Press
February 3, 2012
Carrots, Sticks, & the Bully Pulpit
By Rick Hess
(From Education Week, February 3rd, 2012)
Interesting day at AEI on Wednesday. Hosted a lively discussion on "Education 2012: What the Election Year Will Mean for Education Policy," looking at what the year ahead holds for education in Washington and nationally. I was joined by a wickedly smart crew that featured Democrats for Ed Reform chief Joe Williams; ED's Peter Cunningham; Katherine Haley, key aide to House Speaker John Boehner; influential GOP pollster and policy advisor David Winston; and Ed Week's crack political reporter Alyson Klein. The occasion for the event was the official launch of my new book (edited with my colleague Andrew Kelly), Carrots, Sticks, and the Bully Pulpit: Lessons from a Half-Century of Federal Efforts to Improve America's Schools.
Read the full post here.
February 2, 2012
Q & A: Gloria Romero, Author Of California's 'Parent Trigger' Law
By John O'Connor
(From NPR StateImpact, February 2nd 2012)
California was the first state to adopt a 'parent trigger,' which allows a majority of parents in a failing school to vote on a method to restructure the school.
The bill is expected to be among the most contentious education issues of the 2012 legislative session. Activists have lined up against the bill, arguing it is not being done in their name. Others argue the bill is bad policy.
For more explanation on how Florida's proposed law works, click here.
StateImpact Florida spoke with Gloria Romero, a former California state senator who authored the original parent trigger bill. Romero is now state director for the California chapter of Democrats for Education Reform.
Q: Tell me what your role was with the California parent trigger bill?
A: I am the author of the original parent trigger law in the nation, which today has seen it go across the nation to some 20 states having this concept introduced into potential law.
Q: When you guys introduced this bill in California, what was the situation you were looking at and how was this bill designed to solve it?
A: It's really interesting, because to me the imagination of the parent trigger law is really to understand that it is parents who are the architects of their childrens' future. And for year after year, decade after decade quite frankly, parents felt frustrated, because the administrators -- those who run our schools -- quite simply did not sense the need of urgency to turn around especially chronically under-performing schools. Failing schools, quite frankly.
So I finally wrote this bill, turned into law, which said quite frankly, if you aren't going to do it -- meaning the school administrators and the school bureaucrats in charge of the education system -- then basically move out of the way and we the people, we the parents will. It basically asserts rights, it gives real rights to match the responsibility that parents have and feel towards trying to fight for the best education options for their children.
Q: The first time this law was attempted to be used at the Compton elementary school it turned into a bitter political fight. Is that accurate?
A: It is accurate, however, I think...there's the law and then there's the efforts to implement and use a law. I strongly support the Compton parents, what was done. But it was the first time in the nation and quite frankly the organizers did make mistakes. Now some of them were just quite trivial mistakes, for example they forgot to put a staple on a couple of papers. Or they forgot to put a date on the pages of the petition. There were some issues that were quite frankly that trivial. And yet they were dismissed in a court of law because not having a date on the petition with hundreds of signatures of parents was ruled invalid...
Having said that, the law is powerful. It is imaginative. I mean think about it: What law giving parents real rights that you can think of in recent years has sort of spawned the drive of parents and legislators across the country to try to move it into every state in the nation and that's what I think is so exciting. The funny thing is is that when I was writing this law and fighting for it in the California legislature, I had no idea people across the nation would start looking at that and say 'Yeah, I want that too because my own school district, my own elected officials, my own government is refusing to do what they're supposed to do under federal and state laws. So if they're not going to do it, give it to me and I will have the courage to do it.'
Q: This law has been invoked again since that first example. What have you guys learned since the law was first passed?
Continue reading "Q & A: Gloria Romero, Author Of California's 'Parent Trigger' Law"....
February 1, 2012
School Chiefs' Group Elbows Into Policy Fight
By Michele McNeil
(From Education Week, February 1st, 2012)
Amid the cacophony of special interests fighting to be heard in statehouses and on Capitol Hill, a cadre of current and former chief state school officers is elbowing its way into the nation's education debate at a time when states are taking more control of K-12 education.
Read the full article here.
Better Schools Aren't a Partisan Issue
By Joe Trippi
(From Huffington Post, January 30th, 2012)
How do we give our kids a better education than we've been giving them? It's a question that is leading to a rare bipartisan conversation these days with some big figures in the Democratic party, like Cory Booker in Newark, Antonio Villaraigosa in Los Angeles and Andrew Cuomo in New York, actually leading the discussion. And they're not alone in the Democratic party as I saw this past week in New Orleans and Denver.
What's going on here?
The tough reality we've got to face is that too many of our schools are failing. And if you have a kid in one of those schools, you can bet that you're going to be pretty upset that your kid isn't getting the skills they need to live a successful life. That's where this conversation begins -- with the parents of kids in those schools who demand a better education for their child.
More people are also getting involved. After all, there are serious consequences when a kid doesn't succeed in school, both for themselves and the community they live in. If a kid gets through high school without being able to master basic math, science and reading, that kid is going to have difficulty finding a job. And good luck finding a business that will locate in a community that doesn't have workers with those skills. So you're starting to see a lot of businesses get involved in this conversation as well.
The great thing about this discussion is that there's not going to be just a one size fits all fix. That model isn't working. So there's room for everyone to participate and put every idea on the table. Even if you think public schools are great, can't we improve them? The solutions may vary by town, city and state.
Many communities have decided that the key is to empower parents to choose the best school for their child rather than that child being forced to attend the nearest public school no matter how low academic achievement at that school is or how bad of a fit it is for that child. If a solution is going to work for a child, their parent has to have the power to choose that solution. That's why instead of arguing over or promoting a particular fix, last week people across the political spectrum came together during to promote giving parents more choice in choosing what works best for their child during National School Choice Week.
Last Saturday, National School Choice Week kicked-off in New Orleans with a huge rally. James Carville, who spoke at the event, was so proud of the progress schools have made in that great city since Katrina. "You can't have the kind of successes that we're seeing here, the kind of improvements we're seeing in our schools, without people taking some considerable risk," he said.
Continue reading "Better Schools Aren't a Partisan Issue"....
January 26, 2012
Reform worth fighting for
Lessons of NYC school closings
By Joe Williams
(From NY Post, January 26, 2012)
As the Department of Education closed nearly two dozen of the city's worst large high schools at the height of the "small-schools boom," one of the critics' most common complaints was that the educrats were doing too much, too soon.
A new report that tracks thousands of students who entered the small high schools created on Mayor Bloomberg's watch makes you wonder what would have happened had they done even more, faster.
From 2002 to 2008, the Department of Education closed 23 large high schools, and in their place opened 216 small schools, many offering such specialized themes as sports management or environmental studies. A good chunk of the reorganization was paid for with $150 million in grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The breathtaking pace of change was certainly justified -- the huge, dysfunctional high schools that Bloomberg's team closed, such as Martin Luther King High in manhattan, were dangerous academic wastelands where the idea of someday graduating was often a sick joke.
Graduation rates were often well below 45 percent in the closed schools. At Theodore Roosevelt HS in The Bronx, it was 3 percent in 2006, its last year.
But naysayers -- including me at times -- wondered whether moving so swiftly would cause more harm than good.
The report, from the nonprofit-research organization MDRC, argues that the reforms were worth the risk. Students in the new, small high schools, the study shows, are making it to the high-school finish line at a much higher rate than at those old, large schools.
Continue reading "Reform worth fighting for"....
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