.Assignment: Make K-12 Education Better
by Jay Greene
University of Arkansas Online
October 31, 2006
Department of education reform draws leading academics to consider issues of paying teachers, improving test scores, changing school governance structure
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - Mayoral control of large, urban school systems, teacher pay based on a market compensation model, vouchers to allow special education students to attend the public or private school of their choice. These were a few of the ideas a group of leading education researchers came together recently to discuss.
The department of education reform at the University of Arkansas invited university researchers from Harvard, Stanford, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Brown, Vanderbilt and the University of Missouri-Columbia to spend a day at the Kauffman Conference Center in Kansas City, Mo., to talk about ways to improve student performance in the K-12 education system. Faculty members of the endowed UA department, which is a little more than a year old, also contributed papers or led discussions at the conference sponsored by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing entrepreneurship and improving the education of children and youth.
The grant funding the conference will also support the publication of a book from the papers submitted. "The conference brought together a diverse group of academics, legislators, state agency representatives and educators from both coasts and across the nation," said Reed Greenwood, dean of the College of Education and Health Professions. "The education reform department will offer more opportunities for people to talk about ideas to improve this country's public education system."
Jay Greene, head of the education reform department, opened the conference with a brief history of education spending in the United States. Greene, the author of Education Myths: What Special Interest Groups Want You to Believe About Our Schools - And Why It Isn't So (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), explained that spending on education has increased significantly without a corresponding rise in student achievement.
"The central problem in K-12 education is productivity," Greene said. "The problem is we are spending more and more money, yet the results are the same. How can we provide school systems with the incentives to make better use of education spending to produce higher student achievement?"
Kenneth Wong, the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Professor in Education Policy at Brown University, examined changing a district's governance as a way to improve schools. The director of a new master's program in urban education policy at Brown, Wong has been studying and writing since 2000 about school districts in which mayors exercised control over operations.
Wong and his associate, Francis X. Shen, a doctoral student of government and social policy at Harvard University, conducted case studies and statistical analyses using a multiyear database on a sample of 100 urban districts, examining mayoral leadership in cities such as Boston, Chicago, New York, Cleveland and Philadelphia. They found academic improvement in the districts led by mayors as compared to districts under traditional school governance structures.
According to their research, mayors hold a broader mandate than an elected school board and, when granted power to appoint a school board, can use political capital to mobilize electoral support for school reform. Their paper also cited mayors' ability to leverage commitments and resources from nonpartisan institutions such as universities and museums to improve public schools and to apply fiscal discipline and accountability to the school system in both formal and informal ways.
Greene's paper on school vouchers for special education students proposed that overdiagnosis of students as disabled would lessen if students could take the additional federal funding supplied with such a diagnosis to the school of their choice. He studied a similar program in Florida that resulted in better outcomes for disabled students in private schools than in their previous public schools.
"The only way to overcome the barriers to policy change is to try market approaches in more places, carefully collect information on the consequences of a market approach, and use that evidence to convince people about what will best serve disabled students while controlling costs," Greene wrote.
According to Eric Hanushek, the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, standard pay policies in educational systems do not ensure that high-quality teachers are recruited and retained, and he advocated a teacher-pay system that emphasizes performance. He cited evidence that a teacher's overall experience and graduate education, two primary features of existing single salary schedules, bear little consistent relationship to student performance.
Michael Podgursky, a professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Columbia and a Kauffman Foundation scholar-in-residence, described several merit pay plans being used around the country, including the Teacher Advancement Program developed by the Milken Family Foundation. More long-term studies are needed, he said, and they should be designed in such a way that they can be effectively evaluated.
In examining ideas for reform, the researchers who attended the Oct. 20 conference also identified promising directions for future research. Several people in attendance lamented the lack of scientific data upon which to base decisions about implementing reform measures.
James W. Guthrie, chair of the department of leadership, policy and organizations at Vanderbilt University and director of Vanderbilt's Peabody Center for Education Policy, noted that very few schools of education at U.S. universities have funds to conduct research. Carolyn Herrington, dean of the College of Education at the University of Missouri-Columbia, described the education departments in some state governments as data rich but curiosity poor, lacking systematic analysis of the data.
Greenwood said he detects a sea change among practitioners and schools of education toward large-scale studies. He cited the half-dozen doctoral students and research associates who accompanied the UA faculty members to the conference.
"The mission of the education school is evolving," Greenwood said. "Consider these pre-professionals in the field. They will continue the study of best practices, and deans of education schools are more openly embracing the research."
The UA education reform department's $20 million endowment funds not only six endowed faculty chairs with money for research but also provides scholarships for teachers in training and 10 prestigious doctoral fellowships for students in related degree programs.
"There are so few education schools where members of the faculty have any capacity to undertake the research you all describe," Guthrie observed. "It's very rare."
Other members of the education reform department faculty and its Technical Advisory Board presented papers: · Guthrie, "A Modern Data System for Modern Schools" · Paul Peterson, Harvard University, "The Case for Curriculum-Based, External Examinations that Have Significant Consequences for Students"
· Patrick J. Wolf, University of Arkansas, "Academic Improvement through Regular Assessment" · Herrington, "Revisiting the Importance of the Direct Effects of School Leadership on Student Achievement: The Implications for School Improvement Policy," with Stephen M. Nettles of Florida State University
· Rebecca Maynard, University of Pennsylvania, "The Case for Early, Tailored Intervention to Prevent Academic Failure," with Irma Perez-Johnson, University of Pennsylvania
· John Witte, University of Wisconsin, "A Proposal for State, Income-Targeted Preschool Vouchers"
###
Contact:
Jay Greene, head, department of education reform College of Education and Health Professions (479) 575-3162, jpg@uark.edu
Heidi Stambuck, director of communications College of Education and Health Professions (479) 575-3138, stambuck@uark.edu
The Bush Education Agenda: Then and Now By Dan Lips The Heritage Foundation October 27, 2006
Five years can feel like a lifetime in politics, where momentum can be a stronger force than gravity. For the Bush Administration, five years invested in implementing and defending No Child Left Behind has created a sense of ownership over all aspects of a law that was the result of heavy negotiations. This was apparent in Education Secretary Margaret Spelling’s recent comment that the law needs few changes in its reauthorization. But compared to the original education plan President Bush offered in 2001, the current No Child Left Behind falls short of the Administration’s goals.
The Bush Administration unveiled its education reform plan shortly after Inauguration in 2001. (The Department of Education has an archive of the original 28-page proposal here.)
However, the No Child Left Behind legislation that President Bush signed into law in January 2002 looked very different from the proposal he submitted to Congress in 2001. Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and Rep. George Miller (D-CA), among others, clearly made their mark on the legislation.
The President’s plan was built on four pillars: strong accountability for results, research-proven methods, flexibility and local control, and parental choice. On flexibility and parental choice, NCLB bears little resemblance to the President’s original proposal.
Bush’s plan would have let low-income students attending poor-performing public schools use their share of Title I funding as a scholarship to attend private school. This would have been a significant expansion of parental choice. But Congress stripped out the private school choice component early in the legislative process. At the signing ceremony in 2002, a weakened public school transfer option and a modest after-school tutoring program were all that remained of the President’s broad choice proposals.
After nearly five years, NCLB’s modest school choice provisions are helping few children. According to the Department of Education, only 1 percent of the 3.9 million students who are eligible actually participated in public school choice in the 2003-2004 school year. Only 17 percent of eligible students took advantage of the after-school tutoring option.
As with school choice, Congress also scrapped the Bush Administration’s proposal to give states and school districts greater flexibility and control. The President’s proposal would have created a “charter state” option for “states and districts committed to accountability and reform.” This would have allowed participating states and districts to enter into five-year agreements with the Secretary of Education to free them from certain program requirements while still holding schools accountable for performance. After Congress finished its work, all that was left was a modest provision to grant states and school districts limited flexibility in transferring funds between existing federal programs.
Last week, President Bush said that reauthorization of No Child Left Behind will be a “top priority” for his Administration. He signaled that restoring some part of the private school choice component would be one objective of reauthorization. Unfortunately, President Bush didn’t mention among his priorities a charter state option and restored state and local control.
In 2007 and beyond, a charter state option will be more feasible, politically, than a national voucher proposal, and it would be better policy. Support for restoring state and local control has grown across the political spectrum under NCLB. Governors and state lawmakers who have criticized the federal government’s heavy hand in education should be attracted to the idea of a charter state option.
The charter state idea ties into school choice, too. School choice backers like President Bush should recognize that shifting power back to the state and local levels would open the door to expanded parental choice in education. State and local school choice efforts have proven more successful than the limited choice that No Child Left Behind allows.
Reauthorization will give President Bush a second chance to reform federal education policy. The Administration should start by taking a step back from today’s No Child Left Behind and remembering the principles it hoped to advance in the first place.
## Dan Lips is education analyst with the Heritage Foundation, www.Heritage.org.
Highest court in state to hear school-aid case By Jay Gallagher
UticaOD.com October 10, 2006
ALBANY — About 450 people who want the state to spend as much as $8 billion more on aid to schools in cities plan to be around the Capitol today when the state's highest court hears arguments on a case that would force the extra money to flow.
The observers, coming from as far away as Buffalo and the eastern end of Long Island, as well as Rochester, Yonkers, Utica and New York City, plan to hold rallies and marches, as well as observe the arguments, said a spokesman for the organizing group.
"We want to show there is statewide support for a statewide solution to CFE," said Michael Davoli, a spokesman for the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, the group that has been pressing for more state aid for New York City schools since 1993. "Children all over the state attend underfunded schools," he said. "We must provide for kids all over the state to attend a quality school."
Utica school officials welcomed a group of school aid reform supporters Monday as they rode from Buffalo to Albany on a yellow school bus called the 21st Century Education Express. Utica City School District Superintendent Marilyn Skermont said she hopes if the court decides in favor of more state aid, it will pave the way for a similar lawsuit filed by the city's school board. "I am very serious about our needs for the Utica school district and for rural school districts who are in need of funding," Skermont said. "The formula has to change; we can't wait any longer." Tracy Taylor, the mother of two Utica students and a special-education teacher, said city schools need more afterschool programs like drama and music because they give children a more well-rounded education. Opportunities to participate in those activities are very limited now because the district doesn't have enough money, she said. "I think it's clear that the Utica school district in particular is underfunded," she said. The Court of Appeals ruled in 2003 that schoolchildren in New York City weren't being given the chance to get a "sound, basic education," as required by the state Constitution. The court ordered the state to figure out how much that would cost. The court gave the state 13 months to come up with a plan, but Gov. George Pataki and the Legislature failed to do so. In August 2004, a lower court, the Supreme Court, appointed a three-member panel to come up with a figure. Their price tag: $5.63 billion more per year, to be phased in over four years.A mid-level appeals court modified that to a range of between $4.7 billion and $5.63 billion. The state now spends $17.7 billion on elementary and secondary schools. The state is asking the Court of Appeals to throw out the whole plan. It claims courts don't have the authority to tell the governor and the Legislature how much to spend on education. And besides, a panel appointed by Pataki put the cost at only $1.93 billion. The eventual solution has to be broader than just sending more money to New York City schools, Davoli said. That means the state ought to increase school aid by a total of $8.6 billion annually over four years, he said. Also Monday, a report from a conservative think tank was released that argues that spending more money on schools is not the way to improve student performance. The performance of American schools has been flat for 35 years, despite more than tripling spending per student (after adjusting for inflation), according to a new report from the Hoover Institution, a research organization based at Stanford University in California. "Thus, past efforts to lower class size and to seek better teachers have not had a discernible impact," the report says. The report says good use of this time involving sound academic subjects does not generally cost more than bad use of the time, but gets much better results. Contributing: Vanessa Ebbeling, O-D.
Tale of 2 Schools Suggests Money Can't Buy Success BY SARAH GARLAND New York Sun.com October 4, 2006
Queensbury, a small town in the Adirondacks, spends less money on each student than any other public school district in the state. Bridgehampton, a resort town in Long Island, spends six times as much. But when it comes to statewide test scores, it's hard to tell the difference between the two.
In Queensbury, which spent $8,553 per student in the 2004–05 school year, more than 80% of fourth-graders passed state reading exams that same year and more than 90% passed the math tests. The same is true of Bridgehampton, which spends $51,828 on each student, according to a July 2005 state report to the governor and the legislature.
The comparison raises a fundamental question coming to a head next week in what may be the last hearing in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit: Does money matter when it comes to student performance?
Supporters of the lawsuit, which was filed in 1993 to force the state to spend more on New York City public schools to remedy inequities, say it does.
"You can't do anything if you don't have the money," the senior economist at the Fiscal Policy Institute, Trudi Renwick, said. "But it has to be well spent and well distributed."
In contrast, the lawsuit's opponents, who are coming out with a book this week outlining their case, say money has nothing to do with improving student performance.
"What we've found over time is that money is neither necessary nor sufficient to ensure high performance," a senior economist at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, Eric Hanushek, said. He is the editor of "Courting Failure," a book coming out Monday that is critical of lawsuits like the Campaign for Fiscal Equity.
"Some schools spend a lot and get good performance and some spend a lot and get bad performance," he said. "If you go ahead and try to adjust for what the kids look like. … It doesn't help the picture, you get the same picture."
The state has already pledged an additional $9.2 billion in capital costs to New York City schools, but has yet to pay between $4.7 billion and $5.63 billion in operating aid ordered by an appellate court – the issue coming up in the hearing on Tuesday. In front of a state appellate judge, the plaintiffs will repeat their arguments that the state is not fairly distributing funds to school districts, shortchanging students who live in places where high poverty rates combined with high costs of living make it more expensive to instruct students. The lawsuit demands that the state change its funding formula to send more money to places where there is greater need.
Campaign supporters say New York City, where 59% of fourth graders passed reading tests and 77% passed math tests, is one of those places. The city spends $12,896 a student, according to the state report, although some argue that understates the actual spending. City fourth graders scored worse on reading tests than students in all of the top 10 districts in the state for per pupil spending, but they also scored worse than students in all but two of the bottom 10 spenders. In math, the city scored worse than all but one of the 10 districts that spend the least on pupils – all less than $10,000 for each student.
The lawsuit's supporters say the city doesn't have a chance against places like Wyoming, a rural county in Western New York. Even though it spent the least in the state on instruction per student, $4,269, it came out way ahead of the city, which spends $7,663, on test scores.
"If you live in Wyoming, the cost of hiring a teacher is not much," the director of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, Geri Palast, said.
In Wyoming, 5.8% of families live below the poverty line, according to the 2000 census, while in New York City, 18.5% of families live in poverty. Comparing the city to districts with mostly white, middle class, rural populations to New York City, with its large population of low-income students, special education students and English language learners, is like comparing apples to oranges, Ms. Palast says.
Most of the highest-spending school districts are even tinier than the low spenders, with student populations ranging between 12 and 352. They must pay for teachers in each grade even though there are only a handful of students per class. Most are also located in areas of Long Island where many residences are summer homes and property taxes, along with living costs, are high.
Opponents of the lawsuit agree with its supporters that the high spending districts are anomalies. But helping the city catch up to their high scores is still the goal, and with the end of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity in sight after 13 years, the debate about how to reach it is heating up.
The president of the United Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, says funding should also be allocated to attract and keep qualified teachers in places like New York City, where students have more problems and are harder to teach.
An analyst at the Manhattan Institute, Sol Stern, who is a contributor to "Courting Failure," says that even as spending per pupil doubled in New York City over the past decade, performance hasn't improved.
"If you watch what happened in New York City education budgets, you'll see that pupil spending went up," he said. "And eighth grade reading scores are as flat as they ever were."
The lawsuit's supporters respond that it's not just how much money, but how you spend it – and the debate goes on.
Center for Education Reform Newswire
Vol. 8, No. 45
October 3, 2006
BRIGHTER CHOICES
ALBANY'S ASCENT. Education gurus and researchers have talked for years about the growing achievement gap between poor minority students and affluent white students. But in Albany, where the battle between charter school advocates and the education bureaucracy has been fierce, it is a charter school that is narrowing the gap. At Brighter Choice Charter School for Boys and Brighter Choice Charter School for Girls, students scored first in the city on state ELA tests. Brighter Choice for Girls 3rd-graders finished first with a 63 percent passage rate on the test, while Brighter Choice for Boys tied for first with a 67 percent passage rate. What makes their first-place standing even more impressive is that both schools only admit students from low-income families. "At Brighter Choice, we have proven that race and income do not need to predict academic failure - a result that has profound social implications," said Tom Carroll, founder and chairman of both schools.
SURVEY SAYS. A battle is raging in the Garden State over more school choice for parents. Recent polling by Excellent Education for Everyone (E3) shows that 54 percent of New Jersey residents support the use of parental choice options that include private schools, even as opponents are ratcheting up an anti-choice campaign. "These numbers show that political leaders who do not support parental school choice swim against the tide of public opinion," said E3 executive director Dan Gaby. E3 is party to a lawsuit that seeks, as a remedy to the failed, costly urban schools, the use of vouchers or charter options for people stuck in bad schools. Many legislators and business leaders are lining up in support.
VOUCHER EQUALITY. School choice has become a civil rights issue. Many poor and minority families fighting for good education have been saying it for years, but a new report released today by the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation reinforces their stance. Looking at voucher programs in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Washington D.C., the report found that private schools are far less segregated than conventional public schools. "Private schools have more potential to desegregate students because they break down geographic barriers, drawing from students together across neighborhood boundaries," the report stated. "School vouchers overcome the monetary barrier, enabling private schools to make desegregation a reality." According to the findings, Cleveland and Milwaukee showed the greatest disparity, with their voucher programs showing 18 and 13 points less segregation than their conventional public school counterparts. The study looked at seven accurate empirical studies on voucher programs to make its conclusions. Looking at three empirical studies, the report also found that private schools in general are less segregated than conventional public schools. It's just one more piece of proof that every student - regardless of race, neighborhood, or family income - should have a choice in where to go to school. It's a civil right.
Needed: national standards Quality of education shouldn't depend on where students live Charlotte Observer.com October 2, 2006
New York University professor and education reformer Diane Ravitch in the annual Frank Porter Graham Lecture at UNC Chapel Hill Sept. 20, speaking of the federal No Child Left Behind law:
When the next presidential campaign heats up, and it may already have started, we can expect that education reform will be a hot topic. Every candidate will have his or her take on how to change NCLB. And to be sure, changes will be necessary, as they always are in any new and far-reaching legislative program.
...I seriously doubt that NCLB will be eliminated. It may be given a new name by a new president, but the basic strategy of standards and accountability is unlikely to disappear. I say this not only because of the weight of history, but because so many Americans have become aware of global competition for economic development. In the new world of economic competition, we are required to educate our population better than ever before. To spread the benefits of good education, we must have some way of measuring our progress. We must pay attention to nurturing the talents of our exceptionally talented youth, who have been ignored by NCLB, and we must make sure that we are successfully educating our least advantaged youth....
The fact is that our most valuable asset as a nation is our human resources, the creativity, ability, and intelligence of our people. We cannot afford to waste any of them. We cannot afford to leave the development of our young to chance or to the accidents of geography and demography.
We must continue to improve our standards to be sure that our young people are getting the best possible education. We must be sure that each of our children gets an education that includes not only reading and mathematics but science, history, civics, economics, geography, literature, the arts, and a foreign language.
We must continue to improve our assessments to be sure that we are measuring what matters and doing it thoughtfully. Critics of testing say that pigs don't get fatter because they are weighed. This is true, but it is also true that you can't know for sure whether they are gaining weight or losing weight unless you weigh them. The same is true in education: We can't know whether we are making progress unless we have sound and objective means of evaluating student achievement.
We are not likely to go forward if we continue to insist that each state should write its own standards and tests. The mathematics and science that our students need to know is not different from state to state. There is not one kind of math in North Carolina and another kind in New York or California. The science that our children need to know is the same in North Carolina as it is in London and Singapore and Bombay.
...As a society, we must master the challenge of providing equal educational opportunity for all our children. We must make sure that parents and local communities continue to feel responsible for their public schools. We must respect the power of local school boards to manage their schools.
But localities should not be the ultimate determiners of standards, curriculum and testing. Every community should not be the arbiter of the facts of history and science. Every school board should not be empowered to impose its errors, misconceptions and prejudices on the students in its care.
No Child Left Behind, I believe, is a transitional step that moves us closer to the day when our schools will have the right mix of local, state, and national effort. We aren't there yet. NCLB moves us closer to the day when we will be able to say to our young people that the quality of their education does not depend on where they were born or who their parents are.
That day has not yet arrived. But it will ..., because it is good for America.
The Dismal Record on Parental Choice in NCLB By Dan Lips The Heritage Foundation October 2, 2006
When he signed his signature education initiative into law, President George W. Bush stated that “Parents must be given real options in the face of failure in order to make sure reform is meaningful.” But four years later, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has provided few American families with real options.
Under No Child Left Behind, students in low-performing schools are supposed to be able to seek out alternative educational opportunities. Specifically, public schools that fail to make adequate yearly progress over time must offer students the option to transfer to a better public school or choose an after-school tutoring program.
But few students have benefited from these provisions. According to the Department of Education, less than one percent of the nearly four million eligible students transferred public schools in the 2003–04 school year. About 233,000 students, or 17 percent of those eligible, participated in the after-school tutoring program that year.
For the students who were able to take advantage of choice under NCLB, these new options may have been a lifeline from an otherwise hopeless situation. But clearly these provisions have made far less of an impact than the law’s creators envisioned.
For that shortcoming, blame the public education bureaucracy’s poor implementation and lack of cooperation. The Department of Education found that half of all public school districts notified parents of the transfer option after the school year had already begun, too late for most students to benefit from changing schools. And less than half of eligible families were aware of the after-school tutoring program, according to a Department of Education focus group. Tutoring providers report that school districts are often uncooperative, which leads to reduced student participation.
Dr. Barbara Anderson of Knowledge Learning Corporation, a tutoring provider, highlighted the lack of awareness at a House Education and Workforce Committee hearing last week. “Our company’s experience indicates that too many parents remain unaware of supplemental educational services and the process and procedure to gain access to services,” she explained. “Unfortunately, in too many places, parent notification letters are full of legal terms and long complex explanations that only serve to confuse parents.” Is it any surprise that so few students are taking advantage of NCLB’s choice provisions?
Given this poor track record, what can be done to give children in failing schools better opportunities? One option is to tinker with No Child Left Behind to improve access to public school choice and after-school tutoring. Regulations can be changed to require schools to give parents timely and clear notification of the transfer and tutoring options. Monetary incentives could improve public school districts’ willingness to cooperate.
But reforms that take root at the state and local level show more promise. One alternative to the No Child Left Behind strategy is to give states and local communities greater freedom and flexibility to use federal education dollars. The track record under NCLB suggests that more successful school choice and after-school tutoring programs can be implemented at the state and city level with real cooperation from local communities.
San Francisco stands as a model for how real public school choice can improve a school district. As education researcher Lisa Snell has chronicled, the city implemented a system of universal public school choice and school-based management in 2000. Families can choose their children’s public schools, and public school leaders have the freedom to create school environments that appeal to parents and students. This dynamic, according to Snell, has “produced significant academic success for children in the district.”
As with public school choice, after-school tutoring is more easily integrated into the education system when it’s run at the local level. A good example is Pennsylvania’s enactment of statewide and district-level tutoring programs. In 2003, Governor Ed Rendell, a Democrat, signed into law the Educational Assistance Program to provide tutoring to students in low-performing school districts. In the program’s first year, 46,055 Pennsylvania students received tutoring in reading and math. Another statewide program, Classroom Plus, offers $500 tutoring vouchers to underperforming students. In 2004–05, 1,336 students received vouchers. Sixty-six percent made progress in reading and 73 percent made progress in math after receiving an average of 16 hours of tutoring in reading and 14 hours in math.
All this demonstrates that state and local communities can more successfully implement education reforms that work than Congress or the Department of Education. As Congress prepares for the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind next year, school choice advocates should support reforms that transfer power back to the state and local level-a more fertile ground for the most promising school reforms to blossom..
## Dan Lips is an Education Analyst at the Heritage Foundation, www.Heritage.org.
THE EDUCATION ISSUE Washington Post.com October 1, 2006
There should be efforts to very actively recruit middle-class people into neighborhood schools and make sure these really are schools that prepare kids for college. This recruitment has to be done with artistry and couldn't be started without straight talk about education and race.
In the gregation across the system. If you're going to have millions of little charter schools, it's very hard to have a coherent educational plan for the city. The premise of that approach is that it's hopeless and you can just pick on the bones.
Gary Orfield, professor of education and social policy
at the Harvard Graduate School of Education
* * *
Putting responsibility and authority together in the same place is essential. I think that means having very strong principals in schools. That means giving them authority but it also means rewarding good work. It means paying them very well and making it a very attractive job.
If you have a growing professional class, anything you can do to persuade those parents to keep their kids in the public schools is going to help everybody. Because those parents can be great advocates. And there's a growing body of evidence that diversity is in fact a very powerful educator of people. So part of the pitch to the middle class is to say: At least your kid's going to get a better education.
Colin Diver, president of Reed College, featured in
J. Anthony Lukas's "Common Ground" as a parent of children in the Boston public schools
* * *
A hundred efforts to reform the D.C. school system have foundered on the shoals of bureaucratic lethargy, union contracts and messed-up governance. A dozen "reformist" superintendents have come and gone. What's worked best to date -- albeit not perfectly -- is creating alternatives to the system's schools and letting children freely attend them. The District's burgeoning charter-school sector and its scholarship/voucher program attest both to the demand for such alternatives and to the feasibility of providing them. Adrian Fenty should do all within his power to accelerate and intensify this promising strategy.
Chester E. Finn, Jr. senior fellow, Hoover Institution
at Stanford University, and president,
Thomas B. Fordham Foundation
* * *
Two key things happened in Boston: The city moved from an elected school committee to an appointed one. And Tom Menino as mayor became a real champion of the schools. His two kids graduated from Boston public schools and he's now got five grandchildren in the public schools. You have to show others that you really believe what you're talking about.
Thomas Payzant, superintendent of Boston
public schools from 1995 to 2006
* * *
The best way to reform the D.C. public schools is to focus on the fundamentals of education: excellent teachers, experienced principals, manageable class sizes, a solid curriculum and modern facilities. If these fundamentals are missing, then no rearrangement of the structure or control of the school system will make a difference. There are no shortcuts in education, no silver bullets, no magical solutions.
Diane Ravitch, New York University professor
and assistant secretary of education under
President George H.W. Bush
* * *
The objective should be small schools of parental choice, each autonomously designed and managed by its teachers and providing a program that is legitimately "college preparatory." In order to do that, the city must push authority down, with district-wide authority vested in a board made up of faculty members of each school. Visitors from D.C. institutions of higher education would formally inspect each school every year, making their findings available to the media. Admission would be by "blind" lottery, except for siblings of students already enrolled, who would be automatically admitted, if their parents desired it.
Ted Sizer, founder, the Coalition of Essential Schools
* * *
Students' work must be central and public, and related to the school's broad mission. Only schools whose faculty is as excited as the kids hopefully will be, and whose families and communities presume they are respected partners, can engage the natural curiosity and energies of the young. A good education cannot happen until the young take on the task as their own.
Deborah Meier , author of "Many Children Left Behind" (Beacon), and founder and director, Central Park East Secondary School, a New York City public high school
* * *
I have never been to a meeting on school reform in the District where students were invited to be part of the conversation. And yet students know what is not working in schools. They will tell me that most adults in their schools do not know them well, and that they are not held accountable for much. They tell me that many teachers talk at them, rather than exploring learning with them. Students want to be involved in improving their schools and they want to be held accountable. D.C. students are very sophisticated about their own education. Most adults do not give them credit for this.
Michael Watson, principal of Capital City Public Charter School's upper school, opening next fall