He said that the goals of NCLB were right, but the direction taken to achieve those goals were wrong. He said that he would start granting certain states waivers from No Child Left Behind and hinted at bigger reform saying that it should reflect many of the principles behind Race to the Top.

Whether or not you agree with his policies, his actions are something that each one of us can learn from. One month into law school and I’ve already seen many examples of how I can pitch in.

At Georgetown Law School, there are numerous students and programs that are are examples of this. One of these programs is called Everybody Wins. Every week in Everybody Wins, law students read to local school kids to get them excited about learning. Another is the Street Law Program where law students visit high schools and teach students about legal issues relevant to them and expand their vision for the future.

As Obama said in his speech, “We can’t just blame teachers and schools.” We all need to do better.

To continue the discussion, send Danny a Tweet at @DannymJohnson

In March, I attended the Georgetown Law School Admitted Students Open House to see if everything I had read and heard about the school was true. It suffices to say that I was impressed, and by the end of the visit, I was drinking the Kool-Aid, had joined the Facebook fan page and decided to name my firstborn after Dean of Admissions Andrew Cornblatt (those plans have since changed).

Aside from its great reputation, influential faculty and innovative curriculum, I learned first hand of the unique and inherent benefits afforded to GULC as a place where influencers and thought leaders descend due its location in the heart of Capital Hill.

I had planned to leave DC and return to Utah on Sunday, immediately following the open house, but when I heard that Education Secretary Arne Duncan and former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Conner would be speaking on the campus as part of the Educating For Democracy in a Digital World Conference that Wednesday, I moved my flight and stayed an extra few days.

Aside from meeting the Justice and the Secretary, I met two other people at the event that I was just as excited about interacting with. Those two men were Street Law founder and former GULC professor, Jason Newman, and Richard Roe, the current director of the Street Law Clinic.

Georgetown Law is heralded for its clinical programs and the Street Law Clinic is one of the reasons why. It provides 2nd and 3rd year law students the oppurtunity to teach high school kids in DC about civics and the law and is the one clinic at Georgetown that I am most interested in getting involved with.

I have long had a passion for working with young people that started while teaching under privileged youth in the favelas of Sao Paulo, Brazil and this continued to develop while coaching at numerous basketball camps over the past few years. Thus, when I initially read about the Street Law Clinic, I recognized this as something that I could become passionate about.

Both Professor Newman and Professor Roe were very cordial and engaging. I was very impressed when Professor Roe  told me all about the Thurgood Marshall Academy that he helped found in 2001. The Academy is a charter school for underserved students in DC and recently boasted a 100% college acceptance rate. Though our conversation got cut short, Professor Roe asked that I email him to continue the dialog and he has been very responsive and helpful in answering my questions and providing guidance.

Though I was already riding shotgun on the Georgetown law bandwagon after the open house, this experience sealed my fate as a future Hoya.

To continue the conversation, leave a comment or send Danny a Tweet at @DannymJohnson.

One part of the article is specifically worth highlighting. Sugrue writes: “One fundamental problem (and there are many more that I can’t list here) with the Obama administration’s policies is that they take for granted that segregation by race and class is unchangeable. They take for granted that disadvantaged students will remain concentrated together. And they accept as a given the reality of ghettos of wealth in privileged school districts.”

Money is being thrown around, and new ideas(merit pay) are being championed, but we still continue to expect young minority students to rise above their surroundings.  It is wonderful that there are some charters schools which help minority students fight against the stacked deck that is our educational system. But why can’t we change the conversation entirely and think of new ways to integrate our student bodies – much like the small programs in Boston (METCO) and St. Louis?

A L.A. Superior Court ruled that the L.A. Unified School District cannot lay off teachers at three of the city’s worst-performing middle schools for budgetary reasons. According to the article between half and 3/4 of the teachers were laid off last year. The students have currently been “taught” by rotating substitute teachers.  There were much fewer layoffs at more affluent schools. This is one of the many problems with a system based on seniority.  New York City will soon be dealing with a similar problem, if they layoff 8,000 teachers based on seniority.  The students in the South Bronx will be the ones hurt the most. And while it is great to learn that the law can step in in such a situation, that isn’t a pancea in the interim when students return to school to be taught by substitute teachers who rotate in and out of their lives.

There are countless schools today named for Martin Luther King Jr.  Almost all of the students in these schools are minority children.

This is not a shocking revelation.  I have read Kozol.  And his books are national best sellers so we can presume that young, idealistic college grads are not the only ones aware of this depressing truth.  But it is so rarely addressed. Charter schools, merit pay, improving teacher quality and extending learning time dominate the education policy debate. Today, it is fashionable to advocate for segregated charter schools as the only alternative for low-income parents and children. Fifty-six years since Brown vs. the Board of Education, and it seems clear that separate, not equal reigns supreme.  In fact, in Stepping over the Color Lines, Amy Stuart Wells and Robert L. Crain proclaim: “racial segregation and inequality have become as much a part of our culture as the fourth of July.”  As a student of history, I understand part of how we got here.  The Miliken v. Bradley decision orchestrated by a court packed by Nixon, helped to seal the fate of urban desegregation efforts nationwide.  I just don’t understand why so few people are doing anything to change the status quo.

This past summer I found myself reconsidering my graduate school choices and my life path.  What can a person with law and public policy degrees do in the space of education reform? How is any of this relevant to reforming the system?

I spent the summer composing my own syllabus.  Reading about urban poverty, educational psychology, the history of education. One of my goals was to try to understand what actually constituted education law.  I read about desegregation, education finance reform, and legal challenges to state law constitutions which guarantee children education.

Why is desegregation so rarely part of the education reform conversation?  It is a known fact that one of the largest affects on student achievement is peer effects—low income students benefit from being in a classroom with students of a higher socio-economic status and the higher income children are not hurt.  Why is this so often ignored when we know so little about what else affects student achievement?

I found social scientists who could provide me with answers. Stuart-Wells and Crain write: “As a more aggressive policy, school desegregation represents exactly what whites dislike about particularism and affirmative action: the infringement on their long-term freedoms and liberties to control their personal lives.”

But after paging through a discouraging number of books and studies that seemed to paint integration as a Don Quixote like delusion, I found an antidote to the national lapse on civil rights.  Gerald Grant’s Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There are No Bad Schools in Raleigh tells the story of Wake County’s inventive income-based integration policy. Grant compares Raleigh to the segregated schools of Syracuse, his hometown, and illustrates his belief that programs like the one in Raleigh are part of the antidote this country needs.

In 2007, the Supreme Court struck down two voluntary desegregation plans that relied heavily on race, holding that race could not be used to determine school placement.  Adopted in 2000 and implemented for the last decade, Wake County’s policy stands as an alternative, integrating students of disparate socio-economic status and ensuring that no more than 40% of students at any given school are low-income. By 2005-2006, the school district had achieved this goal in 85 of its 116 elementary schools and middle schools.  This in itself is something to celebrate.  I have taught in three schools where at least 90% of the students qualified for free lunch (which is a proxy for socio-economic status), and I understand the heavy burdens of a school with so many low-income students.  But the effects of this program are more than simply lowering the burdens of schools. In fact, Wake County, Grant writes: “reduced the gap between rich and poor, black and white, more than any other large urban system in America.”

At the end of his book Grant concludes:

“…this tale of two American cities is not just about test scores. It’s about the kind of nation we hope to become. We should not want, nor shall we ever achieve, a nation of equal test scores or equal incomes. But we need to decide whether we want schools segregated by race and class, or schools that provide equal opportunity for all children—schools where students are enriched by relationships and ways of thinking that help them break out of the boxes of race and class that our flawed history has constructed. Do we believe in a nation that welcomes all comers, provides a level playing field in all its public schools, relishes the clash of ideas, and, as a consequence, enjoys one of the highest rates of upward mobility in the world? Raleigh’s reinvention of the ideals of the American common school made it an exemplar of those dreams and hopes (p. 191).”

A month ago the School Board in Wake County voted to end this inventive program.

I am often struck with the thought that while upper middle class parents blame the achievement gap on others’ bad parenting, those upper middle class parents’ own “good parenting” (read helicopter parenting to the point of only thinking of their precious offspring) acts to prohibit low-income students’ access to opportunities.  I understand that parents do not like having their children bussed across town.  I just don’t understand how anyone can think the experiences of his/her own children are more important than an entire county full of children.

What will happen to the schools in Raleigh?  Will we still be able to proclaim there are no bad schools in Raleigh?  Time will tell.  But even if there are no “bad schools” something vital will be lost.

When I first started the Beyond the Classroom blog while still in law school, I hoped to share my insights into how my legal education better prepared me for a career in education policy. Since then I’ve had a few breakthroughs but it is only just recently that I have begun to understand how my law school experience prepared me for my current job and for future jobs I hope to pursue after my University Innovation fellowship.

I moved to Arizona 5 weeks after taking the Maryland Bar Exam. I found it emotionally and professionally challenging to begin a nontraditional legal career after dedicating so much of my time and energy to the intricacies of the law. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love my job and wake up each morning with enthusiasm and commitment to the mission of the New American University. In fact, I entered law school with a clear end goal to “think like a lawyer” with my sights set on a “policy career.” I am living the dream. That’s why I am SURPRISED by the stirring feelings that occasionally well inside of me usually in the form of questions: Do you think you will ever actually practice law? What do you enjoy about legal work – the ultimate mission of being a public servant and advocate and/or the actual duties, day-to-day tasks and responsibilities? Are you going down a path that will prohibit you from practicing law in the future? Are you living up to the goals you set for yourself when you made the decision to attend law school? Should I aim to stick to those initial goals (and not “lose sight of my original dreams”) or would it be better (for me and for the communities I hope to work in and with) to identify new goals?

I have a vivid memory of laying the foundation for these “original goals” during my senior year at Georgetown at a public lecture hosted by the Center for Public and Nonprofit Leadership and the Center for Social Justice entitled From Passion to Profession: Making a Career That Matters. Although all 4 of the speakers were incredible, I was most inspired by Wendy Kopp, President and Founder of Teach for America, and Chris Murphy, then Executive Director of City Year, Washington, DC. Chris explained his path from traditional legal practice to his current job as a nonprofit leader and spoke with me after his presentation about how law school improved his problem solving methods and enhanced his analytical and writing abilities. With this in mind, I embraced the challenge to refine these skills and actively pursue other opportunities for professional development.

Over the course of my 3-year journey including coursework and intensive bar preparation with a primarily content-based orientation (except for my clinics and externship), I lost sight of my primary goal to acquire SKILLS. As a result, I feel an obligation to leverage the CONTENT I so diligently mastered. I close my eyes and imagine large piles of knowledge sitting in my brain collecting dust: the 4 parts to a negligence claim, the intricacies of evidence law, holdings of cases. I attribute my frustration tinted with guilt about this unused content to the content-based evaluation that dominated by law school experience and certainly my months of flash card memorization during my bar exam studies. Of course, an exemplary law school exam evaluates students’ skills, rather than the information they can regurgitate. However, there exists a need to orient students to skill-based learning by allowing students to search for courses based on the skills they will acquire rather than simply the topics on the syllabi.

As my work at Arizona State University progresses, I have a deeper appreciation and understanding of Chris’s reflection about how law school prepared him for a “career that matters.” For example, I am more aware of how law school shaped my written communication style. The memos and emails I write aim to be logical, deliberate (I try to carefully outline step-by-step processes without leaving gaps), mindful of potential counter arguments, and efficient. (Why use 10 words when 3 will convey the same point?)

I am appreciative of my realization that my struggle to come to terms with nontraditional legal practice is based on the tension between valuing an education based on content vs. skills. My reflection fuels my fire to dedicate a significant portion of my career to creating a widespread shift towards experiential and skill-based instruction in K-12 and higher education.* Up until recently, it’s not that I didn’t understand the need to shift education towards skill-based learning, but rather that I didn’t take the time to understand the effect that my content-based education has had on me.

Major responsibilities include:

• Maintaining, organizing and analyzing assessment and demographic data for Beating the Odds, an annual report tracking student performance trends and achievement gaps on state assessments;
• Reviewing assessment and demographic data to assure accuracy;
• Editing graphs and tables in Microsoft Excel

Additional tasks and responsibilities will be assigned as the research needs of the organization evolve. Ideal candidates will be undergraduate/graduate students in a social science field (e.g., education, sociology, public policy, political science, etc.), with a background and/or interest in education issues. Candidates should also have experience conducting basic statistical analyses. In addition, candidates should also be highly organized and detail oriented. The best candidates will be comfortable in a small but dynamic work environment. Proficiency in Excel and other statistical programs such as SPSS preferred.

This position is part time only – 20 hours per week for $12/hr.

To apply, please email or fax a cover letter and resume to:

Candace A. Simon

Research Specialist

Council of the Great City Schools

1301 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW

Suite 702

Washington, DC 20004-1758

Phone: (202) 393-2427

Fax: (202) 393-2400

Email: csimon@cgcs.org