"Did someone intentionally commit a fraud, trying to do EAI a favor?"
This week, the Hartford (Conn.) school district achieved a doubtful distinction. It became the first to turn over the management of its entire system to a private, for-profit company. The five-year contract that the district signed with Education Alternatives, Inc. (EAI) gives the company authority to run Hartford's 32 schools and control the district's $200 million budget. But if the people in Hartford had paid any attention to what was going on in Baltimore, Maryland, they might have had second thoughts.
EAI is in the third year of a five-year contract in Baltimore, where it manages nine schools. The company was brought in to improve student achievement. But as the Baltimore Sun revealed this week, the test scores in EAI schools have declined for two years, while the scores in other Baltimore schools have risen. And, the Sun says, this decline has led to calls to pull the plug on EAI. (Maybe hiring someone who ran one of the Baltimore schools where scores improved would have been a better bet for Hartford.)
There is also outrage about the way the test scores have been handled. In June, the Baltimore school district released some partial scores from EAI schools and claimed the scores showed that EAI was "on track." This week , without any fanfare, the district finally released scores for all the Baltimore schools, and EAI schools looked pretty sick in comparison with the rest. Furthermore, it turned out that June's scores were not even accurate -- they made the performance at EAI schools look better than it was.
What's the story? Why were the citywide scores held back until this week's "stealth" news conference? And why were the EAI scores made to look better than they were? Superintendent Walter Amprey says it was a clerical error. An editorial in the Baltimore Sun (October 19, 1994) suggests another possibility: "Did someone intentionally commit a fraud, trying to do EAI a favor?" As the Sun points out, When city school leaders initially touted alleged improvements at EAI schools in a June press conference, ... [EAI] was trying to get selected to take over the failing Hartford (Conn.) school system. For EAI, it was a critical contract.
The Sun thinks these questions about the test results need to be answered by an independent investigation because Superintendent Amprey has sacrificed his credibility by becoming "too publicly identified as an EAI cheerleader."
And what about the changes in the "control group" of Schools? This is a group of eight non-EAI schools carefully selected to match EAI schools in student composition and achievement and therefore useful for comparison purposes. Now, three high-achieving schools have been dropped from the control group and three low-achieving school added -- a surefire way of making student achievement in EAI schools look much better. If you want to win, just change the rules of the game in the middle.
There are people who look at EAI' s performance and say, "Yes, there are questions; there are problems. But the schools are in bad shape so why not give EAI' s program a try? Then you evaluate it. If it works, you keep it; if it doesn't, you get rid of it."
That sounds pretty sane. But if you look at the contract the Hartford school board signed with EAI, you have to wonder whether it will be possible to get an independent evaluation: "EAI and the Board may mutually contract for independent evaluation of the project."
Mutually. What happens if EAI says, "Well, we have our internal evaluation system. We're satisfied that things in Hartford are 'on track,' and we don't think an evaluation is necessary"? Or "We don't like your independent evaluator. You need to take the one we've chosen"? The contract language seems to give EAI the right to exercise veto power over the evaluation process, so the board has given away the only tool it has to get independent information about how well the project is succeeding.
Why can't the board and the superintendent evaluate the success of the project? In theory, they are the watchdogs for the public. But in a case like this, where the decision to hire EAI was controversial, the issue becomes a political one. And they are likely to say, "I've brought this company in. If it bombs, what will become of my credibility?" That's what has happened in Baltimore, where, as the Sun editorial says, people can no longer trust the superintendent to tell the truth about EAI. There is nothing in the situation in Hartford to make it any different.
Hartford's decision illustrates once again how right P.T. Barnum was: "There's a sucker born every minute." It's too bad that Hartford's kids will be the ones to suffer.