 3.1 percent of its public school enrollment, privately run schools for more than 30,000 Columbus resident students were funded — 72 percent of the total public school students in Columbus.
I’ll finish with Mr. Derrow on this point he made about the most recent teachers’ contract in Columbus: “They’re focused on maximum job, wage and benefits protection for existing employees, even as customers — parents — flee to better choices”. He then calls Columbus a “failed industry.” He is essentially implying that Columbus’ contract is designed to keep old, curmudgeonly teachers around at the expense of newer, fresher teaching blood joining the fray2.
Columbus teachers make $75,219 a year. New Albany’s make $78,299. Meanwhile, here are the relative years of experience for each district:
So Derrow is saying that despite the fact that Columbus teachers are cheaper and less experienced (and probably much younger) than New Albany, it is Columbus’ contract that retains the old, curmudgeonly hangers on like other “failed industry”3?
Got it.
In conclusion, I wanted to spend some time here to explain that public education is a difficult, complex, noble endeavor. It is not a balance sheet. It is not a business. It is not a test score.
It is a civic right.
Costs certainly matter and should be pared down where they can be, but only for meeting the goal of investing more in kids’ educational experiences, not so you can claim some nebulous “fiscal responsibility” mantle or hold onto it to spend on a so-called “rainy day”, which of course never comes, even during pandemics or recessions.
For it is our kids’ educational experiences that matter, even more than what they cost. There is simply zero reason to consider cracking up Columbus City Schools for the reasons Derrow claim exist because doing so will fundamentally harm Columbus kids’ educational experiences.
And those reasons don’t really exist anyway.
My bottom line for Derrow and other Masters of the Universe is this: The path to economic and social prosperity begins in the classroom. If you aren’t willing to invest whatever it takes to enrich that path for our kids, what the hell are you doing?
The local tax effort index in Columbus is 0.88 — well below peer districts’ 0.99. New Albany’s local tax effort index is 0.34. The tax effort index for similar districts to New Albany is 0.61. Here’s how the state’s education department explains the local tax effort index: “Local Tax Effort Index is an index that tends to reflect the extent of the effort residents of school districts make in supporting public elementary and secondary education. This index, is calculated in the context of the residents’ ability to pay, by determining the relative position of each school district in the state in terms of the portion of residents’ income devoted to supporting public education. This measure, like others, suffers from inherent complexities. However, it appears to reasonably reflect voters’ effort in support of elementary and secondary public education. For this calculation a four-step process is used:
In the first step the ratio of any school income tax and class 1 property taxes charged, to federal adjusted gross income is calculated at the district and the state levels.
In the second step the median income of the districts’ residents is divided by the statewide median income to get a ratio of the district to the state median income figures.
In the third step the district ratio calculated in the first step above is divided by the ratio calculated in the second step to measure the effort in the context of ability to pay.
In the final step the ratio calculated in the third step above is divided by the statewide ratio calculated in the first step to determine the relative effort index in the context of the state as a whole.”
This is an old, tired cliche that business types attribute to teachers unions — that all they do is protect older, non-innovative teachers at the expense of the newer “energetic” ones. It’s a bullshit trope that I don’t have time here to get into in depth, but it is out there nonetheless.
Derrow’s complaint is rooted in what roots nearly all complaints CEOs make about collective bargaining agreements — it’s too hard to clear out the bad workers. However, the current Columbus CBA allows for the discipline of teachers, including their dismissal. But it has to be done for cause and progressively. Here’s the exact dismissal language: “Termination shall be according to Section 3319.16 and related provisions of the Ohio Revised Code and applicable provisions of this Agreement.” Wanna guess what the termination language was in the last New Albany contract while Derrow was a school board member? “Suspension of a teacher with or without pay for disciplinary reasons shall only occur for just cause. This just cause standard in this provision shall not apply to the nonrenewal of the teacher’s limited teaching contract, nor shall it affect in any way the rights of the Board or members of the bargaining unit with respect to termination procedures initiated under Section 3319.16 of the Ohio Revised Code.” Another nugget: “It shall not be considered discipline to place a unit member on administrative leave with pay”, reads the New Albany CBA. So it won’t go on the New Albany teacher’s disciplinary record if they’re suspended with pay, but under Section 404.02(C) of the Columbus contract Derrow hates so much, suspension with pay does go on the Columbus teacher’s record. I’m not saying one contract is better than the other. What I am saying is Columbus’ has some areas of stronger teacher accountability than New Albany’s.