Florida Gov. Rick Scott wants a summit to "discuss ways to remove barriers to choice options in low performing areas," according to a draft of his education plans for the next legislative session. Posted on the Gradebook blog this morning, the draft offers a few more details about the governor's proposals than today's story did, but not much. Page 5 deals with school choice, and includes these pieces:

Incentives for educational choice options

Choices in education are critical to ensuring that every student has access to high quality learning opportunities that will prepare them for college and careers. Florida has partnered with the Charter School Growth Fund to develop and support high quality operators that can open new charter schools and establish turnaround options for chronically failing schools in high need areas. To ensure all parents and students have the ability to choose what is right to them, Florida should also remove any enrollment caps on existing charter schools, so that results and capacity can determine enrollment. This flexibility also comes with a responsibility for Florida to work to make sure that all charter schools  participate in the school grading system that has made Florida a leader in educational opportunity. To further the state's investment in choice, Governor Scott will be asking stakeholders to come together for a Choice and Competition Summit to discuss ways to remove barriers to choice options in low performing areas. (more…)

Here's some advice for school districts around the country: If you have a star principal who's uplifted one of your toughest schools, treat her extra nice.

Because folks in Tennessee may be coming with a really sweet deal.

The Tennessee Charter School Incubator has just launched a pioneering effort to recruit top school leaders from far and wide, then give them extended training before they launch their own charter schools.  Those selected into the Education Entrepreneurs Fellowship will study everything from finance to community organizing to faculty development. They'll see excellent schools up close. And many of them will end up in the Achievement School District, a Race to the Top-fueled project that aims to catapult the lowest-performing schools in the state into the top 25 percent.

"The reason we're focusing on national talent stems from some lessons Tennessee has had the opportunity to learn - many lessons that in fact other states have learned the hard way," Rebecca Lieberman, the incubator's chief talent strategy officer, told redefinED in the podcast interview attached below. "One of those key lessons is that any reform effort that you put into place will only be successful if you have the right people and enough of them to make concentrated change."

For now, the incubator has enough funding for six to eight fellows, with three years of support each. They'll get training to build on strengths and shore up weaknesses. They'll get time to build relationships and map out strategies. Ultimately, they'll be tackling what Lieberman called "next generation challenges" of the charter movement - turning around struggling schools, scaling up successful models and introducing new ones.

The fellowship isn't for everyone. A track record of success with high-poverty kids is a must. So is a desire to take ed reform to the next level. "We think there are leaders out there that are innovative, that are looking for their next challenge," Lieberman said.

The fellowship, she added, may be a sign that those who want  top talent in education may have to fight for it: "The best principals and the best teachers - I want there to be competition over them," she said. "And I want more of them."

From U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan's prepared remarks at the DNC tonight:

I'm here tonight as a parent with two young children who attend a wonderful public school. No one has more at stake in this election than our kids, and that is why we need to re-elect President Obama!

Our president knows education is about jobs. It's about giving every child a shot at a secure middle-class life. Right now, we're in a race for jobs and industries of the future. If countries like China out-educate us today, they'll out-compete us tomorrow. The president believes that education begins at home with parents who take responsibility. But he also believes that teachers matter. In his first two years in office, he helped save the jobs of 400,000 educators.

And President Obama didn't just invest resources; he demanded reform. And 46 states responded by raising education standards. The president also believes teachers must be respected and paid like the professionals they are. No teacher should have to teach to the test. Great teachers should be recognized and rewarded.

And President Obama also knows that higher education is an economic necessity. He fought to keep student loan interest rates from going up. He fought for Pell grants. He took the big banks out of the federal student loan program and passed billions of dollars in savings on to young people. This year alone, he helped nearly 10 million students afford college.

The president knows that the path to the middle class goes right through America's classrooms. That was his path. That's America's path. However, his opponent believes differently.

Under the Romney-Ryan budget, education would be cut by as much as 20 percent. Think about what that would mean: 200,000 fewer children in Head Start, fewer teachers in the classroom, fewer resources for poor kids and students with disabilities, fewer after school programs. Ten million students could see their Pell grants reduced, putting higher education further out of reach. And these cuts wouldn't create jobs or pay down the deficit. They would go toward a huge new tax cut for those at the very top.

In order to cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires, Governor Romney will cut education for our children. That's the difference in this election. They see education as an expense. President Obama's sees it as an investment. That's the choice in this election. And that's why our president needs four more years!

This will surprise no one, but the 2012 Democratic Party platform, released yesterday, includes charter schools in the one sentence that offers a nod to school choice but does not include private learning options: "We will continue to strengthen all our schools and work to expand public school options for low-income youth, including magnet schools, charter schools, teacher-led schools, and career academies." Here's the education portion of the platform (by contrast, see the 2012 Republican platform on education here):

An Economy that Out-Educates the World and Offers Greater Access to Higher Education and Technical Training.

Democrats believe that getting an education is the surest path to the middle class, giving all students the opportunity to fulfill their dreams and contribute to our economy and democracy. Public education is one of our critical democratic institutions. We are committed to ensuring that every child in America has access to a world-class public education so we can out-educate the world and make sure America has the world’s highest proportion of college graduates by 2020. This requires excellence at every level of our education system, from early learning through post-secondary education. It means we must close the achievement gap in America’s schools and ensure that in every neighborhood in the country, children can benefit from high-quality educational opportunities.

This is why we have helped states and territories develop comprehensive plans to raise standards and improve instruction in their early learning programs and invested in expanding and reforming Head Start.

President Obama and the Democrats are committed to working with states and communities so they have the flexibility and resources they need to improve elementary and secondary education in a way that works best for students. To that end, the President challenged and encouraged states to raise their standards so students graduate ready for college or career and can succeed in a dynamic global economy. Forty-six states responded, leading groundbreaking reforms that will deliver better education to millions of American students. Too many students, particularly students of color and disadvantaged students, drop out of our schools, and Democrats know we must address the dropout crisis with the urgency it deserves. The Democratic Party understands the importance of turning around struggling public schools. We will continue to strengthen all our schools and work to expand public school options for low-income youth, including magnet schools, charter schools, teacher-led schools, and career academies. (more…)

As the RNC wound down today, it took a sharp turn back towards partisanship in education reform, with former U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings offering the week’s hardest knock on President Obama’s education record.

Former President George W. Bush reached across the aisle to work with the late U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy and other Democrats to pass No Child Left Behind, said Spellings, who Bush appointed. And it’s no surprise, she said, that former Florida Gov. Jeb was the most successful education governor in recent times.

“That’s because of leadership,” Spellings said at an education panel sponsored by Bloomberg Link and the 2012 Tampa Bay Host Committee for the RNC. “We have not seen that from President Obama on this topic.”

“If half the minority kids in this country were not getting out of high school on time, we ought to be marching in the streets,” she continued. “If half the school lunches served next week in these schools were tainted, we would be marching in the street. Michelle Obama would write a cookbook.”

Spellings criticized some aspects of Race to the Top, Obama’s signature education program, and panned his administration’s decision to grant No Child flexibility to a number of states.

“The Obama administration has given waivers out like candy,” she said. And the result has been a return to lower standards for poor kids.

Jeb Bush, who was part of the panel discussion, did not criticize Obama. But he also did not praise him as he has in the past, including earlier this week. He directed his fire at teachers unions. (more…)

Students at six high-poverty schools in Memphis returned to class this month as the focus of an education reform project that's worthy of national attention. The schools are the first cluster in the “Achievement School District,” a Race To The Top-fueled vision headed by Chris Barbic, founder of the acclaimed YES Prep charter schools in Houston.

The district’s near-term goal – lifting schools in the bottom 5 percent statewide to the top 25 percent within five years – is as ambitious as YES Prep’s target of getting every graduate into a four-year college. Its big-picture goal is even more so: Showing the world that lessons learned from the highest-performing charter schools can turn around the lowest-performing traditional schools.

Barbic calls it Charter School 3.0.

“There’s an opportunity here to say, look, we’re not creating the charter school that’s going to be across the street from the public school and slowly bleed it to death. What we’re saying is, this is the neighborhood school,” Barbic said in the redefinED podcast below (the phone interview was conducted during the first week of school). “To me this is Charter School Version 3.0. – which is, you don’t get to pick the kids; the kids don’t get to pick you. If we really believe this works, we’re going to phase you in and you’re now the neighborhood school. And you got to work with all the kids … whatever kids show up with, you have to serve those kids.”

“If we can pull that off,” Barbic continued, “it’s going to make a huge statement that will hopefully accelerate things like this in your backyard and other places around the country.”

Schools like YES Prep and KIPP share many characteristics – high expectations, high-energy teachers, longer school days, more flexibility at the school and classroom level. And yet, despite a solid body of evidence that they’re making a big difference for low-income kids, they remain fairly rare. Barbic said that’s in part because it’s only been in the past three to five years that they’ve learned to replicate more rapidly. But now, folks inside traditional school systems are beginning to appreciate the benefits.

“You’re seeing things in Denver and things in Houston where there’s efforts being made by the district to try and take the practices of the best charters, the best charter organizations, and try to apply them in a larger system,” he said. “And I think what’s happening in New Orleans with the Recovery School District, what we’re hopefully going to be able to achieve here, is an opportunity to say, ‘Look, this works. And it works at scale, in a neighborhood school environment.’ ”

On a related note, Barbic talks about ASD's parent outreach efforts - which are extraordinary compared to traditional public schools. When teachers showed up for school in early July, buses took them to the communities where their students live. “We hit all the apartment complexes. We banged on doors,” he said. “We met (the parents) and we invited them to come out to a community picnic that we were having later that week.”

The response: “Cautious optimism.”

“They’ve met us halfway,” Barbic said. “Now it’s on us to perform and get some results.”

by Eva S. Moskowitz

Big. Bold. Fast. I constantly remind my team at Success Academy Charter Schools in New York City that as well as we are doing in rolling out new high-performing schools (we have one of the most ambitious plans in the nation) we can’t possibly move fast enough. While we now serve thousands of students with a better public education than they otherwise would have gotten, our city has hundreds of thousands of students who need better school options.

It isn’t possible to work as quickly or as urgently as this problem requires. Each year in my city, thousands of students are added to wait lists at high-performing charter schools and the city’s elite public school test-in programs. If you don’t get in, you have school choice but you have to either choose from among lousy zoned district schools, expensive private schools, or move to suburbia.

With the need for more great schools crystal clear in New York and around the country, it is absurd that we could even be having this national debate over whether or not there should be a federal role in education. Of course there should be a federal role, especially in the area of parent choice.

During the recent “I3” competitive grant competition and President Obama’s “Race To The Top” competition, we saw enormous leverage for reform from Washington. Many people didn’t know that leverage was possible, but the proof is in the pudding. States (many with Democratic governors) like Tennessee, New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts lifted caps on the creation of new charter schools – in large part because President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan dared them to.

The Obama administration used its bully pulpit and a relatively small amount of federal money to incent smart, pragmatic policies at the state and local levels. The federal government ought to be able to do the same thing to incent urgency in statehouses, school districts, and on the ground in communities that desperately need good school options.

Bigger. Bolder. Faster. Yes, the federal government ought to be in a position to point its finger at states and districts and say, “Folks, we love you, but your kids are dying. You need to move faster!” At Success Academy Charter Schools, we see this as a moral imperative – the same moral imperative that led to the creation of Title I and IDEA, among other civil rights initiatives. Do federal legislators really think they can afford to sit silently, while the opportunities of another generation of students vanishes? (more…)

by Joe Williams

I spend a lot of my time navigating the tumultuous internal conflicts and ideological inconsistencies within my party, the Democratic Party, when it comes to public education. In fact, that’s more or less my job description. So I have to admit that it is somewhat pleasurable to watch the emergence of similar tensions on the other side of the aisle amongst my Republican allies, especially when it comes to ed reform and school choice. Maybe pleasurable is not the right word. Perhaps it’s perplexing. Even a little depressing.

Nearly a year ago, we watched with great interest as a fascinating left-right alliance formed in Washington between the teachers unions (who didn’t like the concept of federal accountability in schools) and the Tea Party (which didn’t like the idea of any kind of federal involvement in schools.). Together, this alliance wound up shaping proposed changes to existing federal law that would let states and districts off the hook for improving the academic performance of millions of disadvantaged children. Historically reasonable folks like poor John Boehner started looking like the helpless, powerless substitute teachers we used to torment back in middle school.

I don’t intend this to kick a speaker while he is down, but to point out the obvious as Republicans consider their path on education issues: they have to figure out whether they are Boehner Republicans (willing to cut a deal involving a federal role in school choice and accountability issues) or Tea Party Republicans (who would seem happiest if there were no schools, let alone taxpayer-supported public schools). They need to figure out who among them is willing to let the federal government act as a catalyst for some key needed policy changes, and who among them oppose any federal education policy whatsoever just as a misguided point of principle.

I don’t mention this glibly. The tremendous pull that the Tea Party has had on domestic policy issues, including education, has folks on our side of the aisle looking back longingly at the groundbreaking work that President George W. Bush and Boehner were able to accomplish with liberal icons like Senator Teddy Kennedy and Rep. George Miller. You know, back in the good old days where at least both parties agreed that government could be an enabler of good, rather than just an overpriced agent of evil.

So, understanding that tips from a Democrat will be taken with a grain of salt at the RNC, I nonetheless offer these nuggets for consideration:

1. Throw the Tea-Baggers under the bus: If you don’t do it for issues of substance, do it for the politics alone. (more…)

Editor’s note: In one of yesterday’s posts, we noted how often school choice supporters are caricatured. But truth be told, we’re not alone. Teachers unions and their members are sometimes dismissed with unflattering generalizations too. Doug Tuthill, a former teachers union president himself, pauses today to spotlight a union right here in our backyard that defies the stereotype.

Jean Clements is the teachers union president in Hillsborough County, Florida, which is the eighth largest school district in the U.S. And she and her union, the Hillsborough Classroom Teachers Association, are unique in a way that deserves national attention – and national praise. While most teacher unions are resisting efforts to systemically improve public education, Jean and her constituents have partnered with their school district to embrace innovations that are taking on all kinds of sacred cows.

Teacher unions came into being in the early 1960s to protect teachers from management decisions, most notably in the areas of employee evaluations and compensation.  Consequently, teachers’ collective bargaining contracts today prescribe evaluation procedures that render evaluations irrelevant except in the most extreme cases, and standardized pay scales that treat every teacher the same, regardless of their effectiveness.  So, naturally,  eyebrows were raised across the country when Jean and her HCTA colleagues partnered with the Hillsborough school district to win a $100 million Gates Foundation grant to reinvent the district’s employee evaluation and compensation systems.

This wasn’t the only time Jean went out on a limb. (more…)