By RiShawn Biddle on 11.9.09 @ 6:08AM
School reformers can be guilty of neglecting parents' concerns.
When it comes to governors, mayors and even pundits, the school
reform movement has no difficulty selling them on its formula of
standardized tests, stricter accountability measures, mayoral
control of school districts and expansion of school choice.
This can be seen in President Barack Obama's move to dedicate
$4.3 billion Race to the Top initiative, efforts by governors in
North Carolina and Massachusetts to take control of school
agencies, the effort by Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett to add
control of the city's school district to his portfolio, and even
columns bashing teachers unions and supporting federal activism
by Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times' resident
center-leftist and David Brooks, Kristof's (slightly) more
conservative colleague.
But school reformers have a long way to go where it counts:
Addressing the interests of America's parents, who actually
choose the schools to which they entrust their children, and
helping them pick the best schools for their children in the
first place.
At the moment, school reformers aren't considering situations
such as that of the middle-class black couple in East Ridge,
Tenn., just outside of Chattanooga, now deciding where to send
their four-year-old son once he reaches kindergarten. They are
skipping the schools offered by the local school district,
Hamilton County Schools, for a private school option, but not
because of the district's academic performance. Instead, it's
because they don't want their son, who currently attends a
nearly-all-white preschool, to continue being the only black male
in his school.
School reformers aren't talking to the concerns of the middle
class white family in Indianapolis, who are pulling out their
15-year-old daughter out of Lawrence North High School. The high
school's unenviable position on the state's academic watch list
is less concerning for them than their efforts to help her kick a
meth habit. She may end up attending Hope Academy, a charter
school run by a local drug rehab center, where she can address
her addiction and keep up her grades all at the same time.
Often, the movement isn't even addressing the questions of the
parent such as the stepfather in Roosevelt, N.Y., just outside of
New York City, who is solely focused on the kind of academic
rigor on which the school reform movement focuses. Finding out
the education statistics he needs for finding his stepdaughter a
school proves difficult as he has to scour through the New York
State Education Department's cumbersome Web site.
It isn't that parents aren't slowly realizing that they can't
simply find a good school for their child just by buying a home
in tony suburbs such as Chevy Chase, Md. or Rancho Palos Verdes,
Calif. Forty-nine percent of parents surveyed by Phi Delta Kappan
and the Gallup Organization in their annual survey rate their
local schools "C" or lower, a rating that has been fairly
consistent for the past five years.
The growth of the charter school movement, which now educates 1.4
million children in locales as different from one another as
Washington, D.C. and tiny Thibodaux, La., also marks the desire
among parents for expansive school options. The popularity of
homeschooling among middle-class black families, the development
of tutoring programs such as Washington Post Co.'s Kaplan unit,
and the passage of laws authorizing private school tax credits in
states such as Arizona, shows that school quality is no longer
just the concern of urban single mothers or Fundamentalist
Christian fathers.
But the concerns of parents have never simply been focused on
just academic rigor. Social climbing, boosting careers, seeking
values- or religious-based instruction, even exposing their
children to diverse culture, is as much a concern, if not more
so. The consequences of modern life -- more-immediate diagnosis
of autism and mental illnesses, earlier onsets of substance
abuse, the development of the modern two-income household --
means that families are looking to schools to assist in
addressing those issues. And for parents just concerned with
academic performance, the need for easily-accessible,
well-analyzed information on schools is paramount.
And yet school reformers, like those in the public education
establishment, fail to take the needs or desires of parents to
heart. For example, the No Child Left Behind Act has succeeded in
providing more information on the woeful quality of America's
schools. But save for a few private-sector efforts, school
reformers have done little to advance the availability,
accessibility or even the understandability of data.
Concedes Frederick Hess, the American Enterprise Institute's
resident education reform guru: "[School reformers] suffer from a
common shortcoming-excessive faith in prescience and a failure to
foster the conditions that can yield breakthrough advances."
The movement's various activist groups fail to look beyond their
own particular formulas. Supporters of school turnaround efforts,
for example, fail to see that reorganizations are as unlikely to
succeed as similar efforts in Corporate America. The Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation learned this all too well in this decade
when it spent $2 billion on breaking up high schools into smaller
college-oriented schools (more on this is detailed in an upcoming
report I've written in Foundation Watch).
The penchant of reformers to focus on inside-the-Beltway debates
and actions at state capitals often means they aren't taking a
look at how to actually drive change in communities. Typical is a
recent debate between Andy Smarick of the Thomas B. Fordham
Institute and Neil McCluskey, the Cato Institute's resident
school choice activist over "the proper federal role in
education." Not one word of the discussion involves one of the
most-important concerns for two-income households: The need for
longer school days that will help them in their work-life
balance.
If anything, school reformers need to look outside of Foggy
Bottom and away from their theories. Instead, they should rip a
page from successful entrepreneurs and address the needs of
parents at the grassroots level. And they need not look far.
Former teachers Michael Feinberg and Dave Levin figured out how
to address the concerns of urban parents by founding the KIPP
chain of charter schools, while Rock the Vote cofounder Steve
Barr did the same with L.A's Green Dot schools. In New York City,
Geoffrey Canada did the same when he transformed a collection of
childcare centers into the educational village known as the
Harlem Children's Zone.
Such focus on the needs of parents and their children are more
likely to enlist their gratitude.
topics:
School Reform
