By Steven Schulman, on Thu Jul 14, 2011 at 12:00 PM ET
One of the best aspects of my wonderful job is that I get to touch so many different areas. In the morning I am a human rights lawyer, advising refugees; by mid-day I am a civil rights litigator; in the early afternoon, I discuss micro-finance with my transactional partners; later I go to Capitol Hill to lobby for improving our immigration courts; and in the evening – at least on this evening – I work on education reform.
I had the pleasure tonight to host a panel of educators prior to a screening of the documentary “Waiting for Superman,” which addresses the failings of the U.S. public education system. In Akin Gump’s New York office we had Richard Barth, CEO of KIPP; Jason Levy, Principal of NY CIS 339 in the Bronx; and Rafiq Kalam Id-Din III, a former law firm associate and the founder of Teaching Firms of America-Professional Preparatory Charter School in Brooklyn. Our panelists were open and honest, and led a spirited debate about the film, the state of the public school system, and the opportunities to fix it. I won’t repeat what was said, in part because I didn’t ask the panelists for permission to quote them on the record, and in part because there is already plenty written that summarizes the debate well (including here, here, and here), but mostly because seeing this film made me think about our country more broadly.
Read the rest of… Steven Schulman: Waiting on Super Action
RP Readers, here’s your opportunity to prove to one and all that you could sit for the SAT without breaking into a cold sweat:
Jon walked to work at an average speed of 6 miles per hour and biked back along the same route at 10 miles per hour. If his total traveling time was 2 hours, how many miles were in the round trip? Your choices are A. 6, B. 6.25, C. 7.5, D. 8, or E. 10.
Chances are you could probably narrow your choice down to two or three possibilities. But, what if you are a high school junior, enrolled in a school that is overcrowded and underfunded, sitting in classes taught in two languages, and nobody in your family has ever taken the SAT before? What are your chances then?
***
My friend Jack did not have to deal with those challenges when he was preparing to apply to college. The road was pre-paved, and Jack smoothed it out along the way as he studied for the SAT, applied to college, and eventually accepted admission at the University of Southern California.
When he got to USC, Jack caught the entrepreneurial bug. It’s like the “politics bug” – once you catch it, you have a hard time running away from it. Not far removed from taking the SAT himself, Jack started tutoring some family friends for the test. Two students quickly turned into ten, and Jack found that he had written enough of his own material to create a full-fledged pre-college outreach program. That’s how Study Smart Tutors was born.
***
This is a brief look into entrepreneurship and education. They are two worlds we don’t think of colliding; but, when they do, the reaction sparks unlimited possibilities. Like in any chemical reaction, however, there must be just the right amount of reactants…
• 1 Part Risk: Jack graduated college and decided to grow Study Smart Tutors. He turned down stable jobs that most recent college grads now dream of, trading them in for a seat behind the wheel of his own company. Recently, I asked him if he was nervous to take on the gamble that is entrepreneurship as a twenty-something. “Now is the time with the least risk,” he said. “When you’re young and unattached is the time to bet big.” Of course there are still nerves and concerns, and by Jack’s own admission, “things aren’t perfect, especially when there are no regular paychecks or bankable guarantees.” But he understands the risk he is assuming, and he knows that it will be more difficult to take these chances as he gets older.
Read the rest of… Zac Byer: Entrepreneurship and Education . . . A Much-Needed Marriage
By Grant Smith, RP Staff, on Wed Jul 13, 2011 at 11:00 AM ET
The Politics of Generation Y Revisited
On June 15th, my esteemed colleague, Zac Byer, published a thoughtful piece on generation Y’s place in the world. Most importantly, he zeroed in on Gen Y’s strong attachment to nostalgia.
Perhaps most insightful, he theorized that this attachment to nostalgia is potentially rooted in a generational fear that what lies ahead may not be as bright as what has already passed.
At risk of sounding like a pessimist, one has to wonder, “what if the pessimists have this one right?” What if Gen Y – financially speaking – is destined to end up as a new “lost generation?”
Let’s look at what is coming down the road: student loan debt that surpasses credit card debt; risk of inflation from multiple rounds of quantitative easing; the end of Social Security and Medicare as we know it; the list goes on and on.
Like the credit card shopper who splurges at the store, only to wind up with the bill months later, Gen Y is very likely to be the generation who receives the credit card bill in the mail from a previous generation or two. Unlike the credit card shopper who at least got to enjoy their products, Gen Y may get all of the tab, but none of the goods.
Read the rest of… Grant Smith: The Politics of Gen Y Revisited – A New Lost Generation?
By Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, on Fri Jun 10, 2011 at 8:30 AM ET
I recently visited Madison where I spoke to Wisconsin Women in Government, a group founded 24 years ago to support women who choose a career in public service. I welcomed the chance to talk about the ways women discover their power, a subject near to my heart and experience. Even though I’d grown up in a very political family, I’d never imagined as a young girl that I’d become a lawyer or run for political office. That’s what guys did. But eventually the women’s movement empowered me to develop talents I didn’t know I had and inspired me to encourage other women to do the same.
When I was in college, I saw women rally, conduct sit-ins and teach-ins, and march in the streets. In large groups and small meetings, women told their stories, demanded their rights, and passionately argued that they were equal to men. Women friends became class speakers, were hired to teach in law school, and won lawsuits. Heartened by their words and actions, I went to law school myself and founded a group called Women in Politics.
I couldn’t have accomplished these things without the support of other women who were also becoming empowered. Led by trailblazers like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, we gradually came to see ourselves differently and stopped believing what the world kept telling us–that we didn’t have it in us to make it a man’s world. We changed ourselves and we changed society. Friendship and solidarity made these transformations possible.
It wasn’t easy. I didn’t have a single woman professor in college. After law school, I applied for a job at Legal Services, and since I had two children, asked if I could work part time. The director said no. He wanted Legal Services to stick to the same standards as large law firms. They didn’t have part-time lawyers, and neither would he. A few years later, he was elected to Congress and joined a family-friendly caucus. He had changed, like many others.
Read the rest of… Kathleen Kennedy Townsend: Empowering Public Employees: Lessons From the Women’s Movement
By Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, on Wed Jun 1, 2011 at 8:30 AM ET
Elementary education thrives in the middle of an Orlando YMCA
I was in Orlando a few weeks ago, but not at Disney World or the Epcot Center. My youngest is 19, so it’s been a while since I stayed at the African lodge and watched the giraffes come up to our window. Even further back is my memory of “It’s a Small World After All” at the New York’s World’s Fair in 1964, a place I visited quite often as a 12-year-old when my father was running for the Senate. Fast forward almost half a century and my second daughter is pregnant, so I hope I’ll be back to Disney World again before too long.
Actually my destination a few weeks ago was just as exciting as the Big Mountain Thunder Railroad or Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin. It was a school of the future, already up and running: the Lake Nona YMCA/NorthLake Park Community-School Partnership.
NorthLake Park public elementary school is located in the same building as the local YMCA. Wow! The 30,000-square-foot Y is literally right in the middle of the school. The children, who would never have had access to a swimming pool at any regular public school, can now learn to swim, and they also get in shape in the gym and on the walking trails. Some of them take yoga before a test to reduce their pre-test butterflies.
Teachers, too, can easily get to the gym’s StairMasters, weights, and workout classes. The results aren’t just better abs but better attitudes. The teachers are happy, and their higher retention rate pays dividends for the kids.
The parents are also more involved. Instead of an awkward once-a-year meeting, teachers and parents find themselves on adjacent bikes in the spin class. They’re comfortable with one another.
I was stunned to learn that the school was more than a decade old, because it looked so new and fresh. A few years ago, when the school system didn’t have the money to paint the building, they turned to their partner. The Y raised the money and the painters came.
The school and the Y were originally built in 2000, the result of an innovative partnership that included Orange County Public Schools, the Central Florida YMCA, and other private- and public-sector partners.
I admired this partnership because I had led efforts to connect schools and communities in Maryland for almost 20 years. If the community feels the school is theirs, the parents are more apt to visit, volunteer, and talk to teachers. The schools can only benefit from neighbors who care — fewer fights, better test scores, healthier students. Nationally, the group Communities in Schools, launched by the visionary reformer Bill Milliken, has done a terrific job of attracting community support for schools and promoting the ideas that all children should have mentors, do community service, and have great health care.
But what I saw in Orlando was unique, a local initiative that’s the first of its kind in the nation. Here the community is represented by the YMCA, an already vigorous and attractive institution. This means that the school doesn’t have to do all the hard work. It has a built-in magnet.
As I walked along the halls and visited the classrooms, I kept imagining what could be accomplished if we replicated this model in the 2,500 YMCAs across the country. The Ys already flourish, because they have enticing facilities that people are eager to come to. It would be amazing if each Y could be paired with a school.
Read the rest of… Kathleen Kennedy Townsend: The School of the Future, Up and Running
We’ve received a lot of feedback on The Atlantic magazine’s piece that we posted this week, in which former New York City School Chief Joel Klein praised the work that contributing RP Eva Moskowitz has been doing to promote education in the innercity.
We thought that now is an appropriate opportunity to hear it from Eva herself. Accordingly, we present a ten-minute video of a speech Eva gave last year in Denver on the subject of charter schools.
Former New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein penned a lengthy and thought-provoking essay that appears in this month’s Atlantic magazine entitled “The Failure of American Schools.” In it, he reveals a number of disturbing trends and endemic problems that plague the nation’s public schools system.
Klein offers, however, a signal of hope that comes from the work being done currently by contributing RP, Eva Moskowitz, in her Harlem Success Academy:
Eva Moskowitz is Founder and CEO of the Harlem Success Network
At the individual school level, the differences can be breathtaking. One charter school in New York City, Harlem Success Academy 1, has students who are demographically almost identical to those attending nearby community and charter schools, yet it gets entirely different results. Harlem Success has 88 percent of its students proficient in reading and 95 percent in math; six other nearby schools have an average of 31 percent proficient in reading and 39 percent in math. And according to the most-recent scores on New York State fourth-grade science tests, Success had more than 90 percent of its students at the highest (advanced) level, while the city had only 43 percent at advanced, and Success’s black students outperformed white students at more than 700 schools across the state. In fact, Success now performs at the same level as the gifted-and-talented schools in New York City—all of which have demanding admissions requirements, while Success randomly selects its students, mostly poor and minority, by lottery.
These school-level differences ultimately reflect the effectiveness of a child’s particular teachers. Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, has shown that, while some teachers get a year and a half’s worth of learning into a year, others get in only half a year’s worth of learning with essentially the same students. Imagine the cumulative impact of the best teachers over 13 years of elementary and secondary education. Indeed, even if California raised its performance to Texas’s level, Detroit to Boston’s, the neighborhood schools in Harlem to Harlem Success’s—that is to say, if our least effective teachers performed at the level of our most effective—the impact would be seismic.
By Mark Nickolas, on Thu Apr 28, 2011 at 8:30 AM ET
Last fall, at age 44, after 15 years in Democratic politics — or writing about it as an advocate and observer — I decided to challenge myself one more time and go after the thing that has interested me for quite a while: taking my experience and applying it to one of the most powerful mediums for affecting change: political documentary filmmaking.
I had come to believe that the documentary presents the greatest potential of informing the masses about the happenings in our society, providing itself as an important catalyst for political and social change. Think no further than Fahrenheit 9/11 or An Inconvenient Truthor even Super Size Meto understand how documentaries are able to circumvent the media or political filters and speak directly to the public about the issues of our time. They usually don’t force change quickly, but instead help to generate the critical mass necessary to alter perceptions and raise awareness, allowing us to re-prioritize our concerns as a society, rather than relying on the traditional media or, God-forbid, government officials to lead the way (are they still looking for those WMDs in Iraq that they both promised us?).
This time, I resisted the impulse to simply jump into the deep end of the pool and learn the craft of filmmaking on my own. If I were 10 years younger, who knows? But having recently moved back to New York City, I decided to do the thing that many of us 40-somethings frequently seem to long for – rather than just dream about – and that was going back to school. In my case, film school.
In brighter days...
After taking a close look at some of the excellent film programs in New York City, I decided to go against the wisdom of pretty much everyone whose advice I sought, and applied to only one school. If I didn’t get in, I was fine with those consequences. I’ve done well in politics, and had just left a tumultuous stint working for Governor David Paterson as we tried, unsuccessfully, to keep the job that Eliot Spitzer suddenly handed him a few years earlier. I knew I would be okay if school didn’t pan out. Either way, I would have chased a dream and would no longer torture myself over whether or not to pursue it.
Ultimately, I applied to master’s program in Media Studies and Film at The New School. Being a UC Berkeley graduate, and a strong Democrat, I suspected I’d fit in quite well with the more renegade and avant-garde environment of The New School (after all, the school began a century ago largely from a group of breakaway scholars from Columbia University who refused to sign their government loyalty oaths). Beside, while NYU is renowned for its film school, it is geared toward traditional fiction films. If you want to go the documentary route, The New School makes much more for sense. So, I applied in October, got accepted in November, and began school barely a month later.
During orientation, I learned I was the oldest of my incoming class of about 70 students. That discovery came just as I pulled out a notebook and pen to take notes, rather than typing directly into a shiny MacBook Pro, as did a majority of my new classmates (note: I used a typewriter the last time I was in school in the late 1980s). It was a new world and, at first, awkward. Terrifying, actually. It’s funny how you don’t feel old working on a political campaign when in your forties, but feel ancient when you’re a new grad school student. Like, dinosaur-ancient.
Thankfully, that feeling largely subsides after a few weeks as you realize just how great of an advantage and head start you have on your classmates when it comes breath of experience, perspective and focus, all of which translates into your coursework and relationship with professors, one way or another. While most grad students are, understandably, still figuring out what they want to do after they’re done with school, an older student has a laser-like approach to figuring out the lay of the land, the right classes to take and professors to avoid, how to take advantage of all the networking opportunities during visits from filmmakers and distributors and producers, and, most importantly, a plan. As a result, the lectures and readings are remarkably interesting and you’re enjoying it too much to even contemplate meaningful procrastination. On top of that, it turns out that professors love older students because we have a purpose, are engaged by what they’re teaching, and we’ve been around-the-block long enough to intuitively know what matters and what doesn’t when processing large amounts of new information.
Read the rest of… Mark Nickolas: From the Political Trenches to Film School
By Eva Moskowitz, on Mon Apr 25, 2011 at 8:30 AM ET
Contributing RP Eva Moskowitz, a former New York City Councilperson, has been an outspoken advocate for charter schools since her time in public office. Now the founder and chief executive of the Success Charter Network, a collection of seven charter schools in Harlem and the Bronx, she is speaking out on what she has learned from her work. Today, she argues, contrary to conventional wisdom, that class size is not the critical factor upon which to build education policy.
Here’s an excerpt — the link to the entire op-ed piece (originally published in the Manchester Union-Leader) can be found below it:
THAT CLASS size should be small is revered like an article of faith in this country. Its adherents include parents, education groups, politicians and, of course, the unions whose ranks it swells. In many states it is even required by law, which has lead to millions of dollars in fines against schools in Florida and a lawsuit against New York City by its teachers union.
Yet small class size is neither a guarantor nor a prerequisite of educational excellence.
The worst public elementary school in Manhattan, 16 percent of whose students read at grade level, has an average class size of 21; PS 130, one of the city’s best, has an average class size of 30. Small class size is one factor in academic success. The question, then, is whether the educational benefits of class-size reduction justify the costs.
Some proponents contend that because research shows reducing class size is beneficial, spending on this should be prioritized over anything that is unsupported by research. That’s a neat rhetorical trick but unsound logic. The absence of research on, say, teacher salaries doesn’t prove that we should pay the minimum wage to teachers to dramatically reduce class size. Research should guide spending decisions only if it measures the benefits per dollar of spending on all alternatives.
Our own Contributing RP, Jeff Smith, may have never dreamed that any good would come from his required stay at a federal prison. But the unlikeliest of environments proved to be an unexpected fountain of entrepreneurial spirit.
Jeff writes about what he learned in this week’s Inc. magazine:
B.J. was one of many fellow inmates with big plans for the future. He vowed that upon his release, he’d leave the dope game and fly straight. He’d recently purchased a porn website targeted at men with a fetish for women having sex on top of or inside luxury cars, with a special focus that explained his nickname. For just $10,000, he had purchased the domain name, the site design, and all of the necessary back-end work enabling financial transactions. The only component B.J. needed to supply were the women, and due to his incarceration, he’d named his 19-year-old son “vice president for personnel and talent development” and charged him with overseeing auditions. Who says a good old-fashioned family business can’t make it anymore?
It was my first week in a federal prison, and I was beginning to see that it was far more nuanced than the hotbed of sex, drugs, and violence depicted on television documentaries. It was teeming with ambitious, street-smart men, many who appear to have been very successful drug dealers on the outside, and some of whom possess business instincts as sharp as those of the CEOs who wined and dined me six months before. Using somewhat different jargon than you might hear at Wharton, they discussed business concepts such as promotional incentives (“I don’t never charge no first-time user”), quality control and new product launches (“you try anything new, you better have some longtime crackhead test your new shit”), territorial expansion (“Once Dude on the East Side got chalked, I had my dopeboys out on his corners befo’ that motherf—er’s body was cold”), and even barriers to entry (“Any motherf—er that wanna do bidness on the West Side know me and my boys ain’t scurred to cap his ass”).
I had the pleasure tonight to host a panel of educators prior to a screening of the documentary “Waiting for Superman,” which addresses the failings of the U.S. public education system. In Akin Gump’s New York office we had Richard Barth, CEO of KIPP; Jason Levy, Principal of NY CIS 339 in the Bronx; and Rafiq Kalam Id-Din III, a former law firm associate and the founder of Teaching Firms of America-Professional Preparatory Charter School in Brooklyn. Our panelists were open and honest, and led a spirited debate about the film, the state of the public school system, and the opportunities to fix it. I won’t repeat what was said, in part because I didn’t ask the panelists for permission to quote them on the record, and in part because there is already plenty written that summarizes the debate well (including here, here, and here), but mostly because seeing this film made me think about our country more broadly. 
