In The Cold Light of Day...

Yesterday I had a visceral reaction to Rob McKenna bowing out of a meeting with the WEA at the last minute, but here's a more rational view:

What Rob has done is effectively give control of the education narrative to the WEA. If he had filled out the questionnaire in his own words, he would have made the product; instead, he's left a giant cypher where his own opinions could have been. If he had done the interview he could have responded to criticism directly; instead, he'll make time for Excellent Schools Now, whose one-page list of priorities is some of the most generic pablum in the ed reform community today.

He's worked hard to differentiate himself from governors like Kasich and Walker, but something like this just feeds into the narrative that is being set up. When even Frank Luntz is acknowledging that Occupy Wall Street is making inroads in the public consciousness, and then the AG deliberately tweaks the nose of a union like this.....the attack ad will write itself.

This was an unforced error that you'll be hearing about for the next 11 months.

Read more here, if any.

The Worst Education Analyst In the State Strikes Again!

So Liv Finne wandered over to the LEAP website looking for info, and she used it to turn out yet another one of her talking points:

In 2010-11, schools added an additional 235 employees to school payrolls, increasing from 101,675 employees in 2009-10 to 101,910 employees in 2010-11.

"See, there's more employees! Funding's great! Ignore all those lying assholes who actually work in the schools, they don't know how to use the internet the way I do!"

But there's two things Liv isn't telling you, and I'm not really sure that she understands either of them:

1) That same LEAP website shows that enrollment in the state went up by about 6,000 students; in tight financial times this makes sense, as parents can't afford private tuition any longer and pull their kids into the public schools instead.

The state funds high schools at a ratio of 1 teacher for every 28.7 students; in grades K-3, it's 25.23:1. Even if you use the higher number--hell, let's round it to 29 for fun--you would still have an increase of about 207 FTE, and that's only the teachers. If I played around with the formulas for bus drivers, paraprofessionals, etc., I'm willing to bet I'd get pretty close to 235.

The point: when Liv makes a deal out of there being more employees without noting that there are also more kids, it's a lie of omission.

2) The most important thing on the LEAP webpage is the little disclaimer at the top of the far righthand column: "District Budgeted". The figures that she's playing with are from the district BUDGETS for 2010-2011 (the F195 form) and not the ACTUAL for 2010-2011 (the F196 forms, which will start rolling out soon enough).

What's the difference? Most all of those budgets were built with $200+ millions dollars of stimulus act jobs money figured in, money which was later clawed back by the state to plug last year's worst budget hole ever. Take out that money--hey, the state did--and spending is just about the same.

I'll fisk the rest of her column a different day. Right now, it's time to go do report cards for my 28 students.

Read more here, if any.

Joe Zarelli's Bad Week

Budget expert? Not this week.

I'm watching the Senate Ways and Means Committee testimony from Wednesday, and the gyrations that Sen. Zarelli is going through to defend crappy, crappy proposals like average daily attendance (ADA) and a 3% cut to salaries is absolutely fascinating.

Why is ADA a loser? Look just east to Idaho, where a study reported that ADA "may occasionally create unexpected and inequitable results in funding for smaller districts and charters." If you're Benge with 6 kids, and one has an unexcused absence, you're screwed in a way that the Seattle School District never will be. On top of that, imagine the next swine flu epidemic and what a legion amount of unexcused absences could do.

The 3% pay cut was blasted by everyone from the Governor to the Superintendent on down. It looks like some of the blame for this falls on the shoulders of Sen. Rosemary McAuliffe, who needs better researchers. It's chicken to say that the local districts can figure out how to make that cut work--if you want to cut salaries 3%, do it in the salary schedule.

But you know you can't, because that's a cut to basic education. I'll give them praise for a bipartisan budget, as well as to the House GOP for turning out a budget as well and helping the conversation along, but at the end of the day Murray and Zarelli screwed up to the tune of $350 million dollars, and that doesn't reflect well on either of them.

Read more here, if any.

It's Nice to See the Church Worrying About the Important Things

I was raised Episcopalian, married Catholic. I feel at home in my wife's church, and I don't mind seeing my daughter raised Catholic.

That said, the Catholic high school in San Antonio that fired a teacher for marrying a divorced man is just stupid. They may have been within their rights (and rites!), but giving a good teacher her marching papers over something like that isn't in the best interest of her students, at all.

And it turns out that the guy's first marriage had been annulled, anyhow.

I'm sure using the "oops" tag a lot lately.

Read more here, if any.

Seattle Business Monthly: Oops.

I'd been getting Washington CEO magazine, since it's free, and with this month's issue they've merged with Seattle Business Monthly. It's a telling sign of the economic times when even the CEOs can't afford to keep their magazine subscriptions up.

Anyhow, the editor's note from Jeffery Bond had this quote:

The state's budget deficit for the next biennium may grow to $6 billion, forcing the Legislature to make major program cuts and, while no one seems willing to admit it, almost assuredly some form of tax increase.

...which is pretty notable in its own right to see, given the forum it appeared in.

Then I went to their web site to see if I could find an electronic copy, but what I found instead regarding their cover boy was even more fun:

When we decided to profile Terry Drayton and put him on the cover of our January issue, we had no idea that he would become so prominent so soon and for all the wrong reasons.

As many of you know, Drayton, best known for founding Homegrocer.com, was a co-founder and CEO of a small Bellevue-based company called the Arena Group, which runs a software firm called Count Me In. This firm produces software to manage sports leagues of all types, including handling the registration and collection of fees for Little Leagues and soccer leagues across the country.

On Dec. 11, three weeks after our issue had been sent to the printer, we were stunned to hear that Count Me In was being sued in federal court by a New Jersey soccer club that claimed the company failed to turn over $142,000 in registration payments. Since then, we have been contacted by parents from local baseball leagues to say that they, too, have lost tens of thousands of dollars in registration fees.

Neither the writer of the profile nor anyone on our staff had any idea while the article was being prepared for publication that there was a problem with Count Me In’s procedures or that Little League organizations around the country were facing the possibility of losing their registration fees.

It kind of reminds me of this, or the Weekly World News publishing autopsy photos of Timothy McVeigh without considering that his execution date could get postponed and that when they published these pictures of him dead he could still be, you know, very much alive.

Oops!

Read more here, if any.

Charlie Rose Murders Best Friend!

Well, to be fair, he actually declared his friend was dead during a 2008 retrospective, and it was more his producers' fault because they got the names confused, and he's apologized profusely for the mistake, but all the same--when Charlie Rose says that you're dead, YOU ARE DEAD. As evidence I give you this video:



(for the YouTubers out there, 23/6 is woefully underappreciated; they can be hit and miss with their political comedy, but when they hit it's solid gold.)

Read more here, if any.

It would be funny, if it weren't the test!

There's a good chance that students will come up short on the NY state exams. That's because the rulers they use for measurement problems are marked wrong.

I choose to believe it's all a plot by the Chinese; mess up the rulers so the kids mess up the test, mess up the tests to mess up the schools, mess up the schools to mess up the society, then invade Canada.

Read more here, if any.