School "Reformers" most went to private schools

In Public School Efforts, a Common Background: Private Education

by Michael Winerip  New York Times  April 18, 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/18/education/18winerip.html

Ten years ago, the No Child Left Behind bill was passed by
the House of Representatives, 384 to 45, marking the first
step toward a major transformation of public education in
America. The law has ushered in what its supporters like to
call the "reform movement."


No longer did a person with a clipboard have to spend days
observing a school to determine whether it was any good.
Because of the law, it is now possible for an assistant
secretary of education to be sitting in his Washington
office and, by simply studying a spreadsheet for a few
minutes, know exactly how a school in Juneau is performing.

Each year since then, researchers have found new things to
assess. The New York City Department of Education, a pioneer
in the science of value-added assessment, can now calculate
a teacher's worth to the third decimal point by using a few
very long formulas. (No word yet on whether department
researchers have developed a very long formula to assess
chancellors and mayors.)

For a while it appeared that the Republicans were way ahead
on the reform front, but in 2007, Whitney Tilson, a hedge
fund manager and Democratic fund-raiser, founded Democrats
for Education Reform to help his party catch up. By all
accounts, it has worked. Today, the consensus is that there
is little difference between President Obama and former
President George W. Bush when it comes to education policy.
Nor is it easy to distinguish differences between the
secretary of education under Mr. Bush, Margaret Spellings,
and the current secretary, Arne Duncan.

Those who call themselves reformers are a diverse group, men
and women of every political stripe and of every race and
ethnicity.

But there is one thing that characterizes a surprisingly
large number of the people who are transforming public
schools: they attended private schools.

Which raises the question: Does a private school background
give them a much-needed distance and fresh perspective to
better critique and remake traditional public schools? Does
it make them distrust public schools - or even worse -
poison their perception of them? Or does it make any
difference?


Your call.

Following is a list of some of these national leaders and
the private schools they attended:

*  Senators Judd Gregg (Phillips Exeter, Exeter, N.H.) and
Edward M. Kennedy (Milton Academy, Milton, Mass.) and
Representative John A. Boehner (Archbishop Moeller High
School, Cincinnati) were three of the four Congressional
sponsors of the education legislation, which was signed into
law by Mr. Bush (Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass.) on Jan.
8, 2002. (Representative George Miller was the fourth
sponsor.)

*  Mr. Obama (Punahou School, Honolulu) will be remembered
for his signature education program, Race to the Top. This
program rewards states with hundreds of millions of dollars
in grants if they develop systems to rate teachers based on
their students' test scores and if they agree to fire
teachers and principals based on those scores. In contrast,
Michelle Obama, who attended public schools (Whitney Young
High, Chicago), has frequently spoken out against the
education law's reliance on testing. "If my future were
determined by my performance on a standardized test," Mrs.
Obama has repeatedly said, "I wouldn't be here, I guarantee
that."

Michelle A. Rhee (Maumee Valley Country Day School, Toledo,
Ohio), the former Washington schools chancellor and a
founder of StudentsFirst, an advocacy group, is probably the
No. 1 celebrity of the reform movement. She is education's
Sarah Palin.

*  As governor, Mitt Romney (Cranbrook School, Bloomfield
Hills, Mich.) brought accountability to Massachusetts.

*  Bill Gates (Lakeside School, Seattle) has donated
billions of dollars to public schools with the proviso that
they carry out his vision of reform, including tying teacher
tenure decisions to students' test scores. In November, Mr.
Gates and Mr. Duncan (University of Chicago Laboratory
School) called on public school leaders to increase class
size as a way of cutting costs in these hard times. The two
men suggested that schools could compensate by striving to
have an excellent teacher in every classroom. The private
school Mr. Gates attended has an average class size of 16,
according to its Web site. The home page says the best thing
about Lakeside School is it "promotes relationships between
teachers and students through small class sizes." Mr.
Duncan's private school has an average class size of 19.

*  Jeb Bush (Phillips Andover), the former governor of
Florida and the founder of the Excellence for Education
Foundation, is responsible for making Florida a pioneer in
the accountability movement by issuing report cards for
every school based on test results. In the process he had to
overcome many obstacles, including how to explain why his
state's rating system was so badly out of whack with the
federal government's rating system. One year the state
report cards gave two-thirds of Florida's schools A's or
B's, while the federal system rated two-thirds of Florida
schools as failing. As a result, there was widespread
confusion among parents who couldn't tell if their child's
school was succeeding brilliantly or failing miserably.

*  Chester E. Finn Jr. (Phillips Exeter) is the president of
the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a senior fellow of the
Hoover Institution, two of the country's leading
conservative research groups. Mr. Finn is the scholarly
counterpart of Ms. Rhee. Early on, he supported the
privatization of public education, the use of vouchers and
the development of a national core curriculum, which could
possibly mean every public school would be teaching the same
thing at the same time. His recommendation for reforming the
public school system: "Blow it up and start over."

*  David Levin (Riverdale Country School, the Bronx) is a
co-founder of KIPP, the nation's biggest charter chain.

*  Cathleen P. Black (Aquinas Dominican High School,
Chicago), the former chancellor of New York City schools,
had just 95 days to put her reform agenda into place before
she was asked to leave.

*  Merryl H. Tisch (Ramaz School, Manhattan), chancellor of
the New York State Board of Regents, along with David M.
Steiner (Perse School, Cambridge, England), the New York
state education commissioner, have fine-tuned the state's
extensive testing system pioneered by the former state
commissioner, Richard Mills.

*  Steven Brill (Deerfield Academy, Deerfield, Mass.) is
perhaps the charter school movement's most literary
advocate. He is working on a book about public school
reform.

*  Marc Sternberg (Episcopal School, Baton Rouge, La.), a
New York City deputy chancellor, has been a path finder in
the practice of moving charter schools into district school
buildings.

*  Davis Guggenheim (Sidwell Friends School, Washington) is
the producer and director of "Waiting for Superman," the
widely acclaimed 2010 film that championed charter schools
and dismissed traditional public schools as dropout
factories. Mr. Guggenheim's film begins with him driving his
children to their private school and feeling guilty about
all the bad Los Angeles public schools he is passing. This
is not the first time this happened to Mr. Guggenheim. As a
child, he passed bad Washington public schools on his way to
Sidwell Friends.

When President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind
legislation, he expressed his hope that it would combat the
"soft bigotry of low expectations." Indeed, the law could
not have higher expectations: every child in the nation is
required to be proficient in math and English by 2014.
Schools that do not meet their proficiency goals, which are
raised every year, are labeled as failing.

Last month, Mr. Duncan predicted that by the end of this
year, 82 percent of schools will miss their goal. At this
rate, it is highly likely that in a few years, every single
public school in the United States will be labeled a
failure.

This article has been revised to reflect the following
correction:

Correction: April 20, 2011

The On Education column on Monday, about leaders of the
public school "reform movement" who attended private
schools, misstated the name of the advocacy group founded by
one such leader, the former Washington, D.C., schools
chancellor Michelle A. Rhee. It is StudentsFirst, not
Sunshine First. The column also misstated the name of the
organization founded by Whitney Tilson, a hedge fund manager
and Democratic fund-raiser. It is Democrats for Education
Reform, not Democrats for Educational Reform. In addition,
the article misspelled the given name of the chancellor of
the New York State Board of Regents. She is Merryl Tisch,
not Merryll Tisch.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 18,
2011, on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline:
In Public School Efforts, a Common Background: Private
Education.

==========

Rhee the Reformer-Erase to the top!

Mayor Johnson active in school criticism

Feb.28,2011.

SACRAMENTO, CA – Today Mayor Kevin Johnson and STAND UP held the first ‘State of Schools’ meeting in Sacramento at the Guild Theater. Mayor Johnson was joined by Russlynn Ali, Assistant Secretary for Civil
Rights at the U.S. Department of Education, in a conversation on the urgent need for reform in Sacramento’s
public schools.

Today’s meeting focused on the condition of public schools in Sacramento and issued a call to action. The
meeting was sponsored by the Black Parallel School Board, Greater Sacramento Urban League, Sacramento
Chapter for 100 Black Women, Sacramento NAACP, and the Sacramento Observer in honor of Black History
Month.

Currently, less than half of Sacramento schools are meeting academic targets. While Sacramento’s public schools have shown slight increases in academic achievement over recent years, Mayor Johnson believes that the gap is not closing quickly enough.

Johnson stated, “Over the last seven years, city school third graders have improved by an average of two percent per year. This may sound positive, but think about it from this perspective: at the current rate, it will take 20 years before close to 80 percent of our third graders are on grade level. That’s an entire generation.”

Nominated by President Barack Obama to the U.S. Department of Education in 2009, Russlynn Ali has dedicated efforts to underscoring the urgent need to prepare all students for academic success in this global economy.

By Melody Gutierrez

Mayor Kevin Johnson is in Washington, D.C., today with education reformer Michelle Rhee for the launch of a national campaign aimed at eliminating “last in, first out” policies that base teacher layoffs on seniority.

The announcement came at a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Johnson is the founding chair of the group’s Public School Task Force.

“We have to eliminate old policies that satisfy adult needs, but have absolutely no bearing on student achievement,” Johnson said in a press release. “(Last in, first out) policies represent everything that’s wrong with our current education system. I urge every mayor and state leader to stand up for children by eliminating policies that deprive them of great teachers.”

The campaign is being called Save Great Teachers and is being organized through the political advocacy group StudentsFirst, which is run by Johnson’s fiancé Rhee. Over the next seven months leading up to the new school year, StudentsFirst plans to aggressively advocate for the end of seniority based layoff decisions.

Source: The Sacramento Bee
Feb.23,2011.

From. www.standup.org

Michele Rhee ( of Sacramento) continues her assaults on teachers

Though all modern presidents like to think of themselves as leading the national education debate, they rarely are; most important decisions are made at the state, mayoral, or school-board level. But if this decentralized uprising can be said to have a leader, it is the youthful, tough-talking, and telegenic Michelle Rhee. Four years ago, Rhee was chosen to run Washington, D.C.’s troubled school district by a young Democratic mayor, Adrian Fenty. She resigned just as abruptly this past fall, after Fenty was thrown out of office. But while Rhee’s head-cracking, heresy-spouting attempt to revamp the school system was a major contributor to Fenty’s electoral defeat, she left in a blaze of martyrdom, reveling in the extravagant admiration of national ­opinion-makers, as well as her commanding role in the polemical pro-charter-school documentary Waiting for “Superman.”

Over the past few months, rather than taking another municipal gig, Rhee has been campaigning through flash-point states, like a sort of wonky Che Guevara, lending celebrity, credibility, and covering fire to political leaders who endorse her vision of school reform. Last week, she was touring Ohio, as Governor John Kasich, a big fan of Waiting for “Superman,” promised “more choice, more accountability, more dollars in the classroom instead of bureaucracy.” The week prior, she was in Tennessee and Michigan; before that, she testified on Scott’s behalf before the Florida Legislature, where she was hailed as a “movie star.” At each stop, Rhee promotes her platform: expanding charter schools; connecting teacher pay to performance; revamping a pension-and-benefit system that “ends up excessively rewarding longevity”; ending tenure and seniority-based layoffs.

The traditional, patronizing view of teachers, that they are to be treated like saints and paid as if they’d taken a vow of poverty, has lately gone through a schizophrenic inversion. Open the newspaper most any day and you’ll read about “bad teachers” who are holding children back and, through their unions, conspiring to remain well compensated. In a remarkably short time, this view has become popular across partisan lines. Each political party filters it through its own core beliefs: Republicans fixate on the stresses that greedy unions are placing on budgets through their pay, pensions, and benefits; Democrats argue that putting better teachers in troubled schools is a matter of social justice. But they are using much the same language—and rallying around a radical change in how this country thinks about public education.

On Thursday, March 10, Wisconsin’s Republican governor, Scott Walker, published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal justifying the bill his party had rammed through the State Senate the night before. He wrote that he wanted to do away with a “union-controlled hiring and firing process,” installing one of his own that his enemies say aims to remove veteran teachers from the classroom. The same morning, in New York, the Daily News published a column repeating many of Walker’s arguments—this one under the byline of Newark mayor Cory Booker, a Democrat. Some teachers “aren’t measuring up,” Booker wrote, “and ought to find another line of work.”

Such ruthlessness toward a profession that has been idealized for generations might seem an unlikely basis for a popular movement, but Education Secretary Arne Duncan is onboard, as is President Obama, who in this year’s State of the Union address said, “We want to reward good teachers and stop making excuses for bad ones.” So is Rupert Murdoch, who wrote a Journal op-ed of his own last fall suggesting that teachers are held to lesser standards than American Idol contestants. A few weeks ago in Providence, a Democratic mayor fired his city’s entire workforce of teachers, saying they will have to reapply so he can choose the most skilled. Legislators in Tennessee and Indiana are considering bills modeled after Wisconsin’s. Chris Christie has made himself into a New Jersey folk hero by attacking teachers as welfare queens. Florida governor Rick Scott is preparing to sign a bill abolishing tenure. Here in New York, Mayor Bloomberg is battling Governor Cuomo over the proposed repeal of a law mandating that layoffs be conducted by seniority, the “last in, first out” policy.

Though all modern presidents like to think of themselves as leading the national education debate, they rarely are; most important decisions are made at the state, mayoral, or school-board level. But if this decentralized uprising can be said to have a leader, it is the youthful, tough-talking, and telegenic Michelle Rhee. Four years ago, Rhee was chosen to run Washington, D.C.’s troubled school district by a young Democratic mayor, Adrian Fenty. She resigned just as abruptly this past fall, after Fenty was thrown out of office. But while Rhee’s head-cracking, heresy-spouting attempt to revamp the school system was a major contributor to Fenty’s electoral defeat, she left in a blaze of martyrdom, reveling in the extravagant admiration of national ­opinion-makers, as well as her commanding role in the polemical pro-charter-school documentary Waiting for “Superman.”

Over the past few months, rather than taking another municipal gig, Rhee has been campaigning through flash-point states, like a sort of wonky Che Guevara, lending celebrity, credibility, and covering fire to political leaders who endorse her vision of school reform. Last week, she was touring Ohio, as Governor John Kasich, a big fan of Waiting for “Superman,” promised “more choice, more accountability, more dollars in the classroom instead of bureaucracy.” The week prior, she was in Tennessee and Michigan; before that, she testified on Scott’s behalf before the Florida Legislature, where she was hailed as a “movie star.” At each stop, Rhee promotes her platform: expanding charter schools; connecting teacher pay to performance; revamping a pension-and-benefit system that “ends up excessively rewarding longevity”; ending tenure and seniority-based layoffs.

Considered alone, each of these proposals would be controversial, and anathema to the teachers unions; taken together, they amount to a staggering assault. For too long, Rhee says, the system—and her party, the Democrats—has languished in the grip of do-nothing bureaucrats and cynical labor leaders, a protean inertial force that she sometimes calls “the blob.” To fund her cause, Rhee announced in December that she would create a counterbalancing interest group called StudentsFirst, modeled on the NRA, for which she is hoping to raise $1 billion. Rhee frequently says she launched StudentsFirst because “there is no big organized interest group that defends and promotes the interests of children,” a line that, like a lot of things she says, is both highly debatable and maddening to her many critics, since it suggests that any disagreement is tantamount to child neglect. But Rhee sees no room to play nicely with others. “We’ve been doing a disservice to kids for many years,” she said in a recent speech at the Manhattan Institute. “So let’s get comfortable with a little fighting.”

Read the entire story here.

http://nymag.com/news/features/michelle-rhee-2011-3/

And note.  Mayor Kevin Johnson is building this effort in Sacramento along with Democrats ? for Education Reform.

Rhee opens office in Sacramento; Campbell responds

Note: Michele Rhee opens a lobby operation and gets a front page coverage in the Bee and a photo.  She certainly is effective at getting free media for her positions and her new agency.

Link.  http://www.sacbee.com/2011/01/21/3340369/former-dc-schools-chief-to-headquarter.html

We  too have opened an educational advocacy organization with essentially the opposing views.  The Democracy and Education Institute;  link. https://sites.google.com/site/democracyandeducationorg/

Dr. Duane Campbell is the director. 

Starting from over 40 years of working in schools, preparing teachers and teaching, we advocate for a democratic approach to education.   Our  primary researchers have already  prepared  over 700 teachers in the Sacramento region, most of them Chicano, and over 100 educational administrators and leaders throughout the state. 

There are many  available advocacy  strategies.  However, the most important is to share and magnify teacher voices.  Politicians make bad decisions – such as the current budget cuts, or an over reliance on testing- because they are not listening to teachers voices.  Instead they are listening to paid consultants, and “experts” from the corporate establishment.

Newspaper writers and other media writers make the same mistake.  They call their favorite “source” which just happens to be a corporate promoter like Arne Duncan, Michele Rhee,  or one  of the “experts” at elite universities.  Note:  few professors in the elite universities work with  teachers.  They are several steps removed from the classroom.  You can read more about this on the blog Choosing Democracy http://www.choosingdemocracy.blogspot.com.  

The most basic  strategy is to insist on teacher participation in the development of policies.  Get the politicians and the corporate shills out of the classroom. – they have failed our children.

                       A major problem with  campaigns for a democratic approach to schooling is that most of the media and the politicians  has been sold a mindset or framework of accountability by advocates such as Michele Rhee.    Corporate sponsored  networks and “ think tanks” such as the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, the Bradley Foundation,  the Olin Foundation, and now Rhee’s  StudentsFirst  and their access to the media is not likely to change.  The domination  of the accountability frame within the media and political circles  must be opposed.  The appointment of Arne Duncan was symptomatic of the problems.   He represents the kind of corporate/media approach to reform. Certainly  in the current battle with Arne Duncan over the "Race to the Top Funds,"  he has ceased the high ground with a claim of accountability – it’s a false claim- but it works. Education and explaining will be a constant struggle.

There are many advocacy  strategies.  However, the most important is to share and magnify teacher voices.  Politicians make bad decisions – such as the current budget cuts, or an over reliance on testing- because they are not listening to teachers voices.  Instead they are listening to paid consultants, and “experts” from the corporate establishment.

Newspaper writers and other media writers make the same mistake.  They call their favorite “source” which just happens to be a corporate promoter like Arne Duncan, Michele Rhee,  or one  of the “experts” at elite universities.  Note:  few professors in the elite universities work with  teachers.  The most basic  strategy is to insist on teacher participation in the development of policies.  Get the politicians and the corporate shills out of the classroom. – they have failed our children.

The news report says that Rhee’s first goal is to raise $1 Billion for advocacy.  Our goal is to raise $20,000 in in-kind contributions, and we already have that.

We will use public interest advocacy strategies  and to support community organizations to effect education policy. We intend to use important community resources and research such as the Robles v. California law suite and its supporters.

In the current era of draconian ( and unnecessary) school budget cuts almost all school reform efforts have ended, except for the hot air of politicians. Funded advocacy groups such as Rhee’s and  “Democrats?” for Educational Reform need to create a sense of doing something in order to raise funds from foundations and other sources.  However, they avoid the obvious. Schools need funding.  There is a reason why the avoid this topic.  The press should ask them why.

             A second ongoing project of the Institute for Democracy and Education is the development of a Chicano/Mexican American Digital History Project for the Sacramento Region.  This project is also on our web site here:

https://sites.google.com/site/democracyandeducationorg/chicano-mexican-american-digital-history-project

Michele Rhee in Sacramento

The Sacramento Bee has an interesting news/ promotion piece   about Michele Rhee and her new foundation. It is here. http://www.sacbee.com/2010/12/08/3241311/michelle-rhee-brings-her-fix-the.html

Yes, Michele Rhee is controversial.  More important, while firing and evaluation changed, there really is no solid evidence that her approach improved schooling for kids in D.C.  Please look at the data.

Just because Michele Rhee and her cohort make unfair and uninformed attacks on U.S. Schools, that does not mean that there are not serious problems in our schools.

I encourage you to read Diane Ravitch’s book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System; How Testing and Choice Are undermining education. (2010).  She used to be on their side, until she looked closely at the evidence.

The claim that persons entering teaching are in the lowest part of their university classes, well, we don’t have any evidence that this makes a major difference.  What she is really saying is that graduates of elite or selective colleges do better.  That is why she was in Teach for America and started the New Teacher Project.   There is simply no evidence that elite status makes a positive difference.  Primarily you are dealing with working class students attending public universities vs. upper middle class kids going to private universities.

The difference is in the class composition of the students and how many hours per week they work to get through college.

It is a mistake to dismiss every criticism of the “corporate reformers’, the problem is they solutions which they advocate.  There is little evidence that  testing and choice and the profit based solutions work.

More at www.choosingdemocracy.blogspot.com

Yes, Michele Rhee is controversial.  More important, while firing and evaluation changed, there really is no solid evidence that her approach improved schooling for kids in D.C.  Please look at the data.

Just because Michele Rhee and her cohort make unfair and uninformed attacks on U.S. Schools, that does not mean that there are not serious problems in our schools.

I encourage you to read Diane Ravitch’s book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System; How Testing and Choice Are undermining education. (2010).  She used to be on their side, until she looked closely at the evidence.

The claim that persons entering teaching are in the lowest part of their university classes, well, we don’t have any evidence that this makes a major difference.  What she is really saying is that graduates of elite or selective colleges do better.  That is why she was in Teach for America and started the New Teacher Project.   There is simply no evidence that elite status makes a positive difference.  Primarily you are dealing with working class students attending public universities vs. upper middle class kids going to private universities.

The difference is in the class composition of the students and how many hours per week they work to get through college.


For a view of Ravitch's position see this.  

   http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/2010/12/we_need_public_schools_and_democratic_governance.html