Not So Smart, ALEC

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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.