REPOST: Gentler Words About Charter Schools From de Blasio

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio spoke in a conciliatory tone to emphasize camaraderie during his remarks delivered at the Riverside Church in New York City. The New York Times has the full account of his plea for solidarity within the education sector.

Mayor Bill de Blasio delivered remarks at Riverside Church on Sunday.
Image Source: www.nytimes.com

It was perhaps fitting that Mayor Bill de Blasio found himself Sunday at Riverside Church, the neo-Gothic landmark in Morningside Heights: The church was long a cathedral of antiwar sentiment, and the mayor was looking to make peace. 

For weeks, Mr. de Blasio had been locked in a battle with advocates of charter schools, who were denouncing him around the clock in a $3.6 million advertising blitz. The results were beginning to show: His education agenda seemed rudderless, and his popularity in polls was slipping. 

So on Sunday, Mr. de Blasio struck a conciliatory tone, acknowledging missteps and emphasizing common ground. He quoted a theologian, Paul Tillich, saying, “The noise of these shallow waters prevents us from listening to the sounds out of the depth.” 

Charter schools and their backers represent perhaps the most formidable political threat to Mr. de Blasio’s young administration, and the mayor has taken notice. 

In recent weeks, he has spoken about the need to educate all children, regardless of the type of school they attend. And in private, he has phoned titans of Wall Street and philanthropy, explaining that he does not want to “destroy” charter schools, according to several business executives who spoke with Mr. de Blasio. 

For a mayor who won election by denouncing the excesses of business and speaking passionately of the need to bridge the gap between rich and poor, the conversations have been awkward. But increasingly, Mr. de Blasio seems determined to move beyond what he sees as a perilous distraction and to avoid the wrath of a well-financed charter-school movement. 

“There’s a desire on the part of the business community to work with the mayor,” said Kathryn S. Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, a coalition of business leaders. “The question that has been raised is whether that’s mutual.” 

Charter school leaders have seized on a key vulnerability. While black and Latino residents overwhelmingly backed Mr. de Blasio in last year’s election, many also embrace the cause of charter schools, which operate primarily in low-income neighborhoods. 

Families for Excellent Schools, a charter school advocacy group, began running advertisements last month attacking Mr. de Blasio for his decision to deny public space to three charter schools run by Success Academy Charter Schools, a high-performing network. In defending his decision, the mayor said he worried about losing space for special education programs, and he expressed concern about having elementary school students attend classes on high school campuses. He also allowed almost every other charter school to continue using public school space, and more recently, has promised to find space at another site for one of the three Success schools, an existing school that wants to add older grades. 

In one ad, the smiling faces of the school’s students zoom across the screen and then begin to disappear. 

“They love their school and all the opportunities it brings,” a narrator says. “But Mayor Bill de Blasio just announced he is closing their school, taking away their hopes and dreams.” 

In another, a parent named Maria offers a direct message to Mr. de Blasio: “You’re not thinking about the people that you’re hurting.” 

The campaign seems to have taken a toll on the mayor’s popularity, and his aides have acknowledged as much. A poll by Quinnipiac University last week showed that 38 percent of voters approved of Mr. de Blasio’s handling of New York City schools, while 49 percent disapproved. The poll last week showed that 45 percent of voters approved of the new mayor, down from 53 percent two months ago. 

Longtime supporters of charter schools, including the Walton Family Foundation and the hedge fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones, are helping finance the ad campaign, according to an individual involved in the effort. 

In recent days, Mr. de Blasio has aggressively reached out to Wall Street financiers, including Mr. Tudor Jones, in hopes of easing tensions and ending the ads, which are running dozens of times a day. He also has spoken with Daniel S. Loeb, chairman of the board of Success Academy and Jonathan D. Gray, chairman of the board of Harlem Village Academies, another charter network. 

In those conversations, Mr. de Blasio has sought to tamp down concerns that he holds a grudge against Wall Street or wealthy individuals, according to a banker who spoke with Mr. de Blasio but declined to be identified for fear of harming his relationship with the mayor. 

The reception was mixed. Some of those the mayor called said they walked away from the conversations reassured about Mr. de Blasio’s commitment to charter schools. But some said they were still concerned about his educational vision, including his plan to charge rent to charter schools, and others said their critiques of Mr. de Blasio extended beyond charter schools and included his support for raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for prekindergarten and after-school programs. 

Phil Walzak, the mayor’s press secretary, said the conversations were part of a broader effort by Mr. de Blasio to unite community leaders, philanthropists and educators around his vision for the city. “These outreach efforts underscore the mayor’s commitment to uniting people and working together to ensure every child in New York City receives a great education,” he said in a statement. 

Many charter school leaders, accustomed to favorable treatment under former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, fear that Mr. de Blasio will hinder their growth in New York. Charter schools are publicly financed but privately run, and are typically not unionized. Mr. Bloomberg gave charter schools free space in public school buildings, a policy Mr. de Blasio has criticized as squeezing out traditional schools. Eva S. Moskowitz, a former city councilwoman who runs the Success Academy network, raised several million dollars for advocacy efforts in anticipation of Mr. de Blasio’s tenure, according to a person familiar with her efforts. Mr. de Blasio had singled out Ms. Moskowitz during the campaign, saying, “She has to stop being tolerated, enabled, supported.” 

Kevin Hall, a Success Academy board member and president of the Charter School Growth Fund, said it had become necessary for educators to plan robust political efforts.
“In some ways these guys have gotten pulled into being in the advocacy realm because the world kind of changed around them,” he said. “People are trying to figure out now, how do we mobilize our families and others to better tell our story than we have?” 

The attacks on Mr. de Blasio have created divisions within the charter school community. A small coalition of charter school leaders has distanced itself from the recent advertising campaign in hopes of building better relations with City Hall. The group released a statement on Sunday praising the mayor’s speech. “We share a belief that our city needs a high-quality charter sector that collaborates with district schools,” the group said. 

For all his talk of camaraderie on Sunday, Mr. de Blasio made clear that he would not swerve from his underlying agenda: focusing attention and resources on traditional public schools, by expanding access to prekindergarten and after-school programs. 

“The answer is not to save a few of our children only,” he said. “The answer is not to find an escape route that some can follow and others can’t. The answer is to fix the entire system.”

I’m Jamie Squillare, and as a teacher, I agree that camaraderie between schools, government, and communities is extremely crucial to ensure that every child in the country has access to quality education regardless of his or her social status. Click here to read more news on education andliterature.

REPOST: No College Left Behind: Randy Best's Money-Making Mission To Save Higher Education

This article for Forbes spotlights Randy Best, an entrepreneur who's on a mission to transform struggling mid-level U.S. universities into global education brands through his tech venture Academic Partnerships.

Image Source: forbes.com

Randy Best can’t read. “I’m acutely dyslexic,” says Best from his office in a glitzy Dallas skyscraper where he is plotting his assault on the ivory tower. “My mother read to me all through college. She was a schoolteacher, so she was just humiliated–and made it clear to me that she was devastated. Back then there were two reasons you didn’t learn to read: You were lazy or you weren’t very intelligent.”

Even today, as his latest venture, Academic Partnerships, is using the Web to turn struggling midlevel U.S. universities into global education brands, he still needs someone to read to him. On his desk sits a manila folder marked “Read,” where he stashes articles and e-mails for his right-hand woman, Justyna Dymerska, a Cambridge-educated Ph.D., to recite. In fact, Best, 71, can’t even use a computer. His Web activity is confined to an iPad. When he needs to send e-mails, he dictates while someone else types.

It’s a startling confession for anyone, let alone the founder and CEO of an estimated $100 million (sales) education technology company. But Best’s functional illiteracy masks an even rarer ability: making money–and lots of it. There are the jewelry businesses he founded as an undergrad in the 1960s, the art galleries and cattle yards in the 1970s, and outpatient care, oil exploration and defense contracting in the 1980s. By 1995 Best had made several fortunes and turned, momentarily, to philanthropy.

He founded Voyager Expanded Learning as a free afterschool program for Dallas latchkey kids. Originally a nonprofit, this startup would turn out to be his biggest moneymaker yet. Best eventually pulled in so much government money from the No Child Left Behind Act that Voyager–by then very much for-profit–was criticized by education watchdogs as the “Halliburton of Education.” Best sold Voyager for $360 million in 2005 to library database ProQuest. His 37% stake in the company was worth close to $130 million.

Academic Partnerships, founded as Higher Ed Holdings in 2007, is on track to make that payday look like a freshman introductory course. It’s a simple business model: Academic Partnerships helps colleges move some of their degree programs–usually those with a professional or vocational slant–online. The company spends an average of $2 million per school (it currently has 40 U.S. campuses and 17 international ones) to acquire online students, digitize lessons, set up back-end administrative and technical support, and tutor professors in the ABCs of the virtual classroom.

In return it takes a 50% cut of the tuition, which at some schools can be as costly as a traditional degree. The company says it has so far recruited 82,000 students, with an 85% retention rate. When they graduate, those students are granted transcripts and diplomas that are indistinguishable from ones earned the old-fashioned way.

There are now in excess of 2,000 online degree programs in the U.S. About half of the schools rely on a third-party facilitator like Academic Partners or its competitors to put warm, tuition-paying bodies behind their new virtual desks. Other leaders in the industry include Deltak (owned by Wiley), Embanet(owned by Pearson), Bisk Education and 2U. According to Robert Lytle, cohead of education practice at the Parthenon Group, those facilitators currently bring in an estimated $1 billion a year in tuition revenue. That market is expected to double in four years, says Michael Moe, cofounder of GSV Asset Management.

“They are good at that, and we are not,” says Donald R. Bobbitt, president of the University of Arkansas System, which began working with Best in 2012. Best finds students partly through partnering with some 2,000 big institutions worldwide–hospitals, corporations and municipalities–that want better educated (or credentialed) employees. But it’s also a lot of telemarketing. Of the more than 400 workers employed by Academic Partnerships, 50% work the phones–and the e-mails–in a sprawling call center situated right across the street from Best’s office: The three Rs here being recruitment, retention and revenue.

Philosophy, political science and art history majors need not apply, nor gifted high school seniors shooting for top-tier schools. “The Stanfords, the Harvards, oh my gosh, those schools are remarkable,” says Best. “But they’re irrelevant to the market.” The degrees Academic Partnerships are selling are aimed squarely at the bulging middle mass of the college market–the millions of adult students seeking degrees as a vehicle to better jobs and bigger salaries. Let the 20-somethings pack the coffeehouses, stadiums and frat parties. Best’s clients are all business. They are cops, nurses, teachers and construction workers grinding for the promotion and pay bump that comes with a B.S. in criminal justice or nursing or a master’s in education or construction management but can’t take days or nights off–much less four or five years–from the job and kids to earn a diploma.

“We’d all like to be 19 again, sitting in a dorm, but that’s not the way it is,” says Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor and a current Academic Partnerships investor and senior advisor. “We have a whole lot of people who aspire to a better life, are married, have a job, can’t pause and undo what they’ve done in their adult life but want a college career that will help them live a life of purpose and meaning. And without expanding the reach of our public universities, that promise will be unfulfilled.”

It’s great for the colleges, too. Online learning enables them to expand without building new classrooms or laboratories, landscaping playing fields or providing heat, so growing a digital student body has an outsize effect on the bottom line. It costs the average public college $13,000 a year (in 2010 dollars) to educate an undergraduate on campus, according to the American Institutes for Research, a nonpartisan research group. According to Academic Partnerships, it can do the same job online for about $1,500 a year–making digital degrees a profit machine even after accounting for the significantly higher costs of acquiring virtual students (there is much more competition in cyberspace).

In some ways the money couldn’t come soon enough. At elite public universities like UVa or UC Berkeley bright and often wealthy students battle for admission, but there are hundreds of middling state schools on the brink. These schools are being squeezed by decreasing government aid (taxpayers typically foot about 13% of the bill, according to the U.S. Department of Education), falling enrollment and anemic alumni giving.

“Higher education is an industry in danger,” says Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School guru and a senior advisor (unpaid) at Academic Partnerships. “It’s very plausible to say that 15 years from now half of the universities that exist will be bankrupt and in some fundamental way facing extinction and the need to totally change themselves.” Best wants to be that change agent. If his plan works, the same man who can’t find his way through a textbook or use a computer might end up saving the battered U.S. public university system–and mint another fortune in the process.

Best was born and raised in Beaumont, Tex., a fading oil boomtown near the Louisiana border. His father was a hardware store owner (and also dyslexic) and his mother a schoolteacher and principal. He set out to major in prelaw at the local college, Lamar University, but soon realized he’d have to read and write briefs. Best switched to political science and began a lifelong obsession with history, ancient civilizations and the arts.

 Read the full story here.

Hi, I'm Jamie Squillare. I'm a literature teacher who salutes entrepreneurs with a big heart for education. Join me on this blog for another round of discussion on key trends and issues on education.

REPOST: Why Tough Teachers Get Good Results

Hello there! Have you read this interesting piece in The Wall Street Journal? Author Joanne Lipman suggests that given challenges in U.S. education these days, it might be time to “revive old-fashioned education.” Find out from the article below why she thinks so.

I had a teacher once who called his students "idiots" when they screwed up. He was our orchestra conductor, a fierce Ukrainian immigrant named Jerry Kupchynsky, and when someone played out of tune, he would stop the entire group to yell, "Who eez deaf in first violins!?" He made us rehearse until our fingers almost bled. He corrected our wayward hands and arms by poking at us with a pencil.

Today, he'd be fired. But when he died a few years ago, he was celebrated: Forty years' worth of former students and colleagues flew back to my New Jersey hometown from every corner of the country, old instruments in tow, to play a concert in his memory. I was among them, toting my long-neglected viola. When the curtain rose on our concert that day, we had formed a symphony orchestra the size of the New York Philharmonic.

Mr. K began teaching at East Brunswick High School when it opened in 1958. | Image source: wsj.com

I was stunned by the outpouring for the gruff old teacher we knew as Mr. K. But I was equally struck by the success of his former students. Some were musicians, but most had distinguished themselves in other fields, like law, academia and medicine. Research tells us that there is a positive correlation between music education and academic achievement. But that alone didn't explain the belated surge of gratitude for a teacher who basically tortured us through adolescence.

We're in the midst of a national wave of self-recrimination over the U.S. education system. Every day there is hand-wringing over our students falling behind the rest of the world. Fifteen-year-olds in the U.S. trail students in 12 other nations in science and 17 in math, bested by their counterparts not just in Asia but in Finland, Estonia and the Netherlands, too. An entire industry of books and consultants has grown up that capitalizes on our collective fear that American education is inadequate and asks what American educators are doing wrong.

I would ask a different question. What did Mr. K do right? What can we learn from a teacher whose methods fly in the face of everything we think we know about education today, but who was undeniably effective?

Image source: wsj.com

As it turns out, quite a lot. Comparing Mr. K's methods with the latest findings in fields from music to math to medicine leads to a single, startling conclusion: It's time to revive old-fashioned education. Not just traditional but old-fashioned in the sense that so many of us knew as kids, with strict discipline and unyielding demands. Because here's the thing: It works.

Now I'm not calling for abuse; I'd be the first to complain if a teacher called my kids names. But the latest evidence backs up my modest proposal. Studies have now shown, among other things, the benefits of moderate childhood stress; how praise kills kids' self-esteem; and why grit is a better predictor of success than SAT scores.

All of which flies in the face of the kinder, gentler philosophy that has dominated American education over the past few decades. The conventional wisdom holds that teachers are supposed to tease knowledge out of students, rather than pound it into their heads. Projects and collaborative learning are applauded; traditional methods like lecturing and memorization—derided as "drill and kill"—are frowned upon, dismissed as a surefire way to suck young minds dry of creativity and motivation.

But the conventional wisdom is wrong. And the following eight principles—a manifesto if you will, a battle cry inspired by my old teacher and buttressed by new research—explain why.

1. A little pain is good for you.

Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson gained fame for his research showing that true expertise requires about 10,000 hours of practice, a notion popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book "Outliers." But an often-overlooked finding from the same study is equally important: True expertise requires teachers who give "constructive, even painful, feedback," as Dr. Ericsson put it in a 2007 Harvard Business Review article. He assessed research on top performers in fields ranging from violin performance to surgery to computer programming to chess. And he found that all of them "deliberately picked unsentimental coaches who would challenge them and drive them to higher levels of performance."

Mr. Kupchynsky helps his daughter with her bow stroke in 1966. | Image source: wsj.com

2. Drill, baby, drill.

Rote learning, long discredited, is now recognized as one reason that children whose families come from India (where memorization is still prized) are creaming their peers in the National Spelling Bee Championship. This cultural difference also helps to explain why students in China (and Chinese families in the U.S.) are better at math. Meanwhile, American students struggle with complex math problems because, as research makes abundantly clear, they lack fluency in basic addition and subtraction—and few of them were made to memorize their times tables.

William Klemm of Texas A&M University argues that the U.S. needs to reverse the bias against memorization. Even the U.S. Department of Education raised alarm bells, chastising American schools in a 2008 report that bemoaned the lack of math fluency (a notion it mentioned no fewer than 17 times). It concluded that schools need to embrace the dreaded "drill and practice."

3. Failure is an option.

Kids who understand that failure is a necessary aspect of learning actually perform better. In a 2012 study, 111 French sixth-graders were given anagram problems that were too difficult for them to solve. One group was then told that failure and trying again are part of the learning process. On subsequent tests, those children consistently outperformed their peers.

The fear, of course is that failure will traumatize our kids, sapping them of self-esteem. Wrong again. In a 2006 study, a Bowling Green State University graduate student followed 31 Ohio band students who were required to audition for placement and found that even students who placed lowest "did not decrease in their motivation and self-esteem in the long term." The study concluded that educators need "not be as concerned about the negative effects" of picking winners and losers.

4. Strict is better than nice.

What makes a teacher successful? To find out, starting in 2005 a team of researchers led by Claremont Graduate University education professor Mary Poplin spent five years observing 31 of the most highly effective teachers (measured by student test scores) in the worst schools of Los Angeles, in neighborhoods like South Central and Watts. Their No. 1 finding: "They were strict," she says. "None of us expected that."

The researchers had assumed that the most effective teachers would lead students to knowledge through collaborative learning and discussion. Instead, they found disciplinarians who relied on traditional methods of explicit instruction, like lectures. "The core belief of these teachers was, 'Every student in my room is underperforming based on their potential, and it's my job to do something about it—and I can do something about it,'" says Prof. Poplin.

She reported her findings in a lengthy academic paper. But she says that a fourth-grader summarized her conclusions much more succinctly this way: "When I was in first grade and second grade and third grade, when I cried my teachers coddled me. When I got to Mrs. T's room, she told me to suck it up and get to work. I think she's right. I need to work harder."

5. Creativity can be learned.

The rap on traditional education is that it kills children's' creativity. But Temple University psychology professor Robert W. Weisberg's research suggests just the opposite. Prof. Weisberg has studied creative geniuses including Thomas Edison, Frank Lloyd Wright and Picasso—and has concluded that there is no such thing as a born genius. Most creative giants work ferociously hard and, through a series of incremental steps, achieve things that appear (to the outside world) like epiphanies and breakthroughs.

Prof. Weisberg analyzed Picasso's 1937 masterpiece Guernica, for instance, which was painted after the Spanish city was bombed by the Germans. The painting is considered a fresh and original concept, but Prof. Weisberg found instead that it was closely related to several of Picasso's earlier works and drew upon his study of paintings by Goya and then-prevalent Communist Party imagery. The bottom line, Prof. Weisberg told me, is that creativity goes back in many ways to the basics. "You have to immerse yourself in a discipline before you create in that discipline. It is built on a foundation of learning the discipline, which is what your music teacher was requiring of you."

Tough on the podium, Mr. K was always appreciative when he sat in the audience. Above, applauding his students in the mid-1970s. |Image source: wsj.com

6. Grit trumps talent.

In recent years, University of Pennsylvania psychology professor Angela Duckworth has studied spelling bee champs, Ivy League undergrads and cadets at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y.—all together, over 2,800 subjects. In all of them, she found that grit—defined as passion and perseverance for long-term goals—is the best predictor of success. In fact, grit is usually unrelated or even negatively correlated with talent.

Prof. Duckworth, who started her career as a public school math teacher and just won a 2013 MacArthur "genius grant," developed a "Grit Scale" that asks people to rate themselves on a dozen statements, like "I finish whatever I begin" and "I become interested in new pursuits every few months." When she applied the scale to incoming West Point cadets, she found that those who scored higher were less likely to drop out of the school's notoriously brutal summer boot camp known as "Beast Barracks." West Point's own measure—an index that includes SAT scores, class rank, leadership and physical aptitude—wasn't able to predict retention.

Prof. Duckworth believes that grit can be taught. One surprisingly simple factor, she says, is optimism—the belief among both teachers and students that they have the ability to change and thus to improve. In a 2009 study of newly minted teachers, she rated each for optimism (as measured by a questionnaire) before the school year began. At the end of the year, the students whose teachers were optimists had made greater academic gains.

7. Praise makes you weak…

My old teacher Mr. K seldom praised us. His highest compliment was "not bad." It turns out he was onto something. Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck has found that 10-year-olds praised for being "smart" became less confident. But kids told that they were "hard workers" became more confident and better performers.

"The whole point of intelligence praise is to boost confidence and motivation, but both were gone in a flash," wrote Prof. Dweck in a 2007 article in the journal Educational Leadership. "If success meant they were smart, then struggling meant they were not."

8.…while stress makes you strong.

A 2011 University at Buffalo study found that a moderate amount of stress in childhood promotes resilience. Psychology professor Mark D. Seery gave healthy undergraduates a stress assessment based on their exposure to 37 different kinds of significant negative events, such as death or illness of a family member. Then he plunged their hands into ice water. The students who had experienced a moderate number of stressful events actually felt less pain than those who had experienced no stress at all.

"Having this history of dealing with these negative things leads people to be more likely to have a propensity for general resilience," Prof. Seery told me. "They are better equipped to deal with even mundane, everyday stressors."

Prof. Seery's findings build on research by University of Nebraska psychologist Richard Dienstbier, who pioneered the concept of "toughness"—the idea that dealing with even routine stresses makes you stronger. How would you define routine stresses? "Mundane things, like having a hardass kind of teacher," Prof. Seery says.

My tough old teacher Mr. K could have written the book on any one of these principles. Admittedly, individually, these are forbidding precepts: cold, unyielding, and kind of scary.

But collectively, they convey something very different: confidence. At their core is the belief, the faith really, in students' ability to do better. There is something to be said about a teacher who is demanding and tough not because he thinks students will never learn but because he is so absolutely certain that they will.

Decades later, Mr. K's former students finally figured it out, too. "He taught us discipline," explained a violinist who went on to become an Ivy League-trained doctor. "Self-motivation," added a tech executive who once played the cello. "Resilience," said a professional cellist. "He taught us how to fail—and how to pick ourselves up again."

Clearly, Mr. K's methods aren't for everyone. But you can't argue with his results. And that's a lesson we can all learn from.

Any thoughts on Ms. Lipman’s proposal? Whether you are pro or against Ms. Lipman’s suggestion, tweet your sentiment @jamie_squillare. You can also reach me on Facebook.