We Can Learn From Mercer Middle School

The remarkable turnaround at Asa Mercer Middle has School Board members paying close attention. The school's success could significantly influence policies across the district.

By Brian M. Rosenthal

Seattle Times education reporter

For years, Beacon Hill's Asa Mercer Middle School languished as one of the worst in the city.

In 2005, just 13.8 percent of its eighth-graders passed the state science test — 20 points below the district average. Scores in math (33.1 percent passing) and reading (55.9 percent passing) weren't much better.

With enrollment shrinking, many regarded Mercer as another example of a grim pattern seen in schools nationwide: high diversity, high poverty, low achievement.

Six years later, Mercer has shattered that pattern. It's still diverse and poor, but test scores are skyrocketing. Mercer kids now outperform the city average on almost every measure, especially among African Americans, English Language Learners and students receiving free and reduced-price lunches.

And as for that eighth-grade state science test? Last year, 84.3 percent passed it.

So how did this regular public school manage to turn itself around so dramatically?

The story behind Mercer's success is neither short nor simple, administrators, teachers and parents said.

It involves a strong principal, a collaborative group of hardworking teachers and a heavy use of data to constantly tweak instruction. There have been some bold moves, such as scrapping the district's mandated math textbook in favor of a specialized curriculum built to the same state standards.

But the school maintains its success is due mostly to a simple belief in the ability of all its students.

"It's not glamorous," said the current principal, Susan Toth. "It's not a silver-bullet story or a piece of magic."

But it is important — important enough that Seattle Public Schools is carefully studying which parts of the Mercer model can be replicated. In fact, the lessons from the Mercer story may significantly influence district policy in 2012, several School Board members said.

"Other schools need to observe Mercer. We all need to observe it," said Betty Patu, a board member representing Southeast Seattle. "They are clearly having success, so how can we implement this at other schools?"

"We teach urgently"

Bob Ettinger stood in front of his eighth-grade science class last Wednesday at a critical point in a lesson on evolution.

He had already walked students through the basic principles of common ancestors and mutation. Now he asked them to use a list of characteristics of whales, salmon and hippos to figure out which animals are more closely related.

It seemed improbable, but the list showed whales and hippos as having the most traits in common. But when Ettinger announced those animals were the most closely related, the kids were dumbfounded.

"Oooh!" they exclaimed. "What! Why!"

The grasp that Ettinger held his students in represents part of the core Mercer teacher philosophy: Lead with energy and joy. Move quickly. Respect students and ask them to work hard to meet high expectations.

As sixth-grade language teacher Gretchen Coe said, "We teach urgently."

To do that, the teachers rely on data. Many give a mini-test at the end of every class to zero in on parts of the lesson that need further review.

They also use data to identify struggling students early and place them into a structured intervention plan. Those students get extra instruction tailored to their needs. The focus is on core subjects, sometimes at the expense of classes such as social studies.

Most important, teachers work together. The faculty is grouped into teams that meet weekly to discuss individual students and coordinate lesson plans, and all of them gather for a full day every two months to discuss broader strategies.

That adds up to much more planning time than at most Seattle schools, said Cathy Thompson, assistant superintendent for teaching and learning.

The use of data, aggressive intervention and collaboration are all part of a vision implemented by former principal Andhra Lutz.

Described by colleagues as a "force of nature," Lutz arrived at Mercer in 2004 and pushed teachers to buy into the vision, which she learned during a fellowship with the KIPP charter-school network.

The style didn't please everybody. Some teachers felt Lutz would make their life difficult if they disagreed, said Olga Addae, a former Mercer teacher who is now president of the Seattle teachers union.

Lutz denies that, but says she did seek to attract a like-minded team.

"It wasn't about getting rid of teachers," said Lutz, who left last year to work for KIPP in Washington, D.C. She and her administrative team "really worked in collaboration with the teachers and really thought about what they needed to be great."

The push for success has also received outside help.

A grant from the Nesholm Family Foundation funded a literacy-coach position (which Toth held before replacing Lutz as principal), and Seattle's Families and Education Levy supported after-school programs.

At the same time, the school initiated dozens of home visits to increase parent involvement.

The effort to engage parents was "very positive," especially for immigrant families, said Adrienne Hidy, president of the school's PTSA.

"The families at Mercer from the get-go are welcomed into the school and then it kind of builds upon itself," said Hidy, whose son is in the eighth grade.

Rethinking math lessons

The most talked-about aspect of Mercer's success is its decision to essentially form its own math curriculum.

While the district requires middle schools to use Connected Mathematics Project textbooks, Mercer decided those books were too reading-intensive for its large number of students whose native language isn't English. So school officials decided to supplement the district model with whatever resources they thought would best help students meet state standards.

"We didn't scrap it entirely," said Chris Eide, who taught math at Mercer last year, noting the district books were still used when deemed valuable.

The central administration was largely unaware of Mercer's approach, School Board member Kay Smith-Blum said.

"They did it sort of undercover," she said. "They just did what their kids needed."

The results were clear: The number of students passing the state math tests more than doubled, to 70.8 percent, during Lutz's tenure.

Other scores have also spiked. And while a gap still exists between the scores achieved by white students and students of color, the difference is significantly less than it is districtwide.

The gains have not gone entirely uncontested.

Some skeptics say Mercer's population has become less diverse in recent years and underperforming students have been pushed out through suspension and expulsion.

The numbers show scant evidence for either claim: The percentages of black and Hispanic students, as well as students on free and reduced lunches, have all increased since 2005. Suspensions and expulsions dropped 60 percent.

Many have noted state tests have gotten easier, especially in science. That is probably true — scores have risen dramatically across the state — but Mercer went from performing significantly below the district average to significantly above it.

Even Addae, the union president, acknowledged Lutz appears to have achieved her mission of transforming Mercer into a high-poverty yet high-performing school.

Ripple effect

While Mercer's turnaround is still in progress, the striking success it has already achieved is leading to changes around the district.

Next month, fellow Southeast Seattle middle school Aki Kurose is planning to implement Mercer's aggressive-intervention model, said Michael Tolley, the executive director overseeing both schools.

"Every school is different in terms of the needs of the students," he said. "But there are specific strategies that can be replicated."

Meanwhile, a School Board committee is working to adopt policies that would give schools more flexibility in curriculum and instruction.

And some officials are thinking bigger still.

Board Vice President Michael DeBell said Mercer is likely to prompt district leaders to rethink their emphasis on a standardized curriculum across the city.

"I think Mercer is a case study for the idea that what is adopted at the district level may not always work for all children and we have to give our schools the opportunity to find out what does work and apply it," DeBell said. "It proves that every school can be a successful school if given the right tools."

Seattle schools may scale back goals despite gains

While Seattle Public Schools students performed better than the year before in most areas that the district has identified as critical, the improvements are too slow for officials to realistically believe they will meet the goals of their strategic plan by 2013, its final year.

By Brian M. Rosenthal

Seattle schools improved in almost all measurement categories last year, but the gains were small enough that the district is planning to scale back its achievement goals, officials said Tuesday.
The announcement came during a presentation of Seattle Public Schools' annual scorecard, which compiles districtwide and school-by-school reports of test scores, graduation rates and attendance numbers, among other data.
While this year's scorecard showed the district made improvement toward 18 of its 23 goals last year, officials acknowledged the progress was too small for all but three of those goals to be achieved by 2013, the year targeted by a strategic plan adopted in 2007.
Meanwhile, the scorecard made clear that while Seattle students overall continue to improve — and to outperform students in other parts of the state — there remains a large gap between the achievement of students in wealthy neighborhoods and those in poorer areas.
In some subjects, the percentage of students on free or reduced-price lunch who pass the state tests is half that of other students. A similar gap exists between students of color and white students. While the district has made it a priority to reduce the gap, it continues to exist and in some cases is widening, according to the data.
"We are seeing some gains, but it's not enough," Interim Superintendent Susan Enfield said, summing up the scorecard. "And, frankly, we're not on track to meet our goals."
Enfield's presentation at Wing Luke Museum prompted a standing ovation from the crowd, which included city officials like Mayor Mike McGinn, district leaders like School Board President Steve Sundquist and representatives from various community and education organizations.
Several attendees and speakers praised the district for its progress, especially on its high-school-graduation rate — which increased to 73 percent from 67 percent in the year before and 62 percent in 2007. Enfield called that rate a "tremendous point of pride."
Significant progress was also seen in third-grade reading test scores (with 79 percent passing, up from 75 percent the year before) and 10th-grade science test scores (with 53 percent passing, up from 47 percent the year before).
"I can tell you and anybody in this city that when you choose Seattle Public Schools, you get a quality education," proclaimed City Councilmember Tim Burgess in his remarks.
Yet, in many ways, the scorecard left as much cause for concern as it did for optimism.
• Scores slipped in a handful of categories — including the percent of students prepared for a four-year college — 61 percent, compared with 63 percent the year before).
• Most of the improvements that were made were small.
• Perhaps most notably, the achievement gap showed no real sign of shrinking.
Students of color did perform better on state reading and math tests, but so did white students — maintaining the achievement gap. And the gap actually grew significantly for one group, Native American students, who were the only group of students to perform worse on tests than the year before.
"There are obviously lots and lots of issues — about the achievement gap and so forth — where we haven't made the progress we need to and we have a long way to go," Sundquist said.
Some community leaders expressed concern about the announcement — tucked into Enfield's presentation — that the district would reconsider the goals set in 2007.
The goals, made as part of a strategic plan spearheaded by former Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson, targeted 23 categories that were key indicators of student success, said School Board member Michael DeBell, who was on the board when it passed the goals. The targets were seen as achievable based on past progress and high levels of state funding, he said.
As recently as last fall, when the last district scorecard was released, Goodloe-Johnson and other district officials insisted that the goals were reachable.
They are no longer realistic in part because it's a "very different economic reality," Enfield said Tuesday.
"We need our goals to be challenging but achievable," she said. "If we know we might not meet the goals and we may not be able to do all that we set out to do in 2007, we need to revisit it."
Some community members said scaling back the targets would send the wrong message to students.
"I think before we shift those goals we should have a very serious conversation about why we're not making more progress," said Robin Lake, associate director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington. "I don't think talking about the lack of new resources is the right direction. This is our new reality, and we have to figure out how to make progress in it."
The conversation about scaling back the goals will begin in January, Enfield said.

New UW Study Links Student Scores to Teacher's College

By: Donna Blankinship
Associated Press

The academic progress of public-school students can be traced, in part, to where their teachers went to college, according to new research by the University of Washington Center for Education Data & Research.
But the center's director, Dan Goldhaber, cautioned that the study is just a first step toward determining what kind of training — not where the training occurred — best prepares teachers for excellence in the classroom.
Even so, it's the kind of information U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan would like every school to have access to, and that's why he recently announced a new program to use federal dollars to pay for similar research.
Washington state schools are among the first to see which teacher-training programs seem to result in the best student test scores, but 35 states now have the means to do similar research, according to the Data Quality Campaign, a national organization formed by education and business groups to track state progress on collecting data about students and schools.
Where teachers are credentialed explains a small part of the variation of teacher effectiveness, Goldhaber said, with the best way to pick out a great teacher still being a visit to his or her classroom.
Still, the findings of this study, which focused on in-state schools, and a similar report published in Louisiana in early 2010, are meaningful. They both found that the differences between the best and the worst teacher-training programs were as significant as differences between teachers at different experience levels or with different class sizes.
"Improving teacher training has the potential to greatly enhance the productivity of the teacher work force," Goldhaber wrote in the report.
The study examined which education schools were tied to better student progress, without naming any particular aspect of training that the schools did differently.
Duncan announced his new initiatives earlier this month to identify the best teacher-preparation programs and encourage others to improve by linking student test scores back to teachers and their schools of education. The federal government also plans to give away millions of dollars in scholarships to send students interested in teaching in-demand subjects like science and math to the best teacher-training programs.
Carrie Black, a middle-school math teacher in Rochester, Thurston County, says she could have used a lot more time practicing her skills before taking over a classroom on her own and she doesn't think she could ever have learned enough about how to keep control in class.
Black got her initial training at City University and did graduate work in middle-school math at Walden University, an online program not included in the study.
Goldhaber's study ranked City University, a private school, right in the middle of teacher-prep programs, with a score closer to the top schools for math — University of Washington, University of Puget Sound and Pacific Lutheran, Seattle Pacific and Western Washington — than to the schools at the bottom of the math list: Northwest University, Antioch University, St. Mary's University, Seattle University and The Evergreen State College.
The ranks are different for reading scores, with Walla Walla University at the top with the University of Washington — closely followed by Western Washington University, Seattle Pacific, the University of Puget Sound and Washington State University.
A Bellingham English teacher who got his credential from Western had similar issues as Black: too much theory and too little practical advice on how to actually work in the classroom. Todd Hausman said the theories he learned as best practices were completely impractical in the real world, but it took him a few years to figure that out and to have the confidence to abandon those ideas.
Even though their respective schools did well in the study, both Black and Hausman said they would, in retrospect, like to see changes in teacher-preparation programs, including more hands-on training.
Hausman says student teachers should be immersed in a school for at least a year.
"You learn more in a week at school, than you can learn in an entire academic semester," he said.
"Classroom management is a hard one to teach," said Black, a regional Washington teacher of the year last year. "It is like trying to teach someone how to ride a bike by reading instructions. It is different with each class."
She said classes also don't prepare teachers for the stress of the job or for the amount of work they'll do at home each night.
The dean of the top-ranked University of Washington College of Education found the study results interesting but cautioned against giving too much credit to the rankings.
Student test scores should be a part of how teacher-education programs are evaluated, Tom Stritikus said, but he says there should be multiple measures.
"What we're really after here is changing and improving practice," Stritikus said.

Seattle School Board considers firing superintendent

Seattle School Board President Steve Sundquist said Friday the board is considering firing Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson or buying out her contract in light of a report's findings that she didn't do more to stop rampant misuse of public money in a district contracting program.

By Linda Shaw and Steve Miletich

Seattle Times staff reporters

Seattle School Board President Steve Sundquist said Friday the board is considering firing Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson or buying out her contract after a report found she didn't do more to stop rampant misuse of public money in a district contracting program.

In an appearance before The Seattle Times editorial board, Sundquist said the findings in the newly released report "certainly undermine my confidence in the effectiveness of the management."

Sundquist declined to comment when asked if the school board was in buyout discussions with Goodloe-Johnson, but said she is working with an attorney.

"All options are on the table," Sundquist said.

Goodloe-Johnson could not be reached for comment. School staff say she is with her mother, who is hospitalized.

Sundquist and board member Michael DeBell expressed outrage over the loss of up to $1.8 million in questionable expenses, saying their concerns included a finding in the report that district employees did not believe they could report problems to superiors without reprisals.

DeBell called it a "culture" problem.

Sundquist said the board likely would announce at a public meeting Wednesday its decision regarding the superintendent and Chief Financial and Operations Officer Don Kennedy, Goodloe-Johnson's hand-picked choice for the job.

In a report released Friday morning, Seattle lawyer Patty Eakes concluded that Goodloe-Johnson and Kennedy had limited knowledge of irregularities in the small-business contracting program primarily aimed at helping companies owned by women and minorities.

Eakes, a former King County prosecutor, also found no evidence that anyone told the superintendent of their concerns about the program or its manager, Silas Potter, beyond an unfavorable review of the program in 2009 that led the district to reprimand Potter and strip him of part of his authority to award contracts.

Still, Eakes concluded that because Goodloe-Johnson knew about that report, she should have done more to ensure that the program was properly supervised.

Goodloe-Johnson, Eakes said, trusted Kennedy to oversee the program, and Kennedy delegated oversight responsibility to Fred Stephens, the former executive director of facilities.

That led Kennedy to miss warning signs that Potter was misusing district funds, Eakes' report said. Stephens, she said, failed to oversee Potter despite "numerous warning signs that additional oversight was warranted."

Eakes was hired by the district in December to determine management's role in problems with the small-business program.

Her report follows a special investigation by State Auditor Brian Sonntag's office that turned up $1.8 million in payments by the small-business program that provided little or no public benefit. The office's activities are also the subject of a secret criminal investigation by the King County Prosecuting Attorney's Office.

DeBell said Friday the program strayed from its mission to boost the pool of qualified contractors and provide long-term financial benefits to the district.

"It became instead a cronyist sort of operation that then, somehow, was not given the due diligence from management to address those issues," he said.

Eakes, speaking to the Times editorial board Friday, said she found that program largely benefited African American firms, and she heard from many employees that they would be accused of racism if they didn't support it.

That impression came from Potter, she said, but from Stephens as well

In her report, Eakes said she found no evidence that Potter awarded any personal-services contracts as "hush money" to silence opposition from the African-American community about school closures and the lack of minority contractor working on district projects.

"The information we received was hearsay," Eakes wrote.

She said she could find no witnesses with firsthand knowledge of those accusations.

U.S. Secretary of Education Appoints Members of Equity and Excellence Commission

Couple things,

First, Did you see Arne Duncan in the All-Star Celebrity Basketball Game? The Secretary of Education can hoop! Second, the League of Education Voters here in Seattle is having its annual benefit breakfast on Friday, March 18th at 7:30am.  If you're interested, register at their website at www.educationvoters.org. This group has done so much to bring educational reforms to Washington State, so please help support them if you can. Enjoy the read!

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today announced the appointment of 28 education advocates, civil rights leaders, scholars, lawyers, and corporate leaders to the Department of Education's Equity and Excellence Commission. The commission will examine the impact of school finance on educational opportunity and recommend ways school finance can be improved to increase equity and achievement.

The commission will examine the disparities in meaningful educational opportunities that give rise to the achievement gap, with a focus on systems of finance, and recommend ways in which federal policies could address such disparities. The commission will also recommend ways to restructure school finance systems to achieve equity in the distribution of educational resources and further student achievement and attainment. The Department formed the commission in response to a congressional request included in the fiscal year 2010 Consolidated Appropriations Act.

The commission will meet for the first time in public session on February 22 from 10 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. in Barnard Auditorium at the Department of Education building at 400 Maryland Avenue, SW in Washington, D.C., to discuss the scope of its work, outreach efforts, and the timetable for completion of its report.

The members have a wide range of backgrounds in an array of fields including education, business and law and will use their experiences to guide their recommendations:

Christopher Edley—Commission Co-Chair: Chris Edley has been dean of University of California, Berkeley Law School since 2004, and is also Senior Policy Adviser to the University President. He was co-founder of two multidisciplinary think tanks: the Civil Rights Project at Harvard, where he taught law for 23 years; and Berkeley's Chief Justice Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity. Edley held White House policy positions under Presidents Carter and Clinton, and was on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Reed Hastings—Commission Co-Chair: Reed Hastings co-founded Netflix as a DVD rental by mail company in 1997. Reed is an active educational philanthropist and board member of many nonprofits. In addition, he was President of the California State Board of Education from 2000 to 2004. He has led successful statewide political campaigns for more charter public schools and easier passage of local school bonds.

Cynthia Brown: Cindy Brown is the Vice President for Education Policy for the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC. Prior to joining the Center for American Progress, she was appointed by President Carter as the first assistant secretary for civil rights in the U.S. Department of Education and has worked for the Council of Chief State School Officers as Director of its Resource Center on Educational Equity, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the Children's Defense Fund.

Mike Casserly: Mike Casserly has served as the Executive Director of the Council of Great City Schools, the nation's primary coalition of large urban public school systems, since January 1992. Prior to assuming this position, he served as the organization's Director of Legislation and Research for 15 years.

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: Tino Cuéllar is Professor of Law and Deane F. Johnson Faculty Scholar at Stanford Law School. His research and teaching focus on administrative law, executive power, and how organizations implement critical regulatory, public safety, migration, and international security responsibilities in a changing world. He has served in two presidential administrations and was recently appointed to the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States, an independent agency charged with recommending improvements in the efficiency and fairness of federal regulatory programs.

Linda Darling-Hammond: Linda Darling-Hammond is the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education at Stanford University where she has launched the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education and the School Redesign Network and served as faculty sponsor for the Stanford Teacher Education Program. She is a former president of the American Educational Research Association and member of the National Academy of Education. Her research, teaching, and policy work focus on issues of school restructuring, teacher quality and educational equity.

Sandra Dungee Glenn: Sandra Dungee Glenn is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the American Cities Foundation. In 2001, Sandra Dungee Glenn was appointed to the Board of Education for the School District of Philadelphia, and she served from 2002 to 2007 as a Commissioner on the School Reform Commission (SRC), the governing body of the School District of Philadelphia. In September 2007, Pennsylvania Governor Edward Rendell appointed Ms. Dungee Glenn to the position of Chairwoman of the SRC. In 2009, Governor Rendell appointed her to the Pennsylvania State Board of Education.

Jim Edgar: Jim Edgar is a distinguished fellow with Institute of Government and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois. As the 38th governor of Illinois, he made fiscal discipline and children the cornerstones of his two terms. First elected in 1990, Governor Edgar won re-election in 1994 by the largest margin ever for a governor.

Eric Hanushek: Rick Hanushek is the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. He has been a leader in the development of economic analysis of educational issues, and his work on efficiency, resource usage, and economic outcomes of schools has frequently entered into the design of both national and international educational policy. His research spans such diverse areas as the impacts of teacher quality, high stakes accountability, and class size reduction on achievement along with the role of cognitive skills in international growth and development.

Karen Hawley Miles: Karen Hawley Miles is executive director and founder of Education Resource Strategies, a nonprofit organization in Boston, Massachusetts, that specializes in strategic planning, organization, and resource allocation in urban public school districts. Her work aims to help states, districts, and schools rethink resource allocation and empower principals to create great schools and redirect resources to promote excellent teaching, individual attention for children, and productive instructional time.

Kati Haycock: Kati Haycock is currently serving as the president of the Education Trust. She previously served as executive vice president of the Children's Defense Fund, the nation's largest child-advocacy organization. A native Californian, Haycock founded and served as president of the Achievement Council, a statewide organization that helps teachers and principals in predominantly minority schools improve student achievement.

Ben Jealous: Ben Jealous is the 17th President and Chief Executive Officer of the NAACP, and the youngest person to hold the position in the organization's nearly 100-year history. During his career, he has served as president of the Rosenberg Foundation, director of the U.S. Human Rights Program at Amnesty International and Executive Director of the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), a federation of more than 200 black community newspapers.

John King: John King is the Senior Deputy Commissioner for P-12 Education in New York. He is the co-founder of Roxbury Preparatory Charter School in Massachusetts and was a Managing Director of the Uncommon Schools, a non-profit charter management organization.

Ralph Martire: Ralph Martire is executive director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability. Mr. Martire teaches a Master's level class on education finance and fiscal policy for the University of Illinois and Roosevelt University. He has received numerous awards for his work on education policy reform, including the 2007 Champion of Freedom Award, presented by the Rainbow PUSH Coalition to individuals whose professional work embodies Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, commitment to equal educational opportunities.

Matt Miller: Matt Miller is a weekly columnist for the Washington Post's online edition, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and the host of Left, Right & Center, public radio's popular political week-in-review program. A former Clinton White House aide, Miller is also the author of "The 2 Percent Solution" (2003) and "The Tyranny of Dead Ideas" (2009), books which in part addressed issues of educational inequity. He consults to corporations and nonprofits on issues of strategy, policy and communications.

Marc Morial: As President of the National Urban League since 2003 he has been the primary catalyst for an era of change—a transformation for the 100 year old civil rights organization. His energetic and skilled leadership has expanded the League's work around an Empowerment agenda, which is redefining civil rights in the 21st century with a renewed emphasis on closing the economic gaps between Whites and Blacks as well as rich and poor Americans.

Michael Rebell: Michael Rebell is a professor and executive director of The Campaign for Educational Equity, at Teachers College, Columbia University. He is also an adjunct professor of law at Columbia Law School. Previously, he was counsel for plaintiffs in Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State of New York.

Ahniwake Rose: Ahniwake Rose (Cherokee) serves as a Policy Analyst for the National Congress of American Indians. Leading the Human Resources legislative team, Ms. Rose's position encompasses addressing and leading national policy initiatives that serve to empower Tribes and Indian communities to improve their overall health and well-being. Ms. Rose's portfolio includes health, education, nutrition, and child welfare. Prior to joining NCAI, Ms. Rose worked for the Department of Education as a consultant implementing Presidential Executive Order 13336, providing culturally appropriate education to Indian students through the No Child Left Behind Act.

Jesse Ruiz: Jesse Ruiz is a corporate and securities partner in the law firm of Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP, and since 2004, has served as Chairman of the Illinois State Board of Education. The Illinois State Board of Education oversees the operation of the state's school system for 2.1 million students in grades Pre-K-12, and administers an $11.1 billion annual budget. Jesse also serves on the National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE) Government Affairs Committee, and the National Association of Latino Elected/Appointed Officials (NALEO) Education Task Force.

Jim Ryan: Jim Ryan joined the faculty of the University of Virginia's School of Law in 1998 after completing a two-year public interest fellowship in Newark, N.J. His scholarship focuses primarily on law and educational opportunity, and he has written a book on the topic, published by Oxford University Press and entitled "Five Miles Away, A World Apart", and he has published numerous articles on school finance, school desegregation, school choice, school governance, a right to preschool and the No Child Left Behind Act, which have appeared in the leading law journals in the country.

Thomas Saenz: Thomas Saenz is the President and General Counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Previously, as Counsel to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Saenz helped to lead the legislative effort to change the governance of Los Angeles Unified School District. For nine years he has been a member of the appointed Los Angeles County Board of Education.

David Sciarra: David Sciarra is the Executive Director of the Education Law Center (ELC) in Newark, New Jersey. ELC works to improve educational opportunities and outcomes for low-income students, students of color, and students with special needs, through policy initiatives, action research, public engagement, and when necessary, legal action.

Robert Teranishi: Robert Teranishi is an Associate Professor of Higher Education at New York University and Co-Director for the Institute for Globalization and Education. Dr. Teranishi's research is broadly focused on race, ethnicity, and the stratification of college opportunity. His work has been influential to federal, state, and institution policy related to college access and affordability.

Jacquelyn Thompson: Jacquelyn Thompson is the recently retired Director of the Office of Special Education and Early Intervention Services at the Michigan Department of Education. She is a Past President of the National Association of State Directors of Special Education as well as a former Coordinator of the Michigan Education Policy Fellowship Program.

Jose Torres: Jose Torres is the superintendent of School District U-46 in Elgin, Illinois. Previously, Torres served as area instructional officer in Chicago Public Schools, a district with 675 schools and over 430,000 students. Torres has also served as assistant superintendent of student support services for Anne Arundel County Public Schools in Maryland.

Dennis Van Roekel: Dennis Van Roekel, a 23-year teaching veteran, is the President of the National Education Association, the nation's largest labor union and advocate for quality public schools. He has served two terms as NEA Vice President and NEA Secretary-Treasurer, and has held key positions in all levels of the Association, including Arizona Education Association President and Paradise Valley Education Association President. His accomplishments include dramatic increases in membership among teachers and education support professionals while president of the Arizona Education Association and a notable rise in voluntary political action committee contributions during his term.

Randi Weingarten: Randi Weingarten is president of the 1.5-million-member American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO, which represents teachers; paraprofessionals and school-related personnel; higher education faculty and staff; nurses and other healthcare professionals; local, state and federal employees; and early childhood educators. She was elected in July 2008, following 11 years of service as an AFT vice president.

Doris Williams: Doris Terry Williams is Executive Director of the Rural School and Community Trust. Williams guides the organization's work with a network that has numbered more than 700 rural schools and communities in 35 states, connecting student work to local community development needs; strengthening the capacity of rural people to advocate for quality public education; and improving the climate for teaching and learning in rural places. Dr. Williams has more than 35 years of experience as an educator and education policy maker and was previously assistant dean and associate professor in the School of Education at North Carolina Central University.

The seven ex officio members of the commission are:

• ED, Office for Civil Rights (Assistant Secretary Russlynn Ali).
• ED, Deputy Secretary (Deputy Secretary Tony Miller)
• ED, Under Secretary (Under Secretary Martha Kanter)
• ED, General Counsel (General Counsel Charlie Rose)
• ED, Office of Policy (Assistant Secretary Carmel Martin)
• OMB, Education (OMB Associate Director for Education, Income Maintenance and Labor Robert Gordon)
• DPC, Education (Special Assistant to the President, Domestic Policy Council Roberto Rodriguez)

The commission's staff director is Stephen Chen, a 10-year career attorney within the headquarters of the Office for Civil Rights.

TFA 20th Anniversary Summit Provides Inspiration

I apologize for the Monday post.  I just returned from DC.

This past weekend, 11,000 educators, community activists, policy-makers and business leaders converged on Washington DC to celebrate Teach for America's 20th anniversary in stunning fashion.  From discussion panels that included Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, Adrian Fenty, Andres Alonso and others, to workshops that helped alumni learn of ways to be most effective in advocating for reform, to a KIPP school jazz band playing with John Legend in front of thousands, I walked away both inspired and deeply moved, motivated and determined to continue the struggle towards producing meaningful change towards educational equity in our country.

There was, however, one thing that stood out more than anything else. That one thing was the transformation that Teach for America has undergone since its inception 20 years ago - from simply being a teaching corps of recent college graduates who committed two years of their lives to helping the neediest youth in inner-city schools, to something much more meaningful and influential.

Yes, the few thousand corps members currently serving in the classrooms as part of their commitments are making significant differences in their students' lives.  But oftentimes critics of Teach for America use this as ammunition to fuel their arguments, asking why they only commit two years and why they are allowed to take jobs away from certified teachers.  What this summit helped answer for me were precisely those questions.

It started when Secretary of Education Arne Duncan spoke during the closing ceremony, telling a story that he assured us we hadn't already heard.  He told the tale of the day when he took office and wanted to make meaningful change in the way financial aid was distributed to low-income, college-bound students.  He said that for years, secretaries of education had tried repeatedly to help condense the paperwork into something shorter and less confusing so that high school seniors could fill it out correctly and afford college.  He went to the IRS where the financial aid forms were created and asked the head of the IRS why his predecessors hadn't been able to make any change.  Duncan was told that the process of amending those documents was difficult and time-consuming but that this time, things were different.  Duncan, working with the head of the IRS, was able to adjust the financial aid forms last year to make them less ambiguous and much shorter for the first time in years.  Just this past year alone, 750,000 more students received financial aid as a result.  After raucous applause, Duncan mentioned that the head of the IRS that he had worked with to produce those changes was a Teach for America Alum.

Following this, a young senator from Colorado took the stage and claimed that he was an alum as well and that while teaching in the South, he rented a bus to take his students to see the school where the Little Rock 9 first integrated Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas.  He told the story of how his students were reduced to tears when they saw the bench where Elizabeth Eckford was berated by pejorative slurs and taunts by white racists.  They walked up the steps of Central High to see the front door where Governor Faubus stood, demanding that the students go home and that if they were allowed to enter the school, the laws of Arkansas would be tarnished.  Senator Johnston went on to say that one of his students looked up to him and asked, "who makes these laws" at which point, the Senator couldn't open his mouth to answer her question.  He then fast-forwarded to the day when he sat in the Colorado Senate gallery waiting for a vote on the the floor that would allow his bill to become law.  The bill would have made 50% of teacher evaluations be based on student performance, link teacher pay to both seniority and student achievement, take tenure away from teachers after two years of consistent poor evaluation and give good teachers leadership opportunities within the district and school.  He claimed that one member of his own party filibustering the bill asked, "How can one expect to change anything within a bad school? How can you make good bread with dough filled with maggots?" After the bill passed with careful vote-counting on Senator Johnston's part before the filibuster to gain the necessary votes required for passage, the Senator picked up his phone to call his former student to answer the question she had only a few years ago.  "We make the laws" he proudly said.

Whether the alums of this organization continue as educators, principals, IRS heads, or legislators, what I learned from this past weekend is that TFA has become a force that transcends the classroom.  At times in the past, it was difficult to defend the two-year commitment that TFA requires.  I'm convinced now that the greater good of that two-year commitment for our education system puts all arguments against it to rest.  

A "Rosa Parks" Moment For Education

By Kevin Huffman


Last week, 40-year-old Ohio mother Kelley Williams-Bolar was released after serving nine days in jail on a felony conviction for tampering with records. Williams-Bolar's offense? Lying about her address so her two daughters, zoned to the lousy Akron city schools, could attend better schools in the neighboring Copley-Fairlawn district.

Williams-Bolar has become a cause célèbre in a case that crosses traditional ideological bounds. African American activists are outraged, asking: Would a white mother face the same punishment for trying to get her kids a better education? (Answer: No.)

Meanwhile, conservatives view the case as evidence of the need for broader school choice. What does it say when parents' options are so limited that they commit felonies to avoid terrible schools? Commentator Kyle Olson and others across the political spectrum have called this "a Rosa Parks moment for education."

For me, the case struck an additional nerve. As a young teacher nearly two decades ago, I taught bilingual first grade in Houston. Some of my students were in this country illegally; by my third year, a number of them also lived outside the school and district zone. Given their substandard neighborhood options, some parents drove 30 minutes or more each way just so their kids could be in my class. I was supportive of, and flattered by, their efforts. These were good parents, doing the best they could for their families.

In this country, if you are middle or upper class, you have school choice. You can, and probably do, choose your home based on the quality of local schools. Or you can opt out of the system by scraping together the funds for a parochial school.

But if you are poor, you're out of luck, subject to the generally anti-choice bureaucracy. Hoping to win the lottery into an open enrollment "choice" school in your district? Good luck. How about a high-performing charter school? Sure - if your state doesn't limit their numbers and funding like most states do. And vouchers? Hiss! You just touched a political third rail.

Williams-Bolar lived in subsidized housing and was trapped in a failed system. In a Kafkaesque twist, she was taking college-level courses to become a teacher herself - a dream she now will never realize as a convicted felon. It's America's version of the hungry man stealing bread to feed his family, only to have his hand cut off as punishment.

The intellectual argument against school choice is thin and generally propagated by people with myriad options. If we let the most astute families opt out of neighborhood schools, the thinking goes, those schools lose the best parents and the best students. The children stuck behind in failing schools really get hurt.

But kids are getting hurt right now, every day, in ways that take years to play out but limit their life prospects as surgically as many segregation-era laws. We can debate whether lying on school paperwork is the same as refusing to move to the back of the bus, but the harsh reality is this: We may have done away with Jim Crow laws, but we have a Jim Crow public education system.

As Dan Domenech of the American Association of School Administrators told NPR last week, "The correlation between student achievement and Zip code is 100 percent. The quality of education you receive is entirely predictable based on where you live." And where you live in America today depends largely on income and race.

Consider the recent results from a test of 15-year-olds around the world. Headlines noted the embarrassing American mediocrity (31st out of 65 countries in math, with scores below the international average). Even worse, our results are profoundly segregated by race. White and Asian Americans are still in the upper echelon. But African American and Latino students lag near the bottom quartile of world standards. As we think about our game plan to "win the future," our black and Latino students won't be competing with China and Finland - they're on track to scrap it out with Bulgaria and Mexico.

Some on the left will say this is the pernicious result of poverty. Solve poverty, and you solve the Zip-code-equals-outcomes issue. Some on the right will blame culture. Stop teenage pregnancy and crime, and the outcomes look different.

Like millions of parents hoping to do right by their kids, Kelley Williams-Bolar thought that schools were the answer. She didn't have the luxury of waiting a generation while intellectuals argue about poverty or culture. She looked at her options, she looked at the law and she looked at her children. Then she made a choice.

What would you have done?

Kevin Huffman, winner of The Post's 2009 America's Next Great Pundit Contest, is executive vice president of public affairs at Teach for America.