Education reform and charter schools

I wish Sen. Bryles were here. This morning's program was an in-depth debate on education reform, and it really challenged those of us who've refused to consider using public funds for alternatives to traditional public schools. We toured one of the KIPP schools here in inner-city New Orleans, and what I saw was amazing.

Teachers here use the Socratic method with 5th graders (the term is actually disfavored -- they refer to themselves as the Class of 2017, which is the year of their anticipated freshman year of college), and the rigorous curriculum requires students to be in class over 50 hours per week. Local autonomy allows teachers of specific subjects to take one day off from teaching every other week to brainstorm with other teachers in the field about what is working and what isn't. 60% of the post-Katrina schools here are charter schools. I'm not convinced that charter schools are a long-term answer, but they're working here, and some of the discussion is fascinating. If nothing else, many of the fundamentals taught here challenge traditional public schools, which can spark positive change within public schools. I'll take this up when I get some time this evening. The next program starts now.

Up next: The perspective from traditional public schools and policy makers in post-Katrina New Orleans. It'll be led by Paul Vallas, quite possibly the nation's most sought after superintendent, who's led the public school efforts in Chicago, Philadelphia, and now New Orleans. The main point today has been that ideas, not broad generalizations of different forms of education, are what matters.

Politics: I come from a teacher household, and my grandmother was a teacher, so I grew up with that perspective. While teachers are one constituency who are generally skeptical of educational reform (or at least many of the proposals historically associated with it), I've always thought that teachers want to do one thing: they want to teach, and they want to do it in a way that is as free as possible of interference from bureaucracy. Administrators are no different. One reason teachers have traditionally opposed some sort of reform is that they've been demonized in the past. People aren't the problem, the system is the problem. Plus, if I've learned one thing, it's that these groups don't like mandates being passed down from policy makers who have no idea how the policies affect classroom education in reality. One problem is that education reform has become so politicized that the mere mention of specific words ("accountability," etc.) will draw fire from both sides. So the way I see it, we can either give up at that point and remain 49th in education, or we can be persistent and find out the real motivation for the resistance to change. What are the fears and concerns that get in the way of change if the object is to bring reform to schools? And are the historic proposals for reform (required testing, NCLB, charters, etc, etc) the best solution to keep us competitive both nationally and globally for the next generation?

Conclusion:

For more than a decade, debating education reform has remained gridlocked. People on the right have advocated vouchers and otherwise privatizing the public school system. People on the left want to pour more money into the current system. We need to find some middle ground and reduce the overregulation. Easier said than done, but at the very least, we can start trying to break the impasse of the last decade.

Even though many of the terms used in the debate are threatening to both sides, one thing is certain: we need to put the interests of kids ahead of the interests of adults.

The strongest argument in favor of some form of permanent change is the underperformance of public schools (especially the bottom third). Closing this achievement gap is the biggest civil rights issue of our time.

There is a risk in breaking out of the current system, but it's not as big a risk as remaining locked in the same impasse we've seen for the last decade.