MCS Tenure Process demonstrates progress according to plan

Memphis City Schools announced yesterday that approximately 40 out of 499 teachers having completed three years of service were denied tenure. This represents an 8% denial rate, up from a 3% (18 denied out of 448) denial rate last year. See article here: http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2011/apr/07/40-teachers-not-tenured-face-firing/

Please take note of the following...

MCS' Teacher Effectiveness Initiative (TEI), funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, local investors and the MCS, is committed to four strategic initiatives:
(1) Using a common process to define and measure effective teaching;
(2) Improving the quality of teachers in the classroom;
(3) Increasing the support and compensation of existing teachers; and
(4) Improving the culture in schools for both teachers and students to foster effective teaching and learning.

Within #2 (Improving the quality of teachers in the classroom), there are four key initiatives:
(1) Improving the recruitment and hiring of high-potential teachers (of which the MTR is a strategic partner);
(2) Raising the bar and improving the process for granting tenure;
(3) Increasing the retention of effective teachers; and,
(4) Increasing the turnover of the most ineffective teachers.

I bring this to your attention so that the community may know a couple of things...
1. MCS has a clear plan for improving teaching and learning (see TEI plan above); and
2. There is real progress being made. The tenure process, in one year, has improved measurably.

We're moving in the right direction. Press on.

Memphis Leads Nation in Education Reform through City-Wide Collaboration

Monday (April 4), Dr. Irving Hamer, Deputy Superintendent of the Memphis City Schools and Mr. Ken Foster, Executive Director of the Memphis Educational Association (teachers union) jointly wrote the following opinion published in the Christian Science Monitor of the good reform work happening in Memphis. Our city-wide collaboration is a unique and key element in Memphis' leading urban education reform nationally.

See the full storty at: http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2011/0404/Talking-in-Memphis-When-schools-and-unions-team-up-students-win

From our posts in Memphis as a deputy schools superintendent and a union leader, we watch with concern as state legislatures and teachers' unions around the country clash over methods of achieving school reform. While both sides make important points about improving education, the tone of the national conversation is serving as a wedge, further widening the historical rift between labor and management. Such strife can only harm efforts at meaningful reform.

To our colleagues, all of whom want an improved education system but disagree on how to get there, we suggest: Consider Memphis. We have been in your shoes, and we have found a way to work together to effect positive change.

Two years ago, we took a close look at the Memphis City Schools and what we saw was disheartening: Ds and Fs on the state report card, low graduation rates, and an unacceptable number of graduates – merely 6 percent – prepared for college. The MCS have been plagued with this sort of performance for years. But instead of accepting the status quo, we decided on radical change. The Memphis Education Association (the union) and the school administration resolved to join forces in a complete overhaul of our system.

Teachers are key: Fight for funding

It is clear that teachers are the most important factor in children's academic success. Their work is both a science and an art. That's why we sought funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to launch the Teacher Effectiveness Initiative (TEI), which focuses on giving our teachers the tools and support they need to instill children with a love of learning and to increase academic achievement.

We are proud to say we earned that funding and are now putting it to good use. We have also earned considerable support from our community. To date, area philanthropies and businesses have chipped in $21 million to help us implement this transformative plan. Members of these organizations – along with representatives from the administration and the union – also serve on an advisory board, which connects our reform efforts with community advocacy and ensures TEI's sustainability.

Honest disagreements, honest teamwork

To be sure, we face hurdles. As is often the case with union and management, we have honest disagreements over issues such as how much emphasis should be placed on student test scores and how to fairly compensate teachers while staying within the limits of our budget. (TEI funding can only be used in certain ways, and, as with districts nationwide, we are grappling with shrinking budgets.)

But each week, we sit down at the same table and work through these concerns. Of the six TEI executive board members, two represent the union. And union representatives chair all three TEI working groups, making recommendations on reforming the tenure process, changing the way we evaluate and measure teacher performance, and how best to support and retain our educators. We are plotting the district's future together.

Early indicators of progress

We are cheered by early indicators of progress: The state of Tennessee is relying heavily on our framework for evaluating teachers. To date, 258 teachers representing 115 of our 190 schools have become TEI ambassadors and are enlisting the support of their colleagues. We have 800 student envoys participating in TEI workshops and encouraging their classmates to excel academically. Online and after-school courses aimed at high-risk students have helped raise graduation rates by almost 9 percent. And for the first time ever – aided by a district-wide writing program – our students earned straight A's in writing on a state assessment.

All of these successes make for a great start. We are confident TEI can further transform our schools into true centers of student learning, where excuses for failure are neither made nor accepted. It can ensure teachers are recognized as the professionals they are. And by improving the education we offer our students, TEI will help revitalize our community economically and culturally.

A common goal makes cooperation possible

Recently, the voters of Memphis decided to unite Memphis City Schools with the Shelby County district. We have much work to do to prepare for this merger, but it won't sidetrack our efforts to better serve our students by empowering our teachers.

We appeal to our counterparts in unions and management across the country to join us by making their school reforms collaborative. We know how fortunate we are to have the support of the Gates Foundation, our community, and federal Race to the Top funding. But we began our united efforts with nothing more than the realization that change was as necessary as it was inevitable.

A host of union leaders and administrators from school districts across the country gathered at a recent forum on collaborative reform hosted by US Education Secretary Arne Duncan, which bodes well for the future of public education. We know many school districts will have a tough time making reforms, and we sympathize. But we are also excited for them. Because in setting a common goal, and working together to achieve that goal, all of us have the chance to achieve greatness.

Even more important, we can offer a shot at greatness to our students.

Ken Foster is the executive director of the Memphis Education Association. Irving Hamer Jr. is deputy superintendent of academic operations, technology, and innovation for the Memphis City Schools.

MLK's "Paul's Letter to American Christians"

Monday, April 4, 2011 is the 43rd anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

To remember Dr. King, I read his essay titled "Paul's Letter to American Christians" written on November 4, 1956. In this essay, MLK translates a fictitious letter written by the Apostle Paul to the Church in America.

I was especially impressed by his closing paragraphs as he calls those fighting against the injustice of segregation to struggle with Christian methods and Christian weapons. Ultimately, the greatest Christian weapon is the hope of the gospel that reminds us that all we might ever want... all our happiness... is promised to us in heaven. Therefore, until we get there, our mission is to "stand up for the truth of God ... come what may."

Please read below and be encouraged...

May I say just a word to those of you who are struggling against this evil (of injustice). Always be sure that you struggle with Christian methods and Christian weapons. Never succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter. As you press on for justice, be sure to move with dignity and discipline, using only the weapon of love. Let no man pull you so low as to hate him. Always avoid violence. If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in your struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and your chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.

In your struggle for justice, let your oppressor know that you are not attempting to defeat or humiliate him, or even to pay him back for injustices that he has heaped upon you. Let him know that you are merely seeking justice for him as well as yourself. Let him know that the festering sore of segregation debilitates the white man as well as the Negro. With this attitude you will be able to keep your struggle on high Christian standards.

Many persons will realize the urgency of seeking to eradicate the evil of segregation. There will be many Negroes who will devote their lives to the cause of freedom. There will be many white persons of goodwill and strong moral sensitivity who will dare to take a stand for justice. Honesty impels me to admit that such a stand will require willingness to suffer and sacrifice. So don't despair if you are condemned and persecuted for righteousness' sake. Whenever you take a stand for truth and justice, you are liable to scorn. Often you will be called an impractical idealist or a dangerous radical. Sometimes it might mean going to jail. If such is the case you must honorably grace the jail with your presence. It might even mean physical death. But if physical death is the price that some must pay to free their children from a permanent life of psychological death, then nothing could be more Christian. Don't worry about persecution America; you are going to have that if you stand up for a great principle. I can say this with some authority, because my life was a continual round of persecutions. After my conversion I was rejected by the disciples at Jerusalem. Later I was tried for heresy at Jerusalem. I was jailed at Philippi, beaten at Thessalonica, mobbed at Ephesus, and depressed at Athens. And yet I am still going. I came away from each of these experiences more persuaded than ever before that "neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come . . . shall separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." I still believe that standing up for the truth of God is the greatest thing in the world. This is the end of life. The end of life is not to be happy. The end of life is not to achieve pleasure and avoid pain. The end of life is to do the will of God, come what may.

Gates Foundation expresses continued support for Memphis

Friends-

On March 22, 2011 The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation released a statement expressing their continued support of Memphis, our teachers and our students.

While much has transpired over the past six months, one thing has not changed... every student in Memphis deserves a great teacher.

The Gates Foundation is committed to Memphis' continued role as the center of urban education reform in America. And the MTR is committed to the task of recruiting, training and supporting outstanding teachers for each of our city's 100,000 students.

Please see the Gates' "Post Referendum Foundation Statement on Memphis" below:

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is committed to Memphis’s Teacher Effectiveness Initiative (TEI). We believe the community will continue to support the efforts begun and led by Memphis City Schools (MCS), its leadership, and its teachers to ensure that all students are taught by effective teachers every year in every subject in every school.

We commend MCS Superintendent Kriner Cash, Deputy Superintendent Irving Hamer, and their team, the Memphis Education Association, and all the teachers of Memphis for staying focused on the plan for improving teaching during a challenging time. Additionally, we appreciate that the MCS Board has reaffirmed their support of the effective teaching reforms, and as the issues of governance for a consolidated school system are defined, we are confident that the community will remain focused and united on keeping students and teachers first.

Effective teaching is a priority of both Memphis and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. We intend to support the Teacher Effectiveness Initiative for as long as it remains a shared priority.

We will take the school to her...

Please read this recent story surrounding a mother jailed for illegally placing her children in a higher performing school.

Here's the MTR / Christian context on urban education takeaway.... WE WILL TAKE THE SCHOOL (she wants) TO HER.

Read below (introductory paragraph copied from Whitney Tilson email):

This story is getting national attention, as it should. A low-income, black, single mom, fed up with crappy schools in the only place she could afford to live, snuck her two daughters into a much better school (serving, of course, wealthy, white students) and, for trying to do what’s right for her kids, was SENTENCED TO PRISON. This is an outrage! Here’s hoping that this becomes a rallying cry – a Rosa Parks moment – for education reform in general, and parental choice in particular.

Here’s the spot-on response from the Black Alliance for Educational Options:

BAEO Responds to Imprisonment of Ohio Mother

January 26, 2011

We are writing to express outrage at the circumstances that led to the prosecution and conviction of Kelley Williams-Bolar. As reported in the Akron Beacon Journal, Williams-Bolar was found guilty and sentenced severely for an act that defied the strict letter of the law but does not defy reason. She sent her daughters to schools outside her district of residence.

Ohio law says that if you live in Akron, you must send your children to your neighborhood school, even if it is a failing school and regardless of whether you feel your child would get a better education and stand a better chance of success elsewhere. The law says you're stuck-unless you're wealthy enough to opt out or fortunate enough to get into a high-performing charter school or to get selected for one of only 14,000 EdChoice scholarships available state-wide.

Williams-Bolar is not wealthy, so paying private school tuition for her two children was not an option, nor could she afford to move out of public housing and into a district with better schools. To be fair, Ohio has done more than most states in terms of providing options for parents whose children need better educational opportunities. But clearly, more could and should be done. In far too many states, however, these parents have no choice at all. It is high time we change the laws that force low-income and working-class families to choose between playing by the rules and doing what's best for their children.

Earlier this month, our nation honored the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., and this week, BAEO joins families, educators, and advocacy groups coast to coast in celebrating National School Choice Week. The Williams-Bolar case is a sober reminder that Dr. King's dream remains unrealized, and parental choice is the most pressing civil rights issue of our time. Every child deserves access to a quality education, and as Dr. King said, we must act with the fierce urgency of now.

Today, Kelley Williams-Bolar is serving a jail sentence for pursuing a better educational option for her daughters. Meanwhile, her children must-like thousands of other low-income students of color-endure a sentence of their own: consignment to unsafe, underperforming schools in close proximity to their homes, year after year. There is no justice here.

Below is a longer article from the Education Action Group:

The folks in charge of National School Choice Week are calling Kelley Williams-Bolar the "Rosa Parks of education."

Her story illustrates their message perfectly, and it couldn't have hit the front pages at a more opportune time.

Williams-Bolar is a single mother of two daughters who lives in Akron, Ohio. Four years ago she decided she wanted her kids to have a quality education, so she enrolled them in the neighboring Copley-Fairlawn school district, which presumably offers a better program and safer environment than Akron Public Schools.

Unfortunately her kids were not qualified to attend Copley-Fairlawn unless Williams-Bolar paid tuition. School officials finally figured out that she did not live in the district, and her children did not live with her father, who resides in the Copley-Fairlawn district.

They asked Williams-Bolar to pay $30,000 in back tuition. When she failed to produce that sort of money, the courts got involved.

She was sentenced to 10 days in jail, two years of probation and community service for falsifying public school records.

To make matters worse, Williams-Bolar, a university student preparing to become a teacher, will not be able to get a job in her field in Ohio, because convicted felons are banned from teaching positions.

Williams-Bolar went to jail, and perhaps crippled her professional future, for sending her kids to the school of her choice. And all of this happened in the middle of National School Choice Week.

"I did this for them, so there it is," she was quoted as saying about her kids. "I did this for them."

Now, we just need the teachers... Come on.

A captain has to be a captain.

In this morning's Wall Street Journal (January 20, 2011), Peggy Noonan writes a column filled with some essentials of leadership that are good to hear. Her theme, to me, is summed up in one of her brief sentences: "A captain has to be a captain."

Read on:

The Captain and the King

Why Owen Honors had to go, and why a stammering monarch is a movie hero.

At a time of new beginnings in Washington, and as a new year starts, some thoughts on leadership that begin with two questions. First, why is it a good thing that the captain of the USS Enterprise was this week relieved of his duties? Second, why is the movie "The King's Speech" so popular and admired? The questions are united by a theme. It is that no one knows how to act anymore, and people miss people who knew how to act.

Capt. Owen Honors, commanding officer of an aircraft carrier, was revealed to have made and shown to his crew videos that have been variously described in the press as "lewd," "raunchy," "profane" and "ribald." They are. Adm. John Harvey, who Wednesday relieved Capt. Honors of his duties, said the captain's action "calls into question his character and undermines his credibility." Also true.

In a way it's not shocking that Capt. Honors did what he did, because he came from a culture, our culture, in which, to be kind about it, anything goes. Mainstream movies, television, music—all is raunch. To say the obvious, John Paul Jones, Bull Halsey and Elmo Zumwalt likely wouldn't have made those videos, if they could have. More to the point, some average, undistinguished naval captain in 1968 wouldn't have made them either, because he would have had his mind and consciousness formed in the 1930s and '40s, when our culture was more coherent and constructive. It can also be said that Capt. Honors's videos were not extreme by the standards of our day. Even his bigotry seemed self-spoofing, as obviously nitwittish and vulgar as the character he was playing—himself—was nitwittish and vulgar.

But the videos were a shock in that this was a captain of the U.S. Navy, commanding a nuclear-powered ship, and acting in a way that was without dignity, stature or apartness. He was acting as if it was important to him to be seen as one of the guys, with regular standards, like everyone else.

But it's a great mistake when you are in a leadership position to want to be like everyone else. Because that, actually, is not your job. Your job is to be better, and to set standards that those below you have to reach to meet. And you have to do this even when it's hard, even when you know you yourself don't quite meet the standards you represent.

A captain has to be a captain. He can't make videos referencing masturbation and oral sex. He has to uphold values even though he finds them antique, he has to represent virtues he may not in fact possess, he has to be, in his person, someone sailors aspire to be.

A lot of our leaders—the only exceptions I can think of at the moment are nuns in orders that wear habits—have become confused about something, and it has to do with being an adult, with being truly mature and sober. When no one wants to be the stuffy old person, when no one wants to be "the establishment," when no one accepts the role of authority figure, everything gets damaged, lowered. The young aren't taught what they need to know. And they know they're not being taught, and on some level they resent it.

MLK and the Purpose of Education, 1948

Martin Luther King graduated from Morehouse College in 1948. During his senior year, MLK wrote the following words on the "Purpose of Education". As we seek to pursue urban education within a Christian context, I thought his words on education were especially encouraging and on-target:

"The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.

We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character--that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. The broad education will, therefore, transmit to one not only the accumulated knowledge of the race but also the accumulated experience of social living."

My takeaway: PURPOSE (God-given worthy objectives) is as important to living as is EDUCATION. And what powerful allies they are together.