When the nation's largest union agrees to join the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in their recommendations for school reform, you know things are getting hard to sort out.

I find the following news release and the report from The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce to be curious.

On March 10th, two of the nation’s leading business groups joined with the nation’s largest education employees union to announce they “urge states and the federal government to give a fair trial” to the Tough Choices or Tough Times education reform framework. Likewise, three additional states, Arizona, Delaware and New Mexico, announced that they will join Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Utah in implementing Tough Choices or Tough Times in their states.

Here is the Governor of Delaware's press release about it and here is what theU.S. Chamber of Commerce says about it.

From the Executive summary - pages 16-17.

“Schools would no longer be owned by local school districts. Instead, schools would be operated by independent contractors, many of them limited-liability corporations owned and run by teachers. The primary role of school district central offices would be to write performance contracts with the operators of these schools, monitor their
operations, cancel or decide not to renew the contracts of those providers that did not perform well, and find others that could do better. The local boards would also be responsible for collecting a wide range of data from the operators specified by the state, verifying these data, forwarding them to the state, and sharing them with the public and with parents of children in the schools. They would also be responsible for connecting the schools to a wide range of social services in the community, a function made easier in those cases in which the mayor is responsible for both those services and the schools.
The contract schools would be public schools, subject to all of the safety, curriculum, testing, and other accountability requirements of public schools. The teachers in these schools would be employees of the state, as previously noted. The schools would be funded directly by the state, according to a pupil-weighting formula as described below. The schools would have complete discretion over the way their funds are spent, the staffing schedule, their organization and management, their schedule, and their program, as long as they provided the curriculum and met the testing and other accountability requirements imposed by the state.
Both the state and the district could create a wide range of performance incentives for the schools to improve the performance of their students. Schools would be encouraged to reach out to the community and parents and would have strong incentives to do so. Districts could provide support services to the schools, but the schools would be free to obtain the services they needed wherever they wished. No organization could operate a school that was not affiliated with a helping organization approved by the state, unless the school was itself such an organization.
These helping organizations — which could range from schools of education to teachers’ collaboratives to for-profit and nonprofit organizations — would have to have the capacity to provide technical assistance and training to the schools in their network on a wide range of matters ranging from management and accounting to curriculum and pedagogy. Parents and students could choose among all the available contract schools, taking advantage of the performance data these schools would be obligated to produce. Oversubscribed schools would not be permitted to discriminate in admissions.
Districts would be obligated to make sure that there were sufficient places for all the students who needed places. The competitive, data-based market, combined with the performance contracts themselves, would create schools that were constantly seeking to improve their performance year in and year out.”

Read the report for all the recommendations. The summary report is a quick read at 28 pages.

Evidently in this case, the NEA is now agreeing with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business organizations that competition among schools will make everyone better as long as teachers own and run the school. These proposals are a curious mix of free market competition and state control. Hmmmmm. Evidently 6 states so far have agreed and rumor has it Indiana is looking at it too.

Mark Stock
Cross posted at "What's Working in Schools"

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“Not me! Absolutely not me!” stammered Randy, my friend and colleague. The discussion at the superintendent’s meeting had turned to blogging. “I get enough criticism as it is. I don’t need another whacko taking pot shots at me from left field on the internet,” he added. He winced as he said it. “Why should I provide an easy forum for another critic?” he added.

“Randy, don’t you think the rational folks in your school district recognize a whacko when they hear one?” I responded.

“Yeah, most of them probably do but I still don’t want to lie awake at night wondering what the next critic is posting on the internet,” he responded.

“Do you lie awake now?” I asked with a smirk.

“Well sure! Doesn’t every superintendent do that occasionally?” he asked. “I just don’t want to make it easier for people like that to have a voice.”

“I hear you,” I acknowledged, “but what you don’t realize is that now every person has a voice if they want to be heard. The explosion of internet communication through blogging, web sites, chat rooms, instant messaging, emails, and even text messaging means every Tom, Dick and Harry has a voice if they want one. The modern tech savvy superintendent recognizes that they better have a technological forum established BEFORE it all hits the fan and the whackos show up.”

“Listen Randy,” I continued, “If you have an internet presence that’s popular, educational, and already established, your rational public will bury your whackos when they show up. They get embarrassed by people like that who try to represent your community!”

“I don’t know Mark,” he sighed. “I think my skin is too thin and my head is too thick to learn how to blog!”

I chuckled at his insight and added, “Maybe you better start blogging to them before they start blogging about you!”

He shrugged his shoulders and sighed. “You can’t teach an old dog, new tricks. I lasted this long, I can make it few more years.”

I commented, “You might survive, but the new superintendent is expected to thrive, not just survive. Blogging is just one more potential tool in the tool box of the modern school superintendent.”

“Well, then just consider me ‘old school’ then,” he said with a grin.

I nodded and replied, “Old school I can understand, but while you’re sipping margaritas in an RV park in Arizona, our younger colleagues are going to be on the front lines. Who knows what challenges they will face? If we don’t find new ways of getting the good word out about public education, the term ‘old school’ might mean more than you think!”

As the meeting ended and we went our separate ways, I wondered once again what the future would hold for superintendents on the front lines of the war on public education.

This excerpt is taken from Dr. Mark Stock's book chapter in Leaders as Communicators and Diplomats by Corwin Press and Sage Publications and reprinted with permission in his book The School Administrator’s Guide to Blogging by Rowman & Littlefield.

Posted by LeaderTalk Contributor at 7:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Recently the HOPE Foundation helped to bring together top educational leaders to present the best thinking available on how to help improve education in America. (Click here for article.)

Here is the core of what Obama and his team have been presented.

1. Assure Readiness: Success in the classroom requires that children arrive ready to learn – cognitively, physically and psychologically.

2. Provide Rich Learning Environments for All Students: All young people in America deserve rich learning environments that challenges their thinking, promotes learning by doing and focuses on higher-order thinking skills that encourage life-long learning and prepare young people to be engaged, collaborative citizens.

3. Improve Overall Standards, Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment: Policies and systems must be in place to promote best practices in teaching, reward high performers, and provide opportunities for feedback and development for those in need of improvement.

4. Improve Overall Teacher Quality: Policies and systems must be in place to promote best practices in teaching, reward high performers, and provide opportunities for feedback and development for those in need of improvement.

5. Ensure the Development of 21st Century School Leaders: School leadership should be focused on a combination of student learning, progress, and culture building, while enhancing the quality of teaching.

6. Generate and Use Research Effectively: Ensure the use of existing research and advance new research topics that address issues specific to 21st Century challenges.

I think 1 and 2 are the most important items to attack first. But I think 5 is the most important if 4 is ever going to be a reality. What do you think?

Mark Stock

Cross linked at "What's Working in Schools?"

Posted by LeaderTalk Contributor at 1:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

As technology continues to revolutionize communication (everywhere but schools of course), a proliferation of tools are becoming available. Some older applications like blogging are still slow to catch on and are very underutilized by administrators. In my book "The School Administrator's Guide to Blogging: A New Way to Connect with your Community," I outline many ways blogging could help administrators as well as the drawbacks. Yet everyday new technologies and new applications of old technologies keep emerging. Some districts use email and cell phone texting for emergency notifications now. As old hat as that sounds, many schools still do not use anything more advanced than calling the radio station and hope they make a timely announcement (right after this message!).

I recently received an email from a business manager of a school district asking me if I knew of specific school districts utilizing Twitter as a notification system in case of emergencies.

So I wondered what this illustrious group thinks. Are you aware of creative uses of technology by administrators? Is there a creative application of technology that you would like to see schools use that they do not?

Or is it the same old song and dance we have heard before. You know..."Our technology department has blocked that one from our school computers!"

Mark Stock

Cross linked at The Stock Mark Report

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