On this national issue, President Obama says, “We can no longer afford an academic calendar designed for when America was a nation of farmers… That calendar may have once made sense, but today it puts us at a competitive disadvantage… That’s why I’m calling for us to not only expand effective after school programs, but to rethink the school day to incorporate more time.”

Michelle Rhee testifying before the House Education and Labor Committee at a hearing on mayor and superintendent partnerships in education held last July.

The most unlikely figure in the struggle to reform America’s education system right now is Michelle Rhee.

She’s a Korean-American chancellor of schools in a city that is mostly African-American. She’s an insurgent from the school-reform movement who spent her career on the outside of the system, her nose pressed against the glass — and now she’s in charge of some of America’s most blighted schools. Less than two years into the job, she has transformed Washington into ground zero of America’s education reform movement.

Ms. Rhee, 39, who became Washington’s sixth school superintendent in 10 years, has ousted one-third of the district’s principals, shaken up the system, created untold enemies, improved test scores, and — more than almost anyone else — dared to talk openly about the need to replace ineffective teachers.

“It’s sort of a taboo topic that nobody wants to talk about,” she acknowledged in an interview in her office, not far from the Capitol. “I used to say ‘fire people.’ And they said you can’t say that. Say, ‘separate them from the district’ or something like that.”

But pussyfooting around difficult issues hasn’t helped America’s schoolchildren, and Ms. Rhee is equally candid about the challenges she faces in a district where only 8 percent of eighth graders meet expectations in mathematics.

“D.C. is known as the most dysfunctional and worst-performing school district in the country,” she said, noting that the failures are particularly acute for poor students and members of minority groups. A black child from a low-income family in Washington enters kindergarten at the same level as a comparable child in New York City but is two years behind by the fourth grade, she said.

“Public education is supposed to be the great equalizer in this country,” Ms. Rhee said, adding, “That’s not the reality we have in D.C.” Instead, she said, children who grow up in Georgetown and those who grow up in the poor, mostly black neighborhood of Anacostia “get two wildly different educational experiences. There’s a lot of data showing that we’re utterly failing our children in this district.”

This is Ms. Rhee’s second school year, and there is upheaval and recrimination — but also progress. Test results showed more educational gains last year than in the previous four years put together.

Her aim is for Washington to become, in just six years, one of the best-performing urban school districts in the country, while drastically reducing the black-white achievement gap. “A byproduct of that,” she added, “will be that we will take away from all the other school districts and schools across the country the excuse that because the kids are poor, minority, whatever it might be, that they can’t achieve at the same high levels.”

Ms. Rhee’s weakness is her bedside manner. Her transition from rebel to chancellor has been a little rough, and she is often perceived as trying to mount a cultural revolution in a way that antagonizes teachers and itself can undermine education. Surveys show that when teachers leave their jobs, it’s not just because of low pay but also because of unhappiness with their bosses or work environment. Perhaps recognizing the problem, Ms. Rhee lately has reached out to teachers to try to explain her ideas.

The reform camp is driven partly by research suggesting that great teachers are far more important to student learning than class size, school resources or anything else. One study suggests that if black kids could get teachers from the profession’s most effective quartile for four years in a row, the achievement gap would disappear.

As a result, Ms. Rhee has proposed that teachers surrender some job protections in exchange for the chance to earn more money — up to $131,000 annually, more than double the average salary for an American public school teacher. But teachers worry, not unreasonably, that their performance is difficult to measure, that they will be judged by incompetent principals, and that promised bonuses may later dry up. For now the two sides seem stalemated.

“If we come to an impasse, we’re going to move forward with our reforms anyway,” Ms. Rhee said. “Then it potentially gets uglier.”

She’s right on both counts — it could get very ugly, and Washington’s children shouldn’t suffer indefinitely in broken schools just because of a collective-bargaining stalemate. It would help if President Obama firmly backed Ms. Rhee.

Education reform could be the most potent antipoverty program in the country, and Ms. Rhee represents the vanguard in this struggle to try new tools to revive American schools. Unless we succeed in that effort and get more students through high school and into college, no bank bailout or stimulus package will be enough to preserve America’s global leadership in the long run.

The section on KIPP begins at about minute seven.

There are a few places, very few, where great teachers are being made. A good example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP.

MODERATOR John Merrow:

Any talk of abandoning No Child Left Behind is foolish because NCLB is the continuation of a long trail of federal education legislation that traces back to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965.

Congress and the next Administration must do something, but what? That’s the question posed to a remarkable roster of deep thinkers and activists.

Can NCLB be fixed? If so, what changes must be made? How wholesale must they be?

What good has NCLB done in its short history? What harm has it done?

Its supporters say that it has forced schools to—finally—pay attention to certain groups of children who have been all but ignored. By requiring that all identifiable groups of a certain size make what is called ‘adequate yearly progress,’ NCLB has held schools’ feet to the fire.

Critics point out that the law is riddled with loopholes, and that alone has created contempt for the law. States and districts have wiggled out of many of the law’s provisions—by changing the size of the subgroups, for example, rendering ‘results’ virtually meaningless.

Supporters say NCLB forces school districts to pay attention to the credentials of the teachers it hires—finally. No longer can districts put a warm body in front of classrooms, thanks to NCLB.

Read more: http://newtalk.org/2008/08/do-we-need-a-basic-rewrite-of.php

Some of the most troubling questions about schools, such as what causes dropouts, have few clear answers because there is so little research. And the reason that data is lacking, at least in part, is that educators who would otherwise demand it are too busy with more even pressing issues, such as…

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/30/AR2008063000016.html?hpid=news-col-blog

The franchise model applied to schools

KIPP was founded in 1994 by Teach For America alums Michael Feinberg and David Levin, who now run KIPP schools in Houston and the South Bronx. In 2000, Gap founders Doris and Don Fisher donated $15 million to start the KIPP Foundation, with a goal of replicating Feinberg and Levin’s charter school model across the country. Since then, more than 50 founding principals like Singer have launched 57 KIPP schools in 17 states, plus Washington, D.C., serving over 14,000 students. Another 13 Fisher Fellows are now searching for sites and teachers for schools they will open in 2008. CEO Richard Barth says the network expects to have about 100 KIPP schools operating by 2011.

That rate of expansion is rare in today’s charter school world. Beginning in the late 1990s, for-profit education management organizations (EMOs) like New York City-based Edison Schools began expanding at what Ste­ven F. Wilson, author of Learning on the Job, called a “dizzying pace.”

Read more: http://www.hoover.org/publications/ednext/18844759.html

Fund created to support Newark charter schools via The Star-Ledger