Education Reform: Before It Was Cool: The Real Story and Pioneers Who Made It Happen

By Brian Backstorm and The Center for Education Reform

In 1983, Americans, content with the failing education establishment and ill-equipped to change the status quo were handed a wake-up call in the form of A Nation at Risk. This national report exposed the problems in the system, and slowly, Americans began to see possibilities where there were none. Successes bloomed in cities desperate for change; states began to sign bills into laws. Parents and teachers were starting schools on their own and gutsy governors and legislators began to put education reform at the top of their lists. The Center for Education Reform (CER) has led the charge for change since ideas for reform weren't more than dreams, and now, it seems, perseverance has paid off. Education reform is back in the national spotlight and CER remains the cornerstone of the movement. With the Center's vast experience in two decades of reform, Education Reform: Before It was Cool recounts successes, remembers the pioneers of education reform, and continues to press on for our nation's children as the destination for all Americans who seek something better for our country's education.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 26, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493176939

Book preview

Education Reform:

Before It Was Cool

The Real Story and the Pioneers Who Made It Happen

Edited by Jeanne Allen

With assistance from Brian Backstrom

CER_Logo_FinalPMS_2011.jpg

Kara Kerwin, president

Alison Zgainer, executive vice president

Copyright © 2014 by The Center for Education Reform.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 03/21/2014

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CONTENTS

Education Reform

Before It Was Cool

Foreword (And Forward)

By Jeanne Allen

PART 1:

Annenberg Challenge Redux?

Are Union Contracts An Impediment To District-Wide Reform?

By Mike Antonucci

School District Structure And Resistance To Change

By Ted Kolderie

History Lessons On System-Wide Change

By Bob Maranto

What Works In Urban District Partnerships

By Deborah Mcgriff

PART 2:

Not Your Schoolhouse Rock:

How Charter School Bills Really Became Laws

The D.c. Experience

By Ted Rebarber

First In The Nation: Minnesota

By Ember Reichgott Junge

California’s Charter Rush

By Yvonne Chan

Massachusetts’s Charter School Tea Party

By Linda Brown

Show-Me Charter Schools!

Missouri Enacts Its Law

By Jane Cunningham

Getting—And Keeping—Charter Schools

In New York State

By Tom Carroll

Growing Charters In The Garden State

By Melanie Schulz

Keystone Collaboration

By Dwight Evans

PART 3:

Before Chiefs for Change There Was

The Education Leaders Council

Before Chiefs For Change There Was

The Education Leaders Council

Jeanne Allen, Eugene Hickok, And Lisa Graham Keegan

PART 4:

The Real Grassroots of Education Reform

From Mom And Dentist To Reform Activist

By Janet Barresi

The Mom Movement Of Milwaukee

By Zakiya Courtney

School Districts Can Lead Change, Too

By Bill Manning

Grassroots: The Vital Component

By Kevin Teasley

I Just Wanted My Daughter

To Learn How To Read

By Leah Vukmir

PART 5:

Changing the Complexion of the Room

Empowering People Of Color

By Howard Fuller

Making The Message Matter

By Kevin Chavous

Restore The Concept That

Education Is Valuable

By T. Willard Fair

Investment In Community Pays Off

By Donald Hense

PART 6:

Public Opinion: Where we are Today

Public Opinion: Where We Are Today

By Kellyanne Conway

Epilogue: Twenty Years Of Progress, And The Best Is Yet To Come

By Kara Kerwin

PART 7:

Words of Wisdom from the Honorees

A Salute to the Classics of Education Reform

There Are Really Only Two Questions, Who Gets To Teach The Children? And What Do They Teach The Children?

William J. Bennett

Gonna Build A Mountain

Yvonne Chan

Honoring Those Who Do Well And Do Good

Barbara Dreyer

When Passion And Philanthropy Converge

James, Janis And Tracy Gleason

Getting A Kick Out Of Education Reform

Deborah Mcgriff

Innovation And Entrepreneurship At Work

Michael Moe

In Memoriam Honor Roll

About The Author

To the quiet, behind the scenes crowd of people who do the real work making schools better for all children, everyday: you are the true pioneers and the rest of us your servants.

EDUCATION REFORM

Before it Was Cool

T wo decades ago, education reform was not cool. If you weren’t about reducing class size and advocating for more money, you were nobody. The education establishment was the only thing that was really in, and it was the only thing about schools that everyone from the media to the White House seemed to be excited about.

It was a big fat party, and only a handful of people fought to get past the bouncers to try to shake up that party.

It shouldn’t have been that way. After all, the nation was issued a wake-up call in 1983. The research showed that even our best students had an education that was mediocre at best. For poor children, our schools were simply failing them. A Nation at Risk forewarned that if our leaders failed to address education’s rising tide of mediocrity, the world’s economic and social outlook was bleak.

Hundreds of in-system always-costly efforts ensued, to no avail, and the public outrage died down. Then in 1990, a modern day Harriet Tubman pushed through a voucher bill in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Polly Williams became Governor Tommy Thompson’s best friend on school choice. In 1991, Minnesota passed the first charter school law led by the Democrat-Farmer-Labor party. In 1992, Bill Clinton appealed to centrists to embrace public school choice. In 1993, John Engler challenged his state’s establishment and enacted a far-reaching charter school law with university authorizers at the helm. The floodgates to reform opportunities flew open, despite enormous union opposition that targeted supporters at every level.

Gutsy governors took reform on with gusto and began a decade of strong charter laws, rigorous standards, high-stakes testing, and yes, even school-choice vouchers. Legislators from all parties signed-up to join them. Companies joined the movement to help manage schools, organic parent groups organically sprouted and took on the establishment, and some even started schools. By 2000 the education reform movement was in full adolescence and booming. It became cool to be a reformer, and soon those rope-lines in all the hot party places were filled with people who knew that talking money and class size was passé. Choice and accountability were here to stay. And the teachers unions and school boards associations and other members of the entrenched education establishment were so much on the defensive they started writing plans that would get them and their agendas back as part of the in-crowd.

Lots of new people joined the reform party, but they didn’t know the history, the struggles, the reality and brutality of the opposition. They were cool, and that happened to be enough. For a while. Reform efforts began sliding, and resistance to them kept growing. But rather than fight the opponents bolstered by what was truly right for parents and school children, as their predecessors did, many modern-day reformers started talking about collaboration… again. A new push for those consistently failed in-system reforms, talk of the need to get along with unions that were in most cases fundamentally opposed to the basic intent of the reforms, calls for only measured choice, and efforts to over-regulate charters schools where outcomes are supposed to be the defining element all have stymied the movement started by the early reformers.

Good intentions won’t deliver American kids from embarrassingly low proficiency in the basics, restore rigor to their classrooms, or ensure college—and career-readiness. Only hard, smart decisions and substantive efforts will. As The Center for Education Reform turned 20 years young and looked back at the history it helped create, it became clear what the next generation of reformers should learn from the lessons of the past, the battle lines drawn and re-drawn, the missteps made, and the victories won.

FOREWORD (AND FORWARD)

By Jeanne Allen

W hen I started the Center for Education Reform back in 1993, it was a new age for education reform. While it wasn’t cool to be a reformer, we resolved not only to make it cool, but to make it mainstream. We had one singular purpose that lives on today: to expand access and restore educational excellence in our nation’s schools.

Buoyed with a clear sense of urgency, commitment, and passion, I was excited when I began regularly encountering people who, given the right tools, were ready to lead—lawmakers, the proverbial just moms and dads, civic officials, entrepreneurs, even some in the media. I started to find lots of accomplices willing and ready to get going.

Within a few months, the team at the Center for Education Reform was writing and speaking, and we were being called to strategize on how best to get new education reform laws on the books in a variety of states. Days became weeks, weeks became years, and plans and ideas became proposals, which in turn became strategies.

Over those years, we were joined in the effort by new leaders who helped start new organizations and added important and supporting strands to the web that now makes up the modern education reform movement.

The work has never been easy, but it is incredibly rewarding. What got me up every day, and what characterizes the leaders of today’s movement, is what the work stands for and the knowledge that it truly is right. We are proudly opportunistic. Some have called it unfocused, but what they forget is that what we do is not about the plan, but whether the plan is working. Sometimes—in fact, frequently—that plan has to adjust to fit the circumstances, the changing needs of parents, students, families, and society, and the movement has to be nimble enough to embrace and advance the new strategy.

All of us who represent the Center for Education Reform believe that without an opportunistic outlook we will become just like the institutions we sought to change twenty years ago. That’s why our movement must focus on both the opportunity and the need to turn on a dime when necessary to address the challenges of ensuring that every child receives the best educational opportunity possible. To do that, continually, requires the Center to evolve and be ready to evolve again to fit a new time, a new generation, and a new day.

Every generation has its talents and dreams, and its unique selling points, vantage points, and talking points. Today, the movement for education reform is being driven by a new generation, a more sophisticated set of technologies, and refocused and often grander ideals. This generation is leading our best schools, our foundations, and our research organizations.

And this generation will be better than mine. They are more relentless in mission and yet more cooperative. They are more patient, yet resolute. They are focused, but they are fun.

To really understand what’s necessary and how to make it happen, one must have deep and first-hand knowledge of what’s actually going on out there, out of the conference rooms, out of the legislative chambers, and out of the capital cities. One must know the conditions, the background, the causes, and the effects. One must understand data and what it means, and, more importantly—probably most importantly—one must really get to know the people who are doing the real work.

When I was 30 years old, there weren’t a lot of us starting or running organizations. The increase in young professionals joining us daily guarantees longevity for the reform movement, and it ensures it will be a permanent fixture in the enterprise of American education for years to come.

I never knew when I started CER that we’d be at the cusp of a movement that, with a little push and pull, lots of information, and endless challenging of conventional so-called wisdom, we would be approaching critical mass in cities and states and nationwide in the effort to disrupt old, tired, worn convictions that were getting in the way of our kids getting a quality education.

New leadership means steady and full success for choice and accountability in education—and, by the way, in that order. We must never forget in our madness to prove our cause to people who have no interest in being on the team that choice is the driver for accountability, and accountability is not possible without choice.

While I proudly embrace and pass the baton to this new generation of champions for reform, it remains important that they know the movement’s history. One must know who fought the early battles, who took the first arrows, and who made it cool for a new generation to come to the party.

These early pioneers for social change and social justice built the foundation of our education reform movement and made it possible for others to create and build new organizations and achieve their goals more quickly. They made it look easy, so that others might be more willing to follow.

By doing that, these mavericks took what was once heresy and made it mainstream. The quest to make schools better for all kids could be accelerated because first we stormed the beachhead.

History is the best teacher, and it is a handy guide to avoiding repetitive failure and ensuring repetitive success. History is why the Center launched Education Reform University to let people tell the stories of their contribution to building the foundation of reform. History will show you why we coined and use the phrase Parent Power, underscoring our efforts to open the door to parents who might never have been engaged. It will reveal how tri-partisan political support was created to drive adoption of the first charter school laws in this country, and history will teach how and why we began to change the complexion of the room.

But with all the successes history may show, there still is so much more to do.

The education reform movement must envelop the people who have not yet been to the party, and we need to engage their hearts and their minds. That is one of the purposes of this book.

Twenty years ago I wrote, with Angela Dale, The School Reform Handbook: How to Improve Your Schools. It was a first-of-a-kind guide, a roadmap for ordinary people to learn about and become a reformer. That and many other efforts over the past two-plus decades created a firestorm of activity that has now put school choice and accountability front and center in the nation’s education ecosystem.

Education Reform: Before it Was Cool is somewhat of a successor to that first publication. It’s a new handbook, born not of theory but of real practice and success. It is designed for people who truly want to understand what we are, where we are, and to learn first-hand from the greatest contributors to the movement some rare insights about how things got done.

These stories come from an important event in our history: the twentieth anniversary of the Center for Education Reform and the conference and gala commemorating that event. It was October 2013, and nearly 300 genuine education reformers—new and seasoned, representing nearly every state from sea to shining sea—got together to reflect the tons of sweat, a little bit of blood, and an occasional tear that made up our collective efforts. We heard from pioneers who weren’t always cool, those who understood that they had to sacrifice reputation, political clout, friends in some cases, and fight for what is right for our nation’s children—our future—with the tenacity of a bulldog.

These are just a few of the stories shared that day by the education reform leaders who helped get us through those fights.

To the future!

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Full video of speakers at the Center for Education Reform’s 20th Anniversary Conference and Gala—plus much more, including Ed Reform University and our Parent Power Index—is available at http://www.edreform.com/

PART 1:

Annenberg Challenge Redux?

I n 1995, attorney Barack Obama was a member of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, one of nine city collaboratives granted multi-million dollar grants by Walter Annenberg to improve the worst schools in America. Seven years, thousands of people, additional local, state and federal funds combined to result in, well, nothing. The final evaluation of the effort said: The Challenge had little impact on school improvement and student outcomes, with no statistically significant differences between Annenberg and non-Annenberg schools in rates of achievement gain, classroom behavior, student self-efficacy, and social competence.

Some think it was millions of dollars and years wasted on an ill-conceived attempt to, with one broad brush, fix a few cities’ entire public school systems. Yet today, in cities nationwide—interestingly, including Chicago—there seems to be a resurgence of the fix-the-system-without-changing-anything-in-it mentality. From Philadelphia to Denver, folks are getting together happily singing from the same song sheet.

To what end? How exactly do big city school districts get reformed without legal, statutory changes in politically tough areas such as contract and labor law?

Does anyone remember the lessons learned from the Annenberg Challenge? Are the new crop of philanthropists—people such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who pledged $100 million in 2010 to overhaul Newark, New Jersey’s schools—just too young to remember that this approach has been tried before?

Here several essayists, who came together moderated by David Hardy, CEO & Co-Founder of Boys Latin of Philadelphia explore, among other things, whether education reformers have lost their collective memory about the failure of attempts to implement sweeping, broad based, one-size-fits-all, district-wide education reforms to change the whole system all at once. Why