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Schools Push Hits the Road: Duncan Enlists Odd Allies in Multibillion-Dollar Bid to Shake Up U.S. Education
Take another look at The Three Stooges.
By Neil King Jr.
PHILADELPHIA -- Education Secretary Arne Duncan invited an odd pair of allies to classrooms in this city to help tout his multibillion-dollar bid to shake up the country's education system: the liberal Rev. Al Sharpton and the conservative former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
"These two guys don't agree on 96% of everything else, but they do agree on the need for dramatic educational reform," Mr. Duncan said.
As the Obama administration forges ahead with the most ambitious federal intervention in education in decades, Mr. Duncan, the former Chicago school superintendent, needs whatever political support he can get.
The administration plans in just months to distribute $4.3 billion under its new Race to the Top program to help states set new testing standards, boost teacher quality and help rescue or close thousands of the country's worst-performing schools.
The plan has come under fire from powerful teachers unions, which were big backers of President Barack Obama during last year's campaign but are resistant to altering rules for hiring and firing teachers. Some conservatives, meanwhile, are wary of expanding Washington's grip on local school systems.
But Messrs. Sharpton and Gingrich, foes on health care and other issues, are eager supporters of the administration's education agenda.
Arriving late at the first stop, Mastery Charter School in West Philadelphia, Mr. Sharpton joked to students that Mr. Gingrich, a Republican, had "tried to keep me off the tour" by steering him to the wrong school. But the two lavished praise on one another as they described school reform as the top civil-rights issue of the 21st century.
No education secretary has ever enjoyed anything close to Mr. Duncan's level of funding. Aside from the Race to the Top fund, the administration has received about $5 billion for various school-improvement and innovation grants as part of the $787 billion federal stimulus package and the 2009 budget. Combined, all eight previous education secretaries had less than half as much in discretionary funding over 29 years.
Philadelphia is a logical place for Mr. Duncan to kick off his promotional tour, which he and Messrs. Sharpton and Gingrich plan to take to four other states this fall. The Philadelphia school district, with over 220,000 students, has been wracked by the sort of problems that have plagued big-city school systems: crumbling buildings, high dropout rates, low test scores, mediocre teachers.
The state seized Philadelphia's school system seven years ago in one of the first in a series of similar shakeups around the country. Control was turned over to an independent School Reform Commission, which soon brought in private organizations, including a number of for-profit companies, to run 46 of the city's lowest-performing schools.
Mastery Charter School was one on the district's underperformers before it was taken over by a nonprofit group in 2006. With a new fleet of teachers and managers, the high school has transformed students' test scores. The city spends 20% less per student on its charter schools than it does on its traditional public schools.
Mr. Duncan sees Philadelphia as a model for other cities and states. The administration, with its deep pockets, is looking to goad states and localities to open their systems to charter schools and reward teachers according to student performance.
Charter schools are part of the public-school system and operate with public money, but are run by outside groups, usually beyond the control of the teachers unions. Nearly all states permit charter schools, but some have caps on how many can be formed. To compete for the federal money, seven states since this spring have lifted restrictions on the founding of charter schools.
Mr. Duncan's bid to promote charter schools and test-based merit pay for teachers has put the administration on a collision course with the country's muscular teachers unions, which have criticized the Race to the Top as merely an extension of former President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind law, which was passed in 2002.
The unions oppose the administration's push to tie teacher pay and promotions to standardized-test scores, saying that it is too narrow a measure. Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, the country's largest teachers union, said in a statement that "teachers should be evaluated...using multiple criteria, not just one." In many big school districts, unionized teachers win tenure protection after a few years and are almost impossible to fire.
The unions also reject the idea that charter schools are the cure for what ails education. They charge that the schools skim off the best students and often a disproportionate share of funding, leaving the hardest work to other public schools.
"We are working very, very closely with the unions," Mr. Duncan said in an interview. "They are going to be real partners."
Mr. Duncan is eager to avoid a union battle. He shuttered 60 schools and reorganized a dozen as Chicago's education superintendent, but all the revamped schools were unionized. He also backed a union-led move in Congress to slash federal funding to a group of charter schools in Washington, D.C. He acknowledges that many charter schools have shown shoddy results.
— Neil King Jr.
Wall Street Journal
2009-09-30
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125425862829550415.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsThird#
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