Extra Credit

In my education law classes, I normally say no. Or at least not normally. And Jim Ryan at UVA law school has written that we should be skeptical that these efforts will work. This new report suggests that maybe one has made a difference: Williams v. California, a class-action lawsuit brought on behalf of students in California’s lowest-performing schools. The report is produced by the lawyers who brought the lawsuit, so there’s plenty of potential bias. But it is worth keeping an eye on.

The Quick and the Ed has the latest on 2 important new reports. Ed Trust exposes how little states pay attention to graduation rates, and The National Center for Education Statistics has a massive statistical analysis on the background of who goes into teaching and what happens once they get there.

Johnetta Rose Barras nails this.

The facts:

Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee tells a tale about a tour of the central administration of D.C. Public Schools that is revealing evidence of a major problem that confronts her, Mayor Adrian Fenty and other reformers.

“What do you do?” she asked several administrators, who in response offered their job titles.

“I know your title,” she continued. “I mean what do you do?”

Staffers seemed baffled. Absent a prepared script, they were unsure of the answer she sought. Eventually they replied “Whatever [my supervisor] tells me to do.”

Barras’ analysis:

These are windows into the DCPS culture, where people without relevant portfolios are retained simply because they do what they’re told - although what they’re told often has no direct connection to the education of children. And folks, like Millet, are protected by political connections. Relevance, accountability and merit are foreign terms.

Rhee has instituted a hiring freeze. Hopefully that action is an early offensive against a malignant culture that celebrates complacency, mediocrity and incompetence.

The new chancellor admits that she has fired only one individual; a couple of central administration staff have retired. She and the mayor need not wait for others to realize the jig is up. Firing clueless or poor-performing employees is a liberating experience - especially for parents and their children.

Want to get a sense of what new Chancellor Rhee is up against in D.C.? Turns out at my neighborhood elementary school, Shepherd in NW DC, books are stacked in the basement. More books and supplies are in a warehouse. This is beyond offensive. Some things are hard (e.g., finding high quality teachers willing to teach in schools serving low-income kids, providing training and mentoring for those teachers, etc). Getting books out of the warehouse and into the classrooms is not.

Rhee is pissed, and correctly points out that a lot of teachers “spend their own money” on supplies that the District has wasting away in boxes.

I’m not close enough the ground to have a nuanced view of what’s going in New York schools, but it seems to me when The City Journal, Diane Ravitch, Deborah Meier, Edwize, and my step-father all agree, it is worth paying attention. And they all have huge beef with Joel Klein and Michael Bloomberg.

The critiques vary, but they sound similar themes: manipulation of test score data, over-emphasis on PR (press office at DOE has grown 400% says Stern in the City Journal), and disregard for views of parents, teachers, families.

And check this ed-reformers: based on the diversity of opposition, it would be a mistake to dismiss it as “the status quo resisting change.”

I don’t know whether it is too late for Klein to undo the ill will his approach seems to have generated, but Michelle Rhee in DC and other system leaders who seek to make change would do well to pay careful attention to Klein’s mis-steps as well as his successes.

I love that Michelle Rhee is going out and doing community meetings. According to my sources she was a big hit doing a morning reading to the kids at Oak Hill, the juvenile detention center which most DC leaders want to forget, but which Adrian Fenty, Vinnie Schiraldi and David Domenici are turning around. Rhee clearly gets that to make big change she is going to need popular support. And she’s being public about some things which are obvious, but which too few school leaders in D.C. ever admit: 1) the central office is not working well, 2) parents and teachers can no longer be treated as a nuisance by folks downtown (serving them is why the central office exists), and 3) starting now everyone downtown is going to be held accountable for educating kids. More here.

The research is mounting: it is simply insane to ignore the summer as we try to improve academic and life outcomes for low income kids. Low income kids lose even more ground in the summer than they do during the school year. Which is absolutely, positively not an argument for abandoning efforts to improve what happens in schools from September to June. But giving up on the summer is an invitation to disaster, because during the summer low income kids get next to nothing, while wealthier kids get lots of chances to grow, travel, explore new worlds, read, etc. (If you have any doubt how important the summer is, check out what people with means do to support their children’s growth over the summer.)

This issue provides a great chance for charter school and district school operators to come together and tell cities to adequately fund the summer, so that kids can get what they need and deserve. Right now many jurisdictions provide no summer school, others provide lousy options. And charter operators are often stuck with no summer supplements, or ones that are so small that you can’t run a good program with them. But as Beth Miller’s report for the Nellie Mae Foundation makes clear, there is mounting evidence about the effectiveness of high-quality hybrid summer programs that combine academics with sports, arts and other creative activities. So let’s demand more of these programs.

Update: Washington Post has a story on how school districts are expanding school options for kids, with good results.

My feelings about NCLB are quite complicated, because I’ve seen some of its benefits and harms first hand. I just got around to reading a Nation piece from May, which remains timely. The authors are critical of the law, but for the most part want to retain (while improving on) some of its core features.

Linda Darling-Hammond says, and I’ve seen how this happens,

Perhaps the most adverse unintended consequence of NCLB is that it creates incentives for schools to rid themselves of students who are not doing well, producing higher scores at the expense of vulnerable students’ education.

The impact is most severe on mission-driven charter schools. It is getting harder and harder to convince people to start schools serving the neediest students. It is one of the reasons you hear about so few great charter high schools. Nobody wants to start a school serving kids who arrive in the 9th grade 3 or 4 years behind.

And she has this proposal, which seems like a great one. I hope the Obama campaign takes it up; he could add merit and performance pay as his fourth prong, in line with his speech at the NEA convention.

A Marshall Plan for Teaching could insure that all students are taught by well-qualified teachers within the next five years through a federal policy that (1) recruits new teachers using service scholarships that underwrite their preparation for high-need fields and locations and adds incentives for expert veteran teachers to teach in high-need schools; (2) strengthens teachers’ preparation through support for professional development schools, like teaching hospitals, which offer top-quality urban teacher residencies to candidates who will stay in high-need districts; and (3) improves teacher retention and effectiveness by insuring that novices have mentoring support during their early years, when 30 percent of them drop out.

Leo Casey over at EdWize has a thoughtful response to my recent post regarding the responsibility that the African-American community has for demanding better school systems. (For more on how this conversation got started, see Kevin and Sara’s posts at The Quick and the Ed.)

But as I read this and his other post on the topic of fixing broken bureaucracy, I realized that he does not fully understand the nature of the problem in Washington, D.C. (and I expect in at least some other places, but D.C. is what I know best). The problem Casey is focused on is corruption and patronage. But while these are problems, this misses the real issue. The biggest problem in D.C., if you accept the Washington Post’s analysis, is inaction and incompetence.

–It is a brand new school opening, but 3 years later the media production room still doesn’t work, because a critical piece of equipment fell into a bureaucratic chasm.

–It is employee records stuffed in cardboard boxes–and the system is five years behind in processing the contents of the boxes.

–It is a system that lacks an accurate list of its 55,000 students, although it pays $900,000 to a consultant each year to count.

–It is a principal who lured a great math teacher from a charter school, but the paperwork took so long downtown that the teacher went elsewhere.

–It is a supervisor trying to figure out why the system pays so much for trash collection, finally locating the employee deep in the bowels of the bureaucracy, and realizing that the person did not know how to operate the computer on their desk.

–It is a new superintendent finding that personnel records were lost because a motorized filing system had been broken for years, trapping hundreds of records behind a wall. And then learning that people had known about the problem and done nothing.

I agree with Casey that the solution is not dismantling all bureaucracy (nor is it to turn all schools into charters, which are also susceptible to the problems we are discussing). We will always have government-run schools (I don’t think the term is pejorative, by the way), and we need government to work. Poor and working people need it especially. So we need a bureaucracy that works.

But in getting the bureaucracy to work, I don’t think the race and class issues I raise are 20 years out of date. Maybe what I have to say is limited to D.C., which is a majority black city. But I continue to contend that at least in D.C., if a mostly-white system were doing to lower-class black children what our current system is doing, the African-American community would be outraged and this would be a major civil rights issue. That the system has been allowed to under-serve our neediest children for so long is in part because our community still struggles with how to respond when those doing the disserving look like us.