- Born to Rise: A Story of Children and Teachers Reaching Their Highest Potential [FOCUS mentioned]
- Is big disruption good for urban schools?
Born to Rise: A Story of Children and Teachers Reaching Their Highest Potential [FOCUS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
December 5, 2012
Last week I attended a CityBridge Foundation discussion on the book Born to Rise: A Story of Children and Teachers Reaching Their Highest Potential. The work follows the creation of Harlem Village Academies Charter School as captured by Deborah Kenny, its founder and CEO.
The day’s forum was led by a panel that included Simmons Lettre and Carrie Irvin of Charter Board Partners and Mary Van Hoose, Chief Talent Officer for the Advisory Board. Leading the conversation and also a member of the panel was CityBridge President Katherine Bradley.
As I’ve learned is customary for the fine events hosted by CityBridge, many of nation’s capital’s charter school leaders were in attendance. The dialog quickly turned from a focus on the book to a general consideration of governance issues facing this alternative school system. Mrs. Bradley, in a perfectly democratic fashion, drew participation from many members of the audience. Ms. Lettre and Irvin provided their unique expertise with charter school board issues, and it was extremely valuable and innovative to have Ms. Van Hoose in attendance to comment and answer questions regarding attracting and retaining exceptional employees.
Much of the session revolved around an extremely frank discussion regarding actual organizational matters being faced by charters represented by people in the room. Therefore, out of respect for the group that did not realize I would be recording their comments for publication, I will not be repeating their words here. Let me just say that the intellectual concerns tossed around were thoughtful, relevant, and represented issues whose resolution are vital to the high quality growth of the local and national charter school movement. It was as if I had entered a candy store for the mind.
After I left the event I recalled a story I had heard many years earlier regarding Joe Robert, Jr. that I believe is relevant to the topics raised at the CityBridge meeting. We all are familiar with Mr. Robert’s contribution to education in this town, but now I want to pivot for a moment to his tremendous influence in healthcare.
Already ill with the brain cancer that would take his life, one Sunday morning Mr. Robert called leading physicians from Children’s National Medical to his house and asked them one question. Mr. Robert inquired of them what it would look like to transform pediatric surgery. At first, none of the responses from this group of experts satisfied him. Then, finally, after time and time again pushing them for a proposal that would change the world, one member of the group came up with an idea. He suggested that they set as their goal removal of all pain associated with invasive procedures.
Mr. Robert readily accepted this suggestion and his enthusiasm for it led him to securing a $150 million gift from the government of Abu Dhabi to Children’s hospital to make this dream a reality.
I think it is now time to bring the same level of innovation to charter schools. But I am not talking about how we teach the kids. What I picture is a revolution in governance. While the parties gathered at the Citybrige headquarters the other day had many good suggestions on how non-profit boards should be run I think we have moved past the point of benchmarking.
We need to create an institute to bring together all of the best practices charters have accumulated over time from across the country, and its mission would be to disseminate these concepts to our schools. It doesn’t matter to me if this effort is spearheaded by FOCUS, Charter School Partners, Citybridge, the PCSB, the New Schools Venture Fund, or a brand new entity established for this purpose. The charter movement has matured now from one concentrating on the quantity of seats to quality of instruction. It is imperative for future generations of children that we immediately stop making the mistakes of the past and bring all of our institutions up to the high performing level of management and governance that our shinning examples have adopted as a way of life.
Is big disruption good for urban schools?
The Washington Post
By Jay Matthews
December 4, 2012
My colleague Emma Brown has been looking closely at Chancellor Kaya Henderson’s plans to close one of every six traditional D.C. public schools.
In one piece, she cited activists who raised the possibility that the education system of our nation’s capital might, as a consequence of the downsizing, be split in two: Charter schools would rule the low-income neighborhoods, while regular public schools would thrive only in the affluent areas where achievement rates remain high.
This is not some wild nightmare. Education finance lawyer Mary Levy, a careful and longtime analyst of D.C. schools, said at one meeting: “What we are rapidly approaching is a [public school system] concentrated west of Rock Creek Park and perhaps around Capitol Hill, and a separate charter school system filled by lottery in most of the rest of the city.”
This is upsetting to many D.C. residents and people in the region who work or have lived in the city. But to some reformers, it is a great opportunity, a way to let parent choice energize the schools and give urban children more chances for success.
A leader of this disruption-is-good faction is Andy Smarick, a summa cum laude graduate of the University of Maryland who co-founded a charter school in Annapolis and has worked on education policy issues at the national and state levels. His new book, “The Urban School System of the Future: Applying the Principles and Lessons of Chartering,” explains why breaking urban school systems such as the District’s into pieces and putting them back together might bring progress that other efforts have not achieved.
As I interpret Smarick’s idea, Henderson could keep her title of D.C. schools chancellor but get a different and more powerful assignment. She would sit atop three separate entities, the old D.C. school system, the D.C. charters and a collection of private schools willing to meet certain achievement goals in return for some support. She would not run these schools, but would reward and punish those in charge. She would have the power to start new schools and close old ones.
Henderson would oversee what Smarick calls the five pillars of the new system: expanding and replicating schools proven to be effective, closing ineffective schools, starting promising new schools, ensuring a variety of school types and school authorizers, and making sure families have many choices.
If you don’t like charter schools, you won’t like Smarick’s book. He adheres to the charter advocate’s creed that urban school systems can improve only if they embrace change. By adding good schools and subtracting bad ones with rapidity, “we have the potential to drastically improve the educational opportunities of our nation’s most disadvantaged students,” he writes.
I receive many education books in the mail. I toss most of them out because they are irrelevant or impractical. Smarick’s book was relevant but was losing on practicality grounds until I read Brown’s piece on the District’s bleak future.
If it got that bad, I thought, something as extreme as the Smarick plan could happen. I’m not saying it would have the benefits Smarick predicts, but trying it would be interesting and maybe useful.
New Orleans is already heading in that direction. It became fertile ground for radical reform only because a hurricane removed much of the old regime that would have squashed such changes, as Smarick notes often in his book.
Are D.C. schools so bad they might also resort to a public-charter-private massive realignment? Maybe.
A few other cities that have run out of practical options, such as Detroit, might follow suit. Such places can’t get any worse. They might be tempted by a hurricane of an idea, no matter how much trouble it causes.