Wednesday, September 10, 2008 - Posts
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Speaking of the country's education debate: In Dayton, Ohio, yesterday, Barack Obama delivered a major speech on education reform.
Last weekend, I wrote in the Times Magazine that Obama was facing a schism in the Democratic Party over education, with the teachers unions on one side and a new, accountability-focused group of education reformers on the other. Each camp, I wrote, was trying to claim Obama for their own, parsing his speeches and policy pronouncements, looking for clues that he favored their approach.
To me, yesterday's speech sounded more like the words of a pro-charter reformer than a union loyalist. Obama pledged to double federal funding on charter schools and to make teachers more accountable for the success of their students, saying, "Teachers who are doing a poor job will get extra support, but if they still don't improve, they'll be replaced."
But union folks, it seems, liked what they heard as well. Just after Obama's speech, I spoke with Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, and she told me she thought the speech was "very important." She pointed to Obama's support for a measure that would make it easier to close failing charter schools and said she admired his plan to increase the number of high-school students taking college-level or AP courses. The speech, she said, "had a balance of a great tone—even though there were things we disagreed with—along with some serious, concrete proposals."
For someone (like me) who finds the politics of education generally depressing and dysfunctional, what really stood out in the speech was its scope, the recognition that the system needs big, big change: not just charter schools or vouchers or better teacher pay but a complete overhaul. As Obama put it:
We need a new vision for a 21st century education—one where we aren't just supporting existing schools, but spurring innovation; where we're not just investing more money, but demanding more reform; where parents take responsibility for their children's success; where our schools and government are accountable for results; where we're recruiting, retaining, and rewarding an army of new teachers, and students are excited to learn because they're attending schools of the future; and where we expect all our children not only to graduate high school, but to graduate college and get a good paying job.
It's time to ask ourselves why other countries are outperforming us in education. Because it's not that their kids are smarter than ours—it's that they're being smarter about how to educate their kids. They're spending less time teaching things that don't matter and more time teaching things that do. Their students are spending more time in school, and they're setting higher expectations.
I think there are people on each side of the standoff within the Democratic Party who know that the eventual solution is going to require both sides to give something up. But neither wants to be the one to go first. And so for now, the debate feels stuck. It's exactly why I think a broad vision of reform like the one Obama laid out is potentially important—it might serve as something of a peace treaty, a chance for both sides to lay down their arms and figure out the real solutions to the country's education crisis.
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My interest in education and schools came about in sort of a roundabout way. In 2003, I started reporting on what was then a fairly modest social-service agency in upper Manhattan called the Harlem Children's Zone. That reporting turned into an article in the Times Magazine about the project and its founder, Geoffrey Canada, an ambitious and charismatic man in his early 50s who had come up with a unique approach to combating poverty. He had selected a 24-block neighborhood in central Harlem and was saturating the children who lived there with educational and social supports. His goal was to get them all to college and to transform the neighborhood in a single generation.
Usually when I get to the end of reporting a big magazine article, I'm pretty sick of the subject. But this time, the article felt like the beginning of a story rather than the end of one. I wanted to keep following the experiment that was unfolding in Harlem. And so I decided to write a book about it. The result, Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest To Change Harlem and America, goes on sale today, a little more than five years from the first time I sat down in front of Canada and turned on my tape recorder.
There's some background on the Harlem Children's Zone in this review by Sara Mosle last week in Slate. And then, you know, there's always the book itself.
So, how did my Harlem reporting get me into writing about education? Two months after the Harlem article came out in the Times, Geoffrey Canada opened his first charter school, the Promise Academy. When the middle school opened, the administrators gave every sixth-grade student a diagnostic test. They expected that many of the children would be behind grade level; most kids in public schools in Harlem are. But when they got back the results, they were shocked by just how far behind grade level the kids were. Fifty-seven percent of the sixth-grade class was reading at a third-grade level or below.
And Geoff Canada had just promised to get them all to college.
I wanted to find out why those kids had fallen so far behind—and whether anyone had yet figured out a way to do what Canada wanted to do: take disaffected 10-year-olds who had till then received only the most threadbare education and accelerate them to a point where they were on par with their middle-class peers.
Those are some of the questions I explored in my book and which I've been blogging about, in one way or another, here on Slate for the past two weeks. Over the next few days, I'm going to write more about what I found during my time in Harlem—and why I feel it has the potential to change the terms of the country's education debate.
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