As Illinois Senate Bill 7 awaits the governor's signature, education advocates in other states are looking closely at how Illinois was able to pass one of the strongest education reform bills in the country and wondering what it might take to do the same. SB 7 would make student performance a factor in educator hiring, evaluations, tenure, and layoffs and allow Chicago's new mayor to lengthen his city's school day.
Illinois' approach is especially noteworthy compared to its neighbor, Wisconsin. While Wisconsin's governor put forth legislation to accomplish similar ends, he also included a poison pill for the state's unions that seriously curtailed collective bargaining rights. Now, as Wisconsin's leaders are distracted from the work of improving its schools by a wave of recall elections for the senators who backed Gov. Walker's bill, Illinois' civic and education leaders are working together to achieve many of the same education policy goals.
Clearly, Illinois understands that passing laws is the beginning, not the end, of school improvement. Once SB 7 is signed, Illinois is poised to begin work on implementation with all the important players at the table, including representatives of the state's teachers, who are the people whose efforts matter most in improving schools. Sure, there have been bumps along the way, including some last minute arm wrestling around trailer legislation, but the contrast between Wisconsin and Illinois is striking and a credit to Illinois' civic leadership and the professionalism of its educators.
Does all this mean that Illinoisans are just bigger people than their neighbors? Hardly. But they were better prepared for real change. The groundwork that led up to SB 7 is a much bigger story about how leaders in Illinois strategically set about changing their state's commitment to education reform. It is worth telling because it's a strategy that can play out in any state where leading citizens are frustrated with the status quo.
If you follow education policy, you know that, until the last few years, Illinois was as middling as its geography when it came to reform. The Joyce Foundation, a Midwest funder based in Chicago, sought to change that and quickly attracted other funders, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. They initiated a benchmarking study of civic groups working at the state level, observing that in every leading state, at least one and sometimes several education advocacy groups were active. Those organizations brought a full-time, evidenced-based, public voice to debates on public education policy. (I played a small role in those early benchmarking efforts, creating "Rabble Rousers: A guide for launching state-based education reform advocacy organizations", a resource for Illinois that was re-released last year by the PIE Network.)
The foundations then began conversations with some of Illinois's leading citizens from both sides of the political aisle who cared deeply about education. When those leaders gathered as a group, they quickly came to see that they were the leadership they craved -- that theirs were the voices missing in the debate.
Initially, these early conversations within Illinois's civic community were loosely organized as a sort of kitchen cabinet as they explored options and models at work in other states. With growing support from their foundation community, additional research helped identify the state's major policy challenges. Over time, the kitchen cabinet formalized as the board of Advance Illinois, and staff was soon hired.
The early work of creating Advance Illinois changed the landscape for reform in Illinois in five significant ways. First, its founders assembled one of the more impressive civic boards in the country, sending a clear signal to Springfield that the state's leading citizens were collectively paying attention to education. Second, they prepared for their launch with a statewide listening tour that brought disparate communities into the conversation about changing schools. Third, they launched a campaign whose theme, We Can Do Better, provided the data to focus the state's frustrations and the inspiration to rouse its ambitions. Fourth, that campaign set the stage for Illinois's impressive fifth place ranking in the first round of Race to the Top--not bad for a state that wasn't on education reform's radar a few years prior.
Finally, and especially significantly for SB 7, new donors were drawn by the optimism and momentum of this early work, creating the appetite for another advocacy voice. Last year, Stand for Children was invited into Illinois as a second significant advocacy force in Illinois. As Stand built the third largest political action committee in the state, raising more than $3 million in less than a year, and worked with Advance Illinois to expand the state's reform coalition, it helped drive this legislation home.
But before either of these groups existed, leading citizens I spoke with in Illinois sounded a lot like civic leaders I occasionally talk with today from one of the 20 or so states that have no advocacy voice for education representing them in their state capital: frustrated with their state's leaders and disconnected from others who felt the same.
A dozen or so leading citizens, backed by local and national philanthropy, put Illinois on this path to becoming a national leader in education reform, distinguishing its approach from its neighbor. Enacting SB 7 will demonstrate that profound, productive change is within the grasp of any state whose civic leaders want more from their public schools.
Follow Suzanne Tacheny Kubach on Twitter: www.twitter.com/PIENetwork
Jacqueline Edelberg: If Gov. Walker Thinks Wisconsin's Illinois, Dream On
76(R) SB 7 Enrolled version - Bill Text
Illinois Education Association - IEANEA
Chicago Fight Threatens Illinois Education Overhaul - WSJ.com
Which leads me to my next point: the article states "the state's teachers, who are the people whose efforts matter most in improving schools" as a truth. While what we do is important and valuable, it is parents whose efforts matter most in improving schools. They increasingly buy what the media sells as true: teachers are overpaid and underworked, which is another excuse for many to have abdicated what is their responsibility in the first place: see that homework is done, correct, check for understanding, not to mention to get kids well-fed and rested, medically cared for, and psychologically ready (shut off the TV, have a conversation, read a book are just a few examples) to learn when they get here.
Kubach puts another media brick in the wall by ignoring the people who can and must change the learning of our kids for the better, parents. It's their job.
A number of things have to come together in order for it to happen. When they do, it's a self-reinforcing process.
Testing a fire, rearranging the sticks so that you can get a good view, won't make it burn.
Illinois is financially insolvent...so lawmakers probably didn't have any other choice. Then again, such so-called education reform bills are just more legislative window dressing...to cover the fact that lazy parents and unmotivated students are the ones really responsible for poor academic performance(s). Students with drive, determination and adequate parental support can pass any class (outside tutoring sessions, many times for free, anyone?), even if the course instructor is incompetent.
Hopefully, Illinois will -- ahem -- succeed...perhaps better than what the state has accomplished by bankrupting its pension system. But I doubt it...
The idea that we must provide everyone an education whether they want it or not is misguided. What we are required, as a society, to do is to give everyone the opportunity for education. You cannot tie a young person to a chair and force them to learn.
When I was in school (a very decent public school) you were expected to behave and follow the rules if you did not you were suspended and eventually expelled. You could lose your right to an education through bad, antisocial or violent behavior.
An adult who understands the group dynamics and developmental level of the kids, and who doesn't have outside factors interfering, can have them on the edge of their seats, eager to do the next activity. Of course, a child whose home life is distorted by alcoholism or whatever won't be able to concentrate on schoolwork. A child who's on the spectrum won't respond to the social dynamics the same way as one with NPD. With adequate resources, these things can be kept from disrupting the learning environment, and it's the adults' responsibility to do so.
Blaming the children is not an answer.
As for the author's snarky comments about Wisconsin, I'll say this: I taught my trade at a private technical institute in a right-to-work state. During the years that I worked there, a few instructors who came on board were found to be unsuitable, so they were fired. The company didn't have to go through any union mess or anything, they were just able to get those people removed, some during the middle of a quarter, and have other, more qualified instructors take over their classes to the end of the quarter. So what's up with the glorification of unions here?
I'll discuss two of my previous points here, in tandem: education is basically an equation that includes not only teachers and administration, but parents and their children, who are the students. A stellar administration and teaching staff cannot possibly make up for parents who have not gotten involved with their childrens' education, nor instilled the value of education into their childrens' heads, or students who think it's cute and funny to waste their time and not take advantage of their free education which is handed to them on a platter.
Unions are the worst thing in education. It enables substandard teaches can have a job for life.
It's no different than your right to a trial by jury. Would it be just if someone accused you of murder and they just sent you to prison without proving it? That is all that unions do. The tales you hear come from those whose bottom line is threatened by unions.
In most cases, higher scores means wealthier students whose parents went farther in their own education.
You're as likely to find a great teacher in a low-scoring school as a high-performing school, and standardized tests and value-added calculations will never be able to identify them with any consistency.
Before you go teach in a low-income part of Chicago, be aware that this legislation has already said you're doing a bad job.
That's the point.
When we talk averages, we're including all the kids who fail, whose parents didn't even go to high school, who just immigrated to the US, who have a drug problem or are gang members.
And my wife, who teaches in the suburbs, also has students fail. But most of them do well; most of their parents went to college, and they live in homes with pools, and travel during the year, etc.
The average scores obliterate the distinctions between kids, and between teachers, for that matter.
I have one amendment, though--the students whose parents know HOW to take an active part in their education usually excel.
Some parents care a lot but don't know how to get their kids to care, too. One mom told me this year, basically with an "I give up" shrug, that her failing daughter (who was quite likable, actually) was "very rebellious." She wanted to help, but couldn't. Neither could I.
More teachers self-identify as conservative than liberal--this according to the NEA's own survey.
http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/HE/2005-06StatusTextandAppendixA.pdf
(page 127)
Many of them vote republican AND join the union.
Isn't life weird?
2. Make sure they follow these rules once they do start by getting involved with their teachers, going to meetings, paying attention to what is going on in the classroom, making sure homework is done properly.
3. If problems arise with teachers or other students, go to school board meetings, meet with the principal, in other words get involved with what is going on in the childs life. As a parent your responsibility does not end when the child walks into the school building.
4. As I see it, it is a lack of respect, bad behavior, and a could care less attitude that is not being addressed in the home and in the classroom. Teachers are not allowed to discipline the children, and parents (in some cases) won't.
5. Parents start being parents (not best friends), and teachers start teaching. Everyone stop whining about too much work, school days are too long, school year is too long, put your big kid pants on and get to work - you will find out soon enough that it won't kill you, it just might make you a better and more successful person!
For it to be effective there must be control over those that disrupt classes, bully other students, or otherwise make our schools anything other than places of higher learning. Juvenile delinquents that disrupt school need to go to reform school to finish out their education. Teachers cannot be held accountable for the unruly rabble that affect their performance. If the parents can't control these gansta wannabe's the state needs to step in.
Why do you think teachers should be held accountable for student grades, but not accountable for student behavior? And before you say 'parents', why are you holding the parents responsible for their kids behavior and not their grades?