Teaching for a better America; Bronx school inspires McConnell; School Reform's 38th Parallel; For Blacks, a Dream in Decline

1) A great Op Ed in Saturday's Boston Globe (http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/10/22/teaching_for_a_better_america/) by David Gergen, who spoke at the TFA alumni summit.

The message that rang through their Washington reunion is that these young men and women have emerged from their two years of service as the vanguard of a new generation of social entrepreneurs committed to education equity and social justice. Instead of ''retiring" into affluent careers, they are trying to bang down an old system that isn't working and replace it with new one that might.

Two alumni started the KIPP Academies, charter schools that have had some of the best results of any schools in the country. Others launched Jump Start, the New Teacher Project, and New Leaders. Altogether, some 80 alumni are now serving as principals for charter schools. One alumnus who stayed on in regular public schools just won the 2005 National Teacher of the Year award, the first recipient ever from the District of Columbia. He says he would not have entered the classroom had it not been for Teach for America. These are results that both left and right can celebrate.

2) Jack McConnell, the First Minister of Scotland, visited KIPP in the Bronx yesterday (articles at http://www.theherald.co.uk/politics/49462.html and http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/4373610.stm):

Mr McConnell expressed huge interest in a unique regime run by the school. As part of the Knowledge is Power Programme (KIPP), pupils, parents and teachers are asked to sign written pledges committing them to school life.
Mr McConnell said Scottish schools could learn a lot from certain aspects of the system, which pushes children aged 11 to 15 from disadvantaged areas to reach their full potential by aiming for top college and university places.
"Written agreements would certainly have a place in Scottish schools," he said. "It would engage the parents and motivate pupils more consistently. The challenge in Scotland is to create this type of commitment to the school."
The so-called contract signed by the 250 pupils, their parents and 17 teachers at the KIPP Academy in the Bronx, commits them to work to their full potential and not least, attend school from 7.30am until 5pm every day. The punishing regime clearly pays dividends. More than 86% of the pupils perform at or above average in maths and 69% in reading.
The vast majority go on to win scholarships to some of the best private high schools and colleges in New York.
Mr McConnell said the contract built a commitment that gave pupils more inspiration to participate in school life and gave the teachers confidence to make that happen.
The first minister also intends to send someone over to the school in the next few weeks to learn more about how it keeps in touch with every single pupil long after they have moved on.

3) How's this for the embodiment of irony: the leader of Scotland comes thousands of miles to KIPP to learn from a model that's obviously working, yet guess how many times in the TEN YEARS that KIPP has been right down the hall from one of the lowest-performing middle schools in the Bronx that someone, ANYONE, from that school has bothered to merely walk down the hall to try to learn and apply the lessons from what's going on only a few feet away?  NEVER! 

(See article about this: School Reform’s 38th Parallel (http://daily.nysun.com/Repository/getFiles.asp?Style=OliveXLib:ArticleToMail&Type=text/html&Path=NYS/2003/09/22&ID=Ar00901):

In the South Bronx, there is a hallway. At one end, children in shirts and ties and dresses line up to shake their teacher’s hand as they enter their classroom. At the other end, noise escapes an art class. “Excuse me! Why are you running around my room?!” screams a young, blonde, frazzled-looking teacher. “Look at my niggas from the East Side!” yells a black boy, maybe 12 years old.

 

One can pace the hall, moving from quiet to bedlam and back again. I did so repeatedly on Friday, my jaw a tick away from slack. “A lot of people notice that,” a young woman said as she walked past.

 

The hallway is split between Intermediate School 151 and the Knowledge Is Power Program Academy charter school. The schools share a building on East 156th Street, across from the housing projects, but not much else.)

Nor is this unusual: I made a 2nd visit yesterday to the new KIPP Infinity school on 133rd St., which shares a building with a notoriously underperforming, dangerous school (poor Roberto Clemente, having such a school named after him) and I asked Joe Negron how often the Principal of the regular school visited him and he said, "Never."

 

Folks, we have a lot of work to do to fix this system...

 

4) Whatever your view on the widespread decline of unions in this country, it's undeniably a disaster for African-Americans, and makes our work to improve failing schools -- which are disproportionately victimizing minorities -- all the more important.

But then unions lost bargaining power and members. And while labor leaders called attention to the overall decline, few took notice that blacks were losing much more ground than whites.

In the last five years, that trend accelerated. Despite a growing economy, the number of African-Americans in unions has fallen by 14.4 percent since 2000, while white membership is down 5.4 percent.

For a while in the 1980's, one out of every four black workers was a union member; now it is closer to one in seven. This loss of better-paying jobs helps to explain why blacks are doing worse than any other group in the current recovery. Labor leaders have acknowledged the disproportionate damage to African-Americans, but they decline to make special efforts to organize blacks and offset the decrease, saying that all groups need help.

(http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/23/weekinreview/23uchi.html)