Parent Revolution

A few pictures

A week or so late, but here are a few pics from Ben's swearing in ceremony at Weller Street Missionary Baptist Church.  A great time was had by all!

State Board does the right thing

I wanted to acknowledge and thank the State Board of Education, who just did the right thing and granted waivers to Camino Nuevo, Aspire, Para Los Ninos, and Magnolia charter schools so that they can serve the entire attendance boundaries of schools they recently won under LAUSD’s Public School Choice process.

To back up a few steps, the issue was that by law, charter schools do not generally serve entire attendance boundaries, but rather are “schools of choice,” where parents affirmatively choose to send their children instead of the local District school. Although the high-quality charter schools in Los Angeles have almost entirely low-income students that demographically match the neighborhoods they serve, this “school of choice” designation gives rise to a reasonable critique of charters – that the process of having to apply self-selects for a more motivated parent or family that is more engaged in their student’s education. And it does, to an extent, keep charter and District school performance from being perfect apples to apples comparisons (not sure I would say apples to oranges, but maybe Granny Smith apples to Fuji ones).

For reformers interested in systemic change, this was one of the more exciting aspects of Public School Choice – forcing high-quality charters to step up to the plate and use their model to serve every single student in a neighborhood. But to make this a reality, the State Board had to approve a special waiver, which some defenders of the status quo came out against (rather unbelievably, given their frequent invocation of the above argument against independent charters). Yet despite this opposition, the State Board unanimously decided to do the right thing for children and parents, and allowed these reform models to serve entire neighborhoods of children next year and beyond.

The next few years will be a very exciting opportunity for innovation in the dozens of UTLA and charter run schools that have gone through the Public School Choice process, and we will be encouraging parents to demand the best for their children and hold ALL school operators accountable for the academic success of their students.

New Haven as a model for district/union collaboration

The NYT editorial board this week wrote about some exciting news out of my home city of New Haven, where district and union collaboration is showing "what can go right when school districts and unions work together." The two sides have sat down and hammered out what appears to be a smart, thoughtful proposal for transforming the way New Haven teachers are evaluated, with potential to serve as a model for other districts nationally.

The New York Times comes out hard against the status quo, explaining:

"In most schools today, teacher evaluations are not worthy of the name. An administrator typically observes the teacher at work once or twice during the year. Nearly every teacher passes — even at the most dismal schools. Struggling teachers rarely get the help they need to improve. Once they are tenured, it is nearly impossible to dislodge them."

This status quo is absolutely unacceptable given the importance of putting a great teacher in front of every child, and the consequences when that does not happen. With smart, common-sense evaluation systems like New Haven is developing, we will be able to reward outstanding teachers to keep them in the classroom or promote them, and help struggling teachers get the professional development and support they need to improve. And if struggling teachers are given support but cannot improve, they can eventually be removed from the classroom without years of administrative hearings. Equally important, principals and administrators will no longer be able to gloss and ignore the teacher evaluation process, but must be engaged in giving meaningful evaluations and support to their teaching staff.

It is critical that we see more of this collaboration and willingness to find affirmative solutions from districts and unions around the country - especially here in Los Angeles. As teachers unions and reformers in New Haven, Washington, DC, and elsewhere are showing, the days for excuses and claims that evaluating teachers well is "just too hard" are over. Our children are too important to keep defending what is an indefensible status quo.

Dept. of Bad Logic

I'm a few days late on this, but I wanted to ditto what Rotherham said on Monday about a Colorado legislator's reason for opposing a bill to reform teacher tenure and evaluation. Essentially, the lawmaker is opposing a bill to improve teacher quality and accountability because many under-served students in are disadvantaged by a lack of early childhood education, amongst other things. Which is simultaenously very true and an absolutely terrible reason to oppose important systemic reforms to public education. The fact that there is an achievement gap beginning in Kindergarten is both shocking and well established, but as Rotherham notes, that gap gets bigger throughout K-12 education, not smaller.

It is critical that we invest more in early childhood education and wraparound school services to support the multi-faceted needs of working class children and families. But we also desperately need to develop smarter and kids-first policies around things like teacher tenure and evaluation precisely because of the challenges so many of these students are facing and the abysmal failure of the status quo to prepare them for college and beyond.

On variations in charter school quality

The NYT Times had a piece on the variation in charter school quality over the weekend that is well worth reading. The premise is fairly well known – there is large variation in charter school quality, and nationally only a minority of charters outperform their traditional public school counterparts. The more interesting pieces of the story come in explaining why these schools seem to vary so much in quality, and what separates the great schools from the mediocre.

One important and oft-discussed driver of the strong regional differences in charter quality is how accountable charters are held by their authorizers. As the article notes:

What most experts can agree on is that charter school quality varies widely, and that it is often associated with the rigor of authorities that grant charters. New York, where oversight is strong, is known for higher performing schools. Ohio, Arizona and Texas, where accountability is minimal, showed up in Ms. Raymond’s study with many poorly performing schools.

Perhaps the sharpest knock on charters — one that even some proponents acknowledge — is that mediocrity is widely tolerated. Authorities are reluctant to close poor schools. Some advocates concede that the intellectual premise behind school choice — that in a free market for education, parents will remove students from bad schools in favor of good ones — has not proved true.

Additionally, as Matt Yglesias notes, this discussion serves as another important reminder that school quality is variable, and matters a great deal in the educational outcomes of students. Although student demographics and socioeconomic status certainly play a role in student performance, it is undeniable that certain schools and school districts ( be it high quality charters in LA or Boston Public Schools) significantly outperform their peers in the performance of low-income students from underserved communities.

The last critical takeaway is that if we are serious about getting every child a great public education in our generation, we must transform public education and traditional public schools as we know it, and not merely fixate on charter schools. I think President Obama’s Secretary of Education hit the nail on the head in this article, saying “We do not favor one kind of school over another. We favor educational quality and accountability for all schools.” High quality charters are a critical part of education reform – they provide choices for parents, better educational outcomes, and give parents real leverage to negotiate for broad reforms – but at the end of the day we must never lose focus of the need to transform our traditional public education structure into one that is designed for student success rather than adult needs.