April 24, 2007

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A Review: Norm Fruchter, “Urban Schools, Public Will: Making Education Work For All Our Children”

Filed under: Education by Peter Goodman @ 3:15 pm

Although Fruchter never mentions Bloomberg, Klein or Tweed he shreds the philosophical underpinnings of their regency. Fruchter has been a public school teacher, a school board member in New York City and the Director of the Institute for Education and Social Policy at NYU and currently the director of the Community Involvement Program at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University.

His book proposes “that the nation’s urban public schools can be transformed to effectively educate their poor students of color, and that the nation’s urban school districts are the key agents of this transformation,” and, he attacks the “invidious myth - that U.S. public education is so ineffective that it must be transformed by market solutions.”

Just as Jonathan Kozol condemns our political leaders for allowing our schools to slide into segregation so does Fruchter - although he points to the nation’s military schooling - schools on military bases that are racially integrated and high achieving - race cannot be an impediment to success.

Fruchter flunks accountability systems - including “audit and inspection;” he proffers, “Schools with lackluster leadership and with inexperienced and demoralized teachers cannot carry out such efforts without district intervention and support.” Conferring autonomy without capcity-building will only “cut schools loose to flounder, or sink on their own”

It is clear that the current Empowerment Schools movement and perhaps the soon to be launched uber-regions and Partnership Support Organizations are allowing “floundering” schools to sink.

Without effective capacity building and operations support from the district level, schools are placed in jeopardy - and the current NYC leadership’s mantra is: freeing schools from bureaucracy - just the policy that Fruchter espouses will allow schools to fail.

The book is not all theory: it points to three districts in different parts of the country and searches out commonalties:

* Superintendents who initiated, supported and sustained reform for at least a decade.

* structured district wide strategies to focus on instruction

* developed collaborative relationships with their teacher unions

* developed and sustained strong external partners

* an appropriate balance between district mandate and school-level decisions

* new forms of collaborative leadership to makes reform a collective responsibility

* significant resources invested in professional development

And, Fruchter does not leave out parents and the community: rather than “capture” these stakeholders he urges policies to encourage them to become empowered - a bottom-up accountability.

While the current NYC educational leadership rolls out program after program, an astute observer of education points out a path - hopefully it’s not too late to put the train back on the tracks.

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