Joe Williams' Blog
September 21, 2007
The Most Popular You-Tube Video That Doesn't Involve a Taser?
Washington, DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee's speech from Monday night's DFER launch event in the nation's capitol. That corsage on Whitney Tilson's lapel was actually a hidden camera.
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Posted by Joe Williams on September 21, 2007 12:31 PM
September 20, 2007
Jared Polis Update
A few weeks ago we sponsored a DFER Happy Hour in Manhattan for Jared Polis, who is running for Congress in Colorado's 2nd District. The mile-high publication Face The State takes a look at Polis here.Posted by Joe Williams on September 20, 2007 3:49 PM
Jesse Jackson Jr.: Tectonic Shift In Ed Policy?
In December 1998, I attended a rally inside the Mt. Zion Baptist Church on Milwaukee's north side. It was sponsored by the activist group People for the American Way and it was billed as a sort of "call to arms" against private school choice. Just a few months earlier, the Wisconsin Supreme Court had ruled that it was kosher to allow low-income students to use vouchers in private and religious schools. Attacking Milwaukee's groundbreaking choice program became a top priority for the National Education Association (which was helping to bankroll PFAW's work.)
The guest speaker who was flown in for the rally was a young Congressman named Jesse Jackson Jr. (More on what he said that night in a minute.) He also happened to be a guest speaker at DFER's Washington, DC launch event a couple of nights ago. (More on what he said there, as well as a link to video footage of his remarks, after the jump.)
I remember thinking how odd the whole thing was during the Milwaukee event. The Baptist Church they chose for their rally was about 100 yards away from my front door, and because I had kids of my own, I knew a lot about just how crappy the public offerings were in my neighborhood. (We lived in a crack house that we were restoring in a distressed but rapidly gentrifying part of the inner city.) Because my son was white, we were able to get him into one of the city's public magnet schools (about a mile away) with a focus on the arts. In order to preserve "racial balance," white kids got the first crack at the seats in that school; black kids had to contend with a waiting list.
So anyway, the neighborhood school serving our neighborhood (and the Baptist church hosting the rally) was a school called Palmer Elementary School. It was not only THE WORST school in Milwaukee, it was arguably one of the worst elementary schools in America. The test scores were not only shockingly low, an audit by the Milwaukee Public Schools back then showed there was actually some score tampering. I can't emphasize enough just HOW BAD the school was. As proud/arrogant white liberals, we agonized about abandoning our neighborhood school - but we ended up doing what all the other proud/arrogant white liberals did: we sent him to another public school that was filled with proud/arrogant white liberal families. (It was really a great school, and we emphatically patted ourselves on the back for supporting public education.)
Now there was another school about three blocks from the Baptist church which also made the PFAW's rally location seem bizarre to me at the time. It was (and still is) a Lutheran school called St. Marcus. Unlike Palmer (the crappiest school ever), St. Marcus was into educational ass-kicking. At a time when not every Lutheran school in Milwaukee even WANTED to be part of the voucher program (some feared letting government in would mess up their schools) St. Marcus was one of those schools where the people there seemed to believe in their heart of hearts that they were put on this planet to educate inner city school kids.
Continue reading "Jesse Jackson Jr.: Tectonic Shift In Ed Policy?"....
Posted by Joe Williams on September 20, 2007 9:33 AM
September 19, 2007
DFER's Beltway Ad-Venture
This is a copy of the ad we ran this week in Roll Call. Help us run more!
Posted by Joe Williams on September 19, 2007 2:48 PM
NYC Wins Broad Prize
Congrats to NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Chancellor Joel Klein, and thousands and thousands of administrators and teachers for taking home the Broad Prize at yesterday's ceremonies in Washington.
In their remarks, both Bloomberg and UFT President Randi Weingarten highlighted the importance of raising taxes in getting the job done. Not sure what my point is, but I thought that was an interesting concession. In Bloomberg's case, he noted the link between raising taxes and the 40-something percent raises awarded to teachers since he took control of the NYC schools in 2002. Weingarten referred to improvements to the level of basic resources in schools in recent years.
In light of what we're now seeing from Washington, DC in Mayor Fenty, it seems that a strong case is being built that giving control of big city school systems to mayors can (and in many cases should) result in education becoming a top priority during budget season. And when you have a mayor whose reputation is on the line, that additional spending has the potential to be more closely aligned with results than garden variety reform by cash infusion.
But if you're not convinced, perhaps we could try a serious pilot experiment in a place like Newark, N.J. What say you?
Posted by Joe Williams on September 19, 2007 1:09 PM
DFER Launch In DC
I'm late in posting this, as the last few days have been a whirlwind, but thanks to many of our DFER friends in the DC area for helping us celebrate our launch Monday night at the Hotel Washington.
Special thanks to Rep. James Clyburn, the House Majority Whip, as well as DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. for joining in the festivities.
USA Today's Richard Whitmire, blogging on the Education Writer's Association's edu-presidential blog, covered the event here.
More on the event (particularly Jesse Jackson Jr.'s speech) in a little while.
UPDATE: Elizabeth Rich, via David Hoff's NCLB Blog, also has filed a dispatch from the event.
UPDATE II: Alexander Russo, at This Week In Education, now has DFER on his world renowned Hype Alert index and says we're so new we make KIPP and Green Dot "look like accomplished veterans" in the hyposphere. He also asks a bunch of important questions, which I will answer for him the next time he is drinking our booze!
Posted by Joe Williams on September 19, 2007 12:50 PM
So School Districts Can Really Be Trusted To Do Right Thing?
Many critics of the No Child Left Behind law have been pushing the traditional Republican line that the federal government ought to keep its nose out of local school issues, that school districts - because they involve many good people at the local level - are working hard and have every natural incentive in place to do whatever it takes to make sure ALL kids get what they need from the system.
Sam Dillon's stomach-turning piece in the NY Times Monday morning serves as a reminder why that kind of utopic view is simply unrealistic.
The full story is after the jump, but the lead paragraph in the story is not only devastating, but a reminder of how little has changed in our nation over the years. The kids whose parents don't have power get screwed. The No Child Left Behind law was supposed to empower many of these parents, but has pretty much not been inforced by the Bush administration for reasons which still are unclear to me. As a result, local school districts around the nation have gotten away with murder, even while claiming to be doing good. (These are the same districts that want even more flexibility in the next version of NCLB.)
From Dillon's story:
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — After white parents in this racially mixed city complained about school overcrowding, school authorities set out to draw up a sweeping rezoning plan. The results: all but a handful of the hundreds of students required to move this fall were black — and many were sent to virtually all-black, low-performing schools.
Continue reading "So School Districts Can Really Be Trusted To Do Right Thing?"....
Posted by Joe Williams on September 19, 2007 9:57 AM
