Michelle Rhee is Wrong about St. Louis Schools

Today, the St. Louis Post Dispatch published a guest commentary from Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of the D.C. Public Schools. In her commentary, Rhee calls for more stringent testing of teachers to improve classroom quality.

Rhee is wrong.

First, I couldn't help but wonder why Rhee is commenting on the St. Louis Public Schools. Plenty of things about education are transferable, but we should not assume that a strategy that works in one city will work in another. While Rhee is quite the experienced educator, I would think she would understand the intricacies of an education system enough to avoid calling for policy changes based on superficial research and an anecdote.

In short, Rhee doesn't know St. Louis.

Second, improving teacher quality doesn't mean that tenured teachers need to be reviewed more often. It may mean that tenure requirements need to be more stringent, but isn't part of the point of tenure to reduce the resources we spend on teacher check-ups?

Teachers today have to deal with a lot, and more testing may not be the answer to fixing classrooms. Will a kid be less hungry, and thus less angsty, if his teacher received a more detailed evaluation? Will a parent have more time to be involved if her kid's instructor was under more pressure? Will teacher testing ensure that a troubled child gets more in the way of psychological services? 

Will it even help us find those few instructors who can actually deal with all of these societal failings?

Maybe we can improve teacher quality. I'm sure kids would do better if bad teachers were out of a job. But that doesn't mean that we should expend already limited resources to root out the bad through additional evaluations.

We can achieve the exact same goal - improvement of the classroom environment - through a system of support. Good teachers will founder in the classroom if they don't receive enough help. Even the strongest of us can only take so much.

The feedback Rhee discusses shouldn't come in the way of professional evaluations. It should come as the natural part of an educative partnership. It should come through conversation, collaboration, in-school workshops, and real, meaningful, productive professional development tailored to the realities each school faces on a daily basis. Threatening a teacher's job security will only add to the burden teachers are forced to carry.

The political commentator Niccolo Machiavelli is perhaps best known for advocating authority's establishment through fear rather than love. But in The Prince, Machiavelli wrote: "Nevertheless a prince ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred...."

There are limits to the efficacy of fear as a motivating force. The fear of losing a job, especially today, is acute. But when that fear is engendered through additional paperwork or tense meetings or one-way administrative direction, that fear can quickly turn to hatred. 

The fear of losing a job is an essential element in our economic system. But there's no need to turn what could be a collaborative school-wide relationship rooted in practicality into a factory-like workplace where the final bell can't come soon enough.

In the city of St. Louis, our kids deal with a lot, and our teachers are expected to fix it all. It's time to stop telling teachers they're doing a bad job, and time to start asking how we can help them do their jobs better.

EEC Summer Academy 2012

For the last half a year, you haven’t heard much from me. I started law school at Washington University in the fall and let’s just say the time commitment thing has been a struggle. So far, I’ve had to sacrifice blogging for programming, but you can still get updates about us through Twitter and our Facebook page. It takes less time to write 140 characters than a blog post!

This summer, we are partnering with Clay Elementary again to run a 3-week summer academy for neighborhood kids and other children from the city who can find their way there. Last year, our Harry Potter camp was a big hit with the kids and we are looking for another group of volunteers to take the reins this summer. Check out our video from last summer to see the kinds of activities we do.

We are currently looking for an academy director and volunteer academy teachers to run the program. The time commitment is flexible, but the benefits are really worth your time. Several of our academy teachers have gone on to join Teach for America and similar post-graduate teaching programs. Many others have used their experience as a launching point for different academic pursuits in the sciences, public policy, and law. This is a great opportunity to get to know St. Louis city, help a fun group of kids have experiences they wouldn’t get otherwise, and develop better teaching and leadership skills through hands-on application and training.

To learn more, visit www.eduexchangecorps.org or e-mail eec.stl@gmail.com.

Hope to see you out this summer!

How the IRS Can Be Your Friend Too, and Important Information for Those Applying for an EIN as a Non-Profit

April 8, 2011: Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan approves the EEC's Articles of Incorporation. We are an official Missouri non-profit organization!

April 18, 2011: Elad, the EEC's executive director and current legal staffer attempts to apply for 501(c)(3) status from the IRS so the EEC can be tax exempt and receive tax exempt donations. But to complete the forms, I find that I need an EIN (Employer Identification Number). The IRS has an online application program that provides an EIN within minutes.

All goes smoothly until the confirmation page.

Here's where those applying for an EIN as a non-profit should pay attention.

When the user selects "Social Assistance" as the primary business category, the confirmation page shows that the user actually chose "Health Care" as the category!

I wasn't about to mess up what was supposed to be the easiest part of the process. So I tried again. And again. And again. And a couple more agains. Yet to no avail!

Per my Constitutional duty as a US citizen, I proceeded to notify my government of the problem with their online application. I chose to communicate in the most technologically efficient and communicationally deficient manner available today: E-mail.

April 20, 2011: The IRS Help Desk responds to my e-mail saying they can't respond to it by e-mail.

Are the horror stories true? Will my spirit be crushed by a massive government bureaucratic machine? Am I about to voluntarily enter Dante's Inferno?

The IRS provides me with a phone number to call at my convenience.

April 21, 2011: My convenience rolls around. I call up the IRS. Soon the elevator music starts playing. Speaker phone deployed and the wait begins. I start wondering why some underground rapper or country singer doesn't try to sell on-hold music. Maybe I should start a for-profit business for on-hold music...? My attempt to distract myself has failed. I'm still on hold. Time to work.

37 minutes later, a man answers the phone. Within 7 minutes, I'm done and I have an EIN!

So important thing for non-profits to note: If you select "Social Assistance" as your business category, it will change to "Health Care" on the confirmation page. When the IRS guys do it for you over the phone, they see "Social Assistance" an "Health Care" as one category. And if all else fails, just select "Other".

So fear not! You can skip the 37 minute on-hold time with just a few clicks of the mouse.

Turner v. Clayton Column: Documents from the Voluntary Interdistrict Choice Corporation

I'll link my column here and comment a bit once it goes live on Patch.com, but here are two documents the Voluntary Interdistrict Choice Corporation (VICC), the organization that runs the desegregation busing program in St. Louis, sent me.

The first is their Amicus Filing in support of the School District of Clayton and the St. Louis Public Schools. You can find it here (short but good read).

The second document includes the testimony of David Glaser, the CEO of VICC, in the Turner case. You can find it here.

Update: Here's the link to the article: http://clayton-richmondheights.patch.com/articles/legislative-action-appears-logical-recourse-to-enrollment-questions-posed-by-turner-v-clayton#comments

Why Neighborhoods Are Important: Shooting in St. Louis

A shootout in St. Louis gained national attention today. Two US Marshals and one St. Louis Police Officer were shot and injured by a St. Louisan, who holed himself up in a house in south city.

Why am I posting this on our blog? Because only a couple blocks away, a few hundred elementary school kids were supposed to be focused on learning.

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Froebel Elementary, one of our partner schools, is located at Point A. The shootout took place at the corner of Osage and Minnesota, at Point B.

A local man interviewed by a television reporter wished he could live somewhere safer. While the nationwide attention isn't ordinary, the occurrence of violence isn't particularly unique. The standoff was ended when the suspect was killed.

So for those who believe our education struggles can be solved through unilateral or a singular action, maybe this incident can serve as a reminder that community-wide problems really require community-wide solutions.

One of the US Marshals is in critical condition. Please keep those who were injured today in your thoughts.

Updated: One of the US Marshals, John Perry, passed away tonight.

A Friend Passes

A seat at Lexington Elementary has gone unfilled for the last week. It's not a seat that was vacated by an absent student, or the chair of a teacher on hiatus. It's a dark chair in the

school's front office, a chair situated between the front door and staff meeting room. It's a chair that often swiveled its occupant between window views of children entering from the playground to peeks at photographs of family members sitting on the nearby desk. It's a chair that was invariably filled by Debra Sharp, the school's secretary.

It's a chair that, although it will one day be filled by a new occupant, will remain forever empty in the hearts of those who had the pleasure of knowing Ms. Sharp.

Ms. Sharp passed away this week.

Her frank manner, her conversational warmth, her deep interest not only in what folks were doing at her school but also in who those folks were, her optimism for a better tomorrow will be remembered by all who knew her.

The last time I saw her, she was in that same chair at Lexington. We talked about her family. We spoke about her plans for her upcoming wedding. She was thinking about getting married at Lexington, with all of the little kids there to celebrate her special moment with her. She couldn't help but laugh at the thought.

The Lexington family did not get to share in that moment. Ms. Sharp's time here on Earth wasn't long enough to accommodate such a well deserved celebration. Certainly the world could have used many, many more years of Ms. Sharp.

But there was enough time for Ms. Sharp to leave her mark as someone who would get the job done, both professionally and privately. There was enough time for her to give so much of her life to a social endeavor, namely education, that too often gets too little respect.

I thought the next time I would see Ms. Sharp would be at her wedding day. I would finally get to meet those people in the photographs she kept on her desk. Last night, I did meet those same people, and Ms. Sharp was dressed in all white as most brides are. But rather than marry the man she loved, it was her time to bind with eternity.

When someone is so cherished as Ms. Sharp still is, death is but a word that serves only to remind us that a seat in our world will remain empty, while the whispers of memory preserve a spirit ever-flowing.

The emptiness of the chair reflects the emptiness we feel within. But the fullness of spirit of its former occupant serves as testimony to the indelible song the whispers of memory will sing in the halls of Lexington Elementary.

Cranky System and Economics

With volunteers and college students about to start their placements this semester, the online system is about to get tested.

My main goal is to make this as easy as possible for our partner schools to use. So I'm now creating an "Easy View" section of the website that allows teachers and administrators to bypass all the editing options and just see who is coming to their school on any particular day.

But Google is getting cranky and doesn't want to show me my calendars right now. Not like I took weeks to make them or anything....

On a side note, I'm doing some research of my own that will hopefully end with something I can publish. (I'm sure it's not easy for a recent college graduate without any advanced degrees or past publications outside of editorial columns to get published, but I'm feeling lucky.)

The research is centering around the idea of parceling out responsibility and enabling more folks to get involved in our larger social challenges, like education. Now, I'm specifically looking into the economics of scheduling, and I am struggling to find any way for people to coordinate schedules efficiently without the use of a third party arbitrator.

Say we assume that we make decisions based on what's best for ourselves, and let's say there are two people trying to coordinate schedules.

If we set up the scheduling system with Person 1 revealing all of their free time and Person 2 then selecting a slot of that free time, Person 2 would pick that slot which works best for Person 2. So Person 2 would maximize his utility given the situation, but this doesn't mean that the utility of the system (Person 1 + Person 2) is maximized.

Think about it like this: When Person 2 picks the "Best" time slot for himself, that same slot might just happen to be the "Worst" time slot for Person 1. Even though Person 2 might be a little worse off personally picking his second or third most favored time slot, the gains in convenience/happiness for Person 1 in moving from the "Worst" to something better might be enough to offset Person 2's losses.

In other words, "Best" + "Worst" might be less than "Good" + "OK".

In subsequent posts, I'll actually draw out diagrams to explain this all a bit better (if you're familiar with Game Theory, you may have already done this in your head).

Long story short, I'm trying to find a way to set up this whole process that will get people to coordinate and make choices that benefits the whole rather than just one individual.