your life is  hard, until you wear a t-shirt.

STATEMENT BY THE EDUCATION EQUALITY PROJECT

ON NEW WASH, D.C. TEACHER EMPLOYMENT CONTRACT

NEW YORK, April 7, 2010 – The Education Equality Project (EEP) strongly supports Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s efforts to transform Washington, D.C.’s public schools.  We commend her determined insistence that nothing is more important than students and their results.  Rhee, a signatory of our project, deeply shares our commitment to closing the achievement gap.

Today, the District and its teachers announced a game-changing new employment agreement.  We applaud this agreement and the dedication of Chancellor Rhee and Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, who made it happen.

Essentially replacing a seniority based system, this new contract focuses on teacher performance including significant reliance on a teacher’s impact on student achievement as the major criteria.

Particularly important in this new agreement:

·      Teacher performance, which will now be measured largely by student growth, is clearly recognized as the critical factor in all teacher-related decisions;

·      Continuing service is based on teacher performance, measured annually by a well-crafted evaluation process;

·      A compensation system is introduced that pays educators as the professionals they are, looks at outcomes not inputs, rewards success, and makes teaching attractive to talented young people.

“American education won’t achieve equity and excellence without a new employment bargain based on teacher effectiveness and student achievement.  This new contract is a big step in that direction.” – Ellen Winn, Director, Education Equality Project.

So, there are things like Yale’s crew team, or the White House, or things of legend like the World Series. They have been around forever, they are icons of power and stability and the focus of the ambitions of millions. People hold these things up as models of the status quo. This is not a list about those kinds of icons. This is a list about transforming education.

These are the people who I follow, and who sometimes follow me on Twitter. They give me insights, they challenge what I think, and they sometimes really disagree with me. But such is democracy in the twittersphere.

So, I give you the Edurati Twitterati, the 21 Most Important Ever Twitterers In the World, for you to link to. Expand your education reform conversation and build up some new talking points. This is the first list, and another list will come out later that is more exhaustive.

@tvanderark is a consumer of Cuban food, and Newsweek named him once the country’s “Most Influential BabyBoomer.” Yes, no kidding. Go to him for ideas on ed reform, practical alternative pathways to education and thought leadership on tech innovation that boosts student learning. He’s been a superintendent and an investor in private equity. He’s seen a lot.

@ToughLoveforX is a retired printer who likes to talk about fixing high schools.

@VanessaSCassieused to be a high school teacher and is now a consultant.

@21stprincipalbemoans the lost of liberal arts in education and has some pretty pointed views on testing, curriculum and whether schools are being brought into the 21st Century

@AEIeducation is the hub for great writers and analysts for education improvements and policywonks.

@Joe_Bower fuels discussion with a very strong anti-capitalist bent, but that’s fine. Has interesting ideas about changing the education model away from standardized testing and grading. Also, he’s in Canada, which makes his commentary about United States ed reform delightful, interesting, and puzzling.

@ChadRatliff Director of Instruction and innovation porojects in Virginia and calls himself a “relentless seeker of a better way.”

@readtoday has some great views on bringing equity to African-Americans in education, and having it start with focus on reading and literacy.

@Parentella activates the parents in the struggle for education reform and is an active member in discussions about entrepreneurship and innovation in school function.

@Pammoran can be quite poetic at times, and is working to bring 21st century skills into education and develop community learning for all types of life-long learners.

@alexanderrusso is a long time blogger in this space, and self-proclaimed “don’t do nice” when it comes to blogging.

@teachingwthsoul has a great stream of tweets and a thing about passion that I don’t understand, but well worth connecting to her.

@jclassnotebook allegedly left a journalism career to help a high school teach journalism. Wonder if she likes my idea of having schools as communication centers for a community vis a vis hyperlocal media?

@n8ngrimm is compiling resources online for teachers, and you can talk to him about your needs.

@KennethLibby either agrees with me or disagrees with me about entrepreneurship in classrooms, but offers clear-headed commentary and links to good content.

@tonnet pretty much covers all the majors: translation, physics, online, tech, teaching, students. Follow him if you want to get a trenches look at how educators can improve the world of teaching.

@irascol is all about universal design and innovation with a strong liberal bias that has pitched against the likes of the governor of New Jersey. Link to him if you want salt with your sugar.

@Conncan is the best state advocacy group for education reform, and just launched a new initiative for ed reform called 50Can. Follow for updates on state applications for RTTT and for breaking analysis on tools for change.

@Mebutke is the CEO of @Conncan’s first expansion state, Rhode Island. Searching for that education reform higher ground, she says.

@deborahgist cannot be left out of this list, as she’s the Rhode Island Commissioner of Education whose eyes are on transformative change in state public education.

Then there is this one, named GRADE$ HD. That’s right, keep those kids in line by measuring their grades at school and paying them for performance. We can’t do that in New York State with our teachers, since it’s illegal to compare their performance by looking at student data.

At least as a fine, nurturing parent, you will be able to peer into the performance of your student. If you can’t pay the teacher, at least you can help little Johnny Edu 2.0 save up money for his hamster.

I found myself some iPad apps that seem to be worth their salt. Mostly they are maps, and some astronomy apps that help you pinpoint where the constellations are in the morning and the night sky.

Kids could learn from these. The periodic table of the elements, with those brilliant bright colors seems really nice. But not nearly $15 nice.

My superintendent in the East Village apartment I rent would like me to believe that his solution for the cracks around the somewhat faulty plumbing in my bathroom ceiling and wall is entrepreneurial in its deployment and conceptualization. It most certainly is not. It is not Entrepreneur Thinking to “patch” water permeable cracks with duct tape and then paint over them with a layer of white latex. It’s not Entrepreneur Thinking because eventually the water builds up to a point that reveals to us this morning a pool of water, a dirty toilet and the beginnings of what look like mushrooms growing out of where the pipe connects to the wall. Try again. Entrepreneur Thinking is what Dr. Mark Weaver and Kristy Hebert are doing in New Orleans. They are literally putting efforts into redesigning the way principals do their jobs in a range of schools that run the gamut from public bricks and mortar to charters. How entrepreneurial is this thinking? They are coming up with ways to get students to open up cyber cafes in schools so that they can create services for the community. They will start with offering online virtual education resources to the parents of the students. If that plan is successful, then they will offer that service to the rest of the community. Wonderful. School as a community resource and a hub for economic development. Can’t get better than that. And it uses less tape.

Those of you in the education innovation space will know what I am talking about when I say that the era of the book has come and gone.

The book is an artifact. It’s a holdover from an era where knowledge was plentiful (relatively) but access to knowledge was limited. Therefore, it was easy for those with access to call themselves scholars and gatekeepers, and those who did not have access to call themselves serfs or blue collar workers, or the people who just needed a little bit more to get by.

Only ten years ago, that little bit more cost a lot. It wasn’t available. School was not the place where you sought to find the skills that propelled you beyond your class or station. It was the place where you learned that you were what you would always be and that all you were doing was walking into school to get a diploma, to walk out again continuing that path to mediocrity.

That’s not true anymore. The internet changed things. It gave us methods whereby we would radically change not only our station in life, but even change the culture rules that we lived by. How?

It’s interesting to ask how. The answer is, the internet showed us that rules are made up, culture is made up, and reality is the collective belief that everyone can tacitly agree on as being good enough.

We are entering an era where the book is a throw away. It has exercises in it. You can use a book to improve your math. Or, you can use a book to read the poems that you are supposed to memorize and use in your class to understand deeper ways of thinking like metaphor or simile. You can bend your mind space with a book.

But you can’t really create a new culture with one.

Think about this. When Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door, he wasn’t interested in printing a book, or using a book. He knew that if he put it in a book, it wouldn’t get to the right people. It would be censored. It would be curtailed.

He nailed that stuff to the door because everyone would see it. Everyone would talk about it. And even if you never saw it, someone you knew knew someone who knew someone who saw it, or read it, or heard about it from Martin Luther’s second cousin.

That’s the internet.

School is a filter. Teachers these days will not be disseminators of knowledge. They will be moderators of information. They will be learning at the same time as their students. They will realize that you can’t put a clamp on the tap. The flow of information has been cracked wide open.

All we can do now is pick and choose what bits of it we want to pick up, and barring failures in communication, which communities we want to join with to learn their take on things.

We are not far away from a school in Dubuque, Iowa linking up with a college in China to teach the students Mandarin Chinese AND the China art world.

We used to learn to be dominant.

We will begin to learn, using everything at our disposal, to get along. To join. To enmesh ourselves in a multi-colored cloak of cultures and ideals that are partly ours and partly someone else’s. And we will be fine.

They will write about us on the Internet.