A Problem with School Reform Talk

The Outlook Section in the Washington Post today talked about education, specifically about the state of DC schools. Thomas Toch and Sara Mead, of Education Sector and the Quick and the Ed, had the lead article. But one of the sidebars was called "Department of Advice" and included a number of quotes by some very important education thinkers, but there is something missing from almost everyone of the thinkers-see if you can find it.

There should be efforts to very actively recruit middle-class people into neighborhood schools and make sure these really are schools that prepare kids for college. This recruitment has to be done with artistry and couldn't be started without straight talk about education and race. In the District, you've got all this cherry-picking and vouchers that increases segregationacross thesystem. If you're going to have millions of little charter schools, it's very hard to have a coherent educational plan for hte city. The premise ofthat approach is that it's hopeless and you can just pick on the bones.

---Gary Oldfield, professor of educaiton and social policy at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.


Putting responsibility and authority together in the same place is essential. I think that means having very strong principals in schools. That means giving them authority but it also means rewarding good work. It means paying them very well and making it a very attractive job.

If you have a growing professional class, anything you can do to persuade those parents to keep their kids in the public schools is going to help everybody. Because those parents can be great advocates. And there's a growing body of evidence that diversity is in fact a very powerful educator of people. So part of the picth to the middle class is to say: At least your kid's going to get a better education.

---Colin Diver, president of Reed College, featured in J. Anthony Lukas's "Common Ground" as a parent of children in the Boston public schools.


A hundred effrots to reform the D.C. school system have foundered on the shoals of bureaucratic lethargy, union contracts and messed-up governance. A dozen "reformist" superintendents have come an dgone. What's worked best to date--albeit not perfectly--is creating alternatives to the system's schools and letting children freely attend them. The District's burgeoning charter-school sector and its scholarship/voucher program attest both to the demand for such alternatives and to the feasibility of providing them. Adrian Fenty should all within his power to accelerate and intensify this promising strategy.

---Chester E. Finn, Jr., senior fellow, Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and president, Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.


Two eky things happened in Boston: the city moved from an elected school committee to an appointed one. And Tom Menino as mayor became a real champion of the shcools. His two kids graduated from Boston public schools and he's now got five grandchildren in the public schools. You have to show others that you really believe waht you're talking about.

---Thomas Payzant, superintendent of Boston public schools from 1995-2006


The best was to refomr the D.C. public schools is to focus on the fundamentals of education: excellent teachers, experienced principals, manageable class sizes, a solid curriculum and modern facilities. If htese fundamentals are missing, then no rearrangment of the structure or control of the school system will make a difference. There are no shortcuts in education, no silver bullets, no magical solutions.

---Diane Ravitch, New York University professor and assistant secretary of education under President George H.W. Bush.


The objective should be small schools of parental choice, each autonomously designed and managed by its teachers and providing a program that is legitimately "college preparatory." In order to do that, the scity must push authority down, with district-wide authority vested in a board made up of facutly members of each school. Visitors from D.C. institutions ofhigher educaitonwould formally inspect each school every year, making their findings available to the media. Admission would be by "blind" lottery, except for siblings of students already enrolled, who would be automatically admitted, if their parents desired it.

---Ted Sizer, founder, the Coaltion of Essential Schools.


Student's work must be central and public, and related to the school's broad mission. ONly schools whose faculty is as excicted as the kids hopefully will be, and whose families and communities presume they are respected partners, can engage the natural curiosity and energies of the young. A good education cannot happen until the young take on the task as their own.

---Deborah Meier, author of "Many Children Left Behind" (Beacon) and founder and director, Central Park East Secondary School, a New York City public high school.


I have never been to a meeting on school reform in the District where students were invited to be part of the conversation. And yet students know what isnot working schools. they will tell me that most adults in their schools do not know them well, and that they are not held accountable formuch. They tell me that many teachers talk at them, reather exploreing learning with them. Students want to be involved in improving their schools and they want to be held accountable. D.C. students are very sophisticated about their own education. Most adults do not give them credit for this.

---Michael Watson, principal of Capital City Public Charter School's upper school, opening next fall.

The missing item: students. Only in the last two quotes do the speakers really speak about the kids in the system. In short, these discussion appear to ignore the First of my Ten Commandments for education.

Talking about the middle-class, about charter vs. traditional public schools, or about any other structural change means nothing because those are discussions about the adults in the system. Schools are about kids, first and foremost.

For far too long, we have attempted to reform schools from either the top down, meaning that politicians try to effect change, or from the middle, in that teachers/principals/lower level administrators attempt to effect change. However, to date, few of these attempts, even if successful, have been replicated on a grand scale. If no reform efforts have included kids, or at least recent graduates of the public schools, then maybe it is time to include them. At worst, we are in no worse a position than when we started.