Arkansas has paid an Indiana book company, Solution Tree, tens of millions of dollars for a teacher professional development program that education researchers at the University of Arkansas say has shown no positive results. The Arkansas Legislative Council will meet Friday to decide whether to extend the Solution Tree contract, which was initially signed on a no-bid basis, with no objective metrics. If the state renews the company’s contract, it would cost $99.4 million over the next seven years, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reports.
Solution Tree got its series of no-bid contracts after legislators attended a conference in 2017 on the virtues of “professional learning communities,” or PLCs. PLC is a broad, generic term for a process whereby educators meet, exchange ideas, talk about current issues and problems, and generally collaborate. The concept is trendy now in educational circles, and numerous companies have materials for sale which can be used as part of a PLC initiative.
After the conference, legislators passed a series of laws that required Arkansas schools to spend money on PLCs generally, but the funds seem to have all gone to Solution Tree’s proprietary program, “PLCs at Work.”
Although the PLC name is new, the process is as old as a two-room schoolhouse. Solution Tree’s website defines professional learning communities as “schools that work collaboratively in recurring cycles of collective inquiry and action research to achieve better results for the students they serve.”
Is that sort of like getting together and discussing things?
If Arkansas has tens of millions of dollars to waste on newfangled, unproven strategies, I have a better idea: Magic Thinking Caps, or MTCs.
We all remember the admonitions from our teachers who earnestly implored us to “Put on your thinking caps.” Well, now I have developed a unique proprietary program, MTCs at Work, which provides such caps to students.
The cap, which is akin to the one worn by Davy Crockett, gives each wearer an immediate sense of warmth and alertness. The antithesis of the dunce cap, the MTC provides a light stimulation of the cerebral cortex as the tail of the cap brushes lightly against the nape of the neck. An imperceptible static electricity charge is created as the polyester in the cap moves against the student’s hair, stimulating the synapses in the brain’s frontal lobes. The human brain becomes a veritable sponge, absorbing information almost magically.
Good salesmen know Arkansas has a willingness to try expensive and unproven programs. Just look at the state Legislature, which is considering renewing the Solution Tree contract for years to come despite at least three major problems.
The first problem is that the Solution Tree program apparently does not really work. A recent study by the University of Arkansas Fayetteville’s Office for Education Policy concluded the following: “Overall, we find no statistically significant impacts or value-added growth, suggesting that the PLC at Work model may not improve academic outcomes for Arkansas students.” That should be the end of this whole discussion right then and there.
(I sympathize with Solution Tree, because I don’t have any evidence that my Magic Thinking Cap program will actually do anything either. But who cares? We can have conferences, highly paid consultants, training sessions with nice lunches, and all sorts of conflabs where we slice and dice whatever mumbo jumbo the facilitator wants to stick on the wall. We will ask the participants if they enjoyed the process, the food, the fun and the games. And we all get a participation trophy.)
The second problem is that the initial Solution Tree contract and all of the extensions have come on a no-bid basis, despite the fact that the Solution Tree program is incredibly expensive. Let’s repeat: The state is paying for an expensive program that shows no positive results. For a Legislature and governor who claim to be champions of efficiency and limited government spending, this scenario should raise everyone’s collective antennae.
Some in the Legislature have started asking questions, and earlier this year a committee asked for an audit of Solution Tree. The third problem with extending Solution Tree’s contract is that the audit is not complete, yet some members want to move ahead regardless.
How did Solution Tree ever get its first no-bid contract and the subsequent extensions?
In 2016 and 2017, a number of state legislators attended Solution Tree conferences in Atlanta and Phoenix. It was around this time that many in the Legislature threw support (and state dollars) behind PLCs as the next great thing in education. Then, on May 10, 2017, then-Education Commissioner Johnny Key signed a consulting agreement to pay Solution Tree $2,500 to assist the state in planning and implementing a PLC pilot project.
The state procurement department questioned the no-bid process, but Key said at the time, “Solution Tree is the only vendor that can deliver the PLC at Work process. The resources are copyrighted, trademarked and the intellectual property of Solution Tree.”
Key’s logic was absurdly circular. Solution Tree is, of course, the only source of its own program, but lots of companies have competing programs that purport to do the same things. And oddly enough, the “PLC at Work” marketing phrase was only registered after Key wrote his letter insisting that Solution Tree get the contract.
(Here again, I sympathize with Solution Tree. I have to admit you can get cheaper thinking caps than the ones offered with my MTC at Work program. But they won’t be as good.)
Starting in 2005, the Legislature started funding the Arkansas Professional Development Initiative as part of the state’s annual per-pupil funding, which is set by the state annually. As of 2017, the state allocated $32.40 per teacher to school districts for professional development. In March 2017, the Legislature passed a law requiring any professional development funding over the professional development funding base to be spent on PLCs. In the last school year, that legislation pushed well over $1 million to Solution Tree for “statewide professional development programs,” according to the Arkansas School Funding Manual. That sort of permanent and directed funding requirement in education is unusual, to say the least.
Solution Tree has other contracts directly with school districts, education cooperatives and other entities in Arkansas. In February, Rep. Grant Hodges (R-Rogers) said the actual financial benefit to Solution Tree in Arkansas was estimated to be over $140 million when contracts from the state Department of Education as well as education service cooperatives, school districts and higher education institutions were taken into consideration.
It seems irresponsible to extend the Solution Tree contract until all of the facts are known. But the original proponents of Solution Tree want to rush the extension on through.
Lots of companies sell PLC-related programs for much less than Solution Tree. Competing companies with their own versions of PLC materials would have lined up in droves to bid on the PLC initiative that Key awarded to Solution Tree on a no-bid basis. The only logical conclusion is that Key wanted Solution Tree to get the no-bid contract, and he did not want anyone else to compete for it. Incidentally, Key is now an education consultant for a company that appears to help firms sell their proprietary education programs. His firm’s website says it can do this by “pair(ing) best in class solutions with our national and state network of district leaders to simplify this process.”
He made sure the Solution Tree process was simple: a no-bid contract.
The sad fact is that Solution Tree has received millions of dollars for political reasons, and not a dime because it has shown its program works. Solution Tree’s owners gave the Arkansas Republican party $100,000 for Gov. Sarah Sanders’ inaugural gala.
Collaborative problem solving is a good thing, whether you call it a PLC, a teachers’ meeting or a coffee klatch. It makes sense for professional educators to get together and exchange all sorts of ideas and information. But should the state be throwing money at a book publisher that claims to have some secret recipe for success, especially when the U of A’s Educational Policy Institute finds that the program produces “no significant impacts or value-added growth…”?
Frankly, if a magic process or program existed, it would have caught on and be used almost everywhere, because many districts, especially high-poverty districts, are not achieving acceptable results. In another column, I will describe some fundamental steps the Little Rock School District team took during my short tenure as superintendent years ago, and I can show you some encouraging results. The true fixes come only from systemic change, not from expensive experimental programs.
I could have told the commissioner from the beginning that this whole PLC industry is just another trendy program run by opportunists who get their contracts based on who they know, and not what they know. Most programs are supported by “research” that is done by the companies or their surrogates, and in the final analysis the programs come and go, and the next new thing shows up with a team of consultants pushing it. A lot of these companies, like Solution Tree, are run by people with business degrees.
The Solution Tree program is full of “awards,” conflicts of interest, and national conferences. Teaching and learning occur in a classroom, not at a hotel in Phoenix, Atlanta or Austin, and not from a bunch of consultants up-talking their latest and greatest money-making program which they are hawking to legislators. If Solution Tree has something of value, they should pitch it to principals and teachers, not to politicians.
Good principals (and in larger schools, good department heads) already collaborate and engage in group activities to solve problems. Schools are no different than businesses that bring workers together to try to come up with workable solutions to common issues and problems. Sam Walton did this weekly at Wal-Mart. In most instances, this sort of thing happens almost automatically, and surely happens in the teachers’ lounges, during lunch period, and in other meetings, both formal and informal.
It is astounding that our Legislature, so intent on being efficient and thrifty, has thrown millions of dollars away to a company with no track record of success. The only thing that seems to explain this mess is that the people who are pushing for it all have something to gain personally or professionally. Someone needs to follow the money. That‘s what an audit usually does. So before we do anything, let’s get the audit.
Instead of paying Solution Tree millions upon millions for a concept that has been on the street for years, let’s give my MTC concept a try. And as time goes by, I want to keep renewing the MTC at Work program, sort of like Granny’s dance lessons. You have to keep learning the latest about MTCs.
The state could even eventually step up to the MTC 3000. The 3000 comes equipped with an LED at both the top and the tip of the tail of the cap. These lights can be illuminated by the teacher, individually or all together, through the use of a remote control, if the instructor believes that an idea of merit has been articulated. Some preliminary studies have indicated that students will work especially hard to get “lit up.”
Of course, this model comes with a substantial upcharge. It’s priced at $293.00 each. For a mere $140 million, the state could purchase 476,500 of my MTC 3000’s — one for every public school and charter school student in Arkansas. Additional funding will be required for voucher recipients who have never attended a public school but will soon be receiving public money.
And at the next meeting of the Arkansas Legislative Council I would like to pitch my MTC at Work program. During the meeting, we can all don MTC 3000s, thereby modeling the focused concentration required when learning at an accelerated pace. Legislators can also wear their caps during the upcoming special session, to show that higher levels of intelligence and virtue can be reached by extended use of an MTC. They might then decide to forego more tax cuts and instead fund pre-kindergarten education, which has been shown to favorably impact student achievement.
Even if my Magic Thinking Caps do not work as well as we might hope, at least the students will get a warm hat. According to the researchers at the University of Arkansas, that is a lot more than they have gotten from Solution Tree.