• Chicago strike reveals a broken system

    The Chicago Teachers Union agreed on Tuesday to end its strike, allowing 350,000 students to return to classes on Wednesday and ending a tense standoff. However, the contract still requires ratification by the union's 26,000 members. NBC's Rehema Ellis reports.

    By Rehema Ellis, NBC News Chief Education Correspondent

    NEWS ANALYSIS 

    CHICAGO – Now that the Chicago teachers strike has ended, it is inevitable that people will try to figure out who won and who lost. But more might be gained if we went beyond that.

    What if more time were spent thinking about what students and the country gained from this strike, because it focused attention on the debate over teacher evaluations, the weight that is given to standardized tests and the growing demand for education reform?

    Broken system
    A lot has been said about the need to get rid of bad teachers and the union that protects them. The truth is union leaders will tell you they don’t like bad teachers, either. But the union would argue that it’s not their job to weed out bad teachers. Rather, they say, school leaders should do a better job identifying bad teachers and weeding them out.

    In Chicago, according to a 2009 report by the New Teachers Project, 91 percent of teachers were rated “superior” or “excellent” by school principals. Out of the nearly 30,000 teachers in the city public school system, only a small fraction received an “unsatisfactory” rating. But with student achievement at such a low level, clearly something must be wrong with how the evaluations were being done.

    So this is a good time to consider who’s responsible, in addition to teachers, for what happens in school. I spoke with several teachers on the picket line over the past few days who were concerned that they didn’t have books to start the school year. Why isn’t everyone up in arms about that? 

    Other teachers told me that they were assigned to classrooms outside of their area of expertise. One woman on the picket line told me she had taught English last year but she was trained to be a gym teacher. “I just tried to help out where there was a need,” she said. 

    Biggest losers of Chicago's teachers strike? The students, critic says

    Does anyone really believe she is the best English teacher for Chicago kids?  


    Should those students and that teacher be judged on how well she’s able to prepare them to take a standardized test?

    And don’t think this is an isolated, one-of-a-kind situation.  It’s not.  You will find similar stories in schools all across this nation.

    In Finland, where students far out perform American kids, they don’t take standardized tests at all. Students are measured by how well they do on their classroom work and drills.

    There is a collective national will in Finland to educate all students, and there’s a plan to succeed. Finland starts by hiring the best and the brightest to teach. Finnish teachers are required to have a master’s degree and teachers come from the top 10 percent of college graduates. Compare that to the U.S., where 47 percent of America’s teachers come from the bottom third of their class, according to a 2010 McKinsey report.

    Chicago teachers agree to end strike, classes to resume Wednesday

    Big issue: poverty
    Then there’s the issue of poverty and safety and how it affects teaching and learning.

    Mayor Rahm Emanuel went to court this week seeking an injunction to force an end to the strike claiming, in part, the walkout was a threat to “public health and safety.”

    As many as 87 percent of the public school children come from low-income families, according to figures from Chicago Public Schools.   

    More than 90 percent of them qualify for the free or reduced breakfast and lunch program.  For many, school is where they go, not just for an education, but for food. 

    It’s also where many children go to feel safe in a city stricken by far too much violence.

    The teachers hit the picket line demanding money, a fair evaluation system and job security but, they also wanted more social workers in the schools to help them help children who have been traumatized living in broken homes and broken neighborhoods.

    According to the Chicago Public Schools Employee Roster, there are 382 social workers in the school district that serves 350,000 students.  If my math is correct, that amounts to about one social worker for every 916 students. 

    “That means social workers are doing paper work because they don’t have time to do much of anything else,” said Lorraine Forte of Catalyst Chicago, an independent newsmagazine dedicated to reporting on urban education.  

    Education Nation: Get involved in our 2012 summit, Sept. 23-25

    Not unique
    Chicago’s school problems are not unique.  Poverty, crime and lack of resources affect schools all across the country.

    Experts are quick to point out that none of these issues should be used as an excuse for failing to educate America’s children. Teachers, city leaders, policy makers and education reform advocates all agree that these factors also shouldn’t be left out of the conversation. And in fact, they aren’t – but real solutions need to be found.

    Chicago has presented an opportunity for the nation to take a closer, more thoughtful look at a multitude of reasons why schools and test scores and graduation rates are lacking.  It might also inspire us to look at schools that are working to see if they could be replicated. 

    That’s what we will be doing starting this Sunday when NBC launches its Third Annual Education Nation Summit.  But what’s wrong with America’s schools won’t be fixed if too much time is spent adding up winners and losers from one strike.

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  • Mayor paid the price, says it was worth it

    AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

    District of Columbia Mayor Adrian Fenty

    By Elizabeth Chuck, msnbc.com

    A summit on improving education in America this week gave one politician a chance to talk about an issue that may have cost him his re-election.

    Washington, D.C., Mayor Adrian Fenty, who was ousted in a primary earlier this month, was a panelist at NBC's Education Nation summit, and didn't shy away from questions about his public schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, a polarizing figure in his re-election bid.

    Hired by Fenty in 2007, Rhee was tasked with improving D.C.'s schools, the worst-performing in the nation. Her approach – dismissing hundreds of teachers and administrators who she said had performed poorly and closing 20 schools – sparked a special investigation and a political backlash.

    But it was necessary, Fenty argued on Tuesday.

    "We didn't know it was going to be politically costly," Fenty told NBC's Tom Brokaw at a panel focusing on giving all students a fair shot at succeeding in their education. "These are tough decisions, but we have got to do them; otherwise, this achievement gap is never going to be closed."

    Fenty began his term in January 2007. At that time, he said, African-American students in D.C. were 70 percentage points behind white students in math. "We've closed that by 20 percentage points, which is a huge gain, but it still leaves us 50 percentage points behind," he said. "The greatest worry is that we're just not moving fast enough. If I could do anything over, I'd have moved even faster, to be honest with you."

    Nationwide, nearly half of all black, Hispanic and Native American students do not graduate with their class at public high schools, and many drop out with less than two years of high school education.

    "What are we saying to the kids and parents that we've tolerated this for so long?" Fenty asked. "There is no way to reverse the decades of neglect.

    "It's time we did something about it," he added. "At the end of the day, politicians are going to have to make tough decisions and risk their political future because it's the right thing to do."

  • Big names shine spotlight on education

    Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and more on Education Nation

    By Elizabeth Chuck, msnbc.com

    Race, gender and social status won't make or break success, but a quality education will.

    At least that's the view of some big names in Hollywood, music and sports who took the time to participate in NBC's Education Nation summit.

    Actress Cheryl Hines, musician John Legend and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell were among the celebrities, teachers and policy-makers attending the wide-ranging two-day event at 30 Rockefeller Plaza to advocate for improving the quality of education in America.

    Hines and Goodell, who talked with NBC's Kate Snow, both spoke about involving community members in supporting student achievement.

    "We have 180 million fans that watch football. That's great, but it comes with a lot of responsibility," Goodell said. He told msnbc.com he would love to see more football players follow in the footsteps of Randall McDaniel, who became a second-grade teacher after playing for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and Buccaneers linebacker Derrick Brooks, who founded a charter school in 2007 that he became actively involved in following his retirement.

    He also highlighted the role of exercise in learning, citing the NFL's new "Play 60" campaign, which encourages kids to do at least 60 minutes of activity daily.

    "Our effort tells kids, 'You can do whatever you want as long as you're active,'" he said. The campaign was launched in response to studies showing children who get exercise perform better on exams and have higher attendance, he said.

    To help children attain an hour of physical activity a day, the NFL works with local districts to finance P.E. teachers and equipment for schools that otherwise would have to eliminate gym classes.

    "There's clearly a need to improve our education," said Goodell, a father of 9-year-old twins who attend public school. "We all have to do more."

    More is exactly what "Curb Your Enthusiasm" star Cheryl Hines hopes her new show, "School Pride," will inspire viewers to do. The reality TV show, which premieres Oct. 15 on NBC, will visit different cities around the country and work with parents, students and teachers to fix schools in disrepair.

    "They're scraping gum and cleaning toilets, believe it or not," Hines said. "We want a school that we're proud of; we don't want our teachers to have to teach in a classroom where rain is coming in."

    Hines says "School Pride" offers a realistic view of how underfunded education is.

    "It's inexcusable that we have schools that are falling apart; it sends a terrible message to the kids," Hines said. She said she had visited schools that had rats running across the classroom tiles, and history books so outdated they only covered events prior to 1974.

    "Some of these schools, you drive by or you see the test scores, and you feel like nobody cares," she said. "But I truly don't think that's the case."

    Later Tuesday, six-time Grammy Award winner John Legend from The Roots discussed work he's been doing with Harlem Village Academy, a top-performing charter school in New York.

    Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and more on Education Nation

    "Students are coming in in 4th grade reading at a 1st grade level, and graduating 8th grade with 100 percent proficiency," Legend told panel moderator Brian Williams of NBC. "What are the barriers to making all our schools that great?"

  • A brighter future, thanks to a little help

    Elizabeth Chuck/msnbc.com

    Rachel Wise, left, is a living testament to the power of dropout intervention education. With her is Communities in Schools (CIS) site coordinator Sophia Davis.

    By Elizabeth Chuck, msnbc.com

    Rachael Wise is one busy high school student. She's in the marching band, the Junior ROTC and plays on two sports teams – and next year she expects to be the first member of her family to ever graduate from high school.

    The poised 17-year-old from Charlotte, N.C., who never forgets to add "ma'am" or "sir" to the end of her sentences, was in New York Monday for NBC's Education Nation summit on improving America's schools. She'll be speaking on a panel, along with educators and policymakers, on Tuesday during the weeklong event at 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

    Rachael is a living example of how a little help at school can go a long way. She was accepted into a program called Communities in Schools (CIS), a national dropout prevention program that targets at-risk kids, sometimes starting as early as elementary school, and helps them stay on track. She traveled to New York with CIS site coordinator Sophia Davis, who works in Rachael's high school.

    "We get students who are in poverty-stricken neighborhoods that have some high-risk social factors that deter them from being motivated to stay in school," Davis said. She said foster children, teenage parents, students in low-income and single-parent households, as well as those who struggle with academics and attendance, are their target audience.

    Rachael, one of nine children, wants one day to work in military intelligence. She's taken her SATs, and has a handful of colleges in mind that she'll be applying to. She and one of her younger brothers are currently living with their grandmother.

    "My grandmother doesn't drive because she's legally blind, so before CIS, visiting a college campus wasn't even an option for me," she said. In fact, Rachael has had few opportunities for travel in general: Her trip to New York was the first time she'd flown.

    Recently, Davis took a group of students to D.C. to tour Howard University and George Washington University.

    Afterward, "We went to the White House, saw the Smithsonian," Davis said. "By showing them that there's something outside of their school, outside of their neighborhood, it motivates them to go beyond high school."

    Founded in Georgia, the nonprofit organization serves more than 2 million young people around the country.

    In addition to college tours, CIS holds monthly meetings for their students. Some meetings focus on the college application process – how to sign up for the SATs or ACTs, for example – while others, like CIS's "Dressing For Success Fashion Show" teaches students how to present themselves in professional settings.

  • Education chief's urgent mission: Recruitment

    Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

    By Elizabeth Chuck, msnbc.com

    U.S. classrooms will face a severe shortage of teachers within the next decade as more baby boomers retire, necessitating an urgent push to recruit young people to the profession, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said Monday.

    The new campaign, which is outlined at the Teach.gov website, aims to recruit a million new teachers over the next five years. The greatest emphasis will be on finding math, science and special education teachers, as well as men of color.

    “If you look across the country today and put black males and Hispanic males together, it’s 3.5 percent of the teacher workforce,” Duncan said in an interview with Tom Brokaw as part of NBC’s Education Nation summit. “If we’re serious about having young men aspire to go to college, we have to put men in their lives.”

    Education officials will be visiting high schools and colleges around the country to encourage students to consider teaching. Duncan said the dire need for good teachers, which he referred to as “the civil rights issue of our generation,” is reflected in the nation’s drop-out rate.
    “We lose almost a million students from our high schools each year to the streets,” Duncan said.

    Duncan said paying teachers more is a first step in giving the profession the respect it deserves. “There are so many phenomenal people who had education in their heart; it was their passion,” he said. “But they couldn’t afford to go into teaching.”

    To retain and recruit quality teachers, the Department of Education will be offering a variety of incentives, including education grants, grants for those who choose to work in impoverished areas and what Duncan called “income-based repayment” -- a guarantee that after 10 years of teaching, all college debt will be forgiven.

    Talking to students from several universities across the country via a live feed, Duncan said that bad economic news should not deter students from applying to be teachers.

    “There are a couple thousand teacher jobs today, and in January we have another set of folks retiring,” he said.
    U.S. students rank ninth globally for holding a college degree, something Duncan hopes to improve.

    “Five years from now, I would love to have the best teaching workforce in the world,” he said. “Education is the answer.”

  • Debate over merit pay heating up

    New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's announcement Monday at NBC's Education Nation summit that city schools will receive a $36 million Teacher Incentive Fund grant from the U.S. Department of Education highlights an ongoing debate over merit pay for teachers.

    The department is distributing a total of $442 million to schools and nonprofit organizations across the nation for development of merit pay programs for teachers and principals, in what will amount to a field test of performance-based pay in the classroom.

    But Bloomberg's announcement comes just days after the release of a ground-breaking study by Vanderbilt University's National Center on Performance Incentives that is certain to heat up the debate over merit pay.

    Billed as the first ever scientific study of performance pay ever conducted in the U.S., the Project on Incentives in Teaching (POINT) study conducted from 2007 through 2009 in Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools found that merit pay alone did not improve test scores.

    But the study of nearly 300 middle-school math teachers did not test other types of incentives or support, such as professional development or guidance on instructional practices, leaving plenty of room for debate.

    That means that the federal grants to school districts such as Wake County, N.C., and the New York City Department of Education, state education departments in Indiana, Tennessee, Ohio and Louisiana and private companies such as Uplift Education, which has five charter schools in Texas, can be expected to come under intense scrutiny as they are implemented.

    Expect Education Secretary Arne Duncan to have something to say on that effort at his appearance this afternoon at Education Nation.

  • With technology, 'Students can become teachers'

    By Elizabeth Chuck, msnbc.com

    Think watching movies all day rots your brain? Don’t worry, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is on it.

    In addition to keeping the 15 million subscribers of his mail-order movie business happy, Hastings, an educational philanthropist, wants to get the word out about DreamBox Learning – an e-learning site that he acquired in April.

    “It’s adaptive, so it learns what level the student is at, and helps students learn more,” Hastings told msnbc.com after participating in a panel on technological innovations at schools at NBC’s Education Nation summit, a weeklong look at education in America.

    DreamBox is a web-based program that Hastings is hoping teachers and parents alike will use with students. “You don’t have to install anything. It’s an extraordinary site,” he said.

    But as Hasting’s fellow panelists noted, using such learning tools in the classroom requires infrastructure that many schools lack.

    “We need the computers, we need the wires,” said panelist Nancy Peretsman, Priceline.com director and a managing director at Allen & Co. LLC, a New York investment company. “We have to be able to make sure the infrastructure is in place.”

    Said Milton Chen, executive director of the George Lewis Educational Foundation, “Everyone uses computers at work. Waitresses, mechanics – no one doesn’t use a computer. The only place we don’t see computers are in classrooms.”

    Bringing technology into the classroom will complement, not replace, teachers, Peretsman said. “This is about helping teachers become more effective,” she said. “We have to do it in collaboration with the teachers.”

    Noting that most of the current 57 million U.S. students are “digital natives” – kids who were born into a digital world – Hastings urged teachers to use their pupils’ innate technology skills to their advantage.

    “Students can become teachers,” added Chen. “They can teach their teachers; they can teach each other.”

  • One nation, under 30 Rock…

    By Elizabeth Chuck, msnbc.com

    Even though the heavy rain forced NBC to switch the location of Education Nation early Monday, it was a bright and rewarding morning for five students from Public School 399 in Brooklyn.

    “We had to get here at 6, maybe 7 o’clock!” exclaimed fifth-grader Amanda Rodriguez in between bites of breakfast after they recited the Pledge of Allegiance on a stage outside of 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

    Elizabeth Chuck, msnbc.com

    A group of students from PS 399 gather at 30 Rock for the Education Nation summit.

    The kids managed their parts in the NBC-sponsored gathering before a downpour forced much of the event to take place in various parts of the 30 Rock building.

    While many public schools throughout the state of New York have been suffering from dips in test scores and attendance, PS 399 isn’t – which is one of the reasons Principal Marion Brown believes her students were selected to attend the education summit.

    “This is our fourth year receiving an A rating,” Brown said. “Our progress actually went up this year; we’re considered one of the higher performing schools in the community.” As for attendance, anything below 97 percent is considered unusually low at PS 399.

    With the majority of the 514 students coming from Caribbean countries and many of them having already attended a handful of schools, PS 399 puts a special emphasis on creating a family-feel, where students feel part of a community. The kindergarten through fifth-grade school also welcomes students from a homeless shelter two blocks away.

    Each day starts out with an assembly where staff members announce birthdays and perfect attendance awards. Everyone sings the “Star-Spangled Banner,” the so-called black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and the school’s song, ‘The Greatest Love.”

    If a student has experienced a hardship, that, too, is announced at the daily assembly.

    “Last year we had a rough year,” said Performing Arts Specialist Deborah Kennedy Baker, another chaperone at the education summit. “We had a lot of deaths. The school as a whole would write letters to the child or staff person” who lost someone, and sends flowers or fruit baskets to hospitals if a family member were sick.

    Today, the five 10 and 11-year-old representatives of PS 399 were all smiles. When asked what her favorite part of Education Nation has been so far, fifth-grader Allana Ragler said, “Eating and seeing all the people going on stage and talking and all the lights!”, which pretty much encompassed everything the kids had done and seen so far today.

    Being chosen to participate in such a large event was particularly meaningful to these kids because of the big emphasis their curriculum puts on learning outside of the classroom, Kennedy Baker said.

    “You don’t just wake up one day as an adult and say, ‘I know what I want to do.’ In addition to academics, we know students need to be able to show their creativity." The students are exposed to a wide variety of programs such as tap dance, robotics-building, violin, and more.

    “We want them to feel that they are safe, they’re cared for, they’re nurtured, and most of all, they’re taught academics, the arts, and basic life skills,” Baker said.

    Michael Johnson, one of two assistant principals at PS 399, has been with the school for three years.

    “It’s above and beyond all the other schools I’ve worked at, and a lot of that has to do with the leadership of [Principal] Brown and her bringing the arts into the school,” he said.

    As the kids finished their breakfasts, fifth-grader Akele Rodney was disappointed their field trip was over. “We gotta go back to school after this,” he said. But with some dance classes and rehearsals for their holiday show on today’s schedule, going back to PS 399 doesn’t sound so bad.