Reform-minded Educator Sees New Connection to Carolina a Natural Fit
By the University Gazette (UNC)
February 18, 2009
Judith Rizzo knows that Jim Hunt took a risk seven years ago when he hired her to run what would become the James B. Hunt, Jr., Institute for Educational Leadership and Policy.
And for many of the same reasons, it was no less a leap of faith for her.
She would relocate to a state that, despite its phenomenal
growth in places like Charlotte and the Triangle, was still
predominantly rural. She was “urban straight up and down,” having spent the
previous six-and-a-half years as the deputy chancellor for the New York City
school system.
Rizzo had also served as a deputy superintendent for the public school system in Tacoma, Wash., where she championed school-based management and oversaw the implementation of school accountability protocols. In addition, she spent 16 years working in Boston Public Schools and seven years as a principal in nearby Lowell, Mass.
Would her now-fading Boston accent and her big city ways be accepted, she wondered. Then, there was the unknown of working for an organization that not only was new, but that had established a unique mission that no other organization had – or has yet – attempted.
In many ways, the man for whom the institute was named provided its strength and purpose, Rizzo said.
Hunt, during two eight-year runs as governor from 1976 to 1984 and from 1992 to 2000, established a national reputation for making public school improvement not only his business, but also his area of expertise. That is why, during the administrations of presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and now Barack Obama, his name appeared on the list of potential education secretaries.
“When Jim Hunt said, ‘C’mon down, let’s have a conversation about education,’ they knew that what they were going to get was going to be good,’” Rizzo said.
The idea of the institute was to keep the conversations going. In December 2002, seven months after the institute opened its doors, it sponsored its first Governors Education Symposium, which was attended by 32 governors.
“It was held at the Rizzo Center and Governor Hunt was tickled that so many of the governors thought it was my own center,” Rizzo said.
The original plan was to hire a leader who had been a policy wonk – someone who was part of a prestigious think tank and examined the ills of education from afar. Rizzo, on the other hand, was a “practitioner,” someone who had to respond to crises as they arose – from budget battles to the Manhattan schools’ response in the aftermath of 9/11.
It was while she was in the middle of doing all these things that Rizzo and Hunt crossed paths. “As it turned out, many of the things that I had made happen in New York City were things he had championed as governor,” she said.
In Rizzo, Hunt was getting someone who had direct responsibility over 40 superintendents in a school system of some 1.1 million students – roughly the number of schoolchildren in the entire state of North Carolina.
Instead of a policy wonk, Hunt saw in Rizzo a practitioner with the responsibility of crafting reforms and making them work. She also did so in a city that had grappled for years with the same kind of social and demographic issues that states like North Carolina had only begun to experience in recent decades.
For instance, Rizzo implemented a special educational district to provide direct oversight of the city’s low-performing elementary and middle schools and instituted longer school days to give these students more instructional time.
“The more we talked, the more we discovered we could pretty much finish each other’s sentences, because we were looking at the same problems, only from very different perspectives,” she said.
Build for the long run
The institute does not advocate, Rizzo emphasized. It attempts to analyze and synthesize the most current information so that government leaders have it available in a format that is condensed enough to inform their policy decisions. As Rizzo said, “We are not pushing them in any direction except toward the truth.”
Rizzo also encourages governors and legislators to think beyond the next election cycle. If reforms are to last, especially the big ones, they need to be built for the long run, she said.
While the institute is intended to serve all 50 states, its relationship to North Carolina is particularly strong. It conducts a retreat with North Carolina legislators each year to review education data and policy.
Last year, the institute initiated two publications.
The inaugural issue of “Concepts” focused on the importance of providing integrated services, particularly health services to low-income children, as a key to their academic success.
“Blueprint,” an eight-page policy primer, focuses on critical issues in education policy. The inaugural edition included a review of the standards that states have adopted to delineate what students should know at each grade level, from K–12. The review was based on an in-depth study that the National Research Council conducted at the institute’s request.
“Their research demonstrated variability that was greater than anyone had imagined, not only between states, but within states and within different schools in the same districts,” Rizzo said. “These results were dramatic, and alarming.”
Local control of schools is the tradition in the United States, but Rizzo said school boards needed to be smart about controlling only things they understand well.
Complicating the issue, she said, state-created tests are produced through a democratic process that lends itself to adding more and more requirements until the curriculum becomes “a mile wide and an inch deep.”
As a result, there are far too many standards for an end-of-grade test to cover, leading to multiple-choice questions that cannot test for the higher-order thinking skills students will need in a global economy, Rizzo said.
“We need to go back to teaching kids more of what the United States has always been a leader in, and that is creativity,” she said.
Coming home
Rizzo said it was an exciting time to be in her business, with the election of Beverly Perdue as governor and Obama’s selection of Arne Duncan, head of the Chicago school system, as his education secretary.
Also, the institute’s yet-to-be-realized opportunities after becoming affiliated with Carolina last summer are reason for excitement, she said.
Since its inception, the institute had been attached to the office of UNC President Erskine Bowles, but Bowles decided the institute and other similar organizations with education-related missions could work better if each were tied to a particular campus within the UNC system.
“Becoming a part of Carolina was really like coming home,” Rizzo said.
“It just felt so natural and so right. In a funny way, we have more freedom than ever before because Carolina is in a position to better understand what we are trying to do and to become a part of it.”
For more information about the institute, refer to www.hunt-institute.org.
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