The Six Standards of School Quality

(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

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

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

(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

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

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

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.