1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036
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In November 2009, the citizens of Virginia, in an election that commanded national attention, elected Republican Bob McDonnell as their new governor. In turn, McDonnell appointed Gerard Robinson, a hard-charging, reform-minded education secretary, to lead his state's education policy. Robinson is the president of the Black Alliance for Educational Options,
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a former senior research associate for the School Choice Demonstration Project at the University of Arkansas, and a former senior fellow at the Institution for the Transformation of Learning at Marquette University. Because of his participation in and his work on a host of charter and urban school initiatives, as well as his teaching in both Los Angeles and Jersey City, Robinson is uniquely positioned to discuss key developments in education reform at the state and local levels.
It is important to be reminded of the critical role state and local governments play in education policy despite better known efforts at the national level like the "Race to the Top" fund and the stimulus package. In addition, nationally debated issues such as charter schooling, merit pay for teachers, and other reform topics are becoming increasingly important state issues. At this AEI event, director of education policy studies Frederick M. Hess introduced the speaker and shared his thoughts about the groundwork that needs to be done to reform education at the state level. In the following keynote address, Robinson laid out his vision for state education reform.
| 3:45 p.m. | Registration | |
| 4:00 | Introduction: | Frederick M. Hess, AEI |
| Speaker: | Gerard Robinson, Virginia Secretary of Education |
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| 5:30 p.m. |
Adjournment and Reception |
WASHINGTON, MARCH 25, 2010--Two newly elected governors, Bob McDonnell in Virginia and Chris Christie in New Jersey, recently appointed strong, reform-minded education secretaries--a fact Gerard Robinson, Virginia's secretary of education, pointed to as "a signal nationwide that we want to put reform-minded thinkers on the forefront of school reform." Drawing heavily on time spent in eleven different cities, including Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Milwaukee, Robinson discussed how these experiences shaped his views on education policy and subsequently laid out his vision for education reform in Virginia in the coming years.
Robinson highlighted a handful of initiatives Governor McDonnell intends to pursue during the next four years. These include identifying innovative schools; strengthening the higher education system; forging relationships with private-sector partners; encouraging virtual learning; and emphasizing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. He also touted Virginia's current record of success, including strong National Assessment of Educational Progress reading scores and the fact that Virginia was one of sixteen states to close the equity and excellence gap with Latino students.
One of the most important initiatives Robinson discussed is encouraging the growth of charter schools in Virginia, a movement he says has remained stagnant since the first Virginia charter law was passed in 1998. In contrast, he discussed his time in Milwaukee, which has a robust charter-school movement yielding sixty-two charter schools in the city alone. Robinson remarked that school choice made Milwaukee's schools better by showing more traditional public school systems that there are effective and powerful alternative ideas to schooling and "[giving] us an impetus to implement some ideas that we thought were important and just didn't have the firepower to do it."
Reflecting on his time founding a charter school in Atlanta, Robinson declared the single goal of a charter school and other school choice reforms is "to create a school from the ground up that would offer opportunities to children to make college not only a possibility, but a reality." It is this kind of culture that Robinson hopes to foster in his time as education secretary in Virginia: reform-centric and ambitious in its vision.
--DANIEL LAUTZENHEISER
Speaker biographies
Gerard Robinson is the secretary of education for Virginia and former president of the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), a national nonprofit, nonpartisan organization whose mission is to actively support parental choice to empower families and to increase quality educational options for black children. Prior to holding his position at BAEO, Mr. Robinson served as a senior research associate for the School Choice Demonstration Project at the University of Arkansas and as a senior fellow at the Institute for the Transformation of Learning at Marquette University. A former public school teacher, Mr. Robinson has worked on numerous initiatives involving urban school reform and policy development, and he frequently presents on education and public-policy issues at a wide range of forums.
Frederick M. Hess is a resident scholar and the director of education policy studies at AEI, executive editor of Education Next, and author of the Education Week blog "Rick Hess Straight Up." His many books include Education Unbound (ASCD, 2010), Common Sense School Reform (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), Revolution at the Margins (Brookings Institution Press, 2002), and Spinning Wheels (Brookings Institution Press, 1998). His work appears in scholarly and more popular outlets, such as Teachers College Record, Harvard Education Review, Social Science Quarterly, Urban Affairs Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, U.S. News and World Report, Washington Post, and National Review. He serves on the review board for the Broad Prize in Urban Education and on the boards of directors for the National Association of Charter School Authorizers and the American Board for the Certification of Teaching Excellence. A former high school social studies teacher, Hess teaches or has taught at the University of Virginia, the University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown University, Rice University, and Harvard University.
