Press

VIDEO: Watch a clip of the EEP MLK Day Rally

February 9, 2009

The Toughest Job 

Washington Post
By Michelle Rhee
February 9, 2009; A17

Much has been said and written about education in our city recently, and I want to set the record straight with students, parents and, especially, teachers. My thoughts about teachers have not always come through accurately. Much has been lost that they should know.

I often speak of our district’s performance data with sadness and outrage. The situation for our city’s children is dire. Yet while I acknowledge the seriousness of the work we face, I want to be clear about something: I do not blame teachers for the low achievement levels.

I have talked with too many teachers to believe this is their fault. I have watched them pour their energy into engaging every student. I know they are working furiously in a system that for many years has not appreciated them—sometimes not even paying them on time or providing textbooks. Those who categorically blame teachers for the failures of our system are simply wrong.

Rather, teachers are the solution to the vexing problems facing urban education.

In the coming weeks, we will submit a final proposal for a new teacher contract. Through it and other reforms, we can create, together, the most effective and highly compensated educator force in the country. Our key goals:

· Individual choice. Contrary to the rumors, nobody will be forced to give up tenure. All teachers will get a substantial raise. Some may wish to choose an option that includes pay increases and bonuses based on excellence in the classroom. This would result in many teachers doubling their pay, with some making at least $100,000 by year seven.

· Measuring excellence. We cannot rely on test scores alone. Good evaluations of teaching practices must be well rounded. Only some of our teachers work in grades or subjects in which tests are given, so we must use many assessments to measure student growth.

· A growth model of achievement. Many teachers inherit classes of students who are far behind academically. Yet some teachers, even with minimal support, move their students two to three grade levels ahead in a year. Teachers will not be evaluated on an absolute measure but on how far they take their students.

· Protection from arbitrary firings. Some teachers are concerned a principal may want to fire them for reasons unrelated to performance. While principals who do this risk their own jobs (firing effective teachers is a sure way to lower school achievement), we will ensure protections for teachers. We need a fair and transparent process, free from bias and haste, designed with teachers’ input.

· Professional development and support. Teachers have told me that many of their hesitations about the contract—and about me—center on the pressures that teachers face: “What if my school does not support me? What if I am working my tail off and I still have weeks when my patience is thin and things beyond my control are causing problems?”

Our proposal will provide a framework to navigate these questions with strong programs to support and develop teachers as professionals. Neither will we forget the small things that can weigh down great teachers. For example, we want to reimburse those who buy supplies for their classrooms or use their cellphones to call students and families. We want to compensate teachers when they cover classes for others. I was a teacher. I know how these things add up.

Finally, we have to talk about ineffective teaching, which is not a popular subject. I am not referring to situations in which teachers are trying hard but are frustrated by their daily challenges. I am talking about teaching—or the absence of teaching—that shortchanges kids. Do not misunderstand: I do not believe that most of our teachers are shortchanging their students. But in the worst cases, we have teachers who put their feet on their desks and read the paper while students run around. Or they use corporal punishment. Or they intentionally abuse their current contract, leaving for three months at a time and returning for the one day that will keep their job active. We all agree that these people do not belong in the classroom, and we must be able to remove them expeditiously.

I am often asked to name the most important factor in this district’s success. It is teachers. It is their classrooms and what happens there, the expectations they set as they push students to go further. Teaching is the toughest job there is: Doing it well can keep you up at night thinking about your students, their stories and your role in their lives. But as teachers know, this work is also sure to surprise and reward. Teachers deserve recognition and respect for their efforts.

Those who teach well deserve the highest compensation we can offer. All teachers—especially those in one of this country’s most challenging districts—deserve the best professional development available. My hope is that a new agreement will support teachers to continue to love this hard work, to keep doing it and to become even better.

The writer is chancellor of D.C. Public Schools.

Pushing hard, with no excuses

Baltimore Sun
By Sara Neufeld
February 9, 2009

Top administrators in the Baltimore
City school system were used to staff meetings with fluid agendas that left
time for all to speak.

But now, Andrés Alonso was presiding. And class was in session.

 When I send you an e-mail, the schools’ new chief executive told them on that summer day in 2007, I expect a reply within 20 minutes. Twenty-four hours a day. Seven days a week.

This wasn’t a conversation, but more like a lecture, one in which students keep quiet for fear of being admonished for falling behind on their homework. This was the way it was going to be.

Before Alonso agreed to leave New York City, where he was deputy schools chancellor, he insisted that the Baltimore school board give him the power to run the system as he sees fit. He arrived with a mission to bring a culture of high achievement to a system where historically only about half the students have graduated.

To succeed in a job that had defeated so many others, Alonso knew he would have to create some discomfort among the people working for him. Making decisions in the best interests of children, as he pledged, would require adults to operate differently. In short order, he began cutting staff at the mammoth North Avenue headquarters to send more people and money to the schools.

“It takes extreme leaps to get a system like this to take small steps,” Alonso said. “My work here has been all about extreme leaps.”

He made clear to senior staff that, to keep their jobs, they would have to work harder and faster. He would tolerate no excuses, no passing the blame for failure. He didn’t want to hear grumbling that he was asking them to take on too much responsibility, to do things no one demanded from them before.

He didn’t really mean that they couldn’t go to church or a movie without checking their BlackBerrys, but he didn’t mind planting the thought.

“Part of his style is to take very extreme stances to move us just a little bit,” said Laura Weeldreyer, who was the head of charter schools and later promoted to be Alonso’s deputy chief of staff. “You want me to be available 24 hours a day? Really? No, 14 hours a day, but doesn’t that sound reasonable?”

Weeldreyer thought it did. “Parents and kids don’t think we’re going too fast,” she said. “None of them are like, ‘Whoa, I’m really worried about those bureaucrats at central office. I really think they’re working too hard.’”

Looking for answers

Navigating the maze he inherited, Alonso found one thing after another that defied common sense. For example, why was the system spending more to eradicate lead from school drinking fountains than it would cost to bring in bottled water?

That was easy to fix. Other problems were more deeply entrenched.

Each year, thousands of students were suspended for talking back, truancy and other nonviolent offenses, essentially giving them a vacation without meaningful consequences. At the same time, schools weren’t removing violent students for fear of receiving the embarrassing label of “persistently dangerous” from the state.

In the nine years before Alonso arrived in Baltimore, the system lost 25,000 students and gained more than 1,000 employees. So why was he hearing so many complaints about excessive class size? What was everyone doing?

At times, Alonso felt, the only way to get answers was to find them himself. “I just have to grab the bull by the horn sometimes,” he said. “I can’t afford for someone else to play matador.”

He started showing up at schools, often unannounced, at all hours. His first summer, he’d start his days checking out the exteriors of school buildings before dawn. He often spent the evening attending a PTA meeting. Within a year, he made it to more than 150 of the system’s 192 schools.

One day last spring, he dropped in unannounced at an elementary/middle school where teachers were quitting midyear.

He strolled into the office and signed the visitor log. A nervous assistant principal showed him to a room where, on a chalkboard, nine students’ names were written along with “defiance,” “disrespect,” “insubordination” and “violation of school rules.” The principal left a meeting with the parent of a child returning from suspension to join them.

Alonso had been invited to the school’s arts night, so he started his questioning on that topic. The principal told him about the full-time art teacher, the two full-time and one part-time classroom music teachers, the instrumental music teacher, the band teacher. “My God,” Alonso blurted out, “how many people do you have doing the arts in your school?”

“Seven.”

Not that he didn’t support arts education, but how was this an effective use of resources? The principal was complaining that she didn’t have the money to hire teachers in all the basic middle school subjects.

Alonso pointed out that she was due to receive an $800,000 budget increase.

During a tour, Alonso saw dirty hallways, young children lined up in the hall with no teacher, girls pushing each other into the bathroom on their way to lunch. He learned that the eighth-grade classes were on “lockdown” - the teachers were going to them rather than students switching classes - because of chronic bad behavior.

At last, in a science room, he saw the kind of instruction he sought, with children excitedly discussing the Big Bang theory. But these were gifted children, segregated from the rest of their peers.

Suddenly, sirens went off. A student had pulled the fire alarm, and the building had to be evacuated.

No more excuses

Excuses. Everywhere Alonso went, he heard excuses for why students weren’t achieving. “It’s North Avenue’s fault. It’s the parents’ fault. It’s the children’s fault,” he said at a school board meeting in March, characteristically hunched over a microphone. “And the one consistent thing since I came into Baltimore City ... is that far too much, what I hear is that it is somebody’s fault.”

Some of it was from principals, blaming the bureaucracy for being slow, incompetent, cheap.

As a special education teacher in Newark, N.J., Alonso saw what a talented principal could do with the power to take matters into her own hands. As a Ph.D candidate at Harvard University, Alonso concluded that successful school districts allow principals to make decisions based on local needs.

Now, it was time to put those observations to use.

To begin eradicating the culture of excuses, Alonso took a radical step. We’ll give you the money to run your schools, he told principals. You have to decide what to do with it and be accountable for the results.

Baltimore schools had tried decentralizing before, most recently in the 1990s. Alonso says it failed because the central office neglected its duty to support principals and hold them accountable.

Executing his plan meant moving huge amounts of people and money out of North Avenue and into the schools. Money was provided based on the number and type of students at each school, rather than the programs that existed there.

At Holabird Elementary, a tiny east-side school near the Baltimore County line, the redistribution required Principal Lindsay Krey to cut six positions, a third of her staff. The school had improved during Krey’s first year as principal, and with the reductions she worried that progress would stall.

In May, Krey committed during an appearance on WYPR-FM’s Maryland Morning to enroll another 50 children in the school of 160, to make up for the money she was losing. Back at Holabird, employees wondered how they could possibly deliver. “I was like, ‘Well, it came out of my mouth, so here we go,’” Krey said later in an interview. “It really lit a fire under us.”

All summer, she and her teachers, parents and students knocked on doors, talking up Holabird to families who were not used to being courted. Some were sneaking their kids into county schools. Others were choosing magnet and private schools. After the visits, more of them chose Holabird, where enrollment surpassed 220.

That was Alonso’s intent. “I challenged them, as in, ‘You have a good thing going. People want good schools. If they know you have a good school, you won’t have to worry,’” he said. “They did exactly what I wanted. They took it seriously.”

In the fall, Krey got her award: a budget increase.

Some principals, though, found their new responsibilities overwhelming. They were now in charge of figuring out how many teachers they could afford to hire and how many books they could afford to order. While overseeing instruction and managing the building, “you’re trying to figure out how much toilet tissue to buy,” said Phoebe Shorter, who retired last summer as principal of Franklin Square Elementary.

In addition to the budget duties, high school principals have to get hundreds of seniors to pass new state graduation exams this year. When the state school board weighed whether to postpone the requirement, Alonso testified passionately in favor of keeping it. He didn’t want to let up the pressure.

On top of that, he added yet another challenge. Between last January and September, 925 city students dropped out of high school. Alonso’s order to principals: Get them back. After a flurry of phone calls, home visits and re-enrollment fairs, more than 200 returned. That left principals to figure out what to do with students who in some cases are much older than their peers and tough to control.

Hearing complaints, Alonso had no sympathy. To him, the mentality that the students are too disruptive, too difficult to work with, is what led to them dropping out in the first place.

“On this I will take no prisoners,” he said. “So they’re difficult. As opposed to what?”

Encountering resistance

Historically, the Baltimore school system offered employment opportunities to African-Americans blocked by racism from jobs in private industry.

Over time, however, that led to a system in which patronage and loyalty sometimes helped determine promotions and in which people became wary of outsiders, particularly those who weren’t black. When Alonso arrived, his office was decorated in peachy pink and light green: the sorority colors of Alice Pinderhughes, the system’s first African-American female superintendent, who had been gone for 20 years.

One of Pinderhughes’ proteges was Charlene Cooper Boston, the acting CEO whom the school board passed over for the permanent job in favor of Alonso. To Jimmy Gittings, longtime president of the administrators union and son of Baltimore’s first black assistant superintendent, it was a “cold slap in the face” to a woman who had dedicated her career to the city schools.

Gittings soon became a leading critic of the additional responsibilities that Alonso put on principals, many of whom he says won’t speak up for fear of being fired. He and Alonso had several heated exchanges in public, with Gittings accusing Alonso of setting principals up for failure.

In August, Alonso converted an annual back-to-school seminar for administrators from a largely ceremonial event into a work day. There was no room for Gittings’ customary welcome speech. He perceived it as a snub.

“The reason morale is low is because of the way in which individuals are talked to; there’s not a friendly relationship,” he said. The system used to treat its employees like family, he said, and “it is no longer that way. Maybe it shouldn’t be, but in the 37 years that I’ve been in this system, every time you bring a CEO in from outside of the system, that CEO’s job is to cut heads off and get rid of people.”

Gittings wasn’t the only union leader to clash with Alonso. The CEO insisted in his first contract negotiations that principals be able to require teachers to spend 45 minutes a week together planning lessons or reviewing student performance. Three months into his tenure, the teachers union called for his ouster. The union didn’t oppose the idea of collaboration but was angry that teachers were being asked to do more work for the same pay. Alonso largely prevailed in arbitration, and for the most part, he and the union leaders have gotten along ever since.

Alonso has gone out of his way to get to know politicians in the city, taking the advice of the superintendent who mentored him while he was studying for his doctorate at Harvard. But part of his understanding when he took the job was that he’d report to the school board, and no one else.

That led to an incident one morning last winter in which Mayor Sheila Dixon denounced Alonso’s decision to pay students struggling to pass the state graduation exams if they attended extra tutoring and improved their performance. She had read about it in the newspaper.

Dixon spoke with Alonso later that day and by the afternoon came out in support of his action. She said she hadn’t realized the pay was just one component of a plan to help struggling students. She said she told Alonso that “he needs to keep me briefed,” and from then on, he has. Along with Gov. Martin O’Malley, Dixon does, after all, appoint the nine-member school board.

“The reason most urban superintendents don’t last a particularly long time is because of the politics,” said Michelle Rhee, the District of Columbia schools chancellor, whom Alonso consulted before taking the job in Baltimore. “What is going to determine Andrés’ longevity in the job is the extent to which the board and the business and philanthropy community continue to support him so he’s freed up to do the work he’s doing.”

Alonso enjoys the support of state Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick, who had a hostile relationship with his predecessor, Bonnie Copeland, and tried to take over 11 failing schools. “In the years I’ve worked here, he’s really the first person who’s willing to say, ‘What we’ve been doing is unacceptable,’” Grasmick said. “There’s been a lot of rationalizing in the past, and I don’t think he’s into rationalizing.”

Alonso says the hardest part of his job has been learning to work with a school board, something he didn’t have to do in New York. Board Chairman Brian Morris pushed for Alonso’s hiring and helps deliver the votes he needs to get initiatives passed. But Morris will have to leave this summer because of term limits, and Alonso’s test after that will be to maintain the backing of at least five other board members.

During Alonso’s first interview with the board, Morris said, he showed that “he can walk into a room with people that don’t know him and don’t know where he stands and within the first few minutes disarm many of their doubts and present himself as a credible, compassionate educator who is ... one of the smartest people in the room without flaunting it in your face.”

He said that’s what Alonso needs to keep doing.

“If you have the right people around the table who recognize that their service on the board is not about them but about the children,” Morris said, “then I think he’ll do fine.”

Goal of irrelevance

A year and a half into Alonso’s tenure, the changes in the school bureaucracy are profound. Nearly a third of the city’s principals have been replaced. More than 200 teachers who had worked for years without full certification were let go; another 250 just got warning letters. More than 300 of 1,500 jobs at North Avenue were eliminated, and some of those affected were transferred into more demanding jobs in schools for less money. Another 150 central office jobs are on the chopping block this year.

This month, Alonso is trying to fend off state budget cuts that he says would be devastating. But even if he can’t do that, he says his expectations will not change.

While he hasn’t really demanded 24-7 duty, he was serious about employees checking e-mail on weekends and vacations. Last spring, he sent a principal recovering from a stroke a message on a Sunday night with a 60-page draft budget document attached and a request for feedback by the next day. He didn’t know of the principal’s ailment, but he later said it wouldn’t have mattered if he had.

As for the principal, he was honored that Alonso wanted his feedback.

Many who work for Alonso are afraid of him, and he knows it. He said he tries to communicate gratitude to his employees because “I do think that people feel vulnerable when they’re with me.” But when their work doesn’t meet his expectations, he says so.

“I have too much respect for people to give them anything other than my best,” he said. “If they give me something less than what I think the kids of Baltimore deserve, I let them know. For some people, it’s devastating because they’ve never been in a culture where that’s happened.”

Susan Tibbels, principal of New Song Academy in Sandtown, marvels that she can e-mail Alonso about a problem, as she did when a teacher’s hiring was held up in human resources, and he not only answers right away but gets the problem fixed.

Previous CEOs, she said, were “so much like Oz ... that the idea of even asking to speak to them would seem irrational.”

Still, she added, “You can’t run to the CEO every time something doesn’t work.”

Tibbels is enthusiastic about Alonso’s plans for change but said he needs the right people to carry them out. She has been having trouble getting bills paid and supplies ordered by the central office, even though she has the money in her school budget and has submitted the necessary paperwork.

“I see it as the reverse of the old adage, the calm before the storm,” Tibbels said. “It’s the storm before the calm.”

Within a decade, Alonso says, his goal is “to be irrelevant,” to have the system humming on its own. But for as long as he’s in charge, he will do some things himself. He will interview every finalist for a principal’s job. For now, at least, he will review all information released by North Avenue.

Once, a reporter asked him and a staff member for the same statistic and got two different answers. “You just got a front seat to my ongoing frustration,” he replied in an e-mail. “It’s not my job to know more details than the people whose job it is.”

In other areas, he’s starting to loosen the reins. On the day before Thanksgiving, he went ahead with plans to leave for New Jersey - where he spends his rare time off visiting his family and catching up on sleep - even though there had been a near-riot the day before at Forest Park High School. He asked a handful of senior administrators to take control.

“I never would’ve left a year ago,” he said.

Among the survivors under Alonso is Benjamin Feldman, the research and testing director and a 33-year system veteran.

On a recent day, Feldman had been awake since 4 a.m. and done an hour and a half of budget analysis before getting out of bed. He said it had been years since anyone was so interested in what he does, and it feels good to know Alonso finds his work useful - even if he does rip it apart.

“I have a feeling if Jesus brought him the Lord’s Prayer, he would’ve had edits,” Feldman said.

He said some people in the system “just don’t get it. They’ve never taken a class this challenging.”

“You know what would be really heartbreaking?” Feldman asked. “If he failed. If he can’t do it, no one will ever do it. We will never have a superintendent of this caliber again.”

February 2, 2009 

Education Reform Consensus Grows on Fixing Urban Schools; The ground in the battle for school reform is beginning to change

US News & World Report
by Mort Zuckerman
February 2, 2009

One of the most important yet least noticed rallies in Washington during Barack Obama’sinauguration took place at Cardozo High School, a struggling inner-cityschool located not far from the steps of theU.S. Capitol where thechief justice swore in the nation’s first African-American President.

The Martin Luther KingDay rally at the run-down auditorium at CardozoHigh drew a coalitio of strange but influential bedfellows that spannedthe political spectrum, from the civil rights firebrand Rev. Al Sharptonto GOP presidential candidate John McCain.  All of the speakers,however, were united by a single cause: A determination to tackle thenation’s last, great civil rights battle -the shameful achievement gapbetween minority and white students.

Despite its humble setting, the Cardozo rally helped mark a seachangein the battle to fix our ailing urban schools. It provided aremarkable and riveting piece of political theater that would have beenall but unthinkable just a few years ago.

The rally at Cardozo was hosted by the Education Equality Project andits odd couple co-chairmen, Joel Klein, the reformist chancellor of theNew York City Department of Education, and Sharpton.

In a land where education opportunity is supposed to be the greatequalizer, the average black and Hispanic 12th-grader in the UnitedStates  today has the reading and math skills of the average whiteeighth-grader. White parents would be up in arms if their 17-year-oldsons and daughters had the cognitive skills of 13-year-olds, andSharpton and African-American mayors like Cory Booker of Newark, AdrianFenty of Washington and Kevin Johnson, the former basketball star andnew mayor of Sacramento, are equally fed up.

Yet what was most striking about the rally at Cardozo was not just Sharpton’s call to responsibility, but the bipartisan lineupthatstepped up to the lectern, one by one, to challenge the educationestablishment.

A parade of black, Democratic mayors at the EEP rally declared theynolonger would defend the practices that hurt minority students. TheDemocratic Party, Booker declared, had sometimes gone “the wrong way oneducation.” “I am no longer concerned with right and left,” heconcluded. “I just want to go forward!”

Like Booker, none of the speakers at the EEP rally fell back on tirednostrums to excuse the poor performance of minority students ortojustify the need for new spending. Not a single civil rights leadersaid that disadvantaged students bear too many burdens of poverty todowell in school or that the solution to the achievement gap was toshower new money on urban schools. Nor did anyone suggest thatachievement tests were inherently unfair to minority students andshould not be used under the No Child Left Behind Act to holdschools,principals and teachers accountable for raising studentperformance. In fact, this generation of school reformers believes thatschools should be more accountable for student learning, not less so.

No bipartisan tableau at the rally was more striking than the jointappearance of Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, on her lastday in office, and Arne Duncan, who would succeed Spellings the nextday as secretary of education after President Obama’s swearing-in.Spellings and Duncan affirmed that they, too, believed closing theachievement gap was the nation’s enduring civil rights challenge. Evenin the face of poverty, great schools matter, Duncan suggested.

A few short hours later Barack Obama took on the cynics of change inhis inaugural address. “What the cynics fail to understand is that theground has shifted beneath them, that the stale political argumentsthat have consumed us for so long, no longer apply.”

Mr. President, the ground in the battle for school reform is beginning to shift, too. Just ask them at Cardozo High.

January 26, 2009

Chavous Rallies for Education Reform

Wabash College News
by Jim Amidon
January 26, 2009

Wabash alumnus Kevin Chavous ’78, joined by nearly a dozen political and education leaders, spoke at a rally for the Educational Equality Project on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day calling for an end to “the last civil rights struggle in America.”

Chavous, who is an attorney in the Washington, D.C. law firm of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, is the chairman of Democrats for Education Reform, which sponsored the rally.

“It is time for our country to stand up for our children, Chavous said. “As great as we are, we still are failing our kids. Failing them miserably. When half of the children of color drop out of high school, we are failing our kids; when we offer fewer and fewer AP courses, we are failing our kids; when our world education rankings continue to slide, we are failing our kids; and when we remain committed to a one size fits all model of education service delivery, we are failing our kids. Yes, there are some very good schools in America that provide some children with an excellent education. But that is not good enough and we are still failing our kids.”

In his work as an attorney, Chavous specializes in education, corporate diversity counseling, and public policy. The former three-term D.C. City Councilman is the author of Serving our Children — Charter Schools and the Reform of American Public Education.

Joining Chavous at the Education Equality Project rally were Joel Klein, Al Sharpton, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, Newark Mayor Cory Booker, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, as well, as Senator John McCain, Dr. Michael Lomax, and Newt Gingrich.

“At this historic time, in this city of our nation’s founders, on the day designated to honor Dr. Martin Luther King and his legacy, it is fitting that we all stand before you to challenge America,” Chavous said in his remarks at the rally. “Although this challenge is made out of love and respect, it is a challenge nonetheless.”

A leading national advocate for school choice, Mr. Chavous helped to shepherd the charter school movement into the District. Under his education committee chairmanship, charter schools grew from zero to more than forty schools and 17,000 students in six short years. That number represented twenty percent of the overall public school population in the District of Columbia, the highest percentage of charter schools in the country.

Chavous used the occasion of MLK, Jr. Day to remind the large, enthusiastic crowd at the rally of Dr. King’s beliefs on education.

“In his ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail,’ Dr. King directly chastises white clergy for their unwillingness to confront the status quo on the issue of segregation and social justice,” Chavous said. “Dr. King alludes to the interconnectedness of us all by saying that ‘we are caught on an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly’. Indeed, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the inter-related structure of reality.

“Like King, we need to be honest and forthright about what ails us in education. If a child is failing in a school in southeast Washington, DC, it hurts the suburbanite living in Aurora, Colorado. And we all lose. Until each and every American child receives equal access to a high quality education, our destiny will never be fulfilled, our promise never reached. This is the last civil rights struggle in America and we need to employ the same sense of urgency and resolve that we did to end segregation during the time of King.

Chavous advocated a number of changes, including supporting teachers to the fullest extent possible, including raising teachers’ salaries to attract the best and brightest minds to solve one of our society’s greatest challenges — education reform.

“Our message is clear: change means change,” Chavous said on the eve of the inauguration of President Barack Obama. “Continuing to do what we have done in education, in the same way, is unacceptable. On that score, the education cartel, those who insist on maintenance and continuation of the status quo, should take note. We are determined to fight you for meaningful change in our schools by any means necessary. Our kids can’t wait.

“Let none of us rest until we do become the change we are looking for in education, with the ability to guarantee as a fundamental civil right that every child will receive a high quality education each time they walk through a schoolhouse door.”

Fine Print Matters in Measuring Schools

The Dallas Morning Star
by William McKenzie
January 26, 2009

We’ve focused on Barack Obama’s ascendancy as a story about race in America, which it is. But his emergence is also a story about education and the role good schools play in the rise of Americans once were shut out of our system. Not only did Obama graduate from Columbia University and Harvard Law School, but his father went to Harvard and his wife and her brother graduated from Princeton.

They didn’t get there without attentive families and teachers, both in public and private schools long before they reached prestigious universities. Education was what prepared them for a world far beyond Hawaii or Chicago.

So, here’s my question: Why wouldn’t everyone in this country want to devote as much attention as possible to enabling every child to have those same opportunities? The Obamas are living proof that good educations can close many of the gaps in American life.

This question is pertinent nationally and here in Texas. Discussions will start soon in both capitals about how to close the “achievement gap” between white and minority kids.

As this discussion begins in Washington, conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats will take shots at the No Child Left Behind Act. Some conservatives have bought into the mantra that the law is about “teaching to the test”; some liberals hate it because George W. Bush was behind the 2001 law.

Let’s put aside slogans and partisanship and look at the principles that inform the law and with which all states must comply. And here they are:

Every child should learn at grade level. States will test students annually to see if they are learning at grade level. If students aren’t, Washington will push – and invest in – schools and teachers to get students there.

It’s that simple. And, really, why are we even having this debate? What parent doesn’t want his or her child learning at grade level?

Not many, but we still are going to have a row. And it will come down to the fine print, where opponents will try to water down school accountability.

Fortunately, new Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan appears to get the importance of measuring schools. He showed that as the head of Chicago’s public schools and talked specifically about accountability during his confirmation hearing, where he called education “the civil rights issue of our generation.”

At his back are minority leaders who want to know if schools are getting children learning at grade level. The Rev. Al Sharpton and Newark Mayor Cory Booker are among them. And Democrats from the past, like Robert Kennedy and Daniel Moynihan, to Democrats of today, like Ted Kennedy and Joel Klein, are examples of strong believers in school accountability.

Here in Texas, the accountability wars are about to flare up since the state’s way of evaluating schools is up for review in this Legislature.

Some lawmakers will want to weaken the system, for instance, by judging students’ progress by a “portfolio of their work” instead of how they perform on an annual test. Start down that portfolio path, and pretty much anything can get thrown in as a measure.

Of course, no law is perfect.

With No Child, there needs to be a stronger effort to intervene in wayward schools. That will require newer and better teachers – and the dollars to train and retain them.

In Texas, the state could give schools breathing room on annual rankings if one group of failing students were holding back the entire school. A school could get credit for passing the vast majority of its students while still being honest that some aren’t cutting it.

But beware the details in any change. We could end up with mush. More important, we would fail kids, like the next Barack or Michelle Obama.

Anyone care to explain why that would be a good idea?

William McKenzie is a Dallas Morning News editorial columnist and a moderator of Texas Faith. His e-mail address is wmckenzie@dallasnews.com

January 19, 2009

Come on up for the Rising

How Barack Obama can help to improve Washington D.C.‘s failing schools. 

The New Republic
by Joel I. Klein and Al Sharpton
January 19, 2009

Martin Luther King would have been overjoyed towitness Barack Obama’s inauguration, and yet he still wouldn’t haveproclaimed our arrival in the Promised Land. King knew, as W.E.B.DuBois observed 60 years ago, that “of all the civil rights for whichthe world has struggled and fought for 5,000 years, the right to learnis undoubtedly the most fundamental. ... We should fight to the lastditch to keep open the right to learn.” Today this most fundamentalcivil right, the opportunity for an equal education, remains a distantmirage—and nowhere more so than in the nation’s capital.

Today, Martin Luther King Day, we will be doingour part to fight for the creation of equal educational opportunitiesfor the poor. The Education Equality Project, a nonpartisan coalitionthat includes D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty, is holding a rally at CardozoHigh School to shine a spotlight on the nation’s—and thecity’s—shameful achievement gap. Since the election, both Barack andMichelle Obama have said they want to aid D.C. school reform efforts,and the president-elect has said that he plans to make “regular visitsto local schools to meet with kids and meet with teachers andprincipals.” We second those intentions—and believe thepresident-elect has a special opportunity to refashion the federalgovernment’s unique role in D.C school reform.

All throughout the country, the academic achievement of black andHispanic 12th graders in the United States is far below that of theirwhite peers; in big cities about half of minority students in ninthgrade drop out of high school. Yet the National Assessment ofEducational Progress, the nation’s “report card,” shows that thisstaggering achievement gap is even wider in Washington, which is nowvying for the dubious distinction of having the worst big-city schoolsystem in America. The district has the widest performance gap betweenwhite and minority students of eleven cities tested in the NAEP; evenlow-income students in Washington did worse than their low-income peersin other urban areas. Citywide, less than ten percent of ninth gradersgo on to graduate and then finish college within five years. And, as isusually the case, the numbers are far worse in the more economicallydepressed parts of town. “If you live in Georgetown [as opposed to]living in Anacostia, you get two wildly different educationalexperiences,” says D.C. school chancellor Michelle Rhee. “That is thebiggest social injustice imaginable.”

The District and its public schools have had a long and oftencontentious relationship with the federal government. Until theestablishment of home rule in 1974, the D.C. school district was theonly major school system directly controlled by the federal governmentand funded by Congress. As such, federal officials initially wereoptimistic that the district’s schools, as President Dwight Eisenhowerput it in 1954, would be a “model” for school integration. In 1956,assistant superintendent Carl F. Hansen went so far as to report toCongress that D.C.‘s schools were a “miracle of social adjustment.“Even after the establishment of home rule, Congress continued to retainoversight of D.C.‘s schools—and meddled in the school district tomixed effect.

What can the federal government do now to alter its historic role andhelp boost student achievement in the District’s schools? Two pieces ofnews make us optimistic that the Obama administration can play a moreproductive part. First, at a time when many school districts arestrapped for cash, the poor performance of minority students in theDistrict is not primarily due to a lack of resources; D.C. spends moreper pupil than all but two of the largest 100 school districts in thenation. For decades, the District has spent far too much onadministration and far too little on teaching and instruction, butschool chancellor Rhee has started to correct these skewed priorities.She has let go more than 100 workers in the district’s bloated900-person headquarters and dismissed more than 30 principals.President-elect Obama has little direct control of hiring and firingdecisions in the District, but he does have the power of the bullypulpit—which he can use to reinforce the principle that school reformshould be about helping kids, not administrators.

Second, president-elect Obama has already embraced two reforms thatcould substantially improve student performance in the District. He hasproposed to double funding for the Federal Charter School Program tosupport the startup of more successful charter schools. The District isalready a charter school mecca—nearly a third of all public schoolstudents now attend charters—and the provision of choice andcompetition has helped parents and students alike. Many of the city’stop gap-closing schools for minority students, like KIPP D.C. KeyAcademy, are charters.

The president-elect has also shown a keen awareness of the need totrain, recruit, and reward highly effective teachers in undeservedurban schools. Studies have repeatedly shown that good teachers havethe greatest impact on student learning—and urban school reform cannotultimately succeed without reforming the teaching profession. Aspresident-elect Obama pointed out during the campaign, “the single mostimportant factor in determining [student] achievement is not the colorof their skin or where they come from. It’s not who their parents areor how much money they have—it’s who their teacher is.”

The president-elect has proposed a new Service Scholarship program torecruit instructors and place new teachers in overcrowded districts andhard-to-staff subjects like math and science. He also has announcedplans to train 30,000 high-quality teachers by expanding TeacherResidency Programs. Those are excellent first steps. But we believethat the federal effort to improve teaching should be more ambitiousyet. We recommend that the incoming administration take most of the$30+ billion it now spends on K-12 education—including all of thefunding it now spends on low-income students through Title I—andredirect the funding to support the recruitment and retention oftop-flight teachers in underserved urban schools.

It’s no secret that good teachers are the unsung heroes of high-povertyschools. Yet there is also no escaping the fact that union practiceswhich impede student learning must be changed if good teachers are tobe justly rewarded. The best math teacher at a school cannot be paidthe same salary as the incompetent instructor down the hall.

Here again, the District is fortunate that the president-elect is aDemocratic lawmaker who has supported merit pay for teachers. AndChancellor Rhee, who Obama hailed as Washington’s “wonderful newsuperintendent” in the final campaign debate, is firmly committed tofighting the inflexible union tenure protections, single-salary paystructures, and burdensome work rules that protect weak teachers buthurt students.

Michelle Rhee’s own career provides testimony that there is a betterway to develop and train teachers. From her earliest years as a Teachfor America recruit at Harlem Park Elementary in Baltimore to herfounding of The New Teacher Project, Rhee has promoted highly effectiveteachers as the antidote to the achievement gap. The New TeacherProject alone has trained or hired more than 30,000 high-qualityteachers for high-need schools, most of whom fill critical shortages inmath, science, and special education. Already, Rhee has offered toeffectively double the salary of teachers in D.C. who do the most toraise student performance (to as much as $130,000 a year) in exchangefor their giving up tenure for one year. (Alternatively, teachers couldretain tenure and accept a smaller raise, not based on merit pay).

To date, the Washington Teachers’ Union has refused to put Rhee’sproposal to a vote. But there is reason to think that the WTU’sintransigence may not last forever—and that Rhee’s innovative plan tobolster teacher quality could eventually become a blueprint for othercities. In mid-November, Randi Weingarten, president of the AmericanFederation of Teachers, the WTU’s parent union, pledged that “no issue[with the exception of vouchers] should be off the table” anymore inurban school reform. “I will start,” Weingarten announced, “by tacklingthe tough issues like teacher assignments, tenure, and differentiatedpay.”

As the more parochial response of the WTU shows, and as thepresident-elect has pointed out on numerous occasions, true educationreform can only be brought about by a nonpartisan coalition willing tochallenge the education establishment. Many members of the EducationEquality Project are longtime Democrats, civil rights leaders, andbig-city superintendents. But our ranks also include Republican leaderslike John McCain and Newt Gingrich. Today—perhaps for the firsttime—the sentiment to fix the District’s public schools prevailsacross party lines.

Some of our erstwhile allies on the left oppose radical school reformin the District and elsewhere. Schools, they argue, cannot overcome theburdens of poverty for students. Does it matter if a student is so poorthat he receives food stamps, or if he is reared by a single mother orgrandmother rather than two parents? Of course. But poverty cannotbecome an excuse for giving up on schools and students—and all themore so now that we will have a president who was raised by his singlemother and his grandparents, and whose family was forced to go on foodstamps on several occasions. Across the country, high-poverty schoolsare showing that disadvantaged students can achieve at high levels. Inthe District’s classrooms, the answer to the achievement gap simplycannot be “No, we can’t.”

Other skeptics of far-reaching reforms counsel president-elect Obama tomove slowly. The hidebound D.C.-school system is incapable of absorbingrapid change—or so the argument goes. But in 2009, we do not believethat Martin Luther King would have signed on to the ranks of theinch-worm incrementalists. Closing the achievement gap in the Districtshould be about helping disadvantaged students, not about protectingthe prerogatives of school administrators, teacher unions, andeducation schools. As King wrote shortly before he was killed, “Theluxury of a leisurely approach to urgent solutions—the ease ofgradualism—[has been] forfeited by ignoring the issues for too long.“Amen. 

January 20, 2009

Duncan, Spellings Join Education Equality Project’s Event

Education Week
by Michele McNeil and Alyson Klein
January 20, 2009

Arne Duncan, President-elect Barack Obama’s pick for U.S. secretary ofeducation, joined the woman he’ll be replacing, Margaret Spellings, atan event this afternoon hosted by the Education Equality Project,an organization headed by New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Kleinand the Rev. Al Sharpton that calls for a “no excuses” approach toeducation redesign.

“I’m thrilled to be passing the baton at the U.S. Department ofEducation to my good friend and fellow reformer, Arne Duncan,“Spellings told the crowd gathered at the District of Columbia’s CardozoHigh School. “President-elect Obama made a very courageous choice inchoosing this man.”

“I’ve learned so much from Secretary Spellings,” Duncan said. Thereare schools across the nation that are doing an exemplary job ofraising student achievement, he said. “Our challenge is to take thosepockets of excellence and make that the norm, rather than theexception.”

The gathering, a celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, framededucation overhaul as a civil rights issue. It was a Who’s Who ofbig-city mayors, urban superintendents, civil rights leaders, and evensome big-name Republicans, including Sen. John McCain of Arizona,Obama’s opponent in the November election. McCain has supported Kleinand Sharpton’s effort. (You can read more about the role that theEducation Equality Project played in the presidential campaign here.)

McCain got a rousing reception from the mostly African-American crowd,many of whom were wearing Obama buttons and T-shirts. They rushedforward to take his picture when he came on stage.

“Friends, this issue must unite us,” McCain said. “This issue is theuniting factor that should drive us in the twenty-first century and inthe next four years. We must join together.”

Mayor Cory Booker of Newark, N.J., a Democrat, challenged his partyto stand up to “special interests” that he said have halted progress inclosing the achievement gap.

“I’m in the mood for a movement in America. I feel it spreading fromcoast to coast, from north to south, from people who say ‘no excuses,’” he said. “As a Democrat, we have not always been right on education.As a Democrat, there are forces in our party that sometimes pull us thewrong way on education. ... I am no longer concerned with right andleft. I just want to go forward.”

The crowd heard from more than a dozen prominent speakers, includingformer Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich; former Colorado Gov. RoyRomer, who headed ED in ‘08, an effort to raise the profile ofeducation during the 2008 campaign; New York City Mayor MichaelBloomberg; Kevin Chavous, a former D.C. councilman and a founder ofDemocrats for Education Reform, a political action group; Mayor MichaelNutter of Philadelphia; Mayor Kevin Johnson of Sacramento; andphilanthropist Eli Broad, whose foundation gives a coveted award forurban school districts (and is underwriting an Education Week series pegged to the 25th anniversary of A Nation at Risk).

One of the final speakers was Michelle Rhee,the chancellor of the D.C. schools, who has clashed with some parentsand teachers in implementing an ambitious plan to overhaul thechronically troubled system.

“A lot of people have said that we are trying to move too fast,” Rhee said. “It is not possible to move fast enough.”

But when she told the crowd that “a lot of people benefit from the factthat we are dysfunctional” as a school district—an apparent referenceto the local teachers’ union—one woman in the back of auditoriumshouted, “That’s not true!”

Tiko L. Jackson, a Washington resident whose son goes to CardozoHigh, said the speakers were “right on point,” particularly in callingfor parents to get more involved in their children’s education.

So far, she’s been happy with Rhee, Jackson said, and is glad that thechancellor is committed to removing ineffective teachers from thesystem.

“We’re starting to see some real change,” she said.

January 20, 2009

Odd Couple Goes to Washington

The New York Post
by Brendon Scott
January 20, 2009

WASHINGTON - Give Al Sharpton and New York schools chief Joel Klein high marks for diversity training.

The surprise allies for education reform yesterday got together forone of the unlikeliest political gatherings ever to grace a high-schoolauditorium.

On stage were, among others, John McCain, Mayor Bloomberg, Newt Gingrich, ex-Washington Mayor Marion Barry and chinchilla-wearing singer Wyclef Jean.  Each addressed the 400 or so teachers, parents and kids inattendance at Cardozo HS, two miles from the Capitol, sharing theirthoughts on how to close the achievement gap between black and whitestudents.  Collectively, they spoke for more than two hours, as the audience applauded, snapped photos and voiced support.  A number of the speakers hailed Klein’s policies as a blueprint for improving urban schools nationwide.  Bloomberg joked, “Whoever thought you’d see Al Sharpton and JoelKlein on the same stage? That is either the strongest one-two punch forpublic education or a real-life before-and-after hair-growth ad.”

January 19, 2009

Obamas Make MLK Day One of Service

The president-elect paints a youth shelter; his wife packs supplies for the troops.

Los Angeles Times