Are great schools made ON PURPOSE?

Samuel Casey Carter seems to think so in his new book, On Purpose: How Great School Cultures Form Strong Character.

On Purpose introduces readers to the teachers and school leaders who will stop at nothing to see the lives of their children changed for the better,and the children whose futures are brighter because they attend schools with cultures designed on purpose.

Want to learn more?

Then please join Casey, Jeanne Allen and Checker Finn on February 16th in Washington, DC for An Evening On Purpose.

Click here for details and to register.

We look forward to seeing you there.

If you’ve picked up a newspaper or turned on the evening news lately, it’s been all doom and gloom for schools, teachers and the future of American education.

First, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) tag teamed behind Education Stimulus 2.0 in a hearing on the ED budget, claiming that another $23 billion is “absolutely necessary” to save up to 300,000 teacher jobs, proving that everyday is Christmas for the unions (I guess last year’s $100 billion just wasn’t enough).

Then the NEA asked us to remember the children.

Tons of federal money + jobs + children + tears + zero historical context = Media Tsunami

Former CER colleague Neal McCluskey, however, actually grabs the data and puts it all into perspective:

For one thing, in 2007-08 public schools employed more than 6.2 million people; even the 300,000 figure is tiny compared to that huge number.

More importantly, preceding our schools’ few recent years of financial woe were decades of decadent plenty. According to inflation-adjusted federal data, in 1970-71 Americans spent $5,593 per public-school student. By 2006-07 we were spending $12,463 – a whopping 123 percent increase that bought lots of teachers, administrators, and other shiny things!

And, he points out, it hasn’t bought the student achievement demanded or intended.

Unions are becoming reform minded? My foot.

Nowhere in today’s Washington, DC based news coverage of the Schools Chancellor’s layoffs is there any word - anything from the teachers interviewed or their union leaders - that addresses student achievement. Nothing.

Losing one’s job is an awful thing. I know people who don’t have jobs right now; I’ve lived with people who were unemployed.

The jobs lost from the DC teacher layoffs this week - an estimated 229 out of almost 400 people laid off - may have been the lowest hanging fruit, those who - for some reason - were not performing great with kids. Maybe.

We won’t know - and we can’t know as the union sues to block this action and the Chancellor’s office is bound by privacy rights against talking about how they determined who would get the axe. But regardless of why and how it was done, it would be nice if just one of the teachers out there would consider whether or not he or she is really good for kids before they start demanding a right that doesn’t exist - a right to a job teaching kids in a city where 86% are still in schools called failing.

(This post originally appeared on Politico’s The Arena)

The noise about President Obama’s impending speech to schoolchildren Tuesday is muffling the real issues.  While the President has every right to address any segment of the nation on any subject - and we all have the right to voluntarily listen or not - it’s both the way this thing was rolled out and the predicted content that should be most alarming to people - Republican or Democrat.

First, let’s talk about process, i.e. the rollout.  Rather than simply announce that the president was making a back-to-school speech, the policy/PR/other sundry staffers attached to this wrote and distributed superficial lesson plans as if they knew anything about education to begin with and as if this speech was indeed about the president, not the nation’s education crisis.  Telling teachers they should consider engaging students in a dialogue about how President Obama inspires them is ludicrous, not because some may not agree with him, but because it suggests this speech is after all about HIM.  To then go ahead and attack people for attacking the speech is like smoking and then getting outraged when someone says they smell smoke on you.

The speech massagers were clearly set about getting the president press. While I don’t doubt the president wants to give a great, meaningful speech to kids, his handlers messed up and have thwarted that potential now, not Bill O’Reilly or dozens of other known detractors.  The president’s “men” fell on their swords on this one, and President Obama should take full responsibility for that.

Second, the president’s predicted content which we’ll all now see prior thanks to the defensive posture the White House has had to take on this, should not just be about working hard (that’s what parents, teachers, school people and community leaders all over the country are saying to our kids hourly every day in their journey so far this year). It should be about what he - the president - and policymakers around the country can and should do to make schools work better for all children. He should tell them that while all schools try hard, some schools are just bad and we’re all working to change that. Obama should tell these kids that their academic achievement still ranks below most other industrialized countries, that they should have opportunities to make good choices; that they should urge their parents to get active in changing the way schools do business.

He should give a speech like he gave to the NAACP earlier this year, in which he said that there should be no excuses for failure, that some adults who aren’t doing well should be removed, and that we need to be willing to get rid of what doesn’t work and grow what does.

The president could also use this opportunity to applaud successful reform initiatives, be they public, private or charter-based, and put this notion of perestroika with the teachers unions to rest once and for all.

That would be a meaningful speech, and one only he could get away with at this point in our political history.  So please, to my friends in the media, to the President’s staunchest supporters and to the pundits - let’s not lose sight of just how important a speech like this can be, but keep your eye on the real issues, and whether and how he talks about them. Then cheer him or take him on all you want.

I hate to be the skunk at the garden party but will all the education reformers out there please stop asking how to get their pet programs included in the stimulus package?? Not only should real reformers stay far away from this massive, one-time spending bill, they should understand that this stimulus is likely to result in less reform, not more, no matter what happens.

By its very nature, a stimulus is a boost, a kick. Several stimulus – stimuli – should produce many boosts. Boosts take energy – stimulus suggests forward movement, activity. It’s got positive connotations. Lots of good things happen when you stimulate them, right? That is, of course, unless the stimulus is an artificial substance, like a drug, which does something unnatural and temporary, and potentially addictive, to the user.

The stimulus package proposed by the President and being negotiated now in Congress is sort of like a bad drug, at least when it comes to education spending.  After achieving much success in finally convincing the American people of the destructive effects of the status quo - a reliance of inputs over results for kids - the stimulus package promises to return us to the oh so yesterday 80s, where money and government grew for education with little impact on student achievement.

There is much to say about this, and Edspresso will provide live, in person testimony about what occurs when federal spending, in particular, blows out through the Education Department, allegedly headed for schools. Here’s just one fact of life when it comes to federal education spending, than transcends political party or ideology:

Every dollar spent at the federal level will grow the federal bureaucracy first, state government second, local district personnel third, and will only then, reach the schools, where funds will be disbursed not to those who do the best or need it the most, but who have been around the longest.

The process by which the spending is determined will not be specified in the stimulus package. Those decisions will be made amidst the maze of programs, divisions, and branches in the Education Department, with little influence from new political parties (no, Secretary Arne Duncan won’t be able to reach down and change this). The rules and regulations for processing funds will result in increased power for those who distribute the funds, from feds, to states, and incorporate very little innovate thinking, as innovation is not a natural state of the traditional education agency.

Just like the famous story of the Annenberg grant, which spread out millions amongst the worst school districts with no impact, the stimulus bill’s education chapter will have the same impact. But like those drugs we warn our children to stay away from, the initial euphoria will be great when those dollars start flowing. And after it all wears off, we’ll be looking for more money to feed our habit. Will we ask ourselves if we really need it? Is that what addicts do? No, didn’t think so.

Don’t believe it? The Washington Post seems to agree.