The Tsunami of Distrust for Government Spills over to Educators

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New York City Mayor Bloomberg’s appointment of Cathie Black encountered fierce blowback from parent groups, unions, and others who were outraged by her lack of public school experience.  The New York State Commissioner of Education said that he would approve the Mayoral request to waive state requirements if the Mayor appointed an educator as second in command. He did.

The mayor’s choice of a non-educator for the largest school district in the nation got me thinking about the massive distrust of public school educators in general and teachers in particular. They have taken hit after hit, decade after decade, from policy elites and media  for horribly mismanaged urban districts and dragging down the U.S. economy.

Then I recalled the growth of distrust for all government that coincided with this loss of trust. Think of the Vietnam War, Watergate, President Nixon’s resignation, and the habit of presidential candidates from Jimmy Carter through Barack Obama running against  politicians in Washington. That distrust of all government–fed further by the 2008 Great Recession, bailouts of too-large-to-fail financial institutions, health care legislation, sharpened political polarization (and lessened civility) including Tea Party candidates in the 2010 election–even gets goofy. Recall the anger among largely white, middle-aged and older voters against federal intrusion who said: “Shrink the government but don’t touch my Medicare”.

Since many political conservatives in advocating vouchers and, later, charter schools have called public schools, “government” schools, the merger of anti-government sentiments and school haters contributed to bashing educators as self-serving professional who care more for their convenience than what students learn. Moreover, policy elites claim that educators lack  expertise to manage large organizations and commitment to fundamentally change the status quo. Their distrust has yielded policies from NCLB to pay-4-performance schemes and publishing teachers’ records of their students scores on state tests. Many of these policies are borrowed from the corporate sector such as paying teachers for results and hiring non-educators who were effective managers in companies to be superintendents.

Media stories of inept bureaucrats (e.g., suspending 11 year-old for doing cartwheels at lunchtime), teacher unions hostile to reform, and district leaders mismanaging resources  strengthen the conviction that relying on educators to manage effectively is foolish.

Of course, diminished trust in governmental leaders and educators spills over other professionals such as physicians. Increasingly, patients have come to distrust health care providers. Doctors struggle with patients who question their advice.

Have such periods of distrust occurred before? If so, what happened? If not, what can be done?

While there have been past public outcries criticizing U.S. leaders across institutions–consider the massive damages done to labor, immigrants, and public health during the spurt of industrialization and monopolistic practices in post-Civil War decades–these levels of distrust in education, medicine, and other institutions are the highest they have been since the late- 1960s and early 1970s when polls on public confidence began. Most observers point to  pivotal events identified above for the steady erosion in confidence in medical care professionals, educators, political office-holders, and others in authority (except for the military). That K-12 schools is not the only institution that has become less trusted simply illustrates that recent economic, political, social, and technological changes have shaken the confidence that Americans have had in their leaders and society.

The magnitude of those changes and the consequences we see about us have convinced me that no single leader, no single plan, no single solution will suffice to rebuild the institutional confidence that is essential in a democratic society that prizes civic engagement, independent institutions, and an economy that distributes rewards based on merit rather than on race, ethnicity, class, or inherited wealth.

What to do? At this point I should list a 10 or 15 point plan for renewing U.S. society. But I have no plan. Nor do I see a leader now or on the horizon who can frame the domestic and foreign problems the nation now faces and offer a direction to follow. But I am not pessimistic or depressed. I am worried, however.

I do worry about the hemorrhaging of trust in our fundamental institutions. I do worry about  public schools historically vulnerable to pressure groups because of their total dependence on voters and tax payers for political and economic support. What gives me a  small measure of hope–not yet for the lowest tier of urban schools-in the U.S.’s  three-tiered system of schooling–is the frequent polls where parents say repeatedly that the schools that their children attend are doing a good job with their sons and daughters. Does this hope remove the worries I have about the current state of our society where so many people express distrust in our basic institutions? No it does not. So I have a frail reed to hang on to in these turbulent times.

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How One Science Teacher Integrates Laptops into Lessons

Carol Donnelly (pseudonym) has taught 13 years, the last six at Las Montanas. She has been using laptops since 2002 when they were introduced at the school. In 2009, when I interviewed her and observed her classes, she was teaching biology to honors students (one class), regular students (one class), and English Language Learners (ELL) in three classes. She used the same basic lesson for all of her biology classes, stretching out the content for ELL classes while going in more depth in the regular and honors classes (e.g., research papers, PowerPoint presentations, Science Fair projects). She integrated laptops into her lessons once a week.

Every Wednesday, she told me, is laptop day. She brings a mobile cart from the Media Center  to her classroom. In one lesson I observed, Donnelly began class with a review of yesterday’s material on photosynthesis. Afterwards she had students open their laptops to watch animations of photosynthesis that she had loaded on their machines earlier. A pop-up quiz appeared after the animations. Donnelly walked around and checked student scores on the quiz. She then summarized the concept of photosynthesis by questioning students. Finally, she collected homework assigned the previous day.

At the beginning of her senior honors class, students usually work on laptops for their Science Fair project. Today, Donnelly lectured on the Calvin cycle of photosynthesis. Students took notes and then viewed the animations and took the quiz as the other class had. Closing activities were similar to the previous class.

Sometimes, she told me, a laptop lesson on Wednesday spills over subsequent days. She recalled a lesson on the plasma (or cell) membrane that took three days. She included exercises that came from Kerpoof multimedia software that had students draw and label parts of the plasma membrane. She showed me a worksheet that she had created to accompany the lesson. She spends a lot of time finding websites, videos, and applications to use with her classes.

Donnelly  also has her students blogging. With a laptop camera, students liven up their blog page with photos they take of themselves and others. She reads the blogs and comments but gives no grades on entries. She told me about a prompt concerning Thanksgiving and turkey that mentioned tryptophan with URLs to the chemical and what it does in the human body. Some students, she said, blogged on the chemical after reading the links she had provided.

When asked about benefits of laptops for her and students, she said: “When kids do not understand my directions they will ask me what I meant, raise their hands and question me. In regular, non-laptop classes, kids will just less it pass.”  She added: “I have definitely changed my teaching. I do far more preparation now and give kids access to ideas and information they would not ordinarily find.”

She gave an example.  “When I asked students to compare the features of a cell to anything they wanted—the high school, family, friends, sports team, etc.—they created stories, took photos off the web, did an Imovie and a Keynote presentation. I was surprised and pleased. I had not expected all of that to be done in one class period.”

For non-laptop days, I observed Donnelly following traditional science lessons that included a wet lab “experiment” with pairs of students working together, her lecturing, students taking notes, short video clips, and students completing worksheets drawn from chapters in the textbook.

Veteran Carol Donnelly works hard in her five daily classes but knows how to pace herself. By her admission and my observations, I see that laptops have energized her. She sees the benefits from using the web to enrich her teaching through other teachers’ lessons, videos, and websites that permit students to dig deeper into content than their text. She sees that students become engaged with the animation, lectures, videos as she skillfully integrates content from the text, websites, and new software activities. Yet her teaching, while remaining within the tradition of teacher-centered instruction has incorporated elements of student-centered instruction–she is creating a mix of instructional approaches.

Nothing new here, of course. Most subject matter teachers in secondary schools, whether affluent districts or ones with largely low-income students, teach within that tradition, one with variations to be sure–what I call “hybrids.”

But for “pedagogical dogmatists“–think of those at Edutopia— there is only one way to integrate technology into lessons:  “Learning through projects while equipped with technology tools allows students to be intellectually challenged while providing them with a realistic snapshot of what the modern office looks like. Through projects, students acquire and refine their analysis and problem-solving skills as they work individually and in teams to find, process, and synthesize information they’ve found online.”

Donnelly’s classes remind me that thoughtful teaching and smooth weekly integration of laptops into biology lessons –within a five period workload and three preparations across different levels of students–can be done with finesse, humor, excitement, and-yes- within a blend of teacher- and student-centered pedagogy. Like many teachers, she hugs the middle of the spectrum.

CEOs, Ex-military, and Lawyers Heading School Districts, Part 2

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Many questions accompany the current reform effort for mayors and urban districts to hire non-educators. Here are a few.

1. Where do non-educator superintendents serve?

Lawyers Harold Levy and Joel Klein served as Chancellors in New York City. Publishing executive Cathie Black just replaced Klein. Paul Vallas, former budget chief for Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, headed those schools. Colorado governor Roy Romer went to Los Angeles. Generals John Stanford in Seattle and Julius Becton in Washington, D.C. confirm that nearly all non-educator superintendents serve in big cities. Few small town, suburban, or rural districts have sought non-educator superintendents.

2. Why has selecting non-educators become a strategy for improving teaching and learning in urban districts?

Beginning in the mid-1970s, the decline of U.S. workplace productivity, rising unemployment, losses in market share to Japan and Germany, and swift technological changes led corporate and civic leaders to locate reasons for poor economic performance. Within a few years, these policy elites “educationalized” the problem by pointing to low SAT test scores and high school graduates unprepared for the workplace. Schools got blamed for U.S. slipping competitiveness.

What glued together this alliance of public officials, corporate leaders, and foundation officials were key, but often unstated, assumptions. They assumed that:

* Excessive district bureaucracy, union contracts, and lack of accountability had lowered academic standards (particularly in math and science), undermined rigorous teaching, and produced students mismatched to the skill demands of an information-based workplace.

*Better management, high academic standards, increased competition among schools for students, and clear incentives (e.g., pay-for-performance) and penalties (e.g., firing ineffective teachers who fail to raise students’ test scores) would end the mismatch and improve teaching and learning.

* The best measures of improved teaching and learning were higher test scores

* Expanded parental choice (e.g., charters) would create more innovative urban schools and drive out failing ones.

These assumptions added up to a market-based prescription for all public schools (not just urban ones). Since the late 1990s, Presidents and governors from both political parties have moved swiftly to establish curricular standards, impose tests, and hold teachers and administrators responsible for student outcomes.

This business-driven rationale has become the basis for picking urban district leaders. And the lingo: superintendents and principals became CEOs. The theory assumes that big companies are just like school systems but that corporate leaders are better managers than educators. If you climbed the educator career ladder, the theory goes, your prior experiences unfit you to manage thousands of employees, oversee multi-million dollar budgets or make hard decisions. You simply lack the managerial toughness of leaders who had to meet an unrelenting bottom line. If you were a corporate attorney for CitiCorp, you can run the district and improve student achievement.

4. How are non-educators superintendents supposed to improve teaching and learning?

Knowing the three core duties that every superintendent must perform in heading a district will help answer the question.

*Instructional (initiate classroom improvements; oversee their implementation and assessment; develop staff capacities to assess, revise, and continue improvements).

*Managerial (oversee budgets, make personnel decisions, supervise and evaluate staff, secure resources)

*Political (gain school board, teacher, civic, and community support for instructional reform; negotiate with multiple unions to endorse improvements).

So, the question is: in a big city school system, how can one non-educator superintendent–having to perform managerial, political, and instructional duties–reach into thousands of classrooms to improve teaching and learning?

A superintendent has to mobilize resources and support from many different people and groups inside and outside the system, build a climate for instructional improvement over a sustained period of time, and enlist principals and teachers to put into practice jointly shared ends in hundreds of schools and thousands of classrooms.

4. What is the evidence thus far for non-educator superintendents improving academic achievement?

While there are dueling studies from researchers on whether mayorally-appointed non-educator superintendents have raised test scores, see here and here, the policy-to-practice chain that stretches from the Chancellor’s office to a first grade teacher’s classroom is very long with many links. Superintendents can create district learning climates–one link– where principals and teachers are inspired, supported, and pressed to do well in their schools and classrooms. Such district cultures can influence test scores indirectly but these cultures are hard to develop and sustain, particularly if superintendents exit after a few years.

Furthermore, the metrics of success are worrisome. High stakes state tests used year after year show gains as teachers become familiar with test items and prepare students for the exams. But when state officials dump the test and adopt a new one, scores plummet. New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein who previously had trumpeted a rise in test scores, backtracked after test scores dropped following a new state test.

The dream of corporate-inspired reformers for nearly two decades that governance changes and non-educators as managers in urban districts will turnaround failing schools and erase the test score achievement gap has yet to materialize.

Related Articles

• Who Is Best Qualified to Run a School System? (time.com)
• So You Want to Be a Super Schools Superintendent (edreformer.com)
• Leonie Haimson: The Appointment of Cathie Black and Bloomberg’s Abuse of Power (huffingtonpost.com)

Mayors Appointing Non-Educator Managers as Superintendents, Part 1

Many readers probably never heard of Benjamin Demps, Jr.

He is the son of a laborer who grew up in Manhattan and joined the Air Force after high school in 1951. He eventually worked as an air traffic controller becoming a manager of operations. As a married man with two daughters, he returned to school and got a bachelor’s degree at the age of 32 and a law degree at the age of 48. He served as a high-ranking federal civil aviation official for six years. After leaving the FAA, he served as Oklahoma’s secretary of health and human services. In 1999, he was appointed superintendent of the Kansas City (MO) public schools and walked into a firestorm of criticism about failing city schools.

“Some people are skeptical because I’m not from Kansas City…. Who is this guy? [ they ask. He had never been a teacher or principal].” Mr. Demps acknowledges that criticism but said his role was to lead the professionals, not do their job. “Does the general necessarily know how to drive the tank? Maybe not. But he knows how to lead the troops.” Mr. Demps left the superintendency in 2001.

Hiring non-educators like Benjamin Demps as superintendents has made national headlines. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg just appointed Cathie Black, corporate executive for Hearst Magazines as the first female Chancellor of the city schools. Black has no public school experience. Demps, Black, and more than a dozen other lawyers, corporate leaders, and ex-generals have served large urban districts across the nation. Appointing non-educators has been part of a larger multi-pronged strategy aimed at changing urban governance and leadership to improve teaching and learning in every classroom.

By school governance reform, I mean changing how major decisions are made and who has the primary authority to make them. First, a look at governance reform and then in the next post, I turn to non-educators as superintendents and the questions that arise about such leaders.

GOVERNANCE REFORM REDUX

Over a century ago, a national reform movement swept across the public schools and got rid of large boards of education, politically appointed staff. Reformers divorced politics from education and created the civic-minded school boards and professional superintendents that ran urban district for the rest of the century.

In the late-1960s, the civil rights movements turned its attention to big cities and leaders called for decentralizing school board authority and community control of schools. Creating smaller organizational units where professionals make key decisions, such as 30 community districts in New York City or 8 area superintendencies in Detroit or having parents run a school occurred in many cities across the nation as part of these governance reforms.

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, those decentralizing reforms had run their course. Governors, legislatures, and state superintendents, under pressure to do something about low student scores on national and international tests, began centralizing curriculum standards, funding, and testing. State officials made major educational decisions, funded district budgets, and held cities and suburbs accountable for results. Yet even amid these centralization trends, states also encouraged parents and teachers to start new public schools through charter school legislation. Illinois empowered the Chicago school board to have each school site hire and fire principals between 1988-1995 and then gave that authority to the mayor. Thus, over the past century, there has been a shuttling back and forth between centralized and decentralized school governance reforms.

In the late-1990s, after almost two decades of non-stop criticism of urban school boards’ failure to improve schools, reduce dropouts, and raise students’ academic achievement and amid a record run of economic prosperity, many big-city mayors hit on a number of approaches to improve cities by making them attractive to business and young families. Public officials expressed hope that urban school districts just might be able to turn the corner in raising academic achievement and reducing the gap between minority and white scores on standardized tests by using one or more of these newly crafted governance strategies.

a. Mayoral control of schools (Chicago, Boston, New York City, Cleveland)

b. Corporate-led coalitions working closely with school boards and superintendents to adopt particular reforms (San Diego, Seattle, Pittsburgh)

c. Non-educators chosen to lead districts (Chicago, SanDiego, New York City, Seattle,etc.)

These reform strategies, of course, are not mutually exclusive. Some urban districts have forged combinations of these strategies.

Urban school governance reform became the newest new thing to improve failing schools. But questions remain. The next post takes up those questions.

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• New York’s New Schools Czar (nybooks.com)

A Puzzling Fact about High-Tech Use in Classrooms

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After decades of school and classroom use of new technologies, some facts have emerged that puzzle me.

Here’s one.

Since the early 1980s, the federal government, states, and districts—not to mention philanthropists—have invested billions of dollars in wiring schools, buying and deploying machines, and preparing teachers and students to use high tech devices. Nearly all teachers now have access to one or more computers at school. As for students, the number of students per computer across the U.S. has gone from 125 per computer in 1983 to 4 per computer in 2006. Teacher and student access to computers has increased even more in the past decade with thousands of schools issuing computers to each and every student and teacher.

With increased access to new technologies, there is little reliable and valid evidence showing that these technology investments have yielded gains in student achievement.

Why?

One answer is simply that access to machines does not necessarily lead to teachers regularly using high-tech devices in daily lessons. Consider that after nearly 30 years of access to computers in the U.S., based on national surveys and research studies (here and here) of schools, about 40 percent of teachers are regular users, that is, using computers for instruction one or more times a week. These teachers use interactive white boards, laptops, and hand-held devices to have students do Internet searches, turn in typed rather than hand-written homework, take notes on lectures, watch videos, and other familiar classroom activities. A small sub-set of these teachers, however, do use electronic devices weekly in far more creative and imaginative ways inside and outside classrooms with their students. That’s the 40 percent of the teachers.

But the majority of teachers, most of whom–paradoxically–use their home computers a few hours each night, are either occasional or non-users in integrating available machines into their daily lessons.

So one explanation for the first puzzling fact is the flawed assumption that deploying computers to teachers and students will lead to teachers regularly using high-tech devices for instruction. Note that without regular use by teachers, establishing a causal relationship between computers and, say, student test scores, is impossible.

Another explanation for the puzzle of so little linkage between computers and student achievement examines how researchers go about studying the connections between technology and student outcomes.

Many researchers fail to consider that the common designs and methodologies they use to determine linkages between classroom technology use and student achievement cannot capture the inherent complexity and unpredictability of teaching and learning. So researchers use shortcuts to get around that complexity and unpredictability.

I need to unpack the previous sentence. Consider that teaching students involves many factors relating to who the teacher is, what content and skills are taught, and what activities and tasks occur while teaching. Also consider student factors: who they are, what experiences, motivations and interests they bring to the classroom, and what they do during lessons. Then consider the school itself, its organization, culture, and its neighborhood. Finally consider the district, its resources, leadership, and culture of learning or non-learning that it cultivates. All of these interacting factors, sometimes unpredictably, affect classroom teaching and learning.

Yet look at the majority of research designs and methods used to determine the effects of teachers using computers with student. Most common are surveys of teachers and students who report their perceptions of classroom use supplemented by researchers’ descriptions of practices, and interviews with teachers and students. Some researchers set up comparison groups of classes that use computers to study a topic with classes not using computers studying the same topic. Then the classes using and not using computers are pre- and post-tested.

Both research designs have serious defects. Short of establishing an experimental and control design with students and teachers randomly assigned to each group, it is nearly impossible to establish a causal linkage between the use of high-tech devices and student achievement. Such experimental or quasi-experimental designs are uncommon and usually too expensive to mount.

Because surveys and class-comparisons are less expensive in dollars and labor, thousands of studies have been done since the introduction of desktop computers into schools in the early 1980s. Many show minute gains or “no significant difference” in test scores from student use of computers. The results, however, are correlations—associations between presence of computers and gains in test scores, not evidence that student use of the machines caused a rise in test scores.

Here, then, are two ways to make sense of the puzzling fact over the paltry results in student outcomes of so much investment in high-tech devices and so little return on those dollars.

Have I missed another explanation? Is what I say flawed? If so, how?

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Turning Around a Failing High School: Again and Again

Failing urban high schools have been called “blackboard jungles,” “social dynamite,” and now “dropout factories.” For nearly 15 years I taught history in such high schools in Cleveland and Washington, D.C. I have seen the successes that occur in such schools and, yes, the pathologies too. In late 2007, I visited Reagan High School in Austin, Texas, a school declared “Academically Unacceptable,” or failing in TEA-speak (Texas Education Authority).

In 2003, a male student had stabbed to death his ex-girlfriend, during the school day. The murder sent waves of fear and anger through the community and led to the swift appointment of a Community Safety Task Force. Neither the Task Force report, added school security, and “Academically Unacceptable” ratings, however, made Reagan attractive to new students or teachers.

In 2007, over 900 students were enrolled (67 percent were Mexican American  of whom one out of three were English Language Learners, 30 percent were African American, 2 percent were white and 85 percent were poor). Daily attendance averaged 85 percent (state average was 95) and Reagan’s graduation rate was dismal: 60 percent graduated in 2006 (state average was 80).

Frequent principal turnover had also hurt the school. Between 1997-2007, five principals entered and left. When I visited, another principal had been at Reagan for a year. The majority of the 75 teachers had less than 5 years of experience (21 percent came to Reagan with no experience).

With a growing sense of desperation at the school, top Austin administrators pushed the national model of First Things First. After a full year of planning, the principal and staff had organized three small learning communities (SLCs) that began in September 2007.  Here is what I observed and heard from teachers and students on the two mornings that I visited Reagan.

A few students were wearing T-shirts with their SLC’s color and logo; most were not. Security aides patrolled the corridors shooing students into classes. Some students had ID badges with their names, photo, and SLC on it. Motivational signs (“Hard Work Pays Off”) dotted walls of classroom buildings. One very large wooden sign posted the attendance goal of “95% and Better !!” with space for numbers to be inserted next to freshmen through senior classes.

Of the 14 classes I visited, I saw small classes (one had 8 with the largest 21; the average was 15 students). Most students were attentive to the teacher and worked on assigned tasks. In half of the classes, at least one or two students had their heads down on desks with their eyes closed. Some teachers said nothing; other teachers asked students to pay attention or, if they were feeling ill, to go to the nurse. In none of classes I observed (nor in corridors when classes changed) did I see any open conflict between teacher and students or among students.

Teachers collected homework from some but not most students. When students read aloud in class, it was obvious that many had trouble with the text or worksheet passage. In one class, the teacher worked individually with a gang member (obvious tattoos) who was trying hard to pass Algebra.

I saw lessons where the teacher had written the daily objective on the whiteboard, reviewed homework, distributed worksheets, and had question-and-answer exchanges with students. Nearly all of the lessons were geared to the state test. In one class, for example, the chemistry teacher reviewed with students how to write formulas since such items appeared on the test.

Three of the 14 teachers conducted lessons different from the norm: one social studies teacher had a 30-minute discussion based on text and supplementary readings about the use of gross domestic product as an economic indicator; a geometry teacher used 6 learning centers where  students moved from one station to another to complete tasks that would be on the test; students used graphing calculators for some of the station tasks. In another class, the teacher had students teach each other concepts of genes and alleles—items on the state test.

None of the above classroom observations struck me as unusual in urban high schools I had taught in and observed over the past quarter-century. Nor did I see anything unusual in a school in the early stages of creating  small learning communities, advisories, and block scheduling while under great pressure from district administrators and the TEA to raise test scores or close. Nor was it strange to see sleepy students in classes, gang tattoos, very small classes, and highly visible adults patrolling halls. All are common in big city high schools.What I observed briefly at Reagan is what one would reasonably expect to see in the first year of implementation of small learning communities in a school largely attended by mostly poor, minority students including a large segment of English Language Learners.

At the end of that year, Reagan was again “Academically Unacceptable.” No turnaround. Since then, however, many changes have occurred at Reagan.

In 2009, Reagan test scores finally passed muster and the high school became “Academically Acceptable.” However, the Board of Trustees and new superintendent had, by then, “repurposed” the high school. The First Things First model was abandoned. Another principal appeared. Reagan will become a redesigned Early College High School model in cooperation with Austin Community College. The saga of turning around a “dropout factory” continues but one question lingers: what is going on in classrooms?

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Civic Trust in Medicine and Public Schools: Paradoxes Galore

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There is a scene in the film “Hannah and Her Sisters” where the character Mickey, a hypochrondriac played by Woody Allen, goes to his doctor to see if  his loss of hearing is due to a brain tumor. The doctor runs a series of tests and can find no evidence that Mickey has a tumor. The doctor says to Mickey: “trust me.”

The film came out in 1986. In the current political climate of contested health insurance, 20-minute visits with harried doctors who scan records on the computer screen, and Internet self-medicating, few doctors would say “trust me.”

Polls do show a decline in public confidence in medicine. The 2010 Harris poll on confidence in institutional leaders, 34 percent of respondents said they had great confidence in their medical leaders (down from 73 percent in 1966).

Of course, there has been a general decline in trust among Americans in the past forty years for nearly all institutional leaders except for the military. But confidence (I am using trust and confidence interchangeably) in national leaders is not the same as trust in one’s own doctor. A recent poll showed that 79 percent of people surveyed trusted their personal physician. The huge gap between confidence in national medical leaders and one’s own doctor is similar to what goes on in schools.

In the Gallup/Phi Delta Kappan  2010_Poll_Report, those surveyed were asked what grades (A, B, C,D, or F) they would give to the school that their oldest child attended. Seventy-eight percent of the respondents gave an A or B–the highest percentage ever given since pollster asked this question a quarter-century ago. For public schools nationally, however, 18 percent of the respondents gave an A or B –the lowest percent since 1985.

How to explain, on the one hand, the paradox of a large gap between public confidence in national medical leaders and trust in personal doctors and, on the other hand, the huge split between respondents on the quality of public schools nationally and the local schools that their children attended? Social scientists and historians have offered many explanations for the gradual loss of what some call “social trust ” (pp. 148-150). Some point to the U.S. Constitution fragmenting power among three branches of national government and establishing a federal system further splitting power thereby guaranteeing skepticism of government officials. Others point to recent demographic and socioeconomic changes in the population or to specific events like Watergate, Katrina, etc. Research mixed with speculation offers no sure-fire explanation for the loss of “social trust” in national institutions and the counter-point of vigorous “personal trust” for family physicians and local educators.

For schools, the gap between “social” and “personal” trust shows that media and unrelenting policy talk about all U.S. schools being “broken” has influenced public perceptions of schools. The constant media and policy elite drumbeat of “fixing” failing schools and the careless, even mindless, fusion of urban schools with all U.S. schools accounts, to a large degree, for the bleeding of “social trust” in public schooling. How many times must it be said that urban schools, in need of enormous help, are still not all U.S. schools?

That only 18 percent of respondents in the 2010 Gallup poll gave schools nationally an A or B should raise serious questions about the very legitimacy of tax-supported public schools. But when it comes to the local school, respondents’ personal knowledge trumped what they had heard about the nation’s “broken schools” from media, policy debates, and the Bush/Obama agendas for school reform.

How do I make sense out of these paradoxical responses?

In my judgment, poll results showing “personal trust” to be much higher than “social trust” in both medicine and schools are markers of the confidence that Americans have in their actual doctors and educators, not distant ones . Patients’ direct contact with doctors’ expertise, social skills, and concern for them form the interpersonal bonds that comprise that perosnal trust. Ditto for teachers and principals at the local school. Even amid the current geyser of national teacher-bashing and schools-are-broken rhetoric, much confidence in local schools–those interpersonal bond anchored in direct experience–appears in these polls.

The exception, of course, is in poverty-impacted urban districts where bonds of personal trust had frayed considerably. In the past quarter-century, vouchers, charter schools, and other choices have been expanded and parents who have been distrustful of their neighborhood schools now have choices. In these schools, parents have developed those interpersonal ties.

Today few educators and doctors say to their students and patients “trust me.” But if the polls are accurate gauges of public attitudes, as I believe they are, many parents and non-parents, at a time when it is politically suspect to respect educators, whisper to the professionals they know: “I trust you.”

Serviceable Myths about School Reform

Even with the shift to the political right across the nation in last week’s election, both Republicans and Democrats, continue to tell a familiar story about American schools. That well-worn story often repeated by self-confident reformers (or “reformy types”) can be reduced to three statements.

1.U.S. children and youth have done poorly on international tests in reading, math, and science.

2. Students in other nations not only score better than U.S. students but also, upon graduation, possess competence and skills that surpass American workers thereby threatening America’s global competitiveness.

3. U.S. students do poorly on these international tests and in competition with workers elsewhere because the nation’s schools are broken. They can be fixed by holding practitioners accountable for student performance on tests, getting effective teachers through better recruitment and evaluation, having leaders who accept no excuses from practitioners, paying for performance based upon student test scores, and creating more charter schools

End of story.

Of the three statements in this story, only the first is a fact. The rest are myths, ones that are serviceable to policy elites but damaging to public confidence in America’s schools.

1. U.S. students have scored in the middle to lower ranges of international tests in reading, math, and science. See here, here, and here. Vigorous and critical analyses of these various tests and their consequences for policy making have rebutted “schools-are-broken” critics. Nonetheless, I do not dispute the fact of U.S. students scoring where they do on these tests.

Statements 2 and 3, however, are myths, lacking substantial evidence, that have been largely accepted through repetition.

2. The U.S.’s position in the global economy, again and again, has been attributed to weak human capital created by the schools–the historical “educationalizing” of problems that has become a national tic–since the Nation at Risk report in 1983. A steady diet of pundit Thomas Friedman, publisher Rupert Murdoch, and press releases from the Business Roundtable would convince most readers that CEO decisions in managing their businesses, technological choices, swings in financial markets, and global boom-and-bust cycles had little to do with the U.S. economy. While putting onto public schools the solution for economic downturns, rather than business executives, is a loony non-sequitur, it is a victory in shifting blame from corporate leaders’ flawed decisions to the shoulders of educators. Statement 2, then, is a serviceable myth.

3. It is also a myth that all U.S. schools are broken. Surely,most urban schools are low-performing and in many cases have earned the label of “dropout factories.” Washington, D.C, for example, would be a poster child for such districts. Moreover, although islands of excellence in urban districts do exist (including D.C.), they are seldom stable over time. Where the myth-making enters is when urban schools are conflated with all U.S. schools. Not only I but many others have pointed out that the U.S. has a three-tiered system of schooling where the top two tiers have mostly “successful” schools by current standards. The bottom tier contains failing urban schools. Thus, all U.S. schools are not failures by any standard.

As for the inventory of current reforms that are deemed precious by venture capitalists, edu-preneurs, and political leaders from both parties, Diane Ravitch has laid out a compelling counter-story to the popular one on charters, accountability, and other reforms that is fully vetted with evidence drawn from many sources. Pay-4-performance schemes and the use of test scores to evaluate teachers also have been critiqued severely by experts who are far more familiar with the innards of these “reforms” than the champions who promote they ceaselessly.

And “no excuses?” The departure of Chancellor Michelle Rhee from Washington, D.C., may not yet signal the end of the simple-minded view that teachers and principals, by themselves, can erase the ill-effects of poverty, inattention to children at home, and neighborhood pathologies by setting high expectations and academic standards. But I sure hope that the “No excuses” ideology spouted by self-confident reformers and based upon ignorance, will give way to a more complex view of schools and families and community agencies working together.

In sum, then, the familiar myth-filled story justifying current school reform while inaccurate and even self-deceiving is, nonetheless, serviceable. The myths keep alive the ideology of contemporary policy-driven reformers that they are saving all American schools–when they are not; the myths provide activist urban reformers with useful work by letting them dispense advice to hard-working educators–even when so many teachers and principals ignore them; the myths help entrepreneurs and policymakers alike, from both sides of the political spectrum, dream of a better future for urban children and youth than the one they face now. Dreams, however, that deceive the dreamers hardly help those who are the objects of those dreams.

So Much Hype, So Little Mindfulness: The Practical Importance of Knowing the Logic of a Reform-Driven Policy

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Getting behind the brand names of school reform is hard work. Few of us try. KIPP, Green Dot, Teach for America, and One Laptop Per Child are all reform brands. Some are untarnished, well known and admired. Others, well, have become shabby. Of course, buying brand-names is what consumers do daily as a mental short-cut, a way of short-circuiting homework on less well known products. The thinking is: Brand-name product=quality

Reform brand-names, however, go in and out of style swiftly–how many remember the “open classroom” or “Malcolm Baldrige Awards for Excellence in Performance?” There is even a more serious problem with reform labels like “small high schools,” “charter schools,” and “pay-4-performance.” The reform label often masks what the designers assumed when they came up with the idea. Few policymakers, parents, practitioners, for example, ever ask: What are the assumptions behind this reform?

In asking that question, others quickly come to mind: what are the problems this reform is expected to solve? What are the reform’s goals? What are strategies are invoked to accomplish the reform? What are the expected outcomes?

Answers to these questions will determine if the policy is coherent, logically consistent, and has a chance of being put into practice in actual classrooms. In other words, these questions ask the champions of the policy to state clearly their assumptions about what goes on in schools and classrooms. I, for one, like my policymakers to be clothed in logic, evidence, and internally-consistent arguments that principals and teachers can implement when decision-makers say a particular reform is a “must have” for all children. In short, parsing the logic of the reform, its goals, assumptions, strategies, and outcomes, is essential to figuring out what to look for in classrooms to see if reform is working and whether it is practical for teachers and students.

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I have used graphic designs of reforms and their policy logic as teaching tools for school boards, superintendents, principals, teachers, and graduate students. Variously named as “theories of action” or “policy logic,” I use these diagrams to plumb the innards of a policy to determine its logic and usefulness in the real world of schools. The diagrams I have crafted answer the above questions and reveal publicly the thinking that went into the design of the reform.

As one example, I offer the logic of reform-driven policies aimed at buying and deploying computers in school. Across the continents, using computers in classrooms is often called Information Communication Technology or ICT. I use those terms in the following graphic. Please click onto “causal theory of computers [v6)”

While details will clearly differ from one district to another, the “theory of action” behind getting electronic devices into classroom use often applies to the policy logic that dominates most districts when it comes to students using devices during lessons.

To illustrate what I mean by “causal theory” or “theory of action” I will devote the rest of this post to the goals and assumptions, the strategies used, and the outcomes sought from computers in schools.

Begin at the top of the “causal theory of computers” diagram where I list three goals. After reading most of the literature published by districts on why they have bought desktops, laptops, and an arsenal of business-designed applications and educational software, these three emerge as most important. Note how they are wired to underlying assumptions that policymakers make in pursuing these goals: increased access to machines leads to increased use which, in turn, leads to desired outcomes. Outcomes are listed at the bottom of the diagram. Note, again, how these outcomes mirror the goals at the top of the diagram. Then there are the assumptions driving the dominant teacher-based strategies: Supplying sufficient professional development and technical support will lead to increased classroom use. All of these assumptions about access=use=outcomes and what strategies to use drive current policies of buying and deploying school electronic hardware and software.

Some readers, however, may not like the simplicity (or simple-mindedness?) of how I analyzed the logic of the reform. It isa stark version of technological determinism. It fails to capture the complexity of policymaking. They may point out that while most policymakers talk at length about the importance of students using computers in classrooms and future success in the labor market, very few speak openly about their assumptions about teaching, learning, and what the work world will be like a decade from now.

So why do I make a big deal out of policymaker silence about their assumptions? Because these deterministic assumptions drive the adoption and implementation of the reform. These assumptions reveal the thinking that spells the difference between what might or might not happen in schools and classrooms.

And that is my point. Getting underneath brand-name reforms is hard work. I want my leaders to make explicit their assumptions about any reform they are branding as high quality, one that they say will improve schools, teaching, learning, and the lives of students now and in decades to come.

Closing the Achievement Gap: Public Policy That Banks Too Heavily on Schools

The mantra of “closing the gap” in test scores between whites and minorities has become public policy. Why? Because closing the gap is linked to more economic growth and less social inequities in the U.S.  Such reductions in the test score gap and income inequality between blacks and whites did occur between 1971 and  1989 (e.g., black salaries rose nearly 30 percent in  comparison to white salaries). A substantial victory. Since 1989, however, reductions in the gaps in scores and income distribution have ceased. No one can say why with any certainty.

Policy advocates have their own theories as to what caused the substantial decrease in that earlier period and also why subsequent regress has occurred. Some explanations depend upon the strong linkage between family income and test scores. Social scientists estimate the percentage of the test score gap due to family income to be around 30 percent. As black-white gaps in family income dissolve test score gaps between whites and minorities will shrink. That  occurred in the 1970s and 1980s. The key to that reduction, they say, are the cognitive skills (reading, math, thinking, etc.) that children and youth have picked up in family and school.

Other social scientists, bolstered considerably by business leaders, explain the shrinking test score gap and its subsequent stall by looking at what federal and state legislation and public school interventions did and then stopped. Renewed interventions, they say, could reinvigorate efforts to reduce inequities and bring economic growth.

So one policy direction is to concentrate on what schools can do to increase minority children’s cognitive skills by improving teacher quality, changing parenting skills and investing in early childhood development. More preschool education, reducing class size in the early years of schooling, and promoting parental choice efforts among minority parents as well as family practices that have been shown to increase cognitive skills (e.g., reading to toddlers, parental involvement in school). This policy direction relies upon what federal and state officials and practitioners can do to close the gap.

Another policy direction is to focus on those social, economic, and political structures that heavily impact employment and family income such as higher minimum wage, progressive taxation, and reducing labor market discrimination. By making such socioeconomic and political interventions, family income and other benefits could flow to parents that would improve how their sons and daughters perform in school.

Of course, there are other policymakers and social scientists who argue that both approaches–working to improve school achievement and making structural changes–are essential to reducing school and societal inequalities.

Currently, of these policy directions, schools working on teacher quality, cognitive skills and supplying students wuth educational credentials dominate national rhetoric and federal, state, and local action. No Child Left Behind, school leaders preaching “no excuses, just results” from Peoria through most big cities , films such as “Waiting for Superman“–all underscore that schools are central to the future success of America’s children and the nation. The past four U.S. Presidents have said it. Corporate leaders have preached it. The words have become gospel for both parents and college educated youth. From Teach for America to KIPP, from charters to small high schools,  new teachers and principals have gone into the most difficult of urban schools to reduce the test score gap and social inequities.

No surprise here since American faith in the power of schooling to make citizens, prepare workers, build moral character while boosting individuals up the ladder of success has been unstinting for nearly two centuries. Nor is there any surprise here that national problems have been “educationalized,” an historic process of converting serious economic and social issues into school-based curricular, instructional, organizational, and funding solutions.

And this hardy faith and “educationalizing” of national problems is captured by the mantra of reducing test score gap. For the past decade, solutions have been more charter schools, raising teacher quality through better evaluation and pay-for-performance plans, national standards, and testing and accountability.

This may be as good as it gets. Income inequality (the percentage of wealth that has gone to the top one percent and the amounts divvied up among the rest of Americans) is as bad as it was in the late-1920s. Racially and ethnically segregated schools have increased in every section of the country. Since the Great Recession of 2008, unemployment, housing foreclosures, and poverty have gone up as middle class families slip down the socioeconomic ladder.  And the test score gap remains nearly frozen.

Public policy, then, focusing on school improvement to deal with these serious issues relies far too much on a conservative institution that mirrors society far more than its past performance in spurring economic growth or reducing inequities.

Related Articles

• Closing the Racial Achievement Gap: It’s Time to Look Beyond the Classroom (psychologytoday.com)
• Does Income-Based School Integration Work? (time.com)
• Communication gap in the schools (sfgate.com)