MACKINAC ISLAND – Policy-makers will look at education reform differently if they view the system from the student’s perspective, a variety of speakers told those gathered for the Detroit Regional Chamber Mackinac Policy Conference.

While the focus has been on failing schools on most states, the entire education system is failing, Michelle Rhee, CEO of StudentsFirst and former chancellor of District of Columbia Public Schools, said during a keynote address.

“This will be the first generation less well educated than their parents,” Rhee said.

And she said it is difficult to change the system while adults are concentrating on adult issues rather than on the children.

For instance, she said she is a Democrat but, after her time as chancellor, supports vouchers to allow students to choose schools outside the public school system. “My job is not to preserve and protect and defend a system that’s been doing a disservice to children,” she said. “If (policy-makers) stop thinking about it in terms of politics and think about it in terms of children, they would make different decisions.”

“We’ve been maintaining a public education system that’s broken,” John Covington, chancellor of the Education Achievement Authority, said.

He said it was “by intent” that the EAA , which operates some of the lowest-performing schools in the state, looks substantially different from traditional schools.

Rhee is a polarizing figure nationally, revered by the reform community, but loathed by the traditional public schools community with some of the progress DC schools made during in tenure under scrutiny from a cheating scandal. Covington has the backing of top state officials, but has lately come under enormous criticism about EAA operations.

Governor Rick Snyder, at a separate event, agreed that the focus of discussions needed to change. “The first words out of our mouths are becoming, ‘What do we need to do to get children to learn one year (for each year in school)'” he said. “It’s a different question than I hear when I first got here, which was, ‘We need money.'”

Rhee cited opposition she got to laying off DC teachers based on performance rather than tenure. She said a city council member demanded that she reinstate the teachers, but she said that demand dropped when she challenged that member to bring children back into the system and put them in one of those teachers’ classroom.

“Nobody in this room would be okay putting their child in a classroom with a teacher deemed ineffective,” she said.

She acknowledged that new teachers will take some time, up to two years, to gain the experience they need to become truly effective, but she said that should be addressed through a residency program, similar to what physicians have.

Teachers also need to be paid based on their performance, but also on their value to society. “Think about how skewed the values of our society are when those folks (sports stars) are getting paid $12 million and good teachers are not getting paid nearly enough,” she said.

With Common Core as an example, Rhee said education has become too polarizing an issue. “We have to begin to see education as a bipartisan issue,” she said.

Rhee said those opposing the Common Core Standards also have their priorities out of line. “I don’t like it when the federal government is telling us what to do,” she said of the argument against the standards. “What you should not like more than the federal government telling us what to do is China is kicking our butt.”

Schools in Michigan and around the country need to be meeting international standards to be able to compare themselves to China and other key nations, she said.

Snyder said Detroit Public Schools is now working on the right issues. “They’re going beyond the learning environment,” he said. “They’re talking about how to bring the entire neighborhood back.”

The EAA is looking largely at the learning environment, but it appears to be doing the right things as well, Covington said. “One of the things that I’ve noticed is a huge change in the climate and environment in the schools,” he said. Before EAA management, for instance, in the Brenda Scott Academy, “I have never seen that level of disruption.”

The school has an entirely different atmosphere now, he said.

Covington said traditional school districts could adopt the same reforms, but they would need some additional flexibility to do so.

While he is still backing legislation that would codify the EAA, Snyder said it was not necessary. “It could expand under prior legislation under the state superintendent,” he said.

He did not expect such an expansion beyond the current 15 DPS schools for the next school year. “Let it start up and get going,” he said.

Dan Varner (D-Detroit), a member of the State Board of Education and CEO of Excellent Schools Detroit, said his group was planning in July to issue a score card on all of the schools in the city: traditional public, charter and private.

“Early indications are that we’ve got a number of solid schools in Detroit,” he said.

But there are also schools not doing well, Varner said, adding the low quality of education in some schools represents a civil rights issue for the students.

Snyder said the ACT scores statewide, as well as the number of students having to take remedial classes in community college, is a “travesty.”

For the business community’s role, Covington said there needs to be more internships that expose students to real jobs.

“More often than not children are making decisions about their lives absent sufficient information,” he said.

Varner said tech companies could also help the schools cooperate. For instance, he said all of the schools should have a common application process and data systems that allow them to share student records.

FOUNDATION FUNDING: The Michigan Education Excellence Foundation, a primary supporter of the Education Achievement Authority, has raised $59.7 million of its $100 million goal and will use part of those funds to provide community college scholarships for Detroit students, officials announced.

The scholarship, the Detroit Scholarship Fund, will provide two years of courses at one of five participating community colleges in the region, officials said.

The foundation also provides funds for the EAA’s startup and operations, as well as for the Excellent Schools Detroit, which is promoting education reform in the city.

The foundation crossed the halfway point within 18 months of it being founded and officials encouraged those gathered for the Detroit Regional Chamber Mackinac Policy Conference to join the list of donors.

Insufficient private donations have been a major issue for the EAA.

INSIDE EAA: Opponents of the EAA launched a new website Thursday to provide access to various documents that have been collected from the district through the Freedom of Information Act.

The website, insidetheeaa.com, hosts some 1,300 pages of documents provided by the EAA to Rep. Ellen Cogen Lipton (D-Huntington Woods), who has filed a number of FOIA requests, and addition documents are expected in the coming weeks. The site sorts the documents by category: finances, governance, personnel and students.

Ms. Lipton said the records show the EAA had chaotic finances as it launched for the school year about to end and saw substantial student loss and staff turnover.

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