Archive for April, 2010
About the Education Trust–West
The Education Trust–West works for the high academic achievement of all students at all levels, kindergarten through college, and to forever close the achievement gaps separating low-income students and students of color from other youth. Our basic tenet is this — All children will learn at high levels when they are taught to high levels.
Welcome to The EdVocate West
Welcome to our new blog, The Edvocate West. Our entry into the world of blogging was facilitated by three members of our staff, Sheilagh Polk, Melanie Forter and Tracy Solomon, so I’ll start by thanking them for all their hard work. I also want to extend a big thanks to John Fensterwald at the Educated Guess Blog and Katy Murphy at the Oakland Tribune/ Education Report Blog for their wonderful advice and feedback about blogging.
If you’d like to know a little bit more about me, The Education Trust—West or our home office, The Education Trust, those links are to the right.
The Education Trust—West maintains a relentless focus on eliminating achievement gaps and improving the education of all students, particularly those students of color and students in poverty who have traditionally been left behind. This blog, in line with all of our work to date, will serve to highlight the educational inequities impacting students and communities of color in California, as well as serve as a passionate voice for reform.
Certainly, there is no shortage of topics to write about. The education policy world is exploding right now. There’s Race to the Top and the potential reauthorization of No Child Left Behind; the third straight budget crisis crippling our education system and schools; and remarkable reform movements happening in school districts throughout the state. To use a bad cliché from a good book, it truly is the best of times and the worst of times in California.
Of course, given the strange state of our state, it’s been the best and the worst of times for a long time. I came to California from Boston as a young teacher in the late nineties and marveled at the stark differences in both resources and quality between my high-poverty Boston and California schools. My wife, a longtime California teacher, had the same experience in reverse when she came back to Boston with me. She was blown away by both the resources available in her new east coast school and by the comparative quality of the instruction.
It amazes me how so many Californians, especially people in power, polarize education policy issues almost by default. You can talk to people who think resources and dollars will make all the difference for schools and to people who argue that the problem is the way the dollars are spent. Both argue that they represent the interests of students and parents but most of them seem to represent organizations that are funded to promote adult interests – whether that’s teachers unions or taxpayer associations.
Like most of our educational debates, I believe the real solutions are revealed when you plant the opposite positions on either end, stripping away the half-truths and ideological talking points and looking at the hopes and aspirations of those caught in the middle. These are the millions of students of color and English learners their families, advocates, educators and leaders who believe that the answer is high-quality neighborhood schools staffed with good teachers and principals supported by school district leaders willing to hold them accountable for their performance.
In the middle, you’ll find a measure of rationality in an assessment that our progress has not been sufficient in closing achievement gaps; that we haven’t done enough to transform the conditions that keep high-need schools from improving; and that more money is just part of the solution not the whole answer. In the middle are people who know that real reform isn’t another half-baked action plan or conference to highlight problems we all know is exist in order to promote the same old solutions. In the middle are those who know we have failed to fully leverage the lessons and solutions for reform in traditional and non-traditional schools all over our incredibly diverse state and the recognition that doing the right thing for students and families requires challenging and defeating the adult interests who dominate the fringes. Most of all, in the middle, you can find a measure of hope and possibility for the future of California’s education system.
In this blog, we will speak from that middle ground and raise up the voices of others who are working there with us. We’ll confront the anti-reform apparatchiks whose defining purpose in life is to defend the system they’ve helped to construct and praise themselves for all of it’s supposed progress. We’ll work to disprove those who argue that California is such a basket-case that there is no hope for reform and are willing to turn their backs on its millions of students. We’ll expose the perversities of our education system at the local, county, state and even federal level that harm students and their communities in order to serve adult interests or individual political agendas. We’ll expose the choices made by our leaders and the alternatives they rejected in order to hold them publically accountable. As we do this work, I hope you will continue to read along and add your voices and comments in ways that build and enrich our collective vision and work.
