Whitney Tilson’s
School Reform Resource Page
By Whitney Tilson, WTilson@T2PartnersLLC.com
About me: www.tilsonfunds.com/Personal/TilsonEdBio.pdf
Check out my school reform blog at: http://edreform.blogspot.com
I
believe that the most important domestic issue facing our country is the
mediocre performance – and, in many cases, outright failure – of many of our
public schools. We are falling further
and further behind our international competitors and, within the
Today, four million children – mostly low-income children of color – attend a school that has been identified as failing for six consecutive years. The result is that 58% of black and 54% of Latino 4th graders are functionally illiterate – they cannot read a simple children’s story – and the average black and Latino 12th grader reads and does math at the same level as white 8th graders. The large number of failing schools and the resulting vast achievement gaps are the shame of our nation. Tens of millions of our children, especially low-income children of color, are not being given a fair shot at the American Dream, which I believe is one of the fundamental promises of this great nation.
I’m convinced that most people – even well-read, concerned citizens – are simply not fully aware how catastrophically bad inner-city schools are. Yet there is reason for optimism: many schools, spending less money, are taking the same children, providing them with an excellent education and sending 80% or more to four-year colleges. For more on these schools, see #5 below, and to see a speech I gave on this topic, click here (part 1), here (part 2) and here (part 3).
Over the past 18 years of being involved in efforts to improve educational opportunities for all American children – first, helping Wendy Kopp start Teach for America and then in my current roles as Vice Chairman of KIPP charter schools in New York, one of the founders of Democrats for Education Reform and the founder of the Rewarding Achievement (REACH) program – I’ve read a great deal, collected hundreds of articles and studies and written extensively on the topic. I’ve created this web page, which links to the most compelling information I’ve identified, collected and written, to assist those who wish to learn more about this topic:
1) I'm one of the founders of an upstart political organization, Democrats for Education Reform (www.dfer.org), that aims to move the Democratic Party (my party) to embrace genuine school reform, rather than being a major obstacle, which is, sadly, pretty much where it is today. Here is our Statement of Principles, here is an article in the USA Today about the event we organized on the Sunday prior to the Democratic National Convention, and here is an article about us that appeared in Philanthropy Magazine. Thanks in part to our efforts, Obama recently gave his boldest, most detailed speech to date about his education reform policies (here is my blog post about it).
If you're interested in more background on why the Democratic party has been so timid on education reform, I recommend these two great articles on this topic: A) What Democrats Need to Say About Education; and B) A chapter from a fabulous book, Cheating Our Kids, written by DFER Executive Dirctor Joe Williams called Democrats & Republicans - But Mostly Democrats.
If you have any thoughts on people we should be talking to about DFER or if you're interested in getting involved with the organization, please let me know. In any case, I hope you'll take a moment to sign our petition at: http://www.dfer.org/petition.
2) Thought I sometimes fall behind, I’ve been posting many of my school reform emails at: edreform.blogspot.com (if you’d like to be on my school reform email list to receive daily emails, simply email me at WTilson@T2PartnersLLC.com)
3) After seeing An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary featuring Al Gore making a presentation about global warming, I thought to myself, “That’s exactly what school reformers need as well,” so over the past year I’ve put together a presentation, The Critical Need for Genuine School Reform – And How to Achieve It. It is meant to be a collection of data and arguments that forcefully advances an urgent school reform agenda. Click here to see it (it’s a large file and may take a little while to download).
It's very long, but it's easy to quickly go through it and I've organized it into modules so that shorter versions can be used for specific purposes or audiences. It's still in draft mode, so I'm not circulating it widely, but I'd welcome any feedback.
4) There’s a lot of pernicious, borderline-racist, blame-the-victim nonsense out there, and when I encounter it, it really sets me off. Here are three of my all-time favorite rants on closing the achievement gap, the hopelessness myth (also known as blame-the-victim) and defending No Child Left Behind (which, despite its faults, is the greatest piece of civil rights legislation in more than 30 years).
5) I think some of the most exciting school reform efforts
in the country are underway in
6) I’ve visited dozens of schools – mostly charter schools – that have achieved extraordinary success in educating even the most difficult-to-educate students. Here are my comments about a New York Times Magazine article about these schools, What It Takes to Make a Student, and my thoughts on teacher burnout at these schools.
Speaking of charter schools, there’s a lot of mythology around them, so I’ve written quite a bit about them:
- A federal Department of Education study in August 2006 purported to show that charter schools were doing worse than regular public schools. Here is the rebuttal by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (click here), my rebuttal of a NY Times editorial about this study (click here) and further comments in response to a Wall St. Journal editorial (click here)
- Here’s what I wrote about a charter school that shares the same building and students with a regular public school – and the reasons why the charter school is taking children to 70% at grade level in one year vs. 10-20% for the regular public school: click here
I have also posted web pages from visits I’ve made to various charter schools: A) KIPP Academy in the South Bronx; KIPP AMP Academy in Crown Heights, Brooklyn; the Harlem Success Academy charter school; various charter schools in Newark; and two charter schools in Boston.
7) Here are links to come of my favorite posts:
- My thoughts on Randi Weingarten and the teachers unions: click here and (saying something nice) here
- Is blaming teachers for students’ failures like blaming oncologists when cancer patients die?: click here, here and here
- The importance of teacher quality – and how few low-income, minority students get high-quality teachers: click here (and click here for slides with data on this)
- Democrats for Education Reform’s call to action on NCLB: click here
- My critique of Jonathan Kozol: click here
- My critique of Charles Murray: click here, here, here and here
- The homework myth: click here
- The underpaid teachers myth: click here
- The hidden teacher-spending gap: click here
- A defense of Weighted Student Funding: click here
- Thoughts on vouchers: click here
- The class size myth: click here and here
- Ending social promotion: click here
- Affirmative action: click here
Recommended
These are my favorite books on school reform:
1) Education Myths: What Special Interest Groups Want You to Believe About Our Schools--And Why It Isn't So, Jay Greene
2) Cheating Our Kids: How Politics and Greed Ruin Education, Joe Williams (Joe is now Executive Director of Democrats for Education Reform)
3) No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, by Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom
Recommended Viewing
These are my favorite TV shows/segments on school reform:
1) One of the key milestones in KIPP's development was when Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes did a segment on KIPP in August 2000. Don and Doris Fisher, founders of the Gap, saw it and shortly thereafter offered to bankroll KIPP's expansion -- and the rest, as they say, is history. The first part of this 14-minute segment is posted here; the second part is here.
2) KIPP was profiled in a PBS special called Making Schools Work. The first part of this 15-minute segment is posted here; the second part is here.
3) Stupid in America. This 40-minute 20/20 special dramatically highlights our schools’ failures (click here to read the transcript).
4) Newark Mayor Cory Booker is one of the most powerful and eloquent speakers about the achievement gap. Here’s a link to a video of a speech he gave in April, 2008.