Over the next few weeks, you undoubtedly will be bombarded with advice and proposals from many individuals and organizations. We do not want to clutter your in-box, but we wish to make a few suggestions for you and your staff as you attempt to turn your campaign statements into legislative proposals, and ultimately, laws that will transform the nation.

Our proposals are focused on ways to improve education. We recognize that you will face some severe and urgent challenges--from the financial crisis to the sagging economy to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan--that will rightfully demand your immediate attention. But as you said many times during the campaign, a strong education is a key part of the foundation for a strong economy and a strong democracy. We hope you will continue to maintain education among your highest priorities as you set your agenda in the coming year.

We also hope that you provide a particular focus on urban education. More than any presidential candidate in history, you have first-hand knowledge of the challenges urban youths face and the opportunities that exist in cities for strengthening education so that all young people develop academically and socially in order to become capable, successful adults.

Based on our experience and research, we offer suggestions for strengthening education in the following three areas: building “Smart Education Systems.” changing the nature of teaching as a profession, and redefining the role of parents and communities in education.

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Building “Smart Education Systems.”

As you know, enabling all young people to grow and develop into productive adults and active citizens takes more than schools. To be sure, schools are central, and there are many ways that schools and school systems need to be reformed to improve instruction and learning in every classroom. But young people learn and develop twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, not just in the seven hours on weekdays they are in classrooms.

In addition, learning and development begins at birth, not in kindergarten. The value of early-childhood education is well known, and you are wise to highlight it in your proposals.

To ensure that all young people in a community have access to the learning and development opportunities they need, school systems need to form partnerships with community organizations and agencies to provide a comprehensive web of services and supports that will enable them to grow and develop effectively. The Annenberg Institute calls such a web a “smart education system.”

You have proposed a similar system by recommending an expansion of one of the best examples of a smart system: the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ). You have proposed creating twenty “promise Neighborhoods,” modeled after HCZ, that provide a full network of services to an entire neighborhood from birth to college. We strongly support this initiative.

We urge you to provide grants to cities that develop plans to create smart systems that adopt the principles of HCZ, rather than the model itself. HCZ has succeeded by building its own infrastructure: a Baby College program that offers parenting lessons for parents of newborns, a highly acclaimed preschool, charter elementary and middle schools, and after-school programs for high-school aged youths. Few organizations in other cities have the capacity to develop such programs on their own. A better strategy might be to encourage schools and community organizations to form genuine partnerships with existing organizations and agencies that already operate successful programs that provide the needed support.

In addition, we urge you to require grantees to:

• Develop a broad set of positive outcomes for students, families, and communities, and to provide evidence of progress;
• Form partnerships with a wide range of organizations, including community organizations that have close connections with local needs and aspirations;
• Ensure shared accountability across all partner organizations; and
• Have a systematic approach for bringing the work to scale.

In every case, rigorous documentation should accompany these initiatives. As you know, research is critical, but conventional evaluation research provides answers long after an initiative has been in place. Documentation can provide real-time information on how an initiative is being implemented and what effects it is producing, and it can help local communities make needed adjustments as they go.

We believe that an investment in smart education systems can meet your goal of reducing concentrations of poverty in cities and improve education for thousands of young people.

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Teaching as a Profession.

Your platform rightly recognizes the centrality of high-quality teaching in educational improvement. The research is clear: teachers are the most important school-related factor in student success, and the difference between a highly effective teacher and an ineffective teacher is substantial.

Your plan also recognizes that improving teacher quality is a multifaceted enterprise. You have proposed initiatives to help recruit, prepare, retain, and reward teachers. All of these are necessary.

As they are currently constituted, however, few school districts are capable of developing and implementing clear and consistent policies in all of these areas. The systems for overseeing teacher quality are often scattered: recruitment in one office, professional development in another, evaluation in a third. And these offices and policies are seldom coordinated, with predictable effects.

Therefore, in addition to your proposed initiatives, we urge you to consider creating incentives for school districts to redesign themselves to manage human capital more effectively. One way to do so would be to offer grants for innovative strategies in human capital, publicize these, and provide rigorous documentation and research to enable other districts to learn from them and adapt them to their needs. Another strategy might be to require recipients of federal Title II grants to develop plans for human capital management.

Such efforts would help ensure that districts continue to attract highly skilled individuals into teaching, develop their abilities, and keep them in schools.

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Redefining the Role of Parents and Communities.

The importance of parent and community engagement in education cannot be understated. Parents and community members provide the demand that helps ensure that needed changes take place, and the support to keep changes in place during inevitable transitions.

None of this is news to you. As you know well from your time at Chicago’s Developing Communities Project, a strong and well-organized community can make a huge difference in families’ lives.

To date, federal policy has done little to help organize parents and community members to demand and support improvements in education. The No Child Left Behind Act includes some provisions on parent involvement, but these provisions have been weakly enforced and have accomplished little.

Your administration could substantially strengthen parent and community engagement by providing direct support to community organizations. Such support would enable organizations to hire and maintain paid staff, which is essential in keeping them going; to enable universities and other partners to provide them with research and data to assist in their efforts; and to continue to send e-mails and fliers and other communications media.

The level of support needed for community organization is tiny compared with the rest of the education budget, let alone the federal budget as a whole. But it would make an enormous difference in parent and community engagement, and that would make a huge difference in improving student achievement and youth development.

These three proposals are far from the only areas of federal policy that affect education in urban communities. Our work, though, shows that they are high-leverage ideas that, if enacted, could substantially improve outcomes among urban youths. The Annenberg Institute stands ready to provide you and your staff any additional information you might need about these or any other ideas, and we will do whatever we can to help put these ideas into practice, if you so choose.

We wish you every success in the coming months as you make your transition into the White House, and every success as our forty-fourth President.

Contact Person
Robert Rothman
Senior Editor, Annenberg Institute for School Reform
Robert_Rothman@brown.edu