Unacceptable

Today I'd like to introduce you to John Kuhn, superintendent of the Perrin-Whitt Consolidated Independent School District in North Texas. Kuhn is a life-long advocate of public education and public accountability. This weekend, at the National Save Our Schools Rally in Washington DC, he spoke passionately about the vital need for great public schools, the critical importance of a no-excuses public attitude toward educating America's kids, and what it will really take to create the equitable education system our great country deserves. For now, as we work toward those goals, Kuhn says, "I stand before you today bearing proudly the label of unacceptable because I educate the children [private schools] will not educate.... I am unacceptable and proud of it!"

Make no mistake: unacceptable as he is according to current educator grading methods, Kuhn is not an apologist for bad teaching; he is only asking for appropriate systems of evaluation. In April, Kuhn appealed to his state legislature for a two-year moratorium on high-stakes testing. When one representative asked Kuhn why he thought teachers shouldn't be graded, he wasn't prepared with his answer. However, he recognized that this is a question that keeps coming up for educators, and being unprepared to answer makes us look, in his words, "like [we] are just whiners who don't want to be held accountable at all." So he thought about it and developed an articulation, not of why teachers shouldn't be graded, but of how the state has become a bad teacher and, thus, an irresponsible grader.

His emphatic and empathetic response to this question provides a useful starting point for all of us who believe teachers should be graded, but fairly. It's only a starting point, as some folks pointed out in the comments. It is up to the rest of us to develop our own articulations of how to create better forms of teacher accountability, how to fairly evaluate teachers and push them toward achieving greatness. Until we put meaningful teacher evaluation, support, and development systems in place, we must join Kuhn in proudly bearing the label of unacceptable.

Ready for some good news out of Congress?

A few senators on both sides of the aisle spoke some sense about education in a Senate Appropriations Committee meeting, today, where Secretary of Education Arne Duncan appealed for an education budget increase. Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) agreed in principle, saying, "It is wishful thinking to expect improvements in school quality when we are laying off teachers."

In the same meeting, Senators Richard Shelby (R-AL) and Jack Reed (D-RI) criticized competitive grant programs including Race to the Top (RTTT) and Promise Neighborhood (PN) grants. Shelby expressed concern that RTTT ensures inequitable funding and threatens states' rights by introducing a de facto requirement for states to support charter schools. Reed cautioned that funding should not be allocated to "untested" competitive grants, while being stripped from research-based programs.

The senators gently couched their concerns in party rhetoric, but my hope is that this is a sign of a larger political shift away from trying to apply competition-based business strategies to an education system that is supposed to provide equitable education to all. With increasing attention to the way this country educates its children, it seems more folks are starting to understand that the economic purpose of schools is not to turn a profit, but to ensure strong profits, over time, across all industries, by providing a skilled, knowledgeable, creative, and capable national workforce.

Links:

Reuters on the Senate Committee Meeting

HuffPo on the Senate Committee Meeting

Read my lips: reform requires taxes

In today's news, Illinois Schools Superintendent Christopher Koch pointed out that funding cuts are bad for education reform. Now, I wasn't a huge fan of the Illinois reforms to begin with (the big focus was on preventing teacher strikes and paying teachers for high test scores), but Koch is right that education reform is going to take some serious funding.

Real reform, like the suggestions from Iowa's roundtables and the initiatives AFT president Randi Weingarten highlighted last week at the AFT Teach conference, will require real funding. Selling this reality to parents, pundits, politicians, and private sector CEOs will be the biggest challenge we'll face in achieving the long-term goal of improving the US education system to rival those of Finland, Singapore, and South Korea.

While we work on the mid-term goal of selling folks on the idea of higher taxes to fund real school reform, we could act in the short-term to divert funding away from unproven and disproved reform efforts, such as bonus pay for high test scores and developing standardized tests for preschoolers.

More links:

Evansville Courier Press on Koch's funding frustration

AFL-CIO blog summary of Weingarten's remarks

AFT Quality Education Agenda for evidence-based, equitable, scalable, and sustainable reform

School, virtually

Just a quick note today about another experiment in education: the growing online K-12 school movement. Louisiana just approved the first two free online charter high schools for the state, and Connections Academy received 1900 applications for 600 spots. The school is appealing to the state to be allowed to hire more staff and enroll 1200 students.

Virtual school programs provide an educational experience that is truly different from the traditional in-person schools. The option is usually marketed to students who prefer independent work, who want to get ahead in their studies, who have trouble interacting socially or experience difficulty controlling their behavior in large classes, or who feel ostracized or bullied in their traditional schools.

Online schools already operate nationwide as private alternatives to public schools, but several states (OH, UT, LA, IN, and TN among them) have begun incorporating virtual learning into their public school offerings as well. This means funding that used to go to traditional public schools now goes to virtual schools.

The trickiest situations occur in states like Utah that fund students to attend traditional schools and online schools, each part time. In that situation, costs f0r the schools are duplicated, but funding is not. Both schools have to maintain student records and process student paperwork and both schools have to adequately staff their classes, despite being only partially funded for some of their students. This is particularly challenging for traditional schools that have a few students attending online classes part time. They lose partial funding for the students, but still have to physically accommodate them in the classes they elect to take traditionally. In contrast, the school does not lose funding when students attend co-curricular college courses during high school.