Archive for Politics

The fight for/against consolidations

April 5, 2011 at 1:00 pm · Filed under Districts, Politics, Schools

Consolidating schools and/or districts is a highly controversial strategy, but it should be considered in a variety of circumstances. The Board of the Chicago Public Schools is currently debating the pros & cons of consolidating a handful of schools and the community is gearing up for a fight. Once again, this comes down to the “does this decision positively impact the adults or the kids?” conundrum.  (Battles loom over proposed consolidations of Chicago schools, Chicago Tribune, April 5, 2011)

Circumstances that warrant possible consolidation:

Cost-efficiency — Many states have hundreds of small school districts; in some cases, individual schools act as an entire school district. While this may ensure that the local community has a say (i.e. control) of the school, it also means that the community must fund a superintendent’s salary, other district staff, and the students might not have access to the highest quality educational programs and opportunities. For example, it’s difficult to have a full-time curriculum director or literacy specialists in such a small district, and larger districts can use economies of scale to negotiate better prices on purchased products or services. Some independent charter schools are even joining forces, through regional consortiums, to benefit from these type of advantages.

While small districts may produce more jobs for teachers and district staffers, and it may provide parents and the community with the feeling of control, it wastes money that could be better spent on providing higher quality instruction and opportunity to the students.

Attendance shifts — Over time, the population of a community changes and many schools that were built in specific places no longer have enough students to fill all the open seats. In effect, it does not make financial sense to have two or more half-full elementary schools within the same area. While I agree that transporting students across the city isn’t always the best solution, if there are partially full schools within a similar area, consolidation should be considered.

Low-performance — In Chicago’s case, the district is trying to not only save money, but improve the quality of education for more students. Some schools continually struggle with low-performance and are slated for closure within a few years (schools are often allowed to try to improve for numerous years before they are shut-down or phased-out), so the district can adjust attendance boundaries and limit placing new students at that school. In a sense, this consolidates the students before the school. If there are two half-full elementary schools in a close proximity, one high-performing and one low-performing, what are the valid arguments for not consolidating the students into the higher-performing school?

Cautions — Combining schools and/or districts requires a great deal of political and cultural sensitivity. The communities must be informed about the changes, the impact on their children and the neighborhood, and how they will be able to participate in the new school/district. When combining schools, possible gang affiliations or rivalries should also be taken into account. As was evident in Green Dot’s Locke High School transformation gang affiliations caused a significant number of problems while trying to group students into the new “small schools.” (See Alexander Russo’s new book on the Locke transformation for more detail on this issue.)

Consolidating schools or districts is not a magic bullet solution, but it should be considered as an aspect of both school improvement and cost-saving measures. Community members and staff will continue to fight for their schools for a variety of reason (some valid and others not), but the decision-makers need to make the tough decisions and determine what’s best for the students and not the adults.

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The good, the bad & the ugly of unions

February 23, 2011 at 12:53 pm · Filed under Politics

I’ve been watching what’s going on in Wisconsin (and is now spreading to other places) and have finally decided to weigh in. My policy positions are often considered anti-union, and in some circumstances, that generalization is correct.

Historically, most of the fair labor laws we currently have were established because of unions (work day, overtime, maternity leave, etc). I recognize the value, and impact on my life, of these policies. But, I believe that many of today’s unions misrepresent themselves and negatively impact society.

In the education field, especially in chronically low-performing schools, teachers’ unions work against the strongest teachers and the students. Policies such as last hired, first fired; seniority; forced bumping; (non-value added) teacher evaluation systems; mandatory dues contributions; an extensive (and prolonged) removal process; work day limitations; and other working condition constraints place disadvantaged students further behind. While students are my primary concern, these policies also negatively impact strong teachers. Teachers’ unions (principals’ and superintendents’ unions as well) too often maintain the status quo and fight for the low-performers, as opposed to advancing the profession as a whole.

New advocacy organizations are launching across the country to fight against the traditional teachers unions, and to better represent those teachers who don’t agree with their current representation. Organizations such as Teach Plus, Stand for Children and Democrats for Education Reform are gaining momentum and beginning to have a strong impact in politics and on policy. These organizations are not necessarily anti-union, but are instead pro-education.

Wisconsin’s Governor is not going about it the right way; it does feel (and look) like he’s using the budget crisis as a way to bust the unions. Only some unions are being impacted and it is clear that dirty politics are in play.

This all said, a sad truth remains, the majority of cities and states (and the federal government for that matter) are in dire financial circumstances, and funding pensions and increasing the salaries to government employees is not feasible, nor is it sustainable. Everyone must chip in, and that may require salaries to stagnate for another year, or the elimination of pensions. Eliminating all collective bargaining rights is not the right way to pull together as a community and problem solve.

Yes, today’s teachers unions (and many other labor unions) have too much power in the political system, but eliminating collective bargaining rights as a whole causes more harm than good.

Side note: there’s a decent research base that shows teacher rules in states without collective bargaining are just as restrictive as states with bargaining (Invisible Ink, National Center for Teacher Quality). Teachers’ unions are still involved in policy making and lobbying in states that don’t have collective bargaining. Eliminating collective bargaining will not eliminate the role that unions play in the political world.

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Charter schools turning around charter schools

January 13, 2011 at 2:53 pm · Filed under Politics, Schools

A recent Wall Street Journal story highlights a unique turnaround strategy for underperforming charter schools. The model is essentially a charter takeover of a current charter school, meaning that the current charter management rescinds their charter and a new Charter Management Organization takes over the school, establishes a new board, and possibly restaff the school and administration.

Charter schools are often cited as a solution for low-performing “traditional” public schools, but there are many low-performing charter schools that should be closed. Charter schools are public schools and should be just as accountable for their performance as any other public school.

While an active debate about charter vs “traditional” public schools [how they’re funded, how they’re approved (it varies by state), how their monitored, and if they’re eligible for state and federal grants (i.e. RTTT, Title I, TIF)] continues, it is clear that most policymakers and educators agree on one thing: low-performing schools (charter or traditional) should not be allowed to continue to “educate” children.

Charter Management Organizations are often used to taking over low-performing district schools (Mastery in Philadelphia, AUSL in Chicago, etc), but with the exception of some interesting work being done in New Orleans, charter schools taking over existing low-performing charter schools is still a relatively new concept. While there are more schools that need help than there are high-performing Charter Management Organizations who are willing and able to do this work, it is promising to see 1) existing charter school leaders recognize that they are not successful and that the students deserve better and 2) CMO’s taking on the responsibility to turn those schools around.

To read the article, click here.

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Is a school that turned around a “turnaround”?

January 11, 2011 at 12:39 pm · Filed under Politics, Schools

The quick answer in my mind is no. A school that makes rapid improvements (academics, leadership, environment & climate), but that doesn’t serve the same demographic of students that it served before is not a “turnaround.” It may be a good school now, but it’s not a turnaround.

Chicago Magazine’s January issue includes a story about a neighborhood school (Nettelhorst Elementary in Lakeview) that served mostly low-income students and had abysmal test scores. Most of the students were bussed in from other areas of the city; most of the neighborhood students attended other charter, magnet and private schools. A group of active parents took on the cause and transformed the school by gathering thousands of dollars of donations to renovate the building, the school climate, and eventually the overall school operations (many of the naysayer teachers left). In effect, neighborhood students now choose to enroll in the school, test scores have increased, and the school is generally performing well.

Transforming a low-performing neighborhood school into a good (or better) school is commended and is the result of a tremendous amount of work and money, but it doesn’t change the reality for the former Nettelhorst students: Now that the school is better, why can’t they attend? Will they get to go to a good school? Who will transform their schools if their parents don’t have the time, skills, or social and professional networks to fundraise thousands of dollars in cash and donations?

The parents that took on the cause of saving their community school should be recognized for their work, and the corporations that provided donations should be appreciated. That said, Nettelhorst may have transformed into a high(er) performing school, but I would not classify it as a “turnaround” because the demographics of the student population has changed so much.

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Not surprising that charters weren’t more common

December 14, 2010 at 12:14 pm · Filed under Federal Policy, Politics, Schools

I’m not surprised that less than 5% of schools receiving School Improvement Grant funds chose the charter takeover model. See EdWeek’s Politics K-12 blog for more detail on which federally recommended improvement model schools selected. Why am I not surprised?

1) the districts usually write the SIG applications, so why (besides for the well-being of students) would a district choose to relinquish control over a school (and the money that comes with it)?

2) the SIG timeline was extremely tight. Efforts were supposed to begin this school year, so if a charter takeover was selected, it’d be logistically challenging (though not impossible) to transition a school during the school year and to potentially have the old failing school and the new charter school working in the same building.

3) Some states still don’t have charter laws, so it immediately takes that option off the table, especially in more rural states.

4) There’s a lack of good Charter Management Organizations who are willing to take on turnaround efforts, “new starts” are much easier than transitioning a chronically low-performing school.

A charter takeover may be “cleaner,” but it also requires a great deal of political will and community support to become successful. The charter takeover option may become more popular if some of the initial transformation and turnaround efforts aren’t successful.

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Are the schools you control good enough for your kids?

December 8, 2010 at 11:14 am · Filed under Politics

As the Chicago Mayoral election heats up, it was only a matter of time before the candidates were questioned about where they send their own children to school. For some reason, much of the public thinks it’s bad that a candidate/politician won’t send their children to the very schools that he/she is in charge of (in a mayoral controlled city). I disagree for many reasons, and have one major caveat.

First, the safety and security of the politician’s children must be taken into consideration. Can a public school provide the additional security that would be needed for these children? If so, who’s paying for it? If public dollars are used to fund the additional security, is the money being taken away from other students? What are the repercussions on the children if major changes are forced on the school (i.e. when Michelle Rhee fired the principal of the school her daughters attend in DC).

Second, there are some very good public schools in any large city, but it’s extremely challenging to gain admission to those schools (i.e. Waiting for Superman). Imagine the uproar if a politician’s children gain enrollment into one of the most competitive magnet/charter schools. Even if the students are admitted fairly via the lottery process, the public and media will question the validity of the process.

Third, if the students are not admitted to one of the better schools, they will be placed in a less-desirable school. The majority of parents (at any income level) want their children to attend a good school. If a parent has the ability to pay for a private education for his/her children and is willing to make that choice or sacrifice, why is that bad?

Caveat, if a politician sends his/her children to private school AND says that the public schools are good, that’s a problem. Actions do speak louder than words and it is not okay to state that the public schools are good enough for other people’s children, but not your own.

Most parents want a safe environment and strong academics for their children and politicians are no exception. Until the public schools are good enough for politician’s children, it is an indication that more reform and improvements are necessary. We cannot lessen the pressure until schools are good enough that people who can afford private school CHOOSE to send their children to public school.

See a related story in today’s Chicago Tribune.

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Kudos to Baltimore

November 18, 2010 at 11:51 am · Filed under Districts, Politics, State Actions

The Baltimore Teachers Union (affiliated with the AFT) approved the proposed contract, just one month after the rejection of a similar contract. The new contract, along with a few other exemplars (i.e. Colorado) should become national models for contract negotiations. The quality of implementation of the conditions will test the meaning behind the language, but the fact that the new contract changes some of the long-standing practices truly changes what is possible. Now, some of these practices need to be incorporated into state code for the states that don’t have local collective bargaining.

Stephen Sawchuk of EdWeek discusses some of the details, “There are a lot of new details in this plan, but arguably its newsiest feature is that it restructures the base-pay system for teachers, which in nearly every district in the country is based on credentials and longevity. There won’t be any more automatic “step” increases each year in Baltimore; raises will be based on collecting achievement units from good evaluations and participation in professional development… One [graduate] credit is just one achievement unit, while a superior evaluation is 12. So getting good evaluations is a much faster way to increase one’s pay. Teachers can also advance up a career ladder, taking on additional roles as they earn good evaluations and pass a peer review. The contract is important in the larger national conversation about teacher pay, too, because to date most experiments with pay have been with additive features, like bonuses, rather than changes to the base-pay salary grid.”

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An abundance of news…

November 9, 2010 at 12:09 pm · Filed under Districts, Politics

Ron Huberman is leaving Chicago Public Schools at the end of the month. Who will Mayor Daley appoint as the Interim? Will it be someone who can prepare the organization for a new mayor and a new CEO, or could it be someone who the new mayor would want to keep after the elections? Will it be a Superintendent or a CEO? Lots of pressure from the union and community groups to get rid of mayoral control and create a “blue ribbon panel” to select a new CEO.

One of Mayoral candidate Gery Chico’s supporters used her CPS email to solicit attendees for an education-oriented fundraiser. See more here. Ethics much?

An EdWeek article, Regular Public Schools Mimic Charters, discusses ways that charter schools are sharing their best/promising practices with traditional public schools. Additional issues that are not addressed in the article: many charters are not successful, so which ones are sharing their practices? Since an increasing number of traditional public schools are gaining charter-like conditions, how can charter schools and charter management organizations be better used to train & educate traditional public school principals and district leaders about how to use these new levels of autonomy & authorities? At the same time, how can successful charter schools share their promising practices with underperforming charter schools?

The Huffington Post recently posted a column entitled Education for Democracy: If Teachers Were Treated Like Doctors. I strongly disagree with the some of the claims, but I think it’s important to bring these issues to the table. I’d like to know how many doctors would be able to keep their licenses if more than half their patients didn’t make it? How many hospitals would remain open if they had the same problem (i.e. districts)? How many doctors would continue to earn their full salaries even if they didn’t see any patients and were not allowed to see patients for one reason or another, i.e. NYC’s Rubber Room?

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Waiting for Superman

October 15, 2010 at 3:36 pm · Filed under Federal Policy, Politics, Schools, students

I finally watched Waiting for Superman this week. Ironically, I saw the film the same day DC Chancellor Michelle Rhee announced her resignation. It was rather bittersweet to watch the energy and commitment of Rhee on screen and to know that because of politics (i.e. the adults in the system) another leadership change is on the way for DC students.

Yes, the film is pro-charter and anti-union contracts (not necessarily the unions as a whole, but more the highly restrictive contracts and current union philosophies). While I support the schools that were featured in the film, and know many of them well, the piece of information missing is “why were all these ‘beating the odds’ schools actually ‘beating the odds?'” Charters in themselves are not necessarily the answer, but having the ability to hire and fire who is best for the school and having freedom from restrictive operating conditions are key aspects of charters. And, charter schools are public schools – an often misunderstood fact. Explaining some of these issues in more detail would have strengthened the film.

I watched the film with a friend who’s interested in learning more about the education system. During the film, she whispered to me “why do teachers even join the union?” It was difficult to explain the idea that most teachers don’t have a choice. Union dues are automatically deducted from paychecks, if you support union ideals or not. While it’s important to eliminate “free-riders,” I wonder why teachers don’t sponsor a massive protest about the fact that the unions are not representing THEIR best interests and that the unions are not improving the professionalism of the entire teaching field.

Another friend commented that the film doesn’t present enough solutions. In some ways I agree, but one must ask, what was the point of the film? If it was to incite public outrage at the inequities in our education system and to demonstrate the link between economic stability and schools, then the film has surpassed expectations. The solutions are simple in some ways- give students what they need to succeed, give all students access to high-quality schools. But, how those principles are accomplished is where the problems arise. It would be impossible (and very edu-wonky) to discuss the nitty gritty of the potential solutions and the implementation of various school reform models.

Unfortunately, at this point, inciting outrage and educating the public is what we need. Too often we pretend that this is a NIMBY issue (not in my backyard), but even if one of the dropout factories isn’t in your backyard, this issue will effect us all – socially and economically. None of us is protected from the impact of chronically low-performing schools.

My final reaction for the blog — I wonder what about all the kids whose parents/guardians aren’t applying for the lotteries. The students in the film all had someone who was aware of the lack of quality education and searched for a solution. But what about the students whose parents don’t know about the lotteries, can’t navigate the lottery process, or those who don’t even realize that the schools are not educating their children?

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Education news finally reaching the masses

September 22, 2010 at 2:13 pm · Filed under Federal Policy, Politics

Jonathan Alter of Newsweek recently published a great article, “How Obama is Making Real Progress on Education,” that discusses how RTTT has significantly impacted education reform in the last year, and how the democrats are finally getting on the ed reform train. While the article doesn’t go into tremendous detail about any of the specific issues, it’s about time that the mainstream publications/media are highlighting the truth about our education system. Some excerpts from the article:

“In a meeting in Seoul, President Lee Myung-bak confided to Obama that his biggest problem in education was that South Korean parents were pressuring him to import more English teachers so their kids could learn English in first grade instead of having to wait until second grade. This is what we’re up against in global competition, the president said. “And then I sit down with U.S. reporters, and the question they have for me, in Asia, is ‘Have you read Sarah Palin’s book?’?” At that point Obama shook his head and said, “True story. True story.”

The good news, which should in-spire a little hope (though not the usual complacent overconfidence), is that the education-reform movement in the United States—the most critical social movement of our time—has made more progress in the last year than in the previous 10. The push for reform, which began with the 1983 government report “A Nation at Risk,” had been stymied for years by what’s sometimes known as “The Blob”—the collection of bureaucracies, school boards, and teachers’ unions committed to protecting the failed status quo. But Obama is the first Democrat who was elected president without the early support of teachers’ unions (they backed Hillary Clinton), and he has seized the opportunity.

Under pressure from teachers’ unions, many states had shackled charters, which operate outside the archaic contracts that make it nearly impossible to have longer school days, fire bad teachers, or turn around failing schools. It’s true that there are plenty of lousy charter schools that bring down the averages, but today’s renewed attacks on charters ignore the fact that the vast majority of the best-performing schools in at-risk communities are charters.

The key to saving kids and thus the future of the country is to foster good teaching. Perhaps the most important component of Race to the Top is the requirement that student performance be used as a partial factor in teacher evaluation. Instead of comparing schools—the apples-and-oranges centerpiece of President Bush’s unpopular No Child Left Behind program—Duncan aims to find out whether Johnny actually learned anything over the course of the year. It’s hard to believe, but until recently these so-called value-added data hadn’t even been collected.

All this reform has kicked off a family feud within the Democratic Party, and the forces of the status quo are fighting back. When a few House Democrats tried to gut Race to the Top, Obama issued a veto threat. Now Republicans want to prevent White House efforts to replicate the success of Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone. For the first time ever, substantial numbers of Democrats back real reform, though important reformers like Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado and Rep. Tom Perriello of Virginia face tough campaigns this fall.

The two major teachers’ unions have diverged recently. The American Federation of Teachers, headed by Randi Weingarten, even helped enact a teacher- tenure-reform bill in Colorado that’s a national model. By contrast, the hidebound Nation-al Education Association is still bitterly opposed to any accountability. Obama insists that education policy center on what’s good for students, not adult interest groups.”

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