The Great Revolution (AKA The Great Education Debate)
Over in the US recently, the Australian Education Minister Julia Gillard took a look at some of New York's more infamous tough schools - apparently these days full of high achievers. The Australian Deputy PM returned home determined to introduce the same model in Australian schools. So what's all the fuss about this so-called "education revolution"? Here's Amos Roberts.
REPORTER: Amos Roberts
There are probably thousands of teenagers in the Bronx who dream of making it as a rapper. But Robert Griffiths might be one of the few who dream of going to college first.
ROBERT GRIFFITHS, STUDENT: Even though I wanted to be a rapper and stuff like that there's so many fields in music that I can do and go to school for and learn so that I can have a better opportunity and an advantage over a rapper that didn't finish high school and didn't go to college. So that made me really think and say, "I want to go to college. I want to be an educated rapper?"
Today this ambitious 17-year-old is singing for his friends for the first time. Thanks to a remarkable high school, they've all got big dreams. Stephanie wants to be an environmental engineer. Rasheedat, a reconstructive surgeon and Aarron, an electrical engineer.
These students at the Bronx Lab School are clear winners in New York's education revolution. Driving the reforms – and inspiring Julia Gillard - is New York's controversial Schools Chancellor.
JOEL KLEIN, NY SCHOOLS CHANCELLOR: Our vision from day one was not a great schools system. Nobody ever sent their kid to a school system, they sent their kid to a school. And our vision was a system comprised of great schools.
Joel Klein was brought in seven years ago to fix New York's ailing network of 1,500 schools.
JOEL KLEIN: When I took this job the most shocking fact to me was that I would walk into high schools in New York City and I would see kids who were sharp, had been in the system for a decade and could not read the words on a page. Could not decode, much less comprehend, the words on a page. I don't think we should make excuses for that, I think we should fix that.
Robert Griffiths is running late for English.
TEACHER: Hello, other late person.
Teachers here monitor their students closely. This school, Bronx Lab, has become the poster-child for Joel Klein's reforms. It's one of six small schools housed in what was one of New York's worst - Evander Child.
TV AD: Evander was enormous, overcrowded, chaotic. The place was out of control. The city stepped in and felt there needed to be a change. The building may be the same, but the school is very different.
The city now boasts about the turnaround of Evander Child in a television advertising campaign. Principal Marc Sternberg has a masters degree in Education and an MBA from Harvard. He was handpicked by Joel Klein to run this school when he was only 27.
MARC STERNBERG, PRINCIPAL: If I had only one thing to say, the reason why Bronx Lab has been successful, it is because the Chancellor communicated very clearly to us what we had to accomplish and then left the rest up to us.
TEACHER: I haven't seen you in like, a month.
STUDENT: No, it wasn't.
TEACHER: Yes, it has been. So I expect when you come to my classroom you're dead silent and you catch up on all your work. OK?
The Chancellor has given principals a degree of autonomy that's still unheard of in Australian public schools.
MARC STERNBERG: 10 years ago a school principal did not have the freedom to set his own budget. He was told how many teachers he had to have, how many support staff he had to have, how many guidance counsellors he had to have, and, more or less, the job description of all those people. If a school a decade ago was creative in some of the ways that we have been creative, they would be breaking the rules.
STUDENT: See, 99. I did it.
MARC STERNBERG: What took you three years? That's great. Look at that. I knew you could do it. Good job.
JOEL KLEIN: He's a no-excuses guy. He doesn't say, "Well, you gave me hard kids so I shouldn't be expected to perform to the highest levels." And what did he do? He focused very heavily on attracting great teachers, which he was able to do because people want to be around a great leader with a powerful and passionate vision.
The principal also focused his teachers on really getting to know their students. This is Robert's Advisory Class. Throughout their time at Bronx Lab students meet in the same small group four times a week with the same 'advisor' to talk about what's happening in their lives.
STUDENT: Me and my dad had, like a conversation, like an actual conversation, a heartfelt conversation, which made me feel a lot better and feel a lot closer to him. What did you talk about? Not going to talk about.
MARC STERNBERG: There is a phenomenon, documented, researched, known to be true, that affects low-income minority students in radical ways. This idea that they walk into most schools and there is in the air a sense that they cannot be successful. There is an expectation of failure. And if students know that they are not expected to succeed, then what do you think happens? Of course they don't succeed.
ROBERT GRIFFITHS: Most of my education I didn't have no support, not from family, not from friends not from teachers and nothing like that. So kind of have in your mind, like, nobody cares, so why should you even care about it? I got people over here who don't even know me like that. They only know me for a good two, three years and they care so much about me and they want to see me be so successful. That makes you want to change yourself.
Bronx Lab invests heavily in its students' futures. It even has two staff dedicated solely to helping students with their university applications.
TEACHER: So you don't want to teach people how to be, you don't want to teach music, you want to produce it?
The school can afford these extra resources - it receives millions of dollars in funding from donors like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a fact not lost on the system's critics.
JENNIFER JENNINGS, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY: The question with schools like Bronx Lab is whether or not they can be brought to scale. And if you think about this in terms of cars, what you have at Bronx Lab is really a Cadillac or a Rolls-Royce approach to education, which is fantastic for the kids who go there. But on the other end of the spectrum you've got kids who don't have any car at all, they're really not getting the kind of education these other kids are getting. And when we see that we worry about increasing inequality.
At Colombia University a PhD student has become a thorn in the side of New York's Department of Education. Jennifer Jennings has been subjecting Chancellor Klein's claims to rigorous statistical analysis.
JENNIFER JENNINGS: In the best-case scenario you could argue that New York City has improved achievement, but...
Among her findings - the gap between students from different ethnic backgrounds has widened.
JENNIFER JENNINGS: The worst-case scenario is what we see in the national tests - that achievement hasn't in fact improved at all, and we've increased inequality.
REPORTER: None of those things look good as an advertising slogan, do they?
JENNIFER JENNINGS: No, they don't.
REPORTER: Is it fair to compare the achievements at a place like Bronx Lab to the achievements at other public schools, when it is so much better resourced?
JOEL KLEIN: Oh, it's absolutely fair. I will show you all sorts of schools and I am confident that schools throughout this city can get the same kinds of results because there's of lots of schools like Bronx Lab that are getting those results, no question about it.
Education researchers aren't Joel Klein's only critics. He's also been at loggerheads with the New York teachers union, which is hosting this conference.
JOEL KLEIN: You know, from the day I took this job people told me we will never fix education in America until we fix poverty. And I've told those people they have it exactly backward, folks - we will never fix poverty in America until we fix education. Thank you and God bless you for being here today.
Klein has had a turbulent relationship with union boss Randi Weingarten. The most controversial of his reforms have seen schools closed down and principals sacked, ideas that are also raising hackles in Australia.
JOEL KLEIN: If you get a grade of an F or a D, we'll close your school down. We'll terminate principals on that basis and we'll also provide rewards for our teachers and for our principals. A principal based on the school's performance, on our accountability, can get an additional $25,000 in a bonus.
RANDI WEINGARTEN, UNITED FEDERATION OF TEACHERS: I want to say it differently. It's not, "Yes, we can,", it's "Yes, we will." Thank you very much, everybody.
After hard-fought negotiations teachers have now embraced the reforms, but despite receiving $14 million in bonuses, they haven't embraced Klein.
RANDI WEINGARTEN: I would say that the relationship with Chancellor Klein has been challenging. What I think happened was initially we were hopeful, and afterwards we became very wary, because the Chancellor just wanted to make the union and the teachers the scapegoat and to point the finger at us as the culprits for everything society hasn't done to help children.
Last year the union subjected Klein to an evaluation of its own. Among the 60,000 teachers surveyed his approval rating ranged from just 12% to 23%.
JOEL KLEIN: That survey was done by the union during a time when we were having a big dust-up over the teacher performance standards that I talked about and we were in the middle of a budget cut. But look, I'd be the first to admit I want to improve my performance.
Klein's critics say Australia's Education Minister, Julia Gillard, should think twice before buying American.
JENNIFER JENNINGS: I think if you were under the impression that there was going to be a miraculous rebirth of your schools, as a function of looking at a lot of the PR in New York City, you'd end up with quite a disappointed education minister.
Students at Bronx Lab don't care about the politics of these reforms or the research of social scientists. They care about the fact that someone now cares about them and their education. Last year the school celebrated its first graduation – a remarkable 95% of students graduated - more than twice the average for the Bronx.
STUDENT: Teachers should, like, we should all have teachers like we do at Bronx Lab, those that care about us outside of the classroom and inside of the classroom. Those that want to come and help us be the best people we can be. The people that want to help us realise what we want to do. The people that want to help us realise that we are so much better than what our environment tells us to be sometimes.
Reporter/Camera
AMOS ROBERTS
Fixer
LISA MAIN
Editor
DAVID POTTS
Producer
AARON THOMAS
Original Music composed by
VICKI HANSEN
Over in the US recently, the Australian Education Minister Julia Gillard took a look at some of New York's more infamous tough schools - apparently these days full of high achievers. The Australian Deputy PM returned home determined to introduce the same model in Australian schools. So what's all the fuss about this so-called "education revolution"? Here's Amos Roberts.
REPORTER: Amos Roberts
There are probably thousands of teenagers in the Bronx who dream of making it as a rapper. But Robert Griffiths might be one of the few who dream of going to college first.
ROBERT GRIFFITHS, STUDENT: Even though I wanted to be a rapper and stuff like that there's so many fields in music that I can do and go to school for and learn so that I can have a better opportunity and an advantage over a rapper that didn't finish high school and didn't go to college. So that made me really think and say, "I want to go to college. I want to be an educated rapper?"
Today this ambitious 17-year-old is singing for his friends for the first time. Thanks to a remarkable high school, they've all got big dreams. Stephanie wants to be an environmental engineer. Rasheedat, a reconstructive surgeon and Aarron, an electrical engineer.
These students at the Bronx Lab School are clear winners in New York's education revolution. Driving the reforms – and inspiring Julia Gillard - is New York's controversial Schools Chancellor.
JOEL KLEIN, NY SCHOOLS CHANCELLOR: Our vision from day one was not a great schools system. Nobody ever sent their kid to a school system, they sent their kid to a school. And our vision was a system comprised of great schools.
Joel Klein was brought in seven years ago to fix New York's ailing network of 1,500 schools.
JOEL KLEIN: When I took this job the most shocking fact to me was that I would walk into high schools in New York City and I would see kids who were sharp, had been in the system for a decade and could not read the words on a page. Could not decode, much less comprehend, the words on a page. I don't think we should make excuses for that, I think we should fix that.
Robert Griffiths is running late for English.
TEACHER: Hello, other late person.
Teachers here monitor their students closely. This school, Bronx Lab, has become the poster-child for Joel Klein's reforms. It's one of six small schools housed in what was one of New York's worst - Evander Child.
TV AD: Evander was enormous, overcrowded, chaotic. The place was out of control. The city stepped in and felt there needed to be a change. The building may be the same, but the school is very different.
The city now boasts about the turnaround of Evander Child in a television advertising campaign. Principal Marc Sternberg has a masters degree in Education and an MBA from Harvard. He was handpicked by Joel Klein to run this school when he was only 27.
MARC STERNBERG, PRINCIPAL: If I had only one thing to say, the reason why Bronx Lab has been successful, it is because the Chancellor communicated very clearly to us what we had to accomplish and then left the rest up to us.
TEACHER: I haven't seen you in like, a month.
STUDENT: No, it wasn't.
TEACHER: Yes, it has been. So I expect when you come to my classroom you're dead silent and you catch up on all your work. OK?
The Chancellor has given principals a degree of autonomy that's still unheard of in Australian public schools.
MARC STERNBERG: 10 years ago a school principal did not have the freedom to set his own budget. He was told how many teachers he had to have, how many support staff he had to have, how many guidance counsellors he had to have, and, more or less, the job description of all those people. If a school a decade ago was creative in some of the ways that we have been creative, they would be breaking the rules.
STUDENT: See, 99. I did it.
MARC STERNBERG: What took you three years? That's great. Look at that. I knew you could do it. Good job.
JOEL KLEIN: He's a no-excuses guy. He doesn't say, "Well, you gave me hard kids so I shouldn't be expected to perform to the highest levels." And what did he do? He focused very heavily on attracting great teachers, which he was able to do because people want to be around a great leader with a powerful and passionate vision.
The principal also focused his teachers on really getting to know their students. This is Robert's Advisory Class. Throughout their time at Bronx Lab students meet in the same small group four times a week with the same 'advisor' to talk about what's happening in their lives.
STUDENT: Me and my dad had, like a conversation, like an actual conversation, a heartfelt conversation, which made me feel a lot better and feel a lot closer to him. What did you talk about? Not going to talk about.
MARC STERNBERG: There is a phenomenon, documented, researched, known to be true, that affects low-income minority students in radical ways. This idea that they walk into most schools and there is in the air a sense that they cannot be successful. There is an expectation of failure. And if students know that they are not expected to succeed, then what do you think happens? Of course they don't succeed.
ROBERT GRIFFITHS: Most of my education I didn't have no support, not from family, not from friends not from teachers and nothing like that. So kind of have in your mind, like, nobody cares, so why should you even care about it? I got people over here who don't even know me like that. They only know me for a good two, three years and they care so much about me and they want to see me be so successful. That makes you want to change yourself.
Bronx Lab invests heavily in its students' futures. It even has two staff dedicated solely to helping students with their university applications.
TEACHER: So you don't want to teach people how to be, you don't want to teach music, you want to produce it?
The school can afford these extra resources - it receives millions of dollars in funding from donors like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a fact not lost on the system's critics.
JENNIFER JENNINGS, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY: The question with schools like Bronx Lab is whether or not they can be brought to scale. And if you think about this in terms of cars, what you have at Bronx Lab is really a Cadillac or a Rolls-Royce approach to education, which is fantastic for the kids who go there. But on the other end of the spectrum you've got kids who don't have any car at all, they're really not getting the kind of education these other kids are getting. And when we see that we worry about increasing inequality.
At Colombia University a PhD student has become a thorn in the side of New York's Department of Education. Jennifer Jennings has been subjecting Chancellor Klein's claims to rigorous statistical analysis.
JENNIFER JENNINGS: In the best-case scenario you could argue that New York City has improved achievement, but...
Among her findings - the gap between students from different ethnic backgrounds has widened.
JENNIFER JENNINGS: The worst-case scenario is what we see in the national tests - that achievement hasn't in fact improved at all, and we've increased inequality.
REPORTER: None of those things look good as an advertising slogan, do they?
JENNIFER JENNINGS: No, they don't.
REPORTER: Is it fair to compare the achievements at a place like Bronx Lab to the achievements at other public schools, when it is so much better resourced?
JOEL KLEIN: Oh, it's absolutely fair. I will show you all sorts of schools and I am confident that schools throughout this city can get the same kinds of results because there's of lots of schools like Bronx Lab that are getting those results, no question about it.
Education researchers aren't Joel Klein's only critics. He's also been at loggerheads with the New York teachers union, which is hosting this conference.
JOEL KLEIN: You know, from the day I took this job people told me we will never fix education in America until we fix poverty. And I've told those people they have it exactly backward, folks - we will never fix poverty in America until we fix education. Thank you and God bless you for being here today.
Klein has had a turbulent relationship with union boss Randi Weingarten. The most controversial of his reforms have seen schools closed down and principals sacked, ideas that are also raising hackles in Australia.
JOEL KLEIN: If you get a grade of an F or a D, we'll close your school down. We'll terminate principals on that basis and we'll also provide rewards for our teachers and for our principals. A principal based on the school's performance, on our accountability, can get an additional $25,000 in a bonus.
RANDI WEINGARTEN, UNITED FEDERATION OF TEACHERS: I want to say it differently. It's not, "Yes, we can,", it's "Yes, we will." Thank you very much, everybody.
After hard-fought negotiations teachers have now embraced the reforms, but despite receiving $14 million in bonuses, they haven't embraced Klein.
RANDI WEINGARTEN: I would say that the relationship with Chancellor Klein has been challenging. What I think happened was initially we were hopeful, and afterwards we became very wary, because the Chancellor just wanted to make the union and the teachers the scapegoat and to point the finger at us as the culprits for everything society hasn't done to help children.
Last year the union subjected Klein to an evaluation of its own. Among the 60,000 teachers surveyed his approval rating ranged from just 12% to 23%.
JOEL KLEIN: That survey was done by the union during a time when we were having a big dust-up over the teacher performance standards that I talked about and we were in the middle of a budget cut. But look, I'd be the first to admit I want to improve my performance.
Klein's critics say Australia's Education Minister, Julia Gillard, should think twice before buying American.
JENNIFER JENNINGS: I think if you were under the impression that there was going to be a miraculous rebirth of your schools, as a function of looking at a lot of the PR in New York City, you'd end up with quite a disappointed education minister.
Students at Bronx Lab don't care about the politics of these reforms or the research of social scientists. They care about the fact that someone now cares about them and their education. Last year the school celebrated its first graduation – a remarkable 95% of students graduated - more than twice the average for the Bronx.
STUDENT: Teachers should, like, we should all have teachers like we do at Bronx Lab, those that care about us outside of the classroom and inside of the classroom. Those that want to come and help us be the best people we can be. The people that want to help us realise what we want to do. The people that want to help us realise that we are so much better than what our environment tells us to be sometimes.
Reporter/Camera
AMOS ROBERTS
Fixer
LISA MAIN
Editor
DAVID POTTS
Producer
AARON THOMAS
Original Music composed by
VICKI HANSEN