At Risk Students: Lessons from the Post High School Scene

Posted on March 9, 2014 by schooldog

 

Summary: Community colleges struggle with the same deficits in low income students that handicap their progress in elementary and high school. Here are a couple of very different approaches to this pivotal dilemma.

Serendipity sometimes informs the writer. Shortly after I argued in my last post that the real tale of low income student academic insufficiency was told outside the classroom – in their poorly informed self-perceptions, the paucity of an academic road map in their life experience, and in their set of social skills less than well trained to school and job success – along comes an article in the latest Atlantic which in effect makes the same argument in a community college context. “How to Escape the Community College Trap” by Ann Hulbert sketches a program at the Borough of Manhattan Community College which provides support structures crafted specifically to bring low income students over such difficult “soft” psychological ground on their way to a two year diploma.

In the Hulbert story it is with a shock of recognition to read of the struggles of low income students in the standard community college that so strongly echo those which I saw in my own low income high school students, as though a karmic reminder that we revisit the same issues over and over until we resolve them.

The national community college graduation rate is barely a third within six years, and in urban community colleges, presumably with a higher concentration of low income students, the three year graduation rate is 16%. (Guess the problem is not being solved in elementary or high school.)

The Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) at Borough of Manhattan Community College has set out to solve the problem, and by returns of the last two and a half years, is on pace to meet or exceed their goal of program participant graduation rate of 50% within three years. To make the point blunt, note the national and urban graduation rates just cited.

The strategies are not rocket science, and well recognizable by experts and lay folk alike, but sparsely applied outside of the ASAP program. Required for program participants is a “College Success Seminar” which deals with such standards as goal setting, study habits and more generally communication and life skills. Tutoring and remedial classes are heavily used as needed. Mandatory advising sessions provide the core of support and a primary human relationship in the belly of this beast, and are the hub via which various strategies are administered.

Each advisor has approximately 120 students on their case load, which at first blush seems a lot. By way of contrast a typical high school counselor has between 400 and 500 students or more. From where I sit 120 students would give me far more leeway to consider myself effective in my job, whereas with 400+ students I was leaping from hole to hole on the dike.

Incentives include the payment of tuition and books, in recognition that one major barrier to completion of college is money. Metro transportation cards are distributed as students demonstrate continued commitment and progress. Most subtly, by setting its program goal at what initially might seem astronomically high, ASAP sends a message that the standards for its students are high as well.

In fact, the program seems to serve as a surrogate parent, with all the goading, caring, support and problem solving the concept of parent usually evokes. I like particularly Hulbert’s rendering of the ASAP implicit philosophy:

“Students, especially the least prepared ones, don’t just need to learn math or science; they need to learn how to navigate academic and institutional challenges more broadly, and how to plot a course – daily, weekly, monthly – toward long term success. Pushy parents, an asset many of them don’t have, could tell you what it takes to make that happen: a mix of enabling and persistent nudging.”

Of course this successful venture costs money, an extra $3900 per student per year. The argument here is one of pay now, or pay later in the form of welfare or incarceration costs, not to mention the costs to the economy of the failure to produce enough workers with sophisticated new economy skills.

So the ASAP program engages the same elements I saw restraining the success of my low income high school students. First and foremost, each student is able to form a strong bond with a supportive professional who has at hand a variety of remedial tools and incentive systems designed to keep the boat afloat, and who stand ready to remind students they have made a commitment to themselves and to the program, and can’t quit when the going gets tough, which it mostly does. The program by this report fights for its students, much as would a dogged and maybe somewhat enabling parent.

The net effect is to keep students pointed in the right direction, and to breathe in to them faith in self, which translates into self-perception as an effective student. Skills needed to fill in the picture are provided by remedial classes, tutoring, and the College Success Seminar, through which advisors address some of the subtle social and communication skills needed in the middle class environment of school and job market exchange.

This kind of support enters through a radically different metaphorical portal and in altered form as reported in a recent TIME magazine article by Rana Foroohar, “The School That Will Get You a Job.”

Rather than releasing even its graduates to the diaspora finding their way unguided into local institutions of high learning, at the Sara E. Goode STEM Academy in Chicago the Pathways in Technology Early College High School program, or P-Tech for short, combines in one program the two years of technical training after high school with the high school, and thereby guides its students more seamlessly to job ready two year technical educations.

The six year high school innovation at Goode provides a useful parallel to the ASAP experiment in Manhattan, because it address the same demographic, namely low income students during their entry into post-secondary education, in the case of Goode, specifically vocational education.

The trick at Goode seems to be the presence of IBM, as a spiritual, financial, and curricular partner of the Chicago schools, for a concept that had its first litmus test in a school in Brooklyn. Though IBM is a corporate luminary, it turns out according to the TIME article that wherever there is “deep” business involvement in schools student outcomes are “hugely improved.” Such an infusion of context and deepened curriculum appears to give a weight to the opportunity students perceive, and early returns from Goode, as well as a predecessor school in Brooklyn, are promising.

Oh, yes, IBM goes one step further to guarantee a job upon graduation. Now we’re talking. Shades of those programs we hear of from time to time where a wealthy person promises a college education for students (again low income) who finish high school, in the process raising significantly the finish rate for the kids under that umbrella.

Aside from the Wow value of these arrangements, it is useful to speculate about the underlying psychological mechanisms traversed by kids who demographically we can expect to struggle, when they come to Goode and have a better chance of success. First off, it seems to me that arrival at Goode may change self-perception about the possibility of success. The individual has arrived at a school with a clear ramp to a good job, and so enrolled kids can own that possibility.

Secondly, though these students will arrive with a decidedly mixed bag of readiness and skill set, the perception that they have entered an arena of real possibility can in turn have a clarifying effect on attention to task, and leave their minds more open to the teaching of “soft” psychological skills we have been discussing, as well as to doggedness in “hardcore” academic tasks.

Finally, the longitudinal nature of the six years gives the teachers and other staff at Goode a longer term opportunity to effect these transformations both academically and in the various dimensions of psychological habit.

I have to believe that Sara Goode and other schools of this ilk address issues of personal and social infrastructure in something of the manner of the ASAP program – that is, by advisement, the teaching of study habits, and the like. In fact relatively short shrift is given to these realities in the TIME article other than to acknowledge the “the curriculum also emphasizes the soft skills of presentation, self-marketing, and communication that better off kids…..take for granted.” But the guarantee of a job and the presence of an estimable corporate presence may substitute for some of these more traditional support networks.

It is clear that P-Tech will cost more money than the status quo, as does the ASAP program in Manhattan.

The aim of the P-Tech program is to bring along far more students into two year technical success, students who might have shown up in a technical college but not have graduated, as well as a significant number who would never have matriculated at all. From a fiscal point of view P-Tech simply extends high school to six years at public expense, with the public benefit of raising potentially chronic low income folk into the middle class, where they will contribute to the economy at a relatively elevated level. Win for student, win for society.

Here we are again at “money” and social investment. To bring more graduates than currently enter the mainstream into economically useful technical competence will cost more public investment.

Around the turn to the twentieth century the ethic of the Progressive era led to rising graduation rates from high school and in turn increased public education costs, as well as investments in a new network of vocational schools.

A similar leap forward in educational funding occurred in the aftermath of World War II, when the demands of the emerging more technical industrial period required a more skilled workforce. High school became compulsory.

Now the historical forces gather to impel another leap forward in fiscal commitment to our kids. The forces of globalization, increased competition for jobs, and the parallel acceleration of technology in this time compel us to think long and hard about the hazards of not funding forward reaching reforms in how we educate children.

Finally, this conversation begs the question, if we can see some resolution of low income student struggles in programs such as ASAP and P-Tech, could resources applied in parallel ways in elementary or middle school years be equally or more effective, and in the long run less draining of public coffers?

Just asking.

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At Risk Low Income Students: Readiness Is All

Posted on February 23, 2014 by schooldog

Summary: In the race to improve the academic skills of low income students various “soft” skills need address as well. Student self-perception and personal vision, possession of a viable road map to success, and social skills pertinent to socioeconomic advancement may determine success or failure of a more narrow focus on academic skills only.

In significant measure reform in the schools in is a question of how to bring the academic performance of low income students up to the level of their more economically enfranchised fellow students. Across the political spectrum the current debate about income inequality in the long run must also be about how to use schools to improve the job readiness of low income kids.

In my experience as a high school counselor over many years, I have always been astonished by the elusive inability to thrive academically apparent in low income students of mine who have otherwise amply demonstrated the wit and intelligence necessary to flourish in a school setting. The repartee among some of these students, the nimble give and take in elaborate rituals of social one-upmanship, frankly often left me standing in their wake wondering what the heck had just transpired. Apparently I, child of the middle class, had a different set of skills.

Such exposure has left me with the conviction that somewhere in the nexus of perception, habit, set of social skills, and self-image lies a composite low income student less of a fit to success in schools than their middle class counterparts.  Turned into a question, how does one craft interventions that will redirect the energies of kids like this, who desire to be successful despite behavior indicating the contrary?

We are advised by controversies in the social science community to be wary of arguments that subtly or overtly “blame the victim” in describing the cultural byways behind low income student difficulty to thrive in school.

In fact, the “culture of poverty” discussion has revived in recent years, however with advisement against such normative statements. For those interested in more academic discussions, I recommend “Reconsidering Culture and Poverty” in the May 2010 edition of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

Clearly, first of all, the heterogeneity of low income folk predicts correctly that many low income students do succeed in school. The pertinent question is why do some succeed and others do not.

For those who do not I tend to focus on a few characteristics relatively easy to extract from a much more complex web.

First, to be successful, one must perceive oneself as capable of being successful in school. Hope is a variant of the same point. With some regularity, low income students who do not succeed in school also have a parent or parents who haven’t succeeded in conventional ways.

Children indelibly take on the patterns of the adults around them. I look no further than myself to understand the preponderant influence of parental experience on the child. I found myself majoring in economics in college largely I now think because my father worked in a bank, and so outside my awareness my father contoured my own choice of major. I chose the familiar, or can it even be said that I chose?

In the crunch of my work as a counselor, I felt the most important intervention I could do with many low income kids was to help them envision themselves as a successful student first in high school and then in higher education of some kind. When they first entered my office, too many could not do so.

Secondly, to be successful, one has to have strategies that can lead to success. So a student who can see themselves as capable may still not understand the value of goal setting or how to study on one end, or even how to apply to higher education and financial aid on the other, and so shut down because no viable road appears in their future vision.

Third on my particular list, and without delving into a much more complicated discussion, there are cultural habits within middle class America that are a fit for success not only in school, but in the subsequent larger job market. Personal patterns that confer membership in a lower economic class setting, by contrast, can simply be different than those that confer success in school and in the later wider job market.

For example, in a program worth paying attention to in my former school, adult mentors have been careful to teach their male charges to shake an adult’s hand in greeting, while looking them in the eye.

Though these issues exist alongside the impacted test skills that schools struggle to raise, they are very different, and have long been included in the purview of quality teachers.

In turn these quality teachers – and counselors and administrators alongside them – have taken low income children under their wing, and in one way or another helped them to understand those visions, those skills, and those habits that can give shape to vague dreams. Unfortunately, in the current school test obsessed climate, it is more difficult for school officials to act in these remedial, time honored ways. But the need for such attentions remains, and may explain why nationally, despite over a decade of fervent reform, test scores remain sluggish.

Remedy can once again exist within schools. While the hire of more teachers and more counselors fit this bill, creative solutions for some purposes can also cost less. The Harlem Children’s Zone has flourished by intervening at an early age in a family’s life, in large part by coordinating existing social services with that of the schools. In different ways the Logan Square schools in Chicago use parents as mentors. King County’s Treehouse uses young adults as “Educational Specialists” to form relationships with troubled foster youth. The Seattle schools have used Americorps/ City Year volunteers to improve the poor attendance of at risk kids.

Within special education programs, instructional aids help with instruction, but also form relationships with kids that keep them going in school.

When the Washington State Legislature contemplates the State Supreme Court imperative to more fully fund schools, I suggest we look also in the direction of bringing on board more of these types of relationship mentors, as well as counselor and teacher types. Similar to some medical models, teams of counselors, teachers, administrators, adult mentors of various access, and instructional aids might work together to address the various “soft” psychological and sociological issues that together tell the real tale about the wobbly attachment of low income youth who are at risk of failure to thrive in school.

Counselors may deal with or refer the more deeply seated issues of trauma of various kinds that surface as more is learned about a given student. But in many cases, the attentions of less trained mentors chosen for their interpersonal skills and for their own school success may bring a sympathy and a relationship in which low income students can see their own positive future reflected, and from which to learn how to navigate the strategic skills and the habits that will get them there.

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Schools and Politics: The Focus on Income Inequality Is Good News for School Reform

Posted on February 8, 2014 by schooldog

Summary: The rising political focus on income inequality brings renewed scrutiny to the role of school reform for low income students, and a cautious opening to political consensus.

Many low income students I encountered as a high school counselor confounded me with their obvious wit and intelligence on the one hand, and on the other their unwillingness or inability to prepare in school to the dimensions of their clear native intellect.

While the reasons are multidimensional, statistically we know from test and other data that a disproportionate percentage of students who struggle in school are from low income families. As a result, a typical high school counselor works disproportionately with low income kids as I did, because high school counselors spend much the better portion of their time with kids with academic and sometimes behavioral profiles that need near term intervention.

While I also had a healthy share of low income students who navigated their way successfully through high school and on to college, some with the guarantee of tuition from Washington State’s College Bound program, the question remains what it is in the cultural milieu in some families where money is hard to come by that seems to inadequately prepare their children for school success. The scenarios are complex.

We know, for example, from neuroscience that chronic parental stresses such as those of putting bread on the table can essentially be transmitted to kids unintentionally and hinder cognitive growth. The good news is that in the proper supportive environment such early deficits can be overcome, so plastic is the brain’s neurochemistry. In more multifaceted terms, so goes the argument for early childhood education. Class origin need not imply destiny.

As the conversation in state capitals and Capitol Hill trends toward income inequality, with even conservatives now tentatively staking out proactive policy thinking, it is well to remember that the national conversation about school reform, in the end, is about reaching low income children, and figuring out ways via schools to bring their minds to full ticking.

From a public policy point of view, full skill competence is critical to an alert and fulfilled citizenry and to a technical and fast moving employment universe. By extension, a broad base of this set of skills is one remedy to the dysfunctional inertia of a growing underclass.

By this logic, focus on income inequality again highlights school reform.

The discussion about income inequality puts on display some of the usual political litmus patterns. There is the move to raise the minimum wage as the quickest means of reducing the gap, generally but not exclusively advocated by some on the left.

Job retraining for adults and restructuring of the tax code are in the mix, the former established by state and federal programming and incentives (and really an enhancement of programs long in place), and the latter as a means to generate the funding that (let us not kid ourselves) will be needed. There seems some openness to these ideas across a broad ideological spectrum.

There are rumblings on the right about giving young people tools with which to bring by their own efforts a closing of the income gap, as preferred over initiatives that are viewed as giving handouts that would tether recipients to government dependency. Since the left has consistently advocated for school funding, and has had to curtail such spending in the face of political realities, we may finally be coming full circle to a politically common focus on schools.

Schools become one important social nexus through which we, right and left, address in a long term way the income inequality that vexes the country. By the way, not a new idea in American history.

It is worth pointing out that the federal effort to improve health care and to bring poor families into the health insurance fold is a spiritual and practical cousin of educational reform.

The Obamacare that those on the right deride is another of those weapons against income inequality, via its intended impact on the health of low income children.  We know by multitudinous studies that an unhealthy kid does more poorly in school than a healthy one, and so falls behind in studies, and becomes a case study in the need for reform of the health care system.

In short, reform in schools and in health care share a common clientele, our low income brethren, whose full enfranchisement both the economy and a healthy social fabric require. Thus goes the argument for making investment in schools and health care now with an eye to the future. Those willing to think long term should embrace it; Wall Street and corporate employers may well see the logic but will balk at the price tag; patriots of various stripes will find a lot to like; and humanity is served.

Potentially fatal battles over revenue stream obviously remain, but it is refreshing that on some policy perspectives around income inequality the partisans have rational common ground open to multiple perspectives.

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School Reform Via Targeted Hires and “Big Data”

Posted on January 15, 2014 by schooldog

Summary: The use of “big data” and derivative algorithms to predict which applicants will be successful hires in companies may prove useful in the identification of quality teacher candidates.

The fact that 46% of new teachers leave the profession within five years continues to revisit my personal screen, and is one of those conundrums that never seem to disappear because so compelling in a scratch that scab kind of way. It is a factoid that seems to define school struggles in this country as much as the poor match to the highly technical economy of our schools’ STEM graduate output, or our chronically mediocre test results vis a vis other first world nations.

What seems obvious is that there is somehow a very poor fit between candidates who choose teaching as a career, how they are hired, perhaps how they are supported, and the nature of this difficult work.

So drops in my lap the December Atlantic with Don Peck’s inquiry into some game changers in corporate hiring practices, “They’re Watching You at Work.” Though the title and some of the discussion has eerily Big Brother like connotations, in fact the new use of very large accretions of data (“big data”) to predict who will be a successful employee is one reflection of technological prowess in such contemporary creepiness as Google’s offering up of consumer goods based on one’s spending patterns and demographic profile, or the NSA gathering bites well beyond gigs in order to isolate terrorist patterns (which could be dangerous domestically in the hands of the next J. Edgar).

Elements in the private sector are exploring evolving technologies in order to survive and earn profit at a much more cutting edge pace than the public sector, generally speaking. So it is useful to take a look at corporate experiments in hiring, because not all is well and efficient on that front, either, the reputed superiority of the private sector as trumpeted on the right notwithstanding.

According to a study quoted in Peck’s article conducted by the Corporate Executive Board, “nearly a quarter of all new hires leave their company within a year,” and “hiring managers wish they’d never extended an offer to one out of every five members on their team.” In the corporate world profit margins get squeezed; in schools it is not hard to see the exodus of teachers as a drag on test scores, and on other softer measures of academic “profit” in student progress.

Game simulations have long been used to prepare leaders and workers to function in subsequent real time exercise of their function, and to anticipate scenarios that may later have to be dealt with, whether in a military or in a business context.

After decades of experience with continually more sophisticated video and other computer games, it comes as no surprise that such devices are being used to predict the quality of potential hires. Knack, a Bay Area start up, markets a suite of games designed by neuroscientists, psychologists, and data scientists to tease out a set of sophisticated skills in potential hires. The data generated by the games can reveal such characteristics as “how long you hesitate before taking every action, the sequence of actions you take, and how you solve problems” among other factors. The assemblage can be used to “analyze your creativity, your persistence, your capacity to learn quickly from mistakes, your ability to prioritize, and even your social intelligence and personality.” Ultimately, “an assessment of your potential as a leader or an innovator.” If accurately divined, would not any organization in a hiring position, whether public or private, be interested in such data?

A project underway at Shell shows promise in the use of these games to focus in on employees whose intellectual and creative byways are most apt to produce innovative ideas for the good of the company.

The wag in me can’t help wonder how such live wires might function in the top down environment of a school system, but that is another story, other than to comment that a change is one element of a system usually requires adaptations in other parts of the system. The hierarchy in schools would have to adapt into an environment able to nurture the innovation Shell actively seeks out.

While Shell is looking at sophisticated qualities that typify highly pivotal employment, this new generation of human resource tools have shown more clear market success in less complex hires, specifically for such positions as retail sales and customer service. It is here that “big data,” the accumulation of mammoth registries of information on human behavior and employment (which are so large as to neutralize statistical sample bias) can be used effectively to predict which job applicants possess the qualities that echo those of previous incumbents who flourished in similar positions.

Note that the same growth in computing capacity and data storage that makes the current NSA questions even possible has squired this generation of employment prediction and made it more reliable.

Xerox has hired yet another Bay Area firm, Evolv, in order to upgrade the quality of their hourly hires for positions in retail sales and customer service. By comparison with the measurement of intangibles like creativity, the productivity of hourly workers is relatively susceptible to the sales yardstick, and, as Peck says, there are a lot of these workers to make up a statistically reliable sample, from which algorithms that make hiring predictions can be fashioned. Evolv has developed just such a data base of workers and their characteristics, which in turn can be used to measure an applicant’s fit to the set of qualities known to be deployed by previously successful retail sales people, for example. (Not surprisingly, one key characteristic is persuasiveness, but also decisiveness and spatial orientation.)

The measurement of success is a critical ingredient, as followers of the teacher evaluation debate are only too aware. Sales figures are one thing; the influence of a teacher on a student’s learning is more elusive, even if steps toward using academic test scores within a more broad perspective seem valid to me. Test scores are relatively easy to use because quantifiable; more ineffable aspects of teacher influence and quality less so, and so either get left out of the conversation or seem artifacts of overly romantic notions on the part of teacher partisans. In the current climate we have trouble talking about what we cannot quantify.

For example, in the December 14 Seattle Times, Anacortes, Washington superintendent Mark Wenzel notes the importance of hope in low income students, probably as a part of sense of personal efficacy, and relates his district’s efforts to incubate this elusive variable in its students. Similarly, though Head Start cannot be shown to raise its alumni’s grades or test scores, its graduates do graduate from high school at a higher rate than otherwise, and enter post-secondary education at a higher rate than their non-Head Start peers. Please tell me how we enter such subtle but critical factors into teacher hire algorithms that translate into long term outcome improvement.

Closer to the interpersonal texture of the schoolhouse staff is the work of Sandy Pentland, director of the Human Dynamics Lab at MIT. He has pioneered work with a kind of socio-emotional “fit-bit” that subjects wear and which records information about the quality of interactions with others, such as degree of empathy, the frequency of conversation, both talking and listening, and so forth. According to Donald Peck, Pentland’s purpose was to gauge the interpersonal qualities of productive teams by comparison with less productive teams in an organizational context. A significant portion of a team’s success, he concluded, can be predicted simply by the number of face to face exchanges team members have. Moreover, successful leaders “circulate actively, give their time democratically to others, engage in brief but energetic conversations, and listen as much as they talk.”

Pentland and colleagues are working up apps that will help team members and team leaders evaluate their interpersonal quotient, with an eye to upgrading both their own performance and that of the team.

For schools, which in important ways can be defined as a set of purposeful interactions between people, such tools might prove very useful, between peers, in teacher-student exchanges, and as a measure of how fluidly information moves upward in the chain of command, as well as downward, a kind of anti-bureaucratic measuring stick.

So, with the caveat that the set of skills that makes a good teacher are more complex, and the outcomes more textured and therefore more elusive of measurement than those of a sales person, what progress is there on the teacher hiring front? For there to be algorithms that accurately finger a high quality hire, we would have to have isolated and be able to measure the set of skills that produce clearly identified outcomes, which themselves would have to be quantified in some kind of measurable form. Again, it is clear why test scores have gained such ascendance. At least they can fit into a rough algorithm.

75% of professionals in the game could probably agree on 75% of what makes a good teacher, and the same professionals could probably agree 75% on a desirable set of outcomes. It’s the conversion of these factors into useable instruments that puts the effort to rationalize the process in its infancy.

Doesn’t mean some aren’t trying.

According to Benjamin Herold in an Education Week blog post, “Companies Offer Big Data Tools to Predict Teacher Candidates’ Impact,” there are at least two companies, TeacherMatch and Hanover Research, that have created and marketed teacher hiring instruments that echo some of the mining of “big data” common to the work of Evolv and Knack. The outcome portion of the algorithms they have developed are limited to “student achievement,” but if accurately predictive they may well be a huge boost in the hiring and hopefully the retention of capable teachers.

TeacherMatch in particular is based on a research project conducted by the University of Chicago and the Northwest Evaluation Association as lead entities, and which sorted years of information that link teacher candidate qualities to presumably test score based positive outcomes.

The conclusion of the research on what makes a good teacher candidate? Hardly revolutionary. The attributes of the desirable applicant are, according to Herold, “qualifications, including the selectivity of the college or university a candidate attended; attitude, including indicators related to a candidate’s penchant for persevering through difficult challenges; cognitive ability, as measured on tests of content and knowledge; and teaching skills.”

The devil seems to be in the details. How does one measure a “penchant for persevering,” as well as other items in “attitude?” And how does one evaluate “teaching skills” by other than observation, preferably over time? I admit I am surprised that some measure of interpersonal intelligence is not prominent. All of these characteristics seem to pose difficult translations for the algorithm screening instruments of the sort utilized by Evolv and Knack, but TeacherMatch and its similar competitor Paragon K-12 (from Hanover Research) seem to be worth watching as they dive into the real world of school systems. With their research heritage, one assumes that their algorithms will undergo revision with more refined data.

That said, the innovative work crafted in the private sector by Knack and Evolv, and by Sandy Pentland are worthy of experiments in adaptation to the school community. Pentland’s work clearly delves into capacity for teamwork, which is crucial in a well-functioning school. Might there be a correlation between a successful school and the pattern of communication and teamwork it displays? Schools would do well to patch in Knack’s work in identifying hires with a capacity for innovation, and Evolv seems to have done the most complete work of the group in moving from hire to outcome, albeit with more circumscribed role hires.

Evolv has even moved beyond their pre-hire assessments to ongoing evaluation of aspects of the new hires’ life within the company. According to Don Peck again, this includes evaluation “about not only performance and duration of service but also who trained the employees; who has managed them; whether they were promoted to a supervisory role, and how quickly; how they performed in that role; and why they eventually left.” Simply the list of the types of data Evolv looks at would be instructive for schools whose personnel sophistication is generally on a significantly lower level.

Time isn’t really on our side, but the evolution of hiring instruments will take time – another reminder that the reform of American schools, and their transition into 21st century organizations, involves a long term conversion of a culture.

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Schools and Culture: Voices from Unaccustomed Quarters

Posted on December 30, 2013 by schooldog

Summary: Voices from the business community and the Catholic Church give hope that the promise of “compassionate conservatism” will come to fruition, and eventually bipartisan funding will crystalize to supplement the educational growth of low income children.

The populace is increasingly restless as the income gap widens. Those other than the very well-off are floundering. Pope Francis isn’t the only one paying attention.

A small but growing segment of the business community is taking notice and vocalizing concern:  might it be true that the well-being of the one citizen depends on the well-being of the many? What might this dawning consciousness augur for those students in our schools whose deficits beg solution?

Chrystia Freeland in the current Atlantic profiles a group of CEO’s who call themselves the B Corps, presumably the “Business Corps.” This “corps” sees the widening income disparity in American society and recognizes the development as “unsustainable,” and not because their markets are diminished by the poverty of buying power in a reduced middle class. (But probably that, too.)

We may have here some closet bleeding heart liberals, but B Corps folk, along with those Freeland asserts make up a larger international movement, make the case that sustainability in a business context goes beyond environmentalism, or treating employees well and fairly (though the latter is a pivotal tactic). Rather, they seem to suspect any current business practice which widens the income disparity undermines the long term viability of a business. They have eyes on the horizon as the critical measure of a sustainable strategy, rather than on the short term gain.

Even though their argument is couched in the prosperity of the long run bottom line, in the practical effect of their stance they are the spiritual successors of business folk of the mid twentieth century, who saw their role not only as capitalists, but as responsible to the welfare of society as a whole, an ethic that seems to have dwindled in corporate boardrooms of this day.

The B Corps folk may be playing the role of the canary to future Roosevelts. Both Teddy and FDR, scions of capitalist wealth, contended with the excesses of capitalism, and threats to it by the rising clamor in their time of the disenfranchised. In Teddy’s case, the rise of unionism expressed the outrage at the contempt with which the barons of the Industrial Revolution treated those upon whom their wealth was founded, the workers of the union movement. FDR, faced with the essential collapse of capitalism in the mud of its own rampant excesses, paradoxically saved capitalism by sowing the social salvation of the New Deal.

On a more contemporary note, Ms.Freeland in her article refers to Dominic Barton, the global managing director at McKinsey, and David Blood, a former head of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, who take the concerns of the B Corps folk one step further. According to Freeland, “both men worry that if capitalism doesn’t deliver for the middle class, then the middle class will eventually opt for something else.”  Men seditious in their own way who echo the historical worries of the aristocratic Roosevelts.

On the topic of sedition, Jerry Large in the Seattle Times speculates that “America May Be Reaching Its Limit on Economic Inequality.” He cites Pope Francis’ assertion in widely quoted recent remarks that the unfettered market of “trickle down” economics, still in vogue in quarters on the right, “has never been supported by the facts (in paraphrase).” Remember that this pope, though a thoroughly savvy and modern communicator, is leader of a still profoundly conservative church. So, in the secular version of his religious context, where the “trickle down” conceit is the hand maiden to unfettered markets, Pope Francis by extension is consummately a dissident.

Large gets even better. He gives ink to Ron Unz, publisher of the “The American Conservative,” and a proponent of raising the California minimum wage to $12 an hour.

Unz argues that the minimum wage should be raised, because doing so would tend to move the many low wage folks off various social welfare programs and more ready to fend for themselves. He thereby remains true to his conservative principles, but is only a tick away from acknowledging that the brand of conservatism that celebrates unregulated free markets is exposing deeply of its flaws, which need redress. Kudos to him for the courage of his breaking ranks, and for his coincident linkage with the B Corps executives, with whom he gives credence to plaints from the deep working class, and so moves the national conversation a tad more toward reality, which in this case means left.

Parenthetically, Seattle’s Councilwoman elect, socialist Kshama Sawant, as well as other Seattle politicians, propose the same $15 an hour minimum wage recently passed in the Seattle suburb of SeaTac – yeah, I know, and the state has now legalized marijuana and has been out front on gay marriage. We will wave to you from the future.

Linked to the minimum wage, economists note weakness to the economy when the middle and lower classes cannot purchase the goods of a consumer society.

In addition, national conversation with some legs has focused on the critical periods of learning in the very young, and the correlative need to prepare less advantaged low income kids better for school via enhanced early childhood education, thereby to better prepare them to be players as adults in a competitive employment environment. This is the same employment environment in which employers lament shortages in the skilled labor force.

Poorly prepared students remain dependent on the broader economy as adults. It is a simple equation.

These dynamics taken together may reflect a dawning awareness in the culture that economic and social patterns are akimbo and, yes, unsustainable in a society that promises all citizens opportunity and which has a self-image of economic vigor.

In the longer run these voices may signal an evolution to a society more ready to properly fund education for lagging children, and job training for the adults, and in general a safety net that adjusts for misfortune and a race stacked against those less fortunate.

These are crumbs of good news for our low income and middle income families and their children, who must however struggle with the hand currently they play.

Hopefully these nascent ripples are more than the feints of history. Even the possibility gives hope to beleaguered partisans of the low income young that someday the cavalry will arrive.

 

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At Risk Students: Parent Volunteers to the Rescue

Posted on December 10, 2013 by schooldog

Summary: Parent volunteers in schools can provide the critical attention needed to alter the academic trajectory of at risk kids. The daunting organizational tasks required, however, are often beyond the funding capabilities of schools themselves. One neighborhood association in Chicago has filled the breach.

The making of truly community schools, particularly on the elementary level, in which parents are frequent contributors in the classroom and are well melded into the fabric of their kids’ school, has long been a goal of particularly urban school districts throughout the US. Studies have long identified a benefit to student test scores in those schools that have managed the feat, as testified in another of the Seattle Times’ useful Education Lab articles, by Linda Shaw, this time focused on Chicago’s Logan Square Neighborhood Association and the schools in which that community organization manages targeted parent volunteerism in local schools.

While the benefits of parent volunteerism in the Chicago example include the proverbial parental eye on student wayward tendencies and the sense of growth in the volunteers themselves, which can only have a role model influence on the sons and daughters, the more profound effect has evolved from the pairing of laboring students with parent cum mentors in a consistent relationship geared toward academic progress. This, to a degree that a single teacher simply cannot manage herself with twenty five or even thirty students in an elementary classroom.

Contemporary studies of the schools involved have confirmed that the more intensive relationships the parents have provided have led to improved math and reading scores for the kids involved.

To promote such relationships is to get at the heart of remedy for struggles in schools of our at risk populations. Cheaper than instructional aides, and equally committed, it is a wonder than more communities have not found ways to utilize parents in a similarly intensive fashion.

Parents have long raised money for specific needs of their schools, particularly in suburban precincts, often targeted toward the art, music, or sports programs that have been axed as a consequence of misguided budget battles. But the integration of parent energies and perspective into the classroom itself has been an elusive goal for a number of reasons.

In my own urbanizing suburban high school, for example, the integration of parent volunteers into the classroom on any meaningful level properly would take time and resources our school simply didn’t have. In an environment where resources and time were required in testing schemes and academic improvement regimens required by state and federal authorities there was no room at the inn.

Moreover, many of the parents that we would have wanted to attract, from our growing Latino constituency for example, either themselves struggled with English or lacked extended formal education of their own, and so felt themselves outsiders, foreigners, to their own kids’ school. Fledgling outreach efforts in Spanish, such as those of a fellow counselor and administrator around issues of college application, were appreciated by parents, but fell short of the kind of a fundamental entry into the school culture attained in this particular Chicago example.

The difference in Chicago is the presence since 1964of the Logan Square Neighborhood Association, a multipurpose community organization (ghost of Saul Alinsky?) that has in recent years been spotlighted for its success in partnership with Chicago schools to bridge just these gaps in relationship between school and parent community, and ultimately to provide critical relationships in learning between adult community and students at risk.

Parenthetically, the vitality of the LSNA over time, and with its apparent birth in the Civil Rights movement, raises interesting speculation about the link between political empowerment realized and ensuing grass roots solutions to local problems.

Persistent outreach to parents that seems not to take “no” for an answer is the first step. For the awkwardness of immigrant parents in entering the school house, training on school culture is the beginning overture, together with empowering messages about the importance of the leadership and partnership the parents can provide the school.

Moreover, the Association goes beyond the immediate school volunteer level to urge parents to pursue their own future, which has often proven catalyst for parent volunteers to themselves train formally as educators, some of whom now work in the same schools they once entered so tentatively as a parent. Such telling alumni commitment one assumes further deepens the culture of volunteerism in the school, and in turn provides role models with whom newly recruited parents can identify.

I like particularly the sophisticated Logan Square Association notion that teachers will learn as much from parents as parents will learn from the teachers. In my experience, one seldom teaches another anything of significance without learning something in return. In the Chicago instance, this respect of the parent community in the face of their own self dismissal is I think truly transformative.

With abundant anecdotal evidence, and research support that goes back years and still accumulating, why is it that such successful parent volunteer programming has not blossomed more widely? As Shaw in her article notes, “The program involves a lot of organizational work — recruiting and training parents, arranging for background checks, mediating conflicts that arise and raising money to cover the parents’ stipends, their training and to hire a part-time coordinator for each school.” In short, there is a whole organizational apparatus exterior to the school that supports this useful work – it does not appear solely out of good intentions and wishful thinking – and has given pause to some communities seeking to replicate the Logan Square program. Not every community has a vigorous neighborhood association that can play the administrative role.

Foundations and government agencies and the schools themselves have funded the Logan Square program, which begs the question, why are not legislatures, themselves under fire for the struggles of their state’s schools, more eager to loosen the purse strings for such programs that provide a benefit for a fraction of the cost of other initiatives?  To its credit, the Illinois legislature has ticketed one million dollars to expand the program. Though it is difficult from Shaw’s article to tell the cost of the Logan Square program in each school it affects, it does appear to be well under the cost of one teacher, salary and benefits. Such a deal for 15 to 20 parent mentors who spend ten hours a week each to connect with kids whose future desperately needs their attention.

 

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At Risk Kids: Wrap Around Services for Troubled Folk

Posted on November 29, 2013 by schooldog

Summary: The work of one non-profit and one Seattle Schools program showcase the intensive human support of at risk kids needed to bring those troubled kids along into the academically successful mainstream.

Fine hors d’oeurves and good wine greeted us at the door of the downtown Seattle financial institution, Northern Trust, one evening recently, courtesy of restaurateur Tom Douglas. Inside, the conversation was not about finances or the culinary contributions of an elite world, but about the welfare of foster care kids in King County.  All present, financiers and chefs, social workers and donors, were focused on bringing to high school completion, college and beyond, the many foster kids in the county at high risk of dropout and ensuing marginal lives.

My wife and I had been invited by the folks of the nonprofit foster support organization, Treehouse. The event was their bash as a connector of those who have supported their services and those who work with the organization, both within and without, and for all hands as an update on some of the current nuts and bolts work of Treehouse.

On the panel that focused the event were individuals who worked directly with foster kids in Seattle, all with direct or indirect Treehouse connection. A couple were “Educational Specialists,” young professionals employed by Treehouse whose daily mission it was to make consistent contact in school with a caseload of perhaps 25-30 foster kids, and facilitate them through the various crises and discouragements kids down on their luck are prone to. Nineteen such workers focus on foster kids in schools countywide, about 400 kids at most recent count, but a number projected to grow toward 500.

Another panel member was formally a Seattle Schools counselor, dubbed a “Check and Connect Mentor” by Treehouse, whose salary was funded part time by Treehouse in order to provide a point person inside the school membrane to work foster kid issues. Twenty similarly funded and tasked colleagues populate other schools in King County.

Others on the panel were social workers tracking caseloads from the state foster apparatus.

All workers assigned to each kid have regular conversations with one another, toward resolution of problems large and small that cropped up in specific lives, whether of a school nature, or in life outside of school.

One Treehouse goal is to improve the on time graduation rate from high school of local foster kids from the currently dismal 35%. For all the angst about the graduation rate of low income kids, or African American or Latino or Native American kids, this group rate is the most deplorable, and no wonder. It is the group that has faced the most relentless barrage of slings and arrows that society can toss at our young ones, and still be trudging along.

Treehouse provides foster kids the proverbial “wraparound” support, from school clothing to supplies to counseling, and the like, though to my taste the human intensive support of the Educational Specialists and the Check and Connect Mentors, both whom make very regular contact with each kid, is the most critical. Think about it, you are a kid scared and feeling alone in the world, when out of the blue appears someone also youthful who represents some power and expertise in your corner. And, yeah, it’s nice to have nice clothes (from Treehouse’s own kid store), so you don’t stand out…..

The point will be not only that organizations like Treehouse are doing yeoman service in what can seem a quixotic quest, but that the kind of comprehensive services they provide is what it will take to salve the wounds of their clientele, and to empower the kids’ own natural resilience to the point where they can one day take full command of their own lives.

BUT. This kind of advocacy and comprehensive service does not come cheaply, whether in non-profit sector hands such as those of Treehouse, or in the public sector hands of schools – just more cheaply than the alternative cost to society of incarceration or a lifetime of welfare for a foster kid who doesn’t reach independently successful trajectory.

I feel like a broken record. With this tale of the heavily impacted foster population and the importance of comprehensive services such as those offered by Treehouse, I do not mean to diminish the importance in the work with school kids of improved instruction, or of the use of technology, or of a number of the other experiments ongoing in schools around the country, whether these be from federal, state, or local impetus.

But the improvement in kids’ lives and in their academic advancement is primarily a people business. It will take more people to develop on-going relationships with struggling kids, whether low income, or abused, or of divorce, or of African American, Latino, or Native American heritage, or maybe simply boys.

The panel discussion the other night, which tracked the complex interweave of interactions that the state social workers and the educational specialists have with their charges and with other school personnel laid down the same theme in spades. The foster kids involved have financial angels of the likes of Northern Trust and Tom Douglas, but many at risk kids do not fit into the foster category, and so are not supported in a similar fashion.

Too much of formal school reform too little allows the kind of human enfolding that Treehouse manages, because the money simply ain’t being funded while battles over taxation and size of government rage on. Sometimes it feels a little as though the politicians fiddle while Rome burns.

Fortunately in the microcosm the public sector has some spunk. Some of that pluck affirms the themes of the Treehouse effort. In one such example, the use of City Year Americorps members by the Seattle Schools to get chronically absent kids to school more regularly is the subject of the Seattle Times’ “Education Lab” piece by Claudia Rowe, “Attendance Counts.”

The Rowe article and the use of City Year workers have been inspired by the work of Robert Balfanz, a researcher out of Johns Hopkins University.

Balfanz studies at risk youth and schools, and in particular looks at linkages between school attendance and graduation rates. As he phrased it in a recent op ed piece in the Seattle Times, research “shows that chronic absence is a strong predictor of who will eventually drop out of school. And the problem starts early. One study estimated that one in ten of the nation’s kindergarten and first-grade students (is) chronically absent.”

Whether in Seattle or nationwide, the most intransigent of deflated test scores are those in mathematics. Think closely – math is a sequential exercise in many dimensions. What comes later builds directly upon what has been mastered before-hand. A student who misses one day of school is immediately behind the eight ball for the next day of math instruction. What looms as a one day problem expands rapidly for a student who misses a day a week, for example. Keep that same kid in class more regularly and his chances of mastering the concepts presented become greater.

Parenthetically, in a classroom where on average three or four students are absent, and those absent vary from day to day, all of whom miss instruction, and one starts to understand by this simple equation the enormity of the task facing math teachers who chase those ever elusive math goals posed by the No Child Left Behind legislation, let alone their own standards.

According to the Rowe EdLab report, in response to the conclusiveness of the research, Balfanz started Diplomas Now, which uses the power of relationships young college graduates can generate with school age kids to lure them to school and involved with their studies on a consistent basis. In Seattle, and in particular at Aki Kurose Middle School and Denny International Middle School, these human connectors come from City Year, an arm of Americorps.

Each City Year worker tracks ten kids with chronic attendance problems. Twenty are assigned to each school, which provides a glimpse at the dimensions of the attendance issue. As the program became ongoing, at Aki Melrose student attendance showed dramatic improvement in the first year and has continued to improve. At Denny, the effort has contributed to an eighteen point rise in eighth grade math scores.

The human interest angle in Rowe’s reportage is even more compelling. She briefly relates the story of one eighth grade boy from a large family who just plain thought no one cared about his attendance until his City Year mentor started inquiring and building rapport. Now he shows up at school because the mentor “is waiting for me.”

Read these stories.

I cannot help but draw a parallel between these modern day pied pipers and their predecessors (not spiritual analogues!), the old time truant officer, decidedly a more intimidating worker who had the same portfolio, but whose work was more based in fear of authority than in the power of relationship, probably a tale of two very different eras.

Truant Officers were well on their way out by the time I began my teaching career in the Boston Schools. While the technique leaves something to be desired from a contemporary point of view, the importance of attendance was well grasped in that old school perspective.

The City Year, Diplomas Now initiative is a relatively low budget program that makes creative use of the federally funded Americorps program to target a very large problem, but simple in its impact on academic growth. While it is convenient for Seattle Schools to tap into federal money, ultimately the takeaway is that innovative efforts supportive of classroom instruction have a huge role to play in whether or not even enhanced classroom instruction has a chance to meet its targeted learning.

Without these types of supportive efforts, whether for the complexity of struggles foster kids face and which Treehouse engages, or for the chronicity of absence that City Year workers encounter, it seems clear to me we simply will not meet our unifying goal of reform of our kids’ education, so entrenched are the problems of poverty and the weights of history that burden the work.

That such scaffolding will cost money at a time when legislatures, federal and state, have a firm hand on their respective wallets can be demoralizing. Despite such roadblocks, I would not be the first to comment on the vitality emerging at the local level in educational issues. Treehouse and the City Year initiative are two such examples.

 

 

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Schools and Culture: Dysfunctional Cultural Currents Stymie School Reform?

Posted on November 15, 2013 by schooldog

Summary: In Yale students and public school students alike, cultural currents surface and raise questions how these patterns influence our children in their studies.

News in the Yale Alumni Magazine that 62% of Yale undergraduates earned A or A- in their coursework in spring of 2012 first astounded me and then led me to speculate how the news may reflect cultural patterns present as well far, far away in the prosaic confines of public school, USA.

Some on the Yale campus argue that the quality of the student and the productivity of the Yale undergraduate are better than in the past, partly due to a more competitive admissions process. According to this line of thought, the current student works more intensively in a competitive atmosphere much heightened  from, say 1963, when only 10% of grades were in the A/A- range. That’s a stretch, I think, though some of the discrepancy may well be explained by those factors. Full disclosure: I was a member of the Yale class of 1967.

Others, students, claim that such democracy in grading diminishes the competitive factor, and frees students to focus on learning. Still others, some faculty, counter that the grading pattern stems from increased competition to the point of sheer grade grubbing on students’ part, focused as they are on competitive jobs and graduate and professional schools down the road.

Parenthetically, the philosophical and organizational issues involved at Yale echo a current controversy at Microsoft. A recent story in the Seattle Times announced that Microsoft will discard an evaluation schema that mandated a rank ordering of evaluations within each department. Critics claimed the raw competition the previous system engendered distorted Micosoft’s other imperatives toward creativity and collaboration, and has seriously undermined its competitiveness, ironically so.

Back to Yale. Professor Jonathan Holloway fingers a culprit more deeply within current culture, which observers of US public school students will recognize. According to Holloway, the “grade grubbing” is a “symptom of people not learning from an early age about failure. When I was playing little league soccer, you only got a trophy if you won. Nowadays, everybody’s getting trophies.” I nod in recognition, having only recently thrown out many such mementos from my kids’ early sporting days.

By implication Yale faculty members collude in this cultural imperative by choosing not to differentiate more subtly the variations in the quality of their students work. Debate is underway about alternatives, for example mandating that no more than 35% of grades can be in the A range, as Princeton did as far back as 2004, under similar circumstances.

Such debate echoes moves in public schools toward an uptick in standards as one tool in the arsenal to kick start more broadly our student academic progress. The debate at Yale, among other things, is about standards.

I often encountered a kind of entitlement in many of my high school students that spanned income levels. Regardless of family economic circumstances, many to most had cell phones, or other baubles of the culture, regardless of whether or not their progress in school merited what could have been a bauble earned. More to the point, way too high a percentage of students seemed not to appreciate that reward follows being held accountable for the quality of one’s actions or, more prosaically, that one needed to work toward goals that held individual value.

Integral to this constellation is a concern for kids’ self-esteem that judges all level of effort and quality equally good, which however may erode preparation for the reality kids will one day face, and weaken their own ability to discern quality in their own lives and around them. In some kids this cultural characteristic may ill prepare kids emotionally for the failure, and the requisite course corrections to failure, that are a normal part of any life.

It is in this last dimension that we travel full circle back to Yale’s grade inflation issue. Granted, these high quality students have well learned the lesson of accountability for their actions, and to put work and effort toward identified goals, but do they not in their grade grubbing and defense of grade inflation betray discomfit with the notion that on this rarified stage they will finally meet their match and turn out to be mediocre, even if mediocre in very fast company? How will they respond; how will they know how to respond?

Meanwhile, in the ground between elite university students and all public school students, the American College Test (ACT) people recently announced that only 26% of all students who took the ACT last school year scored at a college level on all the four measures of math, reading, English and science. Though this group includes pretenders to college level as well as legitimate candidates, it certainly includes most of those we urge toward post-secondary education, and still leaves out a significant cadre that has not yet accepted the necessity of further education or training on some level.

Despite a decade and more of school reform, these ACT figures as well as the familiar rout of our public school test takers by students in other countries might well make us wonder if we still miss some important dynamic.

While school reformers of all stripe focus appropriately on the maintenance of high expectations, the increase of school funding, instructional upgrades, refined training and recruitment of the teaching corps, attention to at risk students, and so forth, what of elusive cultural currents that undergird the behavior of our students? Collective failure to teach accountability, goal oriented behavior toward reward, and the healthy recognition without despair of one’s position in life’s race may well undermine academic progress. Successful solutions require first targeting a problem clearly, even if it means taking on powerful cultural currents more consciously, hopefully not like Sisyphus.

 

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School Reform: Yup, Some Regular Every Day Schools Are Doing It

Posted on November 1, 2013 by schooldog

Summary: One low income school stages a dramatic turnaround. How it was done maps out a route that other reformed schools have followed, yet poses dilemmas for the choice makers.

The Seattle area’s White Center Heights Elementary prior to the 2012-13 school year displayed an all too familiar and troubled profile of low income schools, America. Eighty-eight percent of students qualified for free or reduced lunch. Sixty percent lived within immigrant families, and spoke a language other than English with their parents. At the beginning of the school year in fall, 2012, two thirds of students in third through sixth grade could not read at grade level.

Mind you, in my experience poor immigrant families often differ from those families who have endured poverty chronically over generations in this country. Often children of immigrant parents still respond to the myth of America as a land of opportunity, which gets reflected in their attention to business, by contrast to the defeatism that can revolve around some poverty born on this shore.

But. The challenges of White Center Heights have been quite real; the statistics cited do not lie.

So imagine the jubilation when the 2012-13 standardized test results showed up just before school this fall, with a stunning message. White Center Height’s kids had raised their average test scores in both reading and writing by double digits, and were one of only two schools in the top ten in the state on this measure in both skill areas. I am not clear where the improvement sits on the scale score of the tests themselves or as a percentage improvement, and one can remark (snarkily) that the previous scores were so low as to amplify otherwise objectively modest results. But, hey, progress is progress and there seems little dispute that is what White Center Heights has created.

How? In one year how, when the solutions du jour are the importing of bright young type A’s (Teach for America), or the absence in the classroom of hard core unmotivated (see charter schools), or the arrival of a truckload of money – none of which appears to have been the case here? Well, maybe some money, but a relatively modest amount, apparently a one shot injection. But the kids are the same kids; the staff for the most part is the same as in the previous school year.

The tale is told in “Teachers Jump-Start Turnaround at White Center Heights Elementary,” by Claudia Rowe, an inaugural piece in the Seattle Times year-long series on education, Education Lab. The article is a snapshot of ingredients evident in many such (still isolated) success stories, and an opportunity to mull some intriguing and instructive choices that face change makers.

The turnaround began with leadership and the pivotal role of principal, with a new, highly trained, and experienced incumbent, Anne Reece.

But before that, the first move came from Reece’s superior, Highline Schools superintendent Susan Enfield, who gave the portfolio to reverse White Center’s dismal test scores to Reece, and then backed way off. “Carte blanche”, as reported by Rowe. No bureaucratic encumbrance is the first lesson. Reece was free to be Reece, to utilize her experience and expertise to rise or to fall with the buck in her office. Hire good people to manage the ground floor and get out of their way.

The statement of faith in Reece, though occasionally marred by micro management from the district level, seems to have been passed on via Reece to the teaching ranks. In the research high expectations of students is one marker of turnaround. And in fact Reece is quoted as saying “the potential of these kids was way higher than the data showed…”

But the other element commented on too little may be high expectations of and faith in teachers. Again, Reece: “the teachers…were smart, capable people, but they’d lost faith in their ability to teach.” Compare this message with much of what teachers read about their failure as a profession, and what teachers too often experience as an uphill battle against school hierarchies that do not heed the expertise below.

In fact, while the importance of school principal leadership has been pretty well established, the urgency of empowering the teaching staff has been less well spotlighted. This principal appears to have managed both.

Note that the teachers chose to follow, which in itself confirms the leadership.

To the mix of leadership, autonomy in the school, and faith in students and teachers we now add research based expertise, as culled from Alicia Reece’s doctorate in literacy education.

Pivotally, Reece taught her staff to “dig deeply into the data,” a mantra that seems to characterize high poverty schools who engineer a turnaround in test scores. Briefly, it prescribes a close look at diagnostic testing that in turn tells the teacher what skills or sub-skills individual students need to work on in order to improve. In the hands of the charter Rocketship, for example, some of those individual needs are addressed through computerized instruction.

In addition, Reece guided her teachers through techniques which deepened students’ understanding of the reading material, and broadened their vocabulary. For example, students were asked more consistently to reflect on their reading and talk about it in small groups, a method called “elaborated talk” in pedagogy speak. The work incorporates but goes well beyond the simple decoding of words and the encoding of sounds.

Moreover, when a student expresses her thinking, it is possible for a teacher to interrupt a misconception that would serve as a faulty building block of later knowledge if not corrected. I am reminded of a former tutee, bright and eager enough but quiet, who had concocted in private a remarkable technique for multiple digit multiplication that could only be described as creative. Her mind was consummately engaged, but in the wrong direction.

Notice the use of “small groups”; these are small groups often of similar skill grouping, which appear to be used extensively at White Center Heights in both reading and math. The dogma, and considerable research, tells us that those students chronically inhabiting the low end skill groups develop educational self-esteem issues that haunt them for life. Special education grouping, for example, too often turns into dispirited struggles between teacher and student, with potential learning falling through the cracks between. The research reports further that lower skilled students tend to do better in groups which include higher skilled students, which may dilute the self-perception of “dumb” or “slow.”

So why have White Center Heights kids apparently responded more positively to homogeneous grouping?

In practice, teachers faced with heterogeneous groupings tend to aim at the low middle of the class skills, which in Reece’s view meant that the whole range of the school’s test scores lowered. In homogeneous grouping, by contrast, at least in theory the teacher can zero in better on specific skills sets that that group of kids needs to master in order to move to the next level.

With regular diagnostic testing that moved kids around from level of group to level of group on a timeline that didn’t allow stigma to sink in, “skills gaps narrowed enough that the third grade has been able to abandon low-track math.” The small groups might just work, that is, if predicated on successful remediation of skill deficits relatively quickly and bringing struggling kids more into the mainstream before they notice, and doing so in an environment where group composition changes frequently. Robert Slavin of Johns Hopkins writing in a blog associated with Education Lab argues that the speed of the changes is the thing; further, kids who continue to struggle at a low level may respond to one to one tutoring while remaining in the mainstream otherwise.

Anne Reece challenged the orthodoxy because she and her teachers perceived a critical need to instruct in small groups, and in the short run perhaps has learned that orthodoxy is not quite the monolith it has seemed. Such is the strength of experiment, and the willingness to follow one’s instincts without the need to get permission up channel. In fact, turnaround schools in general are commonly characterized by ample experimentation, and then a focus on what has worked in that setting. Be nimble, be quick.

Still, a tricky dance.

There is a notable downside seen in schools that have managed turnarounds. Typically subjects ancillary to the hard core learning of reading, writing and math get short shrift, and reportedly White Center Heights is no different. With more time devoted to the core (and tested) skills, disciplines such as art, music, social studies and physical education get less attention. In counter, proponents of the arts cite studies showing that reading and math improve with exposure to those subjects. In the latest Harvard Education Letter Lisa Rosenthal cites a study in the Journal of Pediatrics that finds better fitness linked to higher scores on state tests in reading and math. Which area of study packs the most bang for time spent is the question without clear answer.

However, art, music, social studies and PE have had a run without obviously turning skill levels around. For now, it seems clear we pay keen attention to how the school day gets restructured around close focus on specific skills improvement, and leave advocates of other subjects to make the case that the road lies better there.

Meanwhile we are obligated to track progress well beyond the initial year of success, though Rowe notes that White Center Heights shares much similarity in approach with other low income schools that have engineered turnarounds and subsequently have sustained them. The deep dive into individual diagnostic data is perhaps the most fundamental of those approaches.

If I were the parent of a kid with low skills, I’d vote with the innovations promoted in schools such as White Center Heights that seem the best hope to bring my kid into the economic mainstream with viable skill levels, and thank my lucky stars that we have landed in such a promising school community while others of my acquaintance have not.

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School reform: The Teacherpreneur and the Center of the World

Posted on October 17, 2013 by schooldog

Summary:  Is “teacherpreneur” a re-branding of the classical role of teacher?

The term and role of “teacherpreneur,” which has gained traction in the educational media and via Barnett Berry’s new book of the same name, strikes me at once as a welcome re-centering on the classic role of a teacher as well as a clever re-branding of the teaching profession in language that not coincidentally reflects the zeitgeist of this market ascendant period of time. Perhaps captains of industry, who drive much of the current school reform movement, will now urge the placement of these teacher entrepreneurs at the center of the educational universe, because “entrepreneur” they understand. Back to the future.

In the hands of Berry and his colleagues at the Center for Teaching Quality these allegedly new teacherpreneurs will teach (which one assumes will include the psychological motivation of unwilling learners), mentor novice teachers, do research into pedagogy appropriate to particular students, develop curriculum and assessments, and sit at the table where educational policy is decided – school, district, and so forth.

Moreover, they will do so in the metaphysical wake of the “entrepreneur,” the market hero who creates from the void of the market first an idea, and then an organizational entity that fills a vital and sometimes unrecognized economic niche with a verve that brings commerce to its front door. Think Google, Amazon, and other recent stops on the entrepreneurial gravy train. The point is not always the money, but the creativity, and the building of a truly better mousetrap.

The etymology of the word “entrepreneur” and its closely associated cousin, “enterprise” underscores this creative linkage of disparate pieces into a coherent whole. The entrepreneur “takes” (prendre from French) the interstices “between” (entre from French) isolated elements and builds the imagined edifice from them. It is a fundamentally creative concept.

Similarly the teacherpreneur spans research and curriculum, policy and classroom and mentoring, to create a unique professional persona/portfolio that will expose students to a cutting edge learning environment.

But wait. Seems to me these are the roles teachers have always encompassed, in less glorious and more prosaic terms. By a linguistic sleight of hand, Berry and company may have transformed the teacher of tradition into a contemporary icon.

Though outsiders to the profession – journalists, corporate types, and other stripe of school reformer — don’t see it, in fact present day teachers do straddle multiple roles in the interior lives of schools; “teacherpreneur” takes much of what already exists, ramps it to a more refined level, and demands a still higher order of professionalism.

Quality teachers have always researched better curriculum, and developed their own, even if not in a manner so self-consciously related to ongoing testing as at the present.

Particularly in elementary schools (less so in middle and high schools) it has seemed to me that the smaller elementary setting has encouraged a more intimate give and take between teacher and principal, which has in turn allowed more real input into building based policy making. Maybe it is the collaborative spirit among sisters in the school building that disappears in the relatively more male populated and larger middle and particularly high schools. Yet it is in this area, that of policy leadership, from which teachers have been excluded most prominently.  

Certainly quality teachers have inspired, imparted skills, transmitted knowledge and induced critical thinking despite the low esteem the profession has endured in more recent times and national culture.

Moreover, the mentoring of new teachers and those struggling, and the sharing of technique and curriculum among teaching staffs, has always been common in the schoolhouse, despite the dearth of formal structures to that effect.

These complex roles have always to me begged for better staffing in order to free teachers to their fundamental role in company of students; the introduction of the super teacherpreneur merely ups that ante. The trick is in the balance. Teachers are the practitioners on the front line; that expertise needs to drive the enterprise, but to do so expertly implies deep and continuing experience at the craft. All this will cost more money; today we just celebrate the idea.

Administrative and teacher roles best be complementary. The arrival of teacherpreneurs to power implies a reduction in the power of the “principal;” the expression began not as ultimate administrator but as “principal teacher,” first among equals. Superintendents too will have to learn to share power.

The initial teacherpreneur idea seems to be focused on a relatively small number of uber teachers. In my mind, the notion applies, or should apply, more broadly. Still, in an environment where many teachers leave teaching in their early years, the expanded roles of the uber teacherpreneur provide room for higher echelon responsibility, and so may promote longevity as teacher in the classroom itself.

Most interestingly, the transformation in the narrative from obscure if honored laborer to entrepreneur takes the teacher professional from that of a follower of bureaucratic imperatives to that of the pivotal citizen in the educational enterprise, around whose fount all other job descriptions revolve; in other words, a professional in the mold of doctor and lawyer.

“Teacherpreneur” could even prove to be a brilliant re-branding of a profession of the ages into terms that evoke the leading engines of contemporary corporate and technological innovation, and thereby contribute to the re-enshrinement of the work to its former respect in this country, to match the respect its counterparts enjoy in other countries – countries which, by the way, kick our butts in skills testing head to head.

Perhaps “teacherpreneur” can make the work more comprehensible and admirable to the guardians of the purse strings, which then may be loosed more liquidly in pursuit of school reform.

So Barnett Berry and colleagues may have struck a blow for the good guys.

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