Radical (26 page)

She wanted all kids to have a teacher like Ms. Angot.

Then she heard about StudentsFirst and the initiative we had started in Michigan to put in place a new teacher evaluation system. It sounded simple and made a lot of sense. Based on the evaluation, the best teachers would be recognized, and the ineffective ones would be moved out of the classroom. It sounded perfect to Nancy. She figured that a system such as the one we were proposing would allow Ms. Angot to be rewarded for being an effective teacher. It would also ensure that the other teachers would either receive more training or move on to a different career.

StudentsFirst was mobilizing parents and other members to support the bill. Nancy joined the fray. Along with other parents and teachers, she spent countless hours emailing, calling, and visiting legislators. One of the parents' state representatives was on the fence. It was important to show him how much his constituents wanted the policy in place. We were looking for mothers who would be willing to be featured in an advertisement asking members to vote yes on the bill. Having the face of a constituent making the plea to other community members would be a powerful testament. We warned potential participants that it could mean being targeted for harassment by the teachers union.

“Harassment?” Nancy and the others asked. “Why? This seems basic. We want to keep the best teachers and pay them more money. We want to move the ineffective ones out of the classroom. Who could argue with that?” She and the others agreed to be a part of the effort.

Overnight, it seemed, parents like Nancy Damoose became the face of the movement. She, Div Buegeleisen, Shannon Mayo, and other parents were featured on thousands of mailers that were sent to friends and neighbors asking them to contact their legislators about supporting the law. For Nancy, it was a unique experience. People whom she knew started asking her about the legislation. She told them very simply that as a mom, she wanted to make sure that her kids had the best teachers, and that as a member of the community, she wanted the same thing for all kids in Michigan.

House Bill 4627 passed. It was one of the most sweeping educator quality bills in the country. And it happened because of moms, like Nancy Damoose, who decided to take a stand.

O
NE OF THE MOST
common critiques you hear when you talk to union leaders about accountability is that teachers can't be held solely responsible for the achievement of their students. According to them, poverty and parental engagement are the key factors in whether a student can succeed in school. Notwithstanding that this argument presupposes that we should have no accountability to teach poor children, the parent argument is especially specious.

A perfect example of this is the new parent-trigger laws that are growing in popularity across the country. The first such law was passed in California and allows parents in failing schools to trigger, or force, the turnaround of that school if more than 50 percent of the parents sign a petition. The parents can then choose from a range of intervention options, which include replacing the staff, closing the school, or allowing a charter management organization to run the school.

In 2010, parents at McKinley Elementary in Compton, California, became the first in the country to “pull the trigger.” They worked for months to organize and collect the signatures necessary. Parent Revolution, a nonprofit group led by another Democrat, Ben Austin, helped to mobilize the parents and the community. At their request, I visited Compton and met with the parents.

I walked into Ismenia Guzman's house, where a group of about twelve parents had gathered. They had been working for some time to gather signatures and were close to meeting the 50 percent threshold. I was there to encourage them as they were crossing the finish line.

As I listened to them talk, the stories sounded familiar to me. One mother in particular struck me. Shamika Murphy said that as her daughter was going through McKinley, she received very good grades. When she spoke with her daughter's teachers, they were always very positive and complimentary. Then, when it came time for her daughter to go to middle school, Shamika realized something was amiss. Some of the schools pointed out how poorly her daughter was performing on standardized tests. They noted that she would have to start middle school far behind her classmates.

“I was shocked,” she said. “Here I was thinking everything was fine. But it wasn't. My daughter hadn't learned what she was supposed to in elementary school. Heading into middle school everyone was telling me she was far behind. How is this possible? How could McKinley have done that? I feel like they pulled the wool over my eyes!”

As the parents shared their stories about how McKinley had failed their children, the determination in the room grew. By the end of the meeting, the parents left, ready to continue their battle to take over the school and ensure a different future for McKinley.

In December 2010, the parents turned in their petition. By then the process had become controversial and contentious. Parents were divided. The petition campaign was hampered by charges of harassment, lies, and deceit. Some parents were threatened regarding their immigration status. The Compton school board ultimately rejected the petition on technicalities, and the parents' drive to take control of the school failed.

The teachers union and the district worked extraordinarily hard to thwart the first parent trigger campaign. But what were they protecting? McKinley had been a failing school for decades. In fact, it was one of the lowest-performing schools in the entire state of California. If you were a child attending McKinley for elementary school, your chances of graduating from high school and going to college were abysmal.

It amazes me that union leaders and school administrators who point to a lack of parental involvement as a culprit in defending their teachers from accountability would then turn around and fight tooth and nail against parents who are taking true ownership of their children's education.

How can anyone in good conscience fight to protect a status quo that subjects kids to such dismal outcomes?

W
E PARENTS ARE ADVOCATES
for our children every day.

From defusing a fight on the playground to making sure our kids get some playing time in the soccer game to preparing them for the new school year with the right supplies, we parents fight for our children and their interests. Parents know what's at stake with their children's education. That's why they must mobilize around education reform. Whether it's demanding a better option because their child is stuck at a failing school or understanding the need to fight for the rights of
all
children, parents have to become the powerful special interest group that demands we put students first.

Jane and Jody, with their email about starting a charter school in Florida, helped me realize that parents across the country were poised to take action to improve public education. They and other parents encouraged me to create StudentsFirst. Once we founded our organization and gave parents the opportunity to join a movement, I was surprised and elated at the response. Within months of announcing StudentsFirst, we had more than a hundred thousand members. In six months the organization had grown past five hundred thousand. In a year, we topped a million members, and we're close to hitting the two million mark today.

Parents are the backbone of this movement.

11

Challenging Politicians

F
or most of my life, I've considered myself a lefty liberal. At Cornell, I used to have two buttons affixed to my backpack, which became somewhat of a calling card for me. The first read, “Bush, Stay Out of Mine,” making clear my disdain for the first Bush administration's policies on reproductive rights. The second one was as a phrase popularized by Gloria Steinem: “A Woman Without a Man Is Like a Fish Without a Bicycle.” It's hard to get more liberal than Gloria Steinem.

I voted for a Democratic president, worked for one Democratic big-city mayor, and married another.

My identity as a Democrat is central to my beliefs about public education. I believe that children of all backgrounds and races have both the innate ability and the right as Americans to a high-quality education. I believe that public schools—government institutions—have the ability to make America more prosperous and just. The idea that the government can work to help overcome poverty and racism is a key element of the Democratic Party's ideals—right?

So you can imagine my surprise of late that people have begun to skewer me for linking arms with Republican leaders. How did that happen? Simple. My positions on education reform promote civil rights—and a civil right that was being denied mainly to children of color and in low-income communities. I have sought to make government a more effective tool for change. But some of my proposals threaten institutional power within the Democratic Party. I've always thought that we are a party that stands up to special interests when they are disenfranchising communities without power. We are a party that fights for commonsense policies that help people, not a party that stands behind abstract ideologies that help no one in particular.

But that is definitely not always the case.

As soon as I left teaching and started The New Teacher Project, I discovered that the primary motivation for too many Democratic politicians was to ensure their prospects for being elected again, rather than to bring about the social change they promised. The essentials that children need to thrive, especially a great education, are not always in line with what politicians need to survive. Special interests often hold the keys to their reelection. They come with great access and experience. They are well organized and well funded. They are vested in the status quo.

Here's my unfortunate conclusion: When it comes to making laws and policies in the best interests of educating children, our political system is too often stuck, paralyzed, and dysfunctional. The political parties are locked in opposing positions. There's little compromise. Republicans are often slavishly devoted to free market principles and their ideals around policies like gun laws. Democrats are often captive to the dogma of the leaders of the teachers unions. Neither consistently puts students first. We have to show politicians and their constituents that there's an alternative to the current gridlock.

Democrats, especially, believe they cannot take on education reform because they know they are in for a headache, perhaps defeat, at the hands of the teachers unions. This is something the education reform movement first realized many years ago when people like Joe Williams (a former newspaper reporter from New York and Milwaukee) joined forces with finance gurus like Whitney Tilson, Boykin Curry, Charles Ledley, John Petry, and David Einhorn to form Democrats for Education Reform.

As Democrats, they wanted to create space within the party to discuss real reform. Tilson knew that in order for that to happen, they'd have to have money. Without real support for Democratic candidates, he argued, their pleas would go unheard. With StudentsFirst, we are building on the foundation that DFER and other advocacy organizations like Stand for Children and 50CAN have laid. We are showing elected officials that there's an alternative, that they are not alone. We will use our resources and our nearly two million members to support them, give them cover, and level the playing field for kids.

Let me give you an example. We have seen instances of Democrats deciding to lead the charge to reform education laws at the state level. The special interest opponents of reform have paid for billboards accusing the state rep of being against teachers, or harming students. That sets a narrative that the politician can rarely recover from. So at StudentsFirst we know we have to engage in the same type of tactics. After major reform was passed in Connecticut, we paid for advertisements thanking reformers for working on behalf of the state's children.

When opponents of reform mobilized their canvassers, we mobilized our members who were from the community. The voices of local parents and teachers carried our message of reform to their neighbors and to their representatives in the statehouse.

When the special interests pledged to defeat supporters of reform and started making contributions to opponents of reform, we readied a campaign plan and made contributions to political leaders who now saw that there would be a well-funded, mobilized effort on their side, if they did the right thing for kids.

A well-organized, well-funded grassroots organization will give Democrats cover with media, contributions, and constituent support. We will give officials willing to back our reforms a fighting chance.

W
HEN
I
BEGAN MY
stint with the D.C. public schools, I had strong ideas about what education reform should look like and what it shouldn't look like. I believed wholeheartedly that we had to have a very strong focus on teacher quality. I was also a believer in charter schools. I had seen their value when I served for a couple of years on the board of the St. HOPE Public Schools. I guess that was my first break with Democratic dogma. I knew that charter schools were anathema to teachers unions. I also knew the best ones could serve children extraordinarily well.

But I drew a very deep line in the sand when it came to vouchers. As a lifelong Democrat I was adamantly against vouchers. Vouchers provide public funds to parents who need help in paying tuition for private or parochial schools. Proponents, mostly Republicans, see vouchers as leveling the field and broadening choice for families. Detractors, usually Democrats, decry the use of public funds to pay for private education. I had bought into the arguments that Democrats and others use in opposition to vouchers: vouchers are a way of taking money away from public school systems and putting them into private schools; vouchers help only a handful of the kids; and vouchers take children and resources away from the schools and districts that need those resources the most.

For all of those reasons, my view on vouchers was set. But soon after I arrived in Washington, D.C., I was in a pickle. The District of Columbia had Opportunity Scholarships, a federally funded voucher program that helped poor families attend private schools. The program was up for reauthorization, and there was a heated debate going on in the city.

“You're the most high-profile education official in the city,” a
Washington Post
reporter asked. “Do
you
think the Opportunity Scholarship program should be re-upped?”

My inclination was to say no. As a good Democrat, I should have responded, “I don't support vouchers, because they are not a systemic solution to the problems we face.” No one would have been surprised or upset with that answer.

However, I wanted to have my facts straight. So I decided to meet with families across the city and spend some time better understanding the Opportunity Scholarships initiative. It's amazing what one can learn from talking to parents.

The outreach I did about the Opportunity Scholarships was part of a countless number of meetings I had with parents over the course of my time in D.C. Many of those parents were young mothers who came to me looking for answers. Although they were different in many ways, they often came with the same goal: better schooling opportunities for their children. Usually mothers would request meetings with me during the school selection process that takes place each January and February.

The typical mom would come to the meeting armed with data and talking points. For example:

“I currently live in Southeast,” she would say. “Our house is zoned to the local elementary school. I have done quite a bit of research into the school and was shocked to find that only twenty percent of the children are operating at grade-level proficiency. That means my child has an eighty percent likelihood of failure. That's simply not acceptable for me and my family.”

“Absolutely right,” I would think.

Then the mother would tell me she had gone online and researched all the best schools in the district. She had read about Mann and Key elementary schools, in Northwest D.C. She told me either would give her child a better education, even though it would mean two hours of commuting a day. She had applied to those schools and a number of others through a lottery process that allowed out-of-boundary students to attend certain schools.

I knew what was coming next.

“But we didn't get in. I was devastated. So now I don't know what to do. I went to DCPS. My parents went to DCPS. I believe in public schools, but I simply can't send my child to the local school. Can you help me?”

It was a painful experience for me, each and every time. My instinct was always to tell the mother that I'd let her kid into Mann or Key and make the school make room for one more child. But honestly, it just wasn't doable. Or fair. There were so many parents who visited me with these requests and so many more who were on waiting lists for those schools who had followed all of the rules.

Oh, I could have found a spot for them at another D.C. public school, perhaps marginally better than their home school. But that wasn't what they wanted. They were looking for the exact same thing that I wanted for my two girls: the best school possible.

“Who am I,” I thought, “to deny this mom and her child an opportunity for a better school, even if that meant help with a seventy-five-hundred-dollar voucher? If they got a voucher, and her child could attend a really good Catholic school, perhaps, why would I stand in the way—especially since I don't have a high-quality DCPS alternative?”

I just couldn't look mother after mother in the eye and deny their children the opportunity I wanted for my own children. It would have required me to say, “Gee, I'm sorry, you're just going to have to suck it up. I know your elementary school is a failing school, and your child will probably not learn how to read, but I really need five more years to fix the system. And while I'm fixing the system, I need you and your neighbors to be really patient. Hang in there with me. Things will get better. I promise.”

If someone said that to me, I'd have said, “You may need more time to fix the system but my kid doesn't have time. She has only one chance to attend first grade, and if she can't learn to read by the end of first grade, her chances for success in life will be compromised. So with all due respect—heck no!”

After my listening tour of families, and hearing so many parents plead for an immediate solution to their desire for a quality education, I came out in favor of the voucher program. People went nuts. Democrats chastised me for going against the party, but the most vocal detractors were my biggest supporters.

“Michelle, what are you doing?” one education reformer asked. “You are the first opportunity this city has had to fix the system. We believe in you and what you're trying to do. But you have to give yourself a fighting chance! You need time and money to make your plan work. If during that time children continue fleeing the system on these vouchers, you'll have less money to implement your reforms. You can't do this to yourself!”

“Here's the problem with your thinking,” I'd answer. “My job is not to preserve and defend a system that has been doing wrong by children and families. My job is to make sure that every child in this city attends an excellent school. I don't care if it's a charter school, a private school, or a traditional district school. As long as it's serving kids well, I'm happy. And you should be, too.”

Here's the question we Democrats need to ask ourselves: Are we beholden to the public school system at any cost, or are we beholden to the public school
child
at any cost? My loyalty and my duty will always be to the children.

N
OT EVERYONE BOUGHT IT.
In fact, most of my Democrat friends remained adamantly opposed to vouchers. It was interesting, though: they were always opposed to the broad policy, but they could never reconcile their logic when thinking at the individual-kid level.

I was having a heated discussion one day with one of my closest friends, a public school teacher. She was deriding voucher policy. My public policy wonkiness was not serving me well, so I decided to change tactics.

“You watched
Waiting for ‘Superman'
?” I asked.

“Of course,” she answered. “One of my best friends was featured in the movie.” She chuckled.

“Do you remember that scene with Bianca?” I asked.

Waiting for “Superman”
director Davis Guggenheim did a brilliant job of distilling pretty complicated education policies into easy and understandable terms. But more important, he humanized the problems by following five families in their quest to find a high-quality public school for their children to attend.

One of the most poignant stories was about a little girl named Bianca. Her mother had had a negative experience in the public schools herself. So she was committed to giving her child a better chance. When Bianca was in kindergarten her mother enrolled her in the Catholic school across the street from their apartment, and she worked extra jobs to be able to pay the tuition.

Unfortunately, with the economic downturn, her hours were cut back, and she fell behind on her tuition payments. There is an emotional scene in the movie when Bianca is gazing longingly out the window. It is the day of her kindergarten graduation. She's watching all of her friends and their families file in for the graduation ceremony, but she's not allowed to attend. Tears are streaming down her face.