Click here for the Opportunity to Learn Fund page at schottfoundation.org

 

A National Call to Action

The National Opportunity To Learn Education Summit was an inspiring call to action, echoed by the donors, foundation officers, public education advocates, policymakers, educators, academics, community leaders and youth who participated throughout the two days.  Each participant at the Summit was keenly aware of the deep chasm that exists—more than 50 years after Brown—between many of our nation's children and the “opportunity of an education” to help them “succeed in life.”  These committed leaders bear stark witness to what one termed “education genocide,” and each is working on solutions to this crisis. 

The Summit—and the campaign it helps to launch—serves as a galvanizing force to bring diverse efforts together within an overarching  “Opportunity To Learn” (OTL) framework—to coalesce a national movement for systemic change guaranteeing every child access to a quality education.  There was tremendous excitement about a bold undertaking focused on resource accountability—and eagerness to collaborate to make it a reality. 

We have an outcome accountability frame in place—NCLB holds students, teachers, administrators accountable for their performance.  However, while NCLB may address the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” it doesn't address the “hard bigotry of lack of resources” for children facing not dejure, but certainly de facto, segregation in low-income communities.  The OTL campaign framework holds public officials accountable for providing vital resources—and targeting them to high impact interventions that are proven to increase children's chances of success:

• Access to highly effective teachers
• Early childhood education
• College preparatory curriculum
• Equitable instructional resources

 

Seizing the Moment

The Summit convened on the eve of state and national elections that have portents of great hope and possibilities for progressive education change.  Polls show that while education does not rank as high in voters' minds as the economy or ending the war in Iraq, it is one of their top five concerns, ranking only slightly lower than health care.  Moreover, a June 2008 survey conducted by Education Voters shows that education is an overarching value; voters nearly universally believe in the fundamental principle that every child, regardless of race or income should have the opportunity to attend a quality public school.  What is needed is a campaign that translates that value into an action agenda—and mobilizes to make it a reality.

 

As was oft repeated, in the economic climate we are facing it will be critical that we have a good “offense” strategy; a defense strategy of preventing education cuts in austerity budgets will not win the battle.  The Opportunity To Learn campaign must make a powerful investment case for education—and put focus on those priority elements that will yield highest return on investment.  We have the research to make the case—it must be translated into messaging and mobilizing.  “Citizens are paying a luxury tax because of poor quality education, bearing the greater costs that result from poor education.  It's cheaper to build an equitable, high quality education system,” said Dr. John Jackson at the opening session.  As Dan Leeds, Board Chair of Education Voters, stressed, “Education is not a separate issue independent of jobs and economic development; it is an essential component of a comprehensive plan to build the country's economy and its future.”  National Urban League President Marc Morial equated the opportunity to learn with the “opportunity to earn.”

 

Plan of Action

Three approaches to systemic change were discussed in Summit sessions:

• Legislation—Work to have Congress incorporate OTL into the reauthorization of NCLB, ESEA, and have state legislatures adopt the OTL framework
• Litigation—Work to have San Antonio v. Rodriguez reconsidered
• Work to create a Constitutional Amendment

 

Fundamental Civil Right: Access
to Quality Education

Through the OTL campaign, the Schott Foundation will promote a federal right to an Opportunity to Learn by implementing a litigation strategy to reconsider the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court San Antonio v. Rodriguez decision that rejected education as a federal right.

During the OTL Summit, Dr. Robert Moses, drew a parallel to the civil rights movement of the 1960s to underscore the need for a constitutional amendment to make access to quality education a protected right.  He reminded participants that without protections under federal law civil rights activists would have been solely at the mercy of local sheriffs and state judges.  “Every time I was thrown in jail, it was Mississippi officials that locked the cell and the feds that let me out.”

 

Strategies to Build Movement for Change

Plenaries and workshops addressed many elements of the OTL campaign:

• OTL framework—a national education advocacy brand and agenda to cohere diverse efforts into a powerful national movement
• Grassroots organizing—build strong base of activism in the states
• Voter engagement—activate citizen support for policy reform and to hold officials accountable
• Engage all sectors—parents, students, educators, government, philanthropic, corporate, nonprofit advocacy organizations
• Youth in schools and community organizations play an important role in building demand for change
• Messaging:  move from emphasis on drop outs to resource accountability and nation's need for systemic change
• Link education success to nation's economic future—individuals' opportunity to learn equates to opportunity to earn, to communities' economic health, and nation's global competitiveness.
• Link education success to health of our democracy
• Use compelling research to help make the case; use individual illustrations to dramatize the statistics for the public
• Make creative use of new media to take communications outreach to scale, help build the “echo chamber” for OTL reform

 

Increasing Access to Highly Effective Teachers

There was no consensus among participants on whether “performance pay” was a workable strategy.  But Nicole Campbell, Vice President of Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation, echoed the sentiment of many when she called for Americans to shift their thinking and elevate teachers' compensation.  “Teachers should be paid like doctors; their work equates to saving lives.” 

Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation's New York City program is conducting rigorous research to prove the value of having minority teachers as role models.  They are investing resources to address the limited pipeline of minority teachers, including scholarships and mentoring programs.  Grow Your Own Illinois has a scholarship program to support teachers recruited from minority neighborhoods who make a commitment to teach where they grew up.  The Tom Joyner Foundation and the National Education Association have built a program in conjunction with HBCUs to expand the minority teacher pipeline.

Daniel Losen of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA emphasized that NCLB says that children “shall” have access to good teachers, but at present there's no accountability.  The federal role could be an important point of leverage to increase federal support for teacher recruitment and training.  Several participants stressed the need to improve teacher training at colleges and universities, including experience working with diverse students, including ELL, and in urban schools.

 

Strategies to Achieve Resource Equity

The strong consensus at the Summit was that OTL strategies need to be melded into a coordinated campaign to be successful—in the targeted states and at the national level.  Professor Ted Shaw, former President of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, illustrated this: “Litigation without activism is like a ship without water—it's not going anywhere.”  Particularly in equity cases, litigation has made great strides, but sustained citizen activism and political pressure to secure funding has been essential to turn court victories into classroom realities.  Summit presenters Sheilah Vance, David Sciarra, and John Brittain reviewed landmark funding equity litigation cases in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey—and the common denominator in each case was the need to mobilize coalitions to ensure that the state legislature would, as the New York Campaign For Fiscal Equity phrased it, “Keep the Promise.”   

 

Expanding Access to High-Quality
Early Childhood Education

Funding for preschool programs and other early childhood services continues to increase in states across the nation, thanks in part to the Children’s Campaign efforts of the PEW Charitable Trusts.  Increasingly, the business community, advocates, and states see high quality early childhood education as the fundamental foundation for a high quality public education that leads to a well-educated citizenry and talented workforce.  Through their collaborative initiative with 12 other donors, the Partnership for America’s Economic Success, researchers have documented the high rates of economic return on investments in programs and services for young children and families.  PEW’s Campaign strategy includes focused advocacy at the state and federal levels, high quality objective research, and a broad-based constituency that includes business, education, law enforcement, policy makers, seniors, and the media.  In addition to the Partnership, PEW’s Children’s Campaign currently includes PreK Now, a national effort to increase investments in preschool education, and is growing to include new initiatives focused on children’s dental health and home visiting.

 

Creating Racially Just Schools

Olivia Araiza and Yvonne Liu from Justice Matters! presented a dynamic workshop on creating racially just schools.  The San Francisco-based advocacy group’s “mission is to bring about racially just schools by developing and promoting education policy rooted in community vision.”  The group discussed their concept of REAL(Reclaiming Education, Access and Learning)Education and their REAL Schools Now Campaign—a strategy they have developed to bring about education reform based on racial and economic justice.  In order to achieve substantive reform, this vision includes valuing the diversity of the multi-cultural, multi-generational and multi-lingual communities which our poor, inner city schools serve.  Steps in the effort to achieve racially just schools include:

• Teach students how to critically think about the conditions of the communities in which they live.
• Encourage families and community elders to become school leaders.
• Change the culture of schools so that they become more inclusive of the culture of the families which they serve.

In outlining their strategy, Justice Matters discussed two reports which they conducted.

1) Behind the Test Scores involved a study of high-stakes testing.  The survey results reveal discriminatory practices that shape which students receive extra attention and which do not; classrooms stripped of science, history, art, and P.E.; and schools that fail to prepare students to be critical thinkers and problem solvers. This teaching and learning crisis students are facing is due to a climate that emphasizes test scores over high quality learning that prepares students for their futures.

2) High Schools for Equity is a study and report that was created through collaboration between Justice Matters, Linda Darling-Hammond and the School Redesign Network at Stanford University (SRN LEADS).   It identifies racially just policy solutions through an approach centered on the success of low- income students of color.  High Schools for Equity examined five California high schools that interrupt the status quo by providing low- income students of color with an intellectually rigorous, meaningful, culturally relevant, and responsive education in a caring school community.  The report outlines the policies needed to enable other schools to carry out the exemplary practices of these five schools.

See Justice Matters website for information on the full reports.

The wrap-up discussion was engaging and lively.  The presenters asked the participants to think of personal learning experiences which had significant influences on their lives.  Participants provided both positive and negative experiences.  While some spoke of influential teachers and courses, others spoke of moments when their abilities were challenged and opportunities limited.  Participants also raised issues concerning the cultural diversity of school curriculum and the cultural diversity and sensitivity of teaching staffs.

 

Public Power for Public Education:
Community & Civic Engagement in Education

These are just a few of the many creative ideas about building public support and momentum for the OTL campaign that emerged from the summit:

Messaging—17 of the nation's 50 largest cities do not graduate a majority of their students.  The OTL campaign can shift the conversation from dropouts, which puts the focus on individual “failures,” to system goals of raising rates.

New Media—The Internet creates whole new possibilities to mobilize—and people who want to change policy have to be prepared to use this cutting edge technology to get their communications to scale.  “Narrow casting”—outreach to targeted individuals via email, list serves, and e-newsletters—is a very effective way to share information and organize within networks that have access to computers.  Building communications momentum requires “broad casting” methods to reach new people and diverse networks.  For example, posting compelling information on widely read blogs can reach new readers, and sometimes break through into the mainstream media.  And, if a picture is worth a thousand words, consider the value of a video to bring education reform stories to life.  Production need not be high tech; flip cameras that record 60 minutes of video only cost $100.  Much of the powerful content on youtube.com is developed by young people.  Brave New Foundation Development Director Myra Donnelly used several examples, including their Wal-Mart video, “The High Cost of Low Price”, to illustrate how community screenings and organizing, combined with online distribution, can help compelling education stories reach millions and influence the public dialogue.

Organizing—Of course, online is only one tool in the toolbox.  Education Voters uses “vertical organizing”—finding specific leaders (teachers, parents, business and community leaders, organizations) that can deliver face to face communications in their networks.  This is coupled with “horizontal organizing”—using voter files to identify frequent voters geographically, e.g., when they need to find 30 activists within a specific legislator's district who will speak out.

Report cards—Public education is an important value and people want their Member of Congress or state legislator to vote to support it.  However, in poll after poll, it's clear that the public doesn't know how their representatives vote.  There's no accountability if education stays below the radar screen.  Public education advocates should consider issuing—and publicizing—report cards for legislators, as environmentalists and other movements have used score cards very effectively.

Throughout the Summit, presenters and participants alike emphasized that the OTL campaign must reach out and communicate effectively that all Americans and all sectors have a stake in quality public education—not keep education in a separate issue “silo.”  A participant used the example of senior citizens, an influential political constituency who may have no children in school but who, nonetheless, have a highly personal stake in quality education.  As the baby boomer generation nears retirement, the ratio between the number of workers paying into Social Security and the retirees counting on benefits begins to shift dramatically.  Seniors depend on having well-educated graduates who can move into good jobs and ensure America's workforce is competitive in the global economy.  By articulating connections like these, the OTL campaign can forge diverse coalitions and build broad support.

 

Exploring the Race and Gender Gaps

Click here to read Dr. House's remarks for the Summit.

Dr. Gerry House's luncheon speech portrayed a compelling picture of three gaps—the gender gap, the achievement gap, and the “reality gap”—which signify the complexity and urgency of the problems we face as a nation.  In school settings, girl students outperform boys in grades, test scores, high school and college graduation rates.  Yet, “when it comes to the end game of career payoff for academic achievement, there is a huge discrepancy and the gender gap translates into the economic wage gap we see in the workforce.”   For example, in the education field, teaching is a predominantly female profession, but the gender imbalance is reversed at the end point:  although 75% of classroom teachers are women, only 8% of school superintendents, the highest career position in K-12 education, are women.

NCLB has shown a spotlight on the achievement gap—but the legislation's title belies the fact that 53% of Black male students and 43% of Latino male students who do not graduate from high school are, indeed, being left behind.  Dr. Hank Levin of Columbia University's Teacher's College, author of Cost and Benefits of an Excellent Education for All of America's Children, estimates that the government would reap $45 billion in increased tax revenues and reduced costs of public health, crime and justice and welfare payments if the number of high school dropouts in each age cohort were cut in half.  As Dr. House declared, especially at a time of economic crisis, the prescription to raise revenue is clear:  “educate and graduate all of our children.”

Donald Pink's book, A Whole New Mind, set the stage for discussion of what Dr. House called the “reality gap.”  Pink documents the transition from the information age to the conceptual age, an era that “values new ideas, new designs, the ability to weave threads of the known into the as yet unimagined.”  It requires a different kind of education to develop minds that can succeed in this new age.  The abilities that matter most are “creativity, empathy, seeing the big picture, and pursuing the transcendent.”  Thus, equally as important as teaching math and reading is providing an intellectually challenging curriculum teaching children to “think, invent, inquire, create, analyze, synthesize and collaborate.”  The repetitive, fact-based, rote approach to instruction is commonplace in far too many classrooms—suburban and urban, but it is especially damaging in poor and minority communities' schools where educators are almost exclusively focused on trying to close a low scores, test skill gap.  Addressing only basic skill deficits does not prepare children for the conceptual nature of work in their future.  The 2006 PISA Database illustrated this with an alarming statistic:  less than 2% of U.S. students scored at level six—which measures the capacity of students to apply knowledge learned in the classroom to real world situations.  As Dr. House stated, the competitors are no longer other schools in the district, or even in the United States; “they are the technologically literate and inventive young people in every nation in the world.”

We know the formula for educational success: “creating schools with high expectations, strong leaders, intellectually challenging curriculum, high quality teachers, a safe and supportive physical and emotional environment, adequate resources, and parent and community involvement.”  We cannot create these schools by “tinkering around the edges with a single strand test prep or literacy program.  It will take a well thought out, well planned, well executed comprehensive school transformation program”—like the one in New York City that eliminated big, failing schools and created small, successful schools like Bronx Lab, which went from graduating 36% to graduating 98% of its students.  Dr. House's success stories of these students—and the example of Mrs. Alvarez, a dedicated teacher—gave added inspiration to Summit participants pursuing the Opportunity To Learn for all students.

In closing, Dr. House noted it is also important to acknowledge that there are other gaps for children that exist beyond the capacity of schools.  13.3 million children under age 18 live in poverty; 40% of all children of color live below the poverty level.  These children are also likely to lack health care, adequate housing, nutrition, stability, sometimes they even lack families.  Policymakers at every level must take ownership and address these critical issues.

Click here to read Dr. House's remarks for the Summit.

 

Elevating the Voices of Youth
in Education Advocacy

Georgia State representative Alisha Thomas Morgan facilitated a discussion among a panel of highly active youth organizers and activists. The students and young organizing leaders spoke to the intergenerational audience about the need for schools that are a well maintained, safe space conducive to learning in order for them to take full advantage of their educational opportunities. In their presentations they spoke passionately about their struggles in the current system—their own challenging experiences, and those of their less engaged peers.  Questions about how adults can support young people led the youth to explain that they are active participants in a 21st century movement to demand the high quality education they deserve. They convinced parents, educators and foundation representatives that in order for the education reform movement to be successful, youth must be allowed to lead and must have places at the forefront of the movement rather than being included as an afterthought. Adult allies in attendance challenged participants to involve young people planning and create more spaces for intergenerational conversations about education organizing and reform.