Tag: Richard Lee Colvin


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Why School Reform Can Succeed


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As Ronald Reagan would say, optimism always beats pessimism. Or as Martin Luther King would put it, hopes always overcome fears. Simply stated, the school reform movement in all of…

Few truer words have ever been spoken.

As Ronald Reagan would say, optimism always beats pessimism. Or as Martin Luther King would put it, hopes always overcome fears. Simply stated, the school reform movement in all of its strains — alarmed by the crisis of systemic academic and bureaucratic failure in American public education — are driven by a zealously optimistic faith in the capacity of people to stem the nation’s high school dropout crisis and improve the lives of children.

This optimism is at the heart of every successful mass reform, from the American revolution that started this country, to the Civil Rights Movement that ended Jim Crow racism, to the conservative movement that, until recently, has driven the last three decades of American economic success. More importantly, this optimism always wins against the hopelessness and dourness of the established opposition.

What defenders of traditional public education offer isn’t exactly hope. They offer pessimism, hopelessness, sense of powerlessness over improving the lives of children. Behind their views (both left-leaning and conservative) is the faulty conceit that poverty cannot be overcome, the condescending argument that poor black, Latino, white and Asian families are disinterested in improving the quality of education for their children, and simmering anger against anyone who dares argue that concepts such as choice, quality, rigor and accountability are good things that should be embraced by all of education.

This is the underlying reason why the classrooms and halls of charter schools and reform-minded traditional public schools are often so cheery, syrupy even. It is why a Steve Barr can work unaffected by vicious rhetoric from opponents — and actually force a moribund school district to actually try something new and novel. It is why, despite outrage over the quality of public education, school reformers aren’t consumed by anger and desperation. Anger and desperation equals success isn’t a calculation that can be found in life’s textbook.

School reformers believe the effects of poverty and underclass behavior can be overcome by high-quality education and hard work. Defenders of traditional public education simply believe otherwise. Richard Lee Colvin noted the contrast in a recent piece on his time spent at the New Schools Venture Funds annual summit and a recent confab held by the American Educational Research Association. You can see this in the arguments on Twitter between reformers and teachers stuck in the status quo. It is evident in the stories told by Teach For America alumni and famed teachers such as the late Jaime Escalante, versus the tales of woe told in ed schools and teachers lounges across this country.

There is a reason why half of all aspiring teachers coming out of ed school never take classroom jobs. They spend so little energy apprenticing in classrooms and so much time around ed school professors offering little more than doom. This is exemplified by a story Katie Haycock, the president of the Education Trust, told me back in 2005 when I was still an editorial writer for the Indianapolis Star. Her daughter, Brooke, had performed for a class of teaching students about to graduate from LSU and she noticed the lack of hope and optimism in the air. Their professors had so little to offer them in terms of practical teaching advice and understanding how data can be used in improving student achievement. Those professors, however, offered much in the way of doom and gloom about the ability of these aspiring teachers to improve the quality of instruction the poorest children receive in school every day.

It is also why so many teachers and principals burn out long before they reach the earliest retirement age, walking the halls of their schools like the zombies out of Night of the Living Dead. In his darkest dreams, George Romero could never conjure the kind of dread that pervades some of the worst-performing schools. Their very existence proves that without optimism there is no positive, sustainable action.

This isn’t to say that school reformers don’t have work to do. As the site has chronicled over and over, the movement must reach beyond the Beltway and comfy quarters. It must get its hands dirty in politics and in grassroots change. They must do more to include the very blacks and Latinos their efforts serve and still win over (or browbeat into submission) suburban parents — and the Charlie Crists they elect to office. Those obstacles, difficult as they may be, are easier to overcome than the biggest hurdle facing each of us as individuals and as collectives: Choosing the mindset of confident, providential hope over desperate, implacable fear.

As an eternal optimist proven right more often than not, I can tell you that this old saw is so true: You can manifest your hopes – and you can also make your fears real. But only one will actually yield success over a problem. This is as true for movements as it is for individuals. It is why school reformers will likely succeed where their opposition will surely fail.

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Voices of the Dropout Nation: Teacher Quality This Past Week


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Comments, observations and declarations from people advocating for and fostering change: “No capable and dedicated person wants to work in a quality-blind profession, but that’s what’s gradually happening to education……

Comments, observations and declarations from people advocating for and fostering change:

  • “No capable and dedicated person wants to work in a quality-blind profession, but that’s what’s gradually happening to education… There is at least one teacher on every staff that makes us all wonder, “How the heck did they get in, and why do they still have a job?” Somewhere in that teacher’s past timeline, a college professor or principal did not have the guts to say, “This person doesn’t meet the standards of the teaching profession.” — San Gabriel (Calif.) Unified teacher Heather Wolpert-Gawron in Teacher (password-required) questioning the value of “last-hired, first-fired” policies and other aspects of the current teacher compensation and evaluation system.
  • “Renaissance teachers have been betrayed by their own union. Despite paying dues—and maybe even more importantly, embodying the very essence of teacher voice deployed in the furtherance of student achievement (and not just their own paychecks) that the UFT always talks about—the UFT has more or less told Renaissance’s teachers to eat cake:  the UFT backed last year’s unfair, disproportionate double cut funding freeze on charter schools; and despite promises from its former President, it refuses to advocate on these teachers’ behalf this year.” — Charter school advocate James Merriman observing a protest by charter school teachers represented by the American Federation of Teachers against the union’s New York City local.
  • “If I could make one single reform nationwide, it would be this: make every building principal completely and personally responsible for hiring and firing teachers. If the school board determines that the principal is capricious or incompetent, then they should fire her or him. This shifts the burden of advocacy from students vs. teachers to teachers vs. principals… why we shouldn’t try something new. Is protecting the jobs of marginal teachers and principals worth sacrificing the potential of some students?” — Charter Insight‘s Peter Hilts on ways to improve teacher quality and hold administrators accountable.
  • “The only way to generate increased performance is to structure the incentive system in such a way that the mean is raised. This means abolishing tenure and seniority, thereby removing the safety net for failure. Then find ways to give the best performers a piece of the economic action for increased productivity. If a man can increase the institution’s net income, give him a larger percentage of this when his output increases… We understand this economic incentive system when it comes to business, yet most people fail to understand it in the field of education.”– Gary North offering another teacher quality solution in his obituary to the work of the late Jaime Escalante. [Dropout Nation offers its own thoughts.]
  • “It took me several years to understand how Garfield’s AP teachers, and the many educators who have had similar results in other high-poverty schools, pulled all this off. They weren’t skimming. It wasn’t a magic trick of test results. They simply had high expectations for every student. They arranged extra time for study — such as Escalante’s rule that if you were struggling, you had to return to his classroom after the final bell and spend three hours doing homework, plus take some Saturday and summer classes, too. They created a team spirit, teachers and students working together to beat the big exam.” — Jay Mathews, who wrote the series of stories and books that made Escalante a household name, on how the teacher succeeded in improving the odds of his students making it in life.
  • “These are freshmen, used to a transactional model of education predominant in American high schools. The fact that this model — the teacher tells the students what to do; students follow teacher’s directions; students get good grades — is the predominant one is a serious problem in our schools, but that’s another issue. Whatever the case may be, I am getting these folks in the final four years of their formal schooling (for the most part) and if I don’t get them thinking on their own, they will crash and burn in the real world.” — Robert Talbert of Casting Out Nines on his process for getting his students to become well-prepared men and women.
  • “But here’s my question: why does it matter if they are public or private as long as students are getting a good education and are not being forced into religious instruction?” — Hechinger Institute boss Richard Lee Colvin on the constant (and often, rambling ed-schoolish dribble) efforts of some to argue that charter schools aren’t public schools. The answer is: It doesn’t matter to the children or the parents or to anyone who cares about improving their lives.
  • “The Pessimist complains about the wind, The Optimist expects it to change, The LEADER adjust the sails! Which are you?” — Dr. Steve Perry offering a much-needed reminder on leadership and school reform.

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