GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Teachers unions, school district officials, and lawmakers have all weighed in on New York State’s Race to the Top application with varying degrees of skepticism and enthusiasm, but few have given any thought to the legal issues behind the experiment.

Last night, students at Columbia Law School held a panel discussion on Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s competitive grant program that, in its first round, will award several states hundreds of millions of dollars to adopt the Obama administration’s education policies. The question put before the panel is one any federal initiative like Race to the Top is apt to bring up: Is this experiment stepping too heavily on states’ policy toes?

The panelists included Marcus Winters, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Deborah Meier, a columnist for Education Week, James Liebman, a law school professor and the NYC Department of Education’s former accountability chief, Richard Iannuzzi, president of the state teachers union, and Dan Weisberg, a vice president at The New Teacher Project. (more…)

Has President Obama finally picked a side in the education wars? Three prominent New Yorkers are worrying that he is at least leaning — and that it’s not in the right direction.

Deborah Meier, the respected small schools pioneer, said President Obama’s appointment of Arne Duncan as education secretary “leaves me sad.” Today, Diane Ravitch, the NYU historian and Meier’s blogging partner, described Duncan as “Margaret Spellings in drag.” “This is not change I can believe in,” she wrote in Politico. And on Saturday, Ann Cook, another small-school movement doyenne, said she is also concerned about  Obama’s choice of Duncan.

All three women sympathize with the “Broader, Bolder” manifesto, which argues that schools alone cannot be expected to close the achievement gap and whose members are more suspicious of popular innovations such as charter schools and test-driven accountability systems. Schools Chancellor Joel Klein leads another camp, which strongly supports test-based accountability, the No Child Left Behind law, and charter schools. Klein’s Education Equality Project circulated a rival petition.

Obama made a point of not selecting a side in the debate. He chose two top education advisers, one from each camp. And he touted his chosen education secretary, Duncan, who had signed both petitions, as a pragmatist. But in the last few weeks, concerns about Duncan have begun to surface. (more…)

The panel where Linda Darling-Hammond spoke yesterday.

Linda Darling-Hammond may be feared and loathed by the younger reform set, but among the people who sat with me last night on the Upper East Side to watch her talk, she is such a star! Before the start of the panel, put on by Bank Street College of Education, all I could hear was the simultaneous sound of my Blackberry buzzing with eager e-mails about her and audience members asking their neighbors, “Has Linda arrived yet?”

She finally did, apparently via the very last available train to New York from Washington, D.C., where she had been for Barack Obama’s inauguration. At the panel, she quickly made it clear how dramatically accountability regimes would change if she is given a major role in the Obama administration. (Of course, that’s a big if: Though Darling-Hammond chaired the education policy team for Obama’s transition, it’s looking like those who have the ear of new Education Secretary Arne Duncan come from a different set. She didn’t comment on this yesterday.)

Darling-Hammond laid out a dramatic picture of how she hopes Obama will change American schools, one that (for the most part) differed substantially from the vision currently in vogue, the “idealocrat” program Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has pushed. Darling-Hammond’s big idea is to move America away from a factory model of education, where teachers are seen as trade workers, and toward a model that treats teachers as just as important as doctors or lawyers. The change, as she sees it, requires that teachers are given better and more extensive training, and that the federal government change the way it evaluates their work, moving from No Child Left Behind’s standardized test-based system into one based on sensitive open-ended assessments that schools might create themselves.

She hinted that the last part might be the biggest challenge — to “get the measuring right.” (more…)

One of the books I read during my blogging vacation was “Those Who Dared: Five Visionaries Who Changed American Education.” The new volume, edited by Carl Glickman, contains autobiographical essays by five progressive educators. This week, I’ll be highlighting the most provocative observation made by each one.

First up is Deborah Meier, one of the progenitors of the small schools movement who founded an influential elementary school, Central Park East, in East Harlem in 1974. She went on to help create a host of non-traditional schools in the neighborhood and now teaches at New York University’s education school.

A proponent of play, democratic classrooms, and assessments other than standardized tests, Meier generally isn’t part of the education policy discussion dominated by fans of “no excuses” schools such as KIPP. But in her essay, she describes one challenge currently facing some “idealocrat” reformers: How to sustain innovative schools that are only barely able to exist in the first place. On that question, Meier doesn’t have much advice. She writes:

None of the schools I started were permanently protected from the standardizing influences that have surrounded them in the last 20 years. Above all, I never figured out how, in the world of here and now, such schools could survive without very particular conditions — strong godfathers, politically strong leadership, and few key politically hep parents. Sustainability, short of revolutionizing the entire system to one’s way of thinking or breaking free altogether of the public system, has eluded me.

Congressman George Miller

As the Education Secretary fight nears an end, everyone is trying to figure out how to describe the two sides of the battle for Barack Obama’s affection. But I don’t think any of the recent descriptions — from the Associated Press (“reform advocates”) to Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter (“bomb throwers”) to The New Republic (“Reform School”) — live up to the standards of my New York Sun editor, Ira Stoll, who declared that the word “reform” is hopelessly imprecise and banned it from my writing.

All the more reason to turn our name-those-reformers contest into its final bend. The newest entry is from George Miller, the chairman of the House’s education committee. Jonathan Alter reports:

Rep. George Miller, the leading voice on education in Congress, told me recently that “the debate is between incrementalists and disrupters, and I’m with the disrupters.” So is Bill Gates. The father of disruptive software is ready for another revolution.

The disrupters may not be a real word (or at least a word entered in my computer’s dictionary), but it is a neat proposal. It’s the same distinction Randi Weingarten makes between herself and Joel Klein. As she told the Times, her vision is “sustainable and incremental change.” Klein wants “radical reform.”

But I still have some concerns. (more…)