The school must be the unit of change-and schools must put kids on different pathway than most schools do today.
Canon Anderson, superintendent of the Newark, N.J. school district, on why our kids need systemic reform.
Imagine two eighth-grade students, Student A and Student B, who both attend public schools in the United States. Student A is significantly less likely to have a certified or experienced teacher, over twice as likely to have street gangs present at school and is 10 times less likely to take an AP exam than Student B. In anything else that could possibly affect student achievement — parent involvement, poverty, child care — Student B has the clear advantage. What could possibly cause this severe disadvantage for Student A? The answer is something as simple as the color of your skin. Student A is black, while Student B is white.
Seventh-grade Nashville student Iz Gius, in the Tennessean, saying succinctly what many school reformers sometimes fail to make clear.
We now Stat homelessness, we Stat domestic violence… We’re finding more ways to use it — monitoring day-to-day progress, monitoring the pace at which we improve and push it along. We’re doing a citywide analysis of how to use CitiStat to drill down into problems that have been in existence for years… We’re creating a Stat process — pull all the people into the same room with independent analysts and figure out how to get rid of roadblocks.
Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, to the New York Times, about the use of data in solving quality-of-life problems that plague every locale. This is the kind of unleashing of powerful data that must be embraced to give our children American public education that is worthy of their lives.