Educational Foundations

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School Reform: the Popular Narrative

Education reform has made a lot good copy this year, but the narrative continues to be driven by politicians with the highest visibility and philanthropists with the largest bank accounts.  Seldom has the media so willingly yielded its independent voice and become no more than an amplifier for powerful and prosperous voices.

Time Magazine’s sensational spread on “What Makes a School Great” (September 20, 2010) pumps up the current narrative of  eliminating bad teachers through analysis of student test scores and bringing the teachers’ unions to their collective knees.

The popular narrative goes like this: Student test performances are the best evidence we have of bad teaching. Teachers and teacher unions should cooperate in the firing of teachers whose students are not performing well on these tests.  Teachers who are willing to work hard make the difference in student performance. Energetic, young teachers should be hired without the time-consuming process of certification.

There’s commonsense in this narrative, but it lacks the perspective of professional educators, those who have witnessed multiple cycles of reform.  Because politicians live and die on the election cycle, reform usually ebbs and flows like the tides of the elected and the rejected. Bureaucrats and entrepreneurs lack the patience that serious educational reform requires.

For example, alternative certification proposed under No Child Left Behind was supposed to by-pass the prolonged course of certification that supplied the schools with mediocre teachers.  In the most blighted urban settings, programs such as Teach for America brought young, energetic teachers into charter schools and under-served public schools.  Studies in 2005-06 in New York and Houston showed the students of TFA trachers did not compare favorably with the students of teachers who had taken a full-preparation for teaching.   In a follow-up to this study, the alternatively certified teachers registered significant gains in their students’ scores in mathematics after two years of teaching and completed certification.  However, 80% of the Teach for America recruits had left teaching by year four. Only 30% of the traditionally prepared teachers had left teaching in the fourth year.

This is an excellent example of the short-term gains of so-called reform that lack sustainability.  The TFA teachers were leaving teaching at the time many of them were hitting their stride as teachers. The schools they had revived were left with the predicament of hiring novice teachers again after three years. As Linda Darling-Hammond has observed, this is a severe drain on the financial and human resources of these schools.

To consider a philanthropic example:  beginning in 2000 the Gates Foundation sponsored restructuring for smaller high schools.  Although these projects had mixed results, change brought disharmony in many of these high schools and the test data in Denver, Chicago and New York did not definitively show that the reforms were working.  Rather than trying to improve the model or respond to teacher concerns, the Foundation reallocated its funds toward advocacy in 2005, according Diane Ravitch in The Death and Life of the Great American School System. Think-tanks such as Achieve, the Council of Chief State School Officers and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute received over $57 million from the Foundation in 2005.

The smaller high school idea had great merit, but it would take teacher-buy-in and a willingness to adapt the model for individual contexts to make such radical reform work. Philanthropic foundations are more inclined to impose their will on their beneficiaries and demand a quick pay-off for their investment. School reform does not move at that pace.

The mass media has not bothered to look closely at these examples of reform or given voice to the reformers who critique the validity of the standardized tests used to gauge student and teacher progress.  Credit should go to John Church for his article “How to Recruit Better Teachers” in the current Time Magazine spread, a notable exception to the superficial gaze. Church actually bothered to take a test that was designed to identify promising teachers. “The test has been given to tens of thousands of hopefuls,” noted Church. ” But when I took it recently, I found some questions so vague that no correct answer seemed possible.”

A teacher who has students working in cooperative teams believes that:

A. a good classroom must have some noise

B. students can learn from each other

C. Students must learn to work independently

“Surely all three are true. But Haberman told me that B is the right answer because it is the one given most often by proven teachers. The logic seemed a little circular to me, and the test made me question the whole concept of alternative hiring.” (50)

Kudos to Mr. Church for actually examining a test, instead of placing implicit faith in its authority. Isn’t that what journalists are supposed to do?

I have relied on Time Magazine for its insight into international politics and its features on cultural heroes, but I am dismayed by its half-hearted attempt at analysis of school reform.  There’s a point at which journalism becomes an echo-chamber for the powers that be, and that point has been reached on the topic of education.  The media has become complicit in the popular narrative, and by recycling it for mass consumption, given credence to soundbites and half-truths.

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Teaching Together

Who is really accountable for good teaching, the teacher or the school she teaches in?

The Draft of the Model Core Teaching Standards (published July 19) suggests that accountability might be shared between the teacher and the school, by emphasizing “collaboration,” “communication,”  and “using data to support learning.”

A literal reading of the document shows that every statement begins with “the teacher” as if accountability rested solely on the individual, but much of what the teacher does to achieve these standards depends on collegiality within the school.  If you count up the “performances” that rely on “collaboration” or “communication,” they show 39% of teaching (25 of 64) is collaborative.  Standards 9 (Reflection and Continuous Growth) and 10 (Collaboration) are particularly rife with collaborative performances.

This is a far cry from holding teachers solely accountable for their students’ performances on standardized tests and using those results for tenure or promotion decisions.  In fact, regarding assessment, the document states, “The teacher uses multiple and appropriate types of assessment data to identify student learning needs and to develop differentiated learning experiences” (Standard #6e). The critical descriptors “multiple and appropriate,” applied to assessment, suggest that a single number will not be adequate to evaluate student performance and certainly insufficient to evaluate teacher performance.

If this document were taken as seriously as the Common Core State Standards for learning, it would revolutionize schooling, especially secondary schooling, in the United States. It would mean smaller classes, shared students, common planning time, and  strategic and consistent professional development focusing on identified student needs. It would require a huge transfusion of funding to hire more collaborative teachers, more funding to develop effective formative assessment, more professional development to “independently and collaboratively examine test and other performance data to  understand student progress and to guide planning” (6b).  For most secondary schools in this country, it would be a transformation of school culture.

You can not blame the fragmented school culture on teachers, because they are indoctrinated with collaborative education in their teacher preparation, almost to the consternation of their mentor teachers when they first observe their  student teachers.  Collaboration is not practiced in many secondary schools as it is preached in schools of education.  It is often a function of the size of classes and student load and the flexibility of the school schedule. Secondary schools tend to reinforce the Lone Ranger model of teaching.

The Coalition of Essential Schools provides good models of collaboration in secondary schools by limiting class size and giving autonomy to the principal and teachers. In their “Core Principles” (http://www.essentialschools.org/items/4), they include

Personalization Teaching and learning should be personalized to the maximum feasible extent. Efforts should be directed toward a goal that no teacher have direct responsibility for more than 80 students in the high school and middle school and no more than 20 in the elementary school.

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Resources dedicated to teaching and learning Ultimate administrative and budget targets should include student loads that promote personalization, substantial time for collective planning by teachers, competitive salaries for staff, and an ultimate per pupil cost not to exceed that at traditional schools by more than 10 percent. To accomplish this, administrative plans may have to show the phased reduction or elimination of some services now provided students in many traditional schools.

The details of this vision are better explained on their web site < essentialschools.org>

There is much to celebrate in the Model Core Teaching Standards, especially because they promote the importance of teaching together.   In this sense it is a true school reform document, one that deserves the attention of the educational foundations that place excellent teaching high on their agenda.  It will require the kind of financial transfusion that foundations can supply to implement these standards one school at a time.