Tag Archive for 'Education Person of the Year'

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 #3: Joel Klein is Still Here

Published by Robert Pondiscio on December 30, 2008 in Education News. 3 Comments

You will not like this post about Joel Klein. 

It is impossible to write a sentence that includes the words “Joel” and “Klein” in succession without upsetting people.  Lots of people, in fact.  More than six years into his run as New York City Schools Chancellor, minds are largely made up.  Ask someone in New York City for their opinion about the Chancellor and you will hear “no one cares more and is willing to fight harder for always doing what is best for kids.”  (Whitney Tilson)  Or else you will hear about a “ruthless dictatorship” and “a disaster for our schools.” (Leonie Haimson).  Klein has passionate supporters and detractors, and they are not shy about expressing their opinions. 

Hey, it’s New York.  You got a problem with that?

Like so many controversial contemporary figures in education, your opinion about Joel Klein says a lot about how you feel about a specific set of education reform ideas.  You like merit pay? Charter schools? Alternative certification?  You’re probably a Klein fan.  Not so big on incentives and test-driven accountability?  The Chancellor is not your cup of tea.  But our panel of education observers recognize that Klein’s impact has been deep and broad, earning him the #3 slot on our list of the most influential people in education in 2008.

“Klein continues to do his thing, and he is a love/hate schools chancellor,” notes Patrick “Eduflack” Riccards. “He probably deserves more credit for the data than he receives, since moving an organization like NYCDOE is so difficult.  And he is never one to back down from a fight.”  Sol Stern, often at the vanguard of Klein critics, listed the Chancellor as his top pick for the most influential person in education this year ”for the most radical changes, though not necessarily change we can believe in.”

 At one level, it’s hard to understand why Klein evokes such strong negative response in some people.  Unlike Michelle Rhee, who seems to delight in rhetorical excess and leading with her chin, Klein makes a habit of sounding reasonable, even candid, as he did in a recent interview with U.S. News:

The most important thing that we can do to change high school outcomes is improve the education of kids before they get to high school. People who have a high school-only strategy are going to fail. And the second most important thing is, we have got to finally crack open the nut and say, these are the standards and these are the assessments of what it means to have successfully completed high school. Anybody can get you a high school degree; all they need to do is keep lowering the standards, and more and more kids will graduate. We’re fooling ourselves, and it’s time to get serious about national standards and national assessments.

But where supporters see a hard-nosed reformer, willing to “break some china,” others see a Bush-like refusal to admit error and a nuance-averse brand of ed reform.  ”Bloomberg and Klein placed all their bets for school improvement on market-style accountability reforms,” Sol Stern wrote last summer in City Journal, “such as granting principals greater autonomy over budgets, making schools compete against one another for letter grades, and offering bonus pay to administrators and teachers who boosted student scores.”  In the view of New York Times columnist David Brooks, Klein is “the highly successful New York chancellor who has, nonetheless, been blackballed by the unions.”  Deborah Meier on Bridging Differences  says “NYC’s ‘reform’ has been at best a waste of precious years, and at worst a disaster.” 

These are not subtle differences of opinions.  And so it goes.  And will continue to go.  

A multiple choice question:  Where previous NYC Chancellors would have been well-advised not to purchase green bananas, Joel Klein has held the job over six years. With Mayor Bloomberg having made his path straight for a third term, it’s possible Klein will be with us for years to come. This will make people in education:

a) Giddy with excitement

b) Rend their garments and gnash their teeth

c) All of the above

 The correct answer is c.

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.