Start of something big in LA …
.. or another audition of a reform soon to flop?
So much for the promised webcast of the United Way’s education summit Tuesday in Los Angeles featuring U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Never happened. Technical problems. But author, blogger and Claremont Graduate University research professor Charles Taylor Kerchner was this Johnny’s on-the-spot reporter and offers an excellent account of the day.
By Charles Taylor Kerchner
For the first time since the eclipse of LEARN, the massive school reform program of the 1990s, Los Angeles has hosted a broad scale education summit designed to bring the city together around support for public education. “There had been a lot of what I call ‘silo’ conversations. We needed to make sure the whole community was here,” said Elise Buik, president of United Way of Greater Los Angeles, which organized the program.
Buik’s intent, and that of the United Way board, is to use the half-day event to kick off a longer more substantive discussion of the future of public education. A parent summit is planned for next month.
Charles Taylor Kerchner
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan delivered a keynote that reiterated several themes found in his recent speeches. Tough times may be the “new normal,” Duncan said but, “don’t go into survival mode … Crisis gives us a perfect opportunity, not just a perfect storm.” Duncan and other speakers zeroed in on a handful of opportunities that Los Angeles might seize.
The first of these is building a new relationship with labor. The contract between the Los Angeles Unified School District and its teachers is up for renegotiation. John Deasy, the incoming superintendent, and Julie Washington, the “new sheriff in town” at United Teachers Los Angeles, will negotiate for the first time. They will sit down in an environment that expects the labor contract to be used as an instrument of reform. Duncan raised that expectation, saying that Los Angeles needs productive, tough collaboration to solve problems, not just “a kumbaya moment.” He referenced productive labor contracts in cities such as New Haven, Conn., and the recent labor-management conference that the Department of Education sponsored in Denver.
The second opportunity is to anchor discussions about progress in real data about student achievement. “It’s time to stop pointing fingers,” said Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a remark that was echoed by others, and talk about which students are learning what. Connecting student achievement to teacher evaluation — a wildly controversial subject even a year ago — appeared to be a somewhat settled issue. The question is how, and what data? Judy Burton, president of the Alliance for College Ready Schools, has been developing a teacher evaluation system along with other charter management organizations. Similar efforts are under way within LAUSD and will become one of the items of negotiation with UTLA. In both cases, the evaluation systems under development are sophisticated and involve multiple measures, not just scores on the state’s annual test.
Once the finger pointing stops, the work of designing teacher evaluation appears difficult but at least discussable. Washington asked for evaluations differentiated by the stages of a teacher’s career. “We want beginning teachers to demonstrate competency,” she said, but competency should be followed by mastery and then leadership by the more experienced teachers.
Duncan asked for political help in getting Congress to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that guides the federal government’s largest investment in public education, in part to allow the government to base school ratings on a broader swath of data than it now does. The current version of the law has few rewards for schools getting better: “The only good thing for a school is not being listed as a failure.”
The third opportunity in the current crisis is to begin to redesign teaching and learning. “The system’s obsolete,” said retired business executive and former ambassador Frank Baxter, who advocated the blending of live teachers and computer-aided instruction that has become part of some of the Alliance for College Ready Schools campuses. Both Duncan and Villaraigosa urged rethinking of schooling using neighborhood and community resources. (For my thoughts on redesigning learning and teaching, see Learning 2.0.)
Incoming superintendent Deasy promised rapid and unrelenting attention to student progress, echoed the theme of “no excuses,” and issued a call to the interested, “if you want to be in a place where things are happening fast, pack your bags and come to L.A.”
What’s different now?
For someone who has watched and studied efforts at education reform in Los Angeles for more than 20 years, Tuesday’s gathering was both encouraging and sobering. Others have been on this path before and have come away with sobering realization that “this stuff is a lot harder than I thought it would be.” Los Angeles Unified has auditioned scores of reforms and has largely been unsuccessful in sustaining them. So, it’s reasonable to ask: What’s different now?
Compared with 1991, when LEARN — the last great civic-school reform — was brewing, all the parties are much more focused on student achievement. There are good reasons to criticize test-score accountability. It has done some bad things, but it has focused the system on outputs rather than making the assumption that changing the powers and responsibilities of adults would automatically produce trickle-down results for students. Starting with students and working backward to think about how adults need to change creates a stronger beginning place.
As in the current era, LEARN began as Los Angeles Unified entered a fiscal crisis. But the current one is worse. It may be that even the business community will come to see that schools in Los Angeles and California have been on a starvation diet, and that finding new sources of operating revenue need to be part of the reform solution. There is a real and open question of whether the system has the capacity to engage in what school people call “building the airplane as it rolls down the runway,” or whether decades of contraction have so hollowed out LAUSD that it does not have the capacity to change.
LEARN was anchored in the city’s large core businesses, most of which no longer exist. This time, reform will of necessity need to be more grass roots, more anchored in community based organizations, non-profits, and in smaller businesses. The open question is whether the scattered business community can coalesce around the necessity of lifting California and Los Angeles from the bottom ranks of virtually every education index, and whether it can become politically possible to blend well-designed reform with well-measured revenue infusions.
. . . and all the while, teaching and learning must continue. So, here are some really great resources for K–5 math that anyone can access for use in the classroom or at home.
http://www.mathcoachinteractive.com
There are interactive lessons and simple practice games, organized by topic, to use on interactive white boards or individual computers. At the end of each practice session, the student can click Print and hand in a fully corrected and scored worksheet.
PLUS, the entire MathCoach print library (state adopted in 2000) is now available on line. The print materials are searchable by topic or by current California standard. I like the RtI section where I can find entire topics covered in one place in a simple teaching sequence–lessons and practice sets by topic let teachers really drill down to those skills students need more help with right now.
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Professor Kerchner asks “What’s different now?” and gives a few perhaps-accurate responses, but, uncharacteristically, forgets to mention a few key items.
First, it’s probably accurate to say that LEARN was more of a flop than a “great civic-school reform.” Second, LEARN eventually merged with LAAMP (another effort that most observers would say bore little fruit despite big investments). Third, LEARN/LAMP eventually morphed into the Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, a large charter school management organization. Fourth, independently-managed charter schools now constitute over 15 percent of the district’s public schools and over 10 percent of district-wide public school enrollment.
Perhaps the “open question,” as Professor Kerchner puts it, is not whether unions and business leaders can coalesce in some sort of magic “kumbaya” coalition, but instead whether it’s worth trying at all.
Hard-nosed business and true teacher-leaders appear to have already decided to instead pursue a decidedly different tack, bypass the district central office and union headquarters, and take matters into their own hands by starting large numbers of new schools and spinning-off existing schools as charter schools.
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Speaking of getting tough and eliminating job security, how about making it a firing offense to use the worn cheap-sarcasm term “kumbaya moment” ?
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True teacher-leaders? How many of those who have set up charters have done truly for the children and not for what they, as administrators, can get paid? Examination of the 990s filed by most of the politically active charters parent 501(c)(3) indicates that the CEOs, CFOs, etc, are “earning” $180k and up while they tout that they save money on overhead. I suppose then that these are “hard-nosed business” practices.
Examination of the reported CST scores for those schools also indicates they are not doing much better scholastically than their public school peers and certainly not better than public school magnets. So what is the promise of charters? More money for a few and balkanization of public schools?
I call for greater scrutiny of charters and for the authorizing agencies to do their job. Why does it take whistler blowers to first expose achievement fraud and then public outrage for a Board to reverse the very likely politically motivated decisions of its staff as it recently happened with the Crescendo scandal at LAUSD?
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The problem with all this hardheadness is that it isn’t. I believe you misread history. LEARN was a model of political organizing. People working in L.A. today could learn much from its success and failure. It made real the notion that the district could be organized on some principle other than a vertically integrated hierarchy. And LAAMP more than anything else in recent years legitimated the role of parents. Erik Premack is certainly correct in his assertion that charter schools, and the organized political influence of charters, have changed the educational landscape. But the idea that “true teacher-leaders” only inhabit the charter universe is romanticism. And the hard-headed businessmen are scrambling to raise money, Charter Management Organizations are becoming increasingly wary of their capacity to expand, and even the founders of the charter movement have come to the conclusion that simply chartering a school doesn’t make it good.
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Caroline,
Maybe we should chip in a buy Arne a new speech writer.
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I have always been given to understand that the failure of LEARN impelled the rapid evolution of the charter movement in LAUSD, about which it is also understood that the goal is to reach a 20% market share in LA, after which a “tipping point” will be triggered with sufficient momentum to effect reform. But as for the community based management structure envisioned right now, that may likely take 30 years to gain traction. School politics seems too prone to place holding and monument building, such that any new force that succeeds in wresting power will be prone to the same modes of inaction. A jaundiced eye will conclude that the private sector has to be given a chance to show what it can do. The age of a public monopoly on the management of public education can be said to have passed.
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We would be much better served if his unqualified, resume-faking posterior could be summarily fired. (Sorry if this counts as a personal attack.)
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It does. – John
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And, Duncan’s attack on teachers as the main problem with education is not personal? Tens of thousands of teachers whose careers are now on the line because of invalid Value Added Measurements and charter takeovers being pushed by Duncan and Obama’s blackmail of states to use these policies or lose federal monies would disagree. Merely stating policies in broad generalizations or abstract language does not make them not intensely personal. In fact, the greatest personal harm is committed by people and institutions that feign objectivity but slant everything to fit their personal points of view, and show total lack of concern for these affect real people.
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I have had the same strong reaction over the last couple years to last phrase being used dismissively; it was, at least in my experience, an anthem for celebrating reconciliation and diversity.
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Caroline and Wendy: I plead guilty on misuse of the kumbaya term.
I also agree with Charles regarding the need to learn from LEARN. As California’s earliest proponent of the chartered schools concept, policy geeks may find it interesting to note that I have been disappointed by:
1) The apparent inability of many school districts to break free from the vertically integrated hierarchy model. LAUSD’s recent efforts to diversify who may operate new schools and failed schools could be promising if the district starts to make decisions more on the basis of merit. The original proponents of the chartered schools concept had no intention of “tipping” districts, but we did underestimate the tenacity of hierarchies–as did the LEARN folks.
2) The inability of many deep-pocket donors to recognize the limitations of the vertically integrated hierarchy model and their massive spending on re-creating such models in the form of charter management organizations. Of late, it seems that some are now waking-up to this reality–or at least to the fact that many such organizations may not be financially sustainable without ongoing influxes of philanthropic funding.
3) The lack of attention paid to whether many of the large charter management organizations are really posting any meaningful gains in student achievement–or whether some or many of them are simply serving a less-challenging student population. Carolyn, who often drives me crazy with her anti-charter screeds, did some interesting armchair analyses of this regarding one charter organization a few years back. It might be helpful to have some solid research on this front that isn’t paid for by the deep-pocket donors to charter management organizations. My armchair analyses of some of LA’s highest profile charter organizations seems to yield similar, if crude, findings.
4) The lack of attention paid to many of the small-scale, independently-managed charter schools that are serving challenging populations and that appear to be making considerable progress–usually with little or no philanthropic support.
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One (not-so-small) point: I hope that Judy Burton’s recommendation for teacher evaluation doesn’t signal the arrival of yet another outdated management fad coming into schools, years after its abandonment in the private sector. Yes, beginning teachers should be demonstrating competency, and more experienced teachers should show mastery, however we decide to assess that (a huge and complex topic). But please, let’s not expect every employee to advance into “leadership”. Every organization needs leaders who emerge from the ”front-lines”, but we need to remember that sometimes highly competent, valuable team members just don’t have the temperament or aptitude to be leaders. Those who do can become much more valuable to the organization and its customers through leadership, and they certainly deserve recognition for that, but other team memmbers can also remain highly valuable in their “mastery” roles. One of the best teachers my sons ever had was actually a pretty shy person outside the classroom, and he did not want to assert himself into any kind of leadership role with other adults. But he is a magnificent history teacher, and we have to remember that that was what he was hired to do in the first place.
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True, but he’s a public figure, so I’m not attacking any ordinary individuals or anyone posting here.
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It’s the new harsh, mean climate that dominates our culture today. Celebrating reconciliation and diversity is now something that provokes sneers.
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