When the clock expires, a teacher evaluation system devised by the State Education Department would go into effect, according to the plan outlined in a letter signed by 13 reform organizations from across the state and country. The groups — which include Democrats for Education Reform and and StudentsFirst, Michelle Rhee’s new lobbying outfit — argue both that more stringent evaluations are needed and that the state cannot afford to leave funding on the table during tough budget times.

The state’s teacher evaluation law, passed in 2010in order to secure Race to the Top funding, requires districts to adopt tougher evaluations when they renegotiate teachers contracts. But if they want to draw on several pools of federal funds, they have to finalize the new evaluations sooner. Dec. 31 was the deadline for one set of funds, School Improvement Grants. Another deadline, for Race to the Top funds, is coming on June 30.

Now the reform groups want the state to set another deadline — Aug. 31 — and they want it to apply to all districts, not just ones seeking federal funding. The groups are suggesting to Cuomo that districts that haven’t negotiated a plan by then would have to adopt a “default” plan and put it in place by the following year.

In some ways, the proposal is redolent of city Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott’s request last week that State Education Commissioner John King help the city hammer out an evaluation system without the union’s help. But in this case, both the districts and the unions would be cut out of the process to devise new evaluations.

The proposal doesn’t outline what exactly the default plan would look like. But the lack of a default option makes New York’s evaluation negotiations more complicated than in some other states receiving Race to the Top funding, representatives of reform groups told GothamSchools last year.

Putting a default option in place would require an amendment to the state’s teacher evaluation law, according to SED officials.

The idea of a plan B on evaluations is likely to find a receptive audience in Cuomo, who is expected to propose education policy changes in his second “State of the State” address tomorrow. But the governor, who said last week that he was “disappointed” that districts had not been able to agree on teacher evaluations and urged them to return to the negotiating table, has had mixed results when trying to push specific education policies. In May 2011, the Board of Regents approved a policy change he sought, to make teacher evaluations depend even more heavily on state test scores than the law requires. That regulation was rolled back after a lawsuit by the state teachers union.

The full letter from the reform groups is below:

Dear Governor Cuomo:

We are gravely concerned about New York’s credibility when it comes to living up to our promise of providing every child in the state with an outstanding classroom teacher. As you are aware, labor and management from school districts in many parts of the state have so far failed to implement key provisions of the state’s Race to the Top laws. These laws passed with bi-partisan support in our state’s successful attempt to win $700 million in federal funds for public schools.

It has been widely documented that one of the reasons New York beat out so many other states in President Obama’s RTTT competition was the enthusiastic pledge by leaders of both education labor and management to work collaboratively to implement new teacher evaluations which would highlight the exceptional work done by effective classroom teachers.  See video of New York’s representatives promising to work together to implement the RTTT plan here.

Like other winning states, New York promised it would implement the reforms that came with the money. Nearly two years later, however, all that the students of New York’s public schools have to show for this grand bargain is foot-dragging and politicking by the same grownups who assured the federal government we were serious.

To avert a situation where New York is forced to return hundreds of millions of sorely-needed federal dollars, we urge you to consider introducing “shot clock” style measures to ensure that all school districts will fully implement the state’s new teacher evaluation framework in accordance with the Race to the Top timeline.

New York cannot afford to leave federal money on the table at a time when its schools are already facing budgetary hardships.  Federal education officials have made clear their intention to hold states accountable to their Race to the Top programs, as seen recently in the case of Hawaii.  Hawaii’s failure to secure a collective bargaining agreement with its teachers’ union contributed to it being placed on “high-risk status,” in danger of losing its grant and subject to extensive review and reporting requirements.

Aside from the fact that we believe that implementing these new, modernized teacher evaluation systems is the right thing to do, we are also mindful there are other federal funding streams which could be jeopardized by this high-profile impasse.  New York City, alone, has almost $60 million in federal School Improvement Grants at risk after its negotiations with the United Federation of Teachers around a pilot system for evaluating teacher performance broke down this past Friday.  It is also endangering tens of millions of dollars in federal Teacher Incentive Fund grants earmarked for its teachers, because it has not adopted a system which recognizes and highlights great teaching.

To ensure that the City and the state’s other districts fulfill New York’s promises to its schoolchildren, we request that you introduce a back-stop measure that requires districts to develop teacher evaluation plans by August 31, 2012.  Any district that has not successfully negotiated its own plan by that date will have to automatically carry out a “default” plan, to be created by the State Education Department.  Those districts would have one year (until August 31, 2013) to install and fully implement their default plan systems.

Governor, we thank you for your efforts to date to strengthen New York’s focus on educational  measures and accountability, most recently by introducing your School District Performance Improvement Awards program to incentivize districts to make innovative reforms that improve student performance.

Research studies have demonstrated, time and again, that the most impactful factor on the level of learning in a classroom is the quality of its teacher.  At this critical juncture when the state faces a key deadline in implementing a teacher evaluation framework that will impact its students for years to come, we ask that you step up again to ensure that the task gets accomplished.

Sincerely,

Buffalo ReformED: Press Contact:  Hannya Boulos – Hannya@BuffaloReformED.com – 716-783-3372
Civic Builders: Press Contact:  David Umansky – Umansky@civicbuilders.org – 212-571-7260
Democracy Builders: Press Contact:  Rev. Jamaal Nelson – jnelson@democracybuilders.org – 646-281-9164
Democrats for Education Reform: Press Contact:  Elizabeth Ling – elizabeth@dfer.org – 646-599-6123
Education Reform Now: Press Contact:  Myles Mendoza – myles@edreformnow.org – 303-912-0267
Educators 4 Excellence: Press Contact:  Sydney Morris – sydneymorris@educators4excellence.org – 212-279-8510 ext. 10
National Council on Teacher Quality: Press Contact:  Sandi Jacobs – sjacobs@nctq.org – 202-393-0020
The New Teacher Project: Press Contact:  Andy Jacob – ajacob@tntp.org – 347-987-0749
NYCAN: The New York Campaign for Achievement Now: Press Contact:  Christina Grant – Christina.Grant@NYCAN.org – 516-749-9462
Parent Power Project: Press Contact:  Carrie Remis – carrie.remis@parentpowerproject.org – 585-350-8306
StudentsFirst: Press Contact:  Nancy Zuckerbrod – nancy@studentsfirst.org – 301-204-9391
Students for Education Reform: Press Contact:  Alexis Morin – alexis@studentsforedreform.org – 774-258-0024
Turnaround for Children: Press Contact:  Pamela Cantor, MD – pacantormd@tfcusa.org – 646-786-6200

Screenshot of the campaign page against the UFT/NAACP lawsuit (click to enlarge)

Michelle Rhee’s new advocacy organization is jumping into the fight between the NAACP and charter school families with a new email campaign that has been flooding elected officials’ inboxes since Friday.

The campaign targets elected officials who co-signed a lawsuit, along with the teachers union and the NAACP, demanding that the Bloomberg administration halt its plans to close struggling district schools and replace them with charters.

Students First, which Rhee founded last year, sponsored the campaign, titled “Tell NYC Officials: Don’t Decrease Charter School Space.”

“Remove Your Name from the Charter School Lawsuit,” reads the subject line in the identical emails, which has been sent to the dozen officials listed as plaintiffs in the suit. In four days, more than 550 emails have been sent from people from all over New York State.

“New York needs more quality public school options,” the email reads.

“That is why I ask that you remove your name from the lawsuit that threatens to close several existing charter s ychools [sic] and to prevent others from enrolling new children. This action is tantamount to condemning thousands of kids to failing schools who otherwise would have an opportunity at a great education.”

The campaign is one of the first steps Rhee’s new organization is taking in New York. (She also organized her supporters to send a letter urging Governor Cuomo to oppose seniority-based layoffs.) In New York, Rhee enters an education advocacy landscape that has so far been dominated by the teachers union and its allies on one side and the lobbying group Democrats for Education Reform, along with Mayor Bloomberg, on the other.

The emails targeting the school closure lawsuit appear to be sent to elected officials without much consideration of their constituencies. City Council Member Letitia James of Brooklyn said that few if any emails she received were from the central Brooklyn neighborhoods she represents. They’ve come from Wappingers Falls, Kingston (upstate New York), West Islip, Merrick (Long Island), and the other city boroughs, she said.

“I applaud their activism,” James said. But she said that the petition will not change her opinion on the city’s handling of closures and co-locations, which she called “poor public policy.”

The plaintiffs were initially alerted that the emails came from a Students First initiative in an email sent by UFT officials.

It’s not clear whether the campaign has had an effect on other elected officials listed in the suit; many did not respond to requests for comment.

In addition to James, the other elected officials listed as plaintiffs are Stephen Levin, Erik Martin Dilan, Mark Weprin, Charles Barron, Ruben Wills, and Robert Jackson, of the city council; Eric Adams, Tony Avella, and Bill Perkins, of the state senate; State Assemblyman Alan Maisel and Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr.

A spokesperson for Students First did not respond to several requests seeking comment.

“I think the message is the following, and I think the D.C. community is sending that message to Mayor [Vincent] Gray, which is: We want to continue on this path,” he said.

“We may want some changes in this or that, and I think the best thing he can do is establish himself as a political independent — someone who’s willing not to listen to all the moneyed interests, but actually listen to the people, and ultimately the kids in D.C. — is to go forward with a really strong committed aggressive reform. That’s what the city needs, everybody knows it.”

The chancellor also praised D.C.’s interim superintendent, Kaya Henderson, and called on her to continue Rhee’s policies of closing poor-performing schools and firing incompetent teachers.

Under a proposed “mutual consent” provision, principals would have more power to pick and choose teachers. Teachers who failed to find new assignments would have three options. They could remain on the payroll for a year, accepting at least two spot assignments as substitutes or tutors or in some other support role. If they can’t find a permanent job after a year, they would be fired. Teachers could also choose to take a $25,000 buyout or, if they have at least 20 years’ service to the city school system, retire with full benefits.

If Weingarten’s willing to make these job security concessions for excessed teachers in D.C., maybe she’d also nudge the UFT to give ground on ATR’s in New York.

Klein said the problem with the Republican coup is the possible gridlock it creates. If Senate Democrats challenge the GOP takeover in court, an ensuing legal battle could prevent any legislation from passing, Klein said. And if the legal battle dragged on through June 30, the date at which the current school law sunsets, that would send the city schools back to their pre-2002 structure — a situation many of the fiercest critics of the law have said they do not want.

Klein’s uneasiness with this week’s takeover challenges the argument that a Republican Senate is a boon to the effort to renew mayoral control. “Uncertainty is a bad thing,” Klein said.

For her part, Weingarten said that two days ago she would have predicted a reasonable compromise on a mayoral control law by the end of the month. But she said that the news from the Senate upended her confidence.

The roundtable discussion was organized by the journal Democracy, and it also included D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and Peter Edelman, of the Georgetown Law Center and a signatory of the Broader, Bolder statement on how to improve American schools.

The report goes on:

This inability not only keeps schools from dismissing consistently poor performers, but also prevents them from recognizing excellence among top-performers or supporting growth among the broad plurality of hardworking teachers who operate in the middle of the performance spectrum. Instead, school districts default to treating all teachers as essentially the same, both in terms of effectiveness and need for development.

The report, conducted by The New Teacher Project, a nonprofit founded by the lightning-rod D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, calls on districts to develop more robust teacher evaluation systems that reward successful teachers and easily identify less successful teachers.

The report comes amid a growing push to improve teaching quality across the country. President Obama has said that teachers who are not helping students learn should be removed from classrooms, and even the national American Federation of Teachers union is working internally to build a new method of evaluating teacher quality.

The report bases its findings on surveys of thousands of teachers and administrators across four states and 12 school districts, plus a scouring of the districts’ evaluation records. New York City was not one of the districts studied.

Many of the districts evaluate teachers based on less than a handful of observations, each of which last under an hour, and in some cases just 15 minutes. Across all districts, almost no teachers are rated unsatisfactory, and virtually none are dismissed for poor performance; in districts that rate teachers either competent or not, the ratio rated unsatisfactory versus satisfactory stands at 1 to 99.

That’s despite teachers’ and principals’ reports, in surveys, that at least one of their tenured colleagues is performing poorly, a statement that 81 percent of administrators and 58 percent of teachers surveyed told The New Teacher Project they agreed with. The percentages of educators reporting that tenured colleagues are not competent rises as a school’s students become more impoverished, as the chart above shows.

In New York City, principals rate teachers as either “unsatisfactory” or “satisfactory” at the end of each school year, based on observations they have conducted during the year. A sense that the system was too perfunctory led the Department of Education to create new teacher data reports last year that look at how teachers affect their students’ test scores. The reports have been criticized for their shaky statistical grounding, and a law lobbied for by the city teachers union prevents principals from using the data reports when making tenure decisions.

The New Teacher Project has been criticized in the past by teachers union president Randi Weingarten, who called its studies of the New York City teacher market biased because TNTP has a contract with the city to help bring new teachers into the public schools. TNTP also is the group behind a report urging the city to save money by terminating teachers who are currently without positions. To write this study, TNTP worked with union leaders and school district leaders in the districts studied, which include Chicago; Toledo, Ohio; Denver, Colo.; and Little Rock, Ark.

In a statement, Weingarten said she embraced the thrust of the new report but noted that it ignores a pioneering method of teacher evaluation, peer assistance and review, that has shown gains where it is being used, most notably in Toledo. “We are excited that TNTP shares our goal of redesigning teacher evaluations, and we look forward to working with TNTP and others to improve the quality of instruction in our schools,” she said.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the philanthropist Eli Broad at an inauguration party thrown by Broad. (Via Flickr)

The education philanthropist Eli Broad is based in Los Angeles, but at an event this week in Manhattan he painted a vivid picture of the unique influence he’s exerted in the New York City schools.

Broad said that his foundation has given money to the two charter schools the union president here, Randi Weingarten, opened; has trained seven or eight of the top officials in Chancellor Joel Klein’s Department of Education; and was a player in Klein and Weingarten’s merit-based pay deal.

The remarks came at an event at the 92nd Street Y Monday, where the writer Matthew Bishop of the Economist interviewed Broad on a small stage. Broad said the close relationship began as soon as Klein took the job. “From the first day Joel took office, literally, we met with him,” he said. He is close with other education leaders, too.

In Washington, D.C., the Broad Foundation has met repeatedly with superintendent Michelle Rhee and is believed to be one of the groups that would fund Rhee’s plan to give teachers more money in exchange for giving up tenure rights. Broad said on Monday that several of his staff members are taking jobs in Arne Duncan’s U.S. Department of Education.

The relationships are part of the Broad Foundation’s aggressive education agenda, which includes opening many charter schools, adopting corporate models for school leadership, and changing the way teachers are compensated. Because they are not beholden to public opinion, philanthropies can be “far more aggressive” in their goals than most politicians, Broad said. “We don’t mind taking risks. We don’t mind being criticized, at times even being hung in effigy,” he said.

Broad said his foundation has taken a hit from the economic downturn, seeing its endowment drop in value by 25%. But he said he plans to continue in the business of education giving and offered a few indications of where he might redirect his spending now that his other pet issue, stem cell research, is being funded by the Obama administration. “I’m a big believer in mayoral control,” he said. Earlier, he’d explained his interest in the way school systems are run: “We don’t know anything about how to teach or reading curriculum or any of that. But what we do know about is management and governance.”

He said the continued giving will be important as nonprofit organizations see their capacity shrink. He cited the Harlem Children’s Zone and the Robin Hood Foundation as two organizations that relied heavily on hedge-fund donations and therefore have lost a substantial amount of money in the downturn.

Broad also cited results emerging from the Broad-funded Education Innovation Laboratory, run by the economist Roland Fryer, who previously served beneath Klein. He described the divide inside the Democratic Party and said that Fryer’s preliminary research supports the side he and Klein favor, whose belief he summarized as the idea that schools alone can help close the achievement gap. He said the other side of the debate argues that environmental factors affect the achievement gap as well.

He said his education ventures haven’t always been successful. His foundation backed ED in 08, the national campaign intended to raise make education an issue in last year’s elections. About ED in 08, Broad said simply, “We didn’t succeed.” He said that while candidates adopted pieces of the campaign’s platform, it failed to make inroads in the national consciousness. “It amazes me that the American people don’t get it,” he said. Later, while discussing ED in 08′s call for an extended school year, he said, “The public seems to like long summer vacations.”

“We’re often accused of having too much influence in education,” Broad said. “I’m not sure how you’d restrict that.” While foundations and nonprofits are barred by law from getting involved in politics, they might expand their reach by spinning off organizations with a different tax status that allows them to back political candidates and lobby for pieces of legislation, Broad said. He said the Klein-chaired Education Equality Project is considering doing just that.

Michelle Rhee touted her red-track/green-track teacher pay proposal last night at Pace University, saying it’s made such a splash that Mayor Bloomberg asked Chancellor Joel Klein if they could bring a similar model to New York. The proposal, which is being negotiated with the D.C. teachers union right now, would award some first-year teachers nearly $40,000 raises in exchange for giving up their tenure rights — while others could choose a “red” path where they retain tenure but are paid less.

Rhee said the model came up in a recent chat with Klein, who she said she speaks to regularly to share “best practices” and to commiserate. Klein told her that Mayor Bloomberg had asked if they could bring the red/green plan to New York. “Apparently Klein said to him, ‘Not even you have enough money to do all of that in New York City,’” she said. Rhee’s plan, if passed, will be financed by private philanthropy for the first five years, she said.

A spokesman for the Department of Education, David Cantor, said the story is true.

Rhee spent part of her talk referencing the divide within the Democratic Party, where some education experts argue focus should be on improving schools and schools alone and others push for a broader focus. Rhee, who is firmly in the first camp, along with Klein, explained her objections to the second group by describing her experience as a second-year teacher.

“People say all the time you know, oh, children, if they don’t have proper health care and they don’t have proper nutrition and they don’t have their parents helping them with their homework, they’re never going to be able to be successful,” she said. “With these kids, my kids, their neighborhoods did not change, who their parents were did not change, the violence in the community did not change, their diets did not change. What changed were the adults who were in front of them every single day in school. And that made every bit of difference.”

Rhee got a warm reception at Pace, where many in the audience were young teachers in the Teach For America and Teaching Fellows programs. The teachers seemed especially grateful when Rhee agreed with their criticisms of policies like testing students still learning English in English, rather than Spanish, and test-prepping, which Rhee said she works to avoid by educating principals to set good examples at their schools.

She also laid out her plan for a teacher evaluation system, set to begin next school year, that will look not only at test scores but also use third-party evaluators to conduct observations and require teachers and principals to work together to set goals for their entire school.

Rhee said she intended to come to Pace and recruit all the teachers to come work for her in D.C., but hesitated when she saw that Pace is just a few blocks away from Tweed Courthouse, Klein’s headquarters. “When I realized that, I felt a twinge of guilt,” she said, laughing. “But now I’m over it.”

One question from the audience dealt with mayoral control. The questioner asked whether Rhee thought someone should add “checks and balances” to her authority, asking what would happen if a new mayor and chancellor came to D.C. and she didn’t agree with them.

Rhee replied by explaining that she would never have taken the job if the D.C. mayor, Adrian Fenty, had not had total control of the schools and given her 100% encouragement. “The answer ultimately is how do we get more people like Adrian Fenty into office,” she said.

Moral: Do not forget about our excellent calendar, which updates itself based on your event tips! Tonight not only is Rhee speaking at Pace, but the Citywide Council on Special Education is having an open meeting about the coming special ed overhaul — featuring Garth Harries, the school official who will lead the changes, and Marcia Lyles, the deputy chancellor for teaching and learning.

Just days into Harries’ assignment on the special education beat, advocates have already criticized Chancellor Joel Klein for choosing him, complaining that Harries lacks any experience with special education. Tonight, Harries will have a chance to explain his plans.

With all due respect, Mr. President, this is the problem with public officials sending their kids to private schools. The real story in Washington this year was how D.C. public schools, usually spooked by a light dusting, didn’t close after Tuesday’s snowstorm, thanks to the tough-it-out policies of Chancellor Michelle Rhee. This is a longstanding gripe of mine, how private schools, even ones located in D.C., following the weather guidelines in Montgomery County, Md., as if they float above the actual city.

UPDATE: As a commenter points out below, Sidwell Friends’ lower school, where Obama’s younger daughter Sasha is in second grade, is in Bethesda, Maryland. So it kind of makes sense for Sidwell to follow the Maryland schools. Also, having gone to Maryland public schools K-12, I have to say that I fully support snow days.

This gives me an opportunity to explain once again why I think this contest is important — not just a ring of fire that you should be terrified to wade into, as The New Republic’s Seyward Darby sort of suggested, but a good launchpad for serious debate.

For those not paying attention, the point of the contest is to find an adjective to put before “reformer” that could quickly and fairly and without bias describe a certain type of education activist. The group includes Wendy Kopp of Teach For America, Joel Klein of New York, and Michelle Rhee of D.C. It does not include another set of people who consider themselves education reformers, but object to Kopp, Klein, and Rhee’s methods.

And that’s why it matters, because as much as the Kopps and Rhees would like to own the reformer title, and as much as the mainstream media lets them get away with that, describing only one side of the debate as reformers is neither accurate nor fair nor conducive to robust debate. Rather than hand the glory to one team, we should describe what policies the team wants and then evaluate whether they work.

Ezra Klein made a similar point earlier this week:

Moreover, the point of education policy is not reform credentials or even bipartisan policies. It’s better policy. But the composition of better policy is often assumed rather than argued. The debate over education policy has become unmoored from education policy and is now a debate over whether you are an “old” style Democrat in hock to the unions or an awesome new style reformer who has two! separate! blackberries! That’s not good. It’s possible that Darby or others want to argue that Darling-Hammond’s ideas are bad ones, but thus far, we’ve not seen much of that.

So, smart readers, what do you think of “idealocrats”? Are we ready to anoint a winner?

Time’s story rehashes much of the same ground that other recent profiles of Rhee have covered: it describes her controversial, take-no-prisoners attitude, nimbly Blackberrying fingers, and unwavering commitment to results. (There is at least one new tidbit: Rhee, a darling of the group Democrats for Education Reform, had to be convinced to vote for Barack Obama.)

Responses to the article in the education blogosphere reflect an ongoing tension within the education policy world between those who back radical change and those who take a more cautious approach to reform. Blogging at Flypaper, Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Institute writes that he thinks “it’s hard not to root for Michelle Rhee.” NYC Educator, on the other hand, scathingly outlines the reasons why she’s a danger to teachers. In a post titled “Michelle Rhee is Scaring Me,” Robert Pondiscio takes a middle path, saying that Rhee’s tactics might not be the best means to an end desired by many, including Pondiscio himself.

One of the most interesting responses I’ve seen doesn’t address Rhee’s controversial tactics at all. At Flypaper, Petrilli notes that it’s been nearly two decades since Time put an education official on its cover. (A New York City teacher made the cover earlier this year.)

Who was the last education bigwig on the magazine’s cover? Lamar Alexander, back in 1991. Alexander, then President George Bush’s secretary of education, got the country’s attention by unrelentingly pushing for school choice. He even advocated for public funds to be given to religious schools.

About Alexander, Time asked optimistically, “Can this man save our schools?” I think it’s safe to say that Alexander didn’t fix everything that’s wrong with America’s schools. Nor did his favored policies enter the education mainstream. It seems unthinkable now, but 20 years from now, might Rhee have similarly faded from memory?

But some alumni questioned the feasibility of the warrior lifestyle that Klein said is embodied by TFA grads such as D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee and KIPP charter school founder Dave Levin.

“We want to be like you,” a TFA alum told who now works for the DOE stood up to tell his current boss, District 79 Superintendent Cami Anderson. But he asked how it’s possible for a regular person to make a difference and still have a personal life. Anderson, a former TFA regional director for New York City, has a reputation for putting in long hours and having almost limitless energy.

Confessing to her own struggles with burnout, Anderson acknowledged that closing the achievement gap isn’t going to happen in just a few years, so the work must be sustainable. Before taking her current DOE position, she said, she set personal goals for herself, such as leaving work twice a week at 6 p.m. and sometimes reading frivolous books.

And Levin, whose KIPP schools have been criticized for asking for a superhuman commitment from teachers, said it’s time to stop perpetuating the idea that it’s impossible to work in urban schools and still raise a family.

Anderson and Levin were among several speakers at the summit who encouraged TFA alums to engage in ground-level activism in support of improved schools. Another speaker touted 18 TFA alums who have been elected to political office around the country, and an optional panel offered instructions about how to leverage community boards.

I am an alumna of TFA and a current staff person. 60% of our Corps members stay in education after their 2 year committment. The idea is to cultivate more Michelle Rhees, Mike Feinbergs, and David Levins as well as more people like Cami Anderson (Superindendent of District 79 in NYC). While I don’t think Wendy Kopp is a strong candidate for Secretary of Education due to her lack of actual teaching experience I do not feel that TFA is part of the problem.

Quick explainer: Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin are the founders of the KIPP charter school network, Michelle Rhee is the chancellor of the D.C. public schools, and Cami Anderson runs alternative schools in New York City. All are TFA alums.

Bad schools often have bad leaders. The most dangerous result of dissolving tenure would be the end of a safety net for teachers who are unfairly or arbitrarily fired. With tenure such a scenario is virtually impossible. Without tenure there are administrators who can and will enforce a patronage system of sorts where loyalty and obedience are prized over dedication to the students and the craft of teaching. Rhee would do teachers and the discussion about reform in general a service to acknowledge these facts.

A comparison of urban districts' math score changes over time. From The Nation's Report Card.

While most big-city superintendents would rather their scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress just go away, Beverly Hall of Atlanta has gone out of her way to make sure her students’ progress is judged against the national yardstick.

In a recent profile of Hall, EdWeek reported:

As test scores rose steadily year after year, Ms. Hall wanted to ensure that Atlanta’s progress would not be dismissed by criticism that Georgia’s performance standards and assessment, before recent changes to both, weren’t as rigorous as many other states’. The superintendent decided the city’s students would take a more rigorous national exam and publicly report the scores.

Hall’s colleagues feared that low scores on the national test would draw negative attention to the city’s schools.

But instead, Atlanta was the only district that showed significant gains in both reading and math every year.

That might not have come as a surprise to Atlanta residents, who have seen student absenteeism and teaching vacancies drop dramatically during Hall’s nearly 10 years in charge of the city’s schools. In 2007 all Atlanta elementary schools made Adequate Yearly Progress under the No Child Left Behind Act thanks to their much-improved state test scores.

Formerly the superintendent of the Newark, N.J., schools and an administrator in New York City, Hall could soon become the longest-serving urban superintendent, EdWeek reports.

Despite Atlanta’s success and Hall’s longevity, uncommon among urban superintendents, Hall has been overshadowed by the new breed of urban schools chiefs that includes New York’s Joel Klein and D.C.’s Michelle Rhee. But she attended the Gates Foundation conference this week in Seattle, and an EdWeek reporter says she could be a sleeper candidate for Secretary of Education.

Q So who would you choose as U.S. Education Secretary?
A Someone with Michelle Rhee’s talent and passion. Or someone outside the box—maybe a venture capitalist.

Scholastic also asks Klein about the divide between Democrats on education:

Q Is too much being made about the “divide” between Democrats on education?
A The divide is between those who are and aren’t ready to enact radical reform, which means taking on a power structure that has controlled the debate for decades, defined the problems in education as something education can’t fix, and bestowed influence at every level.

(Hat tip to Alexander Russo)

At his first policy address as president-elect, Obama this afternoon said the family hasn’t yet decided where the girls will enroll. But he suggested that they will be looking farther afield than their neighborhood school. “Michelle will be scouting out some schools,” he said. “We’ll be making a decision about that in the future.”

In Chicago, the girls attend the progressive private school that’s affiliated with the University of Chicago. Many speculate that the Obamas will settle on an elite private school such as Sidwell Friends, which Chelsea Clinton attended. But D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee has been angling for months for the First Family to pick one of her schools. Blogger Matt Iglesias reports that Sara Mead of the New America Foundation says Capital City Public Charter School, with a diverse population and convenient location, would be a good choice.

We are getting closer, but I do not think we are there yet. I define “there” as the moment at which you the readers have delivered me a single adjective that I can slap before “reformer” without feeling a twinge of remorse.

So, please send more entries! As you brainstorm adjectives, the best of the suggestions so far, which I’ve compiled below and which include superstar entrants including Joel Klein and Diane Ravitch, may help.

One set of suggestions included value judgments: A supporter said the “reformers” label is just fine, arguing that not all plans to improve public schools are equal, and so the best should be labeled reform while the others should… not be. Opponents came up with scathing descriptions like “teacher-bashers” and a reference to an Upper East Side bakery:

Up until the 1980’s there was a bakery on E. 86 Street in the old Yorktown/Germantown neighborhood. It was called the Kleine Kondeteri and they created light as air german confections. Maybe we should call them Klein and Co Bakery…light and airy, with the substance of a cloud.

Chancellor Joel Klein e-mailed to say he likes David Brooks’ description, “thoroughly modern do-gooders.” Klein also suggested another title: “the accountability and equity crowd.”

Diane Ravitch wrote to say the divide occurs along a liberal/conservative fault line:

the Klein group (including Schnur, Rotherham) are conservative reformers. They follow the business model of choice, accountability, deregulation, competition. Their ideas were born in the Reagan administration and nurtured at Heritage Foundation.

The BBA group are liberal reformers, who believe that we should make sure that kids and families have adequate social services, as well as a strong curriculum, effective instruction, dedicated teachers, good facilities, etc. This is the LBJ tradition.

Sarah Reckhow, a graduate student at UC-Berkeley, argued that the movement is defined by a “negative view of politics.” Reckhow pointed to Clay Risen’s Atlantic Monthly profile of Michelle Rhee, which lays out “two visions of big-city management” (Rhee and our gang subscribe to no. 2):

In one, city politics is a vibrant, messy, democratic exercise, in which both the process and the results have value. In the other, city politics is only a prelude, the way to install a technocratic elite that can carry out reforms in relative isolation from the give-and-take of city life.

Risen’s article is full of other useful descriptions of Rhee that also work for the larger movement: “a data-focused decision maker, less interested in politics as usual than a politics of results”; someone who sees herself “not as a politician but as a technocrat; a decider, not a negotiator”; an “obsessive e-mailer” with Wendy Kopp-like “zeal” for “message delivery.”

Keep the ideas coming!

Schnur is the gray-haired man on the right (via Flickr)

Jason Horowitz has a story in the Observer this week wondering which New Yorkers could be going to Washington if Barack Obama wins the presidency, as it looks like he might.

Here’s a name I didn’t see on Horowitz’s list: Jon Schnur, the cofounder and CEO of the Manhattan-based nonprofit New Leaders for New Schools. Schnur has been taking time off lately to campaign for Obama, work that has included guest-blogging, debating, and meeting with like-minded, education-inclined fundraisers in fancy Manhattan apartments. (I don’t have a link for that last one but can testify it did happen at least once; I was there.)

Schnur is one of the main players in the quiet battle among Obama’s education advisers which I am told is still raging even this close to the election. Schnur is the leader of the mostly younger “entrepreneurial” set who sympathize with the efforts of Teach For America founder Wendy Kopp and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein — and who likely were not too pleased when the leader of the other group, Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond, criticized Teach For America at a recent Teachers College debate where she was speaking on behalf of Obama.

Obviously we can’t know whether Schnur will get a big position in an Obama administration, like Secretary of Education. Maybe. Marc Ambinder, who is keeping a running list of rumor-intelligence on who would staff an Obama White House, throws out the name of D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee for Ed Sec. That might cause United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who right now is battling Rhee, to explode. If Obama wanted to pick a safer-but-still-aggressive type, Schnur would be a good choice.

I am hearing, however, that the smarter money for Ed Sec is on someone without a clear foot in either camp, a larger-than-life figurehead such as former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who has been spending his post-Bush administration retirement fighting a new war against high school dropouts. Powell, or someone like him, could draw attention away from battles going on behind the scenes.

Still, the battles would probably rage on nevertheless. And if they do, Schnur, who served as an education adviser to Al Gore in the White House, is certainly at the front of the line to lead his side’s fight from the inside.