Education Reform: A New Synthesis and Wide-Scale Reform

Earlier this May, David Brooks wrote an editorial touting Promise Academy of the Harlem Children’s Zone as a “Harlem Miracle.”  In the long-running debate in educational reform between, on one side, an approach that focuses on the larger community and environment surrounding young students and, on the flipside, a focus exclusively on “no-excuses” schools, Brooks cites Promise Academy’s amazing gains in educational achievement among inner city youth as evidence on the side of a school only approach.

This is completely disingenuous. As can be seen in Boston Review’s new article “No Ordinary Success,” Promise Academy actually represents an emerging synthesis between these two camps in the education reform debate. Author James Forman Jr. writes, “In response to the ongoing “fix communities” versus “fix schools” debate, those doing the work in the trenches increasingly are settling on a single answer: do both.”

Brooks correctly notes that Promise Academy experiences high turnover in the search for the best teachers, has longer hours than a typical school and rigorously focuses on every detail of the students’ educations. However, founder George Canada has also described his system as a “conveyor belt taking children from cradle to college,” so for example, Harlem Children’s Zone offers guidance to parents when their children are of a very young age.

This synthesis may be moving from the trenches to the policy world, as can be seen in Obama’s educational platform, which calls for both “tougher, clearer [testing] standards” and aggressive action to improve teaching, as well as a “cradle up through a career” approach that focuses on pre-Kindergarten parent counseling, student health and student education – see Obama’s platform on his website or this more recent March 2009 CNN article.

Is there a clear path for education reform? Brooks ends his article: “We may have found a remedy for the achievement gap. Which city is going to take up the challenge? Omaha? Chicago? Yours?”

But this of course is too easy. James Forman Jr. notes that models of reform like Promise Academy boast extraordinary resources, both human and material, which are simply unavailable for wide-scale reform. With apologies to Mr. Brooks, we do not have a model of reform simply waiting to be implemented across the nation. This is why I was so interested to read today in the New York Times an editorial calling for a focus on so-called “dropout factories.” According to Alliance for Excellent Education, around 2,000 high schools are dropout factories that lose 40% or more of their students that started freshman year, and they produce 51% of the nations’ dropouts. As is rightly pointed out, if we are looking for a sustainable approach to education reform that can be realistically implemented, perhaps the focus should be on these dropout factories.