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Tag: education reform
Activists Protest Campbell Brown’s ‘Colbert Report’ Appearance

Activists Protest Campbell Brown’s ‘Colbert Report’ Appearance

While fans waited to get into Thursday’s taping of The Colbert Report, a small but dedicated group stood outside the studio, protesting Campbell Brown’s appearance on the Comedy Central show that night.

Brown, a former television journalist turned education reformer, announced on Monday that her group, the Partnership for Educational Justice, is helping seven families with a lawsuit against New York State’s tenure laws for teachers. Brown argues that tenure protections make it very difficult to fire incompetent teachers, and that her team is working to fight the cronyism in education.

“We’re under no illusions that this is[n’t] going to be incredibly challenging … when you’re trying to change a system like this, when you’re trying to fight powers that have been fighting to maintain the status quo for as long as they have,” she said at a press conference. “Do you think it’s going to be easy? Of course it’s not.”

The protesters, comprised of about 10 advocates from the Alliance for Quality Education, New York Communities for Change, and a few parents and teachers, could not disagree more. They argue that tenure is an essential protection for teachers.

“Due process is a very important process for our teachers,” Elzora Cleveland, a public school parent and member of New York Communities for Change and the Alliance for Quality Education, told The National Memo. “We want our teachers to be able to teach without worrying about their jobs. It allows them to be more creative, more focused. They can really spend their creative time zooming in on moving children forward in their education as opposed to worrying about whether they’ll have a job tomorrow.”

Cleveland doesn’t think that Brown should be speaking for parents and teachers, especially since she didn’t go to public school herself and her children attend private schools.

“If Campbell Brown is not publicly educated … what could she understand about this process?” Cleveland said. “I believe it is a political stunt.”

Zakiyah Ansari, Advocacy Director of the Alliance for Quality Education, agrees. She says that if Brown wants to improve the education system, then she should be focused on funding, and ensuring that students and teachers have access to the resources that they need. She finds it suspicious that this is the issue on which Brown’s chosen to focus.

“I believe the parents’ concerns are real but I don’t believe [Brown’s] intent to support them are real,” she told The National Memo. “The one percent is running around this country shuttering public education.”

Ansari also thinks that tenure is important because it allows so teachers to fight for funding and better opportunities for their students without fearing for their jobs.

“What would happen to those teachers if they didn’t have … the right to due process?” she said.

The group stood outside the studio for about an hour, holding signs such as “Campbell Brown Doesn’t Speak 4 Me,” and chanting, “Campbell, Campbell, who funds you, hedge funds and Wall Street, isn’t that true?”

Maureen Gephardt, a Colbert fan waiting on line to enter the studio, thought that Colbert was a great person to interview Brown because he would “challenge” her.

“I think public education needs to have advocates all over and they should be able to be here,” she told us.

Video of Brown’s interview with Colbert can be seen below, via Comedy Central:

Photo: The National Memo/Rachel Witkin

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Robo-Truant Tech And Other Apps To Fix Education

Sept. 30 (Bloomberg) — The education reform movement is at an important juncture. It will either peter out in platitudes or advance based on a new consensus. At this week’s Education Nation conference in New York City, I came away with some hope for the latter. My cautious optimism is rooted in two Ts — technology and transparency.

In the pitched battles between reformers and traditionalists, I’ve been passionately on the side of the reformers for almost 20 years. With the help of the last four presidents, they’ve made progress against the education establishment in pushing for accountability, common standards, charter schools, merit pay and rigorous teacher evaluation.

But traditionalists in the unions and the business-as-usual bureaucracy have recently been successful in depicting reformers as teacher-bashers (not guilty) and as overreliant on test scores in reading and math at the expense of other subjects (guilty).

Even if they cordially despise each other, reformers and traditionalists will now have to work together to implement the new accountability laws enacted in the past few years in about a dozen states.

One way to do so is by embracing smart new technology.

For years, faddish tech fixes like computers in the classroom have yielded few results. But that could be changing. One of the most intriguing parts of Education Nation was the Innovation Challenge, a contest with shades of Donald Trump’s show, “The Apprentice.” Three young innovators presented their ideas on stage to a panel of judges moderated by Tom Brokaw:

Classdojo.com uses a competitive point system (always popular with students) to enable teachers to better handle the behavioral problems that so often impede learning. The idea is to build character by rewarding teams of students who work together to stay on task and avoid disruptions. Technology can’t substitute for a teacher’s class-management skills. But with as much as half of class time consumed by dealing with disruptive kids, it can help.

Kickboardforteachers.com creates a dashboard that helps teachers and administrators customize instruction for students who learn at different paces. It could offer teachers the ability to control more variables and deliver a more sophisticated classroom experience. This kind of “blended learning” was a theme of the conference. A related application, Edmodo.com, is already being used by 3 million teachers and students. It’s a Facebook-like tool, controlled by teachers, that streams homework assignments, distance-learning videos and other material to extend the classroom online.

Arguably the most practical if least transformational idea is Truanttoday.com. Founded by a brilliant 16-year-old named Zak Kukoff, this digital attendance book automatically contacts parents when their kids miss class. In the 200 schools now using Truanttoday, 50 percent of the students who ditch show up to class that day after their parents are alerted. As Brokaw quipped, we’ll all be working for Zak some day.

Classdojo won the $75,000 prize. Even if this and other 2011 innovations flop, we’re edging closer to the era when technology finally changes what is essentially a 19th-century system of education. In science, paradigm shifts follow technological breakthroughs. Education won’t be any different.

My sense is that the most potent tool will be the new transparency offered by the Web. The conference featured a lot of talk about “scalability” and “replication,” but that’s only possible with more information about which schools and teachers are successful and why.

The challenge is to break down what works so that at least some of the best practices can be more widely adopted. Like many others at the conference, former President Bill Clinton was focused on why two schools with identical poverty levels so often get entirely different results out of their students. “If every problem has been solved by someone somewhere, why are we so lousy at copying those ideas?” he asked.

A solution may be on the way. This month — too late to be included in Education Nation — the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research unveiled a sophisticated tool for learning which of Chicago’s public schools are working. Finally, someone is bottling the formulas for success.

To the dismay of principals, parents in Chicago can put their address or zip code into a website and see how their kid’s school stacks up on what the consortium calls the five essentials: a sound vision shared by the principal and teachers; collaboration among teachers who constantly critique each other’s instruction; a school’s ties with families and community; a safe learning climate; and classes that are demanding and engaging.

The university’s research (which goes much deeper than these rubrics) shows that improvement in even three of the five areas makes a school 10 times more likely to improve student learning.

These ratings, reminiscent of U.S. News and World Report‘s college rankings (though much more substantive), are assembled through surveys of teachers and students. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation spent millions learning how to evaluate teachers and schools, only to find that brutally honest student evaluations correlate best with actual performance.

Timothy Knowles, a well-regarded education reformer who runs the Chicago program and worked on Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s transition, told me, “Rahm wanted to engage parents more and be transparent and I said, ‘Here’s a way to do both.'” Knowles will take his scorecard to Minneapolis-St. Paul this year and with any luck it will spread quickly to the rest of the country. Already, thousands of Chicago parents are checking out their schools, though results are incomplete because the survey was voluntary the first year. Emanuel is making participation mandatory in 2012.

Knowles angered the Chicago Teachers Union last year by opposing tenure, but now the union supports his five essentials scorecard. Maybe next year at Education Nation we’ll see reformers and traditionalists join together to explain how levers like this will help us scale up, replicate and change American education for good.

(Jonathan Alter is a Bloomberg View columnist and the author of “The Promise: President Obama, Year One.” The opinions expressed are his own.)

Copyright 2011 Bloomberg.

Rupert Murdoch Moves Into Education Business

Rupert Murdoch won’t let a massive phone-hacking scandal deter his business efforts: The News Corp. media mogul is, in fact, trying to expand into other areas. This time, he’s looking at education. According to Mother Jones:

Next month, Murdoch will make an unusual public appearance in San Francisco, delivering the keynote address at an education summit hosted by former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who has lately been criss-crossing the country promoting his own version of education reform.

The high-profile speech to a collection of conservative ed reformers, state legislators, and educators is just the latest step in Murdoch’s quiet march into the business of education, which has been somewhat eclipsed by the phone-hacking scandal besieging his media empire. (On Tuesday, word of Murdoch’s appearance at Bush’s conference came just hours after reports that News Corp. had agreed to pay more than $4 million to the family of a 13-year-old British murder victim, Milly Dowler, whose voicemail was hacked by reporters for Murdoch’s News of the World.) But Murdoch has made it very clear that he views America’s public schools as a potential goldmine.

“In every other part of life, someone who woke up after a 50-year nap would not recognize the world around him… But not in education,” he remarked in May during a speech at the “e-G8 forum” that preceded the G8 summit in France. “Our schools remain the last holdout from the digital revolution.”

Last November, News Corp. dropped $360 million to buy Wireless Generation, a Brooklyn-based education technology company that provides software, assessment tools, and data services. “When it comes to K through 12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the US alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed by big breakthroughs that extend the reach of great teaching,” Murdoch said at the time.

With such a pro-privatization figure eying education, teachers’ unions are understandably wary. Murdoch is delving ever-deeper into what he must consider a profitable new venture — with an impressionable young audience.

Obama Shows Spunk Pushing Brave Education Plan

Aug.12 (Bloomberg) — Although President Barack Obama is on the ropes, with even some Democratic allies describing him as weak and passive, this week he showed boldness and imagination in one vital area: education.

Obama backed Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s announcement that he will grant waivers to states that want to be excused from the punitive provisions of No Child Left Behind , Washington’s much-maligned 2002 overhaul of elementary and secondary education policy.

Republican lawmakers complain that the White House waivers run roughshod over the legislative branch — and they’re right. But gridlock demands more robust use of presidential authority and, at least in this case, we’re getting it. Unless Duncan’s action is challenged and reversed on constitutional grounds, No Child Left Behind will be left behind for good.

Under Obama, education was supposed to be fertile ground for bipartisan compromise. That’s because Obama has executed a “Nixon to China” maneuver; only a Democratic president can successfully take on the teachers unions, and the president has done so in a shrewd way that avoids teacher bashing and keeps the lines of communication with the unions (big backers of Democrats) open.

Republican lawmakers broadly endorse Obama’s policies, but they’re philosophically committed to less federal involvement in education and politically committed to opposing the president whenever possible. So they’ve dragged their feet on reauthorizing NCLB, as have Senate Democrats who can’t agree on how to move a bill.

Duncan’s waivers, which are good for four years, actually enhance local control while ensuring greater accountability. But it’s a different kind of local control and a different vision of accountability than we’ve seen before.

Obama and Duncan are selling something ambitious –a new relationship between Washington and the states. The idea is to set high education standards, then let states figure out how to meet them. “We want to give them a lot more flexibility, get out of their way and let them hit that higher bar,” Duncan said last week.

Some Republican governors, such as Mitch Daniels of Indiana, joined Democratic governors in praising the plan. They and just about everyone else connected to American education are frustrated that so many schools are deemed “failing” under NCLB, even when they aren’t.

There’s a racial subtext to all this. The most common reason schools receive a failing grade is that minority students don’t perform well, dragging down a school’s scores. Duncan’s waivers will require continued focus on the achievement gap between whites and minorities, yet introduce more sophisticated accountability standards that set realistic goals for improvement.

While it deserves credit for bringing accountability into American education, NCLB inadvertently provided incentives to states to dumb down standards so that fewer schools would fail. Tennessee, for instance, was “lying to children, lying to parents,” as Duncan put it, in 2008 when state tests showed 91 percent of its children proficient in math. When Tennessee, under pressure from Washington, replaced those tests with legitimate ones the following year, only 34 percent of students proved proficient.

To underscore the urgent need for action, Duncan warned this spring that with NCLB’s standards, 80 percent of the nation’s 100,000 schools could soon be deemed failures under the law’s crude pass-fail system, which goes by the most dreaded acronym in American education: AYP — Adequate Yearly Progress.

A more accurate assessment of schools suggests that about 40 percent are headed for a failing grade, but the point remains: NCLB isn’t working. It penalizes schools for circumstances beyond their control — like the poor preparation of incoming students — and sets standards that tens of thousands of schools cannot meet. Expecting all students to be proficient in reading and math by 2014, as the law dictates, is a fantasy.

Duncan and Obama rightly believe that there is middle ground between what President George W. Bush memorably called “the soft bigotry of low expectations” and pie-in-the-sky demands for proficiency. They favor replacing AYP with more sensible evaluations of classroom teachers, who will be judged partly on whether their students have shown improvement — even from a low baseline — over the course of a school year.

Instead of being based entirely on student tests, new teacher evaluations will also require classroom observation, student ratings and other means of assessment. Colorado, Indiana and Florida are leading the pack in developing the sophisticated accountability standards necessary for better performance.

We won’t know until September exactly what Duncan will demand of states in exchange for granting them waivers, but the price is likely to resemble the requirements imposed by Race to the Top, the competition launched by the Department of Education in 2009 that has inspired a flowering of reform across the country.

This time, states won’t compete with each other for federal money. But they will probably have to meet many of the same accountability standards demanded by Race to the Top, including closing genuinely failed schools, incorporating student performance in teacher evaluations, and applying new “common core” academic standards that are more rigorous than those adopted in the past.

Steven Brill’s forthcoming book, “Class Warfare,” offers a compelling account of Race to the Top, which, for all of its success, has also been marred by the failure of some states to meet their commitments to more rigorous teacher evaluation.

For years, teachers unions have wanted their members to be considered professionals without being held accountable for performance like other professionals. The Obama policy goes a long way toward changing that. Not surprisingly, Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, told me this week that she opposes Duncan’s waivers because they shift too much accountability to teachers.

Duncan will need to use the power of the executive branch to enforce both the requirements of Race to the Top and whatever broad reforms he demands in exchange for state waivers. If that requires withholding federal funds from recalcitrant states — good. If it means overriding a dilatory and dysfunctional Congress — even better.

(Jonathan Alter is a Bloomberg View columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)