Schools and Politics: Could It Be the Obama GI Bill?

Posted on February 3, 2015 by schooldog

Summary: Though one might argue scarce funds should go first to low income students, President Obama’s offer to make community college free of tuition could also stem the slide out of the middle class for others. Costs of living beyond tuition while in school also complicate the route to college success.
President Obama created a media stir recently, and possibly struck a bit of fear into the populist averse ranks of Republicans, with his proposal to make the two years of community college free to the nation’s high school graduates. According to Obama, the opportunity would be open to “whoever is willing to work for it.” Early details specify a 2.5 grade point average once on campus, part or full time, and that progress be made toward a degree or certification.
The merits of the program aside, it is tempting to speculate on the politics upon which the initiative is based. Does Obama spy a political opportunity to frame a debate that will resonate well into the 2016 campaign, even while knowing the opposition Congress will balk?
At a price tag estimated at $60 billion over 10 years in the early calculations, what do we get besides divergent political camps, even it will be entertaining to see how Republicans doublespeak their resistance?
Though many Republicans squawked at the price tag, as I troll the internet, the clamor is more subdued than on other topics, perhaps because states and local municipalities with Republican flavor have been experimenting with related programs.  Tennessee has an ongoing program for free tuition to community college, begun under the auspices of Republican office holders. Ohio under Gov. John Kasich, also a Republican, has been considering a variation on such a plan. Similar discussions in Oregon have originated in the traditionally conservative voices of rural areas impacted by the need to retrain lumber mill and other workers left jobless by the decline of extractive industries. Thus in pragmatic locales closer to the voters than Washington, D.C., the economic turmoil visited by jobs moving overseas and other disruptions such as in the lumber industry ferment solutions while Congress dithers.
Washington State’s Running Start program pays community college tuition for those who have proven themselves academically while the students are still in high school, and the College Bound Scholar program addresses the tuition needs specifically of low income students after they have graduated from high school, as I have discussed in recent posts.
Will the states lead the feds out of the wilderness?
While we focus on the growing number of low income students and the consequences in our classrooms, as well we should, the growing number of low income students in our schools are sons and daughters of wage earners who have lost their jobs and in the process descended the economic ladder. For the first time in fifty years, a majority of students in our public schools qualify for free or reduced lunch, a standard measure of poverty. Obama acknowledged this reality by pairing his comments on free community college, aimed at the young adult population coming out of high school, with announcement of a separate initiative designed to upgrade adult skills training. Unstated but implicit is the reality that much of this skills training would land in community colleges, where presumably the parents of the young adult population might themselves make use of the free tuition program. Also unstated in the roll out is that previous versions of this tech fund have basically been moribund on arrival in Congress.
The simplicity in educational and hence economic access for a broad swath of the populace packs a hopeful punch where more complex offerings might get lost in the details. It offers something to the middle class wage earner who needs to upgrade training in order to maintain place as well as to the lower income person striving to rise as well as to the apprehensive high school student beginning to figure out that Mom and/or Dad ain’t gonna provide forever.
My first impulse on hearing the Obama proposal was to think that scarce resources should go where they are most needed, that is, to lower income folk. But in the current economy middle class folk who don’t upgrade are in danger of stepping on the down escalator to low income status. Moreover, if the proposal has any chance of engaging the current Republican majority, it has to be with the tag “middle class” in the headline.
Jonathan Alter writing in the Daily Beast makes the point that the Obama proposal is well in line with the philosophy of the GI Bills of the post Second World War era. The initial impulse was bipartisan gratitude for the work of soldiers in wartime, but the program proved to be an effective economic stimulus and helped fuel growth in the postwar era. Similarly, the establishment of land grant colleges largely in the west by none other than Abraham Lincoln (Republican) provided for the training of workers in the extractive skills of the time. All such initiatives benefited from steady bipartisan steerage.
The issue is more complicated than it seems on first blush. For example, a significant percentage of current community college students have much if not all of their tuition already paid by Pell Grants and other financial aid programs. Will the President’s program supplement or replace these monies, or be administered in addition to them? This is a critical question, because students still must eat and put a roof over their heads, manage transport and buy books while attending college. Of those students who dropped out of community college, approximately 80% report they did so for financial reasons such as the cost of living expenses for themselves and/or family, or more generally because the cost of college was simply too much.
By contrast, only 20% of these dropouts reported academic difficulties as the root cause, though clearly academic readiness is an issue for many community college students.
To the point, the burden of supporting oneself and the purchase of books and other academic materials are often the Achilles heel of programs that pay tuition. Beneficiaries still drop out despite the financial assistance because the total cost cuts too close to the bone, and lower income families, already struggling to make ends meet, simply do not have the wherewithal to cover the margin. 38% of dropouts return but not all of these complete their original intentions. The aim of public policy isn’t to create a total free ride, but to promote access and successful completion, and not give something insufficient and blame the kids when it doesn’t work out. As a matter of public policy, we need them to be successful.
Alter, again in the same Daily Beast post just cited, reminds me of a community college advisory program I once profiled through which counselors cum parent surrogates aggressively interact with at risk college students to provide support — emotional, tutoring, and financial — as needed. As Alter observes, in an altogether too common scenario, “by the time the college learns the student is struggling, he or she has long since dropped out.” Any community college access program needs to include an advisory component, or risk program mediocrity if not outright failure.
From the standpoint of the lower or marginally middle income student facing the next level beyond high school, the financial and existential realities can be daunting. Costs of community college continue to rise, while good jobs go begging for takers.
Corporate leaders and politicians urge action but seem not to recognize the answer lies in substantial public investment which they are loathe themselves to promote. Now we have the President rolling out a challenge.

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School Reform: College Counseling is “Elementary”

Posted on January 9, 2015 by schooldog

Summary: College counseling for low income students plays to a largely absent audience if interventions have not been going on since elementary school.
I looked across the room of fifty or sixty seniors with a pride that had little to do with my own labors, more to do with my simple association with these high quality kids on the cusp of their departure to college. All came from low income families, from which group typically emerge a strong majority of those kids at risk of dropping out of school and of failure to launch a fully independent adult life.
But not these kids.
They were sons and daughters – predominately daughters – of recent immigrant families from Somalia and Mexico, Ukraine and India, as well as of longer term African American and Latino American families not yet entered in the American economic mainstream.
These kids sat before me as beneficiaries of Washington State’s College Bound Scholar program, which promises free tuition to higher ed for those low income students who play the game reasonably well.
A key trick of the program is the enlistment of kids in middle school, in theory before the dangers of dropout start feasting on wayward high school students, and in order to invest them with a sense of themselves as entrants to higher education before academic dysfunction has a chance to undermine that possibility.
You may see where I am going. Though I was counselor to these kids, “college counseling” does not begin in the senior year of high school, nor does it begin when a student enters high school.
I cannot say this too clearly. If we want to bring along to full membership in higher education and school prosperity the low income youth who in the end are those that drag down the almighty national test scores, then we have to engage them before their decline begins. In early childhood education. In elementary school. In middle school.
So it was a number of years before this meeting that the story really starts. In the foregoing scene, I serve as these students’ “college counselor”, along with myriad other hats in my service to them. But their progress toward college originated with the hopes and structure of their parents, and continued with their enrollment in College Bound as early as eighth grade.
In addition, my hope was that multiple classroom presentations each year from ninth grade on would fill in as many blanks as possible, and keep their college drive alive. Though students on their own would visit my office during their high school years, I am not a fan of one shot counseling sessions and felt I could disseminate information and carry on pertinent discussions more efficiently in a classroom group.
The College Bound kids aside, there were likely another one hundred low income kids in their cohort who were not in the room that day, many of whom entered ninth grade with their class, but in various states of academic and credit dysfunction that doomed their readiness for the success the College Bound kids were realizing. Some had already dropped into oblivion – dropped out — when they ran into the adolescent buzz saw that is middle school.
As sons and daughters of those who themselves benefited from higher education, children of the middle and upper classes are reasonably likely to grow up in an environment in which a legacy of school beyond secondary is taken for granted, even expected.
Not such a slam dunk for their lower income brethren.
Such a child’s identity begins with parents who struggle to put bread on the table, because they have lacked education, and in families who suffer to a greater degree an ever evolving variety of problems: family fracture, substance abuse, nutrition issues, sub-par health care, and the liabilities of living in communities where the social fabric is notably frayed or ripped.
“College counseling” for these kids begins with amped up resources – counselors, mentors, teachers – that address the deficits that hamper low income students’ rise to college matriculation.
I am pleased to see a couple of recent articles in the New York Times and the Harvard Education Letter about “college counseling.” In the Times, Elizabeth Harris scratches the surface with a true enough rendering of the labors of overworked college counselors in a relatively selective high school in New York. Ms. Harris correctly depicts the time crunch for counselors who facilitate the process of college application and financial aid in the senior year. However, seen properly, such struggle is the end point of a game in which too many kids have already fallen by the wayside.
Suzanne Bouffard, writing in the Harvard Education Letter, delves more deeply into the earlier secondary years. Together with her colleague at Harvard, Mandy Savitz-Romer, she advocates a host of tools that fill in the personal infrastructure and knowledge base the lack of which consigns low income, first generation college students too often to poor grades and confusion in the face of the inscrutable next step. College Board curricula attempt much the same thing, for example by “exploring” in the seventh grade among other things careers and in the ninth grade “planning” a high school course menu designed to qualify for college entry.
These exercises will serve as portals for some kids who are already  primed for college. Many students need more, however.
Savitz-Romer, quoted by Bouffard, finally puts her finger closer to the mark: ”Getting to and succeeding in college is also about having the developmental competencies required to navigate the process – like engagement, motivation, and the ability to overcome setbacks.” She might have added the old favorite corollaries perseverance and deferred gratification. These qualities we know to be central to academic and life success; their dearth cripples the future of too many low income youth.
The good news is these competencies can be taught. For example, Walter Mischel as the innovative psychologist and KIPP charter schools as implementer were profiled in a recent PBS piece on teaching self-control, as an apparently successful example of inculcating this vital skill well before high school entry.
Otherwise, all that fancy college guidance in the senior year of high school plays to an half empty theater.
Savitz-Romer acknowledges much of this need for growth goes begging in an environment resistant to proper funding and characterized by insufficient staffing. More counselors and teachers at all levels strategically placed would have impact as mentors for lost kids who lack personal infrastructure or the mindset to be aspirants to higher education. More teachers because often it is teachers who form the mentor bond day after day in the classroom but who currently have less and less time to do so in the wake of more and more testing. Smaller class sizes would provide some tonic. Savitz-Romer also acknowledges  the worth of programs supplementary to those in the schoolhouse such as “college access programs, college outreach programs, and business and community initiatives such as mentoring.” These latter efforts so far are piecemeal in the broad context of American schools and kids.
If we simply invest in more “college counseling” in the later high school years, we will be advising low income kids whose early experience has not built the world view of themselves in higher education, and whose consequent academic investment leaves their skill level well below that needed for the next level.

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School Reform and the Suspension Trap; Charters Learn the Lesson

Posted on December 22, 2014 by schooldog

Summary: High profile charters in New Orleans learn the lesson good public high schools have known for a while. Suspension often has to take a back seat to more nuanced and humanly intensive interventions in the lives of the kids we aim to include in our academic communities.
With a history as a public high school counselor in the Seattle area, I have to admit to a certain amount of smug, misplaced satisfaction at the struggles of some high profile charter high schools to suspend minimally yet educate to the max all students. It ain’t so easy, no it ain’t.
Despite various reports of success in the charter school movement in specific locales, even one of the most apparently promising networks, the KIPP ensemble, has run onto rocky shoals when one of their high schools in New Orleans has debuted with an uber strict disciplinary code.
The assumption has been (and supported by black constituent parents at the get go) that immersion in a strictly demanding culture would imbue students living in a more chaotic community environment with the self-discipline necessary for academic success.
In three high school level charter programs in New Orleans, as reported by Sarah Carr in the Atlantic, strict regimens outlined not only behavioral expectations, but inviolable dress codes and minutia down to posture, intricate classroom conduct, and how to walk through the halls. Astronomical suspension and attrition rates have resulted, which in turn have been challenged by the parent community that originally supported the get tough policies. To one parent Carr quotes, the disciplinary practices have seemed only a “blind application of rules.”
A couple of the New Orleans schools in the first year suspended over 60 percent of students at least once; in one school 35% were suspended three times or more, a large highly at risk category. Once a kid has been suspended that much, inevitably academic progress lags to the point a strong percentage just give up, though honestly most of this group need help with academic perseverance in the first place. Much soul searching, to the charters’ credit, has ensued, and they seem to have arrived at a more flexible set of guidelines that have seen suspension rates drop dramatically. Students have been given voice, for example, in dress code issues, and administrators have adopted what seems to be a more nuanced set of responses to the wide variety of disciplinary issues typical in a high school community.
So, fewer kids kicked out means more kids still in the game, and exposed on a daily basis to the efforts of school personnel to ensnare them in a constructive cycle.
The newly entered flexible era in high school charter culture sounds very familiar to the struggles of good public high schools throughout the country, certainly in my own neck of the woods. The Seattle Times’ Education Lab reportage on school discipline and suspension, by Claudia Rowe, focused recently on the suburban Kent School District, where I once worked. Kent is an inner ring suburb that has beckoned urban low income residents, including African Americans, due to its lower rental fees and property values as nearby Seattle home prices have skyrocketed.
Warts and all, I always felt the Kent school community nonetheless willing to innovate as required by the student population it served. Suspension rates were higher than we liked, and like many districts nationwide, from eighth grade on the student population gradually suffered attrition so that the senior classes were markedly less robust than the cohort of the same age kids that left seventh grade for eighth grade. Unusually candidly it seemed to me, the Kent superintendent ordered a quality study of the problem, which revealed in facts and figures for public scrutiny what we had known in the schools for some time. We just failed to hold too many kids, though not without trying to do so.
We too went through a zero tolerance period, with results similar to those in New Orleans, only not so pronounced. An older school culture that reached out to kids and offered them relationship in various ways moderated any suspension extremes such as those the New Orleans schools created.
The dilemmas posed by the suspension issue are only the most visible end of a spectrum which includes the slow and stealthy drop out of the unengaged, a diminished graduation rate and the partial readiness of many of those who do graduate for either the collegiate or the work a day world.
No doubt the strict approach does salvage some kids, just not nearly enough, particularly teenagers struggling with a variety of issues in their personal heavens.
Single parent household, divorce, substance abuse whether the student or a family member, financial woes, homelessness, lack of an educated model in the home – the list is an old and numbing one. Individual kids, acting out in the classroom or school corridors, need a response to their misbehavior that is contoured to who they are and what their situation is, by human beings who will be sympathetic, who know the kid as an individual, and who will act the adult structuring role with those factors in play. The kid whose mother drinks too much and who was truant requires a different approach than the son of single mother who works two jobs to put food on the table and who mouthed off at his second period teacher when challenged about his homework.
The administrator might seek the help of a football coach that knows the first student and for the second enlist the help of the teacher the student seeks out after school. Flexible administration of discipline should have a variety of mechanisms available, from mediation to mentoring to community service to counseling to in school suspension to maybe even a referral for social service support.
While disciplinary challenges span a spectrum as wide as a teenager’s imagination, “defiance” and other ill-defined synonyms are notable for their frequency as well as for the opportunity to teach rather than apply the iron fist. One instance might be failure to surrender a cell phone on teacher request. Or skipping a class. Or repeated instances of talking off topic in a classroom or other minor but disruptive behavior.
With perspective, much discipline I have seen stems from what most would identify as minor issues, but which are still significantly disruptive in the management of a classroom or in the maintenance of school house order. The classroom teacher needs a modicum of decorum to have a chance to teach thirty staunchly hormoned adolescents English.
In the case of black students in particular, who are disciplined beyond their proportion in the student body, the dynamics I think are complex. In groups I have worked with, there have been individuals who play to neighborhood buddies, to one up them, and to demonstrate their wit for their friends to appreciate. In the same breath I think they display anxiety about their ability to measure up academically, and their distrust of white instructors, self-styled comics telling the truth. Trust with black students can become an ally for all staff white and otherwise, but hard won, elusive.
Deepening one such dilemma, I felt to exclude a couple of disruptors would be to lose leaders and a significant share of the group vitality, and was wary to boot them for fear of giving a message that the individuals did not belong. Teachers too have to step down from their lectern and engage kids in inquiry, in which case the wayward liveliness can enhance the classroom dynamics. It ain’t easy, it ain’t. Like most staff I myself was simply trying to find my way.
Both of the leader/disruptors, good hearted kids, could have been suspended many times over in a more rigid environment, and may have been briefly on isolated occasions. But at each crux point there were adults in the school paying attention who engaged each kid in conversation. Both guys graduated, and graduated on time.
Hang with ‘em, that’s the clue. Coaches, teachers, counselors, administrators, security guards. Multiple relationships, caring focused. Where we had success with at risk kids, it was often through such multiple relationships. Kids know when someone cares about them and they listen, skin color aside. The New Orleans charters seem to be learning.
This kind of supplemental parenting is human intensive. While many, including myself, looked askance at a recent Washington state ballot initiative (I-1351) which called for a large increase in non-teaching staff in Washington state schools, at least some of the folks intended by the measure could be dedicated to building out of classroom relationships that in the end promote success in the classroom. More administrators, counselors and security guards, not to mention teachers hired for their interpersonal warmth and skills will be necessary to establish effective alternatives to suspension. Current staffing along these lines is simply insufficient.
For example, Kent once had an option called “In School Suspension”, or ISSP, for low level student misdemeanors. The idea was to isolate the student from the school community while still encouraging academics. The practice drew staff out of the teacher pool and increased class sizes modestly, but the game of keeping the kids at their school work proved difficult. Eventually instructional aides took over the monitoring of ISSP. The intervention finally was discontinued, but could be revived as an intensive way to mentor carefully chosen kids among the wayward.
In another example, there is merit in schemas proposed in Richard DuFour’s Whatever It Takes: How Professional Learning Communities Respond When Kids Don’t Learn. The authors tell the tale of a suburban Chicago school district that developed several tiers of successively more staff intensive interventions, groups, and small classroom settings that addressed increasingly more entrenched levels of student dysfunction, both academic and behavioral.
Some students may require alternative settings, either within the school district purvey or without. For example, the kid lost in substance abuse, or the kid who pushes enough buttons that a return to the classroom in the immediate future is not an option; the student who falls well behind his classmates in credits earned, or whose personal problems are so intensive that full time schooling has to take a back seat to psychiatric and counseling interventions.
It ain’t easy, no it ain’t, to bring our disciplinary endangered students into full responsibility for their academic lives. The key is human intervention, which is expensive because it is time intensive, but much cheaper than the costs in social services and incarceration down the road that are the alternatives. Pay now or pay more later.

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Schools and Culture: The Death of Michael Brown

Posted on December 6, 2014 by schooldog

Summary: Prior to his encounter with Officer Wilson on the streets of Ferguson, Michael Brown in many respects was a relatively normal teenager on the cusp of adulthood. His death poses a challenge to the manner in which we empower police, and the American mythology which lives within.
Michael Brown, he of Ferguson, Missouri, beneath the media image of an enraged out of control young man, turns out to have been very much like the many teen agers of all colors I have known. Though this not be a story about schools, it is about the kids we teach, and the culture in which we try to teach.
According to a New York Times background account of Mr. Brown’s life prior to his demise on the streets of Ferguson, he struggled in school, though unlike a large portion of his counterparts, he did the makeup work needed to graduate on time. He was a child of divorce of teenage parents, but maintained important ties to his family, complaining on occasion of their treatment of them. Parents of the world, does this sound familiar? He dabbled in music, in themes that echoed his generation’s rap, and in his last weeks seemed to be asking penultimate questions of faith and existence, right on schedule with his peers. Occasional use of alcohol and marijuana hardly qualifies him as an outlier. He had no juvenile or adult record with the law, according to interviews with family and friends, and some perusal of public records. One minor physical conflict with a neighbor was resolved by the intercession of adults and was an anomaly in Mr. Brown’s short history.
In the limited pre-incident profile available, Mr. Brown could have easily been one of my own students, with whom I sweated to get graduated on time, and whom I attempted to guide toward his intended career in heating and air conditioning. Normal American teenager is the characterization to which I keep returning.
This profile as reported is difficult to reconcile with the bully who pushes a much smaller convenience clerk as part of a theft on a surveillance video the day he died, as well as the enraged and contentious figure Officer Wilson reported he faced the day of the fatal gunshots.
Something doesn’t add up. Perhaps Officer Wilson embellished and polished his account to elude prosecution. The at times wildly conflicting accounts of the critical 90 seconds fail to convince either way, toward either individual’s innocence in the escalation of the conflict.
Perhaps, as suggested in an interesting if a bit over the top piece in Slate, in the panic of the moment, Wilson fell prey to an old stereotype of black men as “giant brutes” of “superhuman” strength, with a bit of demon thrown in for extra kick, and so both Wilson’s fear and his own actions escalated.
And how are we to understand Brown’s theft, the alleged walking down the center of the avenue, even an apparently uncharacteristically venomous verbal challenge to police authority? From a psychological perspective, I can imagine it. He’s been basically a good kid, but now has crossed the membrane to the early stages of adult life. He no doubt shares the experience of virtually every young black man of being stopped by police for no reason other than being black. Now he is aware of entering an adult world in which opportunity for black men is littered with obstacles reserved for them, and in which slights both accidental and purposeful are a common occurrence.
Honestly, what is really the wonder is that more black men don’t go off in some unacceptable fashion. I don’t know how black folk do it. Instinct for survival, I suppose.
But Michael Brown is not really an adult, despite the big body. Like many his age, he thinks he has already earned his spurs, thinks of himself as a man, but he lacks understanding of what that fully means, is still in throe of adolescent angst, with some years yet to age 25 when frontal cortex and his capacity for self-control will be more developed. Maybe he thinks adulthood means doing what one wants, like taking from the corner convenience store, like walking in the middle of the street, confusing those actions with self-assertion. And maybe the marginal heroes of the inner city streets have a bit too much of a hold on his imagination. So his stealing, and his walking in the street are like a coming out party, in his adolescent mind, which is rendered a bit confused (though not violent) under the influence of marijuana.
The search for villainy on either side runs aground on the dawning realization that both characters, the cop Wilson, and the kid Brown, are real humans reduced to two dimensional figures or, even more directly, to symbols of skin color on the American stage. To Brown, Wilson is the oppressor of his dreams; to Wilson, Brown is the community which views his police uniform with suspicion and animosity. Neither are allowed their humanity. The dust clears, and Brown lies in a pool of blood.
An altogether too common theater, with tragic consequences.
There’s another piece to this, as I follow my own logic.
Just why is it that a well trained professional policeman, presumably psychologically inoculated to manage his own emotions under duress, finally deems it necessary to resort to lethal force to subdue an unarmed even if threatening 18 year old? How has he allowed the confrontation to come to that point in the first place? Adult males, not police trained, but weathered by experience, should know the first thing about turning the temperature down when conflict and tempers threaten to spin out of control. Why not this police officer, this police department? Did Wilson, exasperated at Brown in the street, escalate by the tone of his order to “get to the sidewalk?” Faced with escalation even after a first violent encounter, why did he not wait for backup? On another level, was use of a taser rather than a gun ever an option?
Ah, the gun. I swear, as I have read over accounts of the tragedy, I kept seeing a peculiarly American set piece. A street. At one end, a gun man. At the other, a combatant turning to face him. They close……
A scene out of the OK Corral, or innumerable twentieth century westerns, all part of our collective consciousness, the myths which drive us.
In this slice we handle our problems with lethal violence. We empower the individual gunslinger cum sheriff who protects the community by shooting the bad guy. Our hero as single minded, barely verbal, uncomplicated, getting the other before he is gotten.
The myth has become codified into rules of engagement for police that sanctions deadly force to an extent that a temporarily wayward teenager is shot and killed for a petty offense. Against all sanity, Wilson apparently can be judged as having acted appropriately within the rules and training he is given, yet encounter outrage in the human court of morality. In New York, another black man, Eric Garner, dies in a choke hold in the context of another minor offence.
Police encounter circumstances in the street that can breed cynicism, which can dehumanize, and which can breed fear; it can only be humanly challenging work. All the more reason to train carefully, hire wisely, and dispatch with a mindset dialed back from the misapplied aggressiveness in the Brown and Garner deaths.
Before we brand the police evil, remember we citizenry, we culturally put these players in a context we either ignore, or sanction, and they do our bidding unless we instruct them otherwise.
The gunslinger myth is ours; it animates senseless gang violence as well as those serial events in which the cop kills the black man or kid, and even the implacable postures of the black man or kid in that same scenario. How do we acculturate to alternate forms of resolution? Not only police departments need take note.
Meanwhile, I see Michael Brown’s young life as similar to that of students I have known and valued. This vision brings home his death a half continent away.

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Charter Schools: The Search for the Golden Mean

Posted on November 19, 2014 by schooldog

Summary: After lagging behind other parts of the country in establishing charter schools, the state of Washington is poised to enter the arena after enabling legislation was passed via a recent initiative. An article in the Seattle Times which explores the early stages of a charter to be run by Green Dot Public Schools, and particularly reader comments that respond, open anew the passions around charters and teachers’ unions in the Seattle schools.
Time again to talk charter schools. Online verbiage pro and con have taken on a renewed burst of energy in the city of Seattle as new charters make their debut in this fiercely progressive city.
Though we might not think so from the often negative tone of the debate, I maintain there is a rational common ground beneath the bedlam.
The state of Washington has been late to the charter school party, or the wake for public schools, to characterize the view of some. While states and locales elsewhere have been experimenting with charter schools for some years, teachers’ unions and supporters of public schools in Washington had stemmed the charter school tide until 2012, when a statewide charter initiative passed muster with the voting public.
Initiative 1240 set up governance procedures, and allowed that a modest number of charters be given the green light by the state Charter Commission. Since, ten statewide have been approved. Many are scheduled to open doors in the fall of 2015. One has opened already in Seattle. Another, a middle/high school, to be run by the charter non-profit, Green Dot Public Schools, is authorized to open in Seattle and is scheduled to do so fall, 2016.
An article about the organizing efforts for the latter school has revealed some old wounds just below the surface, judging by the comments that follow the online publication of the article in the Seattle Times. Part of the venom that erupts in the comments stems from the firing of a popular principal, Martin Floe, at Ingraham HS in Seattle a few years ago. Curiously, Green Dot has hired as their planning principal for the new charter a former Seattle school district supervisor, Bree Dusseault, who was deeply involved in the firing of Mr. Floe by then Seattle superintendent Susan Enfield. The local outcry over the firing was so great that the Mr. Floe was reinstated. Thus, on top of the wide spread skepticism of charter schools in general in Seattle, Green Dot has placed upon itself a bulls eye in the person of Ms. Dusseault. She’s back, with her new Green Dot charter portfolio.
Do go to the link above and read both the article and the comments that follow, for what amounts to a capsule of citizen positioning around charter schools. I mention Ms. Dusseault’s supervisory history only by way of clarification. In fact, there seems to me an animus expressed toward charter schools that originates well aside from Ms. Dussealt’s previous actions; she seems more a lightning rod than a current controversy herself.
One dropping in on the conversation without prior introduction might deduce that charter organizations are symphonies of the devil, through which evil manipulators line their pockets with gilded salaries, intent on the ruin of the public trust.
Not to be outdone, other voices bludgeon the public schools, and their teachers’ unions in particular, as more interested in protection of vested interest than in the welfare of students, let alone the nation.
My jaw hangs slack at the distance between perceptions expressed here. On the one hand are the assorted passionate attacks on Ms. Dusseault and Green Dot schools; on the other mistrust of teachers and teachers’ unions. To converse with the other side or to acknowledge a worthy alternative view is consorting with the enemy.
It is tempting and probably not too far from the mark to read into much of this “discussion” the public’s frustration with institutions in general.
That said, any impulse to mediation stumbles on the complexity of the issue and gaps of information hard to reconcile.
For example, on the issue of Green Dot charter schools and their legitimacy as an engine of change in Seattle, take a look at Green Dot’s current association with the Los Angeles School District and its stewardship of the former Locke High School. The curious can look at two separate reports, each apparently with some validity, and walk away wondering if the two viewpoints in fact reflect the same reality.
The first is a highly negative account of Green Dot stewardship by a former teacher at the Green Dot reinvention of Los Angeles’ Locke High School, published on the Diane Ravitch blog (which may in itself get some hackles up).
The other is a study done about the very same Green Dot reinvention by researchers at UCLA, which found progress in various measures at Locke. Check out the “Executive Summary.”
The first link implies a highly toxic work environment at Locke in which turnover and turmoil are the norm, which in turn is hard to reconcile with the academic progress reported in the UCLA study, the second link.
However, if we remember the school was failing in the first place, it is easy to conjecture that replacing personnel of all sorts was an early step in a series of upgrades. But how is the removed observer to know for sure? If the same resources focused by Green Dot had been brought to bear by the public system itself, might the modest gains documented by UCLA have happened anyway?
How to envision ground in the middle? Perhaps the pro-union, pro-teacher side acknowledges some teachers have to go who are not up to snuff, and the aggressive reformer type strives to be more careful with the tendency to scapegoat the teachers involved.
In another common drama, antagonists to the charter movement claim vehemently that charters pull money from public schools, as though the bleeding will destroy them. Yes, charters will pull money from public schools, but only in the proportion to the students who choose a charter. The state allotment per student does follow the student to the new charter school, but neither the student/teacher ratio in the original school, nor class sizes, will be impacted appreciably, so the original school is not harmed from that perspective, though its teaching staff will be downsized to match the reduction in enrollment.
On the high school level, as the school becomes smaller, elective options may be curtailed modestly, but the issue would be less relevant on the elementary level, even though complements of support staff such as counselors and nurses might diminish again proportionately to any drain of students.
Also, theoretically in a community a non-charter public school building could become underutilized if the drain to a local charter is substantial, which could be a moderate fiscal issue in the district’s budgetary process. That is, the building may cost the same to maintain with fewer students than it had originally.
Certainly the alarmist broadcast that charters fiscally endanger public schools’ survival withers under scrutiny. Muted, these claims descend to the level of a reasonable trade-off.
None of the impacts, it seems to me, warrant shutting down charters, which in their brightest iterations are legitimate laboratories for innovation and new approaches to old questions.
For their part, charter proponents would do well to remember with humility that many (even most) charters have yet to show progress beyond that of their companion local public schools, and even successful charters often cherry pick their low income students in ways that regular public schools cannot, because the latter are charged with taking and making good with all comers.
In the end, despite the messiness of the issue, I side with charters, on the notion that one good way to approach a problem is to get outside the box containing it, in order to reassemble the contents.

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School Bureaucracy: Behind the Walkout at Garfield High

Posted on November 5, 2014 by schooldog

Summary: The common practice in school districts that adjusts student-teacher ratios a month into school retards the learning process, distracts teachers and counselors from more important work, and in the end simply harms students, some more than others. The practice is a relic of old time school bureaucracy.
Kudos to Garfield High School, Seattle, for its current challenge to a poorly conceived central office decision. This is the school where not so long ago members of the staff refused to administer a district required test on the argument that it was not useful on the high school level, and persuaded the superintendent of the correctness of their stance.
In the latest protest, some staff were joined by students in a walkout over district plans to transfer a teacher. The proposed transfer was a common adjustment to staffing four weeks into the school year, a chronic intrusion to the learning process in many if not most school districts on a yearly basis, and I suspect a smoldering irritant for most school faculties.
First, some background. Each school year in the spring in school districts across the nation, district bean counters make educated guesses about projected enrollments for district schools for the coming fall. How many students will leave a given school to the next level, how many will arrive to the lowest grade, what will be the normal attrition as families move out of the district, what is the expected influx, and so forth. Once the demographics are figured, then projections are made as to how many teachers will be needed in what grades and, for middle and high schools, in what subjects, and so forth. The social science of it will only go so far. In districts large and small, there are serendipitous factors that upset the most careful planning, so some schools end up overstaffed in teachers, some end up understaffed. October 1 is the traditional date for the accounting.
In the published details, the Seattle School District found that Garfield is overstaffed, because it did not reach its projected enrollment for the October 1 measuring date, and so notified Garfield that one of its teachers would be transferred to an understaffed school elsewhere in the district. Garfield staff contests the district’s numbers; hence the walkout, which was not a defense of a particularly popular teacher.
Why such a big deal?
In some ways, it doesn’t matter if a school adds a teacher or two, or loses a teacher or two. Of course, a school adding a teacher would find their class sizes go down modestly so on one hand would welcome the change.
But on the other hand the kids and staff of the impacted school, whether gaining or losing teachers, faces a disruption to classroom environment, to the work of school staff in general, and to student learning. At best the practice erodes progress for some students, while in some cases undermines at risk students whose attachment to the school is tenuous at best.
Under the public’s radar, it is one moderate but telling way in which the hegemony of decision making by the central school district staff implies a bureaucratic deaf ear to the realities in the schools, and to the efforts of teachers to educate their charges.
It pisses people off. It pissed me off, for sure, as a counselor.
Consider the picture. School starts on or about the first week of September. Teachers work hard to establish expectations and routines in their classrooms and are chronically frustrated by students coming and going in the schedule change process, because they have to bring new students up to speed and settled into the classroom culture as late as the second and third week into school; students by the first of October have left vacation behind and are well into the rhythms of their classwork. Counselors will have largely finished the business of completing and correcting schedules and will have turned their attentions to other more important business.
But then, once the district bean counters have completed their review of the October 1 enrollment numbers, the changes in staffing orders come down the pike. As a result, regardless if a teacher is added or transferred, students are wrenched out of their classrooms into that of a new teacher, or wrenched out of a classroom by the transfer of their original teacher. On the middle or high school level, with the intricacies of scheduling, there are cascading effects in which two, three, or more teachers might be exchanged in order to make a new schedule work.
It is bad enough that learning time and energy gets scattered and muted in these transitions, and ultimately shows up in sluggish test scores down the road. Worse, kids whose attachment to school and the learning process are fragile – and there are too many — experience change of teachers from one to whom they may have bonded to an unfamiliar one as the proverbial last straw. At best, the anger blunts their integration into the new classrooms and further inhibits learning. At the worst the long slide to course failure and dropping out is accentuated.
I remember too vividly the plea of one difficult mother of a boy who was three-quarters of the way to dropping out. Out of the blue, the young man had been inspired by a charismatic and youthful male social studies teacher. Suddenly the student had found someone who spoke to him, and who gave him reason to not just show up, but to learn.
Then around came October 1, and the analysis of enrollments. My school gained a social science teacher to alleviate overcrowding in those classes. Unfortunately, my newly attached guy had an easily made schedule change to the new teacher. By the vagaries of existing student schedules at the time, we were hard pressed to find enough other students with schedules that allowed a viable change into the new teacher’s classes. Up against it in these circumstances, I carried the mother’s and the student’s plea to stay in the young Pied Piper’s class to the administrator in charge, who nevertheless directed me to make the change.
I shoulda never asked; I shoulda just left him in there, and run the risk of pissing someone else off.
Too good a soldier that I was, I made the change, with predictable results. Mother and son were incensed, so mother had a difficult time supporting the son’s continuing attention to school, and he was too far gone already to be positive on his own. Nothing dramatic happened in the short run, but a chance to help the student shift gears was lost, and his limited connection to school further withered.
Teachers and counselors who have worked so hard to get a wrap put on the beginning of school and move off into deeper waters, are infuriated by these continuing ruptures to the learning environment; their focus on the business at hand is thrown off center deeply into October.
This is also a story of bureaucratic bones, and of the insulation of the bean counters from the real flesh and blood of the schoolhouse. A cardinal characteristic of life in a dysfunctional bureaucracy is that information flows only one way – down. If ever in these calculations the heartfelt and crucial input from grass roots teachers and counselors and even building principals made a difference, I never saw it, nor was privy to any such question even being asked. There was never a struggle, never a request for input, never a banging on the doors in the central office in frustration. We were just too busy, too inured in our acceptance of the way things were, and adjusting to this bureaucratic idiocy was just part of the job. Sheep, I suppose.
I have no experience as a central office bean counter, though am not unsympathetic to the professional dilemmas of administrators. The bean counters and those in charge of them are charged with fiscal fairness to all buildings, and with a voice in the efficient use of resources. But they lack the familiarity with kids in school, and would do well to listen at least to grass roots input.
Though inefficient from a narrow perspective, perhaps a school district administration could avoid shooting the cause of learning in the foot and leave the overstaffed schools as they are, and on the other hand staff all schools a bit flush so that understaffing and the disruptions to correct it are avoided. Yes, this costs more, but the ultimate measure of counting beans is what bang one gets for the buck. If a practice sets back the purpose of the enterprise – kid learning – as does the class balancing act four to five weeks into school, then it should be re-evaluated and alternatives considered.
In the end, the walkout at Garfield and the turmoil there involves a nascent effort to assert power and determine who gets listened to in a school bureaucracy which, like many – probably most – does not listen credibly to grass roots school building types. The relatively new superintendent has shown restraint when challenged publicly before, in fact seems to have listened. The jury is still out in the present circumstance.
In short, folks, this is in large part the story, I am quite sure, of the walkout by the good folks of Garfield High.

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School Reform: Where Less May be More in the Refinement of Teaching

Posted on October 22, 2014 by schooldog

Summary: Teachers in countries that surpass the US in student test scores spend half or less the time in direct instruction than do American teachers. Regular collegial consultation and feedback, for novice and veteran alike, is part of how that released time is used to refine the quality of teaching.
A typical day in the life of a teacher, or counselor, or administrator in a school is a blur of people and situational decisions, ever diminishing time to complete ever accumulating tasks, a balance of the mundane and the crisis, and satisfying successes with individual kids against the background of too many kids and too many problems.
At the end of the day, so rushed as it has been, with too little time along the way to reflect on the intensity of what has just happened, there is often numbness, even a partial amnesia, as to what has just occurred over the last eight hours. Clearly, much has happened, even of quality and sometimes depth, but it is lost to memory unless painstakingly reconstructed, so imminent are the demands of the next school day on the near morrow.
Sara Mosle’s useful article in a recent Atlantic, “Building Better Teachers,” revisited for me the turmoil of living a professional life in schools, always on the edge, the level of psychic endurance and quick response never enough no matter how adept or weathered one becomes.
Mosle’s article spends much of its analysis on a review of Elizabeth Green’s educational book du jour, Building a Better Teacher, and Green’s assertion that good teachers are made by intentional training, not born.
It is a thesis with which I basically agree, though having seen some teachers whose ability to connect with students is minimal and whose professional commitment to excellence is wobbly I would say trainers of teachers are better off if they start out with the right stock.
Whatever, Mosle arrives for my purposes on fertile ground as she rounds into discussion of Green’s book and its perspective on teacher training.
Primary exhibit is the work of Deborah Ball of the University of Michigan School of Education and her efforts to reform teacher education, in large part by “rigorous apprenticeship: mutual observation of lessons, followed by intensive dissection of what worked and what didn’t.” Further, “Green likens the approach to the Japanese Practice of jugyokenkyu,” “the main form of teacher training in Japan.” This conception of “lesson study” occurs as a matter of course in the Japanese school day, by which colleagues sit in on one another’s classes to afterwards dissect what they have seen in detail, in order to derive guidance for ongoing instruction.
The lesson for the American reader from Green’s, Ball’s, and ultimately Mosle’s point of view is that the success of Japanese schools vis a vis American schools can be laid substantially to the ongoing dialectic within a teaching staff and the consequent sharpening of the skills of veteran and neophyte alike.
Mosle claims her bonafides as a current teacher (charter, private) by seeming to laugh at the unlikely occurrence of similar pedagogical learning in American schools under current practice. In the US, where teachers typically teach five of six periods of the high school day, limited time remains for meeting with students and parents, extra-curricular responsibilities, and phone calls — let alone planning for the next day and (god help us) regular consultation (lesson study) with colleagues. The same time crunch is common in middle and elementary schools in the US.
In fact, Mosle reports, developed countries that outperform the US on the standard international test of academic progress (PISA) require of their teachers half to even a third of the amount of time in direct instruction than does the US. To use two countries often used to compare our outcomes, Finnish and Japanese teachers spend 500 or so hours in the classroom in a typical year against more than a thousand hours for the typical US teacher.
To anticipate the cynic: this is not an argument to make life easier for the teacher in US classrooms, but to rethink how our teachers spend their time, on the argument that their professional refinement is blunted by too many “duties as assigned,” ultimately to the sacrifice of student learning.
Yet even with this revelation, the questions multiply. The US already spends more per student on education (with lesser results) than peer nations in the developed world.
If we are to sharply reduce the hours in direct instruction per teacher in line with the practice in nations such as Japan and Finland, something has to give. Either the number of teachers increases (which raises cost considerably), or class sizes go up steeply, or students spend less time in class overall.
It is not at all clear to me in which of these or other variables those countries that outperform us differ from our own formulas, and still manage to keep their per capita student expenditures below our own. The quandary deepens with recognition that American student/teacher ratios are not greatly out of line with those countries that outperform us, though some differences are significant. For primary grades the US actually has slightly lower student-teacher ratios than Japan and Finland, the two countries I have used for comparison, at least in 1992, which may or may not be a useful comparison in the present, over twenty years later.
Does the rising income inequality in the US play a role? Put another way, do we have a disproportionate number of low income students, which require more resources per student and which present a more costly curve to full skills? Does the American commitment to special education pull resources from the mainstream classroom, or perhaps skew the student/teacher ratios for “regular” classrooms? Are we somehow more clogged by bureaucratic expenses than our economic peers?
The pertinent reality is that there are other cultures that require much less direct instruction from their teachers, and in the bargain get strikingly better results. Unlike the scenario that I paint in my opening, or the similar portrait drawn by Sara Mosle, where teachers are hounded by demands beyond reasonable bounds, teachers in select other countries have time to hone their craft to a fine and widespread degree, year after year.
It is not clear that these educators in other countries have a less hectic day or experience any less craziness than I once did, but their students prosper in their care. As American test scores stagnate, this parallax view from overseas focuses perspective on our own efforts at school reform.

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Progress In School Reform: What Is The Picture We See?

Posted on October 3, 2014 by schooldog

Summary: While by some measures the school reform movement has come up with little but goose eggs in the national aggregate, a more nuanced approach to school change makes clear that improvements do occur in substantial ways, in a cultural context that makes such gains truly heavy lifting.
My friends, you may have heard me nail the stagnant character of this country’s educational progress to a financial cross in my last post. Time to crawl down from that mount a bit, and look more closely at the data which, true to data form, is more nuanced than the headlines and those most loudly mouthed might have us believe.
I thank Catherine Rampell, syndicated columnist, for my comeuppance. She points out that on the long term version of the National Assessment of Educational ProgressN (NAEP), one of the nation’s leading measures of educational progress, there has been a steady rise in scores on the reading and math sections, particularly for 9 and 13 year olds, since 1971. The fact that these results are modest, and over forty years, and that we seem not to be making progress against the skills of First World students around the globe may obscure this truth in some eyes.
Less ambiguously, greater gains than in the population wide picture have been carved out by African-American and Latino kids during the same forty plus years, which means that the gap between white students and these particular students of color has narrowed, though not been eliminated.
In a nation where recent events in Ferguson, Missouri have catalyzed once again awareness of separate societies, the one roiling still with anger, these gains may reflect progress we might well note in the centuries long climb out of slavery and Jim Crow. Clearly, not enough, and a long way to go, but part of the picture if we are to be clear eyed.
In addition, according to Rampell, drop-out rates have declined, which brings to mind echoes of the long term success of Head Start. In the latter, though academic gains in early years do not sustain as robustly as we would wish, alums of Head Start nonetheless do better in the long run than their less fortunate peers who didn’t have that advantage. The implication when drop-out rates go down is that individuals have developed better “grit,” perhaps like Head Start alums, and sustain their skill development longer, which we like to think translates into better preparedness to earn a living.
From my counseling point of view, it may be that kids respond to the extra attention of programs like Head Start and drop-out prevention by gaining faith through these networks, even subconsciously, that they belong, and so persevere. The gains documented in various mentor programs have tapped the same nerve; is it surprising that kids who sense caring in the adults around them make advances?
No doubt a significant part of the hand wringing over school progress stems from radical changes in the global labor market. The continuing rise of technological solutions mandates an increased level of education and sophisticated skills training in the work force than was true ten, twenty years ago. The bar has sprung upward quickly, which magnifies our urgent need to upgrade the prospects for our kids, and muddies any objective assessment of gains.
The fact that change is more apparent in microcosm than in the national view and then sluggish and uneven, should not surprise us; what we have here is a cultural transformation that is messy and hard to command from the federal level or other centralized pulpit.
As a culture we continue to struggle with the demons remaining from our slavery past, in the psyches of white and black, and in the structure of opportunity throughout institutions, public and private.
We are still mightily an immigrant country which, despite the political battles over undocumented immigration from lands south of us, nonetheless continues to educate the children of these migrations, here in a land and in a language that is often unfamiliar to them.
We are also paradoxically a culture of privilege in which some of our children have failed to learn the utility of hard work, the need to persevere in difficulty, and the uses of deferred gratification.
As if these challenges are not enough, the difficulty of assessment may also in substantial measure be a by-product of those political wars between right and left, and their schisms of night and day in which it sometimes seems the camps live in totally separate realities.
So how do we know? Our nearest chance for a useful epistemology is to gather pieces of the puzzle from assorted sources, and put them together in a kind of gestalt – where have we arrived, and where do we go from here? As always, at least some of that picture is going to be in the eyes of the beholder.

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School Reform: Why One Success Does Not Beget Another

Posted on September 16, 2014 by schooldog

Summary: Looks as though the difficulty of replicating the success of one school in another may come down to clever access or lack thereof to extra resources. The first school has been innovative in program, but often by leveraging additional funding in ways the less successful school has not.
It is perplexing. With frequency I read (and comment) about assorted initiatives of rich promise in schools of varied description across the country, some of which result directly in test score gains, such as the use of certain computer based skill drill programs, and others which seem to address critical variables in the upswing of skill development, such as simple attendance in school.
Few weeks go by, it seems, without some report or another that lends hope to beleaguered educators.
Yet our national standardized test scores inexplicably remain stagnant, which implies that innovations that bode well in bright spot locales simply are not translating to broad impact in rank and file schools nationwide. Why are we so stumped when it comes to moving viable innovations to scale?
Others make the same point, among them Joe Nocera, the New York Times and National Public Radio commentator, who in turn credits his awareness to Elizabeth Green (“Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (and How to Teach It to Everyone”) and Deborah Loewenberg Ball, dean of the University of Michigan School of Education.
I remained stumped until I started walking back through the various success stories I had visited in the writing of this blog, whether in standard public schools, or charter, whether elementary or secondary. It began to dawn on me there was a common denominator to these widely varied success stories.
Most at once innovative and productive programs have tapped funds outside of normal school funding mechanisms, whether from foundation grants, federal programs, or the like in order to enhance basic classroom instruction in some creative way, and often but not exclusively to buy more adult time to focus in on specific problems posed by students and their learning.
Let’s take the use of “formative” testing, the micro-testing teachers use regularly to ascertain whether or not their teaching is making imprint on their students; the results of this testing then guides the course of subsequent instruction. A number of schools which have demonstrated success use one version or another of this technique. Though teachers can themselves manage all this structure, the use of Instructional Aides (IA’s) to manage and grade these quizzes release the teacher to higher order tasks for which they alone have been trained.
Instructional Aides are also used in successful programs for micro-instruction of students who need extra help on specific sequences of skills, sometimes in support of computer programs, sometimes on more of a one to one basis during the course of classroom instruction. Though IA’s are a long-time fixture in schools, particularly in special education programs, use of these folks, chosen for their ability to relate to at risk students, can be an efficient use of marginal extra funding.
Instructional leadership is another proven ingredient to current reform. Less experienced teachers need support, whether from administrators or veteran teachers, and more experienced teachers can continue to raise their students’ skills by on-going collaboration with their peers. Such collegial interaction raises workplace morale as well as student performance, but the dedication of time to these subtleties can require more staffing, and increased funding.

Parenthetically, one has to wonder how much the absence of such veteran mentors for new teachers contributes to the exit from the profession of 40% to 50% of new teachers within five years. In turn the same low income students who suppress our national test scores are chronically in the hands of inexperienced and therefore less able teachers. The system as we fund it perpetuates that which we try to correct, and which we may well be correcting, but only in relatively isolated instances.

Then there is the social service version of focused staffing, essentially to augment the traditional lure of a relationship with a teacher that has turned more than one young life around. Low income kids, sometimes tenuously tethered to the schoolhouse and either uncertain of their ability to meet expectations or of how education might brighten their path, can find their academic rhythm in an on-going relationship with mentors beyond that they find from their teachers. The use of Americorps young adults in versions of this role in the Seattle area is one example.
Even the widespread set of adventures with Teach for America high achievers as teachers is an apparent exception that proves the rule. While some gains have resulted through the intensity and commitment of these strong kids, if I read the reports correctly, burnout and attrition have plagued this infusion. In the difficult low income educational environment many of these kids tackle, the standard funding and the standard staffing are simply not enough to sustain them over the long haul.
The bottom line? Teach for America or no, teachers laboring to turn around low income schools need help to have the impact we need them to have – and those settings that have succeeded in doing so have in fact have benefited from targeted supplementary funding.
So we arrive, Jesuit like, at the solution to our query — whither school reforms to scale? I regret to report that money – the dearth thereof — is almost certainly a significant part of the answer. No surprise.
It takes little more than a passing knowledge of federal and state politics to recognize that the paralysis in these settings contributes mightily to the sluggish transfer of success in one school locale to greater scale in others. Foundations can do only so much; in the end in our public life we do not put political will to good intentions nor to pressing need.

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School Reform: The Dance of Competencies and Traditional Grading

Posted on August 31, 2014 by schooldog

Summary: Though the focus on narrow reading, writing, and mathematics competencies serves employers and highlights the need to improve skills, it may also reflect the mirage that traditional grading has become.

Sometimes one has to step outside of a familiar context in order to find a novel perspective.
So it was as I watched a recent PBS NewsHour report on a Southern New Hampshire University program that relies not on traditional credit hours and grades to gauge a student’s learning, but on demonstration of specific competencies within the particular discipline being studied. The traditionalist within university ranks might blanch at the news, and rumble on with reason that there are hallmarks of a true university education that simply cannot be reduced to specific measurable competencies. Critical thinking and the integration of diverse fields of liberal arts thought are a couple of markers of the educated person that come to mind.
Still, it is a bit surprising that competencies have apparently not been more widely and consciously targeted on the university level, because some disciplines may in fact be more adaptable to such thinking. Business and computer science are a couple of fields that come to mind that in part may lend themselves to competency measurement, though broader and more creative thinking in those fields might still confound such linear measure.
Yet with reading, writing, and mathematics competencies ascendant in public schools K-12 nationwide and measured by incessant testing, it was only a matter of time that higher education should explore the same frontiers, particularly as questions are being asked about the intimidating rise in the cost of a college education.
Arguably, the measure of competency may serve one purpose, and the giving of grades serve the traditional purview of both teacher and professor to judge the elusive understanding and growth of the student in the discipline. Of course, traditionally these purposes have been rolled into a letter or numerical grade at the end of a semester.
That’s where my new light began to dawn from the viewpoint of the university innovation. “Well, then,” I says to myself, university practice aside, “why have we gone to competencies on the elementary and secondary level when grades could reflect not only competencies, but the teacher’s assessment of a wider and more elusive set of learning?” Why the public school move to separate the two in the first place?
Though part of the answer is that competency measurement allows focus on a more refined and narrow set of skills, I suspect one deeper reason is that the letter grading system particularly on the secondary level is broken. Letter grades as they have evolved do not predict accurately who employers should hire, nor by extension do they reflect the true range of skills learned.
Though practices vary widely, typically letter grades do not appear until middle or junior high school, and evaluation by elementary teachers seems to me to have traditionally been somewhat competency based. You know, Johnny is either ahead of grade, at grade level, or behind grade level in reading.
By the high school level certainly, from what I have seen first-hand in a reasonably good suburban high school, grading practices have become wildly unmoored from what most adults would consider a sturdy effort with sturdy results.
The reasons are complex. A strong majority of students simply do not give more than the minimal effort, with the result that their learning is also minimal, and worthy of a low pass, at best. Critics would argue that the teaching particularly of our low income students is uninspired and their effort therefore matches the instruction, which has some validity, but pervasive cultural headwinds which diminish the attentions of our youth to school buffet and demoralize even otherwise capable teachers. It ain’t one thing or the other; it ain’t the culture or the quality of teacher; it’s both.
Yet teachers, good, mediocre, and bad all face pressure from community and administration to fail few. And so, inevitably, over time teachers provide passing grades that do not reflect an objective assessment of a student’s work. Those who have really not met minimum competencies of the class receive a passing mark, and those who minimally meet those competencies, in order for the teacher to demonstrate separation, are given grades that exaggerate the level of attainment.
So we should not be surprised that the majority of students who arrive at our colleges need remedial work to bring their skills up to collegiate necessities, nor that the reading, writing, and mathematics competencies of our K-12 students are not up to international standards.
Grade inflation in general is the result of cultural disintegration and smoke and mirrors designed to keep a successful face to the public.
Through this lens the focus on narrow competencies, though serving the particular needs of industry and universities for minimally competent hires and applicants, can be cast also as a dysfunctional response to dysfunction of schools and of youth in culture. That is, it is an attempt to establish meaningful accuracy where traditional grades now fail us.
It’s a bit like runaway inflation in a currency. In certain sets of dysfunctional economic and political conditions, prices and wages rise out of control, to the point one needs a bag of money to purchase simple consumer necessities. At such a point the troubled country’s financial authorities introduce a new currency, typically the “new” unit worth, say, a thousand of the units of the “old” currency. For the time being, bags of money are less essential.
Unless the basic economic problems are solved, the country faces a similar currency reset every so often. By this model, we could predict over time some decay in the value of the competencies our students reach. One sign is the occasional report of teachers and administrators who falsify test results.
Given the fog of our politics, the unavoidable silence of historical perspective, and the apparent stubbornness of our composite test results to rise, it seems fair to me to ask if the transition to a competency based focus, however rational it may seem, in fact serves to obscure our confusion as to how to put a broad base fix on the frailties in our kids’ education and the manner in which those same kids interact with the culture.

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