“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.

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.

Inside the Black Box of the Classroom Practice: Change without Reform in American Education

Readers who have been with me from August 2009 know that I have mentioned writing a book on the linkages between policy and practice in technology, curriculum, and accountability; I posted pieces of my research, for example, on laptops in a school fictitiously-named Las Montanas (see here, here, and here). And there have been other posts as I have drafted and revised different parts of the book.

In this post, I quote from the Preface and some thoughts I had about writing  Inside the Black Box of Classroom Practice.

From the Preface:

I have written a great deal over the past 30 years on teaching, curriculum, school organization, technology, and reform. The topics are all interconnected. After all, reform-driven policymakers have sought to alter classroom practices for at least two centuries in the U.S.  They have used structural reforms from the age-graded school to the non-graded school; from pushing new technologies into classrooms as the 19^th century slate blackboard to the 21^st century “smart” whiteboard.  The same holds for curricular reform;  late-19^th century reformers established one academic curriculum for all students and then dumped it a quarter-century later for a differentiated curriculum tailored to their estimates of  whether high school students would go directly into industrial and commercial jobs, take up white-collar occupations, or attend college. Then, yet again, 21^st century policymakers returned to the Common Core standards for all U.S. schools. All of these and many more structural reforms in school governance, curriculum, organization, and technology aimed to change teaching practices and teacher lessons so that students would learn more, faster, and better. Then those students would complete college, get jobs, and make the nation a better place.

Over many years, I have developed these themes independently in books, articles, op-ed pieces and now in my twice-weekly blog. What I do in this book is draw together these separate themes about structural reforms, societal changes, the role of public schools in a democracy, and teaching in what I call the black box of the classroom. In my career as a teacher, administrator, superintendent, and scholar I have seen up close these connections between policy and practice; top-decision makers making policy decisions  and first-grade teachers implementing those decisions; and societal conditions of poverty, inequality, and race  influencing school practices and classroom lessons again and again.

I lay out the tangled nature of these reforms, analyze successes and failures, and offer my thinking on why the black box of classroom instruction has been largely impervious to structural reforms aimed at moving teaching practices from teacher-centered to student-centered, students from absorbing subject-matter to critical thinking and problem solving. Classroom lessons, however, have been, paradoxically largely stable, seldom fulfilling reformers’ ambitions.

In this book, I synthesize and connect my thinking about reform-driven policy making and classroom instruction; at the same time, I try to break new ground in understanding the contradiction of enormous structural change in U.S. public schools amid stability in teaching practices.

From the Acknowledgements section of the book:

I have found that no matter how many books I have completed starting a new one still gives me the jitters. Writing is both satisfying and frustrating, filled with surprises and disappointments. None of my books has come easily to me.

As I have gotten older, however, I have discovered that revising and crafting words, sentences, and paragraphs has become as satisfying as creating the questions that drive the book, formulating the arguments, collecting and analyzing evidence, and drawing conclusions. Although I still get a kick out of ensuring an internal consistency between questions, arguments, evidence, and conclusions what has surprised me is how much pleasure I get from finding the right word, fashioning vivid phrases that capture accurately an image or idea I want to convey, and rewriting paragraphs a third and fourth time. All of these and more I have experienced in writing this book.

Some additional thoughts. When I was younger, spilling words on pages that capture ideas I had and my experiences in teaching and administration–the creative part of writing–were the highs of writing that I savored. Organizing the sentences and paragraphs were, of course, necessary but it was closer, at least in my mind then, to mopping a dirty floor and cleaning up an untidy room: important but lacking adrenalin-rush of ideas and experiences spilling over page after page. That has changed.

This affection for the craft of the writing has developed slowly over the years and while I need the creative rush, it is artistry of composing and ordering language that now gives me the most satisfaction. I do not know if this is a pattern among aging writers of nonfiction but this is what I have noticed in my writing books over the decades.

The Seductive Lure of Big Data: Practitioners Beware

Big Data beckons policymakers, administrators and teachers with eye-popping analytics and snazzy graphics. Here is Darrell West of the Brookings Institition laying out the case for teachers and administrators to use Big Data:

Twelve-year-old Susan took a course designed to improve her reading skills. She read short stories and the teacher would give her and her fellow students a written test every other week measuring vocabulary and reading comprehension. A few days later, Susan’s instructor graded the paper and returned her exam. The test showed that she did well on vocabulary, but needed to work on retaining key concepts.

In the future, her younger brother Richard is likely to learn reading through a computerized software program. As he goes through each story, the computer will collect data on how long it takes him to master the material. After each assignment, a quiz will pop up on his screen and ask questions concerning vocabulary and reading comprehension. As he answers each item, Richard will get instant feedback showing whether his answer is correct and how his performance compares to classmates and students across the country. For items that are difficult, the computer will send him links to websites that explain words and concepts in greater detail. At the end of the session, his teacher will receive an automated readout on Richard and the other students in the class summarizing their reading time, vocabulary knowledge, reading comprehension, and use of supplemental electronic resources.

In comparing these two learning environments, it is apparent that current school evaluations suffer from several limitations. Many of the typical pedagogies provide little immediate feedback to students, require teachers to spend hours grading routine assignments, aren’t very proactive about showing students how to improve comprehension, and fail to take advantage of digital resources that can improve the learning process. This is unfortunate because data-driven approaches make it possible to study learning in real-time and offer systematic feedback to students and teachers (education technology west-1).

West sees teachers and administrators as data scientists mining information, tracking individual student and teacher performance and making subsequent changes based on the data. Unfortunately, so much of the hype for using Big Data ignores time, place, and people.

Context matters.

Consider what occurred when Nick Bilton, a New York University journalist and adjunct professor designed a project for his graduate students in a course called “Telling Stories with Data, Sensors, and Humans.” Could sensors, Bilton and students asked, be reporters, collect information, and tell what happened?

The students built small electronic machines with sensors that could detect motion, light, and sound. They then asked the straightforward question whether students in the high-rise classroom building used the elevators more than the stairs  and whether they shifted from one to the other during the day. They set the device in some elevators and stairwells. Instead of a human counting students, a machine did.

Bilton and his graduate students were delighted with the results. They found that students seemed to use the elevators in the morning “perhaps because they were tired from staying up late, and switch to the stairs at night, when they became energized.”

That night when Bilton was leaving the building, the security guard who watched students set up the devices in elevators asked him what happened with the experiment. Bilton said that the sensors had captured students taking elevators in morning and stairs at night. The security guard laughed and told Bilton: “One of the elevators broke down a few evenings last week, so they had no choice but to use the stairs.”

Context matters.

In mining data, using analytics, and reading dashboards (see DreamBox) for classrooms and schools, the setting, time, and the quality of adult-student relationships count also. For Darrell West and others who see teachers and students profiting from instantaneous feedback from computers, context is absent. They fail to consider that the age-graded school is required to do far more than stuff information into students. They fail to reckon with the age-old wisdom (and research to support it) that effective student learning beyond test scores resides in the relationship between student and teacher.

And when it comes to evaluating individual teachers on the basis of student test scores, the  context of teaching–as complex an endeavor as can be imagined, one that is only partially mapped by researchers–trumps Big Data even when it is amply funded by Big Donors.

Big Data, of course, will be (and is) used by policymakers and administrators for tracking school and district performance and accountability. But the seductive lure of mining data and creating glossy dashboards will entice many educators to grab numbers to shape lessons and judge individual students and teachers. If they do succumb to the seduction without considering the complex context of teaching and learning, they risk making mistakes that will harm both teachers and students.

A Veteran’s View of Choices Facing Teachers in Implementing Common Core Standards (David B. Cohen)

David Cohen has been teaching since 1993. He completed a B.A. in English at U.C. Berkeley (’91) with Phi Beta Kappa honors, and earned a Master’s degree in Education through the Stanford Teacher Education Program (’95).  After achieving National Board Certification in 2004, David served for two years as a support provider for National Board candidates.  As one of the founding members of Accomplished California Teachers (ACT), he helped author the group’s first two policy reports.This post appeared in the ACT group blog on January 24, 2013.

The implementation of the Common Core State Standards is underway, and the imminent transition that will affect most American public schools is sparking a wide variety of reactions among educators I know and interact with, or whose writing I read online.  At the extremes are the enthusiastic adopters and the active resistors, and in between, a wide swath of teachers who are still sorting out their reactions as they learn more about the content of the standards and the implications of their adoption.

In my blog, I haven’t focused on the Common Core at length, but the posts I have written remain some of the most viewed here at InterACT.  Looking back at “Common Core Confusion” – written nearly two years ago – I see many of the fundamental issues are still driving the conversation.  The argument for the necessity of the standards has never been convincing to me.  The inclusion of a “recommended” reading list in the ELA standards still irritates me.  Additional problems include the likelihood of excessive testing and the money gushing out of schools and into publishing and testing enterprises.  In that post, I quoted or linked to many of the same key players in the debate right now, including vociferous critics such as P.L. Thomas, Yong Zhao, Susan Ohanian and Stephen Krashen.

Shortly thereafter I revisited my concerns in a post written in response to a conference I attended: “Common Core Confusion – ASCD Edition.”  In that post, I found myself increasingly skeptical, and linked to other blog posts that I still think are worth revisiting, by Mary Ann Riley and Alfie Kohn.

So, for anyone familiar with those authors and their perspectives, it may come as a surprise that although I agree with their assessments of the key problems in the Common Core, I actually disagree with some of their more recent writing regarding what teachers should do, or not do, as the transition unfolds.  The divide I’m seeing is revealed in the comments and links that have arisen in Larry Ferlazzo’s recent blog post at EdWeek, “Response: Best Ways to Prepare Our Students for CCSS in Language Arts.”  In that post, Ferlazzo offers viewpoints from a number of teachers who are doing exactly what the title suggests, and offering advice to their colleagues.

Like me, and the above named critics, Ferlazzo maintains doubts about the Common Core.  His post begins:

I have been no fan of the Common Core standards (see The Best Articles Sharing Concerns About Common Core Standards). However, one of the key lessons I learned in my nineteen year community organizing career was that, though we should always recognize the tension inherent in “the world as we’d like it to be” and “the world as it is,” living in the former seldom leads to success in the latter. The Common Core is the reality for most of us, and I’ve begun collecting the most useful resources for implementing them.

 And like Ferlazzo, I have reached the conclusion that teacher leaders need to seize this initiative, engage in the transition efforts of our schools and districts, and do the best we can to make the implementation work for our students.  We should also continue to express concerns and criticisms of the standards, and remain hyper-vigilant regarding the problems to follow in developing curriculum and assessing learning.

That pragmatic compromise smacks of collaboration and submission for the most outspoken critics of the standards….Krashen and Thomas responded in the comments on Ferlazzo’s post; Krashen did concede to a small extent, “Yes, if the common core is instituted, help teachers and students deal with it. But that does not mean accept it. The train has left the station but it has not arrived.”

That sounds like a statement I could agree with, but he goes in more forceful terms: “The arguments against the common core are very strong and clearly indicate that the common core will be the greatest disaster ever to hit education. Please see Yong Zhao’s articles and books, Anthony Cody’s blogs on edweek, susanohanian.org, and of course the first few articles at http://www.sdkrashen.com/index.php?cat=4.  Accepting the common core as inevitable has the effect of making it inevitable.”

Thomas rejects any compromise: “I cannot endorse any efforts or arguments regarding how to implement CCSS; that is the wrong question.  CCSS is a cash-cow for textbook and testing corps, as well as paid consultants and their professional organizations.”  The “cash-cow” argument concerns me as well, but I think our best antidote is to keep excellent teachers engaged in understanding the standards and … expanding our own capacity to work with them creatively, and more independently, reducing the demand for huge and costly purchases of curriculum-in-a-box, some of which is the same shoddy material we had before with “Common Core Aligned!” slapped on the packaging.

Ferlazzo responds to the comments:

I can think of no realistic political scenario that would stop Common Core from being implemented for at least ninety percent of millions of teachers and students in the United States. I have also not heard anyone else share one, though I am all ears….

Given that political reality on the ground, I think the political capital of teachers, students and their families is better spent on other issues that also affect the working and learning conditions in our schools and the living conditions in our communities — teacher evaluation procedures, adequate funding for schools, class size, parent engagement — just to name a few. In my political judgment, teachers and their allies are much more likely to be able to influence those issues.

In his own blog post responding to Ferlazzo, Thomas writes, “If implementing CCSS is inevitable as Ferlazzo claims and if school, district, state, or federal mandates will continue to support those standards and the related high-stakes tests, teaching is reduced to an act of fatalism, and in effect, teachers are de-professionalized and students are similarly reduced to passive recipients of state-mandated knowledge, what Paulo Freire (1998) labeled as ‘the bureaucratizing of the mind’ (p. 102).”

And I might agree with Thomas (and Freire) in the abstract, but here’s the problem: such a transformation of public education could not happen in a vacuum, could not happen solely by the willpower of teachers even if we all agreed with each other, and could not happen quickly – maybe not even in one generation.

Meanwhile, Ferlazzo and I both teach in high schools with over 2,000 students apiece.  I work on a staff of over 100 teachers, and interact with many others around the district.  I help to direct a teacher leadership network with over 300 California teacher members.  The conversations I’m hearing in my school and among peers do include CCSS concerns and criticism, but in my observations there is simply no groundswell of teacher resistance to the Common Core, and I have seen a number of teachers who have favorable opinions of it despite some reservations.  (Thomas points out there is resistance to standardized testing that’s building around the country, embodied most recently in the Seattle teachers who are refusing to administer tests.  I support their efforts, and I would caution administrators around the country to look at the conscientious objections raised not only by Seattle teachers, but also teachers in Chicago, and the broader resistance in New York, led by thousands of school principals.  If the Common Core implementation continues down that path, I doubt the grassroots resistance will take as long to develop as it did with the NCLB testing regimen).

And as for the critics I’ve cited, to my knowledge, none of them is currently a K-12 teacher.  That fact does not invalidate their criticisms, but I think it colors their perceptions regarding a realistic, pragmatic approach, here and now, for those of us trying to serve our current students and schools most productively.

True, I could resist; I could dedicate hours and days to finding and sharing articles, holding meetings, building alliances.  In the meantime, someone will be making decisions about the educational program and policies for my school and district, operating with the state mandate to implement the CCSS.  I’d prefer to be part of those decisions.  If teachers don’t engage deeply in that process, I have no doubt that we will be ill-served by whatever is imposed from above without our participation.  I see more to gain for teachers in approaching this process in a “Yes, and” attitude, rather than a flat rejection.  Yes, we will help implement the Common Core Standards, and we will use the occasion of that engagement as an opportunity to educate our peers, leaders and stakeholders, and become more effective advocates for better teaching, better learning, and a stronger teaching profession.

Advanced Placement Courses Need More Than a Makeover (Jack Schneider)

Jack Schneider is an assistant professor of education at the College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester, Mass., and the author of Excellence for All: How a New Breed of Reformers Is Transforming America’s Public Schools (Vanderbilt University Press, 2011).

To the many in the world of education reform, the latest AP Report to the Nation—released recently by the College Board—is cause for celebration on two fronts. The first achievement has to do with equity.  During the program’s early history in the 1960s, Advanced Placement courses were generally populated by white students.  Even as recently as the mid-1990s, 80 percent of AP exams were taken by whites or Asians.  Today, however, roughly a third of students participating in the program are non-Asian students of color.  And that number is growing every year.

The second achievement has to do with teaching and learning.  By the twenty-first century, AP was being assailed by its critics for failing to evolve.  While college professors increasingly guided students through closer examinations of subjects with an orientation toward critical thinking and hands-on work, the AP Program continued to emphasize survey-style coverage and content memorization.  This latest report, however, details a course and exam redesign that brings AP back in line with “current practices in college instruction.”  And according to the College Board, changes in all subject areas will be substantial.

Both of these developments are the result of hard work, financial commitment (the Department of Education alone has spent a quarter of a billion dollars on its AP Incentive Program), and concerted efforts by all parties involved to promote the twin aims of equity and excellence.

The problem, however, is that AP can do very little to actually realize those aims.

Policy leaders, of course, are aware of the limited success of their labors, both through the AP Program and through other technically-oriented school improvement efforts.  Still, they continue to favor centrally-designed reforms that can be implemented in a top-down manner because they sidestep the unpredictable and time-consuming work of engaging stakeholders, building school capacity, and developing a politically courageous agenda.  Consequently, their efforts, while well-intended, never address the underlying problems that affect school quality and educational equity (a topic I address in my book, Excellence For All).  To use a metaphor of Larry Cuban’s, they create storm-tossed waves on the ocean’s surface without disturbing the deep waters below.

Consider the effort to promote equity through AP.  For decades, reformers tried to use the program as a lever for giving underserved students a college admissions edge.  After all, in the last decades of the twentieth century, colleges and universities looked favorably on students with AP courses on their transcripts.  But most AP courses were taught at private and suburban schools.  Consequently, reformers sought to extend the AP Program, believing they could level the playing field by providing equal access to an elite brand.  Yet, as I have written elsewhere, the expansion of the AP Program failed to promote real parity between the educational haves and have-nots.  Because once the AP Program reached a critical mass, it lost its functionality as a mark of distinction.  Soon, scores of colleges and universities (Dartmouth being the latest) revised their policies around awarding credit for AP coursework or favoring it in admissions reviews.  And ultimately, elite suburban and private schools began to drop the program, calling it outdated, overly-restrictive, and too oriented toward multiple choice tests.  Thus, while students at Garfield High in East Los Angeles were for a short time doing the same work as students at Andover, the aim of equity proved a noble and elusive dream.

Consider now the recent move by the College Board to restore curricular relevance and rigor to the AP brand.  Taking seriously the charge that AP was no longer in line with teaching practices in higher education, the College Board has overhauled the program.  The new curriculum will encourage more work in science labs and less parroting back of formulas, more work on historical thinking and less memorization of historical minutiae.  That all sounds pretty good.  But it will do little to improve teaching and learning, especially at schools with low-levels of instructional and administrative capacity.  Merely asking teachers to spend less time drilling and more time promoting inquiry, in other words, does not make them able to do so, nor does it prepare their students to succeed in such classes.

To be clear: these are good developments, and programs like AP should continue to be refined and revised.  But they will not resolve the deeper issues that affect educational quality and opportunity in the United States.

That is not to say that they must do so; there is, after all, a place for tinkering.  But contemporary reform rhetoric fosters the belief that all of our school problems have relatively straightforward technical solutions that policy leaders could implement if only the unions would get out of the way.

Evidence to the contrary, however, is all around us.  Look, for instance, at Mississippi, which has the lowest average household income in the U.S. and the highest percentage of African-American residents.  Given the way that educational resources are distributed, it should come as no surprise that nearly half of students taking AP exams in the state scored a 1 out of 5.  Only four percent of students scored a 5.  These are not the kinds of problems that the AP Program can solve.

Without a doubt, programs like AP have their place.  And in many schools AP remains a valuable addition to the curriculum.  But when we pretend that all our schools need is the right reform, we erode our collective will to do the harder work required of us.  We distract ourselves from our greater purposes.

Teaching Math: The Driftwood and the Vortex (Michele Kerr)

Michele Kerr is a second-career teacher, credentialed in math, history, and English, with a master’s in education from Stanford University, She teaches math from CAHSEE prep to pre-calc at Kennedy High School in Fremont, CA. She also wrote about teaching English in an previous guest post.

“Ms K, I need to do my work with Ms. V. My education plan is my civil right!” Deon’s entire body was contorted in a geometric impossibility, the better to shout at me from the back of the room.

“Hey, Ms. K! Come here! What if both numbers are negative?” Sticks was waving me over.

“If the rise and run are both negative, the slope’s positive. Just like multiplying!” Jack argued, as Cal watched dispassionately.

Welcome to the first month of my math support class, for juniors and seniors who haven’t yet passed California’s High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE). Snapshots from a typical day:

• Deon and Mack in exile, Deon facing east in back, desk jammed up against the full-wall closet, Mack facing due north, desk flush against the middle of the wall. The two would scream at me for a few minutes, demanding to be released to their guided studies teacher now that I had successfully removed anything remotely resembling fun from their grasp. Eventually, they growled various forbidden words and subsided into something approaching silence.
• Miguel and Eddie obliviously tagging my whiteboards with my precious student markers that I’d taken away twice already.
• Yesenia and Juan, a brother-sister pair who only spoke Spanish, chattering away about anything but math with Pauly Jay who, in a class that’s half Hispanic, is nonetheless my only bilingual student.
• JattJeet dozing off, Tavon fixing me with a hostile stare for disrespecting Deon and Mack.
• Johnny wandering aimlessly, resplendent in a teal plaid shirt and striped turquoise shorts, wearing a pink winter girl’s hat and a purple school blanket wrapped round his shoulders over his backpack, which he never took off.
• Atamai whirling around on a wheeled free-standing chair, stopping only to shout a math question at me or argue when I told him to put his posterior back in a desk.
• Brian tuning out the world with music, having surreptitiously put his earpieces back in when I wasn’t watching.
• Jack, Cal, Victor, and Sticks usually working on the assignment for the day.

And so it went.

Juniors and seniors who haven’t yet passed the seventh-grade standard-based CAHSEE are kids for whom math presents a serious challenge. A class of students with mostly low motivation and widely varying but generally weak math abilities is first and foremost a management problem, and a huge part of the management problem is the math. In order to maximize learning time, a teacher has to manage not only the students, but the math.

First task in managing the students: separate the vortex from the driftwood. The disruptive vortex sucks all the driftwood into his wake, where all spin about endlessly and, alas, happily, in circles all the way to the bottom. Pull out the driftwood and nothing changes. Move the vortex and the driftwood go back to floating about aimlessly, amenable to redirection. The quintessential disruptive vortex, Deon could single-handledly destroy half the class’s productivity if left undisturbed; his absence or isolation always left most of my “driftwood” students open to the idea of getting some work done.

The much rarer productive vortex students capture driftwood and spin it in the right direction. I was blessed with two. Seated with Jack and Cal, Sticks and Victor would compete madly to get the most work done; left to themselves, Sticks would toss wads of paper at JattJeet, with Victor shouting direction vectors. Understand that “good” kids and “bad” aren’t useful distinctions: Jack and Cal had the occasional zero-productivity hour, and all kids had days in which they settled down and learned. Deon was a math-solving machine who worked fiendishly once I isolated him from all other entertainment.

After carefully managing vortices, I sat the rest of the students so that no one, ideally, was next to a buddy. I ruthlessly rearranged students for the sole purpose of ruining their social hour, and pushed hard upon pain points (no music during practice, an F for the day) for any misbehavior. Then I had to figure out who to call and what to write when students left to go to the bathroom and never came back.

By the end of that first month, I occasionally ended class declaring that everyone had a daily F, and often endured various bleats of “Ms. K, why you so mean? Why you yelling? Chill out,”  from kids whose voice volume went up to 11. But most days we had fun. And no matter how crazy the class got, I taught math every single day.

Onto managing the math, so that the driftwood would move in the right direction, and preparing the students for the test.

The students have multiple opportunities to take the test. I aimed my preparation push for the November test, with the February test as a backup. Of the original eighteen students, I thought nine would pass by November, or get close to it. Their existing math knowledge wasn’t so much the problem as was their inexperience in high-stakes tests. The other half did not appear to have the language, motivation, and/or math skills to pass, but at least I could teach them some math they could use when they finally got around to wanting it badly enough.

But even that limited goal was a challenge. I learned how long I could run an upfront discussion before their attention waned, carefully timing the moment when I moved them onto practice problems—which had to be carefully managed, too. Struggling students need to build momentum on a string of problems before they get to their first hesitation point. Hit that hesitation point too early and they “shut down”. They look away and find a more rewarding activity: talk to their neighbor, take a nap, turn up the volume on their iPod, sketch, tiptoe out of the room when I’m not looking, send objects airborne in pursuit of a target. Finding worksheets that started with problems simple enough to get them working and then built to more challenging work that wasn’t too hard took up a big chunk of my day. I’d spend hours looking through practice sets to be sure they didn’t leap to tough problems too soon, and often just wrote a dozen or more identical problems on the board, simply varying the numbers. Even with all that effort, some concepts were still too hard for some students, and I couldn’t always reach each one before he got pulled into a disruptive vortex. And so, from managing the math back to managing the students.

I lived for the days when I scored a win. Much is made by both reformers and progressives about the soul-killing nature of drill, but I got hooked on the genuine triumph my students felt when they worked a whole set of problems correctly. They beamed and bragged. Stickers were not unappreciated, or maybe a big red star with a smiley face. They didn’t mind the drill. They minded that they couldn’t do the drill, and so pretended they didn’t want to.

Sometimes students could do the work but just decided not to that day. Long ago, all these students learned that the relationship between effort and result was non-linear with no guarantee of a payoff. That this payoff was passing the CAHSEE, something they needed in order to graduate, was sometimes forgotten in the moment. But it’s not as if I could offer a guarantee. Some students never do pass the CAHSEE.

“Improving teacher quality” is the buzzphrase for 2013. Yet none of the challenges I’ve recounted are addressed by higher teacher Graduate Record Exam (GRE)  scores, and an understanding of multivariable calculus offers no tools for managing a student howling nonsensical accusations about his rights under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. No conclusive research on superior discipline approaches can inform ed schools of the best way to prepare teachers to help students with complicated motivations and no real desire for academic excellence. Meanwhile, education reformers point accusingly to the very existence of high school students who haven’t yet mastered fractions and percentages as de facto evidence of incompetent teachers with inadequate knowledge, even though all of my students had been taught these concepts dozens of times over the years, from both traditional and “reform” approaches.

Another catchphrase these days is “grit”. While academically they might be driftwood, my students are a forceful, opinionated group who questioned my own views on politics and social policies (“Ms. K, what’s your position on alcohol?” “Upright. Bad idea to drink lying down–and never consume before 21, of course.”). Many hold jobs. At least one is a committed and dedicated athlete. While some have abysmal Grade Point Averages (GPAs), others are respectably above 2.5. Several seniors have done well enough on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) to qualify for military service.

Five of the nine students on my “should pass” list did, in fact pass, Jack and Deon in October, the other three in November. Two of the remaining four got “high fail” scores; the other two did about five points lower than I would have liked. All four on the “should pass” who didn’t probably did well in their February test. Of the remaining nine with more challenging skill deficits, at least half will find the motivation, the focus, or the language skills in the next year to succeed. The others have the option to waive the requirement.

Reformers will judge me for the low pass rate. As a long-time test prep instructor, I judge myself for the four who didn’t pass in November, and will continue to look for better tools. But as a teacher, I judge myself by the degree to which my students develop increased confidence and competence in their math skills, as well as the degree to which they take more responsibility for their academic choices.

And on those criteria, I am content. All the students improved their understanding of proportional thinking, linear equations, and binomial multiplication, skills which will help them move through the high school math track. Sticks is now doing well in my geometry class. Victor stopped by two days before the February CAHSEE asking for practice material to brush up, and Brian visited to give a full report of his performance after the same. Jack and Cal are studying for their college placement tests.

On the last day of class, I read this article’s opening paragraphs to my students. They listened in total silence and then burst into applause, with faces that I must describe as shining. Some of them picked their own pseudonyms. While none said so directly, they are clearly pleased and proud I’d chosen to write their story. As I looked out at the class I’d worked so hard to teach, I remembered my students make their own judgments. Clearly, I hadn’t done too badly in their estimation—and I wouldn’t be a teacher if that assessment didn’t matter most.

District Reforms Past and Present: An Interpretation (Part 3)

There is no Google map for reformers to follow in turning around low-performing classrooms, schools, and districts. Nor have researchers been better than MapQuest.  They have plotted out multiple (and conflicting) routes to the what and how of school reform.

As I have pointed out in Parts 1 and 2, reform-minded policymakers, past and present, have jumped around searching for the best unit of change (e.g., classroom, school, district, state) that would transform teaching and learning while achieving different goals of public schooling. In the past three decades, state and federal authority over local schools has slowly increased to the point that current reformers believe districts offer the most leverage in altering what happens in schools and classrooms. Whole school reform has not been abandoned–think charter schools or Success for All –nor has altering individual teacher and principal performance been left in the lurch–think evaluating and paying practitioners on the basis of student test scores. But overall, a federal policy on reforming schools has emerged in the past decade where current policymakers (and donors) see districts as the prime mover to achieve major reforms.

Since there is no Google map or clear directions from researchers, in Part 2 I examined briefly two previous instances of district reform. As historians and social scientists do, I thought they might offer clues for informing contemporary policy decisions. In this post, I offer a third example, the Sanger school district near Fresno (CA),  and then I give my interpretation of these three cases of district reform.

Sanger Unified School District

In 2004, the California State Department of Education designated the largely minority and poor Sanger school district in the Central Valley of California and seven (of its 19) schools as failing under NCLB; the district with nearly 11,000 students was placed in Program Improvement, a state effort to turn around failing schools. Within five years, all seven schools had recovered sufficiently to leave Program Improvement and four of those schools eventually became State Distinguished Schools. In addition, by 2009, 12 of the 13 elementary schools exceeded the target score of 800 that the state set for the Academic Performance Index. This is an extraordinary accomplishment for a high-poverty, largely minority district facing all of the complexity that such systems encounter daily (Sanger-Report-2)

How did they do it? Opinions differ, of course, on which factors made the difference but researchers and informed observers agree on the following:

*Continuing superintendent leadership over the long haul; Marc Johnson has been superintendent since 2002 and Rich Smith, his deputy, since 2004.

*Steadfast focus on instructional improvement through direct instruction to meet state curriculum standards and improve performance on state tests.

*Establishing systematic and intensive district-wide professional development and school-based teacher learning communities aimed at improved classroom practices in daily lessons.

Evaluators described this strategy:

They adopted the [Rick] DuFour’s model of teacher professional learning communities (PLCs) as the vehicle for teachers to work collaboratively to improve student achievement and develop a sense of collective responsibility.

They chose a model of direct instruction, Explicit Direct Instruction (EDI), with structures designed to help low performing and language minority students work on grade-level standards with frequent checking for understanding. To support students struggling at grade level, district leaders designed their own version of

Response to Intervention (RTI), creating both in-class intervention and a range of intervention classes to meet the specific needs of students at risk of falling behind. To provide added help to English learners, the district expanded its emphasis on English language development (ELD).

Johnson’s vision and inspiration, Smith’s practical implementation of the vision, and teachers’ hard work in  the above multifaceted program help explain Sanger’s successful turnaround of a failing district.

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So where are we in considering the district as an engine of reform in light of these three examples?

Even though the contexts are different in each of the examples, that is, when they occurred and the places in which the reforms unfolded, there are some common factors.

1. The districts have between 10,000-20,000 students.

2. The reforms required district  leadership of at least a decade or more. If superintendent turnover occurred, successors carried the reform torch and sustained it.

3. All three districts needed start-up funds to launch the innovation and then funds to sustain the reform. Moneies came from district budgets and were re-directed to the reform or came from outside sources, or both.

4. Each district built curricular, organizational, and capacity building structures to launch the reform. Shared beliefs about the reform, norms of collaboration and trial and error, and rituals developed that created a common culture for current and new teachers. Durable structures and cultures were essential to the longevity of the reform.

5. Two of the three districts worked closely with the state. In the early 20th century, state departments of education (e.g., Indiana) were marginal operations offering little  to districts.

6. Teacher involvement was essential to implementing and sustaining the reform  but differed among the districts. Building teacher expertise and collaboration in Sanger and Union City began top-down and became central pieces–the common culture–to putting reforms into practice and sustaining them. Evidence of teacher participation in the Gary Plan other than teachers carrying out assigned duties, however, I could not find.

These common factors are hardly ingredients for a recipe that policymakers can use to cook up a successful district reform. They seem more applicable to moderate-size and smaller districts rather than big cities or large county districts. They require initially top-down and and sustained district leadership. They require monies  for building key structures and hard work among practitioners to create a culture focused on helping teachers work together for student improvement. Knowing the factors is one thing; putting them into action is another. Especially since time and place matter when district reform starts up.

Unlike Gary in the early 20th century where state involvement was minimal, Union City had the Abbott court decision in the mid-1980s that required New Jersey to give additional funds to those districts with many children from low-income families. Or in California in the past decade, Sanger officials re-directed ever shrinking state funds to ELD, RTI, EDI, and professional learning communities. In short, current state and federal authorities are up to their hips in pushing, guiding, and massaging district reforms. Context matters.

As many observers have pointed out, reforming a district to improve schools and classroom instruction is a complicated maneuver in a complex system such as public schooling. There are now more players involved with varying amounts of authority (e.g., federal, state, local, donors, community activists, teacher unions, students) than in prior times. Even when smart researchers use exemplars to show how schools, districts, and the state have to work together, the very exemplars– San Diego in the late-1990s or Community District 2 in New York City– disappear in a few years reinforcing the obvious point that reforming complex systems remains an enigma (Fullan, et. al..

The past gives clues to present-day reform-minded policymakers but no maps to follow.

Districts as the Engine of School Reform: Past and Present (Part 2)

Districts have again become the darlings of school reformers. Where once reformers, past and present, skipped back and forth lining up their cross-hairs on the best targets  for improving schooling such as individual teachers and principals, whole schools, and districts, today’s school reformers generally target districts. Many reasons explain the shift to districts but one, in my opinion, that accounts for the current passion among self-proclaimed reformers to turnaround failing schools and a mediocre national system of K-12 education is the increased authority that state and federal officials have accumulated over time to make local decisions.

Historically, states have the constitutional duty to provide education. States created districts and delegated authority to run schools. U.S. education, then, has been a decentralized operation for two centuries. In the early 1930s, there were nearly 130,000 districts in 50 states. Since then, the trend has been to merge districts into larger ones (there are now 14,000 districts). Mergers continued and since the 1960s with the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act, federal and state authority over district schools have become more and more centralized.  State and the federal authorities now mandate what curriculum standards have to be taught in districts, what texts have to be used in classrooms, which tests must be given, what happens when students fail to perform satisfactorily on tests, and–increasingly–how content and skills should be taught. Oops! Did I forget that states (44 percent) and feds (nearly 10 percent) supply most funding for districts?

To state and federal officials, mandates, money, penalties for non-performance, and the stigma of shame are the primary levers to institute desired changes in districts from offering parents choices in charter schools to adopting Common Core standards to evaluating teachers on the basis of student test scores. Yet to these reform-driven officials, too many districts lack the political will and resolve to turn the corner on poor performance. Mandates, money, penalties, and shame seem to have little effect on persistently low-performing schools and districts.

What’s an eager state and federal official, armed with the authority to make rules and dispense funds to do when district inaction or minimal compliance occurs? One answer may be to look at districts, past and present, that have succeeded in turning themselves around, in adopting reforms that they worked at for years, and ask: how did they do it? What factors were common to them?

A recent article on Union City (NJ) does exactly that. David Kirp details what district officials in this largely immigrant and poor school system (10,300 students in 2013) did over a quarter-century–yes, 25 years–to make incremental changes from adding preschools to curriculum overhaul to a culture of learning and respect for community to, even new technologies. All of these changes were coordinated and eventually funded under the state Supreme Court’s Abbott decision. Stable leadership from school boards and superintendents  over decades converted these changes into standard operating procedures. Current school chief is Stanley Sanger who has spent a decade as ssuperintendent after a career as social studies teacher, principal, and assistant superintendent–all in Union City. These incremental and steady changes accumulated into a success story, including the district’s one high school.

Push the rewind button  and go back in time to 1907 in Gary (IN). A company town literally owned by U.S. Steel, the Gary school board appointed William Wirt  superintendent; he served over 30 years. Influenced by the ideas of John Dewey and the emerging efficiency movement, Wirt introduced an innovative way of organizing schools, teaching, and learning for mostly immigrant students to work-study-and play called the Gary Plan or Platoon school. At a time when urban schools across the nation were looking  for ways to solve the problems of slums, overcrowded schools, and how to teach immigrant children the Gary Plan offered solutions.

The innovation was introduced into reorganized schools holding children from kindergarten through the twelfth grade. Administrators divided each school’s students  into two groups or “platoons.” One platoon would be in the classrooms or auditorium while the other would be in the basement where there were woodworking, printing, and other shops; upstairs in music, art, and play rooms; or outside on the playground. During the day, each platoon would change places, giving each child academic, practical, recreational, and aesthetic experiences while using the entire facility. While most urban elementary school children before World War I stayed the entire 6-8 hour school day in a self-contained classroom with one teacher, Gary pupils worked-studied-and played during an eight-hour day, even receiving released time for religious instruction. Adults used the school at night to take English courses and pick up other job skills.

Such a work-study-play-community school arrangement—a revolutionary shift in school organization and curriculum—made it possible to have many more students attend school–over 20,000 in the 1920s–since the schedule permitted all available space to be used by students during the day with adults taking courses at night. The Gary innovation spread swiftly across the nation but by the 1930s and the Great Depression had largely disappeared from the agendas of reform-minded policymakers.

In Part 3, I offer one more example of a district reform and then offer answers to the questions asked above: how did districts do it? What factors were common to them?

Reforms Targeting Teachers, Schools, Districts, and the Nation (Part 1)

“History doesn’t teach lessons, historians do.”  Because historians interpret the past they often disagree, even revise, the meaning of events from the French Revolution to the American Civil War to school reform.

What historians can do is show that in the flow of time constant change occurs. As a wise ancient Greek said: you cannot step into the same river twice. Thus, the past differs from the present even when they seem so similar. Consider, for example, U.S. involvement in Vietnam a half-century ago and Afghanistan since 2001.  Or “scientific management” dominating school reformers’ vocabulary and action in the early 1900s and the audit culture of test-driven accountability pervasive a century later. Historians can show the complexity of human action in the past and offer alternative perspectives that can inform current policy making but they cannot give policymakers specific guidelines. Although some try.

With that in mind, I turn to the current conventional wisdom among school reformers that focusing on the state and district are the best units for engineering change in schools and classrooms.  In examining past generations of school reformers, however,  it becomes clear that where change must occur has shifted time and again from the smallest unit–the teacher in the classroom–to the school, the district, the state, and nation. As political, economic, and social changes occurred in the U.S., previous generations of reformers skipped back and forth among these units of change as to which would best produce the changes they sought.

For example, in the early 1900s, few, if any, school reformers thought of the state or nation as the unit of reform. They saw the district and individual school as appropriate levers for change. A century later, however, with No Child Left Behind, test-driven accountability rules, Race to The Top incentive funds, and Common Core standards in math and reading adopted by nearly all the states– many policymakers see both the state and nation as the dominant units for reforming schools.

Or consider the era of “scientific management” in the years before and after World War I  when efficiency-minded experts from academia studied individual teachers, school principals, and district superintendents to see how well they were managing classrooms, schools, and districts. In these years, reformers introduced rating scales for teacher lessons and schools while also creating district-wide achievement tests for students. The focus was on schools and classrooms as units of change that would eventually transform the entire district’s manner of schooling children and youth.

Among contemporary reformers, there still remains a deep interest in reforming how teachers are evaluated and paid including the use of students’ test scores. Moreover, many reformers pushing “professional learning communities” and “professional development” see individual teachers and schools as appropriate units of change. Current reforms, then, mirror an earlier period of intense focus on individual teacher and administrator actions as ways of improving the entire district.

Times change and reform passions shift. Consider that school reformers in the 1960s and 1970s were hostile to districts, especially in cities. They saw large districts as mismanaged and bureaucratically constipated, even pathological entities, that could not reform schools and classrooms. Both southern and northern urban districts, for example, dragged out the process of desegregating schools. Many big city district leaders also opposed breaking up central office bureaucracies and decentralizing operations into smaller units. The district, reformers said, was the enemy of school reform. Look to the school as the best way to change classroom lessons and district operations. By the early-1980s, especially after A Nation at Risk report appeared, the school became central to reformer’s plans. The whole-school reform movement surged forward in both large and small districts and continued through the 1990s. Charter schools, after all, when they began and now were and are instances of whole-school reform.

Not so in the early 21st century. Districts have again become the engine of reform. Big city districts, for example, receive grants from private donors and federal agencies. Foundations give awards to those urban districts that improve student academic achievement. Surely, individual schools still receive grants and the whole-school reform model exists alongside major district-based efforts. But the facts are clear among contemporary reformers: Federal and state authorities establish the framework for districts to manage reform. Districts manage individual schools to implement the reforms.

Which units of change, then, best achieve reformer goals? Research studies have nothing to offer in guiding those who seek to improve schools. Historically, the answer has shifted again and again, depending on reformers’ goals, and the theories that reform-driven policymakers had in their heads about how change occurs in complex institutions such as schools. The past and present focus on the district has strong historical roots, ones that I will elaborate in Part 2.

Are there lessons that an historian of school reform can find in the district as an engine of change? Hardly. The past is not the present; they differ greatly. In looking at present efforts at district reform, however, I can offer an interpretation of past efforts that might inform current policies.