Reframing the charter school debate for democrats

Aren’t monopolies illegal? Last I checked they’re an unscrupulous entity that stifles innovation and creates a race to the bottom in productivity for the benefit of a few. Yet for decades, the education systems in many of our most prominent cities have had - and many like Seattle still have - one district acting as a monopoly.  And for some strange reason, the Democratic Party tolerates this.  The same party that has fought tooth and nail to protect the rights of the common man against the interests of the juggernauts of corporate America has conveniently overlooked the most threatening monopoly of them all.  And it is this monopoly that is causing the most substantial damage, slighting the opportunities of our country’s most sacred prize – our students.

 It is time to reframe the education conversation.  For too long, the Democrats have resisted charter schools, siding with teachers unions and dismissing any progressive change in education as “pro-business.” Frankly, as a Democrat, I’m frustrated by this. Nothing could be further from the truth. Yet, when pro-charter Democrats respond to criticisms from those who resist charters, we continue sticking to talking points that inevitably open the door to criticism. There is, however, a way to put opponents of charters on the defensive and make them truly uncomfortable simultaneously.  Reformers just have to do one thing – utilize the forbidden word, monopoly.

Why that particular word? Because the word monopoly makes Democrats cringe.  The idea of one is anti-democratic, and the possibility of one existing in public education shifts pressure back on those who support a one-district system.  The strategy?  Remind anti-reform Democrats that when they fight against charters, they are fighting for monopolies. Avoid claiming that charters are the solution.  Assert that pro-reform Democrats don’t think charter schools are the end-all, be-all, nor do they think that all charters are successful, but when they work in tandem with the public system, they provide a healthy level of competition to increase student achievement. 

If we begin framing the conversation in this way, we begin winning the hearts and minds of those not heavily engaged in this debate but who abhor monopolies– the ones who may have voted down the Seattle referendum in 2004* if they had been presented the debate through this lens.

*In 2004, the Washington State legislature passed a law to allow charter schools.   Opposition groups, particularly the teachers union, put forth a referendum to disallow the law from going into effect. Through the dissemination of misinformation, the referendum was passed by Washington State voters.  Charter schools are still not permitted in Washington State, one of only ten states that still don’t allow them. 

Why aren't our teachers the best and brightest?

A super interesting piece on teacher quality...

 

By Paul Kihn and Matt Miller

Washington Post

Why don't more of our smartest, most accomplished college graduates want to become teachers?
People trying to improve education in this country have been talking a lot lately about boosting "teacher effectiveness." But nearly all such efforts focus on the teachers who are already in the classroom, instead of seeking to change the caliber of the people who enter teaching in the first place.
Three of the top-performing school systems in the world -- those in Finland, Singapore and South Korea -- take a different approach, recruiting 100 percent of their teachers from the top third of their high school and college students. Simply put, they don't take middling students and make them teachers. They tap their best people for the job.
Of course, academic achievement isn't the whole story in these countries. They screen would-be teachers for other important qualities, and they invest heavily in training teachers and in retaining them for their entire careers. But scholastic prowess comes first: You don't get through the classroom door in Finland, Singapore or South Korea without having distinguished yourself academically. In the United States, by contrast, only 23 percent of new teachers scored among the top third of SAT and ACT test-takers back in high school. In high-poverty schools, that figure is just 14 percent.
This shouldn't come as news. The late Sandra Feldman, president of the American Federation of Teachers from 1997 to 2004, was open about the problem as far back as 2003. "You have in the schools right now, among the teachers who are going to be retiring, very smart people," she said in an interview. "We're not getting in now the same kinds of people. It's disastrous. We've been saying for years now that we're attracting from the bottom third."
Feldman was right to point out that we are entering a period of enormous turnover in our classrooms: With about half of America's 3.5 million teachers eligible to retire in the next decade, the question of who should teach looms especially large.
So why do top U.S. college students have so little interest in teaching careers compared with their counterparts in the world's best-performing nations?
Partly, it's because we are stuck in a time warp. Up through the mid-1970s, the academic quality of the teacher corps in the United States was effectively subsidized by discrimination: Talented women and members of minorities became teachers at high rates in large part because they didn't have many opportunities outside the classroom.
When that changed, teaching lost its longtime labor supply and suddenly had to compete with more lucrative professions, even as educators' salaries were falling behind. In New York City in 1970, for example, a starting lawyer at a prestigious firm earned about $2,000 per year more than a starting public school teacher. Today, that starting New York lawyer makes $160,000, including salary and bonus, while a new teacher across town earns $45,000. Nationally, teachers' starting salaries average $39,000 today, rising to an average career maximum of $67,000.
But it's not just pay that's a problem. A teaching career does not offer our nation's top college graduates a compelling peer group, opportunities for continued learning or the prestige of other professions. Moreover, our most needy schools mostly fail to offer the working conditions or the leadership needed to retain top talent once it has been recruited.
Our approach to teacher recruitment and development doesn't hold a candle to the methods used in Singapore, Finland and South Korea, where attracting high-quality people to the profession is considered a national priority. The good news, based on research that we and our colleagues at McKinsey & Company recently completed, is that the United States could dramatically increase the number of top students who choose teaching by adopting some of these countries' practices.
How do they do it? For starters, these countries make teacher training programs highly selective, accepting no more than one out of every seven or eight applicants. Their governments also limit the number of training positions to match the expected demand for educators, so that those admitted are assured jobs. American teachers, by contrast, mostly enter the profession through programs that are not selective at all. As a result, more than half of newly certified teachers in the United States -- about 100,000 each year -- do not take jobs in the classroom.
Next, Singapore and Finland fully fund teacher education and pay students salaries or stipends. In the United States, meanwhile, students must often go into debt to attend education schools. In addition, the quality of teacher training in top-performing nations is first-rate. Companies such as Nokia, for example, covet teachers who leave the classroom in Finland, because graduates of teacher training there are known to be exceptional talents.
These countries also foster a professional working environment. Finland, for example, grants teachers the kind of autonomy typically enjoyed by doctors in this country: They have wide latitude over how they teach, they share responsibility for their schools' operating budgets, and they belong to a culture that emphasizes the need to continually update one's skills.
In the United States, by contrast, teaching is often seen as an "unprofessional" career track, even by teachers. For example, we found that only 3 percent of the U.S. teachers we surveyed who were in the top third of their college class think that people who do well in teaching can advance professionally.
Crucially, these other countries provide competitive compensation. Of the three, South Korea puts the greatest emphasis on salary, with starting pay equivalent to about $55,000 and top salaries reaching $155,000. According to Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University, these earnings place South Korea's teachers somewhere between its engineers and its doctors. Singapore, in addition to competitive pay, offers retention bonuses of $10,000 to $36,000 every three to five years.
To top it all off, these nations accord enormous cultural respect to teaching and teachers. Leaders in the United States routinely offer rhetorical tributes to teaching, but the profession here enjoys nothing like the exalted status it holds in these three countries.
What will it take to emulate Finland, South Korea and Singapore? In part, it will require a total makeover of the teaching profession's image. Our national survey of 900 top-third college students (as calculated based on self-reported SAT and ACT scores and grade point averages) showed that such students simply aren't interested in teaching. The good news, though, is that the kind of makeover needed to win them over won't break the bank.
For example, we calculate that the United States could more than double the portion of top-third new hires in the worst-performing 5 percent of schools (serving about 2.5 million students nationwide) from 14 percent to 34 percent, without raising teacher salaries. Under this scenario, which would cost about $1 billion a year, the government would pay for teacher training; schools would offer enhanced leadership and professional development; shabby, unsafe working conditions would be improved; high-performing teachers would be paid a bonus of 20 percent; and a national marketing campaign would promote teaching careers.
More ambitious efforts to close the talent gap would require higher salaries, which are the most powerful lever for attracting and retaining top graduates. For example, we found that in one scenario involving high-poverty schools serving about 8 million children nationally, increasing starting teacher salaries to $65,000 and maximum salaries to $150,000 would increase the percentage of new teachers drawn from the top third of their class from 14 percent to 68 percent. This approach would cost something like $30 billion a year at current student/teacher ratios, or about 5 percent of national K-12 spending.
The cost of action is relatively low, in other words, particularly compared with the cost of inaction, which is staggeringly high. Separate research by McKinsey last year on the economic costs of the achievement gap between the United States and other countries suggests that the stakes are huge: If the United States had closed this gap between 1983 and 1998, raising its academic performance to the level of nations such as Finland and South Korea, U.S. GDP in 2008 would have been roughly $1.3 trillion higher than it was. The ongoing cost of that difference is the equivalent of a permanent national recession much larger than the one from which we are now emerging.
So, if recruiting and retaining teachers drawn from the top third could help close the achievement gap, even at a cost of $30 billion a year, the social and economic returns could be enormous.
Some U.S. researchers say there's little evidence that teachers with stronger academic backgrounds produce higher student achievement, but this conclusion is starkly at odds with the experiences of Singapore, Finland and South Korea. Our McKinsey colleagues have studied more than 50 school systems around the world and have never seen a nation achieve or sustain world-class educational performance without drawing its teachers from the top third of their class. Should we really bet our children's future on the possibility that our country might be the exception?

education@mckinsey.com

Paul Kihn is an associate principal in McKinsey & Company's education practice. Matt Miller, a senior adviser to McKinsey, writes a weekly column for The Washington Post. Together with Byron Auguste, they are co-authors of the report "Closing the Talent Gap: Attracting and Retaining Top Third Graduates to a Career in Teaching."

 

How to Fix Our Schools

This piece was in the Washington Post this week, intended to be a manifesto for reforming our schools by some of the biggest movers and shakes in education today. Enjoy!




By: Joel Klein, chancellor, New York City Department of Education;Michelle Rhee, chancellor, District of Columbia Public Schools; Peter C. Gorman, superintendent, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (N.C.); Ron Huberman, chief executive, Chicago Public Schools; Carol R. Johnson, superintendent, Boston Public Schools; Andrés A. Alonso, chief executive, Baltimore City Public Schools;Tom Boasberg, superintendent, Denver Public Schools; Arlene C. Ackerman, superintendent of schools, the School District of Philadelphia; William R. Hite Jr., superintendent, Prince George's County Public Schools; Jean-Claude Brizard, superintendent of schools, Rochester City School District (N.Y.); José M. Torres, superintendent, Illinois School District U-46; J. Wm. Covington, superintendent, Kansas City, Missouri School District; Terry B. Grier, superintendent of schools, Houston Independent School District; Paul Vallas, superintendent, New Orleans Recovery School District; Eugene White, superintendent, Indianapolis Public Schools;LaVonne Sheffield, superintendent of Rockford Public Schools (Illinois)



As educators, superintendents, chief executives and chancellors responsible for educating nearly 2 1/2 million students in America, we know that the task of reforming the country's public schools begins with us. It is our obligation to enhance the personal growth and academic achievement of our students, and we must be accountable for how our schools perform.

All of us have taken steps to move our students forward, and the Obama administration's Race to the Top program has been the catalyst for more reforms than we have seen in decades. But those reforms are still outpaced and outsized by the crisis in public education.
Fortunately, the public, and our leaders in government, are finally paying attention. The"Waiting for 'Superman' " documentary, the defeat of D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million gift to Newark's public schools, and a tidal wave of media attention have helped spark a national debate and presented us with an extraordinary opportunity.

But the transformative changes needed to truly prepare our kids for the 21st-century global economy simply will not happen unless we first shed some of the entrenched practices that have held back our education system, practices that have long favored adults, not children. These practices are wrong, and they have to end now.

It's time for all of the adults -- superintendents, educators, elected officials, labor unions and parents alike -- to start acting like we are responsible for the future of our children. Because right now, across the country, kids are stuck in failing schools, just waiting for us to do something.

So, where do we start? With the basics. As President Obama has emphasized, the single most important factor determining whether students succeed in school is not the color of their skin or their ZIP code or even their parents' income -- it is the quality of their teacher.
Yet, for too long, we have let teacher hiring and retention be determined by archaic rules involving seniority and academic credentials. The widespread policy of "last in, first out" (the teacher with the least seniority is the first to go when cuts have to be made) makes it harder to hold on to new, enthusiastic educators and ignores the one thing that should matter most: performance.


A 7-year-old girl won't make it to college someday because her teacher has two decades of experience or a master's degree -- she will make it to college if her teacher is effective and engaging and compels her to reach for success. By contrast, a poorly performing teacher can hold back hundreds, maybe thousands, of students over the course of a career. Each day that we ignore this reality is precious time lost for children preparing for the challenges of adulthood.

The glacial process for removing an incompetent teacher -- and our discomfort as a society with criticizing anyone who chooses this noble and difficult profession -- has left our school districts impotent and, worse, has robbed millions of children of a real future.

There isn't a business in America that would survive if it couldn't make personnel decisions based on performance. That is why everything we use in assessing teachers must be linked to their effectiveness in the classroom and focused on increasing student achievement.

District leaders also need the authority to use financial incentives to attract and retain the best teachers. When teachers are highly effective -- measured in significant part by how well students are doing academically -- or are willing to take a job in a tough school or in a hard-to-staff subject area such as advanced math or science, we should be able to pay them more. Important initiatives, such as the federal Teacher Incentive Fund, are helping bring great educators to struggling communities, but we have to change the rules to professionalize teaching.

Let's stop ignoring basic economic principles of supply and demand and focus on how we can establish a performance-driven culture in every American school -- a culture that rewards excellence, elevates the status of teachers and is positioned to help as many students as possible beat the odds. We need the best teacher for every child, and the best principal for every school. Of course, we must also do a better job of providing meaningful training for teachers who seek to improve, but let's stop pretending that everyone who goes into the classroom has the ability and temperament to lift our children to excellence.

Even the best teachers -- those who possess such skills -- face stiff challenges in meeting the diverse needs of their students. A single elementary- or middle-school classroom can contain, for instance, students who read on two or three different grade levels, and that range grows even wider as students move into high school. Is it reasonable to expect a teacher to address all the needs of 25 or 30 students when some are reading on a fourth-grade level and others are ready for Tolstoy? We must equip educators with the best technology available to make instruction more effective and efficient. By better using technology to collect data on student learning and shape individualized instruction, we can help transform our classrooms and lessen the burden on teachers' time.

To make this transformation work, we must also eliminate arcane rules such as "seat time," which requires a student to spend a specific amount of time in a classroom with a teacher rather than taking advantage of online lessons and other programs.

Just as we must give teachers and schools the capability and flexibility to meet the needs of students, we must give parents a better portfolio of school choices. That starts with having the courage to replace or substantially restructure persistently low-performing schools that continuously fail our students. Closing a neighborhood school -- whether it's in Southeast D.C., Harlem, Denver or Chicago -- is a difficult decision that can be very emotional for a community. But no one ever said leadership is easy.

We also must make charter schools a truly viable option. If all of our neighborhood schools were great, we wouldn't be facing this crisis. But our children need great schools now -- whether district-run public schools or public charter schools serving all students -- and we shouldn't limit the numbers of one form at the expense of the other. Excellence must be our only criteria for evaluating our schools.

For the wealthiest among us, the crisis in public education may still seem like someone else's problem, because those families can afford to choose something better for their kids. But it's a problem for all of us -- until we fix our schools, we will never fix the nation's broader economic problems. Until we fix our schools, the gap between the haves and the have-nots will only grow wider and the United States will fall further behind the rest of the industrialized world in education, rendering the American dream a distant, elusive memory.

GOOD Friday posts

Dear All,


Welcome to Education Nation, a blog that purports to shed light on the ongoing reforms taking place in education across the country.  After teaching middle school in inner-city Chicago for three years, I walked away completely and utterly appalled with the state of public education in large urban districts, but found myself committed more than ever to the students who are affected daily by this dysfunctional system. I returned to Seattle a month ago only to find that our city and state are far behind others.  Education Nation, thus, intends to be a bridge connecting the conversations and changes taking place around the country with those occurring here. 


For those of you who follow music, you may know where the term GOOD Fridays comes from.  Education Nation will have an article posted every Friday on some topic pertaining to education reform.  I hope you are able to check back weekly. 


My Regards,


Adel 

When the Spotlight Dims, Will We Still Care?

It’s about time. The media’s fixation on the most trivial, from the religion of our president to the witchcraft purported by a congressional candidate, has been substituted this past week for something more substantive – education reform.  With the release of the documentary “Waiting for Superman,” reformers like Michelle Rhee and Geoffrey Canada have been in the perpetual spotlight and have caused celebrities like Oprah and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to give millions to disadvantaged schools.  It is uplifting to see the media rallying around this story, engaging in its discourse and shedding light on its direness.  But when the next vogue story captures the headlines of the major news outlets, what will happen to our children who are waiting in the balance?

          Our education system is broken; let’s get that out of the way. Sure, we have made significant progress from a hundred years ago, a time when only eight and a half per cent of American seventeen-year-olds had a high-school degree. But today we face an alarming problem in two arenas that is sure to affect our country in the coming years.  First, what once used to be the country that produced the most college graduates in the world, has become an America that ranks 25^th in the world in Math and 21^st in Science.  Second, and perhaps more troubling, is the widening opportunity gap between White students and their Black and Latino peers. This gap can be defined as the difference in access to opportunity ranging from quality schools, to college access, to extracurricular activities, to educated parents, and inevitably leads to the much talked about achievement gap that plagues our nation today.  In May, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that graduation rates in poverty-stricken schools fell from 86% to 68% between 2000 and 2008.  The impact of this achievement gap is yet to be felt in its entirety.

         What does this mean for Seattle? Here are the numbers: The average ACT score among low-income students in this city is an 18, a measly 34^th percentile ranking. 33% of 12^th grade students do not graduate. Although scores of both white and black students have improved in recent decades, the achievement gap between them, specifically in reading, math and science, isn’t closing.

So what is our solution? Washington State has fallen behind 40 other states on the issue of reform.  For years, the teacher’s union has resisted calls for action to improve our schools.  Our state is one of ten that still do not allow charter schools despite their proven success in other states. We still use a quality-blind layoff system, one that fires the least experienced rather than the poorest-performing teacher. We still pump thousands of tax-payer dollars into the professional development system that teachers despise and would admit does little to improve best practices. 

But change is on the way, even in Seattle.  Thanks to incentives created by Obama’s Race To The Top grant, our state passed two major reforms without receiving a penny from the government: A new law allowing alternative teaching certification programs like Teach for America, and a new method of evaluating teachers that takes some –though not yet enough –student achievement data into consideration when rating teachers.  These reforms are a step in the right direction, and require a push by our city’s citizenry to continue.

I’m thankful, as a former educator, that a spotlight has finally been put on the heartbreaking state of this nation’s education system.  I just hope that when the media moves on, as they inevitably will, we still choose to care.