Hamilton International Scholars Program (HISP)

Last Thursday, Dr. Alston wrote Education Matters: Hamilton International Scholars Program (Proposal)

At the next Hamilton Board of Education meeting, March 10, 2016, I will present a proposal for the Hamilton Central School District to host tuition paying students from across the world. The title of this program is the Hamilton International Scholars Program (HISP). The Board of Education will seek input concerning HISP. ... The meeting will be held in the auditorium of the Hamilton Central School and begin at 6 PM...

And he says that the "model we are proposing" is seen at Great Work Stories: Newcomb School - YouTube

Published on Aug 28, 2013
How do you expand a shrinking public school in the middle of nowhere? When Skip Hults became superintendent of Newcomb Central School in the heart of Adirondack Park, he inherited a tradition of excellence, a talented faculty, a supportive community, and 55 kids to fill 350 seats. It was a case of grow or die. But how do you grow a school?

Yesterday Radio Free Hamilton reported Dr. Alston's announcement at HCS considers plan to attract foreign students Thursday, again with the August 2013 video. Hults started his program in 2006; it's still going on. It happens that in December 2013, I wrote about this as a possibility for HCS at HamiltonCentralOptions: International Students

No single proposal will solve any district's problems; we're looking for proposals which have helped other districts with low enrollment, both in and out of New York State. One is quite simple: it turns out that students from a variety of nations would like to spend a year or two of high school in the United States...

and among other links, I gave Rural Leader Buoys School With Foreign Students - Education Week

Recruiting tuition-paying international students has saved the school by bolstering its finances and population, and it's changed its culture by exposing Newcomb students to diverse heritages and languages. It's also redefined the meaning of "family" to the many residents who have hosted visiting international students.
"I believe this has the potential to become a rural norm," Hults says. "It's a win-win."

A few days later I wrote HamiltonCentralOptions: Appealing to International Students

I posted on the possibility that appealing to international students could have financial, academic, and cultural benefits for the school (and quite possibly for schools nearby, as one case where we might share benefits as well as costs). I'd like to say a little more about that.
One interesting question: why would students from China want to come to American schools?...

The following month I reported on a meeting where it was discussed, at HamiltonCentralOptions: 2014-15 Budget Process --- Join In!

Astrid brought this up at the meeting and Diana replied that HCS did indeed go through the "accreditation" process with Homeland Security so we are "SEVIS-certified"; indeed we are on page 108 of last June's official list at DHS and we can accept foreign students with "F" visas, although not "M" visas. See ...
And Clinton High School went through this in 2004 but may have dropped it, their website doesn't mention it....

That April, after another meeting, I wrote HamiltonCentralOptions: Pretty Good News from April 8 "Community Leaders/Fiscal" Meeting

Astonishingly, this could happen next year and could add another $70K--$100K to the budget. (The tuition may be less than the average cost of educating an HCS student, but is far more than the marginal cost; it's mostly "profit".) ...

Update: notes from other attendees: Susan Marafino adds

I mentioned that [Carolyn Hsu] would be a good person to be involved with the potential exchange student program...

All that is from late 2013 and early 2014, when Newcomb was in the news. There had of course been earlier reports and videos, including this Newcom February 2010 "welcome" video in Russian, showing a bit about how hard they were trying: A Newcomb Welcome.mpg - YouTube

A video introducing the Newcomb Central School community to our friends from Russia....

Then there was the Channel One report in 2011: Channel One News: Newcomb High School - YouTube

Oct 26, 2011
This New York school welcomes int'l students that enhance education.

Nowadays, the Newcomb School top page links to a USA Today story from the same period (February 2014): Public schools recruiting international high schoolers

Perhaps more significant for Newcomb: Students like Ipek have attracted more local kids, drawn by the prospect of a more comprehensive, global education. As a result, the school has doubled in size since 2007 to 109 students. Only 18 of those are international — the rest are local students who heard about the program and moved into the district to be part of it. They also were attracted by a partnership with local colleges that helps them earn credits before they graduate.

That partnership aspect continues today: Paul Smith's, Newcomb team up | Paul Smith's College

Paul Smith's College is partnering with Newcomb Central School this fall on a new advanced studies program....

Of course HCS does have rather an advantage in the local-colleges department.

Appealing to International Students

I posted on the possibility that appealing to international students could have financial, academic, and cultural benefits for the school (and quite possibly for schools nearby, as one case where we might share benefits as well as costs). I'd like to say a little more about that.

One interesting question: why would students from China want to come to American schools? School quality is compared between different nations by the "PISA" tests, whose 2012 results came out earlier this month; as you can see at Wikipedia's Programme for International Student Assessment, China (specifically Shanghai) is on top, and we're not. As the Washington Post put it at Key PISA test results for U.S. students

Average scores in mathematics literacy ranged from 613 in Shanghai-China to 368 in Peru. The U.S. average score was 481, which was lower than the OECD average of 494. The U.S. average was lower than 29 education systems, higher than 26 education systems, and not measurably different than 9 education systems.

If we're way down on the test-takers list and they're at the top, why would any students want to come here from there? Community members who went to Yong Zhao's lecture here in August, which I mentioned (with a variety of related material) at HamiltonCentralOptions: Rethinking School Motivations, will not be surprised. Indeed, I'd talked about him (and about psychology prof Peter Gray talking about him) in May at HamiltonCentralOptions: The US is Not Really #1 Yet...Fortunately

You might think the Chinese educational leaders would be happy that their kids are scoring so high on these international competitions. But they’re not. ... At the same time that we are continuing to try to be more like them, they are trying—though without much success so far—to be more like us, or like we were before we began trying so hard to be like them. They see that their system is quashing creativity and initiative, with the result that it produces decent bureaucrats and number crunchers, but very few inventors and entrepreneurs.

So take that as context for the Huffington Post's 2011 article on this topic at Public Schools Recruit Tuition-Paying International Students To Boost Revenue

Lei Huang, 16, from Shanghai, is attending Camden Hills high school this year. The school aims to have 10 foreign students next year, from China and Vietnam.

Schools in China, he said, demand long days in the classroom and long nights doing homework, with an emphasis on memorization and testing. In Camden, he appreciates the emphasis on creativity and tapping into students' interests.

Outside of school, he likes being able to drink water out of the tap, the abundance of trees and time to participate on the high school ski team. But he misses buying live fish at seafood markets in China, authentic Chinese food and public transportation so that he's not dependent on others with cars to get around.

So it shouldn't be surprising that this year, Yong Zhao responded to the PISA score release by saying Education in the Age of Globalization » Blog Archive » Reading the PISA Tea Leaves

While the East Asian systems may enjoy being at the top of international tests, they are not happy at all with the outcomes of their education. They have recognized the damages of their education for a long time and have taken actions to reform their systems. ... It is no exaggeration to say that that the majority of the parents in China would send their children to an American school instead of keeping them in the “best performing” Chinese system, if they had the choice.

I'm not denying the importance of test scores -- other things being equal. Test scores give good data about how well students do on tests, and that tells you a lot about the quality of a significant part of education. However, test-directed education means giving up some even more significant parts of education...and one of the most attractive aspects of attracting Chinese students (and students from other countries that consistently outscore America by virtue of test-directed education) is that it might help us remember that test-directed education is not necessarily good education. The theatre program is also relevant; so are other things. Yes, we should worry about the PISA results with the worst-case interpretation being something like CONVERSABLE ECONOMIST: U.S. Education: "Unthinking, Unilateral Educational Disarmament". Yes, we should also look at demographic factors as in Super-Economy: The amazing truth about PISA scores: USA beats Western Europe, ties with Asia. And yes, we should also consider other points of view like TheMoneyIllusion » Why Swedish schools are better than Finnish schools

South Korean students are the least happy students in the world. Finland’s students are near the bottom, and are the least happy of any Western European country. In contrast, South Korea usually scores at the top of “education rankings” based on test scores, and Finland is often in second place.

It’s interesting to compare Finland with its neighbor Sweden. Based on test scores Sweden has the worst schools in Western Europe, even worse than America’s K-12. Horrible schools. But their students are above average in happiness, far above Finland. What explains that difference?

One reason might be that Sweden has a 100% voucherized school system, so schools have to cater to parents. Now I don’t mean to suggest that schools in Sweden are perfect—Swedes have told me the legacy of the old socialist system hangs on to some extent, and most students still go to state schools. Still, the vouchers are gradually forcing the schools to conform more to customer preferences.

Some might argue that high test scores are needed to produce the sort of highly-skilled workers needed for the modern economy. That’s false, and Sweden proves it. Its workers are more productive than Finnish workers because test scores tell us little about productivity...

(Recent news suggests that some of the private companies providing Sweden's education weren't well-run, financially. That's a factor too.)

And is there a conclusion here? Not really -- except that (1) everything is more complicated, the more you look at it, and (2) there are good reasons why some, perhaps even most, Chinese parents might prefer our school system to theirs, and (3) learning about international students might tell us something about ourselves. Is that surprising?

I was also going to list random attractions, like the walkability of the village and the presence of the hospital, but I think I'll skip that for now.

Enrollment Projections and Merger Alternatives

Downloaded today, December 8th, from the Cornell Program on Applied Demographics, is our problem (click for enlarged view):

As you can see, our school has been shrinking...but Cornell thinks that our shrinkage has pretty much reached an end, for the next several years. I don't know that they're including our currently most-since-1997 elementary enrollment or the Colgate-funded expansion of the nursery school, but I look at that graph and I think: that's a problem, yes. (At least it's a problem for the kind of school we now have, which I expect to be drastically modified in the next decade or two but not right now.) It's a problem. Are we desperate? No. Will we become desperate? We don't know...the graph doesn't go that far into the future, but we're sort-of-okay for a while. Do we have time to work on alternatives which (unlike the currently proposed merger) would actually save money? Yes.
And of course some of those alternatives would be mergers, possibly with Morrisville-Eaton under different circumstances (as I've proposed before) or possibly not -- or possibly with a couple of other schools at once, as Stanley Roe was reminding us in his letter to the Mid-York Weekly this week. None of those merger proposals would make me bubble over with happiness, but if they saved money, if they saved money in the long run, then I would almost certainly stop fussing with this blog.

same-day update: Carolyn looks more carefully and is confident that the recent expansion data is not included, so the graph should probably be given an uptick. Separately, Ken points out that if you go to the Cornell source and check the Madison and Morrisville-Eaton districts, you find that Madison's predicted to have more stable enrollment than M-E. Indeed, we should keep the whole region in mind for all the plans we consider, and I wasn't. Thanks!

Superintendent's Slide-Show on Merger-Related Issues

The Superintendent's blog presents More Information About the Scheduled Merger Meetings, Survey Results, and Tours at the Morrisville-Eaton and Hamilton School Districts. - Dr. Bowers - SuperintendentHamilton CSD

the power point that will be presented at the upcoming Merger Study Information Meetings

(If the slide-show at the bottom seems small, your browser probably has a "View/Zoom" menu option.)

Some of the terms will be unfamiliar to some readers; there are lists of acronyms at NYSED: State Aid Glossary but if you want to know what "High Cost Aid" actually is, look at the New York State Educational Terms Guide (pdf)

High Cost Aid – Aid available for resident students with disabilities served in a DSE approved public school or BOCES, for whom the annual cost exceeds three times the district’s Approved Operating Expense per TAPU for Expense (without limits).

Of course, then you may want to look up several other terms, or you may just say "oh, special needs kids, for whom we have a substantially expanded program over the past several years. Okay." Some terms you may want to Google for, like the GEA or Gap Elimination Adjustment

Those might now be the three dirtiest words in New York's public schools.

We see again that state aid expectations really can't be relied upon. (Some of us aren't even blaming the state for cutting aid; we're just sceptical of plans which depend on future aid not being cut.)

And each slide deserves thought... "Wealth of the Community" rising from $220M to $350M in the 2004-2010 period is of course partly inflation, but less than half, and you can think of that curve as a faded upstate echo of the housing bubble, but it's real enough, and the student decline was real enough too. Will either trend continue? We have more elementary students than at any time since 1997, and elementary students become high school students; Colgate just invested heavily in expanding the nursery school to meet expanded demand, and those are future elementary students. That suggests that the situation is much less urgent than the 2004-2010 trend suggested, but we really don't know what the trends of 2013-2065 will be, or even 2013-2026 for current students.

Note the penultimate "If We Don't Merge" slide, in particular "Increase political pressure to: return of the GEA, modify unfunded mandates." The basic problem is that New York State education, including our own, costs about twice as much as the national average without being obviously better, and many of the costs are imposed by Albany as items to be paid for by local taxes. "Return of the GEA" means paying for those with state taxes; "modify unfunded mandates" could mean funding them, or could mean removing them. Every one of them has defenders, with arguments as to why this cost isn't the one to cut.

No easy answers....

HCS Board of Education Flyer

The Hamilton Central School Board of Education had a meeting last night, and distributed a flyer briefly explaining the issues; it's public information, so I've shared a scan of that flyer on Google Docs (thanks, Amy!). It's pretty good. I would like to make a few points:

• they start out by noting that our current troubles come from an (unplanned) 21% decline in state aid, which is of course a fact, and
they list $20.29 million in future state aid as if it were a fact; it's not. It's a plan, dependent on the sustainability of New York's budget.
• Their "pro" point 1 is "Save money through economies of scale"; this only works if the plan's increased transportation costs, especially fuel, don't continue to rise.
• Point 2: "Improve the ... educational choices" might work if the economies of scale work, or the $20.29M is delivered as planned.
• Point 3: "Receive additional state aid" has the same problem.

And so on.

There are also secondary issues not raised; it's reasonably certain that Hamilton real estate values will go downwards. It's absolutely certain that the debt load to which Hamilton property owners are vulnerable will increase, since Morrisville's debt load is much higher; all such debts are subject to the usual form

The Notes will be valid and legally binding general obligations of the School District, all the taxable real property within which will be subject to the levy of ad valorem taxes to pay the Notes and interest thereon, without limitation as to rate or amount.

Of course, if the state budget turns out to be sustainable indefinitely (i.e., continues to support increased state aid rates even long after the 14-year merger period), that may not matter. It's a gamble.

Yes, but...

Radio Free Hamilton editorializes that it's Time for Merger Study to Flunk Out

There is no good reason on this or any other planet for the HCS Board of Education and its counterpart organization in the Morrisville-Eaton Central Schools District to continue entertaining thoughts of the two districts merging.

None. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Acun. Ninguno. Nullus.

As soon as the study is returned by the State Education Department, both boards ought to stick a fork in the proposal, declare it done, not waste the public's time with a vote and move on to more important things.

And I want to re-register my strong agreement -- the merger is not a solution to the problems we face -- but at the same time, I want to re-re-register my concern that the problems are quite real: there are bad financial and demographic trends which apply to this school district, to Upstate NY school districts, to rural school districts generally. We have a way of doing things, a model of education: that model is slowly coming apart, fastest in the rural regions, and we should be well along in the process of re-thinking and replacing it. We're not.

We're really not.

Demographic Reminder

The other day a neighbor stopped me outside the post office to say thanks for working on the merger proposal...I commented that I was pleased that we'd seen the new-and-reelected Board members speak against it, since I don't believe it solves the very real problems headed our way, but that I hadn't heard what anyone (other than myself) has been proposing as possible-solutions-worth-exploring to those problems. Today I see a reminder of the demographic issue: RealClearScience - Murphysboro & The Death of Small Town America:

Murphysboro appears to be yet another victim among a much larger demographic trend: The slow death of small town America. From 2010-2012, for the first time in history, rural ("nonmetro") America declined in population. (See chart.)

As shown above, nonmetro America's population has always grown -- albeit in fits and starts. But notice how the gray line ("total population change") dips below the dotted line starting around 2010. That represents population loss, and it's happening because of falling birth rates and net migration out of rural areas.
It's hard to imagine this trend reversing. Indeed, immigration into urban areas has been a global phenomenon for decades....

This surprised me in that I hadn't realized that nonmetro America's population had been rising overall; that's not the case around here.

Consolidation Context -- M-E

A note I should have posted earlier, from March's Syracuse Post-Standard, says New York state school districts won't merge even when offered extra money

In 2007 and in 2008, Newsweek magazine recognized Morrisville-Eaton High School as one of the best in the country based on the number of Advanced Placement courses it offered its students.
This year, the Madison County school doesn’t have a single AP class. The district jettisoned them as enrollment and state aid dropped, costs rose and it cut staff and spending to balance its budgets...

Well, maybe some school districts will merge when offered extra money. Or then again, maybe not.

On Demography and Jobs and (not being in) Cities

Rural schools have a problem; they're trying to educate kids for jobs that don't generally appear in the rural world at all. This problem is not getting better. Why High-Tech Companies Are Moving to the City - WSJ.com

For as long as many of us can remember, high-tech industries have flourished in the suburban office parks that are so ubiquitous in Silicon Valley, North Carolina's Research Triangle and other "nerdistans." But in recent years, high-tech has been taking a decidedly urban turn.

I've written about this before, in the local context, at Mistakes By TjM: Upstate NY Demographics and School Consolidation

This is a doom-and-gloom post. Well, not really. But partly. It's not obvious that school consolidation would actually contribute to the solution, but there really is a problem. Let's look at it.

And I added a bit at Mistakes By TjM: Consolidation and "Hollowing Out the Middle". But it's worth noting that things are keeping on keeping on, which is what they will do until they don't.