December 2009 Archives

Bob Dufffy, the mayor of Rochester, N.Y., has joined the chorus of mayors across the country who want more control over their cities' schools.

Duffy, in a recent letter to the superintendent and school board president, said he believed such an arrangement was necessary. The mayor said he was not taking the stance to inflame anyone or point fingers, but because he believes consolidating the district with the city government is necessary for financial reasons and to bring wraparound services to students.

Duffy told the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle that he would want Superintendent Jean-Claude Brizard to stay on under a four-year trial period, in which the district would become a city department.

Brizard has not yet commented on the mayor's plan, but asked for community support for the district's new strategic plan, which includes closing low-performing schools, in a guest column in Sunday's Democrat and Chronicle.

Mayoral control in Rochester would require approval of the state legislature. Adam Urbanski, the president of the local teacher's union, said the organization would fight any such effort.

Rochester isn't alone. As I reported earlier this fall, efforts are under way in Detroit and Milwaukee to institute mayoral control, spurred by frustration over sometimes glacial academic progress.

Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett (who is running to replace Doyle) have been unsuccessful so far in their attempts to get the state legislature to pass a mayoral control bill, most recently in a special session two weeks ago. Barrett is still pushing forward, and the state senate's education committee is holding a hearing on the issue Jan. 5.

In Detroit, Emergency Financial Manager Robert C. Bobb recently asked for academic control of the schools. He and others have expressed support for Mayor Dave Bing having a say in how the schools are run. The Michigan House will take up the issue in a series of hearings starting Jan. 14.

For more on mayoral control, check out this excellent story my colleague (and former fellow District Dossier blogger) Lesli A. Maxwell wrote about the status of mayoral control for our Leading For Learning report on school governance.

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With fewer storm-free shopping days before Christmas this year, many folks aren't paying much attention to the new year that begins next week, let alone any local government elections.

But in Kansas City, Mo., people are so motivated to run in the upcoming school board election that a half-dozen were already in line with their petitions when the board secretary arrived yesterday morning, reports Joe Robertson of The Kansas City Star. One woman told Robertson she spent the night in her car in front of the district offices to ensure she'd be first in line to file her petition for April's school board race. How's that for dedication?

Kansas City's school district has had a bumpy last few years, including less-than-cheerful board-superintendent relations and disappointing state test results.

The board brought on a new superintendent, John Covington, in July to help shake things up in the 18,000-student school district, which is under the state's watchful eye because of a lack of academic progress. Covington and his staff have already begun streamlining a staff they said was far too large for a school district its size and even sued a neighboring school district last week that it says has not fulfilled a revenue agreement.

In 2006, incumbents ran opposed, and in 2008, one person ran a contested race, while one seat with no candidate on the ballot was filled by a write-in candidate. But voters apparently are looking for more change in 2010.

At least three of the five incumbents whose seats are up for grabs are planning to run for re-election, making this the first real contested election in some time for the district.

I'll be keeping an eye on this and letting you all know how this shapes up for Kansas City, including what it means for the turnaround project the district is working on with the state of Missouri.

In the meantime, enjoy some well-deserved time off. I, like many of our Education Week staffers, will be taking some vacation over the next week, so postings will be infrequent at best until most schools start up again in two weeks.

Please rejoin me at District Dossier in January as we track and analyze news from the nation's school districts.

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A.J. Duffy, the president of United Teachers Los Angeles, had been threatening for months to take legal action against Los Angeles Unified officials over the district's new school choice policy. That resolution, passed by the Los Angeles school board in August, will allow outside groups such as charter schools to take over the management of 30 new and existing schools starting next school year.

Late yesterday, Duffy made good on his word. The union filed its lawsuit and held a news conference at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, one of the district campuses slated for new management next fall.

The union is arguing that the district's policy--which would permit charter school operators to take on the management of newly built district schools and hire non-union teachers--violates state law. UTLA contends that at least 50 percent of a school's tenured teachers must sign a petition supporting a school's conversion to a charter, even for a brand-new school.

I don't know if UTLA's got a strong legal argument here, but, at the very least, the union might succeed in binding up the school choice process for a while. The deadline for groups interested in bidding for the management of district schools is less than three weeks away. Superintendent Ramon C. Cortines plans to make his final recommendations on new managers to the Los Angeles board of education by February.

If this is a UTLA tactic to slow the march of charters across Los Angeles, I'm not sure it's the right strategy. Charter-management organizations like Green Dot Public Schools (which are unionized, though not by UTLA), the Inner City Education Foundation, and the Alliance for College Ready Public Schools continue to scale up and draw oodles of money from private philanthropy.

Perhaps UTLA will consider a new tack like some of their union brethren in other cities where charters are proliferating: organizing those teachers. In this memo from earlier in the year, UTLA leaders acknowledge that is a necessary step for their survival. It will be interesting to see what unfolds over the next few months.

And speaking of the future, this will be my final District Dossier post as I sign off of the school district beat here at Ed Week and move on to cover state policy. I leave you in the able hands of my blogging partner and colleague, Dakarai Aarons, who will continue to bring you the newiest, juiciest tidbits from the nation's school districts.

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Robert C. Bobb, emergency financial manager of Detroit's schools, has a few things to smile about this holiday week.

A judge is scheduled to take up the long-simmering tension between Bobb and members of the school board, who say Bobb has overstepped the bounds of his authority as emergency financial manager by making decisions about academic policy.

Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Wendy Baxter ordered the school board to show up in court Jan. 8 with evidence that Bobb has overstepped his bounds. Bobb has been supported so far in his actions by Michigan's governor, who appointed him, as well as its attorney general and state education superintendent.

Bobb recently asked the state legislature to approve legislation that would allow him to take over both academics and finances.

UPDATE: Michigan's legislature will take up the Detroit issue in a hearing starting January 14, state Rep. Tim Melton told me on a conference call this afternoon.

In other news, the school district and the Detroit Federation of Teachers came to agreement over the weekend on a contract the deficit-ridden district hopes will save it $100 million over the next three years.

But as my colleague Steve Sawchuk mentioned last week, some teachers are unhappy with the deal and want to oust Detroit Federation of Teachers President Keith Johnson, who told local newspapers the dissidents represent a minority and would have an uphill battle attempting to overthrow him. You can see more from him in a new post this morning on our Teacher Beat blog.

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With more budget cuts looming, Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Ramon C. Cortines is ordering principals to give low-performing, newer teachers the boot before tenure makes it difficult to oust them.

Teachers in the nation's second-largest school district are automatically given tenure after two years if their principals do not object. A move is afoot to require principals to actively recommend teachers for tenure, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Cortines credited the Times for inspiring him to move quickly on this issue. Reporters at the paper recently presented him with data showing that the district—like many others—fails to give meaningful evaluations to teachers before they are granted tenure. That story is appearing in Sunday's editions.

"The days of coddling ineffective teachers, or allowing them to be moved to another school, are over," he told the Times. "No more excuses."

The Golden State has well-documented budget woes that are likely to lead to more layoffs for L.A. and other California school districts next year. Cortines has also asked for better monitoring of those tenured professionals with negative evaluations and those administrators who have not yet become permanent.

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With some generous seed money from the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson (charter school founder, former NBA star, and fiance of District of Columbia Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee) is launching a new nonprofit venture in California's capital city that aims to "establish and support high quality schools," according to this press release.

The new entity--called STAND UP for Sacramento Schools--is being underwritten in its initial phase by a half million bucks from the Broad Foundation. And it sounds like Mayor Johnson is putting himself on the hook to raise another $500,000 to match the Broad money. Heres's a tiny story about the new venture from a local Sacramento television station.

Given the mayor's experience as a charter school founder, and the Broad Foundation's robust support for charters, we wonder if this entity will focus largely on opening new charters in Sacto? The initial information from the mayor's office says that STAND UP will focus on five pillars: accountability, parent engagement, human capital, high quality school choices, and external resources.

According to the mayor's office, the region's school chiefs are on board with this initiative, at least publicly. No doubt that includes Jonathan P. Raymond, the still-new Sacramento City Unified chief. Raymond is a 2006 graduate of the Broad Foundation's urban superintendent's academy.

Johnson, who is a "weak" mayor under the rules of Sacramento's city charter, has been angling to change that law, which would require a citywide vote. The mayor, who has made no secret of his desire to play a role in improving the city's public schools, recently found himself in an uncomfortable spotlight from fallout over an investigation into whether he had misused federal funds in his St. Hope non-profit and accusations that he had behaved inappropriately toward young women who worked at St. Hope.

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Four years into a radical re-making of public education in New Orleans, parents in that city are mostly bullish on the patchwork system of independent charter schools and state-run public schools, according to a new survey from Tulane University.

Sixty-six percent of the public school parents who were polled--their children had to be enrolled in either a public charter school or traditional public school to be included--reported that they either "somewhat agree" or "strongly agree" that they had good options to choose from when deciding where to enroll their children. An even higher number--85 percent--said their child had been placed in the school that was the parent's first or second choice.

Since Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters upended New Orleans in 2005, researchers at the Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives at Tulane University have tried to capture through surveys how city residents and parents feel about the dramatic changes to the public schooling landscape there. A majority of public school students in the city now attend independent charter schools, while most of the rest are enrolled in the city's schools that are operated by the state-governed Recovery School District.

Here's the Times Picayune's write-up on the survey results.

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Clifford Janey, the superintendent of the District of Columbia public schools until Mayor Adrian Fenty relieved him of his duties to appoint Michelle Rhee, has said nothing publicly about his high-profile successor until this week.

The low-key Janey, who is the superintendent in Newark, N.J., spoke to The Washington Post's Bill Turque about D.C.'s rising scores on the math portion of the NAEP exam for a story that delved more deeply into the district's performance and lingering gaps between white and black students.

But the juiciest stuff from Janey came in response to hearing that Rhee had given him some credit for the improving scores. Here's the money quote that Turque posted in a blog item on D.C. Wire:

Janey does sound like he may have been feeling a teensy bit slighted, don't you think? And perhaps rightfully so. It's true that for most of their two-plus years at the helm, Mayor Fenty and Chancellor Rhee have seldom acknowledged the academic overhaul that Janey and his team executed on the city school's standards, curriculum, and especially, a new state assessment, the DC-CAS.

Was it a slight? Or, was the lack of acknowledgment based more on Rhee's overwhelming focus on human capital issues like purging the system of teachers she deems to be incompetent?

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Covering a school district is one of the most complex assignments any reporter could ever have.

The No Child Left Behind era has increased the number of complicated stories reporters need to cover about how districts are working to make the grade. New developments, including a increasing reliance on data systems to guide decision making, mean reporters need more time and access to produce stories that explain what's being done.

School administrators often complain about the coverage of their school districts, saying reporters focus more on personality clashes and school board in-fighting than teaching and learning. This can be true, in part because conflict is easier to understand and cover than the new reading curriculum. And with the cutbacks in newsroom staff, local education reporters are now often covering other topics for the newspaper and can't devote full attention to the school districts they cover.

But in some cases, district officials need to reflect on how their own policies hamper substantive coverage.

As this story from the Chicago Reader illustrates, when school districts operate in secrecy, no one wins. As the reporters quoted in the story say, (and I can attest from my own experience) the culture of openness at Chicago Public Schools has noticeably changed this year since Ron Huberman took over for Arne Duncan. Longtime, knowledgeable staffers who once readily provided information to reporters now say they are not allowed to talk. They point reporters to the district's communications chief, Monique Bond.

Bond, however, told the Reader nothing has changed. "They're being good managers by wanting to take the extra step by wanting to coordinate with the office of communications. The last thing we want to have is the wrong information to be expressed." She spoke of the value of having "everybody on the same page" and exercising "an abundance of caution."

Others tell a different story. Getting answers that once took hours now can take days, the reporters say, and in the case of some stories, like this one I wrote this fall where we attempted to learn more about the district's multimillion dollar effort to help keep at-risk kids out of harm's way, the questions simply go unanswered.

Chicago is far from alone in having a communications office that makes doing the rich, nuanced reporting that communities deserve much harder to do. (I could tell you plenty of stories from my time reporting in Memphis.) The culture of fear is alive and well in many school districts, where staffers are afraid to speak for fear of reprisal.

Not only do public school districts have an obligation to be transparent about what they are and are not doing to improve education, but districts that stonewall reporters miss a crucial opportunity to help explain their work to the larger public.

I spent part of last week at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education participating in a seminar with its Urban Superintendents Program. Each December, the folks at Harvard invite members of the media and school board members to tell these future school district leaders how to best work with the public.

Journalists and school board members are often viewed as a thorn in the side of superintendents. But we are there as watchdogs on behalf of the public to hold the district accountable for its results, or lack thereof, in raising student achievement and managing public resources.

As we told these future leaders, transparency and honesty go a long way in not only building productive relationships, but earning those leaders a precious commodity they need in communities when trying to move achievement forward in the nation's school districts: trust.

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Robert C. Bobb, the emergency financial manager for Detroit's public schools, implored Michigan lawmakers last week to give him authority over the district's academic program in order to save the city's public education system from total failure. Bobb, who was appointed last year by Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm to straighten out the district's finances, has been tussling for months with Detroit's elected school board over academics.

His request came just two days after the release of heartbreaking results for Detroit students on the math portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Sixty nine percent of the city's 4th graders and 77 percent of its 8th graders did not even reach basic proficiency on the national exam.

Bobb used unflinching language to describe how dire he believes the situation to be, telling lawmakers that Detroit students could have done just as well on the NAEP if they had skipped school and guessed the answers. In the wake of the test scores, Bobb also issued a plea for volunteers to help Detroit's public schoolchildren learn to read.

Although I'm sure that members of the Detroit school board would disagree, it seems the NAEP scores alone make Bobb's case for taking over the district's academic program an awfully compelling one.

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Superintendents have a lot of tough calls to make on the job, but few are as headache-inducing as deciding if and when to close school because of bad weather.

No matter the decision, any veteran school leader will tell you, someone will be unhappy. (Certainly not the students, who love snow days!)

Many school leaders found themselves having to close school this week, as snow dumped on parts of the Midwest, bringing below-zero temperatures. Last week, Houston recorded the earliest snowfall in its history, forcing the district and many around it to close.

As a group of superintendents recently told The Grand Rapids Press' Dave Murray, they often have to make the decision to close school in the wee hours of the morning, well before the full extent of the weather is known. In most places, this decision has to be made before 5 or 6 a.m. so parents will see the closure on morning TV shows and newspaper Web sites before sending kids out into the frigid cold.

When closing early, administrators do consider the hardship that finding last-minute childcare can cause for parents.

"If I decided to keep schools open, I'm guaranteed to get calls all day from people asking, 'Who's the brain surgeon who decided to keep schools open today?'" one former superintendent told Murray. "And if I close them, I get the same kind of calls."

Administrators in Fairfax County, Va. have put together this video to help explain how they decide to close schools for inclement weather.

Among the factors Fairfax administrators look at are the condition of sidewalks and the size of their county-wide school district, which means some parts of the district are covered with snow and ice while others have a light rain.

How does your district handle school closures? Which ways have proven most effective in communicating to parents ?

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As soon as Andrés A. Alonso landed in Baltimore two years ago, the city schools chief began lobbying to bring the district into the Trial Urban District Assessment program, the special administration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

For years, people inside and outside Baltimore had believed the city's public schools were among the worst, if not the worst, in the nation. (Season Four of The Wire didn't help dispel that image). So Alonso, a transplant from the New York City public schools, wanted hard evidence to show exactly where the district stood among its urban peers. Though the district had begun making gains on state exams, "we had no comparative frame," Alonso said, because no other districts in Maryland come close to serving as many poor students as Baltimore.

Yesterday, the district saw its first NAEP results spelled out--for 4th and 8th grade mathematics--and found itself mostly in the middle of the pack. At the 4th grade level, Baltimore scored just behind Atlanta and had the same scale scores as Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. In the 8th grade, the district was near the bottom, only scoring better than Detroit, the District of Columbia, Cleveland, and Milwaukee.

Alonso had some of his research people break out Baltimore's results in different ways. Looking only at how African-American students did--and Baltimore had the highest concentration of black students who took the NAEP this year--the district looks better at both grade levels. The district also looked better when it considered only the performance of students who qualify for free and reduced-priced meals.

Mr. Alonso sees the results as a validation of the gains that students have made on state exams over the last few years. Earlier this year, the district shed its designation of "in corrective action" because of the steady academic gains of its elementary students.

"There will always be skeptics when African-American and Latino kids make progress," Mr. Alonso told me. "They will say that the standards were somehow demoted or that there was cheating, so by doing the Trial Urban Assessment, we could establish beyond a shadow of a doubt that the gains we've been making are real."

Still, the superintendent is not satisfied with the district's performance and told Baltimore Sun reporter Liz Bowie that he might overhaul the math curriculum.

Here's how he put it to me: "Now we go back to the drawing board and look at standards and curriculum, and analyze the areas where we show strength and weaknesses," he said. "And then we've got to work toward creating a culture in the district where [NAEP] becomes the higher standard that we move toward."

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The latest data from the Trial Urban District Assessment, a special administration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, are out this morning.

Check out this story by my colleague Sean Cavanagh for more details. Leaders in the District of Columbia, Boston, Austin, Texas and San Diego all have gains to be proud of.

For school leaders in Detroit, however, the results showed a grim reality: 69 percent of children scored below basic on 4th grade math and 77 percent scored below basic in 8th grade math.

Robert C. Bobb, the emergency financial manager appointed this spring, minced no words in a statement this morning: "This is a complete indictment of the adult leadership in this district. We want people to have not just a sense of urgency after seeing these scores, but a sense of outrage over these scores. "

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Nashville Mayor Karl Dean is one of those municipal leaders who has become deeply involved in his city's education system without having any formal authority to do so, though he has been upfront that he'd embrace mayoral control. He's raised private money and recruited organizations like Teach For America and the New Teacher Project to come to town to help the city's schools deal with staffing challenges. Earlier this year, he hosted an education summit that featured several of the nation's highest-profile educators.

I interviewed him earlier this year for a story about mayoral control and he told me then that he wanted to see a charter-incubator organization like New Schools for New Orleans open up in Nashville.

Today, the mayor is unveiling plans to do just that. Mayor Dean is announcing a new, non-profit charter incubator this afternoon and Matt Candler, the CEO of New Schools for New Orleans, will be at his side. If the Nashville version of a charter incubator works anything like the one in New Orleans, it will invest heavily in charter school founders who want to open new schools and help them out with everything from recruiting board members to operational and instructional support.

Nashville Superintendent Jesse Register and Tim Webb, Tennessee's education commissioner, will also be there, according to the mayor's office. (Sounds like the sort of high-profile buy-in that will count for some Race to the Top points, doesn't it?)

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Abandoned school buildings have long been a scourge on Detroit's landscape and a beacon for crime.

Robert C. Bobb, the district's emergency financial manager plans to change that. Bobb announced this afternoon that he will soon begin the demolition of 14 vacant schools.

Removing this blight is no cheap task—the district will spend tens of millions on this effort. Many of the buildings were not properly cleaned when they were abandoned, leaving behind textbooks and student records. In others, computers and other high-value items were left behind for thieves' enjoyment.

About $3.1 million of that funding will come from a 1994 facilities bond. Another $30 million in bond funding from Proposal S, a $500.5 million bond approved last month by voters, will pay for the demolition of some of the larger vacant schools in that group of 14 and also for other school demolition projects to come, according to a district spokeswoman.

"Vacant schools across Detroit have been blights on the community and safety hazards for far too long," Bobb said while announcing the effort. "Thanks to the taxpayers of Detroit for supporting Proposal S, we can now move forward with substantially changing the landscape of the city and remove these long-standing eyesores."

The district is holding a meeting Wednesday to talk to various experts about the best way to demolish these buildings, while recycling materials and making sure environmentally-sound procedures are followed.

Check out this video I co-produced for Edweek.org this summer on the status of Detroit education to see images of an the abandoned Jane Cooper Elementary School, which was closed in 2007 and sold to the city of Detroit earlier this year. And for more photos, check out this slide show by photographer Stephen Voss, who took the photos we used in our video.

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As educators labor to develop new or revamped strategies to "turn around" their most troubled schools, they may want to heed some lessons from six states and 23 school districts that went through "restructuring" under No Child Left Behind. Researchers at the Center on Education Policy lay it all out in a new report they released this morning. There's also a big confab today in Washington that caps the center's five-year-long examination.

There's a lot of good detail, so be sure to dig into the full report. For now, though, some highlights:

First, no single strategy propelled any of the troubled schools in the study out of restructuring status. In other words, it wasn't enough to just replace weak teachers or adopt a comprehensive school reform model.

Second, how often schools used data mattered. While all of the schools that CEP examined said data was a key part of their improvement strategy, the schools that actually exited restructuring status used it more frequently. Teachers at all but one of the schools that had improved said they analyzed data at least ONCE each month to make decisions about regrouping students by skill level.

Third, a wholesale replacement of the adults in the building was not the answer.(This will be music to the ears of teachers' unions and the folks who believe in the "transformation" approach to school turnarounds). Of all the schools that CEP examined, only one of them in the group that exited restructuring used staff replacement as its main improvement strategy. The others did get rid of some staff members, but only as one piece of a broader tactic. And the schools that were able to find talented replacements were all located in markets where enrollment was stable, or even declining, and where there weren't teacher shortages. Another essential ingredient: a local teachers' union that had granted schools and districts some flexibility around hiring and firing.

By the way, the six states where CEP studied schools were California, Georgia, Maryland, Michigan, New York, and Ohio. And the districts and schools CEP examined were, refreshingly, mostly those that don't dominate the national education reform conversation. Among them: Oakland, Calif., Atlanta, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Flint, Mich., and Syracuse, N.Y.

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The teachers union in Broward County, Fla. is seeking to have a hike in the district's health insurance plan stopped while an investigation continues into a potential ethical conflict involving a board member who voted for the change.

Board member Stephanie Kraft 's husband works for a lobbyist that has the insurance company involved as a client. Kraft was the chairwoman of a three-person committee that approved the insurance rate increases.

The Broward Teachers union is expected to file its injunction in court today, reports The Miami Herald.

Kraft has said her vote was not based on lobbying, but on extensive research comparing options. A citizen filed a complaint against Kraft this fall with the Florida Commission on Ethics.

Kraft is not the only board member to be investigated for ethical reasons of late. Board member Beverly Gallagher was arrested as part of a federal corruption probe. She allegedly promised two FBI agents who posed as businessmen that she would steer lucrative school construction projects their way in return for money paid to her.

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Denver's school board is having such trouble getting along that it has hired a marital counselor to help smooth things over, The Denver Post reports.

The composition of Denver's board changed with last month's elections, adding some new members who had campaigned against the pace of reforms the board and district leadership had been implementing, promising voters they would make sure the perspective of neighborhoods would be taken into account.

One of the new board members had her lawyer send a letter saying the board's Monday action—a vote on turnaround policy by the lame duck school board—was illegal.

That board member, Andrea Merida, had a judge swear her in hours before the board's official meeting so she could vote against the proposal, leaving the outgoing eight-year board member (a cancer survivor who campaigned for Merida) in tears. She and the other two new members of the board were to be sworn in after the meeting. Merida's actions have sparked outrage in Denver.

The new board makeup has been troubling for many in Colorado's education reform community, who have expressed concern that the new board members could slow the pace of reform and make Colorado less attractive in the $4 billion Race to the Top competition. The state has invested a lot of time and energy in the competition, as you can read in this story by my colleague Alyson Klein.

Board members told The Post they are hopeful the therapy session, taking place today at a luxury hotel in Colorado Springs, will help them overcome some of the angst and anger. But in the meantime, Monday's actions are likely to lead to a court battle that could invalidate the votes.

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Education coverage may be disappearing from the pages of daily newspapers, but the hunger for information on schools and districts when measured by Google searches is intense.

Google released its year-end zeitgeist list of the most popular searches by major city, and in almost every market, there's at least one school-related search in the Top 10. In Los Angeles, "lausd" was the top search term for the year. Here in Washington, "fcps blackboard," a Web site for parents and students in the Fairfax County Public Schools, was the most frequently Googled term. And in Chicago, "impact cps," the city school district's Web-based student information system used by teachers, district administrators, as well as parents, was searched for more than anything else.

In San Francisco, the search for the city school district came in at No. 6, behind the often-searched-for schedule for the San Francisco Giants. And in Atlanta, four of the top 10 searches were for various school districts in the region.

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Education leaders in Boston today are announcing a new, perhaps first-of-its-kind collaboration among all sectors of K-12 schooling in the city.

Instead of fussing over who serves kids the best, folks from the public, charter, parochial, independent, pilot, and suburban schools that make up the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity, Inc., have agreed to work together to figure out what best teaching practices look like and how they might spread those across all the schooling sectors. The leaders have already begun visiting the strongest schools in each of the sectors to poach ideas about establishing a strong school culture that is focused on high achievement.

The group, called the Boston Schoolchildren's Consortium, has been convened by Ellen Guiney, the executive director of the Boston Plan for Excellence, the 25-year-old local education fund that works to improve schooling in the city and is especially known for jointly running the Boston Teacher Residency program with the Boston school system.

Too often, the various sectors of K-12 education have acrimonious relationships, said Katie Bayerl, a spokeswoman for the Boston Plan for Excellence. This consortium, she said, aims to rise above the debates about which sector is better and "learn from each other."

The group, which includes Boston superintendent Carol Johnson and the head of the city's Roman Catholic schools, will aim to establish an agenda for their collaboration in the next few months, Bayerl said.

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