New York Rethinks Its Remaking of the Schools; Learning From Ideas for Public Schools

1) I was expecting this article from the front page of Sunday's NYT to be very negative (gee, I wonder why?), but was pleasantly surprised to find it balanced and, dare I say it (I don't want to jinx anything!), even favorable.  Of the people mentioned in this article, I only know Chris Cerf, but if the others are as good as he is, I think some exciting things will happen.

 

I think Klein is on the right track here -- we can't fix our schools unless we fix the dysfunctional, unaccountable SYSTEM.  The more I study big, broken systems -- mostly in the context of large corporations, given my profession -- the more convinced I am that, while there will always be outstanding individuals, the overall results an organization achieves are driven first and foremost by whether the system makes sense.

 

2) I wrote about my thinking in this area in an article I published a year ago, which concluded:

I have spent nearly half of my career in the nonprofit world, and even though I’m currently on the other side of the fence, I remain involved with a number of nonprofits. Overall, my observation is that the most important elements of creating an effective organization, or turning around a broken one, are virtually identical, whether the organization is for-profit, non-profit, or governmental. All organizations ultimately depend on people, and in every case I’ve seen, it’s critical to empower them, give them the right strategies and tools to succeed, measure the results, and then hold them accountable, both by rewarding success and taking steps to address failure.

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New York Rethinks Its Remaking of the Schools

 

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

Published: April 9, 2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/09/nyregion/09Klein.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

The New York City schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, is once again rethinking the nation's largest school system.

He has hired Chris Cerf, former president of Edison Schools, the commercial manager of public schools in 25 states. He has retained Alvarez & Marsal, a consulting firm that revamped the school system in St. Louis and is rebuilding the system in New Orleans. And he has enlisted Sir Michael Barber, a former adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain who is now at McKinsey & Company in London.

These consultants, often in pinstripe suits and ensconced in a conference room on the third-floor mezzanine of the headquarters of the Education Department in Lower Manhattan, are working with a small army of city education officials, all led by Mr. Klein's chief of staff, Kristen Kane. The effort is being paid for with $5 million in private donations.

Together, the consultants and officials are re-examining virtually every aspect of the system, not quite three years after Chancellor Klein and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg charted perhaps its most exhaustive overhaul and made it a laboratory for educational experimentation, closely watched across the country.

They are evaluating everything from how textbooks and paper are bought, to how teacher training programs are chosen, to how students, teachers, principals and schools are judged. They are running focus groups of dozens of principals, and they are studying districts in England, Canada and California.

A top goal is to find ways to relax much of the very centralization put in place by the Bloomberg administration and give principals a far freer hand, provided schools can meet goals for attendance, test scores, promotion rates and other criteria.

An ideal system, they suggest, would put schools near the top of the organizational chart and potentially eliminate or change dozens of administrative jobs. Hypothetically, principals, now supervised by a local superintendent, might choose either to keep that overseer or to use the money to hire a different achievement adviser. Support services, like counseling programs, could be outsourced.

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Learning From Ideas for Public Schools

 

By Whitney Tilson
Published on the Motley Fool web site, 2/11/05

(www.fool.com/news/commentary/2005/commentary05021105.htm)

 

I believe that one of the most pressing issues facing our country is the failure of public schools to keep up with the demands of our modern economy. Education is becoming more and more important -- both for individuals and for our entire nation -- in an increasingly competitive world. A high school diploma is no longer enough, since traditional high-paying blue collar jobs are disappearing. Consider that from 1975 to 1999, the income of Americans with only a high school diploma was flat, whereas paychecks for people with college and advanced degrees soared. Yet, despite a doubling of inflation-adjusted spending per pupil over the last 30 years, academic outcomes are flat.

 

And for low-income and minority students, our public schools are failing to an especially alarming degree.  Consider that on a national fourth-grade reading test, 60% of black children had not even partially mastered grade-level skills vs. only 25% for whites, and the gap only widens over time. For example, black and Hispanic high school seniors on average read and do math only as well as white eighth-graders.

 

So what does this have to do with investing? Broadly speaking, our overall economy, productivity, competitiveness, and standard of living depend on our people. It’s not just an individual who suffers from dropping out of high school or graduating with an inferior education -- our nation does, too, because we not only lose much of the potential of that person but also lose again since numerous studies have shown that high school dropouts are far more likely to go on welfare, commit crimes, serve prison time, etc...