APS's Half Billion Dollar Pitch

A Whole Lot More of the Same?

Does the mill levy target the real problem?

ELECTION - FEBRUARY 2, 2016 -- 31 Albuquerque Polling Stations Will Be Open

MeanMesa has lived in Albuquerque for quite a while -- the U-Haul rolled in here on the day the jets were crashing into the World Trade Center. After spending this much time watching the Albuquerque Public School system and talking to the parents of students enrolled in it, three puzzling conclusions have emerged.

1. Educational outcomes for New Mexico -- including those for Albuquerque -- have been consistently dismal when compared to similar figures for the rest of the states.

2. Plenty [perhaps not "all" or even "most"] of Albuquerque citizens are less than impressed with the performance of the system -- not exclusively any specific part of the system -- but with the entire, apparently self-sustaining, dysfunctional performance of all the parts.

3. Apparently contradicting item 2 [above], most Albuquerque citizens relying on the system to educate their children harbor a strangely stoic acceptance to APS's institutional inertia which leaves them uninterested with the prospect of introducing really far reaching, in depth, systemic improvements to it.

These are pretty broad assertions, so it makes sense to spend a little time with each one -- especially in the light of the $575 Million bond proposal.

MeanMesa encountered three attractive, bright faced high school girls distributing the following card to front doors around the neighborhood. It spells out the pitch -- quite professionally -- from APS and the School Board to encourage Albuquerque voters to approve the mill levy question on the upcoming ballot. If any of the blog's Albuquerque followers haven't received one of these yet, be patient.

The APS Mailer

Perhaps surprisingly, MeanMesa has no particular problem with the goals stated on the cards justifying the expenditure of this money or the mill levy proposal, itself. The local school infrastructure can definitely benefit from some serious attention. Even before the voter campaign, MeanMesa had firmly decided to cast a "yes" vote on the proposal.

The assertions made [above] at the beginning of the post are pretty broad, so it makes sense to spend a little time with each one -- especially in the light of the $575 Million bond proposal.

1. Educational outcomes don't improve much when the APS budget is increased.

When the discussion descends to specific complaints about APS policy of a certain teacher's classroom techniques or the like, the bigger picture becomes blurred. It's natural for parents -- and tax payers -- to single out their "personal issues" with the way APS is handling their child's education or handling the APS budget for, say, building maintenance and so on.

However, MeanMesa thinks the real story here needs to address the "bigger picture" -- the picture in which APS can be considered more as a monolithic institution, and, importantly, what might possibly be done to change this "big picture monolith" into one with improved performance.

Now, although New Mexico -- and particularly, Albuquerque -- residents have demonstrated this unusual "acceptance" of the current performance of APS, when we "switch the parameters," we might understandably expect a better "return" from this 30% "chunk" of the State's budget. For example, if 30% of the same expenditures were dedicated to the highways in the State, we could, once again, very reasonably compare the condition of New Mexico's State highways to state highways conditions found in other states.

It turns out that we -- as common citizens -- know a great deal more about the very material "performance" of something like highway spending than we know about the rather abstract "performance" of education spending.

MeanMesa thinks that THIS is at the root of the problem. We literally do not know what a "reasonable expectation" of APS performance might look like. Further, we have a very visible reluctance to compare APS's performance to that of similar school systems in other states -- i.e. as noted in Albuquerque's very "agitated reluctance" to acknowledge the results of standardized testing.

Interestingly, this may perhaps not be the result of a conspiracy to confuse Albuquerque parents and taxpayers, but instead, the understandable result of school system which has lost track of its primary mission and the necessity of performing at a level with is competitive with national results. There is not much reason to expect the increased spending made possible by the mill levy funding to alter this much.

Student achievement does, actually, require suitable infrastructure, but improvements to infrastructure are not the central element required for better achievement.

2. What explains Albuquerque parents' "general malaise" with APS educational outcomes?

Albuquerque parents with a child attending school in the APS system cannot compare a child's educational progress with that of a child in, say, Minnesota. The parent's appraisal of this progress is individual; it is based on this parent's observation of the child last year compared to this year and generally not on a comparison of the child's progress with national [or international] educational outcomes.

Reviewing data presented on charts showing this comparison, even though the picture painted by such data may show a disastrous situation, will never provoke the same concern as the more subjective impression created at the family's dinner table. This appraisal unavoidably leads Albuquerque parents to the state of simply "hoping for the best" instead of very reasonably "demanding the best" -- or, at least, insisting on some outcomes which are consistent with the very public, material levels of spending.

Parents with children in APS have an intuitive feeling that things are not going along particularly well at all. This is a general impression. When the "educational professionals" respond to this, they predictably dive into minutia and specifics. The experts begin to explain things, not with the goal of actually explaining them, but instead, with the goal of establishing a sort of "counter argument" with the intention of allaying such parental fears about the system's deficient performance and introducing a suspicion that, as parents, they were not really sophisticated enough to understand "the causes."

When these perhaps overly general parental concerns have been relegated to such specific causes and otherwise ameliorated by these "descents into mitigating minutia," parents are supposed to feel "quite reassured" because these "intuitive" suspicions of theirs were not really well founded at all. This has apparently worked for quite a while, but now, the days of such an approach may, thankfully, seem to "be numbered."

The mill levy proposal may have placed all these considerations "on the table" in a very visible way.

The carefully crafted phenomenon patiently developed to this end is "institutional self-fortification." Any challenges which reasonably require significant changes are met with "tweeking" -- and that "tweeking" tends to serve a very institutional interest. After one of these "tweeks" [a minor adjustment to policy or, perhaps, a tiny bit of "unfinished business" with some APS staff member] has been instituted by the institution, practically everything roars back to "normal" almost immediately.

Far from being something similar to being "responsive to the concerns of the community and parents," making these continuous "adjustments" leaves APS's direction in a state so chaotic that it makes even the old adage, "run by committee," look very attractive, indeed.

3. What has caused the unusually tacit acceptance of APS performance by Albuquerque parents?

Amazingly, while still harboring these "uneasy feelings" concerning their children's education, Albuquerque parents are apparently loathe to insist on trying alternatives which are appreciably different from the status quo.

While there may be all manner of compellingly persuasive explanations for this anomaly, it's factual presence is a material player in resolving this. While MeanMesa might prefer to presume this opinion is a mere, confused, geriatric exaggeration, too many conversations with actual parents of actual APS students firmly suggests otherwise.

APS has endured these "contradictions" quite well. Even when the top leadership of the system plunged into an embarrassing scandal, there were curiously few voices agitating for any system-wide changes in philosophy. For the rest of the time Albuquerque parents remained silent, convinced that "only the educational professionals" had any business being so critical.

Within the political structure of the APS and the School Board, this "situational acceptance" offered only the most tediously perilous, temporary sort of job security for the system's leadership and employees [teachers].

APS political conditions entered into a "hyper-dynamic" state as the mill levy's half billion dollar price tag emerged into the public light. Would the "hypnotic" trance of the city's citizens hold in the face of such a big investment?

MeanMesa Suggests a Solution

We can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs.

Can anyone who isn't an "educational professional" actually offer any sort of a "path forward" from this institutional morass?

Maybe.

MeanMesa acknowledges that the full collection of "difficulties" both causing and resulting in APS's current problems will fill a long list -- a very long list. Still, as has already been mentioned in this post, formulating "fixes" to isolated, perhaps unique, "hot spots" no longer really even appears to be sufficient. This is a challenge which can be met only by much wider "adjustments," and it turns out that the balloting process for this mill levy offers an unexpected opportunity do do exactly this.

The advertisement encouraging Albuquerque voters to approve the mill levy proposal included an abbreviated accounting of precisely what the money is intended to purchase. [Interestingly, the amounts listed in the accounting were presented at the resolution of pennies, for example, "Student/Teacher furniture -- $464,996.25" and "Educational Technology -- $9,299,924.92." Although a mere curiosity, this represents the "public school" spending mentality. It may well be evidence that the mill levy's designers were concerned about the psychological impact that "rounding" the account figures might have had on already suspicious Albuquerque tax payers.]

Nonetheless, the title of this section of the post speaks to a "solution." Let's get to it.

Albuquerque Public Schools (APS) is a school district based in Albuquerque,New Mexico. Founded in 1891, APS is the largest of 89 public school districts in the state of New Mexico. In 2010 it had a total of 139 schools with some 95,000 students, making it one of the largest school districts in the United States. APS operates 89 elementary, 27 middle, and 13 high schools, as well as 10 alternative schools. [WIKI]

The school district employs roughly 9,500 teachers. Although there are plenty of problems, current APS teachers represent a major cause of the state of the system.

MeanMesa's "solution" can be expressed in a single sentence -- allocate part of the mill levy proceeds to:

Increase the salaries of APS teachers by 25%.

All of them.

[The salary increase would probably be unnecessary for the abnormally generous salaries already  being paid currently to APS institutional "administrators."]

Naturally, such a proposal merits a bit of explanation. Here's how it would work.

1. APS union teachers enjoy a significant, negotiated tenure. MeanMesa has no interest or appetite for union busting, but among those 9,500 APS teachers, there are more than a few who should, well, probably be employed in another career. A seventeen year old APS student lives right here in Galactic Headquarters and attends a near by APS high school. MeanMesa gets a first hand look at the caliber of school work, home work and general study materials "flowing" through this student's education.

The over all picture is not a pretty one.

There is, apparently, absolutely nothing which is the least bit exciting or engaging occurring in these classrooms. Even after carefully considering all the justifications for such a monstrosity, the conclusion remains the same. None of this student's teachers is "personally bothering to inject any life energy" into the education of this fellow. The grades are exemplary. The course work is horrifyingly inept.

2. These teachers are "here to stay." Not only the union contract's tenure provisions, but also the comparatively dismal pay scales offered by APS make this almost a certainty. 

Neither MeanMesa nor most other parents of Albuquerque APS students is prepared to barge into APS schools with a battering ram to start eliminating the dead weight among the teaching staff. For one, MeanMesa, although realizing the definite need to do this, would have no idea where to start.

The historical performance of APS, the parents and the teachers' union shows the level of "umbrage" and "outcry" necessary to remove and replace a tenured teacher. On the infrequent occasions when this actually takes place, the details are consistently institutional. There are "personnel matters," and they are usually more or less confidential.

3. However, there remains the possibility that the existing system could move dramatically to alter the current moribund inertia which is so depressing and troubling. Happily, MeanMesa's suggestion incorporates a few "temptations" for both the "organized labor hating" Round House and City Council Republicans and the "tenure and job security loving" union teachers. [This parking lot scrap has pretty well buried interest in educational outcomes.]

Just think of it as mixing anti-union ideology and organized labor with the free market while not committing suicide with "right to work" laws.

A "tit for tat" negotiation with the union would offer a significant increase in pay for the return benefit of a three to five year "vacation" of the union contract's tenure provisions. The higher pay rates would be actually competitive with other school district rates. They would attract better class teaching professionals. With the union's agreement to hold the tenure provisions of the contract in abeyance for a pre-determined period, existing APS teachers would have to actually compete with the new blood being drawn in by the increases in the negotiated pay scale.

The pay increase would be permanent, and the contract tenure provisions would return to force when the "experimental period" was complete. Hopefully, when the entire system "returned to normal," the APS teaching staff would have attracted enough new blood to positively influence the educational outcomes.

Those would be the "educational outcomes" which have been so shockingly low and shockingly static for far too long.

And, Finally, There Is Also This

Even the election's manipulation is confusing.

MeanMesa usually has a "gag reflex" whenever the idea of actually posting an Albuquerque Journal editorial comes to mind, but in this case there must be an exception. Spend three minutes with the following link.

Early Voting Sites a Breach of Trust With the Voters/abqjournal

Education Reform: A Memorial to a Math Teacher For All Seasons

MeanMesa offers a quick explanation for this intermediate posting in the Education Reform series promised to all the great MeanMesa visitors.

Today, the 31st of March, 2010, marks the passage of a monument of an educator, Jaime Escalante.  Although Mr. Escalante was born and began his teaching career in Bolivia, his impact on a troubled high school in Los Angeles provides the absolutely amazing impact of his teaching career and the precise part which is so important here.

Mr. Escalante's prominence ushers in two distinct points which must be considered as we think over the possibilities of educational reform in our country.

Two Distinct Points Concerning the Teaching of Jaimer Escalante

The first has everything to do with exactly what he did.

For an account of what Mr. Escalante accomplished in Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, MeanMesa happily hands the "heavy lifting" to good old Wikipedia.  The rather abbreviated biography presented there "tells the story" pretty well.  It includes both the actual educational accomplishment for which he is -- and should be -- famous, along with all the mischief he encountered with the bureaucrats who were running his High School.

From Wiki:

Jaime Escalante

a Math Teacher for All Seasons

Jaime Escalante was born in La Paz, Bolivia. While living in Bolivia he taught physics and mathematics for nine years. In 1964 he decided to move to the United States. To prepare, he began studying science and mathematics at University of Puerto Rico. Upon moving from Puerto Rico to California, Escalante could not speak English and had no valid American teaching credentials. He studied at night at Pasadena City College to earn a degree in biology. He took a day job at a computer corporation (Burroughs Corporation), while continuing his schooling at night to earn a mathematics degree at California State University, Los Angeles where he studied calculus.

In 1974 he began teaching at Garfield High School, East Los Angeles. Escalante was initially so disheartened by the lack of preparation of his students that he called his former employer and asked for his old job back. Escalante eventually changed his mind about returning to work when he found 12 students willing to take an algebra class.

Shortly after Escalante came to Garfield High, its reputation had sunk so low that its accreditation was threatened. Instead of gearing classes to poorly performing students, Escalante offered AP (advanced placement) calculus. He had already earned the criticism of an administrator who disapproved of his requiring the students to answer a homework question before being allowed into the classroom. "He told me to just get them inside," Escalante reported, "but I said, there is no teaching, no learning going on".

Determined to change the status quo, Escalante had to persuade the first few students who would listen to him that they could control their futures with the right education. He promised them that the jobs would be in engineering, electronics and computers but they would have to learn math to succeed. He said to his students "I'll teach you math and that's your language. With that you're going to make it. You're going to college and sit in the first row, not the back, because you're going to know more than anybody".

The school administration opposed Escalante frequently during his first few years. He was threatened with dismissal by an assistant principal because he was coming in too early, leaving too late, and failing to get administrative permission to raise funds to pay for his students' Advanced Placement tests. This opposition changed with arrival of a new principal, Henry Gradillas. Aside from allowing Escalante to stay as a math teacher, Gradillas overhauled the academic curriculum at Garfield, reducing the number of basic math classes and requiring those taking basic math to concurrently take algebra. He denied extracurricular activities to students who failed to maintain a C average and new students who failed basic skill tests.

Escalante continued to teach at Garfield, but it was not until 1979 that Escalante would instruct his first calculus class. He hoped that it could provide the leverage to improve lower-level math courses. To this end, Escalante recruited fellow teacher Ben Jimenez and taught calculus to five students, two of whom passed the A.P. calculus test. The following year, the class size increased to nine students, seven of whom passed the A.P. calculus test. By 1981, the class had increased to 15 students, 14 of whom passed.

Escalante placed a high priority on pressuring his students to pass their math classes, particularly advanced calculus. He rejected the common practice of ranking students from first to last and instead frequently told his students to press themselves as hard as possible in their assignments.

In 1982, Escalante came into the national spotlight when 18 of his students passed the Advanced Placement calculus exam. The Educational Testing Service found these scores to be suspicious, because all of the students made the exact same math error on problem #6, and also used the same unusual variable names. Fourteen of those who passed were asked to take the exam again. Twelve of the 14 agreed to retake the test and did well enough to have their scores reinstated. In 1983, the number of students enrolling and passing the A.P. calculus test more than doubled. That year 33 students took the exam and 30 passed. That year Escalante also started teaching calculus at East Los Angeles College.

By 1987, 73 students passed the A.P. calculus AB exam and another 12 passed the BC version of the test. This was the peak for the calculus program. The same year Gradillas went on sabbatical to finish his doctorate with hopes that he could be reinstated as principal at Garfield or a similar school with similar programs upon his return.

1988 saw the release of a book Escalante: The Best Teacher in America by Jay Mathews (ISBN 0-8050-1195-1) and a movie Stand and Deliver detailing the events of 1982. During this time teachers and other interested observers asked to sit in on his classes. Escalante received visits from political leaders and celebrities, including then-President Ronald Reagan and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

For the whole Wiki story about Jaime Escalante

The second has everything to do with why he was able to do it.

As to why Mr. Escalante was able to pull off such a feat, the further details will be provided based on another one of those famous MeanMesa opinions.  This is important to mention here.  Yes, of course, the results of Mr. Escalante's efforts represent an example of what is existentially possible as we consider reforms to our education system nationwide.  However, perhaps even more important is an inquiry into his ability to do such an unexpected thing.

After all, the President's ambitions seem to have everything to do with reproducing such great results all across the country.  To ever realize that goal, we had better have a thorough understanding of what all was involved in this remarkable example which seems to elude all the excuses and other constraints which are now stacked "sky high" as the explanation for our current national educational calamity.

Why was he able to do such a thing -- the very thing which is presented as a theoretical impossibility by our educational experts?

"Theoretically" there was every possible reason for Mr. Escalante to produce a "just barely" acceptable outcome with his Garfield High School class of misfits, minorities and under achievers.  Worse, this "theoretical" problem went further.  "Theoretically," if his class had done as well as most such classes, there would be no serious problem for everyone involved -- the school principal, the parents, the students and the tax paying community -- to be quite satisfied with such a "just barely" educational outcome.

See, there was an inertia of expectation flooding all across Mr. Escalante's efforts.  Garfield High School already had a well established -- and, apparently, well deserved -- reputation for being, even generously, wretchedly mediocre.  Mr. Escalante's teaching credentials certainly suggested nothing out of the ordinary for teachers hired at Garfield.  The "theoretical" learning capacity of his students was already well established as so distressingly marginal that no one particularly expected them to graduate, let alone learn calculus.

Those of us who frequent MeanMesa are sickeningly familiar with such low expectations.  High schools in Albuquerque, MeanMesa's Galactic Headquarters, graduate only fifty percent of the students who should graduate.  In addition to that dismal reality, New Mexico pours half of its state budget into education every year.

Naturally, the education establishment here, it turns out, is completely prepared to either completely disregard the 50% disaster or explain it away with volumes of sophisticated reasons why such an outcome is Acceptable.  Unavoidable.  Explainable.  Irreversible.  You know, big complicated reasons that every day, "out of the system" taxpayers could never understand.

Hey.  These people are experts.  That means that they know -- as their own absolute certainty -- everything that is impossible.  That's why they get the "big bucks."  Right?

The citizens in the PTA meeting would be met with frightening, hysterical, raucous laughter if they were to so much as mention anything about calculus.

What's the message?

Somewhere in the Escalante story, among the processes, the bureaucracy, the students and the outcome, there is a sinister disconnection between what the statistics -- the "theoreticals" -- predicted and what actually happened.  In fact, given all the parameters of the process which occurred in Garfield High School, the statistical and the theoretical outcome was so unlikely as to be essentially impossible.

This story "hits home" here in New Mexico as unavoidably as the proverbial "fart in a spacesuit."  For the experts, all the "theoreticals and statistics" for the Albuquerque educational catastrophe are presented as completely sufficient to explain away every criticism a parent or tax payer might issue as he watches his child/student descend into a glacial ennui of disgust and disinterest.  Such an educational disaster is not a spectacular exception.

It now consumes fully one half of all public education students in Albuquerque High Schools.

Mr. Escalante was not teaching a in a theoretically effective way to a class which, according to statistics was theoretically able to learn calculus.  He clearly never slipped behind such cover.  He obviously did not throw his "best effort" at some risk averse theoretical teaching teaching system designed to minimize failures and optimize whatever was left in hopes of achieving "acceptable" and "anticipated" results.

No.

For Mr. Escalante, it was far more personal than that.

Mr. Escalante abandoned the theory and replaced it with the fire that was in him to teach.  It didn't matter to him that he had a crappy job in a crappy school.  He took the chance.  He could either teach these unlikely students calculus or he would fail utterly -- with  "all flags flying."  He wasn't searching out any expert excuses for getting rotten results.  He didn't care about excuses -- he cared about teaching.

A Final, Disturbing Overview

Just how remarkable was Mr. Escalante's success?  What can it tell us about the educational nightmare that challenges the President?

Well, to get a firm grip on the matter, we will have to "step back" far enough to gather a little perspective.  Because MeanMesa is never shy about bold, big picture models of things which have too many "fish hooks" when examined in smaller pictures,  let's just take this tack.

Let's consider the students who comprise that 50% drop out group.  A couple of decades before they were drifting away from the prospect of learning, they were infants, crawling around, exploring everything they could reach or see!  Those babies were -- just as Mr. Escalante was "on fire" to teach -- on fire with curiosity.  They wanted to learn and absorb every tiny detail of the reality around them, and they were pursuing that aim without so much as a single thought of the risks involved.

Every parent has watched this process in utter amazement during their child's infancy.

What happened?  How have these immensely curious young humans managed to become so discouragingly uninterested that they are willing to simply walk away from their totally free public educations?

We're way past lurching around looking for scape goats or trying some painless tweaking to repair this monstrosity.

Please stay tuned to MeanMesa as we try to unfold the rest of the education reform stories in this series of postings.

MeanMesa's compliments to President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan.