Full-Service Schools

I had the good fortune to moderate a symposium on education policy in Denver last week hosted by Mayor John Hickenlooper. It was one of ten non-partisan events the host city organized in conjunction with the Democratic National Convention on wonky topics ranging from global warming to transportation infrastructure.

There were several highlights to the conversation among the ten panelists at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, including a declaration by John Wilson, the executive director of the National Education Association, that his union is open to changes to the traditional single salary schedule for teachers. A couple of weeks earlier, the NEA's Denver affliate had theatened to go on strike during the convention over Denver's closely watched alternative to the single salary schedule, called ProComp.

The Denver Classroom Teachers Association had originally signed onto the four-year-old experiment, which combined incentives pay for working in tough-to-staff schools with performance pay tied to strong evaluations, student achievement, and professional development work. The local started making feints towards the picket line in part because superintendent Michael Bennet wanted to give less experienced teachers larger raises than veterans to lower attrition among the city's newer teachers.

Bennet got most of what he wanted in a deal signed during the convention. Word has it that the Obama campaign suggested to the NEA that it probably wouldn't be in the interest of the Democratic party and the several hundred NEA members serving as Democratic delegates to have images of striking teachers playing on a continuous CNN loop in the middle of the convention.

On another topic, Paula Prahl, a vice-president at Best Buy, a symposium sponsor, offered up one of the pithier formulations on public school finance that I've heard: Our dependence on the property tax system to fund public education has turned public schooling into a property right. So if you don't have property [ie, if you don't live in a school system with decent property values], you don't have the right to a good education.

But for my money, KIPP founder Mike Feinberg made one of the most important contributions to the roundtable discussion, which in addition to Wilson and Prahl included Walter Isaacson of the Aspen Institute, former Colorado Governor and LA school superintendent Roy Romer, Obama advisor Jon Schnur, billionaire school refomer and philantropist Eli Broad, former Cleveland superintendent Barbara Byrd-Bennett, and a number of others in the school reform and corporate worlds.

In response to a question from one of the 350 or so people in the audience about whether schools should be expected to overcome the many disadvantages that students from poor families bring to the classroom, Feinberg pointed out the KIPP is build on the premise that there should be high expectations for all kids--and that schools serving kids from impoverished backgrounds need to surround them with support. KIPP provides a longer school day and school year, tutors, parent education programs, and host of community partnerships that supply vision screening, health care, counseling and other services.

KIPP, it struck me as Feinberg was speaking, suggests the futility of the now-several-months-long debate between two rival camps of mostly Democratic school reformers. The first, the Education Equlity Project, a coalition of reformers, urban political leaders, and civil rights advocates organized by New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein, is advocating a regulatory reform agenda: rigorous standards, school accountability and, above all, changes in the way teachers are hired, fired and compensated. The project is the brainchild of Klein's deputy, Chris Cerf, who has sought to build a coalition of African American political leaders to counter the influence of teachers' union in urban education. Cerf believes that it's going to take minority communities and their elected representatives standing up to the unions to win the new teacher compensation systems and other changes that he, Klein and others are pushing to attract and keep talent in urban schools.

The EEC was out in force in Denver, co-sponsoring a press conference and panel discussions featuring rising African American political stars like Corey Booker of Newark and Adrian Fenty of Washington.

The other group, formed by the liberal Economic Policy Institute, argues in a manifesto called the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education that it's not reasonable to assign to schools alone the challenge of, or the responsibility for, educating disadvantaged students. It's unfair to expect schools to bear that burden without the help of better health care and housing and improvements in other aspects of the lives of the disadvantaged.

The two factions have polarized the school reform debate dramatically in recent months. Needlessly, the KIPP model suggests. Many KIPP schools have produced impressive results by combining the core elements of both camps. They have reconfigured the school day and the school year. They have rethought teacher recruitment, roles, and compensation. And they have demanded accountability from every adult in their buildings. At the same time, many of the 66 KIPP schools around the country have sought to address head-on the dearth of social capital among many of their students and have extended their relationship to their students far beyond the classroom to help improve their students' readiness to learn.

At their best, they represent a new breed of innovative youth service and education centers. It's a model for the rest of public education, though one that raises a lot of issues for public educators and school reformers alike, as I'll discuss in a forthcoming Education Sector report.