“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.

Cartoons on Preschool

Recently, I posted two pieces on preschools. In writing those pieces, I began collecting cartoons.  Cartoonists exaggerate key ideas–thus, the humor–driving the national passion for starting school earlier and earlier, collecting credentials in the race to get into college, pushing toddlers up the ladder of financial success, and giving Mommy and Daddy a break from racing around. Often, they poke at the pretentiousness of middle- and upper-middle class parents seeking the edge for their three year-old. So here they are in a monthly feature of my blog.* Enjoy!

________________

*For earlier monthly posts featuring cartoons, see: “Digital Kids in School,” “Testing,” “Blaming Is So American,”  “Accountability in Action,” “Charter Schools,” and “Age-graded Schools,” Students and Teachers, Parent-Teacher Conferences, Digital Teachers, Addiction to Electronic Devices,  Testing, Testing, and Testing, Business and Schools, Common Core Standards, Problems and Dilemmas, Digital Natives (2),  Online Courses,  , Students and Teachers Again, “Doctors and Teachers,” and Parent/teacher conferences.

Framing the School Technology Dream

I wrote the following commentary for Education Week. It appeared on April 17, 2013. The printed ads appear in a slideshow. See below.

For more than a century, educational technology ads have glistened with hope. Newly invented devices from the typewriter to film projectors, from the overhead projector to instructional television, from the Apple IIe to the iPad, have painted pictures of engaged students who will learn more, faster, and better. They have pictured teachers using new technologies to teach effectively. Of course, it is the nature of advertising to promise a rosier future, appealing to what policymakers, administrators, and, yes, parents yearn for … a better, easier, and even enjoyable way for teachers and students to teach and learn. And that is what these ads do. They assure readers that both teachers and students will be better off using these machines.

Take the Royal Portable typewriter ad from over a half-century ago that shows a joyful teenager looking at a report card with Mom and Dad in the background beaming. The ad announces: “A new Royal Portable can raise her marks up to 38%.” The first paragraph adds: “It happens every day! Many so called ‘slow students’ learn to type and then show up on the honor roll.”

Or consider the 1960 ad for a new filmstrip projector. Next to the image of the projector are reasons for buying this cutting-edge device. “Your teaching efforts are more effective. … Pupils comprehend faster with the brighter, more detailed image.” (See the film-projector ad and others in an online slideshow.)

Or the recent ad for the All-In-One iPad app that swears the application “seamlessly combines interactive instruction, formative assessment, progress tracking, and longitudinal reporting against standards with ANY content so the quality of instruction is measurably better and students make authentic performance gains.” Engaged students, higher achievement, and effective teaching are constants in ads for new technology over the past century.

Not to be ignored, however, is the explicit message of lower costs. Consider a 1986 Apple ad (not shown here or online; Apple did not grant permission to republish its advertisements) for a network package connecting the teacher’s desktop station to as many as 30 students’ computers. The ad proclaims: “Now Apple makes it easy to become attached to your students.” Best of all, the ad went on, the Apple SchoolBus network does “it all at 20% less than the cost of individual standalone systems.”

Sure, it’s easy to analyze and even poke fun at ads for high-tech devices ranging from overhead projectors in the 1930s to interactive whiteboards in the early 2000s. I do not want to do that. Instead, I will ask two simple questions about these ads: Who are they aimed at? Why do these ads for new technological devices over the past half-century have these constant dreams of students learning and teachers teaching more, faster, and better?

The answer to the first question is easy. An overwhelming majority of such ads are directed toward those who have the money to buy these devices: school board members, administrators, and parents. The claims for the new technology, including visuals of engaged students and the prospect of higher achievement at less cost, clearly attract school policymakers and administrators. For parents who seek an edge for their children in climbing the ladder to economic and social success in life, these machines shine with that promise. These ads are seldom aimed at either children or teachers (one exception is the filmstrip projector).

If parsing the words advertising copywriters create is important because the words stir hopes of educators and parents, and if knowing that the primary audiences for these ads include policymakers, administrators, and parents, then why do these ads decade after decade cling to the same message of enhancing classroom effectiveness and efficiency?

What helps explain the half-century of promises made in these ads is knowing about the love affair Americans have had with new technologies in life and in schools. Consider the early-19th-century Frenchman who wrote of his travels in America. He said: “Every new method which leads by a shorter road to wealth, every machine which spares labor, every instrument which diminishes the cost of production, every discovery which facilitates pleasures or augments them” impressed Americans. Alexis de Tocqueville saw the practical side of this nation in the early 1830s when he toured it with a companion. Americans’ subsequent embrace of steam engines, railroads, turbines, telephones, assembly lines, automobiles, airplanes, and one technology after another right up to the iPhone 5 and beyond is a history of falling in and out of love with the latest device that will “lead to a shorter road to wealth.”

Inventors from Thomas Edison and Henry Ford to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have become iconic heroes in this country. Each developed a device, a process that “spares labor … diminishes the cost of production … [and] facilitates pleasures.” As for schools, it was Edison who said in 1922:

“I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years, it will supplant … the use of textbooks. … I should say that on the average we get about 2 percent efficiency out of schoolbooks. … The education of the future, as I see it, will be conducted through the medium of the motion picture where it should be possible to obtain 100 percent efficiency.”

Those who produce ad copy and images for the newest laptop, tablet, and smartphone, aimed at enabling students to learn more, faster, and better at less cost, tap into a technology-filled past where heroes spun dreams of using the newest of new tools to advance both the individual and society.

____________________

For a visual tour of the school technology products and pitches aimed at educators since the 1950s, view an online slideshow, “The Promises of Ed. Technology Ads.” To view, click here ….

Donors and School Reform (Stanley Katz)

Scholars, educators, and pundits have written often about well-funded foundations distributing cash to reform schools since the late-19th century. Diane Ravitch, Rick Hess, Sarah Reckhow, and Joanne Barkan, for example, have scolded, defended, and analyzed contemporary philanthropists who see public schools as a useful lever for improving children’s lives and correcting injustices. In this essay, Stanley Katz describe the history of giving to public schools and the decided shift in current philanthropy toward shaping federal and state policy.

Stanley N. Katz teaches public and international affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University and is president emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies. This essay appeared in Stanford Social Innovation Review, Spring 2013

Twenty-five years ago, if I had been asked to describe the attitude of the major foundations toward education policy, my answer would have been that they were predictably supporting the reform ideas of the leading K-12 academic specialists, who were then concentrated in the best graduate schools of education, especially those at Stanford and Harvard Universities. Lots of ideas were circulating, of course, but the “hot” idea, largely emanating from Stanford, was that of “systemic reform”—the notion that we had not gotten very far by undertaking piecemeal improvements. We needed to come up with grand strategies to improve the entire public education system.

This movement was very much a collaboration between university experts, leading national K-12 organizations, and large foundations. In those days nearly all of the big foundations (Rockefeller, Ford, Pew, MacArthur, and Atlantic) had senior program officers (and separate programs) for education policy in the schools. Some of the program officers, such as Bob Schwartz of Pew, were leaders in making national policy and collaborated openly with state (and to a lesser degree federal) education officials, including the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association. By the mid-1990s, however, the “systemic” movement had played itself out, because it could not be successfully implemented. At that point, most of the traditional large foundations abandoned their dedicated education programs and began their current adventure with strategic philanthropy, looking for quicker and more visible accomplishments.This alliance represents an entirely new philanthropic impact on federal education policy, in an era in which for the first time it can be said that we actually have a federal policy.

It is interesting to put this development in the context of the earliest philanthropic foundations at the end of the nineteenth century. The origin of modern foundation philanthropy actually lies in the interests that the Slater and Jeanes Funds—and later Julius Rosenwald, John D. Rockefeller Sr., and Andrew Carnegie—had in improving what they called “Negro” education in the South: building schools and training teachers to assist black children shut out of the rudimentary public education system in the United States’ most benighted region. These efforts to improve education encouraged philanthropists to consider what more they might do to improve other parts of society through philanthropic investment.

But as they created their new foundations, the philanthropists encountered a severe political backlash. The Walsh Commission federal hearings of 1915 alleged that the philanthropists were using their ill-gotten gains to subvert democratic public policy making. For roughly the next 50 years, foundations backed away from overtly supporting social policy. Then, in the mid-1960s, the Ford Foundation brazenly took an aggressive public stance on educational policy by supporting community control of schools in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville section of New York City. Congress once again took hostile notice, and the large foundations retreated to their customary caution in domestic social policy and began to support the sorts of timid reforms I mentioned at the outset of this essay.

That is the back-story behind the entirely new and highly visible efforts of some of the newest crop of large foundations to promote their own, coordinated reform effort. The leaders have been the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation.

These foundations have a strong view of what is wrong with public education and of what needs to be done about it. They support charter schools, high stakes testing, and common core standards, and they aim to prevent teacher unions from standing in the way of “progress.” They also have coordinated their programs in interesting and effective ways

Combined—especially with the virtually limitless funds of the Gates Foundation—they have extraordinary sums available for investment. And they have been able to leverage them through their influence over US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who has for many years been on board with their K-12 reform agenda. When Duncan was CEO of Chicago Public Schools, he was supported by the Gates Foundation, and he has staffed his federal agency with former Gates education senior executives. Thus what we have now is a convergence of federal money (think Race to the Top) and foundations’ K-12 ideas.

This alliance represents an entirely new philanthropic impact on federal education policy, in an era in which for the first time it can be said that we actually have a federal policy with respect to the content of K-12 education. The foundations are vocal and open about their intentions. Their ties to federal, state, and local education bureaucracies have never been closer. They are attracting the support of smaller foundations, multiplying their own huge investment. They are creating new private-public infrastructure (charter schools, principals’ academies), and they have the teachers’ unions completely on the defensive.

I would find this a worrisome situation for public education even if I thought the education policies of the new large foundations were sound. But I do not. I find the brazenness, arrogance, and disregard for public decision making of current philanthropic attempts to influence federal policy just as dangerous to democracy as the critics of the original foundations contended so vociferously 100 years ago.

Principals as Instructional Leaders: Rhetoric and Reality (Part 2)

Past and current research on principals reveal that school-site leaders perform managerial, instructional, and political roles in and out of their schools. Of these multiple (and often conflicting) roles, however, the instructional leader role has been spotlighted as a “must” for these men and women because, as the theory (and rhetoric) goes, it is crucial to improving teacher performance and student academic achievement.

Yet studies of principal behavior in schools makes clear that spending time in classrooms to observe, monitor, and evaluate classroom lessons do not necessarily lead to better teaching or higher student achievement on standardized tests. Where there is a correlation between principals’ influence on teachers and student performance, it occurs when principals create and sustain an academic ethos in the school, organize instruction across the school, and align school lessons to district standards and standardized test items. There is hardly any positive association between principals walking in and out of classrooms a half-dozen times a day and conferring briefly with teaches about those five-minute visits.The reality of daily principal actions conflicts with the theory.

Much of the rhetoric of instructional leadership flowing from true believers in the theory rings hollow when researchers actually go into schools and shadow principals, observing what they do day-after-day in a school a week or more at a time. Such time-and-motion studies have been done ever since the days of Frederick Winslow Taylor and “scientific management” in the early 20^th century. When such studies were done, they showed that the bulk of the a principal’s time was spent on managing the building, teachers, students, and parents. That was then.

Now, a few published studies make the same point: what principals do is largely manage people and buildings spending most of their time outside of the classroom, not inside watching teachers teach.

A recent report ( Shadow Study Miami-Dade Principals) of what 65 principals did each day during one week in 2008 in Miami-Dade county (FLA) shows that even under NCLB pressures for academic achievement and the widely accepted (and constantly spouted) ideology of instructional leadership, Miami-Dade principals spend most of their day in managerial tasks that influence the climate of the school but may or may not affect daily instruction. What’s more, those principals who spend the most time on organizing and managing the instructional program have test scores and teacher and parental satisfaction results  that are higher than those principals who spend time coaching teachers and popping into classroom lessons.

The researchers shadowed elementary and secondary principals and categorized their activities minute-by-minute through self-reports, interviews, and daily logs kept by the principals.

In the academic language of the study:

The authors find that time spent on Organization Management activities is associated with positive school outcomes, such as student test score gains and positive teacher and parent assessments of the instructional climate, whereas Day-to-Day Instruction activities are marginally or not at all related to improvements in student performance and often have a negative relationship with teacher and parent assessments. This paper suggests that a single-minded focus on principals as instructional leaders operationalized through direct contact with teachers may be detrimental if it forsakes the important role of principals as organizational leaders (p. iv)

Two things jump out of this study for me. First, the results of shadowing principals in 2008 mirror patterns in principal work that researchers have found since the 1920s although the methodologies of time-and-motion studies have changed.

Second, there is an association–a correlation, by no means a cause-effect relationship–between principals who spend more time managing the organization and climate of the school than those principals who spend time in direct contact with teachers in classrooms.

Another study of first- year urban principals prepared by New Leaders,  a program imbued with beliefs in instructional leadership, revealed that new principals, a large fraction of whom left the post after two years, had little impact on student achievement even while observing and monitoring teacher lessons (see RAND_TR1191)

A few studies, of course, will not banish a theory lacking convincing evidence, temper the rhetoric of principal-as-instructional-leader,  or alter principal preparation programs.  Current rhetoric and ideology highlighting instructional leadership trump research studies, past and present, again and again.

Some donor-funded efforts try combining the results of the above studies and earlier research about principals managing the instructional program with their direct involvement in teachers’ classroom practices. See, for example, the Wallace Foundation’s recent publication The-School-Principal-as-Leader-Guiding-Schools-to-Better-Teaching-and-Learning.    In their well-intentioned effort, however, they give life to a failed theory and pump oxygen into the prevailing rhetoric.

The rose-colored view that principals of schools, big and small, urban and suburban, elementary and secondary, can throw fairy dust over teacher lessons and improve student academic performance continues to dominate professional associations of principals and university preparation programs.

Day in the Life of a Principal (Part 1)

Jessica Johnson is Principal of Dodgeland Elementary School in Wisconsin. This day-in-the-life appeared on her blog April 26, 2009.

I am guilty of having thought as a teacher and even as an assistant principal, “What is the principal doing all day? Why hasn’t he/she done x, y or z yet?” Well, now that I’m the principal, I take back all of the thoughts I had back then, because you can just never understand what the principal does all day until you live it!

There are so many things that could happen in a day that couldn’t even be shared with staff, because: A) I don’t want to set the tone of the school by complaining B) Some information has to be filtered by me or it would just give teachers more to stress over C) There’s a lot of confidential information contained within a principal’s day. So, I want to write a list of all the crazy things that could happen on any given day.

Monday morning arrive to work at 6:30 am. Turn on the computer and start looking at my list of things to accomplish today (includes 7:35/3:05  Individualized Education Program (IEP) meetings, teacher observation, teacher meeting, parent conference, call McDonald’s for additional donations of ice cream coupons for student of the month awards, write monthly principal newsletter, finalize summer school course packets, sort through the junk mail still piled up from last week-because I didn’t get to it over the weekend, complete purchase requisitions, file pink copies of all purchases for budgeting, get into classrooms).

7:00 receive call from sub-caller, write down list of teachers out today—we ran out of subs so I have to figure out coverage for one of the first grade teachers. Write a note for the secretary regarding this, tell her I’ll be to the class at 8:00, but for her to keep looking for coverage.
7:05 Try to start on paperwork, but a teacher comes in to tell about a phone call she received from a parent after school on Friday regarding a bus incident—record the information to investigate.
7:10 Try to start on paperwork, but get a call from a teacher that our online student information system (for attendance and grades) is down again. Put in a call to tech director to get it fixed…send out an email to all staff that the problem should be fixed soon *hopefully*.

7:20 Parents are here for the IEP meeting…show them to the conference room to wait….no chance of getting paperwork done now. Go to get IEP information for the meeting and see the voicemail light flashing again…check it and hear that a teacher got stuck in traffic and won’t make it in time…go tell the secretary and then run back to the IEP meeting.

7:35-8:00 IEP meeting…this one went well. Now I have to run to cover that class.

8:00-8:30 Teaching a lower grade level, no lesson plans (note to self-remind teachers to get emergency sub plans/folders ready) making it up as I go.

8:30 Call from the office that one of our Emotional/Behavioral Disability (EBD) students needs to be removed from the room—an aide is coming to cover the class instead.

8:35-9:15 Remove EBD student—severe physical aggression, I’m sure I’ll have some bruises from this one—not to mention the mess the conference room is in now (we don’t have a time-out room). I’ve had my glasses broken before, so glad that didn’t happen this time. He/she finally is calm/compliant and I escort the child back to class…
Fortunately another substitute was able to come in and cover that other class now. Thank goodness, I can get to my list…
Check my voicemail—1 teacher call with a question about the new report card, 1 teacher call requesting me to come speak with her about a student, 1 parent call angry about a bus incident, another angry parent upset with a teacher.

9:20 put the sign on my door that says “I’m out in classrooms to see what students are learning” and get to each of the teachers that left me voice messages. Make a move to classrooms for walk throughs—first one has guided reading groups and centers with 1st grade kids reading amazingly well! Start to enter the 2nd classroom of the day when I’m called for on the school loud speaker (I don’t carry my walkie-talkie when I’m going into classrooms and my secretaries know only to call for me in an emergency). Hurry back to the office to find that one of our special needs children ran off from the aide (he/she has never done this before!) I make a special all-call to the staff to let them know we’re looking for ______ and then several of us split up to search….10 minutes later we find her/him in an unattended office in the dark pretending to type on a computer. Whew!

10:00-10:30 Morning Recess-I don’t end up making it out there for all 30 minutes, because I get stopped by 3 different teachers on my way out. (Question about grades deadline, information shared about a student and another technology question)

10:30-11:15 Back out to classrooms. Get into 4 of them (with a note to myself on needing to meet with a teacher for classroom management concerns)

11:15-11:45 Meet with the 4 students that had bus conduct reports. 1 has had enough to be suspended from the bus…make the phone call home and get yelled at by the parent that they can’t pick them up. I’ll spare the rest of the details. Meet with 2 other students that have “earned” after school detention for continuously disruptive classroom behavior.

11:45 Head for the fridge to grab my sandwich for lunch, but get called to a classroom for another EBD student. Fortunately, this child is calmed down much easier than the one this morning.

12:00-1:00 Lunch room duty—grab a slim fast to drink on the way. No, I’m not dieting, but I keep them in the fridge for days like today when there is no time to eat. I sometimes refer to my hour-long lunch duty as migraine hour (because it’s always loud), but I secretly enjoy this hour. Our kids sit at round tables and actually get the chance to talk with their peers. I’ve seen schools where the kids have to eat silently, but I think that’s just mean. I enjoy the chance to walk around to each table and chat with the kids. If I’m not walking around (using proximity) they do try to get away with things (however, they know that if I catch them throw any food they then have lunch room clean up duty!)

1:00 Talk to a couple teachers about student behaviors in the lunch room as they pick up classes (friend issues)

1:05 Get back to the office and secretary tells me that a parent has tried calling several times and is very angry. Go back to my office and check my voice messages—there are 6 of them (not all from the one parent)! I have a classroom observation at 1:30, so I write them all down and just call back the angry one–this parent calls daily, so I’m used to it…I’d like to tell this parent to get a job so he/she has something to do each day, but I refrain from expressing that opinion! The parent again tells me they’re going to call the school board to complain…I’m not worried, because I know that what we’re doing on the school end is the right thing and I’ve already talked to a couple school board members about this parent. Note to any potential administrators reading this—be prepared for threats such as, “I’ve got a lawyer on retainer,” “I’m going to call your superintendent,” “I’m going to report this to the school board” and “I’m going to report you to the state department of education.” If you’re doing your job right, you have nothing to worry about. I now just give them the phone number and am usually able to add, “I’ve already spoken with the superintendent regarding this issue.” I don’t like surprises or hiding things from my superintendent or the school board, so I keep those lines of communication open.

1:30-2:15 Classroom Observation: I love doing formal classroom observations, because you get to see so much more than just in walk-throughs (of the teacher,

instruction and the students). I do think I’m getting carpal tunnel, because I’m so insistent on scripting everything—gives me good information when I’m writing up the evaluation and when I meet with the teacher.

2:15 bathroom break—I seriously think this was my first one today—I’m dying!

2:20 Check with my secretary-2 more phone calls passed through to my phone—nothing major though, so I’ll check them later. Try to tidy up my desk before parent meeting at 2:30. Since I am on the run so much and hardly in my office, I have several piles on my desk. I don’t have a great system yet for organizing yet, but I know where everything is. I once had a principal that said “If you’re desk is a mess, it’s because you’re doing your job well—you’re out in classrooms and not sitting at your desk.” I’ve worked for a principal that was adamant about keeping the desk clean, but I still agree with the previous one!

2:30 Meeting with parent: she wants to request a specific teacher for next year. This is something on my list that I haven’t gotten to yet—working on the class list procedures and a letter to parents explaining why we can’t honor specific teacher requests. I explain it to her and tell her about the letter that will be coming home in a month and ask her to think about her child’s learning styles/needs and not just the teacher that the older sibling had. This isn’t how the previous principal did things, so she’s a little annoyed, but agreed to it. (Note to self—get moving on writing that letter and meeting with staff about class lists)

2:50 Pop into grade level meeting (teachers have grade-level collaboration time

2:40-3:30 on 2 week rotation. Aides cover the class 2:40-3:00 to give them someadditional time). I’d like to sit in on these meetings for the full time to help facilitate discussions on student learning, but it hasn’t happened all year.

3:00 Walk the halls quickly as students are being dismissed. I have a particular student that I walk to the bus each day and remind him/her about how to be safe on the bus.

3:05 IEP meeting…this one goes on forever. Parents are not on the same page as everyone at school. Gets quite heated and I have to do quite a bit of mediation. At 5:00 I finally say that we will have to come back at a later date to finish (No, IEP meetings do not normally last this long!!)

5:05 Back to my office…finish checking voice messages and start calling a few back (had to prioritize which ones can wait until tomorrow). Now to my list from this morning—hadn’t touched any of them! Write my principal newsletter because it was due last Friday. Check my mailbox and add it to the stack of mail from last week (never knew how much mail the principal gets—good grief!) Pull out time sheets, absence sheets, and purchase requisitions because those are time sensitive, but leave the rest. It’s 5:45 now and my husband has called three times asking when I’ll be home. I grab some files to shove in my bag, along with my flash drive so I can type up the teacher evaluation at home).
6:00 Finally home—didn’t have a bad day, but still feel like I got run over by a semi. I’d love to just lay on the couch and crash, but have to make supper, clean, play with my son. After he’s in bed I type up that teacher eval (most of it) until I’m too exhausted and go to bed at 11:45.

I must say that the kids are the easiest part of this position. I can’t even get into detail on some of the difficult conversations with parents and teachers each day that get my stomach churning (and I mean that literally…but now I am on meds for the ulcer, so I’m doing better with that!)

******************************************************************************

Johnson spends a great deal of her time managing tasks that are both on-going and unexpected. She is in and out of classrooms also and in short bursts of time sees parents, children, and teachers again and again over the course of one day. How typical is her day-in-the-life of a principal compared to one in a middle school or high school? Compared to principals in large suburbs and big cities? I take up the answer to those questions in Part 2.

For previous posts that I have written on principals, see here, here, and here.

Preschool as Panacea?

In the political gridlock that has marked cutting federal budgets, gun control, and immigration legislation, one issue brings together both CEOs and educational progressives, political conservatives and liberals: investing in tax-supported preschool for three and four year-olds. President Obama’s recent State of the Union speech called for increasing children’s access to prekindergarten and assembled legislators applauded across the aisle separating political parties.

Study after study shows that the sooner a child begins learning, the better he or she does down the road.  But today, fewer than 3 in 10 four year-olds are enrolled in a high-quality preschool program.  Most middle-class parents can’t afford a few hundred bucks a week for a private preschool.  And for poor kids who need help the most, this lack of access to preschool education can shadow them for the rest of their lives.  So tonight, I propose working with states to make high-quality preschool available to every single child in America.  (Applause.)

Reasons for expanding access to prekindergarten run from the Alabama leader who said: “We’re trying to invest in a work force that can compete in 20 years with other states and other nations”–which President Obama would nod in agreement with–to experts on brain development who say: “Children are born ready to learn. They cultivate 85 percent of their intellect, personality and skills by age five” (brain_dev_and_early_learning, p. 1).

Yet supporters of greater access for all children have their work cut out for them. Over the past decade, many states (e.g., Illinois, Georgia, Florida, Oklahoma) have increased access for families through Universal PreKindergarten (UPK) modeled after Head Start and similar full-service efforts. Even with the spread of these state-funded programs and extensive media attention, variation in access for toddlers across the U.S. ranges from over 70 percent to none (see graphic). As a result, the U.S. ranks 28th out of 38 nations offering parents entry to preschool. Mexico, France, Spain, and Netherlands have 95 percent of their children in preschool while the U.S. registers far below that, a fact that often goes unnoted by media compared to the attention that international test score rankings receive.

Even amid federal and state budget retrenchment, the political coalition of business and civic leaders, political conservatives and liberals has continued its lobbying and marginal gains in enrollment have occurred. But getting “high-quality” preschools, that is another matter. Different versions  of “good” programs serving three- and four-year-olds are contested.

Should preschool be boot camp for kindergarten or a place where very young children, as Alison Gopnik put it, “be allowed to explore, inquire, play, and discover?”

None of this ideological see-sawing about the content of preschools is new, of course. Over the past two centuries,  child-rearing experts have advised Moms to be strict and permissive, be parent-centered and child-centered. Since the invention of nurseries and preschools decades ago, a similar back-and-forth movement between preparing toddlers for the cognitive demands of schools or developing the whole child (and, yes, mixes of both) have had their champions again and again.

For the past three decades, national fears of being outstripped in global economic competition have spilled over public schools with a reform agenda that places primary attention upon  standards, testing, accountability, and charter schools. That agenda has trickled down into both public and private preschools.

*Many private and public preschools require cognitive skills tests.

*Preschool charter schools have been established.

*There are accountability standards for preschools.

But not for all preschools. Progressive ones looking to develop the “whole child”–a phrase that prompts snickers if not ridicule in many elite reformer circles–flourish below the radar. Such schools are, in this climate, mostly private (see here). Some, however, are public. Many parents are caught in the tangled dilemma: “If we give them barbies/GameCubes/television/Play Stations they want and we can afford, will they become too slack, glazed, and lazy to get into Harvard?”

Can research settle what are the best ways for preschoolers to learn? Hardly. Evidence seldom convinces ideologues either about the size of government, the best diet, or how  preschool should educate.  The National Association for Education of Young Children (NAEYC), for example, lays out the research, benchmarks for development for young children ( see KeyMessages). NAEYC anchors the progressive side of the preschool ideological see-saw. In the present political and economic climate, however, they are lightweights compared to well leveraged state and federal policymakers worried about the nation’s weak performance on international achievement tests and civic and corporate leaders who press for cognitively-driven preschools where direct instruction in knowledge and skills give young children a running start in the race through the grades and into college.

The earnest move to enact Universal Prekindergarten endorsed by both civic and corporate leaders, business groups, and educational associations as national investments in economic growth and supported by longitudinal studies (e.g., Perry Preschool, ABCedarian (see Campbell.et.al, etc.) has become politically acceptable and,  as state funding has become available, has spread.

But the content and direction of preschools will again be influenced by the ideological fervor of those wanting boot camp instruction to prepare for school and those wanting more curiosity and play rather than a brain on a stick. Thus, conflicts over what constitutes “high quality” preschools will continue even as access for toddlers expands. No panacea here.