Numbers glued to high stakes consequences, however, corrupt performance. Since the mid-1970s, social scientists have documented the untoward results of attaching high stakes to quantitative indicators not only for education but also across numerous institutions. They have pointed out that those who implement policies using specific quantitative measures will change their practices to insure better numbers.

The work of social scientist Donald T. Campbell and others about the perverse outcomes of incentives was available and known to many but went ignored. In Assessing the Impact of Planned Social Change, Campbell wrote:

“The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor” (p. 49).

Campbell drew instances of distorted behavior when police officials used clearance rates in solving crimes, the Soviets set numerical goals for farming and industry, and when the U.S military used “body counts” in Vietnam as evidence of winning the war.

That was nearly forty years ago. In the past decade, medical researchers have found similar patterns when health insurers and Medicare have used quantitative indicators to measure physician performance. For example, Medicare requires—as a quality measure—that doctors administer antibiotics to a pneumonia patient within six hours of arriving at the hospital. As one physician said: “The trouble is that doctors often cannot diagnose pneumonia that quickly. You have to talk to and examine the patient and wait for blood tests, chest X-rays and so on.” So what happens is that “more and more antibiotics are being used in emergency rooms today, despite all-too-evident dangers like antibiotic-resistant bacteria and antibiotic-associated infections.” He and other doctors also know that surgeons have been known to pick reasonably healthy patients for heart bypass operations and ignore elderly ones who have 3-5 chronic ailments to insure that results look good.

More examples.

TV stations charge for advertising on the basis of how many viewers they have during  “sweep” months (November, February, May, and July). Nielsen company has boxes in two million homes (representative of the nation’s viewership) that register whether the TV is on and what families are watching during those months. They also have viewers fill out diaries. Nielsen assumes that what the station shows in those months represents programming for the entire year (see 2011-2012-Sweeps-Dates). Nope. What TV networks and cable companies do is that during those “sweeps” they program new shows, films, extravaganzas, and sports that will draw viewers so they can charge higher advertising rates. They game the system and corrupt the measure (see p. 80).

And just this week, ripped from the headlines of the daily paper, online vendors secretly ask purchasers  of their products to write reviews and rate it with five stars in exchange for a kickback of the price the customer paid. Another corrupted measure.

Of course, educational researchers also have documented the link between standardized test scores and narrowed instruction to prepare students for test items, instances of state policymakers fiddling with cut-off scores on tests, increased dropouts, and straight out cheating by a few administrators. (see Dan Koretz, Measuring Up).

What Donald Campbell had said in 1976 about “highly corruptible indicators” applies not only in education but also to many different institutions.

So why do good policy makers use bad indicators? The answer is that numbers are highly prized in the culture because they are easy to grasp and use in making decisions.The simpler the number–wins/losses, products sold, profits made, test scores– the easier to judge worth. When numbers have high stakes attached to them, they then become incentives (either as a carrot or a stick) to make the numbers look good. And that is where  indicators turn bad as sour milk whose expiration date has long passed.

The best policymakers, not merely good ones, know that multiple measures for a worthy goal reduce the possibility of reporting false performance.

It is an accepted truism that successful schools offer lessons about “what works” and that those lessons can, in turn, be taken to scale.  It’s a nice, simple idea, and particularly attractive for those put off by the tentative nature of educational research.

And there’s only one problem: it doesn’t work.

The move to identify effective practices and take them to scale is a unique product of the “excellence for all” era—an age in which the traditionally separate concerns of excellence and equity have been fused together.  Prior to that, concerns with “excellence” usually manifested in efforts like tracking, designed to better serve the so-called best and brightest.  “Equity,” on the other hand, was associated with efforts like busing; rather than raising the height of the nation’s educational pyramid, the aim was to level the playing field.

In the mid-1980s, however, these two separate approaches to school reform were bound together as a new corps of politically pragmatic reformers began talking about “excellence for all.”  Equity, they suggested, need not come at the expense of the privileged.  Instead, high flying schools could serve as models for their lower achieving peers.  Identify what makes good schools special, these reformers argued, and reproduce it.

Like reformers of previous eras, those in the “excellence for all” era were drawn disproportionately from backgrounds of educational privilege.  But whereas in earlier eras such lofty educational experiences had been viewed as irrelevant for the work of improving urban public schooling, they became more significant as reformers sought to erase the gap between privileged schools and their urban public counterparts.  As such, reformers increasingly perceived themselves as well-situated to comment on the character of effective schools, relying on personal experience, common sense, and intuition to inform their positions on educational change.

Viewed in this light, the thrust behind efforts like the small schools movement makes perfect sense.  One can almost picture Bill Gates—graduate of a small private school that “made a huge difference” in his life—touring a large urban high school and noting how much bigger it was than his alma mater.  Goaded on by Tom Vander Ark, another private school graduate who frequently cited his own personal experience as an influence, Gates poured $2 billion into small schools efforts, believing that they had found “what works” and could replicate it.

But the small schools movement was not an isolated case of reliance on common sense and personal experience as a means of identifying “what works.”  Consider the popularity of an organization like Teach For America, which won support in government and among major philanthropies by playing up the fact that fixing schools is, in Wendy Kopp’s words, “not rocket science.”  Urban and rural schools, the theory goes, would be better off if their teachers had degrees from places like Harvard—the kinds of diplomas possessed by those teaching at schools like Andover.  It’s a classic overgeneralization error—that a salient factor from one setting would continue to be so in another.  But errant or not, the allure of learning from personal experience and using common sense to draw out lessons is incredibly powerful.  Never mind the fact that most urban high schools look nothing like Andover.

Or take a third example: the effort to expand the Advanced Placement Program.  For the first 40 years of its history, AP was the exclusive domain of tony private schools and wealthy suburban districts.  Consequently, when entrepreneurial reformers began seeking scalable solutions, they saw AP as an obvious example of “what works.”  After all, lots of successful schools used it.  So they began pushing to get AP everywhere, confident it would make a difference.

The results of this approach, not surprisingly, have been less than inspiring.  The small schools movement failed to substantially increase student achievement.  TFA corps members, for all the good work they do, are hardly the kind of life-long expert teachers found at top-flight independent schools, and most studies find them roughly equivalent to other novices.  And the AP Program, having expanded into low-income urban and rural schools, is now being dumped by elite schools and branded as outdated.

Yet despite these mixed results, “excellence for all”-minded reformers are no more skeptical of their work than fish are of the water they swim in.  This generation of “educational entrepreneurs,” after all, came of age believing that successful schools offer particular lessons, and that those lessons can be replicated in entirely new environments.  It is an article of faith.  But like other articles of faith, it sometimes conflicts with reality.

Of all the cartoons on charters that I found, every single one opposed them. I scoured the Internet and could not find a pro-charter cartoon.  I do understand that the nature of cartoons is to satirize and caricature but those I found hammered again and again the theme that charters are, at best, harmful to, and, at worst, destroying public schools. I hope readers will point me to pro-charter cartoons that while they satirize still show positive features of this form of parental choice that has spread dramatically in the past two decades.

Since the initial charter school law was passed in Minnesota in 1990, there are now about 5,000 charters (2010) across the nation enrolling 1.4 million students (2009). Unlike public schools, charters can limit how many students they accept because of the space they have and the type of program. As a result, those charters that have established positive reputations with parents often have waiting lists and use lotteries to select their students.

Like public schools, charters vary in quality. Some are first-rate, some are mediocre, and some have been closed for academic failure and financial irregularities. There is nothing magical about being a charter school. Charter schools do not traffic in miracles. It takes a lot of work and money to launch a charter and, like businesses, many fail in the first few years. It takes a heap of work and dedication–and money also–to keep a charter school on course and thriving. (Note to readers: I serve on a board of trustees that governs four charter schools in northern California).

Now to the cartoons.

The next one refers to the Philadelphia (PA) public schools and then Superintendent Arlene Ackerman.

As I noted above, I could not find pro-charter school cartoons. So, for those readers wanting the pluses of charter schools, “Waiting for Superman,” the David Guggenheim documentary that has been both praised and panned, offers one person’s view of charter schools saving children whose only choice was a neighborhood elementary or middle school. Here is a YouTube interview with Michelle Rhee, former Chancellor of the Washington, D.C. schools who is featured in “Waiting for Superman.”

Pasi Sahlberg is director of the Finnish Ministry of Education’s Center for International Mobility and author of the new book Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? He posted this sensible way of borrowing from another nation on his blog November 5, 2011.

“I think the first lesson that Finland offers to other educational reformers is that whole-system reform can be successful only if it is inspiring to all involved and thereby energizes people to work together for intended improvement. I often use the thinking of Martin Luther King as an example of an inspiring dream that moves people. Dr. King’s dream was not that his country would have a 5-percent annual economic growth rate. That wouldn’t have inspired many people. Similarly, making a country number one in PISA rankings doesn’t excite too many educators. The Finnish Dream since the 1970s has been to provide a good public school for every child in the country. This goal inspired many and was a source of energy that was needed to push through necessary political and educational changes. It was powerful enough to bring different people and political groups to join forces for fulfillment of this dream. The Finnish Dream looks like the dream of John F. Kennedy in 1961: to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. It was challenging, required hard work and political consensus, but in the end rewarded the entire nation through its outcomes.

Second, some observers have concluded that the secret of Finnish educational success is its well-trained teachers. Yes, it is true that teachers and leaders have higher academic education in Finland than in many other countries. But that alone is not the way to whole-system change. What is significant in the Finnish approach is that it has focused on improving the professional knowledge and skills of teachers and leaders as a collective group, not only as individuals, which is the common practice in many current reform programs elsewhere. Finnish teachers learn to work together with other teachers. Finnish education system development has systematically focused on improving schools as social organizations. This includes leadership development that is, according to external reviewers, aimed at enhancing shared and distributed models of leadership. In brief, Finnish educational change is driven by building social capital within the system in concert with individual professional growth.

Third, I think the Finnish example – together with lessons from Canada, Singapore, Japan and Korea – of successful transformation of an education system shows other countries what could be the wrong drivers in educational change…. In my book Finnish Lessons: what can the world learn from educational change in Finland? I talk about the Global Educational Reform Movement (GERM) that has been much less successful than what Finland and the other successful reformers mentioned above have been able to accomplish with almost the opposite solutions. The best-performing educational systems all have built their change strategies on systemic approaches that rely on collective professional and institutional (or social capital) development, enhanced conditions for teaching and learning for all and more equal educational opportunities within their education systems. Countries that have been infected by GERM drive their education reforms by piecemeal changes, stronger accountability for teachers, faith in individual capacity building, and the power of technology over humans as keys to turning around unsatisfactory school systems. Michael Fullan has argued that “there is no way that … nationwide goals will be met with the strategies being used” in the ongoing education reform in the U.S or Australia. “Finnish Lessons” suggests that these are not the right drivers for whole-system reforms. They have never been used in Finland or in any other successful education system as the main strategy of change.

We should not ask whether Finnish educational model would work in the United States or anywhere else. The question should be: What can we learn from the Finnish experience as high performer and successful reformer? The main lesson from Finland is that there is another way to transform current education systems than that based on standardization, testing, accountability and competition. Finland also shows that we don’t need to rely on corporate school reform models to achieve our goals. Finnish lesson is that good policies and overall well-being of people, including poverty reduction, are the corner stones of sustainable educational success.

Related articles

• What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success (m.theatlantic.com)
• From Finland, an Intriguing School-Reform Model (nytimes.com)
• Nice guys “Finnish” last? (matthew.wordpress.com)
• Washington Post: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2062465,00.html

Two years later, retired Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who presided over a growing economy for nearly two decades, apologized to a U.S. Congressional committee that the economic models he had used were flawed.

Then there was President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Don’t forget Enron. And surely, some of us recall those smart people falling for email scams from Nigeria promising millions of dollars for access to social security and credit card numbers.

Of course, psychologists have explored the blunders, mishaps, and mindless behaviors of very smart people. See here and here.

What about school reform? Can smart people do dumb things? You bet they can.

Consider the constant chatter that the U.S. is declining economically, socially, and globally and that schools must be drafted to stop that decline. The low scores of U.S. students on international tests is Exhibit 1. Even without getting into the shortcomings of the tests used to rank nations internationally and measure students domestically, the untoward consequences of raising the stakes on state test scores (e.g., narrowed curriculum, withholding diplomas, closing schools) are evident today. Look around to see if the U.S.’s global economic position has improved. It has not after a decade of NCLB and a burst housing bubble.

But betting that a federal law would miraculously spur economic growth and a larger chunk of foreign markets is not necessarily dumb. It is a national ideological tic that American policy elites have had in “educationalizing” social, economic, and political problems (Labaree Paper-Ed_Theory_11-08 ). Hurtful habitual behavior even on a national level is, like individuals continually smoking, understandable only if we see the behavior as addictive.

What is, however, categorically dumb is the fast-track federally driven movement (states competing for Race to the Top funds) of using test scores to evaluate teachers in the face of damning historical and contemporary evidence, all of which has been available to top federal and state policymakers. Like those smart guys in that 2006 Federal Reserve meeting whose over-confidence in their econometric models fueled joking about a strong economy when they were barely hanging on to a slippery housing market bubble, federal officials pushing states and districts to use test scores to determine teaching effectiveness have not done due diligence. And due diligence is what each of us expect of our top decision-makers.

Consider the British experiment called “Payment for Results” in late-19th century England when Parliament legislated that teachers would be paid on the basis of how many of their students passed tests  (Rapple, Payment for Results ). In 1887, yes, 1887, one school principal saw the consequences and said:

… a teacher knows that his whole professional status depends on the results
he produces and he really is turned into a machine for producing those results;
that is, I think, unaccompanied by any substantial gain to the whole cause of
education. (Lyle Jonesaera99 citing G. Sutherland, Policy-making in Elementary Education  1870-1897 (London:Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 68).

A century later in California, policymakers approved “Cash for CAP,” a program that sent money to schools on the basis of how well they did on the California Assessment Program. Over 500 high schools in the state divided up $14 million for improved scores on CAP (San Jose Mercury News, April 19, 1985, p. 1B). Other districts across the nation in the 1990s launched similar programs for paying schools and, later, teachers for gains in student test scores  Complaints about narrowed curriculum, test prep, and cheating surfaced time and again.(See here, Brian Stecher, Consequences of High-stakes Testing, and Lori Aratani, “Teaching to the Test, San Jose Mercury, February 21, 2000).

And in the past decade, the millstone of test scores grinds even more finely with student test scores determining wholly or in part teacher effectiveness. Supremely confident about all the positives of this policy (e.g., teachers and students working harder, scores rising), top decision-makers have not done due diligence on what experts in testing have said repeatedly about using test scores to evaluate individual teachers (see here and here) and the history of previous efforts to reward teachers on student performance. Had they done so, they might have heeded the record of perverse outcomes that have accrued to such policies. On this issue, then, smart people do dumb things.

Related articles

• Inside the Fed in 2006: A Coming Crisis, and Banter (nytimes.com)

Consider science curriculum in California. The first science framework in 1990 laid out content standards, grade by grade, as to what teachers should teach and what students should learn. Since then, there have been revisions in the state framework (scienceframework-1).

The purposes of the science framework are stated clearly:

Educators have the opportunity to foster and inspire in students an interest in science; the goal is to have students gain the knowledge and skills necessary for California’s workforce to be competitive in the global, information-based economy of the twenty-first century….

This framework is intended to (1) organize the body of knowledge that students need to learn during their elementary and secondary school years; and (2) illuminate the methods of science that will be used to extend that knowledge during the students’ lifetimes.

Note that these purposes for the framework seek to have students leave school inspired and interested in science, equipped with knowledge and skills to enter the workforce, and conversant with how scientists think and act. Multiple and competing purposes drive this framework, a situation that has characterized science education for decades.

The California science standards are connected to approved textbooks that teachers use in their elementary and secondary school lessons and, further, the science standards are linked to the California Standards Test given at grades 5 and 8 and 10 and in the separate sciences (biology, earth science, chemistry, and physics) in grades 9-12. Thus, curriculum standards as a structure are connected to the age-graded school, instructional materials for teaching the subject matter, and assessment of whether the content has been taught and whether students have learned what was taught. This, then, is the intended curriculum.

I say “intended” because once states adopt curricular frameworks in science they will have only a passing similarity to the science content and skills that teachers will teach once they close their classroom doors. In the real world of age-graded schools, pedagogy, assessment, and professional development are thoroughly entangled while the official curriculum too often sails above the clouds loosely tethered to what happens in classrooms. How can that be? The answer is in the other layers of the curriculum structure.

Teachers, working alone in their rooms, make up the second layer. They decide what to teach and how to present it. Their choices derive from their knowledge of the subject they teach (elementary and secondary school teachers differ greatly in their knowledge of science), their knowledge of children and youth, their beliefs about how teachers should teach and children should learn, prior experiences as a student, their affection or dislike for topics in the framework and textbook, and their attitudes toward the students they face daily. In fact, researchers continually find that teachers in the same building will teach different versions of the same course while claiming that they are teaching to the state standards and to the prevailing desired pedagogy. Thus, the intended curriculum and what teachers teach may overlap in the title of the course, key topics, and the same textbook, but can differ substantially in actual subject matter and daily lessons.

The taught curriculum overlaps with but differs significantly from what students take away from class. This is the third layer. Students pick up information and concepts from lessons. They also learn to answer teacher questions, review material, locate sources, seek help, avoid teachers’ intrusiveness, and act attentive. Moreover, children pick up ideas from class-mates, copy their teachers’ habits and tics, imitate their humor or sarcasm, or strive to be as autocratic or democratic as the adults. So, the learned curriculum differs from the intended and taught curricula.

And what students learn does not exactly mirror what is in the tested curriculum. Here, then, is the fourth layer of curriculum. Classroom, school, district, state, and national tests, often using multiple-choice and other short-answer items, capture some–but hardly all–of the official and taught curricula. To the degree that teachers and students attend to such tests, portions of the intended and taught curricula merge. Furthermore,  many of these tests seek to sort high achieving students from their lower-achieving peers. The information, ideas, and skills contained in test items for such purposes represent an even narrower band of knowledge.

There are, then, four curricular layers, not one unvarnished curriculum. The official curriculum, often derived from state curricular frameworks, professional associations, or national standards, is the top layer of the formal structure of content and skills that teachers are expected to teach and students learn. It is the exterior layer that reformers continually change in their effort to alter what teachers teach and students learn. But the official curriculum rests atop three other layers that assemble and distribute knowledge and skills in the age-graded school through pedagogy, assessment, and professional development: the taught, learned, and tested curricula.

I have omitted one important fact about this multi-layered curriculum. Previous reforms create the historical context for the multi-layered curriculum and influence the direction of contemporary reforms. This historical context is like a coral, a mass of skeletons from millions of animals built up that, over time, accumulates into reefs above and below the sea line. Its presence cannot be ignored neither by ships nor by inhabitants. Yet many eager reformers in science education do ignore the coral reefs, pay little attention to the historical context for the new science teaching and learning that they champion.

Having a four-layered structure called curriculum that has been changed time and again is precisely how reform-driven policymakers end up again and again confusing change with reform. In changing the exterior layer of the multi-layered curriculum, decision-makers are confident that they have now improved, nay, reformed the curriculum. They believe that teachers will teach more and better science, students will learn, and test scores will mirror those improvements. When the anticipated results fail to materialize in classroom lessons and student outcomes, confusion, disappointment, and disillusion occur.

Much of that confusion and ultimate disappointment over new science curricula over the past century, then, has had to deal with the discrepancies within and between the multi-layered curriculum and the historical coral reefs upon which it rests.

In 1981, a businessman offered college tuition to elementary school students in New York City who graduated high school. Called “I Have a Dream,” Eugene Lang’s efforts had prompted two Washington, D.C. businessmen in 1988 to make a similar offer to 59 fifth graders at Seat Pleasant elementary school in Prince George’s county (MD). A recent series in the Washington Post documented what happened to those 59 poor and minority fifth graders who were called “Dreamers.”.  The reporter summarized the results of that experiment:

“at least 11 of the 59 graduated from four-year colleges; at least three of those 11 attained advanced degrees; at least 12 students completed trade school; six dropped out of high school; what happened to six more remains unknown.

[The project coordinator] knows that the Dreamers’ high school graduation rate of 83 percent far surpassed Prince George’s overall rate in 1995. He also knows that the vast majority did not finish college, a fact that is true of many Dreamers nationally, according to a summary of several studies by the “I Have a Dream” Foundation.

From New York to Portland to Houston, the Dreamers graduated from high school and enrolled in college in far higher numbers than other students. But they often struggled to finish college.”

The early intervention in children’s lives, the incentive of having college paid and providing on-going help from advisers and counselors have spurred poor students to stay in high school and graduate far surpassing similarly situated students who were not beneficiaries of these programs (see Kahne PDF 1164238 ). Yet far higher graduation rates from high school followed by difficulties in going to college and persisting toward graduation is the pattern for these programs targeting low-income and minority elementary school students. The money and help has not altered the low numbers of those entering college after high school and the ferocious dropout rate among those who did go on to higher education. But it did change the all-too-familiar trajectory of most Seat Pleasant Dreamers–they graduated high school, some went to college, many took jobs, got married, and had kids. And, yes, some went to prison. But not in the percentages that their peers experienced.

So there is a wealth of evidence that educational and social early intervention programs help young children in family and school achieve success in elementary and secondary school, producing hard-working engaged adults who, in turn, help their children succeed.

But that same body of evidence also reveals poverty’s effects on individuals, family, peers, and neighborhood in those who did not graduate high school, dropped out of college, and lost their way in crime and addictions. Zip codes may not be destiny but being poor surely influence one’s life chances.

So why is there a continuing struggle between the “no excuses” crowd of school reformers and those reformers that call for both rigorous academic programs and social services?

ANSWER: The “no excuses” crowd has become the establishment among reformers with two Presidents and most of the corporate community behind them politically as donors line up to fund charter start-ups, expand parental choice through vouchers and similar ventures. Steven Brill’s Class Warfare maps that political terrain very well (See here, here, and here).

It is not that these “no excuse” reformers dismiss poverty as a factor in growing healthy, successful adults. They recognize the harmful effects of being poor but they want schools to focus solely on effective teaching and learning, to concentrate on acquiring knowledge and skills and do what they are supposed to do with children regardless of background. They point to KIPP. They point to those consistently successful charter schools in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. Sure, they say, social class is important but it does not determine what each low-income, minority child can achieve.

Then opponents tear apart the results of KIPP and those exceptional urban charter schools. Such a fruitless ideological debate over policy direction often fails to mention cost.

The crux of the matter is money and political will. Intervening early in children’s lives, providing support services to children and youth as they proceed through school, and offering incentives for going to college do, indeed, show results (or return on investment that would delight any far-sighted CEO). But the initial costs of the capital investment up-front are high. With a shrinking pie of resources for  improving schools, there is weak political will to spend (invest?) more on those who need it the most–even when the evidence, even when the return on investment, clearly shows that such decisions pay off for both individuals and society.

I never understood the phrase “knowing everything and knowing nothing” until I examined my knowledge of teaching. Like most educated adults, I knew everything, and yet nothing, about teaching. The “everything” part of our knowledge has to do with what teaching looks like. As children, we spent many days sitting before teachers. As adults, many of us have visited our own children’s classrooms. From these experiences, we have a sense of the variety of ways in which teaching occurs, and we have a sense of what counts as good teaching or bad teaching. Some of us also have strong views about what teaching should look like, and some of us become education reformers, devoting substantial energy to trying to improve teaching.

But reforms typically fail, forcing us to acknowledge that although we know a lot about what teaching looks like, we know almost nothing about why it looks like this. We don’t understand why teaching seems so intractable to reform efforts, why teachers seem to ignore the guidance offered to them by so many concerned groups. Most American teachers are highly educated and highly dedicated. They are members of professional associations, receive various kinds of continuing professional development, and have access to textbooks and other materials. They care about their students and work long hours preparing their lessons and reading their students’ work. The question we have to ask is this: How can it be that people who are well educated and committed to their work engage in practices that receive so much criticism?

The study I describe shows how classroom events appear to teachers and how routine conditions of classroom life often dictate teaching practices. It reveals that teachers are not unaware of reform ideals, and indeed are sympathetic with them. But they also have to attend to many other things, simultaneously orchestrating time, materials, students, and ideas. They must finish a lesson by 11:33 so that students can be in the cafeteria at 11:35. They must make sure that all students are on the same page, digesting the same ideas, gaining the same understandings. They must make sure that the right diagram, chart, or globe is readily accessible to show to students at exactly the right moment, and that the handouts students will need are also nearby. They must be prepared to respond to individual confusions, misunderstandings, and tangential observations without distracting or boring the rest of the class.

They must also be prepared to have the entire plan disrupted or defeated by some unforeseen event. Someone from down the hall may enter the room and interrupt the lesson midstream. A student may poke another student or ask a question that other students don’t understand or don’t care about. The projector may break, or there may not be enough copies of a handout to go around. Though such distractions appear everywhere, schools seem more susceptible to them than other organizations. Perhaps because schools are teeming with children, they are subject to much higher levels of distraction than most other organizations. And in schools, distractions are not merely temporary setbacks; they are obstacles to intellectual progress. They get in the way of good teaching. All these interruptions and complications can distract teachers from the thread of their own thought and make it harder for them to present coherent lessons. Ironically, schools are places where sustained thought is rare.

These difficulties provide an explanation for our long history of failed reform efforts in education. Reform movements have come and gone for decades without much visible impact on teaching practices. The problem is so widely recognized that historians are now chronicling these movements. Yet reformers continue to try, and others continue to generate hypotheses to account for the failures. Perhaps teachers need more knowledge or better guidance; perhaps we need to change their values or their dispositions. The sad fact is that most reforms don’t acknowledge the realities of classroom teaching, where both God and the devil are in the details.

Students worked on a problem in pairs or individually. Then the teacher passed out “clickers” so students could answer a multiple choice question appearing on an Interactive White Board (IWB) by voting whether A, B, C, or D answer was correct.

Students pointed at the IWB and clicked.

The teacher then tapped a button and the results of the entire class were displayed in pie charts so that the teacher and students saw what percentage of the class got or missed the concept embedded in the multiple-choice question.

Then, the teacher moved on (although she could have re-taught the concept if too many students erred).

Clickers are also used in college classrooms. Northwestern University Professor Bill White who teaches undergraduates “Organizational Behavior” uses the device.  Reactions from students to these instant voting devices vary, of course, but those responding to a journalist’s questions were positive. As one said: “I actually kind of like it. [Having clickers to register your opinion] make[s] you read. It makes you pay attention. It reinforces what you’re supposed to be doing as a student.”

The company that sells “clickers” (cost: $30 to $70 each) shipped over a million in 2010, half to colleges and universities and half to pre-collegiate schools (December 4, 2010 post)

Now I segue to an experience I had decades ago and occurred again recently.

In the late 1960s Stanford University administrators secured federal funds to build a multi-million dollar facility called the Stanford Center for Research, Development, and Teaching (SCRDT). A fully furnished television studio with “state-of-the-art” cameras, videotape recorders, and monitors occupied the main floor with the star-in-the-crown of the new building located in the Large-Group Instruction room (LGI).

LGI

The amphitheater-shaped room with half-circular rows looked down on a small stage with a lectern, a massive pull-down screen, and 2 large monitors suspended from the ceiling. At most of the individual seats was a small punch-button pad called the “student responder.” The responder contained the numbers 1-10 and letters T and F.

student responder

At the very top of the amphitheater was a glass-enclosed technician’s station where an aide could assist the professor with amplification of sound, simultaneous interpretation of various languages, show slides or films, and put on monitors data that the professors wanted.  Administrators had designed the room for professors to enhance the delivery of lectures.

For lectures, the student responder came into play. Designers created the pad for students to punch in their choices to communicate instantaneously to the lecturer their answers to the professor’s questions, such as “If you agree, press 1, disagree, press 2.” “If statement is true, press T.”  As students pressed the keypad, the data went directly to a mainframe computer where the students’ responses were immediately assembled and displayed for the professor at a console on the lectern. The lecturer was then able to adjust the pace and content of the lecture to this advanced interactive technology, circa 1970, that linked students to teacher.

By 1972 when I came to Stanford as a graduate student, the LGI was being used as a large lecture hall for classes from other departments. The now-disconnected keypads were toys that bored students played with during lectures. The pull-down screen was used for overheads and occasional films. The fixed position cameras purchased in the late 1960s were already beyond repair and obsolete.

In 1981, when I returned to teach at Stanford, the SCRDT had been renamed the Center for Educational Research at Stanford (CERAS). In the LGI, none of the original equipment or technology (except the sound system and simultaneous translation) was used by either students or professors. The student responders, however, were still there.

In 2012, nearly a half-century after the SCRDT installed the LGI, the amphitheater room is still in use as a regular lecture hall. I was in that room three weeks ago to hear a colleague talk about his career in education and, you guessed it, as I listened, my fingers crept over to the “student responder” and I began to click the keys. “Student responders” and “clickers” merged in my mind.

And that is where the deja vu all over again comes in.

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*Attributed to Yogi Berra, Yankee baseball team catcher in the 1950s.

Rather than keep reminding people that there is a long chain that extends from policymakers adopting a new reading program to that third grade teacher working with three groups in a 30-minute lesson or pecking at teachers, a mild version of blaming, for reasons why they have been selective and even closed their doors to reformers’ ideas, I would like to ask about these ideas (e.g., small high schools, better math and science curricula to engage students, everyone takes college prep course) that teachers are pressed to put into practice. Where do these ideas come from?

A quick answer is that these ideas come in response to the larger (and historical) pattern of public schools being deputized to solve national problems. For the past three decades, policy elites have drafted public schools to grow the human capital for the nation to compete globally as it shifted from an industrial-based to information-driven economy. Another answer is the influence efficiency-minded business and civic leaders in league with donors and social scientists for the past half-century who have focused on results rather than traditional educators’ usual focus on process (i.e., how something is done and learned rather than outcomes).

Yet those facts do not fully account for the persistence of particular ideas targeted at teachers’ beliefs, knowledge, skills, and actual classroom practices—e.g., teachers expecting more of all students, their learning more about math and science, implementing five-step lessons. Where do those reform ideas come from?

Here I want to suggest a commonplace observation that has a deep truth buried in it, one that while mentioned often, is tossed aside. And that is: every reformer went to kindergarten, finished elementary school, and spent six or more years in secondary schools going from classroom to classroom watching teachers teach. If I add four years of undergraduate schooling and then a year or two for a masters degree (let’s omit those reformers who spent 4-8 years in doctoral work), you have your typical reform-driven policymaker, analyst, politician, foundation officer, and CEO having sat in classrooms for nearly 20 years forming beliefs and ideas about what is good and bad teaching, how subjects should be taught, and what should be done to improve the art, craft, and science of teaching.

There is a “yet” coming and here it is. I draw from Mary Kennedy’s Inside Teaching to elaborate that “yet.”

“Yet children are not privy to the whole of teaching. They are unaware of the decisions teachers make, the plans they make, and the work they do outside class. Moreover, they are emotionally dependent upon teachers, so their interpretation is not likely to be based on a close analysis of events. Yet from those naive experiences, many durable values are formed about the nature of school subjects, how teachers and students should behave in classrooms, and what constitutes ‘good’ teaching.

“Notice that all of us share these early experiences, so the ideals that drive reformers can derive from their personal responses to their teachers…. [Thus] a complex set of beliefs and values about the nature of classroom life–both how it is and how it should be–continues to influence people’s thinking even into adulthood….(p. 14)”

From Bill Gates who went to Lakeside School (private) in Seattle and then onto Harvard before dropping out to President Barack Obama who attended public and private schools in Indonesia and then Punahou (private) in Honolulu to Diane Ravitch who went to public schools in Houston, school reformers formed ideas from observing and interacting with their teachers day-in and day-out; they hardly shed these experienced-produced beliefs about what is “good” teaching and what constitutes a “good” school when they became adults.

Sure, reformers beliefs are often stated in sophisticated language seemingly far removed from their less articulate ideas formed when sitting 10 feet away from their teachers but should those glossy phrases be stripped away, the provenance of reform ideas can be found in the daily experiences of sitting in classroom many years ago. And those ideas, as Mary Kennedy reminds us, are distorted because children are emotionally involved with their teachers and  know little about the planning, the improvisational decision-making during lessons, and work outside of school that teachers do.