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Inexperienced Companies Chase U.S. School Funds

By SAM DILLON

With the Obama administration pouring billions into its nationwide campaign to overhaul failing schools, dozens of companies with little or no experience are portraying themselves as school-turnaround experts as they compete for the money.

A husband-and-wife team that has specialized in teaching communication skills but never led a single school overhaul is seeking contracts in Ohio and Virginia. A corporation that has run into trouble with parents or the authorities in several states in its charter school management business has now opened a school-turnaround subsidiary. Other companies seeking federal money include offshoots of textbook conglomerates and classroom technology vendors.

Many of the new companies seem unprepared for the challenge of making over a public school, yet neither the federal government nor many state governments are organized to offer effective oversight, said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, a nonprofit group in Washington.

“Many of these companies clearly just smell the money,” Mr. Jennings said.

Rudy Crew, a former New York City schools chancellor who has formed his own consulting company, said he was astonished to see so many untested groups peddling strategies to improve schools.

“This is like the aftermath of the Civil War, with all the carpetbaggers and charlatans,” Dr. Crew said.

The Obama administration has sharply increased federal financing for school turnarounds, to $3.5 billion this year, about 28 times as much as in 2007. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is pushing to overhaul 5,000 of the nation’s 100,000 public schools in the next few years.

New York is to receive more than $300 million, and New Jersey about $67 million. Expenditures on each failing school are capped at $6 million over three years.

Under federal rules, school districts can hire companies or nonprofits to help, and experts said a significant percentage, perhaps a majority, were likely to hire at least one outside contractor. Sandra Abrevaya, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, said the department did not yet know exactly how many districts would do so.

“The department is in daily contact with states and districts to provide technical assistance so they can make smart decisions and select high-quality partners,” Ms. Abrevaya said.

Overhauling schools is challenging work, and experts say few efforts succeed. Breaking the cycle of failure in a school that has become a drop-out factory requires an “extreme reset,” said Tim Cawley, a managing director at the Academy for Urban School Leadership, a nonprofit group leading several turnaround efforts in Chicago. Usually that means installing a new principal and a newly committed teaching staff, invigorating the school’s culture with high expectations and a no-nonsense discipline, adopting a rigorous curriculum, and carrying out regular testing to determine what has been learned and what needs to be retaught, Mr. Cawley said.

In contrast, many new groups seeking contracts are hoping merely to bring in a new curriculum or retrain some teachers, he said, adding, “We call that turnaround lite.”

Bob and Megan Tschannen-Moran run one of the new groups. Their company, LifeTrek Inc., based in their home in Virginia, markets life and career coaching sessions to companies, churches and schools.

Ms. Tschannen-Moran is an education professor at the College of William & Mary, but the couple have never led a school overhaul, Mr. Tschannen-Moran said — although LifeTrek has been hired by a few school districts for strategic planning.

The couple recently founded a Center for Evocative Coaching, and this spring, Ohio put the center on a list of approved school turnaround specialists. In July, the couple changed the name of the center’s Web site to schooltransformation.com. The center can help schools by “facilitating new conversations through story listening, expressing empathy, appreciative inquiry and design thinking,” its Web site says. Much of the training can be done via conference call, Mr. Tschannen-Moran said.

Mr. Duncan helped set off the stampede in a June 2009 speech, saying that only a handful of groups, nationwide, had any experience in school overhauls.

“We need everyone who cares about public education,” he said, “to get into the business of turning around our lowest-performing schools. That includes states, districts, nonprofits, for-profits, universities, unions and charter organizations.”

One company that said it had answered Mr. Duncan’s call was Mosaica Education, which operates charter schools in several states and overseas. Five of its 10 charter schools in Ohio are in academic emergency, and the company has become embroiled in disputes over its management of charters elsewhere. Its chief executive, Michael J. Connelly, said Mosaica had built a solid record of raising achievement.

In March, the company hired John Q. Porter, a former schools superintendent in Oklahoma City, to lead a new subsidiary, Mosaica Turnaround Partners. Mr. Porter said he attended a vendor fair at Ohio State University in June that had been organized to introduce dozens of new companies and nonprofits to districts preparing school turnarounds.

“It was like a cattle call,” Mr. Porter said. “No, actually it was more like speed dating.”

Pearson, the giant British publisher, also had representatives at the fair. With 36,000 employees worldwide, Pearson is known in education for textbook brands like Scott Foresman and Prentice Hall.

Last year, it formed the K-12 Solutions Group, and it is seeking school-turnaround contracts in at least eight states. Scott Drossos, the group’s president, said that in recent years Pearson had bought smaller companies that built Pearson’s capacity to train teachers and could draw on its testing, technology and other products to carry out a coherent school-improvement effort.

In interviews last year, Mr. Duncan said he wanted high-quality, nonprofit charter school management groups, like the KIPP network, which operates 99 schools nationwide, to join the school overhaul work.

But Justin Cohen, a turnaround strategist at MassInsight, a Massachusetts nonprofit organization, said that most successful nonprofit charter operators preferred starting new schools to overhauling failing ones, and that few had accepted Mr. Duncan’s invitation.

“The vast majority of people getting into the field are not ready to do the work,” Mr. Cohen said.

Recognizing the risks facing school districts that sign contracts with untested groups, the American Enterprise Institute, a nonprofit conservative policy group, issued a report last month urging that districts require performance guarantees, under which contractors failing to meet achievement targets would forfeit payments.

Dr. Crew’s new company, Global Partnership Schools, which he formed with Manny Rivera, a former Rochester schools superintendent, has signed a contract with the Pueblo, Colo., district that is backed by a performance guarantee. It stipulates that the partnership will be paid its full fee only if it significantly raises student achievement, Dr. Rivera said. The partnership has also been awarded contracts with districts in Baltimore and Bridgeport, Conn., he said.

Dr. Rivera represented Global Partnership at the June 30 vendor fair in Ohio, tending a booth along with 50 other groups.

“It was just like you were selling pencils,” he said. “A lot of these companies don’t have a clue about how to change schools.”

From The Washington Post...

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Obama gets to test his game against hoops greats

By Michael D. Shear
Washington Post Staff Writer

Every hoops fan dreams of that one special birthday when his pro-ball heroes gather on a court to see if he's got game.

President Obama had that chance Sunday, assembling a virtual dream team of college and pro basketball players for a presidential pickup game in front of wounded veterans and participants in a White House mentoring program.

Obama, who turned 49 on Wednesday, took to the court for a game with a stunning list of all-stars, including Grant Hill, Shane Battier, Carmelo Anthony, Chauncey Billups, Derek Fisher, LeBron James, Earvin "Magic" Johnson, Maya Moore, Alonzo Mourning, Chris Paul, Derrick Rose, Bill Russell, Etan Thomas, Dwyane Wade and David West. The game was closed to the media.

Kobe Bryant was there but didn't play, according to the White House, and aides provided no details about the game, which took place at Fort McNair in the District, where Obama often plays basketball with friends.

The presidential motorcade of black SUVs returned to the White House after about two hours for an evening barbecue on the South Lawn. Reporters could see grills being set up on the grass.

The White House provided few details about the festivities but confirmed that the president and his guests would be dining on shrimp harvested from the Gulf of Mexico.

Obama is known for throwing a few elbows on the court and for having a fierce determination to win. But the 6-foot-2 commander in chief had his work cut out for him. A number of the players were 6-8 or taller.

Obama was the nation's bachelor in chief this weekend. His wife and younger daughter returned from a brief vacation in Spain in time for the barbecue, and his elder daughter was at camp.

With his family away, Obama made it an all-sports-all-the-time weekend. He spent four hours at the Andrews Air Force Base golf course Saturday with longtime friends from Chicago and Hawaii, including Wahid Hamid, Laurent Delanney, Marvin Nicholson, Greg Orme, Bobby Titcomb, Michael Ramos, Marty Nesbitt and Eric Whitaker.

That crew was said to be attending the barbecue Sunday at the White House, as well. No word on how many of them joined in the hoops competition.

Basketball is undergoing a renaissance at the White House under Obama, who had a court built on what had been the presidential tennis courts. He plays with staff members and friends, including aide Reggie Love, who was on the NCAA-champion Duke team in 2001.

But in June 2009, when the basketball court was being built, the president told Bloomberg News that he was itching for some professional competition.

"As soon as we get the basketball nets up, we're going to have some of these guys over for a game," he said of pros such as James.

Asked by Bloomberg whether he would be playing, Obama said: "Of course. It's my court."

Staff writer Josh Barr contributed to this report.

If you thought that I could be catty, check out this commentary by Maureen Dowd which appeared in the New York Times over the weekend...

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Feliz Cumpleaños, and Adiós

By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON

Her critics used to paint her as a scary Marxist. Now they cast her as a spoiled princess.

During the campaign, she was caricatured on the cover of The New Yorker as a fist-bumping, gun-toting Black Panther. Now she’s mocked by a New York Daily News blogger as a jet-setting, free-spending Marie Antoinette. (On Spain’s Costa del Sol with Sasha on her husband’s 49th birthday, she did, in effect, say let him eat cake — alone.)

Michelle Obama is the most popular figure in the administration, but last week she had her first brush with getting brushed back in the press.

Some of the women anchoring news shows on MSNBC debated whether the first lady was being “mean” to her husband by deserting him on his birthday for a girls’ getaway to Spain, and whether it was sort of sad, as one put it, that the president, drowning in troubles, had to go to Chicago to find friends (including Oprah) to celebrate with.

Andrea Tantaros, a Fox contributor and former Republican operative, wrote a harsh Daily News blog post calling the first lady a “material girl” for going on a glitzy vacation at a luxury resort in Marbella with a cavalcade of Secret Service agents, friends, children and staff, even as “most of the country is pinching pennies and downsizing summer sojourns — or forgoing them altogether.”

In politics and pop culture, optics are all. And Michelle’s optics sent a message that likely made some in the White House and the Democratic Party wince.

She seemed to be gigging her husband a bit: I’m going to do what I want to do. I can’t worry about whether it gives the Tea Partiers ammo or makes Democrats (including you) campaigning against the excesses of the rich look hypocritical. Even if the country is sliding into a double-dip recession, I’m going abroad to a five-star hotel on Air Force Two and give a boost to another country’s economy.

To defray possible criticism of their upcoming 10-day trip to Martha’s Vineyard, Michelle belatedly agreed to a weekend family vacation on Florida’s gulf coast. On Friday, Spanish police closed a public beach for the American entourage. If Michelle had wanted a closed beach, she could have headed to our gulf sooner. There are plenty of multi-star hotels there, and she and the girls could have cleaned a few pelicans.

Certainly, as Obama adviser David Axelrod says, “not everything is political theater.” The Obamas shouldn’t have to poll, as the Clintons did, to figure out where to go on vacation.

“Folks in the public eye are also human beings,” Axelrod told me. “If you have the ability to show your kid a part of the world and you can do that together before they get to the age where they don’t want to do anything with you, I don’t think it’s right that you have to defer it because of the politics.”

But as Michelle and friends frolicked in the land of flamenco, the birthday boy got few gifts from the news.

More Democratic candidates shied away from appearing with him. The latest disappointing jobs report prompted evening news reports about Americans’ fears of falling into what one called “the abyss.” And a CNN poll showed that a quarter of Americans still doubt the president was even born here.

The job of first lady, tightly constrained by convention, is hard for modern women. Michelle is a gutsy Harvard Law School grad who started as her husband’s mentor. Any coloring outside the lines can cause problems, as Nancy Reagan and Hillary Clinton learned when lampooned as Marie Antoinettes.

Michelle has done such a good job that she silenced her vituperative conservative critics for a year and a half. But perhaps the strain of debunking that “angry black woman” stereotype by playing the smiling, conventional first lady, talking to Ladies’ Home Journal about vegetable cleanses and portion sizes, made her want to assert her independence in the one place she could: her schedule.

The inimitable columnist Mary McGrory once said that if a first lady simply made her husband toast, that was enough, given how hard his job was.

And because his predecessor mucked things up so royally, President Obama’s job is ridiculously hard. But at moments when you think Michelle might make her husband toast, or better yet a martini, she’s often off on a girls’ trip.

When health care passed after a difficult year and the president celebrated with his staff on the Truman Balcony, the first lady was with her daughters on Broadway to see “Memphis.”

When the BP oil spill stained the White House, making the president seem so impotent that he had to make his first national address from the Oval Office, the first lady was playing with her mother and daughters in Los Angeles, staying at the Beverly Wilshire. She was taking in a Lakers game the night of his address.