Tag Archive for 'Joel Klein'

A Promising Start for Core Knowledge Early Literacy Program

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 23, 2009 in Core Knowledge, Education News and Research and Reports. 22 Comments

One year after announcing a pilot program to test a new Core Knowledge Early Literacy program in ten New York City Schools, Joel Klein Tuesday announced very strong early results.  As a news release from the New York City Department of Ed puts it: 

The progress of students in the ten participating schools was more than five times greater than the also-significant performance of students at ten peer schools with comparable student populations, and was reflected among students at all levels of literacy.  Additionally, teachers surveyed as part of the pilot rated the program highly, and nine of the ten participating schools have selected to use the Core Knowledge program with their new kindergarten classes in addition to continuing the program with their first graders, who remain in the pilot.

Speaking at a press conference at a South Bronx elementary school — one of the pilot schools – E.D. Hirsch noted thatwhile the initial results were gratifying, the bigger payoff could come later, since the program is designed to build broad background knowledge across the curriculum, which pays off in improved reading comprehension in the years ahead:

Kindergarten is just a start.  There is always the danger of fade out in later years, as we know from Headstart research.  Elsewhere in the nation, and right here in New York, schools have made noticeable progress in raising reading scores in the early grades according to NAEP, the Nations Report Card.   These improvements reflect better teaching of decoding.   But the improvements in scores are still confined to the early grades.   Verbal scores in the later grades of NAEP have stayed unacceptably low.   Yet these later verbal scores are the ones that predict a student’s ultimate success in life.     

The program consists of two strands: a phonics-heavy decoding strand, and a “listening and learning” strand to build content knowledge.  “Assuming that we will get funding to develop materials for the later grades,” Hirsch noted, “I am predicting that even more dramatic results will show up further on. Instead of the current flat or even declining verbal scores among middle and high school students we will see in students who follow a program like this significantly higher scores, and we will see a narrowing of the language gap between races and ethnic groups. ”

More coverage of the pilot program results can be found here and here.

Solution to Ed Policy Skirmishes “Bafflingly Obvious”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 13, 2009 in Educational Policy, Opinion and accountability. 4 Comments

Fix schools or fix communities?  “From an outsider’s perspective, one of the most frustrating aspects of the education policy debate is that both sides are right,” notes The Atlantic Monthly’s Clay Risen.  “It seems bafflingly obvious that change must come both inside and outside the classroom,” he writes on the Democrats for Education Reform blog.  It’s a must-read.

A backstory is required.  Risen wrote a major profile of Washington, DC Chancellor Michelle Rhee in last November’s Atlantic Monthly. In the new issue, there’s a letter from the University of Michigan’s Susan Neuman, a former Bush administration education official, arguing that Risen’s piece “left readers with the mistaken impression that [Rhee and other school leaders] must make a false choice between quality teachers and ‘extras.”   She also writes ”there is only so much a quality teacher, adequate classroom supplies, and caring administrators can accomplish.” 

The Atlantic typically allows its writers to respond to letters and Risen replied in print that Neuman is “undoubtedly correct that improving teacher quality and improving a student’s social milieu are not mutually exclusive, and are both important means to improve student outcomes. However, education policy is not made in a vacuum, and cannot be. This is where so much of education policy breaks down: there is, sadly, a broadening gulf between teacher-quality advocates and those aligned with ‘A Broader, Bolder Approach.’ Arguably, the answer lies in a mixture of the two. Whether we can find that answer depends much more on improving our education politics than on improving our edu­cation policy.” (ital mine)

Risen’s reply caught the attention of former newspaperman Joe Williams, now head honcho of Democrats for Education Reform.  Knowing that space is at a premium in print, Joe asked Risen to expand on his reply in the Atlantic’s letters section.  Risen notes that the “Broader, Bolder” group and the Joel Klein and Al Sharpton led Education Equality Project are both working toward the same goal and with policies that should be mutually compatible, yet find themselves at odds politically. Says Risen:

Rhee and Co. are, in my view, too eager to reject policies that addresses anything other than teacher quality and too hostile toward anything that smacks of establishment thinking, from unions to teacher colleges. And they’re not entirely wrong–I fear that while many of the signatories to EPI’s “A Broader, Bolder Approach” manifesto are well-intentioned (the list, after all, includes Education Secretary Arne Duncan), too often this wing of the education sector falls into the role of stalking horse for those who prefer the status quo to the disruptive changes that true reform would bring.

Thus a painful paradox: At a moment when education policy is making real strides, our education politics is stuck in a narrow, short-sighted, antagonistic framework in which each side would rather paint the other as anti-student than admit that it might actually have something to contribute. That’s the irony of Michelle Rhee: As a policy thinker and a force for change she is precisely what Washington needs, but she is so politically untuned, so antagonistic toward unions and teacher colleges and the City Council and anything else that might require negotiation and compromise, that she is preventing her policy vision from being realized.

Sound familiar?  In selecting Arne Duncan, who signed on to both ed manifestos as his Education Secretary, President-Elect Obama “understands the need to bring all sides to the table,” Risen believes, “not to minimize dissent but because everyone has something to contribute.”  But each side, he says will have to “concede certain policy principles.”

While teacher accountability is a vital element of reform, for example, it is vital to recognize that teachers are also workers, parents, and taxpayers, not automatons who can be expected to sacrifice everything to student achievement. Nor should we expect them to build lasting relationships with their students if they are spending all their time worried about their job security. While some aspects of teacher tenure and job protections should be relaxed, making them at-will employees is asking too much.  On the flip side, teachers need to recognize that they are not just another class of workers, and that they cannot always make the same demands that, say, teamsters do. Districts need the flexibility to demand a little extra from them, even if it means longer hours.

It’s a political truism that conservatives seek out converts, while progressives hunt down heretics.  The party labels notwithstanding, it sometimes seems the same is true in education debates–too much concern with heresy, not enough with efficacy.  Risen’s “bafflingly obvious” perspective deserves a hearing.  And kudos to Joe Williams and DFER for giving Risen the space to say what needed to be said.

Advice for the Obama Administration

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 12, 2009 in Educational Policy and accountability. 10 Comments

Education’s oddest couple–Joel Klein and Al Sharpton–take to the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal to make a pitch for charters, choice and performance pay in an open letter to President-elect Obama.

Klein and Sharpton co-chair the Education Equality Project (EEP), whose signatories include future Ed Secretary Arne Duncan and a panoply of big city mayors and urban school superintendents.  Their policy pitch argues in support of NCLB’s “core concept that schools should be held accountable for boosting student performance.”  They also call for “expanding parental choice,” citing charter schools like KIPP (but no mention of vouchers). “Beyond expanding federal support for charter schools, as you have proposed,” say Klein and Sharpton, “we would urge you to press forward with two other, far-reaching policy reforms.”

First, the federal government, working with the governors, should develop national standards and assessments for student achievement. Our current state-by-state approach has spawned a race to the bottom, with many states dumbing down standards to make it easier for students to pass achievement tests. Even when students manage to graduate from today’s inner-city high schools, they all too frequently are still wholly unprepared for college or gainful employment.

Second, the federal government should take most of the more than $30 billion it now spends on K-12 education and reposition the funding to support the recruitment and retention of the best teachers in underserved urban schools. High-poverty urban schools have many teachers who make heroic efforts to educate their students. But there is no reward for excellence in inner-city schools when an outstanding science teacher earns the same salary as a mediocre phys-ed instructor.

Meanwhile the Washington Post runs advice for Arne Duncan today from Diane Ravitch, who writes that NCLB “has turned our schools into testing factories, narrowed the curriculum to the detriment of everything other than reading and math, and prompted states to claim phony test score gains. The law’s remedies don’t work. The law’s sanctions don’t work.”  Ravitch also flatly calls the goal of universal proficiency by 2014 “ludicrous.”  No nation or state has ever reached it,” sayseducations preeminent historian.

Mr. Secretary, use your bully pulpit to scrap this ineffective set of mandates. And when the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is reauthorized, as it must be, insist that schools are accountable not only for educating their students in history, science, literature, civics, and the arts, but for safeguarding their health and development.

 

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.

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. 

Big Day in the Big Apple

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 25, 2008 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum and Literacy. 0 Comments

Richard Whitmire dropped a hint last week calling it “the biggest development in reading instruction that won’t make the front pages of any national newspaper. But it should.”  Today came the announcement: a three-year, $2.4 million pilot project to test a new Core Knowledge Reading Program in New York City Schools.  Chancellor Joel Klein made the announcement, along with Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch, Jr., and Amida Gentile of the UFT.  The DOE’s press release is here.

Lots to say about this initiative, but here’s coverage in the New York Times, Edweek, and New York’s WABC-TV.

The Sharpton-Klein Education Reform Agenda

Published by Diane Ravitch on June 23, 2008 in Core Knowledge and Educational Policy. 3 Comments

I have been a supporter of Core Knowledge from its beginning. Indeed, as Don Hirsch will testify, I urged him to write the book that eventually became Cultural Literacy, after I heard him speak iat a conference in 1983. Like Don, I believe that children need a firm command of not just vocabulary and skills, but background knowledge that will help them understand new words and new ideas.

Over the years, I have come to understand that children need a strong, rich, coherent curriculum, filled with the amazing ideas, experiences, discoveries and people that awaken children’s passion to learn and keep on learning.

Will America’s achievement gap really be eliminated by testing kids more?

But I have discovered something else. It is very difficult for children to become deeply engaged in learning when they come to school hungry; when their eyesight is so poor that they can’t read; when their hearing is impaired but no one knows it; when their family moves from place to place because they don’t have a decent home; and when their family income is so uncertain that their home is filled with anxiety about meeting basic needs.

Continue reading ‘The Sharpton-Klein Education Reform Agenda’

Something New Under the Sun

Published by Robert Pondiscio on June 20, 2008 in Educational Policy and Teacher Training. 0 Comments

The New York Sun’s Elizabeth Green reports NYC Schools Chancellor Joel Klein wishes for his Department of Education to have the authority to certify teachers and principals.  Ed schools have that exclusive franchise right now.  Flypaper says the Boys of Fordham were at the Excellence in Education summit in Orlando where Klein discussed this idea, and will have more to say about it shortly.   Could get interesting.