At Jeb Bush’s National Summit on Education Reform in Washington, D.C. last week, two prominent education reformers from the center-left and the center-right joined to make a remarkable statement about parental choice. Asked from the audience to name their “No. 1 idea” to improve public education, former New York City school chancellor Joel Klein and former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice answered with a remarkably united voice.

Their three minutes of extemporaneous remarks are well worth your time, and are available through C-SPAN.org here.

In brief, Klein spoke of the way various types of learning options, including charter schools, have helped spur improvements in New Orleans and Harlem: “About a third of the kids in Harlem in the third grade are in charter schools. What’s amazing is the Harlem District went up, and this is apples to apples, went up dramatically from when we started this intensive choice process there to now. … Not only did the charter schools outperform almost everybody, but the public schools … actually moved up significantly themselves.”

Rice spoke to how competitive pressures have produced a “catalytic” effect in higher education, and noted that only wealthier families tend to have choice in a K-12 system where pupil assignment is determined only by geography: “So the only people stuck in neighborhood schools are poor people, and that’s the height of inequality. And that’s why I’ve called it a civil rights issue.”

The lineup for this week’s Jeb Bush education conference is further evidence that a growing centrist coalition has emerged to move the ball on education reform and school choice.

This is the Foundation for Excellence in Education’s fifth national summit, and it grows in both stature and bipartisanship every year. Two years ago, it made headlines when President Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, was announced as a keynote speaker. This year, Duncan’s speaking again. So is John Podesta, the former Clinton chief of staff who heads the left-leaning Center for American Progress; and Gloria Romero, the former Democratic California state senator who authored the original parent trigger bill; and, on various panels, other Democrats like North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue and Virginia State Delegate Algie Howell.

So, on the one hand, it’s no longer so notable that more and more liberals and progressives and Democrats are part of this constellation. On the other hand, holy smokes! Clearly, they’re not on the same page with Jeb Bush and fellow conservatives on every education issue. But the strength of the arguments in favor of ed reform and school choice, and the leadership of folks like Bush and Obama, have galvanized people from all across the political spectrum to have respectful, thoughtful discussions about our schools and our kids in ways that just weren’t possible 10 or 15 years ago.

I don’t know how long this will last, but the 2012 elections have at least produced a renewed call in Congress for a bipartisan solution to the deficit crisis. I suspect this is a rare opportunity in education, and reformers of all stripes would be wise to recognize it as such, and to do what they can to extend it. One way to foster that political cooperation is to make the public better aware that all this is happening – that Republicans and Democrats have actually found common ground on more than a few planks of ed policy. (more…)

ALEC to remain neutral on Common Core. Report from EdWeek. As we noted last week, Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education weighed in against the ALEC resolution. Thumbs up from Checker Finn. More from EdFly Blog.

Speaking of Common Core … Education Week writes about the dispute between the Florida Department of Education and a private vendor over a website that was supposed to prepare teachers and students for the new standards.

Teacher evals. The FEA holds a press conference to step up its criticism. Coverage from Orlando Sentinel, Gradebook, The Florida Current, First Coast News.

Agenda for ed conference. The fifth annual Excellence in Action National Summit on Education Reform, put on by the Foundation for Excellence in Education, is next week. Full agenda here.

Private school problems. Both the Bradenton Herald and Sarasota Herald-Tribune take a look at issues with The Prep Academy.

This recent speech is 22 minutes long, but Michael Johnston's stories about Tasha and Flavio make it worth every second. Johnston is the Democratic state senator from Colorado who made a name for himself last year when he led the charge to overhaul teacher pay and tenure. He's also a former teacher and principal, and a Teach for America alum. He delivered this gem - a Forbes columnist called it the "best speech about education -- ever" - at a TFA benefit dinner. Get the tissues now. These words in particular will sear themselves deep: "You think I can have that?"

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush opened his national education conference in San Francisco today with an impassioned plea for national Common Core Standards, reminding us of both their relevance and broad political acceptance.

Bush’s conference, the National Summit on Education Reform, has become one of the country’s top venues for education reform and a place where ideas are increasingly attracting bipartisan attention. His support of national standards is hardly new, of course, and reflects the foundation on which he built his A+ Education Plan in Florida. There, he employed “Sunshine State Standards” to drive a plan that then used tests not only to assure the progress of students but also to grade the performance of public schools. “What gets measured,” he often says, “gets done.”

Among the examples Bush used was that of writing. Most states now teach and test writing in strikingly superficial ways. They ask students to write about personal experiences, their family, their travel, their likes and dislikes. But the Common Core Standards, now adopted by 46 states, aspire to do much more. Even fifth-graders are required to “support a point of view with reasons and information, to introduce a topic or text clearly …. to provide logically ordered reasons that are supported by facts and details.” By high school, a student is expected to “introduce a topic and organize complex ideas, concepts and information so that each new element builds on that which precedes it to create a unified whole” and to use “relevant facts, extended definitions, concrete details, quotations or other information and examples appropriate to the audience’s knowledge of the topic.”

These are skills that will help a student succeed not only in college but also in a work world that increasingly depends on people who can synthesize and communicate complex information. Bush certainly knows that.

These standards give some federalists heartburn, of course, which is why it is so important to see a prominent Republican conservative make the case so forcefully. Bush also makes the distinction in how standards are implemented that should provide common ground for common standards. “It is good for our nation to embrace these kinds of standards,” he said. “But for the solutions we need to let states determine their own path.”

Politicos may call that threading the needle, but educators should embrace it for its practicality.