Group items tagged

School reformers are a dime a dozen these days, with education policy a suddenly sexy field and more than a few people willing to challenge the status quo. But it wasn't always so. Back in the 1960s, when Fordham Institute president Checker Finn got his start as an education gadfly, contrarian thinking was hard to come by. In Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik, Finn takes readers on a magic bus ride through the most momentous twists and turns of the past 40 years of education history-many of which he found himself in the middle of. What lessons should today's reformers take from past education battles? Which critical episodes are most often overlooked? And does Finn's own life experience make him optimistic or pessimistic about America-and its schools-going forward?

A recent report from the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution examines three school organization reforms that may yield positive results but have not captured the attention of policymakers or the media. The report concludes that at least two these less-publicized organizational reforms deserve greater attention in the education reform discussion. Think Twice think tank review project reviewer Patrick J. McEwan of Wellesley College finds the report to offer a solid, fair presentation of the research. McEwan's review was published today by the National Education Policy Center, housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education.

After reading the New York times op-ed on school choice in DC, I asked some folks close to what's happening in education there for their thoughts. Mary Levy sent me what is written below and (with her permission), I decided to use it as a guest post. Mary Levy has analyzed DC Public School staffing, budget and expenditures, and monitored the progress of education reform for thirty years. She is a major source for fiscal, statistical and general information on DCPS for the media, government officials and non-profit, business and civic groups. She directed the Public Education Reform Project at the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs for 19 years, during which she played a major role in developing the District of Columbia's school funding systems, wrote numerous reports on DCPS, and participated in every major reform planning initiative. Previously, in private practice with Rauh, Lichtman, Levy & Turner, she did civil litigation in civil rights, labor law, and school finance, including major litigations in New York  and Maryland.

With the publication of Pasi Sahlberg's Finnish Lessons, the education reform debate in the U.S. is moving into a second round of Finnish envy-the first being the corporate reformers' distorted claims about international comparisons and the new being calls to examine the full and complex picture of why Finland has achieved both social and education reform that has pushed them to the forefront of education quality. This second round, however, appears to be exposing a nonpartisan failure among all concerned with public education moreso than the needed turn away from corporate education agendas and toward democratic ideals seeking social justice and human agency. Education Week recently reprinted Erin Richards' piece (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) addressing Finland's education system, titled, "Better Teachers, Common Curriculum Are Hallmarks of Finnish Schools." While such coverage should signal the shift needed in discourse about international comparisons and what the U.S. should gain from Finland's social and educational commitments, the headline alone shows that we persist in seeing not what the evidence shows, but what we already assume about schools and reform.

The liberals of the education reform movement, often more surreptitiously than the overstated former Washington D.C. Chancellor of Schools during Democratic Mayor Adrian Fenty's term in office Michelle Rhee, have for decades advanced negative assumptions about public school teachers that now power the attacks by Christie, Walker, Kasich and their ilk. This is particularly true of Teach for America (TFA), the prototypical liberal education reform organization, where Rhee first made her mark. The history of TFA reveals the ironies of contemporary education reform. In its mission to deliver justice to underprivileged children, TFA and the liberal education reform movement have advanced an agenda that advances conservative attempts to undercut teacher's unions. More broadly, TFA has been in the vanguard in forming a neoliberal consensus about the role of public education-and the role of public school teachers-in a deeply unequal society.

The phrase "education reform" has been co-opted to mean a narrow party program advocated by the reform establishment (mainly billionaires and their designees) that includes a barrage of testing, charter schools, and taking experienced educators out of the classroom. None of these measures have a track record of success, but the actual facts get obscured by Hollywood films and connected charter groups. It's hard to get into the conversation when the corporate side of education reform uses the term as a bludgeon against anyone who questions its agenda -- even when the concerns are supported by research.

Right now, the biggest, heaviest assumption on the reform truck has it that, when the Common Core State Standards Initiative is complete - when somebody has decided exactly what every kid in every state is supposed to know in every school subject at every grade level - the education reform truck will take off like gangbusters. It won't. If all the reformers' flawed assumptions are corrected, but the traditional math-science-language-arts-social-studies "core curriculum" remains the main organizer of knowledge, the truck may creep forward a few inches, but it won't take the young where they need to go if we care about societal survival. The mess from this generation's political paralysis and refusal to address looming problems can't be cleaned up using the same education that helped create it.

what better way to capture the Bizarro world of education reform than with a serious work of journalism, disguised as a comic? Our three-part series - published over the next three months - is not intended to be funny, but rather, to pull back the progressive propaganda disguising the neoliberal, corporate nature of education reform. Our goal is to expose the free-market policies that really make up "education reform"; how these policies threaten our public education; who supports these policies; and, ultimately, what we might be able to do about the "Disaster Capitalism Curriculum."

"The question of what to do with bad teachers has stymied America's education system of late, sparking chaotic protests in state capitals and vitriolic debate in a recent congressional hearing. It has also stoked the movement known as 'education reform,' which has zeroed in on teacher quality by urging school districts to sort the star teachers from the duds, and reward or punish them accordingly. The idea is that America's schools would be able to increase their students' test scores if only they had better teachers. Since 2007, this wave of education reformers -- in particular Democrats for Education Reform, a group backed by President Barack Obama and hedge fund donors -- has clashed with teachers unions in their pursuit of making the field of education as discerning in its personnel choices as, say, that of finance. Good teachers should be promoted and retained, reformers contend, instead of being treated like identical pieces on an assembly line, who are rewarded with tenure for their staying power or seniority. But what to do with the underperformers?"

The foundation invested more than $159 million in education reform initiatives in 2011, marking the largest single-year investment in education reform initiatives. Grants were made to organizations and programs that empower parents, particularly in low-income communities, to choose among quality, publicly funded schools for their children. The foundation invests to expand the right of all parents to have access to quality schools, regardless of type, with the goal of ultimately increasing student achievement. List of grants can be found at http://waltonfamilyfoundation.org/2011-education-reform-grant-list

"Diane Ravitch's New York Times op-ed seems to have stuck in the craw of many a reformer, including Arne Duncan himself. What really burned people up was Ravitch's "straw man" arguments: that reformers say poverty doesn't matter, or only care about gains in student achievement. "No serious reformer says accountability should just be based on test scores. We all favor multiple measures," Jon Schnur* complained to Jonathan Alter last week."

"The shift in E.D. Kain's thinking on education reform of late has been an interesting and, I think, beneficent one for reform discourse. Kain basically blanched when he began to perceive he was too strongly in the "anti-reform" camp (few are actually anti-reform, but that's the unfortunate appellation ascribed to opponents of Duncan, et al)."

In the early days of the education-reform movement, a decade or so ago, you'd often hear from reformers a powerful rallying cry: "No excuses." For too long, they said, poverty had been used as an excuse by complacent educators and bureaucrats who refused to believe that poor students could achieve at high levels.

It's not often that we hear education reformers bragging in public about how they got the better of a teacher's union. But in the following remarkable video, Jonah Edelman, co-founder and chief executive officer of the Oregon-based nonprofit education reform organization Stand for Children, talks about how he and his organization maneuvered to get education reform legislation passed in Illinois this year, snookering union officials along the way.

If you thought you knew everything about the remarkable transformation of Finland's schools from mediocre to one of the top performing school systems in the world, think again.  Native Finn Pasi Sahlberg (educator, researcher, advisor on global education reform,  and Director General of CIMO in Helsinki, Finland),  who has lived and closely studied this remarkable reformation, tells the full story in his newly released book, Finnish Lessons  - What can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?  Sahlberg shows how the Finnish ways of improving schools differ from the global educational reform movement and from the North American educational policies and reform strategies.  It's a wake-up call for all countries around the world who aspire to achieve excellence.

Elmore's edited text illuminates a rarely discussed yet important aspect of school reform efforts: the critical reflective analysis of one's perspective (personal bias), or the connection between our experiences and our interpretations of those experiences. The volume's title and theme draw from a professional development exercise requiring conscious reflection on old points of view drawn from the experiences of educational reformers, theorists, leaders, researchers, and policy makers who have been on the front line of K-12 school reform. Contributors include Howard Gardner, Rudy Crew, Larry Cuban, Jeff Henig, Deb Meier, and Mike Smith, among others. This collection offers an insightful examination of some challenging educational issues of our time, including standardized testing; the role of special education; performance pay; the relationship between social theory and practice; teacher unionism; program development, implementation, and evaluation; the social role of education; and community involvement. The result is timely, as present educational policy is being reassessed on state and national levels.

Consider us optimists, but we think the high-stakes test movement has reached its apex and started its decline. It won't happen quickly given the powerful political forces aligned to promote the testing regime, but the test obsessed "accountability" package for education reform won't continue indefinitely. There are too many bad policies (NCLB, Race to the Top), bad performance reports (NAEP, CREDO, last week's Mathematica study), and corruption/cheating/score inflation scandals (ATL, DC, NY, and more). If you need hope, look back at how Diane Ravitch drove an intellectual stake into the heart of the education reform movement on the Daily Show. She asked the audience how they felt about tests. When the crowd booed, Jon Stewart complained that it couldn't be that simple. Tell that to Michelle Rhee now that her reforms have faced the scrutiny of the voting public (in the DC Mayoral race but again this past Tuesday). In a democracy, eventually, the people have their say.

In 1988, U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett proclaimed Chicago's public schools to be the worst in the nation. Since that time, Chicago has been at the forefront of urban school reform. Beginning with a dramatic move in 1990 to move power away from the central office, through CEO Paul Vallas's use of standardized testing to hold schools and students accountable for teaching and learning, and into CEO Arne Duncan's bold plan to create 100 new schools in five years, Chicago has attempted to boost academic achievement through a succession of innovative policies. Each wave of reform has brought new practices, programs, and policies that have interacted with the initiatives of the preceding wave. And with each successive wave of reform this fundamental question has been raised: Has progress been made at Chicago Public Schools (CPS)?

Paul Tough, author of one of my favorite books about education (Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America), recently published two important essays on education reform. Tough usually writes for general audiences, transforming dry, wonky policyspeak into page-turners filled with rich characters. This time, Tough took a break from writing his upcoming book The Success Equation to pour some cold water on the overheated heads of education reformers.

"Modern education reform is being driven by people who believe that competition, privatization and other elements of a market economy will improve public schools. In this post, Mark Tucker, president of the non-profit National Center on Education and the Economy and an internationally known expert on reform, explains why this approach is actually harming rather than helping schools."