Archive for the 'Education Leadership' Category

2008’s Education Person of the Year: Michelle Rhee

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 1, 2009 in Education Leadership. 24 Comments

To whom much is given, much is expected.  And Washington DC’s Chancellor Michelle Rhee has been given quite a bit:  control of one of the lowest-performing school systems in the country, a broad mandate for sweeping reform, and the unequivocal support of her boss, Washington mayor Adrian Fenty.  She’s also been given an inexhaustible work ethic, a hardcore “no excuses” management style, and an apparent immunity to criticism or the opinion of others. 

Now, much is expected.  Everything, in fact. 

She is, in the apt description of The Atlantic, “the most controversial figure in American public education and the standard-bearer for a new type of schools leader nationwide.”  Her rise in the last 18 months from relative obscurity to the cover of Time Magazine earned her the top spot in our poll to determine the most influential person in education in 2008.   It wasn’t a close contest. 

Jay Mathews of the Washington Post was one of many of our panel of observers to put Rhee at the top of his list of the year’s most influential people in education, citing her status as “the most visible educator of the year, pushing the discussion toward rewarding teachers and ending tenure.”  The Manhattan Institute’s Jay Greene and Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Foundation likewise placed Rhee atop their ballots.  Bill Jackson, founder and president of GreatSchools.net, cited Rhee’s “radical new way of thinking about the teaching profession, including tenure and compensation.”

“Love her or hate her, she is redefining the very definition of an urban superintendent,” said Patrick Riccards, author of the blog Eduflack.  ”She has changed the way teachers, families, the community, and businesses think about DC Public Schools.  For the first time in a long time, people have hope for schools in the District.”

Rhee’s paradigm shattering proposal for DC teachers–way higher pay in exchange for giving up seniority and tenure-has pushed her to the forefront of the national dialogue about teacher quality and compensation.  In the process she has become, perhaps inevitably, the most polarizing figure in education.  Her brand of education reform strikes a nerve-and a chord.  She has clearly tapped into the energy and idealism of younger teachers who are often mystified by union politics and fiercely committed to closing the achievement gap.  Rhee’s proposal is not intimidating, but welcome to many of the “Rhee-volutionaries” she’s attracting to the nation’s capitol.  Perform or perish?  Bring it on.  ”If I worked my butt off, did everything I could, and got fired by an administration like Rhee’s who deemed my teaching ineffective, I would tip my hat, sigh of relief, and find a new career or job,” a first-year Teach for America corps member commented on this blog in response to the Time Magazine cover story about Rhee.  A Newsweek profile, one of dozens of national news stories about the Chancellor in 2008, noted “Rhee doesn’t quite come out and say it, but she and her fellow reformers are trying to change the teaching profession, at least in the inner city, from an 8 a.m.-to-3 p.m. job with summers off, to something that bears more resemblance to joining the Green Berets.”

KIPP schools score well because teachers work from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and on Saturday, and carry cell phones so their students can reach them any time. Summer vacation lasts only about a month. There are teachers who can maintain this pace for decades (just as there are some older Special Forces operatives in the military), but in Rhee’s world many teachers may find themselves working hard, burning out and moving on.

A fight over the teachers’ contract looms in 2009. The Washington Teachers’ Union has brought in the American Federation of Teachers, led by Randi Weingarten to address the stalled negotiations. The stakes and the rhetoric are high.  “I consider this proposal to be an IQ test as to whether teachers are willing to slit their own throats,” union vice-president Nathan Saunders told Newsweek. “I believe this contract is going to pass.  And I believe it is going to have a huge impact,” said Rhee. “Even if it didn’t, it would not stop me.”

That’s precisely the kind of don’t-mess-with-me rhetorical flourish that divides Rhee fans from her detractors. “Such administrators are the reason so many good teachers believe they still need unions, and need them badly,” notes columnist Julia Steiny. ”Hyper-authoritarian administrators storm the beaches, guns blazing, not much caring what dies in the crossfire. Schools may improve, but at the cost of human misery. And miserable teachers cannot foster a love of learning.”   

In the final analysis, Michelle Rhee is, as The Atlantic correctly concluded, carrying the very viability of education reform on her shoulders:

Rhee is confronting the great divide over American public-education reform-not between left and right but between two philosophies about education. To Rhee and her fellow reformers, schools can, by themselves, produce successful students. To her opponents (and they include liberals and conservatives), schools are not enough, however “successful” their students. They are an important, but hardly the only, means with which children are inculcated with the skills and mores of their community. The divide means that Rhee’s challenge is not just to reform one of the worst school systems in the country and, in effect, prove whether or not inner-city schools can be revived at all.”

Note:  Thanks to our panel of education observers and pundits for their time and help in making the Education Person of the Year series possible: Sol Stern, Jay Mathews, Bill Jackson, Andy Rotherham, Diane Ravitch, Mike Petrilli, Jay Greene Michael Shaughnessy, Nancy Flanagan, Patrick Riccards, Corey Bunje Bower and Dan Brown.

Ed Person of The Year #4: Eduwonkette–An Inconvenient Truth Teller

Published by Robert Pondiscio on December 29, 2008 in Education Leadership, Education News and Research and Reports. 17 Comments

Once upon a time there was an unassuming guy from Kansas named Bill James. Big baseball fan. Great with statistics. Uncanny knack for seeing things in the stats others didn’t. Scary smart. Through pure statistical analysis, James was able to show what factors led to teams scoring runs and winning games, and how the efforts of individual players contributed to wins. He was often able to show with hard, empirical data, why many time-honored “truths” about the game were simply not borne out by statistics—why RBIs matter less than on-base percentage, for example. Or why stolen base attempts tend to hurt a team’s offense. He didn’t have a lot of luck getting his observations about baseball published, so he ended up self-publishing an annual book called The Bill James Baseball Abstract. It started out as a cult item with a certain kind of geeky, fanboy appeal. But 25 years later, what James discovered about baseball ended up transforming the way we look at the game and even how some major league clubs put their teams together. It’s probably no coincidence that two years after hiring Bill James in 2002, the Boston Red Sox won the World Series for the first time since the end of the war.  World War, that is.  The first one. 

Before Bill James, baseball was all batting averages, bromides and intangibles-more than a century of baseball men who knew what they knew based on experience and instinct. They didn’t need numbers. They knew the game. Then teams like the Oakland A’s, as chronicled in Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball, started putting Bill James-style statistical analysis to work and found they were frequently able to compete effectively with large-market, big-budget teams like the Yankees. In effect, they used data to close the baseball equivalent of the achievement gap.

Education may have found its Bill James. Her name is Jennifer Jennings, but she’s better known as Eduwonkette. She made a name for herself in 2008 by demystifying the process of using statistical evidence to make rational decisions in education. More to the point, she used her extraordinary, Jamesian grasp of data to call out those who claimed they were using statistical evidence to make rational decisions. Sol Stern puts it bluntly, calling Jennings “the best bullshit detector on the web.” Diane Ravitch, another fan, put Eduwonkette at the top of her ballot naming this year’s most influential people in education. At her best, Jennings implicitly challenges education policymakers to be objective, to pay attention to what the data is telling us about education rather than what they want to believe-or want us to believe. And much like James, she makes the potentially dry world of statistical analysis not merely digestible, but fun. She wields a livelier pen than most professional education journalists, and on data she’s simply without peer.

“The amazing thing about Eduwonkette is the fact that pretty much everyone in the EdBlog world either loves her or deeply respects her work, or both,” says teacher-blogger Nancy Flanagan. “Her commenters are free to argue with her-and she will acknowledge her arguments’ shortcomings with grace and smarts. She makes statistics sing. Her occasional snarkiness is buttressed by scholarship and a finely-tuned sense of humor.”

Launched in late 2007 as an anonymous blog featuring a masked superheroine icon, Eduwonkette quickly won plenty of attention in the edusphere for what seemed like a nonstop stream of posts questioning the gains claimed by New York City’s Department of Education. The blog was accurately described by the New York Sun as “a stubborn thorn in the Bloomberg administration’s side.” But Jennings is no one-trick pony, having spilled varnish remover on Teach for America, Washington think-tanks, proponents of pay-for-grades schemes and dozens of others who seek to use data to promote their programs or points of view. Recently she offered one of the first analyses of incoming Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s record running the Chicago school system. “Have gaps separating white/black and white/Hispanic students in Chicago shrunk in the last 5-6 years?” she asked rhetorically. “Nah.” Note to Mr. Duncan’s future press secretary: You’ve been warned.

“Rather than merely toiling away in the vineyards of the American Educational Research Association, writing papers for fellow academics, [Eduwonkette] recently overtook Eduwonk as the top education policy blogger,” Mike Petrilli wrote in the most recent issue of Education Next, “even though her competitor is a former Clinton White House aide and cofounder of a major Washington education think tank. It’s clichéd to say that the Internet evens the playing field and makes the traditional trappings of power and influence obsolete, but so it is.”

What makes Eduwonkette particularly effective is Jennings’ relative lack of ego or apparent agenda. Guessing Eduwonkette’s identity became a favorite parlor game and gave early buzz to the blog. Her voluntary unmasking (done out of concern that incorrect suspects were being fingered with consequences for their academic work) was even covered by New York Magazine. But coming out has arguably given Jennings even more clout. Where critics were once able to speculate that she had “skin in the game” those whose ox she gores now have to grapple with what she writes, rather than attempt to discredit her with speculations about her affiliations and motivation.

Describing his role with the Red Sox, Bill James told the Wall Street Journal, “I see it as being my job to ensure as much as I can that we act on the basis of actual evidence.” That’s also a pretty fair description of Jennifer Jennings’ job in education. Indeed, if I were a savvy charter school operator, or even an urban schools chancellor, I might be tempted to ring up the talented Ms. Jennings and offer her a job. If Bill James could help the Red Sox break the Curse of the Bambino, who knows what Jennings might accomplish as an insider.   It took over 20 years for Bill James to leave his mark on the game of baseball. It wasn’t until Michael Lewis’ book came out that “Moneyball” became a household word. Today, some education wonks are fond of invoking Moneyball as a paradigm for public education. “Bill was an outsider, self-publishing invisible truths about baseball while the Establishment ignored him,” Red Sox owner John Henry said in a piece about Bill James in Time Magazine. “Now 25 years later, his ideas have become part of the foundation of baseball strategy.”

A prediction:  In the above quote, change ”baseball” to “education,” and “Bill” to “Jennifer.” Fast forward 25 years.

You heard it here first.

The New Stupid

Published by Robert Pondiscio on December 17, 2008 in Education Leadership and Research and Reports. 10 Comments

Gone are the days when educators dismissed data as having only a limited utility for improving schools and school systems.  What’s taken its place, argues Rick Hess, is “The New Stupid” — where data-based decision making and research-based practice “stand in for careful thought, serve as dressed-up rationales for the same old fads, or [are] used to justify incoherent proposals.”

In an article in Education Leadership, Hess describes first encountering the tendency to “energetically misuse data” during a presentation to a group of aspiring superintendents.

The group had recently read a research brief high-lighting the effect of teachers on student achievement as well as the inequitable distribution of teachers within districts, with higher-income, higher-performing schools getting the pick of the litter. The aspirants were fired up and ready to put this knowledge to use. To a roomful of nods, one declared, “Day one, we’re going to start identifying those high value-added teachers and moving them to the schools that aren’t making AYP.”

Now, although I was generally sympathetic to the premise, the certainty of the stance provoked me to ask a series of questions: Can we be confident that teachers who are effective in their current classrooms would be equally effective elsewhere? What effect would shifting teachers to different schools have on the likelihood that teachers would remain in the district? Are the measures in question good proxies for teacher quality? What steps might either encourage teachers to accept reassignment or improve recruiting for underserved schools?

My concern was not that the would-be superintendents lacked firm answers to these questions,” Hess recalls.  “It was that they seemingly regarded such questions as distractions.”

The key is not to retreat from data, Hess counsels, ”but to truly embrace the data by asking hard questions, considering organizational realities, and contemplating unintended consequences. Absent sensible restraint, it is not difficult to envision a raft of poor judgments governing staffing, operations, and instruction—all in the name of ‘data-driven decision making.’”

This is smart, even heroic stuff. 

 

Eich bin ein Reformer

Published by Robert Pondiscio on December 12, 2008 in Education Leadership. 3 Comments

Tired of being a pinata, Linda Darling Hammond takes to the New York Times this morning to defend herself from David Brooks’ charge that she is “anti-reform.”  Says Obama’s point person on education:

Since I entered teaching, I have fought to change the status quo that routinely delivers dysfunctional schools and low-quality teaching to students of color in low-income communities. I have challenged inequalities in financing. I have helped develop new school models through both district-led innovations and charters. And I have worked to create higher standards for both students and teachers, along with assessments that measure critical thinking and performance.

Isn’t ”if you’re explaining you’re losing” a cardinal rule of politics?  The subtext of her letter is really more about who gets to claim the mantle of “reformer.”  The Los Angeles Times (HT: Flypaper) notes LDH’s well-publicized criticism of Teach For America ”give us little confidence that she would support innovative approaches to education.”  The paper isn’t giving blanket support to the self-described reform camp, however, noting that while it would be a shame for the reform movement to lose momentum, ”reformers must be open to how badly No Child Left Behind itself needs reform.”

“After years of public battering, schools need a leader who is less an ideologue than a pragmatist,” the Times concludes, “who puts children ahead of both union and political priorities.”

Public or Private?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 10, 2008 in Education Leadership. 2 Comments

Everyone and their brother is weighing in on where the future First Daughters should go to school once their dad moves to Washington to start his new job.  Jay Mathews of the Washington Post wisely avoids grandstanding, noting that school choice is very personal.  He assumes the Obama girls will find their way to Georgetown Day School, “because of its similarity to their current school, its historic role as the city’s first racially integrated school and the presence of Obama senior legal adviser Eric H. Holder Jr. on its board of trustees.”  However he notes there is a viable public school, Strong John Thomson, a stone’s throw from the White House.

Meet the principal, Gladys Camp, and you understand why Thomson parents think the Obamas ought to check it out. Dr. Camp, as everyone calls her, is a legend. In the past two years, she has won awards from the National Association of Elementary School Principals and this newspaper as the best school leader in the city….Sixty-nine percent of Thomson’s 355 students are from low-income families. Forty percent are Hispanic, 34 percent black, 22 percent Asian American and 5 percent white. That demographic mix often means remedial instruction and little enrichment, but parents say the school offers a feast of music, art and foreign languages as good as what they would find in a private school. 

The last President to send his kids to public school?  Jimmy Carter.  “Thomson is close to capacity,” writes Uncle Jay, “but Camp said she would have room after the holidays for a fifth-grader and a second-grader transferring from the Midwest.”

Bloomberg Era Mayor May Not Be Over

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 2, 2008 in Education Leadership and Education News. 0 Comments

New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg plans to seek a third term.  One small problem, however, is that he’s term-limited to two terms.  But he’s proposing an extension of those limits by a City Council vote.  The impact for school reform is significant, since keeping the City’s sprawling school system under mayoral control is one of Bloomberg’s major issues.  A third term for Bloomberg would also presumably extend the record-setting run of Joel Klein, who has enjoyed the longest run of any NYC schools chancellor.  Klein has previously said he’s open to staying on as chancellor under Bloomberg’s successor. 

Other People’s Children

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 1, 2008 in Education Leadership. 3 Comments

“From liberals like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to conservatives like George H.W. Bush and John McCain, our political landscape is full of people who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk,” notes the WorldWide Education Blog.  “They oversee budgets, funding, and legislation, but they don’t deem public schools suitable for their own children…just yours.”

Earl Butz, the Nixon-Ford era cabinet member remembered mostly for his mouth, famously got himself in hot water with his quip about the Pope’s stance on contraception, “He no play-a da game. He no make-a da rules.”  I’ll just say it might inspire more confidence if more of our top elected officials played the game.  Or had the courage of their convictions.

If You Can Make It There

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 16, 2008 in Education Leadership. 0 Comments

Babe Ruth, Pedro Martinez and…Brett Peiser?  Top ballplayers aren’t the only ones defecting to rivals in New York City.  Boston “has quietly lost some of its top educators to the Big Apple,” writes James A. Peyser, a partner with NewSchools Venture Fund, in the Boston Globe.  After years as a hot spot of education reform, especially in the charter school movement, “Boston is losing some of its best players, raising fears that public education may suffer its own curse of the Bambino.”

A little over three years ago, the founders of three nationally recognized Boston charter schools – Roxbury Preparatory Charter School, Academy of the Pacific Rim, and Boston Collegiate – helped to create an ambitious network of charter schools in New York and New Jersey. Last year, the head of City on a Hill Charter School, which has helped 100 percent of its graduates gain admission to college, moved to New York City to become Chancellor Joel Klein’s charter schools chief. And this fall, the founder of East Boston’s Excel Academy, which ranks among the state’s top five middle schools in eighth-grade math, is stepping down to explore new school reform opportunities in the New York metropolitan area.

“Massachusetts has distinguished itself as one of the nation’s leaders in school reform, and an important part of that success story has been its charter schools,” Peyser writes. “Nevertheless, as the charter movement has taken off in other states and cities, our leadership position has waned.”

The Dark Side of High Achievement

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 15, 2008 in Education Leadership and Education Practice. 0 Comments

Is there room for average students at a high-achieving school?  An open letter on ednews.org from an anonymous parent calling himself John Dewey to the Principal of Langley High School, McLean, Virginia, takes exception to that principal’s assertion that the “middle child” – unexceptional academically or in extracurricular activities -may not be happy at his school.

Langley is widely considered one of the top public high schools in the country.  A new principal, Matthew Ragone, has just come on board and wrote a piece in the school’s newsletter.

One topic of discussion has been the concept of the ‘Middle Child’.  The ‘Middle Child” is the type of student who does not feel at home at Langley because, while they may be smart and academically focused, they are not academically superior like many of their peers.  Nor are they outstanding in extracurricular activities.  This student does not enjoy the prospect of coming to school to face the intense competition, which is ubiquitous in excellent schools, only to be disappointed.

There is no simple answer to this problem.  In my ideal world every student will walk through the front door on September 2 with an exuberant, positive attitude and feel comfortable and be happy throughout the entire year.  Of course that does not happen.  As we start the school year, the Instructional Council will open dialogue with the general faculty and I will talk with parents at PTSA meetings and parent coffees to solicit your input and ideas.  As the discussion continues with all the stakeholders, I am confident we will find a way to serve the ‘Middle Child’.”

Dewey’s advice to principal Rangone:  “Your message should be ‘There are no middle children here. Every child matters; every child is as important as the next.’ And you should mean it. You should provide a culture in which students who aren’t getting the material are identified and the school works with them after school or in special sessions to make sure they understand.”

Dewey, however, does not expect his plea to be heard.  “My experience tells me that Mr. Ragone is not going to be persuaded to change one thing about Langley except perhaps to make things even more competitive, reduce the number of top performers, and make the middle of the bell curve even larger,” he writes. “Isn’t that the name of the game in the ‘winner takes all’ environment that passes for high quality education these days?”

In fairness to Rangone, his missive sounds like he’s concerned (if inartfully so) about the middle child, not suggesting to parents that they go elsewhere. 

(Hat tip: Kitchen Table Math and Joanne Jacobs)

New Paternalism on Steroids

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 12, 2008 in Education Leadership. 0 Comments

Companies in Alberta, Canada are being urged not to hire high school dropouts to encourage students to get their diploma. 

Alberta’s Education Minister Dave Hancock told the Calgary Chamber of Commerce yesterday that Alberta’s high school completion rate needs improvement. Business has a role to play in helping kids stay in school.  “You can help by refusing to hire anyone without a high school diploma,” Hancock said.