schooldog

School Reform: Testing and Mistaking the Forest for the Trees

Posted on June 6, 2013 by schooldog

Summary: The struggles in our schools will not be won by resort to more standardized testing, but by a recommitment to the central role of the teacher in the classroom.

The stories of impactful teachers are legion; the myth of teacher as inspiration to the uninspired and guide to the directionless is well integrated into virtually every adult memory in this country. Regardless, in some sense, today teachers are being asked, “What are you doing for us lately?”

Now, under the latest round of historical challenges to American economic wellbeing, we are impelled to bring a much higher percentage of our economically marginal families into the financially sustainable mainstream, and in particular to make our schools a more consistently effective way of preparing the children of these families for ascension to economic viability. Not only is our self-image as a nation of opportunity to the immigrant or the low income at risk, but in the wider global marketplace our economy will lag with the drag of too many poor who cannot compete and contribute on this newly intensive, uptick stage. A specter of national decline slouches at the edge of the conversation.

In the wake of these contemporary realities the image of the teacher has frayed.

So. Reform education. A sticky, complex business. With teachers on their heels, educational leaders have often turned to testing as a primary tool and a research implement to better probe where students individually and collectively have arrived in order to better determine the next day’s instruction.

With mixed results testing has also been used as a bully whip to compel change in those school districts and individual schools where test scores indicate insufficient academic progress. An unintended result has been to subtly undermine the professional authority of teachers in their classroom by dictating from outside and above in the hierarchy its day to day operation.

Testing itself has become controversial. The truth, at least as I see it, is somewhere in the middle. Focused testing, informally done, clearly can guide instruction in more fruitful directions in individual classrooms, and as directed by the teacher. Too much standardized testing, and the time used is time lost to instruction, while learning itself becomes warped in harmful ways. Testing morphs into a liability for the very progress it is designed to promote.

Testing also runs the danger of transforming teacher as guide and inspiration into something of a mechanic. Teach this skill, test that skill, revise instruction, and around again, much as an auto mechanic might fine tune a carburetor. We appreciate our mechanics, but when were we last inspired by them? (Well, yeah, there was the guy that kept my ancient Volvo going…..)

Enter David Brooks, the New York Times columnist of whom I have periodically made use to make one point or another. In his recent piece, “Psychiatrists: Heroes of Uncertainty” (as published in the Seattle Times, May 29), Brooks marks the latest edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s “Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders” (DSM) with an elegant riff on the gap between the DSM’s attempt at categorizing human angst, and the efforts of psychiatrists (and presumably other therapeutic types) to wade into individual lives, make some sense of them, and alleviate suffering.

Referring to the work of psychiatrists, Brooks writes that “they are heroes of uncertainty, using improvisation, knowledge and artistry to improve people’s lives.” “They are daring adapters, perpetually adjusting in ways more imaginative than scientific rigor.” “The best psychiatrists are not coming up with abstract rules that homogenize treatments. They are combining an awareness of common patterns with an acute attention to the specific circumstances of a unique human being.”

Sounds to me an apt characterization also of a skilled teacher. Improvisation and knowledge, combined with artistry are integral to the toolkit of the best teachers.

Lynne Varner, Seattle Times editorial columnist, almost inadvertently makes the same point with a query in her May 3 op ed column. “How does a teacher create learning projects that include an appropriate level of challenge and inquiry, relevancy, engages each student in the project, and (produces) desirable results — that, is, students actually learning something?”

The mechanics of reading, of writing, of math are the subject matter. But the orchestration of the subject matter in the consciousness of the twenty five students of an elementary classroom, or the 150 for the high school teacher, is in fact as much in the realm of experience, artistry, creativity, and improvisation as a thorough grasp of the mechanics, which do not get conveyed to students unless the teacher finds a way to communicate them, and inspire the necessary attentiveness.

Teacher is part mechanic, yes, but also leader, scientist, artist, muse, communicator, psychologist and the integrals in between.

While there is much lip service in various media to the wonder of teachers and the multiple caps they wear, I am unaware of any thorough going, widespread commitment to a placement of teachers at the center of the educational enterprise to the degree enjoyed by teachers in Finland as described by Pasi Sahlberg in Finnish Lessons. Finnish students, by the way, kick our American butts. (See my previous post for a more extensive discussion.)

The Finns superbly educate their teachers (after years of reform in that process), and give them a reduced case load by our standards, which allows time to plan curriculum, as well as consult with parents, students and one another. In the process the Finns leave teachers relatively free to be excellent, and draw the best and brightest of secondary graduates into teacher training programs. There is little standardized testing that amounts to scrutiny of teachers’ work; standards seem to be assured by the quality of the candidates drawn to teaching and the rigor of their preparation during their stay in university.

The tendency in our country to reduce teaching to mechanics and testing is understandable. Our schools are siege zones in our cultural anxiety. We look for viable roads out of our wilderness.

The ratings of schools and of teachers via standardized testing gives those in charge of schools, the superintendents and the principals (whose jobs are on the line) the partial illusion that they can reach into classrooms and direct what goes on there without doing harm. This on the narrow gauge assumption that testing provides a measurability akin to natural science, and that the basic skills of reading, writing, and math are the only game in town.

Willingness to sympathize with higher ups aside, the current over-emphasis on testing misfires when it diminishes the primary narrative of teacher as a guide to learning. The obsession with standardized testing obscures a more central need for the emancipation, education, empowerment, and professional autonomy of the individuals we allow in the classroom.

Postscript – Teachers in the Seattle schools, centered on Garfield High School, have lately challenged the district hierarchy by refusing to administer the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP), with a variety of arguments about the irrelevancy of the test for their classroom purposes. The current superintendent, to his credit, has heard them out and responded with flexibility. Yes, the testing directives were overmuch, but the bigger story in this teacher rebellion is a reassertion of legitimate power on the part of the teachers involved, and the opening of a dialogue with a receptive superintendent about a shared responsibility to do better by the kids of Seattle.

Posted in School Reform | Tagged empowering teachers, relationships in schools, school administrator training, school reform, teacher evaluation, teacher morale, teacher professionalism, teaching culture, testing and reform | 1 Comment

School Reform: The Finnish Reinvention of Teaching — A Tale of Revolution in Culture

Posted on May 28, 2013 by schooldog

Summary: A central feature in the successful reform of Finnish schools has been the placement of teachers at center stage, as professionals on a social par with doctors and lawyers, and with autonomous responsibility for the academic growth of their students.

The transformation of Finnish schools from a system mired in mediocrity and elitism to one heavily scrutinized as an international standard has been much dissected, and has even spawned a minor cottage industry for the export of Finnish educational ideas. See Pasi Sahlberg and Finnish Lessons. The transformation in the span of about thirty years has been notable, and generates instruction for our own American floundering.

The reasons for the Finnish makeover are complex, within conditions that may not apply to the American experience, and are subjects of books well beyond the scope of a blog post or two. However, I am particularly interested in the voyage of the Finnish teacher from an obscure player in Finnish school mediocrity to the central figure on the stage in Finnish school recovery. How have the Finns managed this?

In Finnish Lessons, Sahlberg recounts the Finnish struggle for cultural independence and national sovereignty, having once been a vassal state to one degree or another to the Swedes or the Russians over different periods of their existence as a people. Because of the struggle for Finnish cultural identity against these historical hegemons, literacy and related things Finnish have long maintained a prominent place in the Finnish firmament. As guardian of this torch teachers have long held esteem in the eyes of their countrymen, though it seems the full ascension to professional character has been an artifact of the late twentieth and early twenty first century – that is, of the more recent era.

Such esteem of teachers as part of the Finnish story of cultural independence contrasts with the more modest perception of teachers in American culture as journeymen and women, lower on the status totem, and mired among conflicting cultural forces as union labor. If the professionalization of the teacher corps is to be a cornerstone of school reform, as I believe it must be, then the Finns have enjoyed a critical head start in an arena that yet perplexes the American school reform movement.

Sahlberg emphasizes the moral dimension of teaching as perceived in Finland. Some of this is what we see also in this country – “the inner desire to help others”, the promotion of social justice, and personal happiness – but Sahlberg implies these values have much more regular application in the real lives of Finns, and so rebound to the social status of teachers. Moreover, it takes little imagination to stretch “moral dimension” to include assuring the survival of Finnish culture against the shadow of not only the Swedish and Russian ethos but also against the many tentacles of other global cultures in the digital age, including but not limited to American popular culture.

Alongside the cultural predisposition to value the teaching profession, Finnish authorities moved in the 1970’s to transit teacher education programs from colleges devoted to teacher preparation to full line status as a field of study in universities, and universities only. In this setting the teaching degree culminated not only with a master’s degree at minimum, but a master’s program that required full research thesis of the rigor and caliber of traditional academic degrees. Along the way, particularly where upper level secondary subject teaching was involved, full university professors in those academic disciplines became intimately invested with the training of teachers, further raising the intellectual demands of the various teacher preparation programs.

The platform was therefore prepared to create teachers who were research oriented in their approach to their classroom work. In some ways, we see similar moves in this country in the guise of formal and informal testing designed to guide instruction based on the progress (or lack thereof) of individual students.

The difference is that Finnish teachers are well prepared to approach their classroom with this mind set in a context that expects professional rigor, while American teachers too often lack a systematic framework, are forced to learn to make good use of testing on the fly, and are sometimes ambivalent about such an approach that arguably takes time and energy away from teachers’ traditional role as mentors in various dimensions for their students. Where American teachers are sometimes ambivalent about their role in research, their Finnish counterparts are fully committed by their investment in their career from the outset of their training.

From the Finnish experience, there is a clear argument about substantial reform in the training of American teachers, though it is difficult to see in the chaotic and much more extensively diverse American environment how we are to row most boats in the same direction. Perhaps there is a model for teacher preparation in a blunderbuss such as No Child Left Behind, which has been greatly flawed but to my mind unquestionable has kick started the school reform movement in this country. It is hard to imagine, however, the fiercely independent American universities and their professors swinging in to line behind such a federal initiative, but federal funding has a way of bending minds.

So, two legs of Finnish reform have been the predilection of the Finns to value literacy and hence teachers, and the coordinated national effort to reform teacher training into a high quality research based academic platform.

A third leg seems to be the “implicit trust” placed in teachers to provide quality instruction and results with their students, and the consequent high level of professional autonomy in the work environment granted teachers, so strikingly different from any allowed in this country.

The origin of the trust and autonomy, however important, is a bit difficult to trace, though likely made more palatable by the vigorous preparation undergone by the Finnish teacher corps. Sahlberg in my reading points to no particular policy decisions. A series of fiscal crises in the early 1990’s in Finland led to decentralized budget decisions in the public sector in general, schools included. In the prop wash of these minor cataclysms school principals found themselves in greater control of their individual schools; possibly these dynamics reverberated into greater autonomy for teachers, which in turn has been protected from upper level hierarchies by the independent decision making of principals.

The comparative role of testing in this country and Finland may give us another lens on the question. Whereas in this country we seem to be comparing schools and their respective test scores with increasing intensity, and measure progress of schools by somewhat objective norms related to the tests we give, the Finns do little such thing. While they obviously submit to the international testing that reveals their enviable results, in day to day practice most testing is of the instructional guidance sort. It does seem at some point there must have been some seminal institutional decision that eschewed standardized country wide testing in favor of an “implicit trust” that the moral element of teaching in Finnish culture and the quality of training provided teachers would produce quality results.

However this key change has come about, Sahlberg asserts in Finnish Lessons that teachers in his country believe that external standardized testing can be “troublesome” by leading to a “narrowing of curriculum, teaching for testing, and unhealthy competition among schools and teachers (pg.89).” Hmmm. Seems to me a not small proportion of American teachers would agree, but the latter is a voice marginalized in too many important forums.

But there’s more. The very autonomy granted teachers in the Finnish system appears to be an incentive to become and remain a teacher. In fact, in surveys Finnish teachers consistently state if they were be continually scrutinized and micro managed, teaching would hold much less sway for them, and they would migrate to other professions. I am reminded of a dear friend who, when I told him I was going into teaching, rolled his eyes and lamented my descent into a bureaucratic death. Professional autonomy can be a highly prized commodity.

Moreover, such a wandering eye in the Finnish teacher would not be chimerical. Because of the rigor of teacher training and its research component, teacher training graduates are well regarded elsewhere in the Finnish economy, and their job prospects outside of teaching are generally good. So gotta treat ‘em well, with respect, or they fly away. It would be interesting to compare the lateral prospects of their American cousins.

From an American perspective, Finnish teachers are given parameters that make a truly professional job possible. Though pay scales are not enormously advantageous for the Finnish teachers (pay does go up more quickly than in America), Finnish teachers spend perhaps 40% less time than their American counterparts interacting with a classroom of students. As a consequence, life in school proceeds at what seems a saner pace and allows contemplation, collegial collaboration, curriculum design, mentoring of individual students, and consultation with parents – much of which is done by American teachers, if done much, on their own time outside of the contracted school day.

The upshot is that teaching is a highly desirable and much sought after profession in Finland. Candidates for teaching come from the upper fifth of secondary school graduates, while it is safe to say American teachers as a group come from a less distinguished slice of high school graduates. So it is not just that Finns trust their teachers – they trust them because they are the best and brightest, have been trained well to guide the development of curriculum and instruction, and have been given the research skills with which to guide themselves independently into pliable territory in their work with students.

Teaching in Finland is a career that enjoys the same social prestige as that of doctors, lawyers, and architects, which in turn draws more of the best and brightest. I note with interest that Japanese teachers enjoy a similar social esteem, another country that consistently scores well on international comparisons of academic skills. Is it accidental that American teachers experience a modest social status, while our student skills lag behind in the same wake? It would be instructive to bring other countries into a comparison on this dimension.

So what are the “Finnish Lessons” for American school reform, specifically in the preparation and culture of teachers? Simply, it would be to prepare teachers with a research based rigor and let them do their job with a minimum of outside interference, that is, with autonomy and a sense of professional responsibility common to doctors and lawyers.

In place of an intrusive testing regimen, there is social trust in the ability of these mechanisms to produce high quality results. By contrast, in the States testing is used as a bully whip that seeks to compel a shift in culture, though with mixed results to date.

Through a more complex lens, with the help of some history, the Finns appear to have managed to create a new culture around teaching that sustains its own momentum. By producing teachers that can contribute at a high level with a modicum of bureaucratic meddling, and can move laterally into other desirable careers, the Finns have managed to upgrade the quality of the individual who becomes a teacher – not exclusively the most intelligent, but those individuals who have the complex of qualities that make for highly successful academics, and who can then be expected to bring that same mix of work ethic and commitment to quality to their work with students. Moreover, were any of these incentives or freedoms to be abridged, the very success of the Finnish educational system would be jeopardized, as apparently the bureaucrats of the Finnish world recognize.

Also, in what seems almost an historical accident, the Finnish school system had significantly decentralized in response to a fiscal crisis, which has tended to reinforce the more conscious efforts made to alter teaching preparation and culture.

The result is a homeostasis that reinforces successful momentum.

By comparison, American schools are stuck in a negative gyre in which teachers are subtly blamed, and so increasingly are subject to hierarchical control in the effort to right the listing ship of schools.

Posted in School Reform | Tagged attracting new teachers, career as teacher, education, empowering teachers, Finnish Schools, school reform, teacher autonomy, teacher motivation, teacher professionalism, teaching culture | Leave a comment

Schools and Culture: The NRA Wants Guns in the Schoolhouse — Say What?

Posted on May 17, 2013 by schooldog

Gotta hand it to the NRA. Back to the Newtown wall, they come out guns blazing, as though there is not insanity in the wash of weapons in our culture, but for sure the solution is in further armament. We are advised that teachers should be allowed to carry weapons, or at least armed guards need to be stationed in all schools.

Ballsy. Ignore reality, assume an alternate reality, and then proceed as though we are still in touch with the world as it exists. So far, Mr. LaPierre and associates seem to be getting away with it.

But, Good God – you expect me to be safer in my class room with gun toting (even if safety minded gun toting) colleagues up and down my hall? In a culture where 30,000 die yearly by handguns, these are not all bad guys, but victims caught in accidental gunfire or in a passion of the moment combined with firearm access. And you tell me you are making me safer?

I suspect that the 30,000 deaths are far disproportionately people of color, death within a community isolated from the lives of the largely white membership of the NRA. So, in echo of Ralph Ellison, these deaths are invisible to NRA consciousness, and perhaps in the larger American Caucasian consciousness. Would the NRA be quite so coated with Teflon if a higher percentage of those deaths were spread more equably around white communities?

A variety of studies over the last ten years have found that just owning a gun makes it more likely an individual will be shot. With such danger in the classroom next to me, do I not reasonably fear that my own vulnerability goes up as well, not to mention if I happen to be ensconced in a hallway of such vigilantes?

Even assuming all such colleagues maintain maximum security on their firearms, and students cannot somehow gain access, do we not thereby give permission to the more impressionable among them that a carry will be winked at by the authorities?

A story circulates of a teacher who went to his truck to retrieve a rifle in order to subdue an individual bent on destruction in his school. All well and good, and thank God he was able to act with restraint. But one story does not alter statistics, which are impassive to individual circumstance, and which tell me I am placed in danger, if placed next to a colleague with a gun.

Note the Australians. Apparently determined to avoid the consequences of guns we face, they have greatly restricted gun ownership in recent years, and death and injury by handgun have plummeted.

We have here on our continent, or certainly within our borders, what amounts to a mass hypnosis, and what seems to me a cultural insanity.

The constitutionality of gun ownership is a fact of life, though I would prefer it otherwise. From a visit to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., I am reminded that Hitler came to power initially by legal means. If it is fear of just such an event that legitimately gave birth in the 18^th century to the second amendment and envigorates its passionate defense even today, then I can live with that, even if paranoia lurks in the wings.

The mobilization of the public and the tenacity of law enforcement in the recent Boston Marathon bombing evoked the spirit of militia and opposition to tyranny of whatever sort, and provided a proud moment in the spirit of the second amendment, even if our own government was on the side of the good guys.

But to claim that any regulation of gun ownership abridges constitutional rights is sheer lunacy, and is part of the hypnotic web the NRA weaves. They’ve managed to define the discussion to such extent that a significant minority cowers indignantly and votes that fear, and more moderate folks fail to understand that the picture presented by the NRA is a bald distortion of our country’s best interest.

Give the National Rifle Association its due. The organization has been clever enough to push the national discussion about guns far to the right of center, some would say by mischaracterization of reality and the manipulation of fear, and perhaps those voices are not only honorable but correct. Again from the US Holocaust exhibit, the irony is that these characteristics of the NRA’s campaign seem to echo those of Hitler’s regime, the very totalitarian presence the NRA claims to guard against by invoking the second amendment.

They also have been politically astute, for example lobbying into law provisions that prevent the National Institutes of Health from studying the epidemia of gun violence, because (I suspect) if guns were determined to be an official health hazard (remember 30,000 deaths a year), then the weight of government law and political scrutiny would require intervention. We study traffic fatalities, which cause about the same number of deaths as firearms (down to about 36,000 in 2012) and which are on the decline due to federal legislative attention, extensive research into the safety of automobiles, and the expectations of an informed driving public.

The NRA makes the extreme claim that unregulated access to guns is sacrosanct on the strength of the second amendment. Yet all manner of rights are modified in practice, beginning with the fundamental right to free speech. It is well known, for example, that I cannot slander, “shout fire in a crowded room,” and so forth.

The regulation of guns merits the same moderation, including back ground checks, mental health checks, likely a ban on true killing machines (though hand guns kill far more), and though anathema to the paranoid for whom totalitarian takeover of government is just around the corner, registry of firearms as a critical link in restricting their ownership by criminals and the mentally ill. The fact that one gun bill recently voted down appeased the gun crowd by outlawing registry only demonstrates how far we are in our national conversation from what an objective dialogue should be.

Guns kill people, 30,000 a year, in the United States of America. The solution is more guns in schools, which will make us safer. We arm ourselves because others are armed, and so make more intense the likelihood that weapons are part of conflict. Help me here, how does this make sense, other than in the most immediate and exigent circumstances? Maybe, maybe, well trained guards are tolerable in some schools, but still we enshrine a gun as the solution, when such an immersion in guns clearly cycles into our many violent deaths.

Though in reason we must acknowledge the Second Amendment right to bear arms, do we not enter the absurd when we allow 30,000 of our citizens to die each year by gun, in the name of liberty on the altar of a misapplied constitutional right? We kill our own species, massively, gratuitously, our countrymen, and still choose to do little substantial about it. Somehow, is not, could not, should not this be a definition of cultural insanity?

So, yes, I am apoplectic about opening the door and inviting the disease inside the school house, which is still my house, though I am retired. I fear for myself, I fear for my colleagues, I fear for my students.

Do not tread on me.

Posted in Schools and Culture, Schools and Politics | Tagged cultural insanity, gun deaths and schools, guns in schools, Newtown and guns in schools, safety in schools, teacher survival, The NRA and guns in schools | Leave a comment

Schools and Culture: Progress in Infant Mortality Begs a Question or Two

Posted on May 5, 2013 by schooldog

Summary: Progress in infant mortality addresses the same root causes as the struggles of low income students in our schools.

The academic struggles of low income students do not originate in poor schools, though are encumbered by them, but in families ill equipped to boost the school readiness that educated and middle class families provide in the normal course of their parenting. From familiarity with the alphabet to proper nutrition to a sense of personal security, in different measures middle class and above kids arrive in school with skill sets that render them more ready than lower class counterparts to absorb the culture and teaching of school as we have known it.

In a sense these deficits are no one’s fault, except perhaps the broader culture for failure first to recognize the gaps as shortcomings of the society, and then for failure to shoulder responsibility and to generate remedy.

Though the logic can seem hopelessly quixotic, the hunt for solution to the failures of too many schools sinks more deeply than the insufficiencies of particular schools, to include the beginnings of their students’ lives.

Moreover, recent news from the battle against high infant mortality rates reinforces the same inexorable logic.

News always seems to break down into good news and bad news. So it goes with the report that infant mortality rates in the US have declined twelve per cent since 2005, have gone down across all racial and ethnic groups, with a particularly hopeful drop among births to African American women. Focus on quality prenatal care is thought to be the operant intervention.

The bad news inhabits the same statistics. Despite the improvement, blacks still have twice the infant mortality rates of whites, and the South continues to have significantly higher rates as a region.

Of course we ask, now what do we do? Quality natal care appears to be necessary (surprise), but not sufficient.

According to Anna Gorman, writing in the Los Angeles Times, as printed in the April 18 Seattle Times, in recent years health officials “have started recognizing that good medical care during pregnancy cannot undo a lifetime of exposure to stress and bad environment.” She likely could include poor diet, and other specific ravages of a low income environment. Gorman quotes one such highly placed official, “for us to improve birth outcomes, we really need to move beyond the nine months of pregnancy. Doctors and others have to start addressing the health of young women earlier.”

Just as we descend to the years before school begins for our students, so we descend before the life of our infant to the mental, physical and economic health of his mother, and imagine the conditions that will bring her to the conception of a child more ready in all dimensions to guide the child to thrive, likely because she herself already has flourished.

The logic marches toward us. The infant nourished by the mother who has benefitted from social program is the school child ready to meet the challenges of elementary school — whose life will then open into broader vistas, and will contribute to the humming of the national economy rather than become a burden upon it. Note to the policy maker and politician –while we approach these problems of social justice and the economy separately, they are in fact fragments that share some of the same origin.

Framing the question differently in a tighter context, does the Harlem Childrens’ Zone, by aligning outreach to pregnant mothers with reform of schools themselves, thereby reach a kind of social investment efficiency?

All boiled down, the problems of schools and the problem of infant mortality are problems of intractable and cyclic poverty, and of the receding commitment of American society to maintain a ramp to the middle class. Our viability as a first nation as well as our identity as a land of opportunity rests with a reversal of this course, for both bleeding heart and hard headed reasons.

Focus on a just society may turn out to be at root the solution to our chronic and lamentable liabilities, whether in education or infant mortality. In truth, the latter are symptoms of the same ills, and our unwillingness or inability as a culture to address what and how we must.

Posted in School Reform, Schools and Culture | Tagged at risk students, dropouts, Harlem Childrens' Zone, indifferent students, infant mortality and poverty, low-income students, poverty and schools, school reform | 2 Comments

At Risk Kids: Attention Deficit Disorder — Its Diagnosis, Its Treatment, and as a Canary in Culture

Posted on April 24, 2013 by schooldog

Summary: With diagnosis of attention disorders on a substantial rise, medication is useful, but is not a panacea, and kids with these disorders are a flock of cultural canaries.

The rate of growth of the number of school age kids who have been diagnosed with either ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) or ADHD (Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity) has been nothing short of astounding, and has been so atypical of normal change curves in social/medical phenomena as to sound the alarm. Epidemic?

According to Alan Schwarz and Sarah Cohen of the New York Times writing in the April 1 Seattle Times, the number of such diagnoses is 53% higher than a short decade ago, with a 16% increase since 2007. 19% of high school males have been diagnosed. What is going on here? Is it only a rise in diagnosis due to greater awareness on the part of physicians?

Well, some of that I think. But there’s more.

ADD is characterized by difficulty paying attention; the diagnosis includes such descriptors as distractible, forgetful, disorganized, and procrastination – all of which derive from inattention to time, place, and task. Such students typically struggle in school, if not in life.

ADHD adds hyperactivity and impulsivity into the same mix. This is the kid who bounces around the classroom, cannot sit still, and so conflicts with the hand of the teacher, who after all must have a semblance of order. Sometimes the diagnosis is confused with the gender, Boy.

The disorder has been traced in part to immaturity of the frontal lobe, seat of organization and order – that is, of executive function. Boys are known to take longer to mature cognitively in those ways; since it may be as late as age 25 before full frontal lobe maturity is attained, boys in particular with ADD or ADHD can have an extended troubled road to their education. Hence, nearly one in five high school boys have been diagnosed with an attention disorder.

While we have long known that the proper way to treat such students in a formal setting such as school is to provide a structured framework within which they can function more capably – that is, provide the structure that students cannot provide for themselves — such intervention requires more staff and is expensive.

In recent years the use of medications has skyrocketed along with diagnosis. Stimulants such as Adderall and Ritalin have the paradoxical effect in folks with true ADD or ADHD of slowing their tendency to shift focus, and thereby allow them to sustain attention better, to track the requirements of a course more capably, stay organized to purpose, and complete assignments on time. Voila! A student! 10% of high school boys take one or another of the appropriate medications.

Because there is substantial evidence the medications can help with school success, the heightened need for progress in school as a precursor to economic competitiveness has put great pressure on both the medical system and the educational system to provide chemical remedy for all manner of student dysfunction. While clearly school failure stems from many causes, it is true that a significant percentage of individual school dysfunction includes elements of ADD. Lacking easily accessible fixes for poverty, abuse, and divorce, the deficits of attention deficit can at least be approached by medication, and so the pressure is on. With the pressure there is danger of over diagnosis.

Moreover, Schwarz and Cohen report that the standards for diagnosis of ADD and ADHD will change with the new DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), the bible of mental health diagnosis, scheduled to come out next month. Among other changes will be the requirement that symptoms merely “impact” daily activities, whereas the language being replaced sets a higher standard – to this point the symptoms must “impair” daily activities. The upshot of these and other changes likely will be to increase the rate of diagnosis.

While we must assume there are physicians influenced by their practice with real kids who argue in good conscience for wider availability of the medication for less disabled kids, it is worth noting that the sale of medications to treat attention disorders has gone from $4 billion in 2007 to $9 billion in 2012. Follow the money. It doesn’t take the depths of paranoia to wonder how much drug company profit motive lurks in these diagnostic changes.

I am not against the use of medication to treat these real problems (though they are not on the order of what I usually think of as illness) because kids with ADD clearly have problems adapting to the behavioral requirements of the current classroom environment, and some solution is needed. In full disclosure, such medications have played a positive if ambivalent role in my own household.

However, first there is a practical problem that tempers my thinking. With high school kids, mostly boys in my experience, there is a common rhythm or two around the use of medication.

Parent, dismayed at Johnnie’s lackluster performance in school, and herself stressed out by the demands of making a buck without adequate education, consults the counselor. Counselor gathers input from teachers, which in turn tells a familiar tale. Backpack looks like a bomb went off inside, assignments are often missing or, if not missing, are incomplete. He does poorly on tests, in fact seems to have missed a significant chunk of material delivered in the classroom. He is often off task in class; in fact, there have been a few phone calls home already about Johnnie’s behavior. Etc.

Counselor (or teacher or vice principal sometimes) brings the conversation around to attention disorders. Johnnie seems classic. Often these days counselor learns the subject came up during earlier academic and behavioral struggles, in elementary or middle school. Medication may even have been tried, perhaps with mixed results, but often has been discontinued for a variety of different reasons.

Johnnie is brought into the conversation. Yes, in fact, he tried Ritalin in ninth grade. Mom then reports he resisted taking it; she was advised by the doc to structure him but leave him the responsibility. The upshot — Johnnie took the medication inconsistently or not at all.

Queried more closely, Johnnie admits, as have a large percentage of young men I have interviewed under similar circumstances, he doesn’t like how the meds make him feel. He will acknowledge that the stimulant helps him focus better in school, and his grades actually improved, but in various ways he says he “didn’t feel like himself,” lacked spontaneity and the sense of fun both he and his friends valued.

Sometimes kids have struck me as over-medicated when they make such statements, and have even seemed to have slipped into a mild dysphoria, which has led me to recommend the parent re-consult with the doc for an adjusted dosage or a different medication that would affect the student’s body and mental perspective differently.

But this downside to the medication has pervaded my efforts and those of parents to short circuit some of the liabilities of ADD and ADHD, and so have limited the otherwise promising capacity of a range of medications to improve school performance before years of school dysfunction leave the kid in an academic hole from which he may never fully recover, despite native intelligence. All this is another way of saying beware of panaceas.

By the way (parenthetically), I think there is an acceptable way to approach the yin/yang of experiences with stimulant medication. The key lies with the kid accepting responsibility for the use of medication, and defuse potential battles between kid and parent over what he puts into his body, because the parent ain’t gonna win that one, particularly with an adolescent. But, eventually some or even most kids will mature to the point that they want to do better in school, despite the down side they have experienced with the medication. At that point they are best advised to find their own balance in consultation with their doc. They should seek that sweet spot that gives them some better focus without unduly subduing their spirit. Sure, they could do better in school with a higher dose, but at a price the kid simply does not want to pay. His call, because he gonna make the call anyway.

There’s another observation about the phenomenon of attention disorders that puts them in the context of contemporary culture.

Without here citing a host of scholarly and popular writings, it is evident many writers have dissected American cultural pathways to lament the waning of structure in our society. Few would go back to the 50’s, its hide bound grey flannel suit days and its exclusions of large parts of our population from normal benefits of association.

On the other hand, the cultural revolutions of the sixties and seventies, while liberating to people in a variety of ways, has left consensus cultural value in a quandary, and our people with a relativistic sense of right and wrong. More perniciously, our young have had too many boundaries lifted from their untutored and unready psyches.

In fact, we adults have things to teach our young about how to live, how to progress, how to be a social being in the company of others and much more. But we have lost our own sense of authority in what we do know, and so our children have tended to drift on a sea of toys, cell phones, and IPads that have given them no idea how to work for something of value and be accountable.

The direction we give our kids is a necessary psychological structure through which they can explore and interpret the world, and eventually find their own unique way. But they need the developmental assistance of the template we give them; we don’t give them enough of this kind of structure.

Students with ADD and ADHD are a kind of cultural canary, because they more than their peers need structure in order to help them order their attention.

In effect, expressions of personality are contoured by the cultural context in which they are to be expressed. The same forces of the fifties that oppressed also salvaged over active and inattentive kids, and gave these students an assist in focus.

The decline of societal direction for kids suggests one possible answer to the perplexing rise in diagnosis of attention disorders. Kids forty, fifty or more years ago grew up in a structured society in which the parent down the street supported other parents and the school in a kind of cultural synchronicity. Kids whose frontal lobes were less developed had a cultural nexus that embraced them and did not permit the dimensions of variance we now allow. The same kid so contained in 1960 becomes the medicated kid in 2013. Boundaries of all types have loosened, some for the good, but in this particular case the result is to undercut the same kid’s ability to prosper. And so here we are.

Posted in At Risk Students, Schools and Culture | Tagged at risk students, attention deficit disorder in school, indifferent students, medication and ADD in school, structure ADD, structure in society | 2 Comments

School Reform: Yes, Put the Principal in Charge, But That Ain’t All

Posted on April 13, 2013 by schooldog

Summary: Moves to give principals the authority to determine who will work in the school building for which they are responsible make sense, but to do so is but one of several interlocking changes that need to proceed together. One neglected change could torpedo other related reforms.

A late spring and early fall ritual in schools, a nail biting rite for some and a dysfunction for the school house in general, is the counting of student heads, projective in the spring, and actual in the fall, in order to determine state funding and hence teacher staffing for the new school year. The actual ratios of teacher to student are further refined by local school district target ratios. Jobs for some can be in jeopardy, notably those low on the experience totem pole.

Newly minted and sometimes promising teachers are on the bubble, while veteran teachers with the surety of tenure hardly pay attention, though they may worry with young colleagues that the latter’s promise might be lost. A small minority of the oldsters sit back on haunches, cruising toward dysfunction from lack of effort, corrupted by a system that can touch them only in moral turpitude.

The practice of counting student heads is inherently destabilizing on the school level, and consumes time for the administrators who have to either make new hires or reshuffle teacher assignments to accommodate the loss of newly “riffed” teachers.

Most importantly, the counting of heads and the practice of seniority are at the heart of critics’ charge that teachers union bargained rules protect inadequate teachers who have earned tenure while making life difficult for those newly minted — perhaps erratic in their first couple of years — but whose learning curve is on a decided upswing and whose character will benefit students.

For some young teachers the game is too stressful and demeaning; others weather the storm and eventually find themselves beyond the reach of the numbers game. I have seen both happen, the loss of staff members who could only strengthen our school, and the perseverance in the profession of a new teacher who nonetheless was fated to leave our building.

Among the many headed features of the school reform movement is the often political effort to put principals squarely in charge of hiring for the school for which he or she is responsible, and so protect young teachers whose upside is significant and short circuit the re-assignment of poor teachers to a building where they would continue their previous ineptitude, and whose own principal under current rules cannot block the transfer.

In the latter case, a wily principal in the first building may manipulate the rules to exit a teacher who in some way is substandard. In such a manner substandard teachers can be passed around, rather than be confronted with the choice to improve, or find other work.

Removal is tedious and time consuming for the administrator; a substandard teacher retained is demoralizing for those teachers who do give good value, and of course harms the kids who have the misfortune to be assigned that teacher.

These realities together with the ethical belief that a principal held accountable for progress in his or her building should also be able to have significant control of its hire and fire have led to various initiatives to put principals in control of who works in a particular school house.

Charter schools provide one vehicle to test the thesis; many are able to negotiate the rules under which they operate. I am not clear how widespread the practical independence of principals has evolved around the country within regular school district structure. In my own state, Washington, such prerogatives exist in some school districts on a patch work basis, and a bill currently under scrutiny in the legislature would give principals the power to decline a specific transfer, and would give the same choice to the teacher in question.

Progress, I believe, in the right direction, with the caveat that the devil is often in the details.

Also a caveat that we should not mistake this one circumscribed battle as the totality of reform, even as grudging as progress in this particular fight might be. Other interlocking pieces also must proceed for the potential in principal hiring prerogative to be met.

For example, a greater reformation arguably is that of teachers into a more professional occupation, with all the power and authority implied when used in the context of doctors or lawyers. A major liability in our schools today is the confusion of teaching with labor, not only in the public cultural eye, but in the self-perceptions of teachers, a prison abetted by the excessively top down, hierarchical nature of our school systems, in which teachers are left with the implementation of decisions others make without much teacher input.

To mandate that principals be more autonomous from the district hierarchy in their control of their staff composition, could only substitute one form of servitude for another in teachers’ experience of it should principals mismanage their new authority.

In my view, the true potential of the reform in principal prerogative is to decentralize, and to institute collegial decision making at the grass roots level in which teachers and principal are collaborators on a professional team, much as the Toyota model I have discussed elsewhere has proven successful in bringing factory floor employees together with management to refine the manufacturing process. (Odd, I admit, that I should use a labor example while arguing for a separation of the teaching profession from its history as labor.)

Without the collegial environment, the inclination of the principal to share power, and a found identity on the part of teachers in which they perceive themselves as taking charge, I think reform just doesn’t happen, or happens inadequately to our lofty goals.

In turn, this shift implies a cultural revolution in how both administrators and teachers are trained.

Related systems interlock with one another, and often share some of the same working parts. Failure to reform one subsystem may prove subterfuge for incipient change in another related system, and so waylay reform that is not prosecuted widely across numerous related systems.

One more example, another necessary piece. Astute principals and teachers recognize the challenge to their powers by the liabilities too many students bring into the school house, regardless of the perfection of school house systems.

While it is difficult to argue for more staffing and other resources to capably alter these liabilities in the current economic and political environment, and while we cannot claim to say we know beyond doubt how to do so, the truth is that reform will absolutely need more resources, not only in the school house, but in support for low income households and in the lives of variously transgressed kids well before they arrive in school.

The accretion of power to the school house principal fulfills the spirit of the old adage: “necessary but not sufficient.”

Posted in School Reform | Tagged administrative style, charter schools, empowering teachers, relationships in schools, school reform, teacher professionalism, teaching culture | Leave a comment

School Reform: Testing and Data — Does the Tail Wag the Dog? Part B

Posted on April 4, 2013 by schooldog

Summary: A continuation of the last post which explores the relationship between testing, the data it collects, and the legitimate role and limits of both in school reform.

Already the digital data perspective has altered how we think of and evaluate teaching, as a response to America’s poor test results in comparison with our industrialized peers. Traditionally an ancient narrative in which one human inspires another, teaching in the current climate seeks greater science in the promotion of academic growth. Testing, and the data about individual students thereby produced, is believed to hold a key to growing those students who have too long languished and fallen out of the economic race.

A current hot button among ranks of teachers and school reformers alike is the use of the student test data to evaluate teachers. Intuitively a reasonable shift of emphasis, and an introduction of data driven research into a complex topic, nonetheless teacher types and their unions have often resisted the change. Let’s face it — there is fear of the change and apprehension in many teacher hearts that they may not be up to the challenge.

Panicked arguments rise in rebuttal, but underneath the extremity of the resistance there are legitimate questions about how the data developed is to be applied, many of which can be traced to the implicit fairness or otherwise of the means of measurement.

What if my students are overwhelmingly of low income or otherwise troubled backgrounds? What if I am given too little support in aide time or curricula for my struggling students? What if my students had an inferior teacher in the previous year? How does the data model account for poor school leadership, district leadership, or the inadequacy of curricula? How is a high school social studies teacher, who has students perhaps one hour a day for one semester, to be evaluated by student data? Does the test score model apply only to elementary schools? How will cheating by teachers under scrutiny be detected?

Should the model be applied school-wide, as a measure of the success of the overall school building quality, and in the process reinforce collegial longer term thinking, rather than the efforts of one teacher with one classroom for one year?

Though such questions may originate in resistance, to ignore them is to risk missing important ingredients. The fight over the use of test scores in evaluation is many parts power struggle; too much power struggle and the subtleties that can spell the difference between failure and a quality reform may be overlooked.

Teaching by teachers and the learning by students is a complex interchange; perhaps we should be wary that the introduction of data in the form of test scores somehow will be the magic bullet that alone will transform our schools; take care lest we be seduced by simplicity; do not confuse a useful tool with an answer.

As with Oakland Athletics baseball and cost issues in medical care (see last post), in education we have arrived on troubled terrain at the convergence of historical streams. The myth of opportunity for low income children and the crisis in their welfare coincides with our economic need to prepare such students for the jobs that will make them contributors to the economy rather than unproductive brakes upon it. Both streams are at risk.

The argument is not that we shouldn’t use the exponential growth in computing power and the data that springs from the capability. We should use it. Simply recognize its limitations.

ADDENDUM

Data does not drive decisions; humans do. For perspective on the current hyper focus on data in education, I find it useful to employ a metaphor much removed from schools.

Briefly, fracking is a process by which chemicals and high pressure water is used to break rock deep underground, thereby creating fissures in the rock through which oil otherwise trapped can be channeled to the surface. Such oil bearing rock deposits are widespread in this country and elsewhere; the new technology promises to relieve us of our dependence on overseas oil, and continue our ability to rely on petroleum for our energy needs longer than we thought a few short years ago.

Of course, there is a downside, beginning with questions about contamination of ground water supply, and extending to reliance on the same fossil sources that fuel global warming.

Thus, fracking is a case study of how human decision making might make use of one set of data, but ignore other countervailing data.

The metrics of our consumption of oil and our costs in military adventure to ensure supply from overseas is more sophisticated and immediate in a temporal sense than the lament for the earth, still more the stuff of distant alarm than of hard headed data, at least in the composite political imagination.

We will need to see how our economy will suffer palpably in data driven ways by the migration of species (or their failure to do so quickly enough), the rising of the oceans, and the onset of dustbowls in former bread baskets.

We are too short sighted to act on such data too distant to our myopic gaze. Data will perhaps transform only when it arrives in our face too late or when we are on the eve of crisis, when the problem compels near term solution.

At the current moment, only the disappearance of oil reserves and dependence on foreign oil is perceived as a crisis, no doubt accentuated by oil company profit motives, and abetted by worried politicians.

Richard Manning in his fine article in the last month’s Harper’s illustrates the dilemma by placing the ghost of Teddy Roosevelt, Mr. Conservation, at his Elkhorn Ranch in North Dakota. Nearby, fracking boom towns flourish and enormous money is being made. The Missouri and the Little Missouri have flooded recently, have inundated slush ponds designed to hold the toxic refuse of oil operations, and have carried the contaminants downstream, to affect the environment, people of small towns and large, fish and other wildlife in ways subtle but deleterious. Such quiet carnage is increasingly documented by the work of medical investigators and environmental scientists alike, but with little widespread avail in the face of immediate economic imperative.

In fact, we probably do have solid enough projective data about the future consequences of human alteration of the earth to play close attention to it, but too few of us act on the information by adjusting our habits to a requisite degree, and so are guilty of contemporary pleasures at the expense of the future welfare of our descendants, a willful blindness we pass on to those politicians who would represent us. Manning is an honest enough man to note his personal irony. As he does his daily run through the Badlands near Elkhorn Ranch, he wears polypropylene and fleece, both derivative of petroleum, and has traveled by petroleum fueled auto and airplane to research his story. Guilty as charged we all.

We listen to the data when we begin to fear because it seems to offer a solid direction; otherwise, we maintain a selective attention.

To what extent has our current obsession with testing and our use of the data it produces distorted our perception of how to reform American schools and elevate the prospects of kids who struggle? How often in education do we cycle from the growth of an idea, to its enshrinement, and then to its decline and rejection, all without discernible progress?

Posted in At Risk Students, School Reform | Tagged at risk students, low-income students, school reform, teacher evaluation, teacher morale, teacher survival, Testing | Leave a comment

School Reform: Testing and Data — Does the Tail Wag the Dog? Part A

Posted on March 26, 2013 by schooldog

Summary: Testing and the data collection it produces can be a useful tool in school reform, but serious question persists that in this forest it is too easy to lose perspective, and end up magnifying testing results beyond their legitimate utility. The first of two posts exploring this theme.

Third grade room, state test time, elementary school USA.

Charlene, a teacher with nineteen years of experience at various grade levels, has arrived early to school to move the desks in her room from study clusters in which they are normally arranged, to rows which emphasize maximum distance from one another. She places dictionaries at strategic points around the room. On each desk she arranges various materials obviously related to the test – a pencil, an eraser, a protractor – but also a water bottle, a granola bar (chosen to be opened quietly and to provide energy), a “smencil” — a pencil which smells like the peppermint, which is known to enhance focus — and a stick of gum, also known to enhance focus. The latter trio not your father’s test materials.

Charlene then spreads white butcher paper over various materials on the classroom walls that have been used to teach critical items on the day’s test, and fastens the coverage with staples and masking tape. The visual effect is as though the room has been sanitized.

On the door to the classroom she hangs a sign “Testing in Progress – Do Not Disturb”, though it will be hard for anyone approaching her classroom, if allowed in the building at all, to not know she should enter other than quietly.

Finally, she pulls the test booklets and answer sheets from the box in which they came, and makes sure each student has a test with their name and identification number on it.

Boys and girls begin to spill into the classroom. Charlene uses the mass movement as camouflage and reminds a few students that they are to go another room. For some, a smaller environment, with fewer distractions, will help them to achieve to their capacity on the test.

The bell rings. After some initial confusion the students settle down as they figure out the altered seating arrangements. They buzz at the gum, the granola bar — anxious noise. Charlene raises her hand, and the room becomes quiet.

The testing session begins.

In the progression from poor national test scores to national conversation to politics to elections to policies, the pulses of culture land in real class rooms seeking data with which to measure progress and guide change, and have led to the ubiquity of the scenes just described, across schools of all types, and replicated frequently throughout the school year with varying intensity.

Though voices are raised about the cost of such obsession, to my ear they have smacked too much of romance, and are too little backed by articulate research, and so lack the intellectual rigor that the testing itself, in fits and jerks, promises to produce and so is less vulnerable to challenge.

However. Questions of creativity, of art or music, of critical thinking, of patriotic, civic and historical instruction are valid, though are marginalized in the current troubled educational environment driven by a testing culture that emphasizes basic skills, and which sometimes seems to have orphaned the more elusive liberal arts.

Then there are the haunting voices from Finland suggesting we have gotten it all backwards, anyway.

Given the combined concert of quality choirs such as these, it is prudent to question the singular dominance of testing, to restrain our thrall at the march of data, and to seek a balanced perspective. Best not to have a tool wag the question.

As often, David Brooks offers a perspective that I lean on somewhat in this caution. In his column “Driven to distraction by big data,” as published in the February 20 Seattle Times, Mr. Brooks takes several philosophical steps back to gain perspective. While acknowledging variously the utility of data (and I might add particularly as computation power grows), he offers caveats about the limits of its use.

In Brooks’ analysis, data “excels at measuring the quantity of social interactions, but not the quality.” In a classroom, data produced through the observations in a classroom might produce the number of times a teacher interacted directly with individual students, and might even be able in the hands of an astute recorder be transformed into categories that reflect crude quality of interaction that might be used in evaluation.

But compare such data with the perspective of an evaluating principal, who experiences the personality of the teacher in many settings, informal and formal, in conversation, in interactions with other teachers, in the classroom, and so forth day in and day out. The depth of perspective of a socially adept principal, experienced in assessing the value of the teacher’s ability to communicate with colleagues and students alike, will surpasses the relatively thin ability of data to assess the same skill.

Brooks again: “Data struggles with context.” “People are really good at telling stories that weave together multiple causes and multiple contexts.” For example, again the principal might note that a given teacher has a positive effect on colleagues, is a kind of keystone communicator or mentor in a particular sector of the school, and might in such a way bolster the test scores of students beyond her classroom.

Similarly, a principal might observe where data could not that a teacher serves as a magnet for marginal kids, and it is relationship with that adult that keeps kids in school even if not greatly productive there. Possibly it is parallel to the effect found in Head Start studies, which find no discernible benefit from Head Start for student academic skills over time, but do demonstrate that Head Start participants were more likely to graduate from high school, and less likely to be involved in crime.

Nonetheless, the march of data and in particular our ability to manipulate it via computers has been formidable.

In medicine, the superior ability of machines to incorporate and analyze data will bring new precision and predictability to medicine. New machine algorithms will enhance the diagnostic skill of doctors themselves, and will allow tech assistants to make some diagnoses now primarily in the provenance of doctors, who are increasingly in short supply and expensive. In the March 2013 Atlantic, Jonathan Cohn (“The Robot Will See You Now”) reports that Watson, the super computer that bested former champions at Jeopardy, is being taught to diagnose medical conditions by absorbing literature in the field of medicine, and the data stream from the medical tests and self-report of individuals. In time Watson and its cyber descendants will become a critical adjunct to teams of doctors, nurses, physician’s assistants, and other holders of technical licensure. These innovations may yet play a role in reducing the cost of medical care as the Baby Boomers move toward the years when they will suck up medical care dollars.

Since I write from Florida, and under the influence of baseball’s spring training, allow me to point out as a frivolous example that baseball has its sabermetrics, a form of data mining first championed by Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics. Beane, challenged by the parsimonious budget provided by Oakland ownership, transformed a traditional network of old boy expertise by unearthing player talent through sophisticated data analysis, in enough cases talent detected imperfectly by old school shoe leather.

Note that in both examples, that of baseball and of medicine, the data use becomes innovative and action is taken when the problem looms in the near term, whether it is the need to compete with wealthier teams, or the medical and fiscal urgency of the entitlement crisis, and the arrival of the boomers to the point of their frailty.

Education has not escaped the trend.

(To be continued.)

Posted in School Reform | Tagged at risk students, communication in schools, Data in education, low-income students, school reform, teacher evaluation, teaching culture, Testing | Leave a comment

School Reform: The Education of a Reformer

Posted on March 11, 2013 by schooldog

Summary: In an echo of assertions in recent posts that school district leaders need to listen deeply into the ranks in their effort to reform failing schools, we take a look at the current arrival point of the career of Michelle Rhee, once a bright star of the Washington, D.C., firmament, brought to ground by politics and her apparent inability to understand the full dimensions of her leadership role.

For perspective on the role of superintendent in school reform, we take a brief look at the career of former Washington, D.C., schools head Michelle Rhee. Laurel Rosenhall of the Sacramento Bee, in the February 4 Seattle Times (“Reformer Rhee is eager to shake up California schools”), profiles Rhee and her continuing efforts to shake up the teacher union establishment, this time with a lobbying organization based in California called StudentsFirst.

While I have not followed Rhee’s work closely enough to form a clear opinion, my impression is that she represents both the yin and the yang of school administration. On the one hand, she has been resolute and clear headed in forming her strategies for school change; she seems to have won some battles, but lost others, including in the end her job in DC. On the other, she has incurred the enmity of teacher unions; she has seemed to have a take no prisoner style that may simply reinforce the very resistance she criticizes. In short, she may have without intention become part of the problem. Apparently, a polarizing figure.

Her self reinvention as a lobbying force and political maven with StudentsFirst, at least in Rosenhall’s telling, displays some of the same blend of pugnacity with commitment to the cause of students as she displayed in DC. Her organization has challenged candidates of the California Teachers’ Association at the polls, but has also put forth legitimate proposals to my eye, including the expansion of charter schools, the removal of seniority as the primary factor in teacher layoffs, and the inclusion of student test scores in the evaluation of teachers, though I would probably disagree with her degree of emphasis.

Rhee is an agent provocateur, and so fills a necessary and useful role. She may be wise to remove herself from her line position in a school system; she may in fact be too hard charging for its complexities, perhaps too vested in her own intellectual command, too little willing or able to listen to and incorporate the intensities of others under her authority.

One wonders if she were in Jose Banda’s position in Seattle (see 2/18/13 post) how she would react. Mr. Banda, the relatively new Seattle superintendent, has seemed to proceed cautiously toward teachers who have refused to administer the MAP test to ninth graders. Rhee’s reputation, at least, would have her strongly sanctioning the offending teachers, thereby missing the opportunity to build bridges and breathe life into the energies of the staff involved, now mostly frustrated.

With this preamble, I attended with curiosity an event in Seattle at which Rhee was to be interviewed publicly. The pretext was a tour through which she is publicizing her new book, Radical: Fighting to Put Students First. The very title broadcasts her apparent comfort with confrontation, and is maybe a bit over self-congratulatory, seeming to forget that many others, beginning with tens of thousands of teachers, also “fight to put students first.” Ironic, too, since it has apparently been fights with teachers, albeit in the form of union structure, that have made her reputation and, in the end, have cost her the opportunity to continue her arguably useful work in Washington, D.C.

Unfortunately, the interview event turned out to be a bit of bland, a game of slow pitch lobs from a gentleman she apparently knew. Though there was some turmoil and demonstration on the sidewalk outside from points of view not always pertinent to her appearance, and some derisive voice inside during the event, the affair was pretty tightly controlled. Questions were written out before hand and selected by organizers; there was no direct give and take with the audience, which ultimately reverted to Seattle polite, and so in this case what might have yielded stimulating interchange became more of a showcase, and an opportunity for Rhee to soften some of the edges around her public persona.

But there were substantive questions posed. To my ear, her responses to both the moderator’s and the audience’s questions were well within the contours of rational debate. For example, on the subject of the use of student test results in evaluating teachers, Ms. Rhee correctly pointed out that the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has endorsed the shift, though at a percentage below the 50% Rhee herself advocates. Her point was that her position wasn’t really all that radical from the point of view of at least one major teachers’ union; the conversation about how large a percentage of an evaluation should stem from students’ test score improvement in a teacher’s class is something “we can talk about” in a much less divisive way than if one side advocated such practice and the other side refused to go there at all, which is still the case commonly.

The AFT has seemed to me to be more flexible and willing to think progressively than the National Education Association, a larger and rival entity, as have splinter groups of teachers on local, state, and national levels. Fuel for a future post.

Meanwhile, at the time of her visit, Rhee was interviewed by a Seattle Times staff reporter, and it was there in the paper the next day that to me some of her more telling comments were reported (February 20, Sarah Freishtat, “Rhee has some advice for state schools”).

“’I did not think that my job was to have a communications and PR shop,’ Rhee said,” according to Freishtat. Left at such a dismissive, this statement (assuming accurately reported and not distorted out of context) would speak volumes of flip about the kinds of problems she had in DC. Intellectual arrogance and disrespect for the legitimate points of view of others would be starters. Pair such a stance with that of teachers and principals who already felt embattled before she arrived, and the conditions for full out war are already staged.

After Rhee demonstrated her lack of PR tact, Freishtat reports a more moderate version. “That said, if she could do it all over again, she would manage news sources better, Rhee said, making sure she understood the media and they understood her.” Well that’s better, probably true, and significantly more respectful of the points of view of others than the original petulant note.

However, she fails to include teachers in this particular outreach, and maybe thereby she betrays the source of whatever failure she encountered.

In paraphrase of Rhee, Freishtat reports the former chancellor “wanted to improve the education system, and unions wanted to protect teachers.” This latter is not a particularly nuanced position; it panders to the politics of union as whipping boy; it stereotypes what was a large collection of individual points of view; and it completely sidesteps what would arguably be Rhee’s own responsibility as leader of the school system to reach out both to union and individuals within the union in order to carve out common working ground. Instead, she seems to have chosen combat.

Hers is reminiscent of Joel Klein’s tenure in New York as a story of meeting the beast head on, and finally of an exit leaving a trail of blood, her own and that of others. In counterpoint stand the significantly more successful administrations in Montgomery County, Maryland, and New Haven, Connecticut, where collaborative efforts between district leadership, teachers, and teachers’ unions have reportedly made gains of the type that eluded Rhee, and upon which I have commented previously.

Michelle Rhee’s strategic retreat to head a lobbying organization (StudentsFirst) in California may in fact better suit her combative style. She is not wrong in charging that unions are an interest group that needs counter balance from groups such as hers whose constituency is more clearly students and parents. But she is wrong in assuming that unions cannot be or are not advocates for students, for clearly there are many within unionism whose higher priorities include the welfare of kids.

While clearly hammers such as hers are needed among the tools in a superintendent’s toolbox, before she would return to the line superintendent role one would hope that she has genuinely learned from her DC experience, beyond the need to tend to PR, which is a faux cause, and has become more adept at communicating direction and rationale down the ranks, and to accept and make strategic use of ideas that originate from grass roots teacher ranks — in other words, has refined the art of leading human beings in a common cause; communication is a keystone of the job. Otherwise, as I have noted elsewhere, she becomes part of the problem by her intransigent righteousness, and reinforces the worst parts of her opponents by inducing their retreat to defensive positions. Stalemate ensues, the kids do not come first, but egos do.

Posted in School Bureaucracy, School Reform, Schools and Politics | Tagged administrative style, communication in schools, empowering teachers, flat oranizations, Michelle Rhee, relationships in schools, school leadership, school reform, StudentsFirst, superintendent style, teachers' unions | 2 Comments

Schools and At Risk Kids: Early Intervention Redux

Posted on February 28, 2013 by schooldog

Summary: The President’s State of the Union message unexpectedly highlighted early childhood intervention, and has stimulated further discussion of the issue. Is there a whiff of bipartisanship in the air?

In my post of February 5 I displayed my pessimism that the political culture would ever get it right, and invest more heavily in early childhood education and intervention, specifically for kids of low income families. Without such strategy, the current bifurcation of society into the haves and have nots will intensify rather than be remedied, and the myth of American social and economic mobility will fade to a rigidity common to ossified cultures elsewhere in the world.

Imagine my surprise when President Obama shortly after my post promoted early childhood intervention in the State of the Union message. I resist the urge to claim responsibility!

More likely than my influence, and not very likely, is a conspiracy via the media to hoist trial balloons for the president by articles in the days before with discussions of early intervention. Mr. Nicholas Kristof, Mr. Jerry Large, the two gentlemen to whose thoughts I responded in my own post, by this theory must be tuned in to frequencies the rest of us do not detect. In fact, perhaps there are subtle leaks in the nation’s capital as the State of the Union looms that prominent columnists such as Mr. Kristol turn to advantage. More likely, there is no such conspiracy after all, only buzz in the bubble that is the beltway; that which is perfectly random prevails.

More to the point, the president’s remarks have elicited conversation that puts the question more prominently among the many social and economic issues facing the country. In the days subsequent to the president’s address E.J. Dionne and David Brooks, among others, took note.

Dionne (“Republicans as Problem Solvers”, Seattle Times February 19) noted that Republican governors of Alabama and Michigan had recently proposed preschool funding in their own states, presumably because they have read the same research available to all that point to early childhood interventions as a key not only to social mobility, but by extension to expanded economic prospects via education for those in lower economic classes. And that is good for an economy that will otherwise struggle with the limited prospects of these same children. That which arguably strengthens the economy is traditionally a Republican concern.

Mobility in this culture has been a foundation of American exceptionalism, particularly embraced by conservative forces. Arguably, and in an ironic twist, this same mobility has been stymied by the reluctance of those same forces to partner with efforts to level the playing field for low income kids, all on the altar of cutting back the influence and exchequer of the federal government.

Dionne voices the wishes of many voters that initiatives such as those of the governors of Alabama and Michigan become the stuff of bipartisan action, but acknowledges the need for more moderate Republicans to dodge the tea party and partake in the creation of proactive social policy. On this the Oscar night on which I write, the stuff only of dreams, I hope not.

According to Brooks, the Obama administration intends to partner with creative initiatives within states which promote educational readiness among children of poor families (The Seattle Times, February 17). The federal government would match state funds in exchange for pledges of scientific rigor and evaluation of results. The states would become data driven labs for promising experiments that address the typical school ready deficits of children of lower income families. He acknowledges there is a lot we don’t know about how to rectify these deficits; we know clearly, however, they represent both personal prisons for individual kids and economic decline for the larger culture.

One caveat. Early intervention should mean early, as in near birth, or even prenatal. It is not an accident that the folks of the Harlem Children’s Zone seek out and work with mothers who still carry their child in the womb, and follow them in the newborn’s early years. To wait until, say, four years old, is to encounter already dysfunctional psychological templates.

Brooks clearly gets it, he a moderate Republican voice, as will others, politicians of his persuasion, though too much silent in their fear of right wing ballot retribution. Brooks writing of kids from less advantaged homes:

“Their vocabularies are tiny. They can’t regulate their emotions. When they get to kindergarten they’ve never been read a book, so they don’t know the difference between the front cover and the back cover.”

Further, he acknowledges “this is rude to say…..but millions of parents don’t have the means, the skill or in some cases, the interest in building their children’s future. Early childhood education is about building structures so both parents and children learn practical life skills….” and, he adds, it is about learning the habits of organized individuals and the psychological pathways to achievement.

This comprehensive federal government strategy from the Obama folks models a collaborative effort; it acknowledges state vitality within federalism, and recognizes the strength of a multiplicity of approaches within a rigorous social science research network to problems for which we lack too many definitive answers.

One hopes that the wise retreat from excessively top down federal education policies will find echo in how states relate to school districts, school districts to schools and their principals, and finally to relationship with the teachers who, after all, are the ones who will do it.

In the current political climate, it may be difficult for Obama’s political rivals to acknowledge the conservative bent of this initiative. Yes, the direction represents federal policy, but of a vector shared substantially by the states, and a policy that devolves broad power and decision making to the states, as though transmuting the flat, static, undifferentiated animus toward government by the far right into a positive, constructive interpretation of the more local control advocated in the Reagan era.

It seems to me there is something to like in this platform for moderately conservative thinkers. Could bipartisanship grow from this soil?

Local solutions to locally unique sets of problems. Positive results within states will inform further experiment across the states. Measure outcomes, learn from the data.

The model may save the federal government cash at a time when a stubborn minority of the population votes resolutely to shrink the size of the federal budget. The raising of money, as well as more responsibility for creativity, will also have to come from the states, but it will be for their own flesh and blood kids, which will make more urgent the task. We hope.

Posted in At Risk Students, Schools and Politics | Tagged at risk students, bipartisanship, early childhood education, early childhood intervention, educational policy bipartisanship, federalism, funding for early childhood intervention, low-income students, Nicholas Kristof on education | 2 Comments

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