Month: November 2011

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On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I challenge the view of the Los Angeles Unified School District, teachers’ unions, and school reformers who oppose revealing the names — and performance…

On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I challenge the view of the Los Angeles Unified School District, teachers’ unions, and school reformers who oppose revealing the names — and performance — of high-quality and laggard teachers. Presenting good-to-great teachers (and poor-performing counterparts) to the public will provide information that helps families, the teaching profession, and, most importantly, all of our children.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod, Zune, MP3 player, smartphone, Nook Color or Kindle. Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, the Education Podcast Network, Zune Marketplace and PodBean. Also download to your phone with BlackBerry podcast software and Google Reader.

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Best of Dropout Nation Giving Parents Power

Best of Dropout Nation: Making Parents Consumers — and Kings — in Education

Dropout Nation Editorial Board

November 19, 2011 10:20 am November 19, 2011

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One of the primary themes of Dropout Nation is that systemic reform of American public education can’t happen without parents taking their rightful roles as lead decision-makers in schools and…

One of the primary themes of Dropout Nation is that systemic reform of American public education can’t happen without parents taking their rightful roles as lead decision-makers in schools and learning. Over the past couple of years, we have seen more parents like Gwen Samuel and Kelley Williams-Bolar stepping up and demanding the ability to overhaul the schools in their own neighborhoods, challenge zip code education policies, and push for more-expanded school choice opportunities that allow their kids to escape the worst public education offers. The expansion of digital learning, along with creations such as the Nook Tablet and Kindle Fire, can also allow for families and communities to band together and form do-it-yourself schools. And despite the criticisms of education traditionalists (and the occasional reformer still stuck in the expertise mindset), more parents are realizing that the experts don’t really know what to do.

In this Best of Dropout Nation from 2009, Editor RiShawn Biddle discusses the importance of putting parents in their rightful roles leading schools. Read, consider, and take action.

If Calif. State Sen. Gloria Romero succeeds in allowing parents in the state to to replace administrators and teachers at their schools (or convert the schools into charters), it will be an amazing step. Same is true if discussions in New Jersey about expanding its inter-district choice program come to pass. And the federal Race to the Top initiative could provide even more options to parents — especially those stuck with sending their children to the worst urban school systems.

At the same time, these events offer an opportunity to consider what education policy — and America’s education system itself — should look like in the next half-century. And the answer is: Similar to the markets for consumer products everyone enjoys.

Few sectors in the American public or private sector are as dominated by experts, technocrats and lobbyists as education. From the development and approval of curricula to the kind of schools children can attend, the decisions are based, much consideration is given to what some adults want, how some adults want to be paid, national economic and social priorities, and occasionally, what children actually need. Every now and then, what children and their parents want does come into play. But this a rare event.

But imagine if children (and to be honest, their parents) actually could choose the kind of schools they want to attend, select the curricula that they will learn, even whether they will attend a neighborhood school or a manicured campus in suburbia? It would be difficult to figure out the direction of education at that point; after all, parents use schools as much for social-climbing and instilling their own values as they do for providing the most-rigorous education possible for their children. But it would be interesting: Perhaps “education villages” — where hipsters-turned-parents and single mothers can stay in the city and still gain the best of suburbia — would spring up in the heart of Atlanta. Or children otherwise deemed troublemakers in the traditional public school settings of today will learn in classes where the instructional day is compacted for more efficiency (and thus, less time for having to sit in class wasting time as likely to happen for students in Chicago).

These thoughts come as the Wall Street Journal presents its chart on the 25 largest companies in the world at the end of this decade. As pointed out by William Easterly (who spends his time criticizing foreign aid), only eight of the top 25 companies at the end of the 1990s kept their places by the near-end of 2009. Only six tech firms made up the top 25 versus 13 at the end of the 1990s; the tech firms on the list range from old-school software crossing into videogames and consumer wares (Microsoft) to handy cloud computing and search (Google), to a company that managed to switch gears and helped complete the personal technology revolution began by the Sony Walkman (Apple Computer).

Certainly, many of the companies knocked off the list had merged into other companies or went bust altogether; others just seen declines or stagnation in their market value. But mergers and market value losses represent a reality that these companies didn’t cater to their consumer markets. Notes Easterly: “Creative destruction is one of the triumphs of the market. The consumer is king: in 2009… The radical uncertainty of how to please consumers is an argument FOR free markets.”

At this moment, American public education is undergoing its own peculiar form of creative destruction, as education reformers and a smattering of parents — armed with data, research and political power — are forcing defenders of the status quo (teachers unions, schools of education, and school districts) to accept the need for effective change. As Fordham’s Checker Finn points out, reformers are slowly being forced to admit that their longstanding conceits also need updating (and more often than not, ditching altogether).

Yet, as I’ve pointed out over and over, the reformers must also rid themselves of their faith in expertise. They must begin to embrace the grassroots and, more importantly, accept that children and their parents must have more than just a seat at the table of decisionmaking. They must be the decisionmakers, period, and anything less just won’t do.Why? Because the nature of the reforms being proposed, promoted and legislated — all of which involves choice, consequences and accountability — requires active participation from parents, and therefore, their support.

Choice begets choice; this is true when it comes to cellphone plans and this is also happening in education. The advent of Milwaukee’s school voucher plan in the early 1990s didn’t foster widespread development of vouchers. But the program, along with the charter school movement, has spurred the interest among parents in the kind of choice initiatives being considered in these states (and may likely become reality in the Los Angeles Unified School District). Once parents are exposed to having real power and engagement in school decisionmaking, they will not want the traditional expert-driven approach. This is a good thing.

Now, I’m not advocating for an education system that is fully free market in orientation. The reality is that the underlying infrastructure for such choice — easy access to useful information through guides, organizations or Web sites; actual mechanisms for exercising choice that exist outside of home purchases — is only coming into existence. Parents are just beginning to realize that the old concept of education — that the school can educate every child without active engagement of families that goes beyond homework and field trips — has gone by the wayside; they will make mistakes along the way.

Poor parents, in particular, need guidance; yet the current public education system treats them as even bigger nuisances than the middle-class families (who can exercise enough influence to just be merely ignored) and wealthier households (who ditch the public school system altogether). Assuring equality of opportunity in education, no matter one’s income, should not only be of paramount importance, it would be a more-effective form of economic policy than stimulus plans and tax cuts combined; the evidence largely clear that dropouts cannot be contributors to economic and social life.

But giving parents power, choices, options, advice and information should be the governing credo of education reform for the next half-century. It can be done.

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Best of Dropout Nation

Best of Dropout Nation: Urban Parents Don’t Care About What Gary Orfield Thinks

Dropout Nation Editorial Board

November 18, 2011 1:28 pm November 18, 2011

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The idea of racial and economic integration as school reform remains as seductive to education traditionalists as ever. After all, it seems magical: Simply put poor and minority kids into…

Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Chronicle

The idea of racial and economic integration as school reform remains as seductive to education traditionalists as ever. After all, it seems magical: Simply put poor and minority kids into schools with wealthier counterparts, and Voila!, student achievement will improve. But time — along with the fact that half of all fourth-graders on free- and reduced-cost lunch in suburban schools are functionally illiterate — has proven that integration on its own doesn’t deal with the systemic problems of low-quality teaching, shoddy curricula, lackluster leadership, and cultures of low expectations (especially for poor and minority kids) that plagues American public education even when those kids are put into suburban middle-class schools. The success of high-quality charter schools serving mostly-minority children in those urban communities (where the schools tend to also be segregated thanks to pernicious zip code education policies) also proves lie to the idea of integration as school reform. And these realities, along with the memories among black families, who remember how integration led to continued decline of the schools within their own neighborhoods, has made charters a more-attractive option than the kind of integration schemes supported by Century Foundation scholar Richard Kahlenberg and Gary Orfield of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA.

Yet education traditionalists, ivory tower civil rights activists, and dyed-in-the-wool progressives, still stuck on integration as school reform, would rather criticize charters for supposedly perpetuating segregation (even though most urban communities largely consist of one race or class) than embrace a tool for helping poor and minority families give their children opportunities for high-quality education. In this Best of Dropout Nation from February 2010, Editor RiShawn Biddle explains to those foes of charter schools why their arguments are not only off-base, but insulting to families who want better for their kids. Read, listen to this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast on families and schools, consider, and take action.

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.

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Three Thoughts

Will There Be Lawsuits to Stop Arne’s and Obama’s No Child Waiver Gambit?

November 17, 2011 1:44 pm November 17, 2011

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While the Harkin-Enzi plan for reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act is legislatively comatose, President Obama’s gambit to issue waivers from the law that will effectively eviscerate its…

While the Harkin-Enzi plan for reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act is legislatively comatose, President Obama’s gambit to issue waivers from the law that will effectively eviscerate its Adequate Yearly Progress provisions remain quite alive. With 11 states already petitioning for waivers (alongside others that have been pressing for them this year), the president and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan are dead set on essentially weakening their school reform agenda by taking apart the very tool that can be used to hold states and schools accountable for the children in their care.

But what if Parent Power groups, school choice activists, conservative legal organizations, and civil rights outfits push for a court injunction of the waiver effort? Such a move would once again shine light on one of the most-fervent reasons why so many have objected to the effort. It would also force Obama and Duncan to finally begin working with Congress on a revamp of No Child that will continue to spur systemic reform.

At the heart of such a legal argument is the extent to which the U.S. Department of Education can allow states to deviate from elements of the decade-old law. The department can allow some adjustments that remain in the spirit of the law (even if not necessarily in the letter of it), and has done so in the past. For example, two states — Arkansas and North Carolina — were granted waivers that allowed them to use test score growth over time as part of their school accountability efforts; the department has also allowed states to provide students in failing schools with additional tutoring services instead of exercising the law’s public school choice option (which allows families to move their kids into better-performing schools in a district).

But the Obama waiver plan is more than just a slight adjustment. By allowing states to evade accountability, Obama and Duncan are effectively allowing the states to ignore federal law. The bigger issue is what states would have to do to get that waiver: Enact college- and career-ready curriculum standards in reading, math, and science. Since curriculum standards are not written into No Child, one can argue that the Obama administration is attempting to make law. Just as importantly, the college- and career-ready standards requirements could be considered a violation of federal law banning the Department of Education from creating national curricula –especially since the requirements essentially endorse the newly-developed Common Core State Standards.

Duncan has stated publicly that the states don’t have to actually enact Common Core in order to get the waivers. But that is cold comfort to conservatives who note that the administration has essentially championed those standards; they can easily argue in court that the curriculum standards condition is a de-facto violation of federal law. On the other side, civil rights activists can use Duncan’s statement (along with the federal ban on curriculum creation) in pushing for an injunction. Why? Since the administration is waiving AYP without the ability to require states to enact new curriculum standards, it is essentially letting states off the hook, violating federal law altogether.

There are also conservatives of a more strict constructionist bent who would argue that the Obama administration can’t issue waivers at all. Why? Because under the Constitution, only Congress can pass laws; the president and his administration is only allowed to enforce them. Given that Congress often ends up giving the executive branch plenty of leeway in such enforcement through the regulatory process, such an argument may not stand. After all, on that basis, the federal Race to the Top program (which was originally funded as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) would also be illegal; but it isn’t because it actually complies with the original law itself. But given that regulations can only go as far as the law allows, one can also surmise that agencies cannot issue waivers or regulations that allow states to evade the law. Which is what the Obama administration’s No Child waiver gambit does. As Hoover Institution scholar Bill Evers argued last month in Education Next: “Imposing such conditions has never been approved by Congress, and the federal waiver law does not permit it.”

Parent Power groups and school choice activists could challenge the waivers on those grounds. More importantly, they could also argue that the elimination of AYP essentially disenfranchises children and their families, violating their civil rights. Why? As Dropout Nation reported last week, the elimination of AYP would effectively eliminate the mechanism that allow for the use Parent Trigger laws in California and Connecticut; ending AYP could also spell the end of some school choice plans targeted to families whose kids are attending failure mills. Given that the No Child Left Behind Act and previous versions of the formally named Elementary and Secondary Education Act are essentially civil rights laws, the Obama waivers could be considered antithetical to the law’s original intent. There would also be plenty of evidence — including Duncan’s move two years ago to allow Virginia to retroactively set their accountability targets in order to stay in compliance with the law — to show that the Obama administration has violated the intent of No Child at the expense of children.

Will the challenges come? As Andy Rotherham noted in an Education Next commentary, 63 percent of Beltway players surveyed by the Whiteboard Advisers report he runs with longtime player John Bailey expect a court challenge to come. As seen earlier this month in Los Angeles, where parents filed suit against the City of Angels’ school district to push for an overhaul of its teacher evaluation system, using the courts to bring equity to American public education is no longer a province of school funding activists. Given the dissatisfaction among civil rights groups with the efforts by both the administration and congressional leaders to eviscerate No Child’s accountability provisions, the unwillingness of the administration to back away from the effort, and the successful court challenges launched by those opposing implementation of the Affordable Health Care Act, it is quite likely that reformers on both sides of the ideological line will take Obama and Duncan to court.

No matter what happens, Obama and Duncan should drop their waiver gambit. From where Dropout Nation sits, the effort will damage the laudable reform efforts the administration has undertaken, especially the Race to the Top and I3 initiatives. Instead, they should push for Congress for a reauthorization of No Child that expands accountability, pushes harder for advancing Parent Power and school choice, and finally forces the nation’s ed schools to improve how they train teachers. Certainly it is difficult to do given four-year-long standoff over what the next No Child should look like. But waivers are no substitute for pushing legislatively for strong federal policy that advances reform.

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Giving Parents Power

Kelley Williams-Bolar Launches a Parents Union

November 17, 2011 11:39 am November 17, 2011

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Back in January, Akron, Ohio, mother Kelley Williams-Bolar became the poster child for ending zip code education and expanding school choice when she was convicted of what can only…

Back in January, Akron, Ohio, mother Kelley Williams-Bolar became the poster child for ending zip code education and expanding school choice when she was convicted of what can only laughingly be called stealing education. Williams-Bolar would end up spending 10 days in jail for placing her two daughters in the relatively high-performing (and, more important to her, safe) Copley-Fairlawn school district (where few of the black students drop out) instead of keeping them in the woeful, more-dangerous Akron district (whose Balfanz rate for young black men and women, respectively, is 62 percent and 76 percent) in which her family resided. The conviction jump-started the much-needed discussion over expanding inter-district public school choice and forced a new discussion about ending zip code education practices that condemn poor and minority children to the worst American public education offers (and keeps middle-class families from improving their own options).

Ten months later, Williams-Bolar is taking her place alongside parents such as Gwen Samuel, Matt Prewett and Hanya Boulos to launch the nation’s fifth parents union. The Ohio Parents Union is still in its infancy, and according to Williams-Bolar in an e-mail to Dropout Nation, still working with families to map out a full agenda. But Williams-Bolar’s new group is already getting help from the Samuel and the Connecticut Parents Union; Samuel has already introduced Williams-Bolar to the growing network of Parent Power activists and to Whitney Tilson, whose e-mails reach into the core of the overall school reform movement. It will be interesting to see if Terry Ryan and the folks at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (which was originally based in the Buckeye State and is a major charter school authorizer there) will team up with the new group on the kind of on-the-ground efforts for which Dropout Nation has advocated (and Fordham’s research czar, Mike Petrilli, acknowledged was necessary).

There will be plenty for Williams-Bolar to tackle. Forget moving to make the Buckeye State take full responsibility for education funding (and thus transforming school dollars into a voucher-like system in which kids can attend any school within the state). The efforts to overhaul how teachers in the state are recruited, trained, and compensated — especially in light of last week’s defeat of the collective bargaining ban — means that school reformers will have to be more-aggressive and savvy in their efforts. Parent Power groups such as Williams-Bolars could immediately strike a blow for families by following the course of parents in L.A. who are suing the school district there in order to force the use of student test data in teacher evaluations.

Another would be to require more-accurate school data that shows the performance and safety of schools in their communities. Right now, Ohio’s school data system is barely useful for families in any meaningful way. And pushing Ohio to enact a Parent Trigger law similar to those in California, Connecticut and Texas would go a long way in helping parents overhaul the very schools whose failures are at the epicenter of decaying communities.

Williams-Bolar can now help families like hers avoid the fate that befell her. And we need more parents like her taking power.

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Leave No Child Alone Three Thoughts

Harkin-Enzi is in a Coma (But the Obama Waiver Plan is Still Alive)

November 17, 2011 9:39 am November 17, 2011

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The good news, or at least as good as it can be given the dismal conditions of federal education policy discussions, is that the plan for gutting the No…

The good news, or at least as good as it can be given the dismal conditions of federal education policy discussions, is that the plan for gutting the No Child Left Behind Act offered up by Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee Chairman Tom Harkin and Republican Ranking Member Mike Enzi, won’t be up for full consideration until next year. Even that is unlikely. Considering that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and his fellow Democrats will be struggling to keep control of the upper house, the likelihood of the Harkin-Enzi plan (or any reauthorization of No Child) coming up for a vote by the full body is slim to none.

None of this should be surprising. Looking to head off President Barack Obama’s almost equally as unappealing No Child waiver plan, Harkin finally got off the snide (and away from equally unproductive efforts to shut down the for-profit college sector) by putting together a gutting of No Child that was far more favorable to education traditionalists (and their efforts to preserve the status quo) than to continuing systemic reform. Not only did the proposal gut Adequate Yearly Progress — the most-successful element of the law that has spurred school reform efforts — it didn’t even move the ball on improving teacher quality, overhaul how teachers are trained by the nation’s woeful university schools of education, or expand school choice in any meaningful way. The initial plan to require states to evaluate teachers using student performance data was excised from Harkin-Enzi as soon as the National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, and Senate Republicans made their opposition known; after all, without the support of the latter, Harkin-Enzi wouldn’t have made it to paper. Even with some of the small improvements made during the markup of the bill, Harkin-Enzi was a disservice to Parent Power efforts, to the futures of young black, white, Latino, and Asian men (who make up three out of every five children who ultimately drop out), and, ultimately, isn’t worth the paper upon which it is written.

But Harkin-Enzi could only come to pass if congressional Republicans who control the federal lower house would move on their own plan — and if Harkin’s fellow Democrats in the House would team up on a similarly bipartisan proposal. Harkin himself made that clear last week. But that was never going to happen.

House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline may want to gut No Child’s accountability provisions, but he wasn’t going to help President Obama get even a cosmetic legislative victory in the one policy area in which he has garnered mostly-bipartisan praise. The fact that Kline only wants to pass a set of piecemeal bills instead of an omnibus version of federal education policy, along with the divide among congressional Republicans and their counterparts outside of Congress (including No Child’s masterminds Sandy Kress and former U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, along with reform-minded governors, who have found No Child useful for their purposes), also dooms any effort on Kline’s part.

As for congressional Democrats? Given that the ranking member on the House Education and the Workforce Committee, George Miller, is a staunch defender of accountability, any effort to gut it wasn’t going to fly. Nor would it fly with other congressional Democrats. When the chairs of the Congressional Black Caucus, Congressional Asian-Pacific American Caucus, and Congressional Hispanic Caucus, declared last week in a letter to Harkin, Miller, Kline and Enzi that they would oppose any bill that didn’t keep and expand subgroup accountability and live up to No Child’s longstanding role as “a civil rights law”, Harkin had to know that nothing was going to happen on the legislative front.

Certainly Harkin-Enzi is now in a legislative coma. That is a good thing; it was a terrible piece of legislation. But the bad news is that Obama’s waiver plan, which will gut accountability as thoroughly as anything Harkin or Kline would offer, remains on course. School reformers will have to keep fighting to remind Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan of their responsibility to help all children succeed in school and in life — and that what they offer won’t do the job.

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