Tag: grassroots


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The Dropout Nation Podcast: Building Cultures of Genius Block by Block


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On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I explain why we need churches, iron men of success, parents and our other grassroots players to lead the overhaul of American public education….

Dropout Nation Podcast Cover

On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I explain why we need churches, iron men of success, parents and our other grassroots players to lead the overhaul of American public education. More than ever, parent trigger laws and sheer force of will is compelling grassroots activists to challenge the status quo and improve the quality of instruction, leadership and curricula in our schools. But we need more people to play their part.

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

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Michelle Rhee’s School Reform Opportunity


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If you are, as my colleague, Steve Peha, still disappointed in former D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee for not sticking it out after her patron was ousted as Chocolate City’s…

If you are, as my colleague, Steve Peha, still disappointed in former D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee for not sticking it out after her patron was ousted as Chocolate City’s mayor,  you will certainly have high hopes for her newly-launched Students First initiative. And if you are a general fan of work, as this editor is, you can’t help but support the initiative’s goals of rallying parents and community members to embrace and demand reform America’s teaching corps — and ensure that every student is given high-quality instruction.

At the same time, Students First is in some ways, less than satisfying. Why? Because Rhee’s initiative still doesn’t hit the sweet spot when it comes to school reform: Merging policy savvy with hard-core, take-it-to-the-streets activism and entrepreneurial (and operational) drive.

Right now, there is a divide of sorts within the school reform movement between the Beltway reformers (who spend plenty of time on policymaking and working the halls of Congress and statehouses), the grassroots activists (who do the tough work of rallying support door by door) and charter school operators and reformers working in state agencies and school districts (who put ideas into practice). While the three sides share the same goals and concern for reforming education so that every child can write their own story, they don’t see eye-to-eye when it comes to getting things done. More often than not, the three parties often fail to understand the shortcomings of their own approaches and the importance of the work their colleagues are doing.

The biggest offenders are the Beltway-based reformers. As seen in the reaction earlier this year from big-named players such as Rick Hess to the Los Angeles Times’ special report on the low quality teachers in L.A. Unified schools,  the Beltway reformers  seem to prefer bloodless talk about reform than taking the steps  to make reform a reality (including publicly naming laggard teachers and the institutional leaders who protect them). Beltway reformers are also more comfortable with theory and policy than making things work and rough public battles with teachers unions and other defenders of traditional public education. They fail to understand the key lesson of every reformer, activist and revolutionary of any sort: You don’t accomplish anything without afflicting the comfortable within the status quo.

This problem extends beyond the sparring matches. Beltway reformers fail to understand that it takes more than policy to make reforms work.  Save for a few outfits such as the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (which actually authorizes charter schools), most are unwilling to do the unglamorous, difficult task of working with families and communities — from listening to concerns, providing time and other resources,  and dealing with the messiness of families (many of which are struggling with a litany of other issues) — in order to make reforms a reality. Although organizations such as Democrats for Education Reform are now playing more-prominent roles in political campaigns, they haven’t mastered the brutal art of election politics; so they end up conceding ground to teachers unions and other status quo defenders.

At the same time, grassroots activists and school reformers on the ground fail to understand the importance of policymaking, which often includes winning over politicians with carefully-worded jargon, working those legislative committee rooms, and crafting legislation that achieves the politically possible. As important as their shock troop work is to winning reform on the ground, they must still understand that the ground game is one part of the war over reforming American public education.

As for charter school operators and in-district reformers? Their problem lies in the fact that they are often too focused on operations and mission than on thinking about how their work can help make the case for reform. More-importantly,  as Rhee herself admitted in October in a Wall Street Journal she co-wrote with her former boss, Adrian Fenty, reform-minded operators don’t always realize the importance explaining to community members how their efforts will improve the quality of education for their kids. Nor do they dare to actually question their opponents within traditional public education on their essential anti-intellectualism and misunderstanding of such matters as economics and management theory. The operators can certainly teach the ed school profs and the teachers union bosses a few things about what the real world actually looks like.

Yet all three groups are important to making school reform a reality. Working together, they temper each other’s excesses, force one another to consider flaws in thinking, and inform each other’s work. The school reform movement needs thinking activists, men and women who both know how to work the corridors of power and get their hands dirty in the trenches, skilled at policymaking, bomb-throwing and implementing all at once. This need is why Dropout Nation discusses both policy and practice; they all must come together in a continuum of actions in order to foster a revolution (and not an evolution) in public education. Reformers can’t just stay in the Beltway , work the streets or operate schools; they must get involved in all three areas.

Rhee has shown success in the policy wonk and school operations arenas; she has also displayed her flaws in rallying grassroots support. Students First offers her an opportunity to get her hands dirty in all three areas, learn from her mistakes, and put some of the lessons she has learned into practice. And she can show all three groups within the school reform movement how to not be limited by their respective perspectives.

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The Dropout Nation Podcast: Rallying Voters Around School Reform


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On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I discuss why school reformers haven’t been able to translate their success in gaining attention to the problems of American public education to this…

Dropout Nation Podcast Cover

On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I discuss why school reformers haven’t been able to translate their success in gaining attention to the problems of American public education to this year’s midterm elections. It will take more than screenings of The Lottery and talk about Waiting for Superman to turn education into a primary issue in general elections.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod, Zune, MP3 player or smartphone. Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Podcast Alley, the Education Podcast NetworkZune Marketplace and PodBean. And the podcast on Viigo, if you have a BlackBerry, iPhone or Android phone.

1 Comment on The Dropout Nation Podcast: Rallying Voters Around School Reform

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Why Russ Whitehurst Gets It Mostly Wrong on Harlem Children’s Zone


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The Harlem Children’s Zone and it’s chief executive, Geoffrey Canada, have not only exemplified what school reformers can do when they take a community-based approach to improving education, but has…

The promise of the Harlem Children's Zone can be seen in Garry Kasparov playing chess with one of its Promise Academy students

The Harlem Children’s Zone and it’s chief executive, Geoffrey Canada, have not only exemplified what school reformers can do when they take a community-based approach to improving education, but has even spawned a movie, an American Express commercial, and the Obama administration’s Promise Neighborhoods program for tackling poverty and education. So naturally, the release of a report this week by the Brookings Institution criticizing the performance of one of the Harlem Children’s Zone’s charter schools (and by proxy, the underlying approach of Promise Neighborhoods) was certainly going to get some attention (along with a terse response from Canada himself). While Canada and the report’s co-authors, Russ Whitehurst and Michelle Croft, get to sparring, here is Dropout Nation‘s analysis of the report and the competing philosophies behind both Harlem Children’s Zone and the Brookings report:

  1. Certainly Harlem Children’s Zone can — and should — do better in improving student achievement in its schools: The fact that its Promise Academy does a better job of improving student achievement than traditional public schools in the community it serves isn’t enough, especially when those schools are abysmal in the first place. Harlem Children’s Zone isn’t just proving itself against those schools, but against other public charters that don’t offer such a wide array of services. More importantly, it comes down to this: Black and Latino children in its school have to do better than average because they often enter school so far behind academically. So Harlem Children’s Zone needs to take a hard look at its performance and get going on improving its outcomes.
  2. But the Brookings report argues unconvincingly that the model doesn’t work: The report doesn’t really attempt any sort of true longitudinal snapshot of academic progress at Promise Academy over time; there is some evidence that Whitehurst and Croft had opportunity to do some longitudinal analysis for grades six-through-eight (from 2007, 2008 and 2009 results), but the report doesn’t offer evidence that such an attempt was made. Certainly the analysis provided offers a sobering glimpse on Harlem Children’s Zone’s success and challenge. But it  also comes to some headline-grabbing conclusions about the program’s future success with incomplete analysis.
  3. The report also underscores an amazingly thoughtless conceit among Beltway school reformers — that grassroots networks don’t really matter: This may not be intentional on the part of Whitehurst and his co-author (or from folks such as Sara Mead), but it seeps through the entire piece. It is also quite incorrect. As Dropout Nation has argued ad nauseum this week, it is the very lack of bodies — especially networks of grassroots activists and churches — that has posed the single-biggest problem for Beltway-based reformers in sustaining their prescriptions for overhauling American public education. It isn’t enough to argue for policies: It also requires getting the hands dirty, working with the 51 million single parents, grandparents and immigrant families ready to embrace school reform (but who lack the resources, especially knowledge and guidance on what high quality education should look like, in order to make it a reality). Given the remaining strength of the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers and their allies on the ground, Beltway reformers need get into the grassroots game. This means understanding that you can’t solve educational issues without also working with those who understand the other social issues (and who can rally support around reform solutions). [By the way: There is also a major difference between the family empowerment through education  approach taken by Canada — who is a co-signatory on the Broader, Bolder manifesto Brookings so rightfully criticizes — and the rest of the crowd, who are defenders of traditional public education and argue that education cannot overcome poverty. Sadly, however, Whitehurst (an otherwise excellent researcher) and Croft neither notes those differences nor provides much nuance on any of this. They should have done so. Period.]
  4. But this doesn’t mean the Harlem Children’s Zone approach is for everyone: The idea behind Canada’s program is powerful and exciting, as is the promise and even the reality. It will serve well the children and families under its umbrella. But there are plenty of successful programs on the community end which can do the social services work better than any school reformer can; after all, there is something called comparative advantage. What Beltway-based school reformers can do (and, in the case of the grassroots-based reform counterparts already do) is form networks of organizations that can handle those social needs, then create data systems that can track how kids are doing over time. Easy to do? Not in the age of FERPA (traditional school districts don’t do this well). But school reformers have the resourcefulness to make this a reality.

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The Dropout Nation Podcast: Rallying Single Parents, Grandparents and Immigrants for School Reform


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On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I discuss the importance of rallying single parents, grandparents and immigrant families for reform of American public education. For school reformers, these families are…

Dropout Nation Podcast Cover

On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I discuss the importance of rallying single parents, grandparents and immigrant families for reform of American public education. For school reformers, these families are hungry for ways to improve the quality of education for their children. All they need is for reformers to actually come to the ground and help them turn policy into reality.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod, MP3 player or smartphone. Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Podcast Alley, the Education Podcast NetworkZune Marketplace and PodBean. Also, add the podcast on Viigo, if you have a BlackBerry, iPhone or Android phone.

6 Comments on The Dropout Nation Podcast: Rallying Single Parents, Grandparents and Immigrants for School Reform

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Three Questions: Steve Barr


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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…

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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