Book Review - A Chance To Make History

A Chance to Make History: What Works and What Doesn't in Providing an Excellent Education for Allby Teach For America founder Wendy Kopp is a current look at a positive force for education improvement in America. Education books about various educational programs are released each year, but as numbers change, the books become outdated and less accurate, or less applicable. So, A Chance to Make History, released in 2011, and with stats reported from the latter part of 2010, is a very good current snapshot of the education system in America.

Right at the outset, I wish I had the book in electronic format so I could easily count the number of times the words “transformation” or “transformational” were used. I think this word was the right choice for the needed reforms in American education. I do think those word uses were incorrectly applied in some instances, where the words were another way or saying “better”, “different” or “changing”. What American education truly needs is Transformational Change.

Calling for such change is another way of saying that the current system is beyond being fixed by piecemeal measures, or tinkering around the edges. As was pointed out in this book, more money and more funding is not always the answer. In many cases we are simply spending more for the same, mediocre results.

What A Change to Make History clearly demonstrates is that private enterprise can achieve better results than can any level of government, such as local or federal. There are several instances where not having to deal with any government bureaucracies allowed innovators and investors the chance to get in and do the work of educating children. One great quote to illustrate this:

"Post-storm, there was no bureaucracy left, and it really was an open opportunity for people to come down and get schools open quickly, schools that could be designed to close the achievement gap right from the start." (p. 96, in reference to post-Katrina New Orleans)

I understand that Teach for America does get some federal funding, but that most of its funding is philanthropic and received from donors. I object to the federal government being involved in education at all. If government has to be involved, I would prefer to see them solely fund organizations such as Teach For America. Get the bureaucrats who look at numbers and studies and decide the fate of students across the country that they have never seen and will never see, out of the way of state and local education authorities.

The federal government has proven it can not manage large, complex systems well. Look at the post office, which recently had to be bailed out to the tune of $11 billion. If the federal government had to go to a rational bank and apply for a loan to fund the Department of Education, and if they presented the current model for education as their business plan, they would be laughed out of the building, denied the loan, and shut down for good.

Specifically, A Chance to Make History is an enjoyable read, it is a narrative, with stories that the author comes back to time and again. It is a hopeful book, and a positive book when you see the positive results. I felt the book, at 218 pages, was a quick read, and frankly I could have kept reading. Fortunately, the book is loaded with some great footnotes for further research. Finally, this book might be seen very much as a sort of brag sheet for Teach For America. I’d advise readers to get over that fact and focus on the results oriented focus of the book instead. Whether it’s through Teach For America or similar efforts, let’s start transforming education in this country by unleashing the entrepreneurial spirit that can be found in our 310 million citizens. Let’s start at the local, community level and build up from there.

I'll close with this quote from page 113:

"I believe part of the reason that the achievement gap has not narrowed in an aggregate sense over the past two decades, despite all the energy and resources invested in education reform, is that our policy makers and influencers have been so obsessed with finding a quick fix that we have gone lurching from one silver-bullet solution to another rather than embracing the big idea of transformative education and engaging in the very hard work of implementing it. Equally distracting, we have also spent inordinate amounts of energy blaming one group or another-"silver scapegoats," we could call them - when there are clearly larger systemic issues at play. The fact is that our system was not initially designed with an understanding of what it would take to change the path predicted by students' socioeconomic background."

The time for Transformational Change in American education, is now.

National Start-A-Business Month

I can't speak to anything specific about LegalZoom.com, I have never used their services and frankly I don't know anyone else who ever has. But March is National Start-A-Business Month over at LegalZoom. Find out more about it here. Even if it's just a set of reduced prices for their services, the idea of someone encouraging entrepreneurs to try something new is a good idea to me.

WSJ Blurb - Brief Post for Now

Tuesday's Wall Street Journal had an interesting little blurb in one of it's two editorials that I'm going to come back to in an upcoming post, but I figured the blurb was worth posting now.

Medicaid isn't in trouble because it is badly run, though of course it is. The problem is that it has become so vast and is meant to fill so many political demands that no one can truly control it. Given the Obama Administration's rigidity, this is not the best reform moment, but unlike his predecessors, Mr. Cuomo seems to recognize that these liabilities can't be repaired at the margins. The real test will be if he starts to do the politically difficult work of scaling Medicaid down.

My readers will note that their reference to "repaired at the margins" sounds a lot like the "tinkering around the edges" phrase I often use. It all means the same thing. Again, I'll come back to this editorial in a day or so, but I felt this was worth posting now. The final point of focus, is that Medicaid has simply gotten out of control. As the editorial suggests, this is no time to make marginal changes, to "tinker around the edges", it's time for an overhaul. More later.

Transformational Change in Education Might be the Place to Start

A great column appeared in the Houston Chronicle today.

As we are watching Professional Leftists in their true form carry out their childish acts in Wisconsin, we see some good examples of what happens when adults are in charge.

Houston has attracted entrepreneurial educators from across the globe, many, like Tarim, drawn by the University of Houston, Rice and nearby Texas A&M. Other educational entrepreneurs were not new to the country, but were new to Houston. Feinberg, Levin and Barbic were among an army of young, idealistic TFA corps members from out of state drawn to Houston to save urban schooling. Houston has the nation's largest TFA chapter. Unlike many cities, Houston welcomed TFA rather than seeing corps members as taking jobs from locals.

So what makes Houston different? First, the Houston Federation of Teachers never had the power to keep out TFA or hamstring KIPP and other charters. But that still left a bureaucracy, which, as Jay Mathews writes, resented KIPP's notoriety and success. Before KIPP became a charter, the Houston Independent School District central office investigated KIPP, and at one point reassigned its classrooms. Political leadership saved the day. HISD Superintendent Rod Paige publicly praised KIPP and intervened when bureaucrats attacked. Paige also had HISD serve as an incubator for YES Prep. As Barbic recalls, "A lot of superintendents would have seen that innovation and tried to kill it, but Paige did the exact opposite." Paige's successors have followed his lead, fashioning a public school system that can compete with the charters.

In a couple of my recent posts where I have discussed some ideas suggesting we need Transformational Change, this article highlights two sections where I think this absolutely applies.

Highlighted in yellow, entrepreneurial and entrepreneurs suggest the type of thinking and the type of people we need to transform the nations education disaster. This is the new thinking we need. This is where the new solutions that work will come from. Highlighted in orange, is the old thinking, the continual path to ruin and inefficiency. The orange highlights are the way to stop progress.

Newt Gingrich has discussed a newer model, called Entrepreneurial Public Management to replace bureaucratic public administration. A more scholarly paper on Entrepreneurial Public Management can be found at AEI. As I have been thinking about how we reform, and therefore transform the current system(s) in America, this seems like a very logical place to start. Obviously the teachers unions will be the biggest problem. Anyone who has seen the documentary Waiting For Superman knows what I'm talking about. Think about that "rubber room" in New York. And think about the all-out assault the Professional Left launched against Michelle Rhee, for the crime of, hold your breath, WANTING CHILDREN TO LEARN, gasp. Fortunately, Michelle Rhee is able to do her own thing now.

So, I see a clearer path now than I did a few days ago. I'm still working and thinking about how we get to a point of Transformational Change and what that looks like. I hope you're working on it or thinking about it as well and I welcome your ideas and collaboration.

Do we really need 5,100 more IRS agents?

A brief editorial in the Wall Street Journal should make you ask a few questions, after your skin stops crawling:

President Obama's fiscal 2012 budget doesn't cut much of anything (see above), and certainly not the Internal Revenue Service. The White House is requesting that the most beloved of all government agencies get an additional 5,100 agents next year, no doubt to wring further tax revenue from Americans. The White House wants to give the IRS a 9.4% raise in fiscal 2012, to $13.28 billion. Reuters reports this would allow for a roughly 5% increase in agency manpower to 100,537, including $460 million more for tax enforcement than in 2010.

I'm not for more government, but I will advocate for a big government idea to make a larger point.

What if instead of hiring 5,100 new IRS agents, the government instead gave 5,100 people $500,000 under the watchful eye of the Small Business Administration, and let them go out and create real jobs, and real wealth in America? We could play with the numbers one way or the other, at the high end this is $2.5 Billion. $250,000 instead would be $1.25 Billion. Something like that would be a real stimulus, not creating more government workers.

The Time Is Now

Friends, the time is now, to figure out where this country is headed. I figured I would say this at some point during the Obama Regime's Reign, but I figured it would be closer to the Marxist-In-Chief's re-election run, and not now, in February 2011. Shoot, it's not even April 15th, Tax day. It's just a Tuesday night in America.

I don't yet know the format this will take; meaning I don't know what the blog posts will look like, what the graphics will look like or what the overall approach will be. It might vary and not flow well at all, but the theme will be the same.

The bottom line is, we can no longer continue down our current path as a nation. We cannot keep spending on everything that our government views as necessary for one reason or another. But, saying "stop spending" is not enough. What does that really get us? Cut a few billion dollars here or a few billions dollars there; drops in the ocean. This is what I refer to as using a teaspoon to clear water off the deck of the Titanic.

What we need is transformational change. That means tough decisions. No, it won't be easy, certainly not as easy as continuing the spending that got us to this point of disaster in the first place. If you want more tax increases, we'll you've gotten them. Have you paid attention to the prices rising all around you? Everything you buy has increased in price since January 20, 2009. So your cost of living has increased, you want to pay more taxes on top of that? What are you getting in return for your taxes each year? Where does is stop? When does it stop? The time is now.

I think the first question needs to be; What do you view as the fundamental role of the federal government? I think we'd all agree that a military is necessary. But, I'm not even willing to make that assumption definite. In my mind, we have to get back to finding out what the basic functions of the federal government need to be, then we build up from there. So, you tell me, let's start with that.

The time is now.

Memories of Ronald Reagan at 100

So many people are documenting their thoughts about Ronald Reagan on this, his 100th birthday, so I will give in to the temptation and offer some of my memories as well.

My earliest memories of President Reagan go back to my third grade year. One of my best friends at the time (Mike M., he knows who he is) and I stood up in front of our class and each recited the 40 Presidents at the time, in order. And of course, at that time Reagan was the 40th and last President. Mike M. and I both got extra credit for doing this, and we were the only two in the entire 20-25 student class to do this.

Our third grade class wrote letters to the White House when we were studying the Presidency. Each student who mailed a letter, received a package in the mail which contained an 8x10 of President Reagan (the now infamous bust shot of Reagan with the American flag in the background), a book/magazine about the White House (a book/magazine that I still have to this day) and a letter from the President thanking us for writing and encouraging us to study further. Yes, I realize this was not a personal letter, but the 8x10 got thumb-tacked to my bedroom wall, how many third graders can say that? What can I say, I always thought President Reagan looked cool. He was the same age as my grandfather, and I thought that was cool too. My grandfather would have been 100 later this year, I'll write about that in due time.

In 1984, my classroom did a secret ballot vote for Reagan vs. Mondale. The 22-1 defeat I suffered that day was made better when I read about the landslide victory the next morning on the front page of the San Antonio Express-News. I'll take 49-1 across the country every time.

Finally, I remember President Reagan speaking to the country the day the space shuttle Challenger exploded. My class at the time was watching tv live when the shuttle took off, as we were studying astronomy and all the teachers in America were especially intrigued with Astronaut (and teacher) Christa McAuliffe being on that space flight. I remember President Reagan speaking to the country, and especially singling out the students of America, practically talking directly to us. Again, it was like grandpa was speaking right to me.

I was an adult when President Reagan revealed he was suffering from Alzheimers. I was living in Georgia, working on a congressional campaign, when the President died in 2004. I have been to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, three times, the first time being in 1999. I have even visited the Library there as a researcher, where I was able to look at papers from the archives. I have twice been able to stand where the President is buried, where he will forever face the sunsets in the west, when the sun drops below the mountains of Simi Valley at the end of each day.

Anyway, those are my recollections for this momentous day celebrating a momentous man.