Kiss Michelle Rhee Goodbye

With the publication of Radical and a few years after founding StudentsFirst, a policy advocacy organization, former Washington, D.C. Chancellor of schools continues to push her reform agenda nationally, one that was severely burned when she exited the district after only three years in office. Well versed in being a celebrity, Rhee made the rounds of high profile media (e.g., Jon Stewart show) pushing her new book and the organization that she leads. So why should anyone kiss Rhee–”America’s most famous school reformer“– goodbye?

Because she is a divisive figure and damaged goods as an educator.  Both mean that her celebrity-hood as a school reformer–on the cover of Time magazine, chatting with Oprah and Jon–will give her visibility in 24/7 news cycle but not lead to any substantial elected or appointed political or educational office.

No President will appoint her Secretary of Education; no governor will appoint her state superintendent of education and no school board will appoint her as their school chief. She is a polarizing, radioactive figure who will set off Geiger counters and create instant political turmoil and  organizational instability–outcomes that may be good for media attention and garnering large speaker fees but disastrous for those responsible for making schools better and improving student performance.

In the absence of actual work with states, districts, schools, and classrooms, her reputation as a divisive figure forever trailed by a dark hovering cloud of cheating on test scores will tarnish  her efforts to have any direct impact on students,  pushing her  further and further down the food-chain of celebrity status.  She will slip into the land where once highly touted educational celebrities such as Joe Clark   (here also) and Chris Whittle  (here also) became answers to the game: Whatever happened to _______ ?

Won’t her advocacy organization StudentsFirst lobbying state legislators for more charters, vouchers, performance evaluations for teachers, and the end of seniority for rehiring laid-off teachers make a difference? I doubt it for the following reasons.

Compared with the efforts of the deep-pocketed Koch brothers in influencing state legislatures through the American Legislative Exchange Commission (ALEC), or the well-funded Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), Rhee’s organization is minor league in political acumen,  expertise, and experience in political advocacy. Nor does StudentsFirst have any bench strength; it is all Michelle.If  she leaves the organization out of fatigue or pique, no more StudentsFirst. Moreover, such political work to be effective is back-channel and under the media radar. Such work is not Michelle Rhee, considering her few years in Washington, D.C. and since.

But there is something that Rhee can do to reduce the radioactivity, remove suspicions about her motives, and regain a pinch of credibility that she carried as a school reformer when the mayor of Washington, D.C. appointed her in 2007.

That something is for her to return to the classroom and teach for three to five years. Teaching will redeem her soiled reputation as a fame-seeking missile interested only in snatching the headline, the interview, the donor’s dollar. She will regain her credibility as someone who cares about school reform by teaching and working to have her students do well in school and in life. She might even move on, were she so inclined, to take state and federal leadership posts.

Although I hope she will make such a counter-intuitive move, for I do admire her energy, intensity, and commitment to students, I doubt that will occur. Celebrity-hood, once tasted,  becomes addictive and, so often, spirals downward as the addict seeks the next moment-of-glory fix. With regret, I blow a kiss goodbye to Michelle Rhee even now as she rides the cresting wave of “America’s most famous school reformer.”

Reformers Creating a Usable Past: Myths and Realities

Consider the following:

*Progressive school reformers praise the 19th century one-room school for multi-age grouping, students helping one another learn their lessons, and close connections between school and community; conservative school reformers see the same one-room school house as a place where order and discipline ruled the day and students learned basic skills.

*Technology-driven reformers describe 21st century U.S. public schools as products of a late-19th century industrial age when schools became assembly-line factories and continue to this day to turn out graduates unequipped to enter a post-industrial, knowledge-based economy where jobs require collaboration, problem-solving skills, and creativity.

Both statements about the past are myths. Both derive from reformers-turned-historians with selective memories who seek to advance their current agendas. They create a usable past. And in doing so, they tip-toe around truth.

Professional historians wince when fellow historians and policy elites dip into the past and recover evidence that is useful in pushing particular reform-driven policies. Called “presentism “ among professional historians, it is an epithet that wounds academic reputations. Not among reformers cherry-picking facts from the past, however.

Why are the above statements myths? Other historians delving into primary sources  determined the accuracy of such statements labeling them as nostalgic renderings from imperfect memories. Jonathan Zimmerman looked carefully at the rural one-room school.

In Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory, Zimmerman points out how educational progressives and conservatives in the 1960s both pointed to the “little red schoolhouse”–which Zimmerman notes was seldom red since paint cost too much in most rural districts–as evidence for their current passions. Progressives committed to “open classrooms” in those decades saw through rose-colored glasses teachers and multi-aged students in the one-room school working together to learn; conservatives, deeply concerned about drugs and crime in most suburban and urban schools sprinkled pixie dust over the one-room school and saw the Three Rs, discipline, corporal punishment, and dunce caps as practices that needed to be resurrected (see YouTube of author discussing book).

Zimmerman’s careful sifting and analyzing of sources shows how the icon of the one-room school clearly had the features that both progressives and conservative attributed to the one-room school but fell far short of being an accurate portrait of all that occurred in such schools. He toppled the myth by offering a well-rounded portrait showing how memory and history are entwined in photos, documents, and recollections of teachers and students about their experiences in one-room schoolhouses.

In turning to the myth of current schools as factories producing graduates unfit for working in an information-driven economy, one need only turn to a few examples since such rhetoric is so pervasive in the past few years (see here, here, here, and here).

Many historians and other academics argue that it is a myth that U.S. schools are failing (and have failed) propagated by reformers who selectively use evidence to push their favorite reform. These scholarly challenges, however, have yet to gain much traction among the larger public in the super-heated global climate of reform talk coming from policy elites and street-level activists (See here, here, here, and alan krueger). What these scholars and journalists point out is that U.S. public schools compared to its own history of two centuries and compared internationally now are a mixed picture of successes and failures–not a black-white photo but one in rich colors.

Yet the myth of U.S. schools as failures persists in policy talk and action because such rhetoric and policies fit the ambitious agenda of technology-driven reformers eager and willing to transform failing U.S. schools into high-tech successful ones. See here, here, and here.

Historians of U.S. schooling, however, have investigated different features of public schools and described how the structures, norms. and culture of age-graded schools invested with powerful social expectations from parents and taxpayers have maintained a stability, a “dynamic conservatism,” in daily school operations that permits some innovations, including new technologies, to be adopted, others adapted and even others shunted aside. David Labaree, Nancy Cohen, Jon Zimmerman, William Reese, and other historians offer portraits of different aspects of schooling that give pause and invite skepticism of  what past and contemporary reformers promised and how the best of reformers’ intentions have gone awry time and again.

These historians do not seek a usable past; they shine a light on earlier eras that reveal ideas and actions taken in the context of earlier decades. They do not pick and choose which facts best illuminate present reform agendas. Such historical detective work questions contemporary reform-driven actions and urges mindfulness, even humility, among those who construct a usable past to justify policies that, more often than not, produce unintended consequences.

Framing the School Technology Dream

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

____________________

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

Swiss Cheese Argument for School Reform: Add Another Hole

The prevailing rationale for school reform for the past thirty years, repeated by Presidents Ronald Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, is that there is a skills mismatch between what employers need in an information-based economy and graduates coming out of U.S. schools.

That lack of math,science, and technical skills among high school graduates means that employers cannot find job-seekers, just out of school or unemployed experienced workers, who can fill vacancies. Unfilled vacancies leave companies elsewhere grabbing a larger share of the market for goods and services that U.S. firms could produce. If schools would do their job of preparing skilled graduates, the three-decade old argument goes, then the economy would be stronger.

Politicians and policymakers focus on the skills mismatch because the problem can be fixed: more math, science, and technology in elementary and secondary in U.S. schools. In this way, students have the knowledge and skills to enter the labor market, get decent-paying jobs, and contribute to an ever-changing domestic and global economy.  That unrelenting and unchallenged rationale for school reform, however, just developed another leak.*

Blaming schools for a skills mismatch is convenient and historical–remember that business and civic reformers pushed vocational education into U.S. schools over a century ago because of a so-called skills gap–but misses the central role that employers play in hiring new graduates and the unemployed.

According to University of Pennslyvania’s  Peter Cappelli  in his recent book Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs,  the skills mismatch argument of the past thirty years is shot through with holes. Cappelli says:

There is no “mismatch” between the industries and occupations where people were laid off and where hiring is taking place…. Jobs have not changed over the last couple of years in any way that changed skill requirements substantially. The “failing schools” notion, even if it was true, couldn’t explain the continued unemployment of the majority of job seekers, who graduated years ago and had jobs just before the recession.

He emphasizes that employers are to blame, not schools. Yes, those who do the hiring. How can that be?

Cappelli has story after story of companies using complicated algorithms that screen out job seekers with requisite skills, paying low wages, and offering no on-the-job training. Employers, awash in applicants, don’t fill their vacancies and seldom calculate the opportunity costs of not filling the jobs.

Some examples:

*Employers only want experienced job seekers. The software many employers  use screens out people who have the knowledge to do the job but have no experience or lack a perfect fit for jobs with narrowly drawn requirements.  A firm advertises for an entry-level engineer and gets 25,000 responses. They couldn’t find the right engineer. Cappelli’s favorite example : the absurdity of this requirement was a job advertisement for a cotton candy machine operator – not a high-skill job – which required that applicants ‘demonstrate prior success in operating cotton candy machines.’  The most perverse manifestation of this approach is the many employers who now refuse to take applicants from unemployed candidates, the rationale being that their skills must be getting rusty.

In a labor market where employers have their pick of the crop, they shoot themselves in the foot by screening out able and qualified applicants.

*Not filling vacancies have costs that employers ignore:

Cappelli: If I were an employer, I would first begin… to ask if I know what it’s costing me to keep a vacancy open…. Do I know what it’s costing me to train somebody versus hiring somebody and chasing them on the outside? If you have answers to those questions, you start realizing that it does cost something to keep vacancies open. Searching forever for somebody — that purple squirrel, as they say in IT, that somebody who is so unique and so unusual, so perfect, although you never [find] them — that’s not a good idea.

*Unlike a few decades ago, most employers do not train entry-level employees.

Cappelli: What employers are complaining they can’t find now are not things the schools can deliver. They want work-based skills. They want the kinds of things that you can’t learn in a classroom. How do you manage a team of people? How do you implement this particular software? And we shouldn’t expect the schools to try to do that. It’s not very efficient. It’s much easier to teach somebody as an apprentice in the field.
Cappelli believes that employers need to loosen job requirements (and web-based software that screens out fine candidates) and offer paid internships and on-the-job training–as some employers still do.

There are already holes in the argument that high school graduates’ skills are mismatched to employer needs. Peter Cappelli adds another.

________

*Some historians have critiqued this reform-driven argument for linking the economy to better schooling. See Lawrence Cremin, Popular Education and Its Discontents (1989) Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson, The Education Gospel (2004), Larry Cuban, The Blackboard and the Bottom Line (2004), and David Labaree, Someone Has To Fail (2010). Also see posts here and here.

No End to Magical Thinking When It Comes to High-Tech Schooling

Few high-tech entrepreneurs, pundits, or booster of online learning, much less, policymakers, would ever say aloud publicly that robots and hand-held devices will eventually replace teachers. Yet many fantasize that such an outcome will occur. High-profile awards to entrepreneurs, the occasional cartoon, and  advocates who dream of online instruction anywhere, anytime transforming education feed the fantasy.

Consider Sugata Mitra, Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University (United Kingdom). He recently received the TED award of $1 million for creating learning environments where illiterate Indian children had access to computers in actual holes-in-walls on streets of New Delhi slums. Some of the children told him: “You’ve given us a machine that works only in English, so we had to teach ourselves English.” Believing that children’s sense of wonder and intrepid curiosity would spur them to use computers and learn English, science, and whatever else they were curious about on their own, Mitra said to his audiences and funders: “My wish is to help design the future of learning by supporting children all over the world to tap into their innate sense of wonder and work together. Help me build the School in the Cloud, a learning lab in India, where children can embark on intellectual adventures by engaging and connecting with information and mentoring online.”

The million dollar award is not an accident when so many vendors, enthusiasts, and dreamers are willing to spend large sums of money to advance the spread of Mitra’s initiative and similar ones through both the developing and developed world.

More magical thinking–another noble dream–occurred nearly a decade ago with the  One-Laptop-Per-Child initiative (OLPC). Nicholas Negroponte, MIT professor and former director of the MIT Media Lab, designed the project to put inexpensive, solar-powered laptops (running now around $200) in the hands of children and youth in least developed countries in Africa, Asia, and South America.   

No shortage of critics, however.

Thus far, the largest distribution of laptops, nearly a million, have gone to rural and poor children in Peru over the past few years. A recent evaluation of the effort concluded:

*The program dramatically increased access to computers
*No evidence that the program increased learning in Math or Language.
*Some benefits on cognitive skills

Results for other developing countries such as Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Uruguay have similar mixed results. At best, it is too early to say what the benefits have been; after all, laptops are slowly becoming obsolete since smart phones and cheaper devices have nearly replaced them in many parts of the world; at worst, OLPC approaches what Mike Trucano, ICT specialist for the World Bank, listed as one of the 9 worst ed tech practices in the developing world: Dump hardware in schools, hope for magic to happen.

I certainly saw that with instructional television in the 1960s, desktop computers and labs in the 1980s, 1:1 laptop programs since the mid-1990s and I now see a similar pattern with iPads, other tablets, and smart phones. Magical thinking about transforming teaching and learning–dumping teachers and traditional schools disappearing–is close to make-believe even when children have these powerful devices in their hands.

Vendor-driven hype and wishful policy thinking over robots, increasingly sophisticated artificial  intelligence software, and expanded virtual teaching feed private and public fantasies about replacing teachers and schools. Taking a step back and thinking about what parents, voters, and taxpayers want from schools–the social, economic, political, and individual goals–makes magical thinking more of a curse in the inevitable public disappointment and cynicism that ensue after money is spent, paltry results emerge, and machines  become obsolete.

I end with the obvious point that magical thinking and the accompanying curse afflicts not only educators but also the rest of us, as these homeowners found out:

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?

Does Collective Teacher Autonomy Make Any Difference for Student Achievement? (Kim Farris-Berg), Part 3

Farris-Berg is lead author of Trusting Teachers with School Success: What Happens When Teachers Call the Shots. She is a Senior Associate with Education Evolving, a policy design shop based in St. Paul, Minnesota, and an independent education policy strategist. Her Twitter handle is @farrisberg.

High-performing organizations assess performance and act upon results to improve performance. The teachers who have collective autonomy to make decisions influencing school success do too.

Of course these teachers and their students participate in state standardized tests. Under No Child Left Behind they must. But, like many other teachers, they are concerned about the current policy context in which their school quality is judged by the percentage of students who score “proficient” on these tests—especially in comparison to other schools.

Many teachers who participated in our study pointed out that mean proficiency scores (high or low) cannot isolate the contribution of school and teacher quality from other contributors, such as family background and prior educational experience, no matter how good the test. My colleagues and I have argued that we also cannot learn much about the effects of practice (for example, teachers’ chosen learning approach) in each school so that we can really determine which practices work best. For that, we’ll need an altogether different research approach.

Autonomous groups of teachers want to score well enough on state standardized tests to maintain their autonomy (and consequently their approach to schooling), but otherwise they don’t worry much about a measurement of quality that, in their view, cannot withstand serious scientific scrutiny. Moreover, many teachers reported their resentment that so much school funding and time is spent on state- and district-required tests that are not useful for making decisions about how and what to teach individual students.

These teachers do, however, find a use for testing. They want to know individual student progress down to the specifics, and some choose to spend discretionary funding on assessment tools that they determine most valuable for providing this information. These teachers don’t just want to know if Johnny is doing well in math. They want to know what areas of math Johnny understands, and what areas he doesn’t so he can reach his own next level of achievement.

But individual academic improvement is not the only quality indicator autonomous teachers use to evaluate their practice. And, when you step back and think, this just makes sense. Think about how you evaluate restaurants, cars, and even your significant other. It’s almost never based on a single measure of quality. Why should it be any different for schools and teachers?

A number of teacher groups have opted to use The Hope Survey, for example, to determine students’ psychological adjustment in a school environment over time. Teachers can learn how well they are doing in addressing students’ sense of autonomy, belongingness, and goal orientation.

Teachers also develop their own rubrics and use portfolio assessments, public learning exhibitions, and rounding (just as medical doctors round with patients) to assess students’ nonacademic abilities in areas such as self-direction, time management, team work, information retention, self-advocacy, community interaction, active citizenship, persistence, risk management, flexible thinking, and critical thinking.

One group of teachers serving students in grades 6-12 created the Raised Responsibility Rubric, a tool used by both teachers and students to track students’ development of intrinsic motivation. The more a student develops, the more responsibility she is granted to manage her own time throughout the day.

So, does collective teacher autonomy make any difference for student achievement? The answer is yes. Autonomous teachers value a broader range of achievement than is currently valued in K-12—so much so that they are seeking, designing and financing new ways to assess this achievement. They use all the information they deem valuable to improve teaching and learning in their schools.

I imagine that some folks started reading this blog with the expectation that I would report a nice summary of the state standardized test scores of schools run by teachers in comparison to conventionally governed schools. Out of respect for the ideas and practices of teachers who call the shots, we opted not to report these scores in our work. It wasn’t because we couldn’t say anything good about the scores or because the teachers wanted to avoid measurement. We simply didn’t want to participate in anyone’s attempt to boil everything autonomous teachers do down to a single measure of quality—a measure that doesn’t begin to reflect all they do or their work’s relevance to the future of K-12 schools.

If we are open to trusting teachers, we ought to be open to their broader definition of student achievement and its implications for measuring school quality. These trailblazers could be kicking off a major period of innovation in K-12. Encouraging them will likely require less snap judgment and more confrontation of our nation’s tolerance for the hard work of change.

Are Teachers Interested in the Opportunity To Call the Shots? (Kim Farris-Berg) Part 2

Farris-Berg is lead author of Trusting Teachers with School Success: What Happens When Teachers Call the Shots. She is a Senior Associate with Education Evolving, a policy design shop based in St. Paul, Minnesota, and an independent education policy strategist. Her Twitter handle is @farrisberg.

If we made it loud and clear, in both policy and practice, that teachers can have autonomy to collectively make the decisions influencing whole school success, would any teachers take advantage?

Collective teacher autonomy isn’t for everyone. It is a working arrangement that some teachers long for, but others never imagine for themselves. Teachers who are now calling the shots in more than 50 district and chartered schools around the country describe themselves as pioneers both in the professionalization of teaching and in the modernization of schools and schooling.

Pioneering is intense and difficult work, they say, especially in an education culture that values and even manages toward “sameness.” Yet it is also enormously rewarding. The teachers report that they thrive in these environments where they work with their colleagues to make what they determine to be necessary changes and see their commitment’s positive influence on student learning.

There’s evidence that, if the opportunity was firmly on the table, many more teachers would be interested. Public Agenda tested a national sample of teachers’ attitudes toward new arrangements and reported the findings in Stand by Me: What Teachers Really Think About Unions, Merit Pay and Other Professional Matters (Farkas, Johnson and Duffet 2003). Fifty-eight percent of teachers were somewhat or very interested “in working in a [chartered] school run and managed by teachers.” Sixty-five percent of these teachers had worked less than five years, and 50 percent had worked more than 25 years.

Of course, there are also reasons why teachers currently don’t take the leap. To ask for something, you need to know about it, and many do not. Plus, among the teachers who are interested, many are afraid of what might happen to their professional reputations if they ask for authority.

Others fear getting only partial, informal authority. In these cases, teachers worry about making the time investment (in school design, school management, and lobbying school district or state leaders to adapt management practices to support teacher autonomy) only to have their authority pulled back. Teachers have seen this happen too many times before when, as the former 22-year Minneapolis Federation of Teachers President Louise Sundin puts it in Zero Change of Passage, “the bureaucracy [asked for innovation, but ultimately]…couldn’t tolerate…differences in delivery or design.”

Still more teachers have trouble imagining the arrangement’s possibilities for their own professional careers and for their students. Just ask Janesville, Wisconsin high school teacher Stephanie Davis.

A highly-qualified teacher, Stephanie got her first teaching job at the 1,780-student Craig High School. Doing everything her district and school leaders asked of her, she applied the skills and knowledge gained from her training for the good of her students. She felt proud to work at Craig, where everyone worked hard to make a great school.

So Stephanie was crushed when, like so many other teachers, she was laid off by the Janesville School District amidst state budget cuts. She hoped for another job in Janesville, and eventually district leaders assigned her to a school chartered by Janesville Public Schools called Tailoring Academics to Guide Our Students (TAGOS Leadership Academy).* But she was furious. TAGOS was known as a place full of “bad” kids. Stephanie thought, “I am a good teacher. How can I do what I was trained to do in a place like that?”

The TAGOS Leadership Academy teachers welcomed Stephanie and explained that their learning program of choice focused on individualizing learning for students, not staying on a specific track. They had requested a colleague like her so she could help realize the goal of getting each student to his or her personal next level of achievement. They had the authority to collaboratively manage the school, they said, and could make whatever changes needed.

At first Stephanie was so focused on how things usually work—and how TAGOS was breaking convention—that she failed to digest her colleagues’ request. “Then we went on winter break, and I had time to reflect on what they were asking of me,” she explained. “Suddenly I got it. I had a real opportunity at TAGOS. My voice mattered. I could lead [my colleagues]—work together with them—to create a learning program that would really change how our students learn!”

“I hadn’t really thought about how prescribed everything I was doing at Craig was,” she continued. “I had to use the prescribed book list, in the prescribed order, at the prescribed pace, using a prescribed budget. There was so little opportunity to tailor what I was doing for the individual students I was working with, whether they were far beyond or far behind. . . Here at TAGOS was a chance to do all the things I thought might work better.”

Stephanie was as nervous as she was excited. She realized that in exchange for such decision-making authority, she and her fellow teachers at TAGOS Leadership Academy would be accountable for the learning program they developed in addition to all of the other choices they made.

“It was a scary idea at first,” she said. “I hadn’t ever pictured myself in this position. But now that I’ve worked with [collective] autonomy, I realize that I was missing out on professional opportunities to [decide with my colleagues] what would work for our students. . . It’s not that I was unhappy at Craig, but this is just a much more satisfying job. I am a much better teacher for having worked in this way.”

Stephanie’s story is worth considering. How many more teachers would flourish and find more satisfaction in their jobs if we made it clear that they could have full, professional authority to make the decisions influencing school success?

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*Note, some teacher groups have hiring autonomy, but TAGOS Leadership Academy teachers do not.

The Past Lives on in the Present: Customized Learning then and Now

Pupils are working on their own. The second and third grade reading class of 63 pupils … is using a learning center and two adjoining rooms. Two teachers and  the school librarian act as coordinators and tutors as the pupils proceed with the various materials prepared by the school’s teachers and … developer, The Learning and Research Development Center at the U. of Pittsburgh. Each pupil sets his own pace. He is listening to records and completing workbooks. When he has completed a unit of work, he is tested, the test is corrected immediately, and if he gets a grade of 85% or better he moves on. if not, the teacher offers a series of alternative activities to correct the weakness, including individual tutoring, There are no textbooks. There is virtually no lecturing by the teacher to the class as a whole. Instead, she is busy observing the child’s progress, evaluating his tests, writing prescriptions, and instructing individually or in small groups of pupils who need help.*

The school is Oakleaf elementary near Pittsburgh (PA) and the time is 1965. Implemented across all grades, the innovative program was called Individually Prescribed Instruction or IPI (el_197203_tillman-2, p. 495).

Nearly a half-century ago, before there were desktop computers, university developers and school-site practitioners championed IPI as a program where students move through materials at differentiated paces until each achieved mastery of the content and skills to then continue on to the next unit of study.  Observers found students engaged in the process, pleased with the prompt feedback, and delighted that each could move at his or her pace rather than wait for the entire class to move to the next lesson.

Sound familiar?

It should. IPI was a more sophisticated version of psychologist B.F. Skinner’s “teaching machine” in the 1950s that evolved from “programmed learning” engineered by psychologist Sidney Pressey in the 1920s.

IPI was a prototype for subsequent online learning once electronic devices became widespread in K-12 and higher education. The DNA of present-day blended learning (e.g., Rocketship schools’ Learning Labs, Carpe Diem schools) and MOOCs in  higher education reaches back nearly a century into  “programmed learning,” “teaching machines,” and  IPI.

Alright, Larry, you made the self-evident point that earlier renditions of self-paced, individualized learning appeared nearly a century ago. So what?

At that time and now, those various incarnations of individualized, self-paced learning sprang from competing ideologies of what children and youth should learn and how they should learn it. Student-centered vs. teacher-centered ways of teaching and learning (and mixes of both) have competed for time and space in K-12 schools for the past two centuries in schools. Teacher-centered instruction (e.g., lecture, discussion, textbook, worksheets, quizzes and tests) has won time and again and dominates classroom lessons. Yet student-centered instruction challenged conventional practice repeatedly.

Connecting students to the real world, students working in small groups and individually, teachers acting as guides and mentors, and a host of other student-centered activities that blend different subjects and skills (e.g., math, science, art, and poetry) moved to center stage of public attention on different occasions (e.g., progressive curriculum and instruction in the 1920s; open classrooms in late-1960s). But after a brief fling in the spotlight receded to the wings in past decades.  Of course, there have been hybrids of both where many teachers hug the middle of the spectrum of instruction, but advocates for each pedagogical ideology continue to contest one another even today when K-12 battles erupt over different kinds of math content, reading textbooks, and early childhood programs.

In higher education, rival ideas about teaching and learning, albeit under wraps, drive  different versions of MOOCs.  The answer, then, to my “so what” question is that  pedagogical ideologies that drove earlier versions of individualized, self-paced instruction are active in current versions of MOOCs.

The prevailing version of MOOCs offers traditional, technology-enriched teacher-centered instruction, that is, lecturing to large groups of people, asking occasional questions, online discussion sections, and multiple-choice questions on exams. Such MOOCs possess advantages of efficiency in delivering information especially in particular subjects (e.g. procedural knowledge in computer science, mathematics). Computer science departments at Stanford, MIT, and Harvard launched the initial MOOC offerings, not the Humanities, social sciences, or natural sciences, according to Keith Devlin, a Stanford University mathematician currently teaching a MOOC course on mathematical thinking.

There are other ways of teaching these courses, however. Some enthusiasts for MOOCs see opportunities for non-traditional forms of teaching where students learn from one another, form online communities, crowd-source answers to problems, create networks that distribute learning in ways that seldom occur in bricks-and-mortar colleges and universities. To Devlin, “the key to real learning has always been bi-directional human-human interaction (even better in some cases, multi-directional, multi-person interaction), not unidirectional instruction.” In other words, student-centered or learner-centered pedagogy.

So these rival ideologies contend with one another in MOOCs as they did when “teaching machines” and IPI were garnering public attention. Chances are efficiencies in cost and delivery will drive MOOCs toward teacher-centered instruction, as has occurred in the past. I would hope, however, that there would be attention to (and discussions of) MOOCs where benefits derived from student-centered ways of learning occur.

 

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*Thanks to Justin Reich and Dan Meyer for pointing me to IPI as a past reform that lives in the present.

Whose View of the Past Matters on School Reform?

History is more or less bunk. It is tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that’s worth a tinker’s dam is the history we make today.

In 1916, as the U.S. was gearing up to enter World War I, Henry Ford, who had applied new technologies to mass manufacturing of  cars while earning profits for his company, said  those words. He wanted the kind of history that would speak to the present, not those school-taught accounts of kings, queens, generals, and diplomacy students learned. To Ford, that kind of history was “”more or less bunk.” He wanted a different history that was relevant to the here-and-now, that could answer tough questions today (p. 1).

Today, political, military, social, economic, and education historians gather, analyze, and interpret facts to answer questions about the past as objectively as they can. The past, then, never speaks for itself in coughing up answers; historians establish facts, interpret the past, some even rendering their judgments, to inform the present.

Yet those in authority who make decisions then and now pursue a different view of the past.

Case in point. Before the housing bubble burst and cascaded through the financial community here and abroad leading to the crippling Great Recession in 2008 economists, investments bankers, Federal Reserve officials, the President of the U.S., and hundreds of other policymakers had been warned time and again about the housing boom. For example, Yale University economist Robert Shiller examined historical records dating back centuries–yes centuries–when housing prices spiked and then plunged in the Netherlands, Norway, and other countries. As recent as the early 1990s, another housing bubble burst in Japan. These popped bubbles damaged these nations’ economies badly.

Shiller said the same thing had been occurring in the U.S. since the early 1990s. He told that to Federal Reserve officials; he gave interviews to network journalists; he wrote op-ed pieces. He talked to hedge funds CEOs and top officials in investment banks all of whom were hip-deep in packaging subprime mortgages for sale to investors even though few understood what was being bought and sold. When did he say all of these things? 2005. His research findings were ignored.

But the housing bubble did pop in 2008 and the near-financial collapse of the nation has led to high unemployment and a severely damaged economy that is just barely recovering in 2013.

Why did so few hedge fund managers, CEOs of financial institutions, and investors–much less top federal and state officials and legislators–heed these lessons from the past. Because these policy elites  had a different view of the past in their heads. To them, accelerating housing prices was not a bubble it was economic growth in the American way. What happened elsewhere couldn’t happen in the U.S. because it was different. Rising housing prices were another mark of American exceptionalism. The U.S. had won wars with Britain, Mexico, and Spain in the 19th century, and twice defeated Germany in the 20th century (Vietnam was a forgettable error while the 100-hour first Gulf War in 1991 was the historical pattern). U.S. capitalism had triumphed over Soviet Union.  That was the historical map that these very smart people had in their heads. So why take heed of a Yale economist and other Cassandras warning about an economic debacle around the corner?

So the issue in front of policymakers who influence the economy–like those who seek school reform–is not ignoring the past. They like voters, taxpayers, and those interested in school reform such as practitioners, parents, researchers already have historical maps in their heads.

Years ago, David Tyack and I wrote about the history of school reform. We said:

Whether they are aware of it or not, all people use history (defined as an interpretation of past events) when they make choices about the present and future. The issue is not whether people use a sense of the past … but how accurate and appropriate are their historical maps. Are their inferences attentive to context and complexity? Are their analogies plausible? And how might alternative understandings of the past produce different visions of the future? (p. 7).

The questions we asked nearly two decades ago about the accuracy of the historical maps that reform-driven policymakers use in shaping the future of schools apply to K-12 and higher education rhetoric and action in either championing new technologies or using student test scores to evaluate teachers. Are the inferences policymakers make attentive to school contexts and complexity? Are the analogies plausible? Do other interpretations of past reforms contain different visions of the future?

After living through the housing bubble and its popping and now listening to the rhetoric of those committed to technology transforming teaching and learning, I do not hear these questions being asked. The historical maps advocates of “disruptive” technologies have in their heads do not permit such questions. Not asking these questions lead me to slightly amend Henry Ford: Their history “is more or less bunk.”