Teaching History Then and Now

Suppose you could find someone who taught history in three different high schools in two cities between the 1950s through the early 1970s. Suppose further that this person had been trained as an historian and had kept personal records such as a journal, student grade books, scattered lessons, school yearbooks, and student letters from those year of teaching.  Suppose even further that this person could reconstruct from those sources and official school archives what it was like to teach history in those three largely minority high schools a half-century ago. And, finally, suppose that this former high school history teacher (who had ended up as a university professor researching curriculum, teaching, the uses of technology in classrooms and school reform) could then go to those same three high schools–still largely minority–in two different cities today, yes, today, and observe how teachers teach history now.

If all those “supposes” could happen, would those pictures of teaching history then and now in the same high schools a half-century apart reveal anything worthwhile to policymakers, practitioners, researchers, parents, and reform-minded non-educators?

My answer is yes. And that is what I propose to do over the next two  years.

I taught history and social studies at Glenville high school (Cleveland, Ohio) for seven years beginning in the mid-1950s. I and my family moved to Washington, D.C. in 1963 and for nearly a decade I taught history and social studies in two different DC public high schools (Cardozo and Roosevelt) while also serving as a district administrator.

Last month, I proposed to a foundation that I would reconstruct my teaching in those three high schools a half-century ago and then return to those same high schools and watch contemporary teachers of history teach students in 2014. I wanted to answer one question: Over the past half-century, amid enormous changes in the political, economic, and social context for public schools, what has changed in the content I once taught and how I taught it and what has remained the same?

Of course, I and other scholars have examined this question in past decades. I have found that subject matter has changed in the sciences, math, English, and the social studies. I have also found that most teachers in organizing the content they taught incrementally blended elements of teacher-centered (sometimes called “traditional”) and student-centered (sometimes called “progressive”) ways of teaching. In one book, I called the blended instruction “teacher-centered progressivism.” In a later book, I saw these hybrids “hugging the middle” of the teaching spectrum in grouping for instruction, using textbooks, adopting new technologies, and assessing what students have learned. In short, most teaching practices blended the old and new, creating change while maintaining stability. That  mix of new and familiar practices may explain to outsiders looking inside classrooms such as policymakers, researchers, and parents why they find classroom lessons very familiar to what they experienced years earlier as students.

What I propose doing is to track those classroom changes in more intimate ways by looking at what and how I taught history decades ago and comparing and contrasting what I can reconstruct from that earlier period with what I observe of history teachers today in those very same high schools that I spent a substantial portion of my career. But not only record my teaching.

I need to look at how my colleagues in each high school taught. When I taught then, I tried out new materials and experimented with different ways to organize the teaching of history while mainly using teacher-centered practices. I need to track down whether there were differences in how my peers and I taught.

To determine how other history teachers in the schools within which I taught conducted their classrooms—to see if there was variation among my peers—I would use school yearbooks, student accounts of their teachers, journalist articles, etc.  to craft a coherent description and analysis of their teaching as well as the district, school, and  classroom contexts in which we taught.

By necessity, portions of the “coherent description and analysis” will be autobiographical. I would include vignettes of my teaching in those years.  I am fully aware that there is a natural tension between writing an historical account as I have done in other studies and constructing a personal narrative. Writing autobiographically, in fact, has become a genre in of itself for historians with its own complications and dilemmas. I will note those tensions and deal with them explicitly in my written account.

For the current district, and school contexts in 2013-2014, I would collect documents and interview key district and school participants. In the three high schools, I will observe and interview as many teachers of history who would be willing to participate. I have written extensively about the national context of school reform over the past quarter-century and will determine to what degree those reforms became state policies and then filtered into the two districts and classrooms I observe.

The key part of the analysis of both time periods would be parsing what the words “change” and “stability” mean. There are, for example, different kinds of institutional change over time (e.g., incremental and fundamental). Are the changes I identified occurring over the past century mostly incremental (e.g., higher teacher certification requirements, high school courses added and dropped) or were there some fundamental changes in organizing curriculum and instruction (e.g., project based learning, middle schools replacing junior highs)? Sorting out such changes gets complicated when, to give another example, changes are made that end up reinforcing traditional patterns of teaching (e.g., more tests and accountability regulations turn into teachers spending more instructional time on preparing students for exams). Moreover, school structures and cultures that affect what is taught and how it is taught shift over time within schools (e.g., schools get larger and smaller, daily times schedules for classes get longer and shorter, professional learning communities arise and disappear).

Consider further the varied meanings of “change” when one examines teaching practices. Take a teacher, for example, who agrees to use laptops stored on a mobile cart in one of her five history classes. She is deeply interested in using primary sources and wants students to analyze those sources. That decision involves risk on her part in having students distracted by the devices and being off-task in achieving the objectives of her lesson. Yet, she is willing to experiment. . During the 50-minute class period, she has students use the laptops to look up vocabulary terms in the textbook chapter on the Great Depression of the 1930s. She then asks them to find photos of dust storms and farmers leaving the Midwest—all of these tasks are for a homework assignment. There is little discussion of the definitions students found that differ from what the textbook says and the different photos students found. She has adopted a technological innovation to further her goal of students parsing words and photos but uses it conventionally in her lesson.

Has she altered her teaching? The teacher says yes. She is using laptops in one of her five daily lessons and students collect information from different sources. An administrator who visits her classes also says yes. The researcher, however, looking to see whether the teacher has students analyze primary sources and come up with interpretations of what those photos say about the effects of dust storms on Midwest farmers might say no. From the researcher’s perspective, the teacher is surely using laptops to investigate what occurred on many farms during the Great Depression in one of her five classes. Yet when she does have students use these devices, their use reinforces existing teacher-centered practices that the teacher has always used. These multiple perspectives have to be considered when determining whether colleagues and I have altered daily teaching practices.

Thus, the complexity of the concept of change has to be unpacked, analyzed, and fit to the contexts and teaching that I describe in earlier decades and now.

To sum up this project, I propose that a working historian of education who had taught for nearly 15 years in three urban high schools a half-century ago, revisit those high schools and districts to answer the thorny question of what has changed in both the content and pedagogy and what has remained the same. It is not an easy question to answer but important to informing policy decisions for current and future policymakers, researchers, parents, and reform-minded activists who seek to improve teaching and student learning not only in history but also in other academic subjects as well.

This is what I intend to work on for the next two years.

Does Online Instruction Work? (Part 3)

Here is the fundamental question that public policymakers (e.g., federal and state officials, local school board members and superintendents) have to answer when making decisions that involve children and youth compelled to attend public school. Such a question, however, about the effectiveness of online instruction in raising student’s academic achievement and producing other desirable outcomes such as increased attendance, higher graduation and lower dropout rates, and college admissions—that is what I mean by “work”– gives educational leaders heartburn.

Why heartburn? Because of the tortuous role that research plays in policymaker decisions about adopting and implementing technologies in schools, especially the current clamor for online instruction. Over the past few decades, there have been thousands of K-12 studies that have sought an answer to the question.

The answers provided by scores of studies have been contested because most have had serious design and methodological flaws. Moreover, many of these studies lumped together full-time virtual schools, hybrids, and online courses, And the results have been underwhelming.  That is where heartburn enters the picture.[i]

Even when researchers over the past few decades have performed meta-analyses of a smaller number of studies that have met higher standards of quality they found that virtual instruction in its various modes, at best, is equivalent to regular face-to-face classroom instruction. At worst, some studies showed less achievement gains than traditional teaching. And keep in mind that these meta-analyses were of studies where online instruction occurred in mostly math, reading, and science courses—not other academic subjects. The overall picture is considerably less than promoters of full- and part-time virtual schooling have promised or leaders had expected.[ii]

What complicates matters is that findings drawn from research studies on the effectiveness of online instruction are only one of many interlocking tiles in a mosaic that policymakers assemble in judging whether to adopt virtual instruction for children and youth. Policymakers are often torn by the push-and-pull of conflicting impulses over determining what kinds of evidence of effectiveness matter and how much evidence is necessary to inform, shape, and justify a policy decision?[iii]

Consider the push impulse for evidence. Using research and other forms of evidence to make a decision is rational, a value highly prized in life much less for policymaking where the stakes in power, influence, and resources run high. Gathering, sifting, and analyzing data to make a personal, professional, or organizational decision is what is expected of those in decision-making posts. So when it comes to public policy decisions, in the best or worst of fiscal times, policymakers have to make a strong public case anchored in ample evidence to convince voters and key stakeholders (e.g., school boards, chambers of commerce, teacher unions, state officials, etc.) to buy and deploy new technologies in classrooms and have students use them regularly. Evidence, including research studies, that these technologies will help students learn more, faster, and better is expected.  Furthermore, current top-down pressure among business, civic, and educational leaders for “research-based practice” and “data-driven decisions” hammers school decision-makers to have solid proof in their pockets or snazzy PowerPoint presentations filled with studies that tout the effectiveness of students receiving online instruction.[iv]

Where the pull impulse enters the policy picture is that these very same policymakers have an equally strong tug to buy and deploy glittering new technologies as quickly as possible without waiting for researchers to come up with supportive findings. At professional conferences, national leaders pitch the virtues of “revolutionary” changes springing from virtual instruction and placing new technologies in classrooms. Pulled by first-hand experiences and stories of “transformations” in student learning and astute marketing by vendors, policymakers, technology leaders and school officials do not need to read research studies, visit other districts, or attend more conferences. They know in their gut the answer to the question of what works; they have faith in their intuition and, like entrepreneurs and ambitious decision-makers elsewhere, they want to forge ahead and implement virtual schooling swiftly because they believe it will help students learn.

These policymakers are not irrational. There is a political logic in mandating online courses for every student as a graduation requirement, starting pilot tablet and laptop programs, and encouraging a principal and cadre of teachers to create a technological innovation tailored to their school They consult with key stakeholders in the community before inviting charter management organizations like Rocketship Schools to establish blended learning programs in their schools. These decision-makers do not need researchers to tell them that these new technologies “work.” They believe in their heart that they will work. Push-and-pull conflicting urges pit solid research studies against strong beliefs and leave unanswered the question of what kinds of evidence matter. Too often beliefs trump facts.[v]

In asking the fundamental policy question that too often goes unanswered about whether online instruction is effective in teaching and learning, it helps to examine other reforms that have “worked” where responsible decision-makers did not rely on stories, beliefs, and intuitive snap judgments but, instead, were guided by solid research evidence.

Take preschool education. Well-designed study after study of three and four year-olds who were in preschool programs (e.g., Perry pre-schools, Abecedarian) followed their progress through schools and into adulthood. These studies show short- and long-term gains in academic achievement, adult behaviors, and post-graduation earnings. Or consider the research and evaluations of career-technical academies where students get prepared for both college and career.  Researchers doing experimental and quasi-experimental studies have found over the past four decades a range of positive student outcomes for graduates of these programs.[vii]

Considering these examples where research studies in K-12 schooling clearly show that certain investments in programs and practices work, why do so few policymakers who buy, deploy, and mandate different forms of virtual schooling seldom cite studies to determine whether online instruction is effective? Why is the return on investment of taxpayer monies so often ignored?

Three reasons come to mind.

Research results are scant and mixed. As stated above, the results of meta-analyses of K-12 studies do not show a decided edge for students taking online courses or in virtual full-time schools performing even marginally above students who are in teacher-led classrooms.  More striking, however, is that only a few studies of virtual instruction in K-12 schools meet the minimum quality threshold for design, sampling, and methodologies. From a recent (and often cited) meta-analysis of studies, researchers stated:

Few rigorous research studies of the effectiveness of online learning for K–12 students have been published.  (original italics). A systematic search of the research literature from 1994 through 2006 found no experimental or controlled quasi-experimental studies comparing the learning effects of online versus face-to-face instruction for K–12 students that provide sufficient data to compute an effect size. A subsequent search that expanded the time frame through July 2008 identified just five published studies meeting meta-analysis criteria.[viii]

The authors of the meta-analysis conclude that these five studies:

comprises a very small number of studies, especially considering the extent to which secondary schools are using online courses and the rapid growth of online instruction in K–12 education as a whole. Educators making decisions about online learning need rigorous research examining the effectiveness of online learning for different types of students and subject matter as well as studies of the relative effectiveness of different online learning practices.[ix]

In short, given the results of the few K-12 studies that have been done, there is clearly insufficient evidence to launch major online initiatives in either elementary or secondary schools. For those policymakers who seek to appear rational and prize research findings, the pantry is nearly empty.

The research being done is shoddy. While only a few analyses of online instruction approach the gold standard of experimental or quasi-experimental studies, a great deal of research has been (and continues to be) done. Unfortunately, much of it is poor quality. Most studies fall far below minimum standards researchers have established to determine the effectiveness of an educational program or procedure. Bias is evident in the sampling of students and teachers included in studies. Bias also appears in studies funded by technology vendors. Moreover, there is far too much reliance on teacher and principal surveys and self-reports of student engagement and achievement. Finally, among those studies that claim higher test scores as a result of online instruction, few studies control for obvious factors that could explain the rise in test scores. [x]

Slip-shod research, of course, has seldom stopped champions of online instruction from pressing policymakers to include such studies in their recommendations and use such research to persuade practitioners of the merits of virtual schooling for children and youth. Thus, poorly designed studies loaded with lethal flaws that show student gains in test scores often made media headlines for millions of readers and viewers while occasional well-designed studies that show modest or no gains turned up in academic journals read by a few hundreds researchers.

Nonetheless, policymakers have decided again and again to have more and more elementary and secondary school students in blended schools and taking online courses to solve one or more of the problems described in Part 2.  Were sensible observers of the contemporary policy scene to watch top-level district, state, and federal leaders push ambitious virtual programs, these observers would note the frequent absence of convincing evidence for the sharp expansion of online instruction. These observers would easily conclude that decision-makers made policy on grounds other than research findings. They would hardly miss that when policymakers did cite research studies in making the decisions, citations would be selective and, more often than not, had justified a policy already decided upon. Why is that? Here is where I offer a third reason for the minor role that research plays in making decisions about virtual learning.

Symbolic, political, and budgetary reasons carry far more weight in making policy decisions about online instruction than research findings.

State and local school boards and superintendents adopt elements of virtual schooling because they want to be seen as technologically innovative and ahead of other districts. In this culture, the value of technology is equal to social and economic progress. Even the term “high tech”—like high fashion, high church, high class, high society—conveys a whiff of superiority relative to “low tech” methods and materials. Symbolically, high-tech is high status. Students using new technologies signals that schools are modern, up-to-date, and preparing the next generation to enter higher education or go directly into the labor market with sufficient skills and knowledge to find jobs. Being in the vanguard of innovation—schools buying iPads for every kindergarteners—signals voters, taxpayers, and parents that the district wants to raise achievement through engaging students while bringing the real-world into classrooms to prepare children and youth for an information-driven economy. Not adopting new technologies, even when funds are short, sends a clear message that district leaders are failing their students, mindlessly reinforcing traditional instruction, and neglecting grave educational problems. (xi)

For policymakers to be seen as ahead of the game in technology garners public support. Too often school critics forget that local boards of education are completely dependent upon voters for funding. Those school boards that rely upon local and state resources to raise funds for schools are politically smart, then, to buy computers, whiteboards, and expand online instruction as high-status symbols to cement community support for future tax levies and bond referenda. They are also politically smart in spending monies to adopt and implement virtual schooling because in the long-term—about a decade—it will reduce significantly the cost of schooling children and youth.

Finally, policymakers also know that business, civic, and community expect of them unceasing efforts to improve students’ academic performance through better school organization, governance, curriculum, and instruction—including the adoption of technology. Since World War II, job number one has been reform. Unrelenting reform is, in short, a policymaker strategy for political survival. [xii]

For these three reasons, policymaker use of research studies on online instructional effectiveness matters little.  The truth is that even were there more than a handful of rigorously designed studies showing strong student effects from taking online courses, such results would be used to justify after-the-fact policy decisions. Of course, such solid studies are missing from the research pantry. The fact remains that no one knows for sure for which students virtual schooling works, in what subjects, and under what conditions.

If that is the case now, it does not mean it will be so forever. Recall that I pointed out how rigorous research designs, sampling, and methodologies have produced findings over time that have accumulated into convincing caches of evidence (e.g., preschool and career-technical academies) sufficient to give policymakers a rock-solid foundation for making decisions if the political conditions and resources were favorable for such policies.

Sure, that final “if” clause is crucial but it is realistic in light of the history and practice of making and implementing school policy over the past half-century. Political, economic, and social conditions influence which reforms get identified and adopted. With the current excitement over virtual learning and blended schools unlikely to abate in the immediate future and interest in spending ever larger amounts of money on online instruction, asking decision-makers about the evidence supporting expansion of online instruction is, at the least, a question that demands answers that can be reviewed and analyzed publicly.

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[i] Gene Glass, “The Realities of K-12 Virtual Education,” p. 5.

[ii] Cathy Cavanaugh, et. al. “The Effects of Distance Education on K–12 Student Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis.” 2004 Naperville, IL: Learning Point Associates ; Rosina Smith, et. al.  “A Synthesis of New Research on K-12 Online Learning”. 2005,  Naperville, IL: Learning Point Associates; Barbara Means, et. al., “Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies,” (U.S. Department of Education, Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development, 2010).

[iii] See, for example, Charles Lindblom and David Cohen, Usable Knowledge: Social Science and Social Problem Solving (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979); Carol Weiss, et. al., “The Fairy Godmother and Her Warts: Making the Dream of Evidence-Based Policy Come True,” American Journal of Evaluation, 2008, 29(1) at: http://aje.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/29/1/29

[iv] For a typical example of calls for practitioners to use data-driven decision making, see:  Pamela Shorr, “10 Things You Always Wanted To Know about Data-Driven Decision Making,” Scholastic Administr@tor, September 2003, at: http://www.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=423

[v]Michelle Davis, “States, Districts Move to Require Virtual Classes,” Education Week, October 9, 2011; Kelsey Sheehy, “States, Districts Require Online Ed for High School Graduation,” U.S. News, October 24, 2012 at: http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/high-school-notes/2012/10/24/states-districts-require-online-ed-for-high-school-graduation

[vi] Districts sometimes give up laptops. See Winnie Hu, “Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops,” New York Times, May 4, 2007; Jonathan Schorr and Deborah McGriff, “Future Schools,” Education Next, 2011 at: http://educationnext.org/future-schools/

[vii] James Heckman, “Skill Formation and the Economics of Investing in Disadvantaged Children,” Science, Vol. 312,  June 30, 2006, pp. 1900-1902; James Kemple, “Career Academies: Impact on Work and Educational Attainment,” March 2004, MDRC

[viii] Barbara Means, et. al., “Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies,” (U.S. Department of Education, Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development, 2010), p. xiv.

[ix] Ibid., p. 54.

[x] Yong Zhao et. al., “What Makes the Difference? A Practical Analysis of Research on the Effectiveness of Distance Education,” Teachers College Record,  2005, 107(8), pp. 1836-1884; Means, et. al., “Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies.” For an example of vendor bias in reporting research, see: Intel White Paper: Education Transformation, “The Positive Impact of eLearning—2012 Update.” A capsule summary that contains the both the high-and-low of research on online instruction as well as studies of educational technology is on p,8:

While few rigorous experimental or controlled quasi-experimental studies on eLearning’s benefits have been published, a critical mass of evidence indicates that investments in eLearning can deliver substantial positive effects.

[xi] In the discussion on symbolism of technology in K-12 schools and in the larger culture I draw from Kathryn Henderson, On Line and On Paper (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998, chapter 8; John Meyer and Brian Rowan, “Institutional Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony, in Walter Powell and Paul DiMaggio (Eds.) The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp.41-62; Jeffrey Pfeffer, “Management as Symbolic Action: The Creation and Maintenance of Organizational Paradigms,” Research in Organizational Behavior, 1981, 3, pp. 1-52.

[xii] Frederick Hess, Spinning Wheels: The Politics of Urban School Reform (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1998).

What Critical Problems in K-12 Schools Does Online Instruction Solve? (Part 2)

K-12 online instruction attracts policy-inclined school reformers and reform-minded policymakers because it appears as a technological and inexpensive solution for serious problems at a time when public schools are viewed as a double failure: in urban districts where largely poor and minority youth get a third-rate education and many suburban and rural schools that fall short of producing skilled and knowledgeable graduates who can contribute to a strong, competitive global economy.

Here is a brief list of those problems that promoters say will get solved through virtual instruction.

* Traditional whole-class instruction. Teaching lessons to the whole group of 25-30 students at one time generation after generation has resulted in tedium and boredom for students who already know the content or are too far behind to grasp the lesson. It has been difficult for teachers with these size classes and district and state requirements to cover the curriculum to hit the sweet spot of learning that brings all students along at the same time.

With online instruction, lessons finally become individualized. Online instruction and blended learning provide “differentiated instruction” that can take each student from where he or she is and go to where each one can be–the Holy Grail pedagogical reformers have sought for generations. Moreover, these technological innovations permit some regular classroom teachers to “flip” their lessons. That is, at home students see teacher lectures or go through online programs and then come to class where teachers help individuals and small groups work through difficulties in understanding the lesson strengthening critical thinking, analytic, and problem solving skills.

*Disengaged and underachieving students. Online courses and blended learning will motivate individual students to work harder, gain more knowledge and skills, and embrace learning. Engaged students will achieve higher grades and graduate high school. Online instruction will bring such student up to speed in knowledge and skills necessary to finish academic courses and enter college or careers in a highly competitive global economy.

*Disconnect from world of work. Current content and skills taught in academic subjects seldom have real-world connections. Moreover, while high-tech devices continue to spread in schools, student use is often restricted to low-level tasks hardly tapping the enormous information and communication power of these devices. With digital competence expected of anyone working in an information-based economy, students graduate unprepared for the labor market. Taking online instruction regularly will close the gap between what schools offer, what students do in daily lessons, and what youth will face when they graduate, advocates say.

Rising cost of schooling children and youth;  The single largest item in K-12 budgets are salaries for classroom teachers. Because virtual schools, cyber-charters, and blended schools hire fewer teachers, average expenses for online schooling comes in lower than costs for operating regular age-graded schools. The national average expenditure for instruction in regular schools runs around $10,000. Costs for virtual schools range between $5100 to $7700 and for blended schools $7600 to $10,200. While there are dueling studies over costs among policy advocates and opponents, few would question that online instruction is cheaper than providing a teacher for every class in an age-graded school .

Those promoting online instruction, then, pitch this instructional approach as solving heretofore intractable problems. It is an idea, they say, whose time has come.

Yet, amid reform-driven policymakers’ enthusiasm for virtual learning and widespread expansion of online instruction across the U.S. in the past decade, is the nagging question that drives many policymakers and educational leaders bonkers. Even with all of the hype for online instruction being “revolutionary” and “transformational” in teaching and learning, school board members, superintendents, parents, and media journalists still ask: What does the research say about whether we should invest in virtual learning? Which brings me to the second question: Does online instruction work?
I answer this in Part 3.

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Online Instruction for K-12 (Part 1)

For those familiar with past efforts to install new technologies in schools, the many claims for online instruction transforming traditional teaching and learning in K-12 public schools either cause snickers for their hyperbole or strike a flat note in their credibility.  Consider the following answer Clayton Christensen author of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Transform the Way the World Learns gave to an interviewer’s question: “Do you think that education is finally ready for the Internet?”

I absolutely do. I think that not only are we ready but adoption is occurring at a faster rate than we had thought… We believe that by the year 2019 half of all classes for grades K-12 will be taught online… The rise of online learning carries with it an unprecedented opportunity to transform the schooling system into a student-centric one that can affordably customize for different student needs by allowing all students to learn at their appropriate pace and path, thereby allowing each student to realize his or her fullest potential….

Such hype from academic gurus is unfortunate. Apart from mirth, they contribute to low credibility because of the history of exaggerated claims for earlier technologies (e.g., distance education, instructional television, and desktop computers) and thereby mask the complexity of online instruction. Moreover, the claims ignore differences among students who take online courses, how teachers deliver instruction, the quality of online teaching, assessments of student learning, and design of research studies.

Consider, for example, that students receiving online instruction span children of home-schoolers and those with disabilities who cannot attend school to students enrolled in the International Baccalaureate diploma program and Advanced Placement courses to those teenagers who have failed courses and sign up for credit recovery. And recently, there are now elementary schools that blend individual “learning labs” with regular classroom instruction. [i]

Web courses also differ in delivery. Some emanate from virtual schools with a curricular menu of software programs in different subjects and ones where teachers lecture and demonstrate lessons to thousands of students at one time; others are courses in which teachers hold online discussions with fifteen students in a section with periodic face-to-face contact and loads of email exchanges.

The quality of online instruction also varies. There are stars among instructors who relish the work, plan thoughtfully, and use the limited face-to-face interaction and discussion threads creatively. They offer many stories of student success. Most online teachers are hardly stars, however, yet soldier through their duties and complete assigned  tasks satisfactorily. While current technology permits online and offline discussions among students and between teacher and students, the nature of the setting nearly always results in short bursts of teacher telling, checking for understanding with multiple-choice questions, videos, YouTube segments, and bullet-point slides with students interacting later. The pedagogical epicenter of most online instruction is squarely within the teacher-centered tradition.

Then there are engaging software programs loaded with audio and video clips that take students point-by-point through carefully designed materials that can re-teach concepts and skills for students who answer questions inaccurately. For those students who master the content and sail through the quizzes, they can push ahead with advanced material.

Nor can one ignore the varied research and evaluation designs and methodologies used to assess online instruction or particulars devices (e.g., tablets, laptops, clickers)–whatever the new “new thing” is— to determine whether they have produced proficiency in knowledge and skills or gains in student test scores (or both). Horse-race type studies—is online instruction better, the same as, or worse than traditional instruction?— have been done for well over a half century and have been shown, time and again, to be flawed for not taking into consideration other factors that could explain proficiency (or lack thereof) and growth (or decline) in student achievement. In such studies key factors as the teacher’s pedagogy, students’ socioeconomic status, instructional materials, and other variables are missing. None of the foregoing, however, has stopped (or will stop) evangelists for online instruction from gathering a grab bag of defect-filled studies claiming student achievement gains.

Regardless of the quality of research on new technologies, cheerleaders continue to trumpet online learning as the “disruptive innovation” that will replace regular schools. Advocates spread the gospel of blended schools using exaggerated claims to sprinkle over holes and cracks in the innovation.  Promoters of these innovations overestimate the power of their words and underestimate the facts of variation in students, how online instruction is delivered, teaching quality, and research designs. They attribute achievement gains (or losses) to online instruction while disregarding its diversity thus contributing to romantic myths about powerful technologies solving grave problems.  Claims about online learning revolutionizing teaching and student learning are, to put it charitably, just claims.

What hangs in the air over these claims are two key questions that policymakers too often leave unanswered. Explicit and public answers to these questions could replace unexamined assertions and myths with credible arguments and facts.

1. What are the pressing problems in K-12 schools to which virtual schooling are solutions?

2.  Does online instruction work?

I answer these questions in subsequent posts.

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[i] By online and blended learning I mean:

“[A] wide range of programs that use the Internet to provide instructional materials and facilitate interactions between teachers and students and in some cases among students as well. Online learning can be fully online, with all instruction taking place through the Internet, or online elements can be combined with face-to-face interactions in what is known as blended learning….”  This definition comes from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Technology, “Understanding the Implications of Online Learning for Educational Productivity,” January 2012, p. v.

Blended learning, a combination of individual online instruction and whole or small group instruction in regular public school buildings has emerged recently in K-12, particularly in charter schools. Entrepreneurs, both for-profit and non-profit, and educators have developed various models of mixing online and direct classroom contact between teachers and students.

History Lessons about Preschools in U.S.

“Our four-year-olds do have a place in school, but it is not at a school desk,” said Ed Zigler, Yale University psychologist who helped design Head Start in President Johnson’s “War on Poverty” and led the Office of Child Development in President Nixon’s administration. He wanted K-12 systems to welcome all young children but was concerned about pre-kindergartens becoming another academic boot camp for four-year-olds.

Many others, however, were strongly opposed to putting preschoolers into an already bureaucratized, ineffective K-12 system. For example, the head of the Commonwealth Foundation (PA) asked: “Would you hire a carpenter to remodel the first floor of your home if he was already working on the second and third floors and doing a poor job? Would you expect the results on the second and third floors to improve just because the carpenter was also remodeling the first floor?”

Both quotes stake out different positions on the significant policy question whether preschools for all children should be part of the existing K-12 system–as it is in Oklahoma, New York, Georgia, and New Jersey–or be part of the private market for child care in homes, churches, and corporate-owned facilities as it has been in most cities and suburbs for decades or, another option, a mix of public schools and private child care. These policy options capture the dilemma facing decision-makers on the issue of expanding access of three- and four-year-olds to preschool in the U.S.

The quotes come from Elizabeth Rose’s historical study (pp. 98, 179) of early childhood education from Head Start to universal preschool called The Promise of Preschool.
In tracing the trajectory of publicly-funded preschools since the mid-1960s, Rose points out how important business leaders were in the political coalition that pressed state and federal policymakers for expanded preschools in the 1970s and their continued presence since then.

“Corporate reformers,” as critics have labeled current reform advocates, include CEOs. They have been crucial members of the political coalition promoting both targeted access (only for poor children) and preschools for all children. With so much rhetoric flung  at “corporate reformers” (see here and here), it is worthwhile to remember that educational policy making is largely a political process that needs a big tent to cover a wide array of supporters.

Rose does more than tell readers of the role that business leaders had in driving the expansion of preschools for poor and middle-class children over the past half-century. In describing and analyzing the history of preschools since the mid-1960s until the present, historian Rose presents recurring policy dilemmas–re-read above quotes for divergent policy choices–and extracts a number of lessons that can inform current policy decisions. There are a few lessons that she lists that I would like to elaborate in this post.

* Inflated claims of what preschools can do for all three- and four-year-olds  are seldom achieved.

Just as hype surrounds the newest technological innovation for schools to buy and deploy, similar exaggerations accompany expanding preschool. Listen to a state superintendent of education touting preschools:

“It’s like finding out there’s an effective polio vaccine. Once you have seen the … evidence of what preschool can do for children, it becomes almost obscene not to call for universal preschool (Rose, p. 226). Or the governor of Oregon saying that expanding Head Start would be “the most significant–and most effective–anti-drug, anti-crime, and pro-education strategy” for the nation (Rose, p. 225). That providing preschool can solve larger social problems as poverty, crime, and drugs is like saying that doing exercises regularly when you are three- and four-years old will mean you will be physically fit for the rest of your life.

Life doesn’t work that way.  Preschools do not innoculate young children for the rest of their lives from pursuing bad habits, making poor choices, and avoiding mistakes.

Hyping preschools (or new technologies) may help mobilize initial political support but, historically, has led to unrealistic expectations for what can be achieved resulting in  disappointment and splintered coalitions.

*Historically, framing preschool as education rather than child care has succeeded  politically.  Yet divorcing one from the other is a policy error because U.S. families need both high-quality child care provided by private and community care-givers  and high-quality public schooling.

Business and civic leaders, educators, and parents chose strategically since the 1980s to frame preschooling as an educational issue because they believed that it paid off as an investment and was at or near the top of issues voters and taxpayers ranked as important for decision-makers to address. In doing so, advocates  stressed the importance of four-year-olds learning academic skills, having well-trained teachers, and access to proper facilities.  Calling preschool “pre-kindergarten” made it part of the K-12 system. It was a strategic decision that has worked.

In making the choice, however, promoters of “pre-kindergarten” easily slipped into denigrating child care as “custodial” and “warehousing.” Moreover, policy and voter attention shifted from just-as-important needs of infants and toddlers for high-quality child care to getting young children ready for kindergarten. Some states such as Illinois and New York have provided a full range of programs for infants through five-year-olds recognizing that both first-rate child care and preschools are needed.

These are a few of the lessons that Elizabeth Rose has drawn from her study of past and current efforts to alter the schooling and care of the young in the U.S.

Turning Around Failing School Districts: How Many Examples Do Policymakers Need??

David Kirp’s new book, Improbable Scholars, tells the quarter-century story of the Union City (NJ) victory in creating a successful, largely minority and poor school district as measured by test scores, college admissions, parent surveys, teacher accounts–take your pick. It is a story where stable city and district leadership, over the course of a generation, worked to build strong preschool, elementary, and secondary programs with cadres of knowledgeable and experienced teachers and administrators who stayed the course and who used new technologies to advance district goals. Stable leadership. Committed educators. Persistence. Adequate funding. Kirp lays out these and other principles that he extracted from the long-term school reform in this New Jersey district. For a conversation with Kirp and the President of Teachers College, Susan Fuhrman about the book, see here.

Of course, Union City is not the first nor last district to have turned itself around over a few decades and stayed effective. We know of Long Beach (CA), Aldine (TX), Montgomery County (MD), Sanger (CA), Cincinnati (OH) and many more. See, for example, Greg Anrig’s Beyond the Education Wars. The seven principles that Kirp extracts from Union City’s success mirror features of these other districts.

However, a long list of such districts that have learned the importance of adequate funding, strong preschool programs, continuous district leadership, supporting teachers, and building cultures that honor both teaching and learning does not add up to an easy recipe. For sustaining “good” districts is a set of inter-connected complex tasks that require ingenuity, resources, committed educators, and luck. Oops! I forgot to mention time. The very ingredient that policy elites eager to scale up school-by-school innovations, build new district structures of school choice, and add high-tech scrimshaw often forget or ignore.

For the dominant  thinking among federal and state policymakers is a rush-rush strategy of transforming low-performing school districts through fear, sanctions, and putting money on the stump for districts to grab. See Race to the Top. I have written about the the short-sightedness and, yes, foolishness of such strategies for individual schools but now I want to ask the simple question: with so many examples of school districts, big and small, past and present, raising student achievement and sustaining that achievement, why do policy elites keep preaching widespread school failure and reaching for more online schooling, outsourcing schools to private and for-profit managers, wholesale restructuring, and closing schools?

OK, I admit, the question is not simple. It points to the continuing split among reformers over the role of the school in combating poverty–the “no excuses” brand (e.g., ex-chancellors Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee)–and joining schools with community services early and systematically from prenatal through age 21. Squeezed resources, of course, make choices inevitable so the “no excuses” crowd whose slogan also means that reforming schools is much cheaper than the alternative continue to dominate the media and the conversation over what works while ignoring the striking results of investing limited resources in those districts that have the know-how and are creating success, however measured, over the  long-term.

Books like Improbable Scholars and Beyond the Education Wars  show a mix of large and small districts provide sufficient examples of what can be done within current governance and structures without resort to the next quick-fix-it solution coming around the corner.

The evidence is there. Policy elites choose to ignore such evidence because it is slower, requires different allocation of resources, and challenges the current orthodoxy that U.S. schools are irreversible failures and need total transformation.

How To Teach History

Here is how a journalist described a class she watched a few months ago in a Northern California high school.

In the 1986 comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Ben Stein famously plays a high school teacher who drones on about the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act while his students slump at their desks in a collective stupor. For many kids, that’s history: an endless catalog of disconnected dates and names, passed down like scripture from the state textbook, seldom questioned and quickly forgotten.

Now take a seat inside Will Colglazier’s classroom at Aragon High School in San Mateo. The student population here is fairly typical for the Bay Area: about 30 percent Latino, 30 percent Asian and 40 percent white. The subject matter is standard 11th grade stuff: What caused the Great American Dust Bowl?

Tapping on his laptop, Colglazier shows the class striking black-and-white images of the choking storms that consumed the Plains states in the 1930s. Then he does something unusual. Instead of following a lesson plan out of the textbook, he passes out copies of a 1935 letter, written by one Caroline Henderson to the then-U.S. secretary of agriculture, poignantly describing the plight of her neighbors in the Oklahoma panhandle. He follows that with another compelling document: a confidential high-level government report, addressed to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, decrying the region’s misguided homesteading policies.

Colglazier clearly is a gifted and well-trained educator, a history/economics major and 2006 graduate of the Stanford Teacher Education Program. But what sets this class apart from Ferris Bueller’s is more than the man; it’s his method—an approach developed at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education that’s rapidly gaining adherents across the country. At a time when national student surveys show abysmal rates of proficiency in history, trial studies of the Stanford program demonstrated that when high school students engage regularly with challenging primary source documents, they not only make significant gains learning and retaining historical material, they also markedly improve their reading comprehension and critical thinking…..

Colglazier builds his thought-provoking classes using an online tool called Reading Like a Historian. Designed by the Stanford History Education Group under Professor Sam Wineburg, the website offers 87 flexible lesson plans featuring documents from the Library of Congress. Teachers can download the lessons and adapt them for their own purposes, free of charge. Students learn how to examine documents critically, just as historians would, in order to answer intriguing questions: Did Pocahontas really rescue John Smith? Was Abraham Lincoln a racist? Who blinked first in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Russians or the Americans?

Most history teachers do not teach like Will Colglazier or the cartoon figure teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.  Colglazier is an exception, albeit according to the journalist, one who joins many others in using  historical thinking to gain deep understanding of the past rather than a heritage approach, that is, using facts from the past to recreate a present that tells Americans who they are, who they were, and the nation they are part of.

As I and many others who have been in classrooms have pointed out, most history teachers tilt toward the heritage end of the spectrum of history teaching but many do incorporate historical approaches in their lessons (See here and here).

Why?

One answer looks at how external testing, state academic standards, federal accountability regulations, teacher certification, and the unofficial national curriculum of Advanced Placement influence what teachers present. These omnipresent structures in the policy terrain set the boundaries within which teachers teach. To answer the above question on why teachers tilt toward “traditional” teaching, then, I also want to identify other factors that often go unmentioned by those eager to improve the teaching of history in K-12 schools.

Consider that cultural beliefs about the function of public schools to socialize children and youth into the dominant civic and social values (e.g., honesty, respect for others’ values, cooperating) are anchored in age-graded school structures. They become a powerful organizational mechanism for carrying out societal expectations (i.e., kindergarten prepares children for the first grade, a high school diploma is essential to going to college or getting a decent job). Teachers operating separately in their classrooms move 25 to 30-plus students through a 700-page history text, and give frequent tests to see whether students have learned the required knowledge and skills.

Moreover, age-graded secondary schools have history teachers teaching five classes a day (with at least one planning or “free” period and lunch) usually involving up to three different preparations (e.g., world history, U.S. history, and economics) with a student load of anywhere between 125 to 165 a day. The sheer whirl of traversing these classes between 7:45 AM-3 PM is exhausting for 22-year-olds. Imagine what it is like for 62- year-olds. When grading homework, reading essays, and checking quizzes are factored into the workload of most history teachers—don’t forget most teachers see individual students before school, during planning periods and lunch, and then after school–the daily decisions and fast pace of the day, much less the unpredictable emotional ups-and-downs that accompany working with teenagers, exhilarate and exhaust teachers. These social beliefs and school structures added to the public expectation that every student passes a test to graduate and then goes to college merge to create intense workplace conditions that influence how teachers teach.

Yet history teachers are hardly passive agents that societal expectations and school structures pour into a mold. Teachers bring their life experiences, formal and informal knowledge, and personal beliefs about children, learning, and serving the community that also influence what and how they teach history. And this is where blends of heritage and historical thinking pedagogy enter the picture.

Both constrained and autonomous, teachers accommodate to external demands and organizational structures while carving out a niche for themselves in which they can make independent decisions about how they organize their classrooms, group students, and teach.  Most history teachers end up picking and choosing different practices to put a tattoo on their teaching yet fall somewhere in the middle part of a continuum of teaching practices.

While most teachers use a version of the heritage approach, a small minority like Will Colglazier work within the constraints of the age-graded school and make other teaching choices based on their beliefs about learning, children, and knowledge of history.

Consider New York teacher Linda Strait (a pseudonym). A researcher who observed her teach a hybrid of both traditions of teaching. She teaches U.S. history through lectures, guides discussions, and controls what content is taught and how.

Yet in her Civil Rights unit, she offered a series of lessons beginning with a videotape “The Shadow of Hate” after which students divided into small groups to discuss and list their reactions on wall charts; an ungraded quiz on a reading Strait had assigned; a roundtable discussion of four questions she posed to the class; a two-day simulation of a local skating rink that refused to admit minorities with the teacher role-playing the owner and students making pitches to her to keep or drop the policy. Then two days of reviewing notes, writing in-class practice essays for the 11^th grade Regents tests that would draw from the Civil Rights unit.

Strait tells the researcher, “I try to throw in as many activities and projects, but I still feel that I am too heavily the center of it.” She has invented a hybrid of the two teaching traditions out of the choices she made within the constraints of state and school district policies, the structures of the age-graded high schools, her knowledge of the subject, personal experiences, and beliefs about how her students learn U.S. history (pp. 16-28).

Will Colglazier is part of a minority of teachers using historical thinking pedagogy. Most teachers of history blend both pieces of it and the heritage approach; they hug the middle.

Beliefs in the “Goodness” of Technology: Those Talkative Kids in Ads

Have you seen those 30-second ads by AT & T with six year-olds sitting around a table answering questions from an adult about whether more is better than less and whether faster is better than slower?

The kids, cute as buttons, answer that faster is better than slower and, of course, more is better than less. If you have not seen the ads, see here and here. They highlight AT&T’s  speed and services in a humorous way.

And the ads have been hits, according to market researchers. Ad agency BBDO released the series–called “It’s Not Complicated”–last November and they have soared in ratings as measured by how many times tweets mentioned the ads.

I have watched these ads many times and I finally put my finger on what bothered me about them. What got to me was not that the values of speed and quantity were being reinforced with kids–hey, the first-graders’ responses are cute and you gotta smile when you see a gap-toothed little kid jump up and down in excitement. What bothered me was the degree to which the pervasiveness of beliefs in technology and its generous fruits are held in America and is now peddled to all of us explicitly without a blink or doubt… by first graders.

Not only in “Silicon Valley” (CA),  Austin (TX), Seattle (WA), Boston (MA), and New York (NY) where high-tech businesses and culture flourish but also in small towns, leafy suburbs, and along Main Streets elsewhere are these strong beliefs in the power and glory of technology prized. What are some of these social beliefs?

*New technologies can not only solve global warming, cancer, and low reading scores but also entertain us daily and make life at home easy.

*New technologies spur change, altering old and familiar ways of doing things. Thus, change means improvement. Improvement leads to  progress and progress  is good.

*Fast is better than slow.

*More is better than less.

None of these beliefs and the values they mirror, of course, is new. They were in the DNA of  colonists in Pre-Revolutionary America, mid-19th century pioneers,  homesteaders and entrepreneurs, early 20th-century captains of industry, and greenhorn immigrants disembarking at Ellis Island. Relishing the use of new technologies from the plow to the mechanized reaper, from canals to railroads, from the stethoscope to the X-ray, from the classroom blackboard to the iPad–Americans have seen these inventions as unvarnished progress in solving vexing problems. It was America on the move, creator of the new and destroyer of the old.

What’s new is that these beliefs have been converted into facts and made explicit; they are so commonplace as to appear in ads where six year-old foils shout them out.

So what?

No rant against technology here. After all, I have a full array of devices in hand and at home to use for work, play, and managing my life. What bothers me is that the taken-for-granted  acceptance of these beliefs now made explicit has silenced serious examination of their flip side, the negatives of these entrenched views.

Where, for example, can issues of how new information technologies erase boundaries between work and home, where you are on call 24/7, be examined?  Where can issues be discussed of new communication technologies not leading to more democracy but being used by dictatorships (e.g., Syria, North Korea, China) to stay in power  or how new technologies worsen existing problems (e.g., fracking for oil, loss of privacy)?

In the home already saturated with labor-saving and entertainment devices? Hardly. Few families can examine openly beliefs they cherish.

Perhaps in the old media of newspapers, television, and books where such opportunities do exist but, unfortunately, they are largely ghettoized into newspaper op-eds, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) programs, and seldom read academic studies.

Sure, there have been some academics and public intellectuals from Langdon Winner to Neil Postman to Evgeny Morozov who have pointed out the political and social downside to a technology-rich culture viewed as crucial to economic growth and solving age-old problems. Moreover, a few social scientists have compiled experimental evidence on multi-tasking, distractions, and the perils of doing things speedily. And some philosophers have laid to rest the deeply embedded notion of inevitable progress as a positive good. A nano-fraction of the public read these studies.

Where, then, can the pluses and minuses of technological innovations  be examined? Perhaps you have already guessed where I am going for an answer. Public schools.

There are some schools and teachers who within the disciplines of science, math, history, English get students to think critically about past and present issues including analysis of media ads, technological innovations, and the beliefs students hold about these issues. Not many, however.

Most public schools are enmeshed in a standards, testing, and accountability regime aimed at sending everyone to college. Critical thinking, media literacy, and analyzing the pros and cons of technological innovations are seldom in evidence in most school settings, given the past three decades of making schools an arm of the economy.

I do wonder about those six year-olds who made those ads for BBDO and what they learned while the camera was on. What if their teachers asked them whether faster was better than slow in doing a school project or helping a friend or eating dinner with a parent? I do wonder.

Are There Lessons from the History of School Reform?

For some people, history lessons are clear.

For some, history lessons are ambiguous.

For some, history lessons are depressing.

These cartoons capture differences among historians and teachers over whether or not there are lessons for decision-makers seeking solutions to pressing problems.

No clear lessons, however, can be drawn from the past because then and now are different in significant ways. Take the second cartoon where the man in the center assumes that the other two are agreeing with him when they have completely opposite analogies in mind. The notion of obvious lessons derived from the past assumes that, for example, France and Britain caving into Hitler’s demands over Czechoslovakia in the 1938 Munich Pact was similar to the U.S. government sending troops to Vietnam to prevent Southeast Asian nations falling like dominoes to communism and, again, similar to President George W. Bush and Congress authorizing the invasion of Iraq in 2003 to strip weapons of mass destruction from a tyrannical Saddam Hussein.

But, of course, the national contexts of the late- 1930s, the early 1960s and a decade ago were neither identical nor even closely similar. Britain and France in the 1930s, suffering the effects of a lost generation of its youth in World War I, were very different nations than the U.S. at that time. And in the U.S., since the late-1930s, momentous shifts in the U.S. government, economy, society, politics, and culture occurred to make involvement in Vietnam and the run-up to toppling Saddam Hussein very different from these easy-to-use historical analogies. That assumption about situations four and seven decades apart being the same drives the idea that history can teach lessons.

Historical analogies, of course, are common. Historians use them to shed light on current situations and can be helpful as long as the different contexts for the unfolding of events are made clear.  Even Richard Neustadt and Ernest May, two scholars who dredged up past instances in Thinking in Time (1986) that could help top policymakers make better domestic and foreign policy decisions, stressed the importance of knowing the differences between then and now.

Those who fail to point out contextual differences or the weaknesses of particular analogies, in the scathing words of Gordon Wood become “unhistorical historians ransack[ing] the past for examples….” They are presentists who, in creating a “usable past” advocate certain policies because they believe their analogies, their examples fit the current situation. They are mistaken and misuse the past (see previous post). Which brings me to contemporary school reformers.

The current crop of school reformers have a full agenda of Common Core standards, test-driven accountability, expanding parental choice through charters and vouchers, spreading virtual teaching and learning, and ridding classrooms of ineffective teachers based upon students’ test scores. These reformers have their eyes fixed on the future not the horrid present  where schools, in their charitable view, are dinosaurs. These reformers are allergic to the history of school reform; they are ahistorical activists that carry the whiff of arrogance associated with the uninformed.

*They do not want to know what happened in schools when political coalitions between the 1890s-1940s  believed that there was a mismatch between student skills and industrial needs.  Vocationally-driven schools cranked out graduates who could enter skilled and semi-skilled industrial and white-collar jobs (See Benavot voc ed and Kanter voc ed). That was then. The current vocational drive to get all students into college and equip them with technological skills that no employer could turn away might give reformers pause in learning from the earlier generation of reformers’ impact on schooling.

*They do not want to know what happened in past efforts in various cities throughout mid-to-late 19th century schools in introducing widespread testing, evaluation of teachers based on those scores, and accountability. See here and Testing in 20th century.

*They do not want to know what happened when previous efforts to introduce innovative technologies into schools stumbled, got adapted in ways unforeseen by reformers, and even disappeared. See history of technology and here.

Were these starry-eyed reformers to pause and find out more about previous widespread efforts to transform schools along the lines they pursue, chances are they would find that that historical studies instil skepticism and, in Gordon Wood’s words, question “people’s ability to manipulate and control purposefully their own destinies.”  Moreover, historical knowledge takes people off a roller-coaster of illusions and disillusions. “  So often reforms go  awry and lead to untoward consequences, usually perverse ones, that reformers had not anticipated. History calls for humility among reformers, unfortunately, a trait in low supply among the current crop of amply-funded reformers.

These are the lessons that history teach school reformers.

“Good” Schools Seminar: Gleanings from a Class

For at least a decade I have taught a seminar for graduate students at Stanford called  “‘Good’ Schools: Policy, Research, and Practice.” The masters and doctoral students who take the course are committed, for the most part, to school improvement and reducing social injustices. They have scored high on the Graduate Record Exam and bring a strong record of prior academic achievement to the seminar.  Many have spent time in both charter and regular schools teaching either through Teach for America or after completing university-based teacher education programs. Even though they have attended and taught in schools under a regime of state curriculum standards, state tests, and the regulatory accountability of No Child Left Behind, they come to the seminar with varied visions of “good” schools imprinted in their minds.

In the seminar’s syllabus, I explain why I put “good” in quote marks.

“Good,” I tell my students, is obviously not a technical term but a common one that is in daily use by educators, researchers, policymakers, parents, and taxpayers. A “good” school  also can be described as “great,” “excellent,” “productive,” “first-rate,” “effective,” or other similar terms. For the past quarter-century the dominant view of a “good” or “great” school has been one where students do well on state tests and send increasing numbers of their graduates to college. That view, while pervasive, is contested by other definitions of “goodness” represented in different designs for “good” schools (e.g., KIPP schools,  New Trier high school in Winnetka (Illinois), and the Open Classroom School  in Salt Lake City (Utah).

The second reason I offer for putting the word in quote marks is to make clear that it is a value judgment based upon individual and group conceptions of “goodness” in schools (e.g., federal and state definitions anchored in values of what makes a “good” school such as  Adequate Yearly Progress or AYP).  Conceptions of “good” whether it be a “good life” or a “good friend” are loaded with values. So, too, is what we believe should the purposes of tax-supported schooling in a democracy, what knowledge and skills should be learned, how learning and teaching should occur, and what should constitute success.

To make this point, in their first assignment I ask them to write an op-ed piece describing their version of a “good” school for a general audience. Their op-eds traverse a range of schools they call “good.”

After analyzing their op-eds in the seminar, I then offer students a wide variety of school models that designers, participants, and experts judge to be “good.” They are: Core Knowledge, School Development Project or Comer schools, Thomas Jefferson High School of Science and Technology, KIPP schools, Rocketship Schools, and Child Development Project schools.

Then in one session summarizing these “good” schools, I  ask them to figure out why they are considered “good”–their purposes, strategies to achieve those purposes, measures of success, and responses from students, teachers, and parents. Then, I ask the students to judge which ones they consider “good.”

Most often, students judge each of the model schools they have read about and we have discussed in great detail, “good.” Afterwards, I ask them to write down answers to two additional questions that cause much consternation among them. The questions are: Would you teach at the school you have said was “good?” Would you send your children to the school you have judged “good?”

During the lesson, I tally all of their responses publicly to the above questions on whether the school is “good,” would they work at the school they designate as “good,” and, finally, would they send their children to that “good” school. Conflicts within individual students and across the class become evident.  Again and again, students see that while nearly all  of them designated, for example, KIPP or Rocketship as “good” schools, most of them would neither work nor send their children there. Most students wanted to work at  Comer and Child Development Schools. Most wanted to send their children to Core Knowledge and Child Development Schools.

The data from their choices revealed much individual and group nail-biting: the school is “good” but many would not choose to work at the school or send their children there. Often, discussions erupted at obvious inconsistencies expressed by students. The group slowly came to realize that while a school may be considered “good” by designers, participants, and experts, that does not mean that an individual teacher or parent would choose to work at that “good” school or  send their children there. Not only is the concept of a “good” school value-driven, they discovered, but many versions of  “good” schools exist and there is no one “good” school for all or even most children and youth. Period. End of lesson.