TANSTAAFL on surveys

Why doesn't the FCC just put this issue to bed? Yet another appeal has been filed aksing the FCC to allow applicants to use the percentage of low-income students looking only at those that returned the free lunch form, rather than looking at the entire enrollment.

Schools are allowed to use surveys, so several seem to have taken the idea that the NSLP form can be used as a survey instrument. And as the applicant in this appeal correctly pointed out, the FCC has never expressly forbidden this, nor do the USAC rules tell applicants not to do this.

But the reason for not allowing this is obvious. If I made up an income survey, and on it said: "Please fill out this survey. All low-income families that return it will receive $100. Families that return the form but are not low income will receive nothing." Would the response be representative of the population? Of course not. Well, a low-income family that fills out the NSLP form gets a couple hundred dollars in free lunches. Families that are not low-income get bupkus.

So the FCC should just come out and say outright: "Any survey (including the NSLP form) which rewards low-income families for returning the form, but does not reward families that are not low-income, cannot be used as a survey instrument."

As my physics teacher used to say: TANSTAAFL; There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

USAC gives me REM

I read the warning posted on Wednesday, but it didn't really hit home until I just went to usac.org: no USAC Web site for the whole weekend. I feel bereft. For all the griping I do, I spend a lot more time on that site than I realize.

And this shutdown was positive in two ways. First, we got warning. Only 2 days, it's true, but except for me, there probably aren't many people who are impacted. Second, when I try to access the Web site, I get a nice "Web site down for maintenance, back on Monday" message. That's a step up from the regular maintenance of the Data Request Tool, which is not announced anywhere, and you just get a message saying that no records match your query. Which, let me tell you, can really freak you out when you're trying to get an update on a client's FRNs late at night. "What?! No records?! What happened to those FRNs?! ... Oh, yeah, the database must be offline."

Maybe I'll catch up on sleep this weekend. Most people, E-Rate puts them to sleep. Me, lack of E-Rate allows me to sleep.

Cost-effectiveness can't Win

I've been griping about Cost-Effectiveness Reviews (CERs) for some time now. I just saw an E-Rate Central submisssion supporting the appeal of a CER that nicely lays out the problems with CERs.
The FCC has created the mess by requiring cost-effectiveness, but refusing to define what that means. Now there are three possibilities:

1. The cost-effectiveness "bright-line" standards are part of the secret tome of PIA procedures approved by the FCC,
2. USAC has developed standards, but the FCC has never seen them, or
3. USAC has no standards.

If the first is true, then the FCC is developing rules in secret. Well, actually, the rules would have been developed by USAC in secret and approved by the FCC in secret.

If the second is true, then USAC is exceeding its authority by creating program rules.

The third option would be the worst. It would mean that there is a person (or group of people) sitting in a room somewhere, reviewing applications, and sometimes deciding, "That's out of hand!" And in order to pass a CER, the applicant has to convince him/her/them that the request is not out of hand. With no objective criteria, the process is arbitrary in addition to being secret. It becomes a matter of giving the reviewer(s) a warm fuzzy. After the applicant has sent info off to USAC, hoping to hit on something that will sway the reviewer, the applicant and USAC just end up going back and forth with "Is too cost-effective!" "Is not!" "Is too!" until USAC issues a final "Is not!" in the FCDL and takes its ball home.

There are certainly criteria for triggering a CER; these reviews are not assigned randomly. It is clear to me that USAC takes the amount of the request, divides it by the number of students, and if the result is over a certain number, the applicant gets a CER. So there is a "bright line." The only question is whether this is part of the FCC-approved secret tome of PIA rules, or a rule that USAC just came up with on its own.

As ESPA pointed out in their recent filing, the result is that CERs disproportionately hammer small applicants, whose cost per student is higher than average.
The E-Rate Central filing supports an appeal from a small school serving disabled students. I have two clients like that, and I expect a CER every year. When you have 40 students and 200 staff members, the cost per student for everything from phones to network drops is unusually high.

As I've said before, the CER is the worst of all the program's audits/reviews, because the process is completely secret. No one even knows how many CERs are conducted, and how many applicants pass a CER.

Coal in my stocking

I happened upon a Christmas wish list I made at the end of 2006, and thought it would be fun to see how many of my wishes came true during 2007.

Came true:

1. New online Form 486
2. "Two-signature/two date" finally put to rest
3. The same PIA reviewer 2 years in a row [some of them, anyway]

Didn't come true:

1. COMADs only for Waste, Fraud, Abuse, not errors
2. No Form 486
3. All FCC appeals decided within 90 days
4. Publish the secret 700-page PIA manual
5. How about publishing 200 pages of it?
6. How about just telling us what triggers a Cost Effectiveness Review?
7. Don't take the Data Request Tool offline at night
8. At least let us know when the DRT will be offline
9. At the very least, let us know that the DRT is offline. As it stands now, you just get a message that no records were found.
10. A "copy" button on the 470 and 471 which lets you import all the info from last year's forms [For most small, low-discount applicants, those forms are identical year in and year out, and for all applicants, many elements are identical.]
11. Let applicants edit BEARs after they've been sent to service providers, so we can correct errors the service providers find
12. An online tech plan tool that applicants can use, set up so that it will generate plans that the SLD won't later decide are inadequate
13. A list describing the most outrageous requests. You know that PIA reviewers must pass around really hilarious requests. Let us all in on the joke.
14. Block 4 information in the Data Request Tool
15. Registration of consultants
16. The discount matrix topping out at 80% for equipment
17. Dark fiber eligible
18. An "about us" page for the SLD. There aren't that many people there, and I'd just love to see a brief resume for each of them.
19. Mel Blackwell in a red suit and beard, flying all over the country, handing out Priority Two funding to applicants with a 40% discount. Ho ho ho.

Oh, well.

Tea time

Oh, please. I just finished reading an article in eSchoolNews about the award of a contract for information systems administrator to SAIC, which also gets millions of dollars in E-Rate money as a service provider. Apparently several other service providers are incensed over a potential conflict of interest, since SAIC would have access to information in USAC's systems. It's a tempest in a teapot.

We all have access to most of the information in USAC's systems. The Data Retrieval Tool (DRT) lets you download information from the 471, 486 and 472/474. There is a similar tool for downloading info from the 470. What info would SAIC have access to that are not publicly available?

1. Contact info from the 471, 486 and 472
2. Info on individual invoices (472 or 474), rather than the annual total currently available through the DRT
3. Item 21 Attachments

None of that info is that valuable. Contact info is available through a little research, or from any number of marketing firms. Individual invoice amounts is of little consequence.

The service providers seemed to focus on the possibility that seeing the Item 21 Attachments would be an unfair advantage. Wrong. How would seeing the Item 21s be an advantage? If SAIC sees an applicant with a large contract with a competitor that they'd like to steal, rather than peak at the Item 21, they can just wait until the next 470 is posted and go after the business like everyone else. The information in the Item 21 is not going to be as good as the info they'll get from the applicant during the 470 process.

Of course, USAC could short-circuit this discussion by making Item 21 Attachments publicly available. Which would be a good move.

I know that USAC put out an RFP for this contract, and I trust they have picked the most cost-effective vendor, with price the primary factor. I don't want more of the program's funds spent on administrative costs just so some service providers can have a flimsy veil over the terms of their contracts, which, since we're talking about public schools and libraries, are public information. (And if SAIC, sub-contracting from Solix, is responsible for the significant improvement in USAC's online tools, then I'm overjoyed to see them take on more.)

Anyway, I like this set-up better than the original one, where a not-for-profit subsidiary of the telco's lobbying group gave the contracts to a for-profit subsidiary of the same lobbying group.

A final comment on a different tangent: As usual, most of the service providers demanded anonymity. It is shameful that this program still inspires so much fear that no one wants to publicly say anything negative. But secrecy breeds fear, and the level of secrecy in this program is astonishing.

SRIR hits the gym

Cue the Jaws music: it's the first Selective Review of the year. Good news, though: the Selective Review has slimmed down since last year. The SRIR has gone from 9 pages down to 5. Here's a sample of the new form.

What's gone?

The Item 25 Worksheet:
I'm so happy to see this go. It was that tedious worksheet where you had to give information on expenditures for hardware, training, etc. The one that really got my goat was the "Retrofitting" section. Most applicants are upgrading existing infrastructure, so they didn't need any asbestos abatement, so this number was usually zero, which set off red flags, even if you mentioned the earlier retrofitting in the Resource Plan and E-Rate Implementation Description.

Resource Plan and E-Rate Implementation Description:
This was that narrative where you described your implementation strategy. Not difficult, but tedious, and inevitably scads of people would want to review it, but would not actually add value.

Selective Reviews are still tedious, but both the items above make the process significantly less tedious. Now if they would just stop requesting all the correspondence between me and the applicant.

ESPA A-OK re: PIA

I'm starting to like this ESPA (E-Rate Services Providers Assocation). When the FCC approved the processing rules for PIA, I just posted a snarky blog entry. ESPA, on the other hand, formally submitted comments to the FCC.

ESPA's first suggestion is a bold one: all PIA procedures should be published for public comment every year, the same way the Eligible Services List is handled now. Now that would be cool. Of course, there are probably only 6 people in the country who would read all 700 pages, but it would be enough. Imagine being able to comment on PIA's procedures....