Leadership Workshop Series
Education Reform
December 7, 2000
Moderator
Dr. Michael W. Kirst
Professor of Education, Business Administration (by courtesy), and Political
Science (affiliated)
Stanford University
Panelists
Scott Hamilton, Managing Director, Pisces Foundation
Steve Jubb, Executive Director, Bay Area Coalition of Essential Schools
(BayCES)
Meredith Maran, Author, Class Dismissed: A Year in the Life of an American
High School, a Glimpse into the Heart of a Nation
Kim Smith, Founding President, New Schools Venture Fund
On December 7, 2000, the Stanford Graduate School of Business Public Management Program held the first in a series of workshops aimed at improving leadership in social purpose organizations. GSB alumni, students, and local education and community members interested in K-12 education reform in the United States were among those who attended the December workshop. To facilitate a dialogue concerning the current state of education and efforts to create lasting reform, the PMP assembled a group of education reform thought leaders with a diverse range of experience in the education industry. Each panelist brought their unique backgrounds to issues including the following:
- What issues are American schools facing today?
- How do we create educational equity?
- What reforms will last?
- What can others do to help the situation?
These notes attempt to capture the range of ideas that were shared at the workshop. By highlighting the important takeaways from the discussion, the Public Management Program hopes to disseminate knowledge and build a platform for an ongoing dialogue about the issues.
Welcome Remarks
Dr. Michael W. Kirst briefly welcomed the participants to the Workshop.
Dr. Kirst noted that education reform has efforts can generally be placed
in three bins:
- Reforms that last (e.g., kindergarten)
- Reforms that fail. These often come back (e.g., vouchers)
- Reforms that ebb and flow. These often depend on the mood of the country (e.g., bilingual education)
In addition, Dr. Kirst proposed four characteristics for reforms that will last:
- Structural or organizational
- Creates constituency
- Is easily monitored
- Does not change pedagogy or classroom culture
Panel Discussion
Each panelist discussed their background and experience with theeducation
industry and shared with the audience their suggestions for education
reform.
Meredith Maran, Author and Activist
Meredith comes to education reform after having spent a significant amount
of time "in the classroom." A writer by trade, Meredith became
involved in education after researching and writing her book, Class Dismissed.
For the book, Meredith followed three Berkeley High students for one year
and wrote about their experiences.
Issues in the Current Educational System
- Schools are not offering equal opportunity to education across racial and socioeconomic lines.
- Without equal education there can be no equal opportunity for people as they grow older.
- With the private school option, parents are grappling with giving the best education to their children versus supporting public schools.
- Schools are segregated; students do not see people unlike themselves. This experience does not prepare children for later life.
Successful Educational Reform
- Take the military budget and put it into education.
- Abolish private schools.
- Make public schools like private schools.
- End segregated classed.
- Pay teachers well.
- Get families into schools.
What Others Can Do To Help
- Become aware of the consequences of what is going on in the public schools.
- Be wary of rhetoric.
- Trust your instincts.
- Become involved in your children's schools.
Steve Jubb, BayCES
A former Richmond Teacher of the Year, Steve has worked in education on
many levels. He started in the classroom, moved to the school and state
levels, and is now running a regional network of schools as the Executive
Director of the Bay Area Coalition for Essential Schools (BayCES). BayCES
recently received a $15.7 million grant from the Gates Foundation to create
a regional network of smaller schools and help those schools get better.
Issues in Education Today
- Too many students are crammed into schools (e.g., in Oakland 1300 kids crammed into a school built for 700).
- Too much toleration exists for lasting inequity in education between rich and poor students.
- The use of multi-track teachers with no classrooms creates a lack of community.
Successful Education Reform
- Goal of reform has to be educational equity.
- Leadership development across divisions is a primary focus of BayCES:
Coaching for teachers to imagine, renew and create good schools.
Professional development. - Models of successful reform that are based on working principles rather than recipes are required.
- Education cannot reform itself. Need outside pressure from parents and the community.
- Faith in community based organizations to make good choice is a necessity.
- How you define the problem determines the outcome:
Lack of discipline=more cops
Overcrowding=smaller schools - Generic reform will fail. You have to name the problem (i.e., who is not achieving and why?).
Scott Hamilton, Pisces Foundation
Scott has spent a good deal of his career working on education on the
policy level. Currently, as Managing Director of the Pisces Foundation,
he is helping to reform education by making large, strategic investments
in a small number of initiatives with a focus on academic achievement.
Scott believes that it is an exciting time to be involved in education
reform as the break-up of the "public school monopoly" has led
to unprecedented creativity. He addressed the initiatives in which he
is involved and dispense advice for others who wish to become involved.
Initiatives
- Pisces Foundation: awarded $25 million to turn around California's 7 worst performing elementary schools.
- GreatSchools.net: created to provide a clearinghouse of school performance information to help consumers make informed choices.
- Teach for America: challenge grant.
- KIPP Foundation: focused on effective middle schools for educationally disadvantaged child.
Advice for Audience
- Know history and fault lines of education in the country:
Progressive - View that knowledge is not necessary for certain class of people
Liberal/Classical - View that knowledge is power; opportunity is rare, not ability. Progressive view is the reigning view in education today. - Have a theory of change:
Create competition, standards and measurements to demonstrate the possible.
Aim to bridge the achievement gap. - Be clear about the purpose of education - to acquire knowledge and skills.
- Reformers need to think about how to develop capacity:
Can strengthen programs that already exist.
Can create new entities and public education services such as Teach for America. - There are not shortcuts. It takes obsessive attention to a thousand details.
- Common sense goes along way and it is not uniformly distributed amongst people in education.
Kim Smith, New Schools Venture Fund
Before earning her MBA from the Stanford Business School, Kim was a member
of the founding team of Teach for America and founded and directed BAYAC
Americorps. Now, as Founding President of the New Schools Venture Fund,
Kim is working with educational entrepreneurs who are dedicated to improving
the system by looking at what programs work well and trying to scale them.
In the interests of time, Kim focused on the ways in which New Schools
is trying to create lasting reform.
Ways to Help Create Lasting Reform
- Help develop more capacity: new schools and services.
- Bringtogether people on the ground level and the structural level tocreate new solutions.
- Build a hybrid model of reform by combining the intellectual capitalof the different levels of industry experts.
- Work to find out if for-profit or nonprofit programs work better.
- Assess which incentive programs actually work.
- Bring entrepreneurs who want to improve the public school systeminto the process.
- Figure out who is bringing what to the table and try out solutions;remember that school reform is a lumpy process.
- Learn the whole of the system and work to put all of the pieces together.
Discussion
The last 15 minutes were dedicated to answering audience questions. Following
are some highlights of the issues and take-aways from the ensuing discussion.
School Calendar Issues
- Sending kids home at 2:00 pm has a devastating impact on educationally disadvantaged students.
- Summer vacation has been shown to interfere with learning progress, especially among the disadvantaged.
Best Student Age on Which to Focus Reform Efforts
- Cannot just focus on one age group, can't slice up life Need to take holistic approach.
- There are some important transition years:
Reading by 3rd grade.
If kids are not prepared by 9th grade they tend not to make it. - Sr. High School has been least affected by innovations.
How to Ensure Quality Teachers
- One view: look at teacher life as continuum and identify the problemareas:
Recruitment - schools don't start early enough and don't have enough incentives.
Teacher education - not enough preparation currently.
Teachers "bail" in first couple of years.
Those who do survive break into 3 camps: self-contained "rulers," cynics, and activists. - Need to address these problems through support, incentive and accountability over long haul.
- Another view: So what if a teacher teaches for 4 years and then does something else? In this day and age everyone changes jobs.
- Third view: May need to re-evaluate what constitutes a good teacher. Different people may be able to reach different kids.
- Fourth view: Unions get in the way of effective reform - cannot reward teachers for good performance. May need to get rid of teachers unions.
Building Better Schools (BayCES)
- Creating pipelines with the best teachers' colleges.
- Emphasizing a massive commitment to professional development.
- Creating a "new teachers" center.
- Creating smaller schools with a focus on relationships so you know every kids names and families; problems are in your face.
