Joe Williams' Blog
March 3, 2010
ESEA Reauthorization: Keep Accountability Strong!
Washington, DC, March 3, 2010 -- Democrats for Education Reform joined a coalition of 18 advocacy, civil rights, and policy study organizations today who submitted a set of recommendations to the President and Congress regarding the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
"This statement of principles makes it clear that there is broad support for a new ESEA that invests in fundamental education reform, promotes innovation, builds human capital, and continues to holds schools accountable for results," said Charles Barone, Director of Federal Policy at Democrats for Education Reform. "Part and parcel of this effort must be decisive action to fundamentally restructure schools and school systems that are chronically low-performing."
Overall, the group endorses the direction the Obama Administration is taking to school reform. The signees ask the Administration to maintain and elaborate the bright lines in federal law around accountability and teacher quality and effectiveness, and couple that with a competitive grant strategy that invests in and rewards states that are ready, willing, and able to step up their education reform efforts, including reconstituting, restarting, converting, or shutting down the lowest-performing schools.
Highlights:
NCLB and Race to the Top
"We the undersigned believe that even though neither is perfect, ESEA 2002 (NCLB) and Race to the Top are both landmark education reforms that have moved the country's education goals and policies in a markedly positive direction."
Accountability
States must set annual, measurable, and ambitious goals for the academic performance of all students and for closing achievement gaps between: 1) economically disadvantaged students; 2) students from major racial and ethnic groups; 3) students with disabilities; and 4) students with limited English proficiency, as compared to their non-disadvantaged peers.
School Interventions
"We embrace the Administration's push to compel increasingly intensive interventions in low-performing schools.
"Persistently low-performing schools necessitate fundamental changes in staffing and leadership, including reconstitution, conversion to a charter school, restart, or shutdown. After other approaches have been tried and have failed, these are the only viable options with a reasonable probability of success."
Performance-Based Funding
Continue reading "ESEA Reauthorization: Keep Accountability Strong!"....
February 23, 2010
Applause For Obama Administration's Tough Position on Title I Requirements
Changes to NCLB will provide additional incentive for states to enact more rigorous academic programs
New York, NY, February 22, 2010 - Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a national advocacy organization that seeks to reorient the education debate within the Democratic Party, commends President Obama in the wake of his announced proposal to overhaul the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The president delivered a stern, but necessary, message to the governors of all 50 states today that failing to enact and implement sufficiently rigorous education standards in their states would result in a drop in federal funding through Title I, under his proposed plan.
"President Obama has taken a bold step to correct one of the weakest aspects of No Child Left Behind," said Joe Williams, DFER's executive director. "In requiring states to adopt 'college or career ready' standards in order to receive Title I funding, the president is sending a message that academic rigor is not just a nice bonus in our educational system - it's a requirement. No longer will the federal government throw away good money on failed state education policies. Simply put, states must actively work toward the best interests of our nation's students or face a terrible consequence."
DFER further commends President Obama for seeking additional funding for the administration's successful Race to the Top initiative as part of the NCLB reform. Race to the Top's first round catalyzed serious policy innovation in a number of states, with 40 states and the District of Columbia submitting applications for funds to be distributed on the basis of serious reform proposals.
Continued Williams, "The beauty of Race to the Top is that it rewards those states that are putting actionable reform proposals to work, and encourages every state to get serious about fixing their broken education systems. The era of rewarding mediocrity is over."
February 11, 2010
More Houston Teachers Removed For Criminal Misconduct Than Poor Teaching
Yet More Than 100,000 HISD Students Not Reading At Grade Level
Will Tonight's School Board Action Save Public Education In Texas' Largest District?
On January 12, in a widely publicized speech, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten called for "A New Path Forward" for the nation's second largest teachers union - one that would embrace more rigorous systems of teacher evaluation that would "include student outcomes."
We don't question President Weingarten's intent or sincerity, nor do we doubt her assertion that ineffective teachers are a minority of the teaching profession.
But far too often in the past, promises by union leaders for real reform over the airwaves have been squarely contradicted by the positions advanced by union officials in political backrooms. Both national unions have steadfastly treated teaching, despite the high stakes for children and communities, as a right rather than a privilege.
The first test of AFT's commitment to the principles it outlined last month will begin tonight in Houston, and play out over the days and weeks ahead.
In a vote this evening, the Houston Board of Education is expected to approve a policy put forth by HISD President Terry Grier that would make student achievement a significant factor in teacher evaluations and create a tiered system where ineffective teachers would first be given the opportunity and resources to improve, but which would ultimately terminate their contracts if they continue to underperform.
Recent statistics show that right now, termination of teacher contracts in Houston is a rare occurrence. Last year, in a district where 100,000 students were reading below grade level. only 36 teachers, a miniscule .3% (yes, point 3 percent) of a total teaching force of 12,000 were let go for performance reasons.
Over the last five years only 140 Houston teachers were dismissed for performance reasons, while 240 were fired "mostly" for criminal activity. Could criminal misconduct, sexual abuse, workplace intoxication, and job abandonment really be almost twice as prevalent as poor job performance? It seems about as unlikely as it would be tragic.
During recent school board elections, where the biggest issue of contention was the use of student performance data in teacher evaluation, the AFT flew in staff and members from outside of both Houston and Texas in opposition to reform oriented candidates. Beginning tonight, the AFT can signal that it truly has embarked on a "New Path Forward" by standing with the Superintendent and the School Board rather than, as it had done in the past, actively working against it. The whole school reform world is watching.
February 4, 2010
DFER On UCLA Civil Rights Project Report On Overly Black Charter Schools
Democrats for Education Reform released the following statement on the newly released Civil Rights Project report on charter schools:
"The UCLA Civil Rights Project seemingly wants to block minority parents from choosing to enroll their children in better schools simply because it feels those schools aren't white enough. What's up with that?"
January 26, 2010
State Of The Union On Education
Statement on President Obama's First Year
Unfettered by inside-the-beltway partisan politics, President Obama indisputably has affected more change in the nation's education policies in his first year in office than any President in modern history.
The boost that the Administration's Race to the Top initiative - which was accompanied by a record $100 billion increase in general federal aid to education - has given state and local education reform efforts is the Administration's biggest domestic policy success of 2009 - all without yet expending a dime of the $5 billion Race to the Top fund.
What's more, while not a single Republican Congressman and only 3 Republican Senators voted for the economic and education reform stimulus package last February, the policy initiatives that Obama and Secretary Duncan put forth have since been embraced through both words and action by state and local elected officials in both parties across the ideological and geographical spectrum.
These accomplishments reflect campaign promises kept - in recognition of the relationship between education reform, jobs, and economic growth - to make education one of three key components of a long-term U.S. economic recovery strategy (the other two being energy and health care which obviously, and to say the least, have not fared as well), an augur well for the work on education reform that is yet to come.
Some effects are immediate - for example, more than a hundred thousand slots have already opened to parents across the country who want to choose a high quality public charter school for their children. Others, such as changes in state academic standards to ensure that students are college and career ready, the development of better tests, more rigorous qualification criteria and better pay for teachers, and fundamental overhauls of chronically failing schools, will pay dividends later this year, and over the next several.
These changes reflect an ongoing and historic realignment in education politics. First, the politics of education reform, at least once one gets outside the Beltway, increasingly have less to do with inter-party politics than with pragmatism and the imperative need to get children out of schools to which no parent would voluntarily choose to send their children.
Second, and equally important, it represents forward thinking by the President which reflects a broader base of support for real education reform within the Democratic party. The days when the interests of adults completely overrode those of children and parents, when elected officials not only did some of what they were asked to do by the education establishment but everything they were told, are slowly but surely coming to a close. This is the beginning of the end of monolithic control by powerful interests over education policy that has stymied sensible education reform in the U.S. for decades.
The fights are far from over. While some states that have been historically intransigent to real education reform, such as California, have enacted ground-breaking policies as part of their Race to the Top effort others, notably New York, succumbed to back room tactics and bullying by lobbyists trying to preserve and defend an educational system that is failing hundreds of thousands of children in that state alone.
Moreover, the real challenges for the Administration, the real tests of its resolve, remain. Especially in an election year, government officials will have to work hard not to succumb to political pressure to reward states that have proven to be unwilling to advance credible and ambitious reforms. A retreat to this old way of doing things in Washington would represent a squandered opportunity of epic proportions.
But if the Administration continues to keep the bar high for Race to the Top, and stays on the path of real change by making major investments only in those states and school districts that have shown the willingness to break out of the old ways of doing things, it will mark a major turning point in U.S. education policy, the effects of which will reverberate for decades.
To download DFER's handy 5-page fact sheet on "Educational Change We Can Believe In", click here.
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