Monthly Archives: February 2016

The Climb

Every career is different.

But, anecdotally, the below trajectory is a common path I see amongst people who have accomplished a lot for others.

Of course, there are other paths, but for what’s it worth, here are some thoughts on this path.

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High Achiever Phase

At the beginning of your education and career, you are for the most part only accountable for your own performance, as well as perhaps the performance of a few others.

If you can execute, you can get a lot done. This is not to say that there won’t be ups and downs as you progress, but, professionally speaking, the ups and downs will be bound within a reasonable range and the overall trajectory will be up.

Failure, Massive Learning, Recovery

Then, at some point you will really fail.

Sometimes this failure will be known to the world; sometimes it will be known to your management team; sometimes it will be known by your board; sometimes it will only be known to you.

Given that there’s only so much you can fuck up when you’re early in your career and individually executing, your first spectacular failure will generally happen when you’re managing a large initiative, team, or organization.

Some people recover from this and some don’t.

Generally speaking, perseverance, self-awareness, ambition, constant learning, and a deep drive for improvement help someone rebound from major failure (which might be one event or a dark year or two).

I also imagine certain elements of privilege (social capital, race, money, etc.) help, which is unfair.

Sometimes people have to change roles or organizations to fully rebound.

Sometimes they don’t.

The Climb

Ideally, the lessons of your failure are engrained so deeply that you never fail this hard again.

I don’t think it is great for an individual, in the career sense, to fail fast and to fail often.

You should improve enough that you train yourself to mitigate major downsides while giving yourself shots at high upsides.

Some of your upsides will hit for reasonable successes, while some will hit for astounding successes.

But spectacular failures should generally be avoided.

With a good understanding of your own strengths and weaknesses, you should be able to build the right teams and enter into the right situations to give yourself a decent chance of doing great things for others.

Once you’ve entered The Climb, you can get in a virtuous cycle of challenge, growth, and success.

In Sum

Unfortunately, Massive Failure is often the entry ticket to The Climb.

Buckle up.

The End of Education Reform

I. The Odds

If you grow up poor, you will likely not get a bachelor’s degree. Here’s the data:

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9% of students from the bottom quintile of income receive a Bachelor’s degree by age 24.

Even amongst our nation’s best schools for low-income students, the numbers are still tough:

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Or as leaders at Match charter school put it:

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II. And Even if You Do

Even if you go to college and graduate, you might not learn a lot.

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Yes, through some mix of signaling and learning, you are much more likely to get a job if you have a degree, but it seems like there is a strong signaling component, which makes college very inefficient for everyone involved (save for the social component, which seems to work quite well, in both the best and worse senses).

One way I like to think about college is this: would you learn more if you simply worked at a decent for-profit, non-profit, or governmental organization?

I think most colleges fail this test. And even those that do pass, I still worry that they are underperforming their actual potential.

III. Two Problems to Solve

So there are two problems to solve:

(1) Given that getting a degree is good for the individual, how do we increase degree attainment rates for low-income students?

(2) Given that humans learning things is generally good for society, how do we make colleges more effective?

IV. The Innovators 

Match charter school created Match beyond to try to solve both of these problems.

Here’s how it works:

  • Match Beyond partners with Southern New Hampshire University, which has a fully online college degree called College For America.
  • College For All is competency based and designed to build skills in students that employers say they need to be successful in the workplace, such as data analysis, working in teams, communication skills.
  • Match Beyond splits a pell grant with New Hampshire, so the degree is basically free for students.
  • New Hampshire provides the platform and competency based curriculum.
  • Match provides 1-1 coaching to their students to guide them through the competencies.

In more detail:

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For what’s it with, I’ve seen it in action. I went to the Panera, had a coffee, and watched the tutoring.

Here’s the results to date:

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V. Can It Scale Across a City? 

After all the hard work in New Orleans – and the unprecedented achievement gains – many people in the city (and myself) are worried that these gains won’t translate into degrees and jobs.

Here’s some data on where New Orleans is trying to head.

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To make this a reality, a coalition of high schools, 2 year and 4 year colleges, employers, and non-profits are trying to reconstruct the high school -> post-secondary -> job pipeline.

The strategy is a mixture of alignment (building clear pathways where students aren’t lost in the transitions between schools and the job market) and innovation (rethinking high school, college, and job training).

It is unknown whether this will work.

But for New Orleans to realize the promise of its K12 improvements, some sort of breakthrough will need to occur in the post-secondary sector.

I am concerned that the leadership and entrepreneurship we’ve seen in the charter sector does not exist in the post-secondary sector.

I hope groups like Match Beyond change that.

VI. The End of Education Reform

We can think about the phrase – “the end of education reform” in three ways.

One way to think about the phrase is that education reform ends at twelfth grade, and from there students are left to struggle in a dysfunctional post-secondary system.

A second way to think about the phrase is that education reform will end because it failed to deliver on its promise of a better life for those who benefited from the reforms.

A third way to think about it is that reforming post-secondary and job training institutions is the logical end effort of education reform, and that success here will improve the lives of students in this country.

Time will tell which way of understanding the phrase will most ring true.

Life in the Time of Perpetual Marshmallow Tests

Humanity has consisted of three main eras: hunter and gather, farming, and industrial.

Each of these eras can be understood through different lenses: economic, technological, cultural, health, and so forth.

Ultimately, the driving force of each era appears to be energy production.

Hunter and gathers captured modest amounts of energy from plants and animals; farmers harnessed increased energy from agriculture; industrialists produced significantly more energy through mechanically induced chemical reactions.

How much energy each era of humanity produced,  as well as how each era had to organize itself to produce this energy, had major effects on human behaviors and values.

How much energy each era of humanity produced,  as well as how each era had to organize itself to produce this energy, also in large part defined human struggle.

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In hunter and gather societies, humans struggled against pain and death. Mothers and children died during and after birth, people starved, and people killed each other at fairly high rates.

This by no means is to say that life was miserable. It may very well have been the opposite.

Food was varied, exercise was abundant, and societies were fairly equal.

So long as bouts of pain were brief and death was quick and the fear of either didn’t produce too much anxiety – well, life was probably ok.

Though we’ll likely never know or truly understand.

At the very least, the human condition was highly congruent to the human brain.

They had evolved together.

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In farming societies, humans struggled against drudgery, submission, and disease.

For most, life was hard and boring.

Labor was repetitive, food was mediocre, and societal structures were highly unequal.

Moreover, disease was rampant due to higher population densities and poor sanitation.

Life for many (most?) was probably not that great.

Our brains were wired for the hunter and gatherer era, but wheat transformed society into something altogether different.

Agri(culture) leapfrogged our brains.

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In industrial societies, humans increasingly struggle with abundance.

We are struggling with our own production.

Of course, many people still live in deep poverty, but these rates are decreasing rapidly, and when it’s all said and done, it may be that it was only three hundred years into the industrial era that the vast majority of people transitioned to struggling with abundance.

For those of us living in abundance, life is a perpetual marshmallow test.

Rich, middle class, or poor – we struggle with many of the same things: we eat too much sugar; we drink too much sugar and alcohol; we take too many drugs; we borrow too much many to buy too man things; we watch too much porn; we watch too much television; we overly obsess over our children; we have or attempt to have or think about too much sex; we pollute too much; we are addicted to our phones; we rewire our brains in a way that both creates a hunger for meaning *and* makes meaning ever elusive…

This is not to say that the rich and poor suffer the same – it is undeniably easier to be rich – it is only to say that we all suffer many of the same ills, even if these ills vary in severity and frequency.

Yes, tragedy still strikes, but it strikes less often.

And what strikes most often is ourselves: we fail the marshmallow tests; every day consists of hundreds of marshmallow tests, and we fail many of these tests – some cause us to gain a few pounds, some cause us to wake up hungover – some cause us to die.

We have many labels for failing marshmallow tests: addiction, hedonism, greed, laziness, immorality, thuggishness, materialism, recklessness, and so forth.

The social class of whomever fails the marshmallow test generates the label.

But all these failures are best understood as eating the marshmallow.

In this era, our production capacity is ruthlessly tailored to our brains.

We are in trench warfare and we stand on both sides of the trenches.

We are most likely better off than we were during the drudgery and submission of farming, but it is unclear if we are happier or more satisfied than our hunter and gather ancestors.

At the very least, we live longer. And we know more.

But, if ultimately happiness is a function of environmental and brain congruence, we’re still far away from home.

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All this is to say: if you understand that our struggle is one of marshmallow tests, perhaps you’ll have a better chance of winning more of the tests, and perhaps you’ll have more empathy for those who fail.

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What will we struggle with in the next era (if there is one)?

That’s impossible to know, of course.

My guess is that we struggle with controlling our own information. When we can copy ourselves, upload ourselves, etc. – gaining or losing information will likely have immense consequences.

But who knows?

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I wrote this without citing or crediting sources.

Suffice to say, very little of the above is my own original thinking.

This post is mostly one of framing and sequencing.

Let me know what I got wrong.

 

Number Crunching: Introducing the State Charter Growth Index

Given major differences in state size, I was curious which states were doing well on charter growth when controlling for their populations.

I played around with state numbers for total new school charter growth and net charter growth (growth minus closures), and then compared these numbers to overall state population.

From there, I converted (schools / state population) into an index.

See results below with two caveats: (1) I don’t think new school numbers are totally clean (2) I was doing a lot copying and pasting in excel and I might have made mistakes.

Let me know if my math is wrong and I will fix the sheets.

High Growth States: 25+ on Growth Index or 20+ on Net Index 

Yes, somewhat arbitrary cut offs, but anyways…

For 2015, the major (proportional) drivers of new school development were: DC, DE, AR, TN, RI, AZ, CO.

For 2015, the major (proportional) drivers of net new school development were: DE, TN, RI, NH, AR.

Surprises

I was surprised to see Delaware, Rhode Island, and Arkansas do so well. Yes, they are small states. But still…

Also interesting to see Michigan and Ohio having negative charter school growth given that everyone always complains about loose authorizing in these states.

Laggards

New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois are really doing poorly, reflecting, it seems, the weak charter growth in New York City, Philadelphia, and Chicago. The politics in the more left learning big cities remains pretty brutal.

That being said, New York had 18% enrollment growth, so perhaps school count isn’t catching something or a lot previous openings are still adding grades.

Virginia is a perennial laggard as well.

Data Feels Off

My guess is data is off in New Jersey, where multiple schools often open under one charter

New School Index 

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Net New School Index 

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Pearson’s Law, FAT Law (?), More Data Please

Thanks to everyone who responded publicly and privately to last week’s posts on charter data.

It really helped me clarify my thinking.

Some further thoughts below.

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Scott Pearson made an interesting point about charter growth / closures trends. Scott noted that:

  1. National new school openings have been fairly consistent over past decade: 400-500 per year.
  2. National closure rates have also been fairly consistent at 3-4%.

Given this, we get Pearson’s Law: if national new school openings and national closure rates both remain at historical constants, eventually we will hit a year of zero net new schools.

In short, because the closure rate is based on total existing charters, eventually total existing charters will be large enough that a 3-4% closure rate means more schools are closing than opening.

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Smart people at Arnold Foundation said they’d much rather know total of net new high-quality openings than simply net new openings. I agree. See end of post for all I’d want to better understand.

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Others raised the point that perhaps many of us may have been wrong: growing the sector through very high bar authorization (NY, MA, etc.) might end up being an inferior strategy scaling the sector rapidly and then cleaning it up (FAT states: FL, AZ, TX).

For whatever it’s worth, in New Orleans I think we took a middle ground here: we grew the sector with less quality control than MA but more than the FAT states.

All told, the most recent data has moved a few notches over to the FAT strategy.

But I don’t think the FAT strategy should be a law yet. Still much to learn.

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Moving forward, I think we’d be much better off we had the following national data:

  1. Total new openings
    • With new school being defined as the initiation of an expansion that will lead to an increase of enrollment of +300 students over time.
    • With data scrubbed by every state charter association contacting each operator to get exact data.
    • Maturity: school tagged as start-up, early stage replication (2-4), large CMO.
    • Quality: each operator is tagged by some quality measure (CREDO?) so we understand what % of expansions are high-quality replications.
    • Source: each school is tagged to a source, if any (Charter School Growth Fund, New Schools Venture, BES, local harbormaster, etc) so where we understand where schools are coming from.
    • Geography: Urban, suburban, rural.
    • Diversity: whether CMO leader / school leader is person of color.
  2. Closures
    • Cycle: whether closure occurred during renewal or through crisis.
    • Age: how many years charter had been in existence.
    • Enrollment: how many students school enrolled.
    • Authorizer: whether it was district, non-profit, state, or university.
    • Quality: how school performed on state tests and / or CREDO (and perhaps attainment as well).

 

The Net New Charter School Growth Rate Just Plummeted to a Decade Low

I just spent some time with charter school growth numbers from 2005 to 2015.

I think these numbers are right but please do correct me if they are wrong.

I tried to look at a few data sources, and not all of them agreed, though they were roughly aligned so I feel like the below is a reasonable estimate of new school creation by year.

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From 2005 to 2013, net new charter schools great at a healthy ~7% a year.

And then in the past two years the net new school growth rate has plummeted, as has the absolute number of new schools created.

In 2015, there were only 132 net new school created compared to 310 in 2006. 

Some Reflections

1. If, like me, you believe that high-quality charter schools will be a major source of increased educational opportunity, this data is probably not good news.

2. There is some chance that this most recent data is reflecting a Great Cleanup. In this last year, 272 charter schools were closed, which drove down the net new school creation (404 schools opened, which is lower than one would hope, but not catastrophically low by historical standards).

3. Interestingly enough, charter school enrollment still grew by 9% this year. This could be the result of charter schools that opened in previous years growing to full enrollment (this often takes 3-4 years); new schools are being opened in ways that aren’t showing up in the data (a middle school adds a high school under the same charter); or virtual schools distorting the school to enrollment ratio (by enrolling thousands of students). Or something else I’m not thinking of.

4. All these closures + lower rates of new school creation could just mean that the sector is taking quality much more seriously. Perhaps the result of the Great Cleanup will be that the next CREDO national study will show better results.

5. My biggest worry is that this data reflects a slowdown in entrepreneurship; that some combination of politics, regulation, national mood, vision, etc. is causing great educators to not take the jump to open an awesome school.

6. I feel a little lonely in digging through this data! When labor data is announced, you have 10,000 economists and pundits analyzing the numbers. I feel like there’s about five of us in the country who do this with charter data. Of course, I don’t expect the amount of analysis to rival national economic data, but it feels like that for a sector of this maturity there is not a ton of data analysis. And, yes, I’m now in a position to fund others to increase this capacity, so if this doesn’t get fixed I’ll share some of the blame.

Let me know if any of this data is off and I will correct it.