Another (more minor) theft I have regularly seen from superintendents is from their paid time off. Typically, the school board chair approves their time off but actually has no idea when they are out. This is coupled with the fact that superintendents often have a huge amount of paid days off in their contracts that get paid out. I have worked with quite a few who never took a single day off despite regularly being on vacation. They argued they were still on call by nature of their role. but that was unallowable behavior by other senior leaders or principals. This often led to annual payouts of well over $25k.
Tim, speaking of corruption, did you hear the one about the private school ED in Boston who was keeping two sets of books and hiding millions of dollars in debt?? You can't make this stuff up.
You remind me that I need to finish a piece on Lies, Damned Lies, and K-12 "Evidence," with a subtitle "Why it's so easy for marketers to scam schools" or "A field guide to scamming schools with faux studies." Because in truth, I think the overwhelming majority of the waste in education comes via the totally legal legal acts of marketing crap to districts, and districts choosing to purchase it. (Hello, national outcry about iReady and other Ed Tech). That said, I appreciate your points here, and we should talk about all of it.
I think we should also look at professional development as fraught with bullshit. New trends and initiatives that tend to be old shit in new clothes. Expensive and padded bullshit trainings that are abandoned. The state requires that districts make teachers serve professional development hours. This has created a cottage industry of scammy workshops complete with books, inconsequential teaching techniques/tricks/gimmicks that quickly lose their novelty -and the truth is the districts are better off easing up on trainings and hiring more staff.
Is there any evidence of any kind that professional development days for teachers lead to better outcomes? If not, it would be better to get rid of them. If teachers see them as a helpful respite from work, it would be less expensive to just give them days off.
i wholeheartedly believe that there is zero evidence, unless a bunch of teachers were taught a very specific skill they would need to use for some kids. Like medical, or reading, or writing. The basics. I’ve been working for 26 years and i can only remember two effective workshops over my career that had ideas i used and improved things for real.
Someone sent this to me. They did not know I know you and forgot you were a fellow Substacker. I could talk about this topic forever. I have been documenting it in our district, DeKalb, where our superintendent was indicted in October. I have written a lot about it, even appeared on podcasts to talk about it, and became so mad, I am running for school board!
Tracy, I found your work through Tom Hayden‘s blog. Thank you for it.
For the rest: the superintendent of whom Tracy speaks has also been indicted for embezzling and defrauding the K-8 school district of Evanston, Illinois. This superintendent fits the profile of Barbara Byrd-Bennett, the one-time head of Chicago’s public schools: like Byrd-Bennett, he used crusading rhetoric and sometimes engaged in “management override.” He got away with it for a long time because there was no oversight from our Board of Education. Together, these two parties—the superintendent and the Board—have done notable damage to our community.
Tom does a good job of explaining why this happens in a lot of places across the country. The state groups that accredit school boards are made up of ex-superintendents and they have trained school boards not to question superintendents, that any questioning or voting no on a contract is overstepping into “operations.” It is not the spirit nor letter of the law on school board authority.
Enter this into any ai and your feelings about school reform might change. If we made school completely optional, but still wanted people to use it, what would school have to change?
More radical preventative action would be to increase state-level oversight of school districts. Ideas in increasing level of radicalism:
1. Many states have spending transparency portals where all state contracts and spending are posted. Schools could be required to use these systems too.
2. Have state education departments approve (or at least review with possibility of veto) school expenditures. School boards are too prone to amateurism and cronyism to systematically do a good job.
3. Ditch the idea of school boards. North Carolina has their school districts correspond to counties and a few large cities. You could go further and say that education is handled by county boards or city councils, and is no longer a freestanding thing.
Pass a law giving different kinds of district and school officials rights of action to sue the relevant parties for fraud, improper use of funds, self-enrichment, etc., and offer some percentage of whatever was recovered to the person bringing the suit.
Passing a couple of these laws — making sure they're well-tailored to the kind of fraud we want to catch — would create a local education bar that could start policing districts.
I am not convinced that oversight is as lacking suggested here, indeed most of these instances of graft cited were eventually discovered by some of the oversight mechanisms we have. That actually should be a pretty good deterrent. GAO publishes guidance on internal controls. Most school districts are required to have financial and federal compliance audits as required by the Single Audit Act. Those auditors need to follow GAO's standards (known as the yellow book) which require them to assess internal controls when conducting their audits. It's not perfect, but these generally do reinforce good financial and governance practices. The bigger school districts have internal audit shops or even independent inspectors who are empowered to examine all of these issues as well. LA Unified's OIG has a whistleblower hotline: https://oig.lausd.org/apps/pages/index.jsp?uREC_ID=4429321&type=d&pREC_ID=2667620
It is true that the issue with senior or chief leaders is a bit trickier than rank and file employees when it comes to internal controls, but that is by no means unique to the public sector. The most important internal control is the upper management setting a "tone from the top". I would suggest you read Cynthia Cooper's work who discovered the WorldCom scandal as an internal auditor. Most of the internal controls were followed, and testing revealed no problems, it was only careful forensic accounting and people who had good ethics who were willing to stand up to management that did not. https://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Circumstances-Journey-Corporate-Whistleblower/dp/0470443316
Here in Montclair, NJ, our school's budget has a $20M hole. Seems that it's more about underbudgeting and mismanagement than outright fraud but it's taken 2 years for a financial audit to be approved, not started yet.
Another (more minor) theft I have regularly seen from superintendents is from their paid time off. Typically, the school board chair approves their time off but actually has no idea when they are out. This is coupled with the fact that superintendents often have a huge amount of paid days off in their contracts that get paid out. I have worked with quite a few who never took a single day off despite regularly being on vacation. They argued they were still on call by nature of their role. but that was unallowable behavior by other senior leaders or principals. This often led to annual payouts of well over $25k.
Tim, speaking of corruption, did you hear the one about the private school ED in Boston who was keeping two sets of books and hiding millions of dollars in debt?? You can't make this stuff up.
You remind me that I need to finish a piece on Lies, Damned Lies, and K-12 "Evidence," with a subtitle "Why it's so easy for marketers to scam schools" or "A field guide to scamming schools with faux studies." Because in truth, I think the overwhelming majority of the waste in education comes via the totally legal legal acts of marketing crap to districts, and districts choosing to purchase it. (Hello, national outcry about iReady and other Ed Tech). That said, I appreciate your points here, and we should talk about all of it.
Please do!
i teach right by some of these places.
I think we should also look at professional development as fraught with bullshit. New trends and initiatives that tend to be old shit in new clothes. Expensive and padded bullshit trainings that are abandoned. The state requires that districts make teachers serve professional development hours. This has created a cottage industry of scammy workshops complete with books, inconsequential teaching techniques/tricks/gimmicks that quickly lose their novelty -and the truth is the districts are better off easing up on trainings and hiring more staff.
Is there any evidence of any kind that professional development days for teachers lead to better outcomes? If not, it would be better to get rid of them. If teachers see them as a helpful respite from work, it would be less expensive to just give them days off.
i wholeheartedly believe that there is zero evidence, unless a bunch of teachers were taught a very specific skill they would need to use for some kids. Like medical, or reading, or writing. The basics. I’ve been working for 26 years and i can only remember two effective workshops over my career that had ideas i used and improved things for real.
Someone sent this to me. They did not know I know you and forgot you were a fellow Substacker. I could talk about this topic forever. I have been documenting it in our district, DeKalb, where our superintendent was indicted in October. I have written a lot about it, even appeared on podcasts to talk about it, and became so mad, I am running for school board!
Tracy, I found your work through Tom Hayden‘s blog. Thank you for it.
For the rest: the superintendent of whom Tracy speaks has also been indicted for embezzling and defrauding the K-8 school district of Evanston, Illinois. This superintendent fits the profile of Barbara Byrd-Bennett, the one-time head of Chicago’s public schools: like Byrd-Bennett, he used crusading rhetoric and sometimes engaged in “management override.” He got away with it for a long time because there was no oversight from our Board of Education. Together, these two parties—the superintendent and the Board—have done notable damage to our community.
Tom Hayden offers many details about this sordid case at https://foiagras.com.
Tom does a good job of explaining why this happens in a lot of places across the country. The state groups that accredit school boards are made up of ex-superintendents and they have trained school boards not to question superintendents, that any questioning or voting no on a contract is overstepping into “operations.” It is not the spirit nor letter of the law on school board authority.
Enter this into any ai and your feelings about school reform might change. If we made school completely optional, but still wanted people to use it, what would school have to change?
More radical preventative action would be to increase state-level oversight of school districts. Ideas in increasing level of radicalism:
1. Many states have spending transparency portals where all state contracts and spending are posted. Schools could be required to use these systems too.
2. Have state education departments approve (or at least review with possibility of veto) school expenditures. School boards are too prone to amateurism and cronyism to systematically do a good job.
3. Ditch the idea of school boards. North Carolina has their school districts correspond to counties and a few large cities. You could go further and say that education is handled by county boards or city councils, and is no longer a freestanding thing.
Pass a law giving different kinds of district and school officials rights of action to sue the relevant parties for fraud, improper use of funds, self-enrichment, etc., and offer some percentage of whatever was recovered to the person bringing the suit.
Passing a couple of these laws — making sure they're well-tailored to the kind of fraud we want to catch — would create a local education bar that could start policing districts.
I am not convinced that oversight is as lacking suggested here, indeed most of these instances of graft cited were eventually discovered by some of the oversight mechanisms we have. That actually should be a pretty good deterrent. GAO publishes guidance on internal controls. Most school districts are required to have financial and federal compliance audits as required by the Single Audit Act. Those auditors need to follow GAO's standards (known as the yellow book) which require them to assess internal controls when conducting their audits. It's not perfect, but these generally do reinforce good financial and governance practices. The bigger school districts have internal audit shops or even independent inspectors who are empowered to examine all of these issues as well. LA Unified's OIG has a whistleblower hotline: https://oig.lausd.org/apps/pages/index.jsp?uREC_ID=4429321&type=d&pREC_ID=2667620
It is true that the issue with senior or chief leaders is a bit trickier than rank and file employees when it comes to internal controls, but that is by no means unique to the public sector. The most important internal control is the upper management setting a "tone from the top". I would suggest you read Cynthia Cooper's work who discovered the WorldCom scandal as an internal auditor. Most of the internal controls were followed, and testing revealed no problems, it was only careful forensic accounting and people who had good ethics who were willing to stand up to management that did not. https://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Circumstances-Journey-Corporate-Whistleblower/dp/0470443316
Such a chilling post. And a great read!
Here in Montclair, NJ, our school's budget has a $20M hole. Seems that it's more about underbudgeting and mismanagement than outright fraud but it's taken 2 years for a financial audit to be approved, not started yet.
Tim, I learned a lot by reading this. Thanks for putting it together…