Whitney Tilson’s
School Reform Resource Page
By Whitney Tilson, WTilson at 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 United States, there are vast educational inequalities.
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 54% of African-American and 50% of Latino 4th graders are functionally illiterate – they cannot read a simple children’s story – and the average African-American 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 below).
Over the past 20 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 on the boards of KIPP charter schools and the Council of Urban Professionals in New York and of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, one of the founders of Democrats for Education Reform, and the co-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) 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 I put together a presentation entitled A Right Denied: The Critical Need for Genuine School Reform. 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 Adobe Acrobat 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.
If you wish to download the Powerpoint version so that you can, for example, edit slides and incorporate some of them into your own presentation, I encourage you to do so. Click here to download the main content and click here and here to download the two appendices (these are both large files).
I gave this presentation at an event in Washington DC on Nov. 4, 2009 – you can watch it by clicking here, here, and here. It has also been made into a documentary, which was released earlier this month. You can see the trailer and, if you wish, order it at: www.2mminutes.com/films/a-right-denied.asp. During the month of April, $10 of every sale goes to Teach for America and KIPP.
2) 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, President Obama has been extraordinarily bold on this issue, starting with his selection of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education.
I’ve posted an appeal to get involved here and I hope you'll take a moment to sign our petition at: http://www.dfer.org/petition.
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 Director Joe Williams called Democrats & Republicans - But Mostly Democrats.
3) I’ve posted many of my old school reform emails at: edreform.blogspot.com. I sometimes don’t find the time to keep this blog up to date, however, so if you’d like to be added to my school reform email list to receive emails 2-3x/week, simply email me at WTilson at T2PartnersLLC.com.
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 New York City, spearheaded by Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein. Here are my comments on Bloomberg and Klein’s reform plan, here’s a link to Bloomberg’s brilliant speech to the Urban League, and here’s a link to a video of Chancellor Klein speaking about this topic.
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; two charter schools in Boston; Achievement First/Amistad; Uplift Education in Dallas; and photos from more than a dozen schools I visited in September and October, 2009.
7) Here are links to some of my favorite posts:
- One of my friends sent me this story of his experience as a TFA teacher in the South Bronx a decade ago (though he's no longer there, he is still (thankfully) very much involved with educating disadvantaged kids). It is one of the most powerful, heart-breaking, enraging things I have ever read – and perfectly captures what this education reform struggle is all about. Stories like this about what really goes on in our failing public schools need to be told and publicized.
- This is an incredibly powerful speech to new TFA corps members by Ryan Hill, the amazing founder of KIPP/TEAM in Newark. It’s one of the most powerful ed reform speeches – scratch that, ANY type of speech – I’ve ever read.
- A KIPP Academy student, Sayda Morales, who is now a junior in high school at my daughters’ school, read this slam poetry tribute to her grandmother at Cultural Night last year. It’s one of the most moving things I’ve ever read/heard. Click here to read it. (Incidentally, she is also the author of the poem that she reads at the beginning of this KIPP Welcome Video, which is also very moving.)
- Here is a brilliant New Yorker article about NYC’s infamous Rubber Room, which captures how impossible it is to remove even the worst teachers.
- Is blaming teachers for students’ failures like blaming oncologists when cancer patients die? No! 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 thoughts on Randi Weingarten and the teachers unions: click here and (saying something nice) here
- My critique of Diane Ravitch: click here and 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 Reading
These are my favorite books on school reform:
1) Cheating Our Kids: How Politics and Greed Ruin Education, Joe Williams (Joe is Executive Director of Democrats for Education Reform)
2) Work Hard, Be Nice: How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America, Jay Mathews
3) Crazy Like a Fox: One Principal’s Triumph in the Inner City, by Ben Chavis
4) Escalante: The Best Teacher in America, by Jay Mathews
5) Education Myths: What Special Interest Groups Want You to Believe About Our Schools--And Why It Isn't So, Jay Greene
6) No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, by Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom
Further book recommendations are here.
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. KIPP was also profiled in a PBS special called Making Schools Work. Links to both are here.
2) Stupid in America. This 40-minute 20/20 special dramatically highlights our schools’ failures (click here to read the transcript).