California schools superintendent. The stakes couldn’t be higher

The single most important ed reform race in the country right now is the battle for California schools superintendent. The stakes couldn't be higher: it's the largest state, with the most charter schools and students, and the Vergara ruling is on appeal.

 

The contrast between the two candidates (both Democrats) couldn't be more stark: Marshall Tuck, a Harvard MBA, is the former President of charter school operator Green Dot Public Schools and CEO of the Partnership for Los Angeles School (which led the turnaround of 17 failing public schools in some of the LA's toughest neighborhoods). He is challenging incumbent Tom Torlakson, a 30+ year politician who "panders to the politically powerful California Teachers Association by defending the status quo." He has, for example, done his union masters' bidding and appealed Vergara.

 

Marshall has received the endorsement of every single major newspaper in California, both liberal and conservative. The San Jose Mercury News wrote, "He would be a game changer for education in California," (full editorial below) and the LA Times calls him "an overdue force for change," with "the energy and vision to turn California's schools around."

 

This victory would be a game changer for kids in California and a bellwether for what we can do in other states.

 

Polls show the race is a toss-up.

 

The CTA is pouring millions into supporting Torlakson (knowing that his election will result in exponentially more dollars flowing back to them), so to win Marshall needs our help. 

 

Please join me in supporting Marshall Tuck. I just donated another $1,000 to him at: https://dferlist.org/page/candidates (on this page, you can also support five other wonderful reform-oriented Democrats in key races around the country; I also just donated $3,500 to them).

 

Together we can start making a difference in kids' lives. Marshall is the right candidate: he understands the policies, has the experience bringing real change to failing schools, and will be an independent voice for parents and kids in California – and on the national stage. 

 

Thank you!


http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_26253067/mercury-news-editorial-tuck-california-schools-superintendent

Race fore California Schools Superintendent

The single most important ed reform race in the country right now is the battle for California schools superintendent. The stakes couldn’t be higher: it’s the largest state, with the most charter schools and students, and the Vergara ruling is on appeal.

 

The contrast between the two candidates (both Democrats) couldn’t be more stark: Marshall Tuck, a Harvard MBA, is the former President of charter school operator Green Dot Public Schools and CEO of the Partnership for Los Angeles School (which led the turnaround of 17 failing public schools in some of the LA's toughest neighborhoods). He is challenging incumbent Tom Torlakson, a 30+ year politician who “panders to the politically powerful California Teachers Association by defending the status quo.” He has, for example, done his union masters’ bidding and appealed Vergara.

 

Marshall has received the endorsement of every single major newspaper in California, both liberal and conservative. The San Jose Mercury News wrote, “He would be a game changer for education in California,” (full editorial below) and the LA Times calls him “an overdue force for change,” with “the energy and vision to turn California’s schools around.”

 

This victory would be a game changer for kids in California and a bellwether for what we can do in other states.

 

Polls show the race is a toss-up.

 

The CTA is pouring millions into supporting Torlakson (knowing that his election will result in exponentially more dollars flowing back to them), so to win Marshall needs our help. 

 

Please join me in supporting Marshall Tuck. I just donated another $1,000 to him at: https://dferlist.org/page/candidates (on this page, you can also support five other wonderful reform-oriented Democrats in key races around the country; I also just donated $3,500 to them).

 

Together we can start making a difference in kids’ lives. Marshall is the right candidate: he understands the policies, has the experience bringing real change to failing schools, and will be an independent voice for parents and kids in California – and on the national stage. 

 

Thank you!

http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_26253067/mercury-news-editorial-tuck-california-schools-superintendent

The Battle for New York Schools: Eva Moskowitz vs. Mayor Bill de Blasio

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/magazine/the-battle-for-new-york-schools-eva-moskowitz-vs-mayor-bill-de-blasio.html
Run, don’t walk, to read this NYT Magazine article on “The Battle for New York Schools: Eva Moskowitz vs. Mayor Bill de Blasio.” Eva takes no prisoners and pulls no punches in her crusade (and I use that word knowingly) on behalf of children who are being screwed by the system.

By 1997 she was teaching at Prep for Prep, a program in New York City for gifted minority students. She assigned her 11th graders to document the disparities between the city’s cleaning of parks on the wealthy Upper East Side and its non-upkeep of a park in the Harlem neighborhood where some of them lived. She told the students to take photos and complain to the sanitation and parks departments. “We created a little bit of a ruckus,” she said. “I think Prep for Prep was nervous about it. I was asked why I couldn’t just do simulations.” The park, she continued, got a cleaning.

During that period, Moskowitz grew consumed with the dismal performance of the city’s vast Department of Education, which is responsible for schooling 1.1 million children — and with the union-guarded contracts that continue to make it nearly impossible to fire teachers for incompetence or give raises for merit. “I remember reading,” she told me, turning to the protections for administrators, “that a principal had to demonstrate ‘persistent educational failure’ to be in jeopardy of losing his job. I remember thinking, that’s crazy! Persistent. Like a driver would have to persistently kill people before being taken off the road!”

Moskowitz’s zeal persists to this day. My first exposure to her was at an informational gathering two years ago; my girlfriend was about to enroll her daughter in a first-grade class at a Success Academy school. I caught a glimpse of an educator who can be dismissive of anyone whose opinions differ from her own, and over the past four months, as I met with Moskowitz or watched her at work, that impatience with dissent emerged as one part of a furious and almost crazed passion. She has devoted herself to training a legion of young teachers and principals in how to conjure “world-class schools” or even, as she puts it, “educational nirvana.” Two of her own three kids attend her schools. She claims that her academies can stand up to any private school — she calls much of the teaching there “lazy.”

Her students have been performing phenomenally. In 2013, on the state exams that gauge proficiency in math and English, Success Academy schools far outscored not only the city’s regular public schools but also its most highly regarded charters, networks like Achievement First, KIPP (the Knowledge Is Power Program) and Uncommon Schools. At one of Moskowitz’s Harlem academies, the fifth graders surpassed all other public schools in the state in math, even their counterparts in the whitest and richest suburbs, Scarsdale and Briarcliff Manor. That year was no fluke. The 2014 results, released last month, put the network in the top 1 percent of all the state’s public schools in math and in the top 3 percent in English. At one Bedford-Stuyvesant academy, where 95 percent of students are black or Latino, 98 percent scored at or above grade level in math, with 80 percent receiving the highest of four ratings.

It might seem as if any New York mayor would be thrilled to have thousands of the city’s most underprivileged children educated so well. But during Bill de Blasio’s campaign last year and then as he claimed City Hall, he and Moskowitz took each other on in a ferocious political battle. They are two liberal crusaders with profoundly divergent ideas about how the mission of aiding the disempowered should be carried out. De Blasio is essentially a populist; Moskowitz, whose network’s board is filled with Wall Street one-percenters, is hardly a woman of the people. The political differences have stoked personal enmity, with de Blasio moving to block the expansion of Moskowitz’s network and Moskowitz mustering her own political resources to move him out of her way. The ultimate outcome of their clash may determine the city’s educational future.

(I want to give credit where it’s due however: perhaps de Blasio is coming around, as just this week granted space to four charter schools, including two of Eva’s, so kudos to him for that! http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/11/nyregion/mayor-agrees-to-accommodate-4-larger-or-new-charter-schools.html)

Colleges enrolling poor students

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/09/upshot/top-colleges-that-enroll-rich-middle-class-and-poor.html
Another “run-don’t-walk” article in the NY Times, which published a College Access Index, showing which colleges are doing a good job of enrolling a reasonable proportion of poor students – and which aren’t (adjustment for size of endowment per student). This type of public acclaim (and shaming) is REALLY powerful. You better believe the folks at Wash U and Kenyon are going to do their darndest to get off the left side of the chart below:

Vassar has taken steps to hold down spending on faculty and staff. Amherst and the University of Florida have raised new money specifically to spend on financial aid for low-income students. American University reallocated scholarships from well-off students to needy ones. Grinnell set a floor on the share of every freshman class – 15 percent – whose parents didn’t go to college.

Over the last decade, dozens of colleges have proclaimed that recruiting a more economically diverse student body was a top priority. Many of those colleges have not matched their words with actions. But some have.

These colleges have changed policies and made compromises elsewhere to recruit the kind of talented poor students who have traditionally excelled in high school but not gone to top colleges. A surprising number of such students never graduate from any college.

To see which selective colleges are doing the most, and the least, to change the situation, The Upshot has analyzed data for every college with a four-year graduation rate of at least 75 percent. We combined data on enrollment and tuition costs to measure how hard each college is trying to attract and graduate poor and middle-class students. The result is our College Access Index.

Student survey to evaluate teachers

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/04/technology/students-grade-teachers-and-a-start-up-harnesses-the-data.html
A third REALLY important article – this one about how a company is developing sophisticated surveys of students to evaluate their teachers. Not surprisingly, they know exactly who the good and bad teachers are – and can give teachers valuable feedback to improve.

Panorama is trying to assess how well teachers are doing by conducting scientifically valid student questionnaires that collect data about a variety of factors that might affect a teacher’s performance, from how well she conveys the material and whether she encourages interest in a subject to whether a school fosters a sense of belonging for students.

The company, which is run by two 23-year-old Yale grads with a penchant for computers and data crunching, has run surveys in more than 5,000 schools, and it has been adopted by some of the largest school systems in the nation, including the Los Angeles Unified School District and schools in Connecticut.

Panorama has followed the model of Uber and Airbnb in using the unconventional methods of tech start-ups to reinvent industries that have long been seen as tech backwaters. And its increasing popularity suggests that techniques pioneered by the tech industry — including the collection and analysis of large troves of data — may help address problems in American education.

The firm’s techniques have been widely praised by education experts, and it has won prominent supporters in the tech industry. Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder of Facebook, and Google Ventures, the search company’s investment arm, are among its largest backers.

Some of its innovations sound small, but they have been instrumental in making its surveys more widely accessible than older educational survey methods. For instance, to reduce the costs of its surveys, Panorama created its own scanning system, which allows it to print and collect students’ answers on regular paper, rather than the expensive bubble-scan sheets more commonly used for collecting responses. The firm says its surveys and analytics services are about half the price of older survey methods.

Panorama also hired a team of software engineers and statistics experts to create a kind of analytics “dashboard” for schools — an interactive panel of graphs and charts that presents practical information teachers need in a comprehensible, rather than overwhelming, user interface.

Teachers can dig into how they performed on a question-by-question basis, and they can monitor their performance by subgroup. The survey reports allow teachers to see if they’re connecting better with boys than with girls, or if students who have trouble with English are having more difficulty in a classroom than those who are native English speakers.

Panorama has also invested heavily in improving survey science. It has sponsored research into the best way to ask questions of students to get the most accurate assessment of what’s going on in the classroom, including one recent study by Hunter Gehlbach, a professor of education at Harvard. Last week, again borrowing from the tech industry, the company announced that it would make the survey open-source, meaning schools can use and amend it free.

Seeing how students think about teachers, and how that perception is affecting what they learn, is an unusual development in public education. Today, schools assess the effectiveness of teachers primarily through standardized test scores and observations by administrators, but both measures have been criticized as too narrow, unable to shed light on the complex interplay between teachers and students on a day-to-day basis.

“Education is just starting to figure out what measurement actually means,” said Aaron Feuer, Panorama’s co-founder and chief executive. “Five years ago we thought test scores were the answer to everything. We’re offering a way to focus on the right metrics.”

But in some ways, what the company is doing isn’t new. Student surveys have long been seen as a potential third metric for education. In 2012, the Measures of Effective Teaching Project, a three-year study sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, found that when combined with test scores and observations, student surveys made for a more reliable and consistent way to measure how teachers were performing.

“A lot of people are unhappy with an overreliance on test scores, but I don’t think it’s an option to drop test scores and go to nothing,” said Thomas J. Kane, a professor of education at Harvard who directed that study. “Student surveys are the most obvious place to add some other measures that aren’t based solely on test scores.”

Gina Raimondo

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/matt-miller-gina-raimondos-win-in-ri-could-transform-debate-on-progressivism/2014/09/11/b5a324d0-39ab-11e4-9c9f-ebb47272e40e_story.html
This was great to see (DFER has long supported Gina, as she’s equally bold in challenging traditional Democratic entrenched interests re. school reform):

It seems preposterous to argue that an obscure primary in a state with a million people could alter the debate inside the Democratic Party — much less to claim that the race could transform the broader national conversation about how to achieve progressive goals in an aging America. But that’s exactly what’s in store after Tuesday’s election in Rhode Island, when state treasurer Gina Raimondo won the Democratic gubernatorial nomination over her union-backed foes.

Raimondo made her name in 2011 when, after taking office, she decided not to punt on the unfunded public pension woes that afflict virtually every state as well as the federal government. Instead, alarmed by the long-term projections, she barnstormed the state with graphs and charts to make a progressive case for reform.

Usually those out to trim future pension costs are cast as evil conservatives bent on decimating a dignified retirement (and sometimes they are). Raimondo reframed the debate from the left. She told Rhode Islanders that if they didn’t come together to tackle these unfunded promises, not only would public employees counting on secure pensions be left high and dry, but before long there also would be no public money available for schools, transportation, job training and other critical investments on which future prosperity depends.

How Arne Duncan Exposed the NEA.

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2014/09/asd.html

Speaking of Duncan, here’s EIA’s Mike Antonucci on how he (and Obama and everyone else) is totally ignoring the NEA’s call this summer for his resignation:

How Arne Duncan Exposed the NEA. The big story that came out of July’s National Education Association Representative Assembly was the union adopting a measure that called for the resignation of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. You don’t have to take my word for it. The Associated Press ran it on The Big Story page.

There never was a realistic chance that Duncan would resign, but we were assured that it was necessary to send a message that it was intolerable that Duncan would “promote policies and decisions that undermine public schools and colleges, the teaching education professionals, and education unions.”

But during the summer that new business item seems to have lost any teeth it had.

…NEA and Duncan do have a lot in common, and it’s only practical to continue to deal with the fact that he isn’t going away. But the union’s disillusionment with Duncan goes far beyond standardized testing, and it wasn’t even the trigger for the vote on the resignation NBI – his positive reaction to the Vergara ruling was.

I’m reminded of the laundry list of complaints about Duncan the union passed in 2011 – I described it then as “two counts of heavy focusing, four counts of failure to recognize, one count of felony myth-perpetuating, and a misdemeanor count of weighing in.”

Duncan has been U.S. Secretary of Education for five years, and there is every indication he will remain in that office for the rest of the President’s term. More than that, for all his perceived missteps and blunders, he hasn’t suffered a single tangible consequence. Indeed, the allowance from the NEA president that he’s “a very nice man” is probably the only compliment a union officer at any level will give him. Nevertheless, he is Education Secretary despite the union’s explicit and direct call for his ouster, and the education policies of the Obama administration move forward much as they have since 2009.

So the question arises: If President Obama and Secretary Duncan can safely ignore NEA’s demands, why can’t we all?

Charlie Christ sell out

www.miamiherald.com/2014/09/10/4340927/charlie-crist-sides-with-teachers.html

Sad (but not surprising) to see Crist sell out FL kids, just as Jerry Brown is doing in CA (this is why we need more Dem governors like Andrew Cuomo, Dan Malloy and (soon) Gina Raimondo!):

Charlie Crist has made education policy a centerpiece of his campaign, but it’s also a wedge issue dividing two Democratic constituencies: teacher unions and black ministers who support school vouchers.

Crist made his choice clear Wednesday when he refused to heed the request of a major Panhandle civil-rights leader, the Rev. H.K. Matthews, who asked the Democrat to “publicly denounce” a new teacher union-led lawsuit that seeks to dismantle the major school-choice program.

“You cannot stay silent on this lawsuit,” Matthews wrote. “These families deserve to know if you support or oppose the lawsuit to evict 70,000 poor — and mostly minority — children from their schools.”

Asked about Matthews’ request to call on the unions to drop the suit, Crist said “I’m not going to do that. They have the right to sue for that if they want to.”

Matthews said Crist’s response left him “disappointed” because he recalled standing with Crist at the state Capitol in 2010 when the then-Republican governor expanded and pledged to support the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program, which gives corporations dollar-for-dollar tax credits to underwrite private education.

Now Crist is standing by a lawsuit that could undo that very program, which this year uses about $358 million this year — a figure that will grow to $447 million next year.

From the Panhandle to South Florida to Tampa Bay and Jacksonville, influential African-American ministers help run or are affiliated with private schools that accept students who receive the vouchers targeted by the lawsuit, led by the Florida Education Association.

Here’s another article about this lawsuit:

Nation’s largest private school choice program now under legal attack

By Travis Pillow on August 28, 2014

www.redefinedonline.org/2014/08/lawsuit-filed-challenging-florida-tax-credit-scholarships/#sthash.xmmcywMY.dpuf

Rise Academy

From a friend at the wonderful RISE Academy in Newark (a KIPP school):

 

Although the education reform movement, and charter schools in particular, are often criticized for being too test-prep focused, failing to educate the "whole child", and ignoring things like sports and the arts, Rise Academy, a KIPP middle school in Newark, NJ enrolls more than 65% of their students in a diverse range of more than 25 extracurricular activities, from golf to ballet, that keep them safe, healthy, and engaged in continuous learning.  Rise Academy not only provides these exceptional extracurricular programs to their students, but is also one of the top-performing middle schools academically in the KIPP network year after year.  For more information about the extended learning programs at Rise Academy, or to get involved, follow this link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_PUOfKO9rcccUZmN1RLWFZUdkk/edit?usp=sharing.