Me and my family dog, Martina, ca 1992/1993

Image created with #Snapseed

Every morning she pounces on me to wake me up only to go back asleep on top of me instead of at my feet.

Thanks @edure

Last day of vacation. One hour until airport.

The 80s wants its cruise ship back.

Ted Nesi was gracious in offering me a guest spot on his blog, Nesi’s Notes this week to discuss education funding in Woonsocket. The main conclusions of my post are:

​1. Woonsocket has not increased local funding for education over the last fifteen years despite massive increases in education expenditures in Rhode Island and nationwide.

​2. General education aid from the state has rapidly increased over the same period, demonstrating that a lack of sufficient revenue at Woonsocket Public Schools is first, if not exclusively, a local revenue problem.

I wanted to provide three additional bits of information on my personal blog.

First, I want to outline some analyses that I have not done that I think are critical to understanding education funding in Woonsocket. I will also describe more completely what conclusions cannot be drawn from the analysis on Nesi’s Notes.

Second, I want to discuss the legal context of school funding in Rhode Island. This is especially interesting since Pawtucket and Woonsocket are both currently suing the state for additional funds for the second time. I am going to review what happened the first time these communities brought their fight for education aid to the courthouse and explain why I believe this strategy will fail once again.

Third, I want to provide instructions on precisely how I retrieved the data and created the graphs in that post. I am a firm believer in “reproducible research”, so I want to be entirely transparent on my data sources and methods. I also think that too few people are acquainted with the Common Core Data provided by the National Center for Education Statistics that I relied on exclusively for my guest blog. Hopefully these instructions will help more concerned citizens and journalists in Rhode Island use data to back up assertions about local education.

Please reserve your comments on my original posts for Nesi’s Notes. I have disabled comments on this post, because I would like to keep the comments on the original analysis contained in one place. Feel free to comment on each of the follow up posts.

Prospect

Prospect, #nofilter

Sleepy poppa. I so sleepy.

#providence #waterfire

Brunch

Elsa’s first lobstah

First time at Oki’s.

If I were still in college, I would buy this for “RELEASE” when real drunk.

I’m on Instagram now. I guess this makes me hipster enough to be cool again.

Trees are early on Westminster.

The end of every night.

If you’re just beginning to use R and want a quick and easy way to make some charts/graphs, etc, GrapheR is a great package to quickly produce high quality plots through a self-explanatory GUI. Here’s an article in The R Journal today.

My only complaint is that GrapheR does not appear to have a way to export the code that produced the graph, which would be a very helpful feature for a beginner who wants to learn the guts of producing publication quality charts in R.

To install and then run…

install.packages('GrapheR')
require(GrapheR)
run.GrapheR()

I am glad that Philissa Cramer is reporting on some of the deeper details of the Special Education Student Information System ¹ implementation at the New York City Department of Education here. Many people don’t really understand the ins and outs of government contracting. Folks really think NASA designs and builds the lunar module, for example, instead of realizing that they issued an RFP and contracting with Northrop Grumman to do that work for them. Similarly, in education, especially around complex technology projects, most districts and states purchase products or services through a bid product rather than develop solutions in house.

However, I am a bit disappointed in the angle that City Limits, (Ms. Cramer’s source) took in their reporting. There are real problems with government contracting, but they really mischaracterize the story around SESIS in an attempt to simplify the issue for casual readers. City Limits acts as though it is surprising, or even deplorable, that an RFP was awarded to a company with a largely existing product.

They point to the fact that Maximus, the vendor for the SESIS contract, was modifying an existing product to meet the requirements outlined in NYC DOE’s RFP as though this was clearly bad. City Limits uses words like “revealed” and “simply” to describe what Maximus was offering. This just ignores the reality of government contracting and shows disregard for risk mitigation. Almost all government agencies handsomely reward companies that can point to successes in developing and implementing solutions that can meet many of the requirements outlined in the issued RFP. The government wants to hire people it believes can do the job and do it well and often one of the best ways to make that determination is to see that someone has done it before. In almost all cases, this means selecting a vendor who has an existing product or process for meeting many of the requirements in the RFP that will be expanded upon or modified. But government purchasers don’t just want experienced partners, they also want to leverage efficiencies by not paying for duplication. One of the major reasons for purchasing an existing product or contracting with a vendor is that school systems actually aren’t that different from one another and the basic functionality and organizational structures required in an IT solution are shared across schools, districts, and states. Why pay substantially to build the same basic software infrastructure that already exists elsewhere? It’s a waste of money most of the time.

City Limits then goes on to criticize the massive increases that can occur due to change orders. This is a serious problem with government contracting, but they fail to really explore why. A change order occurs when the client wants new or additional functionality that was not included in the initial contract. Their frequency and expense are not an example of why government agencies should not contract with outside vendors, rather, they demonstrate just how poorly bureaucracies are at managing large-scale complex projects. Change orders happen due to several failures, and almost all are the government agencies' fault. In no particular order, the government agency:

• failed to do proper discovery before issuing the RFP and, therefore, missed major functional requirements that are not identified until more intensive discovery occurs during development or initial implementation;
• agreed to a contract that was far too specific and did not allow for the reality that requirements do evolve over time (though often not in ways which substantially change the nature or quantity of work);
• agreed to a contract that was far too vague such that the vendor can claim to have delivered a product or service when they did not meet already identified functional requirements for the system;
• did not take into account the preparation and costs required to sustain the product beyond the life of the initial engagement with the vendor.

These are the main things that lead to change orders. If the government agency is doing a top-notch job, they can all be avoided and the only occasion for a change order should be large external shocks that dramatically alter the functional requirements, intentional decisions to move away from the initial functional requirements that weighed the costs of altering the vendor contract, and a desire to extend and expand a relationship because of the success of the initial implementation resulting in a substantially more advanced or mature product.

It is really hard to manage vendor contracts right. It requires actually knowing what you want to buy before an RFP is issued (or recognizing what is and is not known and correctly assessing the scope of the impact future decisions on unknowns will have on the work). It requires a really good team of lawyers to fight outside forces that literally make their profits on carefully abdicating as much responsibility as possible at the contracting phase. It requires selecting good partners that are adequately willing and prepared to evolve and work with the agency as their needs and knowledge grow and mature. It requires an honest assessment of future resources that will be available to assure sustainability of large investments. And perhaps most difficult of all, it requires strong project management infrastructure throughout the entire agency to ensure alignment and consistency across multiple products produced internally and by multiple external partners.

The benefits of outsourcing products can be huge and are worth leveraging. Vendor contracts are difficult to manage, and bureaucracies are not always well-suited to managing these projects, but all government agencies struggle with getting this right.

One last parting thought…

In my view, the most challenging aspect of getting vendor contracting right for government agencies is spending ample upfront time, even before issuing an RFP, articulating the functional needs that a solution must meet in detail. I feel that often public sector employees are so intimidated by the arduous process around issuing and awarding an RFP that they rush to get an RFP out there and worry about the details during contracting and product initiation. Whenever possible, resist this temptation at all costs. Whether custom designed internally or provided by an external vendor, satisfaction is dependent upon clarity of the desired outcomes. This is particularly true with technology projects. Vendors will always produce something, but whether the solution is any good is almost entirely up to good requirements gathering.

UPDATE: You should also read this page on jasonpbecker for some very strong and interesting rebuttals to Carey’s article that I commented on below.

Do read this article on Diane Ravitch. I personally have two major criticisms of Ravitch, both of which Carey exposes eloquently.

First, I believe that she leverages her respect and expertise as an historian and professor to present herself as an experts in areas of academic research and policy where she has little expertise. This is very common with public intellectuals, and I think it’s deceiving and deplorable.

Second, I am unsure about whether she is a reliable narrator of history because my impression is that she’s the “best in the game” at least in part because so few are playing. I don’t personally have the skill to judge her histories and given her blatant academic dishonesty in so many other areas where I have some ability to judge quality, I find it hard to view her as an honest operator.

What is somewhat new in Carey’s take on Ravitch, and what I think most here on Plus will find interesting, are two revelations. First, one I was somewhat acquainted with, it seems possible that some of Ravitch’s shift to rhetorical vitriol against someone who seemed a natural ally (Joel Klein) may be partially attributable to a personal dispute involving Ravitch’s “partner” (this and other articles seem to be intentionally ambiguous about the nature of this relationship). Second, and most interesting to me, it appears that Ravitch doesn’t have the typical academic acumen of an acclaimed scholar in her field. In fact, it appears that Ravitch has produced almost exclusively popular history throughout her career. This detail in particular plays into some of my very concerns about the reliability of her historical narratives.

On a side note, I think if I could be one person in education policy today it’d be Kevin Carey. He’s smart as hell and an excellent writer, even if I disagree with him on higher education issues.

I wanted to write a lot more about this, but I just don’t have the time.

This storyis about rezoning schools in downtown Manhattan which is struggling to meet the demands of emerging residential neighborhoods. Reading this story (and struggle) just brought up something I’ve thought about for some time now.

The cost of school buildings is ridiculous. Schools are generally built for one purpose. They are generally built to last a very long time. They are generally built to a quality standard that suggests it will perennially be far too expensive to knock down and start over even if renovations are obscenely expensive and inadequate. In most areas (dense urban cities are probably the exception), we build schools on large plots of land with field/park space attached. This land is technically for public use, but in the name of safety for children, land uses are far more restrictive than most public parks.

It all just seems like an absurd setup that wastes countless public dollars. Why wouldn’t we want to have smaller schools in mixed-use spaces that represent far less capital investment and introduce substantial budget flexibility as enrollment patterns change? Why would we want to build separate libraries from existing public resources? Why would we want separate fields rather than bringing students to truly public spaces during the day?

The school house as a public space that’s isolated and locked away from the community that builds it, the school house that’s on a 100-year bond designed in such a way that any conversion to other uses is very unlikely… isn’t that school house a bit anachronistic?