As 2011 draws to a close, this blog’s 7th(!) year, thank you for reading, taking time to comment on posts, using social media to share them, and all best wishes for 2012 – and perhaps a year that is slightly more productive for our national conversation about education.

The Times reports that New York education officials are dropping more than one ball on New Year’s eve this year. The state* wants school districts to get serious about honoring their commitments under Race to the Top or forfeit some funds.

What’s most surprising about the back and forth in New York over the evaluation question is that because of the structure of Race to the Top there is a clear record of key stakeholders agreeing to do this, it’s not just the application and proposals -  we can go to the videotape! I’m surprised the NY media hasn’t been on this more because asking for changes to make the evaluation better is one thing but this is plainly just an effort to backslide on commitments made during the competition.

Update: No deal.  Here’s a statement from the commissioner.

*BW has done work for NY but not on this evaluation issue.

The new evaluation of Boston Teacher Residency* ($) is worth checking out, Sawchuk has a solid write-up here. The Boston Teacher Residency, a flagship teacher preparation program, is a residency-based teacher preparation program where teachers learn in a job-embedded setting. Punchline on the results: The program’s candidates struggle the first couple of years and then start to outpace other teachers, on average.  It’s pretty small n stuff but nonetheless interesting.  The study raises a host of questions and issues, here are a few.

First, and I’m reading between the lines just a bit here because I’ve seen more data on this,  it seems like diversity is a sleeper issue here.  BTR seeks to improve diversity in the teaching force – a worthy goal to be sure – yet the performance-trends indicate that efforts to do so must be coupled with intensive support.  Looking holistically at teacher preparation it may well be that selectivity and intensity of training can be inversely related, at least to a point, across various programs.  That idea would obviously be at odds with the common notion that we need task forces, commissions, etc…to divine the one best way or system for training teachers.

Second, on the performance issue, the Ed Week headline is interesting, “Teacher Residents Seen Outpacing Peers in Later Years.”  That’s quite right but it’s not how Teach For America research – which clearly shows that TFA teachers outpace in the early years – is generally presented. Perhaps editors just don’t dig into the data but I actually think it’s something else.  And I don’t mean to pit the two programs against one another but I think this illustrates a prevalent bias in our field – rooting against the upstarts.  There is a deeply seeded desire to believe that things from within the system can work – and sometimes they do, of course, and sometimes ideas from outside the system don’t. But this sentiment and concern about the more disruptive things going on can cloud how we look at various pieces of information in a pretty basic glass half-full/glass half-empty sort of way.  Put more plainly, if this study was about Teach For America teachers I suspect the headline in many papers would have been – “Teach For America teachers struggle in their first two years.”

There is also a more substantive issue here. I think Teach For America works because – despite all the crazy rhetoric about the program – the evidence (to be clear by which I mean actual studies with actual quantitative research methods) makes it pretty plain that on average TFA teachers do no harm in the classroom and are a good choice relative to other options. I think the secondary impacts of TFA are tremendous but classroom impact has to be paramount.  The other day in a meeting someone noted that Wendy Kopp was sitting atop the most powerful human capital pipeline of the last quarter-century.  It’s not an overstatement, it’s 20K alums are all over the place and in cities around the country you see them playing instrumental roles in all sorts of high-velocity education projects (Bellwether is crawling with them). Complaints that TFA devalues the teaching profession, could be made better with various changes, and other long term impact questions etc…are all legitimate points to argue, even if you don’t agree – I don’t, but TFA is not harming students.  In this case BTR, however, raises the exact same question.  In the first two years its teachers struggle relative to other teachers.  To its credit BTR is seeking to address this but while I may have missed it I didn’t see a lot of concern about this issue in the wake of the evaluation.  Double standard?  Sure.  But that’s the easy part.  The harder issue is the question of just how much adverse impact are we willing to tolerate in the service of other goals? Right now the answer is situational although ironically TFA doesn’t put that on the table, BTR does, at least based on the data available now. No one is picking it up though.  At least thus far.

Finally, enormous cost-benefit questions embedded in all this.  The preparation/training conversation can’t happen in a fiscal vacuum.  I favor a variety of routes into the field with common high bars, and am comfortable with investing more to achieve other goals, for instance diversity, because education is not a purely utilitarian or economic undertaking.  But that doesn’t mean cost-benefit considerations should not enter into the public policy conversation – and today they generally don’t when it comes to teacher preparation.  Hard to look around and conclude that’s not going to have to change.

*Disc - BW worked with BTR earlier this year.

Solid overview of what’s happening in California around the state charter school association’s call to shutter some low-performing charter schools there. Big takeaways: (1) In education quality is still in the eye of the beholder. (2) When is the last time you saw a traditional education association forthrightly call for this kind of consequential accountability? (3) Despite that, it’s still hard as hell to do.

Background from California Charter Schools Association here.

Here’s an Eduwonk flashback.  Last year’s holiday-themed School of Thought column:

It’s a holiday ritual as predictable as Santa showing up at your local mall: overheated rhetoric about the “War on Christmas.” A lowlight this year was a feature on The O’Reilly Factor about a letter from the Tennessee chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union urging school districts to make holiday celebrations inclusive. Through O’Reilly’s prism, the letter — quoted selectively — was an attempt to squelch Christmas. In reality, the letter just asked school districts to avoid celebrations focusing exclusively on a single religion. It was more common sense than state-coerced atheism.

Unfortunately, once you cut through the blather on cable news, there is a real, if much less discussed, problem in that public schools are skittish about teaching much about religion. Although there is little hard data, the consensus among those who study the issue is that to the extent world religions are taught, they are treated superficially, usually with the help of just a few textbook pages that have been heavily sanitized to avoid even the hint of controversy. And that’s not good news if you believe a working knowledge of the world’s religions and their history is an important aspect of a well-rounded education…

Devout?  Agnostic?  Atheist? No matter, you can read the entire column by clicking here.

Arne Duncan has put Hawaii on double secret probation over concerns about state’s Race to the Top antics and lack of progress.

This week’s TIME School of Thought column checks in with the iconic SAT test. The SAT is loathed but useful and it soldiers on despite that as well as the cheating scandals and efforts to marginalize it.

There is little love for the SAT. How little, you ask? When a massive cheating scandal erupted this fall, fewer people rushed to defend the test than rose to defend Penn State officials for allegedly covering up the sexual abuse of children. But as unpopular as the iconic SAT may be – among students and many educational activists alike – it’s actually pretty good at what it’s designed to do, which is to serve as a common measure across the hodgepodge of academic standards, grading systems and norms being used by America’s sprawling 25,000 high schools.

You don’t have to get the right answer, a 2400, or even fill in a bubble to read the entire column.  Just click here.

Alyson Klein tells you what the budget deal means for education. And CER takes a look at charter school closures. Remember though, when an authorizer says they closed a school for financial reasons, it’s often the Al Capone approach – get ‘em on their taxes.  Those schools are often low-performing, too, but the fiscal case is the easiest one for authorizers to make because in this field you can argue about performance all day.

Politico Influence highlights one item from the most recent “Education Insider.” We asked respondents an open-ended question about who they saw as the most effective education lobbyists lobbying federal policy right now. Not surprisingly the NEA captured the top spot. They were followed by The Education Trust and the Council of Great City Schools.  Penn Hill came in fourth. Couple of interesting takeaways from this ranking.  First, it’s organizations not hired guns who are still seen to have the most influence.  Second, while the Council of Great City Schools hitting the board might surprise people who don’t follow D.C. closely it’s actually a reflection of all the wheeling and dealing they’ve done and not so surprising.  Finally, if you’re wondering why not much gets done on education besides spending bills consider the divergence in the agendas of those three groups.

Be sure to take a look at Peter Meyer’s Ed Next blog about the recent NYT op-ed on poverty and education. I had much the same reaction, people keep saying and writing that other people want to ignore poverty but who are these people?  There is a pretty obvious distinction between saying schools can do better, or saying demographics need not be destiny, and saying that poverty doesn’t matter.  It’s also instructive to flip the question – and in this case the title of the op-ed – around.  “Class Matters. Why Won’t We Admit It?” OK, why won’t we admit it and do what? If the answer is double-down on improving schools as well as addressing various community issues then I don’t know anyone in the centrist education reform world who objects (many of whom don’t have quite as dark a historical view of anti-poverty efforts as Meyer does).  And as I’ve noted before such a strategy would create a formidable political coalition. But if the answer is codify lower expectations either tacitly – through weak accountability systems – or explicitly – through accountability rules with different expectations for different student groups then you lose a lot of those who would otherwise be allies.

Speaking of school improvement efforts, Connecticut’s governor is calling for boldness there in a letter released yesterday (pdf).

CAP takes a look at state applications for ESEA waivers.

Update: It’s on! New Jersey objects! Chris Cerf, the acting Commissioner there, sends the following note:

The CAP report you circulated last night has egregious misrepresentations of NJ’s ESEA waiver application – and by that measure alone appears to be irresponsibly inaccurate work. I have not looked at other states’ applications relative to the CAP report but suspect you may want to do so before any further circulation or commentary.

For example:

“NJ is one of six states that does not have a teacher id”… This is flatly UNTRUE – appears to be based on a year-old DQC document.

“How NJ is going to reduce regulatory red tape etc.. is unclear” … Also completely UNTRUE – we have had a year long regulatory red tape reduction task force that has produced a mountain of action and recommendations including a complete revamp and eventual elimination of the state’s own parallel accountability system..(all of which is described in the application).. in fact some people have commented that this is the strongest part of the NJ application. Over 300 regulatory changes are in process, incidentally. We had 15 lawyers and experts review 3000 pages of regulations and statutes. The yield from that process is nothing short of unprecedented in the history of either state or federal education bureaucracies.

“Sample performance reports do not include sub group performance data”… UNTRUE (couldn’t be further from true..) They simply didn’t read our submission. In fact, we took enormous care, as EdWeek and others have reported to continue USDOE’s historic commitment to subgroup performance reporting.

More later.

The janitor mess continues: Newt Gingrich is still mangling the specifics about how schools operate.  At Factcheck.org New York City schools spokesperson extraordinaire Barbara Morgan sets him straight on what janitors actually earn and earn relative to teachers.

Important report out today from The Mind Trust* about school governance and organization in Indianapolis.  Indy Star with some ins and outs here and a thoughtful take by Matthew Tully here. Significant for a few reasons.  Indy is a large city, overall the 12th largest in the country, the report raises issues that other cities are thinking about, and it shows how various third-party non-profits are impacting the state and local education conversation in some powerful ways.  Check it out yourself at the link above.  *I was a founding board member at the Indy-based Mind Trust and am still on the board.

At last, here’s a thoughtful critique of teacher evaluation in Tennessee.

Per today’s latest Hess – Petrilli broadside against achievement gap efforts, three quick points.  First, it’s as though these guys have never heard of enrichment programs, early childhood education, etc…They write that expecting more diverse participation in gifted programs, “…ignores the unseemly reality that advantaged children are statistically more likely to be ready to succeed in tough classes than are low-income children raised in households with fewer books and more television.” Sure, but it’s not immutable and there are things policymakers can do to ameliorate it.  The same issue applies to their assertion that improving diversity in advanced classes axiomatically means diluting excellence.  Want an example of an institution that has figured this out pretty well?  The officer corps of the United States military.

Second, this part is just slippery.  They write that, “The Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Northwest Evaluation Association released a study in September that tracked more than 100,000 high-achieving pupils over time and found that more than one-third lost steam as they progressed through school.”  How much did they fall?  And how do we know that’s not just the way the data are going to look?  Hint: The answers are – not all that much and we don’t.  I happen to think there are trade-offs in all this but the case is largely circumstantial or based on possible counterfactuals that it’s hard to examine with today’s data.

Third, this whole debate unfolds with scant attention to what happens to gifted kids who are poor and minority. Here’s a smart paper from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation about that issue (pdf). Petrilli and Hess clearly think that our future rest on gifted children.  But what if a lot of gifted kids are now lost among all the students trapped in persistently lousy schools or overlooked and undereducated in better schools?  In other words, there is a compelling case that many of our potential future leaders are among those falling through the cracks.

Finally, I honestly don’t get this emerging hobby horse among the conservative think tank set.  How anyone can look around this country – even look around Washington in case you don’t get out much – and conclude our problem is that we’re spending too much attention and/or resources on poor people or minorities escapes me.  Longer look at this manufactured crisis from  TIME via this link.

Rocketship Education* taking off in California: Approval for 20 new schools in and around San Jose. It’s an interesting venture so keep an eye on how they manage all the usual challenges of growth but also what this does to the politics of education in the area.

In Louisiana Stand For Children* is launching a new chapter – and heavy-hitter Rayne Martin is leaving the LDOE to run it.

Public Impact just released an overview of ideas about different school models* – part of this whole project on expanding the reach of great teachers.  Good food for thought.

And speaking of rockets, this initiative in McDowell County is terrific if it comes to fruition – The link? Homer Hickman, think “October Sky,” is from Coalwood in McDowell County.  Places like McDowell are too often overlooked in the conversations about key educational issues, in particular human capital and ed tech.  The framing in this morning’s Washington Post story is unfortunate, however.  Apparently looking for friction or finding friction offered to them they pitch this as some sort of referendum or proof point on the what schools can do versus how much poverty matters debate. For starters the people in McDowell deserve better than to be used in that way.  But substantively the initiative isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be, framed that way to begin with.  Based on what’s known, now, the initiative is clearly going to address the sorry state of the schools there as well as the various community challenges in McDowell.  And that’s great.  Why? Because both are sorely needed and because the data are already pretty clear about this strategy – for all the breathless talk about the Harlem Children’s Zone the evidence from Harlem indicates that good schools, even more than the services, are the linchpin to improving student outcomes there. You see that in the data on the zone and on other schools operating in Harlem.  Admittedly it’s a crazy idea that good teaching is what matters most to good teaching, but it’s true! The services matter in a variety of ways but if you want great educational outcomes you need great educational institutions, too.  Anyway, everyone should be pulling for McDowell (and other similar too often ignored places throughout Appalachia), and for the American Federation of Teachers to pull this off.

*Couple of discs on this morning’s items. My BW colleague Kim Smith is on the Rocketship Board, BW works with Stand and has a hand in this Public Impact project.  And despite their best efforts to ruin it by blasting the tops of the mountains I still adore West Virginia and love spending time there, so partisan in that way.

Now that the infamous “fail wail” is back in the news via today’s Times story pointing out that the administration’s estimate of the number of schools that wouldn’t make “adequate yearly progress” was wildly off it’s worth remembering two pieces of context that this TIME column from this spring tried to address. First, while the number wasn’t valid the underlying goal was: Prod action on No Child Left Behind reauthorization at a time that probably was the point of no return in terms of getting it done before 2013.  Second, when you look at the data is 48 percent of schools missing targets really all that surprising?  Plenty of good schools, of course, but let’s see, six in ten minority students not finishing high school, 8 percent of low-income students getting a B.A. by age 24, four grade-level gaps in achievement on the NAEP by high school, poor outcomes for kids in special education programs and students whose first language is not English…And all those students are not concentrated into just a few schools, these issues affect all communities.  So is anyone seriously surprised that a lot of schools need to do better?  The No Child law’s accountability system needs to be modified, of course, – it’s almost a decade old – but don’t shoot the messenger too much and don’t let the problems with the law obscure the underlying context about what’s happening in our schools to too many kids.

The former President of the United States may joke about being retired but he’s still keeping busy.  One thing he’s up to is working on education and he’s quietly attracting a lot of people to his efforts.  This week’s TIME School of Thought checks in on one aspect of his Bush Institute’s work, school principals.

George W. Bush is writing a sequel to his big education act. The No Child Left Behind law was signed almost a decade ago, with overwhelming approval from Congress (384 to 45 in the House and 91 to 8 in the Senate). Now, amid a bipartisan effort to gut its accountability measures, the former President is quietly pushing new education-reform initiatives aimed at improving and empowering school principals, who too often lack the training or authority to effectively run their schools. And once again, he’s approaching this massive education problem by blurring political lines.

I was invited in my role as TIME’s education columnist to sit in on a small meeting this week that Bush organized in New York City, and I was struck by the roster of advisers he had assembled to guide the George W. Bush Institute’s education work. The group included some big names in the education non-profit world as well as leaders of traditional public schools and charter schools. But by my informal count, most of the 10 people around the table were Democrats, including Clinton and Obama administration alums…

If you want to see the former President the Secret Service has to let you, but no one can stop you from reading the entire column by just clicking on this link.

I’m not a stock analyst and I don’t invest in education stocks because of other work I do, but K12 Inc.’s stock dropping 23 percent yesterday on that NYT story seems like an overreaction.  Sure there is an enthusiasm bubble around ed tech and online right now but K12 is established and has a diverse revenue stream and operations (think language programs with Middlebury, AP tools, etc…) and online learning is here to stay in some form.  More likely the stock drop is either more fundamentally a reaction to speculation like this, concerns about pricing pressure that will emerge on K12 over time in the states as policies change, or it’s an overreaction to a news story that offered little new information for insiders who follow the issue.  K12 (ticker LRN) is down again today and shortsellers seem to be having a field day.  We saw this movie before on for-profit colleges and those stocks basically recovered as a class (to be clear – in terms of perception and seem to move more based on underlying valuation of individual companies today).

This NYT story on Medicaid and state budgets could be the most important piece of education content you’ll read today…

Interesting article about pensions in Virginia…what accounting standards to use?  It’s not a minor technical point.

TNTP is rolling out a new $25K prize for public school teachers today.

Reading Sol Stern’s new City Journal article about whether public schools are shortchanging the “best” students (my view on that whole debate via TIME here) this line caught my eye:

…the percentage of black students passing the admissions test for top-ranked [New York City's] Stuyvesant High School has dropped steadily over the past decade. Last year, it fell below 1 percent.

I asked a few people including a colleague who is an expert on the city’s high schools about what is going on.  Turns out white students are falling in representation at Stuyvesant, too.  And the high school expert noted that successful enrichment programs to help minority students prepare to do well on the test and at competitive admissions public schools were a casualty of decentralization efforts in New York City.  In other words, perhaps that sad statistic is an argument for exactly the kind of program that some of those now counseling us to focus on high-achievers see as a misplaced emphasis or less than optimal use of resources.

The long-awaited NYT story on online learning is here at last. Focuses a lot on K12 Inc.* There will be plenty of back and forth but a couple of quick reactions.  First, while this story takes  a pretty strong point of view (too strong in places in my view) that shouldn’t obscure that quality in the online space is quite mixed and there is something of a bubble around virtual and ed tech more generally.  But – context alert! – quality is very mixed in all sectors of public education.

It’s pretty clear that this is as much a public policy story as a financial one. Regulations have not yet caught up with technology in terms of online ed so public policies around finance, attendance (eg the recent dust-up in CO), etc…are increasingly out-of-step with what new providers are doing. Exploiting inefficiencies in public policy is nothing new for vendors, in education and more generally. And that’s not a reason not to have online programs.  But, it does mean state policymakers need to start thinking a lot more about core issues such as resource allocation and accountability with an eye toward a much more diverse system of providers.  Many of today’s policies simply don’t work in this environment. If providers fight efforts to fix these issues hold them accountable for that, but don’t hold them accountable for the existence of policies they didn’t create.

For its part K12 – and all online providers – should be conducting rigorous and independent evaluations that take into account the context in which they operate and show impact on students. If they continue to rely on AYP and other measures they’ll always find themselves on the defensive.  There isn’t an excuse for low-performing schools but context does matter in thinking about non-traditional schools. Finally, more generally, K12’s US operations showcase the promise and the challenges here.  Their curriculum is very strong – not surprisingly – because of the considerable investment they made in it and continue to make. But school delivery remains a challenge. Like many other education ventures and initiatives there is a lot of learning bound up in there but it’s unlikely to be surfaced in today’s polarized debate.

*Disc – Bellwether has worked with K12 in the past but is not now.  No one at BW has any financial position in the company.

I saw an interesting presentation by Lake Research the other day about where the public is on education.  The slide to the right (which you can download full size by clicking this link (pdf)) jumped out for a few reasons, but especially the rural data.  It’s ironic that the region most likely to appreciate the importance of school improvement is the one most overlooked in the current reform conversation.

Still going…The Times takes a long look at the big fight over rules to better regulate for-profit colleges earlier this year. Well worth reading.  In addition to the obvious, a couple of things jump out:

First, this is one of those situations where multiple things can be true at the same time.  For instance, Department of Education spokesperson Justin Hamilton is right when he says that the initial regulatory proposal, “would have unnecessarily eliminated many, many good schools along with the bad.”  This was a complicated issue and not an easy one to craft tough but fair regulations. But, at the same time, the main thrust of the article is also correct: The final rule was significantly weakened even beyond those concerns.  And this is an industry in need of some regulating – at least where public money is concerned.

Second, this is significant – an eyewitness account!:

But Robert Shireman, a former Education Department official who helped shape that original plan, said the intense politics surrounding the issue played a part in “watering down” the final result.

“From early on, the industry was going to friends inside and out of the administration and saying, ‘They’re out to get us,’ and creating the impression that these regulations were unfair or irrational,” said Mr. Shireman, who left the department before the plan was finished.

“They decided to raise holy hell,” he said in an interview.

Third, despite all that, the outcome seemed pretty clear even from early on.  In the Whiteboard “insiders” survey we asked tracking questions about the regulations for more than a year and insiders pretty accurately predicted how it would all play out in terms of the final regulations.

Finally, this is a long game and the current regulations are now a foothold.  In other words, this will flare up again.

Former CRS analyst Wayne Riddle takes a look at Title I formulas in The Title I Monitor (pdf). The same issue also takes a look at an ongoing formula fight.  Great preview of the subsurface issues that will emerge whenever an ESEA renewal bill really gets moving.

The NEA has a new report out (pdf) and it’s a lot more interesting than the press statements about it. This task force did seek out input and ideas from independent voices and wasn’t a whitewash.  It’s easy to point to past – and similar efforts – and predict little change. And there is a Charlie Brown/Lucy quality to all this to be sure.  Still, big institutions change slowly and there is some important signaling in this even if you don’t agree with all the details. A decade ago differential pay was a non-starter, this report calls for it.  Don’t write it off too fast.

Testing…testing…Achieve has an opening for a program assistant to work with the PARCC consortia. Garden State: New Jersey needs a director for its charter school office (pdf). And you can get your civics on working with Democracy Prep and the Civic Education Initiative. Here’s a WSJ clip from today’s paper about that.

I think Newt Gingrich once again pointed out the kernel of an important trend while bungling the specifics – that’s today’s TIME School of Thought column.  At CNN Ruben Navarrette hearts him up and down on the same issue and praises him for saying kids are lazy. I see a big difference between habits of work and laziness.  Spend some time with kids including those considered at -risk or involved with juvenile justice and it’s clear laziness is not the issue.  Developing good habits of work and success is a distinct (and important) issue.

Elsewhere, important report from Fordham on charter incubators. It’s a good idea that is better in version 2.0. Might be choice on steroids in St. Louis? And Edmondo announces a big funding round with Greylock Partners and Benchmark Capital.

Rick Hess thinks that I was unfair to his Times op-ed with LDH the other day.  On the use of consultants and Race to the Top point, which Rick revisits and clarifies, most state departments of education don’t have the strategy capacity to undertake that work on their own, it was a good use of consultants (and Bellwether helped several states, full disclosure).  The problem is that if you held the competition again next year you’d still have to use consultants in very much the same way in many of the same places. In other words, what has RTT done/will do to build the kind of capacity that state department’s need to more effectively function?  That’s a big issue, in my view, going forward.

Give Newt Gingrich this – he can spot trends in education with the best of them.  That’s the topic of my TIME column this week.

Newt Gingrich has a penchant for saying provocative and often downright crazy things. When the former House Speaker gave a lecture at Harvard last month, calling child labor laws “truly stupid” and suggesting that low-income kids should be required to do some manual labor in their schools, it was a classic Gingrich proposal: over-the-top, totally tone-deaf, and way too broad in scope. But it also was not entirely wrong. Although his specifics are often bewildering, it’s hard to deny that Gingrich has a knack for spotting trends in education…

…Still, in the education reform community, Gingrich’s latest salvo was greeted with a shrug. Sure, his blanket indictment of the work habits of poor kids was obnoxiously broad, but the idea that schools should systematically teach life skills is considered a no-brainer. Many schools already do a little of this through service projects and activities. On-site gardens are also becoming an increasingly popular strategy to teach students good dietary habits as well as values like responsibility and caring. Other schools give students work experiences during the summer, and some assign tasks to students such as giving tours to prospective parents or — nod to Newt — cleaning up a little.

To read the entire column you need no habits other than the ability to click on this link.

Yesterday I mentioned this cool initiative in Minnesota to allow a teachers union to authorize charter schools. Late yesterday afternoon the president of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers sent the following letter to teachers in Minneapolis.  Read it yourself because it’s interesting in a few places (especially the line about schools inside or outside of school districts) and illustrates the various audiences union leaders must balance. But, a few contextual things are worth noting.

First, “CMOs” (Update - to be clear – as distinct from for-profit EMO’s, which comprise about 13 percent of charters nationally but are mostly found in a handful of states) are only “private” in the sense that they’re not run by traditional school districts.  About 16 percent of charters nationwide are part of a CMO.  They’re non-profits (so to be clear since there is obviously some confusion: They don’t make a profit and that’s not a goal) and public bodies have to give them approval to open schools – they’re highly integrated with the public system.  And their growth if fueled by, you know, parents choosing these schools.  Second, although the ‘charters were Shanker’s idea and then there was a fall that we must struggle to overcome’ rhetoric is a catchy narrative it’s not quite right.  The history and various streams of thought in the charter world are more complicated – and full of tension.  Third, despite the ‘to the barricades at last!’ rhetoric, in practice this could reasonably be considered the third teachers union foray into charter schooling.  To recap, the National Education Association launched a big initiative that subsequently fizzled.  The UFT in New York City opened some schools and they’re facing some challenges. Bottom line: Opening and running really good schools is hard work.  You’d think that would create more curiosity about how exactly the networks that have managed to do it at some scale do it.

From: all-teachers-bounces@list.mpls.k12.mn.us on behalf of Lynn Nordgren
Sent: Tuesday, December 06, 2011 4:11 PM
To: All-Teachers@list.mpls.k12.mn.us
Subject: Breaking the mold…

This is a long email but is important information for you to know…thanks for taking the time to read it.

MFT has been working to become an authorizer of public school charters over the past 18 months – which we were just approved to be by the Minnesota Department of Education with the support of the American Federation of Teachers. The information below tells you why we are pursuing this since it may cause some of you to question it – especially in light of the history of charters. I have sent out some preliminary information to you about this work over the past year and have also shared it with stewards at several meetings. This is a progress report.

Everything the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers does these days, in one way or another, is designed to support educators so they can have a voice in improving education overall and increasing student achievement, specifically. As educators, we all have a fundamental belief in each student and truly want them to be successful in school and in life. Some of the ways the MFT approaches these efforts is to find and implement ideas that will help us continuously improve our profession and strengthen our union work as advocates for students. It is critical work given the attacks on teachers, public education and unions. We cannot step back and merely protest these attacks (that come in many forms) – we must move forward and lead.

An idea I had two years ago was to move forward and lead the way to take on the charter school movement. I realize for many of us, charter schools are associated with bad things. The idea of charter schools was born from AFT President Albert Shanker’s thinking some 30 years ago. He thought charters could become lab schools that inform the larger school system. Unfortunately, his idea was abducted by others and shape-shifted into something else very different from Shanker’s original idea. Too often, charters haven’t respected teachers, their unions, or delivered on the promise of student achievement.

But, it is also true that charter schools are not going away despite 20 years of protesting. Because of this, it is time to figure out how to bring our kidnapped idea back home so we can also stop the de-professionalization of teaching, the bleeding out of our unions and the miseducation of too many students. While new state laws are tightening up the approval process for charters and for authorizers, as well as the oversight of them both, charters continue to grow. It is time to “get in the game” and make it ours.

While the mom and pop charters are not at issue, the larger corporate, privately run Charter Management Organizations (CMOs) schools are. CMO schools are spreading across the country and taking over major, urban school districts leaving professional teachers and their unions out in the cold. These corporate run CMOs have several goals in mind: take over public education, take down the unions, drown out our professional voice by having complete control over teachers, and, make a profit. We can look to New Orleans as an example of a complete take over by a CMO. There are at least 8 other urban districts in America who have between 40-60% of CMO schools in existence. Minneapolis has its first CMO school – opened this past fall. To open the CMO school, one of our existing schools (Cityview) was closed to make room for it. We protested loudly all of this happening along with families and students – to no avail. Only one MPS teacher now works in the CMO school – the rest of the MPS teachers were pushed out along with the union. As you might guess, the salaries are much lower for those in the CMO school but the work hours and duties are the same. For this reason, we must strategize how to stop the proliferation of CMOs and ensure the health and welfare of public education. Becoming an authorizer is just one strategy – we are working to find others as well.

I want to seize the opportunity for our union to help shape the future of our profession and of education – whether it is inside or outside of a school district – charter or traditional. So, about 18 months ago, with the approval of the MFT Executive Board, I went ahead and applied for an American Federation of Teachers (AFT) innovation grant. We were approved. The innovative idea the AFT approved was centered on unions taking back the charter school movement by becoming authorizers (approvers) of charter schools. This would ensure charters authorized by unions will: be high quality schools, monitored for progress, keep our union responsibilities and rights as an option, and make sure teachers are respected and have a voice in the the schools in which they work. As an authorizer, we will put students and educators front and center so their ideas are valued and used. The AFT has been very supportive of this effort – so much so that they continued funding for a second year. The majority of the AFT funds go to pay for a director, who is a former MPS teacher.

If every union local in the U.S. had the capacity to authorize charter schools, we just might be able to compete with the CMOs. Imagine a movement of our own. I cannot think of a better and more important time for us to make it happen.

Thank you for your time and attention. I am open to and appreciate all comments and ideas as we move forward.

Onward!

Lynn Nordgren MFT President, Local 59

Interesting new HUD partnership with GreatSchools. Content warning: Strong language “voucher.”   Dreambox just raised $11 million. It’s a good tool, engaging for kids but actual content, too. I’ve been demo’ing it with the Eduspawn and it’s for real.  Plus some edudrama in Gotham!

At TIME, Kyla Webley writes up this year’s New America rankings of academics and college football. Jon Schnur asks if we can teach citizenship and gives a shoutout to David Feith’s new book.