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An education advocacy group launched by Chancellor Joel Klein and the Reverend Al Sharpton over two years ago has lost its director and faces an uncertain future.

Unveiled in 2008 in Washington D.C., the Education Equality Project was intended to influence discussion of education policy in the presidential election. (Remember those wars — manufactured or not — within the Democratic party?) It was also a way for Klein to broadcast his views on a national scale, much like former D.C. schools superintendent Michelle Rhee is doing with her new advocacy group, StudentsFirst.

After Arne Duncan was named Secretary of Education, EEP seemed to lose steam. Now comes news (via edReformer) that EEP director Ellen Winn is leaving for a job at 50CAN, where she’ll be in charge of expanding the education advocacy group’s work beyond Connecticut.

Winn’s departure was expected, said Democrats for Education Reform Executive Director Joe Williams, who is on EEP’s board, but the group hasn’t found a replacement for her yet. Williams said the board hasn’t met for several months. (more…)

The rift between the Rev. Al Sharpton and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, the two founders of the Education Equality Project, widened this weekend when Sharpton used his weekly radio address to criticize New York City’s brand of parent involvement, as we reported he would.

Sharpton told the audience at his rally in Harlem on Saturday that problems with education in the city could not be solved “without parental involvement and respect.” Dividing the mayoral control debate into two sides, he defined one faction as “our so-called liberal friends,” who he said prioritize safeguarding teachers’ jobs over the needs of children, and the other as people who say, “Let us run everything and we’ll make all the decisions,” a reference to Klein’s vision of mayoral control. (more…)

Rev. Al Sharpton (Via Creative Commons)

Rev. Al Sharpton is scheduled to host a key critic of mayoral control on his radio show tomorrow morning, in what will be the same talk that he postponed last week.

The importance of parental input in decisions about public schools will be a main topic, said Zakiyah Ansari, a parent organizer and member of the Campaign for Better Schools who will be Sharpton’s guest. A press notice about the talk says that Sharpton will join Ansari in calling on state lawmakers to build parental input into a new school governance law.

Ansari told me on the phone today that she hopes to form a “partnership” with Sharpton on the issue, though she said she’s not sure exactly what such a collaboration would entail.

Sharpton has previously said that he clashes with a more concrete partner of his, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, on the issue of mayoral control, favoring more checks and balances than Klein. The two together formed the Education Equality Project, a national advocacy network that pushes changes to public schools of the sort Klein has promoted in New York City.

But this could all get trickier if Sharpton ends up formalizing a partnership with Ansari’s group, too. The thing to watch will be exactly what kinds of changes to the 2002 mayoral control law Sharpton endorses.

Details on tomorrow’s radio show are below the jump: (more…)

Rev. Al Sharpton invited one of the strongest opponents of mayoral control onto his live radio broadcast tomorrow morning.

This is not the first time the reverend has publicly distanced himself from Schools Chancellor Joel Klein’s support for mayoral control. In April, at a conference for their shared group, the Education Equality Project, Sharpton ceded the floor to Assemblyman Charles Barron, who called for ending mayoral control of the schools. (Barron also called for Mayor Bloomberg to fire Klein.) Sharpton said he invited Barron because he wants the Education Equality Project to “hear all views.”

The appearance was postponed late this afternoon in light of the recent police shooting. Instead, Sharpton will devote his radio broadcast to a vigil for the slain officer and will address mayoral control at a later date. (more…)

We’ve said in the past that our long-term plan is to expand our Community section to include more voices. Today we’re taking a step in that direction with a contribution from Pedro Noguera, the New York University professor and co-chair of the Broader, Bolder project (the one that clashes with Rev. Al Sharpton and Chancellor Joel Klein’s Education Equality Project).

Noguera argues that David Brooks’ recent New York Times column on the Harlem Children’s Zone drew the wrong conclusion:

In most cases, these schools succeed not because they impart middle class values, (there is very little evidence that the middle class is the only group that values hard work and courteous behavior) but because of high academic expectations and a clear, coherent approach to educating children. Most importantly, these schools succeed because they also address social, health and psychological needs of the children and families they serve.

Read Noguera’s full commentary here. And please feel free to send your own commentaries. We’re building the Community section up slowly, but we are building it up.

This piece of news slipped through the cracks last month, but it seems newly relevant in light of Mayor Bloomberg’s visit to the Oval Office yesterday: In the wake of gushing visits by Arne Duncan, Obama’s new education secretary, to New York City schools, Betsy Gotbaum, the city’s public advocate, sent Duncan a cautionary note last month.

“While we both agree generally that the Mayor should retain control of the school system, I would caution against focusing too much on the data provided by the Department of Education,” Gotbaum wrote to Duncan in a letter dated April 27. “I have always said that it is a fundamental flaw that the current system gives the Mayor and the Chancellor an incentive to present information in a positive light.”

Gotbaum, who first reported the letter on her blog, enclosed a copy of the report on school governance that she commissioned and the accompanying book, which was published by the Brookings Institution.

For what it’s worth, a slightly curious thing about the visit to D.C. yesterday is that only three men entered the Oval Office with President Obama: the Rev. Al Sharpton; Newt Gingrich, the former House majority leader, and Michael Bloomberg. Joel Klein, who is a co-creator of the Education Equality Project with Sharpton, appeared later with the men outside the White House to speak to reporters, but he did not enter the Oval Office.

Gotbaum’s full letter is after the jump:

(more…)

Mayor Bloomberg will meet with President Obama this afternoon at the Oval Office to talk about the achievement gap. The meeting, which also includes the Rev. Al Sharpton and Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House majority leader, adds to signs suggesting that Obama is taking the Education Equality Project group’s stance on how to improve public schools seriously.

A spokesman for Chancellor Joel Klein, David Cantor, said that the group will discuss “education reform, in particular how best to address the racial achievement gap.”

The Washington Post reported that Sharpton, who along with Klein is a co-founder of EEP, requested the meeting.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post incorrectly said that Klein attended the meeting at the Oval Office. He did not, though he did appear with the group later outside the White House.

UPDATE: Ben Smith at Politico’s take is that the meeting is “a way for the administration to signal openness to a range of voices on the topic” of education. Seems to me it’s just the opposite, because — believe it or not — at this point Sharpton, Bloomberg, and Gingrich are actually on the same page about education. (more…)

A statistic that Joel Klein, Al Sharpton, and Mort Zuckerman have all recently employed to bemoan the racial achievement gap appears to be wrong.

Here’s the statistic, as Klein and Sharpton recently summarized in the Wall Street Journal (and Mort Zuckerman used it here):

“today the average 12th-grade black or Hispanic student has the reading, writing and math skills of an eighth-grade white student.”

The problem isn’t the principle behind the claim; America definitely has a racial achievement gap. The problem, according to an official at the National Center for Education Statistics, is in the specific way that Klein et al describe the gap.

The best available measure we have to compare all American kids is the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or the NAEP test. But the NAEP test, which is given only to a sample of students across the country, not to every child, does not permit the kind of detailed comparison Klein’s statistic would demand, Arnold Goldstein, the NCES official, said. “It would be great if we could. It’s kind of frustrating not to be able to make these sorts of statements,” said Goldstein, who is program director for design, analysis, and reporting at NCES’s assessment division. “But that’s a limitation of the data.”

I contacted the Department of Education several times for comment but got no response this week. UPDATE: A spokesman, Andrew Jacob, wrote to say that Klein got the statistic from “No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning,” a book by Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom. (more…)

This interesting comment went over the New York City public school parents list serve yesterday, from Robert Bowen, a parent of grown public school children and a member of iCOPE, Black New Yorkers for Educational Excellence, and the parent commission on school governance:

Moreover, the UFT is positioned as the legitimate opposition to mayoral control. Therefore, they alone will be the definers of the whys and wherefores of the disenting voices.

Reminds me of Sharpton being positioned as the voice of African American concerns.

Yesterday, we noted that Chancellor Klein hadn’t signed on to the “Broader, Bolder” platform. Today, we learn that Klein has a coalition and platform of his own. In Washington, D.C., today, Klein and the Reverend Al Sharpton announced the launch of the Education Equality Project, a new campaign to position education as “the civil rights issue of the 21st century” and to challenge politicians and educators to reform schools in a way that puts children’s needs before their own.

Stacked with leaders of ED in 08, an education-focused political action committee, the campaign is clearly intended to influence discussion of education policy in the presidential election. In fact, the project includes members from both political parties and plans to hold forums at both the Democratic and Republican conventions later this summer.

The 15 founding members of the project — more will join shortly, they say — represent a strange set of bedfellows. Klein and two urban superintendents created in his image — Andres Alonso, the former DOE official who now leads the Baltimore schools, and Washington, D.C., chancellor Michelle Rhee — are on the list. But so is Geoffrey Canada, whose Harlem Children’s Zone programs perhaps best approximate a vision of the Broader, Bolder approach in action. Arne Duncan, the reformist superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools, signed onto both agendas. And some of the African-American leaders who have signed on, including Sharpton and radio personality James Mtume, have in the past expressed skepticism about political leaders’ commitment to helping poor children.

The Education Equality Project’s guiding principles are essentially a summary of the DOE’s recent talking points. They call for increased pay and professional development for teachers and principals, and recourse to fire those who don’t perform well; school choice that includes charter school options; and accountability at every level. In addition, the project’s principles take aim at those who they believe make decisions in order to “make people happy” — as Rhee puts it in the DOE’s press release — instead of based on the best interests of children.

The contrast with Broader, Bolder is obvious. Adherents of the Broader, Bolder movement will say that the Education Equality Project promotes shortsighted solutions that cannot possibly equalize educational opportunity; Education Equality proponents think the Broader, Bolder folks are merely offering excuses for failing schools. And where yesterday’s statement couched a moral argument in the language of accountability-driven reform, the Education Equality Project frames a contemporary reformist agenda in starkly moral terms, alluding repeatedly to the civil rights movement. “It took our country 165 years to conclude that, under our Constitution, separate isn’t equal in education, but, still, 54 years after Brown v. Board of Education, too often our schools fail our highest needs students,” Klein said in the press release. “We need to get serious about giving all children the education they need to succeed. It won’t be easy—the status quo has lots of defenders—but it can be done and it is absolutely essential that we do it.”

With its roster of activist superintendents espousing specific policy remedies that have already gained traction in many districts, including in New York City, the Education Equality Project is poised to influence national politics this year. If it does, several undercurrents of its agenda are worth monitoring. First, the campaign appears to use the past to justify the implicit attack on organized labor contained in its agenda, saying, “As the civil rights movement itself makes clear, such transformations inevitably generate resistance and political conflict.” In addition, the project’s call for “an honest and forthright conversation about the root causes of this national failure” rings hollow given that its leaders aren’t willing to contemplate the possibly that the causes of national educational failure may have their roots outside of the schoolhouse doors. Finally, we should consider the possibility that the two coalitions rolled out this week present approaches that are not mutually exclusive; perhaps there is room for a middle path toward improved academic achievement.