Chancellor Tisch: Moving the State Ed. ocean-liner to better results.

The only thing more difficult to turn around than an ocean-liner is a government bureaucracy. If the Titanic proved too slow a turn to avoid the iceberg, most bureaucracies would have rammed it head-on.

The state Education Department (SED) may be slowing defying this conventional comparison if current trends continue. Consider some recent developments:

Assessments: After years of phony grade inflation, SED this year transformed the state exams to better align them with reality to reflect a true picture of how many students are meeting and exceeding state standards and how many more are not (here). Only when one knows the true depth of the problem can you do something tangible correct it. For years, New Yorkers were told (lied to) that many more students met grade level standards than was true. No longer.

Race to the Top: After first operating in group-think denial (e.g., here and here), SED and the Regents proposed a bold agenda to make the state competitive for federal Race to the Top funding. Last fall the Regents proposed reforms in teacher education, tying test results to tenure, charter school expansion, and improved data systems, among other initiatives (here). Rather than take direction from the teacher unions --a decades-long penchant--SED instead dragged them kicking and screaming to a deal for using student test scores in making tenure decisions. SED also provided new credibility on charter schools and helped get the legislature to raise the charter cap, with the negative exception of trying to remove SUNY's power as a charter authorizer. These results are likely to win New York hundreds of millions in new federal money, which will be announced next week.

Teacher Education/Certification: The push continues to make education schools more responsive to student needs and realities, while enabling other entities to certify teachers. This agenda is a tall order, but at least the SED has begun the conversation.

Oversight: SED established a new Office of Innovative School Models to examine persistently low performing schools and oversee charter schools, among several other major responsibilities. Early signs are encouraging, e.g., a Joint Review Team recently concluded detail inspections and critiques of several Buffalo public schools with stark conclusions. Shedding light on district malpractice is an important initial step, and SED needs to do more; but it's a good thing for district dysfunction to be outed.

Charter Schools: SED recently issued its version of a request for proposals (RFP) required by the new legislation that raised the cap charter schools. This RFP is streamlined, practical and user-friendly, and gets at the issues that matter when creating a new school (here). The alacrity with which SED produced this document stands in sharp contrast to how much longer it took to produce an application in 1999 after the charter law first passed. This RFP also is a superior product than the more bureaucratic and cumbersome RFP issued by the SUNY Charter Schools Institute, the state's other charter authorizer. The RFP is one prominent example of the changing approach for the better that SED is making toward charters (see here).

Personnel is Policy
These particularly positive trends are the result of the new leadership at the board of Regents and Education Department. The Regents Chancellor, Merryl Tisch, assumed her role in May 2009 and set out to transform the Education Department and a range of policy areas. She's got much to show for it in little more than one year since becoming Chancellor. This began with personnel.

It is axiomatic that personnel is policy, and Tisch understood this most of all when she led the effort last summer to hire a new commissioner, David Steiner (here), a reform-minded outsider and prolific writer, who was Dean of the Hunter College School of Education. Right out of the gate, last fall Steiner got the state to rethink its presumptuous approach toward Race to the Top, and got the Regents to make more bold policy changes in the subsequent two months than it had done in perhaps two decades.

Commissioner Steiner and Chancellor Tisch are methodically reshaping the bureaucracy by appointing leaders throughout the various bureaus and offices, including many individuals from the outside. The Senior Deputy Commissioner, John King, a successful charter school founder, is one salient example, along with Sally Bachofer, the Director of the Office of Innovative School Models (see above).

Challenges Remain
Many tests and hurdles are ahead for the Regents and State Ed., and old habits are hard to break. The Department should directly take on the teacher unions and examine their rigid contract provisions that impede better education. SED also will need to methodically work the state legislature to get beyond having to tip-toe around its many political minefields. Still, in the 15 months since the Regents selected Merryl Tisch as Chancellor, positive change is more and more manifest. It will take relentless leadership for it to continue.

Peter Murphy
for The Chalkboard
Twitter.com/petermurphy26
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