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"A Broader, Bolder Approach" to school reform

"Evidence demonstrates, however, that achievement gaps based on socioeconomic status are present before children even begin formal schooling. Despite impressive academic gains registered by some schools serving disadvantaged students, there is no evidence that school improvement strategies by themselves can substantially, consistently, and sustainably close these gaps."

--A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education

"Taken together, however, these effects suggest a cumulative disadvantage for lower-class children that depresses average performance, even with high-quality instruction. In other words, on average, with equally high-quality instruction, children from disadvantaged families will achieve at lower levels than those from families without these disadvantages.

"Research thus suggests that strategies to improve lower-class children’s performance will be more effective if they combine school improvement efforts with policies to narrow social and economic inequalities."

--Richard Rothstein, background paper, A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education 

In my last post I wrote how a group of market-friendly neoliberals has been anointed by the media as school "reformers."  The "reforms" they propose can be summed up succinctly:

• opposition to teachers' unions; and
• advocacy of accountability, merit pay and charter schools.

Real "reformers", many of whom are signatories to the statement they call "A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education," dismiss the quick and simplistic reforms of the neoliberals and propose more comprehensive solutions to the low school achievement of poor and minority students.  Many of those solutions involve the health and well-being of children in the five years before formal schooling typically begins. 

They argue that until we enact social policies designed to ameliorate the debilitating effects of poverty on the ability to succeed in school, no amount of tinkering with school structure and pedagogy will close the achievement gap. 

In short, the problems associated with poverty cannot be addressed by education alone.

It would be helpful if school boards, including the Portland Public Schools Board of Education, would acknowledge that reality and stop blathering on about how the policies they adopt are designed with an eye on "closing the achievement gap."

That said, public schools can do a better job in helping students learn.  That won't be accomplished, however, by pushing test-based accountability, teacher merit pay, or charter schools.

(I said I would address those issues, particularly charter schools, in subsequent posts.  And I will, but circumstances here at home have prevented me from blogging as frequently as I would like.)

Carole Smith fails to bring out the best in Madison teachers

"Creating opportunities for teachers to work together, to teach in teams, to share in professional development, and to be more involved in educational decision making are ways to bring out the best in teachers."

                            Ronald Wolk, founder and former editor of Education Week

The quote is from a Wolk article taking issue with the "five faulty assumptions" underlying the school accountability movement which began over 25 years ago with the publication of A Nation at Risk.  One of the assumptions Wolk takes aim at is the belief that putting a "highly qualified teacher in every classroom" will assure educational excellence.

Wolk says that's impossible.  What he suggests instead is what I have long advocated --teacher empowerment.

Portland superintendent Carole Smith apparently hasn't gotten that message.  Her decision to freeze out teacher input at Madsion High School into one of the most crucial decisions affecting a school, the appointment of a new principal, is evidence that Smith has little regard for the educational expertise of the district's teachers. 

Instead of involving Madison's teachers in "educational decision making", Carole Smith has ignored them.  She appears to have gone out of her way to show them great disrespect. 

Bear in mind that the Madison faculty had earlier voiced no confidence in their former principal.  For that, Smith had the apparent ringleader of the staff insurrection, counselor David Colton, transferred to another school.  This latest episode appears to be some sort of payback for the Madison challenge to top down and arbitrary administrative decision making.

Here's the latest PPS Equity comment on the principal appointment dispute at Madison, from a Madison sophomore student:

"None of this would ever happen at a place like Lincoln or Grant. Smith never would have been able to get away with something like that. ... Never in my life have I met teachers so dedicated to helping students learn and succeed. ...  Now how our teachers weren’t included in the decision to choose a new principal I have absolutely no idea ... .

"Something needs to be done.  And it needs to be done soon."

I would suggest that what needs to be done is to sit Carole Smith down with Ronald Wolk's advice on how to get "the best" out of the district's teachers.

NCLB in ...England?

(Thanks to Tauna Rogers)

It's true.

In fact, as Steve Koss reports in a must read piece on the excellent NYC Public Schools Parents blog, England's 20-year experiment with "performance standards and school rating" is the "progenitor of No Child Left Behind."   The experiment has proved so disastrous that the English National Union of Teachers, with its 190,000 members, has decided to boycott the 2010 national standardized exams. 

More surprisingly, the "National Association of Headteachers appears set to follow in their boycott footsteps... ."  Headteachers are the equivalent of American school principals.

Boycott.  Where are the American teachers unions?  A refusal to administer the annual standardized tests would bring the misbegotten NCLB notion of school accountability to a screeching halt.

What are the people who run the schools going to do?  Fire all the teachers and replace them with Teach for America recruits?  I don't  think so.

How did an NCLB-type program end up in the United Kingdom?  For that we can thank --who else?-- Margaret Thatcher.  In 1988 she introduced something called the Standard Attainment Tests designed specifically to measure a Thatcher-conceived national curriculum.  Not only could these tests keep track of student progress, they were also used to rate each school's yearly performance.

Sound familiar?

Criticisms of the Thatcher program began almost immediately, but it took until the early 2000's for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to effectively drop out of the program.  But not England, which persisted in using the tests to rate schools AND to determine "teachers’ pay, headmasters’ continued employment, and schools’ reputations."

Sound familiar?

But criticism of the Standard Attainment Tests continued to grow:

"Educators throughout England were decrying the narrowing of curriculum, pervasive 'teaching to the test,' widespread demotivation of students toward learning, and impacts on students’ health due to intense pressure from schools and parents."

Sound familiar?

And then, inevitably, cheating to raise test scores reared its ugly head.  A teacher accused of helping her students cheat committed suicide.

Sound familiar?  (The cheating anyway.  As far as I know, no teacher has died as a consequence of cheating, at least not in the physical sense.)

American educators should learn the lesson of England's experiment with its version of No Child Left Behind.  So should Barack Obama and Arne Duncan.  Perhaps then it won't take twenty years to acknowledge the bankruptcy of NCLB's testing for accountability.  It shouldn't take that long to learn what British state school teacher Francis Gilbert finally came to realize:

"In practice, however, these tests have proved to be nightmarish failures. The Sats have not only led to a marked decline in standards, they have broken children's zeal for learning. They have alienated pupils, teachers and parents alike without making schools properly accountable. ... the Sats ... have bludgeoned out all enthusiasm for learning, leaving [children] lacking in initiative, floundering when confronted with unexpected challenges, unable to construct sustained arguments and powerless to think imaginatively."

Teaching

"...you can have the most fantastic credentials ever in your field, but if you don’t know how to manage a classroom of 8th graders you don’t know jack."
       
                                                            Rose, in a comment to PPS Equity

Rose--as usual-- is right.  And her remark calls into question No Child Left Behind's requirement for "highly qualified teachers" in every classroom.  No matter how many academic and ed classes you pile up, you'll never be a good, or "qualified", teacher if you can't relate to kids. 

That trumps everything, especially in elementary school.  But it also matters in secondary schools.

It helps to know a lot, of course.  You better have some grasp of math before you face a room full of algebra students.  But then again, if your students can't stand the sight of you, they're unlikely, especially as adolescents, to learn much anyway.  A good teacher, regardless of specialty, is one who engages students.

Teaching is hard.  That's a judgment confirmed by the poet T.S. Eliot who worked as a school teacher, a banker, and an editor.  Of those, he acknowledged that teaching was the most arduous.

So teaching is hard.  And stressful.  But once you get the hang of it, once you master classroom pedagogy, teaching can also be extremely gratifying.  (Of course, true mastery can only be approximated.  Occasionally a teacher will feel that everything has gone right, but only occasionally.)

But here's the larger point.  Ultimate gratification in the teaching profession comes with the empowerment of teachers, not only to do well with the relatively small number of students they encounter in the classroom, but empowered to contribute to the larger educational community as well --the school, the district, the profession. 

When I write about school reform, I mean reform through teacher leadership.  That's what I mean when I talk about grassroots reform as opposed to top-down prescriptions, prescriptions often coming from people who have spent little time in an actual school classroom. 

When a building educator --a teacher-- is involved in that sort of reform leadership, that's when he or she truly begins to feel like a professional.

That's when teaching becomes ultimately fulfilling, and ultimately gratifying. 

School reform and the "Billionaire's Boys Club"

And speaking of the "influentia", those movers and shakers who, because of their prominence, exert so much control over educational policy, let's not forget the malign influence on that policy of the mega-wealthy.

Bill Gates, for example.

San Francisco ed activist Caroline Grannan writes that former Republican insider, Diane Ravitch, has taken to calling Gates and his ilk the Billionaire's Boys Club.  The former Assistant Secretary of Education under Bush 41 has concluded:

"It appears that the Big Money has placed its bets on dismantling public education."

Ravitch writes from New York, so when Mayor Bloomberg

"...shows up at charter school rallies and tells the parents that their local public schools are no good and that they are lucky to be in a charter"

Ravitch assumes that such a pronouncement

"...has the enthusiastic endorsement of the Billionaire Boys Club, that is, the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and the Walton Foundation. They know what needs to be done, and they don't see the point of listening to such unenlightened types as parents and teachers."

And how do they know "what needs to be done"?  Well, they have lots of money, don't they?  And if they're wrong (as they most assuredly are), what does it matter?  They'll lobby for their "reforms" heedless of any evidence to the contrary.

Gates, as Portlanders will recall, put up the money for the botched reconfiguration of Jefferson High School.  And the superintendent at the time --Vicki Phillips-- now works for the Gates Foundation.  So it goes.

*************************

While we're on the topic of charter schools and billionaires, over at change.org, teacher Clay Burell takes on Obama's embrace of charters.  His main objection is that, for traditional public schools, the charter model is simply not replicable:

"...if we're going to say charters should still be supported in order to serve as those 'laboratories,' the missing link in all of this talk centers on this question: 'What's the mechanism that will allow for that "duplication of success" in traditional public schools?' ...

"...One dangerous answer to this is: Traditional public schools will have that 'flexibility' when they are able to break union-negotiated teacher protections - to be union-free - and when they submit to the meddling of Gates, Broad, and the other billionaires at the Business Roundtable when they dangle their strings-attached money."

Fraud and merit pay

From EDDRA* correspondent Marc Barlow, who also saw the Bill Moyers interview with William Black:

"I was surprised by Black's comment that bonus structures create loyalty to fraudulent systems. 

 

"Of course, I immediately associated this to teacher merit pay and nclb's questionable assessment design and interpretation."

The implication of Barlow's remark is that NCLB's test-based school accountability "system" is a fraud. 

He's right.  Even more fraudulent is the drive to tie teacher pay to the performance of their students on a pair of tests.  Such an abuse --and blatant misuse-- of standardized testing is obvious to anyone who has either spent time as a classroom teacher or knows anything at all about testing and measurement.

Bottom line --NCLB must go!

*(Education Disinformation Detection and Reporting Agency listserv)

More pros and cons for charters and choice

As an advocate of public education,  I see little difference between the charter school option and school choice generally.  So for the purpose of this argument, I'll treat the two as synonymous.

For some parents, charter schools offer an alternative to what they view as the stifling orthodoxy of traditional public schools.  In districts that bow to the testing dictates of No Child Left Behind (like PPS), charters are refuges from excessive testing and the obsession with literacy and numeracy at the expense of a much broader curriculum that includes music and art and all the other areas of student learning that can't easily be assessed by a multiple choice test.

Some charters, then, --not all (like the Arthur Academies)-- are perceived as student centered.  And progressive.  That's a good thing.

Some say that charters are laboratories for innovation that can steer other public schools in the right pedagogical direction.  If true, that's also a good thing.  I have my doubts about the legitimacy of that claim, however, on two grounds.

First, to say that charters can influence what happens in traditional public schools makes no more sense to me than the notion that competition between schools results in better schools all around.  That's market ideology.  It doesn't work in the realm of education.

Secondly, as I wrote in a comment to the post on charters on PPS Equity, we already know what works to truly improve and reform K-12 education.  (Steve Rawley later noted that I "...took the piss out of that argument [labs for innovation], and I think he has a point… we already know what works; we just have to implement it.")

Here are some of the reasons why charters and choice fail the test of good public policy:

• They don't serve the common good.  They benefit some students --usually the more advantaged-- at the expense of others.

• Charters and choice concentrate good students with supportive parents in some schools, and leave others --the disadvantaged-- behind in less affluent schools.

• Despite the ruse of the "lottery", charters are selective primarily because they require a parent application.  That works to the benefit of motivated and informed parents.

• Charters can dismiss students who are behaviorally difficult.  (That may be more true nationally than in Portland.)

• Charters may be publicly funded, but they are otherwise private.  Charter school organizations are statutorily tax exempt 501(c)(3) corporations run by special interest groups, even though the groups consist --usually-- of "concerned" parents.

They are other "cons" to the charter school issue.  Suffice it for me now to conclude with a couple of quotes from Ockley Green parent, Rose, (a nom de web, I'm pretty sure, of a fairly well-known Portland writer.)  Rose has contributed much to the (again) record-breaking PPS Equity post, "Charters and PPS":

• "...you asked how charter applications are barriers to poorer families.

  "You have to think of this in terms of a parent without your resources. You clearly have a car, don’t work nights, have childcare, and speak English, and other abilities which make going to 4 mandatory meetings almost an entire year before your child might attend a given school a viable option.

  "Think about this process for a parent without those resources. There are many parents without cars, without computers, and with limited English." ...       

• "...school choice has stripped many schools of their wealthier students. Now Ockley is a largely poor minority school floating in a gentrifying neighborhood where most white parents send their kids Somewhere Else.

  "We don’t need to discuss how much this hurts a school and hurts the students left behind."

• "...I don’t see any way around the barriers imposed by school choice and charters. Someone will always be left out, and that someone will probably be brown, black or poor.

  "So the short answer is, we need to bite the bullet. We need to get rid of school choice."

What Rose says makes eminently good sense.  Let's bite the bullet on school choice.  And charters.

Better countries, better schools

Over at PPS Equity, Peter Campbell's post on pathologizing children has garnered a record --to date-- 84 comments, some of which deal with the limited recess time available for primary students at many of Portland's low income schools.

The villain in the story is No Child Left Behind and its demand for ever higher reading and math test scores.  In Portland Public Schools, even kindergartners are subject to literacy testing.  And why not?  We have an achievement gap to close.

One country that apparently leaves no child behind without No Child Left Behind is Finland.  Consequently, it provides its schoolchildren with lots of vigorous recess time:

"After each 45-minute class, students at the Vaajakumpu Primary School in Finland suit up in their snow gear, and for 15 minutes, they frolic on ice skates, sleds, and skis."

Compare that to, say, Portland's Rosa Parks Elementary.  According to Campbell, kindergarten students there have, on a typical day, only "...25 minutes to be goofy and run around and be little kids in a span of 6 hours.  The rest is all business."

The sad thing is that all children are kinesthetic learners.  They learn best when moving.  In fact, that's probably true of any student regardless of age.  History's most famous teacher knew that.  Socrates taught his students while walking. 

But there's more to the Finland story.  Schools there are not tasked with solving the problem of poverty:

"Finns also enjoy strong governmental supports for parental leave, day care, and healthcare (in exchange for high taxes), which means that problems associated with poverty don't show up at the schoolhouse door nearly as often as in the US."

In the U.S., instead of confronting poverty directly, we adopt a "no excuses" policy for our schools.  High expectations and good teaching are the tools we use to deal with poor (and underachieving) students, even though we're fully aware of the strong correlation between the income gap and the achievement gap.

Keith Baker, a frequent contributor to the EDDRA* e-mail listserv, is convinced that the "socialist" Scandinavian countries are the most enlightened in the world when it comes to education.  He also sent along a list of the world's "best" countries based on a variety of factors like literacy, quality of life, the environment, etc. 

Here's the list.  Note that all the Scandinavian countries are in the top ten:

#1 Sweden	1683 points
#2 Denmark	1598 points
#3 Netherlands	1572 points
#4 Finland	1514 points
#5 Germany	1422 points
#6 UK	1407 points
#7 Canada	1373 points
#8 Switzerland	1326 points
#9 Norway	1320 points
#10 Belgium	1208 points

*(Education Disinformation Detection and Reporting Agency)

Bernie Madoff and school accountability

"Mindful of H.L. Mencken's observation that, 'for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong,' the new Obama administration should avoid making the mistake of previous administrations in equating accountability in education with high-stakes test scores."

So what can Bernie Madoff teach us about the folly of testing for accountability?  Four lessons:

1.  What's wrong is often "hidden in plain view."  Just as Madoff's guaranteed investment returns of 10% or more were too good to be true, evidence is emerging that "...high-stakes test design can't tell us what we need to know in order to drive education reform." 

Tests, in short, are largely "insensitive to instruction.

2. Secondly, from Madoff we learn that, in order to be taken in, or bamboozled,  "... our fears need to be played to."  That's the role of the test-based No Child Left Behind.

"The consequences of teaching "test taking," as opposed to substantive math or science, are likely to be profound in their long term implications, especially for children attending schools currently deemed underperforming."

3. In order "to forestall the day of reckoning", as Madoff did,  make sure that you're totally in charge of both establishing and interpreting standards of success. 

In school testing for accountability, a handful of testing companies are

"...essential both to ongoing test construction and to the interpretation of the results for nearly all of the high-stakes tests developed in the country."

4. Finally, in order to continue the fraud, it's necessary to surround oneself with "true believers."

If one truly believes in the potential of testing to really gauge how much students are learning, it's much more difficult to recognize, and then admit, that testing really isn't the answer.

"Professional reputations are on the line."

Class  adjourned.  Instead of testing the material covered, how about writing a short essay summarizing the lessons learned.                   

Go the 'full monty', Bobbie Regan

Bobbie Regan's op-ed piece in today's O argues for keeping the No Child Left Behind law --after "fixing its flaws."  She's wrong.

The law needs to be abolished.  Wiped off the books.  Its flaws cannot be "fixed."

Regan's argument itself demonstrates the futility of 'fixing' the law.  She says that NCLB's transparency and accountability are good things.  We can keep those, while jettisoning the law's 'rigidity' and its 'punitive' approach.  I question how its possible to make school accountability anything other than punitive.  Accountability, especially for teachers and school administrators, is by definition punitive.

How do you hold someone accountable without the threat of some form of punishment?

The underlying --and more important-- issue is the total reliance of NCLB on test scores, primarily reading and math test scores, to determine how well students are learning, teachers performing, or schools themselves functioning.  Even Regan's fix --measuring improvement rather than meeting arbitrary benchmarks-- is test score reliant. 

Let me repeat what I've written here many times:  Standardized test scores are neither adequate nor appropriate measures of student learning.

Regan also argues that somehow, under a revamped NCLB, schools will begin teaching more art and music.  I disagree.  As long as test-based accountability is in place, that won't happen.  Those held accountable --teachers and administrators-- will still do everything possible to get test scores up.  They have no choice.  Test scores are their fate, and teaching to the test will remain the most important* component of a school's curriculum.

But there's an even more pressing issue confronting Portland Public Schools.  Regan and others on the school board like to pretend that reforming NCLB will somehow ease pressure on the district to allow neighborhood school transfers.  It won't, not as long as the district itself encourages school choice through its transfer policy. 

Therefore, when I urge Bobbie Regan to go the 'full monty', I mean more than lobbying for abolition of No Child Left Behind.  I also mean ridding the district of its transfer policy which has done much more damage to the district than any misbegotten federal legislation.

This latest post on PPS Equity makes the argument powerfully.  And this comment on the post implies that the school board, including Bobbie Regan, is complicit in the district's inaction on rectifying the inequities caused by choice and transfer:

"PPS currently has absolutely no incentive to fix the transfer policy... .

"Anyone who thinks that the superintendent’s Transfer Policy Committee is going to be allowed to recommend policy reforms for the system is seriously deluded. If PPS wanted to change the transfer policy they would have. Waiting over 2 years after the transfer audit to even form a committee to study the issue is the ultimate delaying tactic, not progress."  

*  (The emphasis on test scores has even taken a bite out of recess time for primary students.)