Teaching in Turnaround Schools: Second Time Around

As I approach the second anniversary of my blog, I will be returning to particular posts in the past 24 months that hit themes I believe are important in reform and classroom practice. In presenting the post again, I will update facts in an introduction to the post and then make a few comments.

This post originally appeared August 11, 2009. Rafe Esquith continues to teach, Sarah Fine is no longer teaching. The questions I ask here are ones that I have mentioned numerous times over the past two years as crucial for anyone who makes, adopts, and implements policy–that means school boards, superintendents, legislators, principals, and teachers–to answer.

Lots of stories from principals, parents, and students reveal practices that range from marvelous to malign. Individual teachers give us a sense of what happens in their classrooms. Rafe Esquith in LA writes about his lessons and his kids’ experiences in an elementary school; Sarah Fine, an English teacher in a D.C. charter school, tells of her successes and failures. But beyond stories and first-hand accounts, helpful as they are in giving us a peek into different classrooms, we know very little about the kinds of daily lessons that unfold across the grades and in academic subjects. We know especially little about classroom teaching in those turnaround schools that get extra resources, new (and young) staff, and the charge to go from a chronically failing school to a high-flier.

So what? What’s wrong with being largely ignorant of how teachers teach in turnaround schools or even high-performing ones? Knowing how teachers teach is critical because school boards and superintendents assume that their decisions to turnaround schools (and adopting other policies targeting better student performance) will alter classroom teaching and lead to improved test scores.

In short, every single federal, state, and district policy decision aimed at improving student academic performance has a set of taken-for-granted assumptions that link the adopted policy to classroom lessons. From the feds putting money on the stump in “Race to the Top” to getting states to adopt charters and pay-for-performance schemes to a local school board and superintendent deciding to give laptops to each teacher and student, contain crucial assumptions–not facts–about outcomes that the new policy will bring to classrooms. And one of those crucial assumptions is that teachers will change how they teach for the better. Rarely are serious questions asked about these assumptions before or after hyped-up policies were adopted, money allocated, expectations raised, and materials (or machines) deployed to classrooms.

Consider a few simple questions that, too often, go unasked of policies heralded as a cure-all for the ills of urban schools, including turnaround schools.

1. Did policies aimed at improving student achievement (e.g., turning around failing schools, mayoral control, small high schools, pay-for performance plans, and parental choice) get fully implemented?

2. When implemented fully, did they change the content and practice of teaching?

3. Did changed classroom practices account for what students learned?

4. Did what students learn achieve the goals set by policy makers?

These straightforward questions about reform-driven policies inspect the chain of policy-to-practice assumptions that federal, state, and local decision-makers take for granted when adopting their pet policy. These questions distinguish policy talk (e.g. “Race to the Top”) and policy action (e.g., adopting and implementing policies) from classroom practice (e.g. how do teachers teach as a result of new policies),and student learning (e.g., what have students learned as a result of different lessons)….

Teaching in schools declared failing or teaching in turnaround schools is hard work both intellectually and emotionally. Martha Infante, an Los Angeles school district high school teacher described how hard it is in a post that she wrote in February 2011.