On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I explain why school reformers need to reach out to grassroots activists. Inside-the-Beltway policymaking, important as it is, will mean nothing for improving the educational destinies of children if school reformers don’t reach out to urban groups such as the Black Star Project and activists working in suburban and rural communities.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod or MP3 player. Also, subscribe to get the podcasts every week. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Podcast Alley, the Education Podcast Network and Zune Marketplace.

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All about the Benjamins: Equity and adequacy lawsuits may be on the comeback

Yesterday, after analyzing a school funding adequacy case in Washington State, Education Sector analyst Robert Manwaring wondered whether such torts (and their twins, funding equity suits) were on the comeback. The answer is yes. And the Obama administration, through the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, may be aiding those efforts.

Back in November, at the Schott Foundation for Public Education’s annual confab, Pennsylvania Congressman Chaka Fattah announced that the department would be stepping up its efforts on that front — and reverse Bush administration policies on addressing adequacy and equity. Declared Fattah: “We need to use… the leverage of the federal dollars… to cause the other dollars to be spent more equitably.”

A day later, the Assistant Secretary of Education overseeing OCR, Russlynn Ali, admitted that the office has begun investigations into alleged violations of Title IV provisions, and is looking to provide “real data” that can help advocates and school funding lawyers advance their goals. Although the former Education Trust official cautioned those advocates that a school equity agenda needed to be more than about lawsuits and funding, she also declared that OCR was “back in business.”

All this comes as such suits are on the decline. Until the Washington State decision, the last major school funding tort was Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State of New York. Most of these suits have fallen to seed partly because Centrist Democrat school reformers have found charter schools and standards-and-accountability to be better solutions for educational inequities. As seen in New Jersey with Abbott, funding equity and adequacy suits also fail to do little to fix the underlying problem of big urban school systems (and their suburban counterparts): Restrictive teachers union contracts; state laws that limit the ability of districts to remove laggard teachers; and systemic bureaucratic incompetence. The fact that these urban districts already yield per-pupil dollars from past funding formula revisions in their favor that make their spending nearly as high as their suburban counterparts often shows that more money doesn’t equal better student performance.

This also comes as states and school districts wrangle with strapped budgets. Already, Campaign for Fiscal Equity’s Michael Rebell is arguing that cutting school funding — which often accounts for at least a quarter of state budgets — is unconstitutional. Expect Rebell to make those arguments in court — complete with the usual citation of constitutional provisions that states must provide for free education.

Then there is the reality that as much of the problem lies with overall urban policies — including the granting of tax abatement that reduce tax revenues and a lack of focus on solving crime and other quality-of-life issues — which districts can’t solve without the backing of municipal governments. One important reason for mayoral control of schools is that the mayor must also think of schools as he considers whether to hand out another tax break to a favored property baron.

But more adequacy and equity lawsuits are coming.

Photo courtesy of Fallbrook Bonsall Village News

A few things to ponder as the snow melts:

1. When will Centrist and left-leaning Democrat school reformers not named Anthony Williams or Marion Barry embrace vouchers as zealously as they support charter schools? After all, both promote choice and improved educational opportunities for poor students — and place public dollars into private hands. And given the research gleaned from the pioneering Milwaukee voucher program, the effectiveness of vouchers is no less proven than that of charters.
2. Will Denver’s Tom Boasberg be the next crusading reform-minded superintendent in the Michelle Rhee-Joel Klein mold? Reed Hunt’s protege-turned telecom executive-turned school official  is already striking a blow against forced placement of laggard teachers. But can he advance the district’s performance pay plan and take it up several notches to make it truly effective in driving teacher effectiveness?
3. Which state will be the next battleground over teachers pensions and retiree benefits? National Education Association affiliates in Vermont, Pennsylvania and New Jersey are already battling to stave off increases in contributions and retirement ages. Could it be Indiana — home to the collapse of the NEA’s Indiana affiliate (and where Gov. Mitch Daniels and Superintendent Tony Bennett are already already advancing a series of reforms)? Or is it nearby Illinois, home to the nation’s biggest teacher pension deficit? Or maybe, Utah?
4. What is the next step in the debate over charter schools and segregation? It is well-known that Richard Kahlenberg and company are displeased with the role of charters in President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top reforms and likely even more displeased by its role in his proposed reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act and the 2010-2011 budget. Will the reports released by the Civil Rights Project and EPIC be followed up by missives from a few members of the Congressional Black Caucus and other key players on the Hill?
5. How will Randi Weingarten react to the move by the Houston Independent School District to fully tie student test scores to teacher evaluations? Given her pronounced support last month for such measurements, will she end up siding largely with the district and telling her local to just water it down a little? Or will she back the local’s effort to ditch altogether. Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee are definitely watching this one. So is the NEA and the school reform movement.
6. And yes, I had to add a sixth: Who will succeed Jack Jennings as head of the Center for Education Policy? More importantly, will it release another report on high school exit exams? The second answer is clearly more apparent than the first.

More burning questions later this week.

On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I explain why the NAACP, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA and New Jersey’s Education Law Center should abandon their tried and truly counterproductive approaches to improving equity and equality for the nation’s poor black and Latino children and embrace approaches offered by the school reform movement.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod or MP3 player. Also, subscribe to get the podcasts every week. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Podcast Alley and the Education Podcast Network.

Update: You can now download the Podcast from Zune Marketplace.

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Photo courtesy of Jose Vilson

While one appreciates Fordham’s Mike Petrilli for arguing that racial and ethnic integration in charter schools is as worthy a goal as it is in other aspects of American life,  there are a couple of problems with his overall argument.

The first? He involves a false assumption not based on evidence: That charter school operators aren’t necessarily interested in integration. This isn’t the case. If anything, as evidenced by National Alliance for Public Charter Schools President Nelson Smith’s response to Gary Orfield’s latest report decrying segregation in charters (or to be more precise, the latest study coming out of his Civil Rights Project at UCLA), charter school advocates definitely think integration is important. This is also true in the fact that most charters are open-enrollment, lottery-driven schools which are open to all comers so long as the children and the parents commit to being the active players in education decision-making they should be.

Petrilli also downplays the role of state charter legislation in fostering the segregation he and Orfield mutually decry. (It could be worse, of course: Orfield and company pretend this doesn’t even exist.) As I’ve noted, the likelihood of integration is as much dependent on the location- and demographic-based restrictions as it is on the choices of parents. As evidenced in Maryland and Virginia, the dual role of traditional districts as both public school operators and charter authorizers also means that charters are also less-likely to exist in suburban communities. Suburban districts abhor the presence of charters even more than their big-city counterparts. Until these barriers are eliminated, charter schools will continue to confined to the nation’s urban locales. And unless those cities manage to lure more whites from suburbia through sensible fiscal and quality-of-life policies, charters will also remain highly-segregated.

Certainly integration is a great benefit, both to society and to the people on an individual level. After all, I’ve spent most of my career arguing for a color-blind society and even, demanding that my fellow African-Americans stop placing themselves into ghettos intellectual and otherwise. Petrilli is correct in noting that, depending on the setting, integration can even help improve student academic achievement (as well as, to borrow from J. William Fulbright, promote mutual understanding). Eliminating restrictions on the growth of charters would greatly aid that goal. So would the expansion of school voucher plans, the abolition of intra-district zoning  and magnet school policies, the promotion of inter-district public school choice (by making school funding a state-level role), and even the expansion of grassroots groups aiding parents in education, be it the Black Star Project or the PTA.

But integration isn’t the only social good. More important to black and Latino families — especially my own — are opportunities to provide the best education for their children. Given the low graduation rates for blacks and Latinos — and the consequences of mass academic failure wrought upon these communities — integration becomes a secondary priority. These families can no longer wait for the benefits of integration, wonderful and enriching as they are, as their young men and women struggle in traditional public schools that treat them as afterthoughts.  They want — and deserve — the power to choose better options.

Photo courtesy of the New York Daily News

Dear Gary Orfield:

As someone who grew up in one of the better (of the admittedly abysmal) urban neighborhoods in America, I can tell you that many parents care greatly about the quality of education for their children. So when they see opportunities to escape woeful public schools — as in the case of Virginia Walden-Ford as a most-famous example — they will take it quickly.

This is the chief reason (along with the restrictions on the location, growth and even demographics placed by state legislators at the behest of teachers unions and suburban districts) why America’s public charter schools are mostly black and Latino, generally attended by they poor, and largely in big cities. It is also why there are some 39,000 New York City children waiting for seats in charters and why President Barack Obama is pushing states to end restrictions on their growth.

In some ways, this lack of diversity also explains the success many charters have had in bolstering the academic achievement of their largely at-risk student populations. Besides the attention given to kids in their mostly-small settings, the opportunity for children to see peers of their own race and color succeed academically — a reality that happens far too infrequently in traditional public schools — gives these children the sense of pride they need in order to succeed in school and in life. Certainly, we may all believe in a color-blind society, but most of us don’t think that the melting pot and racial pride are mutually exclusive.

When the cvil rights activists of five decades ago used to talk about “separate and unequal”, they were talking about a lack of equal funding for schools, the restrictions on black children to attend any kind of school they wanted — majority white or otherwise — and ultimately, fulfill their academic and economic destinies without barriers codified into law. Most of those racial barriers have been brought down (although some of the issues of funding still do exist, partly because of the neglect of “broken windows” by generations of big-city leaders, along with their economic decisions  to grant tax abatements and other deals that have reduced much-needed tax revenue). But the political and political barriers — including woeful public school bureaucracies; gamesmanship by districts with Title I funding; and zoning and “magnet school” policies that favor wealthier families — still exist.

These, along with the sclerosis within public education systems makes it more critical than ever to give poor urban families as many choices as possible to escape the worst traditional schools. They don’t care about the segregation they knowledgeably choose; their concern is about the quality of education for the children they love. They truly understand that for which Thurgood Marshall, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were fighting. Choices of great schools, traditional, charter or private, both in their neighborhoods and outside of them without restriction.

In other words: Urban parents don’t care about so-called civil rights activists who work in ivory towers, live in suburbs, release reports on “segregation” just in time for Black History Month (wink, nudge), and avoid the worst American public education offers on a daily basis.

And Mr. Orfield (and you too, Richard Kahlenberg), they mean you.