Are There Lessons from the History of School Reform?

For some people, history lessons are clear.

For some, history lessons are ambiguous.

For some, history lessons are depressing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These are the lessons that history teach school reformers.

“Good” Schools Seminar: Gleanings from a Class

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Cheating Scandals Reaffirm, Not Diminish, Testing

Not until the trials (or plea bargains) are over, will a verdict be rendered on former Superintendent Beverly Hall’s guilt or innocence in what is called the Atlanta cheating scandal. Hall’s indictment follows on the heels of finding El Paso Superintendent Lorenzo Garcia guilty last Fall. He is now serving three and a half years in jail (see here and here).

Even before a judge or jury decides on her guilt or innocence, anti-testing groups, feeding on Atlanta, El Paso, and the investigation of tampering with test scores under Washington, D.C. school chief, Michelle Rhee, have grabbed the case to further their cause. Moreover, over the years, journalists have uncovered oddities in test scores jumping sky-high in one year in other districts across the nation.

Foes of standardized tests feel the rush of adrenalin in saying that these examples of dishonest adults raising student test scores to receive applause and cash awards are pervasive. Defenders of standardized testing and accountability, however, see the  cheating as exceptions, as a few rotten apples in a barrel full of worm-free ones. Most educators, advocates of test-driven accountability say, are decent, hard working professionals who play by the rules and can be trusted to do the right thing.

In this volleying back-and-forth between advocates and foes of standardized testing,  school scandals have been compared to cheating in baseball, bicycle racing, and other sports.

From Mark McGuire‘s stained home run record to Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong‘s admission that he doped while racing, these and other sports have come under a dark cloud of suspicion–an outcome damaging to top athletes, companies dependent upon income derived from professional sports, fans turning into cynics, and disappointed youth who only want to play the game by the rules.

Cheating in both sports and schools can be traced to the unleashed and fierce competition in performing better and better to gain ever-larger rewards. Professional sports are money machines and being a top performer is rewarded handsomely; scores on international tests, ranking schools within a state and district based on performance, a broader array of school choices, and federal regulations in No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top  have ratcheted upward intense pressure to beat  state tests.

Also common to school cheating and drug-drenched sports is betraying the public trust to gain personal advantage.  When adults erase student answers and professional athletes take illegal drugs to enhance performance, such acts erode the faith that adults and youth have in social institutions being fair.

Another common feature is the unshaken confidence that current authorities have in written and computerized tests assessing student learning and drug tests determining whether athletes are cheating. When cheating is uncovered, few decision-makers question the tests. Tighter security and better tests are the solutions.

*Few decision-makers question whether there might be something wrong in professional athletics (i.e., expansion of baseball, football, hockey, and basketball leagues and over-the-top competition for more money).

*Few decision-makers question whether most toddlers and young children from low-income families should be tested especially since they bring to school very different strengths and weaknesses than children from middle and upper-income homes. Or that such early testing of young children squeezes inequities into judgments of what they can and cannot do in preschool and elementary school classrooms.

*Few decision-makers question the national obsession with student test scores as the correct metric to judge schools, teachers, and students.

This deep reluctance to question powerful interests invested in socioeconomic structures and cultures in which cheating occurs is why I believe that standardized tests in schools, like drug testing in sports, will be reaffirmed rather than overturned. There will be continuing challenges–as there should be–but standardized testing will remain rock-solid. Why?

First, note that most of the cheating incidents have been largely in districts where high percentages of poor and minority students attend school. Sure, there are exceptions but when you look closely at where dishonesty is found, those charters and regular public schools enroll large numbers of children from low-income families. I have yet to find any district school boards, investigators, charter school leaders or policymakers recommend examining the tests to see if they do what they are supposed to do or, after conducting such an examination, finding unworthy tests and getting rid of them. Yes, there have been protests by educators, students, and middle- and upper-middle class families against too much standardized testing (see here and here). These protests have led to occasional boycotts but none have occurred, to my knowledge, in poor neighborhoods. If anything, there is a reaffirmation of tests, calls for greater security, and plaudits for any whistle-blowers.

The point is that these tests sort students and schools by scores that  reinforce rather than erase existing gaps in achievement. And sorting is necessary to determine who, beginning at the age of four, shall climb each rung of that ladder reaching college. The system of private and public schooling requires such tests to distinguish high achievers from others. If the tests were really that accurate in making such distinctions across children and youth of being smart on paper, with people, and in life now and later, then, perhaps we need such tests . But that is not the case now… by a long shot.

Second, to underscore the above point, consider the experience of cheating on the SAT. After a scandal revealed that high-scoring individuals with fake IDs were paid to take the SAT test, Educational Testing Service tightened security at test sites. No challenges of the test itself occurred. SAT scores remain crucial for college admission and no school boards, teachers, or parent groups called for the end of the test.

Count on cheaters getting more clever and investigators still hunting them down. Amid increasing numbers of cheating incidents, standardized tests will be challenged, maybe the numbers even reduced, but nonetheless, they will reign for the immediate future.

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.

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.

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.

Back to the Future: High School Graduation Rates

Yes, the rate for U.S. students graduating high school reached 78 percent in 2010, the highest since 1970. And furthermore, dropout rates has fallen to three percent,  its lowest since that year. Have you heard any bells chiming the good news? Any upbeat news flashes interrupting CNN anchors? Where are the bloggers posts of U.S. schools finally turning around and on the upswing refuting those school reform Cassandras’ constant talk of failing U.S. schools? I have not heard any bells chiming, seen any news flashes, or read such posts. Isn’t this good news? Sure, it is but bad news accompanies it as well.

Here is some history on U.S. graduation rates. Not  until the 1930s, did getting a high school diploma seem within reach of most U.S. teenagers (13-17 years of age). During the Great Depression, for the first time over half of 13-17 year olds attended high school. WW II interrupted that trend. Half of high school students completed high school for the first time in 1940. By the 1950s, about two-thirds or more were graduating and  receiving a diploma became the norm. In 1970,  78 percent of U.S. students graduated high school. Current figures return U.S. to that period over four decades ago. Thus, back to the future.

What about the diploma gap between whites and minorities?

Historically, minorities dropped out far more often than white students. That trend continues although in the most recent figures far higher percentages of minorities received diplomas than they had decades earlier. But the diploma gap–the bad news– remains substantial.

So why have high school  graduation rates increased overall including gains for minorities? Here is where explanations get dicey. Keep in mind that a single-factor explanation for annual upticks (or down-ticks) in national numbers is suspect. Schooling, like life, is complex. Many factors come into play in trying to explain changes in U.S. schooling. So picking factors that are associated strongly with one another and leaping to a cause-effect conclusion would be an error.

Those observers who point out that more students stay in school during hard economic times when jobs are difficult to find (e.g., the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession after 2007) are surely correct. Just as those who swear that standards-based testing and accountability policies over the past few decades have paid off in more diplomas also have evidence of a strong correlation. Or in looking at where the gains in graduation rates were highest–among, for example, minorities most of whom lived in urban districts–those gains could have bumped up national figures. Or perhaps there were differences in how graduation rates were calculated then and now–passing General Education Development tests (GEDs) are sometimes counted and sometimes not.

I could go on list other factors but readers can see that there are many ways to explain the upward trend in high school graduation rates. Here I want to offer an additional explanation that rarely gets attention to help explain partially–not fully–the 78 percent of U.S. students graduating, a figure that was reached forty years earlier.

School reform talk and action between the 1970s and now–recall deep public concern over falling SAT scores in the 1960s and 1970s, in part, leading to the publication of A Nation at Risk (1983)–has hammered again and again the same nail: U.S. students, compared to other nations’ students, were behind and getting worse. The Nation at Risk and the test-driven accountability reforms of the 1980s through No Child Left Behind (2001) were anchored in the assumption that all U.S. schools were failing. That assumption, however, was false for all U.S. students although it was correct for a subset of children and youth.

The correct part of the assumption is that in most urban districts, poor and minority students were receiving (and still do) a second-rate schooling compared to students in affluent mostly white districts in the U.S. These schools had failed for decades and continued to fail children and youth. In cities like Washington, D.C. and New York between 40 to 50 percent of students left school before graduating. They still do.

The rest of the assumption that all U.S. schools are failing their students, however, is incorrect because the point of comparison are those nations who score high on international academic tests. For policymakers and public officials, scoring well on international tests, particularly in math, means–and this is the mistaken leap that smart people make–that those graduating from high school and then college will have the essential skills and attitudes to be productive workers in ever-changing industries competing in global markets. The  economy will grow. Leaping from international test scores to productive workers and then economic growth is the error in the assumption. Yet that flawed assumption has driven school reform for the past thirty years.

With 78 percent of U.S. students graduating in 2010, a figure reached four decades earlier, and with nearly one out of four poor students dropping out of school when it used to be much higher, there should be bells ringing and chimes sounding. Surely, much work remains to be done in big cities and poor rural districts. I do not know why these trends have occurred since many factors are in play but, nonetheless, it is an achievement. Yet it goes unrecognized largely because–and here I am speculating– it challenges the dominant rhetoric of the past three decades about failing U.S. students–a badly damaged assumption that, sadly, remains intact.