Morning Shots

You can steal the plays, but that doesn’t mean you can execute the playbook.

This week in the New York Times, Houston Public Schools explained how its troubled schools were looking to improve by mimicking successful charter schools.

It’s great that HPS is acknowledging that charter schools are successful in educating low-income, urban kids. And it’s said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. But, it’s shortsighted to think that by cherry-picking a few plays from the charter school playbook achievement is going to rise in regular public schools.

HPS teamed up with Harvard researcher Dr. Ronald Fryer to identify and implement five key ideas common to successful charters: “longer school days and years; more rigorous and selective hiring of principals and teachers; frequent quizzes whose results determine what needs to be retaught; what he calls ‘high-dosage tutoring’; and a ‘no excuses’ culture.”

This approach demonstrates the lack of understanding about what is truly happening in charter schools.

HPS can’t just pick and choose charter school elements and think that’ll change everything. Charter schools are an entire culture shift that cultivates innovation and provides freedom from burdensome regulations.

Giving more quizzes and making the school day longer isn’t going to have the systemic change that comes out of a true charter environment.

“If you see something good, why not try to replicate it?” said Terry Grier, Houston’s superintendent.

Sure. But instead of just trying to replicate charter schools, why not become one – don’t just steal the plays, steal the playbook.

Once upon a time, in this country, early in the last century hoards of Italians, (like me!), Irish, German, Jewish peoples and more descended on this land in search of something better. From the schools to the sweatshops, they took jobs that paid little and demanded much. Haste, greed and neglect soon became the norm in the American workforce. Labor unions stepped, to collectively support and advance the rights of people to work and be given adequate wages, benefits and a quality environment. It was great, when it was needed.

Today those same unions — in this case in education — no longer protect people who are being abused, neglected, forced to work 15-hour days with no break for food or bathroom. Because of enlightened leaders, workers and yes, labor’s past contributions, today we and our institutions are protected. Those protections however, may have swung too far past the original intentions. For when it comes to teachers unions, protections now are all about labor not product.

Consider the attack by the United Federation of Teachers of New York in successfully challenging a new state evaluation system that would allow schools, parents and the public to know for certain if the people teaching our kids actually is successful at it!

The national unions have been fighting efforts to allow parents to turnaround failing schools. They oppose California’s parent trigger law and have well-documented tools for members who succeeded in squashing a similar proposal in Connecticut. The unions not only oppose real performance evaluations and parent choice but even standards and testing, funding teachers to rally in Washington over efforts to hold schools accountable.

This is what labor unions have become?

Movies have been done, books written, and hundreds of thousands of blogs, tweets, and news articles on the same subject.

This Labor day

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Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts, said the late great Daniel Patrick Moynihan. And indeed, the PDK/Gallup poll underscores the wisdom offered by the former Senior Senator from New York, no doubt in the larger public policy context of his day.

While everyone has opinions, pollsters are supposed to provide at least a baseline of data to allow someone to offer an opinion on information that he or she may or may not have known before being asked a question. The annual PDK/Gallup poll lacks much needed context, perhaps not unintentionally, rendering its usefulness nearly meaningless. Asking someone about spending priorities in the absence of knowing what the nation spends on schools doesn’t really tell you what we believe about money. Defining online learning as a way to learn at home doesn’t really inform the reader about how much we know and like the new digital learning age. Dozens of such data-lacking examples abound in this year’s annual survey of Americans’ attitudes.

Therein lies a nugget of truth that is perhaps at the heart Senator Moynihan’s admonishment. If this is a world in which opinions matter but facts do not, is it any wonder we are failing to educate millions of students? There’s no shortage of opinions among Americans, even if we don’t have data to back them up. And isn’t that the difference between productive learning environments and ones destined to fail? Good policy and bad policy? From pre-school to higher education, we are convinced that thinking and talking without real content knowledge is acceptable and that opinions matter, regardless of how well informed they are. Why try to find out the answers when your opinion counts, regardless of what you know?

If facts mattered in this survey,

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