Andrea Silbert named President of Eos Foundation

Hoya:

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While I agree with the general point that the thread should be more “Hooray for Andrea, who will be continuing her dedication to helping the least fortunate” (What’s Deb Goldberg up to these days?), I thought I’d respond to your question. 

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The cover story of the NY Times Magazine article from a couple weeks ago.  9 pages long.  In the education world, it’s been the most lauded and cited article of the year. 

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Any BMGer who follows education at all will enjoy it. 

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Relevance: starting on page 3, the writer profiles a few of the charter schools Pablo mentions – KIPP and Amistad/Achievement First – and describes how ALMOST nobody really questions anymore that these schools are amazing in driving minority student achievement through the roof. 

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In short, to answer your question, yes these schools have been effective. 

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For a long time, the teachers unions, like Pablo, have argued that the massive improvements were a mirage. 

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However, more recently, even many union leaders are conceding the excellence of these schools.  Their new take — which I think is reasonable — is the degree to which these schools might be replicated since they rely on unusually dedicated teachers working crazy hours. 

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For example, the NY Teachers Union, which has blocked charter expansion in NYC, has this take: 

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So with what some charter schools, like KIPP, have shown us can be done, society has some choices to make. If we just want to pay lip service to the goals of NCLB without shelling out real money, we can allow charter schools to continue as exemplary but limited, non-unionized incubators of effective education strategies, and then continue to blame the teachers and their unions for preventing poor, black children from getting a good education. That’s the road many of those on the right have chosen because it kills several birds with one stone: it keeps taxes low and promotes their anti-union agenda.

On the other hand, if we are truly committed to giving all our kids a decent education, we can make the major investment necessary to take those strategies to scale so we might actually have a chance of closing the gap by 2014 (a la NCLB) or even 2020.

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I don’t fully agree with this analysis – not sure Bill Clinton created 3,000 charter schools b/c he wanted to “blame unions”, though I do agree that these schools (like mine) rely on workaholic, cherry-picked teachers. 

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But the point is that they even union officials now are more likely to concede that standout, jaw-droppingly good inner-city schools do exist, and they are quite likely to be charters. 

I don’t know anything about  the Eos foundation.  Who are these people?  I looked up their website, and got the barest of under construction pages.  Not much else on a Google search.

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So I did look up the Robin Hood foundation.  Up front, lots of talk on the front page about fighting poverty.  Yeah, I would get out the credit card.  But a deeper look showed the education component to be a fundraising arm of the charter school industry, dumping lots of money into the charter schools and $0 into NYC public schools.

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I don’t know what Ms. Silbert is planning to do with this Eos foundation, but I hope she is not setting up another organization that fronts as an anti-poverty organization but is really a funding mechanism for the charter school industry.