Photo courtesy of PopTech

Steve Barr probably didn’t think he was taking a new, grassroots-centered approach to school reform when he started the Green Dot collection of charter schools back in 1999. A decade later, before stepping down as chairman of the charter school operator, Barr managed to rally the city’s Latino parents to revolt against the systemic incompetence of the Los Angeles Unified School District, took control of one of the district’s dropout factories, and formed a charter school in New York City in partnership with the American Federation of Teachers that broke with traditional union work rules. He also proved that the poorest Latino children — many of whose parents are immigrants legal and otherwise — can achieve academic success, even if the Heather Mac Donalds of the world choose to think otherwise.

Barr took some time during a drive from L.A. to San Francisco to offer his thoughts on school reform, working in the grassroots on improving education, and the disconnect between Beltway-based reformers and those who work on the ground. Read, think and consider.

What is the one surprising thing you have learned during your work starting up Green Dot? How did that affect your own approach to school reform and civil rights?

The most surprising is a daily surprise. You have to challenge all preconceptions. People don’t like to talk about it, but [those preconceptions] come down to race and politics. I have yet to meet a group of people who don’t care about the conditions of education. What’s surprising to me is no matter where you from, who you are, is how intensively interested people who are about education because they love their own kids. But if you listen to people, they think that only certain people care about education. They say “you only succeed because you get only these kind of children or they have these kind of parents.

What people don’t realize is how bizarre that statement is. There are only one or two percent of people out there who don’t care about kids. But that’s not most people. Out of the 8,000 kids we have [at Green Dot], only a dozen of them are white.

When I started Green Dot, I didn’t have kids. I wasn’t married. I wasn’t even close to being married. Now that I have kids and I’m married, I get it more. I get why [Green Dot’s parents and others] are intensely interested in education. Every day, I find it reassuring that people care about improving education. It gives me hope.

Is there a disconnect between school reformers inside the Beltway and community activists – and why does it exist (if it does)?

I think it is hard to stay connected in Washington. This is why I’m loathe to go to Washington. It’s a company town. It is also an incredibly segregated town. Once you are there, it is hard to stay connected. It is also an elite class of folks. It doesn’t mean you can’t work with folks. It doesn’t mean there isn’t any good work done. It’s just that it is hard to make the connection between them and what is done out here.

How can school reformers and grassroots activists work together to improving education for poor Latino and black children?

If you truly want to improve education for the urban poor, you have to truly immerse themselves in their communities. You have to approach it with an open mind. When we open a school, we do a lot of outreach. When I go into an African-American church, I have to realize that they have been lied to by people for a lot of years. It means I have to come back there again and again and build trust. The first time, it may not go well. But that’s the work. You have to understand where people come from. Over time, you build trust with them. They will become reformers as well.

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As a titan of economic theory, Milton Friedman more than deserved his Nobel Prize. But perhaps his greatest contribution came not with the Monetarist theory or the concept of permanent income hypothesis, but in developing the concept of school vouchers — the first step in expanding parent and student choice over education. Although vouchers remain controversial, small-scale experiments, his theories on school choice have helped education reformers offer an alternative path to traditional public education.

This excerpt from a debate with several education and economic theorists — including longtime American Federation of Teachers Albert Shanker –  from Friedman’s show, Free to Choose, offers a sense of the understanding Friedman had about the power of choice that most educators still lack today. Whether or not one agrees with him, one has to admire the intellect and the apparent care he had for the lives of children and families.

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As a former superintendent of Milwaukee’s public schools, Howard Fuller is well-acquainted with the dysfunctional bureaucracies, disdain of parents and difficulties parents and even parents groups can face in improving the quality of education for their children. This is why he has spent much of the past two decades working to expand options such as vouchers and charter schools — and ultimately, make parent power a reality.

In this 2006 video clip, adapted from a longer videocast produced by the Cascade Policy Institute, the chairman of the Black Alliance for Educational Options expresses a righteous fury that is sometimes missing among inside-the-Beltway school reformers and can often be found among the Phillip Jacksons and other grassroots activists. Watch, listen and realize that a little indignation is well-deserved on behalf of our children. The key is to turn that indignation into reform-minded action.

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Think this family cares what the ed school crowd thinks? Me neither. (Courtesy of COGIC)

A problem among the non-research and non-practice “educators” at university schools of education (and also found among some teachers) is this mistaken conceit that public education is somehow highly correlated (and even equals) Democracy, despite the fact that there are numerous dictatorships which also successfully educate their populations. Cuba and the old Soviet Union are two that come to mind.

This faulty thinking extends even into their concept of how public education should be designed. In their minds, the concept of public education cannot abide any rethinking of the status quo. If it doesn’t involve the direct operational control of a school by an elected official or body, it cannot be public. The fact that so much of public education outside of K-12 — for example, public universities (which derive most of their budgets from tuition, federal financial aid dollars and restricted public and private grants) — doesn’t fit such a definition never factors into their thinking. Nor do they ever consider whether the status quo is any more accountable in realistic terms than a model that involves privately-managed institutions that serve the public good.

One such observer still stuck in old school thinking is Alexander Hoffman, a doctoral student at Columbia’s famed Teachers College, who managed to get Gotham Schools to let him take some 1,300 words to explain what he could have said in less than half. Public charter schools may be “quasi-public” schools, but they are not to him public schools. Why? You can wade through this piece if you so choose. I”ll do the Mickey Kaus method and save you the time: The sum of the argument is that charters aren’t public schools because their boards aren’t elected — and therefore, unaccountable to the public — while they supposedly don’t have to accept all children and therefore, unaccountable for the public good.

Hoffman doesn’t accept the fact that charters are highly-regulated by the school districts and authorizing agencies that oversee them, must provide a full open accounting of their finances and accept all students via a lottery system that unlike magnet schools and selective schools such as Stuyvesant, must accept all students via lottery for all the seats they have. He manages to compare charters to restaurants even though the latter (along with most businesses and many nonprofits) don’t have to disclose their finances in writing to any public body (the IRS filing, which isn’t public information, doesn’t count). Declares Hoffman: “The fact of regulation does not make these entities public.”

There are more than a few flaws in Hoffman’s argument. I’ll hit on the most-important flaw: A willing ignorance of something called the law, which in some 42 states deigns charters as public schools on nearly equal fiscal and operational footing as traditional public schools (in most states, they are considered districts and corporations). Sure the ed school crowd chooses to ignore this fact and indulges in philosophical blathering (by the way, this explains why they are failing to adequately train aspiring teachers). But ignorance of the law, to paraphrase that old saw, is no excuse to evading reality. Essentially the argument over whether charters are public schools truly ended twenty years ago when Minnesota authorized the first batch of them.

The bigger problem with Hoffman’s thesis lies in the mindset of the writer and those who share his philosophy: They are far more concerned with philosophy than with practice. Essentially, they would rather indulge in thesis than in figuring out the more-important question of how to assure that every child receives the highest-quality education possible.

See, when a third of America’s children drop out annually into lives of crime and poverty, the question of what is “public education” can no longer be academic. The focus must be on turning around — or shutting down — dropout factories; improving the quality of academic instruction; staffing classrooms with teachers ready to teach every child no matter their socioeconomic background; offering rigorous, challenging curricula; engaging parents and the community in improving school quality; and providing as many educational options as possible in order for every child to get the education they need. The current system was never really equipped for that purpose and it isn’t achieving these goals now.

From where school reformers sit, this is ultimately achievable by abandoning the traditional definition of public education — a school district that runs school buildings — but by a more-expansive system of funding the best choices for each child. It doesn’t matter whether the child wants to attend a traditional public school, a public charter, a Catholic school or one run by Marva Collins. One could even see a situation in which students are served by teachers who are paid by families through a voucher (credit for this idea goes to Iowa principal Deron Durflinger). The matter is whether they get the best education possible and that we make sure that the money is there to make it happen.

Hoffman and company are encouraged to join this conversation in a more meaningful way than they do now. It would be nice if they accepted the offer and pitched in to do the work.

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On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I offer six steps for school reformers and grassroots activists to expand the role of parents in education decisionmaking. The expansion of charter schools and other forms of school choice, along with initiatives borne out of the No Child Left Behind Act and Race to the Top such as Parent Trigger, offer great opportunities to truly put children and families at the center of education (and improve the lives of even the poorest children). But only if an infrastructure is built to help parents make the best decisions.

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Charters are on her mind -- and in more ways than one.

The dropout nation in the news today:

1. For the past three decades, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers has regarded the charter school movement as the worst of the elements in the overall school reform movement. From efforts to restrict establishment of charters in statehouses and school boards to efforts to use preliminary National Assessment of Educational Progress results to sway federal education policy, the nation’s two primary teachers unions have failed miserably in attempts to stall the growth of charters. But over the past couple of years, the NEA and AFT have focused on organizing teaching staffs within these schools. Why? Read more in my latest Labor Watch report and drop by Dropout Nation for more commentary on the strategies and the likelihood of success in their organizing efforts.
2. As I noted last week in The American Spectator, the closing of Catholic schools in Baltimore should prompt alarm among school reformers interested in expanding the availability of high-quality educational options for the most-under-served children. This doesn’t just apply in Baltimore. As the New York Post reports today, parents and children attending two New York Archdiocese schools slated for closure are none too happy about this prospect. Certainly the traditional model of financing and operating Catholic schools is uneconomic; some closing may need to happen. But figuring out ways to support these choices should figure into the minds of all reformers.
3. This week’s Headshaker comes courtesy of Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams, who echoes complaints from Diane Ravitch and others that teacher quality reform efforts (along with the outlier that is the firing of 93 teachers at the high school in Central Falls, R.I.) are signs that reformers are becoming bloodthirsty and overly blame-gaming. Her position: Parents and children need to take responsibility for their own academic failures. The fact that children already bear the brunt of poor academic instruction in the long run through poverty, chronic unemployment and incarceration fails to figure into her thinking. So does the reality that teachers have long been insulated from performance management thanks to a lack of strong human capital management by districts, bans on the use of student test scores in evaluating teacher performance and state laws that make teacher dismissals expensive, cumbersome and difficult to undertake. And the fact that teachers are protected by unions that use their war chests and lobbying heft to influence education policy also doesn’t figure into her discussion. Oh, and she uses too many anecdotes instead of facts.
4. In Detroit, several foundations are looking to launch 70 new charter schools, according to the Detroit Free Press. If these charters do the job, this could mean more opportunities for high-quality education for the Motor City’s poorly-served children. It also comes for Detroit Public Schools at the least-opportune time: It is attempting to bolster its declining enrollment. (HT for the latter link to Steve Moore, who Dropout Nation readers should also follow on Twitter, along with yours truly.)

Check out today’s Dropout Nation report on the U.S. Department of Education’s renewed civil rights enforcement efforts and what this could mean for school equity/advocacy tort lawyers, states and districts. Also listen to today’s Dropout Nation Podcast on what President Obama and Arne Duncan should do in expanding Race to the Top.

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