5000 Hours

Almost Another NCLB Victim

2011-11-15T05:03:00.000-08:00

"Dr. Wood, I need your help on this one." My assistant is one of the most competent people I know, so when she asks for help I figure it is pretty important.

"While you were out yesterday a young woman came in to enroll. She is eighteen, has missed almost 14 days of school this year, and still has several graduation tests to pass. She says she is living with a boyfriend in our district - so?"

If you don’t deal with the demands put on schools by No Child Left Behind and state accountability models you might not know what the question was. Let me make it simple for you: Do we take this girl--who we do not have to take, who has aged out of public schooling, who is not an ‘official’ district resident--and risk damaging our school report card?

It works this way. Clearly this young woman is at risk of dropping out. She is several credits short of graduating this year even if she passes all the classes she is taking. She has an attendance problem, does not have a stable family getting her to school every day, and, according to her prior school, has failed an early childhood course because she refused to get the required physical that would have cleared her to work with children. Additionally, she has failed repeatedly several of the state-mandated tests required for graduation.

If we enroll her and she drops out, or does not graduate because of credits or tests, our school will take the blame for her as a dropout even though she will only be with us for six months. She will be reflected in our graduation rate, and given that we are a small school - this year’s graduating class is 87 students - if she drops out she will lower our rate by 1.1%. The graduation rate is used by the state to rate our school and determine whether we need state intervention, need to spend money on transferring students, or resort to some other brilliant turnaround strategy like firing staff.

By allowing her to enroll, even though we do not have to, we put the entire school at risk.

I should not be thinking this way.

Instead, I should see this young woman as part of our mission, as someone we can help, as someone worthy of yet another chance. It should not matter whether or not we predict she can graduate. We should work to help her graduate.

And we will; we enrolled her the very next day. (My assistant knew we would, I think she was just testing me.)

But here’s the deal. Rather than punishing us for taking a chance, how about using an accountability system that gives us credit for putting ourselves on the line. We believe that in just six months we can get her to finish school, something neither her parents (who are nowhere in the picture) nor the other school she is leaving believes. We need a system that says if you take at-risk kids, if you open your doors to them--regardless of the conditions they are fleeing or have created--we will give you credit for that. In fact, we might even give you the extra funding you need to track these kids, offer them after-school help, and make sure they have the supports they need just to get in the door every day.

I know that is really too much to hope for.

But I am asking anyway.

And if the answer is no, how about simply adjusting the way you compute graduation rates so it makes it easier for us to say yes to kids like this?

Add This to Your Reform Wish List

2011-11-09T05:29:00.000-08:00

On a recent fall Wednesday morning I found myself on the deck of an almost completed cabin overlooking the mist coming off the Hocking River. Two teachers, three fathers, sixteen students, and I had gathered for the once-weekly ‘show and tell’ session in our junior/senior Advisories -- this time at the cabin three seniors had designed and built for their senior project.

The cabin is ‘off the grid’. It has solar power, a composting toilet, water caught from the roof, and a wood burning stove. It is, in the best sense, sustainable. The three seniors had done all the research on the building techniques, worked with local carpenters and solar installers to learn what they needed to know, and had built the cabin from the ground up.

This morning we had gathered to hear about their work. We also sat in a circle to listen to one student play Wildwood Flower, on the banjo, see the sketches for another’s ceramic project, and go over the fitness plans another was designing for four participants in an experiment in weight loss and exercise.

What a complete joy.

Here were young people being given the freedom to manage their own learning, challenged to find someone who could guide or mentor them in that effort, and presenting a finished product to their peers and community. School, at its finest. And if I only had a picture of the pride on the parents’ faces as they watched their boys present their work!

I used to be puzzled by why more schools do not have a senior project or similar requirement. Given that when these same young people graduate in just 7 months they will never again experience anything like ‘school’, it would only make sense to do things to prepare them for the world after school.

Think about it. Never again will they find themselves in the cocoon of the school. Where someone makes sure they are fed, decides what they are to learn and how fast, where if they do not show up for class someone goes looking for them, and makes sure they have a ride to school and a meal at lunch time. I guess the military is the closest thing to school that I can think of, and even that experience, as it tries to take away individuality, runs counter to the school’s dual charge of developing individual talents while simultaneously inducting newcomers into a culture.

It is no wonder that so many kids drop out of college or find themselves adrift in the job market after school. More importantly, how few of them engage themselves in the civic life of our neighborhoods or communities. They just are not ready for it.

For all the yammering on about schools helping kids be ‘college and career ready’ not a single reform plan put out by any legislator or foundation addresses this issue in an honest way. Come on, be real, what gets us ready for life after school is not calculus or the intricacies of the War of 1812. That may help. But what really matters is the ability to be resilient, to find one’s own way to learn, to be able to take on individual and group challenges, and to know how to learn.

Of course, you are not going to find that in the new revisions of ESEA or in the current mantra of tying teacher evaluations to test scores. And, I am afraid, when we hit the next decade and I am retired we will still be reading stories about the need for change in our schools.

But if we want to make a difference in the lives of our children, it is time to stop tinkering around the edges. We just keep on demanding another test, or more content, or new teacher evaluations when the answer is not there.

Instead, we could, right now, just change what it means to be a school graduate. We could ask each school, in its own way, to demonstrate that all of their graduates are proficient in the ability to learn, that they can manage their lives, that they are engaged in their communities. In fact, many vocational schools, like ACE in Albuquerque, NM, do that now. And so do many of the schools, such as The Met in Providence, RI, and the many schools associated with the Coalition of Essential Schools founded by the late Ted Sizer and which meets this week in its annual Fall Forum.

I would not have every school require a Senior Project like we do at Federal Hocking. But I would provide every school with the options and supports to build a program that faces the future rather than our past.

In the meantime, I am still savoring the mellow banjo notes floating over the smells of bacon, eggs, and coffee and the smiles on the faces of young people celebrating the accomplishments of their peers.

More Reasons for Hope

2011-11-08T09:42:00.000-08:00

In a recent post I found a few things to be optimistic about in terms of educational policy in the states. Now, more hopeful signs: the results ihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifn the Wake County, NC school board elections, an Oregon school district’s refusalhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif to take the bribe to institute teacher assessments linked to standardized test scores, and the pressures of No Child Left Behind landing on the doorstep of an innovative school.

In 1976 the school board in Wake County, lead by one of the more courageous superintendents in the nation, began the process of desegregating its schools by socioeconomic status. The logic was simple: if you wanted to ensure equal access to an education, you needed to make sure that schools were not segregated by the incomes of students’ families. When you group all the middle class students in one school and all the poor students in another, you simply exacerbate the effects of poverty and all but ensure one school will succeed while the other will struggle.

Unfortunately, when the well-to-do in Wake County found that they had to share access to public schools, those who have struck out at those who do not. The school board election in 2009 brought to power a group of citizens determined to overturn the equity agenda. Public battles became the rule of the day at the Wake County Board meetings.

But, and here is the hopeful moment, elections in October brought back a school board committed to the equity agenda. This happened in spite of the funding provided by anti-public school folks such as Art Pope, the Koch brothers, and the interestingly named Americans for Prosperity. The 2009 election was a sleeper, with the anti-equity candidates running a well-financed stealth operation. But when the questions were out in the public, when the issues of equity were front and center, a coalition of progressive groups held the day.

Here is more. It seems that a $2.45 million dollar bribe could not convince the Oregon City School District to walk off the plank of so-called teacher performance pay. Let’s be honest, teacher performance pay is just a nice moniker for paying teachers for higher test scores, because that is the only ‘data’ that matters in these schemes. The research on this is clear; it does not work, but, as we all know, what drives educational policy is not research but ideology.

And one more, an article in the New York Times points out that the Oyster River Middle School, in Durham, N.H., is failing under NCLB. Yep, a school known for creative teaching in a district with an average home value of around $350,000, where around 5% of the kids qualify for free or reduced lunches, with 70% of the kids going on to college while averaging an SAT score of 1674 (the national average is 1509) is failing.

So why is that a hopeful sign? Well, I have always thought that once schools that are serving the most powerful of families are under pressure from NCLB then, and only then, would legislators understand how poorly this law works. More than anything else, money talks in DC and state capitals. And when the schools that educate the children of the well off start to feel the pain of having all kids proficient by 2012 then, and only then, will pressure be on to change the law. Looks like that moment is finally arriving.

If you think about it, all three of these stories from around the nation speak to what the federal government should be doing when it comes to educational policy. As The Forum for Education and Democracy put in its report on the changes needed to ESEA, "we must restore an appropriate balance of authority, with the federal government taking a more pro-active role in ensuring equitable educational opportunity, and a less heavy-handed, more productive role in helping states and localities to focus on improving the quality of teaching and learning. This agenda would reclaim and extend the historic federal role in public education: first, by acknowledging education as a civil right that should be made available to all on equal terms, and second, by taking on the critical tasks that demand a strong central role in building the capacity of schools to offer high-quality opportunities responsive to our fast changing world."

Policy makers could learn from Wake County, Oregon City, and Oyster River. They could learn that their most important job when crafting federal policy is to focus on equity and teacher supply. That would indeed leave no child behind.

Misreading History

2011-11-08T09:40:00.000-08:00

I don’t own a television, but I do watch the box when I find myself in a hotel room. Just small doses of it remind me why we turned ours off some 30 years ago.

Take, for example, the incessant worship of Steve Jobs. Sorry to rain on the parade, but you cannot turn on the television without yet another story about the Apple leader. Just this morning it was an interview on "Good Morning America" with his biographer.

Yes, I know he single-handedly invented personal computing--sort of like how some would have us believe that Henry Ford invented the automobile and built all of them himself. And where would we be without phones so smart we can use them while driving down busy highways or spoil a dinner out with friends while we check the latest sports scores or new hot music video?

But besides television’s penchant for not telling the entire story or reducing it to the simplest line, it also chooses what history really matters--and usually makes the wrong choice.

Case in point: while the commentators were fawning over Jobs, they mostly missed the passing of another great American on the same day -- Fred Shuttlesworth.

If you don’t know who Fred Shuttlesworth is it is probably not your fault. You may not know that in 1963 he lead the folks standing up to the dogs and fire hoses in taking on Sherriff Bull Conner in Birmingham, Ala. You may not know that he prodded the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. into taking a stand in that town that would begin to turn the tide in the civil rights movement. And you may not know that his church was bombed three times, he was arrested 30 times, and more than once was nearly beaten to death as he stood for the rights of Americans to do simple things like vote, drink from a water fountain, or go to the beach. (Start your primer on Shuttlesworth here.)

Of course our schools--mine included--share the blame for allowing Shuttlesworth to disappear from history while making Jobs and others our new heroes. But this also points out how hard it is for our schools to combat the incessant drumbeat of the media. (Try this, Google Steve Jobs’ death and you get 260,000,000 hits, Shuttlesworth gets a 1000th of that.)

When I was in college I used to joke that I wanted to belong to a "countercultural institution." Being a public school educator fits that bill.

The Jobs/Shuttlesworth comparison points out how mainstream culture goes for the easy story, the story with a simple line. Iphone is an easy sell. The civil rights movement? Way more difficult. We also know the media loves to go with the "one great man" approach. The civil rights movement cannot be reduced to just one person or one moment.

Finally, let us not forget that mainstream culture, as defined by the media, is product- and consumer-driven. The Jobs story is one that resonates right through the computer on which I am typing. You can’t sell civil rights or make a profit on it, so does it really matter?

What Fred Shuttlesworth did to change the lives of millions of Americans was way more important than creating the ability to see your favorite team’s touchdown on your mobile device. Unfortunately, that’s not the message our kids get from the television.

It is up to our schools to change that message and to counter the drumbeat of prevailing culture.

Yet Another Commission

2011-10-19T04:58:00.000-07:00

In yet another signal that the one-size-fits-all approach of NCLB is not working (as if we need one), policy makers in Ohio are pointing to an ever-growing number of college students needing remedial work. Of course, every such problem provides a chance to convene yet another ‘commission’; this one is called the "Regional Consortia for P-20 Alignment."

Their task is "to bring high school standards in line with the realities of higher education," according to our state superintendent. With 41% of college students taking remedial course in mathematics or English something must be done.

Really?

After thirty years in this world, spanning both K-12 teaching and district administration, serving as an elected school board member and as a tenured professor, I know not to trust what the experts say. So before the State holds hearings complete with gnashing of teeth over the sorry state of public education, I have a few questions for them to consider.

One, how do we know these college students actually need remediation? Just because a college says they need it, what is the evidence? I am sure more than one parent has been shocked by tuition billings for these courses and has wondered if they are getting their money’s worth.

Further, given that graduate students teach most introductory math and English courses on our state college campuses, maybe the problem is with the teacher and not the learner. My experience a the collegiate level was that very little time is spent with faculty helping them learn how to teach; they were mostly just lecturers. Oh, but surely the problem is with the kids - it always has been, as we have heard the ‘they need remediation’ complaint for as long as I can remember.

Second, haven’t we been testing the pants off our kids for the past two decades and they still can’t do math or write. Hmmmm, wonder what the lesson is here? OK, sorry, just had to ask.

Third, what counts as evidence of what would improve the college readiness of our students? My guess is that the consortia will come up with a bunch of stuff around higher standards, a few more tests, and more curriculum guides written by college professors and state staffers who have no idea how to teach this stuff to real live kids.

In the meantime nearly 60% of the kids are, apparently, ready for college. Is anyone looking at what these kids did on the way to college to be so well prepared? Aside from my guess that most of them are middle class or affluent, had homes where they were well fed, and had health insurance, etc., I would love to know about the school environments that prepared them.

Here is a novel idea - rather than gripe and moan about what some schools are not doing, let’s look at what many schools are doing well, and actually learn from them. The national Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) conducted just such a study (disclaimer, our high school was one such school studied) and when they looked at college transcripts they found that kids from schools that followed a CES model were doing quite well in college and on track to graduate on time.

These are schools that built strong personal relationships with students, had a focused curriculum, believed in assessment by exhibition, and engaged students in meaningful work. No matter, no one in any state has followed up on this study.

Why bother? We have named another commission.

Often I have complained that educational policy-making is an ‘evidence free zone.’ Once again I am afraid we are about to see another demonstration of this as the sages of Ohio’s educational bureaucracy will mandate yet another new curricular model, and more tests, and, well, just more of the same.

Our kids deserve better.

Glimmers of Hope

2011-10-11T09:09:00.001-07:00

OK, I’m a ‘glass half full’ kind of guy. And to start this week, what I read in the press gives me just a little hope that thinking about our schools, at least at the state levels, might be a little clearer.

First there was Governor Jerry Brown’s veto of the education bill in California. In his letter, the governor chided the legislature for continuing to rely upon standardized testing as the only ‘data’ that counts when measuring schools success. In his own words: Finally, while SB547 attempts to improve the API, it relies on the same quantitative and standardized paradigm at the heart of the current system. The criticism of the API is that it has led schools to focus too narrowly on tested subjects and ignore other subjects and matters that are vital to a well-rounded education. SB547 certainly would add more things to measure, but it is doubtful that it would actually improve our schools. Adding more speedometers to a broken car won’t turn it into a high-performance machine.

And then, my favorite quote from his veto message: SB547 nowhere mentions good character or love of learning. It does allude to student excitement and creativity, but does not take these qualities seriously because they can’t be placed in a data stream. Lost in the bill’s turgid mandates is any recognition that quality is fundamentally different from quantity. There are other ways to improve our schools to indeed focus on quality. What about a system that relies on locally convened panels to visit schools, observe teachers, interview students, and examine student work? Such a system wouldn’t produce an API number, but it could improve the quality of our schools.

OK, I know, its California. But how about Iowa? Governor Terry Branstad has released a educational change platform there and while the devil is no doubt in the details, there is much here to like. Such as increasing teacher pay and training, providing mentor teachers and career ladders, freeing up principals to lead schools, and a new way to think about accountability that include, from the document, taking into account that healthy and successful children and more than just test scores making sure teachers and other educators have the supports they need to succeed measures parent satisfaction. In my mind all of this is a step well beyond what we have been hearing lately about NCLB.

Of course, I could be fooled again (with a nod to The Who). There are probably plenty of internal politics behind both of these agendas of which I am not aware. But I must say it was nice to start the week hearing Governors of two very different states share a common message it is time to see kids as more than a test score and schools as more than just test preparation mills.

All politics are, in the end, local. That may be what is really behind my ‘half full’ feeling this week. On Monday the staff of our school district gathered for a full day to share our practices and improve our craft. For several years we have been building a reading and writing across the curriculum agenda. We have invested in our teachers’ expertise, and have tried to build an approach from the ground up that invests in teachers, trusts them to do the right thing, and provides ways for them to share successful practices with students.

Monday was a testament to this work.

For a full day teachers shared with one another how they have been implementing the literacy agenda. They modeled what they have done in their classrooms, engaged colleagues in mock-lessons, and planned together where they will go from here with this work. (We also enjoyed a great meal prepared by our cooks with some local produce.)

This is what could happen if Governors Brown and Branstad really mean what they say. We could invest in the expertise of our teachers, find ways to assess the quality of our schools based on the quality of instruction and student engagement, and give schools the latitude to meet the needs of their students in ways that are context specific.

It is hard to imagine that the folks in Washington, guilty as they are for first passing NCLB and now refusing to amend/improve/abandon it, will see the error of their ways. But they could start by taking a look at what a couple of Governors are trying to do, and what one small school district does every day.

One Superintendent's Thoughts on Opening Day: "Keep Paddling through Rough Waters"

2011-09-08T07:59:00.001-07:00

It is a tradition in our district to bring together the entire staff--teachers, aides, bus drivers, custodians, cooks, and secretaries--for an opening day meeting. Part of that morning is an address from the superintendent, and this year I gave my first such speech. There was much to say that was specific to our district, but in closing I had some things to say about the overall state of public education. Here are those comments:

The last decade has not been kind to us, or public schooling in general. While the needs of our kids have increased, our resources have decreased. At a time when the country needs a well-educated public, our schools—you and I—are seen as something to blame for our problems rather than the solution to them. When doubt in our public institutions increases, the media focuses on the occasional cheating scandal rather than upon the thousands of schools and hundreds of thousands of teachers, custodians, secretaries, aides, cooks and bus drivers who do their job well, day in and day out, with little or no attention.

I was thinking about this while listening to my son John describe his work this year. He is, in a credit to many of you, doing quite well as an instructor for Outward Bound. He specializes in teaching whitewater canoeing and kayaking and I overheard him telling a neighbor that he felt like he spent a lot of the summer telling students to ‘keep paddling.’

I asked him what he meant by that and he said that all too often, when faced with a new situation or with failure, his students would simply stop doing what they knew they should do.

They had the expertise, but they doubted their ability.

After several days of instruction, his students faced a new challenge. They were sent down the river through a rather tricky series of rapids that was preceded by a short waterfall, something they had not seen before. My son stationed himself at the top of the rapids, lining up each canoe and cheering his students on.

With every group the same thing happened.

Some students took what they knew, executed the right paddle strokes, and flew through the rapids. But others panicked, and in almost every case, just lifted their paddles into the air and screamed. The result was always the same, a flipped canoe and two students flailing away through the rocks.

I think that it is this way for us right now. We know what to do to help kids learn. We feed them good meals and get them to and from school safely. Certainly we will make mistakes, but overall, we know what to do, despite what the media or politicians might say. The millions of young people who have gone through the public school system--one free to all comers and open to every child-- and have gone on to hold jobs, vote, and build decent communities are a testament to that.

The temptation is to quit paddling, to believe the critics, to panic in the face of the unending drumbeat of criticism.

My message to you about this year is simply this—you know what to do, you know you are making a difference in the lives of our kids, so just keep paddling, and let me know if I can make the water any smoother.

Managing From Up Close

2011-08-11T05:13:00.000-07:00

I believe the current conventional wisdom about school district leadership is flawed. Many of the current ‘reformers’ are betting on what I would call ‘management from afar’. It goes like this—find an executive from an area other than education, train them in the business of schools, and turn them loose to cut budgets and drive up test scores. Oh, and keep the old model of district leadership with orders coming from ‘downtown’ and the district leadership knowing little, if anything, about the real life of classrooms.

That may work in some places, and fail in others. (If it does work then we need some similar approaches to the leadership of our medical system, Congress, and the home mortgage and banking industries.) But I am willing to bet that the impact will be limited.

As an alternative, I believe that administrators who are still involved in the day-to-day lives of teachers, students, staff, and families would better serve districts. That leadership should not be ‘downtown’ but should be down the hall; that administrators should have to experience the consequences of their decisions made; and that easy access to district administrators is owed to the public that pays them.

So, with that in mind, this year I am taking on the dual role of superintendent and secondary school principal in our school district. We will see if this model, one that keeps the superintendent in daily touch with everything from announcements to pep rallies, can be effective.

There are three pieces of this leadership model that are crucial; shared leadership, staying connected with the school and community, and understanding that the only job of central administration is to support teachers in helping children learn.

A few notes on each.

First, shared leadership. Of course I cannot do everything a superintendent and a principal can and should do. Even in our small district that would not be possible. But what we have done is taken what we would have spent on a full time superintendent and used those funds to make sure each of our schools had a full time leader. In addition to their building duties they also have some central office functions. So one elementary principal handles federal and state reporting, the other directs curriculum and staff development, and an associate principal at the secondary school also directs the extracurricular program.

This team approach goes all the way to day-to-day building management. When one of us is out of his/her building, the fourth administrator heads to that building for the day and works from there. So some days my office (basically my computer) may be at an elementary school. The point is that we all share responsibility for the education of every child and the support of every teacher.

Second, staying connected. Nothing epitomizes the distance of district leadership from the real work of the schools than the expression, ‘it came from downtown.’ Far removed from the real lives of kids and teachers, bureaucrats make decisions, issue pronouncements, and try to micro manage the work of the classroom—all the time with little or no contact with real kids and real classrooms. Even more notable is the central office isolation from the families that the schools are to serve.

My dual role means I am still involved in curriculum, working with teachers on instruction, meeting with families about kids. In fact, in the past few weeks I have been cornered in the grocery store by a woman wanting to know why we did not hire a family member, talked with a laid off staff member about how to manage the new fiscal realities that family faces, and written two letters of recommendation for members of the class of 2011. This contact reminds me that every decision I make has real consequences for people who are my neighbors, and for kids and staff that depend upon us to provide them with the learning environment they deserve.

Third, supporting teachers. I believe that the only reason you have a central office is to support the work of teachers in educating our children. When you are removed from the school, when your degree is in management and not education, you may forget that. The job is not to manage instruction and learning, it is to support instruction for learning. And if you have not experienced the actual life of a school it is nearly impossible to support what you do not know.

I do not believe this will be easy, or that I will always do it well. But I do believe the models of managing schools from afar are seriously flawed and are hurting our schools. We will try managing from up close. I will keep you informed as to how it goes.

A Voice of Hope Rises Above the Din

2011-06-14T06:23:00.000-07:00

The school year ended a couple of weeks ago here. The halls are empty, we are cleaning up last year’s records, building next year’s schedule student by student.

What goes on now is the work behind the scenes; work done without fanfare or hype, by teachers and staff whose work right now makes next year’s successes possible.

Things are a bit slower, however, and it allows me to catch up on things sent my way that were set aside in the rush to graduation this spring. In that collection of articles, books, and notes was one piece that caught my eye and gave me hope in spite of the ongoing and oft misguided debates about our schools. You can find it here, and I believe you will find this parent’s plea for school reformers to get serious about what really matters in schools inspiring.

I do not know the author personally, though I think I would like Helen Gym. She is the driving force behind something called Parents United for Public Education, good people who work for reforms like free busing for kids to school, smaller class sizes, healthy fresh food in cafeterias—you know, simple stuff that does not make headlines but really makes a difference.

But it was Ms. Gym’s piece on what parents really want when it comes to schools that caught my eye. Here is the short list, but I encourage you to follow the link to her entire piece:

Programs rich in the arts, sciences, and history that are about more than test scores;
Critical thinking;
Small classes;
An experienced, stable, and professional teaching force.

And what she points out is that while this is what parents want, these simple steps are ignored by politicians who contract out teaching, spend fortunes on tests and pre-packaged curricula, and continue to dumb down our schools with a focus on one-size-fits-all standardization.

Now that I am superintendent of schools in my little district, I can lead on some of these things in spite of state budget cuts and the focus on testing here. As Ms. Gym suggests, we are going to keep our early childhood programs in the face of reduced funds—and we are going to see how to make them more developmentally appropriate. We are going to squeeze just a bit harder to reduce class sizes in our middle school. We are going to continue to offer our staff the best support we can to bring on line a curriculum rich in critical literacy skills. And we are going to create a better website and re-launch our district newsletter to try and do a better job connecting with parents.

And I think I am going to send all of our staff—from teachers to custodians, aides to principals, a copy of Helen Gym’s fine piece of writing.

I have no idea how this will turn out for us, or for Ms. Gym and her allies in Philadelphia. But I do know that on this Saturday morning, in spite of the rain, things seem a bit brighter just knowing she and her friends are on my side.

The Triple Crown

2011-05-17T07:42:00.001-07:00

It’s spring, and time for the Triple Crown. But I do not mean in horse racing.

Rather, at Federal Hocking Secondary School it is time for the academic Triple Crown for our seniors.

The first of the three, our Graduation Portfolio presentation, took place last Friday, the day before the Kentucky Derby. Each senior stood before a panel of faculty and defended the portfolio that they had assembled demonstrating their readiness to graduate.

The first section of the portfolio was their plan for after high school, complete with college or job acceptance letters, resumes, letters of reference and their own agenda for life after high school.

Section two demonstrated, through course work or work outside of high school, their competence in math, science, humanities, and at least one elective area. And the third section presented their competence as a citizen, documented through work at school, in their community, and in the society writ large.

All day the staff listened to personal stories of challenge and achievement as our students stood and delivered their best for our appraisal.

Next will be the Senior Project presentations. For the past year every potential graduate has been charged with designing and carrying out an individual project where they learn something new of their choosing.

With the help of an outside learning resource that each student has to identify, they have had to learn a new skill and then present a product that demonstrates that achievement. On Project Showcase night this year our halls will be filled with artifacts ranging from a 1940s restored car to a biodiesel refinery, rehabilitated horses to gourmet desserts, computer programs to gun cabinets, and hand-tied trout flies to gluten-free cookbooks.

Each of these projects has challenged our students to learn on their own, to find a passion and pursue it, and to find someone to teach them something new outside of the school walls. These are skills that will last them a lifetime.

Finally, on the two days prior to graduation, our seniors will take their final performance assessments. I have written about these previously, but in case you missed it, we do not believe the traditional ‘final exam’ best demonstrates what students have learned.

Thus, we schedule half-day performances that range from researching a position paper, writing it and defending it in a seminar, to carrying out a new lab investigation in the chemistry class. It is a moment when our students prove to us that they can use what they have learned in a new context independent of our help. So much more valuable than one more multiple-choice test.

Many people have pointed out that for too many youngsters the senior year of high school is a waste. Having finished all the requirements for college by December, they coast through a spring featuring nothing but proms and pranks. I would agree—but not here. While some schools see the senior year as a victory lap, we see it as the final lap in the one-mile race, a sprint to the finish.

Do we get push back? You bet: Why do we have to do what no other school around is doing? This is too much pressure on my child in the final year. How can I fail to graduate if I have all my credits but did not do my project?

Of course, with many adolescents, push back is the name of the game. But in the end our goal is not to make school easy—it is to make it meaningful. As my colleague Nancy Sizer pointed out in her important book Crossing the Stage the senior year can be a vital capstone to an educational experience, but only if we make it so.

Yes, we push hard down the stretch. But why not? We want our graduates to know that you put in your best effort at any task all the way to the end, not just through the first three-fourths of the task. And given that for many young people high school will be the end of their formal education, it is our responsibility to make sure they are well-prepared in the areas of careers, intellect, and citizenship when they cross our stage later this month.

It is a shame that policy makers do not get the importance of standards such as the ones we use at Federal Hocking. In fact, in Ohio the current administration is heading towards ending the Senior Project requirement, put in just two years ago by then-Gov. Ted Strickland. This while they will keep the five-part multiple-guess graduation test that students take in tenth grade.

No matter, it is springtime here in Southeastern Ohio and the bugle has blown calling our candidates for graduation to the starting line. The race for their own personal Triple Crown is underway; and I am proud of their ability to take up and master this challenge.

March Madness

2011-03-17T06:14:00.000-07:00

I used to love March.

I attended the University of North Carolina as an undergraduate and March meant madness of the best kind. There was the ACC Basketball Tourney and then the NCAA playoffs—and of course, March meant spring break as well.

Now, I hate it. Forget the fact that there is so much more to love as I have grown older. Sure, there is still the basketball—and for all you doubters my Tar Heels have returned! But with March my farm comes alive starting with the spring peepers calling from the creeks, the first bass from the ponds, and wildflowers in fields and the smell in the woods telling me spring is here.

While it should be one of my favorite months all of this is overshadowed by the most important part of March for the kids and schools in Ohio--the annual madness called the Ohio Graduation Tests.

For five days during either the second or third week of March (it depends upon when your spring break falls) tenth grade students across Ohio sit for five days for tests that will decide whether or not they will graduate from school two years later. Those same tests also determine the school’s ranking with the state and whether it will fall prey to the Annual Yearly Progress measures that determine its fate with the state and federal government.

For five days students sit for two and one half hours taking tests in Reading, Math, Writing, Science and Social Studies. During these five days students face a barrage of questions covering the Boxer Rebellion to quadratic equations, possessive plurals to theocracies, Punnett squares to the meaning of a poem. Questions that I doubt any adult in Ohio not currently in high school could answer. It is like nothing they have done before and nothing they will ever do again. And yet it is one of the most important measures of their success in school.

We have been giving some version of these tests for nearly 20 years now—and I keep wondering why.

Someone once said (it is attributed to Einstein, but no one is really sure) that the definition of madness is continuing to do the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Our own March madness is exactly this. We continue to give standardized tests as if giving them will in some way improve schools. Sure enough, each year states enter into the test score sweepstakes (led by Education Week magazine among others) to see whose scores are the highest. So what?

There is no study that links the scores on these exams with success in life, college, the military, or the workplace. There is no study that says these tests have led to a richer or more challenging curriculum, or more engaging teaching practices, or more welcoming schools (in fact, the evidence seems to suggest just the opposite). There is no study that says that the money we are spending on these things is a good investment, with more of a payoff than, say, more teachers, books, supplies, or extracurricular activities. There is simply no evidence that doing more of the same will get us different results.

But when you are suffering from madness, reason does not matter.

Which is probably why I have the Tar Heels winning the national championship in my local pool.

Something Else I Don't Get ...

2011-02-24T05:22:00.000-08:00

In an earlier post I shared my confusion about who gets to speak for public education. I am confused again.

Maybe I am missing something but aside from ideology, what is really behind the work in several states to end collective bargaining rights for teachers’ unions?

I’ve been a school principal for 19 years, two of which I spent away from my beloved secondary school in Ohio to start an independent school in Los Angeles. The school in Ohio has a negotiated agreement and a teachers’ union; the one in LA did not. I prefer the union and the contract.

Before I tell you why, let’s be clear about the bigger picture that is going on right now. While teacher unions seem to be taking the blame for whatever is wrong with public schools (and it is not as much as you think but we will leave that for now), there isn’t much evidence that this is the case. In fact, it seems that students in states with unions do better on tests and graduation rates than states without. (The best and most balanced summary of the evidence I have found is here.)

Additionally, while teachers (and all public employees for that matter) seem to be taking it on the chin as states cut their budgets, it is certainly unclear as to whether they are to blame for the current recession. If you want to punish someone for the current economic crisis we would do better to tax bankers, mortgage lenders, credit default swappers. Or better yet, as Ezra Klein in the Washington Post points out, blame the politicians themselves who cut taxes for the rich and other connected friends—tax cuts that did little to create jobs and directly led to the current meltdown.

Clearly, the budget problems could be solved without the union/teacher-bashing--if the politicians wanted that to happen. In my state of Ohio the $8 billion dollar budget hole could be plugged up to the tune of $7 billion just by reducing tax expenditures that cover tax breaks for everything from utilities installing already required environmental equipment to brewers paying their taxes two weeks early (the piece by economist Mark Cassell pointing this out was published in the Columbus Dispatch, offices across the street from the legislature—I wonder if any of them read it).

But on the micro level, as a school administrator I prefer working with, rather than against, the local union for several reasons.

First, coming together to talk about contracts helps us all see where we can work together for our kids. It is tough for a teacher, whose pay depends upon the benevolence of a school head, to speak up when something needs to be done about a lack of resources, too many kids in the class, or coordinating planning times.

Second, I have yet to see any fairer way to determine salary and working conditions than through a negotiated agreement. Without a negotiated agreement I have seen first hand how favored teachers get easier loads and higher pay, while the ones willing to raise questions never seem to reap the fruits of their labor.

Third, contracts set expectations -- clear expectations -- for teachers, too.

Fourth, contracts make clear the process of teacher evaluation. I hear a lot these days about “poor” teachers in schools and how hard it is to get rid of them. Well, I have let several teachers go (I am not proud of that—it just means I could not figure out how to help them improve) and know it can be done. And remember, every teacher in every school has been assessed by a principal or supervisor, and has been recommended for a contract renewal. If you want to find the source of bad teachers in schools, I suggest you start with administrators who are not doing their jobs.

Finally, as a school principal, my job is to work with teachers on improving instruction, not debating how much they get paid or how many hours or days they work. That agreement is between the board and the teachers; my work is about teaching and learning.

I know there are contracts that some administrators loathe…but here’s the deal; two parties agreed to those. That is why they call it negotiation. Are there some things in our contract I don’t like? There might be. But the contract carries the signatures of our publicly elected board of education. If people do not like it, they should elect someone else.

And if statehouse politicians do not like unions, they should just say so. They shouldn’t use the current budget crisis they created as a smoke screen for an agenda they could not force through otherwise.

More of the Same

2011-02-10T09:45:00.000-08:00

A while ago I wrote that I was disappointed that no one in Washington was interested in the wisdom to be found in our successful public schools. I put it this way, “But would somebody please explain to me how the success of my staff, and the staffs of many schools just like ours, is no longer of value to a nation that seems to still want a good public education system?”

Today it feels like déjà vu all over again.

I received, from the esteemed U. S. House of Representatives, news that the first hearing to deal with education policy has been scheduled! In the new era of small government, of listening to the people, of getting Washington out of the way of real reform, I was hoping the hearings this time around would be different. No more would policy wonks who have never dared put a foot in a classroom be ushering in school reforms that were unproven at best, damaging at worst.

No, now we would hear from, as Carl Sandburg said, ‘the people, yes, the people.’

Imagine a room full of teachers who were making a difference in the lives of children—teachers who actually taught a child to read, who helped a student discover the love of science, or who knew how to manage a classroom of 28 adolescents when they first dissected a worm—talking to our esteemed members of Congress on what they needed to keep up the good work! Stunning!

The preliminary word was that this hearing, scheduled for later this week, would consider how “many states and local school districts have adopted innovative solutions to improve academic performance, enhance accountability, and involve parents in their child’s education. Federal policy should not undermine important efforts underway at the local level to advance student achievement.

Members of the committee will hear testimony that describes the challenges and opportunities that states and local school districts face in preparing students for success, and examine the current federal role in the nation’s education system.”

Hot damn!

But then I went to the witness list. Four witnesses, with a combined classroom experience of (at least to what they will admit on their official biographies) nine years. Apparently most of that was nearly a quarter of a century ago.

No worries. Maybe they know something about public education and how to make it better.

Well, only if you think the best way to go is to end public education, give parents vouchers, and hope everything turns out all right. The members of Congress will hear from the leader of an Arizona school choice organization whose web site streams cute videos of kids but runs banners about how to gut public schools. And then there is the fellow from the Cato Institute who would be happy if every public school in the country closed tomorrow.

What a shame, and what another lost opportunity. Once again the voices of those closest to kids, of those willing to forgo the law school option at the end of the two year TFA foreign service stint, of those who, like my wife, are spending another night planning for instruction using materials they bought with their own money, will not be heard.

Imagine if we did this to doctors, the military, or business leaders. If we simply held hearings in DC where the most adamant critics of their work were given free rein to call for the socialization of medicine, the elimination of the Department of Defense, or the firing of the most senior CEOs. Too hard to think about? Well, it’s what is happening to our teachers as their voices are silenced and their experience devalued.

Tomorrow, bright and early, I will head to school. I’ll be in the company of expert craft persons who have devoted their lives to teaching kids in one of the poorest areas of our state. They are teachers who make a difference in those students’ lives every day -- from preparing them for college and teaching them how to write for publication to preparing them to be a citizen in our democracy.

Lucky me. And too bad for an America that will continue to be subject to policies from Washington that are more about ideology than ideas.

Putting the "F" Word Back in Education

2011-01-24T07:56:00.000-08:00

Smokey Daniels, a well-known literacy guru, was talking about schools at a meeting my staff and I were attending. He stood up and said, “I think we need to put the “F” word back in schools. I mean we need “F” (pause for effect), “U” (another pause), “N” (relieved laughter and clapping).

He’s right, of course. Kids and teachers could use a little more of the “F” word.

When second semester began at my school my school this year you couldn’t find a student in math, science, social studies or English classes.

Instead, the kids were concocting “healthy” cookies in the food lab, banging out ironworks with a blacksmith from England or arguing the finer points of law in mock trial teams.

Me? I was teaching the finer points of fly tying and casting.

It was all part of our annual “intersession” program, a time between the first and second semesters where teachers offer courses based on their expertise outside the academic areas they usually teach and where students learn new skills and activities.

Most of all, it is fun. In this era of high- stakes testing and “accountability,” I have been dismayed by how fun has been taken out of school like air from a balloon. More and more we’ve heard about kindergartners losing recess or play time to test preparation or field trips to cultural sites being scrapped in favor of drill-and-kill drudgery. Time-on-task is measured in minutes, and it squeezes out the occasional classroom diversion or story book read out loud. It’s all in the name of keeping up with some illusive ratings game involving international comparisons of our kids.

Here’s the funny thing: most of those international hot-shot countries aren’t as obsessed with test scores, time-on-task, and all the other stuff we here hold up as the only way to improve schools. Instead, those countries spend time and money on the front end providing for the health and welfare of kids, preparing a strong teaching force and funding their schools in an adequate and sensible way. Then, they stand back and watch all the good stuff happen — probably with a few “intersession” programs like our school uses.

Yes, it’s true that test scores are up in China. Yet employers there say they cannot find employees who can solve problems and come up with creative and innovative solutions. Some of that country’s well-off parents seek to export their children to America for school. Look, China does a great job with cheap, exploited labor producing mass quantities of look-alike goods. Good for them. But that’s not a future I want for my kids.

Historically, it was not kids who had been in school the longest and taken the most tests that led and changed America. Rather, it was the farm boys and girls who knew how to fix tanks with bailing twine and set bones with torn shirts who won World War II. And it was backyard tinkerers like Homer Hickam who launched rockets and created computers. They went to school and took tests, of course. But they also were allowed time to work with their hands and their imaginations.

I am not calling for a return to the “good old days,” a time when some children were consigned to less-demanding classes and other children were not even allowed through the school house door. But I do think we have lost something in our unending quest for lofty standards, more rigor and higher test scores.

That something is the joyfulness of play, and the creativeness of curiosity. We have separated our children from the very world that sustains them. They will be poorer intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually for it.

People smarter than me have pointed this out. Deborah Meier has written how physical and imaginative play is the important work of childhood. Richard Louv has warned us of a “nature deficit disorder. " Sustainability educators have pointed out how children have been disconnected from the physical world which makes their lives possible.

All of these folks are on to the same thing—the best way to engage our children in school is to make sure schooling includes the “F” word.

Our intersession week is one way to do that. And we hold on to it in spite of pressure to cover more content and take more tests. (A confession: tenth-graders spend part of intersession learning “test-taking” skills as a way of making sure they can tackle the state exams. After all, we do live in the real world!)

Amidst all the talk about No Child Left Behind re-authorization, national standards, new tests and budget shortfalls, I suggest those of us who are in the front lines of education – those of us who are actually in the schools -- keep asking the same question: Where can we sneak in a little of the “F” word?

Meet the New Test -- Same as the Old Test

2011-01-06T09:38:00.000-08:00

In a recent Washington Post piece, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan repeated a refrain we have heard far too often about the subject of testing.

In a nutshell, Duncan admits that No Child Left Behind and its reliance on standardized, fill-in-the-bubble, multiple guess tests both dumbs-down and narrows instruction. Surprise, surprise.

The Secretary goes on to promise that new consortiums working on assessments will produce “a new test” he claims will “measure what children know across the full range of college and career-ready standards, and measures other skills, such as critical-thinking ability.”

Allow me to express a bit of doubt. For starters, I hope he doesn’t define “new test” as “one test” because that will never accomplish what he claims he wants: an assessment that measures a broad spectrum of student abilities. Further, unless these new tests are uncoupled from the high stakes they currently invoke—such as punishments for schools and teachers—they will be just another standardized, easily scored exam that tell us little about what is really going on in our classrooms.

I am thinking about all of this today because it is the first of two days of our semester performance assessments at our school. At the end of each semester, teachers engage students in extensive, half-day performances of what they have learned. The idea is to have them show what they know through performance rather than filling in bubbles or choosing the right answer from a list of choices.

Here are several examples:

We give our American Government students two opinion pieces that take opposing view points on the recently passed health-care legislation. They are first asked to read the pieces using a literacy strategy called text-marking, and they are assessed on how well they have read. Then, using resources they accessed in class and information they glean from work in the media center, they are asked to draft their own position paper and submit it as an opinion piece for the local newspaper. Finally, they will engage in a Socratic Seminar discussing both the pieces they read and their own writing. A team of teachers using the rubrics students have used all semester long will evaluate each piece of the work.

Chemistry students begin class with a paper-and-pencil activity in which they balance chemical equations and solve for missing quantities. They then move to the lab where they will find a station with the requisite materials to conduct an experiment. The task: complete the experiment and produce a full lab report that includes the hypothesis tested, the results gained, and implications for further research.

And in physical education our students spend the first part of the period using a web site to determine their metabolic levels and basic data. Then they select a candy bar from their teacher’s desk. Now, the kicker: they are asked to design and then perform a 60-minute exercise program based on what they have learned this semester that will work off those calories!

I could go on, but you get the drift.

We are not perfect at this work. That’s why we take time after the assessment days are over to review how the assessments went and, most important, what we learned about our students’ abilities. What we find impacts our teaching next time around.

Compare this kind of assessment to our students’ experience with the Ohio Graduation Test, which is used for both state and federal accountability reporting. Each test -- reading, math, writing, science and social studies -- takes the same amount of time. But rather than ask students to do something with what they know, these tests ask them to regurgitate what they have heard. In fairness, there is some writing on the tests, but most of it still involves selecting the right answer from a list of givens.

Add to this shallowness the fact that our faculty never gets to see full student results or the writing samples and how they were graded. It does little to inform teaching except to let teachers know they should spend more time on The Boxer Rebellion, photosynthesis, or two-step equations, or similar inferences based on aggregate scores of the entire class.

Duncan applauds NCLB for disaggregating data—but bad data disaggregated is still bad data. And let’s be honest. All this so-called “data-driven decision-making” talk should really be called what it is: test-driven decision making. Ohio’s school report cards consist of 26 “data” points, and 24 of them—92%--are test scores.

By the end of this week we will have mountains of information on our students, their achievement, and our teaching. All schools could have the same information. The New York Performance Assessment Consortium has demonstrated time and time again that performance assessments, teacher-designed and evaluated, have led to higher rates of student success both in and after school.

I wish I could believe that the new Congress, in some yet to be found bi-partisan spirit, would end the reliance on standardized tests—much like the higher- achieving nations we point to with admiration. But when Duncan continues to talk about one standardized, high-stakes evaluation, I have more than a few doubts.

In the meantime, our school will continue to use what we learn about our kids through performance assessments to improve instruction and prepare them for the years after high school -- years where what you can do will count for a lot more than what you can memorize.

After the Dust Clears

2010-11-08T09:47:00.000-08:00

After the election of 2008, I thought the stars were aligning for some serious changes in the way the federal government treated public schools.

Gone were the architects of No Child Left Behind. A president who had repeatedly said we should not judge schools or children on the basis of one test was elected to office. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act was up for reauthorization, and I was hopeful things would change.

I did not mind waiting while other issues took stage, because I liked most of what was going on. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, health-care reform, getting higher education student loans out of the hands of the banks, a recovery act, and much more. Schools were provided a generous slice of the recovery dollars – not just once, but twice-- and that money kept the budget ax from falling on my school.

But reauthorization of ESEA languished, and the initiatives from the U.S. Department of Education including more money for charters, turnaround plans that seemed to focus more on punishing than supporting teachers, support for short-term teacher training, all echoed the plans of prior administrations. Now that the reins of legislative power have again changed hands, what should we expect this time?

I am not sure. I worry that despite election-year rhetoric about the intrusion of the federal government into local school decision-making, the new bosses in Washington may be the same as the old boss (with apologies to The Who). But I have an idea as to a bi-partisan effort that might make everyone happy: eliminate the Department of Education.

Everybody dislikes bureaucracies, but for different reasons. The “right” complains they are unresponsive, full of “feather-bedders,” and a waste of taxpayer money. The “left” complians they are unresponsive, full of people who are too busy pushing paper to see the real work, and too intrusive into local, democratic decision-making. Maybe we should unite all this new energy for making government more responsive and efficient around the idea of eliminating a bureaucracy that was probably a bad idea in the first place.

Remember that Department of Education was a pay-off by Jimmy Carter to teacher unions for their support. Before that, education was part of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

That's where I propose returning it. Here are several reasons why:

First, the current structure of a national Department of Education gives it inordinate control over local schools. Remember, the feds only provide about 8% of education funding. But through through NCLB, Race to the Top, and innovation grants, they are driving about 100% of the agenda. Clearly this is a case of a tail wagging a very big dog.

Second, by separating education from health and welfare, we have separated departments that should be working very closely together. We all know, even if some folks are loath to admit it, that in order for a child to take full advantage of educational opportunities he or she needs to come to school healthy, with a full stomach, and from a safe place to live. But the federal initiatives around education seldom take such a holistic approach; instead, competing departments engage in bureaucratic turf wars that, while fun within the beltway, are tragic for children in our neighborhoods.

Third, whenever you create a large bureaucracy, it will find something to do, even if that something is less than helpful. After years of an “activist” DOE, we do not see student achievement improving or school innovation taking hold widely. We have lived through Reading First, What Works, and an alphabet soup of changing programs with little to show for it. In fact, DOE has often been one of the more ideological departments, engaging in the battles such as phonics vs. whole language. Who needs it?

It might be viewed as peculiar for someone who values education to be arguing for what has often been a very conservative position. I know I will hear responses that education is a national issue and is too important to be left to states and locales. But this has always been the argument of the “I know better than you” crowd, and it's time we stop buying into that logic. The fact is, the federal government has demonstrated time and time again it does not know better when it comes to our schools.

I would also suggest that this smaller bureaucracy have a more limited role than in the past. Instead of trying to tell our schools what to do, the feds should play a more circumspect role. That role would include insuring all children have equal access to school programs, providing and disseminating high-quality research on successful schools and programs and funneling federal dollars to schools facing the most challenging conditions (the original intent of ESEA).

Of course it's probably naïve to even suggest a bureaucracy as large as DOE go away – it's hard to name any such organization that we have eliminated. But why not try out an idea that appeals to our current climate of more democratic localism, less federal intrusion, and more effective use of federal dollars? It could end up being a case of addition by subtraction.

5,755 and Counting

2010-10-28T08:32:00.000-07:00

I thought the number would be 1,000.

That would be the number of America’s sons and daughters dead in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that would catch our attention and end our involvement.

I was wrong. This morning I read the names of two more children, both 21 years old, who were the 4, 417th (Iraq) and 1,338th (Afghanistan) war deaths. 5,755 and counting.

I appreciate the New York Times’ willingness to publish, daily, the names of our fallen soldiers. Their families deserve our thoughts and thanks, and I wish every paper in the country would follow the Times’ lead.

Perhaps the papers should add a daily tally of the financial cost of these wars as well. It would be hard to do, the costs are spread all over the federal budget and we spend so quickly the tracking services numbers race across the page. Additionally, we have no way of knowing what future obligations these wars will invoke. But as of this morning at 7 a.m. it looks we have spent about $1,099, 250,200,000 on the wars. (Or nearly $9,500 per household.)

(By the way, I worry about what we are doing to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan as well—the numbers dead, the cities and infrastructure ruined.)

Why am I cluttering up an education blog with talk of the wars? I’m a high school principal, what do I know?

Not much, really, but during the recent election cycle I have heard next to nothing about the wars and their costs in terms of lives destroyed and dollars wasted. Why not?

Perhaps it is because the leader of the loyal opposition in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, thinks his party’s most important job is to end the Obama Presidency. Or maybe debating who is most likely to follow the Constitution is easier than taking a stand on extracting us from our foreign wars.

But as an educator, I want to know why our leaders are behaving so foolishly. They talk about reducing deficits, but the war adds to it by the minute and it never comes up. They bemoan the cost of health care legislation or the stimulus or TARP but not a word is said about the cost of war.

How, I ask myself, can we ever teach our children about the use of facts versus opinion, evidence versus hearsay, or reason versus bluster when our leaders do not seem to know the difference?

More importantly, we educators know some things about change that could help the country out if we were listened to. We do not say it often enough, but what we do holds the key to the changes we thought these wars would bring about.

That’s right, if we had decided, back in 2001, to spend a decade building a public education system in Afghanistan and supporting liberal (read, not fundamentalist) education efforts in Iraq and other nations, we would have spent less and accomplished more.

I apologize for not pointing this out earlier and leaving it to Nick Kristof of the Times to recently state the obvious—more schools, not troops is the way to stop extremism. To add injury to insult, it took a soldier who responded to Kristof to illustrate how $359,000 spent on teacher preparation in Afghanistan would provide 200 new teachers for Afghani schools and set up the program to run without additional support. Oh, and that $359,000 is about the cost of one 2,000 pound bomb.

Of course, Kristof will always say it better than I, so I want to let him sum up the point I am trying to make here:

It always strikes me that in decisions about the military, financial constraints are rarely even discussed. Rather people say: If the commander wants troops, he should have them. But of course nobody would say: If the Secretary of State wants diplomats, she should have them. Perhaps that’s why there are more members of American military bands than there are diplomats in the American foreign service. Likewise, there is a furious debate about the cost of health care reform, but much less about the cost of troops in Afghanistan — which is already mounting at a clip of $60 billion a year, two-thirds the cost of health reform. (Full blog here.)

How long will we keep counting the dead and dollars while our politicians remain silent?

(In the meantime, maybe every educator in this nation could donate to the effort to build schools in Afghanistan—how about we all pledge as much as we paid for the political nonsense we have heard over the past few months. I would recommend the Central Asia Institute which is busy building schools in remote parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan.)

Waiting for Sanity

2010-10-27T06:58:00.000-07:00

This fall brought not only the start of another school year but plenty of noise about schools as well. A movie, a manifesto, and a mayoral election in DC all amplified the ongoing debate about who the real education reformers are. Noise and more noise.

Thank goodness for the sane voices that arose in the midst of all this. There is Diane Ravitch with her continued campaign that brings us back to what is really at stake when filmmakers try to bend public opinion. And Mike Rose, always close to the ground, reminding us of what school reform really involves.

Now comes the news that, in light of whatever is going to happen on November 2nd, the Obama Administration is looking for ways to work with the next Congress and has targeted, among other things, NCLB.

Yikes.

With the level of animosity and acrimony currently filling the airways it is hard to imagine that Congress and the President will do anything together, let alone the long overdue overhaul of NCLB. I worry about the common ground they might actually reach: grading teachers by student tests scores, breaking unions, putting every kid in a charter school. None of these strategies has been proven as a recipe for the schools our children need and our communities deserve, but lack of evidence has never stopped us before.

With all of this in mind I have decided to trek off to Washington this weekend and join Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity. Why? Because I want to talk to some folks and see if they might accept a few basic principles around what it would take to shore up our public school system. I want to see if they are willing to take seriously the Jeffersonian ideal that public education is vital to a healthy democracy, and the notion that now, as much as any time in our history, we need such a system of public schools.

I haven’t been invited to speak at the rally, but if Stewart calls, here is what I might say:

“America’s public schools are a national treasure and it is past time that we started treating them as such. Every one of you here today probably has a schoolteacher to thank for the fact that you can read, add, and think rationally. A teacher who opened your mind to new ideas, who helped you speak that mind and listen when others spoke theirs. It’s a great system, and it opens its doors to every kid no matter their race or nationality, no matter what language they speak or if they can speak at all, no matter rich or poor, motivated or not, whole or impaired.

“We have spent too much time the blaming our schools for all that ails us. Sure schools could do better—but so could the banks, big business, and Congress. Schools, our teachers, and our kids, are not responsible for the economic strains our nation feels; or for the loosening bonds that threaten the civil discourse our republic requires. They are, however, part of the solution to these threats to our social security. But only if we come together on a few things in the name of a saner approach to making sure every kid has a good public school to attend.

“First, we have to admit that as much as schools can do, they can’t do it alone. It is hard for a child who is homeless, hungry, or in pain to heed the lessons of her teacher. America should, as part of education policy, work to see that every child is safe and secure, has good medical care, a roof over her head, and food in her stomach.

“Second, we must all admit that there is no doing a good school system on the cheap. America is 14th among the 16 industrialized nations in how much we spend on our kids’ education. But it is not just how much we spend, it is where we spend it. In the Harlem Children’s Zone, a project that considers all of what it takes to raise a child, the charter schools are spending one-third more than the public schools in the city, and they still are struggling. This is not a condemnation of that important work—it just means we should admit that we are going to have to invest heavily and in a targeted way if we want our schools to work for all our kids.

“Third, over 90% of our schools are good old regular public schools—not a charter or a choice, just where kids go to school. If we are serious about every child having a good school, it won’t be by creating a few fancy alternative schools. It will be by improving all of our schools.

“Fourth, we already know what works. All our schools--charters, magnets, public--have had successes, but we don’t seem to learn from them. Successful schools are places filled with good teachers who are well supported, where strong connections are built with students and families, where kids do real work not just read textbooks or listen to lectures, and where kids are evaluated by what they can do not by what test question they can answer. They also are places not segregated by social class.

“So what would a sane person, perchance a sane Congress, do to help and support our kids and schools? Hate to be simplistic, but here you go—We have to shore up our safety net for all kids to have access to health care, food, and shelter; use federal resources to get dollars to kid in the most need; and focus on all schools using the lessons learned from our most innovative and successful schools and getting the regulations and rules that prevent this change out of the way.

“This is what I wish for my school, your school, all schools. We don’t need Superman. We just need some sanity.”

Blame the Kids

2010-09-13T06:32:00.000-07:00

It’s funny how the start of school also marks the unofficial start of the fall campaign season. What isn’t funny is how so many politicians running for office blame kids for our faltering economy.

It’s an all too familiar story—when America has a problem, we often choose to blame the victim. That seems to be exactly what is being done in the rhetoric on the campaign trail these days. If only our schools will improve the economy will improve. If kids step up their games, study harder, get better grades and test scores, somehow this will make everything all right.

Nonsense.

We have heard this blather before. Remember “A Nation At Risk” and the rising tide of mediocrity that threatened the American way of life? That was 1983 and the National Commission on Excellence in Education wanted schools and teachers to buckle down and work harder, because if not the economy would crash.

Of course, when the economy turned around in the early 1990s there were no parades and celebrations to honor the hard work of our kids and teachers. No, just more bleating about how bad schools are and the beginnings of the press for more standards, testing, and ‘accountability.’

I am thinking about this at the start of this school year as we begin to see the effects of the current economy show up at our doors.

For several families that have brought us children we are having a difficult time proving residency in the district—because they have moved in with sisters, aunts, parents, whoever has room for a family of five whose parents have lost their jobs. The oil spill in New Orleans brought us a child as well, all the way from the gulf to southern Ohio.

I am happy to have these children. Their parents come to us on the chance that we can shelter them from the turbulence of their changed conditions; and the hope that we can provide them with an education that will turn things around.

But I am unhappy that so much seems to rest with us.

In case you have not noticed, the welfare of our children is not well these days. The recent report by the Casey Foundation points out that nearly 20% of children live in poverty, over 10% live in a home with and unemployed parent, and over 16 million were ‘food insecure’ (as in hungry) during the past year. What is important to note is that on the ten indicators of childhood welfare the Casey Foundation tracks there has been little improvement since 2000; as compared with drastic improvement from 1996 to 2000.

It is not a stretch to point out that when the economy catches a cold, many kids are headed for the emergency room. But what is a stretch is to blame it on the kids.

I visited Detroit last month; I grew up near there and make an annual pilgrimage to see a Tigers’ game and wander the streets. Once again it broke my heart. Woodward Avenue, the route we would take with our parents to buy school clothes in the big city, is lined with empty and abandoned buildings. Houses are boarded up and dilapidated. The only vibrant businesses seem to be the check cashing services, six of which I counted in one block.

I had to wonder—how do you convince a child to do more math or read more books when s/he walks past a shuttered and burned out public library every day? And why do we put it all on the shoulders of these children and their teachers? Clearly they are not to blame for the abandonment of Detroit, or New Orleans, or our rural areas.

Our economy did not collapse under the weight of under performing schools or kids. Industry did not flee the country, first to Mexico and then to Asia, for better-educated workers. No, they went for cheaper labor. And the mythology about the Asian ‘miracle’, how many engineers they educate, etc. simply collapses under the evidence. Evidence of grotesque working and environmental conditions in China and the so called engineering graduates in the developing world who would not qualify in this country to fix your car.

So as long as we keep blaming kids and schools for our economic woes we will refrain from actually doing something about them. Things like fixing trade policies that allow jobs to flee to low-wage, anti-union countries; things like investing in renewable energy and infrastructure jobs; things like actually asking the rich in this nation to pay their taxes.

That may be too much to ask. But I know what I will not ask. I will not ask the teachers and kids I work with every day to take the blame for the unethical and immoral acts of the investment bankers, mortgage brokers, and industrialists who brought this nation to its economic knees.

Instead I will try to help them do their best to stand up to the half-truths and shaky logic that blames them for a world they did not create.

Not So Smart, ALEC

2010-09-13T06:23:00.000-07:00

The recent headline in the Burlington (Vt.) Free Press was sent to me by my good friend Carl Glickman: “Low-income Vt. students rank No. 1: Report faults state on education reform.”

It seems that despite the gains made by the kids in Vermont, ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) gave the state an “F” for education reform. Incredulous, I decided to check out ALEC’s web site for verification. Guess what, while they give Vermont their #1 “performance ranking” they actually give Vermont a grade of “D”, dead last, on education reform.

I have often thought that debates about public education go on in an ‘evidence-free’ zone, but this takes the cake!

To understand how this first to last phenomenon occurs, you have to see how the smart guys and gals at ALEC come up with their ratings. The performance rating, the one that puts Vermont on top, comes from student gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) fourth- and eighth-grade reading and mathematics exams over the period of 2003 to 2009. In particular, they look to see what states help low-income children increase their scores the most. Like tests or not, congratulations to Vermont and its teachers for their good work.

But when it comes to rating education reform, ideology, not data, raises its ugly head.

Seems that ALEC has an agenda here, with private school choice, charter school availability, online learning, homeschooling, and alternative routes to teaching certification making up 8 out of 13 categories (or over 60%) of the grade. Three more of the categories come from how well ALEC thinks a state does on retaining effective teachers and firing ineffective ones and two others rate the state’s education standards. Because Vermont does not buy the political agenda of ALEC around school choice, charters, and alternative certification they get a “D”. Tough graders, these guys. (“Teacher, I go the answers right, why did I get a bad grade.” “Because I didn’t like how you did it.”)

After digging through ALEC’s so-called “Report Card on American Education” (and please, click here to read it, just in case you don’t believe me) I am amazed at the paucity of evidence that the education reform ratings are based upon. There is no evidence that school choice, charters, alternative routes to teaching, etc. necessarily improve student performance. In fact, as Diane Ravitch, formerly a supporter of such agendas, has pointed out there is actually evidence that these strategies hurt the educational attainment of our children.

Of course, maybe ALEC’s report card is the best evidence we could have that such strategies do not work. Take a look at the top five states for student performance and the grades/ranking that ALEC gives them for education reform: Vermont rates #1 in performance but gets a “D” in reform; Massachusetts #2 for performance, “C” in reform; Florida #3 in performance, B+ in reform; New Hampshire #4 in performance, “C” in reform; and New York at #5 in performance earns a “D+” in reform.

For even better evidence that the reforms ALEC supports should be avoided at all costs, here are the bottom five states: Louisiana #47 in performance earns a “B” in reform; New Mexico #48 for performance gets a “B” in reform as does the #49 state, Michigan; West Virginia ranked 50th in performance earns a “C” for reform and South Carolina, coming in at 51st in performance (includes the District of Columbia) is near the top of the education reform rankings with a “B”. (“B+” was the highest ranking given, and Vermont’s “D” was the lowest, no grading on a curve for these guys).

Being from Ohio, I had to also take a peek at our scores. We ranked 35th in performance, but forgive me for not being surprised that we earned a “B-“ for our school reform efforts. The report’s authors must have been supremely impressed by our charter school laws, the topic of yet another scandal this week.

The authors of ALEC’s report card (who come to us from the Goldwater and Heritage Foundations) are to be thanked. They have provided all the evidence we need to show that the emperor, this time in the guise of the charter/choice/alternative certificate crowd, has no clothes. I just hope someone tells the people of Vermont.

Not the Change I Had in Mind

2010-08-04T08:31:00.000-07:00

I am still not over the sadness and anger I feel over what happened to my colleague, Joyce Irvine.

Even though I have never met her, I call Ms. Irvine my colleague because of the way her work as principal of Wheeler Elementary School in Burlington, Vermont, has been described. As reported in the New York Times parents are grateful for her leadership, she knows all her students, she has begun innovative programs, her teachers and her superintendent give her high marks, even her U.S. Senator praises her work.

And she has been fired.

Yep, call it what you want (she has been transferred to a district administrative spot) but she has been fired because the children in her school, overwhelmingly poor and immigrant, did not get the test scores the federal government says they should have. And given the choices the district faces—pass up on federal stimulus money or take on one of the federally mandated ‘school turn around’ strategies—Joyce Irvine was removed from her job.

Recently, apparently feeling the sting of repeated criticisms of his administration’s education policies, President Obama said that part of the resistance to his Race to the Top initiative (which led to Ms. Irvine’s firing) “reflects a general resistance to change.”

Guess again.

What it reflects, in the case of many dedicated educators, is a resistance to change that does not have any basis in reality.

Many of us have been involved in the front lines of change in our schools since the time that the President was an undergraduate at Columbia. While not counted among the so-called education reformers today, these leaders such as the late Ted Sizer, Linda Darling-Hammond, James Comer, Gerry House, John Goodlad, Robert Moses, Deborah Meier, and others have demonstrated how to change schools so that all of our children can have more equitable educational opportunities and outcomes. There are lessons to be learned here, but they do not include firing principals who choose to work with those students whose test scores will never reflect the mandates of Washington.

As noted, some of the critiques of the current administration’s agenda seem to be getting through. At a recent speech Secretary Duncan admitted that the current ways we measure student progress are wrong and that the criticism of teacher’s unions and blanket praise of all things ‘charter’ are not useful or factual.

Perhaps this is in response to the recent critiques put forth by a network of civil rights groups. And maybe the Secretary will look at the alternatives to his current ‘turn around’ strategy found in the recent report put out by Communities for Excellent Public Schools.

But this comes too late for Joyce Irvine. As I have pointed out many times before, current federal policy has created at the local level all the wrong incentives. When rewarded or punished solely on test scores schools are encouraged to push out or not take students who will not score well, narrow the curriculum to basic skills, cut out enrichment and engagement activities, and narrow teaching to rote memorization drills. Joyce Irvine would not do any of that, and she is paying the price for it.

Federal policy works by creating incentives for particular actions. Funds are dangled before states or other entities if they will do what the feds want. We know this strategy can work—it desegregated schools and has opened up educational opportunities for groups of students excluded from public education. The problem with the current set of incentives is that they have things backwards. Rather than reward principals like Irvine for taking on students who are the least likely to do well on standardized tests, it punishes her for the work we all want to have done. Meanwhile, schools that work with the easiest to teach—through district boundaries or admission policies in some charter or similar schools that skim off the most motivated students and parents—get all the praise and rewards.

Over the next few weeks school will reopen, ushering in a school year in which ESEA may be reauthorized. Congress should heed what happened to Joyce Irvine and her school when they finally get around to overhauling NCLB. The Forum has, as have many front-line educational groups, issued our recommendations for change. But above all when Congress acts they should remember the physician’s admonition—first, do no harm.

Somebody Explain This to Me

2010-06-16T06:22:00.000-07:00

For the past eighteen years I have worked as a high school/middle school principal along side a dedicated staff and a committed community to improving a school. In that time we have increased graduation and college going rates, engaged our students in more internships and college courses, created an advisory system that keeps tabs on all of our students, and developed the highest graduation standards in the state (including a Senior Project and Graduation Portfolio).

But reading the popular press, and listening to the chatter from Washington, I have just found out that we are not part of the movement to ‘reform’ schools.

You see we did not do all the stuff that the new ‘reformers’ think is vital to improve our schools. We did not fire the staff, eliminate tenure, or go to pay based on test scores. We did not become a charter school. We did not take away control from a locally elected school board and give it to a mayor. We did not bring in a bunch of two-year short-term teachers.

Nope, we did not do any of these things. Because we knew they would not work.

There is no evidence that firing staffs and using the turn around strategies that failed when Secretary Duncan was in charge of Chicago’s schools is suddenly going to work (here’s the evaluation from Duncan’s supervisors).

Tying teacher pay and tenure to scores on the current batch of narrowly constructed tests has never worked and will not, as Thomas Hilton, former researcher at the Educational Testing Service notes, work now.

Charter schools do not do any better than good old public schools. And there is no evidence that eliminating democratic involvement with our schools through elected school boards improves educational opportunities for kids. (I cannot do better than Diane Ravitch on these.)

While I applaud the commitment of the young people who see things like Teach for America as a way to serve the nation, it is a shame that we think the best we can do for kids in our most challenged communities is a steady diet of inexperienced short term teachers. (And it might not be all that effective, according to a new report examining the academic achievement of students under the instruction of TFA staff.)

So would somebody please explain to me why the new reform agenda is made up of so many unproven or failed strategies? Everywhere I turn the mantra is the same—fire teachers, close schools, start charters. Even from people who should know better.

One more thing, I also find it interesting that some of the more powerful pushers of these ideas are the so-called titans of Wall Street—the Broad Foundation, Bill Gates of late, and Democrats for Education Reform (a bunch of well-funded venture capitalists). Hey, private capital did such a great job with the economy (and oil wells) why not turn over our public schools to them?

While legislators and opinion writers seem to have drunk deeply from the ‘reform’ Kool-Aid, I believe the people who work with kids at the school level know better.

What we know is this.

To turn around a school and keep that success going requires educational leadership committed to through teacher assessment and support—I have fired tenured teachers and worked to expand the skills of every teacher in our building. And in turn my staff has taught me more than a few things about leadership and professional development.

To make sure every young person learns means constant reassessment of the curriculum, multiple measures of student achievement, and support systems throughout the school. We cannot rely on the archaic standardized tests we today use to judge student learning as they dumb down and narrow curriculum. And we must make sure that every student has equal access to the conditions to learn in every school.

To have every student rise to his/her potential we must use our communities, through internships, mentoring, and, yes, school boards that hold educators accountable to the local community.

I know this is no longer thought of as reform. And as I get ready to shake the sweaty hands of my 18th graduating class, I have to admit to being part of the educational establishment. But would somebody please explain to me how the success of my staff, and many schools just like ours, is no longer of value to a nation that seems to still want a good public education system?

Maybe we just don’t have a good press agent.

Wayne's Day

2010-06-01T07:02:00.000-07:00

The Sunday before Memorial Day was Wayne’s day.

It was the day he graduated from our school. A day he did not think would come. But a day he made happen—and we helped.

Wayne came to me last summer and asked could he please come to our school. Eighteen, having been pushed out of his school in northern Ohio, he had moved in with a girl friend in the area.

He was wearing his best tee shirt, his smudged glasses set askew on his face, as he earnestly asked me if he could come to school. He knew that because of his age we were not obligated to enroll him, but he was making his best pitch on what might be his last chance.

For the school it was a risk. He had not passed all the of Ohio state tests, he needed every single credit he could get, and we did not know him. The reason it was risky was that if we took in this young man and he did not graduate it would count against us on our school report card. He could lower our graduation rate (we have fewer than 100 seniors so every one moves our graduation rate by more than one percentage point) that is part of the state’s accountability calculation. We would put our ranking and our reputation on the line by taking him.

But how could we turn him down? Isn’t this what schools are supposed to do—take in kids, care for them, teach them, try to graduate them?

So we took him, the guidance counselor and I took some time to get to know him, finding out what he was interested in and then secured a place for him in our career center—and he graduated on Sunday. He passed the tests, passed his courses, did what it took.

What worries me when I see Wayne is how many other kids do not find a school that will take him. Schools that know it would be the right thing to give him, and others like him, a chance—but feel they cannot do it because the risk is too great.

This one case illustrates clearly what is wrong with the current ‘hold schools accountable’ mantra. It holds them responsible for the wrong things.

Had we turned Wayne away, no one would have known, we would not have lost points on our state report card, and it would not have effected our federal accountability measures either. We took him, and it could have hurt us on all of these measures.

The system is simply wrong. It incentivizes the wrong things—and punishes schools for doing the right things. I know it is time to change it, but it seems that our leaders at both the state and national level have absolutely no clue.

But I am not worrying about that as I write this. Because Wayne graduated; in clothes that our bus supervisor and his partner bought for him after graduation practice and in a gown that my secretary secretly paid for.

It was Wayne’s day—and a good day for our school as well.

Say What?

2010-04-27T12:36:00.000-07:00

Earlier this month Governor Charlie Crist of Florida surprised lots of folks by vetoing a school ‘reform’ bill passed by the state legislature. Who knows how this figures into his political calculations; I’ll just say that the veto made educational sense.

The major fault of the bill was its connecting teacher promotion and pay to student scores on standardized tests. Despite loads of evidence that schemes do not work (http://www.forumforeducation.org/node/483 and http://www.pbs.org/onlyateacher/today2.html), and even more evidence from around the world that the best way to improve teaching is to invest in and support them, we just don’t seem to want to learn that lesson. I think it is because of the mythology that surrounds so-called performance pay.

Even the esteemed New York Times falls prey to this myth. In the reporting on the Crist veto, the reporter had this to say about performance pay: “teachers should be treated like people in most professions, and paid based on how effective they are.” What Kool-Aid is that reporter drinking?

Really, name for me one profession we pay for based on performance outside of professional athletes. Let’s try and few and see what we get.

Doctors: Well, I know I don’t pay my doc based on how good I feel. When I am sick, I go see him and he tells me what to do or writes a prescription, good enough. But when I walk out of the office I pay the cost of the office visit whether or not I will get well; I pay on faith. Further, I don’t think we want a system of physician reimbursement based on people getting well—put simply enough, if your pay depends upon success (wellness), who would have treated my father as he died from Alzheimer’s? Pay docs and nurses for performance and watch how quickly the seriously ill and elderly find it impossible to find care.

Lawyers: Despite the fact that some lawyers make good on big cash settlements, very few of them are in that ballpark. Nope, most of them get paid in defending you whether or not you win, arranging divorces no matter who gets the house, and helping you keep your driving privileges even if you have to pay the ticket.

Firefighters: Pay them for performance and the next thing you know they will be setting fires so they can collect more fees. (I don’t really believe they would do that, but you see the logic.)

The point is that in every case we pay not for performance, but for judgment. I don’t expect my doctor to get paid for every pound I lose or every drop in my blood pressure; I pay him to help me gain the tools to be healthy. And I have lots of ways to know if I should trust his judgment. For example, when I follow his directions, do I get better; what do his other patients say about him; and can he answer my questions about my care (even take time to listen to my questions).

It is the same with teachers. In a recent post Marion Brady points out that teachers have always been accountable—to those they teach and their parents. The point is not to narrow accountability to so-called performance measured by standardized tests; trust me, any teacher or school can figure out how to nudge up scores through mind numbing drills, bribing kids with money, or simply pushing kids out the door before its time for the test. Rather, what we should be doing is investing in teachers’ judgment through improving preparation, support, and development of our teaching force. It’s what we do in the other professions, and it is time we did it for teachers as well.

Blueprints for Change

2010-03-22T05:31:00.000-07:00

As a school principal, I read everything about education with an eye towards how it would affect my school and my kids. So it is with the recently released ‘blueprint’ from the Administration on changes in NCLB.

I have approached the upcoming reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) with cautious optimism. During the last campaign season I heard lots of talk about ending the over-reliance upon standardized tests, supporting teachers, and equalizing educational opportunities. I hoped this would mean my school, our teachers and kids, would have something to look forward to.

Not wanting to wait for Congress to get around to coming up with what we should be doing, the team of educators that I work with at The Forum is releasing our own blueprint for ESEA next week. So I read the Administration’s blueprint while thinking about both what The Forum will propose and what my kids need. Here is a short comparison of key points:

First, I am pleased that the Administration has finally realized that the key role of the federal government in public education is insuring equal opportunity for all kids. In several places the blueprint calls for equalizing funding across schools, requiring states to address resource disparities, and holding states accountable for providing teachers and principals with the supports they need.

But the Administration’s blueprint does not go far enough. In fact, by making more Title 1 funds based on competition rather than going to support the schools with the highest numbers of low-income students, the Administration’s plan may increase rather than decrease the inequity about which they are concerned.

In the case of my school, the funding disparities are not between schools in the district—we are the district’s only middle and high school. Rather, the issue is the continued disparity in our state where some schools spend over three times more per student than we do. This is the case in state after state as schools that serve the poorest children in the most challenged neighborhoods have fewer resources to help students than those schools in wealthy community. That is why The Forum will be calling for the federal government to use its appropriate powers to allot funding to states based on the state’s movement towards resource equity for every child.

Second, I was happy to see the focus on teachers through out the Administration’s plan. NCLB avoided any serious support of teachers, leaving it to the endless filling out of form and taking of courses to determine if highly qualified teachers were teaching students.

The Administration needs to be bold in the proposals they roll out to support teachers. In my school we have lost several great teachers because they could not make enough money to pay off student loans. Our teacher support programs, built around teacher leadership, professional development on site and consistent with school mission, and common planning times for teachers who share students, are done with little or no support from the feds or the state. This is why The Forum will call for a radical overhaul of teacher preparation, including mentoring of all new teachers, financial support for teachers that work in hard to staff schools, and funds to provide high quality professional development and support activities in each every school.

The biggest disappointment for me in the Administration’s blueprint is that they do not address the over-reliance upon high-stakes standardized tests for federal accountability. It is hopeful to see the Administration at least acknowledge that improved assessments that focus more on actual student performance should be developed. But what happens in the meantime? It appears that the plan is just to keep on testing, using the same tests that Secretary Duncan has acknowledged are inadequate, and then ratchet up the punishments for schools that do poorly and provide cash prizes for schools that do well.

This will do little to turn back the culture of testing that has overtaken all of our schools. Even at my school we engage in test preparation activities, not because we think our kids are not learning, but because the higher order intellectual skills on which we focus are not on the type of test they take. Desperate to avoid being labeled as the worst schools—which could lead to mass firings—and anxious to earn the few extra dollars on the table, schools will continue to engage in test-prep agendas, pep rallies, and all sorts of student accounting tricks to get test scores up. All the while little will change in terms of daily teaching and learning practices; in fact the focus on test scores will further calcify school practices that are focused on memory and rote rather than thinking and logic. Ending Annual Yearly Progress, which is not mentioned in the blueprint but has been spoken about in hearings, is a good start. But not enough.

The Forum will call for rethinking assessment across the board, including performance assessments, school visitation teams, and information about school climate when looking at educational success. Further, it is time to end the radical experiment that judges our children and our schools by answers bubbled in on a machine-scored test. We will recommend a wide selection of measures that will serve to inform teaching and learning; and let each community know clearly what and how their children are learning.

Fourth, it does look like the Administration values innovation, providing funds for new promising practices. Good, my school’s middle name is innovation. We have advisories, integrated curriculum, internships, portfolios, projects, school wide writing rubrics, and we have eliminated tracking and ability grouping. Often these are done in spite of rather than with the support of federal policy. But we are not a charter school—thus, we are eligible for only slightly more than half the pool of federal money for innovation. Out of $900 million set aside for innovation, $400 million is designated for charter schools. Charters educate around 5% of the kids in our county, why the largess? The Forum will call for innovation funds as well, but we want everyone to have equal access to them.

For my school we need more change than what the Administration blueprint seems to be calling for. We need a greater emphasis on equity that guarantees my students educational opportunities will not be based upon their zip codes; we need teachers that are not only well-prepared and well-supported to teach in ways that are engaging and challenging but who also do not have to sacrifice their financial well-being to work with our kids; we need to stop the culture of testing so we can focus on a community of learning; and we need a fair and equal shot at all federal funds for innovation, even if we are just a plain-old public school.

After a decade of tinkering around the edges and making it harder for successful schools like mine (we graduate over 95% of our kids, with the vast majority going on to college and succeeding there—this in a community with an average family income of around $22,000) to do our best work, it is time for a bold change in federal educational policy. While the administration’s blueprint offers some good first steps, I hope the actual legislation rolled out focuses even more attention on equity, teaching, and innovation and less on punishment and sanctions.

Fridays

2010-03-08T09:01:00.000-08:00

This past week I was in Washington to talk with colleagues and friends about the upcoming debates over NCLB. While I enjoy the city and my friends, it was great to get back to my school just in time for Friday—one of my favorite days. And it has nothing to do with it being the day before the weekend.

Every other Friday my staff and I meet for what we call ‘planning period meetings’. Since we are on a semester schedule with long periods this means we have about an hour to talk about our shared work. During the first semester of the year we read a book together and discuss it. In the second semester we take on a protocol called ‘looking at student work.’

The task is simple; a teacher presents work from one of his or her classes to colleagues and asks us to discuss a question generated by the assignment. Usually this involves student work that is not what the teacher had hoped s/he would get. So we examine the lesson, the strategies used, and the student work and try to find ideas that will improve the work of students.

This past Friday lived up to our usual expectations.

We began with an Agricultural Science teacher presenting student essays that did not address the need for evidence in making their case. I sat in the back as the group of middle and high school teachers from math, science, humanities, and special education (along with a couple of student teachers) poured through the work. The discussion looked at how students were coached on such assignments through the term, what the rubric looked like, how to use the building wide writing standards.

Second period a team met to look at a 7th grade science assignment, and the discussion turned quickly to how students see work as opposed to how we see it. (In this case the teacher had asked for students to create a poster showing living things from most simple to most complex — the kids mistook it for a chart showing how humans evolved from sponges!)

Third period we looked at how to create performance assessments in trigonometry; and the most interesting ideas came from the band instructor.

We finished with a look at an integrated humanities class that blends history and literature for ninth graders. The assessment of the unit on ‘Revolution and the Enlightenment’ asked students to compare and contrast the ideas that informed the Founders calls for independence. Having not received the papers he had hoped for, the teacher wanted us to look at the literacy tools he had used during instruction and see if they were best suited for such writing.

I sat in my office at the end of the day marveling at what I had heard. The insights shared amongst colleagues, the seriousness with which they took student work, the effort to understand instruction as it cuts across content areas.

And I wondered, what if the policy movers and shakers who are responsible for reauthorizing ESEA had been with me today rather than still back in Washington. Would they finally understand that the most important investment they can make is in teachers and teaching? That if we have teachers doing the type of work that we did today they would not have to worry about micro-managing schools? That threats and punishments do not motivate teachers, rather that teachers are already motivated they just need the space and support to do their work?

So here’s an open invitation: Before you write one more line of legislation, before you approve one more regulation, before you dare to think you know how to turn around a school, stop by any Friday. We’d love to have you.

The Six Standards of School Quality

2010-02-22T07:04:00.000-08:00

(Previously published on Valerie Strauss' blog "The Answer Sheet" in the Washington Post)

Years ago, I learned that if you want to communicate with people, it’s best to avoid jargon.

It was my fourth year as principal, and I’d decided to add a portfolio requirement for graduation. After two years of study, meetings, and hearings, we were ready to move forward and decided to share the plan with the entire community. Feeling creative, we decided to put the entire proposal in a booklet and mail it to every district resident.

Then, mistakenly, we decided I would write the booklet.

I was still under the influence of academia, having just left my tenured university post three years earlier. Consequently, our booklet was yet another exercise in academic writing. The community was bewildered, unsure of what we were proposing to do to their school, and damn sure that that college professor principal was not doing things in the best interests of their children.

I look back on that experience often. It was not a lack of education or intelligence that caused the unrest. Rather, it was the contempt we had shown for our community by using insider language that was confusing. I have tried to avoid ‘eduspeak’ ever since.

Thus I was taken aback by a response to a recent piece Pedro Noguera and I wrote on this blog about the reauthorization of ESEA (commonly known as No Child Left Behind).

This person wrote that when he “got to the last sentence/paragraph, I came upon a term that has become sickeningly ubiquitous and vacant: ‘high quality schools.’ Could all the pundits in the education system do without this phrase?”

Our critic may be on to something. After all, ‘high-quality school’ is one of those phrases that everyone can agree with only because they don’t know what it means. While I won’t give up using the phrase, I do think I should explain what I mean when I use that term--based upon my own experience as a principal of nearly two decades.

*A quality school is a place that graduates its students. Every school should clearly post its five-year graduation rates (some kids take an extra year), broken down by socioeconomic class, race and educational handicapping conditions. Meet the state graduation averages and you are an OK school. Beat them and you are a school of quality.

*A quality school engages and challenges every student. It’s no good just to pass students on and hand them diplomas. The best schools ensure that every student meets the same common expectations. While different students may meet these expectations in different ways, all students should have the same opportunity to learn. With our ability to track students using computers, it would be no problem to see which curriculum kids of different backgrounds are taking in a school. The quality schools would show no difference.

*A quality school should be able to demonstrate how much and how well students are learning. I have no problem with using an occasional standardized test to sample this; it’s akin to my doctor taking my blood pressure, pulse, and temperature every time I go in for a check up. But these are only indicators of health, not the whole story.

More importantly, schools should be willing to randomly sample student work and submit it, blindly, to panels of teachers who can score and compare the work to an established standard (as we grade the Advanced Placement Exams). High quality schools would have student work that is in the top tier every time.

*A quality school would also engage students in learning experiences beyond the school walls. At the high school level, this would mean 100% of the students would be involved in internships, college classes or similar experiences. The reason for this is simple; it prepares students for life after school.

*A quality school would have clear evidence of the success of its graduates. For students who go to college, transcript studies could show student grades and progress toward graduation; for students who go to the military, the armed forces could share detailed records on advancement, training and deportment; for students who enter the workforce directly, a simple system could be established that allows employers to track which schools their employees come from and respond to questionnaires about educability, work habits, etc.

Beyond work and college, random samples of students could assess whether they feel prepared for what came after school – including the demands of democratic citizenship.

*A quality school would establish a positive working environment for its teachers. The evidence is clear; well-prepared and well-supported teachers lead to student success. Interviewing teachers about the provision of professional development opportunities, administrative support, time to collaborate and curricular and teaching materials would yield the information we need about a quality school.

Six standards of quality: Graduation rates, challenging curricula, evidence of learning, experiential learning experiences, success after graduation, and teaching environments. They are standards that illuminate schools of high quality. And they are standards every school can meet.

Snow Days and Global Warming

2010-01-14T06:45:00.001-08:00

For the past week my school has been closed due to the snows that have made our roads unsafe for bus traffic. This happens sometimes, and it starts the annual computing of when the last day of school will be. It also started a rather telling conversation about global warming.

At the monthly pancake breakfast this past weekend a number of folks dug out of the snow and made it in for coffee, conversations, and too much to eat. More than once some neighbor made a comment about the weather and global warming. “So much for global warming,” or “Where’s Al Gore when we need him?” or “If the world’s heating up, why are my walks still frozen over?”

While some of these are made in jest, many reflect a belief that global warming is a myth and that trying to do anything about it is a political not scientific question. What worries me the most about the glib fashion in which a one-week cold snap is used to discard several decades of research is how it reflects our poor understanding of science.

Of course, some of this is to be expected as political posturing generated by faux news reports and partisan debates. But I wonder if it does not also reflect how poorly we teach science—something that will not change under the current policy environment.

This summer I was vacationing at the beach with my family and my mother and I went to the rental agency to reserve a place for the following year. Mom casually commented how comfortable it had been for the week in August, ‘not as hot as usual,’ was the remark. ‘Yep,’ the young man making our reservation said, ‘just one more reason I don’t believe in that global warming stuff.’

Actually, whether or not he believes in global warming simply does not matter, at least in terms of the climate. But it does raise serious questions for education and public policy. What his comment reflects is a sense that science is something to ‘believe’ in. And that one event, a week of snow or of rainy weather, is enough evidence upon which to dismiss years of research and observation. What could be further from an understanding of how science works?

But maybe we should expect as much given the way schools are expected to teach science. Look over any state set of science ‘standards’ and you will find a laundry list of facts to be memorized. For example, in my state of Ohio the science standards include almost 700 discrete facts and topics. The tests children face to see if they have ‘learned’ science are multiple choice, standardized batteries of disconnected facts ranging from earth, to physical, to biological sciences. It would be possible, I believe, for a student never to carry on a sustained field observation, conduct a genuine experimental activity, or visit a functioning lab and still pass these tests.

Nothing on the horizon in the way of public policy seems destined to change this state of affairs. The federal Race To The Top funds, requiring more freedom for charter school authorizers and tying teacher evaluation to test scores, will not do a thing to improve the teaching of science. Volumes of new standards keep rolling out, apparently created by panelists of science folks more interested in protecting their fields than having students think about or do science.

It could be different, and if we are to prepare our children to face the scientific challenges that await them, we need it to be. We could focus our science teaching on developing the skills of scientific thought, reflected in performance assessments that demonstrate real achievement. We could prepare teachers that are not simply well versed in a single field of science but who know how to create experiences in science for their students. We could create science standards that are fewer in number, generative in character, and that lead to students doing genuine scientific inquiry.

In "The Disciplined Mind" Howard Gardner reminded us of how hard it is for us to learn concepts in science as they run against what we think is true. Start with something as simple as disabusing young children of the notion that the sun ‘rises’ as opposed to the earth moving around our star. Remember the film, “A Private Universe” where Harvard grads, in science no less, could not explain correctly why we have seasons? We have beliefs about the way the physical world works, many of them wrong. They cannot be changed by exhortation or lecture, they require experiences that literally reframe the way we see; so we can see like a scientist sees. Science could be taught this way in our schools, but only if we set up the practices and policies that make it possible.

It is no surprise that the science around global warming is being debated as whether or not it is something to believe in; and that weekend snowstorms are comparable to years of scientific observation and research. Herein lies a danger. While science does not have a corner on truth or even all the right answers, we ignore scientific thinking at our peril.

Twenty-five years ago Ted Sizer argued that “the existence of powerful means of psychological and political influence through the organized media and of an intellectually complex culture and economy amply justifies, and indeed compels, (the school’s) focus on the effective use of one’s mind” (Horace’s Compromise, p. 85). The debate about global warming shows at what cost we ignored that advice.

Testing, Testing

2009-12-17T07:54:00.000-08:00

In the Dec. 14 issue of The New Yorker, physician Atul Gawande takes on one of the persistent critiques of the current health care debate:

“We crave sweeping transformation, however all the current bill offers is … pilot programs, a battery of small-scale experiments. The strategy seems hopelessly inadequate to solve a problem of this magnitude. And yet—here’s the interesting thing—history suggests otherwise.”

The history that Gawande is referring to is that of the federal agricultural extension agency, where multiple small scale ‘experiments’ helped transform the productivity of farming. It’s a history that could inform federal policy in education as well.

Gawande grew up in my backyard. His parents are well-respected doctors (now retired) and all of us have a certain pride that our county produced such a literate physician (he is the author of several books and is regularly featured in The New Yorker). And it is a testament to his broad thinking that he finds in the history of agriculture policy seeds of a lesson for health care.

I don’t want to recapitulate all of what Gawande has said in this piece, it’s a quick read and I recommend it. But I guide you to it because what he has to say about health care reform is worth considering when we think about how to support our public schools. Simply put, his point is that while we may want a quick fix for health care, one probably does not exist. And, if the history of federal intervention into local practices teaches us anything, the best thing we could do is seed promising practices and do our best to disseminate what works. Here is an extended quote from the piece, insert ‘education’ for ‘medicine’ and you get the point:

Much like farming, medicine involves hundreds of local entities across the country—hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, home-health agencies, drug and device suppliers. They provide complex services for the thousands of diseases, conditions, and injuries that afflict us…Our fee-for-service system, doling out separate payments for everything and everyone involved in a patient’s care, has all the wrong incentives: it rewards doing more over doing right, it increases paperwork and the duplication of efforts, and it discourages clinicians from working together for the best possible results. Knowledge diffuses too slowly…And the best way to fix all this is—well, plenty of people have plenty of ideas. Its’ just that nobody knows for sure.

The history of American agriculture suggests that you can have transformation without a master plan, without knowing all the answers up front…

We have our models, to be sure. There are places like the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota; Intermountain Healthcare in Utah…that reliably deliver higher quality for lower costs that elsewhere. Yet they have had years to develop their organizations and institutional cultures..Even they have difficulties...Each area has its own history and traditions, its own gaps in infrastructure, and its own distinctive patient population. To figure out how to transform medical communities, with all their diversity and complexity, is going to involve trial and error. And this will require pilot programs—a lot of them.

When I read this I think of what would have been helpful nine years ago when NCLB was passed. If the feds first would have realized that our schools are profoundly local entities with a national mission. When I open the doors every morning 450 some kids come in with 450 different learning styles, injuries, strengths, and dreams. Some general strategies reach all of them, but no one of them is a carbon copy of another. We work daily to rewrite the book on how to meet our kids’ needs; rethinking the organization of the day our advisory program or our curriculum. Honestly, really, nobody knows for sure what will work from one day to the next. We rely upon our shared wisdom, research, experience, and, yes, just plain gut-instinct (so, by the way, do good doctors and farmers).

And we rely upon models. We have visited other schools, gone to meetings, invited friends to visit and critique. They all have their own limitations; no one thing fits us exactly. But we bend and shape them into our own pilot program, the one that seems to fit us the best…today, that is—it may be different tomorrow.

While we do this we work in a system that rewards all the wrong things. The matrices we use, standardized test scores, are one dimensional and easily manipulated by tutoring, pushing kids out of school, and doing more around lower level memorization skills that teaching for higher level thinking. The pile of paperwork and reports seem designed more to keep bureaucrats in business than to help kids learn. And the rewards/punishment system is set up as a ratings game with losers and winners rather than all boats rising together.

I think the bottom line here is that we trusted, some 70 years ago, local farmers to take on productive practices and produce the food we needed. And for the most part we trust our doctors to have our best interests in mind and believe they are willing to do what is right if they are given the opportunity. The same can be said of teachers, still one of the most trusted professions in America.

So, when it finally comes time for the reauthorization of ESEA those that represent us in Washington might do well to keep in mind what we learned in providing for our stomachs when they think about how to provide for our minds.

Approach on Education Needs an Overhaul

2009-12-14T09:05:00.000-08:00

(Previous published in the Columbus Dispatch)

The recent release of the Department of Education's Race to the Top application has me anxious and hopeful. On the one hand, we've been through a trying eight years of the failed No Child Left Behind Act. Schools have dumbed-down and narrowed curricula, cutting the arts, physical education and more in the name of prepping for tests. Some kindergartners have forsaken rest time and recess for test prep; field trips have been replaced by worksheets; and some students likely to fail the tests have been pushed out of schools.

On the other hand, the promise of what targeted, serious federal funds can do is tantalizing to those of us faced with daily decisions of which services we may have to cut and which we are mandated to carry out.

With this in mind, the following is one school principal's proposal to policymakers as they prepare to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, or ESEA, which largely determines how we create and fund the education our children need and deserve.

To begin with, the federal government should get out of the business of mandating teaching practices and curricula. For example, the "Reading First" program that mandated particular reading approaches, and the focus on machine-scored standardized tests, as opposed to the performance assessments that were used in many states prior to NCLB. Dictating to communities how to run classrooms is something that the feds are unsuited to do.

Alternatively, the federal government should concentrate its efforts in places that have the greatest needs. ESEA was first passed as part of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. The goal was to provide schools that served the neediest of our children with extra resources to help level the playing field. The focus was on reading and math, fundamental skills that opened up a life of learning. We would do well to get back to that agenda, with a particular focus on the early years of schooling.

Proven tools should be adopted and brought to scale by federal policy. Yale University child psychiatrist James Comer's work demonstrates that when schools provide a program focused on early childhood development, children flourish and succeed in school. The Reading Recovery program documented success in Ohio and other states in helping children who had fallen behind in reading make amazing gains and catch up with their peers. And many Ohio public schools, ranging from alternative to charter to traditional, have launched innovative programs that help every child learn.

What we need is federal policy that takes those lessons learned and offers schools support to put them into practice. It could be done tomorrow.

One of the things the federal government does well is large-scale research and development. Think of the space program, highway safety, the Internet. The revised ESEA must find assessments of student learning that are more than bubble sheets and memorization tricks. Let's catch up with the rest of the world that uses performance assessments, portfolios and other demonstrations of student ability that actually reveal what our children are learning.

The federal government should invest in the preparation and support of a first-class teaching force. Every parent knows the most important question their child asks before the new school year is, "Who will my teacher be?" Yet there is no federal policy agenda to ensure an adequate supply of good teachers, let alone ensuring that every child gets a good teacher no matter where that child goes to school.

Stanford University's Linda Darling-Hammond and colleagues have a plan to improve teacher education, provide support for teachers willing to work in our hardest-to-staff schools and build career ladders for teachers who are willing to improve their practice and take on more responsibility. The cost for this five-year program is less than the price of one month of the war in Iraq.

Finally, we must tackle educational equity in America. Our schools are some of the most inequitably funded in the industrialized world. Some kids go to schools with plenty of teachers, swimming pools and tennis courts, up-to-date texts and computers, while others share books in overcrowded classrooms. ESEA should link federal funding to each state's record on equity in educational resources. The Fattah-Dodd Student Bill of Rights would make this the law of the land and has been introduced annually in Congress. It is time to pass it as part of ESEA.

Fund what works, develop good assessments, support good teachers, work for equity in educational opportunity. It is the least we should expect from a federal government that has failed on its promise to leave no child behind.

George Wood is in his 18th year as principal of Federal Hocking High and Middle School in Stewart, Ohio, and is also the executive director of The Forum for Education and Democracy.

Election Day

2009-11-11T05:27:00.000-08:00

I always try to be first to vote in my town, and usually lose out to a local electrician whose job starts even earlier than mine. Part of the reason for my early arrival is that it gives me time to check in and chat with our former students who are working the polls as well as those that are showing up to vote.

Some educators claim that their decisions are “data-driven.” By this they mean that they spend hours parsing standardized test scores to see what tweak they can make to the curriculum in order to raise scores a percentile or two. At my school we do “data-driven” decisions as well—but we use data that actually has meaning to our community and school. And part of that data I was collecting on Election Day; seeing which of our graduates were voting and working at the polls.

It is a shame that our public schools, the most important weapon in the arsenal of democracy, are not seen as the incubators of democratic life that they were intended to be. Thomas Jefferson, who was one of the earliest to call for a system of free public schools, realized that democracy rested upon the wisdom of the public. And the best way to insure that citizens could exercise their own judgment was to make sure they could read, write, and reason.

Today this is still the most important mission of our public schools. Contrary to popular belief, we cannot and should not be preparing kids for specific jobs nor should we simply be a boot camp for college. Rather, public schools should be focusing on the attributes we want in citizens, in our neighbors. A short list includes the ability to read critically; to write for an audience; to understand numbers and how they work—in particular statistics, which are often used to deceive; to know how science works; and to have a background in our history and the cultures that have made this nation great. You might add to that an appreciation of the visual and performing arts; a familiarity with our environment and where our food comes from; and the knowledge of how government works (or doesn’t). Finally, a set of personal characteristics that would include the ability to work with others, including those who are different from oneself; the ability to listen; and a willingness to suspend decision-making until requisite information is available.

Now here’s the rub. As a former college professor, I would have loved to have students come to me who could do all of those things. And I cannot imagine an employer, who really wants people he or she can train to do a job knowing full well that jobs change quickly, that would not also list these characteristics as desirable in our graduates. That is, the attributes that make for a good democratically engaged citizen are the same that we might want in college students or employees. However, it does not work the other way around.

Simply prepping kids to do well on the ACT or other college admission examinations does not ensure that they will be the type of participants our democracy needs. And teaching students how to do jobs that may be phased out in the next wave of technological innovation does not prepare students to be life long learners.

At my school, as with many, we take seriously the challenge we have given ourselves to prepare our charges to be life long learners, active democratic citizens, and flexible in their career choices. Young people here have to demonstrate, through actions ranging from community service, to voting, to working at the polls, to taking on leadership within the school that they are practicing habits of democratic life. Along with demonstrations of life long learning skills and career flexibility these things are placed in a portfolio for graduation. What we know is that what we assess and value at school is what students will not only do now, but will continue to do after school.

Election Day is assessment day in my little corner of the world. It is one day in which we observe how well we prepared our students to take on the challenges of democratic life. One more piece of data as to how well we are doing as a school. One more way of testing ourselves to see if we are living up to Mr. Jefferson’s ideal.

Without good teachers, it doesn’t matter

2009-11-02T05:51:00.000-08:00

Last week I was able to spend a lot of time at the most important part of my job—supporting teachers as they practice their craft. Monday I spent a long session with a first year teacher, reflecting on a lesson she had taught and the lessons she was learning. I was impressed about how quickly she had incorporated some of the ideas colleagues and I had shared with her into her classroom work. And doubly impressed with the insights she had developed into several students.

Later that day I spent an hour with a senior faculty member who is working on developing some extensive performance assessments for our students. Her insights into how students approach texts, and how they write from experience, were amazing. How lucky our kids are to have someone who takes them so seriously.

Wednesday included an hour with the two faculty members who run our Teacher Center. Based on their work in classrooms and conversations with staff we were developing a professional development sequence around reading and writing across the curriculum. Additionally we spent time on how we might fine tune our Advisory program in order to better meet the needs of our students.

The support and development of professional educators is the most important thing we can invest in if we want to have a public education system that challenges and engages all of our children. Ted Sizer, founder of both The Forum and the Coalition of Essential Schools put it best in his book Horace’s Compromise:

While our system of schools contains many consequential characteristics—for example, the subjects of the curriculum, the forms of governance, the uses of technologies and teaching aids, the organization of programs for special groups—none is more important that who the teachers are and how they work. Without good teachers, sensibly deployed, schooling is barely worth the effort. (p. 4)

Ted’s book came out 25 years ago—if only we had headed his words then.

We again have the chance to heed Ted’s challenge with the reauthorization of ESEA this coming year. Hopefully this time our representatives in Congress will get it right and pay attention to the preparation, placement, and support of teachers. The Forum for Education and Democracy’s recently released briefing paper, Effective Teachers: High Achievers presents eight strategies that could be undertaken immediately if the nation wants to take up the challenge to put a well-prepared and supported teacher in every classroom.

Based on my 18 years at my desk in Federal Hocking Middle and High School I know that the most important question every parent and student asks each school year is ‘Who will my teacher be?’ It is my job to make sure that parents and learners will be satisfied no matter what teacher at our school is named in response to that question. Such should be the goal nationwide.

One more note. When I shared the Forum’s plan for teachers with a group of students at the nearby university during a guest lecture, one of the students challenged whether or not America could afford the plan we are putting forward. Well, do the math. The Forum’s proposal calls for an annual investment of $3.4 billion dollars in teachers. The federal government last year put over $12 billion dollars into saving General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC), an outfit that finances car purchases. Are our kids worth ¼ of what we put into our cars?

We Already Know What Works

2009-10-21T06:13:00.000-07:00

Another school year is already flying by and my seniors are celebrating this morning with a breakfast cook out. The reason? They have all submitted their senior project proposals, another step towards meeting the standards we have set for them here at FHHS. As I chat and eat with them, I am reminded that for many students this school year has not started this way. Rather, they are still plodding through schools focused soled on standardized tests and credit accumulation. What a shame.

Last week I had the great fortune to join a panel of luminaries in educational change at the National Network for Educational Renewal conference. The authors of the book Those Who Dared, John Goodlad, James Comer, Henry Levin, and (via video tape) Ted Sizer were present to share their personal stories of how they came to spend their lives working for good schools for all of our children.

Near the end of the lively session I was moderating the question and answer period when the most memorable question was asked: “What do you still not know?”

In a nutshell, the panel all shared their frustration with why, after years of success in multiple settings, the school change and renewal strategies they had championed had not penetrated the policy world. Why indeed?

For example, Jim Comer talked about the clear and compelling evidence drawn from his work in multiple schools that when childrens’ developmental needs are attended to they will be more successful in school (http://www.med.yale.edu/comer/) And yet none of this good work and research, carefully documented over years of practice, has made it into the educational policy framework in DC or the states.

Then there is the work of Deb Meier, who created in both New York and Boston outstanding secondary and elementary schools focused on respecting children and the work they can do. There is simply no arguing with her success, and her students have been tracked for years after graduation. But one would look in vain to see how the structures and environments Meier has developed would be supported in educational policy.

Ted Sizer’s Coalition of Essential Schools (of which my high school is a proud member) is currently documenting through transcript studies the success of our students in college. The evidence is clear—our students have higher grade point averages, credit attainment, and progress towards graduation than the average high school graduate – despite often stemming from the poorest of backgrounds.

So what gives? Is Congress an “Evidence Free Zone?” Or is something else at work?

Could it be that there is no profit to be made by textbook publishers or testing companies in the strategies of Comer, et al? Or is there something about the trust that Meier and Goodlad put in teachers that rubs the wrong way those who see our teaching corps as just the hired help? Maybe it is Levin’s and Sizer’s insistence on the equitable treatment of every student, not just the privileged, that just is too much to swallow?

I am not sure which of these explains our reluctance to do what we know works when it comes to children and schools. But I do know that it is time to take the campaign slogan “Yes We Can” and give it some new life. Yes, we can do the right thing for our children and our schools…right now, right here, because we already know what to do, we just have to do it.

Counting the Wrong Things

2009-09-22T05:10:00.000-07:00

My drive to school everyday takes me through fifteen miles of wooded countryside following the flow of the Federal Creek. Recently, some logging activity along the riverside has reminded me of how often in so many ways we count the wrong things.

In this case, the logging company will count sales and the quick profit they have turned in just two weeks of stripping the timber, including a number of beautiful walnut trees, from the river side. But they will be long gone when the fall rains begin and the creek flows out of its banks as it always does. With the trees gone and the earth churned up by the heavy equipment the topsoil will find its way into the creek. I already know what will happen; over the next three to four years this area will erode away and before long the creek will begin to edge toward the road.

After the logging company is gone the state will be left to pick up the check for repairing the road. And the silting in the creek will decrease the water quality and flow. The ecosystem will be altered for decades to come; long after the profit loss sheets are forgotten.

How similar this is to so many things in our society.

The economy is in a slide because Wall Street demanded instant profits rather than careful business practices. Mountain tops are removed and streams filled in throughout West Virginia and Kentucky to for easy access to coal. And schools have narrowed curriculum and engaged in the most limited of teaching practices in order to raise scores on standardized tests.

The single-minded focus on testing continues to damage our schools long after it has been established that such scores are, at best, just one indicator of what goes on inside the school walls. Even those who used such scores to assail public schools have found that raising scores are not only easier said than done, but maybe not the most important thing they could do. And recently David Berliner, Past President of the America Educational Research Association, has called for a moratorium on high stakes standardized testing given all the problems with this strategy for school improvement.

As Berliner found in his research, “high-stakes high school exit exams did not improve scores on other tests such as the SAT or NAEP tests, and contributed to higher drop out rates.” We should not be surprised by this or the fact that, as Berliner goes on to point out, corruption “invariably occurs when an indicator of any kind takes on too much value. Both the indicator (test scores, stock prices, return on investment) and those who work with it are frequently corrupted.”

I do not think the people cutting down the trees that once graced my drive to work are bad people. But I think they work in a bad system. One that rewards the quick scalping of the landscape more than it rewards the careful harvesting of trees and the restoration of the land.

Unfortunately, educators are working in a bad system as well. One that only rewards test scores and ignores the human cost in terms of increased drop outs and narrowed curriculum. It could be different, if we changed the accountability system to take into account the entire picture of what makes a good school—from graduation and retention rates to teaching for and assessing higher order thinking skills across the curriculum.

When I drive by this clear-cut every morning I am reminded of that old saying of not seeing the forest for the trees. When it comes to what counts in school, we also seem bent on destroying the forest while measuring the trees.

No Surprises Here

2009-09-10T05:59:00.000-07:00

Sadly, I was not surprised by the lead story in Sunday’s New York Times: “Surge in Homeless Pupils Strains Schools.” I have seen it at our school—more kids homeless, more on free lunch, more not able to purchase supplies. Our enrollment has been more erratic this early in the year than I can remember as families move in and out in the search for employment.

And America continues to fare poorly when it comes to measures of childhood welfare. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) recent survey of childhood well-being places the US in the bottom third of nations in many indicators and notes that childhood poverty rates in the US are double the average of the OECD nations.

Of course, school people don’t need international comparisons or the New York Times to tell us about the needs of our children. When the economy catches a cold, schools, especially those serving our poorest children, catch the flu. Along with social service workers, teachers are on the front lines of helping our most vulnerable citizens navigate economic dislocation.

We get little or no credit for doing this work—from making sure kids eat lunch and breakfast to helping kids find jobs to walking first generation college goers through the application process. Instead, in this so-called era of accountability, we are told over and over again that the only thing that counts are test scores on fairly low level measures of thinking and knowledge.

It is time to hold the entire nation accountable for the plight of our children. From health care to nutrition to housing America needs to be held accountable for a childhood poverty rate of nearly 22%, a rating of 25 out of 30 in terms of educational possessions held by children, the 4th worst infant mortality rate and 5th worst child mortality rate amongst industrialized nations we can do better.

When it comes to schools, it is time to hold America accountable as well for the educational apartheid where some children find themselves in schools with swimming pools, chemistry labs, and well prepared and supported teachers and others are in schools with few books, permanent substitutes for teachers, and crumbling facilities. For whatever reason we have allowed educational equity to be reduced to equalizing test scores. This is wrong, we can do better.

I am proud to be part of a school community that serves all comers, that provides for children who have very little, and that refuses to allow any child’s needs to go unnoticed. I am also pleased that a new campaign has been launched, Rethinking Learning, that addresses directly the issue of fairness and equity. It is past time that we return to the promise that all children will have equal access to a high quality education no matter where they live, what they have, or the color of their skin.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

2009-09-01T05:46:00.000-07:00

This year it happened on the second day of school.

I was told there was a young man waiting in the office to see me. My secretary gave me the heads up—he was 18, had moved in with someone in the district, and wanted to come to our school.

His glasses were broken and he needed a shave, and it didn’t help that he had a hard time looking me in the eye because of his nervousness. The story was one I have heard every school year in one form or another. Jeff (not his real name) had left home and landed in our backyard because of a girl he had met on a visit to the area. Living with her family, he wanted to come back to school and try to graduate.

Jeff was earnest enough; he claimed to have heard we were a good school, and he knew he could not make it without graduating from high school. Much to his credit he had come with a copy of his high school transcript. A good start, but we would still need a birth certificate and shot record, things he was not quite sure how to get.

Ten years ago the decision would be easy. Even though we do not have to enroll students over 18, especially if they are not ‘officially’ a resident, we would let him try. But now the rules have changed, and to let Jeff come to my high school puts our standing with the State of Ohio in jeopardy.

Jeff is potentially a drop out; not only has he experienced limited school success, he has yet to pass two of the five tests the state requires for graduation. If I admit him and he decides to quit, or does not pass the state tests, he will count against our graduation rate. If we don’t graduate 90% of our students we lose a point on our state report card…and with 85 kids in the class of 2010 Jeff could cost us dearly.

The problem is that federal and state policies are not focused on encouraging schools to take a chance on the Jeffs of the world. Why admit a student who will drag down the school’s chance of meeting AYP or staying out of ‘school improvement’ if you don’t have to? We get no credit for helping Jeff, but there will be a price to pay if we try and are not successful in getting him to graduate. Even though the first seventeen years of his education was somewhere else, we will now stand solely responsible for his success or failure.

This simply must change. All over the nation schools are playing tricks to avoid the punishments of state and federal accountability systems. Tricks like pushing out students who will struggle with testing programs, or encouraging potential dropouts to leave school voluntarily and enter into a GED program, or refusing to let Jeff come to school. Every one of these tricks, and dozens more, is an attempt to game the system to avoid punishment.

The Forum for Democracy and Education has recently written to Secretary Duncan in response to the ‘Race to the Top’ initiative and pointed out how the current accountability system works against schools that admit the Jeffs of the world. From our letter:

There has been much discussion about NCLB’s “push-out effect”—a phenomenon in which poor performing students are encouraged to leave school in order to improve schools’ Annual Yearly Progress performance. The Forum is deeply concerned that the Race to the Top guidance contains language that may unintentionally accelerate, rather than reverse, the push-out effect.

Specifically, the Race to the Top Fund considers the extent to which a State “has ambitious yet achievable annual targets for increasing graduation rates.” Although this is a laudable goal, the guidance does not provide complementary instructions that ask the State to set similar targets for decreasing dropout rates. With the focus on four-year graduation rates, there are many incentives not to keep or re-admit students who would take longer than four years to graduate, who struggle academically, are credit deficient, have left school due to pregnancy, homelessness, incarceration, illness, or other reasons. Without this instruction, the incentive to push poor performing students out of the system is magnified.

I can only hope that policy makers might actually listen this time around to the voices from the field who work every day with students like Jeff.

In the meantime you should know that we admitted Jeff, and his girlfriend (who had stopped out from high school a year ago) as well. If we manage to make all the right things happen they will both graduate this year and have a much better chance in life than they currently face. If things don’t break their (and our) way, we will take a 2.3% drop in our graduation rate and probably not make state standards. But at least we will have done the right thing, regardless of how the bureaucrats in Columbus and Washington see it.

Back to School and the Health Care Debate

2009-08-17T09:40:00.000-07:00

This week for the 18th time I’ll be out front of Federal Hocking High School welcoming students back to a new school year. If I ever needed a motivator for starting a school year the recent noisy, uncivil, and often unruly public debates about health care have me anxious to get back to school.

I don’t have a television, so I have missed much of the squawk-box invective around health care reform. But it has been hard to avoid the pictures of red-faced citizens screaming at elected officials or one another and congresspersons hung in effigy. Even more outrageous have been the signs claiming that health care reform proponents are Nazis or the oft-repeated lie that reform legislation includes some sort of ‘death panel’.

The most fundamental purpose of public education is to prepare our children to take their place as citizens in our democracy. We cannot determine whether or not they will go to college or what job they will hold. But we do know that every one of them will leave our school as fully enfranchised citizens of our democracy. Clearly our inability to hold civil debate about an issue as important as the health of our nation illustrates the need for public schools to make sure they act upon this most important of all missions.

Unfortunately, much of the public policy debate about public education leaves out any consideration of the higher order skills democratic life requires. Focusing solely on holding schools accountable for improving standardized test scores, state and federal policies have even worked to push out practices that focus on critical thinking, research, debate, and public speaking skills. I have to wonder if the screaming town hall participants, the name-calling radio and television personalities, and those that deliberately spread falsehoods in the name of democratic debate on health care did well on those tests but missed something else in school.

While we at FH do not always get it right, we try to make sure that inculcating the habits of mind and heart that make democratic life possible is at the center of our school. Our students have a voice in decisions from the hiring of teachers to what we serve in the cafeteria; coursework focuses on higher order thinking skills; our literacy initiative is not about test scores but about the reading and writing skills needed to make your voice heard; and in dozens of ways, big and small, our students share with the staff the management and welfare of our school. These are practices we share with other schools through networks like the Coalition of Essential Schools, The Five Freedoms Project, and the League of Democratic Schools.

While none of us in any of these schools doubts the effectiveness and importance of what we do around education for a democratic citizenry, we also know that when it comes to school accountability measures we will not be given any credit for this effort. All that matters in this hyper-testing environment are the standardized test scores…scores that may yield interesting comparisons, but are apparently not yielding thoughtful citizens.

Who Knew?

2009-08-12T06:24:00.001-07:00

Thanks to Libby Quaid of the Associated Press for taking the time to sort out the facts behind the myth-making that goes on around our public schools. While she points out that our schools could do better—no kidding, that’s why my staff and I put in so many hours on behalf of our kids and community—she makes it clear that the facts do not support many of the claims about our schools.

I’ll leave it to you to read her analysis, but a few highlights—

•On international comparisons, which, as Gerry Bracey often points out can be suspect, American school kids do as well as the Brits and Germans.
•Our kids may not go to school as many days as do kids in South Korea, but because of a longer school day they spend more time in school than do students in that and other nations.
•Our college graduation rates, while no where near good enough, hold up well internationally when you factor in things like that the US includes non-citizens in such rates and that many European countries have switched to three year degrees, easier to complete than four or six year degrees which are the norm here.
Who knew?

But on closer inspection, there are some other questions to be raised.

School days: The reason kids in some of the so-called high achieving nations have shorter school days is because those systems, which value teacher development, use part of the day for teams of teachers to work together on lessons and student achievement. The Forum has argued that time in the teacher day for staff development, cooperative lesson planning, and reviewing student achievement is necessary if our schools are to improve. Just adding time to the school year is not the answer, it is how that time is utilized.

More on school days: The nations we are so often compared to do not provide all the other things our schools provide—sports, bands, theater, etc. Rather, this is left to the larger community and the schools just focus on academics. Not a choice we have made, but something to remember when looking at time comparisons.

Tests: American kids do not do well on one of the international tests of math, Program for International Assessment (PISA), but do better on the Trends in International Math and Science Study (TIMSS). This should not be any surprise—PISA measures how well kids apply math to real-world problems. Given the single-minded focus on standardized test scores driven by NCLB it is no surprise kids do not do well on a test that looks at real world applications. Again, who knew?

Look, we all know that we can do better in our system of public education. But maybe we can find the solutions not in sloganeering from politicians but in the hard work of teachers in this nation right now.

The Forum, through our Democracy at Risk recommendations last spring set forth an ambitious plan for investing in teaching, high quality learning opportunities, performance assessment and community involvement. It was, as Representative George Miller, chair of the House Education Committee said, “Spot on….a good place to start (when discussing NCLB reauthorization).”

We agree.

I wish I had more time to work on this agenda in Washington. But today my staff and I are too busy as all of our seniors present their Graduation Portfolios which demonstrate how they are ready to leave our school as life-long learners, engaged citizens, and on the path to career or college. How I wish those folks inside the beltway could see what is going on inside our school.