A few more words…
Last week, Greg Toppo of USA Today solicited advice on closing the achievement gap in American education for now President Barack Obama.
Here is what CER’s Jeanne Allen had to offer:
As a nation, we are ignorant of the crisis we face in education. Use your historic achievement to convince us that education’s failure is extensive and not limited to the streets of D.C., the hills of Appalachia or the banks of the Mississippi. Pepper your every remark with the reality we face. Implore us to action. Do for education what Al Gore did for the environment. … We mandate that children attend schools we know are failing. We say we are working on it, but continue to send them because … why??
Parents and educators of students in “better” schools are comforted by grade inflation. Policymakers believe failure is a result of bad homes and communities, not bad schools. The education establishment protects this lie and challenges every solution that could make schools great. They scorn data and ignore that our achievement is an international embarrassment.
Bold solutions take only months, not decades, to implement. We lack the will because we lack the understanding that we are in crisis.
Your words can change that.
The Education Trust’s Amy Wilkins, 2007 National Teacher of the Year Andrea Peterson and the Century Foundation’s Richard Kahlenberg weighed in with their thoughts as well.
What bit of advice would you offer the new Administration for achieving education across the board? How about for teachers and parents?
Please join in the conversation below…
Derrell Bradford
January 21, 2009 | 12:34 PMMy Advice: Give minority children Obama’s chance.
Barack Obama’s ascendance to the presidency has been a triumphant opus to the American possibility. Obama, a man identifying himself as African American, has transcended the rules of race in our politics, shirking the iron cloak and repressive history of blacks in this country for the garb of his hopeful brand of statesmanship.
However, his meteoric rise and his role as heir to the future of black Americans are the results of a dramatic life opportunity that made Obama who he is today. An opportunity cruelly denied millions of African American and Hispanic children even as they aspire to, one day, walk in Obama’s footsteps. And that opportunity was embodied in his access to a quality education. Because of this, Obama’s education policies—particularly whether minority children will have school choice and the same educational opportunities he had—will be the most resonant and of his presidency.
In America’s history, there has been no president whose k-12 experience mattered more than Obama’s. Implicit in his ability to overcome race and ideology as he has were not only his exposure at Columbia University and Harvard Law School, but his attendance of the prestigious Punahou School, a private, diverse, college prep school in Honolulu, HI. Hawaii has one of the country’s worst public school systems, with NAEP scores near the bottom consistently. It typifies the kind of school system minority students nationally attend en masse. The kind that spurn reform, choke hope and throttle change, the core tenets of Obama’s revolutionary campaign.
Obama is of an often lauded, hyper-educated, breed of “post-racial” African American current-and-recent Democratic elected official. Among them are Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick (Milton Academy & Harvard), former Tennessee Congressman Harold Ford, Jr. (St. Albans & UPenn), Illinois Congressman and prospective U.S. Senator Jesse Jackson, Jr. (St. Albans & Chicago Theological Seminary), and, of course, Newark Mayor Cory Booker, the lone public school graduate among these (Northern Valley Regional in affluent Bergen County & Stanford) who is also the most vocal supporter of school choice. Other than the country’s support of them and their shared support for Obama, what ties them together is this: they went to schools—overwhelmingly but not exclusively private—that children who share their skin color across this country do not.
Elite private schools like the ones these African American leaders attended, high performing charters, and selective magnets to a lesser extent, are overcoming the achievement gap and making the next generation of African American political leaders. These schools share similar characteristics: focus, a relentless push for results, high achieving school cultures, and, most importantly, a highly skilled teaching force. Either through self selection, or through the competitive nature of the private, and charter, school spaces, these schools attract and retain teachers for whom there are no excuses for failure. Which is to say, there is every reason for a minority student to succeed within them.
In this conundrum—managing traditional party loyalties to the education status quo with the fierce reality of his own existence, and the rise to the nation’s highest office—lies the true challenge for Obama. And in it lies the transformative role of education, and its place in shaping the future of black political participation.
Additionally, these schools, private ones in particular, ostensibly subscribe to a unified standard that is genuinely high: college readiness. The achievement gap is exacerbated by the lack of a unified standard across states, the inability, or unwillingness of state Departments of Education, to implement rigorous curricula, and a focus on “graduation,” not “education.” Minority students are getting diplomas that say they have mastered the same content as their white counterparts, but this, in actuality, is smoke and mirrors of the worst kind.
Sadly, the Obamas, Bookers, and Fords of the world remain in short supply because the channels that produce them are locked in the grip of traditional education reform leadership. Ironically, this has ensured that the fight for the future of quality educational access (and the production of future black leaders like Obama) will be between African Americans of one generation who found prosperity working in public education and who possess the lion’s share of the political power, and the minority students whose futures are sacrificed on the altar of the failed reforms that typify the nation’s urban education systems.
But there is hope and, interestingly, it comes from a leader of the old guard of black politics. Rev. Al Sharpton, in a recent press conference on education reform offered, “There have been a lot of old alliances being protected, and the children are not being protected. And if we’re going to move forward, we’re going to have to be able to have new alliances here—that might mean some old relationships with teachers unions, principals unions and all are going to be a little troubled. But we cannot say that we’re going to close this achievement gap but protect ineffective teachers or principals or school chiefs or not challenge parents.”
Sharpton rightly challenges the adults who run our public education bureaucracies as well as parents. But in his, Booker’s, Patrick’s, and the “black community’s” support of Obama—in the adoration many felt as he was elected—the entirety of the man must also be accepted. We must understand that his experience was profoundly shaped by the opportunity to attend a top-flight independent school—an environment that correlates with his message and the success of many new black leaders, which is completely congruous with the closure of the achievement gap—instead of what was likely an underperforming local district school. And that, as Obama’s life shows, and his choice to send his daughters to private school in Chicago and now D.C echoes, the future of black America, and the closure of the achievement gap, lies in school choice, whether the status quo likes it or not.
As Obama, the Harvard lawyer, would understand well, res ipsa loquitur—the thing speaks for itself.
Will President Obama affect the change so many of our minority students need by embracing educational opportunity, and access to quality public, private, and charter schools, along with a relentless focus on achievement, and a seriousness necessary to embrace the facts of school failure, over the politics as usual of the education establishment? Thus moving the debate beyond where it stands mired currently.
Yes he can.
Yes, he must.
Momindant
January 22, 2009 | 12:27 PMAbsolutely true that Obama was the beneficiary of the best schools, beginning with Punahou, but before Punahou, he had a nagging, persistent mother, who watched over his schoolwork and would not allow him to fall below her own high standards. Upon moving back to Hawaii, his grandparents assumed this role, with expectations that he would never deliver less than his best. We have to change American cultural aspirations, and place our empahsis on academics instead of sports, popular culture, and yes, even the fine arts, if it detracts from our ability to fund public school programs in science and math. We have to demand responsibility from the parents and guardians, as well as the students and teachers. We also need to abandon a one-size-fits-all educational model, because it simply does not work. We need to adopt divergent educational tracks, offering a choice of practical vocational ed or rigorous college prep, instead of trying to blend the two into something far less than satisfactory.
Darren
January 22, 2009 | 1:53 PMOver at Joanne Jacobs’ site is a post called “Let parents ‘be the change’”. It discusses how to get parents, especially the parents of lower performing students, more involved in the education of their children. I liked the idea of public service announcements.
Schools also need to reach out to parents. I worked at a low-SES school, and the first thing we did was have a Back To School Barbecue and invite all the families. That way, the first experience the parents had with the school that year was a good one–and there was FOOD. That was a big help, they didn’t see school as the enemy (that, of course, came later).
Bully pulpit. PSAs. These are the things the President should focus on. Vocational ed, individual programs to reach out to parents–the states should deal with those topics.
Don Long
January 23, 2009 | 9:51 AMPresident-elect Barack Obama?s election is as historic as that of FDR?s in 1932 and promises a ?rendezvous with destiny? not only for African Americans but also for all of the American people. He has inspired millions of Americans to get engaged in the democratic process and to continue to want to participate in and lead change at the national, state, and local level. But, while the election may represent the achievement of Martin Luther King?s dream, the real work lies ahead and requires every citizen to take an active role. Genuine transformation in a democracy requires change from both the top down and the bottom up. Public education is the best choice to build upon and fulfill this renewal of American democracy. Here, as seen in the minority achievement gap and the national crisis in dropout rates of up to 50 percent among African American and Hispanic students, the reality of failed promises and dreams demands our attention and energy to make this a true rendezvous with destiny. And the strengths of public education, its model of community empowerment, makes this possible.
Arguably, the greatest harm of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), with its top-down and prescriptive test-driven system of accountability, has been its enormous condescension to the real change agents in education ? teachers, students, and parents. There has been a myopia in state capitols and Washington D.C. that bureaucrats, test publishers, and policymakers can effect change simply through the design of tests and the calibration of incentives and penalties based on test data. This is education reform on the cheap and results only in superficial change. It is reform with the ?people? left out and thereby fails to tap into the wealth of social capital that makes America exceptional. If we are to prepare our children for the 21st century, classrooms and schools must be 21st century learning and leading communities, and this requires making optimal use of all available talents and resources. Fortunately, there is international research that shows how we can do this, while building on the foundations of standards-based reform and the noble intentions of NCLB.
The astonishing and historic achievement of NCLB is that it has clearly concentrated all minds on the moral imperative of equity and excellence in education. And yet, the hoped for gains in student achievement have failed to materialize under NCLB even after six years of implementation. Even more distressing is an analysis by the National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE) that predicts, given the current trends, at least 90 percent of schools and local districts will fail to meet the NCLB goal by 2014 and therefore be subject to restructuring, including being closed. In preparing for the coming ESEA reauthorization, a new ?reform consensus? has been forged, led by the nation?s governors and chief state school officers. The proposals of this consensus present only incremental changes in accountability and testing. They mainly include ?growth models? that measure individual student growth, differentiated consequences for varying degrees of failure to achieve mandated adequate yearly progress, performance assessments that measure and support higher order thinking skills, and the use of multiple measures in accountability that recognize that students, schools and districts show their ?true? performance in a variety of ways and should be evaluated accordingly. Lacking this alternative vision and democratic trust, the dominant ESEA reform consensus would simply give states more flexibility, while leaving the fundamental regime in tact; this will merely replace one tyrant with fifty. The cumbersome weight of its accountability system ? ponderous, slow-moving masses of data that hang over schools like a heavy omnipresence in the sky ‑ is an anachronism. The reformers are on the wrong side of today?s digital divide of lightening quick information and action and of bottom-up empowerment. Instead, they reflect the hegemonic persuasion in American culture for technical engineering and abstract system building, for software and hardware solutions, and a deepening distrust in human judgment and democracy. Increasingly, education is bathed in the black ink of data.
The idea of balance promotes rethinking accountability in fundamental ways. The creation of district and classroom data supports the conception of community-based accountability, which is an ongoing engagement of a school community, broadly defined, using a rich variety of data to evaluate schools and to proactively support and continuously improve them. This is in contrast to the present accountability system that imposes restructuring after long neglect. A two-tiered system of state- and community-based accountability enables reframing the current use of state testing data in the accountability system. State tests can serve the more limited but valid purpose as a ?first glance? identifier of local districts and schools that require further inspection to determine if in need of improvement. State testing can be incorporated in a proactive technical assistance orientation, where states work in partnership with districts to provide support as needed in a more timely manner. As in Europe, more fine-grained on-site analyses of these schools identified by state tests as not meeting state benchmarks could then be carried out, using the full variety of evidence to yield the most accurate and comprehensive evaluation. And we can even exceed the European model by taking advantage of our uniquely American advantage of citizen volunteerism and community engagement. Community Boards of Review, representative of all local stakeholders in education, would conduct their work freely and openly to evaluate schools, though with technical assistance and evaluative criteria from the state or district.
Research by the OECD attributes higher performance by nations in PISA in mathematics and science not only to more balanced assessment systems but also to a culture of strong, ongoing support for teachers and collaborative work structures. Over the last two decades, there has been a growing body of research in labor and economic policy that demonstrates the importance of employee participation and representation in decision-making for greater productivity, flexibility, and innovation in the 21st century ?knowledge economy? The support in this research for more democratic ways of organizing work to promote learning and leadership resonates with current education ideas of teacher leadership, professional learning communities, and whole school change. Fostering the spread of high performance work organizations can best support full development and utilization of human resources. The ?flat world? discovered recently by Thomas Friedman, where educated individuals are free to communicate, connect, collaborate, and create at anytime and from anywhere in an increasingly interdependent and diverse world, makes even more imperative the movement to more democratic ways of organizing work (The World is Flat, 2005).
Within the framework of balanced accountability and assessment, high performance schools can be the pioneers of high performance work organizations in their broader communities. In this way, educators can work with active citizens and lead not only in the transformation of their schools but also in that of their communities. By calling forth the strengths in education, we can reinvigorate our democracy and capitalism too.
Derrell Bradford
January 26, 2009 | 2:53 PMThere is an interesting conundrum emerging here. It is informed by my perspective in NJ, so feel free to take it or leave it if you’re in another state.
There is a circle of reform that starts and ends–and also succeeds or fails–with parents. We have a long series of court-ordered reforms here that have informed our urban education reform discussion. Increased spending (well over $20,000 a student in our urban districts, fully funded construction, teacher salaries in places like Newark near $80K) along with full-day free pre-k for urban families are precisely how we have dealt with the parenting deficit many of these children suffer from. So, we’ve funded a system, and implemented numerous programs, of which I only mention a few, that are meant to address the challenges of a child who comes from a home that is very likely low-income, very likely broken, and very likely lacking in the enrichment his or her suburban counterpart receives.
So here’s the circle: we set up and fund a system to deal with a child who has none of these supports, but still, in the presence of the new resources and programs, require the parent to transform for us to be successful. That doesn’t square with me.
Even ceding that a child with the ideal parent/s has a better chance, I don’t think it’s fair, to the child, that we require an involved parent to make the system successful. In our urban districts, we have the children we have. They come from the homes they come from. That’s the start, middle, and finish of the exchange. We need a system that is successful in that environment with those preconditions.
I don’t say it to assert that it is fair, but to say that, it is how it is.
Notably: and as I am sure you can tell about me…there is greater capacity for accepting and dealing with this challenge than in our traditional public school sector alone. We should be using it. And using it today.