Author: John Branston

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Opinion

College Football Top Ten and Expenses/Revenues

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At last. It seems like forever since the college football season ended in January. Seven agonizing months later, the USA Today preseason coaches’ poll is out, and national champ Alabama is on top.

Alabama is also the biggest spender in the Top 10, according to data from the U.S. Department of Education’s website on spending in college athletics. The Crimson Tide spent almost $37 million on football and earned $82 million. Not bad, but not best either. The University of Texas, which didn’t make the preseason Top 10, had revenue of $103,813,684, while Michigan had $85,209,247. Notre Dame, which is ranked 11th and lost to Alabama in the 2013 national championship game, earned $68,986,659 and is a football independent.

Most bang for the buck? That would be Georgia and Florida, each with more than $3 in revenue for every $1 spent. Most likely to improve this season? That would be Texas A&M and quarterback Johnny Manziel, the newest member of the Southeastern Conference, which earned a paltry $44 million last year.

(The University of Memphis reported football expenses of $12,983,962, balancing out revenue of $12,983,962. The only Top 10 team on the schedule this year is Louisville.)

Here’s the Top 10, with expenses and revenues in parentheses. Remember, football players are student athletes and academics comes first.

1. Alabama ($36,918,963, $81,993,762)
2. Ohio State ($34,026,871, $58,112,270)
3. Oregon ($20,240,213, $51,921,731)
4. Stanford ($18,738,731, $25,564,646)
5. Georgia ($22,710,140, $74,989,418)
6. Texas A&M ($17,929,882, $44,420,762)
7. South Carolina ($22,063,216, $48,065,096)
8. Clemson ($23,652,472, $39,207,780)
9. Louisville ($18,769,539, $23,756,955)
10. Florida ($23,045,846, $74,117,435)

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Opinion

Facebook, Me, George Will, and Flower Your Buttocks

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The end is near. I am into Facebook, to the tune of $940 and four new friends.

On Wednesday Facebook stock hit $36.80, just below its initial public offering price of $38 but well above its September 2012 low of $17.73. As much of a lemming as the next person, I bought 25 shares at slightly over $37 bucks with no commission thanks to my 50 free trades at my discount broker. If l live to the biblical three score and ten I should make some money if this isn’t a fad.

Penny wise and pound foolish? Maybe. Facebook was $26 a week ago. But that was before I added four new friends to my list that previously included only my son and daughter, who rarely post anything the old man can see anyway.

I prefer to believe my decision moved the market.

George Will

  • George Will

I have previously dissed Facebook as a stock and a pasttime. I unfriended a friend, then refriended her and was rewarded with this photograph of an unusual yoga pose. And I see that George Will, the columnist, is on Facebook, although he has only followers and no friends, and offers only his college pedigree and no funky family vacation photos. His approach, like his picture, seems as sensible as most of his columns. He probably grinds his teeth whenever he posts to his Facebook page, which he has not done since May.

But if I see a picture of him doing a flower-your-butt yoga pose I’m doubling down on my investment.

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Opinion

Teach For America Memphis Corps Hits 350

Athena Turner

  • Athena Turner

Bolstered by national attention to school reform, Teach For America will have 350 corps members in Shelby County classrooms when schools open next week.

That number includes 200 first-year teachers and 150 second-year teachers, said Athena Turner, executive director of Teach For America Memphis. An additional 250 TFA alumni are working in the Memphis area, the majority of them in teaching positions, she said. Memphis is one of the Top Ten TFA locales in the country.

“Education reform is the reason,” said Turner, a member of the 2006 TFA Memphis corps.

She said Memphis ranks somewhere between Number 10 and Number 20 in preferred placement for prospective corps members, behind such favorites as New York, Chicago, and San Francisco among others.

The Walton Family Foundation announced this week that it is investing up to $2.7 million in Teach for America in Memphis — the first such investment in Memphis by the Arkansas-based foundation. The money will be used to recruit and train nearly 4,000 new teachers. TFA has clout in Tennessee, with alumni including Tennessee Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman and Achievement School District Superintendent Chris Barbic and a growing number of charter and non-traditional schools. For the first time, TFA Memphis did its summer training in Memphis and boarded corps members at the University of Memphis this year.

“It was a good bonding experience for them and the full-time staff,” said Turner.

Only two corps members will be teaching in legacy Shelby County schools, one at Millington High School and one at Lucy Elementary. One corps member is placed at academic powerhouse White Station High School but is teaching in the traditional as opposed to the optional program.

TFA Memphis plans to have 250 new corps members each year starting in 2014.

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Opinion

What to Make of Latest TCAP Scores

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The schools story has become so complicated that it’s unclear what’s to be made of the latest batch of TCAP standardized test scores released this week.

The scores got generally positive notices from officials of the state Department of Education and the unified Shelby County School System. Scores increased for the majority of school districts in Tennessee in nearly every subject. In its last year of independence, Memphis City Schools showed increased proficiency in math, science, and social studies. The legacy Shelby County School system did the same, and also improved in reading.

But “improved” or “increased” compared to what? The scoring system — the curve for those of you in the education game — changed a couple of years ago, making long-term comparisons impossible. There are new subgroups of schools, such as the Achievement School District and the Innovation Zone (I confess to not knowing there was such a thing). Apples to apples has become apples to oranges to bananas to mangoes to papayas. And scores for individual schools, including public charter schools, have not been released yet.

More on that in a minute, but first the official statements.

“Sustained improvements across the state show that our efforts to raise student outcomes are working,” said Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman. “Our students, teachers, and administrators worked incredibly hard. The results prove that if we continue to maintain high expectations and quality support for our teachers, our students will continue to grow.”

David Stephens, deputy superintendent for the Shelby County Schools, was more restrained. Legacy MCS and legacy SCS districts both earned an overall Level 5 rating for student growth – the highest level of growth possible. In grades 3-8 Reading/Language Arts, legacy MCS showed a slight decrease (-0.4), while legacy SCS showed a slight increase (+1.1). The details are here.

“We realize that we still have work to do, but are very pleased with these accomplishments, especially in the midst of a school year involving the merging of two systems. The results are proof that our teachers and leaders continued to effectively advance student achievement in the classrooms, while adjusting to changes at the district level and preparing for a unified district.”

Statewide, 30 districts saw double-digit gains in Algebra I, some gaining more than 25 percentage points. More than 50 districts saw double-digit gains in Algebra II, some reporting growth over 40 percentage points.

Such gains are cause for inspection as well as celebration because they are probably due to a major change in the test-taking population or a small sample, which magnifies the change. If such a thing were replicable on a large scale, then the wizards who did it would be running every public and private education outfit in the country.

In Memphis, the seven Innovation Zone schools, which are hard cases like the ASD schools, showed an increase in proficiency from the previous year (Math +10, Reading +2.4, Science +13.4, Social Studies +11.9) that was at a higher rate than the state and the ASD.

Credit where credit is due, but the focus on small groups of schools at a time when the biggest school system merger in American history is nigh seems, well, curious.

Congratulations to all those who did better. But determining “better” these days is a little bit like making up a football schedule. If you can’t find someone somewhere you can beat somehow then you’re not trying very hard.

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Opinion

Not Looking Up

The Memphis skyline looks great in those golden-hued pictures taken from the other side of the Mississippi River or in an aerial shot taken at night when the lights are on at AutoZone Park.

The trouble is that several prominent buildings from the Pyramid to the South Bluffs are empty or emptying out. The skyline shot is a bit of a fake.

The 100 North Main Building is the tallest building in Memphis. By our standards, it is a skyscraper. The view from the 34th floor looks down on Civic Center Plaza, the Marriott Hotel, the convention center, and the Pyramid, where Bass Pro Shops has plans for an observation deck and restaurant at the apex.

But the 1965 office building with more than 400,000 feet of space is sparsely occupied, mostly by lawyers who work at the courts. The lobby is barren except for a concession stand and a few parched potted ficus trees. The escalators don’t run, and the elevators run so infrequently that some tenants worry about access to the upper floors in an emergency. There are no tenants at street level. The revolving restaurant on the roof is long gone, along with the Union Planters Bank sign (the bank was never a tenant) that gave the illusion of occupancy.

Building manager John Freeman declined to talk about any deal that might be in the works to sell the building, which was on the market for $20 million in 2006, but said he might have news in August. The owner lives in California and could not be reached for comment. Paul Morris, president of the Downtown Memphis Commission located across the street, said tenants are being notified that their leases will not be renewed. “The building has been neglected over the years and desperately needs improvements,” he said.

Reinventing a building that was as bland as its name in its best years “is a tough one.” Suggestions include a combination hotel, condo, and apartment building.

“The best market now in downtown is multi-family apartments,” Morris said. “But that is a huge building. I don’t think it would be profitable or cost effective to turn it into apartments. The proximity to the convention center helps. We need more hotel rooms. That is a possibility.”

Chuck Pinkowski, a consultant to the hospitality industry, has spoken to the owner and is not optimistic.

“It would be very expensive to retrofit it,” he said.

Job sprawl and office blight have taken a huge toll on downtown. It is more than likely that, within a year or two, Civic Center Plaza will be bracketed by two empty office buildings. The 12-story state office building on the north side of the plaza has been declared obsolete in a state report, and its 900 workers will be moving, possibly to another downtown building.

Nearby, the owners of the Lincoln American Tower and Court Square Properties have said they are facing foreclosure without extended tax breaks. Raymond James is laying off hundreds of employees and shopping for space in East Memphis to use in negotiations when its lease runs out at 50 Front Street next year. One Commerce Square lost its main tenant, Pinnacle Airlines. The Sterick Building next to AutoZone Park has been vacant for 25 years and, like other abandoned buildings, is not counted as leasable space in the reports that put downtown office occupancy at 84 percent.

“I don’t think the theory of an office tower is obsolete,” Morris said, citing the positive stories of AutoZone and First Tennessee, both of which own and occupy their buildings. “I have not gotten any credible information that Raymond James has made a decision. The advantage downtown has is that market rates are less. But the downtown office market is very weak, in contrast to the downtown residential and entertainment markets, which are doing very well.”

Indeed, the signs of new development can be seen this summer south of the train station and along the future path of the Harahan Bridge bicycle and pedestrian trail. Developer Henry Turley has cleared several acres for apartments and has been goading other property owners and the city to improve cleanliness, lighting, and safety so that visitors “wouldn’t think the city died in 1945.”

If you look out instead of up, things are looking up.

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Opinion

Jock Tax on Grizzlies Under Fire in Nashville

Tony Allen

  • Tony Allen

The so-called “jock tax” on NBA and NHL athletes in Tennessee is tip money to them so it was sad to read in The Tennessean about the opposition to it in Nashville this week.

Tennessee has no state income tax and Memphis has no local payroll tax. To raise money, Memphis must increase the highest sales tax rate in the country or the highest property tax rate in the state. Both the Memphis City Council and Shelby County Commission raised property taxes this year.

The jock tax costs players a maximum of $7,500 a year. According to the fiscal note on the 2009 legislation, the total tax on NBA and NHL players this year is about $3.5 million, about half what Mike Miller will make next year when he returns to the Grizzlies.

Grizzlies fans pay a tax on seats, tickets, and concessions that helps pay the cost of the arena.

Tony Allen, who signed a new contract with the Grizzlies paying him $5 million a year, was in Nashville to oppose it. Allen, who has said he “bleeds blue,” did not speak at the hearing Thursday. If he played in Georgia he would pay state income tax of 6 percent; in North Carolina, the state tab is 7.75 percent. In Tennessee, $7,500.

The Grizzlies ownership opposes killing the jock tax because the revenue is passed through to them. Jason Wexler represented the ownership group at the hearing. He told the Flyer the tax brings about $1.1 million a year to Memphis.

“We use it to recruit events to FedEx Forum,” he said. “Memphis is a good market but not a must-play market. We get about ten concerts a year.”

“It’s working,” he added. “It’s an effective incentive tool.”

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Opinion

Smarter than a Fifth Grader? Maybe Not on TCAP Test

Chris Barbic, ASD superintendent

  • Chris Barbic, ASD superintendent

What I would love to see is the TCAP test for elementary school kids given to a random sample of adults in Tennessee. I bet a lot of them would fail it, or make a score far below what the state considers “proficient” in science, reading, and math.

Not because the adults are dumb but because school knowledge and test-taking skill are not the same as being a successful functioning member of society. Are you smarter than a fifth-grader? The answer is probably yes and no.

As you probably know by now if you are reading this, the TCAP scores for the six schools in the Achievement School District came out Wednesday. Five of the schools are in Memphis. Students improved in science and math, but the number of students deemed proficient in reading dropped by 4.5 percent to just 13.6 percent overall.

“It’s the first year the kids have been held to a higher standard, and I think we need to continue to give the ASD our support,” said school board member Dr. Jeff Warren.

Said board member Kenneth Whalum Jr., “The fact that some TCAP testing areas show improvement among ASD students proves that student achievement isn’t rocket science. Focused attention, additional resources, smaller class sizes, and parental involvement usually enhance a poor student’s ability to perform well in school. It also shows that “teaching to the test” works well. The fact that the Reading scores are down, as I understand it, proves that there is no guarantee that a child’s comprehension skills are bettered by any measure aside from improving the home life of the child, as home is where
communication skills are honed.”

I agree with both of these gentlemen.

The ability to read can’t be faked, at least not on a standardized test. Most kids from reasonably well-to-do families learn to do it before they are in the third grade, with lots of help from family members. Kids who can’t read a lick by then are screwed, and so is the teacher whose job rating depends on making them “proficient”. My first job was teaching reading in Nashville, using flash cards, menus, road signs, and a baby book about “Cowboy Bob” to try to teach embarrassed teenagers how to read. Despite having the smallest classes in the school, I would not have made the ASD cut by a mile. Such is the road to journalism.

Basic literacy might not be enough to achieve “proficiency” because reading comprehension questions about random passages can be baffling and prompt a “don’t have a clue” reaction. Reading for survival, entertainment, and spiritual sustenance has little relationship to the goofy questions that show up on tests and compare-and-contrast theme assignments.

Math is a code. If you have a fourth-grader or have ever been one, you know the tipping point is simple fractions, percentages, and relationships. Give Archimedes a lever and a place to stand he could move the world. Give a teacher a pizza, a pizza cutter, and a reasonable class size and he/she can move the scores. If you don’t know what one-fourth means, much less that it is the same as 25 percent, you’re screwed. Algebra? Bet there are plenty of college-educated business professionals who would flunk Algebra I today if they haven’t been in a classroom in decades.

Science, I suspect, is a statistical outlier because it is rarely if ever taught at all in some failing schools, so any exposure at all, combined with practice testing, is likely to increase test scores.

So give the ASD some slack, and I hope the ASD gives its teachers some slack too, because longer hours and higher demands and drill and kill are going to turn classrooms into “sweat shops” as Kriner Cash said and drive them out of teaching, where most of them are badly needed.

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Opinion

Brains, Money, & Football

Rhodes College versus the University of Tennessee in football? Not a chance, but the idea of a small liberal arts college playing a Southeastern Conference powerhouse is not far-fetched.

Last year, Wofford College, an academic powerhouse in South Carolina, with 1,549 students, played SEC bully South Carolina, coached by Steve Spurrier, and lost 24-7. This year, Samford University in Birmingham, with 2,750 students, will play Arkansas.

Granted, there’s a special factor in each case. Wofford’s big donor is alumnus Jerry Richardson, a former NFL player and owner of the Carolina Panthers. And Samford is in Alabama, cradle of SEC football and home of the annual “Media Days” lollapalooza in which a thousand or so sportswriters compete to find the most trivia.

But when I saw the new light poles on the almost-new artificial-turf field at NCAA Division III Rhodes, I called athletic director Mike Clary just to see what’s up. “I’ve been associated with this college for 39 of the last 41 years and have never entertained any thought of playing at any other level,” he said. “Doing something that would be more expensive and more of a cultural change from our academic and athletic balance is just not something we would ever do.”

Mike Clary

That doesn’t mean Rhodes (1,808 students) and other members of the Southern Athletic Association are isolated from changes in the college football universe. The Rhodes 2013 schedule includes the University of Chicago, whose football claim to fame is winning the 1905 national championship and giving up the sport in 1939. Also on the schedule are Claremont-Mudd-Scripps in California; Berry College and Hendrix College, which will be fielding teams for the first time; and Birmingham-Southern, which pulled a Chicago in 1939 and brought back football in 2007. Off the schedule is Colorado College, which dropped football in 2009.

What the schools have in common is no athletic scholarships and the ability to make the claim that their average SAT score is larger than their enrollment.

Here are excerpts of my interview with Clary. Lest anyone think he was talking out of school, data on athletic department budgets is public information at http://ope.ed.gov/athletics/.

How did Chicago get on the schedule?

Mike Clary: Chicago and Washington University in St. Louis compete in all sports and struggled the last seven or eight years to get a schedule because so many Division III schools belong to a league. We accepted Chicago as an affiliate football member in 2015 and play them at home this year and away in 2014.

Why Claremont and the travel expense?

We struggled with this. In our old conference, we had to fly to San Antonio to play Trinity every other year. With them off the schedule, we can use those funds to fly to California to play Claremont and Pomona in 2014. With 75 people at $450 a ticket, it’s about $32,000.

Why the lights on the field?

As our enrollment has increased, we have more afternoon and evening classes. Lights minimize conflicts with classes and science labs. We had been asking donors for several years and finally were able to get a gift. The cost was about $350,000. They will mainly be used for practices when time changes in late October. In the future, we will probably play Claremont at night, since they have to stay over. Normally, schools at our level don’t play at night because they drive to games and if the game is over at 10 o’clock, they don’t get home until the next morning.

What do you think about small schools playing big ones?

Every year, I hear from someone at those smaller schools asking about our budget. In a perfect world, they would like to be more like Rhodes, but the external pressure is just astronomical. Wofford has about 100 players, and tuition and expenses are about the same as here. Our average grant for our 100 football players is around $15,000, whether academic or need-based. So we’re spending about $1.6 million.

(Note: According to public reports for 2011-2012, Rhodes spent $454,000 on football, Wofford $3.6 million, Samford $5 million, the University of Memphis $13 million, and the University of Tennessee $19.8 million.)

Is football necessary to attract male students?

Of our 550 first-year students, 200 will be varsity athletes, including 55 football players. We could recruit our student body if we didn’t have football, but we like the dynamic it brings to the Rhodes community.

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Opinion

Wharton Says Memphis Is No Detroit

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Memphis Mayor A C Wharton said Friday it is not a time to “pile on” Detroit in the wake of its bankruptcy, but took pains to make a case that Memphis is a much healthier city.

Wharton called reporters to City Hall for a comparison-making session that he admitted was not unlike the athletic director who calls a press conference to announce support for the football coach — which is often the kiss of death. He said his first reaction was that the comparison “is so inept that I am not going to dignify it by responding,” but respond he did.

“They need to hear that we do recognize our challenges and are going to meet them head on,” he said. “They need to hear that from me.”

He produced a chart showing that the Memphis city pension plan is nearly 75 percent funded, with more than $2 billion in the bank. Memphis, he said, has roughly half as many city employees for close to the same population, and a budget approximately one fifth as large. Memphis has a more diverse economy. The “key difference” he said is “there is no denial in this city” that there are financial challenges even during the heat of council debate over the budget. As for the state comptroller’s letter, “we had started down that path even before that without any warning or threats that said we have to change some things in the pension situation.”

Wharton opened the session with some comments about Trayvon Martin.

“I have six sons and four grandsons and have been in courtrooms a good part of my life, so for me it wasn’t just can you comment on something on a tv screen,” he said.

He said he is “glad folks are going to rally” for a “noble cause, that is to ask for some redress.”

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Opinion

How Low Will ASD School TCAP Scores Be?

Chris Barbic

  • Chris Barbic

The superintendent of the Achievement School District, Chris Barbic, took the unusual step of explaining, or spinning if you will, the TCAP standardized test scores before they are released.

Barbic wrote a column for The Commercial Appeal Friday in which he let the cat out of the bag and confirmed what some teachers have been saying for a couple weeks — the state-run ASD schools (education jargon for failing schools) got mixed results.

“Not all is rosy. Our kids are far behind in reading and we need to catch them up. There are bright spots in reading — for example, students at Gordon Science and Arts Academy grew nearly three grade levels this year. But overall our students’ reading scores dipped.”

There was no accompanying news story on school-by-school TCAP scores, which Barbic wrote will be released the week of July 22nd. In an email to the Flyer earlier this week, Kelli Gauthier, director of communications for the Tennessee Department of Education, said the scores would be released next week. The statewide TCAP results have been released and can be found here.

The ASD has set a high bar for itself — to move the lowest-performing schools to the top 25 percent in five years. Teachers, especially those who lost their jobs because they were deemed mediocre or worse in raising student test scores, will be watching closely.

To its credit, the ASD has not cherry-picked students or schools — just the opposite. But raising test scores across the board in all subjects is, as Barbic wrote, “incredibly difficult work” because low-scoring students can pull down the average.

Veteran teachers are likely to say something like “welcome to my world.”