Wendy Kopp says she doesn't want to be schools chancellor, but it's a great job. Photo courtesy of Tulane Publications.

The occasion of Teach For America’s twentieth anniversary, along with a new book by founder Wendy Kopp summarizing the lessons she’s learned, is pulling the usually low-profile don out of her shell — and leading her to say some interesting things.

Yesterday, the Daily Beast’s Dana Goldstein published a profile in which Kopp said she would love to run the New York City schools.

Or, at least, she seemed to say that. When I asked her to follow up yesterday afternoon, Kopp dismissed the idea.

Education writer Goldstein writes that it is “fair to wonder if Kopp, 44, has her own political ambitions”:

In an interview at TFA’s loft-like headquarters near New York’s Penn Station, she smiles when asked if Mayor Mike Bloomberg spoke to her about replacing former Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. Despite a long relationship between TFA and the New York City schools, he did not, she says.

The job went to former Hearst magazines chief Cathie Black, who had no professional experience in public education, and who sent her own children to private boarding school. Kopp, whose four kids attend public schools on Manhattan’s West Side, says running the city’s schools would be a dream job, far more attractive than heading to Washington, D.C. to succeed Arne Duncan as the secretary of Education.

Goldstein also quotes Kopp calling the chancellor job “the best job in the world.”

“I think it’s just awesome,” she gushes. Then she catches herself. “That being said, other than my job. I’ve really drunk all the Teach for America Kool-Aid myself.”

When I asked Kopp if she was actually trying to signal her interest in the position, she gave a firm no. “I really do think the Chancellor job is a great job — but I don’t want it myself!” she wrote in an e-mail. “I was trying to make the point that so much of the critical work happens at the school district level. This is one of the highest impact and most important jobs in the country.”

Kopp also told the Daily Beast that she opposes the Bloomberg administration’s push to publish individual teachers’ value-added effectiveness scores, calling the idea “baffling.”

“The principals of very high performing schools would all say their No. 1 strategy is to build extraordinary teams,” Kopp said. “I can’t imagine it’s a good organizational strategy to go publish the names of teachers and one data point about whether they are effective or not in the newspaper.”

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?

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.

New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has received support from DFER, which is based in Manhattan, but the group’s memo specifically rules him out as a possible Education Secretary. The memo says Klein’s aggressive efforts to improve public schools are admirable, but that they make him and the like-minded D.C. school chancellor, Michelle Rhee, a poor choice for Barack Obama’s White House. “The need for them to occasionally ‘break some china’ in order to affect much-needed change puts them and other hard-charging reforms like them in an unlikely spot to be selected for a role like Secretary of Education (a role for which either would be well suited),” the memo says.

The memo also elevates the New York-based education leader Jon Schnur, who co-chaired Obama’s education advisory board during his campaign, as another choice for a top administration position. Schnur founded the group New Leaders for New Schools, a kind of Teach For America for principals that is based in Manhattan. He is also the leader of the movement we’ve been trying to name on this site.

What the Democrats for Education Reform group recommends will not necessarily be adopted, but the group’s recommendations will surely be taken seriously. Members of the group’s advisory board were donors to Obama’s campaign, and the group has worked with Schnur, who is serving on Obama’s transition team. Yet the group is also firmly on one side of the ongoing divide inside of the Democratic Party over education issues, and even its own members may not know which side President-elect Obama will take in that fight.

The memo is the first time Wendy Kopp’s name has been mentioned as a possible U.S. Education Secretary. Democrats for Education Reform offer her as a second choice behind Duncan, the superintendent of schools in Chicago, saying that either she or Jon Schnur would make good choices “if Duncan was unable/unwilling.”

Kopp created Teach For America out of an idea born in her senior thesis at Princeton University. The group has since been credited with transforming American education by recruiting college graduates with Ivy League pedigrees into some of the worst-performing public schools in America. The Democrats for Education Reform memo describes Kopp’s work as inspirational. “At a time when the popularity of the public education franchise was suffering, Kopp’s leadership ushered an optimistic breeze of reform and has created an entire army ready to fight to save and improve public education,” the memo says.

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!

In an earlier post, I referred to the Schnur/Eduwonk/Joel Klein nexus (axis?) as the “reform-minded” camp. In doing so I used a label the group calls itself, but also violated a principle I was taught at the New York Sun about the importance of precise language. I was rightly chastised by Leonie Haimson, who pointed out in the comments section that almost everyone involved in the education debate would like to see “reform”; the question is what kind.

A similar problem was raised by Richard Whitmire of USA Today in August, who was following up on Jay Mathews of the Washington Post. Their concern was what to call a group of “elite” inner-city schools whose students score better on tests than students nearby neighborhood schools. Ultimately the contest ended unsatisfactorily, and Whitmire posted my e-mail to him explaining why the contest was so hard:

“I think the difficulty of the contest is a symptom of a bigger problem. Aren’t these schools a part of a movement without a name? My editor banned me from ever letting the word “reform” follow the word “education” and I am glad for the lesson in precision, but I have never found a good substitute. The Wendy Kopp movement. The Teach For America alumni club. The people-likely-to-say-”relentless”-twice-in-one-sentence movement. HBS Grads for Change. Education warriors. Joel Klein, Paul Vallas et al.

The best description I’ve read was David Brooks’, “the thoroughly modern do-gooders”.

Anyway, my submission is the cop-out that maybe we first must solve that naming dilemma, and then get to the schools.

So, let’s solve this dilemma! Send ideas to me at egreen@gothamschools.org, and I’ll update on our progress as time goes by.

Ninive Calegari, John Woods, Wendy Kopp, and moderator Zack Frechette. Photo by Adam Auriemma for FishbowlNY.

GOOD Magazine brought together three “mavericks” of the education world for a panel discussion last night.

Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach For America (TFA), and Nínive Calegari, CEO of literacy nonprofit 826 National and producer of a documentary film about teacher salary reform, took on the teacher-pay system:

Nínive Calegari: I’ve actually taught in a wealthy district … and so I’ve seen what a school with a good rhythm, with resources, actually looks and feels like, which is a very positive thing to have happened, but a thing that I thought was very devastating that happened was that after three years there, I got tenure, and I would have been able to play cards with the kids and it would have been very, very difficult to fire me. And I think that we have to look at the tenure issue and figure out how to make that work and how to move forward.  You know, the way that we pay teachers and the way that we design the system is antiquated and it’s time to really look at accountability.

Wendy Kopp: The key to success in any sector… number one, it’s about people. …I think it is about teachers but it’s hugely about school leaders. I mean, it’s very hard to find a high-quality school that isn’t run by a stellar principal. And it’s about superintendents and a whole bunch of other folks at the district. It’s about talent at every level.  So, first of all, developing a talent mindset, where school systems are obsessed with recruiting talented folks and developing them over time and sustaining them over time, I mean, that’s one thing. And then those people need to figure out how do we build strong cultures and good systems for accountability and continuous improvement.

Calegari thinks the key to recruiting and retaining talent in the schools is to pay much higher salaries to teachers and principals but remove union protections:

In Washington, DC — you guys have to keep an eye on what’s happening in  Washington, DC, it’s incredibly exciting — the new schools chancellor is asking for the community to pay salaries of up to $131,000, which I think is perfect, in exchange for some real accountability.

The full house at Housing Works Bookstore & Cafe burst into applause.

The third panelist, John Woods, founder of international library-building organization Room to Read, focused on the importance of educating girls in developing countries.