schooldog

School Reform: Yes, There Is Some Good News!

Posted on October 2, 2013 by schooldog

Summary: School reform is a long and often discouraging slog. This is a pause to celebrate the many hopeful events and trends that together refresh for the next round.

It is time to celebrate positives in the many headed effort to reform public education in the US. While the educational landscape is littered by pitched battles between factions at odds, and the composite picture too often seems directionless and characterized by modest progress at best, I am reminded that the successful reform efforts overseas took decades to bring to the fruition we admire today.

Within the general chaos, there are success stories and hopeful trends, borne of the energies of individuals and teams, and which burble up from the general cauldron.

The ferment itself is a good thing. Few districts, schools, or practitioners of all levels assume business as usual. So, I give another nod to No Child Left Behind, for having been the mainspring, though it has catapulted us into a purgatory like space within which we are still finding our bearings.……

The media are rife with reports from individual schools of innovation and improved test scores, even though NCLB dampens enthusiasm for these achievements by its unrealistic insistence on continuing year by year improvement to predetermined arrival points. As an example of good news, my own former school, distinguished by a hardworking staff and the tenacity of its administration, but also encumbered by the top down flavor typical of many bureaucratically encrusted school districts, won some well-deserved state of Washington plaudits despite the liabilities. Equally to the point, 380 other schools in the state earned similar plaudits.

Though there seems to have been continued gnashing of teeth at each new year of NAEP national testing results, which in part compare American students to their international counterparts, the ever interesting Diane Ravitch on her blog a year ago took the long view to point out, among other positive trends, that fourth grade black students who were rated “below basic” dropped from 80% of the tested population in 1992 to 49% in 2011. While the 49% is sobering enough, the substantial long term improvement brings to mind the march of the Finns and the Polish to their current high skills status over thirty or forty years. Patience, perseverance, and hope are the orders of the day.

The ongoing Stanford CREDO charter study in its 2013 iteration reports charter results are improving to the point they match the record of the traditional public schools with which they are being compared. Renewed calls, including by President Obama, to axe charters that perform poorly, as originally intended, will make charters as a group look more successful.

Eruptions of teacher and union activism in reform and examples of heightened teacher input to decision making at the school and district level encourage me….. In an article in the Harvard Ed Letter (“The Push for Progressive Unionism”), Erika Hobbs outlines some of the forces that are making for improved union-management collaboration; the impetus comes from both sides of the divide…. In my own back yard reform minded leadership has emerged in the Seattle Teachers Union, and an offshoot of Seattle teacher/reformers called Teachers United has poked its head into the conversation….. Tim Walker in NEA Today reports on unionizing efforts in a Los Angeles charter school initiated by staff who have felt their school drifting from its original mission and wish to influence future decision making (“NEA Steps Up Organizing Efforts in Non-Union Charter Schools.”) …….In Houston, where Houston schools recently were named recipient of a Broad Education Prize for Urban Education for improvement in student achievement and a reduction of the usual achievement gaps, Houston school officials cited site based decision making as one key to raising test scores, because it allows “teachers and administrators more flexibility in managing their schools and addressing student needs.” (Alyssa Morones in Education Week – “Houston Schools win Broad Education Prize”)

In the same category is a recent editorial in the Seattle Times extolling progress in the newly negotiated contract between the Seattle Teachers’ Union and the Seattle School District. Improved pay was part of the package, but also an apparently sophisticated teacher evaluation system that utilizes “multiple measures of performance” that may well reflect the teacher-in-the-trenches view of what is essential to quality teaching.

The same editorial page reports that poorly rated teachers are leaving the Seattle district at an increased rate, even under the earlier installment of the teacher evaluation process. (Jonathan Martin – “Bad Teachers Shouldn’t Be Forced on Our Kids”) While some types might grimace at the threat of exit, in each school it is generally known who the less productive teachers are, and as long as the process is fair, I for one would welcome a more streamlined scrutiny of whether or not a few of my former colleagues should remain in the classroom, and if they were stay, under what plan of improvement.

In other good news, the Gates Foundation has begun reassessing some of its head butting with teachers and unions and has ramped up rapprochement efforts, as reported by Linda Shaw in the Seattle Times. Together we stand or divided we fall, or something like that.

Experiments in technology to further individual skill development have proven successful in diverse settings, from parent testimony about the Khan Academy, an online library of video tutorials, to the wide use of increasingly sophisticated individualized software to supplement classroom skills instruction, particularly in math.

Legislative agitation and court action, for example in Washington and Colorado, have increased funding for schools. In Washington, as reported by Donna Gordon Blankenship in the Seattle Times, the coalition that brought suit successfully against the state for its failure to fully fund public education, as stipulated by the state constitution, is readying for another round of legal action. While the state legislature found a reported one billion dollars in additional funding in the current school year, some of that was budgetary sleight of hand, and in any event remains inadequate, the plaintiffs will allege.… The bottom line, more money will be needed to bring the Washington State public education success rate to a satisfactory level; much of that money should be targeted toward increasing the teacher/student ratio – that is, promote more intensive human intervention – for low income students.

These are disparate events, initiatives, and data points in the stream which together stitch together some reason for optimism for the progress of our schools. How is it that these small and often subtle pieces get lost in the sometimes vituperative macro debates between factions that paradoxically seek the same arrival point? It is too facile to point the finger at the media, who do in fact love to report on a good fight. More to the point is probably the dangerous degree to which the public arena has become polarized; we have all become actors in the cultural dysfunction.

But that worry can remain for another day. Today, we celebrate these many reasons to hoist the glass.

ADDENDUM

In my mind there are quarters of silence, arenas crucial to the reform of schools as I imagine it, but about which I at least see too little reference in the various media I reference. For example, if teachers are to become the power actors in school once again, how then are teacher training programs radically shifting to prepare these new “teacherpreneurs,” as some have dubbed them?

Equally to the point, how are administrator training programs reforming themselves? More specifically, as teachers in fact agitate for more power, as professionals, will the new generation of principals and superintendents create the flat organizations that welcome and use teacher input, even expect teachers to agitate for power seats at the decision making table?

These are complimentary roles, teacher and administrator, that need to be crafted to fit together.

Posted in School Reform | Tagged administrative style, charter schools, education and politics, empowering teachers, low-income students, No Child Left Behind, school administrator training, Stanford CREDO study, teacher evaluation, teacher professionalism, teacher training | Leave a comment

School Reform: Has the Baby Been Thrown Out With the Bath Water?

Posted on September 22, 2013 by schooldog

Summary: In the tight focus on testing for basic skills and the evaluation of teachers, do we look past issues such as critical thinking and civic education?

Every now and then in my personal life I stop and realize I am working too hard at something, and more often than not it is because I am going about a problem in too complicated and wrong minded a way. Eventually I refine my approach, usually into a more simple and direct strategy which fits the problem in a more elegant fashion, as a key fits a lock.

Something of this dilemma confounds me about the school reform movement, where much frenetic energy circulates around academic test scores, which measure student progress and evaluate teachers, but with modest effect so far despite much sound and fury.

My general support for these experiments aside, certain questions periodically cycle around to dog me.

Are we still educating our youth to citizenry in ways in which the original founding of public schools intended? Are our students learning to work together with one another or, more broadly, are we successfully mentoring them to embrace the increasing diversity of this republic? Are they learning to think critically above and beyond any rote instruction, in order to better transport these analytical skills to problems as yet unanticipated?

What do we lose as we obsess about academic skills, as much as that case continues to be compelling?

Where and how does the time come to do it all? Basic skills aside, voices periodically and patiently articulate directions in which the pendulum will need to swing one day.

For example, former Washington State Superintendent of Public Schools Judith Billings and former teacher Web Hutchins contribute an op ed piece in the Seattle Times that calls for more fervent attention to civics education for our future voters. They note that only 21% of 18 to 29 year olds voted in a recent federal election, an appalling figure if projected over the group’s adult voting life. How does a democracy function on such apparent civic illiteracy, even irresponsibility?

For myself, I wonder about the ease with which certain populations send representatives to Congress bent solely on reducing the federal government, oblivious to the various ways in which an activist government has incubated technology, funded economic progress, created assorted infrastructure, and on – in short, ushered our economy into the contemporary market environment. Too many accept too many simplistic solutions; reinvigorated civic education, aligned to critical thinking will hopefully deepen the debate, not necessarily toward big government, but toward rational choices in which government does what it can do best, and a civic environment in which citizens separate the wheat of politicians’ words from their chaff.

Implicit in the Billings/Hutchins plea is a corollary acknowledgement of the role multi-cultural instruction might play in a culture where Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman tragically play out their mutual fears of one another, or in an economy where people of color lag in their share of the pie. Whither the country if we do not continue to make progress on these issues; should not schools play a role?

What of teaching our youth to work together? Ironically, it is big business, which often bankrolls efforts toward basic skills accountability, which also requires workers who can work together on a team. Of course, competent teamwork and focus on skill enhancement are not mutually exclusive, but the former receives far less attention in the pedagogic councils of school war.

And then there is the all-important skill, critical thinking and its close cousin problem solving. Angela Ripley in her new book The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way reports that American students (again!) are outpaced by students of other countries in these critical dimensions, according to internationally administered tests (of course) that purport to identify these skills. The Economist in its review of Ripley’s book notes that countries such as Poland and Finland have set out to teach these skills over a period of years, particularly in the manner in which they teach math, in concert with expectations held high, and produce young folk whose critical thinking skills outstrip those of our own.

Arguably, once our schools were superior, and helped feed the economic behemoth of the second half of the twentieth century, but for complex reasons have failed to evolve to the more demanding requirements of the twenty-first.

From my perspective we are in the midst of growing pains, and need to remember that the Finnish and the Polish have been at their school reform desk for thirty and forty years. For now, we focus primarily on basic skills, which have proven a sluggish enough enterprise; we have more sophisticated standards we will have yet to meet. First we walk; then we run.

It is worth noting that both the education ministries of Poland and Finland may operate in an environment more conducive to direction from the top than ours. Both with socialist histories, their social fabric are more accustomed to central direction. Moreover, particularly Finland is much smaller than the US, where federal education directives are inevitably subject to the cacophony of the states.

The Common Core, signed on to by forty-five states, promises to address some of these more sophisticated skills around which the corporate hiring engine hungers – critical thinking, teamwork, and of course basic skills with STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) at the most desirable (and better rewarded) end. No doubt there will be further course corrections as the roll out of Common Core proceeds.

In response to Common Core, I can hear teachers moaning that another change occurs just as they begin to get their feet under them from the challenges of No Child Left Behind. As Diane Ravitch has observed, American schools are famous for causes and interventions du jour. So we shall see.

Meanwhile, other wild cards continue to haunt my thinking, and which may well be beyond the purview of school reform. Too many children of the middle class, who take for granted the opportunity in front of them in their good schools, do not do their part in preparing themselves well. Can we really ask schools to change the culture that has taught them they get what they want regardless?

And can schools really change economic inequality in a game in which the table tilts in favor of the already privileged?

These contemporary cultural weaknesses cause the gears of school reform to grind more ponderously and confound the best efforts of the many players, who are in fact working very hard.

Posted in School Reform | Tagged basic skills testing, Common Core, critical thinking, Finnish Schools, low-income students, multi-cultural education, No Child Left Behind, Polish schools, school reform, teacher evaluation, teaching teamwork | 1 Comment

Charter Schools and the Selling of Short Term Teachers

Posted on September 11, 2013 by schooldog

Summary: How is it that young charter teachers achieve results comparable to their more experienced traditional public school brethren, and why do so many in both camps leave teaching so prematurely?

Whether or not any charter iteration creates a silver bullet, charter schools prove their worth simply by the mirror they hold up to schools as they are. We see more clearly, the philosopher tells us, in comparison between alternatives.

Motoko Rich writing in the New York Times, “Charter Schools – Short Careers By Choice,” compares the relatively short career trajectories of charter school teachers to the generally longer ones of traditional public school teachers. The former tend not to last beyond two or three years, arguably before they can fully reach their professional stride, while traditional public school teachers last an average of fourteen years, well into what we expect to be full professional stride, though an appalling 46% bail within five years. Lurking around the edges, in the hiring of young hot shots by charter schools, is the criticism that longer term public school teachers, particularly in lower income urban schools, hit a wall and compromise on the calling that led them to teaching in the first place.

Ms. Rich apparently has hit a nerve; in short order at least two other commentators have responded.

Rich quotes Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America: “the “strongest (of charter) schools develop their teachers tremendously so they become great in the classroom even in their first and second years.”

The claim asserts further that this transformation occurs through a summer of training and close supervision during the school year. The latter is laudable, and worth emulating more broadly in regular public schools themselves, with rookies and veterans alike.

From my experience, however, the average principal in a traditional public school would need to be liberated from other pressing duties to supervise so intensively. Just as the need for more tightly woven relationships with low income students calls for better teacher/student ratios, principals to be effective in “tightly woven” supervisory relationships need help from more administrative bodies to perform ancillary administrative work.

I suspect an important innovation of charters might lie in the restructuring of schools and the refined emphasis of how different staff players spend their time.

Though I have respect for Kopp and what she and her organization have developed, her claim of nearly immediate teacher excellence is a bit too gushy, and contrary to my experience in a good high school which has a history of attracting quality individuals as novice teachers.

New teachers with mature personal infrastructure may become good contributors in their first couple of years, but “great” is a stretch well beyond the edge. Did she really say that? Was she quoted out of context?

Rich, without direct comment, dutifully quotes the rational “other side.” “Studies have shown that on average, teacher turnover diminishes student achievement.” Two years and gone, the charter and Teach for America norm, qualifies as rapid turnover. Of course, the 46% turnover within five years for traditional public school teachers frankly isn’t a banner under which we want to march, either.

What, for example, is the turnover in Finnish, or South Korean, or German schools? I suspect they would find risible Kopp’s contention, and be appalled at the parallel rate in traditional public schools.

What is it in a teacher’s life in an American school that so wrenchingly alters the new teacher candidates’ intended direction? At minimum, tough work surely, in the viscous hold (heavy water) of bureaucracy, poorly respected, modestly recompensed.

Rich dives into the world of compensation. She quotes Kay Henderson, the chancellor of the District of Columbia schools, who says a high performing teacher in the DC schools by their third year could be paid $80,000 a year, albeit from a relatively high urban pay base. The unstated question is whether similar financial incentives might lure the short term Teach for America and charter newbies to stay into their teaching maturity, or would alter the exit statistics from traditional public school teaching positions.

Hard to say. Teach for America for some is a type of social contribution, after which these quality young people evaporate into other careers better rewarded by society, which include administrative and policy positions sited on education. Good teachers, committed teachers, need to love the work, truly like kids, and have the self-awareness to know that their growth in these dimensions of service provide a significant part of their life blood. To the extent that charters and Teach for America can divine these qualities, they are likely to retain more candidates beyond minimal and, yes, novice years, regardless of recompense.

But money! This harried and defensive defender of unions exults! Maybe those nasty old unions are in the business of school reform, after all. They may poorly project professional agenda and eschew finer point debates about how to release low income student abilities, but they know teachers and schools need money, the lack of which contributes to teacher flight via perpetually capped paychecks and relief from mounting expectations.

Matthew Yglesias on his blog “Moneybox” in Slate carries the comparison between the longevity of charter school teachers and regular public school teachers further.

The latest 2013 CREDO results out of Stanford, which compares charter school progress with that of traditional public schools, suggest that charters have at least equaled or exceeded the results of their traditional public school counterparts. Referring to these latest figures, Yglesias rightly asks, “given that these charters are really held back by having such a large share of first- and second-year teachers, how is it that they’re able to produce decent educational results?”

He then answers himself. “The evidence isn’t airtight, but the natural inference to make from the turnover data is that the experience-adjusted quality of the charter school teachers is substantially higher than of the traditional public school teachers.” He goes on to offer up a couple of usual suspects – the poor validity of screening process for new teachers and the suspicion that too many traditional public teachers are of poor quality. Hence, high quality newbies, though callow, can match the teaching quality of the allegedly dead wood.

To his credit, he doesn’t overly pile on the accustomed anti-teacher, anti-union bandwagon, and seems to suspend judgment, but his question — how do young teachers in charters match their experienced counterparts – has merit.

It’s just much more complex a topic than to simply lay the answer at the feet of the current teacher corps. Though we know that the Teach for America inductees as a group are stronger students in college than the average teacher training graduate, if we stop there and assume we have the answer we have simply identified a scapegoat, which solves no problem, though the knowledge does beg the question as to how to incentivize better the entry ramp into the teaching profession.

Yglesias’ approach is deductive, which can divorce conclusions from the real world.

The first answer to his query lies in the respective structures of the schools in which the charter and the traditional teacher labor.

A friend on the board of a non-profit was recently bemoaning the stodgy, negative atmosphere of the organization he oversees. Its mission was foundering, and it was desperately in need of fresh ways of thinking, he went on. He might well have been talking about a multitude of schools across the country, in greater or lesser degree.

The hallmark of a school bureaucracy is the top down grip on power, and the discouragement to the point of suppression of any creative thinking outside the orthodox mold. It is not a sinister environment, just one that dulls any initiative that might otherwise blossom outside of each teacher’s world inside the classroom with the door closed. It is as though thinkers need not apply. At least not and broadcast it.

Type A rookies, fresh from their university academic triumphs, will find in traditional public schools a bureaucratic modus operandi that blunts their eagerness to contribute.

Further, the isolation implicit in the often inadequate supervision of new public school teachers may be a deal breaker. At least “regular” teachers, graduates of teacher education programs of differing quality, have had preparation beyond the rudimentary summer crash introduction typical of Teach for America, but they too leave teaching in hordes only relatively less pronounced. Perhaps they leave having suffered similar disillusions.

I suspect the more successful charters are simply better and more exciting places too work, “flatter” organizations whose local energy is locally transformed into ideas and practices to which new teachers eagerly contribute, and in fact are expected to contribute.

It is this presumed characteristic of successful charters that accounts for at least some of the ability of new teachers in charters to match the results of their more veteran public school counterparts. Charters may simply stimulate the talents of these novices by giving them a seat in the power structure and incorporating their input into decisions. How might the current traditional school teacher corps fare if they were similarly blessed by more flexible management structures?

Incubated in this presumed organizational quality of successful charters is a second reason why I suspect young charter teachers match their traditional public school cousins.

Charters hire young unformed folk because they do not carry the inevitable bureaucratic virus contracted by years in traditional public schools.

Moreover, with the encouragement of the “flat” charter managerial style they zealously give extra time, energy, and messianic commitment to task that more veteran teachers must give to families and other parts of their lives. This fervor pays a variety of dividends for charter students.

For example, one axiom in the effort to stimulate the academic growth of low income kids is the importance of relationship with a teacher. Such relationship building is time intensive. Because young recruits have an abundance of time they will later not have, often enough they lend it to the cause, and in the short run provide the extra boost that is reflected in charters’ impressive documented showing. Provide traditional public schools with ten, fifteen, twenty hours more a week per teacher and then let us compare notes.

The choice of young hire is likely purposeful as much as it may be shortsighted; the technique seems to lead to an inevitable burnout from a pace of contribution that simply cannot be sustained in a normally balanced life. This reality has led charter teachers in Chicago to investigate the protections of unionization from the overwork into which they have felt pressured. I find it hard to believe that charter administrators would cynically hire novice teachers with the intent to take advantage of their eager energy, fully knowing they will reach a useful peak quickly, and then disengage. Or perhaps the unstated bargain is the teachers’ youthful energy and stage of life in exchange for the excitement of the work, the making of a difference, and the headiness of crusade.

Sara Mosle in a contribution to Slate provides a wonderfully textured completion of the circle begun in Motoko Rich’s original article. Mosle brings her practical experience as a parent and teacher to the table, and relays the changed perspective of another former Teach for America teacher through his transition from young “hard charging” 25 year old to a parent himself with new found appreciation for the experience of veteran teachers.

Ms. Mosle herself taught three years in a charter in New York City, then exited the profession, only to return some years later to charters, in the interim becoming a parent. There are threads in Mosle’s account that leap out at me as fundamental truths absent from the narrative pushed by too many reform voices, and which give context to the comparison between the results attributed to young charter teachers and their public school counterparts.

Among those threads….Though clearly the young and the childless can be excellent teachers, there is a leavening of a teacher’s viewpoint in the process of having one’s own children that lends a broader understanding both of one’s students and of the hopes and fears of their parents. Amen, I say, as a once teacher young and eager, and then as an older parent working with kids and their families as a school counselor.

To the leavening of parenthood I would add the combined adult experience of making one’s way independently in the world, and the perspective it provides to the mentoring of students preparing for their own way.

Mosle adds to her own credibility that of Ryan Hill, once upon a time one of those “hard charging” young idealists introduced in Motoko Rich’s article, but now a charter administrator. Speaking of veteran teachers in the school he administers, he acknowledges “Our people who are proven, who are good, are so irreplaceable. It was just not an option for us to lose them.” As a consequence, in both his school and in the one in which Mosle reactivated her teaching career hours have been adjusted to accommodate new parents among the staff, and benefits such as maternity leave have been initiated.

I admit to find this testimony satisfying, as well as Hill’s assertion (in Mosle’s words) that “his attitude (about the importance of veteran teachers) isn’t always shared or understood by some corporate backers who come ‘from fast-growth, non-people dependent industries.’ But in teaching, Hill argues, your people are everything.”

Do not take this as dismissal of the reform minded movement often energized from outside of schools, but as recognition of the role experience with real kids must play in finding our way to better instructional outcomes. Again, this is a call for dialogue among the players, and a pointed reminder that the scapegoating of veteran teachers shuts out critical contributions.

So give a tip of the hat to the Rich/Yglesias/Mosle troika for an unusually rich lode of insight amid the mountain of verbiage on school reform.

Ha! Including mine!

Posted in Charter Schools | Tagged career as teacher, charter schools, flat oranizations, low-income students, school reform, Stanford CREDO study, Teach for America, teacher motivation, teacher overwork, teachers' unions | 2 Comments

School Reform and the Greening of Teachers’ Unions

Posted on August 31, 2013 by schooldog

Summary: Announcement that the National Education Association will engage dissident teachers in dialogue is a welcome step toward improving teachers’ union real involvement in school change.

The apparent dearth of reform themes emanating from the union side in bargaining talks continues to confound me. Within the many rich memories of my time in schools are countless conversations with teachers about their interactions with different students in their classes, and a willingness on their part to participate in a plan for improvement of the students’ academic success. That is what the many good teachers do; it remains a mystery why this ethic does not better “osmose” into union stance in contract talks, particularly on the district grass roots level.

In my own former district, for example, more or less by administrative fiat formative testing has been employed with some success in order to target instruction with individual students. Though there has been some resistance to the lack of collegiality in some of the implementation, I like to think teachers have recognized the positive outcomes the testing has facilitated.

Of course, it may be a quantum jump from the recognition that testing has been useful to focus instruction, to endorsement of student test scores as a factor in one’s own professional evaluation.

Still, the success of the school reform movement in painting teachers’ unions as the bad guys resisting necessary change suggests across broad reaches the underlying professional ethic of teachers has too little crossed the membrane from membership to union leadership.

Perhaps leadership has not listened, though in defense of my local union leadership, input in recent years has clearly been solicited. I am indicted with my companions in the membership in that I handed off my priorities in survey form, and then let the process commence without further elbow grease on my part.

As a corollary factor, I and my now former colleagues operated without raise or cost of living increase for some years, so it should hardly be a surprise that money is the first priority in negotiations, along with rising class sizes. Other more complex and subtle topics involving pedagogy, or the dilemmas low income students bring, or the finer points of teacher evaluation, tended to remain low on the totem pole, or remained as questions not broached by teaching staff struggling to keep heads above water financially and or in terms of their work load.

On teacher evaluation in particular, despite the anxiety naturally elicited by the sea change implied in evaluation that includes student test scores, in a perfect world a response might be to look into the option further, with an eye to maintaining a balance that includes fairness to the individual teacher. Moreover, to stonewall the issue invites the criticisms that currently descend, and without the input that only teachers are in a position to provide.

So I welcome news I first encountered in a Seattle Times editorial that the National Education Association is reaching out to those among its ranks that value their union membership, but at the same time have voiced concern that the union both nationally and locally is “not acting in the interest of students or elevating the profession of teaching,” in the words of Christopher Eide, the executive director of the Seattle teacher organization, Teachers United.

Over the next year the NEA will host discussions with a selected group of these dissident teachers.

Though the 53 invitees from around the country seem a drop in the bucket compared to the overall NEA membership, one hopes this is only the start of a deeper, more long lasting, and wider conversation that opens up the union side of the reform ledger, and allow unionism to serve, as it has not been, as a real world balance to the sometimes theoretical slants of the most vocal self-styled reformers.

Before the union can engage in substantive dialogue in the reform world, it must first dialogue better with its own members.

Posted in School Reform, Schools and Politics | Tagged education, education and politics, empowering teachers, National Education Association, school reform, teacher professionalism, teachers' unions | Leave a comment

School Reform and the Confusion of Labels

Posted on August 23, 2013 by schooldog

Summary: Who are the school reformers, and how do we tell them apart? And what do traditional labels such as “liberal” and “conservative” mean in this context?

Who are the reformers in American education? Honestly, in my time in schools, I thought of myself as a reformer, in the down to earth sense of trying always to find better ways to motivate the kids before me and enhance their learning. I know I was hardly alone in my particular school. The faculty served up a diverse menu of skills and attributes, and a strong majority of staff (at least I thought) measured a significant part of their self-worth as stemming from the quality of their impact on the kids they taught.

Yet I am struck that seldom are teachers and more generally workers in schools labeled “school reformers,” while those outside schools such as corporate donors, think tank opiners or market oriented intellectuals often are so labeled in the media. “What is up with that?”

How have we school folk allowed the phrase to be hijacked? Perhaps there is no mystery or ulterior action involved. After the grading of papers, the preparation for the next days’ lesson, there is little room in the teachers’ life for meetings after meetings after school, or for evening meetings that conflict with family time. Just the practice of teaching itself for those committed to the craft consumes as much time as the practitioner is willing to give it.

Many teachers can little afford to be politically assertive in any school movement, including their union, unless they be young, without family and mortgage. As a consequence the ministrations of the union remain traditional, on compensation and work conditions — the latter which does intersect with issues of educational quality in matters such as classroom size — rather than on the broader philosophies of school reorganization and reform.

So unions are cut off from the better reform instincts of teachers, and show a face to the public, as a teachers’ organization, that poorly reflects the reformist heart lurking in most teachers, that instinct that brought them into the profession, a desire to create a better world.

By contrast, on the outside of the school community, it is in corporate interest to be able to hire well qualified public school graduates, and so time and resources are set aside to “reform.” University and private foundation thinkers make schools the focal point of their labors, and so produce ideas that “reform.”

I am struck that one of the original “reformers”, Diane Ravitch, has somehow been ascribed a reactionary patina, because she has come full circle to rebut some of the darling ideas of the “school reform” movement.

There are other time honored labels that seem to have been stood on end. What, after all, does “progressive” mean in school reform context? Can corporate types be “progressive” when they boost reform in their capital self-interest? Or does progressive somehow denote an approach to the betterment of others or the common good? Liberal used to mean something along those lines.

What then does “liberal” or “conservative” mean now, and in this context?

Are unions, once the liberal champion of the working person, now conservative because they too often deflate school progress? Once upon a time in American political discourse “conservative” referred to a respected position, and was not the pejorative it has become in the context of our acid, over heated national partisanship. One side spits “liberal”; the other spits “conservative”. The former evokes gutless do-gooder and the latter stick in the mud.

In the name of market ideology another faction dons the mask of reformer and advocates school vouchers as a way out of low income and failing schools for low income parents and their kids. Are they then “progressive” for pursuing a conservative market ideology for its own sake, or is there altruism in the movement as well?

Such semantic confusion echoes an in depth disarray in education. In this world of misapplied labels and hyper partisanship, the factions tend not to confer with one another, a failed behavior modeled by Congress, and so pursue solutions in their own tunnels that may fit a preferred way of seeing the world, but at best address real problems only in a fragmented fashion.

Thought about school reform has become so partisan that teachers, the guts of the matter, are somehow left out of the discussion, and instead have become the butt of the problem, probably because as a group they are too silent. Teacher voice might pose just the dose of reality needed to leaven the frantic offerings from the lookers on – the corporations, think tanks, and politicians of various stripe that have some form of skin in the game.

Ours tends to be an adversarial society; in the end it is believed that better ideas will win out to the betterment of society as a whole. However, the model works best when positions are flexible enough to break bread with competing visions.

It seems to me that conversation between players has been a casualty. Peace, my brothers and sisters. Let us confer.

Posted in School Reform, Schools and Politics | Tagged education and politics, empowering teachers, partisanship in education, political labels, progressive, school reform, school reformers, teacher as reformer, teacher overwork, teacher unions in reform, teaching | 1 Comment

School Reform and Politics: Teach for America and Its Political Identity

Posted on August 15, 2013 by schooldog

Summary: Has Teach for America been hijacked by conservative and market ideology?

Teach for America has become a political lightning rod in the struggle over reform in American education. The organization was originally conceived as an avenue through which to induce high energy Type A college graduates into low income and struggling urban schools and, not unlike the Peace Corps with foreign cultures, introduce a generation of cultural leaders to the intricacies of public education in this country. Today Teach for America faces a growing chorus of dissidents from among its own incumbents and alumni that the organization has overly aligned itself with one set of players in the assault on the failures of schools serving low income students.

These critics charge in effect that Teach for America has been hijacked by a set that has a conservative and business patina, as well as an anti-union bias, and in extreme iterations seems bent on waging a general war on the existing education system.

Harold Blume of the Los Angeles Times (“Teach for America Criticized for Apparent Stance on Educational Policy”) frames the story, and Diane Ravitch on her blog provides useful context from the point of view of a critic of the conservative/business forces within the school reform movement.

Blume notes that the conservative leaning Walton Foundation recently gave a good deal of money to support the work of Teach for America. The Dell Foundation has also given to Teach for America, and certainly the Gates Foundation has been a player in education for a long time, but it is also true that governments of various levels have funded Teach for America, for example by paying Teach for America teachers the normal salary for rookies, and districts certainly have invited the TFA folks into their schoolhouses.

Yet the Walton donation, presumably because Sam Walton is known for his right wing views, has sparked a round of criticism that the monies are serving a private, corporate interest.

Are these funds from foundations associated with industry disinterested entries for the good of the American educational ecosystem? I am willing to acknowledge some altruistic intent. But it is also true that corporations typically find it necessary to upgrade skills of new hires in areas it is reasonable to expect the educational system to have already nailed down. So, enlightened self-interest can be said to have originally driven this particular corporate ship. It is understandable and even appropriate that the corporate eye turns itself to such solutions, via related foundations.

But somewhere in recent history, perhaps amid the same kinds of frustrations teachers and schools have faced in reversing low income students’ poor academic skills, it has seemed to me those same teachers and their unions have become the symbol of a status quo viewed as hopelessly mired in dysfunctional structure by largely conservative business figures and market oriented intellectuals, and have become the butt of a school reform rallying cry on the part of these outsiders.

In turn, Teach for America has become the poster child for school transformation in the mind of the right, and regarded as a fifth column whose role is to undercut the power of teachers unions and frankly much of the public school establishment.

Now, I basically like Teach for America and its original charter, so I instinctively resist the appropriation by the right, and welcome the rising chorus of those who see its political alignment drifting into overly partisan waters, despite my sympathy with some of the causes espoused by conservatives, such as charter schools, though I see them as crucial experiments, not as battalions in a war.

I see several elements to these developments that bear watching.

First of all, Teach for America continues to look like an evolving enterprise. Linda Darling-Hammond has conducted a respected analysis of Teach for America results in real classrooms. Her study found these sketchily prepared but ambitious folks fare consistently more poorly as teachers than regular line teachers of experience and more lengthy training. Moreover, though these young people would be expected to improve their skills over time, most have moved on no later than three years from the start of their classroom experience, often enough into other positions related to education.

To the credit of Teach for America, their staff continues to refine their selection criteria, in order to better identify the best teacher candidates and those who will remain in the classroom and education in general.

But to date the enduring footprint of Teach for America seems not so much in the classroom lift its young apostles desire, but in the diaspora of alumni into the world of educational administration and related policy posts.

We are wise to pay attention to the difficulty of the work of a teacher. According to Ravitch, the average time teaching for TFA is two plus years. 46% of regular teaches also leave the profession, but after five years. TFA would seem particularly to burn out their elite neophytes; as long haul candidates, when experience deepens skills, TGA recruits have a poor track record. The degree of revolving door instead brings succeeding waves of inexperienced teachers on board. In practice, the eagerness of TFA recruits is being exploited to a degree that cannot be sustained.

Perhaps TFA training should better recognize that the zeal of its recruits will almost always be unsustainable, and better counsel the newbies to set limits on the time and energy they will give. Perhaps more general better training is in order, though such corrections may torpedo the cost model of the program.

Similar grievances in education as well as in the broader economic history of the US have led to the rise of unions. Yes, those same nasty unions. Enlightened corporations themselves try to evaluate what a reasonable work load means. Overworked workers can be inefficient and/or short term workers; TFA, well meaning, has apparently not evolved to that level of organizational sophistication.

It seems to me TFA incumbents are well advised to keep an eye on the vigor of their local teacher unions. In the past I have noted with interest that some charter teachers have found it provident to look to unionization, for similar work load as well as salary issues.

It is useful to remember, as teachers’ unions are criticized aptly from various directions, that they exist in origin for a good reason.

TFA teachers, as new employees, earn toward the bottom of the union bargained pay scale, significantly less than experienced teachers. I am probably being paranoid to suspect fiscally motivated wheels within this wheel, but in the big picture, lower average salaries means less pressure on corporate tax obligations, and so feed the corporate interest of the Walmarts of the world.

In a longer run, this is a short sighted strategy. High powered college grads, idealists, will one day need a living wage, and will have career alternatives to depressed teacher salaries. Low recompense in the long run will not buy eager idealism and the uber commitment to task such motivation brings.

More likely the corporate target is the power of teacher unions, which offsets the corporate old school instinct to keep recompense and hence cost at a depressed level.

By contrast, one need only look at the level of compensation in the high tech worlds of Silicon Valley and its brethren to recognize that knowledge workers, well compensated, are the engine of the enterprise. Teachers in revitalized schools should also be the “engine of the enterprise.”

One possible side effect of the TFA route to employment could be that regular training programs competing with TFA hires may shrink; the pressure shifts to teacher training programs to themselves reform, which is another story.

In the context of cost control, flesh and blood teachers cannot be outsourced readily in the way that manufacturing jobs have migrated to the third world. But tutoring via Skype and other such computer communication is part of distance learning now. Online courses are offered online widely from high school through the university level, all of which may yet change schools in profound ways and sooner than we think give stiff competition to the status quo in American education.

Related technologies and variations on computer learning currently are used to cut costs in other ways. Instructional Aides in conjunction with the use of computers to build individual skills are cheaper than teachers, and can be used to eliminate teaching positions, which if duplicated widely would tend to reduce demand for teachers and suppress teacher salaries. The latter is not the purpose, but perhaps an unintended side effect.

Rocketship Schools in California, a prominent charter option founded by John Danner, himself a son of corporate Silicon Valley, has used this model with some success in low income schools. Not coincidentally, they also utilize Teach for America candidates. With the savings of one teaching position per grade level through use of computers, together with the entry level salaries paid TFA recruits, Rocketship is able to hire an admin level mentor for the young teachers along with a cadre of Instructional Aides to monitor and help with computer use and still meet the budget pinch of the California fiscal crisis.

While this strategy has shown promise in securing more bang for the taxpayers’ buck in Rocketship hands, a less ethical application might be used to just cut costs, period, which in the corporate or wealthy world means less pressure on taxes as a source of revenue, a core conservative/corporate theme. See the machinations of the Koch brothers as cases in point.

Meanwhile the cynic in me notes that money is to be made by companies that produce the computers and develop the software that, if successful, would make more marginal the expensive teacher in the classroom.

Let us remember that when schools are successful in creation of student academic skills – Japan and Finland are two examples — teachers are a truly professional class, not simply items on a spreadsheet that must be reduced or replaced. The teaching of low income students in particular rests on a relationship between teacher and student.

These developments around teachers fit into a larger zeitgeist — the much larger decline of middle class wages, the continuing attack by corporations on efforts to bolster union wage, the realities of global competition that propel cost cutting measures, and the yawning of the rich/poor divide. There is a parallel decline in consumer buying power which is the back bone, ironically, of corporate profits.

In various subtle ways, via fifth columns such as Teach for America, and the use of technology to do (theoretically) some of the traditional work of teachers more effectively, there is evidence that the corporate world is in fact slithering tentacles into the heart of American education.

Thus introduced is the market mantra of creative destruction. Institutions that have become too maladaptive, too rigid to shift to meet new environments, and so in effect self-destruct, give rise to more competitive and adaptive forms. Will we look back in perhaps fifty years and recognize that currrent school bureaucracies and the state of teaching in the early twenty-first century met such an end?

I am not unsympathetic to the doctrine of creative destruction. In fact, Darwin beat the latter day market philosophers to the punch.

Unions as well as school bureaucracies have become ossified and slow to respond to the complex failure of low income schools. The entire school enterprise is inextricably intertwined with the failure of other aspects of the society, such as the breakdown of family structure and the economic struggles of low income families. Conservative politicians stymie remedy in Congress and fail to even acknowledge the cyclical family suffering of low income folks, and to fathom that the broader community good is tied up in the fortunes of less fortunate members.

But unions are part of the problem, and do not serve their membership by not only resisting change, but too often by failure to be in the forefront of change. As Howard Blume reports in the earlier cited article, in LA or Huntsville, unions are leading their own way to marginalization. Those who don’t adapt remain only in history books.

How do I say, however, that I am uneasy with these newly arrived corporate bedfellows? I welcome the capacity to create new structures that thrive by the dictates of a current market, for example in the dynamism of new Silicon Valley offshoots. As I have blogged before, the flatness of these organizations has much to teach any school that recognizes its bureaucratic nature as a central aspect of school struggle.

But the values of capitalism do not overlap well with that of the teacher in the classroom putting her heart where at risk kids will recognize the care she brings to their lives. To the extent that the imperatives of market dynamics dominate reform in schools, I worry to the same extent the heart felt commitment to students that is the core of teaching and learning will suffer, or at least fail to be understood and disregarded, or not nurtured. Mind you, teachers manage to teach in bureaucratically challenged schools; no doubt their ethic will survive corporate shenanigans. But the task of reaching at risk kids is daunting enough without extraneous cross winds that complicate the target.

Given the history of American capitalism, it is prudent to be wary of association in the care of our children with creative destruction, the injection of the needs of capital, and the presence of indirect agendas. These forces seem too narrowly focused on the metrics of testing, though testing most certainly has a role, while the maligned teacher, seemingly in unrequited silence, argues the broader and deeper dimensions of the topic.

Further worry is that these are powerful, well-funded entities whose only brake is the attention of government. The other potential white hat with comparable clout that might serve as a political counter balance are the teachers’ unions. However, the unions endanger the reform project from a different direction, and have demonstrated only episodic ability to influence issues beyond compensation.

Meanwhile, to my thinking the more fundamental failure in schools stems not from the inherent insufficiency of teachers, though there are poor teachers, but from the top down, hierarchical nature of schools and school systems, which suppresses talent and innovation on the teacher level. The real legacy of Teach for America, of charter schools, of the use of technology, if we are to remember these experiments fifty years hence (and there is scant evidence yet a silver bullet has been found), will not be any resounding revolution in teaching technique or the injection of Type A teachers, but in the creation of school structures that free teachers to be professionals in charge of the domain.

That would be creative destruction and reconstruction that all would applaud.

Posted in School Reform, Schools and Politics | Tagged at risk students, charter schools, empowering teachers, low-income students, politics and school reform, school bureaucracy, school reform, Teach for America, teacher professionalism, teachers' unions | Leave a comment

School Reform and Politics: The Inflammatory and the Misperception Across the School Reform Divide

Posted on July 30, 2013 by schooldog

Summary: An op ed piece from the Washington Policy Center is examined for its “non-partisan” view on the Washington Education Association and school reform in Washington State.

School reform is a highly complex enterprise, with streaming from the surrounding culture always in play, and actors as diverse as students, parents, teachers, and administrators inside the educational beast. Operating from the outside are politicians, university based researchers, special interest organizations with skin in the game (in a sense including unions), journalists and all manner of lookers on with their own particular set of knowledge and skills and sometimes an axe to grind.

Note the “inside” and “outside,” which is purposeful. I do fear that often there is too little understanding of the real problems of teachers on the part of outsiders, while the power of outsiders and their particular solutions, sometimes well-meaning and well thought out, but sometimes petty and poorly conceived, can intensify the bunker mentality in schools, and hinder rather than help progress. I read with interest a report by Linda Shaw last month in the Seattle Times that the Gates Foundation, heavy hitter in school reform circles, has found it appropriate to mend fences with teachers, after past head butting. Cross fertilization and communication are too often casualties when diverse points of view seek identical goals.

So it was with dismay that I read a recent op ed piece in the Seattle Times by Liv Finne, the Educational Director of the Washington Policy Center, which attacks the Washington teachers’ union — “Education reforms for state students blocked by the WEA.”

The website of the Center identifies itself as a non-partisan think tank “promoting sound public policy based on free market solutions.” The skeptic in me wonders if advocates of free market solutions can in fact be non-partisan, particularly in the current political environment, but as a fallen away economics major in college I have myself with limited success tried to apply market principles to public policy issues, particularly education, so am relatively open to such arguments where they make sense. We need all the help we can get, particularly fresh ideas. I even agree with a couple of the major positions Ms. Finne argues, in both of which the WEA falls short.

But the title of her piece, “Education reforms for state students blocked by the WEA,” immediately raised red flags: “uh, oh, another bashing of the union and by extension the teachers it represents.” At least the Gates folks have learned from their mistakes. And, indeed, some of the half-truths in Ms. Finne’s article are uttered in the fine tradition of partisanship, which need not mean the usual Democrat/Republican divide, but which may refer more generally to advocacy of one side of an argument to the exclusion of more balanced (and therefore confusing!) rebuttal. How language is used can reveal partisan intent, in this case an attempt to delegitimize the WEA.

First, she is correct in lambasting the Washington Education Association for its resistance to charter school experiments in Washington State. As I have argued in a recent post, the union appears to have failed to even consider the option and has left little evidence of entering the conversation in order to allow the wealth of its membership’s knowledge to influence the outcome.

Second, she is correct in my view that principals be given the power to prevent the forced transfer to his or her building of an inferior teacher, as I have also argued in a recent post. Ms. Finne lays the blame for the failure of this proposal at the feet of the WEA, as well. I have not been close enough to this particular issue to comment on the charge, but other of her statements remind me that the full story is a casualty when politically charged comments enter the arena.

For example, she states that in typical school practice “restrictive seniority policies prevent students from learning from the best teachers.” Overreach, Ms. Finne. Though I agree with the point you attempt about the forced transfer of inferior teachers, this particular statement implies a blanket quarantine of students from the best teachers, and so misleads and inflames.

Better that market based philosophy find ways to keep the 46% of teachers who leave the profession after five years. Among that throng are surely many individuals who would have developed into the fine teachers you lament. Or, learn from the Finns (no pun intended), and ask how market based solutions might guide the infusions of state money the court has ordered, untie the many tangles of school bureaucracy, and liberate teachers into the ranks of independently acting professionals. Ponder in market philosophy the message of Finnish teachers that they value their autonomy as professionals in the Finnish system more highly than their pay scale, which is not so astronomically different from our own.

Later in the same article, Ms. Finne avers that “the WEA is also working to cut educational services to children.” The absurdity of this line fades into misstatement when she clarifies that the WEA pushed in the recent legislative session for a half day school closure for planning and training purposes. The periodic half day workshop has been a negotiated item in individual school districts for a while now. I am not a particular fan of them. Though well intended to give teachers and administrators time to plan and train, in my experience the time often could have been used in a more concentrated fashion. The intent has been to improve instruction; to make the distorted claim it is to “cut educational services to children” raises questions about the partisan purpose of its author.

Other of the positions of the Washington Policy Center as outlined in Ms. Finne’s article echo other entities “outside” the school bubble and similarly insulated from it, and so share their poor understanding of reality from a teacher’s classroom point of view.

First case in point: she laments the failure by the legislature to end the practice of “social promotion” of students “who cannot read at grade level by third grade.” Clearly these students represent an important nexus of school challenges. However, the preponderance of the research is pretty consistent that retention at grade level has a negative outcome over time. Students who are retained are more likely to fall further behind and eventually drop out of school. Better is targeted intervention with such students while they continue on with their class.

I am unclear why the Washington Policy Center would advocate for such a policy; perhaps to their thinking inadequate students have not met the market test and so should not be rewarded with advancement. If so, a poor choice of time, place, and circumstance to implement ideological perspective; it comes across as punitive. They might more consistently argue that in this particular market more investment is needed. To implement social retention would be a step backward, not a reform. If the WEA is responsible for the maintenance of this particular status quo, score one for them.

Second case. The Washington Policy Center also wants to implement A-F “grades” for schools “so parents could easily understand how well their local school is performing.” I don’t know if this is more disrespectful of parents or of teachers and their schools. First off, Ms. Finne earlier in the article already has acknowledged that schools are ranked as “struggling”, “fair,” and so forth. How do letter grades substantially enhance the fundamental evaluation that is already in place? Does the WPC think parents will not understand or that teachers will not get the point? Is there something ambiguous about “struggling” and “fair?”

Moreover, there is something subtly patronizing to subject a complex adult activity such as teaching to the simplicities of grading similar to that which we use with our children. Somewhere in the position is the blame of and disrespect of teachers I upon which I have remarked in previous posts, and smacks of a punitive stance toward school people.

In the end, this position is frivolous, advances the cause not one whit, and wastes the time of the legislature. If the WEA has squelched it, score two for them.

Finally, the Washington Policy Center would have salary increases beyond adjustments for inflation tied to “professional training in methods that actually work at teaching underachieving students.” One could infer a belief from this passage and its choice of phrase that all teachers actually have no clue what works, and currently flail in the wind. Perhaps true of novice or demonstrably inferior teachers, but to lump all teachers under one heading in this way merely stereotypes and ignores good work being done by good teachers and schools.

This position is not a new one. In my own school district in the past, as an outcome of negotiations, local supplements to the state designated salary schedule came in the form of additional recompense for activities intended to improve instruction.

From the perspective of the teaching ranks, however, remember there have been no raises to the salary schedule within recent experience, and cost of living increases continually have been removed by the legislature in the face of dire budget realities. In effect, conscientious teachers who give strong effort to their workload, which has increased over recent years in a state which is short on teachers in national comparisons, are asked to work even longer hours just to get a modest increase on their pay check.

At some point the individual teacher, no matter how good a soldier, does a slow burn and tires of carrying the burden without adequate recompense, and in the face of misperceptions of their competence by people who have never walked a step in the complexities of today’s classroom.

I understand enough economic theory and the psychology of incentive to wonder why the Washington Policy Center’s thinking, allegedly in the search for free market solutions, would not understand this existential dilemma in teacher lives.

So if the WEA is responsible for death of this particular policy, then they likely are listening to their constituency, and the quiet smolder behind closed doors in the schoolhouse. Consider it pushback. “You ain’t gonna solve this problem by laying the full burden on our backs.”

On this issue, I think the WEA aligns with its constituency.

All this said, the relationship between union and membership in general puzzles me. Speaking for myself, I valued the collective strength and procedural protection, if needed. It wasn’t, but I admit to some paranoia working in the school bureaucracy, so there was solace in knowing I had the union behind me.

But it was also true that I had little time, being probably overly committed to my work, for contemplation of the kinds of issues I can entertain in my subsequent retirement. After family, home, and work, chronically my sleep suffered. Charter schools? I didn’t have time to refine my thinking and influence my union’s position. It wouldn’t surprise me if the ranks of the various teacher school reform offshoots are numbered by young teachers in the period before new families and home responsibilities have commandeered all available time.

I don’t think my experience is unique.

In the absence of assertive and consistent input from membership, union leadership is left with protection of the status quo on its agenda, with progressive action on issues essential to professional purpose too often eddying to the side.

That said I believe local chapter unions have crafted reformist compacts with school districts. And it has been my impression that Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, has been prominent in reform conversations, so activism does happen from union shores.

I am not blind to the failings of the Washington Education Association. But I have my loyalties, and they include calling out pale arguments against the WEA for their insufficiency. Though I think they have some of the issues correctly, on others the Washington Policy Center needs to broaden its thinking and more diversely inform its purported non-partisan point of view.

So I growl back at the attack dogs; a quasi-partisan response to a quasi-partisan launch.

Posted in School Reform, Schools and Politics | Tagged education, education reform, partisanship and school reform, school reform, teachers unions and school reform, teachers' unions | Leave a comment

School Reform and Bureaucracy: The Washington State Charter Battle

Posted on July 16, 2013 by schooldog

Summary: A lawsuit challenging Washington’s new charter school law on constitutional grounds may be embarrassingly in the end a defense of a dysfunctional status quo.

I believe in teachers. Not the Type A’s that reformers would like to attract from their intent upon law or medicine or programming, though those too would be welcome, but the many teachers I have encountered and worked with over the years I have spent in schools. The strong majority I know have a sense of mission, enjoy kids, and will go the extra mile the profession requires. Good people who take their work seriously, though in various ways I see as hunkered down against criticism of the profession, hierarchical directives to which they have little or no input, and the increasing requirement to do more things and faster. And along the way heal the culture via the children the society bequeaths them. An emotional fortress only those inside understand.

So it is with a mixture of dismay and puzzlement that I read that the state teachers’ union, the Washington Education Association (WEA), that represents my friends, as well as the Washington Association of School Administrators, has opposed the introduction of charter schools into the state of Washington, first fighting last fall the initiative that ultimately authorized charters, and now filing suit alleging the new enabling statute violates the Washington State constitution. (The League of Women Voters and El Centro de la Raza, an organization in the Latino community, have also joined in the suit.)

I am not a lawyer; I cannot comment on the legal merits of the case in the manner of one so trained. But experience and common sense can often comment usefully on the fabric of the law.

I do not contend that charters are the only and irrefutable answer to all school ills. The original Stanford CREDO study in 2009 put that to rest; in the original study only 19% of charters nationwide outperformed their local comparison public schools.

However, in its most recent (2013) update CREDO reports the “performance trend” nationally for charters has improved modestly in the interval since, including among at risk groups of students, one primary target of the Washington State charter law. In fact, in reading skills charters advanced learning for their students marginally better than over half of the traditional public schools the charter students would have otherwise attended. In math, charters outperformed their traditional public school counterparts a smaller percentage of the time, but still to a degree improved over 2009. Progress.

It is a no-brainer that there are lessons from these hard fought gains that we can ill afford to ignore; in the relative failures there may also be worthy instruction. Charters are laboratories that can propose solutions and successfully promote the growth of diverse settings for diverse learners, if monitored properly in the name of public interest and subject to the same elusive measurements with which we saddle regular public schools.

My puzzlement lies with the all-out manner in which the WEA seems to be waging war in a context that exudes complexity and ample grey, and therefore calls out for a more reasoned deliberative. I have not detected much nuance in the public resistance; almost, it seems a battle for existence. It may be that all of the constitutional concerns of the WEA have merit; what gives me pause is that I have encountered little in what media I read in which union or administrative representatives rebut from an educational perspective the contention that benefits can flow from charter activity. They just agin it.

A benefit of the market place of ideas in a free society is that better mouse traps get designed where the opportunity to do so flourishes. The argument applies also to the relatively cautious opportunities made possible by the Washington State charter law.

Moreover, the WEA parent body, the National Education Association, according to its website, does recognize the validity of charter schools under specified conditions. From their website: “ NEA believes that charter schools and other nontraditional public school options have the potential to facilitate education reforms and develop new and creative teaching methods that can be replicated in traditional public schools for the benefit of all children.”

By contrast, what it might be that has constellated such resistance from the WEA? Do we accept the suit solely at face value – namely, the WEA simply argues the charter law is unconstitutional? In my view the context of the WEA’s action suggests deeper currents in these waters.

The charter movement, funded heavily from outside the educational establishment most notably by Bill Gates, but by others as well, is an indictment of school patterns as they exist, and expresses a frustration on the part of the employer community with the glacial pace of progress in school reform. As such, the charter concept challenges the entrenched power of both the Washington Education Association and the principals’ organization, the Washington Association of School Administrators, which as noted earlier has joined the WEA in the lawsuit.

Could the lawsuit challenging the charter law be a classic case of those under fire responding with trench warfare? We have an environment in the state of Washington in which business and tech types clamor for higher quality graduates out of our schools and, frustrated when their efforts to push reform stall, blame teachers and principals for the perceived failure of the schools, which in turn helps to draw the battle lines.

Never mind that the seemingly implacable complex of forces surrounding school reform leave the many ardent teachers and principals as nonplussed as the business types who need higher quality graduates; the battle degenerates into an irrational power-fest. The atmosphere of blame short circuits attempts to deliberate together, though both sides desire a better outcome. In the discontinuity, the battle for power becomes bald. Who controls?

Some of the attendant dynamics are as old as the hills, and are buried within them. The current bureaucracy provides jobs and a kind of security. Rock the boat, and it will not be clear who the winners will be.

In this distrustful and combative atmosphere, the stakeholders outside the school hierarchy go to the public in the form of initiative and fire a legal salvo. The union and the administrators’ association see the initiative as an attack on their prerogatives, and respond with their own legal maneuver. We see some of the same dynamic in the national Congress.

The State Supreme Court has ordered the state to make good on the constitutional requirement to “fully fund” public education; the state legislature has made some initial moves toward compliance. The WEA claims on its PAC website that ” The Charter School Act interferes with the state’s progress toward compliance by diverting already insufficient resources away from public school districts.”

The truth is that perhaps 80% of the cost of schools goes toward staff pay and benefits. Staffing is determined in specific schools by student enrollment, and funding to school districts flows based on student enrollment. Even if charter schools were not considered to be “public” schools (and even that contention is questionable in my mind – the charter law specifically refers to the charters as “public” schools), the net effect of charter schools would be to shrink the strictly public school sector, in which the “full funding” target would also be reduced.

The net effect on funding per pupil may be felt, but more at the margin. For example, if a building has fewer pupils in it, it still must be heated as a full entity. Technically, charters may “interfere” with full funding in this fashion, but in a much more subtle fashion than the WEA claims; such an impact must be weighed against the potential benefits of charter schools.

The parent NEA website, by contrast, provides a guideline: “Charter school funding should not disproportionately divert resources from traditional public schools.” (See link cited above.) The WEA undercuts the legitimacy of its claim by making too broad a statement, which weakens their lawsuit, in my view.

Next up, according to the WEA, the Charter School Act “unconstitutionally diverts funding that is restricted to use for public common schools to private charter schools that are not subject to local voter control.” Again, seems to me fudging the truth here. Charter schools can be subject to local control if the local school board applies to the State Charter Commission to become an authorizer, which to date only Spokane SD has done. It is true a potential charter operator can apply directly to the State Commission, whose members are appointed by high level government elected officials, including the governor. Not local, but subject to elective control. The lapse in more local control would seem to occur by decision or lack thereof at the local level.

Moreover, the use of the word “private” is a red herring. It implies for profit private corporations, which are explicitly prohibited from operating charters in the state of Washington. A cursory reading of Section 208 of the empowering law confirms that the schools are to be non-profit and considered public.

Some items that buttress the filing of the lawsuit are primarily of a legal, constitutional nature that may or may not have salience. However, taken together, one might expect if the constitutional issues were in fact the real issues for the teachers’ union and the administrators’ association, then both entities might have been expected to work with other parties to address their concerns in the context of preparing the initiative to go before the voters. Or, if the union saw merit in charter schools as a concept, then it might have proposed some option that met their constitutional objections.

That they appear not to have done so to this close reader of the daily news suggests both union and admin bodies simply are opposed to the concept, and ride alleged constitutional coattails to gain what they have lost in the political arena. If this inference is correct, then in my mind neither the teachers’ union, whose existence I believe necessary, nor the administrators’ association, which represents many people I respect, demonstrate the necessary chops to be considered advocates for school reform on this issue.

We are left to wonder to what extent each entity expresses the will of its membership. I’d like to think not.

One more question in this series of questions about the charter law suit. According to the WEA/PAC website, the Charter School Act “violates the ‘general and uniform’ requirement in the constitution because charter schools are not subject to most of the laws and regulations applicable to public school districts, including many of the common school provisions defining the elements of a basic education.”

Of course, that’s the point! Though it would be incorrect to argue that all of “the elements of a basic education” as set forth in the regulations are obstructive of reform, the set of procedures and regulations that describe how schools are managed and the ingrained culture – the school bureaucracy — that has emerged from those rules constitute a major part of the problem. (See some of my recent previous posts on School Reform) Charter schools short circuit these dysfunctional structures by establishing a relatively tabla rasa legal oasis, an opportunity for a creative brew, where it is intended innovation can prosper.

Hopefully, the framers of Initiative 1142 have crafted the law to meet the alleged constitutional objection.

The intellectual basis of the suit may derive from an opinion published in 1997 in the University of Washington law journal during earlier bouts around charter schools. The author, L.K. Beale, finds after sober historical and definitional analysis that the charter proposals of the time in fact violated the constitution in many of the ways the current suit alleges. Of course, lawyers file briefs from the right, and lawyers file briefs from the left, all tightly argued, but argued by folks trained as advocates within the law, which leaves said briefs short of the full truth. L.K. Beale, presumably a student at the time because that is how the law journal system usually operates, is a player of unknown bias and unidentified potential client.

That said, the carefully researched article lends legal gravitas to the suit against the charter law. From my lay point of view, the eventually ruling by the court will revolve around how narrowly or inclusively the justices interpret the words “general and uniform,” which in their constitutional derivation are intended to guarantee that all students have access to a “general and uniform” education. Will charter schools be generally and uniformly similar enough to other “common schools” to pass constitutional muster?

The good news is that the terms have been scrutinized before when “common schools” have morphed into specific variants, such as high school. The bad news — if the court finds in favor of the plaintiff, it is difficult to see how the pertinent constitutional issues might be addressed in any new charter initiative without weakening it to the point of irrelevance.

It is not a long metaphorical jump from the invocation of long standing school laws and regulations (as does the union/admin suit) to de facto entrenchment of powers and prerogatives which enshrine the position of both teachers and administrators in stable but significantly dysfunctional frameworks.

The lawsuit is most distressing in its lesson on the difficulty of change. One system among a network of systems cannot sustain change without adjustments elsewhere in the network; without simultaneous change in multiple interlocking systems, the inertia of the unreformed will return the rebel to its original stasis. In school terms, new ways of reaching at risk kids can be stymied by systems grown to the status quo.

Behold, the power of the status quo.

Posted in Charter Schools, School Bureaucracy, School Reform, Uncategorized | Tagged at risk students, charter schools, Initiative 1240 Washington State, legal challenge charter law, school bureaucracy, school reform, Stanford CREDO study, teachers' unions | Leave a comment

At Risk Students: Warnings from Japan While Congress Fiddles

Posted on June 28, 2013 by schooldog

Summary: The lessons of “slacker” youth in Japan, and chronic economic stagnation there, warns us of the perils of too many underemployed, undereducated youth to longer term economic health, and the role of government in human capital investment.

Jack is a bright young man, by testament of others and by aspects of his school record. That he has been an indifferent student need not have been too limiting in better economic times, but in these waning days of the Great Recession, with employers wary of human investment and the employment opportunities of the recent past having dried up even for the liberal arts university graduate, a young man like Jack, lacking university diploma, has found himself stuck in a round of poorly paying, often part time jobs that prohibit major purchases or the planning of a life with his girlfriend.

In fact it is a work environment in which well paying, highly technical jobs go unfilled, if we are to believe our corporate employers, and Jack, still struggling along at community college in vaguely a business program, has misplayed his opportunity to work hard in school, earn good grades, be smart about his college major, and be ready to go to work as a programmer or scientist or some other technical type that the current economy rewards. A child of American privilege, even as a member of a middle class family, he shares the fate of others who also never learned to work for the baubles they have been given, assumed manna will continue to fall from heaven, and so are lost when they are finally required to stand and deliver by the economic realities around them.

Jack is puzzled how to go about finding a well-paying job in this new economic environment.

The plight of our increased number of unemployed and marginally employed young people is anguishing for them and their families and poses both short term and potentially long term harm to our economic outlook.

An eye cast overseas to the Japanese economy and the shaky employment position of an oversized portion of their young, and increasingly of middle aged workers should tighten our breath a bit.

Following the crash of an enormous real estate bubble in the early 90’s, the Japanese economy has teetered along well behind the pace of its “tiger” years when Toyota and Sony seemed well on the way to replacing American companies in the corporate vanguard. The malaise continues to this day. According to Ethan Devine of Indus Capital Partners writing in the May 2012 issue of the Atlantic (“~~The Slacker~~ Trap”), Japan’s economy has stagnated to such an extent that its current size is smaller than that in 1992.

Much as we see in our current sluggish recovery, in the atmosphere of economic uncertainty Japanese companies have continued to play their financial cards close to their vest and have declined to expand in aggressive ways. Japanese companies once hired thousands of university graduates who they then trained in their corporate byways. Such confidence in the future has evaporated, replaced by the hiring of part time workers with the very specific skills needed.

The consequence for young workers in Japan is staggering. “In 1992, 80 per cent of young workers held regular jobs. By 2006, half were temps,” according to Devine. By comparison, less startling, but worrisome as a trend, 30 percent of young workers in the US in 2012 were part time, up from 23 per cent near the beginning of the Great Recession.

While Devine emphasizes that there are significant differences between the struggles of the Japanese economy and our own, he goes on to speculate that the stagnation in Japan may be related to the plight of their young workers.

Modern economies thrive where investment is made in human capital. Where young are trained or educated into roles crucial to the functioning of a cutting edge economy, the country as a whole benefits from the growth achieved. On the other hand, as young workers become marginalized by even a temporary shrinkage of the economy, the fund of human capital can diminish to the point where the phenomenon begins to be a player in a larger, more chronic stagnation. It is here in this quandary we find our friends the Japanese, whose example if accurate ought to stimulate remedial action on this side of the Pacific.

The term “slacker” of the Devine article refers to young folks of the early 90’s who rejected societal expectations to work hard, enter the economic mainstream, and conform to patterns that included 15 hour corporate days. They essentially “dropped out,” not unlike their counter cultural counterparts in America of the sixties.

Unfortunately for these rebels, they were doing so at a time the Japanese economy began its slide into profound funk. While our own countercultural types for the most part found their way back into a healthy American job market, in Japan many of these folks never found their way into economic sufficiency. The early waves are now moving into middle age without restoration, while younger people in damaging numbers are submerged in their wake. The composite struggle of these groups contributes to the current Japanese stagnation, Devine argues.

The more contemporary economic comparison to the Japanese slacker is an all too common student characteristic on this side of the big pond, as exemplified by the aforementioned Jack. Bruce Ramsey, a Seattle Times editorial columnist, sounding a bit like a curmudgeon grinding an axe, grumps up a letter received from a “frustrated teacher” in his May 22 column, “Education reform is only part of the answer to student achievement.”

The frustrated teacher reports for one assignment “half the students did not have their papers. ‘I don’t like to write’ or ‘I forgot it at home’ were the excuses…Teachers deal with 5×30 individual kids every day, many of whom consider school a waste of time and ten per cent of them (are) absent.”

A subsequent conversation Ramsey has with a professor of literature at a state university produces similar grievance. “The professor’s complaint: students who won’t read books. Also administrators who won’t back up professors who flunk students who won’t read books.”

The bilious quality of the latter message aside, my experience with high school students was similar. In my own reasonably good suburban high school, perhaps 30 percent of students could be said to have worked hard, while most of the rest simply did enough to get by. Some coasted so consistently that their idea of hard work was delusional. Perhaps I am curmudgeonly as well.

Of course, as educators our role is to work with who is in front of us; our portfolio is to motivate the unmotivated. Do we listen to the professor of literature and fail the many who earned just that? Will the parent community allow such shock therapy?

When I contemplate what voice might awaken slumbering resources in our young, I find myself imagining a larger view, down the road some years, where the yearnings of millions in the Chinas, the Brasils, and the Indias of the world take shape as vigorous competition for those kids now in our schools, a competition this generation will lose handily because they do not compete with enough hunger, and whose coming job market dungeon will serve as warning, then stimulus, to their own children yet unborn.

How we manage or fail to short circuit this brutal lesson of international competition may go a long way toward determining whether or not our economy will continue to be vital, or run the risk of wallowing in the manner of the Japanese.

Thomas Friedman reports on a structural issue on this subject that in some ways echoes the dislocation of the Japanese workers. According to Friedman in his recent column “More than ever, it’s what you can do, not what you know,” job hunters seem not to have adjusted to what has been a fairly rapid shift in the interface between employers and prospective employees. On one hand, as in the Japanese dilemma, employers no longer hire university graduates, or promising other young, with the intention to train them in the byways of the work available. To the contrary, they are looking for prospective employees who have the very skills the corporation needs to add value to its enterprise right now.

Too many of our young do not have these job ready skills because their schooling has not been focused in the proper areas and/or the student has been less than diligent at the task.

Moreover, Friedman reports, job seekers too often seem not to have adjusted to the new corporate hiring strategy, and so flail inefficiently while looking for work with inept strategies. The successful job seekers are those with the maturity level to essentially be entrepreneurs on their own case, and find creative ways to bridge the gap between their current mix of skills and that which employers expect.

Meanwhile, such an impasse promotes the growth of an underclass, not unlike Japan’s, that is chronically under-employed, and by sheer numbers serves as a brake on the economic engine.

A corollary theme in school reform is the need for cognitive and emotional bridges in our graduates that link them to real economic life — the vision to project themselves into independent financial maturity — together with the nimbleness to navigate the complex byways of an uptick employment market in ways now bewildering to too many of their slightly older cousins.

In my own area south of Seattle a consortium of “Road Map” school districts has won a Race to the Top federal grant designed in part to add counselors whose work would help bridge the gap to college and beyond for low income students. A program called Navigation 101, native to Washington State, gives step by step instruction along the same track. (See Lynn Varner writing in the Seattle Times, “Helping high school students navigate the next step.”)

Alas, all such efforts, to be properly implemented, will take more counselors and teachers — that is, a lower teacher/student ratio — and inevitably, better funding, the progressive lament.

A slowly improving economy makes such choices at least more feasible.

While federal and state investment in human capital might create more robust bridges from job seeker to training to employment, shore up better the dicey prospects of some of our young, and thereby undergird a more robust and sustained recovery, conservative ideologues believe a return to self-reliance and small government pivotally serve the salvation of the nation and so resist these expenditures.

So government fiddles while the dynamic for a sticky economic stagnation on the order of that in Japan slouches into the picture.

Posted in At Risk Students | Tagged at risk students, career education, economic stagnation, education, global marketplace, human capital, investment in human capital, low-income students, school reform, student motivation, unmotivated students | Leave a comment

School Reform: Teacher Entrepreneurs Need Not Apply

Posted on June 16, 2013 by schooldog

Summary: Innovation and entrepreneurship by teachers tend to be dead on arrival because of a broader school culture which favors hierarchical directives.

How are teachers to be established as the cornerstone player in a decentralized school culture, as I argue needs to happen if we are to set our ship of schools on a more successful course? The impatient in me secretly harbors and urges insurrection; the cautious in me acknowledges the problems are too complex for any black and white approach; the honest in me acknowledges I myself as a high school counselor was more likely to simply keep my head down, mouth shut, and blunt my own intuitions.

The problem is one of systems, how they are set up and the power relations within them, and more generally of a culture that stifles too much individual initiative on the teacher level. How to change culture, how to power disruption to dysfunctional pathways as they now are?

One answer may lie in the role of disruptive innovators, cultural entrepreneurs.

Jonathan Rauch has written thoughtfully in the Atlantic about death and dying in America, following the recent death of his own father. His most recent effort in this May’s issue, “How Not to Die,” tells of the work of Dr. Angelo Volandes and his wife, Dr. Aretha Davis, to alter what they depict as the inhumane and expensive practice in American medicine of “heroic” measures to extend life in the face of certain and imminent death. It is an aspect of culture deeply imbedded in our medical practice, understandably originating in the medical community’s core focus on healing, but also more nefariously in the business/medical culture which reimburses for procedures rather than outcomes.

Rauch arrives at this investigation because of stories, including that of his own father, where families have felt they have lost control of medical choices to the doctors in charge.

Volandes and Davis hope to change this culture with videos designed to inform critically ill patients of the choices they face in dealing with their illness and the end of life, from heroic measures (with positive and negative consequences), to partial intervention, to palliative care designed to enjoy last days as comfortably as possible.

The early data from use of their videos with patients indicates the video informed patients will choose the less intrusive path – the palliative care – at a higher rate than their docs would have chosen for them.

Change of culture is the topic, and is clearly the Volandes/Davis target. Rauch goes on to say that medical culture is highly impervious to innovation. In fact, to my ear he could be talking about the educational culture: “Medical training discourages entrepreneurship, embedded practice patterns marginalize it, bureaucrats in medical organizations and insurance companies recoil from it.”

Rauch has an Ah ha! moment as the article progresses. He realizes Volandes has a personality pattern he has encountered previously in Silicon Valley — the “entrepreneurial obsessive-compulsive disorder: the gift, and curse, of unswerving faith in a potentially world changing idea.” Think Bezos, Gates, Jobs, Brin, and before them the Hewletts and the Packards.

He finds hope in initiatives powered by individual docs he ticks off that challenge standard medical thinking and practice as do Volandes and Davis. For example, Dr. Brad Sutter of Sutter Health at Home, “who is building a new late-life-care system that bridges the gap between hospital and hospice,” and Dr. Woody English of the very large Providence Health and Services, who has introduced the use of the Volandes videos to his organization. Both men by their efforts challenge what is both a lucrative and ingrained habit of the medical establishment.

David Brooks makes a related argument in a recent column on China and a key cultural weakness as it seeks to enter the world of first economies. (“China’s Branding Issues” published in the Worcester Telegram 6/7/13).

He notes that much of the history of American economic progress has been powered by the genius of individual entrepreneurs who have tapped the culture of dissent and “branded” the dreams that have circulated without a focal point until coalesced into brands such as Apple and Nike and their iconic products.

A similar mechanism has channeled the angry energies of the Black Power movement of the 60’s and 70’s into progressive political action as well made constructive and subtle contributions to other byways of American culture.

In China by contrast, a culture of dissent is at best only nascent, and Chinese elites have little of the regard their American counterparts have for those less powerful. This comparison will strike no one as new, but the insight that the cultural pathways of Americana allows the burbling up from less enfranchised depths the yearnings of the less powerful is useful and brings an intriguing twist to this country’s mythology. Not only by the ballot box but via the interstices of a flexible economy, previously inchoate needs are given voice in the brandings created by entrepreneurs.

The irony for China may be that citizen unrest around issues such as the environment that continues to earn disfavor with the party may one day mature into a more cutting edge wealth incubator, perhaps on the way to a more democratic society.

Who will be the entrepreneurs who lay down pathways of reform in American schools? What about folks such as John Danner, formerly a Silicon Valley venture success, who founded the innovative Rocketship Schools, a growing charter school option? Danner was essentially an outsider to schools, previously successful in a free-wheeling technological universe, whose school legacy could be said to give voice to parents whose children lag in the academic skills race. The success or failure of his venture is less important in the short run than the fact that his innovation has continued life.

More to the point, can common American school culture incubate the kind of coalescing, innovative entrepreneurship of our economic leaders or our medical pioneers? Is school culture flexible enough first to tolerate, then incubate, then install and celebrate the unique products of teachers’ creative minds and will?

Notwithstanding isolated exceptions, I fear the answer is generally no. While in a significant minority of schools I believe teachers and administrators work collaboratively, and ecumenical leadership listens well to teachers, my take is that the general culture that governs the broad reaches of our nation’s schools is sadly more akin to the bureaucratic, hierarchical, top down flavor of the evolving Chinese experiment or the ossification of the American medical/business complex than the more dynamic flavor of our economy in general, or even of our politics, for that matter, current stalemates notwithstanding.

Entrepreneurs, I am afraid, need not apply. Prospective young innovators too often move into other enterprise after the yoke of too much direction and frankly the difficulty of the work together prove too much for them. Forty-six percent of new teachers leave the profession within five years for a reason. Finnish teachers tell us professional autonomy draws them to teaching; absent that autonomy many would exit to other careers.

If teacher innovators in fact are to be allowed to flourish in schools, then the structures by which they are governed have to become more flexible, more on the order of the wider culture, which implies that more must be expected of teacher professionalism, in exchange for much more discretion in their authority and prerogative. By this means we may finally incubate native teacher entrepreneurship.

Posted in School Bureaucracy, School Reform | Tagged administrative style, communication in schools, empowering teachers, entrepreneurship and teachers, flat oranizations, innovation in schools, school administrator training, school reform, teacher morale, teacher motivation, teacher professionalism | 2 Comments

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