New Philadelphia schools CEO Arlene Ackerman is making an impression right away; the Philadelphia Inquirer reports:

More than 200 Philadelphia School District staffers received layoff notices this week, a move the new schools chief hopes will begin to de-centralize the district and move resources into classrooms.

The employees were all academic coaches, mostly veteran educators who supported teachers in a variety of roles, from technology to mentoring new teachers.

In short, she’s quickly asserting control over a behemoth bureaucracy, much like Michelle Rhee is in D.C.

The Philly union leader suggests it’s for show: “This is the kind of thing that happens each time a superintendent takes over.” I might be so cynical myself, except we know that such central-office “coaches” are often poorly managed and, unbeknownst to them or anyone else, can help cause huge funding inequities between schools. Marguerite Roza has studied this phenomenon; in an anonymous city where four psychologists float among 10 schools, one “says she spends most of her time at a school where the principal ‘values her work,’” and another “spends the largest portion of her days at the school her own child attends.” As a result, some schools are shortchanged—and often those with the neediest students.

Ackerman might have such a problem in Philly: “When I asked what these coaches do, people would sort of shrug their shoulders and say, ‘Well, I don’t know.’”

But what’s most encouraging to me is that it’s “a move the new schools chief hopes will begin to de-centralize the district and move resources into classrooms.” Such decentralization is a crucial element of weighted student funding, an important reform Ackerman helped implement in Seattle, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. In this interview, she leaves no doubt that Philadelphia will be next, welcome news for those of us disappointed by Rhee’s moves in the opposite direction in D.C.

The New York Times marks the midway point of Newark mayor Cory Booker’s first term with a supportive editorial. Meanwhile, Booker spent yesterday evening at Metropolitan Baptist Church in Newark to welcome incoming superintendent (and former D.C. schools chief) Clifford Janey.

The well-seasoned Janey (he’s 61) sounded the right notes. For instance:

“It makes no sense and is actually harmful to move students along and provide them with a phony diploma,” he said to one burst of applause. “We will not only look at the standards but the promotion policies from elementary right through high schools.”

That’s a highly worthwhile undertaking. As Checker and Liam pointed out in Gadfly a few weeks ago, most states and districts struggle to maintain meaningful academic standards when lots of students can’t meet them. Holding back or denying diplomas to 50 percent of your pupils is not very palatable, politically or otherwise, so typically you end up either watering down tests so more kids can pass or simply waiving the exams altogether and accepting a “portfolio of work,” or some such empty alternative instead. The result of which, of course, is that graduating or moving on to the next grade in no way signifies that a student has reached a certain level of skill or proficiency.

The problem for Newark, though, is that Janey promised the same thing in D.C., and his plan never blossomed. In 2004, Gadfly reported that the incoming supe was keen on implementing high school graduation exams and “replacing the city’s lax academic standards with fine models from Massachusetts or California.” He never did either.

Maybe it’s not entirely his fault; life as a big-city superintendent is precarious, particularly when one is pushed into the ring without a powerful mayor in his corner—a luxury that Janey’s successor, Michelle Rhee, enjoys with Mayor Fenty. But the situation doesn’t favor him much more in Newark, where the schools are run from the more-of-the-same state capital instead of by the everything-must-change Booker. One wants to believe Janey will deliver on his promises, but it’s hard to imagine he’ll be able to follow up a tepid tenure in troubled D.C. with a revelatory reign in shattered Newark.

Gadfly wasn’t pleased with the Philadelphia Inquirer last week, as the paper saw only bad news in the Philadelphia School District’s decision to take back six of the 38 schools that have been managed by private operators since 2002. Well, Sunday’s Washington Post didn’t find any silver linings either, calling it a “severe setback” and closing with a quote admonishing the supposed “quick fix” mentality behind this reform plan.

We can agree to disagree. But at least the Post did here what it does well—sniff out the politics at play. It reports (and perhaps editorializes) that since 2002, “What has changed in Philadelphia, as elsewhere across the country, appears to be the political atmosphere. Pennsylvania’s governor is now a Democrat, Edward G. Rendell. And the privatization wave now seems a little passé.”

I hope that seeking out quality school managers—and yes, it’s possible those could even exist outside a district bureaucracy—never becomes “passé.” But one fears this could get worse in Philly before it gets better, so I’ll be watching to see if recently-hired schools CEO Arlene Ackerman, a sensible reformer, will withstand or join this anti-privatization wave.

At first glance, this New York Times article on Brooklyn’s Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice looks to be another feel-good story about the small schools initiative. It mentions the usual statistics—93 percent of seniors graduated, most are going to college, etc—but then the article takes a moment to focus on the dedicated teachers who make it all possible. As in many high-performing charter schools, this specific small school has a young principal (Elana Karopkin, 32). For four years she’s led the school and produced what on the surface appear to be positive results. But, Ms. Karopkin is leaving her school to become an assistant superintendent at Achievement First. Here’s what she has to say about the move:

Ms. Karopkin said it would be unfair to say she was burned out, but admitted she was nothing less than “exhausted,” both physically and emotionally. “You are taking a bunch of hyper, type A perfectionist people and giving them a herculean task,” she said. “People have to work much too hard to do what we are doing. People cannot work at this level all their lives and nobody is prepared to do something at a level of mediocrity.”

I’m not sure that Achievement First will be much different (although perhaps in an oversight role the pressure subsides a smidge), but that’s beside the point. Ms. Karopkin’s comments are a rare, frank look at what happens when the raw enthusiasm of a twenty-something out to change the world collides with reality. Yes, these greenhorns enter these schools (be them small, charter, urban, etc.) with open minds and full hearts, but they’re also incredibly driven and perfectionists (per Ms. Karopkin). Within Teach For America, “corps members have an average GPA of 3.6 and 95 percent held leadership positions on their college campuses.” Based on their performance, I’d hazard a guess that the majority of these young reformers are not accustomed to failure.  And when they see failure—students failing classes, dropping out of school, ending up on the streets—that is completely out of their control, it saps their will to continue the Sisyphean task of pushing kids to better and brighter futures. Therefore, the ultimate question is: how can schools capture the energy of these young teachers and funnel it such that it sustains for a longer period of time?

Could it be with more money? Smaller class sizes? Tempered expectations? A more gradual introduction to the problems of an urban classroom? For his part, chancellor Joel Klein said

“When people are part of the world of changing things for children, they don’t view it is as work,” he said, pointing to members of his own staff who log 14-hour days.

Perhaps Klein’s crew doesn’t view their work as such, but I’m not sure many of them spend time in the classroom. For the teachers that do, whether they view it as “work” or not, they require the means to maintain their sanity. If both innovative school districts and charter schools can’t figure out how to meet these needs, we’ll continue to lose our most talented reformers in the trenches.

On Wednesday’s NewsHour, John Merrow resumed his series on Michelle Rhee’s efforts to revamp the D.C. Public Schools. This installment centers around Hart Middle School, a chronically-failing institution that landed on Rhee’s radar as a candidate for dramatic restructuring. Merrow interviews teachers, students, and administrators from the school, all of whom resent the threat posed by Rhee’s evident willingness to mix things up. We also hear from William Lockridge, a member of the D.C. Board of Education, who says that Rhee is misguided and hasn’t “taken a thorough analysis of this school district.” All of which adds up to an amazingly widespread and unyielding adherence to the status quo. At a school that has missed AYP five years running, everyone wants more of the same.

Merrow tells us that after the segment was taped, Rhee dismissed all the administrators at Hart and replaced them with a private management company. So far, Rhee has emerged surprisingly unscathed from such controversial adventures; the somehow ever-popular Marion Barry got a taste of Rhee’s teflon when his plan to protest the latest round of school closings fizzled. If the resentment that comes through in the NewsHour segment is any indication, though, Rhee is nurturing a growing opposition. One worries about how long she can keep this all up.

A few weeks ago at the NewSchools Venture Fund summit, Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s jealousy about Washington mayor Adrian Fenty’s successful takeover of D.C.’s schools was palpable. This isn’t going to help: Governor Corzine has selected, as Newark’s next superintendent, Clifford Janey—the very man Fenty ran out of town as soon as he got the reins of the school system. I can hear Fenty laughing now.

A post from guest blogger and Fordham Vice President for Ohio Programs & Policy Terry Ryan.

Ohio’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, Susan Zelman, announced to her staff today that she will be stepping down as state superintendent. She is leaving after several months of public, and sometimes nasty, tussling with Governor Strickland and his emerging agenda for Ohio’s K-12 education. Dr. Zelman will be missed, and now speculation turns to her possible successor. Scott Elliott of the Dayton Daily News has listed on his blog four possible candidates (including the Governor’s wife). He is seeking suggestions on other names to consider; if you have any insights here please share with Scott and his readers.

So, after posting this, Mike drops me an email asking if I’ve got his back... I, of course, ask if he is insinuating that my blond highlights are not completely au naturelle.  Alas, he merely fears a backlash from the female constituency (not unusual in a campaign year). While I agree with him that hair color rights are a must in the workplace (not that I need them, mind you), I’m not sure I would take it much farther. I happen to like, for example, things like dress codes. And I’m reminded of the dress code section of the Fordham personnel manual (yes, I actually read it after being hired recently). It states, “Business casual attire is required. Managers reserve the right to require business attire for special situations (board meetings, important visitors, for example).” Hmmm... I’m not so sure that the Bowling Green administrators and workplace administrators are all that different, and that’s a good thing. I, for one, (a former high school teacher who chaperoned many a school dance) have had my fill of prom-dress bikinis.  Back to work....

Update: This post was originally and erroneously attributed to Liam Julian, who does not have blond highlights.

One clear message from today’s conference is that Washington, D.C., is the new “it” city for education reform activity. The jealousy in the room is palpable. First, there’s Michelle Rhee (speaking now), who is dynamic, entrepreneurial, and fearless. There’s Adrian Fenty, who is putting every bit of his political capital into turning around the District of Columbia Public Schools. There’s competitive pressure from charter schools, which enroll 30 percent of the city’s students. And there’s even a reform-minded teachers union president, George Parker; Rhee just mentioned his recent Washington Post op-ed. Consider this concluding line:

The old-school paradigm of union rigidity must give way to a new-school approach of working productively with school leaders to improve student achievement.

Ah, watch the reformers from other cities swoon.

The American Enterprise Institute’s education scholar, Rick Hess, has a new piece out about mayoral control of district schools. Basically, Hess concludes that mayoral control is no panacea for a city’s educational problems... so cross it off your “Educational Panacea” list.

Amidst criticism over her principal firings, D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee has dismissed the principal of the school that her own kids attend.

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee will fire somewhere between 24 and 30 principals at the end of the school year, in large part because under the rules of NCLB she’s required to restructure 27 chronically-failing schools.

The head of the principals association, meanwhile, evidently finds it inconceivable that replacing a school’s leader could help improve its performance:

Frances M. Plummer, executive director of the D.C. Association of Elementary School Principals, called the firings “wholesale and heartless” and said Rhee was damaging the school system.

“To cut people loose at this juncture does not benefit children,” she said. “If you are about the children, you should be about the teachers and administrators, too.”

Is there, in Plummer’s mind, a juncture at which such firings would be appropriate, I wonder? At least this nonsense was buried at the bottom of the article.

Bravo to Andres Alonso, Baltimore’s schools superintendent, for launching a campaign to recruit 500 volunteers to work in the city’s schools. It’s one of his smartest responses to last week’s horrible teacher attack (his other was declaring “zero tolerance” for that sort of violence). Alonso’s spokesman says that “people want to help, and they want a concrete way to help.”

Indeed. To be sure, Baltimore needs a broad-based, systematic approach to solving its discipline problems. (Consider that students have been expelled 112 times this year alone for attacking teaches.) But rallying parents and the larger community is smart. Perhaps Alonso, a long-time New Yorker, remembers the public’s overwhelming interest in doing something to help after the 9/11 attacks. Or learned from the Bush Administration’s failure to enlist the public in making sacrifices or performing community service in a time of war. Whatever his thinking, it shows great leadership to turn an awful incident into an opportunity for positive action.

Mike, I agree that holding superintendents accountable for the performance of their schools is entirely appropriate, but as with any new law, the devil will prove to be in the details. The Commercial Dispatch reports that school performance will be based on the state’s accountability system; that’s not terribly encouraging in a state that earned a D+ from Fordham for its state standards. And what about a superintendent whose district shows great improvement for two straight years, yet still rates “underperforming”? The proposed law appears to be a blunt instrument applied to a complicated problem, especially considering that two years is barely time to implement changes, much less see the results show up in testing. Finally, we can’t forget that superintendent turnover is already a problem, with the average tenure lasting just a handful of years, and that should give us education reformers pause: change is hard to sustain without consistent leadership. Let’s hope this law works as intended, weeding out those superintendents who do little to help kids, and that it doesn’t exacerbate the leadership shortage found in too many school systems today.

The Mississippi Board of Education wants superintendents to be held accountable for student learning, the Clarion-Ledger reports. Supes in underperforming districts would be removed after two years, even if they were elected by the public. (Yes, some southern states still elect local superintendents.) Unfortunately voters don’t appear to put student achievement high on their priority lists when voting for education officials—at least in the case of school boards—so this tonic is more than appropriate. Fair is fair: if educators are to be held accountable, their bosses should be too.