- Muriel Bowser plans to unveil platform at first debate
- Catania argues for school quality, but his platform may not improve it
- No more teaching to the test: Some DC teachers adopt a technique that gets students to think deeply [Thurgood Marshall Academy PCHS mentioned]
- A STEM-based investment comes to D.C. [Friendship PCS mentioned]
- Most D.C. residents support school boundary plan, poll finds
- Three D.C. Education Officials Fired
- Criticism toward Teach for America is misplaced
Muriel Bowser plans to unveil platform at first debate
The Washington Post
By Mike DeBonis
September 18, 2014
When Democratic mayoral nominee Muriel E. Bowser introduces herself at Thursday night’s American University debate — the first of the general election season — she will be touting a new platform that adds depth to her education plan, lays out new public safety and transportation initiatives and makes other concrete pledges for her potential mayoralty.
The 41-page platform, which the Bowser campaign shared with The Washington Post on Thursday afternoon, appears timed to blunt criticism, particularly from independent rival David A. Catania, that Bowser has been deficient in laying out her vision for the city. On Monday, Catania released his own “Vision to Secure Our City’s Future,” pitching himself as the most substantial candidate in the race; fellow independent Carol Schwartz has also issued a lengthy education paper.
A new NBC4/Washington Post/Marist poll found Bowser leading Catania only slightly — 33 percent to 30 percent — among likely voters asked which mayoral candidate has the clearest vision for the city’s future.
Bowser’s platform contains a number of concrete proposals, some of them mildly controversial. For instance, on education, she pledges to “increase collaboration” between charter schools and traditional public schools, empowering her deputy mayor for education to “make recommendations” in that area — including around “efforts to locate charter schools and provide a neighborhood preference,” which are prospects that most charter school advocates have resisted. Bowser also pledges to raise $50 million in private funds to supplement school funding, a practice that has generated some discomfort in the past.
Also on education, Bowser proposes to “completely transform” the city’s middle schools by 2020, redouble efforts to make school budgets more transparent, and expand the “SchoolStat” data-driven accountability system used by DCPS. Bowser’s platform also reiterates her support for keeping Kaya Henderson as school chancellor: “Continuity in leadership at DCPS is the best way to ensure the District’s reform efforts move forward uninterrupted,” the document reads.
To promote employment and economic growth, Bowser is proposing to “elevate” the city’s small-business agency above its current mission of certifying local businesses for government contract opportunities, refocusing it on helping local businesses grow. She pledges to “enable a new business owner to obtain a business license in less than one day – and renew it quickly online,” and make the city’s capital-gains tax rates and licensing fees more competitive with neighboring jurisdictions. Bowser also pledges to create an “Office of Public Private Partnerships,” similar to agencies developed in Virginia and elsewhere, to help fund large-scale infrastructure projects.
On housing, Bowser pledges to devote at least $100 million a year to the city’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund, its main mechanism for financing low-income housing production; require “at the very least” 20 percent of housing units built on public land be affordable to low-income households; and pursue a “multi-pronged approach” to end family homelessness by 2018. She proposes to close the city’s troubled family homeless shelter at the former D.C. General Hospital, but does not commit to a specific timeline.
Public safety proposals include hiring a new fire chief with a “strong EMS background” to address problems with the city’s emergency medical response; establishing a “crime and violence prevention hotline” to be promoted in schools in hopes of stopping incidents before they spiral out of control; and expanding the police force beyond 4,000 officers “when it becomes necessary.”
On transportation, Bowser says she will “lead a comprehensive assessment of the DC Streetcar project,” saying residents “have been rightfully concerned about the project’s excess costs and delays” — a stance that separates her from Catania, who committed in his own platform to a full build-out of two streetcar lines. Bowser also proposes to appoint an “innovative leader” atop the city transportation department, complete the Metropolitan Branch Trail, and convene a “parking and congestion task force.”
Catania argues for school quality, but his platform may not improve it
The Washington Post
By Natalie Wexler
September 17, 2014
Mayoral candidate and D.C. Councilmember David A. Catania (I-At Large) has laid out his vision for a key issue in the race, education. Building on the education-related legislation he introduced as a councilmember, Catania calls for strong measures to improve school quality, reduce the achievement gap between black and white students, and strengthen special education services.
Catania identifies the basic issue in D.C. education as school quality. The unevenness of that quality, he says, results in what he has called a “morning diaspora,” with some 60,000 D.C. students choosing to commute to schools other than the ones they’re assigned to.
Catania proposes attacking the quality problem through both vertical and horizontal measures. He calls for “vertical alignment” between the elementary, middle and high schools in the same feeder pattern, so that programming and expectations are consistent throughout a student’s school career.
On the horizontal front, Catania wants to standardize offerings across the District. One middle school, he points out, might have “expansive language and enrichment programs while a middle school across town has far fewer of both.”
And when elementary schools with different levels of “quality and preparedness” feed into the same middle school, he says, the entire middle school suffers.
Catania also has other prescriptions, such as directing more funding to at-risk students, something that he’s already effected through legislation he introduced. He also wants to guarantee college aid to students who graduate from DC high schools, expand career and technical education and change the way school improvement is measured to introduce factors other than test scores.
And he discusses, in general terms, the legislation he's introduced that would overhaul many aspects of DC's system for delivering special education services.
Catania has made himself into something of an expert on DC's education system since becoming chair of the Council's education committee at the beginning of last year. He's personally visited almost 150 traditional public and charter schools, and he's introduced a raft of education-related legislation. His energy and ability to retain information are awe-inspiring and have won him ardent supporters among parents and others involved in education.
A variation on "Deal for All"?
But his basic plan for improving school quality—vertical alignment and horizontal standardization—is unlikely to get to the root of the problem. At bottom, it's a more sophisticated version of his opponent Muriel Bowser's simplistic mantra of "Alice Deal for All," a promise to bring the features of Ward 3's highly sought-after Deal Middle School to every sector of the District.
In arguing for the benefits of vertical alignment, Catania points out that "DCPS's highest achieving feeder pattern"—the one that includes both Deal and Wilson High School—"already employs this practice of vertical integration with great success." But while vertical integration may be a good idea, it's not the reason Deal, Wilson, and the elementary schools that feed into them are high-achieving. That has far more to do with the relative affluence of their student bodies.
Similarly, Catania's plan to standardize programs and offerings throughout the District will only take us so far in improving quality. You can offer the same "expansive language and enrichment programs" that Deal boasts at other middle schools. But if the students at those schools aren't prepared to take advantage of them, they'll be no more than empty promises.
As Catania is no doubt aware, low-income students generally start school far less prepared than their middle-class counterparts, and the gap between the two groups only widens as the grades progress. If you want to truly improve the quality of neighborhood schools beyond the few that are now seen as desirable—and which, not coincidentally, have a high proportion of affluent students—you need to figure out a way to improve the performance of low-income students.
Prescriptions for closing the achievement gap
Catania does have some prescriptions for doing that, but they're either vague or somewhat mechanical. For example, it's great that, largely thanks to his efforts, more money will be directed to at-risk students, but there's still the question of what that money will be used for.
He mentions that directing funds to at-risk students recognizes "the fact that students from more challenged backgrounds often require additional resources for academic and social-emotional interventions." But he doesn't specify what those interventions should consist of, or how the government can ensure that poor children get the services they need to counteract the effects of poverty that often interfere with their ability to learn.
Catania also points to legislation he authored that essentially ends the practice of social promotion. True, promoting students who haven't mastered material year after year is a recipe for disaster.
But merely requiring those students to repeat a grade doesn't ensure they'll learn what they didn't absorb the first time around, especially if teachers use the same methods. And the stigma of being held back can have lasting effects.
School quality and school boundaries
The question of improving school quality has taken on added urgency because of the recent controversy over school boundaries. Catania has said he's opposed to any plan that would switch students to lower-performing schools.
He's also said that he would delay implementation of the current plan for at least a year, but the measures he outlines—or any measures, for that matter—are unlikely to improve school quality anywhere near that fast.
Catania doesn't mention school boundaries anywhere in the 15 pages his platform devotes to education. Nor does he mention another hot-button issue: whether to place limits on the growth and location of charter schools.
And yet both of these issues have major implications for school quality. When more middle-class families attend a school, its quality generally goes up, benefiting the school's low-income students as well. If boundaries are redrawn so that a group of middle-class parents know their children will be attending a particular lower-performing school in, say, five years, they can strengthen each other's resolve to send their kids there and improve it.
On the other hand, if charter schools that attract middle-class families continue their current rapid growth, they could undermine that possibility by draining those families out of the traditional system. Catania's failure to address this controversial question is understandable, but it's nonetheless disappointing.
For all its flaws, Catania's education platform is far more detailed and has many more solid ideas than anything that his rival Bowser has put forward so far. There are still many uncertainties, not least of which who Catania would install to replace DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson, who is likely to depart if he wins. But right now, he's the only candidate who has both articulated a vision for improving education in DC and who stands at least a chance of winning.
No more teaching to the test: Some DC teachers adopt a technique that gets students to think deeply [Thurgood Marshall Academy PCHS mentioned]
Greater Greater Washington
By Natalie Wexler
September 18, 2014
Has education become too focused on test scores? Do we need an approach aimed at getting students to think analytically rather than memorize facts? A growing number of educators from a variety of DC schools think so, and they're changing the way they teach.
For the past two years, a group of DC teachers has been meeting regularly to learn about something called Project Zero, an educational approach research center at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The group has grown rapidly, and now includes over 500 teachers from independent, parochial, charter, and traditional public schools.
This summer, over 100 175 DC-area teachers gathered for a Project Zero institute sponsored by the independent Washington International School, which uses the Project Zero approaches school-wide. The teachers learned how to use classroom techniques called thinking routines: sets of questions teachers can pose to get students to think deeply about an image or a text.
The objective of the Project Zero routines is to "make thinking visible." One basic routine, called See-Think-Wonder, has students looking together at an image of a text or work of art. First they spend several minutes simply discussing what they observe. Then the teacher asks what they think is going on in the image.
After that, students talk about what the image makes them wonder about, based on their observations and interpretations. Along the way or at the end, the teacher or students "document" the discussion, writing down ideas. Teachers say routines like this get students to slow down, pay attention to details, and engage in analysis.
Critiques of test-focused teaching
Although Project Zero has been around since the 1960s, its approach fits in with recent critiques of test-based instruction for focusing too much on basic skills and not enough on analytical thinking. Even Arne Duncan, who many see as the architect of a test-focused approach, recently called for de-emphasizing test results. Locally, the Fairfax County school system is formulating a plan that its superintendent says "will lessen the focus on standardized, high-stakes testing."
A new best-selling book, Building a Better Teacher, argues that treating students as passive receptacles for knowledge only gets you so far: for true learning to take place, it argues, students have to take a more active role.
The Common Core standards, adopted by DC and 45 states, also aim to get students thinking analytically, and their emphasis on "close reading" of a text resembles the Project Zero approach.
Some of the thinking routines, like See-Think-Wonder, seem particularly well suited to studying works of art. In fact, the National Gallery of Art has used the routines in many of its education programs for over 10 years, according to Lynn Russell, head of its division of education. But teachers say the techniques can be applied to almost any subject.
Tondra Odom-Owens, a teacher at Savoy Elementary, a DC Public School with a low-income student body, says that when her students "wonder" about a work of art, they ask questions that go beyond the surface: "I wonder why he used that color, I wonder what if this was a portrait of a man." It hasn't been difficult for them to translate those strategies into thinking deeply and analytically about texts, she says.
And Karen Lee, who teaches government at Thurgood Marshall Academy Public Charter School, recently used a thinking routine to get her high school students to make connections between the Langston Hughes poem "I Too" and the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson. The routine, she says, "provided a framework for deep thinking."
Effects on comprehension and test scores
I saw some thinking routines in action recently at Sacred Heart, a bilingual Catholic school in Mt. Pleasant that has a largely low-income, Hispanic student body, and where most teachers have had Project Zero training. The 7th- and 8th-grade classes I observed included sophisticated and thoughtful discussions of concepts like empathy and ambiguity.
"I think kids' comprehension has sky-rocketed," said the Sacred Heart teacher I observed, Kristen Kullberg. "They begin to understand that ambiguity and unanswered questions don't need to be sources of frustration. The reality is a lot of things are ambiguous."
While teachers say it's too soon to know whether the approach has an effect on test scores, Kullberg says her students have developed a "culture of perseverance" that could help on tests. And Odom-Owens said she feels thinking routines will help her students understand test questions and come up with strategies to answer them. Lee says the routines also help her figure out what her students haven't understood, so she knows where to focus.
All the teachers I spoke with say the thinking routines level the playing field, bringing lower-performing students into the discussion. Because there are no wrong answers, kids are more willing to take risks. And the lower-performing students sometimes have the most perceptive observations, winning the respect of their peers.
The Project Zero approach could help move teaching beyond the rote drilling that too often characterizes education today. But there are some caveats:
It takes training. The teachers I spoke with all said the approach fit in with their natural teaching styles. While most said they thought any teacher could use the thinking routines, it's not just a matter of following a script. Teachers not only have to ask the right questions, they also need to be responsive to students' answers. It helps to observe teachers who are experienced in the approach.
Schools need to be flexible about teaching methods: The routines can be adapted to work with any curriculum, but classrooms can get noisy as students move around or call out their thoughts. Odom-Owens said some DCPS teachers, especially new ones, might shy away from the approach for fear of getting a low score on the system's teacher evaluation system.
It won't provide everything lower-performing students need: Students deficient in vocabulary and background knowledge, as many low-income students are, will need more direct instruction to construct coherent sentences and organize their thoughts logically in writing.
But in the hands of a skilled teacher, the Project Zero thinking routines can play an important role in engaging students in learning, spurring analytical thinking, and giving them the motivation to put their insights into persuasive written form.
A STEM-based investment comes to D.C. [Friendship PCS mentioned]
The Northwest Current
By Tom Nida
September 17, 2014
As D.C. students begin a new school year, a new public school investment in Ward 8 is exciting parents and students alike. Friendship Public Charter School’s new Technology Preparatory Academy campus just opened its doors. It offers a college preparatory education and specializes in STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — disciplines and environmental sciences.
The $18.9 million, three-story, state-of-the-art facility on the site of an abandoned McDonald’s restaurant includes 25 classrooms equipped with interactive learning tools. Classrooms have entire walls of dry-erase white boards up front, with information technology that allows images to be placed and moved on them. The school will serve 650 middle and high school students.
As at every other Friendship charter school, the first floor features a “Smart Lab” (science, math and research technology lab) with a variety of computers and other high-tech learning aids. The new campus also has a robotics lab, two chemistry labs and two biology labs. And it has a rooftop greenhouse and green roof.
The new building is a significant step up from the former Boys and Girls’ Club where the school was previously housed. D.C.’s public charter schools must regularly overcome such resource issues, but many still regularly outperform D.C. Public Schools programs.
As befits a school designed to introduce students to environmental sciences and related disciplines, the new school building is Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design-certified.
The 59,000-square-foot structure was built by Turner Construction and designed by Architecture Inc. both local firms. In sharp contrast to the metal window guards of far too many D.C. Public Schools facilities, this schoolhouse has expansive windows that let in light, welcoming the students and emphasizing that their education and welfare are important.
Friendship has six charter campuses in underserved District neighborhoods. In line with Friendship's mission, Tech Prep aims to provide a quality public education in a long-neglected community. Enabling the children of today’s Ward 8 to access the opportunities of tomorrow is an important goal for the school — as is helping minority communities to participate in the growing field of environmental sciences.
In any real estate development, location is important. Interestingly, the new building borders the old St. Elizabeths Hospital, which will be the new home of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and a significant investment by Microsoft Corp. As such, the school leadership anticipates forming many rewarding alliances with its neighbors, resulting in school talks and study trips; internships, training and jobs; and other benefits.
On the building’s other side is Friendship Southeast Academy, serving students from pre-K through the fifth grade. This elementary school campus was another significant contribution to the area’s long-neglected infrastructure, as it was refurbished and extended from a previously abandoned Safeway grocery store.
Tech Prep will have its first graduating class this year. School administrators hope that it will emulate the success of Friendship’s Collegiate Academy in neighboring Ward 7. Collegiate Academy has a 97 percent on-time high school graduation rate, which compares extremely well with the 56 percent average for traditional D.C. public high schools. Collegiate also sees 100 percent of the graduating class accepted to college — in a school where three-quarters of the students qualify for federal lunch subsidies
As I walked the hallways of the new campus, admiring the investments in technology and the overall quality of the building, I was impressed with the strong emphasis on college preparation and the positive messages offered to students. The walls are adorned with words that remind students what is important: “caring,” “respect,” “responsibility,” “patience” and “confidence.” Large images of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the March on Washington greet visitors.
Gleaming hallways are adorned in part with the crimson colors of Morehouse College, the alma mater of Donald Hense, Friendship’s founder and chairman.
Investment in the educational future of children growing up in D.C.’s long-neglected communities is important. It offers the chance to end the divisions of race, class and income that have long plagued our city.
New buildings, as I have described above, are a physical investment helping to directly heal these divisions.
I’m a graduate of Anacostia High School who has seen the neighborhood change so much during my career in D.C., and this new investment gives me hope for the students it enrolls.
Tom Nida, former chair of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, is regional vice president for D.C. and Maryland for United Bank.
Most D.C. residents support school boundary plan, poll finds
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
September 18, 2014
Recently approved school boundary changes have been a source of anxiety and controversy for many District parents. And two leading mayoral candidates have pushed to slow or restart the process across the city.
But new polling numbers show that a majority of D.C. residents support the plan, which aims to bring coherence and predictability to feeder patterns last overhauled 40 years ago.
More than half of the city’s registered voters — 56 percent — say they “generally support” the plan to change “where students can attend traditional public schools and when children are able to attend schools outside their boundaries,” according to the results of an NBC4/Washington Post/Marist poll released this week.
“I like lots of things in the plan,” said Sarah Sorscher, a mother of two young children who lives in Ward 1 and wants to support her neighborhood schools. Most of all, she likes that the plan includes a stand-alone middle school nearby that her children could eventually attend. “But right now we are in limbo,” she said.
Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) adopted the plan in August, capping a contentious 10-month citywide process. Within a week, the mayoral candidates aiming to replace Gray revived the debate.
D.C. Council member Muriel Bowser (Ward 4), the Democratic nominee, said she opposed the plan and would restart the process. David Catania, an at-large council member who is running for mayor as an independent, said he would seek to delay its implementation for one year.
Both candidates have said it’s not fair to reassign families to lower-performing schools.
Independent candidate Carol Schwartz has said she would seek to make some changes to the plan but would not start over from scratch.
Hot spots of opposition remain across the city, particularly in some Ward 4 neighborhoods that were previously zoned into Alice Deal Middle School and Woodrow Wilson High School, two of the city’s most-crowded and sought-after schools. Many residents also have been wary of changes to the rules governing out-of-boundary lotteries, which many families have relied on to secure better school options.
Absalom Jordan, chairman of the Ward 8 Education Council, said the main message he heard from residents east of the river at boundaries meetings “was to ensure you had quality schools in all wards before you moved to change the boundaries.”
But among voters in general who were surveyed, majority support was fairly consistent, including among different racial groups, income levels and ages and across different parts of the city.
One exception was in wards 2 and 3, where slightly less than half of adults surveyed — 48 percent — said they support the plan. There, 19 percent oppose the plan and 33 percent are unsure.
Results were not broken down to reflect the views of parents with school-age children, who are most directly affected.
An early proposal in the spring that would have replaced neighborhood schools with a citywide lottery ignited strong opposition from parents in Northwest who chose to buy homes there specifically for the access they provided to high-performing schools.
Lissy Melia, a mother of two, petitioned against the first proposal, which came out soon after she and her husband drained their financial resources to buy a house in the Janney Elementary School district in Upper Northwest.
Later proposals reaffirmed a system of neighborhood schools, and sentiment changed, she said.
“Once they took the citywide lottery part out of it, a lot of people simmered down,” she said.
City officials already are implementing the new boundaries, sending maps and letters home to parents at each school describing the changes and how they will be phased in. They also are uploading the new boundaries into the online lottery system, which will open Dec. 15.
The NBC4/Washington Post/Marist poll was conducted Sept. 14 to Sept. 16 among a random sample of 1,249 D.C. adults reached on conventional and cellular phones. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points overall and for the sample of 1,070 registered voters.
Three D.C. Education Officials Fired
NBC Washington
By Mark Seagraves
September 18, 2014
Three top officials who helped oversee public education in the District of Columbia have been fired, including the deputy superintendent of education.
All three worked in the Office of the State Superintendent of Education.
Sandy Schlicker, the highest ranking of the three, oversaw nutritional programs including school breakfast and lunch programs.
Iris Bond-Gill was assistant superintendent of elementary and secondary education and Gregory Meeropol was deputy assistant superintendent of post-secondary education.
All three were let go last week.
A spokesperson for the agency would not comment because it is a personnel matter.
Criticism toward Teach for America is misplaced
The Washington Post
By Wendy Kopp
September 18, 2014
In the spring of 1989, I turned in my undergraduate thesis proposing a national teacher corps, and my adviser pronounced the idea “obviously deranged.” He eventually became one of our greatest advocates, but he was hardly the last person to question what we were doing.
In the 25 years since, Teach for America has enlisted more than 47,000 individuals to commit two years to teaching in some of America’s neediest schools. Long after they finish their commitment, 86 percent of Teach for America alumni still work full time in education or professions related to improving lives in our most marginalized communities. About 11,000 alumni are teachers; more than 800 are school leaders. Alumni have started and work in education nonprofits and help shape policy in districts and state education departments. Teach for America has helped inspire similar organizations in 34 countries, which now make up a global network called Teach for All.
As we have grown, so has the criticism. Some of it includes valuable feedback from our teachers, alumni and partners. Alongside many others, Teach for America is tackling the complex problem of educational inequity — an enormous challenge that has required huge leaps of learning. We are constantly working to get better.
But some of the criticism is based on misrepresentation and toxic rhetoric. Critics say, for example, that Teach for America “endangers students’ education.” Some characterize our teachers with phrases such as “Ivy League short-term student saviour” and allege that we are “an experiment in ‘resume-padding’ for ambitious young people.” One organization mounted a social media campaign to discourage students from applying.
It is crucial that we have an honest, open-minded conversation about what it will take to improve educational — and ultimately life — outcomes for kids. But a very different kind of conversation is playing out. As this country debates everything from raising standards for students to teacher tenure, Teach for America is often condemned without consideration of the facts.
One of the most serious criticisms we get is that Teach for America teachers are not helping kids learn. We recognized from the beginning that there are significant skills, knowledge and mind-sets essential to effective teaching. Over the years, we’ve built an intensive program of pre-service and ongoing professional development with more than 700 staff members devoted to supporting our teachers. A rigorous study of secondary math teachers, published last year by Mathematica Policy Research, found that Teach for America members moved their students forward an extra 2.6 months during one school year. In the three states (Louisiana, North Carolina and Tennessee) that rank teacher preparation programs based on the impact their graduates have on achievement, Teach for America comes in at or near the top.
But there is always room to improve — and we’re working hard to support our teachers to provide students with the world-class educations they will need to fulfill their true potential. Most recently, in March, our co-CEOs Matt Kramer and Elisa Villanueva Beard launched two pilot programs: one to provide a year of upfront training for recruits, and the other to extend our professional development to teachers who remain in the classroom for a third, fourth and fifth year.
Another frequent criticism we face is that Teach for America isn’t diverse enough. We agree — teachers who share the economic or racial background of their students can approach their work with deep understanding and show students what is possible through their own examples. We’ve worked hard at this and this year, 50 percent of our incoming teachers are people of color, while 47 percent are from low-income backgrounds. This is far more diverse than the field of teachers overall.
Critics also allege that our members care less about education than about their own careers on the way to becoming corporate executives. Yet 64 percent of alumni now work full time in education and another 22 percent work in jobs that relate to improving education or quality of life in low-income communities.
In the communities where we’ve been providing teachers for 15 years or more, the impact of Teach for America is clear. Twelve years ago, D.C. students were scoring at the bottom compared with their peers in other large cities. Today, although there is still much to be done, schools in the nation’s capital are improving faster than any other urban district’s. This change is the result of the efforts of many people, but without Teach for America alumni, we’d lose much of the energy behind it. We’d lose schools chancellor Kaya Henderson and much of her cabinet, the mayor’s deputy for education, the state superintendent, the past four “Teachers of the Year,” the managers of the school principals, 20 percent of principals, hundreds of teachers and the leaders of many nonprofits working to support schools and students.
Would the United States really be better off if thousands of outstanding and committed people did not apply to Teach for America? We should be cheering those who devote their energy to working alongside others to meet the extra needs of our most marginalized kids. Not all of them will be teachers forever. But teachers can’t solve this problem alone. We also need those who choose careers in education administration, policy, public health, law and business, who will carry with them the conviction and firsthand experience to lead change from outside the classroom.
This country is failing our kids, and the conversation we’re having is not helping. It’s not elevating the teaching profession. It isn’t changing kids’ lives or giving them the best chance to fulfill their potential. It’s undermining trust in the efforts of so many to improve education, and driving away what we need most: The energy and attention of every person willing to work for our children.