The battle for the soul of the Democratic Party, at least in the area of public education policy, was on full display yesterday at two panel discussions organized by Democrats for Education Reform. (Full disclosure: I am DFER’s Florida coordinator.)
The first panel consisted of Democratic state legislators from Colorado, Indiana, New Jersey, North Carolina and Ohio discussing their legislative efforts to improve public education by changing teacher evaluation, tenure and compensation systems. These initiatives, generally opposed by teachers unions, are designed to make the current factory model of public education more effective and efficient by giving management more control over personnel decisions.
The second panel included the presidents of the two national teachers unions (Dennis Van Roekel of the National Education Association and Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers), two educational entrepreneurs with strong technology backgrounds (John Katzman from 2tor and Noodle.org, and Joel Rose from New Classrooms Innovation Partners), and Joe Reardon, the mayor of Kansas City, Kansas. They discussed what a post-factory model of public education might look like. There was broad agreement among these diverse panelists that customized learning is the future of public education. They all emphasized the importance of innovation and entrepreneurship, and the economic and moral imperative of more effectively overcoming the achievement gap related to family income.
The fault lines within this second panel, and in the Democratic Party as a whole, appeared when the moderator, Jonathan Schorr from the NewSchools Venture Fund, asked about the role private providers should play in public education. After acknowledging that private, for-profit companies provide buildings, desks, buses, textbooks, computers, pencils and electricity for district schools, both Weingarten and Van Roekel opposed allowing nongovernment employees to teach in public education, arguing that the essence of public education would be undermined if nongovernment personnel received public funds to teach children.
Katzman and Rose, the entrepreneurs/innovators on the panel, seemed agnostic about who employs teachers. They cared about the freedom to innovative and customize. Katzman in particular stressed that learning providers needed to be agile. Weingartner responded that teachers unions could provide this agility through collective bargaining contracts if only management would agree. She asserted that school districts were the impediment to flexibility and innovation, not teachers unions.
The teachers unions’ current business model is tied to teachers being public employees, so I understand why that’s a must-have for them. No business voluntarily gives up market share, but asserting that only public employees can further the mission of public education defies logic and common sense. (more…)
After going 56 years without attending a national political convention, I’m headed to Charlotte for my second convention in a week. For school choice advocates, the Democratic National Convention will be a somewhat hostile environment, unlike last week’s Republican National Convention in Tampa, where all forms of school choice were enthusiastically embraced.
As we’ve discussed previously on redefinED, the political left, including wide swaths of the Democratic Party, was supportive of giving parents - especially low-income and minority parents - access to more diverse schooling options in the 1960s and throughout most of the 1970s. That support began eroding when the National Education Association gave Jimmy Carter its first-ever presidential endorsement in 1976, and was mostly gone by 1980.
President Clinton’s support of charter schools marked the beginning of a renewed interest in school choice within the party, and pro- and anti-school choice forces have been battling ever since. After two decades of struggle, the momentum today is clearly on the side of the pro school choice Democrats, which has caused anti-choice Dems to become more desperate and strident. American Federation of Teachers’ President Randi Weingarten’s recent attack on the new teacher/parent empowerment movie, Won’t Back Down, was so disingenuous and hyperbolic I was embarrassed for her.
Both Weingarten and NEA President Dennis Van Roekel will be participating in a town hall meeting tomorrow sponsored by Democrats for Education Reform. Four years ago, at the Democratic convention in Denver, DFER burst on the scene at a similar event, and, with close ties to the Obama Administration, immediately became a majority power center within the party. I’m anxious to see what issues predominate tomorrow, and how Weingarten and Van Roekel position themselves.
Won’t Back Down is a quintessential Hollywood drama in which a teacher and parent unite to fight against the odds and restore hope to their dysfunctional elementary school, and it comes complete with a tear-evoking final scene in which a young girl conquers a stressful passage of reading. Only in the real world of education, though, would a feel-good movie provoke a national teacher union president to release a 2,000-word critique branding it as “divisive” and claiming it “demoralizes millions of great teachers.”
Let’s just say this is American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten playing to type.
The film is fictional and, interestingly enough, presents characters that in many ways have more dimension than those in the educational documentary, Waiting for Superman, that featured Weingarten herself. The director, Daniel Barnz, comes from a family of teachers and told a screening audience this week at the Republican National Convention that: “We wanted to create a film that suggests that people can come together.”
Though the movie is being billed as a dramatic reenactment of parent trigger laws, Barnz himself calls attention to a significant difference. In his fictional account, the “fail-safe” law does not allow charter conversion and only allows for a leadership change at a school with the support of both the parents and the teachers – and then the school board.
Yes, the school principal, school administration and the local teacher union are cast as villains. But the teachers are most certainly not. (more…)
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie won applause at the RNC with his zinger, “They believe in teacher’s unions. We believe in teachers.” Ditto for former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum when he said President Obama’s solution to a failing education system “has been to deny parents choice, attack private schools and nationalize curriculum.”
But with the convention winding to a close tonight, it’s interesting how much the suggestion of stark divisions between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney on K-12 education has not been the norm – at least away from the main stage. Jeb Bush, who speaks tonight, said as much in his appearance with Michelle Rhee. And this is what son George P. Bush said yesterday when asked what’s the most important thing the federal government can do to improve education: No matter who’s elected president, he said, “Keep Arne Duncan … he’s been a fantastic education secretary.”
As we wrote yesterday, George P. Bush and Josh Romney, Mitt Romney’s middle son, also made interesting comments about teacher pay. And Josh Romney seemed to suggest large classes might be an issue when he said, “We sometimes have teachers that aren’t able to cope with the size of their classrooms.” (On a related note about crosscurrents, there’s a post on today’s Politics K-12 blog about the dwindling band of Republican U.S. reps who are backed by teachers unions.)
The political blurring will continue next week at the Democratic National Convention - at least at a town hall meeting organized by Democrats for Education Reform. AFT President Randi Weingarten and NEA President Dennis Van Roekel will be among the panelists, but so will Colorado state Sen. Mike Johnston, a Democrat who sponsored a bill reforming teacher tenure and evaluations, and North Carolina state Rep. Marcus Brandon, a Democrat who co-sponsored legislation this year (which did not succeed) to start a statewide program for tax credit scholarships. Closing remarks will be made by Newark Mayor Cory Booker, a rising star in the Democratic Party who wholeheartedly supports private school vouchers.
Randi Weingarten must be watching the RNC goings-on pretty closely too. Minutes ago, the president of the American Federation of Teachers sent out a lengthy press release criticizing "Won't Back Down," the new movie about a mother and a teacher who use a parent trigger type law to turn around a struggling, inner-city school.
I mention the timing because StudentsFirst is sponsoring a special screening of the movie at the RNC this afternoon, followed by a panel discussion with Jeb Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Michelle Rhee and the movie's director, Daniel Barnz.
In her statement, Weingarten specifically mentions the parent trigger debate in Florida earlier this year. Here's an excerpt:
This movie could have been a great opportunity to bring parents and teachers together to launch a national movement focused on real teacher and parent collaboration to help all children. Instead, this fictional portrayal, which makes the unions the culprit for all of the problems facing our schools, is divisive and demoralizes millions of great teachers. America’s teachers are already being asked to do more with less—budgets have been slashed, 300,000 teachers have been laid off since the start of the recession, class sizes have spiked, and more and more children are falling into poverty. And teachers are being demonized, marginalized and shamed by politicians and elites who want to undermine and dismiss their reform efforts.
Parent engagement is essential to ensuring children thrive in the classroom. The power of partnerships between parents, teachers and the community is at the heart of school change.
But instead of focusing on real parent empowerment and how communities can come together to help all children succeed, “Won’t Back Down” offers parents a false choice—you’re either for students or for teachers, you can either live with a low-performing school or take dramatic, disruptive action to shut a school down.
At the RNC in Tampa this week, a small but bright constellation is scheduled to line up on education reform. Democrat Michelle Rhee, who famously tangled with teachers unions as schools chief in Washington D.C., will share a spotlight with Jeb Bush, who has praised President Obama’s ed initiatives, and Condoleezza Rice, who co-authored a Council on Foreign Relations ed report with Democrat Joel Klein. The panel will be moderated by Campbell Brown, the former CNN anchor who just got into a Twitter spat with Randi Weingarten. All will come together after a private screening of “Won’t Back Down,” a new movie that shows even Hollywood has embraced parental empowerment in education.
This will be a remarkable little event – a hopeful symbol of a centrist political coalition, in the midst of a red partisan sea, that is poised to take advantage of historic opportunities to re-shape the nation’s schools.
Poised, that is, unless it get chewed up by the fringes.
The Republican Party may be tilting even more right, but on education the centrists still hold sway. Jeb Bush, who supports a federal role for education, and backs national academic standards, remains one of the party’s leading lights on ed reform. His prime-time speech will likely generate more ink about education than anything else that happens at the RNC.
But obviously, there is tension. Rising Tea Party currents want to erode recent federal activism in ed reform – a position that so ironically leaves them pitching tents next to teachers unions. Their passion is well-meaning; their arguments worth considering. But their timing is especially bad: Reform-minded Republicans and Democrats are getting close when it comes to a common vision for public education – a vision that includes a healthy dose of school choice and bottom-up transformation. This rare alignment is mostly intact because the GOP led on education, and enough Democrats bucked their own fringes to shift the GOP’s way.
In a recent op-ed for redefinED, Margaret Spellings, the secretary of education under George W. Bush, didn’t call out Tea Party groups by name, but she didn’t mince words when it comes to the potential consequences of their aims: “This ‘unholy alliance’ between the unions and those who want no role for the federal government in education is propping up the status quo on the backs of our most vulnerable children,” she wrote. “It’s shameful beyond words.”
Mitt Romney and the ed centrists won a quiet victory in Tampa last week. They beat back attempts to restore an old plank in the GOP platform – eliminating the U.S. Department of Education. Tea Party linked groups got almost everything else they wanted. But according to Politico, instead of using the word “eliminate” in the draft language regarding the U.S. DOE, a subcommittee voted to replace it with a call to “support the examination and functions of.”
That’s a breather, but a temporary one. It should give added urgency to those in both parties who want to see constructive change and know more will get done, quicker, if centrists work together and find ways to grow their ranks. It’s important to remember that today, at the start of the storm-delayed RNC, before the spin makes every crack between Romney and Obama on education look like a canyon.
Editor's note: Due to technical difficulties with the blog, many redefinED readers were unable to read this post when it was originally published Friday. Thanks to those of you who notified us. Thanks to all for your patience.
It’s old news that many religious schools teach creationism and intelligent design – and that some of those schools accept students with vouchers and tax credit scholarships. But the recent New York Times piece on tax credit scholarships gave school choice critics fresh excuse to pick up and hurl. Teachers union president Randi Weingarten immediately tweeted, “Public money being funneled to creationist, anti-science religious schools.” A few days later, a left-of-center think tank in North Carolina, out to stop a legislative proposal for tax credit scholarships in that state, described the Times story as concluding that “redirected public money” is being used to “spread fundamentalist religious theology like creationism.”
I’m in the science tribe. The evolution-is-fact tribe. But I don’t share their outrage. During my own evolution on school choice, I’ve had to grapple with the fact that many private schools are at odds with what the vast majority of scientists consider good science.
I’ve come to this conclusion: Even if we disagree about creationism, we shouldn’t be so blinded that we forget all the other lessons these children receive in all the other classes they take, in all the years they attend school. We should not overlook whether these children are learning to read and write and succeed in life. I'm hoping that people who do value scientific literacy would be more likely to look at the issue with a sober analytical eye. I’m hoping they might even be willing to place scientific learning in a broader societal context, where many public school students are suffering in part because they lack the foundational learning skills that also handicap them in the arena of science.
The fact is, not many traditional public school students are doing well right now in science. It pains me to say this, because I had amazing biology, chemistry and physics teachers in my public high school. What I learned from them has benefited me personally and professionally. But the facts are informative. In 2009, 21 percent of high school seniors scored at proficient or above on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in science. Break those numbers down into subgroups, and depressing morphs into apocalyptic. Only 8 percent of low-income and Hispanic students reached that bar. Only 4 percent of black students did.
In Florida, the state I know best, only 27 percent of low-income students scored at grade level or above on the state’s high school science test in 2011. To be fair, that’s up from 19 percent in 2006 – and many talented people worked hard to move the needle even that much. But it’s nowhere near high enough or fast enough. (more…)
Nobody invoked Ronald Reagan this week and demanded that somebody (Randi Weingarten? President Obama? The local school board?) “tear down this wall,” but two school choice champions got close. Step Up for Students President Doug Tuthill used the Berlin Wall analogy yesterday in a redefinED post about the big-picture trends in ed reform. And in a beautiful coincidence, Robert Enlow, president and CEO of the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, did so today in an op-ed for CNN.
Wrote Enlow: “Just like the millions of East Germans who demanded freedom, we know that there are millions of parents that want to be removed from a system that uses a zip code to determine where their children must attend school.” He concluded, “Vouchers should be made available to children no matter if they are poor, disabled, from the middle class or from a family of 10, or from a rural, suburban or urban area. There should be no restrictions on who gets to choose, just like there were no restrictions on who could escape tyranny once the Berlin Wall fell.”
Also by coincidence, one of the nation’s biggest pollinators for school choice, Jeb Bush, delivered an ed reform speech in Colorado this week. He didn’t explicitly urge anyone to tear down any walls, either, but according to Education News Colorado he did implore the audience of 1,700 to “join reformers to make school choice both public and private the norm in our country."
Hmmm. Anyone else see speech potential here? Tampa. August. Fired-up delegates shouting "Tear down this wall!" as millions watch ...
As a former U.S. Commerce Department Foreign Service officer, as well as someone who worked extensively in international trade and economic policy earlier in my career, I was especially interested to read the Council on Foreign Relations new report, "U.S. Education Reform and National Security." The council’s task force was chaired by former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and former New York City schools chief Joel Klein. For anyone who spends time thinking about international competitiveness and security issues, the important link to a successful education system is readily apparent. But for many, education remains a domestic issue separate from foreign activities.
For us education policy wonks, most of the data is not new or surprising. An exception for me: the fact that now 75 percent of U. S. citizens between 17-24 are not qualified for military service because they are physically unfit, have criminal records or have inadequate levels of education. Among recent high school graduates who are eligible to apply, 30 percent score too low on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery to be recruited. The achievement gap is alive and well in the military also: African American applicants are twice as likely to test ineligible as white applicants.
The report quotes from a U.S. military report that found in a staff of 250 at an intelligence headquarters in Iraq, “only 4-5 personnel were capable analysts with an aptitude to put pieces together to form a conclusion.” This included both officers and enlisted personnel. Suddenly, it becomes more plausible to understand how a military unit in Afghanistan thought burning Korans would be a good way to dispose of them! Unfortunately, data raising questions about the critical thinking and educational background of some in the officer corps correlates with the huge numbers of seemingly strong high school graduates that require remediation in college.
Rather than a long litany of recommendations, the report makes only three. And one of them is to restructure education to provide students with good choices. The task force wants parents to have a wider range of options and wants to see a system that encourages and supports innovation. (more…)
Parent trigger advocates are applying more presure on AFT president Randi Weingarten to pay more penance after an AFT document surfaced in Connecticut that detailed a textbook plan on killing "trigger" legislation. Notably, prominent California Democrats and parent-trigger backers Gloria Romero and Ben Austin have written Weingarten suggesting that simply distancing herself from the Connecticut document is insufficient.
As Romero, a sponsor of California's trigger law, writes in her letter to the union chief:
I am requesting that you make public all other Power Points that were developed to train AFT members on how to disable and kill parent empowerment legislation that were used in subsequent states where Parent Trigger legislation was introduced. To my count, there have been at least thirteen other states ...
... This type of “lesson plan” and strategies are offensive and dismissive to the very individuals who should be fully respected for their goals to further the educational opportunities of their very own children: the parents. I believe you need to go one step further and offer an immediate apology and a commitment to never let something like this happen again.
The Connecticut strategy, emblazoned with AFT's logo and titled, "How Connecticut Diffused The Parent Trigger," outlined how AFT leaders in that state worked to "kill the bill" that would have established a parent trigger similar to California's (The document was originally on AFT's Web site but has since been removed; Dropout Nation editor RiShawn Biddle copied the presentation and made it available to his readers). Romero also says she was singled out in that strategy and wants that "lesson plan" public as well.
Austin, the executive director of California's Parent Revolution, wrote to Weingarten saying that:
Over the last year, we have requested on multiple occasions to meet with you and discuss our common agenda. Each time, you have refused to meet. Now, after reading your memo, it has become clear why. You seem to view parent empowerment as a zero-sum game: if parents win, teachers must lose ...
... the substance of your plan includes ensuring that parents are “not at the table” when real decisions are made, and creating fake "governance" committees that trick parents into thinking they have power when they actually do not. The fact that this memo has surfaced in the wake of the president of your California affiliate calling the Parent Trigger a “lynch mob” law – and then also refusing to apologize even after civil rights groups demanded it – makes your reaction to this incident all the more troubling.
As much as we have in the past viewed you as a progressive leader and potential partner in kids-first transformation, we cannot have a respectful dialogue with someone who cannot disavow those positions and tactics. If you view parental power as a threat to be "killed," then we unfortunately don't have much to talk about.
