From Reform to Results: The EdReform 10.0 Empowerment Principles

From Reform to Results: The EdReform 10.0 Empowerment Principles

“We are appalled that more than 30 years since A Nation at Risk, the nation’s overall academic proficiency rating is less than 40 percent (often less than 20 percent among at-risk students), that high school graduation is not a measure of a well-rounded, rigorous education and, among other things that students are able to leave high school lacking college and career readiness.

“While we respect and recognize that many exceptional and well-intentioned lawmakers, leaders, and educators may disagree, we believe the single most impactful and important gift we can give to our communities, our families, our children and grandchildren is the power that comes with the opportunity to choose one’s school and make their lives better.

“We refuse to accept that in such a great and bountiful country, and despite 25 years of experience, we can offer only a few million students in need tenuous choice opportunities at a better education.

“To do so, advocates must unite anew.

“We will set a foundation for what we require of both policy and politics to ensure the next generation of education reform is built on innovation and the flexibility to create, iterate, test and implement the next wave of education policy in the United States.

“We believe it’s time to achieve the new “split screen” approach to innovation, broaden the charter schooling movement, and expand all forms of school choice to those who need it the most.

“First, we will aggressively advocate for new laws that allow a wide variety of providers and organizations to create, manage, approve, and work at charter schools and educational enterprises. Favoring only those individuals or institutions that have already proven that their system works ignores the fact that such entities were once a new idea with no established track record. Discriminating against organizations willing to create, manage, and fund charter schools based on tax status or tenure impedes the rights of students and families.

“Second, we must create laws that encourage the creation of new schools — in public, private and charter communities — to create and restructure existing traditional schools. Laws that over-regulate private schools while at the same time permitting parents to make choices inadvertently discourages private schools from entering such programs or expanding.

“Third, we commit to ensuring that policies and laws created with our involvement ensure flexibility. Only schools free from most rules and conventional regulations can best explore the potential to deploy digital technologies, teach an entirely experiential curriculum, or support project-centered learning as part of competency-based education.

“Fourth, we believe in accountability that is student centered, not system centered. We renew our commitment to holding to high standards any person or institution with the privilege of serving our children. However, we commit to focusing this decade’s version of assessment and measurement on individual students, and will call on researchers and measurement experts to produce real time, longitudinal evaluations which provide a long view of progress.

“Fifth and finally, we commit to extending ourselves and our work beyond true-believers, to non-believers, to engage in discussions, civil debate and argument, and failing to turn hearts and minds, to fighting with every resource at our disposal to accomplish our shared goals.

“Hence, we the undersigned join hands and commit ourselves to the birth of EdReform 10.0: a vision of innovation, flexibility and freedom in our shared quest to improve all schools, and to the understanding that a young movement can disappear if its founders, participants, and beneficiaries fail to keep it alive and ignore the importance of struggle in making real progress.”

Click here to sign your commitment to the EdReform 10.0 Empowerment Principles.