Tag Archives | Arne Duncan

Making the educational success of Latinos a top priority

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On July 7, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, Parent empowerment, School Choice

Editor’s note: This guest column comes from Julio Fuentes, the president of the Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options (HCREO), a national coalition dedicated to education reform that counts civil rights and Hispanic business leaders along with public school teachers and ministers among its supporters.

The history of our education system is marked by pivotal opportunities when leaders and policy influencers joined forces to bring about improvements and policy changes for the betterment of students. From public school desegregation to teacher quality measurements and standardized testing, the landscape of education has evolved and matured to best serve students and their families.

Last week, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan urged parents, educators and school leaders at the local, state and national levels of government to seize the next of these pivotal opportunities – specifically, he said, we must make Hispanic educational excellence a national priority.

Secretary Duncan noted that the Obama Administration’s goal of having the world’s highest share of college graduates by 2020 will not happen “without challenging every level of government to make the educational success of Latinos a top priority. America’s future depends on it.”

Secretary Duncan’s call to action came in response to a new report from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the U.S. Department of Education’s statistical center, which outlines in grave detail the Hispanic achievement gap that has long been of such concern to my organization and others. Hispanic students are the largest minority group in our nation’s schools, but they continue to fall behind. Continue Reading →

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President signals support for district school that operates more like a charter

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On January 26, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, Teacher quality

Most policy watchers measuring the impact of the State of the Union have responded to President Obama’s calls to reform public education with disappointment, but some have leavened their criticism with details that have been slow to stand out. “The education passages didn’t have a lot of substance but they did have some interesting signals,” said Andrew Rotherham on Eduwonk. One of those signals, Rotherham notes, is the story of Denver’s Bruce Randolph School.

In 2008, Bruce Randolph, a struggling middle school, was granted autonomy from key union and district rules and won what was considered historic freedoms in staffing and scheduling (Mike Antonucci has more backstory here). With that autonomy, Bruce Randolph was able to decide its own calendar, develop its own hiring procedures and devise its own incentives for teachers. Most notable was a decision by then principal Kristin Waters to ask all teachers to reapply for their jobs. Of 40 teachers at the time, only six came back.

The results from that move caught the attention of Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, who visited the school in 2009 and surrounded himself with reporters while praising what Waters had called, “Challenge 2010.” It signaled support for nothing less than a district school that gained the flexibility to operate like a charter. The following summary last spring in The Denver Post appears to have inspired the passage in the president’s State of the Union:

Bruce Randolph — where 95.4 percent of students are poor enough to be eligible for federal meal benefits — could be considered the point of origin for Denver’s education-reform movement.

It is a turnaround school that went from being the state’s worst middle school, located on the turf between two rival gangs, to a grades 6-12 school that on Tuesday graduated 97 percent of its first class of seniors. Eighty-seven percent of those grads were accepted to college. Most will be the first in their families to attend a school of higher education.

“This is what it is all about,” said school board president Nate Easley Jr. “It’s proof that reform works.”

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No Child Left Behind demands we employ every option for poor children

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On January 3, 2011 in Achievement Gap, Charter Schools, Customization, Education and Public Policy, General, Parental Choice, Private Schools

In his Washington Post commentary today on reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan is still offering a narrow definition of flexibility and an unnecessarily limited set of options to reduce the achievement gap.

Duncan lauded the bipartisan support in Congress for “providing more flexibility to schools, districts and states,” but failed to mention the importance of providing more flexibility for teachers and parents.  We are over-regulating our classroom teachers and undermining their ability to innovative and be entrepreneurial.  Empowering teachers to create and manage their own schools will give them the same opportunities as professionals in law, medicine, accounting and architecture, and the diverse schooling options they will create will provide more schooling options for parents and other teachers to choose from.  Unfortunately, when Secretary Duncan writes of greater local control, he means more power for school boards and not for teachers or parents.

Duncan also applauds the progress states and local communities are making in reducing the achievement gap, writing that, “School districts and their local partners in inner cities and rural communities are overcoming poverty and family breakdown to create high-performing schools, including charters and traditional public schools.” But this statement ignores the tremendous contributions being made in high-poverty communities by other publicly-funded education institutions, including private schools serving students on publicly-funded scholarships. Continue Reading →

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Mr. Secretary, we don’t drown students in Florida

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On December 21, 2010 in Charter Schools, Customization, General, Parental Choice, School Choice

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan brings an intellectual heft and a genuine compassion to his job, which is why he can’t be excused for his duplicitous talk on learning options for poor children.

That word, duplicitous, is unusually harsh. So please allow me to try to defend it with three of his own statements, made all within a 29-minute span, to a distinguished audience at former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s National Summit on Education Reform in Washington earlier this month.

Statement No. 1: “We have to make sure that every single child has access to a great, great school. … Where we have high-performing schools – be they charter schools, be they district schools, magnet schools, International Baccalaureate curriculum – we need to replicate those successes. We can’t rest, we can’t wait until we have that great option in every community.”

Translation: This is his pitch for options, saying that each serves a role in a public education system that tailors instruction to the needs of all students. Not every student is right for IB or magnets, nor are these options intended to serve every student. In fact, privately operated and publicly franchised charter schools, which are a favorite of the president, currently are forbidden in 11 states.  

Statement No. 2: “I always think that in this country what works for wealthy people often works for poor families as well. In this country, for decades, probably for centuries, wealthy folks have had access to two, three, four, five, six great learning options. And poor families have often been relegated to one choice, and often that choice wasn’t a very good one. And the more we can empower parents and help them figure out what the best learning environment is for their child, help them understand what their child’s strengths and weaknesses are, and give them a menu of great options, and let them vote with their feet and figure out where they want to go – I think that will help to create a system of improvement.” Continue Reading →

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The blueprint for digital learning recognizes no distinction between public and private

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On December 2, 2010 in Customization, General, Technology and Innovation

Two former governors from two different political parties this week announced the 10 elements of a digital-learning initiative they hoped would set educators on an entrepreneurial path to disruptive innovations in public education. If it wasn’t clear to the more than 500 people in attendance at the Washington, D.C., conference, where the elements were unveiled, this was a bipartisan drive to further scramble the current conept of “public schools” and “private schools.”

What former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise identified at the National Summit on Education Reform were the principles of transformational productivity in education demanded by President Obama’s White House education team. When Bush says that we have to think of public education “as educating the public” and calls for policies that allow students to customize their education, he’s applying the same concept that U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan does when Duncan tells schools to do more to “personalize” education.

The Digital Learning Now! initiative meets all these goals, and makes no distinction between public and private schooling. Indeed, its provisions demand that states recognize all learning providers – public, private and charter – equally. And for traditional school districts to adopt the digital innovations at the core of education reform, they will have to recognize private providers – with all their human and financial capital – as partners. Continue Reading →

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The power of a genuinely bipartisan approach

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On November 30, 2010 in General

The applause burst today at a telling moment. In kicking off his high-powered National Summit on Education Reform in D.C. this morning, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush opened and closed his remarks with a call for lawmakers to find creative ways to build on the bipartisan common ground forming around meaningful child-centered education reform. “In this one place,” said Bush, “we can put aside the partisan divide and make things happen.” The room erupted.

This is not to be dismissed as idle happy talk. Bush achieved much of his own sweeping education agenda in Florida from 1999 to 2007 through taut partisan muscle and against an increasingly embittered teachers union. He was introduced this morning by a Democratic mayor, Adrian Fenty, who fought much the same education fight in D.C. against an unwilling union, and the conference will close tomorrow with a Democratic U.S. education secretary, Arne Duncan, whose message is nearly indistinguishable from that of Bush. Continue Reading →

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Duncan gave us the guidebook for creative destruction in public education

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On November 30, 2010 in Customization, General, Parental Choice

On NationalJournal.com this week, Tom Vander Ark calls Arne Duncan’s recent speech at the American Enterprise Institute perhaps the education secretary’s most important yet. When Duncan outlined the “new normal” in public education today, Vander Ark writes, he reminded us of the forces shaping other American industries that were browbeaten to renew themselves in the throes of the Great Recession.

That concept is known as creative destruction, a phrase economist Joseph Schumpeter made famous when describing how market forces revolutionize an economic model from within, “incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.” Now Duncan is urging educators to embrace “transformational productivity.” The industrial-age factory model of education doesn’t foster the innovation necessary to drive a 21st century model of education.

But for innovation to proceed in this scenario, one must accept that families no longer define a public education in the traditional way. In commentary published this week on edweek.org, former assistant secretary of education Bruno V. Manno shows how public education is transforming in one way: Parents are voting with their feet. According to Manno’s own analysis, 52 percent of the nation’s 57 million elementary and secondary school students are attending a K-12 school of their choice. Public education to these families no longer represents the traditionally zoned neighborhood school. It encompasses charter schools, magnet and alternative schools, faith-based schools and online schools. Continue Reading →

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