Tough wrote,
“It is simply impossible, Pastorek has come to believe, for a traditional school system, run from the top down by a central administrator, to educate large numbers of poor children to high levels of achievement. “The command-and-control structure can produce marginal improvements,” he told me when we met last month at a coffeehouse on Magazine Street. “But what’s clear to me is that it can only get you so far. If you create a system where initiative and creativity is valued and rewarded, then you’ll get change from the bottom up. If you create a system where people are told what to do and how to do it, then you will get change from the top down. We’ve been doing top-down for many years in Louisiana. And all we have is islands of excellence amidst a sea of mediocrity and failure.”

As long as we have NCLB-type test-driven accountability though, we will always have top down management, if for no other reason than the need for centralization in order to manipulate data. You might, as Tough noted, get incremental improvements in some systems. (there is no way of knowing under the rules and climate of NCLB, however, if those few gains are real.)

The obvious solution is to follow Ravitch’s proposals, set standards, remove sanctions, create better, national tests, and use the data for ranking and the disinfectant of sunlight.

Tough does a great job in discussing family and the need for social services and outreach to families. What could we have done if the billions of dollars wasted on quick fixes, as well as all of the time and energy, aimed at compliance to NCLB had been directed towards those real efforts? Even if money was no object, there is not enough time in the day to play the CYA game and also reach out to parents, especially when the law pressures schools to push out those vulnerable students. (I don’t think I’ve ever seen an intentional effort to push weaker students out, but the panic caused by NCLB clearly prompted policies that have driven large numbers out of school, and in my experience the push-out factor accounts for the majority of gains under NCLB rules.)

I’m a big supporter of “let a hundred flowers bloom,” but nobody would want such a big and unruly garden as we have in New Orleans. On the other hand, absent another cataclysm no other school system is likely to have so big of a portfolio to manage. By definition, the most cost effective system of accountability would be to focus on schools and teachers who are obviously failing. (You rob banks because that is where the money is and you address the worst problems to get the most bang for your reform buck.) Pastorek as a huge advantage, wrote Tough, because “the combined force of those four nonprofit human-capital pipelines will make it easier, in coming years, to pull the trigger (on bad schools and presumably ineffective teachers.”

Pastorek is undoubtedly correct that he must show improvements before he gets further investments from the government (and that undoubtedly explains why decent and intelligent people are afraid to give up on test-driven accountability despite its underwhelming results). But that just reinforces the need for real, rifle shot accountability, closing ineffective schools and removing ineffective teachers. We can make the political point that we are accountable by implementing tough-minded and effective programs like the Toledo Plans and by making the tough decisions necessary to make neighborhood schools safe and orderly.

Again, Tough was excellent in pointing out that the charters do not face the toughest challenge of educating the most difficult students who don’t make it in magnets. The realist in me says that they are overly optimistic in anticipating the effectiveness of “instructional coaching” and behavioral intervention programs for principals and managed curriculum and benchmarking for teachers. But – and this is a big but – those efforts could be transformative within the context of the programs sought by the Broader Bolder Approach. To date, The Turnaround Challenge has documented, instruction-driven reforms that have been effective in magnets (that inevitably cream) have been ineffective in neighborhood schools, and that the key is building relationships. Build relationships by bringing the full range of community services into buildings and the students out of the buildings and into the community, and then those instructional reforms could be just as effective as they are in KIPP and other magnets.

Tough’s wonderful portraits are eye-opening. For instance, he quotes Paul Vallas about having no “institutional obstacles,” like the Board or the union, so “No one tells …, Nobody tells me …, I can hire … I can dismiss …” It probably takes an ego like that to change such a system. It is a reminder, though, that improvement can be sustained only if we also have strong and yet collaborative unions. Some of their instructional reforms are bound to work, some fail, and some in between, but the only way that honest information is passed up the chain of command is under collective bargaining protections.

The quotes also explain so much about Washington D.C. where the system is equally resistant to change. Michelle Rhee is a Hurricane Katrina trying to wipe away those obstacles, thinking that she will survive and end up in with Vallas’ authority and opportunity.

But I don’t want to get negative. If you guys could follow Diane Ravitch in rejecting the failed NCLB-type accountability, and we could adopt your urgency in closing bad schools and firing bad teachers, then together we could use the lessons in New Orleans to recruit, develop, and retain a corp of educators and other providers. Under those circumstances, this skeptical veteran would be just as hopeful as the most energetic TFAer.

By the way, the article does not address the best thing about NCLB which is the focus on poor minorities in low poverty schools who were hidden by the averages. Its not really relevant except if we are going to bridge these differences we have to each acknowledge the successes of the other. You guys highlighted that and other problems. Now its time to move on the more constructive policies.

Catastrophically mismanaged inner-city institutions like the old New Orleans School District (and the old D.C. School District, L.A.’s King/Drew hospital, and the city of Newark under Sharpe James) always seem to be run by an all-black staff.

Unlike the poor kids in the schools, who have their poverty as an excuse for their underperformance, black leadership of such institutions, who are middle-class by definition, has no such excuse.

Occam’s razor would suggest that this is because the main goal of such leadership is to provide jobs for other black folks rather than to meet any performance goal.

To the extent that the previous generation of black leadership is identified with gross incompetence and mismanagement, this, rather than 19th-century-style racism, explains a lot of white (and Latino and Asian) hesitancy toward Obama, for instance.

Hopefully in a few years’ time, Cory Booker and scores of other new-model black leaders will have had a chance to model high-quality leadership even if it comes at the expense of racial solidarity — bluntly put, firing the underperforming legacy black staff and replacing them with a top-notch staff of all races.

Until then, the inspiring young leaders (of all races) who go into places like New Orleans to try to fix things have to keep telling a classic Noble Lie, listing everything under the sun except black racialist jobs-program solidarity, in giving an account of how the system got so screwed up in the first place.

Stanley Kurtz on Obama toeing the racialist line in South Side Chicago

Hymowitz, The New Black Realism

The troubles at King-Drew hospital