Whom Will He Choose?

Obama's choice for Secretary of Education will be important. For the first time since the early 1970s, we may have an opportunity to improve the educational system where it is now least effective, in large urban and poor rural and semi-rural school districts.

Obama knows this. His campaign platform spelled out an ambitious program to invest in expanding early childhood education, using tuition offsets and higher starting salaries to recruit highly qualified young people into teaching, reforming teacher education so that new teachers would be better trained, implementing mentoring programs to induct teachers into the conditions of inner city schools, and training a new generation of principals and superintendents in the most advanced management methods.

Obama also knows that the current economic crisis, grim as it is, gives his administration a golden opportunity. With government as the investor of last resort, he has broad support to implement major changes in the educational, health care, and energy systems using federal money.

So who would be the best person to carry out this new federal education investment strategy?

You would think it should be someone who is in tune with Obama's vision of educational change; someone who, like Obama, believes that improving the quality of America's teaching force, attracting more highly qualified teachers into under resourced districts, and developing top-flight local educational leadership are key to raising student achievement.

However, there is a not so quiet campaign to disparage this vision of reform. One example is David Brooks' column Friday in the New York Times. "Who[m] will he choose?" Brooks asks. He goes on to argue that one of the leading candidates for Secretary of Education, Linda Darling Hammond, my colleague at Stanford University and currently head of Obama's educational transition team, is a defender of the status quo, whereas the other hypothetical leading candidates are real reformers.

This is an intentionally misleading characterization of the candidates. At issue is not Brooks' status quo versus reform, but whose reform.

On one side are those who believe, based on increasingly convincing data from here and around the world, that you can't have good schools without a large pool of highly qualified professional teachers and managers who are kept accountable to taxpayers. You also can't expect students to do well in school if they spend their early years in poor health and lacking language and other learning stimuli. The McKinsey Company, hardly a bastion of pro-union liberals, argues that the very high achieving countries -- Finland, Korea, Japan, Canada, and others -- all make sure that the very best people go into teaching, that they are pre-screened and then well prepared in teacher training institutions, and that all children have access to health care, nutrition programs, and high quality pre-schools.

On the other side are those who claim that only deregulating education and introducing market incentives can make schools better. These are the charter school and voucher advocates who believe that competition among schools, increased parental choice, and annual reviews of teachers in public schools using student achievement gains will increase learning.

The usual villains of this piece are the teachers' unions, teaching as a "profession," and schools of education. Instead of unionized teachers certified by regulated teacher education programs intending to make teaching a career, these reformers are pushing hard for using many more "short-termers," young people who stay in teaching a few years and then move on to other jobs.

For those of you who are confused and think this is John McCain's education platform, you are right. It is. But it's being pushed by a group of Democrats. This despite the deregulatory experiences of the past eight years, the mounting evidence that charter schools and voucher plans have negligible effects on student achievement, and little proof that merit and other pay incentives improve teaching.

The experience with choice is predictable, since charter and voucher schools draw from the same teacher and educational management pool as regular public schools. They also have to educate the same kids. So when low-income parents in, say, Milwaukee, which has total parental choice, pull their children out of their neighborhood school and send them to a privately run voucher or charter school, they are bound to get a teacher and classroom that is no different academically from the one they left.

That is why Obama's much broader reform agenda makes a lot more sense, and why it is foolish to characterize someone like Darling Hammond as a defender of the status quo. If anything, the reforms of teacher education and certification she has fought for, and the district reforms her work has supported in Boston, Chicago, and pre-Joel Klein in New York City, are more effective than the choice reforms in Milwaukee and Washington, D.C.

Neither is Darling Hammond opposed to charter schools -- she helped found and is deeply involved in Stanford's charter school in East Palo Alto. It's a matter of what she expects charter schools to accomplish. Along with Obama, she wants closely monitored charters as potential sites for innovation, but doesn't expect them to become the new educational system in low-income districts.

True, Darling Hammond has good contacts in the teachers' unions. Why that is a negative for an educational reformer is a mystery that Brooks (and his fellow deregulators) should have to explain. If collective bargaining were really the reason that students don't achieve at high levels, then all those southern states with no collective bargaining would be at the top of the state rankings, and Canadian and Finnish students would be doing a lot worse than students in Alabama. Yes, unions make it hard to fire teachers without due process. But well trained principals and superintendents know how to go through the process and get bad teachers out. Trouble is, we don't really train our educational managers to do this, nor to be instructional leaders, nor to use achievement data to help make teachers aware of their shortcomings.

There are ineffective teachers in big city school districts (and in high income suburban districts and in private schools). Yet, until and even when we have better replacements for them, to improve schools we need tough, long-term leadership that has the cooperation and trust of the good teachers already in the system and their unions. Barack Obama, long experienced at the grassroots level of Chicago's reform, knows all this. It makes him a much better judge than David Brooks of whom to choose for Secretary.

Comments

[hberlak]

There has got to be an explanation as to why is it that LDH a solidly moderate, liberal-leaning Stanford education professor known for being pro teacher, is being attacked so ruthlessly as a dangerous, out-of control, pro union radical who would obstruct school reform. My view is that though she is no radical, her readiness to consider changes to NCLB that reduce dependence on standardized test scores would undermine the education agenda of the DLC, Business Roundtable, a host of other think tanks, mainline foundations. pro business lobbies and business notables such as Eli Broad, Bill Gates, Donald Fisher, not to mention Bloomberg and Joel Klein. All view standardized testing as the primary measure of school success and student growth and achievement

Harold Berlak

[monyc]

I thought that the bloom was off the rose of de-regulation. Is anyone seriously thinking it failed on Wall Street, but is still worth the gamble with our schools? Martin Carnoy's comments in support of Linda-Darling Hammond are exactly right.

[ja0862]

Martin Carnoy gets it right! He draws his conclusions from facts, not from ideology. The Democrats for Education Reform not only favor a market approach to education, but they, their media partners, and corporate supporters have disdain for teachers. Such disdain will not produce the teaching force this nation needs. And as Carony points out, there is scant evidence that the reforms they propose actually work.
With regard to Joel Klein, founder of Democrats for Education Reform, where are the facts that support the assertion that he is a reformer? The NYC small schools high school reform for which Klein is credited, was actually initiated in 1993 and Darling-Hammond was a partner in that work at that time. The NYC BOE was giving bonus pay to schools that improved their performance for several years before Klein came on the scene. The NAEP shows that student test scores have remained flat through Klein's tenure There has been a decrease in the percentage of Black and Latino students admitted to gifted programs and NYC's highest performing high schools. A recent survey showed that more than 75% of parents give Klein poor job approval rating. The report card accountability system is a statistical sham that has schools narrowing curriculum to test-prep rather than college-prep. The old bureaucracy has been replaced with a new bureaucracy that lacks transparency and is as confusing as ever. The elimination of principal tenure has resulted in no change in student achievement.

[berger788]

Selecting a Secretary of Education is quickly being re-framed by competing ideas of accountability and the future of education. With that has come a rush to label ideas as either "reform" or "establishment" (see Brooks, 12/5/08). Such steps are in stark contrast to the Barack Obama's candidacy, which was built on a platform of inclusion -- moving beyond stale and divisive ideologies and finding common ground. The values at the core are equity, opportunity and possibility for all children. The re-authorization of NCLB and economic challenges ahead make it imperative that we reaffirm three core values in supporting educational reform:

* the holistic development of all children (not just reading/language arts and math standardized test scores);

* deep and extensive educator preparation and in-service staff development; and

* the development and support of entire organic communities that support quality teaching and learning, not the disenfranchisement of many to make way for quick structural reforms.

We believe that David Brooks has it exactly backward in referring to Joel Klein as an exponent of reform and Linda Darling-Hammond as representing the establishment. We strongly support the policy platforms of educators like Linda Darling-Hammond who have worked throughout their careers for policies and reforms built on the above core values. We welcome the day when these core values and approaches would actually be the "establishment" rather than solely the option of a select few.

[xanderhod]

Thank you so much for setting the record straight! Trying to portray Linda Darling-Hammond as "status quo" is absurd. I am a high school principal in California, and from her position at Stanford, she has been one of the most prominent and effective advocates of progressive school reform in the state, if not the nation. She supports real redesign of schools, not tinkering around the edges. She is a huge advocate of teacher quality and teacher training. And she is always focused on equity and on improving the achievement of low-income students and students of color. She has been a teacher, a researcher, a policy advocate, and a school founder. I can't think of a better "change" pick for Secretary of Education.

[DelRay]

What also makes me nervous is not Darling-Hammond herself, but the work of many teacher's unions. I was a public school teacher in New York; I had to choose between alienating my union or my principal during my first year of teaching because I asked for the day after a holiday off and my principal respectfully declined. I ended up going to work that day for many reasons, and my principal personally thanked me, but it was that instant that made me realize the harm that was being done to children through Weingarten's efforts. Teachers routinely took days off (I was told by the union that I should fight the one day that year my principal wouldn't grant me) leaving other teachers to come in and cover, usually for extra pay. I went in to classrooms; sometimes there were lesson plans sometimes there weren't. DC is another example of the union stepping in the way of even the teachers by not bringing Rhee's contract up for a vote. I think they were nervous that it would pass and that a lot of teachers would end up having large paychecks.

[DelRay]

But Martin, comparing the United States to countries like Japan is difficult. There are major cultural differences between the United States and Japan, especially when it comes to education. In Japan parents are very involved in a child's education at the earliest stages. Many public charter elementary schools make parental involvement a must and work with parents constantly. The best public charter schools were started by leaders who love public education but don't necessarily want to go through the traditional means of school leadership which then creates a facilitator instead of a leader.

I highly respect Linda Darling-Hammond and see a place for her in the new administration, just not the top spot. What makes me nervous about her is this utopian idea for society that the government is supposed to create. Let's say this does happen, we still lose one or maybe two generations of children. I also believe, talking to teachers in Teach for America, Teaching Fellows programs and teachers who went in to teaching through a more traditional route, that many ed schools are a nuisance instead of a positive. That is unless one enrolls in a good programs (in New York: Bank Street, Hunter and possibly Teachers College). A Master's in Education can almost be an antiquated way to ensure the quality of a teacher.

[Martin Carnoy - Huffpost Blogger]

The best charter schools are indeed run by exceptional people, so it is a real plus that the option of charter schools attracts such leaders into education. The problem is that many in the charter school movement see even the charters that are not good as preferable to traditional public schools for ideological reasons. Obama's philosophy on charters is to promote the good ones for the reason you give, but not push charters broadly as an alternative to public schools. The idea is to make all schools better by increasing the quality of the teacher pool available, particularly for low-income school districts and to give lower income students an enriched learning environment in high quality pre-schools.

There is no question that most teachers in the US are badly prepared by our teacher education programs. That should not translate into the notion that you don't really need to be trained to be a teacher. We need to do something about teacher education, period. Giving one month training programs to bright college students and throwing them into inner city classrooms may be an interesting experiment and provide character-building experiences for these young people, but it is not a long-term answer to inadequate teacher preparation programs.

[JoyceSaly]

Despite six years of the Klein administration"s misinformation to the public, there is sufficient data to prove that his reforms have produced no significant improvement in student achievement.

The Klein administration claims of a 12 percent increase in Reading and a 19 percent increase in Math scores on the New York State Assessments are inflated. These results include the scores obtained in 2002-2003 well before the implementation of Klein"s reforms. Without the 6 percent increase in Reading and the 15 percent in Math in 2002 - 2003, the figures read a dismal 6.4 percent rise in Reading and only 4.2 percent in Mathematics.

The only independent check on student achievement in NYC also shows a completely different picture from that claimed by Klein. The results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress administered by the US Department of Education, considered the gold standard in testing, show that student achievement in NYC has stagnated since 2003 with virtually no improvements for Black, Hispanic and low income students. http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pdf/dst2007/2008455.pdf

Mr. Klein"s public relations team has made sure assessment information is not accurately presented to the public. The failure of Klein"s reforms become all the more evident when we consider all assessment measures " declining SAT and High Schools Advanced Placement Subject Tests, one of the worst graduation rates in the country (43rd out of 50 large US cities), a 50 percent drop in students attending gifted programs in NYC, etc.