1. The Path Forward series in Dayton started in a new direction (but still forward of course!) on Sunday when a lengthy interview with Dayton City Schools superintendent Elizabeth Lolli was published. As has been noted previously, the supe has a multi-point plan in various stages of development and implementation to, hopefully, improve the district’s report card for the 2018-19 school year. The stated goal is, of course, to “avoid state takeover”. I, as you might guess, would rather focus on improving academics for the benefit of students. Or even just “doing the job you’re supposed to do”. However you couch it, I personally remain skeptical that this plan can achieve the goals to the level needed. The Path Forward series now promises to look in depth at each of the areas Lolli’s plan is supposed to address, with the first being improvements to teaching quality, a big chunk of which is also contained in this piece. Perhaps once you read it you will share my skepticism. (Dayton Daily News, 9/30/18)

2. “Every school has areas for improvement and we’re no different. … But we wouldn’t be continuing to add students and graduate larger classes if we weren’t making a difference in students’ lives.” Ohio’s newest online school is open and growing like crazy. (Dayton Daily News, 9/30/18)

3. Finally today, a tale of two non-public, non-tax supported schools. It seems to be the best of times for Heritage Classical Academy in Northeast Ohio. Enrollment is up and the school has new digs in a former district school building the town of Peninsula. (MyTownNEO, 10/1/18) But it seems that the worst of times for Christians of Faith Academy, about whom we have spoken a fair bit here, just keep getting worse. Note: this is a revision of the same story we clipped last week but with lots more dirt. (ThisWeek News, 9/28/18)

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Over the course of the 2018–19 school year, the Education 20/20 speaker series, sponsored by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Hoover Institution, will prod prominent conservative writers, intellectuals, and policymakers to provide compelling answers to the age-old question, “What's the purpose of school?” On, September 27th, an event featuring Heather Mac Donald, author of The Diversity Delusion, kicked off the series with her perspective on race-based discipline reform, including why it hurts the children it purports to help and how it cuts against one of the core goals of schooling.

These were my opening remarks.

***

Good afternoon. I’m Mike Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. Thank you for joining us today, here in person or online, especially given the competition we’re facing from a certain hearing across town.

It is my honor to welcome you to the first event in our Education 20/20 speaker series. In a moment I’ll introduce today’s amazing speaker, Heather Mac Donald, but first let me spend a few minutes explaining the purpose behind the series and what we’re hoping to accomplish.

And if you’re following along on Twitter, please use the hashtag #Ed2020.

The basic idea of Education 20/20 is to get an esteemed group of the nation’s leading conservative thinkers, scholars, intellectuals, and policymakers to weigh in on the purpose of K-12 education. Not a familiar bunch of education policy wonks—we have plenty of opportunities to dig into the weeds of this policy or that. But wonky policy stuff isn’t what we’re about with this project. So we asked people who think broadly about social policy from a right-of-center perspective. And almost all of those we asked said yes.

Our goal is to bring fresh insights and timeless principles into the education reform conservation. My colleague Chester Finn and I both believe that today’s reform discussion has grown stale and even a little boring, especially on the right. Once upon a time, conservatives were bursting with ideas for how to fix what ails American education, important things like school choice, charter schools, accountability, merit pay, character education, core knowledge, and on and on. In Bill Bennett’s day there were the “Three C’s”: Character, content, and choice. These days it’s more like the one C: choice. That’s all most conservatives seem to talk about. Like so many others who aren’t conservative, they tend to settle for some sort of silver bullet rather. Along the way, they—like so many others who aren’t conservative—have sort of become one-trick ponies.

Don’t misunderstand me:  we wholeheartedly support school choice, too, in all of its forms. We are particularly bullish on high-quality charter schools, as well as inner city Catholic schools, both of which have proven to be highly effective at boosting the achievement of low income kids and kids of color, and demonstrating that it is indeed possible to push back against intergenerational poverty and all the social ills that come with it. And like many conservatives, we look at most big urban districts and agree that nothing except choice appears to be doing anybody much good.

Where we disagree with many of our friends on the right—and especially the libertarian right—is around the notion that choice alone is the answer, that it’s a bona fide silver bullet.

Some libertarians, for example, point to the many culture wars that have invaded our schools, and argue that choice is the solution. Why fight over what curriculum to teach, which heroes to emulate, how to tackle human sexuality or human evolution, whether to be strict or lax, whether to teach virtue or vocation, or any of the other debates that can divide us? Just let individual schools find their own way, and then allow parents to find THEIR way to the school that matches their values. Don’t try to make these decisions democratically, as that will inevitably mean the majority will get what they want, and the minority will lose out (or a mushy middle compromise will be found). Let the market rule, and let everyone get what they want.

Even some non-libertarian conservatives settle for choice alone, especially in the context of a culture that is increasingly at war with conservative values. In so doing, they seem to us to be settling for a version of the Benedict Option—retreat into our own educational communities, especially religious schools—and protect our children from the culture at large. The reasoning is that the culture is hopeless so let’s isolate ourselves and our kids from it.

Yes, we support parents who make that choice. It’s a free country and choice is a plus. But it’s no silver bullet for education, not in the lifetimes of ourselves, our kids and probably our grandkids. Even with the growth of scholarship programs, tax credit initiatives, and education savings accounts, as well as charter schools, virtual schools and home schools, the vast majority of American schoolchildren attend traditional public schools, and will for the foreseeable future. We’re talking about upwards of forty million children. If conservatives don’t engage on debates around what these children do and learn all day, we are ceding the public schools—and the country’s future—to progressives. We did that already with higher education. Are we really sure we want to do that with primary and secondary education, too?

The topic that Heather is tackling today is a perfect example of the risks of that approach. School discipline is an inherently difficult issue, because it pits the needs of the vast majority of children—who come to school, do what they are told, and generally behave—against the needs of a small minority of disruptive students, many of whom are growing up in tragic situations. Yet if we cede this issue to the left, virtually the only students who will be valued are the disrupters, the misbehavers. As Heather will explain, the entire focus of the left, when it comes to so-called “discipline reform,” is less discipline. Which may or may not help the unruly kids, but likely won’t help their peers.

If conservatives decline to engage, we do so at great peril. So over this academic year, about once a month, we will be here, with leading conservatives, to engage in the great debates, and to focus on the purpose of K-12 schooling. We hope you’ll join us. At the end we’ll turn the keynotes into an edited volume, to be published by the Templeton Press. We appreciate the support from the Kern Family Foundation for making all of this possible.

New charter school success story: Menlo Park Academy

Yesterday, the Fordham Institute released the latest profile in their Pathway to Success series. The profile features Menlo Park Academy in Cleveland. Menlo Park, a school designed to uniquely support gifted students, shows how the charter public school model can be used to serve an often overlooked student group. You can read the new profile here—and please do let Madison Yoder know if you have any suggestions for future profiles.

State Superintendent visits Columbus charter school

Yesterday, State Superintendent Paolo DeMaria visited the Columbus Collegiate Academy - Main campus. Several seventh and eighth grade USN scholars had the opportunity to participate in a discussion with the Superintendent and share their experiences as middle school students. You can learn more about the round-table panel on the campus’ Facebook page.

Columbus charter school parents having trouble with busing

Charter school students in Columbus continue to face some pretty big transportation issues. This has been a particular issue for Summit Academy, where some students have literally missed weeks of school at the start of the year due to problems receiving transportation from Columbus City Schools as a result of the district’s new online transportation request process.

The disparate aftermath of ECOT's closure

Public media outlets in Ohio this week took a brief look at how the mid-year closure of ECOT has affected both students and teachers. A family in Canal Winchester is still looking for the right balance—one child has opted for a traditional district school, while another has opted for homeschooling. Meanwhile, a former administrator and a former teacher at ECOT seem to have landed on their feet quite quickly with similar-paying jobs in the rural district in which they live.

School Performance Institute workshop

Are you a school leader interested in purposefully designing your school for improvement? Then you should check out the School Performance Institute’s upcoming workshop. You’ll have an opportunity to visit a high-performing charter school during a school day (to observe how the school has been purposefully designed to get results in a high-poverty context using proven methods) and discuss concrete ways to apply these ideas in your own school. You can register here, if interested, or contact John A. Dues for more information.

Thomas Jefferson, in a 1787 letter to James Madison, wrote, “Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to; convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.” Those words should resonate with everyone alive today, as we struggle to maintain even civil discourse and civic engagement. Because Jefferson was right—in a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, an educated populace is imperative.

We have failed to heed his words, although it is not from lack of trying. Since the publication of “A Nation at Risk” in 1983, a steady drumbeat of reforms and innovations have been brought to bear on our K–12 education system, all strongly supported by private dollars. As executive director of the Jaquelin Hume Foundation, I am part of this effort, so I applaud those of my foundation colleagues who recognize the fundamental part K–12 education plays in lessening myriad societal problems.

Unfortunately, our collective efforts have done little to improve the performance of our children. This is partly because those providing the money, many of whom are revolutionaries in their fields, haven’t required the same return on investment as they do in their business endeavors. If they had, they would have steadily pivoted to other possible solutions and used their considerable resources to rapidly test their effectiveness. So that’s exactly what we must do going forward, lest we suffer the consequences that Jefferson feared.

Since time immemorial, the purpose of education has been to transmit knowledge from one generation to the other. Starting with the most basic technologies like fire and the wheel, we have learned from our ancestors what we needed to know first, to survive, and after the Industrial Revolution, to thrive. Every generation has added to the trove until the beginning of the twenty-first century, when both the speed and the amount of knowledge increased so dramatically that the experts (the shamans, the high priests) were no longer able to maintain their dominance. Knowledge is now a commodity, and what our children need to learn is where to find it, how to evaluate it, how to select what is germane, and how to apply it to the problem they are trying to solve.

Yet our current education system was developed in the early twentieth century and was well designed to meet its Industrial Age needs. What it was not designed for was the challenges of the twenty-first century. In today’s information age, there are fundamental things it gets wrong. For the past thirty-five years, everyone involved in K–12 education has been clamoring to prepare our children to be college- and career-ready. But the components of our existing system—Carnegie units, seat time, pacing guides, age-based cohorts, summative testing regimens that serve as autopsies, memorization, and competition—don’t achieve those goals because they were never designed to do so.

There is, however, a solution: Adopt competency-based learning, which replaces many of the current system’s inadequate, dated elements with sequences that enable students, teachers, parents, and administrators to monitor, in real time, the progress pupils are making. To facilitate this shift, we must develop strong academic standards, and convert them into learning objectives that can be taught in whatever way individual teachers find most effective. Then pair all of this with short online assessments that test whether students have mastered content; the requisite technology to accomplish this already exists.

Competency-based learning allows every student to learn at their own pace and understand that failure is just a step on the road to success. It provides all adults involved with actionable data to find appropriate interventions as necessary. And it frees teachers from the requirement of designing their own lesson plans. Many hours are wasted when educators all over the country must do this on an individual basis, all while dealing with upwards of thirty students who range widely in ability. In any given fifth grade classroom, for example, a teacher today might have three weeks to teach fractions, even though some students need five. She’ll try to give them more help, but she’s responsible for dozens of other students who also rightly claim her attention. So those who are behind never master the content, and as the years go on, they fall further behind, and they graduate high school unprepared for college or career. The purpose of education is for children to learn. That must be the constant. Time must become the variable. We have it backwards.

Yet if we do make this must-needed shift, we must be careful to not give technology an outsized role. Students should still be in classrooms, together, interacting face-to-face with their teachers and peers. For it is only when children learn together that they acquire the ability to take others into account, to collaborate for achieving a common goal, and to understand that decisions have consequences. These are not skills and dispositions that can be exclusively developed in front of a screen, or at home, where there are no “others” with whom to contend. This also aligns with the burgeoning, important field of social and emotional learning, which can help give students a well-rounded education.

Accomplishing all of this will transform our schools. No longer will we be jamming square, triangular, octagonal pegs into the round holes of standardization by shaving their edges or discarding them. It’ll create an environment that accommodates all learners and provides them with whatever they need to achieve their potential.

Unfortunately, most of the organizations that are at the forefront of this revolution are non-profits. They face an existential crisis because they depend on philanthropic dollars to continue and expand their work. It is incomprehensible to me that most of my foundation colleagues (who support treatment of the symptoms but not the cure for the illness), corporations (who depend entirely on an educated workforce), and high-net-worth individuals (who give liberally to their alma mater) do not appreciate and/or acknowledge the role that K–12 education plays in our nation.

Perhaps it is the seeming immutability of the entrenched status quo that stands in the way of their involvement. But there is now a nascent movement that is advocating for the shift I have described above, and it has become the basis for the transformation. Like other societal movements such as women’s suffrage or gay marriage, this will take time. It will also take money.

So, above all, this is an appeal to my fellow philanthropists to invest some percentage of their giving in the revolutionaries. If we don’t fix K–12 education, we will not only lose our children, we will lose our country.

Gisèle Huff is the executive director of the Jaquelin Hume Foundation in San Francisco.