schooldog

Schools and Politics: In Epitaph Of A Tale Told By An Idiot

Posted on January 6, 2016 by schooldog

Summary: The demise of No Child Left Behind together with the rise of Every Student Succeeds acknowledges the limits of federal power and corporately inspired test measurement, targets funding to lower performing groups, and shifts the balance of policy power toward the states.

In writing the epitaph of No Child Left Behind, it is tempting if a bit flip to quote the Bard, “’Tis a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.” After all, from the benefit of hindsight, who in their right mind would pass a bill that would legislate its own failed future, as NCLB did by requiring all students in all schools to be at grade level by 2014. Well, Congress did, so let’s pile on.

I confess. Back at No Child’s inception I did wonder at its cumulative requirements and its complex ratcheting up of expectations, but I didn’t grasp the full absurdity, nor did many, as schools and teachers labored in frustration to reach the rabbit that kept leaping out of their grasp.

It was a skinny rabbit. No Child was one of those infamous products of Congress, the unfunded federal mandate, which I suspect gave cover to the resistance of states, which took a variety of other costume. Teachers and their partisans vehemently opposed the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers. Advocates of local and state control resented federal intrusion. Power structures in some states feast covertly on the poor and less educated and contest any effort to improve their lot. On this latter, I am whistling Dixie, though other states elsewhere also fail to take action on the plight of their poor.

Moreover, as I have frequently contended, the test scores that stagnate our national score card are those of lower income kids. While we falter for complex reasons to address our income inequalities, the problem of schools is a problem of the same poverty. It will take investment in human capital, not unfunded mandates, to alter that equation.

Now, as Washington State Republican Chris Vance has noted, No Child is utterly devoid of defenders and its demise has been one fragile point of bipartisan handshake in the run up to its successor, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). In what I hope is not an ill omen, the name of the latter is such pabulum as to beg what compromises we may yet note that eviscerate the act’s intent.

I do worry with the federal sheriff significantly declawed that accountability will waiver, though, as my conservative friends would contend, that responsibility shifted to the states may invigorate more subtle, broad based approaches and breathe new life into school reform on the more local level. May the conservatives have this one right.

Back to the sound and fury part of the Shakespearean overview. There’s no question in my mind that No Child has kicked, shoved and dragged many school systems out of complacency and on the quest for better practice. Fear of consequence as dictated by the defunct act only goes so far; to the benefit of kids, many of the educators I have known themselves welcomed the challenge to find a way to do better by their students, but in my view have been part of an army that has needed still more warriors.

The results of No Child and the broader school reform movement at this point are mixed. Anecdotes abound in the literature of progress, whether public school or charter. In the aggregate, particularly in comparison with the gilded Finns and other first nation students, we have made little progress, despite persistent reports of improved graduation rates and school test scores that have trended upward, just not to the impossible standard NCLB ultimately set.

In this somewhat confusing picture, one wonders about the validity of some of the score reports. States that lower the bar to look good. Graduation statistics that are gerrymandered. With pressure, there is sometimes progress, sometimes prevarication.

In another way, though King No Child be dead, long live the king, for federally mandated testing is still with us, though in a more benign and less intrusive manner. The notion as urged by corporate leaders that measurement on the industrial scale will refine education in the same way it culls the wheat from the chaff in the commercial environment has suffered comeuppance, or at least a political setback.

The verdict of many teacher types is more damning. From many classroom points of view, the high stakes emphasis on testing has distorted, even perverted optimum classroom balance. In my view there is a place for informal formative assessment to help determine whether students are mastering what teachers are trying to teach. However, NCLB has subtly but drastically affected the classroom environment by hyper-focus on skills measurement. The act’s provision for penalties for poor performance that have labeled most schools as failed has thwarted its own intent. Classrooms do not work well that work with fear.

Where the feds have largely failed to kick-start pervasive progress, it remains to be seen if the states and localities can do better with the federal brother more distant but still offering fiscal partnership. Under ESSA in a less adversarial manner the feds offer funding for a variety of purposes that generally target under performing groups, including monies that would support preschool for low income students and boost special education and English language learners.

Under Every Student Succeeds states are to determine how academic progress is to be assessed. Test scores are to be used, but language in the act specifies that there are to be limits on time devoted to test preparation. States are free to implement broader measures of progress, such as graduation rates, the closing of achievement gaps from lower performing groups, and “college readiness.” For the latter, beyond skill readiness it is difficult to see how more elusive qualities such as inclination to access help and deep motivation would be assessed.

The use of student test scores to evaluate teachers is no longer mandated, and also left to the states. Those who pushed such elements will cry foul and claim that entrenched teacher unions have won a victory that is pyrrhic for the cause of education reform. On the other hand, many legitimate questions remain for teacher advocates, including from my own perspective, about both the justice and the technical validity of measuring teaching quality by student skill outcome, particularly in low income classrooms, even while acknowledging doing so may seem proper from a lay point of view.

Without specifying the mechanisms, ESSA also requires states to intervene in the lowest five per cent performing schools. Some lower intensity federal requirements remain necessary. My major worry about the diminished federal presence in education is that it will enable those states less organized or more entrenched in discriminatory practices not to address the compensatory needs of lower performing groups, such as those in poverty and particularly Latino and African Americans. My recent visit to Alabama, for example, has reinforced those concerns.

So we shall see what we shall see. The landscape has been altered in school reform. No Child in fact has signified more than the Shakespearean existential nothing. Schools and states know the status quo has to change. The notion that the federal government can order the populace to fall in behind its behemoth powers has been shown to have limits, though it’s been a nice try. I confess my own relearning in this instance has been to recognize the wisdom of the balance of powers between the state, the local and the federal, and hope ESSA has struck a better balance; some matters may be better addressed closer to the action, but still with federal support. Ronald Reagan may rest a bit easier in his grave. That I invoke him at all is a grudging acknowledgement that the progressive perspective does not hold all the cards, and the political discourse needs to redouble recent efforts of each side in Congress to listen to the other on the field of ideas. In fact, that is how we got to ESSA.

Posted in School Reform, Schools and Politics | Tagged closing achievement gap, education and politics, educational progress, Every Student Succeeds Act, graduationa rates, low-income students, No Child Left Behind, school funding, school reform, Testing | Leave a comment

At Risk Youth: The Teacher’s the Thing by Which to Catch the Student Being

Posted on December 23, 2015 by schooldog

Summary: Meta-studies of psychotherapeutic outcomes, transposed onto relationships between teacher and student, suggest a preponderance of any change in an at risk kid’s academics stems directly from a positive relationship with a teacher.

You know the kid. He sits near the rear of the room, if you let him, and either has a unique ability to disappear into slouched anonymity, or perhaps situates himself near buddies, with whom he is in constant disruptive communication. As a student, he is listless, disinterested, though may regurgitate enough material to fully establish himself as a D, or at best an uninspired C student. Or, he simply fails, is absent at least one day a week, and establishes his slow slide to dropout status early in his school career. Or, she.

I betray my history as a high school teacher and counselor, as this profile is that of a young teen. Seen some years earlier as an elementary student, attendance has already been spotty, disruption of classroom, tantrum or tears is typical of his modus operandi, and within a few years (if not before), his teachers have remarked on his lagging academic skills.

When we find the time to inquire, invariably we encounter an intimate family story of neglect, or poverty, or divorce or single parent, or abuse, or substance use.

So his story goes, unless he happens to land a teacher or teachers that tune into his wave length, establish a bond, and deepen the relationship into an alliance that lifts the fellow’s (or lady’s) academic motivation into the mainstream of the teacher’s efforts. Ah, then the learning occurs.

Education is a people business, which the obsession with testing, and with curricula and pedagogic technique in recent history often tends to forget. It seems for every page I read that speaks to the elemental rapport between teacher and student there are ten that obscure its importance.

I am led to this meditation from a cousin to the teaching discipline, that of psychotherapy, in which I once practiced, and a book entitled Mindfulness and Psychotherapy, which in part tries to bridge the not so distant gap between Buddhist psychology and western modes of psychotherapeutic practice.

More specifically, one of the authors discusses research findings that attribute the success (or failure) of psychotherapy to a few critical variables. Two or three of them bear relevance to the human bond between teacher and student.

The most obvious is that approximately 30% of variance in treatment outcomes in psychotherapy is attributable to qualities of relationship and the character of the therapist, from whom qualities of “empathy, warmth, understanding, and acceptance” set an environment in which successful treatment proceeds.

Let’s go back to the prototypical at risk student profiled above. Though the task of school be academics, quality teachers understand intuitively, because of who they are as people, that kids marginally present in the classroom need the extra buoyancy that those qualities of contact provide. In fact, though we teach reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic, much of our success with at risk students lies in the subtext qualities of relationship that good teachers establish with them.

Could it be that 30% of the variance in outcomes for at risk students in the classroom revolves around these qualities, before we consider curricula, or instruction, certainly testing?

There is more.

A separate 40% of the variance of outcomes in psychotherapy, according to these authors, derive from the characteristics that the client brings to the therapy, other than the presenting problems – motivation and other resources, support from outside significant others, and the circumstances of the client’s life – all qualities that would appear to be beyond the therapist’s influence.

Yet, some of this latter set of characteristics, viewed through a classroom lens and the dysfunctional quandaries of a young kid, might be provided by an empathic teacher. In time, motivation can be stimulated by quality human connection. Lack of support from inconsistent significant others in the kid’s life can find some compensation in the steadiness of a teacher’s regard.

Another 15% in psychotherapy treatment is accounted for by “placebo effects and expectation of change.” Many at risk kids turn away from applying themselves in school because they think they cannot do it, are too dumb, and or have fallen behind in previous grades. A good teacher breathes belief and builds confidence in progress. The kid who has been a reluctant student finds a spark with a teacher who encourages.

In this admittedly heuristic conversion of psychotherapy outcomes to a school setting, as much as 85% of school outcome may revolve to greater or lesser degree around a teacher or teachers with whom a young student bonds. Teachers, please remember in the deep winter of your next difficult season.

Though the argument assumes parallels between the emotional suffering of psychotherapeutic clients and the deficits that at risk kids face in their lives, the personal connection is arguably a factor in the school engagement also of children of stable families, but otherwise bound up in academic ennui by their loving families’ tendency to simply give them too much without the earning of it.

Which leaves 15% of this model to be accounted for; in the psychotherapeutic world, this last variance accounts for different treatment models. According to this research, none of the over 400 identified treatment models shows consistent and clear superiority to others. In other words, though a trained competence in a given approach is assumed, it generally doesn’t matter in what technical skills the therapist is trained.

I am reminded of a study from my own training, in Philadelphia in the 1950’s, which compared client outcomes between experienced and degreed therapists and housewives chosen for their native empathic qualities who received a brief orientation. Interestingly, the clients of the housewives demonstrated greater progress than those of the credentialed psychotherapists.

An outcome sure to humble the sophisticate and the Freudian.

The corollary in the classroom and with the teacher would suggest that despite the search for a magic curricular or instructional bullet, many techniques adequately trained for are likely to work roughly as well as another. Overmuch testing in this light looks a bit like an emperor without clothes – a confusion of a measure of a progress with the ultimate goal.

Our proverbial Johnnie, he of the earlier composite list of personal issues, sits in a classroom with a teacher who checks for understanding before proceeding, breaks larger concepts into component parts, and is careful to teach to different modalities. But none of these techniques will land their good intention without the willing attention of a kid who admires his teacher and senses benevolent interest in his progress.

Posted in At Risk Students | Tagged abuse and school progress, at risk students, dropouts, indifferent students, low-income students, relationships in schools, relationships in teaching and psychotherapy, teaching | Leave a comment

Schools and Poverty: The Good News from King County, Washington

Posted on December 9, 2015 by schooldog

Summary: In a flash of progressiveness, the voters of King County (Seattle) have levied themselves a substantial sum to lift children born to poverty, and may yet more fully put their money to their famously progressive mouth.

Perhaps it has been because of the seasonal holidays, a traditional time of gift giving, of brother and sisterhood, and of community celebration. In King County, that of Seattle, voters approved “Best Starts for Kids,” a six year levy to raise $392 million to fund a variety of youth intervention programs, from prenatal care to teen mental health.

Then, as though that passage didn’t stoke the fires of hope enough, news arrived last week that a rider had been attached (creatively!) to enabling legislation in the state legislature by Representative Jessyn Farrell (D-Seattle) that would raise approximately $600 million in “contract fees” over fifteen years from contracts let by the regional Sound Transit authority. These monies would be dedicated to a variety of county kid uplift programs — for homeless kids, or low income kids, or foster kids. Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza indeed.

I found myself counting the money as though all that remained was to figure how many teachers and instructional aides the money would buy. For the record, according to my rough calculations, $65 million of one year’s Best Starts money, salary and benefits, would buy 774 teachers or 2031 instructional aides.

How would such an infusion of staff affect the approximately 100,000 on free or reduced lunch across the county, as well as those in poverty that have chosen not to participate in the program? Would it be enough? Certainly it would be a large step in the right direction.

Well, friends, though this news be good, on closer reading of the details the inevitable caveats started to appear before my eyes. First off, though in my enthusiasm I had already hired the teachers and instructional aides, I realized in my second or third reading that all this citizen largess would flow through the county, and be controlled by the county, and would not flow through schools, let alone my fantasy hands.

Schools would be left to wait on the legislature, under sanction by the state supreme court to increase school funding markedly, for their own financial transfusion.

None of the pot of gold would provide for academics directly, but would address the underlying complex of factors stemming from poverty that teachers know make school academics problematic.

Now this falls well short of “Bah, humbug,” though I confess my school partisan disappointment. The nearly one billion dollars in the two measures should provide a very tangible infusion of care to the same kids school people strive to educate, and whose troubles undermine readiness to learn, whether that be kids whose mothers now have support in parenting, foster kids once left dangling, or depressed teenagers whose lives are now rebuilt.

Though the Best Starts money is secure and specific programs conceptualized, the Sound Transit contract fee pot of gold awaits first a decision to put the expansion of the rail system up to the voters of three counties, and then passage of same. So far, voters have seemed alert to the benefits of rapid transit, but the vein has already been mined deeply as the region catches up on its transit options.

Moreover, I wonder if voters will view the contract fee/kid support provision as a backdoor tax similar to the Best Starts for Kids they have already approved, on the grounds that contractors will simply pass the fees on to the county as part of correspondingly enlarged bids. In effect, then, voters will have paid the contract fees themselves.

Let us agitate, meanwhile, that the county not remain only in its own silo, and join forces where appropriate with schools. School personnel should be at the table when decisions are made, if they are not already, for their deep experience with kids, and for the obvious reason that we work with the same population.

Whether kids are in preschool, or kindergarten on, they see teachers daily who will serve as an early warning system on students’ welfare and can refer them to the enriched resources available through the county. Coordination of service will require that nurses, or counselors, or teachers are linked to ongoing health or mental health care outside the school in order that their respective work will not be at cross purposes. The teen health and mental health clinics in schools envisaged in Best Starts will clearly require coordination with schools.

To the county’s credit under the leadership of Executive Dow Constantine, each of the items in the Best Starts for Kids plan cites research as its guiding light. Check out the county website as referenced earlier. By report, much of the underlying data reflects frustrated findings of many researchers that one dollar spent now to solve a problem in society saves four, fifteen, twenty-five or more dollars down the road in social costs such as welfare, prisons, and the like.

So let us also lobby for research linkages with local universities to design programs, vet those underway, and provide a regional research base on top of what already exists to guide future assaults on the nexus of poverty, student health and academic wellness.

I have in mind various models that stem from the data, and about which I have written previously. The Harlem Children’s Zone deeply integrates prenatal and health care services with the efforts of the schools. KIPP charter schools in Newark dedicate funds to in school social workers to channel kids and their families to needed services in the community. In Seattle, the Treehouse organization benefiting foster kids pays part of the salary of certificated counselors in the school and maintains a network of young college graduates to act as mentors to kids.

Though not all of such efforts seem in the wheelhouse of Best Starts for Kids, they are examples of programs that link outside agency with the ongoing welfare of students within schools.

While we wait… and wait….for enlightened federal policy that attacks poverty at its source with jobs and training, and for state legislative funding that gives schools a fighting chance to impact the effects of poverty in the classroom, Best Starts and its companion in the prospective Sound Transit transactions aims to impact the fallout from poverty for kids before they become more chronic and less malleable.

In the end, it is the effect of poverty on kids that poses the greatest challenges for teachers in the classroom.

So, really, this is Happy Holidays for kids of poverty in King County, and for those yet unborn. We may grouse about our taxes on payment day, but here in this abundant locale, blessed by economic vigor and sea and mountain scapes, we also have a political environment where rational social policy is possible, (though it typically takes a while to arrive). Our kids of poverty and the work of our teachers will be the better for it.

Now vote for the extension of Sound Transit when it comes around the bend.

Posted in At Risk Students, Schools and Politics | Tagged at risk students, Best Starts for Kids, Dow Constatine, education and politics, education research, foster kids, Harlem Childrens' Zone, Jessyn Farrell, low-income students, parent support, poverty, preschool, school funding, teen clinics | Leave a comment

Schools and Culture: Beyond Separate and Unequal

Posted on November 25, 2015 by schooldog

Summary: Acceleration in the mortality rate among low income white males due to suicide and drug abuse holds a mirror up to a war on drugs which targeted disproportionately the black community. The comparison puts in relief the distance between the two communities, black and white, and identifies a natural and accustomed role for school people.

So, school people. Among many briefs, schools are to play a role in a reversal of centuries of discrimination toward black people and cultivate the academic/economic prospects of people of color in the backwash of slave times. Most of the focus is on improvement in curriculum and instruction and, in more enlightened areas, on the psychic fallout of poverty through relationship building and intensive human intervention.

But there is another element of interracial interaction where schools can and do play a less identified, but elemental role.

Seemingly out of the blue, in this era of improved medical care and declining death rates, including among blacks and Hispanics, the death rate among poorly educated white males is actually increasing. The rate of increase in mortality in this group is matched in modern times only by the HIV/AIDS epidemic and stems largely from psychological related ailments, specifically suicide and heroin and opioid poisoning or overdose. The increased mortality is linked with difficulty socializing, chronic pain, and poor health, all closely associated with depression, and hence full circle to suicide and drug abuse.

A key ingredient in the bundle of despondency has been financial distress, as hopes for a middle class life style have evaporated with technological efficiency and global outsourcing of low skill jobs.

Some commentators, including Jerry Large in a recent Seattle Times column, have pointed out that the dilemma of low income white males echoes a more chronic profile of black men who for years have struggled with dim economic prospects, poor health, and consequent depression and drug abuse. Crack cocaine. Heroin. War on Drugs.

Where now shock, compassion, and alternatives to jail seem the order for these latter day sorrows of poor white males, the response in past drug crises has been zero tolerance, and an epidemic of incarceration of people of color, particularly black men.
The wheel seems to be turning, not so much due to a new found compassion for people of color or even for the epidemic among poor white males, though the scales may be lifting from some eyes, but because the costs of incarceration for legions of substance abusers who ran afoul of the law costs so dang much, which finally has politicians paying bipartisan attention.

We, blacks and whites, one hundred and fifty years after the Civil War, live in two different lands, two very separate communities. The substantive conversation back and forth has been frighteningly meager in the big picture. The black community has seen the human waste from the ravages of drugs for many years, while whites mostly saw in the same scene only drug crime. Because whites held the power of narrative, they (we) responded with massive incarceration of non-violent black addicts. Any gut response to the psychic pain involved, to pain in the black family, for too many whites has simply not been a factor, at least in the political and collective response. Containment of the “other” rather than remediation within community was the order of the day. The white community, isolated from communication with blacks, was and is blind to the suffering.

Begged is the question, how might this separation moderate so that pain within any part of the community breeds a compassionate response, rather than gulag isolation?

In the second half of the twentieth century the political scientist Karl Deutsch analyzed a variety of social communications common to nation-states and nationalities — mail, phone calls, travel, media, commerce, and so forth. He was able to demonstrate that the internal communications within a community are far more frequent than are similar communications across boundaries outside the group.

In fact, the web of communications themselves define the community, both as an internal entity, and as an entity distinct from outsiders with whom there were notably fewer communications.

Deutsch’s insights provided a useful tool for understanding not only the glue of community, but also a way to understand an important dimension in how we remain relatively separate from communities exterior to our own.

Take the US border with Canada. The web of social communication within each country, were it to be designated by physical lines, would be denser within each country than across the border, despite the enduring reciprocity of this specific international relationship.

Bring the same concept back home, to blacks and whites in America, year 2015. Had communications between the white and black community been more on a par with the communications separately within each community, it is arguable that the incarcerations of black drug offenders might have veered into treatment and shorter term sentencing path. More specifically, were lines of communication between police and relevant black communities more robust, would Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, and other legions still be alive today, absent demonization on both sides and first response by gun? Community policing may be a start.

Reasonable questions, I think, without assuming the answers are simple.

In fact, if communication across racial lines is to be a key ingredient to progress, then we currently may be moving in an wrong direction, as cities gentrify to white, and income inequality pushes white communities of wealth and black of low income further apart.

Meanwhile, black students do better across a range of measures, including health, academic skill level, socialization, mental health, and financial future when they attend desegregated schools, where proximity to white students is more likely to guide resources their way. As a corollary to increased housing segregation, in many communities blacks are less likely to go to school with whites than in the recent past.

Finally, bring the discussion back to the role of schools and teachers, counselors, and administrators in the quest for racial equality. Granted the richness of resources is pivotal to success in bringing black kids to equality, desegregated schools also tend to be the place where black and white kids interact, become curious about one another, and begin tentative relationships. Some of that happens in sports activities or other extra curriculars, but also in the hall ways and in the classrooms as nurtured by teachers, who we hope are adept.

This cascading set of back and forth interactions among students, black and white (and brown), bridges social gaps as though across borders, and institutionalizes the transit of black and white students from outsiders in relation to one another to part of the same collective community. The effect is to inoculate blacks from the marginalization so injurious to African-Americans in our history, and we whites from our inability to see.

In fact, schools are a unique place where different races have an opportunity to break down walls within one community on a regular basis, and have been doing so for many years, Brown vs. Board of Education on.

Posted in At Risk Students, Schools and Culture | Tagged at risk students, black white relationship, desegregation, education and politics, heroin epidemic, interracial relationships, low-income students, police community relations, resegregation, social communication, teaching, war on drugs | 2 Comments

Let Us Not Be Blamed: A Meditation on the State of Teacher Unionism, Corporate America, and Poverty

Posted on November 10, 2015 by schooldog

Summary: Unions are targeted by corporate based reformers as the bad guy, and do need to take better charge of the debate, but the real culprit at base is the political failure to impact poverty.

Maureen (we shall call her) was a well-organized young counselor, bright, who made good contact with the variety of kids on her case load. Hector, a talented scientific type, demonstrated unusual skill in working with kids with disabilities and other marginal academic types, and had a gift for making the mysteries of science accessible. The administration had shown acumen in hiring these recent college graduates. Both after their first year of teaching had become well-knit into the cultural fabric of our school, earned affection from their students, and had formed bonds which have endured with their colleagues.

But what seemed the onset of satisfying careers working with kids came to a proverbial screeching halt in the fall of their second year.

Common in school districts is a dysfunctional practice by which the number of certificated staff within schools is adjusted in the fall of each year, once the enrollment has stabilized, usually by the first or second week of October. The central district office in the previous spring projects enrollments and hence staffing for the fall. Invariably it seems, whether by the vagaries of demographic movement, or by a distant incompetence or emotional disengagement on the bean counting end of things, the projected enrollment school by school is off significantly. As a result, teachers get axed in one school, and moved to another. The younger, most recently hired, the lowest on the totem pole, are the ones moved.

The damage is considerable for students, who have finally settled in to routine by October. With a vanished teacher, or with a new teacher transfer from another school, sometimes massive movement between teachers, periods and classrooms is required. In one particularly egregious year, I remember at risk students, moved around, who never recovered their fragile mojo.

Yet the more vivid butchery for me was the loss of Maureen and Hector. Both were ripped out of their incipient professional home to another school where both were given fragmented responsibilities, and the following year, disillusioned with the rules of the game, left the public school teaching ranks. Schools cannot afford to hemorrhage such potential talent, but school districts do so each year. Those new teachers affected are in the vanguard of the 47% of teachers that leave the profession within the first five years of their experience.

How does this happen? Part of the answer is the overly precise penchant of school districts to balance student/teacher ratios in each school, and the apparently elusive skill set necessary to get those ratios right in the first place.

But the elephant in the room is the union contract guarantee to seniority within a district’s teacher clan, and the related practice of tenure, to which Maureen and Hector had also fallen victim.

Let me be clear about a couple of things. I am a partisan of unions, in my own profession and elsewhere. Unionism is under dire assault from globalization, technological changes, and ascendant corporate bottom line philosophies, all of which have widened income inequality in the nation. On the other side of the coin, as I have gained experience, I have understood better the complexity of change and have had better sympathy with roles other than my own, including the administrative type.

When we lose promising young professionals such as Maureen and Hector, however, in part due to the armor of the contract, then something is wrong in Denmark, though I am humbled by the task of figuring out how else to manage the imbalance. Immediately we are confronted with the gnarly contemporary issues – if Maureen and Hector are to go, then who? The more lowly rated? How does one rate teachers, fairly? Student test scores even used as one of a number of indicators in teacher evaluation is in its infancy, at best (as one of the fathers of the metrics himself acknowledges), and certainly cannot be used to predict a young teacher’s potential. If the lowly rated are to be moved to another school, how does that benefit the other school, which has in effect become a dumping ground? That is hardly reform.

Tenure is the practice, after an initial trial period of two or three years, of essentially guaranteeing employment to union contracted teachers, absent a disciplinary process so exhaustive that it is seldom acted upon by school administrators. Seniority is a related concept, which establishes a pecking order based upon years of experience for movement between schools or layoffs, with the newest teachers exposed, as were Maureen and Hector at the nether end of things.

Both tenure and seniority are anathema to many reformers, who see unions as the enemy, as protecting incompetent or lazy teachers, and allowing legions of others to coast within those protections. A certain amount of the contempt is black and white thinking on the part of absent critics too far from the action. Meanwhile, reports of charter teachers who seek union representation as a counterweight to administrative overreach in school reform’s charter back yard reinforce the importance of collective action in the long view.

There are a great variety of schools and settings in this large and diverse country; a characterization accurate in one setting has at best marginal validity in another.

In the good suburban high school I know best, most staff and teachers were competent, professional, and hard-working, yet all set practical limits on the amount of time they committed, for it is a job that can readily swamp one’s private life. It was only a very small minority that needed to shape up or ship out, in my view; the number was kept as low as it was by a perceptive hiring eye on the part of school administrators.

But the situation is likely strikingly different within the intractable demographics of our larger urban school districts, inhabited as they are by poverty far more dense than in the student body I knew. It is there, in the New Yorks, and the Washington, D.C.’s, and the Detroits where stories of incompetent teachers protected by union due process originate, and are perhaps conjured as a beast larger than they are by honest forces appalled at the palpable failure of the schools, and therefore tarnish also good teachers left without adequate resources to bear the full on brunt of the poverty that blunts their students’ start in life. That some teachers give up as they age and turn hopeless is not surprising; to put myself in their place leaves me to wonder how I myself would fare in similar circumstances.

You may see where I am going. While unions need to be partners with administrators in optimal scrutiny of teacher quality, and adjust the boundaries of fair due process, even stimulate more administrative and peer pressure on teachers to improve practices – we all need our butt kicked in a collegial fashion now and then — the major obstacle to academic success is poverty.

Of course, a real attack on poverty will require substantial and sustained funding, as well as leadership from around the political compass that can rally the nation’s soul, which in this fractured period is not forthcoming.

The crux of this balance of power, I have come to believe, lies in ascendant corporate America’s drive to maximize profits. It is what they do. From that point of view, unions and their upward pressure on wages create problems. The boardroom is aided and abetted by the downward pressure on wages wrought by global outsourcing and the steady gains in productivity made possible by technological change.

Corporations are rightly concerned about the quality of school graduates as employees, so enter the educational fray and follow their play book, which is in part to restrict the power of unions. The national dialogue appears to have bought in. Unions in my reading have too often given such rivals momentum by intransigence in the face of obvious need for reform. Adjust or become irrelevant; define the debate or be beaten by it.

There is a concomitant move to overlay schools with the corporate sense of measurement and accountability, which has borne us the testing culture, in turn become a vested interest of its own, well beyond the useful limits of assessment.

Perhaps we need to get outside the box and propose an alternative narrative.

For example, the optimal school culture and the optimal corporate culture may be different in fundamental ways. At times, I have tried to apply market principles to problems in schools, but usually have ended up stumped at some point in my logic. If profit is the measure of success in a corporate environment, what is the equivalent outcome in a school? Improved test scores may play some moderate portion of this role, but what of the student bonded to a teacher that remains in school rather than disappearing to the street, who limps along academically and may in fact drag down test scores? It will take years of nurture to reverse the handicap of his early experience. He is still a success story. Moreover, perhaps he is a success for the culture of the entire school, not just one teacher. Progress may be more complex, more organic, than dreamed of in linearly and corporately inspired test scores.

Perhaps we need a communitarian inspired metaphor; despite our individually oriented larger culture, perhaps schools in our ideal are more truly communal in nature, which spirit is closer to the village than the anonymously urban. In this vision, tenure is part of a bond to the group and enshrines experience, and recognizes masters and mistresses of the guild, its inhabitants like elders a repository of communal lore. Tenure is granted to the most respected, those recognized as particularly capable, and not to all, and attention is paid by the group to their learnedness.

At base it is a question of power, in this case the power to define in the way professors define academia, or doctors define the hospital. There is an argument we teacher types, via our unions, have ceased to be creative as a group, and so the interlopers, the corporate reformers of schools, have usurped power in the school setting we still know best. So far, we have not found sufficient voice; at least too few others hear us.

How this will solve the dilemma of Maureen and Hector, I do not know, but suspect our schools will be on firmer ground. So ends the meditation.

Posted in Schools and Culture, Schools and Politics | Tagged at risk students, charter schools, education and politics, low-income students, new teachers, poverty, school funding, school reform, seniority, teacher evaluation, teacher morale, teachers' unions, tenure, union contracts | Leave a comment

Charter Schools: Russakov’s The Prize, and Lessons from Newark

Posted on October 25, 2015 by schooldog

Summary: Dale Russakov’s tale of the assault by reformers on Newark Schools is a saga of conflict, righteous myopia, entrenched interests, unintended consequences, upheaval in neighborhoods, grudging progress, and a rending of social fabric; yet in the end no easy characterization applies.

The Newark Public Schools are in veritable ruin on the edge of fiscal collapse, after a few years of scorched earth school reform, and the introduction en masse of charter schools. The whole story, told ably by Dale Russakov in her recent book, The Prize, has unfolded as surely in retrospect as a Greek tragedy, in part a narrative of good intentions outflanked by real conditions, and of destruction and public upheaval that have distracted from some of the good work actually done.

Make no mistake: Newark schools had earned their label as “failed.” Faced with the seemingly intractable, reformers have closed failing schools in Newark and replaced them with charter options, however in a top down, deaf ear to the ground fashion.

The reformers failed themselves to note that New Jersey state law enshrines seniority and tenure protections for teachers, so as district schools closed and their teachers were left without positions, the district was on the hook for their salaries, whether or not they did productive work, and without the state subsidies that vanished from the budget with the transfer of thousands of kids to charters. These “excess” teachers apparently could not readily be reassigned per contract, and have not been picked up by the charters, who tend toward the young and the Teach for America type.

Undeterred, the now exited superintendent of schools, Cami Anderson, dictated that 40% of students in Newark would be enrolled in charters by the present school year, which would prove bloody for the tradition of neighborhood schools, and served as the last straw for a populace that felt that the reforms were being rammed down their throats by outsiders, and white folk at that. As part of the accelerated opening of charters, numerous neighborhood schools, centers of community, would be closed and schools consolidated, fiscally necessary with diminished revenues, but humanly a blow to already blighted neighborhoods.

On the ground, charters in Newark were generally outperforming the district schools, for complex reasons, which fueled the exodus from the district schools, and deepened the crisis for the 60% of students left behind in the district schools.
The improving performance of Newark charters, as with success of charters elsewhere, is laden with a heavy asterisk. Both meta studies and critics have noted that charters have “cherry picked,” in both a passive and an active sense, those students most likely to be successful in their system, and have left those students more deeply impacted by poverty to fend for themselves in district schools. As the argument goes, kids who select for charters are more likely to have a parent or parents ambitious for their success and so organize family efforts to get their student into a charter and support him or her once there. Moreover, a student from a more disorganized family who manages to land in a charter may be less likely to meet the academic and behavioral expectations of the charter, and so wash out. The upshot is that charter success, while real, is based on a collectively more purposeful population than that of regular public schools, which are the halls of last resort.

In the face of all these pressures, many parents remained unconvinced that the district would “take care of” their children. The charters as a group continued to effectively exclude the most entrenched of the needy kids, despite Anderson’s efforts to stretch their services, and the district’s survival was uncertain, to say the least, as the bottom financial line veered toward the specter of fiscal collapse.

The mayor’s race in 2014 revolved around the boiling emotions in the neighborhoods, and the sense of voters that their kids had been poorly served by those in charge. There were hints that better lines of communication might have brought some mutual understanding, but by now the district was embattled, the reformers righteous and barricaded, and seemingly intent on simply blowing up the public district without replacing it with stable and trustworthy options for all needy kids.

In fact, it became clear that reformers had entered the arena without a clear plan to resurrect the district schools, or to even anticipate the quagmire of difficulties that would be created by the drastic transfer of resources to such a large stable of charter schools. Similar dynamics may exist in Philadelphia and Detroit, which also teeter on fiscal collapse and have invested heavily in charters. It is worth note that still other large cities investing heavily in charters seem to be weathering the fiscal storm better, albeit with different circumstances.

In Newark’s case, test scores in the regular district schools continued to languish, despite some reforms and new teaching blood that seemed to indicate otherwise. It is worth speculating that the atmospheric furor in which the district was steeped affected students and teachers negatively. One also wonders if the higher percentage of the neediest kids left behind by the charters further lagged the overall district scores.

The quest for better schools is a contentious one. In the case of Newark, an impoverished community is provided jobs by a bloated school bureaucracy, and state law protects teachers’ jobs via political leverage. Thus powerfully entrenched interests, more complex than simple greed, stand to lose by school reform that channels funding in greater percentage to the classroom. Charters, for example, where they succeed do so in significant part by a much more efficient use of the funding they receive. Long story short, a Newark charter classroom might see around twelve thousand dollars per student while a district classroom would see approximately seven and a half thousand. It should not be a wonder that charters tend to outperform district schools based on this metric. Freedom from state and union structures that allow flexibility in use of personnel is a creative icing on the cake.

Thus, the argument for blowing up the old school district.

Perhaps the logical conclusion is that a district of 100% charters should replace the old model. “Not so fast,” say the residents, “you’ve lost us by how you have treated us, you outsiders. We don’t trust you.”

Russakov herself speculates that the communities, deeply affected by the desiccation of the district schools, might have still signed on to much of the continuing reforms had they not felt shut out of the deliberations and presented with a fait accompli. The reformers, embattled and perhaps rattled, shot their cause in the foot by consulting only with committees of the already converted. Interestingly, Mark Zuckerberg, a $100 million contributor to reform in Newark schools, has taken a much more consultative tack deeply in the parent and school communities he has subsequently supported in the Bay Area. Burned some, he learned.

With money and power involved, and the welfare of one’s kids in the balance, resistance can take a variety of forms. One of the more interesting that Russakov discusses is what I choose to call the subsistence parent. A mother on the lower end of the social and income scale can be as ferocious in the protection of her offspring as anyone. Given the vagaries of the Newark schools, such a mother might become adept at securing a school’s most energetic and competent teachers for her kids, and thus guide their career through the shoals of inadequate teachers and the perils of poverty. Now the neighborhood school, of which she has made close study in defense of her students, is threatened with closure. Her means of protection of her kids is neutralized; she turns her fear to a resistance to school change. Her family has survived in the old system; why should she trust the changes brought by the reformer, who has torpedoed what she knows will work? Thus does a subsistence farmer in the Amazon basin resist farming techniques that will both increase his income and preserve a fragile environment, because at least he knows he can survive by using the old ways.

The Newark story is a cautionary tale to advocates of charter schools. I, for one, feel a bit naïve as I read Russakov’s tale. In my mind, charters are forums for innovation, sites of experimentation in which hide bound public schools are dissected and put back together in more productive configurations, from which lessons the broader range of public schools reconfigure themselves. Though nationally charters are only modestly more successful than some comparable public schools, there are enough exceptions to teach us that attention to the psycho-social needs of kids in poverty is at least as important to their academic progress as improved curriculum and instruction, and that some proportion of funding needs to be targeted in that outside of academics arena. Ironically, some of the best examples of Newark charters seem to prove just that.

Perhaps the condition of the schools and the prospect for change from within is the defining variable in how aggressively to proceed with charters and how much to invest in reform from within the existing district. Many American schools can and are improving. Maybe some, as in Newark, are too resistant for complex reasons, and need to be circumvented. But the eagerness to do so should be wizened by the prospect of an utter destruction similar to that currently in Newark’s district schools, despite the apparent charter progress elsewhere in the city. There most certainly has been scorched earth in the bargain, and plenty of angst to go around, including that of the innocent.

Posted in At Risk Students, Charter Schools, School Reform | Tagged at risk students, charter schools, Dale Russakov, education and politics, low-income students, Mark Zuckerberg, school bureaucracy, school funding, school reform, school reformers, teachers' unions, The Prize | 1 Comment

Charter Schools Revisited: The Washington Supreme Court Throws a Curve Ball

Posted on October 8, 2015 by schooldog

Summary: In a major blow to the belated arrival of charter schools in Washington State, the Washington Supreme Court has ruled that charter schools in the state cannot receive public funds dedicated to “common schools” because they are not governed by locally elected boards.

To the chagrin of Washington State advocates of charter schools, the Supreme Court of Washington State has ruled unconstitutional the portion of the charter enabling initiative passed in 2012 that would dedicate state education monies to charter schools.

The deal is pretty straightforward. Though charter schools themselves were deemed legal by the Court, the use of public funds designated for “common schools” is not.
The decision pivoted on the definition of “common schools,” as established in the 1909 Bryan finding by the same Court, which the court invoked. In response to litigation at the time, “common schools” eligible for public funding under the state constitution were defined as those “subject to and under the control of the qualified voters of the school district.” In other words, local control of local schools was and is paramount.

The echo we hear is of “no taxation without representation.”

As contrast, by the terms of the charter initiative, the boards in a supervisory capacity for charter schools are to be appointed by the charter operator, and are NOT elective office holders beholden to the will of the electorate. Therefore, because of this lack of accountability to the local taxpayers, charter schools do not qualify as common schools eligible for funding under the terms of the state constitution; they are left without the public monies that they need to operate.

All of which has left Washington’s nascent charters in a state of upheaval and uncertainty. The state association of charters has vowed to raise the money to keep the charters open, but faces an uphill battle.

Accountability to the voting and taxpaying public is the fulcrum. Lines of authority to individual charters extend from the State Board of Education and the State Charter School Commission, both of which are appointed by the Governor, who of course is elected, but that line of accountability is too diffuse to satisfy the local accountability rule. Looked at through the lens of local control, the court decision makes sense to me, though I generally support charters. For a local charter to appoint its own board members – well, that may well be a bit too much of the fox guarding the hen house; the board’s interest may be divided between the welfare of students and loyalty to the initiators of the school that appointed them.

Though most charters so far authorized in Washington State are independent of local school boards, two in Spokane has been authorized under the authority of the Spokane School Board, though also have their own individual separate boards. Players in Spokane argue the Supreme Court overlooked their unique circumstances, and that in fact Spokane charters meet the court’s requirement for a locally elected school board.

Spokane’s contention may yet lead charters out of the fiscal wilderness, but it will take time for whatever strategy they embark on to cycle through the court. Perhaps the court will agree and let funding flow. Or, perhaps more likely, the political and legal landscape will evolve to require local school boards to authorize and supervise charters directly, as they do any of their schools, without the intermediary of an appointed board. That would seem to meet the court’s criteria.

Some legislative action would be needed to rescind the charter requirement of an appointed board; such a work around appears more likely than a change to the state constitution, which may be a walk too far.

It is not clear to me how these governance issues play out in other states long invested in charters; perhaps some comparative study would give perspective to the Washington State dilemma.

To bring locally elected school boards into direct authority over charters could play some havoc with the ethos of charters, which in their conception are intended to sidestep the regulation and bureaucracy that often stifle innovation. Clearly, wise school board members might protect that ethic while enforcing business as usual in regular schools. Moreover, said wise school board members might then be in a position to champion successful charter implementation in regular classrooms.

The impulse to blow up schools as they are, particularly where they are viewed as inhibiting the academic growth of low income kids and in particular black and Latino kids, is understandable if overly impulsive, and has fueled the charter movement. Sometimes it is necessary to step outside, and gather new perspective, which is the great strength of the charter movement and is its most persuasive emblem. It is not clear that duly elected school board members, imbued with traditional ways, can insulate and energize that ethic. But we in Washington may have no choice.

There are clearly charters elsewhere in the nation whose creativity of instruction, curriculum, technology, and structure has generated much food for thought, and has kept the experimental spirit alive. This is not to say that the Promised Land has been discovered and awaiting replication. Far from it. The latest Stanford CREDO study (2013), likely the most comprehensive on-going analysis of charter schools, in complex findings conclude that there has been “slow but steady” improvement in charter performance since the study’s inception in 2009. Often criticized for “cherry picking” only those students compliant to their efforts, and excluding too many difficult to reach low income, black and Latino kids, charters have made progress toward serving a higher percentage of such kids than in earlier measures by the Stanford folks. The ecology of the charter scene has shifted modestly with the closure of low performing charters, which had been the intention from the get go, but which has proceeded sluggishly due to the loyalty of families and the tenacity of adherents. The findings of the CREDO researchers should not be disregarded lightly, if they do not exactly promise rapture.

Moreover, it is difficult to hear anecdotal evidence of specific effective charter inroads into academic insufficiency without concluding that the trial into charters yet may have more broadly productive periods, and we would miss critical opportunities to learn by jettisoning the experiment too hastily. For example, journalist Dale Russakov in her new book, The Prize: Who’s in Charge of America’s Schools?, tells of a KIPP charter in New Jersey that has raised test scores in part by concentrating social workers beyond accustomed ratios in order to mitigate the various psychological and home life difficulties that inhibit the academic progress of kids in poverty. Other charters have demonstrated that the increase of the adult/student ratio in a school has had the same beneficial effect, but often via the infusion of foundation monies.

Such relative outliers beg the question – why are not more such innovations pursued in regular public schools? The answer may come down to schools’ flexibility, the taxpayers’ willingness to tax themselves, and ultimately to the public’s faith that schools will use the money well. Meanwhile, the role of charters is to show there is a better way.

Posted in Charter Schools, Schools and Politics | Tagged accountability to voters, at risk students, charter schools, Dale Russakov, education, low-income students, school reform, Stanford CREDO study, Washington Supreme Court charter schools decision | 1 Comment

Schools and Politics: Seattle Teachers Strike and Aim to Be Players

Posted on September 26, 2015 by schooldog

Summary: The Seattle Teachers’ strike has ended with advances in salary and working conditions, but also in agreements that address quality of schooling for kids, such as disproportionate discipline for kids of color and, in general, suspension as a tool of discipline. Supportive parents appear to be lining up to carry the school funding battle to the Washington State Legislature in Olympia.

The Seattle teachers’ strike of 2015 has ended without great bombast and of short duration, amid claims of success by teachers. Perhaps more portentously, school reopens with a budding informal alliance of parents and teachers, apparently forged in mutual wariness of the impact an incessant testing culture has had on schools and Seattle kids.

My first thought was to join the teachers on the picket line. The juices were running. I, the old war horse in the starting gate.

The blood boils in the school trenches, as I remember well. Frustrations are pent up. Teachers who in their character are helpers and accept responsibility for their students frequently feel overwhelmed by too many needs of too many kids. Many hours of uncompensated time are the norm. Meanwhile, outsiders who have less grasp of the realities of working with kids have taken the political reins, ignore and denigrate the professionalism of teaching staff, and dictate the structure of instruction around the overmuch testing. Buying power of salary has been eroded by year after year of suspended cost of living pay increases, and teacher pay falls further behind steadily increasing private sector salaries for similar levels of education. Teachers can’t help but feel their good natured caring for the welfare of kids is taken advantage of by those resistant to the fiscal changes needed to pay them a fair wage. There are rejoinders, some with merit, to each of these articles, but at some point, enough is enough, and feisty local teachers (don’t we want passionate folks teaching our kids?) such as those in Seattle go on strike.

One conservative commentator carped that “it is illegal for teachers to strike” and opined that there was “no need”, now that the Court has mandated that the legislature get its educational fiscal house in order. She clearly has never worked in schools nor understands the utility of political pressure on the legislature that the uptick in teacher salaries represents.

There were agreements in the strike that get to the heart of what is good for kids. Against the backdrop of kids of color facing suspension at a significantly higher rate than white kids, there will now be training aimed at such “disproportionate” discipline. Hopefully, one outcome will be effective alternatives to excluding kids from school, by use of remedial, still consequential channels. The use of testing will be reviewed by joint administration/teacher committee.

Other elements of the agreement appear at first blush to benefit teachers and staff, but scrutinized more closely also in the longer run benefit students. Caseloads for specialists that serve specific disabled populations will have an upper limit, which should allow for better service for those kids, as mandated by federal law.

Teachers won significant across the board pay increases, on top of recent state concessions on cost of living increases, both boosts quite remarkable from the point of view of this retiree who saw nothing remotely near such an increase in the last ten to fifteen years of his career. My wife, also a retired educator, jokes that we should sue for back pay. No doubt the wall crumbled some in the face of the recent Supreme Court ruling holding the legislature in contempt for inadequate funding of public schools, and the partial increase in funding recently granted by the legislature.

In an environment where 47% of teachers leave teaching within five years, bolstered salaries may help, and in turn help kids who are ultimately those who suffer from teacher turnover and a teaching cadre short on experience.

Perhaps most controversially, testing results will no longer play a role in the evaluation of teachers, a matter of great sensitivity to those in the classroom. Some have criticized “teaching to the test” as detrimental to broader and deeper student learning, though a focus on such evaluation has been one pillar of a conservative and business push for school reform.

I am particularly pleased to see the Seattle Teachers’ Union seize this day, and to do it in a way that the parent community appears to embrace, or even to take inspiration. Parents appear to be organizing to carry the political battle to the legislature for better school funding.

This latter development, if it sustains and grows, is the most hopeful. In the end, it is not only teachers’ salaries that need buoyancy, but the strategic concentration of more adults in schools in a position to buoy kids at risk. For example, as reported by Dale Russakoff in her recent book The Prize: Who’s in Charge of America’s Schools?, and profiled on NPR, certain public charter schools in Newark, New Jersey, outperform their companion district schools by placing two certificated teachers in each classroom K-3. In addition, three social workers minister to the psychological needs of approximately 520 kids in the same school, including weekly therapy sessions for around 70 kids. Moreover, a “dean of student and family engagement” oversees efforts to impact kids whose lives outside of school negatively impact school progress. In this particular school, run by KIPP charter schools, the dean worked to identify adults in the lives of such kids who might take personal responsibility for their school success, thereby leveraging supportive adults in kid lives outside of schools.

The net result has been superior academic progress with troubled and impoverished students than managed by comparable regular district schools, which have not been able to marshal their funding as effectively.

There is no apparent and necessary reason why the principles effective in Newark charters would not apply in Seattle Public Schools, with efficiencies and increased funding.

Back to the Seattle schools strike with a word about the Seattle Schools administration. I’ve been on the picket lines a couple of times. In each case stories were rife on the streets of the obduracy and skin-flintiness of the school district, and of the “rainy day” fund that was flush, but considered inviolable as a means to increase salaries. The latter may or may not have been true, but I cite the thread of conversation as evidence of a prospective ill will between teachers and the “head shed.”

Interestingly, little such animosity surfaced in reports I encountered of the strike. In fact, principals and superintendents alike, former teachers themselves, at base should have sympathy for striking teachers, even if they in their fiduciary positions can’t walk the line themselves. That sympathy, difficult to discern in my personal experience of teacher strikes except in building level administrators, present here may have played a role in the relatively quick settlement. So a tentative hats off to the central district administration, which after all has to have to money to feed the settlement.

So it’s back to school. Kids see their friends, belatedly. Parents, even supportive, sigh relief at not having to scramble each day for day care, and teachers, many veterans like myself, feel more natural back in their traces, facing kids, and carrying on their work. The adrenaline ebbs, with maybe some withdrawal pangs salved by the inevitable stories of the picket lines. Soon the rhythm of schools takes over, and we head more normally into the fall. It will be Thanksgiving before we know it.

Posted in Schools and Politics | Tagged at risk students, Dale Russakoff, disproportionate discipline, education and politics, empowering teachers, low-income students, parent support, school funding, school reform, Seattle Teachers strike, teacher morale, teacher pay, teachers' unions, Testing | Leave a comment

School Reform and Politics: The Lessons of LBJ and the Pedernales

Posted on September 11, 2015 by schooldog

Summary: Truly radical government intervention seems to occur at moments of raggedness in the social fabric, such as in the aftermath of the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. At what point do the struggles of our low income students – and by extension our public schools – take on such depth of crisis as to evoke a radically effective response?

Good historical scholarship casts patterns that help us to see how the problems of today could be resolved from what otherwise may seem a hopeless mess.

The struggles of poverty and its impact on lower income kids, and the corrosive effect of institutional racism on those students of color, has an historical analog in the sufferings of backwater rural poor in the 1930’s. Cue specifically the farmers of the forsaken Hill Country of Texas and the Pedernales River basin, the birth place of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th president of the United States. Johnson biographer Robert Caro in The Path to Power profiles in excruciating detail the ordeal of the men and women of the Hill Country striving to survive in its hardscrabble agricultural environment without the brawn of modern electricity that had already transformed urban life elsewhere in the United States.

Truly, the account seems almost Biblical in its depiction of toil without mercy, and its entrapment of the human spirit. Water for cooking, washing, cleaning, cooking, canning, and drinking, was a primary task master to which farmers of the Hill Country had to respond, though hardly the only one. Water from the well perhaps two hundred feet from the house and 100 feet down had to be carried manually to the house numerous times a day. By one reckoning the task took an estimated 63 eight hour days and 1750 miles of walking to and fro in a year’s time. The women, to whom much of the task fell while men were tending the fields and the animals, became stoop shouldered and physically worn before middle age.

In the 90 and 100 degrees of the Texas summer, under a tin kitchen roof beneath a remorseless sun, the farmer wife kept the fire burning in the stove to heat water for washing or bathing or for canning fruits and vegetables (which would rot quickly in the heat if not quickly preserved), and for cooking meals from scratch each day (there was no refrigeration). The stove had to be regularly supplied with wood, though with care in order to maintain a steady heat for cooking. Corn for meal had to be ground by hand.

In the same vein of manual drudgery, wet clothing as wash had to be held in the air on a pole to drip dry before being rung by hand. Irons for pressing clothes, literally made of iron, were kept hot on the wood stove, and weighed six or seven pounds, compounding the physical strain on the women.

Meanwhile, the men milked the cows at night by the dim glow of kerosene lanterns, but without electrical refrigeration the ice they used to keep the milk from spoiling was an imperfect substitute, and milk was regularly lost.

Each of these elemental tasks would prove much less burdensome with the advent of electricity and the machines they powered, which would draw water from the well, wash clothes and press them more efficiently, preserve food and milk, and cook and bake food without primordial resort to wood fire.

In our contemporary urban life, it is difficult to imagine this essentially subsistence existence, but it was one stage set in the crisis facing FDR when he took office in 1933. In the wings was a young Lyndon Johnson, already a minor player in national and Texas politics, and in the hunt for his own path to power.

Johnson ascended to the House of Representatives in 1937. Shortly after, he leveraged his relationship with FDR to give a rural Pedernales electrical cooperative the authority to bring electricity to the Hill Country, despite classic resistance from private utilities and the bureaucratic intransigence of the Rural Electrification Administration. Lyndon Johnson, narcissism personified, and amoral in his person, hungry for power and recognition, was a genuine hero. In one of those apparently ceaseless ironies of history, the transformation of the lives of Hill Country farmers in the wake of new electricity was directly due to his often venal manipulations,

So I ponder: In the depths of a hell on earth that had corollary in other walks of life in the 1930’s, the Hill Country farmer found relief in the ministrations of the New Deal government, which acted where all previous regimes had abdicated. Does it take extremity to call forth drastic, even heroic measures? Are there lessons in this for our schools, and more particularly the academic future of our students of poverty, be they of color or white?

The lives of kids of poverty and their sub-par school experience have a different cast than the Hill Country existence prior to the introduction of electricity, but they are just as bluntly defeating for the students whose lives are affected. Cases in point: the kid whose father has disappeared and whose mother is absent at work long hours of the day, the kid of the addict, or the object of abuse, or the kid whose parent moves incessantly, or is homeless, and loses long stretches of learning, and so shows up by high school with barely elementary skills. At all levels, the schools that serve these kids are not up to their complex task. These are not isolates, but whole populations, the dislocations of poverty in the lives of poor folk, and anchor our chronically low national academic skills. To intimates of schools, this is crisis.

I think also of the Marshall Plan that responded to the specter of communism on the edge of Western Europe, and helped speed a recovery from World War II that quieted the restlessness on the left. Teddy Roosevelt, he of trust busting, responded to a labor environment that had become truly violent in the face of the various hegemonies of Big Steel and the railroads, among other exploiters of working men and women. FDR and the New Deal responded to the cataclysm of the Great Depression and, perhaps the imminent collapse of capitalism (as some historians would have it), and certainly to the pains of the little people of the Hill Country and beyond. Johnson’s own Great Society and Voting Rights Act, ebbed as it has, still gave hope to many people and redressed imbalances of economic and political power of the1960’s.

This meditation on history comes to its end. Will the collapse of urban schools that serve the poor, and the struggles of low income students even in more fortunate academic environments, have to descend to more deeply crisis levels before ascending calamity is registered in halls of power, state and federal, and truly radical remedies are considered on the order of the New Deal, TR’s trust busting, or the Marshall Plan?

I worry this is the case, as one who sees no out from a need for greater (and hopefully well targeted) school funding mostly to deepen and widen the human intervention cadre working with at risk kids. Pockets of successful reform in public schools and charters alike not only improve upon the teacher/student ratio and provide mentors, but deliver services targeted to common struggles of low income families which interfere with long view academic success — health and mental health care, financial assistance for housing, quality day care, and other supports as circumstance merits.

Too many power brokers are late to an understanding of the crisis, being predominately whites blind to the realities that black folk, for example, take as given. Some privileged folks also have a misguided tendency to ascribe indolence as the primary door to poverty. Fresh strategies to alleviate the related and growing income gap occupy too little of our collective creativity and political will.

Perhaps storm clouds gather for a reckoning. Black Lives Matter is the latest of the series of paroxysms on race in the life of this country that demand justice before the body politic, this time in the person of the police. The echo extends to failed educational opportunity. The Washington State Supreme Court takes the extraordinary measure of censuring the Washington State Legislature for failure to fully fund education in the state. Orthodoxy is challenged by charter schools. American students’ poor standing against a globe of their peers continues to frustrate and bewilder heartfelt commitment of many in the extended schools community and on the part of relative outliers who know the crisis well.

In parallel with the New Deal, today’s calls for educational opportunity for the poor and the needs of capitalism become one and the same: students whose learning is impeded in various ways become burdens to the economy in the form of welfare, depressed consumer activity, and the costs of incarceration. Corporate CEO’s with vision are taking note.

We cannot take all this as good news, but perhaps it is necessary news that will sooner than later bring the school reform to the center of our political attention, and the perceived crisis generate educational investment on the order of the New Deal, with machinery parallel to that of the Rural Electrification Administration, which altered life so fundamentally on the Pedernales River.

Posted in School Reform, Schools and Politics | Tagged at risk students, crisis in schools, education and politics, LBJ, low-income students, non academic support, race and school reform, school funding, school reform, school reform and the economy | Leave a comment

School Reform, Politics, and Culture: Can We Performance Base Ourselves to the Promised Land?

Posted on August 28, 2015 by schooldog

Summary: Enshrining performance and research based thinking deeply into school reform, and investing accordingly, will invite best practices, promote better life success for students, and in the long run restrict the body of poor outcomes – incarceration, chronic poverty, etc. – that drain the treasury.
Over time and in diverse media, I’ve come across assertions such as “every dollar spent on preventive human services saves four dollars down the road.” The latter comes from TIME magazine and the date may well have been 1966. (Only my body is that old!) Seldom did the article or TV program expose the assertion to scrutiny, though the research somewhere back in the chain of information may have been sound, nor did I inquire deeply myself into the buttressing research, partly due to my once upon a time poor decision to duck statistics in graduate school. Mostly these assertions fit my prejudices, and/or aligned with my gut instincts as a veteran human resource worker, and so I have accepted them at face value, while lamenting that such rational considerations seldom inform funding decisions in the political arena anyway.
In education in particular, precious little quality research has guided instructional practice or school structure, and what little is clear from existing research – that the quality of adult relationships with at risk kids improves their outcomes – seems not to impact the political funding of schools, for if it were, staffing levels would be closer to adequate than they are. Apparently our Republican colleagues, in answer to voters who resist taxation and a vigorous public sector, prefer to spend a great deal more money later on incarceration and the assorted much more expensive programs that respond to such later stage social failures.
Republican demagoguery aside, I have some sympathy for the weary voter whom we need to convince that her money is spent in a rational way, as an investment in tried and true formulas that will enrich the society and ultimately benefit her and hers.
Schools in my experience tend to lurch from one new idea to another, and too seldom platform sustainably on practices deeply grounded in well vetted research (though I concede the zeitgeist seems to be changing). That said, case in point, where is the well vetted research that establishes the current testing frenzy as the route to thoroughgoing educational improvement? I rest my case.
The Gates folks have tried to base funding decisions on bed rock research, but have yet to find a holy grail. For example, at one point “small schools” was well the rage in Lower Queen Anne, but headwinds were encountered and the initiative dropped when desired outcomes proved elusive, regrettably from my point of view because I suspect smallness of setting promotes closer adult/student relationships, and so is a necessary if not wholly sufficient element of change.
We need not worry that education is a dysfunctional island separate from other human resource arenas, for example in veterans’ affairs, or young mothers, or youth violence and gangs. Same story in these latter areas: rational funding decisions based on sound social science metrics take second fiddle to political winds.
So it took a few mentions in the paper and on TV for me to take note of a promising shift in the Seattle and in particular surrounding King County’s administration of human services. Perhaps the area’s progressive politics turned scientific will move human services in a research based direction.
Whether it has been the local Gates’ search for reliable metrics in human intervention across the globe as well as near at home, or King County Executive Dow Constantine’s technocrat’s inclinations, but the county’s human services department has specified that contracts let to various satellite non-profits be performance based. In a related comment, the Seattle Times editorial board cites an unnamed study that found “$221 spent on behavioral interventions for kids in child care yields benefits (better grades, fewer disruptions, prevented crime) worth $31,741.” Similarly, a program that works with struggling young mothers must demonstrate outcomes such as infant and child health, perhaps continuing education, or other of the variety of indicators that the money has been well spent toward an identifiable outcome. Or, intervention with gang involved youth must demonstrate transitions to successful schooling, employment, and the like.
Such consciousness is progress, I believe, though another voice whispers, with incredulity, that such a standard should go without saying when the public’s money is spent.
Some of these examples border closely the liabilities of kids already in school, so the county enterprise, should it sustain, will have spill over toward the long term well-being of the kids in a proverbial Ms. Johnson’s second grade classroom with whom she works without the time to be as effective as she would like. Could these county programs pass through the membrane into the school, as a partner in Ms. Johnson’s classroom, under the same performance based philosophy? Could the old time research based algorithm of adult relationship and at risk student progress morph into much more specific interventions into student dysfunction of various types, as part and parcel of school programming, and thereby sharply diminish demands on public monies for such items as prisons and welfare down the road?
Might university departments of education, social work, psychology and the like partner closely with schools to study newly implemented ideas, and vet them for continuation or the junk heap based on hard-nosed performance criteria? I think of work I once did with groups of African American and Latino young men, which needed more of my time than I could give, and more help than I had, but which would have benefitted from the rigor a good researcher might have lent to outcome analysis. As it was, the statistics I mustered were suggestive of a modestly positive outcome, but not of the depth and breadth upon which to build funding.
In fact, school staff members in my experience often have innovative ideas that have sprung from their close engagement with their students, and the consequent recognition of need. Implementation is too often done with too little time available, too few resources tapped, and too little scientific rigor to demonstrate that any goals in fact have been achieved, and finally with marginal energy which cannot sustain a rigorous analysis and program revamp for the next phase. And so we lurch to the next good idea, last year’s good idea discarded.
My current favorite program type is those that mentor young men and women, in school or in the community. Big Brothers and Big Sisters have done so for many years. President Obama has lauded the mentor network My Brother’s Keeper. Programs in certain Seattle Public Schools, as well as elsewhere have used recent young college graduates, some of them in Americorps, to mentor at risk youth as well as specifically foster kids. All of these if memory serves me claim research based positive results. How rigorous is the research? Is it done in house by like-minded types, or have qualified and probably university based researchers independently vetted these outcomes? Do the results include savings down the road via the intervention in the present? Has the research been replicated?
If to all this the answer is “affirmative,” then can the political culture muster the will to do the right thing by these essentially innocent kids, as well as the pragmatic, longer term fiscally responsible thing? One and the same, yin and yang, my friends.
Always, there are ghosts that haunt choice points, and remind of the scale of the stakes involved in even such relatively small, local decisions such as King County’s performance based policy. Will the American experiment continue its long march to inclusion and continue its pragmatic genius, or will we slowly sink into a second world, bifurcated dead end in which the rich confront the poor and blame them for what would in fact be a collective failure?

Posted in School Reform, Schools and Culture, Schools and Politics | Tagged at risk students, child care funding, low-income students, Performance Based, relationships in schools, school reform, school research, teacher overwork, teacher professionalism, youth violence, youth violence prevention | Leave a comment

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