SAVE OUR SCHOOLS
CLASS ACTS OF SCHOOL REFORM: Some of the people who are making a difference (Part 4 of 5)
BY NOREEN O'DONNELL AND JOSH BERNSTEIN
The drive to improve schools so that all American children get a top education has drawn reformers from all corners. Many come from outside the system, whether corporate executives, Teach for America alumni or well-known philanthropists.
The problems of struggling schools, particularly those in inner cities, are stubborn and although changes have been made, enormous difficulties remain. Here are profiles of some of those on the front lines.
SYDNEY MORRIS & EVAN STONE
Sydney Morris and Evan Stone began Educators 4 Excellence in New York City to ensure that amid the noise over how to improve schools, teachers got a voice, too — an independent voice. The teachers union wasn’t providing the one that they wanted.
“Teaching is a very isolating profession,” Morris, 25, said. “There was really no forum for teachers to interact with policy-makers.”
Though as an elementary school teacher she was a member of the American Federation of Teachers, and describes herself as both pro-union and pro-reform, Morris takes very different stands.
The worst teachers should be let go when schools need to make layoffs, not simply the newest arrivals. Tenure should be more difficult to obtain. Teacher performance evaluations should include how well their students are doing — the so-called value-added data — among other measures.
Morris said that she and Stone were a day shy of gaining tenure when they left their jobs to start the group in March. They have since signed up 1,300 members.
“Teachers join our organization because they want to be empowered to have an impact on more than just the students in their classroom,” Stone, 26, said. “This feeling is not restricted to just young teachers, but is true of all teachers who want to put kids first.”
More than half of their members have four or more years of experience, and they teach every subject and grade level.
“The same sorts of frustrations kept coming up,” Morris said. “Teachers feel like they’re not evaluated in a meaningful way. They’re not receiving the tools or the resources or the support that they need to improve at their craft. They’re not being acknowledged or rewarded for tough work in a really tough profession.”
MICHELLE RHEE
As the former chancellor of the Washington, D.C. schools — and a guest on "The Oprah Show" — Michelle Rhee was already a celebrated if controversial educator. With the launch of her new advocacy group, StudentsFirst, she now has a national vehicle for change.
The organization will be an advocate for children just as unions represent teachers and administrators, she said.
Its policies call for eliminating tenure, rating principals based on student achievement, and giving students tax-funded vouchers to attend private schools.
But the policy that’s gotten even more attention would force districts to get the written consent of parents before placing their children with ineffective teachers.
“The process through which an ineffective teacher is dismissed from the system is extraordinarily cumbersome,” she said. “It’s very time-consuming. It often can last years and years and years. And what is the dirty little secret is that in the meantime, while that process is happening, kids are suffering.”
The group will donate to political campaigns and work with governors to implement its agenda.
Education Commissioner Arne Duncan has called education the civil rights issue of the time, but Rhee is reluctant to embrace that language. During the Civil Rights movement, people knew a fight would be necessary, she said.
“In public education we’re very conflict-averse,” she said. “We all just want to hug and get along and pretend like the issues don’t exist. So if we really want to treat it like a true civil rights issue then we have to know that we’re in for some conflict and controversy and not be afraid of that.”
WENDY KOPP
Twenty years after founding Teach For America — an outgrowth of her Princeton University thesis — Wendy Kopp can picture success.
Hundreds of schools across the country are setting poor children on track to graduate from college at the same pace as wealthier children, she said. The challenge now is to educate children across entire cities.
And for her, the how is not very different from when she started: the people.
“What’s so overwhelmingly clear wherever we see transformational change ... it is so much about talented leadership,” Kopp said. “That’s a tough fact because there’s no easy, quick way to develop an effective leadership pipeline. It’s just a lot of hard work.”
In her new book, “A Chance to Make History,” Kopp cites poor test results at a high-tech school in Philadelphia and writes that without strong leadership, the technology was not only not beneficial, but, in fact, distracting to the students.
“In the classroom I visited, as the teacher attempted to talk loudly through the day’s lesson, I watched from the back of the room as literally every kid in the class either surfed the Internet, played computer games, sent instant messages to friends, or, in the case of a few students, attempted to fix broken computers.”
The scene would have been funny if not for the stakes involved, she wrote.
Teach For America places recent college graduates in low-income public schools. Late last month, four philanthropists teamed up to donate $100 million for its first endowment.
Teach For America had more than 46,000 applications for just 4,400 positions this year. It also has 20,000 alumni, nearly two-thirds of whom work in education, the organization says. Half of those are teachers.
Critics accuse the group of putting young graduates with little training into classrooms where they stay for only a few years and essentially practice on students.
GEOFFREY CANADA
Geoffrey Canada is the visionary behind the Harlem Children’s Zone, a network of services that embraces families, providing everything from preschools to asthma and obesity programs.
Its motto: “Doing whatever it takes to educate children and strengthen the community.”
The idea is to address all of the problems poor families face, from crime to chronic health problems to failing schools. Today the zone encompasses 100 city blocks and serves 8,000 children.
Raised by a single mother in the South Bronx, Canada believes education reform must extend beyond schools in poor communities made up primarily of black and Hispanic communities.
“People believed that the vast majority of American schools were fine,” he said. “I think the realization is sinking in that the rest of America is not fine.”
The stubbornly high unemployment numbers are forcing people to reconsider, worried that their children will be ill prepared for the restructuring of the American economy, he said.
“I don’t think most Americans paid any attention to global competition unless they were in manufacturing,” he said. “I just think people felt, ‘Who cares what’s going on around the rest of the world?’ This is now becoming more and more apparent to people, that we are competing with folk who are as educated or more educated than we are.”
With budgets tight, schools are under even more pressure to confront labor regulations such as tenure and seniority, he said.
“I think you’re going to see a lot more middle-class families saying: ‘Enough. This doesn’t make sense. This is not what my kid needs.’”
TED MITCHELL
The president of NewSchools Venture Fund, Ted Mitchell believes educational reform is at a critical juncture.
Changes such as longer school days and higher expectations for students have brought about improvements, he said. Now the challenge is to find the next generation of innovations.
“It’s not doing education better,” said Mitchell, the former president of Occidental College and of the California State Board of Education. “It’s doing education different.”
Over the last decade, the San Francisco-based fund has raised more than $145 million to support entrepreneurial nonprofit and for-profit organizations. It selects promising entrepreneurs and helps them expand.
Among its ventures: Carnegie Learning, a for-profit provider of mathematics curricula for middle school and high school students, and Civic Builders, a nonprofit real estate development firm that maintains school buildings for New York charter schools.
For the future, it is looking at teacher training, individualized instruction and measuring students’ progress. Its fourth fund will try to spur innovation in teacher preparation, the management of charter schools and the turnaround of failing schools. It also will focus on hybrid charter schools that blend in-class learning with an online component.
SEE PART ONE OF SERIES: http://bit.ly/hmkFVS
SEE PART TWO OF SERIES: http://bit.ly/e6QGMA
SEE PART THREE OF SERIES: http://bit.ly/gElNII
Credit: The Daily (www.thedaily.com)
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