schooldog

Schools, Bureaucracy, and Politics: Parent Power and Teacher Professionalism

Posted on February 18, 2013 by schooldog

Summary: Restiveness by parents in Los Angeles and teachers in Seattle reflects the tendency of educational bureaucracies to ignore voices from the grass roots level.

Crenshaw High School in Los Angeles is poster child to the desperate academic struggle in too many American urban schools. According to Christina Hoag of the Associated Press (Seattle Times 2/4/13), at Crenshaw “just 3 percent of students are proficient in math and 17 percent in reading.” Further, “just 37 percent of students attend school 96 percent of the time. Just half of the class of 2012 graduated,” though given the skill proficiencies cited one wonders how many of those graduates have skills that are ready for the real world of employment and higher education.

So it is counter intuitive to learn that some Crenshaw parents are in the process of filing a civil rights complaint with the US Department of Education, alleging that drastic reinvention of Crenshaw into a magnet school has led or will lead to significant destabilization of their community, in which the school has been framed as one of the few pillars upon which the residents can rely. Moreover, the changes have been made, allegedly, without grass roots community input, by leadership removed from the largely black and Latino communities that are affected.

Though the particulars of complaint vary from community to community, other groups around the country have filed similar civil rights complaints involving top down change in their own schools.

The Federal Department of Education itself appears to be one primary driver of the controversy, albeit in the role of providing money for school reform, $535 million, to be exact. “School Improvement Grants” are given to schools which “turn themselves over to a charter or other operator, replace at least half of the staff and principal, hire a new principal with a revitalized learning strategy, or which simply are closed” (in which case, presumably, the money is used for the transition to whatever comes next).

Politicians, school boards, and other power elite who know how to access and organize these monies, no doubt with the best of intentions, would seem to be placing themselves on the other side of a divide from at least some of the population they are determined to liberate from clearly failing schools.

LosAngeles Unified School District Superintendent John Deasy labeled “immoral” the historically poor performance of Crenshaw High. He might have also echoed the cry of others, ironically given the civil rights suit pending against the school district, that improving school performance among low income and students of color may well be the civil rights issue of our time.

Yet why have these efforts elicited a backlash, in fact a civil rights suit, from the very families whose prospects they intend to transform?

The suit charges that community input was shortchanged in the course of the decision to convert Crenshaw to a magnet school. Apparently key parent priorities, poorly grasped by elites outside of the community, were ignored or at best minimized. As would any self respecting set of individuals, elements of the community are fighting back. In effect, they are saying, “Listen to us.”

The motivation of higher level administrative types is not questioned here; they are as pained by the failure of schools under their authority as any one.

Yet in the rush to reform, and under pressure to perform, elites — politicians, federal education officials, state directors of education, on down to school superintendents and even principals — understandably fall prey to the perceived facility of making orders from their relative perch rather than engaging authentically in the time consuming process of grass roots input.

Thus the entrenched educational culture readily channels communication top to bottom, but allows too few messages to reach up from grass roots to influence decision makers, whether those grass roots folk are parents or teachers.

In my experience and observation this pattern infects much effort to reform our schools, is too little recognized for the harm it inflicts, and may well be an important reason why progress is less than all parties hope to achieve.

Many teachers in the classroom experience the same habitual top down management style that has elicited the Crenshaw parent backlash.

In the case of teachers, otherwise promising initiatives are clumsily implemented for want of teachers’ practical voice. Or, ideas poorly conceived in isolation from the lives of real kids are not adequately vetted from a viewpoint in the classroom and so waste time and money rather than promote the mutual cause.

Moreover, such top down, bureaucratic order stifles any healthy growth of the teacher professionalism that many parties agree is the lynchpin to a sustained and successful school reform. Instead, the product is resentment.

Teachers hide behind their collective unions, as their port in the storm, and thereby incur criticism; they reflexively resist change, become part of the problem rather than providers of solution, and thereby are partly responsible for being bypassed in the decision making process. Ah, I smell a vicious cycle.

Could the power elite more consciously respect teachers by including them better in the decision making process? Of course. Could teachers and their collective unions get more out front of the reform process, thereby claiming ground that is theirs? Of course. What we have here is a dance, destructive to the common goal, in which elite entities and teacher entities mutually reinforce the unproductive behavior of the other.

In a similar manner the long history of dysfunction and community disorganization at Crenshaw elicits the top down directive of the school elites, who in their zeal to right the ship trample community prerogative and point of view.

In parallel with the Crenshaw civil rights rebellion by parents is a current refusal by an apparently united teaching staff in a Seattle high school, Garfield specifically, to administer to its ninth graders a standardized test called the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP). The test typically has been administered in Seattle schools from grades one through nine, two to three times a year, and is used to monitor and diagnose student progress, as well as to form part of teacher evaluation.

According to Linda Shaw writing in the February 6 Seattle Times:

“Teachers say the tests’ margin of error is greater than the number of points that the average ninth-grader is expected to gain, that the tests cover material they are not expected to teach, that students who are struggling must take the tests more often even though they shouldn’t miss class time, and that giving the MAP test ties up Garfield’s computer labs for weeks.” (The MAP is administered via computer)

Jose Banda, Seattle’s relatively new superintendent of schools, seems to demonstrate some ability to listen when he is quoted in the Shaw article as having learned in the dialogue with the Garfield teachers that they may not have had the training necessary to make use of the MAP’s results.

While the time devoted to testing is a widespread teacher complaint, clearly the zeitgeist of this current interval in schools uses testing to diagnose student academic ills, and to inform remedial action; the practice is common to the point that failure to do so might well incur critique. In my own school, I believe it to have guided progress in student test scores, and the MAP is reported by associates in nearby schools to be useful for the same purpose.

So the Garfield teacher boycott of the test in part may be based upon unstable ground, perhaps created by a district bureaucratic lapse when it did not bring the teachers on board with proper training.

On the other hand, it is mainstream thinking to ask, as do the Garfield teachers, whether or not added hours of testing for struggling learners, to the detriment of time on task in the classroom, is a productive use of time and resources — the third of the four reasons quoted in the Times as rationale for the boycott.

Whatever the particulars of this struggle over testing, they invite comparison to the parents of Crenshaw and their civil rights suit. In both cases centralized directives evoke rebellion that sounds a lot like “No mas!”

As did the Crenshaw parents, teaching staff at Garfield had a choice to either knuckle under and let events wash over them, or to resist in some way.

That they chose resistance, whatever the merit of different items of their reasoning, to my thinking is evidence of some vitality in their ranks, and at least incipient professionalism.

In no way does this mean the district administrators are the demons, but it does mean teachers, to pursue a professional identity, must become players at the table of policy within schools and within districts. The old adage, “power is taken, not given,” applies here. The school district cannot “give” teachers professionalism; teachers themselves must create it and earn it.

Possibly such is the subtext of the current conflict; hopefully Mr. Banda is skillful enough to recognize the opening and utilize the opportunity. He is in a difficult position, because simultaneously he has to maintain some discipline in the ranks.

Meanwhile, the leadership of the Los Angeles School District might do well to pause in their restructuring plans and ask what the civil rights complaints against their efforts really mean, and how a sensitive address to the concerns might lead in the end to a more broadly successful shift of gears. Methinks it likely the LA educational elites are missing something substantial.

Granted, leadership can’t please everyone, and worse than incorporating all points of view is not to stake a direction and take action.

However, the widespread nature of the civil rights complaints, and their repetition over many sites, seems likely to derive from the common tendency of educational bureaucracies to wax roughshod over grass roots intelligence, whether in the community served or of the teachers employed.

Posted in School Bureaucracy, School Reform, Schools and Politics | Tagged administrative style, at risk students, communication in schools, Crenshaw High School, empowering teachers, Garfield High School teacher boycott, low-income students, MAP testing, parent power, school reform, teacher morale, teacher professionalism | Leave a comment

At Risk Students: The Case for Early Intervention

Posted on February 6, 2013 by schooldog

Summary: Though the case for early intervention, before kids reach school age, is persuasively cost effective, preciously little suggests the political culture is wise or mature enough to be so rational.

Wouldn’t it be nice if wishing were to make it so?

Much of what I write, including the story of Travis and his employer, Starbuck’s, in my last post (now three weeks ago as I return from the Caribbean surf), examines how we as teachers, principals, and school communities deal with the hand we are dealt by the kids walking in our doors, and how we try to help them transition into the scholars many of them now ain’t.

Occasionally I have deviated from that norm, and have written about the social conditions and family life circumstances that produce behaviors that leave kids other than school ready; for example, I borrowed from Ruby Payne to illuminate the deficits many low income students present to their teachers from an early age, the same students many of whom are exhibit one in the annals of school reform. (1/1/13 At-Risk Students: The Decline of Marriage and the Low Income Student)

It is an old story that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” As early as my college days I remember a study reported in Time magazine (sorry, don’t have the citation) that one dollar spent now on some social welfare issue would save four in medical costs, incarceration, welfare, and other consequences that would otherwise burden society down the road.

So it is important to pause and acknowledge recent journalistic reminders that it is cheaper in the long run, beneficial to the social fabric, and transformative to the outcomes of our students in school, that money be focused in programs supportive of kids below five years old, even those prenatal.

In this conversation the logic predicts our school problems will diminish with early childhood intervention, as will the cost to society and individuals, but it is difficult for this dog to be anything but pessimistic that such rational thinking will prevail now when it has prevailed only in isolated episodes in the decades of social struggle with which I am personally familiar.

I am dismayed by my negativity, and wonder how this stems from my otherwise relatively optimistic soul. After all, there seems to be a growing quantitative quality in the social sciences, and in the measurement of other human activity, and perhaps the obvious efficiency of investment before the very young become more elder will guide social policy more consistently in our future deliberations. It’s just that so far such social wisdom occurs haltingly, and more commonly school folk and social health folk have to fight for the same elusive and all too singular dollar.

But let us be reminded. Jerry Large is a columnist for the Seattle Times whose down to earth commentary on mostly social issues I have referenced before. In the January 14,2013 edition Large reports (“A Cure for Social Ills? Prevention”) the work of researcher Richard Catalano and the Social Development Research Group at the University of Washington, the website of which (www.sdrg.org) catalogs various prevention programs that already boast a research base that demonstrates their efficacy.

Large himself focuses on the Nurse-Family Partnership, which hooks up a visiting nurse with a pregnant young woman, and mentors her through the child’s first two years of life. Long story short, a complex of social costs down the road — three dollars for every dollar spent on the visiting nurse program — are saved by such enlightened human investment.

Catalano suggests to Large that small communities of 25,000 to 40,000 be identified and thoroughly saturated with a sampling of research proven prevention programs.

The Harlem Childrens’ Zone, widely identified as a successful community based intervention in the school lives of students under its wing, uses a version of the Nurse-Family Partnership program, going so far as to seek out pregnant young women to offer its prenatal services, among other wrap around efforts coordinated with local social services agencies.

Also, I am reminded of an observation out of the American immigrant community by Claudia Koller, author of The Immigrant Advantage, as reported on the PBS NewsHour on January 2, 2013. Though visiting nurses are not involved, something of the same role is played by the extended family. For the first period of time after giving birth, as much as forty days, the new mother is relieved of her normal duties as cook, house-cleaner, and general provider for family to focus solely on her needs and those of the newborn. Koller asserts that such early bonding and support cements enduring communion of parent and child, and the early security of the child needed for healthy psychological development.

It is only speculation, but compare each of these examples with the circumstances of the harried low income mother who must hasten back to work after giving birth in order to simply put food on the table, and whose child is left to the care of well meaning relatives, or some quasi-professional daycare.

As I mentioned in the Ruby Payne post, the gap in nurture by comparison with middle and upper middle class families only widens as the latter can afford both time and money for enrichment activities, while lower class parents, equally loving, are left to scramble for the basic necessities of existence, food and shelter.

Nicholas Kristof (Seattle Times, January 26, 2013: “Get All Children to the Starting Line”) echoes many of the same themes. Mr. Kristof often reports on incipient causes of strong moral imperative but long road ahead, such as that of girls’ education in traditionally Muslim societies, so my pessimism on this topic raises its ugly head when I say that he is right in his element advocating for early prevention strategies, which he acknowledges are currently “underfinanced and serve only a tiny fraction of children in need.” Kristof often serves as moral compass, a kind of Diogenes searching for a just and enlightened society.

As does Jerry Large, Kristof cites the Nurse-Family Partnership, and reminds us that Head Start has long lasting positive effects according to longitudinal studies, and would possibly be even more effective if followed up with similar enrichment as target individuals grow up and out of Head Start itself.

Kristof also reports on a new book by Susan Neman and Donna Celano, Giving Our Children a Fighting Chance, which echoes Ruby Payne by comparing the educational resources and child rearing time available to the parents and children of middle and upper middle class with those heavily impacted by poverty. As a result of the discrepancy, children of poverty are “left behind at the starting line.” Ergo, “the most cost-effective anti-poverty programs are aimed at the earlier years….”

Large and Kristof, good men, and true telling, both.

Yet I remain pessimistic. Why so?

Partly it is ground level experience. For years until my recent retirement, I have seen things I and my colleagues could personally do, and were doing, to successfully mentor and instruct low income kids in our high school. But we simply did not have enough people time to do all that was needed, against diminished funding for schools as the national economy floundered and state tax revenues, the life blood of school funding, diminished.

If any time, this was a time for cost effectiveness; yet if more investment was being made in early interventions, I have not been aware of it. In fact, in my community funding for public health access has decreased in recent years, which would have been a system nominated to implement a prenatal nursing program, for example.

Moreover, thorough going prevention programming across a wide population would be expensive, and would compete for scarce dollars with corrective efforts in the school lives of older kids, most of whom would have missed any early intervention.

In my state, the business community has been prominent in pushing for educational reform. No doubt some are motivated by altruistic public spirit, but practical self interest has been a strong motivator because our local graduates have not been as a group up to the standards that industry needs in writing skills, interpersonal skills, computation, and critical thinking skills. And with a concentration of highly technical industry in the Seattle area, those needs are particularly acute locally.

So my pessimism is stoked by a recent article in the Seattle Times by technology columnist Brier Dudley (January 28, 2013: “High-Tech Expects Tax Breaks While Education Funding Suffers”). In fact, the title tells the story well. While the state of Washington looks for over a billion dollars in additional educational funding mandated by a State Supreme Court decision, the Microsofts and the Amazons of our fair Puget Sound seek to maintain or expand a multiplicity of tax breaks that would slough off their share of the financial burden for educational upgrades that they themselves have lobbied for strongly (and correctly) with the state legislature, as well as with more local official bodies.

Hypocrisy may be too strong a word; more likely different systems within these large organizations are poorly aligned, or the companies are guilty only of aiming at the bottom line in a capital driven economy, and Bill Gates gets a certain number of passes for his sterling work in education and elsewhere on the base of his fortune, but the upshot is to fuel my pessimism that we will be ever enlightened enough as a composite society to do the rational thing.

In my more deeply pessimistic moments I think we contemplate the age old problem of “other”. By comparison with the Finnish example (“School Reform: “Finnish Lessons” 12/23/2012), which deals with a more largely homogeneous society, a good proportion of our low income and at risk population are children of color, in contrast to the Caucasian-ness of our power structure. That subtle, yet profound difference in a society still heavily in transition toward social color-blindness, can leave too many decision makers stuck on unconscious default, on blame of the victim as lazy, or not caring, or one of the other host of epithets that can justify one’s own intellectually lazy position.

More moderately, the psyche of the voter and taxpayer in the street, him and herself scrambling to find a secure niche in a competitive society, are loathe to spare too much of their hard earned currency when there is little enough for their own family and responsibilities.

I share the view that we all rise or fall ultimately by the fortunes of the society of which we are an inextricable part. Further, the winners in the game have an obligation to give back to the system which has given them rise. In the American experience, more often we choose, when we are wise, to provide conditions in which individuals can prosper by their dint of their own efforts and native intelligence. Fair enough; then let us level the playing field.

I am reminded of passages in my current reading of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s biography of Abraham Lincoln, Team of Rivals. Reflecting on the 1830’s and 1840’s Kearns Goodwin comments several times on the internal urgings within young men of the era to seek their fortunes in the newly opening lands out west, by which was meant west of the Appalachians, spurred by the success of the new country of America in the years since the American Revolution, still then within relatively near memory. Such was both the myth and the founding real opportunity of the country. Born in Kentucky in 1809, Lincoln was of that generation, as were his “rivals” for the presidency later in the century.

Our current charge as educators, and as a country, is to provide the same incentive to self improvement that too many of our young charges, both boys and girls, seem to lack. By extension from Kearns Goodwin, as a culture we have failed to incubate for these kids the hope, belief, and anticipation Lincoln and his counterparts followed to the West, as response to broad cultural imperatives of their time.

Our own interventions are best focused to the first five years of life in order to incubate a contemporary version of that resilience. We may need yet to mature further as a culture, a bit more to the communitarian, ironically, before we can act in such a way in this, our mutual self interest.

Posted in At Risk Students, Schools and Culture, Schools and Politics | Tagged at risk students, early intervention, Harlem Childrens' Zone, Jerry Large, low-income students, Nicholas Kristof, Nurse-Family Partnership, Ruby Payne, school reform, student motivation, Team of Rivals | Leave a comment

At Risk Students: Can Willpower Be Taught? Part B

Posted on January 16, 2013 by schooldog

Summary: A book by the New York Times journalist Charles Duhigg tells the story of one individual and numerous researchers that suggest that willpower can be taught. See also Part A, last week’s post.

As life has it, a book from my reading group, The Power of Habit, by the New York Times journalist Charles Duhigg, provides a related perspective on the growth of willpower from the training annals of the Starbuck’s corporation.

Travis, as he is named in Duhigg’s Chapter 5, grew up the son of functional dope addicts, then to find himself on the threshold of adulthood able to find jobs, but poorly able to manage the stresses of employment, the angry patrons, the food rudely slung at him by customers, the confrontation with employers – all the usual trudges of the workplace that involve self discipline or, from the previous schools discussion, “grit.”

With serendipity, at the suggestion of an acquaintance – Travis seems to have been able to make substantial contact with individual people – he found his way to Starbuck’s which, like many large corporations, has a thorough going training program for its often entry level workers, which in the case of Starbuck’s focuses closely on assuring their customers have a welcoming experience in their stores. Thus is framed the magnitude of the changes Travis would have to make.

Duhigg shifts to a study out of Scotland which involved rehabilitation after hip and knee replacement surgery (a subject with which I am quite familiar, by the way!) for mostly older folks. Patients are ordered up and about almost immediately after surgery, and expected to walk and exercise with regularity in order to optimize their return to normal activity.

Unfortunately, not all do as told; how to ensure greater compliance is a common problem. (In my case, I experienced a veiled threat that the doc would have to stretch my knee under anesthesia if my own efforts did not yield adequate flexibility within a given length of time. I did as told.)

A scientist connected to the hospital where the surgeries occurred asked each who had undergone the procedure to write down in a booklet their post surgical goals for each week, and then stipulate with some detail how they would meet those goals. Lo and behold, those who followed orders, particularly those who complied in highly specific detail, made progress toward normalcy at a rate significantly more elevated than their counterparts whose booklets remained relatively blank. How, the researcher asked herself, could simply the writing down of goals make such a drastic difference?

Note the similarity to the Stanford/Cohen study cited in my last post in which African American students wrote papers which reflected on their core values in the context of stress, an exercise which seemed to bolster their grade point averages by contrast with a control group.

When the Scottish scientist scrutinized her subjects’ booklets more closely, she realized that the more advanced patients had written plans that dealt closely with anticipated moments of pain, and had already concocted a strategy that would see them through the discomfort, “over the hump”, as it were, when they might be otherwise likely to slip back into immobility, which could become chronic and self defeating of the purpose of surgery in the first place.

In other words, the moment of pain was a “point of inflection”, a critical point of decision, a cue to either slip back into accustomed behavior, or to move forward with ultimately more adaptive and healthy activity.

Those who met the point of inflection with sustained activity, however into the midst of discomfort, could be said to have developed willpower around their recovery.

In fact, it is precisely this mechanism that ultimately proved decisive for Travis as his Starbuck’s adventure continued.

In early conversations with his manager, who presumably himself had been trained as a mentor to fledgling baristas, the number one subject of angry customers arose. Tentatively, Travis acknowledged his own detrimental reactions in such a pivotal moment. The manager normalized those feelings as common to most people in similar circumstances, and then went on to work with Travis to develop alternate and more constructive ways of responding from what was in effect a Starbuck’s playbook. The inflection point? The presence of an angry customer.

What did Travis learn? Like the Scottish surgery patients, either by making use of alternate scripts provided by Starbuck’s or his own ingenuity, Travis could be said to have developed some staying power – willpower – in these and other situations of stress that before he had been unable to negotiate without unraveling. As suggested by the studies earlier involving students in schools, the repetition in actual task deepened his lesson, which inculcated the same constellation of skills we earlier termed “grit.”

Travis today is a success story. As recounted by Duhigg, he manages two Starbuck’s stores and oversees forty employees, and he himself is quoted as saying, “Starbuck’s is the most important thing that has ever happened to me. I owe everything to this company.” The gushing is his, and apparently genuine, and apparently an accurate sentiment.

Of course, this is a classic yin/yang observation. Clearly Starbuck’s is not in the business of selfless social uplift, but serves the corporate motive. Yet, it is striking that this corporate training program, like those of other companies, has managed to teach the very same willpower without which too many of our nation’s students flail in their studies, and in the process have enriched the lives of employees like Travis.

It is clear to me from Duhigg’s analysis of Travis that the social science underpinnings of willpower — of “grit” — and how to teach it already exist, and in fact have been made practical in the corporate world, where the insistence of the profit line doth demand all the best information and the creativity to make use of it.

I am not by profession an adherent of the corporate world, but this story makes me wonder how it is in education we flounder in ways that would lead capital out of existence, and wonder what we in education may yet have to learn from the private sector.

Duhigg becomes even more specific in his social science research primer as it relates to grit. Willpower developed in one area stimulates self discipline in other areas of an individual’s life. Willpower is a finite skill, and will tire if called upon beyond a given individual’s capacity. Distraction from temptation enhances willpower. A sense of control over one’s experience also strengthens willpower.

Finally, willpower can be taught in the right circumstances, particularly in the context of consistent support and adequate motivation, the latter itself a complex topic.

Clearly Travis is a young adult, beyond school age, beyond adolescence, and has been motivated to succeed by the need to survive. The students we serve in public schools who fall below standard in most cases also deep down are motivated to succeed, but that will is too often buried beneath various masks that pose challenges in themselves for schools.

Posted in At Risk Students | Tagged at risk students, Charles Duhigg, dropouts, education, indifferent students, low-income students, relationships in schools, school reform, Starbuck's training, student motivation, student willpower grit | Leave a comment

At Risk Students: Can Willpower Be Taught? Part A

Posted on January 11, 2013 by schooldog

Summary: Numerous studies suggest that “performance character traits”, such as perseverance and a willingness to work hard count for more in academic success than sheer intellectual capacity. Can such willpower be taught? The first of two posts on this topic.

Let’s revisit my friend Harry from my last post, he of the exploded backpack and the unengaged approach to school, and speculate what a school and its teachers might do to orient him toward academic success, which in his case would include upgraded organizational skills, an understanding of the link between current effort and future payoff, and the belief in and the capacity for hard work and delayed gratification. In other words, teach him the handles of personal progress. (See 1/1/13 post “At Risk Students: The Decline of Marriage and the Low Income Student”)

As it happens, among the several remedies in current literature and practice is a renewed interest in teaching these same time honored skills — the “performance character traits” of hard work, perseverance, resilience, and a host of other intertwined skills, colloquially “grit” — that we see lacking in Harry and too many of his brothers and sisters of the lower end of the academic and income spectrum.

Numerous studies have established that it is these skills that spell the difference – not intellectual capacity – between students who succeed and their academically stymied classmates.

Though different demographically, and perhaps as a group stronger skill-wise, there is also a wide spectrum of middle and upper middle income kids, much commented upon by various observers, who seem to have come to expect certain entitlements in their lives, and so mimic the same lack of performance character traits we observe in lower income kids. These middle and upper middle income kids also do not know how to establish and seek goals, to defer gratification, or to understand what it means to be accountable for their actions.

Both cross sections of students, Ruby Payne’s low income, and the underdeveloped “entitlement” kids, overlap in some ways, and are different in others, but share some of the same flaws in their personal infrastructure, and so represent some similar challenges for teachers.

Schools all the time, whether charter or public, city or suburban or rural, impact some of these kids, just not enough in the aggregate, and certainly not always in a systematic fashion. What might be some conscious strategies that will promote “grit” in the low income and entitled kids whose academic and character skills are below standard?

Laura Pappano in the January/February edition of the Harvard Education Letter, explores whether or not grit can be taught in her article ” ‘Grit’ and the New Character Education.”

Incredibly, while the research amply identifies grit as a key ingredient to academic success, the experts in the field who Pappano cites, including and Angela Lee Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania, and her counterpart at Boston University, Scott Seider, acknowledge that we really don’t know very much about how to systematically teach such qualities as perseverance. According to Seider, “there is very, very little research that demonstrates that we can take the level of grit or perseverance that a kid has and increase it.”

Honestly, I am stunned at this apparent lacuna in the huge mass of educational and psychological research. I am reminded that resourceful teachers who make connections with their students manage the transformation all the time, but in the current environment apparently we do not look to teachers for our answers. This is an editorial.

Still, Pappano writes bravely on, and cites several promising frontiers, bookended by a caveat from Geoffrey Cohen, professor of education and psychology at Stanford, among others: “When we are often at our best, it doesn’t depend just on what’s inside of us but on being in the right circumstances with people we trust.” Or, Jason Baehr of the Intellectual Virtues and Education Project at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles: “Human change occurs more readily in the context of caring and trusting relationships.” The gentlemen reflect one of the few solid understandings about at risk kids, namely that relationship with valued adults is key to their growth. Certainly the same can be said of any youthful growth, at risk or otherwise.

One frontier Pappano investigates involves what psychologists might term cognitive interventions. For example, confusion in learning given material or the struggle to write are easily interpreted as evidence in the student’s mind of their lack of capacity, a fear readily accentuated by peer commentary. In fact, the confusion and the struggle arguably are normal experience in the process of any growth, including academic growth. Reframing these experiences in a more positive fashion could induce the student to persevere with the teacher’s guidance.

In a related cognitive study, Cohen of Stanford had African-American students reflect in writing on the effect of their core values in their lives at certain stress points during the school year. By comparison with a control group their grade point average remained higher over some time. Presumably the reflection on those personal core values reinforced the students in some way that sustained them, and provided them “grit” during challenging periods.

That said, Cohen cautions that it is not only the mental restructure that is important, but also the on going implementation of the new perspectives on a difficult set of tasks in the real world, presumably with adult guidance. In other words, practice.

Cognitive strategies underlie efforts at Cristo Rey Boston, part of the Catholic school network, to teach performance character traits upfront, then link the concepts explicitly to student experience in their neighborhood life and in work-study experience provided by the school. Teachers mediate reflections by students designed to integrate classroom and practical learning in order to “fortify” them through current and future claims on their mettle. Echoing Cohen and the need for practice of the fledgling growth, Elizabeth Degnan of Cristo Rey seems to emphasize that the supervised work experience is a cornerstone to the project.

In each of these examples, the intercession of trusted adults provides soil in which these tentative reflections can take root. While we can celebrate at least knowing this much, we should not get too overly excited, for we have only rediscovered what we already know from normal child development, that optimal growth takes place in a secure and supportive environment. The efforts of teachers and other trusted adults in schools are really just replications of the same familial human imperative. As in the family life, in the proper school environment a student may wish to please an elder by making changes, and can feel safe enough to explore novelty in flexible ways.

Still this observation is useful, and begs the question how we do so optimally in a school setting.

(Next week’s weeks post will continue the exploration of grit via some observations in Charles Duhigg’s, The Power of Habit.)

Posted in At Risk Students | Tagged at risk students, character education, delayed gratification, dropouts, entitled youth, grit, indifferent students, low-income students, school reform, student character traits, student motivation, student resilience | Leave a comment

At Risk Students: The Decline of Marriage and the Low Income Student

Posted on January 1, 2013 by schooldog

Summary: The well publicized increase in children borne out of wedlock arguably increases the percentage of low income students in our schools, and therefore students relatively poorly prepared for the middle class norms by which schools operate.

Harry carried around a backpack that looked inside as though a bomb had gone off, an archetype in schools with large numbers of low income kids. To watch him jam an assignment inside, apparently destined for deep oblivion, was to understand in a nutshell why he struggled in his schooling. Classically disorganized and superficially not caring, when confronted around a missing assignment, excuses could tumble from him in a creative tangle, and homework, if begun at all, was seldom completed to any degree satisfying to a teacher or which could be considered to have furthered his understanding of anything. Harry was natively a capable enough kid, and eminently likeable, but he was more immersed in his social network and the entertaining of it than committed to his studies or attentive in class, and seemed to be more mired in the moment than cognizant of any obligation to his own future, though if asked, he would assure one that he intended to go on to college. At least the notion was there.

Ruby Payne is a well known scholar of poverty. She has taken a variety of research on the characteristics of low income and middle class culture, weighed the implications for students of poverty in classrooms set up by middle class norms, and translated them also into descriptions of students that teachers see, daily, in their classrooms. In short, students from low income families as a group exhibit characteristics as a group quite different from middle class kids, and those differences go a long way toward explaining why lower income kids tend to struggle more in school.

My friend Harry, who qualified for lunch subsidies (“federal free or reduced lunch” a marker of a low income student), fit some of the bill Ms. Payne describes. He had never learned to organize his backpack into the sections of notebooks that middle class parents provide as instinctively as the breath they take. Intent on the moment, he too little thought through the ramifications for the immediate future when he would be required to deliver to his teacher a completed work, and demonstrate his knowledge thereof, perhaps because deep down he doubted his own ability to materially affect his future, unlike the middle class student who is more likely to view his work habits as a vehicle to place in life. School and its byways made no sense to him in his world. Harry was more thoroughly embedded in his social network than would be a middle class student who would be more likely to be focused on his or her own future and self sufficiency, and hence more likely attentive in school.

Though the picture is far more complex than this thumbnail sketch, Payne’s work is crucial to an understanding of why low income students like Harry do not succeed within the kinds of middle class cultural norms that our schools reward, despite the readily apparent intellectual capacity to do so.

Payne’s conclusion, one with which I agree, is that schools are the only entity in a position to teach low income students the norms the broader culture rewards. Not only first responders, the only responders.

I would go a step further, and say that it is the professional and practical responsibility of schools to midwife these complex cultural transitions, because if we do not do so, then we will continue to under educate our low income students, and will simply fail to do our job. In today’s nomenclature, our test scores will continue to lag because it is largely our low income students who pull down the mean.

I suspect, by contrast, that the success of the minority of charter schools and others that affect this demographic successfully, do so by facilitating this critical cultural transition, and do so by deploying numbers of adults beyond the norm for that role.

We’ve got to get it right, because this educational demographic appears to be deepening, a consequence of other cultural changes of recent years, which include the increased number of children born to single mothers, often to be raised by one parent. To wit:

The Columnist Kathleen Parker published a piece recently in the Seattle Times (December 17, 2012), “The Middle Class Marriage Deficit” in which she discusses “The State of Our Unions”, a report out of the University of Virginia and the Institute for American Values.

According to her column, once upon a time, in the 1980’s, the group of American mothers with high school education, but no college, gave birth to 13% of their babies out of wedlock. By 2010, that percentage had jumped to 44%.

Parker goes on to quote Elizabeth Marquardt, the lead author in the study:

“Researchers are finding that the disappearance of marriage in Middle America is tracking with the disappearance of the middle class in the same communities…..”

Further, she points out, “Marriage fosters small cooperative unions – also known as stable families – that enable children to thrive…”

Clearly with formal marriage on the decline, one cannot assume that all of the three fold increase in marriage out of wedlock for this population has led to a single parent family with one bread winner, because some parents maintain their common law status together, but the statistical decline of membership in the middle class and an associated rise in the numbers of low income folks implicitly argues such is the case in many such instances.

Though the psychological and sociological mechanisms that drive one set of cultural norms for children of low income, and a largely different one for middle class kids probably revolve around the role of financial security, and even responsibility and commitment in our broader culture, for our current purposes children of non marriage unions are much more likely to end up over time imbued with the characteristics my student Harry exhibits, and less those middle class norms that can enhance success not only in school, but in adult life, as well.

These powerful cultural trends around the institutions of marriage, and its relationship to procreation have profound impact on the children who arrive in our classrooms.

While we labor to understand the challenging educational slopes we face at present, it appears the broader culture loads the snow pack still more; the problem deepens even as we trudge our way to remedy.

Posted in At Risk Students, Schools and Culture | Tagged "The Middle Class Marriage Deficit", at risk students, culture and education, low-income students, readiness for school, Ruby Payne, school reform, single parent families | Leave a comment

School Reform: “Finnish Lessons”

Posted on December 23, 2012 by schooldog

Summary: Some characteristics of Finnish school reform give perspective to similar American efforts to change, particularly in the autonomy granted to teachers, the trust of whom is grounded in rigorous preparation and a successful lure of top students into the profession.

Trust. Remember that word.

Pasi Sahlberg is a long time Finnish school official and one time teacher whose book, Finnish Lessons, reflects on thirty years of progress in Finnish schools, from also ran status to one of the more successful school systems among the nations of the world, as measured by the very same testing regimen that kicks American school butts, and impels us with cacophony toward our own schools future, however it shall come clear.

Mr. Sahlberg touches on multiple dimensions of the Finnish success as he sees it, but the constellation of changes that most interests me at the moment are those that have apparently transformed the teacher corps into a professional body comparable to other professions, with wide ranging prerogative in how they educate their young charges within broad guidelines set by the government.

For the sake of contrast and argument, the broad tone of American schools can be depicted as top down, where “accountability” in the form of test scores can be interpreted as a kind of tyranny, tentacles reaching from nether heights into the classroom to control the professional instincts of teachers, and thereby deprive them of autonomy, professional dignity, and finally perhaps the most finely tuned productivity of which they are capable.

The hegemony of test scores is understandable, given that the alarm has sounded for American education by the relative weakness of our academic test scores compared internationally, but the Finnish experience will suggest that the measurement of outcome by testing need not imply that testing also be at the core of reform.

The value of such outside perspective is that we may be so much within a certain forest that we cannot see the trees – that is, the extent to which testing may impede progress. I take no particular stance on this issue, and in fact most recently worked in a school where it seemed to me grudging individual progress has been guided by micro testing. But I am also aware of musings on the part of teachers that the spirit that should animate various academic disciplines has been squeezed to extinction by the ultra focus on skills growth. And I’m not even talking about the civic education of future voters.

In fact, Mr. Sahlberg argues that testing overmuch can retard the pure academic skills growth of students, and cites international test results that show lower national scores in recent years as testing to guide instruction distributes more widely around the world.

Finally as preamble, Mr. Sahlberg bends over backwards to insist that the USA should not copy Finnish reform slavishly, and cites the much greater complexity and diversity of our problems in evidence, though in his private thoughts one wonders if he doesn’t in fact think we are taking exactly the wrong tack along several dimensions.

For example, (and here I wander a bit from my main point), according to Mr. Sahlberg, a number of practices of Finnish schools seem counter productive from the zeitgeist common on this side of the Atlantic. Kids don’t enter school until seven years of age (though widely attend preschool), and then are not graded until fifth grade. In the name of cooperation rather than competition, the relative test scores of different schools, when they are finally taken, are not noted nor published, and the total amount of testing is drastically reduced from our norm. Students experience less contact time with their teachers during the school day as well as less homework, and expenditures per pupil are less than is common in State-side schools.

Each of these Finnish conventions cast doubt on trends generally promoted in our current educational communities.

That said, Finland is a land of five and a half million people, with modest variations on the basic Lutheran Finn. Many of our states match it in population, more or less, but fewer if any will match it in homogeneity, whether racial, ethnic, or land of origin.

We should hope that many of the “Finnish lessons” apply only poorly here in our culture, otherwise we are faced with the prospective reality that we are wandering into a trackless wilderness upon fictitious assumptions rather than upon pathways rationally constructed by social science and attuned to the successful experience of other cultures.

But, back to center, my current curiosity about Sahlberg’s message concerns the apparent transformation of the Finnish teacher from mediocrity to a skilled professional on par in our culture and theirs with doctors and lawyers. It is not merely a story of transformed preparation and heightened standards of entry, though it is that, nor merely a tale of improved pay – which may be a theme in only a minor key.

In my hearing, the critical flip has been to “trust” the educational future of Finnish children to the autonomous ministrations of teachers and principals within schools, absent the prying eyes of anxious politicians and bureaucrats, and absent also the autocracy of standardized tests other than those of the exit variety from high school. Out comes the Finnish student in the wash, much more skill ready for the world they enter than the average American student, by contrast tested to distraction.

The implication, that the critical ingredient of learning lies within the classroom in the hands of highly qualified teachers with full portfolio granted by their culture, is one that seems ancillary in our current American march to educational reform.

More commonly, the American teacher corps is bashed, and blamed, without coordinated questions being asked about the hierarchical structure of American schools, which too little rewards teacher initiative and too much rebuffs teacher ambition, and which therefore bears some of the responsibility for the dysfunction observed.

Much of my commentary is built on a YouTube recording of a talk Mr. Sahlberg presented at Vanderbilt University’s Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations on December 9, 2011, and comments by Lynne Varner’s op ed piece on Sahlberg’s work in the Seattle Times November 16, 2012, and Linda Shaw’s article in the same paper on Sahlberg November 14, both stimulated by his talk around the same time at the University of Washington.

Whatever the reform machinations of Finnish policy in the 1970’s and 1980’s, today the primary school teacher training programs at Finnish universities take only the top 10% of Finnish graduates from secondary school. Even for the primary grade training, good math and science skills are required of the graduates in order to be competent to mentor young Finns toward careers on the technological and scientific cutting edge; interestingly, skills in music are also important for the holistic exposures they imply.

Once enrolled by various demanding metrics, prospective teachers undergo an exacting, research based curriculum that culminates with a master’s thesis that according to Sahlberg will allow graduates to be “easily hired” in various other markets should they not continue on into teaching. Such broad work place applicability of the university teacher education is clearly an additional inducement for high quality applicants to seek entry.

Following a candidate’s completion of their formal training, an education board examines, among other issues, the candidates’ motives in entering teaching, and presumably their characterological suitability to engage young students. In Sahlberg’s telling, it is not uncommon for students to complete their teacher education, but still be denied entry into the profession.

And so the rigorously vetted teacher enters a system where they are “trusted” (the word again) to collaborate with their principal and their teaching colleagues to construct curriculum that follows general state guidelines, and to be responsible for their young charges often for as much as the full six years a given student spends in the lower grades. Clearly the stakes are high, because one mistake in accepted application and subsequent hire could spell disaster for a classroom of children over time.

The “trust” in the responsibility granted to teachers is a tough swallow from the perspective of an American steeped in “accountability” which, let’s face it, acknowledges that too many schools and teachers and students fail to muster up to standard, and so cannot be trusted, at least in the current system, to be left on their own to produce, when the stakes are as high as they are.

Put yourself in the position of the squires of the American educational system, the state and national bureaucrats, the superintendents, the principals. Are you going to make a leap of faith and “trust” when your job depends on progress in the institutions beneath your sway? No, I think you are going to become more controlling, not less, which from what I see is the current state of affairs.

One more thing, one more set of Sahlbergisms. He describes the current arrival point of teaching as a profession in Finland as “dignified”, though he may have meant “prestigious”, the distinction lost in translation. In this country, we do not use either word to describe the cultural estimation of the teaching profession.

It is not clear to me if salaries have markedly changed. Teachers make approximately the same as other publicly employed professionals with the same educational attainment. However, the salary curve, with years of experience, is fairly steep.

In surveys that have examined those aspects of their work important to Finnish teachers, professional autonomy or freedom ranked among the most important attributes; put another way, if that autonomy were compromised, for example if inspection were instituted in the form of standardized testing, many said they would leave teaching.

Easy to make threats. However, since we know that 47% of American teachers leave the profession within five years of their start, under conditions hypothetically surveyed in Finland, perhaps that very same professional autonomy is a necessary component in motivated professionalism. I wonder what American doctors and lawyers would have to say on this topic in their professional world. How also will elite American university graduates be lured into a rigidly tethered educational world their Finnish counterparts claim they would exit?

Deep professional responsibility and autonomy seem linked in the Finnish experience to the attraction of highly capable people to exacting preparation for culturally valued work, which still begs the question how the Finns have managed to perform such a pivotal about face in the culture of their teaching profession.

The Finns have undergone a conscious process to get there; according to Sahlberg, in the 1980’s Finnish schools were centralized, managed in a top down fashion, and mired in mediocrity. Sound familiar?

The Finnish lesson is heeded in principle by some elements of American school reform, in terms of revised teacher preparation, the call to raise salaries, and the effort to bring a more elite sector of American secondary and university graduates into the teaching field. I am not sure these movements have gone much or widely beyond the voice stage, Teach for America notwithstanding.

The voices that seem to understand that teacher professionalism at base means autonomy and the associated responsibility are less prevalent, and in my reading seem sidetracked as too liberal, too soft, too little admissible to hard data and, yes, accountability.

Yet to the Finns, or at least to Pasi Sahlberg, this set of issues form the beating heart of school reform, a leap of faith the culture has made that has transformed Finnish schools to among the world’s most successful. One irony is that he gives some American school thinkers some of the credit for early stage inspiration.

In the greater irony, it has been the relatively more socialist state, Finland, which has let go of control, while it is the more freeform relatively more capitalist nation, the United States, which controls in bureaucratic fashion.

Posted in School Reform, Schools and Culture | Tagged attracting new teachers, career as teacher, education, empowering teachers, Finnish Lessons, Finnish school reform, Pasi Sahlberg, school reform, teacher morale, teacher professionalism, teaching culture | Leave a comment

Schools: A Changed Perspective

Posted on December 8, 2012 by schooldog

Summary: On the cusp of the end of a career in schools and the onset of a blog infested retirement, some meditations on the changed perspective the shift in life imposes. And a plea for stories, please.

This summer I retired from my position as a high school counselor, after forty four years of working with kids and their families. Whew. Mixed feelings, etc., but that is a whole ‘nuther story.

For this blog, my retirement signals some shift in direction. For one, it is time to come out from the shadows, and name myself.

For another, my freshly arrived perspective removed from the schoolhouse constellates a much altered view on my part of schools and the struggles therein.

At the outset of this blog, in January 2011 while still working in a school, I wrote the following introduction:

“I came to age in a school bureaucracy, sure to its character, which seems often to not perceive that teachers and other staff might offer insight creative in the very difficult tasks we face in schools.

Moreover, to offer suggestions counter to those in administrative vogue is to see ideas hit a wall and slide down to oblivion or, worse, set he who proffers on a course to poor favor or, even worse, into fear for one’s job.

So I decide for now to stay underground, anonymous in my postings, fairly sure that the point of view I express will resonate with denizens similarly ensconced as I, head down, in the thousands of school bureaucracies nation wide.

Let me be clear, however. There have been few villains in my school experience; to the contrary, the vast majority has been willing enough to do right by kids and give good enough energy to the task, administrative types and line staff such as teachers alike.

But we all labor in a bureaucratic web, a meta reality, that stifles communication and the birthing of good ideas, and siphons too much of our energies. We are all borne into it as newly minted professionals, and by the time we have become more experienced, we have already been inculcated in its ways, all of us.”

Retirement has enforced a significant shift in my perspective, simply because my daily experience of topics in education is much different – much less intense and less the stuff of direct personal and emotional experience – and is sustained more through my reading of books and media than daily exposure to the throes of work within a school system. I find it more difficult to articulate the experience of a teacher or of a counselor because I no longer share the intense emotional daily experience of kids and the challenges they bring.

Most observers necessarily share this disconnect, which stands as a disability for those concerned with finding ways to alter the progress of our schools. The emotional tone, too often the suffocation of creative energies by overly hierarchical management practices and the frustration of too many problems faced with too few resources, is an experience interior to teaching staff in too many schools, and is mostly hidden from the view of all except those who really want to hear what teachers really have to say.

Principals, superintendents, and other administrative types for the most part begin their professional school experience in the classroom. Once they transition to an administrative role, commonly the new administrator quickly loses touch with the juice of the classroom and the day to day constructive engagement with kids as a teacher experiences it, much the same shift as I experience in retirement.

No impairment is implied; all humans are subject to the observation that those full in the trenches of any endeavor understand it better on an experiential level than those who observe; to my thinking the better administrators recognize the resulting disability of their removal from the classroom, and so listen closely to the grass root teacher for the echoes of the understanding of kids and a teacher’s experience that they once shared.

Such administrators then use these echoes to deeply inform their decisions.

Retirement is a similar kind of disability. I read the passion and the injustice in my earlier writing, including the passage I cited just now, and wonder if I could still spin that same verbal web. I recognize and still validate the sentiments, but the phrases reflect a nexus of experience in which I no longer am immersed.

Over a few beers recently with former colleagues still working in schools, I was struck by the contemporary stories they told, yet ongoing, that frankly reflected a craziness typical of schools, or probably of most similarly frenetic and passionate social enterprises. Stories of events piled one upon another, before the first had been resolved or absorbed, criticisms experienced for actions that evolved out of running too fast, of having too many things to do, the absurdity of being set up for a fall by circumstances beyond one’s control or by directives into which one has had no valid input.

The experience on teachers’ part of being whipped around by winds outside of their control, with a worry of failure and a knowledge that not all of the expected can be done properly lurking in the background, evokes a sense of absurdity and sometimes bitter laughter, privately of course. “Life in a school bureaucracy.”

Professionalism in the school ranks, and additional money/staffing, along with a culture change that places teachers more completely at the center of the school power universe, are antidotes to this current reality.

Better training, even higher salaries, both aimed to improve the quality of teaching and to lure highly qualified graduates from other career alternatives, will not be enough by themselves without investing trust as well in the professional judgment of these nouveau teachers, and liberating them from the too many superordinate voices who think they know better than the classroom teacher how to teach the children.

Though a long time in the coming, for the first time I sense via reportage in various media some momentum building along these important channels. The rebel army doth approach, but yet a long way off.

The experiences of line staff are compelling and crucial to reform, but are stories too little told, because to tell them clearly leaves individual teachers exposed to retribution for stories told out of school, so to speak. As long as I am not defamatory in my comments, I can try to tell these tales, but am now hobbled, frankly, by the “disability” to which I have referred. While still working in a school I covered my tracks by remaining anonymous (and by, it should be told, a modest readership).

More commonly these stories get told under the umbrella of union inquiry, in privacy, when union officials ask the membership for those items that should be emphasized in the next negotiation. From what I have seen, be admitted in a small fraction of the greater school universe, grievance about working conditions and perceived disrespect persistently are at the head of the list.

It is my hope that school incumbents will tell me their stories, without defamation, but in the interest of informing the school reform debate. Such confidences would be the anonymous, because attribution could put the teller of the story at risk. This is not an ideal formulation, because attribution is an ingredient of legitimacy, but is better than suspending the story in silence, and the teller grinding teeth in isolation.

The contrary argument for anonymity is that it frees legitimate and archetypal story lines, those with larger lessons, from the passions, charges and counter-charges of a particular moment with particular personalities, and leaves their instruction relatively above the fray for others at distance to profit.

I would be the arbiter of whether the stories have credence, and whether they faithfully reflect school cultural realities important to the school reform effort.

This is an invitation to dialogue to teachers and other school folks listening.

As for my own attribution, if you care to know, please see the newly revised “About” section of this blog.

Posted in School Bureaucracy, Uncategorized | Tagged career as teacher, communication in schools, education, empowering teachers, flat oranizations, school reform, teacher morale, teacher overwork, teacher professionalism, teaching culture | Leave a comment

Charter Schools: A Closer Look at the Stanford CREDO Study — Part B

Posted on November 24, 2012 by schooldog

Summary: Last post I began a dive into the details of an inquiry by The Stanford Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO) into charter school progress in the United States. This post continues the same swim with more of the specifics.…..

Again, from the Stanford CREDO study, further potentially rich lines of investigation…..

— After what is often a halting start in their initial year in a charter school, students tend to do better in that setting in their succeeding years, which argues that individual families need to stay the course in the new system they have chosen.

This finding should not surprise. The CREDO study itself speculates that many charters themselves are in initial phases, and did not at the onset of the study have their systems fully hammered out.

Further, the student in transition to charter may well be expected to take time to adjust to his or her new setting, particularly to begin to see that an opportunity has opened in contrast to a previous discouragement.

— As dutiful researchers, the CREDO authors acknowledge that there may be issues of “selection bias” in their matching of charter school students with traditional public school students. That is, does the simple choice of and follow through with a charter option mark the charter student as different somehow than a student who would otherwise be his demographic “twin”, and thereby skew the head to head comparison?

In a fairly extensive discussion, the authors conclude the study minimizes such effects, but it is not hard to imagine a potential cascade of connected events, beginning with the fact that a choice to step outside of conventional schooling and immerse one’s kid in a new framework marks a family as by definition different than a traditional public school family. Such a charter choice arguably comes from a special determination for a child’s betterment, and the ability to turn determined optimism into action over time, by contrast with a traditional public school twin, whose parent may be relatively more mired in hopelessness or otherwise an inability to act. Such a difference would not necessarily show up in the demographics that match the twins in the two types of schools.

The issue of selection bias is not a quibble, but hardly an invalidation of the CREDO results. Just a caution as we meander our way looking for some results we can hang our hat on.

— The diversity of the population studied exceeds that of the nation as a whole (for example, 27% were African American, 30% Hispanic), and almost half, 49%, were recipients of free and reduced lunch. These are the at risk populations, among others (Special Education, English Language Learners), that pull down the nation’s composite academic test scores, can be expected to labor in a knowledge intensive economy, and so are closely monitored for evidence of promising interventions.

These figures are an opportunity to expand on concerns about the accurate comparison of charter students with their traditional public school counterparts. Gary Miron, a researcher at Western Minnesota College of Education, as reported in the Huffington Post, argues that the positive test scores of the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) charter school network are buoyed by the exit of less successful lower skilled students who would have downgraded the school results had they stayed enrolled. Such sustained enrollment or lack thereof over time in either charter schools or traditional public schools could skew a comparison of skills “value added” between charter and traditional school students.

I am not clear if Miron’s criticism focused on KIPP results for all grade levels, or on one level, likely high school, or perhaps middle school.

Dropout from traditional public high schools is legion; the capacity of charter high schools to “hold” at risk students is less clear. It is on the high school level that traditional public schools outperform charters in the CREDO study; one could speculate they do so only because the drop out rate of lower end students from traditional public schools exceeds the drop out rate in charters.

However, the matching virtual twin design of the CREDO study would seem to minimize if not eliminate such an effect, because presumably the loss of one half of a virtual twin via dropout would lead the researchers to drop the other half from the study, as well. The criticism of the KIPP charters by contrast may be of a research design not so adept at neutralizing the dropout issue as is the CREDO study.

That said, the ability of a school, charter or TPS, to “hold” students and minimize dropouts in the process of improving their educational mindset and their academic skills nonetheless should be a vital part of the conversation.

Note that the conflicting winds in just this mini discussion exemplify the extreme difficulty facing researchers who try to get a handle on academic progress, whether of charter schools, or more broadly across the educational landscape.

— Performance of charters varied significantly between states, which should give some direction about where to look for strategies and policies possibly worth emulating. Specifically, charters in Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Colorado (Denver) and Illinois (Chicago) showed gains beyond those of traditional public schools twins.

— At least some of the success of these states presumably rested with the policies they implemented at the state level, as I discussed in my support of Washington State’s Charter School Initiative 1240. (See November 1, 2012 “Charter Schools and Politics: Vote Yes on Washington States Initiative 1240”) Specifically, a lack of limits on the number of charters, a low number of “authorizers” of charters themselves, and the opportunity for charters to appeal decisions by authorizers were all correlated with stronger test scores on the part of charters in states that adopted such policies.

— Any successful performance by specific charter schools would also be worth emulating. Though the study does not name specific such schools, it notes (as I discussed a couple of posts ago – see October 24, 2012 “Charter Schools: The Stanford CREDO study and Charter Progress”) that 17% of charters outperformed their traditional public school counterparts, and so would be candidates individually for further scrutiny.

So where do these useful but complex results leave us?

They support continuation of charter school experiments, for sure, despite the circuitous and sometimes ambiguous turns of this long running narrative.

They urge closer scrutiny of individual schools that have demonstrated successful interventions, and attempts to replicate the most promising.

Perhaps they argue for greater focus within the charter movement on elementary and middle school development, with eventual transition within those school districts to charter high schools for those same students.

At some point, charters and reformers will have to acknowledge to the voters in a more clamorous fashion than heretofore that enhanced funding for schools, focused on at risk students primarily, will be a necessary part of public school reform, as exemplified in charter success using foundation funds as a key and consistent ingredient. Again, a tough sell.

States, through their charter “authorizers”, will have to find the political will to shut down failing charters, because they drain funds and energies that might be targeted toward more promising ventures.

After approximately fifteen years of the charter movement, as far as I can tell there has been relatively little transfer of the charter experience to public schools in ways that are outside what public schools are doing innovatively on their own. Roland Fryer’s efforts with the Houston school system appear to be an exception (again see the October 24 post “Charter Schools: The CREDO study and Charter Progress”). It seems to me it is this transfer of success or failure to do so that will ultimately define the charter movement. Meanwhile, charters are not the only route to school reform.

Though there are foundation monies that have found their way to purely traditional public schools, such as those from the Gates Foundation most prominently, as far as I know such flows are outside the charter influence.

Which brings me to take a closer look at such reportedly successful school reform movements such as the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) and the Harlem Children’s Zone, as well as other reform networks such as the Coalition of Essential Schools.

Finally, I continue to look for exemplars, charter or otherwise, which may promote professionalism within the teacher ranks, and so pose a challenge to the old school, top down hierarchical order that in my experience dulls staff energies and limits progress. So far I have yet to uncover much such evidence in the charter movement, but believe it to be there.

It’s gotta be there, know what mean? Anyone out there who can point me in the right direction?

Posted in Charter Schools | Tagged at risk students, charter school students, charter schools, dropouts, education, KIPP charter schools, low-income students, Roland Fryer, school reform, Stanford CREDO study | Leave a comment

Charter Schools: A Closer Look at the Stanford CREDO Study (Part A)

Posted on November 12, 2012 by schooldog

Summary: The details of the Stanford CREDO study on Charter Schools flesh out the more widely reported summative findings.

The Stanford CREDO study (Center for Research on Educational Outcomes) cited over my last couple of posts proves to be the gift that keeps on giving. Just as sometimes interesting tidbits are buried toward the end of a newspaper story, the nooks and crannies of the CREDO study hold nuggets perhaps not quite such headline fodder as some of the results widely reported, but which flesh out the picture in a more complete mosaic, and sketch potentially fertile further lines of inquiry.

In fact, most reportage on this study I have seen in quality mainstream media refers only to the most composite of the study findings. I am reminded that most of the time when I encounter information in these sources about which I am professionally or otherwise familiar, I am struck by the inadvertently poor focus of the picture presented, so hurried sometimes the reporting to meet a deadline, and therefore am forced to ponder how distorted may well be the information I encounter about which I know relatively little. Left indicted are both the reporter who digs in too shallow a manner, and the consumer who accepts overly broad swaths as in depth knowledge.

This has been just a little reflection, a side editorial if you will, on our lives in the midst of information overload, and the dilution of knowledge into what can approach the useless at best, or misleading, at the worst. Yet we act, believe, or vote thus with a knowledge set often somewhere between the fragmentary to the illusory.

But I know you are eager to learn of the CREDO nuggets. So, in some rough order of importance…..

Remember – the core methodology of the study involves matching charter school students with their demographic twin in their corresponding traditional public school (TPS).

— Note that the results cited, while statistically significant, actually represent relatively small differences between the results earned by the charter school students and the TPS students.

— Across the full study elementary and middle school charters outperformed their traditional public school counterparts, by contrast with the overall results that found 37% of charters underperformed by contrast with their traditional public school counterparts.

— By comparison high school and “multi-level” charter schools, presumably K-8, but nowhere defined, did more poorly than their public school peers.

These latter two sets of results leave me curious and beg various questions, which this initial study doesn’t attempt to answer. Simply, why the differences cited? Though it is tempting to assume (waggishly) that the younger children, elementary and middle, have not yet been sullied by the nasty public school, there is no differentiation noted in the statistics between the kid who arrived on the charter doorstep at the beginning of kindergarten, and she who arrives after a stay in the traditional public school. More likely, charter schools share in the TPS quandaries about American adolescents, and how to rein their energies to academic discipline, while there is still something more receptive to adult input in the younger kids……Though that formulation does not explain why high school charters should perform worse.

Hope lingers around the results for middle school age kids. Studies in my own former school district and elsewhere have lamented the decline of at risk kid as student through middle or junior high school to the point of dropping out before high school or, almost as bad, stumbling with poor attendance, poor grades, and poor discipline records in the middle school years, so that those habits perpetuate in high school and dropout simply happens later. That transition from elementary, where these same kids often have done well enough, through the stages of puberty into high school, commonly frustrates the efforts of many middle and junior high schools.

— Low income students and students for whom English is a second language, otherwise known as English Language Learners (ELL), who found their way to a charter setting outperformed their traditional public school counterparts, while Special Education students in each setting performed about the same.

— By comparison, African American and Latino students in charter settings fared more poorly than their traditional public school colleagues.

As the CREDO study points out, the modest success with low income students is particularly good news, for that group of young people is large, and represents a challenge for the American myth of upward mobility, so much under siege in the current era.

By historical patterns African Americans and Latinos are over represented within low income strata. Arguably, policy can hope to right these imbalances more clearly through actions that lift folks out of poverty, via education, than the more politically fraught (and perhaps legally fraught) affirmative action.

Which further begs the question, however, since low income charter students posted welcome figures, why the same measure of success didn’t extend to Black and Latino students? Here is where aggregate statistics may start to lose their usefulness, and where focus in on specific schools in specific communities may give us more vital directive. What role, if any, does staff race and ethnicity contribute to the success of their students? Where school districts struggle to upgrade minority professional presence, it is a relevant question. What is the source of the reported success of schools in the Harlem Children’s Zone, for example, beyond what works for low income students solely, this in a state outside the purview of the CREDO study? Etc. Stay tuned for more CREDO next week.

Posted in Charter Schools | Tagged African American students, charter schools, elementary school reform, Latio students, low-income students, middle school reform, school reform, Stanford CREDO study | Leave a comment

Charter Schools and Politics: Vote Yes on Washington State’s Initiative 1240

Posted on November 1, 2012 by schooldog

Summary: Arguments surround Washington’s proposed charter schools; in balance it is time for passage of I-1240.

November 6, 2012 is Election Day. Or, these days, the last day to vote. On the ballot in the state of Washington is Initiative 1240, which would establish up to forty charter schools in the state.

I support the initiative as creation of educational experiment in Washington State via a charter school framework. Properly set up, it will demonstrate in our front yard that certain schoolhouse practices, already suggested by experience in other more progressive places, hold potential to upgrade our state’s school and student performance.

Down the road (and perhaps in an ideal world), the more successful experiments will inform and reform practice in mainstream public schools.

The charter evidence so far is that we need more funding for more staffing and more time on task between teachers and students, most notably with our at risk populations. Note Roland Fryer’s dictum, taken from charter school successes elsewhere (see last week’s post, “The Stanford CREDO Study and Charter School Progress”) that instructional time needs to be increased from the current norm in the form of a longer school day, an extension of the school year, and the enhancement of tutoring opportunities for students.

I would argue that the other two of Fryer’s key ingredients, an upgrade of teacher competence via more full service supervision and the study of data to guide instruction may also require additional targeted funding, if it is to be done properly.

The citizen voter, hearing reference to money, understandably shakes the collective head, and screams “No!!!” And why should they send more money after what they see as bad, currently? We need to first demonstrate that certain expensive reforms will in fact breed the desired result.

Enter the successful Washington State charter school, which will eventually demonstrate what successful charter schools seem to be showing elsewhere, that enhanced monies, currently often from foundation sources as far as I can tell, targeted in specific ways, may raise student scores in reading, writing, and math – particularly for low income, African American, Latino, and Native American students. Special education and English Language Learners are special cases, but will also benefit.

There will still need to be a prodigious effort to link the newly minted research to enhanced public funding designed to spread the reforms beyond the charter universe and into traditional schoolhouses K-12. That will mean political action.

Whether in the current economic environment or in better economic times, such funding will be a hard sell, no matter that the voter wants good schools and it is the state’s primary responsibility by the state constitution to provide for them.

Here it is, the ugly little secret I hear no charter or other reform advocate broadcasting as of yet — there is no magic bullet that will reform traditional schools into more successful entities short of cash, albeit cash spent wisely. But we have to begin somewhere, and charter schools can provide the rationale.

Vote yes on Initiative 1240, Washington State!

Opponents to Initiative 1240, which include a large proportion of the state’s educational establishment, from the state teachers’ union, to the state associations of school board directors, principals, and superintendents, and the state PTA, worry among other issues that charter schools will siphon money from already cash strapped schools. Organizational advocates for minority interests, specifically La Raza and the NAACP, are also opposed.

We see many schools striving with some desperation to maintain quality and to pursue mandated reform, with some hard won progress, in the face of continuing cuts to staff in tough economic times. Morale suffers in this environment, so it is to be expected that fears of additional de facto cuts via the charter route accentuate a broader anxiety. Change is harder to promote when the margin of survival feels slender.

But let’s look closely at one or two of the mechanisms involved in a transition to charter schools. Students who go from a traditional school to a charter school take their state funding with them, which leaves the original school with less state funding. It is true that fewer students in a given school building may leave it under capacity to some degree, while the building still needs to be heated and maintained, for example, at the same level.

However, a high proportion of funding for schools is tied up in teacher salaries and benefits. When the new charter students exit the old building, that institution would not be on the hook to pay the charter teacher salaries, which would diminish the impact of the loss of funding, it would seem to me, in that particular school.

It is true such a drain, depending how extensive, could be a blow to the interpersonal fabric of a school, from which it would have to recover.

In a separate concern, some opponents also worry that the section of Initiative 1240 that empowers authorizers to revoke a charter is too vague and therefore ineffectual. According to the Stanford CREDO study discussed in my last post, in other states one failure of the charter school movement has been the continued life of charters that perform below acceptable level.

In fact, on the human level, it has to be difficult to terminate a community of people such as a school. Despite statistical failure, there will be teachers committed to their immediate schools, and passionate loyalties on the part of parents and students to the institution of which they are intimate part. So, revocation could be bloody, and so has been avoided in other states, apparently.

In my reading, there is clear language enabling revocation of charters for poor performance. Though I cannot claim expertise on the matter, it seems to me that the failure would be with the political resolve, no matter how perfectly the enabling legislation might be.

But I am not persuaded in balance that these considerations are sufficient reason to not move forward with charters. There will be fiscal disruptions and school culture changes whenever charters are implemented. Revocation of charters remains a conundrum with which communities will have to struggle, but the general issue is clearly addressed in the initiative.

Moreover, my core argument is that quality charters, as they have in other states, will point the way to reforms in how we bring lagging groups of students into heightened academic achievement. Eventually, the economy will regain its vigor, and the state Supreme Court has already ordered the state to come up with more money to fund education, so we need to be ready with cogent argument as to how to utilize enhanced fiscal resources. Charters seem to me one focused way to develop that argument.

Vote yes on Washington State Initiative 1240!

* * * * * *

The bulk of the political commercial out of the way, for those wonkish types interested in further arcana of the charter school debate, the Stanford CREDO study (again, see last week’s post…… ) has some additional findings that have relevance for the construction of Washington State’s proposed charter framework. In this case the relevance is negative, which the state may need to review once it has more experience with charters.

The CREDO researchers re-aggregated their data to look at the effect of state level charter policies on the outcomes at the micro level, in schools.

Some states have established a cap on the total number of charter schools allowed. The CREDO study found that student test results were lower in charter schools in such states than were the test results of their counterparts in traditional public schools. That is, students in those states as a group had significantly lower scores (but not hugely lower) than they would have had were they in a state without limits on the number of charters.

Washington’s proposed law caps charters at 40 statewide, or new ones at a rate of eight every year, no doubt as a moderation to fears on the part of anti charter forces, and so would seem to walk right into a trap that will skew results to the negative.

The researchers are uncertain why such an effect occurred, but speculate that high quality successful potential operators may have reacted to the caps as a barrier to entry and taken their wares elsewhere.

Similarly, some state policies allow “multiple authorizers” of charter schools. “Authorizers” refers to those entities that have been granted authority to “authorize” a new charter school, which in Washington’s case would be a newly created state charter commission and local school boards (which would first have to be given the prerogative by the state commission). The CREDO study found that student test results were lower in charter schools in such states than were the test results of their counterparts in traditional public schools, and by a greater factor than in the case of the limits on the number of charters. By contrast, where the number of authorizers was limited, charter school students did relatively better than their traditional school counterparts. Clearly, Washington State appears on the path to multiple authorizers, and so has walked into a second trap that may skew results in an undesirable direction.

Again, the researchers are uncertain why this effect percolated through the data, other than to speculate that in a forest of multiple authorizers, potential charter operators would seek out the least restrictive contract, which may lead to less stellar results.

Finally and by contrast, the presence of a process through which charter operators or, presumably, potential charter operators, can appeal an authorizer’s decision, is shown by CREDO data to have a positive, upward influence on student results. I do not find an appeal process in Washington’s enabling initiative in a quick scan of the verbiage, but could have missed it, and so Washington’s effort would miss out on this relatively small statistical advantage.

CREDO researchers are vague about why such an effect would occur, but speculate that the possibility of appeal leverages closer scrutiny of charters in the first place, and so may send a message of greater accountability, and hence provide upward pressure on quality. But, one could fill in the blanks differently.

Given the attention proponents have given to charter schools over a number of years, it is surprising none of these policy issues were addressed by Washington’s initiative in observance of the CREDO findings.

The good news is that results shift in the contrary positive direction if policy is changed and caps are either eliminated or expanded greatly, and if the number of authorizers is restricted. I am unclear if this could be done legislatively, or would once again have to run through the initiative process.

Though disheartened a bit by this news, and hopeful that Washington will somehow avoid similar effects, it is still time to dip our toes in these waters, and learn as we go. Again, vote yes on Initiative 1240!

(In a near term post: more nuanced lessons from the CREDO study.)

Posted in Charter Schools, Schools and Politics | Tagged charter schools, Initiative 1240 Washington State, Roland Fryer, school experiment, school funding, school reform, Stanford CREDO study | Leave a comment

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