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The op-ed below written by Jeanne Allen was published in Realcleareducation.com on October 26th, 2017

Matt Damon and I are “in” the same film. I should be thrilled, but it’s a poorly contrived documentary with a storyline worlds apart from the reality of education for most Americans.

Entitled “Backpack Full of Cash” for a phrase I used in an interview with the filmmakers, it posits that the point of any form of education choice – charter schools, opportunity scholarship programs and other alternatives to traditional public schools – is to privatize American education, hence the use of my comments to frame the documentary. The full metaphor is actually focused on equity, and how choice can give power to the least powerful in society when their children are “worth” the same amount of money as everyone else.

Then, schools must vie for the privilege of educating our children, versus forcing them into specific schools, chosen by political actors in school systems, and based on one’s ZIP code. Rather than educate the public about these artificial, adult-centered school assignments and their impact on student outcomes, the producers of the film depict those who believe in education choice as people who seek profit and the ruin of public schools, and those who run failing public schools and fight with millions in taxpayer dollars to protect their contracts, their zoning and their turf day after day as selfless characters. What?!

The traditional school system and its protectors have a captive clientele. Unless you have the money, a proverbial backpack full of cash, to go to private school or move, you are stuck. Being stuck is precisely why charter schools and myriad other options were created. These tools that give parents real power have mitigated poverty, criminality, dysfunctional communities and discrimination – all conditions prolonged by an education system that fails approximately 60 percent of its students year after year.

Sarah Mondale should know this. A producer of the film, she and her uncle, former Vice President Walter Mondale are from Minnesota – the birthplace of charter schools, where progressive educators embraced the importance of student-centered learning, of innovation that knows no walls and of power for parents to decide what school or learning environment works best for their child.

Hollywood star Matt Damon should also know this. A Hollywood millionaire and the film’s narrator, he was blessed with living in the right ZIP code and went to a prestigious little high school a stone’s throw from Harvard Yard, where he would attend college. Only a few miles away, kids in Boston’s poorest neighborhoods find themselves in the wrong ZIP code, with futures as dim as Damon’s was bright. Damon could have described their plight; instead, his narrative papers over a system where bureaucracy and unions mandate uniformity, seniority and tenure, and students are expected to abide a centuries-old system while the rest of the world moves on without them.

It’s not like our actor friend doesn’t understand school choice. Damon chose not to send his children to their assigned public school, even in Pacific Palisades, CA. He once told The Guardian that sending their kids “to private school was a big, big, big deal.” He went on to explain: “And it was a giant family discussion. But it was a circular conversation, really, because ultimately, we don’t have a choice. I mean, I pay for a private education and I’m trying to get the one that most matches the public education that I had, but that kind of progressive education no longer exists in the public system. It’s unfair.” I’ll tell you what’s unfair. Unfair is telling parents of few means that their ZIP code, not the aspirations for their children, will sentence their children to attend schools that fail to educate their students year-after-year, decade-after-decade and generation-after-generation.

By his participation in the film, Damon has taken a very public stand against education opportunity. That’s hypocrisy. He, like many of us, make choices every day that we believe will help our kids receive an education that meets their needs. Surveys and experience show that most Americans believe such choices should be available to every parent, particularly the disadvantaged. He does not. Rather than embrace the notion that money should follow students to the schools that best meet their needs, he succumbed to hallow rhetoric bought and sold by unions whose membership and support base is in decline.

The backers of “Backpack Full of Cash” ignore the global paradigm shift that is transforming education, from small rural districts that have personalized learning to private micro-schools in Africa giving students their first access to learning. The one-size-fits-all factory model of schooling is obsolete – it’s evident in America’s flat test scores and startling high college remedial course rate. SAT scores find less than half of all students exceed college and career readiness benchmarks. And for students who do enroll in college, an estimated 40 percent to 60 percent of first-year students require remedial courses. Technology has transformed access to knowledge, and research has produced information about how brains function and the way students learn that should be changing the way schools are structured. But that’s nowhere in the documentary. It is written like it’s 1950 and Martians have invaded the schools – looking for cash.

The documentary’s trailer ironically argues that the innovations in teaching and learning, to which parents, once given a choice, are making a beeline for their kids to choose, have “a devastating impact on public schools, and the most vulnerable children who rely on them.”

The filmmakers have it exactly backward. It’s the system they are defending that now has the devastating impact on those it was intended to serve.  When the zones around failing schools are no longer a barrier and doors are open to them, those who have an alternative will take the exit. They know that their children need schools that work for them, schools that reflect today’s world, not a 180-year old system. When you’re ready to narrate that film Matt Damon, we’ll get you a truly progressive filmmaker. And some cash.

Jeanne Allen is Founder & CEO of the Center for Education Reform. Allen was interviewed for the film, which was portrayed by the producers as a broad overview of education reform, with no indication of the bias of the actual product.

The op-ed below written by Center for Education Reform CEO and Founder Jeanne Allen appeared in the Washington Examiner on October 23rd, 2017.   

“How can we, through a variety of efforts, whether it’s through technology, innovation or policy, have an equal opportunity for everyone to participate in the future?” Those were the words of Silicon Valley entrepreneur Michael Moe, and it was the central question addressed by Moe and the nation’s leading education innovators and thought leaders on the occasion of the Center for Education Reform’s 24th anniversary last week. These individuals, diverse in race and ideology, are unified in their focus and their work.

Their conclusion? Education must be rooted in rigor assuring high levels of literacy and numeracy, be broad in scope, personalized, and accessible beyond ZIP codes and traditional schooling lines. “The way to have better outcomes for all kids is to meet them where they are and inspire them,” said former D.C. City Councilman and author Kevin Chavous, rather than the current system that requires them to sit still, be directed by teachers still trained the way they were 50 years ago, and not provide them with an education that truly meets their own way and interests in learning.

Former Gov. John Engler, R-Mich., who this month took over the reins as chairman of the National Assessment Governing Board, which conducts national assessments and publishes “The Nation’s Report Card,” kicked off the evening’s discussion. Engler’s biggest concern is with the nation’s inadequate reading scores and its multiplier effect on an individual student’s long-term growth.

According to its latest assessment of reading levels, only 9 percent of fourth graders reached the level of “advanced” in reading, only 27 percent are proficient, and a combined 64 percent are basic or below basic. That’s in fourth grade.

These troubling figures nearly mirror the NAEP scores from two years prior, and they’re almost identical when U.S. students are measured in eighth grade (4 percent advanced, 31 percent proficient and 64 percent basic or below basic). In other words, the U.S. education system has flat-lined from year to year and between grades.

Consider that an estimated 40 percent of students will enroll in a two- or four-year college, but more than 60 percent of those students will need remedial courses, and only 59 percent of first-time college students will graduate within six years.

Engler encouraged the education reform community to eliminate the stigma attached to skilled technical and manufacturing jobs, and the pathways to those careers.

For years, the mantra in education was preparing and ensuring every student would enroll in college, but the evidence is clear, both in terms of student debt, remedial rates, and college dropout rates that the nation is failing to ensure that a majority of students will be prepared for education and for life. While we must work to resolve these issues for young students, we must also address the single biggest issue facing our economy – millions of jobs that don’t have workers and workers without the skills and lacking basic literacy necessary for many jobs. The fastest growing sectors in the U.S. economy are technical and manufacturing jobs that require high technological literacy, not to mention a wholly different approach to schooling.

A study by Deloitte estimated the U.S. economy will create 3.5 million manufacturing jobs in the next 10 years.

Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta told a gathering at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce last week that an estimated 6.2 million unfilled jobs include a high percentage of skilled manufacturing positions that rely on employees having advanced training and technological know-how that yesterday’s manufacturing positions did not require.

As our conversation at CER made evident, more needs to challenge the status quo in order to improve our nation’s education system. Doing so requires a relentless pursuit of ensuring that innovation and education opportunity are infused throughout all of education, and that we must provide diverse offerings for students to pursue multiple pathways to master basic subjects and become college or career ready.

Chris Whittle, an education entrepreneur who started the first public-private partnership in education, founded the internationally recognized Avenues Schools and now has launched Whittle School & Studios, said the modern school should help every student master the basics and identify the area(s) every student is good at.

Whittle impressed the importance of helping students achieve their unique long-term goal, and more importantly, the vital role a school can play in enabling a student to succeed for the rest of their life. Whittle added, “If a school can help you find that, that school helps you find something else that’s even more important, which is confidence…”

Today, the education system silos students throughout their schooling lives to the detriment to students and our nation’s success. Those silos are supported and protected by hundreds of separately regulated and restricted funding streams, processes and rules that mandate arcane behaviors that no longer recognize how students learn, how teachers might better teach, how schools may be constructed, and how technology and knowledge might be better utilized and transmitted.

In the next 24 years, we need to break down these silos. We must move away from the us-versus-them mentality perpetuated by the education establishment (namely, teachers’ unions, school board associations, and other entities that profit off the antiquated one-size-fits-all approach to education). The need to eradicate silos doesn’t end there. As a country we must also eliminate the mentality that education should be delivered by fixed grade levels, that 8th grade or 12th grade has an objective definition, that primary and secondary education should be separate from post-secondary.

The Center for Education Reform is committed to a future for education that centers on the individual needs of the student, from kindergarten through adult life. This nation must ensure that learners at all levels have what they need to access the American dream. That doesn’t require more funding; it requires different approaches that embrace the truly American idea of freedom at the core.

The full discussion referenced in this piece is available here.

The op-ed below written by Johnny C. Taylor Jr. appeared in the Times Record News on September 29th, 2017. Taylor is the president and CEO of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, the largest organization exclusively representing the black college community. He is one of CER’s “Voices of Opportunity.” Follow him on Twitter at @JohnnyCTaylorJr.

The greatest country on earth is awash in fragile communities in which less than 20 percent of adults are literate, fourth graders lack proficiency in basic reading and math, jobs are scarce, and incarceration is as common as college.

These fragile communities are black, white, brown and yellow. They exist in places as different as Appalachia and Fort Lauderdale.

I know. I grew up in one. And had it not been for my mother’s choice to take me out of a traditional public school and take advantage of the educational opportunity offered at a pilot magnet school, I would never have become a successful lawyer, corporate executive and now the head of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, which represents 47 historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) — schools established when black students had no option other than segregated institutions. These schools have a long history of educating some of the nation’s most influential and successful African-American doctors, educators, lawyers, business leaders and entrepreneurs.

It is through the lens of HBCUs that we have come to see that the plight of students trapped in poor schools, often in fragile communities, is not only an economic challenge for this nation, but an issue of national security.

We have a unique understanding at our colleges. We know what it takes to help students who are most economically disadvantaged and educationally vulnerable. And we know that when students are well prepared in primary and secondary grades, they are more likely to learn and to graduate from higher education than if they were disserved.

We also have a vested interest in ensuring that the children who arrive as freshmen on our campuses are extraordinarily well-prepared. Although some of our campuses have experienced enrollment growth recently, the challenge we increasingly face is how to graduate young people who arrive as college freshmen woefully under-prepared academically. Currently, about 35 percent of HBCU students graduate within 6 years of starting their education. As federal and state governments refuse to fund remedial education for university students and demand higher graduation rates from post-secondary institutions, the only way HBCUs can survive is if the students who show up are college ready when they leave the PK-12 system.

Better parental choices are, frankly, a matter of life or death for many of our country’s HBCUs. And the only way to impact that is to ensure that high quality secondary school choices abound and that parents are aware of the options that exist to help them take their families out of traditional district schools that have long failed their precious youth.

HBCUs have stepped up to the plate to provide this leadership. Howard University, for example, started a charter school called Howard University Middle School of Mathematics and Science, which is preparing the next generation of leaders for careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. This area of focus is of particular importance because African-Americans receive just 7.6 percent of all STEM bachelor’s degrees and 4.5 percent of doctorates in STEM.

Another example of HBCUs taking matters into their own hands can be found in Tallahassee’s Florida A&M University, which opened the Developmental Research School in 1877. The Research School gives a nationally competitive college preparatory education to each of its students and serves as a state-of-the-art laboratory for education innovation. Throughout its 140 years of existence, the school has graduated thousands of students who have gone on to become leaders in their chosen professions.

These are some of the things we are doing to address fragile communities. If we don’t do it, who will?

It’s become clear the organization that once supported the greatest needs of our disadvantaged is no longer interested in that work. The NAACP recently came out and again called for a moratorium on charter schools, absurdly claiming that the promise of charters never materialized.

This was preceded by American Federation of Teachers boss Randi Weingarten’s attacks on school choice, referring to charters as the “polite cousins of segregation.”

We cannot afford this kind of issue-myopia in our society. The stakes are simply too high as fragile communities continue a downward spiral. The only solution is to improve educational outcomes and that begins with increasing school choices for parents. We have seen the dangerous domino effect if kids in these communities are forced to stay in failing schools.

And while the NAACP and Weingarten seem to be perfectly comfortable with that scenario, we are not.

We will continue to fight for these fragile communities. And if the NAACP continues to reject the educational opportunities school choice provides them, they risk becoming irrelevant — or worse — an enemy of the very people they claim to fight for.