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Addressing the American Federation of Schools convention after her election as president, Randi Weingarten urged the dramatic expansion of the community school model:
Can you imagine a federal law that promoted community schools — schools that serve the neediest children by bringing together under one roof all the services and activities they and their families need?…Imagine schools that are open all day and offer after-school and evening recreational activities, child care and preschool, tutoring and homework assistance. Schools that include dental, medical and counseling clinics.
Robert Podiscio of the Core Knoweldge Blog worries that such schools could relegate education to the margins while becoming "social service agencies of last resort." This is definitely a danger--if schools lack the resources and support to carry out their broader role. Pondiscio thoughtfully describes what often happens when schools must redeploy their existing resources to fill the void left by policymakers who blithely de-fund programs for communities in greatest need. ...
Last week, we interviewed Paul Houston, who recently retired from his 14-year position at the helm of AASA, about his legacy as an educator and his thoughts on the current state of education reform.
This week, we turn our attention to another education leader who is reflecting on a long and distinguished career: Warlene Gary, who in late June retired from her position as executive director of the national PTA.
In our exclusive interview, Gary speaks about what she has accomplished in her 35-year career, her commitment to equity, her efforts at the PTA to reach out to poor communities and communities of color, and her frustration with the "paralysis of analysis" that hamstrings so many education reform discussions in Washington, DC. ...
In today's Education Gadfly, Checker Finn wrote a thoughtful, at times almost lyrical, meditation on the role of schools in forging national unity. Unlike most voucher advocates, he acknowledges the risk of national balkanization posed by the proliferation of "charters, vouchers, tax credits, virtual schools, magnets, hybrids, and on and on"--in other words, schools that often cater to specific ideological, social or religious interests without championing any larger vision of national identity.
Finn advocates "well-wrought, statewide academic standards joined to well-wrought and forceful state testing-and-accountability mechanisms" but concedes the difficulty of applying this structure to private schools under a voucher scheme. Indeed, private schools that accept public dollars, align their curricula with state standards, and submit to state testing and accountability strictures sound an awful lot like public schools and would most likely be anathema to all but the most temperate privatization supporters. (Apparently, a forthcoming Fordham report will wrestle with this issue.) ...
The last few weeks have brought us six new inspiring stories about successful public schools and districts. Be sure to check them out: ...
The NEA has just released a major new paper on the federal role in education entitled Great Public Schools for Every Student by 2020.
In doing so, they join a number of other groups that have deemed it high time to clarify the federal role after seven years of NCLB--and before a new administration arrives in January. (See, for example, the recent report by the Forum for Education and Democracy and the even more recent statement released by a distiguished task force calling for a "Broader, Bolder Approach to Education.")
NEA's report begins with the premise that NCLB has thrown the federal role out of whack, creating "top-down, command-and-control, federally prescriptive testing and accountability mandates" that have narrowed curricula, robbed assessment of its power as an instructional tool and failed to close achievement gaps.
With the aim of ensuring universal access to great public schools by 2020, the NEA document outlines six priorities for federal involvement in education: ...
Over the past few weeks, Public School Insights has been interviewing signers of a recent statement calling for a "Broader, Bolder Approach to Education"--an approach that combines ambitious school improvement strategies with out-of-school supports for student achievement--such as early childhood education, after-school programs, and health services for children.
A few days ago, we had the privilege of interviewing Nobel prize-winning economist James Heckman, a signer whose recent work on topics such as graduation rates and the benefits of early childhood education has attracted close attention from education advocates. ...
The Public Education Network has just released its "Civic Index for Quality Education," a tool to assess and improve community support for excellent public education. According to the good people at PEN, the Civic Index "identifies and measures the level of involvement across 10 sectors of the community...:
- Education leadership of local elected officials
- Commitment to the values of tolerance and inclusiveness
- Active parents
- Strong civic organizations (parent, philanthropic, civic/religious organizations)
- Utilization of school performance data to improve school quality
- Youth involvement
- Partnerships with higher education
- Knowledge o, and voting for, the school board
- An active business community
- Media coverage
"These [indices] reflect 10 key conditions that must exist outside of schools--and complement those conditions we know from Standards Based Reform must be present inside schools--to ensure student success." ...
Over the past week, Public School Insights has been interviewing the distinguished co-chairs of the high-profile task force behind a new campaign calling for a "Broader, Bolder Approach to Education." As we noted in an earlier post, the task force is advocating for a set of policies to reform schools while offsetting the social and economic disadvantages that contribute to academic achievement gaps.
I recently spoke with campaign co-chair Helen Ladd, a prominent professor of economics and public policy at Duke University. Like co-chairs Pedro Noguera and Tom Payzant, Ladd argues that schools alone cannot close achievement gaps--The nation needs aggressive school reform strategies as well as policies to minimize the impact of poverty on student performance. ...
Currently a professor of practice at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, Tom Payzant has been around the educational block. He has served as an Assistant Secretary of Education under President Clinton, and as superintendent of schools in Boston, San Diego, Oklahoma City, Eugene (Oregon), and Springfield (Pennsylvania). In Boston, he was credited with narrowing achievement gaps and presiding over the largest improvement in mathematics scores of any major urban district participating in the National Assessment of Education Progress Trial Urban District Assessment. He has received many leadership awards, including Massachusetts Superintendent of the Year, and published extensively, promoting academic reforms to both professional educators and policymakers. Recently, he also served as co-chair of the task force that released a statement promoting "A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education." ...
Pedro Noguera is a professor at NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, a leading authority on school reform, and a co-chair of the task force that recently released a statement promoting "A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education." As I wrote in an earlier post, the statement calls for policies to reduce the educational, economic and social disadvantages that depress the academic achievement of our most vulnerable students.
Noguera recently took some time to tell me about the content and goals of the task force's work, and to address criticisms of the statement that have been circulating through some education policy blogs: namely, that the task force is letting schools off the hook and shying away from hard-hitting education reforms. ...
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