inequality

Michelle Rhee on Education Reform

February 3, 2025 By admin

On June 15, 2011, Michelle Rhee, Founder and CEO of Students First, spoke at Roosevelt House on education reform and creating schools of excellence.

Michelle Rhee began her career as a Teach for America (TFA) corps member in a Harlem Park Community School in Baltimore City. Through her own trial and error in the classroom, she gained a tremendous respect for the hard work that teachers do every day. She also learned the lesson that would drive her mission for years to come: teachers are the most powerful driving force behind student achievement in our schools. In 1997 Ms. Rhee founded The New Teacher Project (TNTP) to bring more excellent teachers to classrooms across the country. Under her leadership TNTP became a leading organization in understanding and developing innovative solutions to the challenges of new teacher hiring. As Chief Executive Officer and President, Ms. Rhee partnered with school districts, state education agencies; non-profit organizations and unions to transform the way schools and other organizations recruit, select and train 23,000 highly qualified teachers in difficult-to-staff schools.

On June 12, 2007, Mayor Adrian Fenty appointed Chancellor Rhee to lead the District of Columbia Public Schools. Under her leadership, the worst performing school district in the country became the only major city system to see double-digit growth in both their state reading and state math scores in seventh, eighth and tenth grades over three years. In 2010, she left DCPS to found her own organization – Students First – which she describes as a grassroots movement designed to mobilize parents, teachers, students, administrators, and citizens throughout country, and to channel their energy to produce meaningful results on both the local and national level.

Education Reform and Equality of Opportunity

August 4, 2024 By admin

Equality of opportunity is supposed to be a fundamental American principle. But it is not being realized today – in large part due to our failing education system. Despite being better funded, American public schools consistently lag those of comparable countries. The disparity is especially stark in inner-city and minority school districts, where poor children are most in need of quality education. Is school choice the solution? What role should the federal government play in education? And what legal issues are implicated by reform efforts?

This panel was presented at the 2016 National Student Symposium on Saturday, February 27, 2016, at the University of Virginia School of Law.

Panel IV: Education Reform and Equality of Opportunity
Caplin Auditorium

–Hon. Clint Bolick, Arizona Supreme Court
–Mrs. Cynthia Brown, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress
–Dr. William Galston, Senior Fellow, Governance Studies, The Brookings Institution
–Prof. Amy Wax, Robert Mundheim Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania Law School
–Moderator: Hon. Jennifer W. Elrod, U.S. Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit
–Introduction: Ms. Abby Hollenstein, 1L Committee Co-Chair, University of Virginia School of Law Student Chapter

University of Virginia School of Law
Charlottesville, VA

Liberating education: how schools can empower and transform | Trish Millines Dziko | TEDxSeattle

April 17, 2024 By admin

In her 2021 TEDxSeattle talk, Trish Millines Dziko asserts that the teaching techniques most commonly used in our public education system are in need of radical reform. She asks, “What would happen if we rebuilt public schools to develop the genius in every student, and give them the tools to be critical thinkers, problem solvers, ideators, and leaders?”

She explains how her nonprofit organization successfully collaborates with public schools to help change school culture, implement project-based learning, center racial equity, and enable students to actively participate in their own education. Through real-world examples and stories, Trish’s talk challenges us to consider how we can promote student-centered teaching, and ensure our schools are educating, and not just “schooling” our youth.

00:55: Project based learning explained
10:20 Steps to rebuild public education

More to explore:
Learn more about Trish’s organization, Technology Access Foundation

Home

Read about educator and philosopher Paolo Friere, quoted in Trish’s talk
https://www.freire.org/paulo-freire/
Watch 16-year-old E Wen Wong talk about how project based learning inspired her
https://www.ted.com/talks/e_wen_wong_how_project_based_learning_is_the_key_to_sustainability Meet Trish Millines Dziko: co-founder of Technology Access Foundation, and a passionate advocate for developing the genius in all children in our public schools. At least once a year, Trish has a moment where she realizes she is doing exactly what she was meant to do.

Raised with the belief that we have a responsibility to care for our communities, Trish is inspired by James Baldwin’s words, “For these are all our children. We will profit by, or pay for, whatever they become.”

Twenty-five years ago, Trish was traveling the country for Microsoft, recruiting college-level, technically-trained people of color, but finding only a small pool of candidates. Seeing this shortage, and reflecting on her own experience being discriminated against for her race and gender in the work world, Trish was inspired. She embarked on her own mission to ensure students of color have opportunities in the booming tech fields and that companies create environments where they can thrive.

With a commitment to recognizing and developing the genius in all children, Trish co-founded the Seattle-based Technology Access Foundation (TAF), a nonprofit that creates access to transformative systems of learning for students and teachers of color to eliminate race-based disparities in our increasingly diverse society.

Through Trish’s leadership as Executive Director, TAF became a statewide leader in public education, creating 2 co-managed public schools, partnering with public schools to promote the highest level of student learning, and increasing the number of teachers of color through the Martinez Fellowship. Trish has been recognized for her work with numerous awards including the YWCA Dorothy I Height Racial Justice Award, US News 100 Women Leaders in STEM, Seattle Business Magazine Tech Impact Champion, and Senator Maria Cantwell Women of Valor Award.

Where we are, Trish believes, is a moment of possibility, a crucial moment where – if we act quickly and with strength – we can transform our public schools to get rid of deficit thinking and focus instead on what would happen if every child had what they need to succeed. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

Education reform: Reorganizing schools to address inequality – with Stephen Raudenbush | VIEWPOINT

April 12, 2024 By admin

In his new book “The Ambitious Elementary School”, Stephen Raudenbush of the University of Chicago argues that “effectively meeting the challenge of educational inequality requires a complete reorganization of institutional structures as well as wholly new norms, values, and practices that are animated by a relentless commitment to student learning.” His study, coauthored with Elizabeth McGhee Hassrick and Lisa Rosen, draws on data gathered from real schools in the South Side of Chicago. Interview conducted by AEI’s Nat Malkus.

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If America’s education system is outdated, how can we evolve? | Derrell Bradford | Big Think

July 9, 2020 By admin

If America’s education system is outdated, how can we evolve?
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The current education system wasn’t designed to accommodate the dynamism required today.

Derrell Bradford of 50CAN points out that, while education reform in the past has done some great things for many students in America, there is a definite need to evolve. That evolution involves maintaining the positive aspects of the education system and overcoming the negative.

This video is supported by yes. every kid., an initiative that aims to rethink education from the ground up by connecting innovators in a shared mission to conquer “one size fits all” education reform.
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DERRELL BRADFORD

Derrell is the executive vice president of 50CAN where he advocates to improve educational opportunities and options for families across the country. Derrell also recruits and trains local leaders across the 50CAN network and leads the network’s National Voices fellowship; a seminar focused on education policy, political collaboration, and media.
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TRANSCRIPT:

DERRELL BRADFORD: There are lots of times when I go out and I talk to people, and I have a little game I play I’ll say, “Who in here has more than one kid?” And then somebody will raise their hand and I’ll say, “I bet sometimes you look at one of your kids and you’re like this one is mine and other times you look at the other one and you say I don’t know where you came from.” Those kids breathe the same air, they eat the same food, they live in the same house, they have the same parents, guardians, they have wildly similar experiences, but the demands of their individual learning can be night and day. And the way that we’ve organized our current education system is not one that is meant to be dynamic enough to meet those needs. And it was also built for a less distracting time, and our kids today they grow up in the most distracting time in the history of history. So, it is our belief as an organization, as people who work on these issues and are trying to, again, build toward more dynamism, that personalization or the closer the education is to the child in terms of proximity and in terms of specialization are ways to optimize what we should be doing in the system or systems of the future. And as a society, look, at different times we prize different things. In the early part of the 20th century, we had the fewest number of high school graduates in the world and then we had the most because there was a point where as a country we decided to prioritize high school graduation and it was a massive lift and we did lots of things to make that possible like tracking, like comprehensive high schools, which like bells and whistles like sorting and AP and all these other things that we’ve kind of come to know, which were meant to do something else, which was like sort people who were going to go to college and then translate everybody else into a workforce that doesn’t really exist anymore, so those things were the best things we had then. I think our country, our kids, our families they want something different now and we’d like to help them build that.

If you’re old like me, and if you’re younger than me but older than everybody else, like a lot of the senior staff, you have a longer view on how to get things done than lots of people do in the current political moment. And if you work on education policy you can remember that the set of ideas that are most well known, assessments and measuring progress, like reforming the way teachers are trained and paid, charter schools and choice all these other things, they started in the Clinton administration and then they were organized in a more tangible way through a partnership with George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy and that became No Child Left Behind. And then they were sort of gassed up in the Obama administration and we’ll call that the Obama Duncan Consensus. And in all of these phases you had Democrats and Republicans, for wildly different reasons, like urban Democrats who were deeply concerned about under-performance for kids of color in cities primarily and a lack of choice in those places, lots of conservatives and free-market Republicans who believe in competition and choice and who are anti-monopolist working together to build the framework that gave us the improvements of the last 20/25 years, particularly in urban education, but broadly in kind of American education forever.

At 50Can, and for me specifically, we think that’s a feature, not a defect. And we believe, especially as an…

For the full transcript, check out: https://bigthink.com/yes-every-kid/education-reform