Tag Archives | Andy Rotherham

Andy Rotherham occupies educational inequality

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On November 17, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, Unionism

This column from Andy Rotherham appearing today on Time.com is so well worth reading that it’s hard to edit it down to a few excerpts. It’s the most prescient and fair-minded argument on where to direct our “Occupy” anger in the cause for social and economic justice, ending with a plea to the Occupy Wall Street movement to “demand the kind of radical change we need to create a school system that lives up to our values rather than mocking them.”

On economic inequality: “… when it comes to giving Americans equal opportunity, our schools are demonstrably failing at their task. Today zip codes remain a better predictor of school quality and subsequent opportunities than smarts or hard work. When you think about it, that’s a lot more offensive to our values than a lightly regulated banking system.”

On ideas to foster equal opportunity: “… our politicians are too skittish to take on special interests or too wrapped up in ideology to acknowledge that no single solution — for instance, school choice, ending the federal role in education or just addressing poverty — will fix our education system.”

On the teacher union embrace of the Occupy movement, what Rotherham calls “a sad irony”: “The unions are hardly the only cause of our educational problems, but they’re not doing enough to fix them. In ways large and small, they defend practices and policies — things like how teacher pay is factored into the amount of money that is allotted to individual schools — that disadvantage low-income students. Can the Occupy movement square this circle? We’ll see.”

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A think tank stumbles into some familiar arguments

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On September 23, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, School Choice

There is a reason Richard Lee Colvin was selected earlier this year to lead Education Sector. He was an accomplished national education reporter who left the Los Angeles Times in 2003 to lead the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media at Columbia University’s Teachers College, where he guided other education reporters to be smarter journalists, myself included. So it is with great respect when I say I miss the nuanced leadership and analysis exhibited by Education Sector’s co-founder Andy Rotherham.

I wasn’t looking for an endorsement of private school options from Colvin when I read his thoughts yesterday on Indiana’s new voucher plan on NPR’s StateImpact. But I was looking for a more sophisticated conclusion than his assessment that the policy represented the outcome of a struggle between only two groups — market dogmatists and “common schooling” democratic advocates.

Further, Colvin slips into familiar ideological traps when he claims the “unfortunate” wave of vouchers this year is “undermining” already anemic public school budgets. We’re also beginning to see some peer-reviewed studies that show some voucher-like options are modestly boosting the academic performance at the public schools mostly likely to lose students to the programs, but Colvin dismisses any competitive effects with almost absolute arrogrance.

Rotherham has never endorsed vouchers, either, but he at least lives up to his reputation by taking a careful and balanced look at one of our nation’s most volatile education policies. He knows that taxpayers are seeing some financial benefits when programs like this are in place, and he also understands that we’re beginning to find evidence of the positive competitive effects that vouchers can have on public schools, but that we need to learn more.

We do need to learn more, and Rotherham is correct to also call out the more outrageous claims from voucher proponents and opponents alike. Here’s hoping the think tank he left behind can re-ignite itself as a responsible resource to sort the wheat from the chaff.

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Insurgents, or engineers

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On August 11, 2011 in General, Parent empowerment, Unionism

Andy Rotherham today gives us a look at a few examples where progressive-minded teachers are acting as change-agents within their unions. And, surely, the news is promising. But these “insurgents,” as Rotherham calls them, are still mostly acting as engineers tinkering with the machinery that drives a top-down model of public education. Nowhere in Rotherham’s examples do we find evidence that teachers want to disestablish the duopoly among boards and unions and introduce parents at the bargaining table.

This takes us to an overlooked passage in the now-famous strategy document prepared by a Connecticut affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers. The AFT, to be sure, understood that simply saying, “No,” was no longer a solution, that it had to propose ideas to reform troubled schools if it wanted to kill legislation that would have established a parent trigger. The AFT believed that it stopped the parent trigger and, according to the document, “turned it into a vehicle for collaborative success.” The union’s ideas included the creation of school governance councils that gave parents a voice, but it acknowledged that the word “governance” was a misnomer. The councils would have no real authority.

To be fair, Rotherham does argue that these insurgents still have a lot to prove and they have yet to wrestle with the decision to protect their members while agitating for real reform. But our debate still mostly looks at reform within a corporate structure and falls short of finding solutions that create a truly professional relationship between teachers and families. The change-agents profiled by Rotherham say they want to be more accountable, but we don’t know to whom.  Giving parents authority through the trigger or through choice establishes professionalism between families and teachers simply because the parent can sever the relationship at any time. NewTLA, Educators for Excellence and Teach Plus are to be commended for their ambitions, but they should strive to be more responsive to the needs of parents. By doing so, they will empower themselves.

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Rotherham on choice and empowerment

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On August 5, 2011 in Charter Schools, Education and Public Policy, General, Parent empowerment, School Boards, School Choice

Andy Rotherham spent his weekly real estate on Time.com describing his method of choosing a school for his children. Of particular note to redefinED are his comments on choice, equity and empowerment:

… the amount of choice is still limited by administrators (who alone get to decide, for instance, whether to open a second Montessori-style school in a district even if the first one has an insanely long waitlist) and legislators (who can do things like refuse to let charter schools into districts like the one I live in). Our school district does offer some choice, but it’s called “controlled choice” — we were able to pick only from a subset of the schools …

… It’s amazing how routine it has become in public education to deny people choice and power. Giving more Americans this kind of empowerment matters to my wife and me out of basic fairness, but also because in ways large and small, our fate is bound up with those of millions of parents around the country who are growing frustrated with our public system …

… In other words, so far it’s worked out for us, but I’m struck — as both an analyst and parent — by how much public education, an institution that is predicated on a common understanding of the collective good, does things to undermine the very support it’s dependent on to thrive.

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The political marketplace of charter schools

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On June 9, 2011 in Charter Schools, Education and Public Policy, General

In his weekly “School of Thought” column on Time.com, Andy Rotherham considers the political backlash currently afflicting charter schools and walks away with two lessons that help explain the difficulty in having a nuanced and complex conversation about their role in public education today:

First, with 5,000 charters ranging from very traditional to completely online, the term ‘charter school’ is increasingly meaningless. After all, what does a network of schools like Achievement First really have in common with the mostly low-performing online schools run by White Hat Management in Ohio — the force behind the proposed deregulation there?

Second, the public can’t be expected to parse those distinctions, so the quality issue has more potency than many charter advocates seem to realize. The education marketplace is not an economic one with the best ideas winning out. Rather it’s a political one with the loudest or most organized voices usually carrying the day and the most compelling examples winning the public debate. So one spectacular charter screw-up counts more than 100 quiet successes, and the good and great schools can’t overcome the headwind created by the laggards.

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Rotherham on vouchers

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On February 17, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, Education Research, General, Parental Choice, School Choice

In his latest Time.com column, Andy Rotherham provides a fair-minded appraisal of the school voucher debate as he attempts to disspell the common myths that are tossed around like rhetorical hand grenades. Vouchers don’t drain money from traditional public schools, Rotherham argues, nor do they skim the best students. On the flip side, he says, we need more evidence to support the contention from some that vouchers lead to higher academic achievement and that the resulting competition for students leads to greater results overall for public schools (although on this note, Rotherham does reference the results from a recent study of the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship which found that the competitive effect boosted the academic performance of public schools faced with the threat of losing students).

Notably, Rotherham concludes his column with a statement that arguably should guide the debate over school choice, but too often does not:

Parents should worry a lot less about the legal status of a particular school than whether it’s the right school for their child. A good fit depends on a host of factors including a strong academic program, successful outcomes, a clear curriculum, areas of emphasis like arts or technology, and even lifestyle factors such as limiting time spent in transit or a year-round schedule.

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