Corruption big and small

Hi! This is Scholastic Alchemy, a twice-weekly blog where I write about education and related topics. Mondays usually see me posting a selection of education links and some commentary about each and Wednesday posts are typically a deep dive into an education topic of my choosing. If Scholastic Alchemy had a thesis, I suppose it would go a little like this: We keep trying to induce educational gold from lead and it keeps not working but we keep on trying. My goal here is to talk about curriculum, instruction, policy, public opinion, and other topics in order to explain why I think we keep failing to produce this magical educational gold. If you find that at all interesting, please consider a paid subscription here, or at the parallel publishing spot on Beehiiv. (Some folks hate the ‘stack, I get it.) That said, all posts are going to remain free for the foreseeable future. Thanks for reading!

Author’s Note: I’m back from a restful spring break with the family, posting will resume as normal.

That time my principal “resigned” for stealing from the school athletics

Actually, that’s basically the whole story but I’ve been in a reflective mood recently and I want to reach back for useful connections today. When I started teaching 9th grade ELA, the school where I started was a single year into the tenure of a new principal. He’d come on board with a mission to turn the school around after several years of lackluster performance. I should note that the school itself was performing really well, far above state and county averages on Georgia’s state tests and been recognized nationally for their career and technical education program to boot. However, the school had dropped a bit in test scores and that was enough for the district to look for new leadership.

Principal Dr. M had a track record of success at his previous school that he’d turned around from being one of the worst in a neighboring county to being average. Through this he’d built a bit of a personal brand around working with schools full of low-income kids of color which was a growing challenge where I worked. What had been a school full of wealthy and middle-class white kids and a handful of black kids bused from distant black neighborhoods (as ordered by the courts), was dealing with an influx of “apartment kids.” The school was not used to kids whose parents who weren’t affluent enough to get a mortgage in the rapidly growing northern ‘burbs but also weren’t poor black kids from “south county.” The school’s demographics shifted in a more Hispanic direction and many of the new student population struggled academically, had interrupted education, and were frequently absent. In absolute numbers, out of a school of about 2000 kids, the shift was maybe about 10% of the student body with an even smaller percent struggling academically, but when you’re pretty much at the top of various rankings even a small change can bring you down the rankings pretty fast. So, in comes Principal Dr. M.

My introduction to Principal Dr. M was, in fact, a non-introduction. I showed up to interview at the school and met only with a department head and assistant principal. Apparently, the school’s leader didn’t interview new employees. At the start of the year, Principal Dr. M required every teacher to spend two days participating in teambuilding activities designed and implemented by the physical education department. No pre-planning here! After his speech kicking off the year, wherein he stated that our purpose as a school was to be home away from home for our students, an engaging comforting place where they desire to spend their time, he vanished and did not participate in the team building. In a subsequent year, one of my colleagues in the English department tore his Achillies tendon during the mandatory team building but that’s a story for another day.

As the year went on, it was common for Principal Dr. M to roam the halls dressed in fake tits, a blonde wig, and a cheerleader outfit. He would burst into classrooms and do a little cheer. Other times he’d wear football pads or soccer equipment and come in throwing and kicking balls at unsuspecting students. Principal Dr. M described these as engagement strategies to keeps students entertained and interested in coming to school. Along those lines, he scaled back disciplinary measures and urged teachers to “keep it the classroom” whenever we had challenges with student behavior. Kids getting suspended was generally reserved only for things that fell under the district’s “zero tolerance” policy, such as drugs or alcohol. The biggest problem, it turned out, was that kids would not keep it in the classroom and plenty of kids roamed the halls instead of going to class. You might think this is some woke, restorative justice stuff, but Principal Dr. M never talked about it that way. Nobody in our school did. It was too early. The “great awokening” hadn’t happened yet.

That brings me to Principal Dr. M’s other big policy, test prep. All the laxity and fun vanished for about one month of the year. From late March until the state’s standardized tests in late April, there were no kids in the halls. Electives were put on hold and replaced with study hall. Whatever content we were in the middle of had to wait. In its place we received a pile of test prep packets for our students. The packet contained mostly test taking strategies. There were also three practice tests that we gave each Thursday leading up to the final week before state tests. The tests would be turned in, scored, and that would help us know what to prepare students for the following week. Again, though, there was no content support so if we felt like a kid’s poor performance was the result of not knowing some kind of content, we had to “break the rules” and reteach that content instead of testing strategies. The fourth week of the pre-state test month was the polar opposite. It functioned as a kind of spirit week full of pep rallies, fun meals from Chick-fil-A, movies in the auditorium, board games in the library and so on. It was, I’m sure, quite fun. I knew some families who went on vacation this week knowing that nothing meaningful was going to happen. Principal Dr. M, though, was in peak form, doing everything he could to entertain and motivate students in the lead up to the tests.

Anyway, this is all just to give you an idea of what this guy’s leadership was like. Test scores did not improve but they also didn’t continue to decline, so I guess it was somewhat effective? I have to admit that as a new teacher I wasn’t super clued into the inner workings of the rest of the school. It came as a surprise to me two years into my working there that Principal Dr. M suddenly resigned over Christmas break and the school’s old principal came back. I learned in a department meeting that Principal Dr. M and our school’s bookkeeper were both not allowed into the building anymore. The pair had, I was told, been having an affair and taking money from the school’s athletics budget for their own personal use. I don’t know how much money they took or what it was used for. She was fired and he, in lieu of termination, was allowed to resign — I guess so he could keep working as a principal somewhere, it’s unclear why this was a good outcome. To me, if you steal, you should be prosecuted, doubly so if you steal from a school because that’s the public’s money and we have a duty to use it for the right purpose.

When is it corruption? When is it business?

The odd treatment, my old principal getting to leave with dignity and career intact while his partner in crime was fired and would probably have a hard time finding a job in this line of work again, offers us an important lesson in scholastic alchemy. The things that we consider corrupt or criminal or even just bad behavior happen within systemic contexts that lead to unexpected outcomes. I have no idea what happened to Principal Dr. M but it’s entirely possible he went on to lead another school somewhere. A resignation, while odd, is not something that automatically disqualifies someone from a job, especially when it’s a job where there aren’t typically a lot of qualified candidates to begin with. He can point to test scores and say that he successfully stopped their decline. He can point to attendance and disciplinary records and legitimately claim to have improved both, even if the truth is murkier. Not wanting a scandal, perhaps, had led the district to sweep things quietly away.

I’ve been thinking about all this recently because I was reading Tim Daily’s recent post on Why It’s So Easy to Steal from School Districts. He notes some high-profile examples and comes to a few conclusions about, mostly, graft.

1. Board members approve vendor contracts for major expenses like construction, transportation, and insurance. With such influence, a stray hand can find its way into the cookie jar

2. Lax financial controls and excessive trust in longtime employees can make embezzlement a lucrative pastime

3. All it takes is a few willing allies inside the district to concoct a lasting scheme

4. Unions blast districts for ineptitude when scandals strike, but they have plenty of their own problems

He offers some prevention tips from the Government Accountability Office as options school systems could adapt for their own use.

Certainly, those last two bullet points could have helped in with my old principal. Maybe that’s how they were caught? Who knows. But what also stands out to me is Daily’s focus on schools/districts are the locus of corruption to the exclusion of other ways that school funds are misused. There’s been plenty of discussion recently over the role of education technology in schools, and a growing sense that this has not been money well-spent. I’d wager that the money spent on ed tech far outstrips even the highest estimates of fraud and graft in our schools but that’s of little interest to Daily. Nor do we hear from Daily about how public dollars flow into private hands through the use and abuse of voucher programs with lax oversight. When it’s private schools using the windfall from voucher cash to pay exorbitant sums to their administrative teams, are we supposed to assume it’s just business? How about when well-connected state legislators create charter authorization organizations that appear to offer a pay-to-play option to anyone seeking to create their own charter school? Charters that, mind you, often fail academically or don’t even open, despite taxpayer dollars spent?

I think that my old principal should have been charged with a crime. He should have been prosecuted, and the district should have taken that scandal head-on. Simply letting Principal Dr. M back out into the world to potentially run another school and potentially steal again is a mistake. Daily makes the same mistake when he limits his discussion of corruption to public school systems and gives a pass to the other kinds of fraud and abuse that plague our schools. Wasting money on ineffectual curriculum? Yawn. Those unions, though! Private schools funded by taxpayer vouchers extending six-figure personal loans to their leadership teams? Nothing to see here! It’s all lawful in Texas. You should focus on what’s happening in those public schools!

This tells you a lot about the kind of thinking that hides just below the surface for advocates of school reform. Because, yeah, Daily’s absolutely right that we should crack down on fraud and graft. The GAO recommendations are a good place to look for guidance. None of that is objectionable in the least. Yet, somehow, when you read his post, you come away thinking that fraud and graft are uniquely problems for public schools. He has portrayed it in such a way that public schools seem inherently corruptible. It also points us away from the “business of education” that deserves a lot more scrutiny.

Thanks for reading!