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Parent power can’t merely be empty words.

Wall Street Journal's Top 25 Companies of the Decade

Choice is no panacea. But as seen in the consumer products market, choice can help spur innovation. Let's try this in education.

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 begats 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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Research school choice school data This is Dropout Nation

Ability Tracking: Outmoded Idea in the New Education Paradigm

RiShawn Biddle

December 22, 2009 8:50 pm December 22, 2009

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Dusting off old education thinking just won’t do.

Education policy wonks can sometimes be like executives at telecom giant AT&T’s cell phone unit: Even as the world has changed — sometimes radically so — thanks to such disrupting technologies and practices as the iPhone and charter schools, they continue to hold on to old paradigms that no longer matter.

This came to me just as I was reading a satirical commentary on Fake Steve Jobs (run by my former Forbes colleague Daniel Lyons) in which the guise of America’s favorite ex-hippie-turned-computer industry icon/phonemaker gives its partner AT&T the business for offering incentives to iPhone users and other high-volume data customers to use less data. After reminding the executives that music giant EMI didn’t ask teenage girls to stop buying Beatles albums, Fake Steve pretty much tells them that they should do everything they can to expand network capacity and increase data volume. After all, the better for AT&T to gain more customers, sell more iPhones and put lie to all those hilariously stinging Verizon ads. Essentially, AT&T needs to embrace change before esubscribers leave for Verizon, Sprint or T-Mobile.

This can also be said for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute released a report that essentially calls for the return of ability tracking. Ability tracking? Yes, that hideous system of grouping children based on what “experts” (i.e. teachers and guidance counselors) perceive as academic ability and potential which, along with the advent of the comprehensive high school, has done more damage to more American children with so little effort.

The report essentially states that high-achieving students are being ill-served by schools — especially dropout factories and the academic failure mills that feed into them — because they have decided to stop tracking student abilities and focused more on helping their most-disadvantaged children reach grade level. In order to help high-achieving children, Fordham suggests a return to ability tracking, albeit in an amended, less-racially (and ethnically discriminatory form.

Fordham and Tom Loveless, the author of the study, should be commended for researching the effects of ending ability tracking. Fordham research czar Mike Petrilli’s nuanced argument for Fordham’s position, admirably sensitive to the historic use of ability tracking to discriminate against blacks and immigrants, is also appreciated. All that said, Fordham is following AT&T in making the same mistake: Dusting off outmoded concepts for use in a new day and age.

Although you can understand Fordham’s longstanding concern for helping high-achievers reach their potential, there are also plenty of reasons to shake your head at its suggestion. There’s the historic use of ability tracking to deny high-quality education to blacks and other minority students; on this fact alone, ability tracking should be banished along with the comprehensive high school. Then there’s the fact that the teachers and guidance counselors being asked to make the decisions often lack the subject-knowledge competency to even make such judgments in the first place.

Ability tracking is also lacking as a fine-tuned instrument; the lack of homogeneity even within a group of students with similar levels of ability can throw off tracking methods. If you want, you can also use any outliers such as Albert Einstein: If not for his wealthy parents, he would have likely been guaranteed a second-tier education because teachers struggled to distinguish his ability from his generally dismissive attitude towards academic instruction.

The most-important reason why Fordham’s embrace of ability tracking is wrongheaded is because it is reflective of an old-school paradigm in which public schools are black boxes that magically turn out students who can work in factories and behave as good citizens. This paradigm — and the concepts spawned from it — is being replaced by an evolving one, largely based on providing as much contextual data as possible to students, parents and stakeholders for individual and community decision-making.

This is emerging through the expansion of the charter school movement; inter-district choice programs such as those in New Jersey and California (for students in the worst-performing school districts in their respective states) and even homeschooling. Through these forms of school choice, a child’s educational path to be made bywell-informed parents (who are likely to have a good, if not perfect, sense of their child’s academic capacity) than by “experts” who may be blinded by their own biases or lack discernment needed for such decision-making.

It also means that decisions can be tailored for each type of student. A high-achieving 9th grader could then double-up on classes in order to graduate early and attend college, while a similar child may attend more AP classes and stay in school until the official graduation day. Students considered low-achieving in traditional tracking systems, on the other hand, may actually have skills needed to do higher-level work; it may just be a question of changing courses or even assigned teachers. Charters, private schools, community foundations, even Kaplan tutoring programs may even emerge in order to give parents a wide array of options depending on the needs of those students.

This isn’t to say choice is a panacea. As I’ve said elsewhere, school reformers need to think about how to provide parents — especially the urban poor — with resources they can use to guide their decision-making. There are some groups such as the GEO Foundation, which operates charter schools and offers resources to parents seeking out educational options; but more-neutral third party players are needed. State-level school data systems are still underdeveloped, still geared to meeting compliance with federal rule-making, and measures few of the data-points most parents need to care about in order to inform their thinking. School reformers should work harder on developing data systems and standards that make information useful for parents and everyone else. Fostering educational entrepreneurism, as Frederick Hess has pointed out, is also crucial to making all of this work; there is more than enough room for schools, curriculum suppliers, data providers and others who can give parents power.

But it is clear that the solutions to educating children of differing abilities lies not in reviving useless theories of the past that stand in the way of children achieving (and exceeding their potential). All players in education, including reformers, must break with old ways of thinking and embrace the new.

Ability tracking is an ashbin concept in this century. And like old an Motorola StarTac, should be placed back in it where it belongs.

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This is Dropout Nation

Voices of the Dropout Nation: Walter Dozier On Education and Violence

RiShawn Biddle

December 7, 2009 5:18 pm December 7, 2009

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One man’s call for using education to end violence.

Killing our seeds before they grow: Black America must stop this.

As an applied anthropologist in the D.C. suburb of Prince George’s County, Walter Dozier has spent much of his time addressing the high levels of underachievement and crime that have plagued that community’s neighborhoods. But after watching the spate of teen-on-teeen murders that have bloodied Chicago’s streets, Dozier wonders whether black communities in that city — and elsewhere — are ready to embrace education as the solution to ending such carnage. Here are his thoughts (thanks to Phillip Jackson of the Black Star Project):

It has been two months since the murder and funeral of Chicago teenager Derrion Albert. His violent death sparked a national outrage and generated intense international media attention. Albert is one of thousands of young black males whose loss of life has gone largely unchecked within the black community. Yet black youth violence alarm bells have been sounding for decades.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, homicide is the leading cause of death for the majority of black Americans between the ages of 10 and 24 years old. Further, research by Northeastern University shows that the number of homicides involving black male youth as perpetrators increased 43 percent between 2002 and 2007. Just as important, the number of black male youth involved as homicide victims increased 31 percent.For gun killings, the increase was even greater with a 54 percent increase for young black male victims and 47 percent increase for young black male perpetrators.

In Chicago, almost 70 students have been murdered in black communities, since the beginning of the 2007 school year. But this is not just a Chicago problem Two weeks after Albert’s death, in the Washington D.C. area, where I live, seventeen year-old Kenyetta D. Nicholson-Stanley was killed during an exchange of gunfire at the Edgewood Terrace housing complex while she sat on a bench. A week later, 15-year-old Davonta Artis and 18-year-old Daquan Tibbs, were gunned down not far away from where Nicholson-Stanley was killed. Artis was on his way home from a local middle school where he was reportedly an A-student. Three other teens were also wounded in what community members called a war-like shootout between rival neighborhood gangs.

In all three incidents, law enforcement officials and family members publicly pleaded for community assistance in identifying the attackers so they apprehended and brought to justice. In all three incidents police struggled to get witness support as community members refused to take a stand against the epidemic violence – in their own communities. Had it not been for the technological advances in visual media – cell phone cameras — Albert’s killers might still be unidentified.

So, with a generation of black youths attending candlelight vigils as a cultural way of life and make shift memorials unexceptional landmarks throughout many black communities, there is a disquieting absence of community call-to-action, a disquieting lack of effort to address the killing of young black males – unless the assailant is white. Then the call to unify against racism is unyielding.

Some community watchers say the complacency is a problematical mix of family breakdown and an engrained sense of hopelessness fueling violent episodes of self hatred. Still others cite a concentrated and misdirected focus on materialism and consumerism rather than on educational excellence. Education advocates say the failure to provide black children with a 21st Century education will only increase the rate of terror within black communities. The U.S. Department of Labor estimates 90 percent of new high-growth, high-wage jobs will require some level of postsecondary education.

Children without a quality high school education are hopelessly destined to the lowest possible quality of life imaginable in the United States. According to a recent report by Columbia University’s Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education at Teachers College, reducing the high school dropout rate in half would yield $45 billion annually in new federal tax revenues or cost savings.

So we have now reached the “what now?” stage of the Derrion Albert tragedy. The media attention is fading, the family will be left to grieve alone and young black males continue to terrorize our communities while self-annihilating each other. The status quo approach to solving problems is not, and has not worked for years. Since the arrested development of thousands of young black males can no longer be singularly attributed to racism, new community survival strategies are critical to our survival. Blaming and complaining are not strategies; they are excuses. It is now time for a moratorium on excuses and a fundamental shift in thinking and action.

The problems of under-and unemployment are clearly related to educational deficits and too many black youths are turning to the criminal enterprise. In majority black communities across the nations the governance of school systems has rested in the hands of black leadership for years. Yet, the quality and direction of education remains in question as political, faith-based, business and community leaders are for the most part hopelessly uninvolved, uninformed and uncommitted to saving our children.

Our communities have gotten too comfortable with violence and underachievement.Without a committed and sustained effort to educate our children and rebuild our families, the permanent destruction of the black community is simply a matter of time.

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California Dreaming Giving Parents Power school choice School Leadership

A Considerable Legacy: Steve Barr

RiShawn Biddle

November 22, 2009 3:36 am November 22, 2009

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One man’s vision others couldn’t see or embrace becomes real.

Leading a parent revolution.

Back in 2003, when I was a reporter in Los Angeles, I had begun work on a piece about Steve Barr, whose Green Dot Charter Schools was simply a handful of charter schools in Tinseltown’s gritty neighborhoods. What was fascinating at the time — which my editors could never fully grasp at that time — was the revolutionary (for L.A.) ideas he espoused: That city’s Latino students, often cast off as future gang-bangers, potential Chicano revolutionaries or likely cleaning staff, could actually achieve academic excellence, graduate from college and become contributors to the city’s — and nation’s — socioeconomic fabric; and that L.A. Unified and its sister school districts owed their taxpayers far better than substandard teaching and curricula.

These days, it seems difficult to realize how dispirited most were about the possibilities of achieving a high quality education in L.A. schools. The gamesmanship of maintaining a residence in Beverly Hills to attend the schools, as shown in the film Slums of Beverly Hills was no movie fantasy. For the poorest parents, many of whom were (and still are) undocumented immigrants, the struggle to achieve the American dream on behalf of their children and themselves made such activity the last thing on their minds. The simple idea that every neighborhood should have a great school, a concept that had already taken hold in Washington, D.C., Atlanta and New York through the charter school movement and school district overhauls, was not even considered in L.A. Unified, a district which managed to squash Jaime Escalantes and Richard Riordans alike. Especially odd given that California was the second state to legislate charters into existence.

Barr wanted to make this happen by gathering parents and focusing them on the basics. Back then, he had a few believers, notably boxing legend Oscar De La Hoya (the namesake of one of Green Dot’s schools) and the parents left behind by the region’s educational establishment. This was two years before Barr and his crew began staring down L.A. Unified, first in an unsuccessful attempt to convert Thomas Jefferson High into a charter school — and four years before he and parents at Locke High finally wrested control of that school from the district’s bureaucracy. And certainly long before national attention noted that in the City of Angels, another model for education reform — one both eschewed the inside-the-Beltway game and evolved independent of the Teach For America school — was coming to fore.

Now, with L.A. Unified talking and (mostly) walking school choice and accountability, one can now fully get what Steve Barr was doing. And as he leaves the board of the charter school organization he founded, it will be interesting to see what he does next.

By the way: More on L.A. Unified will appear in National Review Online this week.

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At the State Level School Leadership

Race to the Top: The Battles to Come

RiShawn Biddle

November 17, 2009 11:35 pm November 17, 2009

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Battles in Massachusetts and New York previews the next phase in Race to the Top.

All's quiet on the Massachusetts front -- tonight at least. Photo by PhilPie

Last month, I noted how states such as California and Tennessee have pushed to qualify for federal Race to the Top funding by passing measures lifting caps on the number of charter schools and allowing the use of student test data in measuring teacher performance. Now, New York and Massachusetts are trying to get into the act. And unfortunately for school reformers in those states, not even federal money is enough to gain traction.

Tonight, senators in the Bay State passed a reform measure by a vote of 28-11 after hours of debate and some 100 proposed amendments. The bill does lift the cap on the number of charters the state can authorize, but it also restricts the presence of charters to areas of the state where traditional public schools are in pervasive academic failure. Charter school advocates weren’t satisfied for several reasons, including the fact that the requirement that the first three schools authorized had to be located in the worst-performing districts; since only three charter schools are approved annually, the advocates fear that charter school expansion is just smoke.

Opponents of charter school expansion may figure out a way to kill the bill in Massachusetts’ lower house. One legislator, Liz Malia, has already told the StateHouse News Service that: “Charter advocates did a lot of things very quietly… and they got too much of the pie.” The bill may not even be passed this year.

Meanwhile in the Empire State, the New York State United Teachers — an affiliate of both the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association — is already bearing its teeth in opposition to a set of proposals from state Assemblyman Sam Hoyt to end the state’s ban on using test scores in evaluating the performance of probationary (pre-tenure) teachers and lift the cap on charter school expansion. The state Education Department and Board of Regents also wants to bring back the use of test scores in evaluations. Given that United Teachers successfully brought the ban back to life last year after it was ended in 2007, the likelihood of tying student and teacher performance may be a dead horse not worth the time for legislators — thinking about their re-election efforts — to kick.

New York State officials also remain stubborn about addressing other changes needed to qualify for Race to the Top. Lame duck Gov. David Paterson (yes, he’s running for election, but he’s unlikely to win) hasn’t been willing to exercise any of the pluck he has shown in battling the legislature over the state’s fiscal morass. The new state education commissioner, David Steiner, also seems less interested in reform than even his predecessor, the much-lauded (and also, much-bemoaned and often spendthrifty) Richard Mills.

These battles do show the limits of federal government-led reform initiatives even when the dollars are attached to the effort. That the final Race to the Top rules hardly touch teacher quality reform — among the most-important issues in achieving true education reform — also makes the opposition among traditional education supporters at the state level seem rather, well, ridiculous. After all, allowing parents additional school options — and thus, making them true partners in education decision-making — should be embraced by every educator. And test score data is certainly far more objective than the standards used in private-sector performance reviews (which, by the way, use plenty of subjective multiple measures).

School reformers have clearly won the battle for the hearts and minds of leaders at the federal level; they have certainly won the day in states such as Indiana and Colorado, where legislators and governors have reached agreement some agreement on the need for overhauling public education. Even California, who may find itself replacing one reform advocate (Arnold Schwarzenegger) with another (former Gov. Jerry Brown) after 2010, may actually move towards meaningful reform.

But in states where systemic political dysfunction is the norm, teachers unions and other defenders of traditional public education can rally supporters on their behalf. They can count on some of their longtime critics on issues such as the expansion of charter schools. There is also the skepticism of school reform among suburban parents, who may realize public schools are in atrocious shape, but also have a relationship with schools and teachers that few school reformers (save for the Steve Barrs and Geoffrey Canadas) have dared to match.

The relationships between parents, traditional public school officials and teachers are, for the most part, superficial; the latter two are disinterested in any active parental involvement outside of the traditional jobs of supervising homework and attending field trips. They don’t want parents to be full partners in decision-making. But like any, dare one say, abusive relationship, the parents are more than willing to play along . And together, this trinity is formidable against school reform. In those states, school reformers must move themselves out of the Beltway and into the grassroots in order to win the day.

Given the influence of state legislation on local reforms and on national efforts, these battlegrounds will loom larger in school reform discussions.

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Featured Articles Influencing dropouts The Special Ed Ghetto This is Dropout Nation

The Special Ed Crisis By The Numbers: Atlanta Public Schools

RiShawn Biddle

November 8, 2009 12:04 am November 8, 2009

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Special education is the place where graduation doesn’t happen.

Special education is the place where graduation doesn’t happen. Less than one-fifth of students ever graduate. Seventy-three percent of students with learning disabilities or emotional disturbances will end up being arrested and incarcerated over time. Yet despite evidence that overdiagnosis of learning disabilities is leading to more labeling of students, especially black and white males, there is ample fiscal incentive for school districts to engage in the gamesmanship.

A look at Atlanta’s public school district offers some clues as to what is happening to far too many young men and women, especially black and poor whites:

2,181: Number of special ed students in Atlanta’s public schools in 2005-2006, as funded by the Georgia state government. This doesn’t include kindergartners or elementary school students who are special ed, but are served under the state’s program for early intervention. About 3,035 students in Atlanta schools are diagnosed with a learning disability.

$7,550: The amount given for each special ed student by the State of Georgia. The state just provides $2,181 for each student in regular academic programs and $2,705 for every student in gifted and talented programs.

49: Percentage of special education/learning disabled students who spend 60 percent or more of their time outside regular classes, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Essentially, they are not likely to participate in academic courses that lead to college and beyond.

1,515: Number of special ed students (all served under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act or other federal laws) either suspended, expelled or subject to corporal punishment in 2005-2006. The more often children are suspended, the less likely they are to graduate from school.

9: Percentage of black males labeled with a specific learning disability — and likely in special education classes; this is three times higher than the likely occurrence of such disabilities. Three percent of black females are labeled.

4: Percentage of white males labeled with a specific learning disability. Just slightly above the likely occurrence of such disabilities. Only two percent of white females were labeled.

92: The percentage of the labeled learning-disabled enrollment who are black; blacks make up 86 percent of all student enrollment overall in Atlanta public schools. Whites account for three-hundredths of one percent of learning-disabled students, despite making up eight percent of overall enrollment.

42: The percentage of Atlanta’s gifted and talented program students who are white; that is eight times higher than their overall enrollment. Blacks do account for 53 percent of students in the gifted and talented program; but that is below their overall enrollment in the school district.

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