STOP THE PRESSES!!! Steven Brill, author of the single most impactful ed reform article of 2009, "The Rubber Room: The Battle Over New York City's Worst Teachers" (http://edreform.blogspot.com/2009/09/rubber-room-battle-over-new-york-citys.html) is out with another BRILLIANT article, this time the cover story of this coming Sunday's NY Times Magazine. This story will rival Elizabeth Green's NYT Magazine article, "Building a Better Teacher" (http://edreform.blogspot.com/2010/03/building-better-teacher.html) for the ed reform article of 2010.

Here are extensive excerpts, starting with the opening:

MICHAEL MULGREW is an affable former Brooklyn vocational-high-school teacher who took over last year as head of New York City's United Federation of Teachers when his predecessor, Randi Weingarten, moved to Washington to run the national American Federation of Teachers. Over breakfast in March, we talked about a movement spreading across the country to hold public-school teachers accountable by compensating, promoting or even removing them according to the results they produce in class, as measured in part by student test scores. Mulgrew's 165-page union contract takes the opposite approach. It not only specifies everything that teachers will do and will not do during a six-hour-57 ½-minute workday but also requires that teachers be paid based on how long they have been on the job. Once they've been teaching for three years and judged satisfactory in a process that invariably judges all but a few of them satisfactory, they are ensured lifetime tenure.

Next to Mulgrew was his press aide, Richard Riley. "Suppose you decide that Riley is lazy or incompetent," I asked Mulgrew. "Should you be able to fire him?"

"He's not a teacher," Mulgrew responded. "And I need to be able to pick my own person for a job like that." Then he grinned, adding: "I know where you're going, but you don't understand. Teachers are just different."

That is the kind of story that makes Jon Schnur smile. Schnur, who runs a Manhattan-based school-reform group called New Leaders for New Schools, sits informally at the center of a network of self-styled reformers dedicated to overhauling public education in the United States. They have been building in strength and numbers over the last two decades and now seem to be planted everywhere that counts. They are working in key positions in school districts and charter-school networks, legislating in state capitals, staffing city halls and statehouses for reform-minded mayors and governors, writing papers for policy groups and dispensing grants from billion-dollar philanthropies like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Bill Gates, along with Education Secretary Arne Duncan; Teach for America's founder, Wendy Kopp; and the New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein could be considered the patron saints of the network.

Over the last several months, Schnur and the well-positioned fellow travelers on his speed dial have seen the cause of their lives take center stage. Why the sudden shift from long-simmering wonk debate to political front burner? Because there is now a president who, when it comes to school reform, really does seem to be a new kind of Democrat — and because of a clever idea Schnur had last year to package what might otherwise have been just another federal grant program into a media-alluring, if cheesy-sounding, contest called Race to the Top.

Here's a great summary of why reform is on the move:

When the starting gun for the Race went off, four forces that had been building came together and gained strength from one another.

First there's the rise of the reformers who seem to be in daily communication through e-mail and blogs. The standard profile is someone who went to a prestige college, joined Teach for America for a two-year stint and found the work and the challenges so compelling that he or she decided education should be more than a layover before a real career. So they did more teaching or became involved running a charter school or a reform group, then kept moving up the ladder as sympathetic political leaders, including Democrats (most in this network also seem to be Democrats), took over cities or states and looked for people to overhaul school systems. One exception is Schnur. "I was in Wendy's class in Princeton in 1989, so I couldn't do T.F.A. because it didn't exist yet," Schnur says, referring to Wendy Kopp, who founded Teach for America in 1990 based on a senior thesis she wrote envisioning a Peace Corps-like cadre of young college grads.

Although Schnur is a cheerful, modest type, there is a strain of self-righteousness that runs through the reform network. Some come off as snobs who assume any union teacher is lazy or incompetent and could be bested by young, nonunion Ivy Leaguers full of energy. And others see tying teachers' pay to their students' improvement on standardized tests as a cure-all. But most — especially those who have taught and appreciate how hard it is — understand that standardized tests are far from perfect, and that some subjects, like the arts, don't lend themselves to standardized testing. They know that most teachers want to be effective and that data-based performance assessments should be combined with classroom observation and other subjective measures not only to hold teachers accountable but also to help them improve their performance.

The second force at work is a new crop of Democratic politicians across the country— including President Obama — who seem willing to challenge the teachers' unions.

Third, there's the boost given to school reform by high-powered foundations, like the Gates Foundation, which have financed important research and pilot reform projects, and by wealthy entrepreneurs, who have poured seed money into charter schools.

And fourth, there's the charter-school movement, which has yielded an increasingly large and vocal constituency of parents whose children are among the more than 1.5 million students attending more than 5,000 charter schools.

Put those forces together with the Race, and you have education reform moving into prime time.

A nice mention of Joe Williams and DFER:

ON MARCH 4, Duncan announced that 16 applicants were finalists for the first round. And he said that they all were examples "for the country of what is possible when adults come together and do the right thing for children." One of those finalists was New York, which finished 15th but where the union's clout was such that the application failed to address the core requirements of Duncan's agenda. Joe Williams of Democrats for Education Reform sent an e-mail message to the network — addressed "Dear Education Warrior" — saying he was "baffled" by Duncan's apparent leniency in giving states like New York a pass. But by the end of the month, Duncan had redeemed himself with the reformers. He picked only two states, Delaware and Tennessee, for the first round of awards.

A great summary of NY's struggles to overcome union power and recalcitrance:

THE PERSON IN charge of preparing New York's application was John King, the senior deputy commissioner of the state Education Department. Schooled in Brooklyn (where his father was the first black principal in a Brooklyn school), King is an alumnus of Harvard and Yale Law School and was a founder of the Roxbury Preparatory Charter School in Massachusetts.

King works for David Steiner, the state education commissioner. But the Education Department is largely under the control of the Legislature, which appoints the State Board of Regents, which oversees the department. The Legislature has also passed — and could repeal — statutes that essentially guarantee lifetime teacher tenure and that mandate teacher layoffs strictly on the basis of seniority. The key leader of the Legislature is Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who, like many New York Democrats, held an election-night victory party at the U.F.T. headquarters. The U.F.T.'s Web site calls Silver "our partner" and quotes him as declaring at a union rally, "I and my colleagues in the Assembly majority will be your best friends . . . in Albany."

King says that "navigating all of the competing interests in New York is a lot different than any other job I have had." Thus, he explains, that with "all of the limits we had with the laws and collective-bargaining agreements in place and the political reality of the Legislature," preparing New York's application "was difficult and frustrating."

One frustration centered on charter schools.

A BRIALLIANT comparison of Harlem Success Academy and PS 149, which share the same building on 118^th St. in Harlem:

A building on 118th Street is one reason that the parents who are Perkins's constituents know that charters can work. On one side there's the Harlem Success Academy, a kindergarten-through-fourth-grade charter with 508 students. On the other side, there's a regular public school, P.S. 149, with 438 pre-K to 8th-grade students. They are separated only by a fire door in the middle; they share a gym and cafeteria. School reformers would argue that the difference between the two demonstrates what happens when you remove three ingredients from public education — the union, big-system bureaucracy and low expectations for disadvantaged children.

On the charter side, the children are quiet, dressed in uniforms, hard at work — and typically performing at or above grade level….

On the other side of the fire door, I encounter about a hundred children at 9:00 a.m. watching a video in an auditorium, having begun their school day at about 8:30. Others wander the halls...

But while the public side spends more, it produces less. P.S. 149 is rated by the city as doing comparatively well in terms of student achievement and has improved since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took over the city's schools in 2002 and appointed Joel Klein as chancellor. Nonetheless, its students are performing significantly behind the charter kids on the other side of the wall. To take one representative example, 51 percent of the third-grade students in the public school last year were reading at grade level, 49 percent were reading below grade level and none were reading above. In the charter, 72 percent were at grade level, 5 percent were reading below level and 23 percent were reading above level. In math, the charter third graders tied for top performing school in the state, surpassing such high-end public school districts as Scarsdale.

Same building. Same community. Sometimes even the same parents. And the classrooms have almost exactly the same number of students. In fact, the charter school averages a student or two more per class. This calculus challenges the teachers unions' and Perkins's "resources" argument — that hiring more teachers so that classrooms will be smaller makes the most difference. (That's also the bedrock of the union refrain that what's good for teachers — hiring more of them — is always what's good for the children.) Indeed, the core of the reformers' argument, and the essence of the Obama approach to the Race to the Top, is that a slew of research over the last decade has discovered that what makes the most difference is the quality of the teachers and the principals who supervise them. Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the University of Washington, reported, "The effect of increases in teacher quality swamps the impact of any other educational investment, such as reductions in class size."

This building on 118th Street could be Exhibit A for that conclusion.

"I've got one child in a charter and have had two in public schools," says Bernice Wynn, who runs an optician's shop on Lenox Avenue with her husband, and whose daughter, Tiana, is in the Harlem Success Academy. "There is no comparison. Tiana is in first grade and already reading chapter books and writing stories."

"Someone like Perkins has to know that we know that," DeJuan, her husband, adds.

A nice plug for Michelle Rhee:

"When I came here, all the adults were fine; they all had satisfactory ratings," says Washington's schools superintendent, Michelle Rhee, referring to the teachers. "But only 8 percent of eighth graders were on grade level for math. How's that for an accountable system that puts the children first?"

In 2008, Rhee — a Klein protégée, who founded the New Teacher Project after teaching in Baltimore for Teach for America — proposed huge salary increases for those teachers who would give up lifetime tenure guarantees and lockstep compensation and agree to have their performance linked to student test-score improvements. Those who didn't volunteer could keep their current pay scales and job security. For two years, the union refused to allow Rhee's offer to be put up for a vote. Rhee persisted — "I'm not big on the collaborative, warm and fuzzy approach," she says — and became a hero of the reformers.

Despite efforts by both sides to save face for the union by preserving the language of tenure, the deal that Weingarten and Rhee negotiated in April actually achieved more than Rhee sought in her original offer. The new contract unambiguously, if subtlely, strips tenure of its core job-security protections. Two clauses now make it possible for Rhee to fire any teacher with tenure, no matter which track he or she chooses (lockstep compensation or performance-based pay), if the teacher is evaluated as "ineffective" for one year or "minimally effective" for two years. The criteria used to define "ineffective" or "minimally effective" are, according to another clause, "a nonnegotiable item" determined solely by Rhee and her staff. Rhee still has catching up to do when it comes to the data systems that other Race finalists demonstrated, but this new contract — which New York's Klein calls "a home run for Michelle" — gives the District of Columbia a better shot for the second round. (Washington placed 16th in the first round.)

And for Michael Johnston in CO (with well-deserved kudos for Randi):

Certainly, the political math has changed. "My basic calculus of school reform is that I know I have every Republican vote and at least some of the Democrats," says Mike Johnston, a Colorado state senator who is a Democrat and avid reformer (and another Teach for America alumnus). As with Bredesen's Tennessee First to the Top Act, Johnston got lopsided votes for a Race-friendly bill he sponsored in February that not only ties student test scores back to teachers but also names the educational institutions that trained the teachers, so that education schools, too, would be held accountable.

But Colorado is more union-friendly than Tennessee, and Johnston's math only got him so far last winter in a state where Democrats are the majority in both houses of the Legislature. He also pushed for a bill that would make 50 percent of annual teacher evaluations depend on test scores. However, Gov. Bill Ritter, another Democrat, instead submitted an executive order setting up a council to define effectiveness and create an implementation plan that would then be presented to the Legislature. That probably explains why Colorado — whose largest school system, in Denver, already has strong teacher-accountability rules — did not win in the first round; the state was a finalist but came in 14th.

"I'm going to try to get the bill passed in May," Johnston told me in April. "Not winning the first round should help." Last week, despite a pushback from the union that included demonstrations and radio ads, his bill passed by a wide margin with votes from both parties. And in a development that would have seemed surreal six months ago, Weingarten endorsed the bill after Johnston agreed to minor amendments, including an appeal process for those tenured teachers judged ineffective. (The larger teachers' union, the National Education Association, opposed it.) Colorado now seems likely to win in Round 2 of Race to the Top.

Asked if Colorado and the District of Columbia didn't represent some pretty significant concessions, Weingarten told me, "Anyone who knows me knows that I have always favored what's good for children and fair to teachers, and that's what I stood for here."

Finally, a great conclusion:

"Every Democrat knows the president really cares about this," Schnur says. Which suggests that the Nixon-to-China dynamic that prevailed in states like Tennessee may work in Washington. Obama could most likely get some, probably many, Democratic votes, while winning support from Republicans on an issue they have championed so strongly in the past that taking a flat-out anti-Obama approach would be especially awkward.

"That President Obama did this is a total game changer," says Pastorek, the Louisiana schools superintendent, who is a Republican working for a Republican governor, Bobby Jindal. "If he really sticks to this, education will never be the same."

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