Education Reforms Are Here to Stay
Last week, District of Columbia Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson stood in the auditorium of Dunbar High School, the country's first public high school for black students, and delivered some news that the more than 350 teachers, students and parents gathered there are slowly getting used to hearing.
For the fourth year in a row, graduation rates in the once flailing 49,000-student district increased, this time from 58 percent to 64 percent.
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"The progress in graduation rates is another indicator that we are the fastest improving [urban] school district in the nation," Henderson said.
Henderson has been at the helm of D.C. schools since 2010, when she replaced the hard-charging Michelle Rhee, a national figure and lightning rod for the so-called education reform movement who was all but run out of town after making major changes to the school system.
Despite having the marks of a firebrand reformer herself – she served stints at The New Teacher Project and Teach for America – Henderson took on the role of chancellor with a softer hand and sought to repair fractured relationships.
But here's the thing: In taking over the school system, Henderson kept in place nearly every policy Rhee's critics used to vilify and ultimately oust her. And now, under Henderson, charter schools are still thriving, some of the district's worst schools have been shuttered, more rigorous standards and tests are in place and teachers are transitioning to evaluations based on student test scores.
And this is happening across the country.
Over the last eight years, largely since President Barack Obama's election, states have recruited schools chiefs who have ushered in major education policy changes during their tenures. In large part, they were criticized for their brash leadership styles and for asking too much of teachers and students. Most of them have now been replaced by new state superintendents who take on that role with more discretion and sensitivity, and are thought of as being more inclusive of community input – but they aren't getting rid of the policy changes.
"It seems that after a series of divisive figures in education reform, there has come a second series of people who speak much more as uniters, but are not in any way taking a different policy stance than the people who came before them," says Lanae Erickson Hatalsky, vice president for social policy and politics at Third Way.
In Tennessee, Kevin Huffman, a former executive at Teach for America, oversaw the rollout of the Common Core State Standards and matching assessments, new teacher evaluations and an aggressive school turnaround mission. Along the way he provoked school district leaders – among many others – nearly 60 of whom called for his resignation, something that had never before happened in the Volunteer State.
In Rhode Island, Deborah Gist, the Chiefs for Change member and former Broad Superintendents Academy fellow, OK'd the mass firing of nearly 2,000 teachers in cash-strapped Providence, inciting a nationwide protest fueled by the 1.7 million-member American Federation of Teachers.
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In New York, John King, the soon-to-be acting U.S. secretary of education, drove the implementation of Common Core-aligned tests amid statewide protests, resulting in thousands of parents opting their children out of the tests and helping to spur the national opt-out movement.
In New Jersey, Chris Cerf, a former deputy chancellor of New York City schools, restructured teacher tenure, expanded charter schools and pushed for a school voucher system for low-income students – all positions that earned him his fair share of critics, most notably teachers union members.
The list goes on.
"I don't think you could have achieved those reforms without people who fell on their swords and created opportunity for folks like Henderson to come in and really rebuild a lot of the bridges that have been burned," says Melissa Tooley, a senior education policy analyst at New America, a Washington-based think tank. "You need someone who is willing to almost be a little bit deaf to the pushback in order to get you over that tipping point."
The more important question at play now, however, is whether those policy changes will continue to stick, especially in light of the increasingly politicized nature of things like Common Core, which entrenched interests on both the right and left have railed against.
"The era of education reform was peaking at the exact same time the Obama administration was coming into office," says Andy Smarick, a partner at Bellwether Education Partners and formerly deputy education commissioner in New Jersey. "What I have been asking myself is … is this era of reform going to be permanent, or is it going to be like a rubber band where it stretches and stretches and then snaps back to the way it was? It feels to me like it's a bit of snapping back."
Though he admits that on 19 out of 20 issues Henderson would probably agree with Rhee, Smarick argues that the newer state chiefs aren't as wedded to the policy changes their predecessors made, and evidence of that can be seen in states tinkering with and refining those changes.
"They're not in a full-throated way opposing what came before them, but they're also not storming the castle the way their predecessors were," Smarick says. "It's hard to find state chiefs today that are talking in the same way about teacher evaluation, teacher tenure, accountability, testing and standards."
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Several states have backed out of the two federally funded Common Core aligned testing consortia, Smarter Balanced and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers. Many states have also delayed the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers, and others are taking a second look at the Common Core standards themselves.
Even still, states are just fiddling with policies, a sign, some argue, that the new chiefs are just as supportive of the controversial education policies. The difference, they say, is that the new chiefs' roles aren't to advocate for the changes. Instead, they must manage the transition to them.
"The current wave of state chiefs are equally committed to reform, but I think they'll be quieter about it in Education Reforms Are Here to Stay - US News:
