We Did It!! Chicago School Board Approves Turnarounds

"We were all scared to breathe.  We closed our eyes and held hands and then one by one they voted to approve every one of the proposed actions unanimously!  We hoped for 3 or 4 schools, but we got a shut out!" cried Last Stand for Children's Monica Caldwell

Ms. Caldwell could be forgiven her excitement as everybody at Last Stand for Children First was ecstatic over the Chicago School Board's decision to turn around every single school on the list.  Only a few hours earlier Caldwell had joined dozens of other speakers at the open meeting. Caldwell's impassioned speech urged the Board to not be dissuaded by the poor academic performance of earlier turnarounds, the overwhelming parental sentiment against the turnarounds, or the deaths of students like Derrion Albert who were victims of previous turnaround policy, but instead to "make a bold move against the status quo, by continuing the 15 year old policy of turning around schools."

"Mayor Emanuel showed real leadership," said Last Stand for Children Director Myron Miner, "It isn't easy to stand up to crying children and angry parents.  A lot of people might have felt guilty and backed down.  That's why Emanuel is such a great mayor.  He doesn't back down.   I never believed it would be possible that the Board would approve every single one of these actions, but I guess having an appointed board makes it much easier.  I think the tears of children are like anything.  After awhile, you kind of build up a resistance."

The Board has shown that facts and opposition won't stop them from doing what is best for the students of Chicago and that's something we can all celebrate.

Bidding War Begins for Chinese Educator

In Gao Bin's, previous job as assistant director at Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. (Foxconn), he oversaw a complex in  Longhua, Shenzhen, where hundreds of thousands of workers includes 15 factories,^[worker dormitories, a swimming pool, a fire brigade, its own television network (Foxconn TV),and a downtown complete with a grocery store, bank, restaurants, bookstore, and hospital.  Now, he's coming to America and everybody from Stand for Children to Students First to our own organization have been engaged in an aggressive recruiting battle.

Gao may have become more willing to move on following recent negative attention drawn to Foxconn by worker suicides protesting inhuman working conditions.  The protests have spurred Apple to investigate worker complaints as Foxxcon makes their top selling products like the IPhone and IPad.  

While, Gao has no real education experience, his ability to get workers to work 18 hour days, sometimes without pay, seems to make him a natural for managing an education reform campaign or even an American school district.

"Up until a recent rash of suicides, his record of getting his employees working hard and staying on task despite tough working conditions and long hours has been nothing short of amazing," said an excited Michelle Rhee.

Gao's move to America is reminiscent of countryman Yao Ming's move to the NBA.  Unfortunately, job protections in many fields have limited Gao's opportunities even in a sluggish economy.

"Most workers can't be bullied here, but teachers can be.  We will get at least 12 or 14 hour days out of them," said a smiling Gao through his interpreter.

Asked if the language barrier would prove a hindrance, Last Stand for Children First Chairman Myron Miner responded, "It hasn't hurt Chris Christie.   Yelling is a universal language.  Sometimes, you have to make sacrifices for children.  I don't think it's too much to ask teachers to do the same."

Celebrate School Choice Week

This week is school choice week.   This is one week we celebrate the right of charter schools to choose which students they will teach and which ones will be counseled out.   I believe preserving that right for charter schools may well be the civil rights issue of our time.

In many cities, there are tremendous private schools, but those schools are always at a disadvantage because parents are forced to pay nearly the entire cost of their child's education out of their own pocket.  What makes charter schools so great is that it's a way for parents to get that great elite feeling that only the best private schools provide, while doing so at taxpayer expense.  This is why people the Koch Brothers and their organization Americans for Prosperity love School Choice Week so much.

Whether you have a student in a charter student or maybe one that's been counseled out because they were too expensive to teach, a discipline problem,  or just got low test scores, let's all raise a glass to charter schools this school choice week.  Their right to be selective is under constant attack and it's important to use this week to remind ourselves to stay vigilant.

Last Stand for Children Launches Campaign on School Turnarounds

After working hard in the legislature last year to strip Illinois teachers of bargaining rights and OSEA protections, Last Stand for Children First is proud to announce the formation of a Chicago chapter to work on issues specific to Chicago.

This week, Last Stand's President Myron Miner announced that it is launching a television campaign to “educate Chicagoans about the value of public turnaround schools.” Group leaders also plan to host extended robocalls where CPS officials and community leaders can record talking points to play for residents of the South and West sides the “need for quality schools.”

 
The television advertising is sure to turn heads and features 3 separate commercials pushing the message that turnaround schools are just like your neighborhood schools, only better.

Executive Director Monica Caldwell says turnarounds—in which the entire staff of a school are fired and must reapply for their jobs--are a proven way to improve schools.  "When CPS took over Sherman in 2006, they lost 20% of their student population and their low income percentage dropped 10%.  Think what we could do if we could get the more difficult students to transfer from every Chicago Public School?"

Caldwell emphasizes that Last Stand for Children First supports firing all the adults in a building to turn around it's test scores. 

"Sure, the lunch ladies, security guards, and janitors don't do test preparation, but maybe now that they see what can happen, they'll start.   Our students need quality schools and that means giving them 4 choices constantly throughout the day and asking them to make the best one possible, just like on a Scantron sheet."

In addition to holding their own events, Caldwell says that Last Stand for Children will get the parents they work with out to the community and public hearings on the school actions.  "There are a lot of people who are willing to carry a sign for $25 and a bus ride.  We will go out into the communities and find them."

The new movement by Last Stand to get involved in grassroots organizing is a big jump from their work so far in mobilizing the city's business elite.   Caldwell says they've always been more comfortable with the city's wealthy and besides, "some of these neighborhoods are kind of gross and the people are scary."

Last Stand for Children First plans to become much more active in Chicago issues.  Myron Miner stated, "there's definitely a Chicago website coming and you can be sure we're all over the Longest Day plan Chicago is rolling out next year."

Rethinking College Readiness

 The Winklevoss twins' Harvard education prepared

them for their future after college.

Many of us have believed for a long time that the role of a good education is to get a student ready for college so that he can get a degree that will enable him to not only improve his station in life, but also the situation for the student's family and neighborhood.   President Obama has made college readiness a cornerstone of his education and economic policies.  As a country we've tried to address appallingly low college readiness by adopting the common core curriculum.  Now it turns out we may have been all turned around on things.

A paper by Lauren Rivera from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University revealed that the top professional services firms recruit pretty much exclusively from 4 elite universities -- Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford.  These firms in the fields of law, investment banking, and consulting really are among the few employers that could provide the sort of transformational wealth that people like Michelle Rhee have called on schools to provide for our students.  To quote Rivera:

"Evaluators relied so intensely on the criteria of 'school' as a criterion of evaluation not because they believed that the content of the elite curricula better prepared students for life in their firms -- in fact, evaluators tended to believe that elite and, in particular, super-elite instruction was 'too abstract,' 'overly theoretical,' or even, 'useless' compared to the more 'practical' and 'relevant' training offered at 'lesser' institutions -- but rather due to the strong cultural meanings and character judgments evaluators attributed to admission and enrollment at an elite school."

I know some of you have had just about enough of my Vassar bashing, but we must ask ourselves if getting a student into a school like Vasser is really doing her any favors?  If a student becomes a teacher for instance, what good is a $40,000 salary if they achieve that salary with $150,000 in student loan debt.   We must not reward our public schools for turning out Dartmouth educated social workers, Vasser educated teachers, and New York University educated television repairmen.

College readiness is a meaningless tradition that simply serves to prop up the Browns and University of Chicagos in our country.  Our goal must be to send students to elite universities where they can truly have the future we want for them.  Currently, we estimate that between 25% and 40% of high school graduates are college ready, but if we look at the 4 elite schools, the number is much lower.   The 4 elite schools accept between 6% and 8% of applicants and that doesn't mean that all of those students are ready for the education they provide.

Until we have all students in America, applying and getting accepted at our country's elite schools, we will never achieve our greatness as a nation and we will continue to shortchange our schools.  There must be a way we can increase the rigor of our schools so that every student knows he has a Yale or Princeton education waiting for him after high school.

Elevating the Teaching Profession with STRIPES

One of the biggest problems that we face in education today is the seemingly endless quest to elevate the teaching profession.  Back in 1989, Wendy Kopp had a vision of taking gifted college students who weren't education majors, but wanted to teach and sending them out to learn how to teach on our country's neediest children.  The result has been Teach for America and one need only watch a talk show or listen to musicians like Common and John Legend to know what a success it has become.

Unfortunately, 23 years later, Teach for America feels like a relic of an earlier time.  Things like smart phones, the internet, and HDTV didn't exist in 1989.  In today's cyber age, gifted young people don't want to wait through a laborious five week training period and then commit to a two year teaching period.   You only have to wait 48 hours to get a gun, why should you have to wait five weeks to be a teacher.   If I am a brilliant young college student with so much to offer students, I want to do it now.  In five weeks I may well be onto something else.  For that matter, the two year commitment seems extremely archaic.  When you think about it, two years is the length of time Russell Brand was married to Katy Perry plus the length of time Kim Khardashian was married to Kris Humphries plus the length of time it would take to stream the new Bear in Heaven album in its super slowed down speed at http://bearinheaven.com.  In other words, 2 years is forever.

If we are serious about really elevating the profession by taking it out of the hands of professional educators, we need a new teach for America.  We need a program where if you decide you have a calling to teach on Friday, we can give you an intense training session over the weekend and have you in front of students on Monday.  Rather than a 2 year commitment, we would only ask that you teach for one semester.  Think about it, in less than six months, a gifted student could become a teacher, impact children's lives, and move onto being a professional education reformer.  Last Stand for Children First believes it is time for this new breed of teacher to elevate the classroom.

We are calling our program Strategic Teacher Recruitment In Poverty Endangered Schools or STRIPES.  It is our goal to have the first 50 STRIPES in classrooms in time for the second semester of this school year.  Teaching sounds like a lot to learn in one weekend, but if anybody can do it, I believe the proud members of STRIPES will be able to because we will recruit them from only the most elite students at only the most elite schools.  If anybody can reach students living in poverty, it will be them.

As We Approach 2012 - Scrappy Reformers are Turning the Tide

In the battle between the Goliaths of the status quo and the scrappy Davids of education reform, the tide may be slowly turning.  It was Arthur Reynolds Award winner Anthony Russo, whose This Week in Education article brought new attention to the battle for the hearts and minds of the American public, but the battle lines could not be more sharply drawn.

On the one hand, you have the Evil Empire.  If there is a person in public life who more closely resembles Darth Vader than Diane Ravitch I don't know who it is.  She was once a promising educational expert in her own right with the Bush administration before she was drawn to the dark side of critical thinking and educating the whole child instead of regimented standards based testing and preparation. 

Of course Darth Vader didn't like doing his own dirty work.  That's where the army of public school teachers come in.   Through their unions they fight the very changes that will save education.  In fact, they've been fighting these changes so hard for so long, they've made it very hard to find any evidence that the best reforms like charter schools, merit pay, and ending last in first out benefit students. 

This of course brings us to the force.  With evidence mounting that the very reforms we have staked our reputations or our careers on do not work, we're left to take it on faith.  Why is it that they don't work?  I believe it's teacher sabotage, but it may be some other equally plausible reason.  However, what we have is faith.  In Star Wars, they refer to that faith as The Force.  I believe that the force of education reform is equally power.

On the opposite side, are a ragtag collections of rebels.  In the picture above I used Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee, and Eli Broad as Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and Hans Solo, but there are a whole lot of these underdog heroes like Rahm Emanuel as C3PO, Mike Bloomberg as Obi Wan Kenobi, and Chris Christie as Chewbacca.   Despite overwhelming odds, they've fought a tough campaign against the establishment from their cobbled together resources.

Now, I said the tide was swinging towards the rebels and it is.  In Star Wars, the empire was everywhere, but there would always be a number of backwater planets inhabited by scoundrels and cut throats, where rebels who sometimes had shady pasts like Han Solo could plot the rebellion.  In this world, that place is Detroit.  In Detroit politicians with imagination have given Emergency Manager the freedom to take on teachers and collective bargaining.  The money he has saved from over inflated teacher contracts has enabled him to bring in Dr. Maria Goodloe-Johnson from Seattle and John Covington from Kansas City.  They both have very shady pasts and they may just be the kind of rogues we need to finally take down The Empire.