African American Kids and School Based Reparations

Posted on July 28, 2014 by schooldog

Summary: Ta-Nehisi Coates calls in the recent Atlantic for reparative dialogue, and even financial recompense for the long American history of slavery and Jim Crow. An educational superfund that supports the educational turnaround of poor and at risk kids of all races may serve as a de facto reparation in the absence of the kind of conversation Coates has in mind.
I met Robert in an after school credit recovery program where I monitored on line course work designed to make up for failed classes. I’d known his brother a few years before. The brother had not graduated, though was close to doing so. I would hear differing accounts of the brother for a couple of years after he left school, one that had him having finished his diploma, others having him off the deep end into substance abuse.
Robert is memorable to me because of an interaction toward the end of the credit recovery semester. The on line class required a research paper as a culmination, which I accommodated to mean a paper on something of deep interest to the student. In the context, a fully documented and footnoted research paper was unrealistic for many of the students. I figured some passionate inquiry and a report on it was worth the flame I hoped would ignite.
Maybe later that flame would flicker into motivation to upgrade his skills and pursue something more substantial – such as a job training program.
Robert chose to write about hip hop culture. With some structuring and encouragement, he identified source material, organized some of his own thoughts, and put together a paper that was frankly of poor quality and difficult to understand. But he clearly had interest, and there were ideas in the work that had merit, and from which I learned – it was just that their extraction was difficult. Simply put, he couldn’t put his thoughts into coherent sentence and paragraph structure.
We worked at it together, using his handwritten paper as a template to make it more acceptable. I remember his looking at me with what I took as bewilderment, as though “does this guy really think I can learn this????…..” For the record, I did finally accept his paper for completion of the course, more for what I hoped he had learned than for the quality of the product.
I thought of Robert, as well as other African-American students I have known, as I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ recent article in The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations.” After a tortured account of the history of slavery and Jim Crow in this country on the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and its haunting in contemporary American culture, Coates initially seems to aim at financial recompense, and teeters there with a brief suggestion of how much such a sum may likely be, compounded over the literally hundreds of years since African slaves were first transported to North America.
Likely also he intends to bring white American up short in its self-congratulations on such a fiftieth anniversary, which marks some progress, but is objectively only a way station. Robert, for example, is as yet still a young African-American man, but prospects for him in his individual and contemporary life are profoundly hampered by the complex legacy handed down to him by American history.
Then finally that is Coates’ point. The financial recompense is not the issue, but a full airing, a full truth commission, of the slave and Jim Crow past, in order to bring the ghost into the light, and integrate our history in such a way that we can move forward as a culture with less of an unacknowledged conversation lurking in the closet, contaminating much national discourse, large and small.
Amen.
But not so fast with leaving the financial recompense behind. My student Robert is either a direct descendant of slaves, or he has been molded by that history in the act of breathing the air around him. African American families were torn apart, and torn apart repeatedly, by the action of slave owners and traders, and then hounded by Jim Crow. This past is still alive among us in the person of our many African American kids who struggle in school, and so face uphill prospects in the increasingly global race for meaningful work and a decent standard of living.
We know now a fair amount about how reparative funds might be used to positive effect with youth, whether labeled as recompense or camouflaged in some more politically palatable package. Robert, I can tell you, may well have responded to an extended and an earlier version of the brief attention I gave him around that one paper one time. Each city today can tell stories of mentor programs that have had demonstrated impact on the school career of student beneficiaries. Particularly on the elementary level, teachers with fewer students are able to surround at risk kids with the same kind of healthful attention. The corporate world has gotten into the act; where a company adopts a school and embeds its energies there, some good things have happened.
In short, the strategic application of supplementary monies, largely translated into intervention by human relationship, can shift the balance in the effort to improve the academics of poor kids of all races.
America remains unenlightened by comparison with our European counterparts. We are one of the few developed nations in the world that does not fund poor students at a higher rate than affluent students, who already have been inducted into the necessaries of school and the economic world by their parents and their communities.
I fear we cannot wait upon the true reparative conversation Coates advocates; reparations, let’s face it, is not a card in the contemporary deck. Too many generations will have passed and suffered before the culture matures enough to entertain such a fraught discussion.
An educational superfund might nominally acknowledge the due of racial justice, but would take as its target all low income youth and be a kind of de facto reparation for students such as Robert.

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School Reform: Build In Support and They Will Come

Posted on July 14, 2014 by schooldog

Summary: Presidential directives and court cases are useful, but good teachers know schools of poverty will burn out their energies without well designed support for their efforts.
The drumbeat of reform has a new cause. Since quality teachers are the sine qua non for turnaround in low income schools, a chief impediment to progress is the predominance in those halls of new and less qualified teachers.
President Obama has recently announced that he will order by executive authority that high poverty schools will have their share of experienced quality teachers, and a Los Angeles Superior Court judge has ruled that teacher tenure laws are unconstitutional under the California constitution because they protect longevity over quality, and so deprive poor California students of the equal right to a quality education. Creative move, that.
But I suspect that both the Obama directive and the court development, while waving big sticks, will be insufficient in the face of some critical realities on the ground.
Let’s say I’m a teacher in an elementary school in a big city USA. I do have a sense of a mission I am called to, and in particular on a deeply gut level I am incensed by the inequalities I see around me and the poor shake given to too many students of color in particular, and often low income students in general. So I am motivated to chart my course in a poor neighborhood with a host of the social ills foisted upon it by the broader culture, and which the culture of poverty continues to incubate in a deepening beat.
But I am increasingly overwhelmed, despite my emotional commitment to the kids in my class. Some have parental support behind them, but lag in skills because of poor previous instruction, or the intrusions of a chaotic street on their attention to school. Another may be in foster care, several contend with unknown abuse in the home, and others eat poorly or not enough at all, and may have already suffered cognitive deficits from inconsistent and inadequate nutrition. Only a few have been read to on a frequent basis, or have had the luxury of competent day care. Perhaps 75 – 80% of my students are behind grade level in math or reading, or both; the degree of deficit varies with each student. Yet I am charged with bringing each student up to grade level standard, a requirement that seems unpityingly unrealistic.
For a few years the battle zone has fed my sense of making a difference. I am in a school with a demanding but supportive principal who pushes her staff to step beyond assumed limits.
But in important ways my personal life has been put on hold, such are the emotional and multiple demands on my time. I simply cannot maintain my current commitment without limit. My boyfriend encourages me to check out recent openings in a nearby suburban school……
Well, our hypothetical teacher may in fact leave to a suburban school. Or, burned out, she may leave teaching entirely. Or, as Mr. Obama laments with his executive order, she may have been riffed in a context of many more experienced teachers, get disgusted with the system, and leave it entirely. The upshot from these vectors is that the student in the poor school in a low income community does not get an equal shake.
These one direction personnel exits beg the question, why do not quality teachers flow from their suburban enclaves to more challenging inner city venues? After all, that is where the action is.
Well, for the same reasons our hypothetical teacher has left. Teaching is difficult wherever one teaches. But the difficulty of teaching is amplified in deeply urban areas because of the relentless demand on flexibility, creativity, time and emotional resources. It is one thing to sustain energy in the first blush of professional life; it is another to do so year after year for a sustained career.
Simply, teachers in poverty schools need more supportive infrastructure, and fewer students so as to better mentor the multiple needs their students have.
Social workers to provide a variety of family and individual scaffolding, and programs to upgrade nutrition are but two examples. Instructional assistants to help with the monitoring of individual progress and the customizing of curriculum to meet student need on a daily basis can play a vital role in this era dominated by testing.
In a familiar tactic that is cheaper than hiring more certified teachers or other professionals, Garfield Middle School in Revere, Massachusetts, has partnered with an after school outfit called Citizen Schools, which leverages Americorps’ young college graduates to supplement the work of regular teachers (as reported by Laura Pappano in Inside School Turnarounds). Citizen Schools’ “teachers” provide after school tutoring, call parents on a regular basis, forge relationships with kids, and in general do the many things that teachers know need to be done to be effective, and which wear down teachers’ resilience in their absence.
To me, it is striking that charters and inner city schools that have shown promising advances all seem to have supplementary monies and hence programs that support the fundamental effort of teachers. That is not to say that many of them haven’t leveraged existing resources in creative ways, but most that I encounter benefit from foundation support, or dedicated tax dollars, or some other means of bringing resources to bear beyond the norm on the problem of poverty in schools.
Provide in creative ways such supports to the classroom teacher in neighborhoods heavily impacted by poverty, and then ask the experienced teacher to take up the challenge of teaching there, without the risk of giving until her spirit is exhausted.
She may be ordered to the inner city, and tenure may disappear, but she cannot shift the balance in the way poor kids need without significant assistance.

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School Reform: Can the Gates Foundation Listen to Teachers?

Posted on June 29, 2014 by schooldog

Summary: The Gates Foundation says it is listening to teachers as it calls for a moratorium on the use of Common Core testing to evaluate teachers. A good thing, if true, but meanwhile recent research casts doubt on the use of any test results in evaluating the quality of teaching.
On the heels of my most recent post that lamented the inability of power levels to listen to front line teachers, a key player has grabbed a share of center stage to challenge my whine. The Gates Foundation, which has donated in the vicinity of $200 million to develop the Common Core curriculum, has urged that Common Core based testing to evaluate teachers be put on hold for a couple of years. By doing so Gates appears to honor grass root teacher anxieties about the rapidly moving adoption. The message Gates says it hears from the depths of the ranks is, “we like Common Core, but give us time to figure out how to make it work.”
Well, likely not all within the ranks would agree with that formulation, as demonstrators testified outside the Gates’ gilded new headquarters in Seattle the other day. Part of what these activists had to say was that too much too fast has been piled on too few teachers, which is a separate, genuine, but fully related issue. Common Core in this context becomes just another change on top of a previous testing regimen to which schools and teachers had already struggled to adapt with too few resources. From within the ranks, Common Core can feel like just the latest fad that will also fade, in an exhausting pattern only too familiar to those who have experienced it time and again. Much work only to be wasted when the next new bauble comes along.
Nonetheless, the arrival of the Common Core curriculum on the national scene has been well orchestrated, and developed with cooperation among the fifty states and the feds. It is designed to set national standards to guide and measure reform efforts. Students will be evaluated based on these standards, and so will teachers in those states that have evolved to the use of tests to measure teacher value added.
While a handful of states belatedly are balking at the Common Core national standards, the national teachers’ unions, the NEA and the AFT, also have been lobbying to delay the use of Common Core testing to evaluate teachers.
Up until the last couple of years, the Gates folks had been part of the chorus attacking the intransience of teachers’ unions to school reform, but most recently seem to have recognized the pivotal position of teachers, that it made no sense to make anything other than common cause with them and to listen to their perspective, and so have extended this recent olive branch.
As Vicky Phillips, the foundation’s head of K-12 programs put it, “The standards need time to work. Teachers need time to develop lessons, receive more training, get used to the new tests, and offer their feedback. Applying assessment scores to evaluations before these pieces are developed would be like measuring the speed of a runner based on her time — without knowing how far she ran, what obstacles were in the way, or whether the stopwatch worked!”
As a sidelight, the pause may have tactical implications. According to an article in the Washington Post, a recent large scale study published in the journal of the American Educational Research Association has joined other studies in casting doubt on the ability of test scores to separate the good teachers from the bad. If subsequent studies concur, a major strand of reform thinking that relies on testing to evaluate teachers may wilt, and Common Core for that purpose along with it.
Stay tuned to this last development.
But in the meantime, the lesson from the twin debacles in the Veterans’ Administration, where vets have declined or died, and General Motors, where cars with mechanical defects have caused deaths, is that the unwillingness of any bureaucracy to listen to those who perform the fundamentals of the work portends breakdown of the mission. Schools have failed in part because teachers are muted in a system that often penalizes the professional pedagogical voice rather than encourage it.
The Gates Foundation, to its credit, appears to acknowledge this reality as a cornerstone of school reform. If testing as a part of teacher evaluation turns out to be a false turn, it will be interesting to see how the foundation responds.

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School Bureaucracy: Lessons from the VA and GM

Posted on June 16, 2014 by schooldog

Summary: The current debacles at the Veterans’ Administration and General Motors, and the parallel inability of upper management to solicit data from grass roots workers, may well mirror the deaf ear of too many senior school administrators to teacher point of view.
The suffocations of work in a bureaucracy and their profound consequences are legion, whether one works in schools, in other public organizations, or in private corporations.
One of my favorite school examples, though admittedly an extreme, occurred in a recent year when our state required each “at risk” student to have an individually tailored Student Learning Plan, or SLP. The task sounds reasonable, even progressive. Why shouldn’t each kid who struggles enjoy singular focus, and a plan created for his or her betterment?
In this case the ideal runs aground on the shore of the real — full implementation was not anywhere near possible at the existing level of staffing.
In the first place, a useful SLP would begin with an assessment of the student’s socioemotional readiness, the strength or otherwise of his support system, and the fit of his level of academic development for the requirements of the current grade in school.
Secondly, the resources would need to be mustered in order to carry out the individual kid’s plan in areas such as substance abuse intervention, or counseling, or tutoring, or clothing, or housing.
Our school district, to its credit fully understanding the impossible nature of the directive, rather than saddle already stretched personnel with still further complex responsibilities, created a template with which we designated counselors could create SLP’s in computerized fashion for each of the thousand or so students in our school who qualified, and thereby satisfy the state requirement for SLP’s for each of the kids.
A day wasted, but the hounds kept off our backs because we produced the letter, but hardly the spirit of the directive.
The key ingredient here is that the state directive was disconnected from the realities on the grass roots school level. Had we been asked, or had we thought our complaint might be viewed as having merit, those who initiated the idea might have not made the mistake in the first place.
In a sense, we did deliver a message, but in a fully dysfunctional manner.
I think of such experiences as I read of the current troubles in the Veterans’ Administration. In another well-meaning directive, Eric Shinseki ordered that all vets seeking medical care be seen within fourteen days. Unfortunately, with the ranks of the baby boom vets reaching an age of increased medical need, and younger vets from the Middle East wars growing in number, the capacity of the VA system to respond in the required timely fashion was stretched well beyond capacity. In a perfect world, this message would have traveled up the ranks to inform and modify the thinking of leadership. Or perhaps might have generated more of the needed funding.
Instead, in this real world, personnel in individual VA centers, responding to incentives to meet the fourteen day goal, falsified records to such an extent that 100,000 vets languished on surreptitiously held secondary waiting lists. Apparently in the VA rank and file most workers felt it a waste of time or dangerous to their careers to communicate to decision makers the impossibility of meeting the Shinseki mandate.
Mr. Shinseki lost his job in the ensuing furor, which he probably should have, though by some accounts he had made some inroads with chronic problems in the VA system that well predated his arrival. One of those problems would be the inability of leadership levels to value and hear the messages of those actually caring for vets.
Lest we think this is a public bureaucracy problem only, consider the recently revealed failure of General Motors to publicize and act on mechanical failures in its cars that have resulted in documented deaths among passengers and drivers.
The salient feature of this mess is that internal GM documents make clear that grass roots employees were fully aware of the defects in GM cars, but somehow that reality either failed to sufficiently reach decision makers or decision makers buried the information. Culpability appears difficult to establish. The fact that some engineering and lower level types were fired, preserving the jobs of upper level types, is somehow neither reassuring nor convincing. Even if upper level types were not aware of the depth of deficiencies in GM cars, are they not responsible for setting a cultural tone in which such messages can rise to the top? Otherwise substantive voices will rightly worry that their information will not be received in any manner that will be rewarded.
Well. I return to the public bureaucracy of schools. We do not have vets declining or dying without access to health care. We do not have customers injured or dying because of faulty machinery.
But we do have millions of students that still flounder in schools that seem unable to sufficiently buoy their skills and prepare them for their future, despite more than a decade of reform, and despite solid models of teaching culture and support structure for at risk kids.
What are the lessons for school reform of the VA and GM debacles? As they have been created in part by the failure of messages from the grass roots employees to arrive on high, does the similar muting of voices of teachers and even principals by bureaucratic imperatives frustrate the mission of schools?
I think so.

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At-Risk Students: Follow the Money

Posted on May 31, 2014 by schooldog

Summary: Incentive systems for school districts to retrieve and hold dropouts are themselves dysfunctional. Yet, in committed communities dropout retrieval efforts are succeeding.
“Follow the money.” Normally a line uttered on a TV crime show, a recent Education Week article reminds me that the same catchy phrase applies, however ironically, to the financial incentives given schools to retain at risk students or to reengage dropouts.
While the TV show line implies there is money to be traced in the unraveling of a crime, in the case of drop outs and at risk kids there is little money to follow, which is the point. Schools are funded through state funding schemas by the number of students actually enrolled; there is little to no money channeled for drop-out prevention or retrieval. From a fiscal point of view, the troubled dropout simply “drops out” of fiscal calculations for all intents and purposes.
Moreover, according to a parallel piece in Ed Week as, “most state accountability systems give schools and districts little credit for re-enrolling students who have little chance of graduating within four years, or even six years for an extended graduation rate,” says Andrew O. Moore, a senior fellow at the National League of Cities’ Institute for Youth, Education, and Families in Washington.
Though schools and school districts do seize the initiative on drop outs despite the lack of state incentives, they do so out of their own general budget along with a cobbled together grant or two, which leaves the effort something of a fiscal orphan, and likely not as successful as it might have been with a more robustly funded response. Re-enrolled dropouts do bring monies to the district on the same per student basis as a normal student, but a district has to seed the effort initially, and re-enrolled drop outs are in high danger of dropping out again without resources diverted to their support once they return.
The rescue of the students who hemorrhage from our schools and the engagement of their brethren who remain in school, but in an unengaged manner, is highly human resource intensive, and require staffing beyond that simply dedicated to mainline instruction. Should it be a surprise that our schools do poorly in retaining our kids through completion when our funding mechanisms largely to completely ignore their continually documented need for intervention on a relationship level?
Anecdotally, every year in every high school there are students who finish largely because of the relationship teachers or counselors have forged with them. In my experience, high school teachers today devote so much time to data crunching, which legitimately drives a fair amount of instruction, that they have less time than they once did to mentor troubled kids. The problem is that there are too many at risk kids, and too little time to reach them all, or even a majority.
We know that disciplinary issues, varieties of abuse in the home or in kids’ lives, and homelessness put kids on the brink of dropping out, and the daunting task of navigating a confusing future can be the coup de grace. Most kids are redeemable, but only if the adults around them can muster them sufficient support.
Despite this Sisyphean landscape, effective drop-out prevention and retrieval programs do exist, sometimes stimulated by the most desperate of circumstances.
Programs in Boston and Washoe County, Nevada, typify versions of such programs that have managed hard won inroads on the dropout rate; in the case of the latter the county leaders were shocked when a federal audit of their academic progress revealed that only slightly over half of their incoming ninth graders eventually graduated.
In both school districts, aggressive outreach programs have brought back into the fold students who have left school. Efforts have been intensified to work with at risk students before they drop out.
The real truth is that kids who drop out have done so for reasons that still exist when and if they re-enroll. So human resources are needed to make the re-engagement work. Case managers, called “chasers” in one Los Angeles area charter school, become versatile “fixers” for kids who need tutoring, or access to health care, or a place to sleep.
Further, in old models, when kids have returned to their original schools, not only were there no support mechanisms in place, they landed back in a setting where they carried a reputation, academically and behaviorally, and where their social niches have been such that they are drawn right back into dysfunctional habits.
In my high school, even with kids who didn’t graduate on time but returned for a “super senior” year, the number who successful completed their diploma in that setting was only around ten per cent. Those who did graduate, by the way, tended to do so where they had bonded with a staff member.
The solution in Washoe County, and elsewhere, including in my old district in the Seattle area, has been to channel returnees into “re-engagement” centers, where resources can be centralized, and where the social context can be better engineered to promote positive outcomes.
Much of this good work is likely done out of the commitment of communities to their kids, and to their future work force, not through the formal fiscal and accountability systems of their respective states.
The good news is that in Washoe County such centers and associated programs have produced a double digit growth in graduation rates, though work remains to be done.

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Schools and Culture: Boys in Disarray

Posted on May 21, 2014 by schooldog

Summary: The struggles of boys in today’s American schools reflect historical assaults on their self-image and the erosion of legitimate authority in the culture.
It was an impressive group of kids, these seniors at my high school outside of Seattle. I’d called them together, about sixty strong, all of them from low income families, in order to communicate some details about the College Bound Scholar program they’d enrolled in during eighth and ninth grade, and which was about to help fund their college attendance in the next school year.
The Washington legislature, which otherwise struggles to properly fund public education in the state, several years before had understood some basic incentives correctly, and had guaranteed tuition paid for low income high school graduates in good standing when they moved on to college. Hence, the College Bound Scholar program.
I was struck by the multi-racial, multi-ethnic make-up of the group, proud and successful kids.
But I was also struck by one other characteristic – the overwhelming majority of the kids in front of me were young women. Where were the guys?
It is not news that our boys are lagging by many measures, whether those be academic or behavioral. As David Leonhardt reports in the New York Times, while we correctly focus much attention on the gap in school performance between kids from poor families and those more affluent, in behavioral measures of school appropriateness that translate into quality of academic performance a greater disparity exists between boys and girls than between rich and poor kids, or between students of different racial or ethnic groups.
Yup. We got a boy problem in our schools, played out in the makeup of the fine group I encountered that day in my school. The lesson from my group of College Bound Scholars is that the low income young women of my school would respond rationally to the economic incentive of paid college tuition, but that the problem of reaching their male counterparts proved much more enigmatic. Despite the lure, too many of the comparable boys simply did not or would not organize themselves toward similar success.
While observers are rightly careful to hedge their bets on any one contributing factor, to my mind the underlying patterns can be detected in a variety of cultural changes over the last forty years, loosely constellated around male self-image on one hand, and around the breakdown of authority and social structure on the other.
The women’s movement over that period has done a remarkable job of enlarging employment options available to young women. Not only may they aspire to be a teacher, but a superintendent, or the lawyer who crafts legislation, or the senator who enables it.
Of course men continue to have such options open to them, and in fact boys in academically challenging environments do just fine.
However, the loss of middle class factory jobs to overseas workers leaves the sons and grandsons of men who once worked with their hands contending with a tight labor market. Even with a current stateside mini-renaissance, today’s proverbial job on the factory room floor has more of a technical, highly trained bent to it than that of their fathers.
The well-paying jobs today, in short, require more brain than brawn, as much skill and education as a simple willingness to work hard. Hence, for our young men as well as young women the labor market puts a premium on what is learned in school and college.
Once upon a time a guy could ride west to seek fortune in a variety of extractive or farming enterprises – physically active pursuits all – and succeed by the willing bend of his back as well as by native guile. As cultural history, our current boy dilemma is a late phase in the demise of the frontier mentality, as mediated by the rise of technology and the complexity of the global economy.
Arguably male dominion over women was part of this earlier world view and served to prop up men’s vision of themselves, a perspective clearly being eroded, if ever solid or secure, by the challenge of feminism.
Moreover, if a man is to secure a position of power in the current environment, he must become more collegial and less independent, more communicative, and less of a lone wolf, and more comfortable with ideas and technical intricacies than maintenance of physical strength. In short, the masculine must adapt and adopt more of the characteristics traditionally ascribed to women in order to navigate not only school, but the work environment. All this while testosterone trumpets “action!” and boys seek an identity separate from that pretty blonde with long hair a couple of rows over.
Thus the absence of boys in my group of College Bound Scholars. Even with the incentive of tuition paid, the path to college is too fraught by these shifting sands for them to see clearly a future there.
Some part of what used to be considered manly has become a bit of an anachronism. Many of our boys, particularly those who are sons or grandsons of men who worked with their hands, are adrift without clear guidance as to how to recalibrate their self-image, as individuals and as a gender.
The fracture of other parts of the social contract also has played a destabilizing role. In a balance between structure and flexibility a parent provides appropriate boundaries, but also gives the child room to grow and learn on his own. The child learns over time to incorporate the parental boundaries into his own personality structure – that is, learns his own self-control – which allows him to direct his own further growth.
The frontal cortex in boys, the seat of self-control, develops more slowly than in girls, and is not fully mature in males until around the age of 25. (Some of us wonder if we’ve ever matured!) Because of this biology, boys are relatively more and longer in need of structure by their parents, and by extension society as a whole.
The role of such appropriate authority has been under an attack from which it has not yet recovered. In the prop wash of these assaults, the authority of parents, of teachers, and well-meaning adults in general has been undermined, and boys in particular who are not ready to guide themselves are molded academically too loosely by the cultural byways around them.
Where in the fifties at least, boys were more likely to attend to their studies in school out of fear of authority, by the turn of the 21st century that authority had lost faith in itself, and boys who needed structure found no consequences it was worth their while to honor when they essentially refused to toe the much weaker line being provided.
In a parallel issue, the rise of the diagnosis “attention deficit disorder” is, I think, directly related to the breakdown of the old authority that helped contain active boy behavior.
The breakdown of structure has been abetted somewhat by the rise of single parent, usually female, households. The lack of an engaged father, particularly for adolescent males, has been a pivotal blow to those kids’ need for structure. In corollary, the rise of the proportion of lower income households has further undermined parental ability to provide guidance, not because they don’t care or love their kids, but because such parents (again likely single parents) devote a high proportion of their time and energies just to put bread on the table.
Left to their own devices, my potential male College Bound Scholars simply could not and would not discipline themselves to get the grades and the credits and learn the college application process as required to earn the free tuition.
Amid the disorganization of the school reform movement is evidence of some successful interventions that might well be replicated more widely. For example, in isolated instances mentors of both sexes have been salving the ravages of cultural change on boys. The promise of free college tuition, as in the College Bound Scholars program, does work with young women and some number of young men. And, ironically, the drills of direct instruction dismissed in some sectors as too mindless, may herald a return to a kind of effective structure in schools.
In another structural breakdown, American political life cannot muster the collective will to bring consistent remedy to these essentially cultural issues, yet debates rage on with “passionate intensity.”

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School Reform: Once Again A Tale of Teacher Power

Posted on May 10, 2014 by schooldog

Summary: Amid the relative merits of “direct instruction” and “inquiry” approaches to curriculum, a narrative emerges that suggests teacher empowerment may be the more important variable.
In the ongoing assault on school dysfunction, debate rages between those who advocate “direct instruction” — drill in the basic skills of reading and math, and which has some proven success in raising test scores — and partisans of “inquiry” based approaches that purport to teach greater understanding of concepts and hence promote longer term problem solving.
A recent story in the Seattle Times that features success in low income classrooms at Gildo Rey Elementary School in Auburn, Washington, plants the discussion in a context in which teacher initiative has been a critical component. Thus, the outcome there to date says as much about the importance of institutional culture in a school as it does about the respective merits of one pedagogical approach or another.
For the record, it seems clear to me if kids don’t have the basic skills they’re lost, and are not going to have the future opportunity to hone their problem solving. This is not to dismiss the importance of inquiry at all, but merely says we all walk before we can run.
The Times in its commentary rightly applauds the importance of teacher involvement in the school’s evolution, and correctly trumpets the obvious conclusion that poor kids can learn, and that troubled schools do turn around, the nation’s composite test doldrums notwithstanding.
As a hardened veteran of school wars, high school version (my thinking warped by many years in top down school bureaucracies!), a full understanding of the teacher role at Gildo Rey should go a few steps further.
In the excessively top down environment of the current game, in which the feds tell the states who tell the districts who tell the individual principals who tell the individual teachers what to do, well-meaning and even talented teachers can get the motivational sap squeezed out of their identity as a practicing professional with the primary responsibility for those students before them.
There is all the world of difference between a hard working teacher who does what others tell him to do and an equally hard working teacher who seeks better ways of teaching and who continually evolves in the wake of what works for his students and what doesn’t. The latter is one trusted to lead, even expected to lead, and so rises to the occasion to the full extent of her native ability. The former stays well inside the frontier, and is a mainstay of the status quo. I privately wonder how many of the 46% of teachers who leave within five years do so out of creative frustration.
To me, this distinction is the essence of the Gildo Rey story.
While acknowledging there are difficulties extrapolating from a story on line or in the newspaper, the turnaround at Gildo Rey started with the entrance of an experienced principal, Robin Logan, who appears to have understood that schools are communities, and people must talk with one another within them. She insisted that teachers work together, number one, and, number two, that they follow the data wherever it led. Whatever works, figure out together how to follow it.
Now that is a culture change, and was probably not instituted in a democratic fashion, even if the intent was in that direction. If I read correctly, there were bruised egos and Ms. Logan was not universally acclaimed. As one teacher put the spin, “it’s just better to succumb” to her will. The role of strong leadership from a principal (not perfect leadership) in school reform is clear in the research.
However, once the system with its expectations was in place, and dissidents moved on, Logan was a wise enough administrator to let her horses run, and particularly those with the bit most strongly in their teeth. At the risk of stretching the metaphor too far, teachers too often are penned up bureaucratically and their creativity poorly engaged. (Not a good way to train a thoroughbred?)
By the Times story, much of the successful shift in math instruction and the rise in math scores was teacher created, led and spread, and guided by test data. Within limits, testing is a necessary evil, expensive in time, but without which the road ahead is defined too much by guesswork.
The story is not a perfect one. One of the teachers who led the changes in the math approach under the collegial umbrella is now out of the classroom in a district position designed apparently to spread the gospel. Depending upon the twist given to his powers by the district administration, there is irony if what he has to offer, developed in a collegial atmosphere, was now to be mandated (too often a schools pattern). I don’t know that is the case, but it would be better if his portfolio was to foster the same give and take and the search for individual school solution in which he apparently thrived.
My other lament is that this talented teacher is out of the classroom. Somehow, some way, the profession of teacher has to be infused with enough social wealth and institutional power, and probably enough remuneration, to warrant its being the work of a lifetime, rather than a stepping stone for ambitious and talented sorts.

 

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At Risk Kids and the College Game

Posted on April 28, 2014 by schooldog

Summary: Low income kids often are first in their family to contemplate college, and so lack the fund of family college information taken for granted by middle and upper class students. Their back up option, the guidance of their high school counselor, is limited because of the many duties common to the counseling position in today’s schools, but supplemental systems and creative solutions can bridge the gap to some extent. (Note: This is an expanded version of a “guest opinion” piece that appeared in the digital version of the Seattle Times recently.)
Suppose you are a low income student, son or daughter of parents who themselves did not attend college. You have been diligent as a student, and as your senior year in high school approaches, you think about going to college, as you vaguely know you should, but who do you turn to for help? You have friends whose own parents went to college. You are bewildered and intimidated that these friends seem not only to know how to go about the application process, but also what course of study they will follow, and how they will pay for it. To whom do you turn?
Well, there is always your friendly high school counselor.
In fact, high school counselors do advise students about college, which includes career planning and financial aid information. But the help is mostly via classroom presentations — not enough and too impersonal to intercede vitally in our hypothetical low income student’s college planning. Such a student needs more 1:1 intervention throughout her high school growth, but her counselor does well to spread himself in a relatively thin fashion over classrooms of students on a periodic basis.
Those students whose more privileged families have already channeled them toward higher education and have fostered career paths are the ones who most profit from such presentations, while those who more profoundly need the information tune out or at best face confusion because they lack the framework of expectation and personal infrastructure upon which to hang what they are being told.
So the real question is how to “college advise” low income kids whose personal family experience has not prepared them to take advantage of the limited exposure their high schools can provide them in the run up to the years of higher education.
Moreover, from an educational perspective “college advisement” is really the culmination of development that originates in elementary and middle school with timely acquisition of skills, a birth of educational thirst, and the ability to visualize academic and vocational attainment – in short, the ownership of strategies and habits that have always undergirded success in any enterprise. Giving a kid who has not followed such a path all along the wherewithal to fill out a college application is a low percentage endeavor.
Because some families for complex reasons cannot or have not been able to forge such tools in their children, it has fallen to schools as society’s representatives to do so, not just to salvage the kids, but also to further society’s best interest.
Outside of the family, much remedy can only be through the building of personal relationships with kids at each level of schooling, where teachers and counselors historically have encouraged faith in self and built expectation of accomplishment upon it.
The gods of testing, currently ascendant, have diverted considerable time from such informal tutelage by teachers and counselors alike, and budget cuts have further vitiated that traditional role.
I am reminded of the story of one elementary counselor who spent an outsized portion of her time monitoring a troubled student for whom a specialized school would have been more appropriate, but was not in the cards, because budget constraints had made the more intensive setting too expensive. With her time circumscribed toward one student, the counselor’s ability to attend to the needs of more normal students suffered.
Sometimes on the high school level relatively late inspiration can be communicated. I think of a son of Mexican immigrants, challenged by various staff members, who opted into an Advanced Placement class because he now recognized that was a way to prepare for a college future. He knew it would be a struggle, and it was, but in the end he forged new confidence in himself and his rising academic trajectory.
Today high school counselors strive to survive, as each year seems to bring at least one new responsibility on top of already too many others, which in turn are done hurriedly and often inadequately. Many struggle with morale issues. Most are in the game because of a desire to help kids. Yet too often counselors, and certainly high school counselors, largely have become administrative custodians of data and managers of process: credits and graduation requirements; authorization for credit recovery; registration for courses and schedule changes; the management of legal learning disability procedures; Running Start authorizations for juniors and seniors. Not to mention responding to all the assortment of problems, circumstances, and crises present in a case load of well over 400 high school students.
So what to do? Some would argue our use of resources has reached an imbalance; we devote too much time and people power to testing that might be used in other ways. The kind of mentoring needed is people intensive, and hence expensive. Surely more counselors on all levels, some dedicated primarily to the nurture of the learning careers of low income kids, and improved teacher/student ratios would be steps in the right direction.
More intensive work around careers and college thinking has sprouted in some curricula on all levels. Linkages in these curricula to counseling for targeted low income kids might accentuate the curricular work.
There are human resources less expensive than counselors or teachers, or funded through related budgets. For example, I have been intrigued by the work of City Year/Americorps volunteers in encouraging school attendance in Seattle schools, as reported by the Seattle Times. Young college graduates mentor foster kids through a Treehouse program in the Seattle area. Adults mentor students in an innovative program in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood.
A recent Seattle Times review of college advising for high school students (“Outside guidance helps students get in”) acknowledges the beleaguered status of high school counselors as they struggle to meet the need, and tells the story of a couple of supplementary programs that help low income students make the transition to higher education. The College Advising Corps uses both Americorps money (again!) and grants to hire young adults, themselves college graduates, to mentor high school students in the mysteries of college application.
Another program, Rainier Scholars, identifies promising low income students in middle school and structures around them a variety of supports designed to make them ready for Ivy League and other elite universities. Still other supplemental efforts target low income parents to make them aware of financial aid and application opportunities as early as eighth grade.
One informal study of allocation of high school counselor time found that as much as a quarter of what they encounter does not require counseling skills. For example, much graduation credit management and program planning could be handled by a detail competent Instructional Aide, who would be much cheaper than a full counselor, and who would thereby liberate counselors to more substantive student empowerment work.
Creative resource management of these sorts would not eliminate the need for counselors, but could liberate counselors to more substantive empowerment work with disadvantaged students.
These realities and options underline the State Supreme Court’s finding that the Washington Legislature underfunds public education. Pay it forward, or surely we will pay more at a later date.

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At Risk Students: Changes in the SAT Amount to Nothing Useful

Posted on April 9, 2014 by schooldog

Summary: New changes in the SAT serve only to respond to increased market share on the part of the ACT, and distract from the business of improving schools and stimulating at risk students to make use of opportunities before them.

The forces of change signifying nothing have landed for the moment on the exalted SAT, or Scholastic Aptitude Test, for the second time in a decade; the SAT has announced sweeping changes to its iconic college entrance exam.
The SAT for much of the second half of the twentieth century was the dreaded marker of collegiate readiness, joined by the ACT, or American College Test, increasingly as the century moved to a close. The SAT historically has purported to measure thinking ability, though according to critics the examination is couched in materials biased toward those from educated families, while the ACT has claimed to measure what students have learned to that point in their schooling, though that also puts those low income students who have attended mediocre or worse schools at a disadvantage. Tough to be low income in this system and aspire to higher.
The two tests share an ugly but poorly kept secret. Neither is predictive of college success beyond the first semester of freshman year, yet applicants produce stomach acid and the system generates revenue every year for both the SAT and the ACT, in a dance of questionable enterprise, the very definition of inertia at work.
A growing number of colleges have responded in rational fashion, and no longer require either the SAT or the ACT as part of application, though the majority of their applicants continues to provide a score.
Critics, including syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker (“The New SAT don’t care ‘bout no fancy words”) wag that the changes in the SAT are in response to challenges to its market share by the ACT, which recently overtook the elder test in the number of tests administered. Ouch for the establishment. Looking at the figures, it is hard not to conclude that the SAT change represents competition at work.
Among other assorted changes, the SAT will begin to feel more like the ACT by framing test questions around what is assumed the student learns in high school, for example vocabulary typically used in college preparation, but short of the abstruse variety for which the SAT has become notorious. Not coincidentally, the relatively new president of the SAT, David Coleman, was heavily involved in the creation of Common Core standards and curricula, the latest new dish on the plate of educators across the nation, and which are designed to make all students “college ready.”
Parker, in her wittily acerbic, sometimes distracting way, charges that the new SAT is a dumbing down of standards to make it easier for low income students to make the grade in the college entry sweepstakes.
Not sure about that dumbing down. Parker may be betraying her own elite perspective.
Seems to me it is progress to take one impediment to the rise of lower economic students off the table, namely the advantage to relatively wealthy kids from middle and upper class backgrounds raised in enriched home environments with educated parents, and make the proving ground a rigorous school based curriculum, theoretically available to all regardless of family background. Theoretically, I say, because clearly too many low income youth do not attend schools that fit that definition, or in echo of their parents’ patterns they neglect the opportunity their schools do have.
So opportunity remains blunted for a sizeable minority.
It is here that Ms. Parker finds an estimable stride. “If we truly want to improve everyone’s chance at eventual employment and success, the playing field needs to be plowed and seeded well before the harvest of standardized testing.”
“It starts with schools and teachers, and everybody knows it.”
In some ways, the SAT and the ACT were both an attempt to cull the college ready from the bewildering range of student applicants from secondary schools of disparate depth and quality. The first truly wide scale administrations of the SAT were in the immediate post Second World War period, and have continued to this day with some alterations.
After all these years, such testing has been shown to be inferior to the predictive strength of a strong high school record in rigorous course work. Its continuing existence as a rite of passage is transparently a social illusion pursued by the anxiety of parents and students, and to a lesser degree maintained by vested interests, of which the SAT and the ACT are two parties.
The staying power of these tests is remarkable as pivotal items in the collective imagination. A recent story in the New York Times about the changes in the SAT elicited over 550 comments; in the Washington Post 350. Everyone has an angle of approach; most of those making comment, professionals and lay folk alike, have ideas how to improve these imperfect constructs.
So I return to my opening gambit. The newly “new” SAT represents the triumph of the forces signifying nothing and marking the road to nowhere ultimately useful.
I do find myself wondering what these realities about one set of testing, the SAT and the ACT, imply for the obsessive search for improved test results in our public schools, which so far seem to have made mostly anecdotal and relatively isolated gains. Though I have supported moderate skills testing both to guide progress and to help evaluate teachers, these meditations on college entrance testing can’t help but cast doubt on all that enterprise, and make me wonder if one day in the indeterminate future the illusion of testing’s efficacy will come into policy focus, and more solid ground will be discovered in the commitment of students simply to rigor and the empowerment of a teaching corps to seal that bond.

 

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At Risk Low Income Students: Sometime Victims of a Blame Game

Posted on March 26, 2014 by schooldog

Summary: Stereotypical assumptions about low income kids should not cloud the will to social investment, via schools, in their economic future.
Yesterday I visited with an old friend and neighbor in a community in which I had lived for 35 years. He is indisputably a good man, of what I understand to be a progressive history. So it was with an initial sense of dislocation when he voiced concern about government supporting people on welfare. He had relatives, he said, who have found a kind of sweet spot for themselves in part time or low paying jobs, with food stamps and maybe some tax credit on the side. They had no motivation, he said, to “better themselves,” but were content live in that margin, and accept some measure of dependence. Exposure to his relatives had left my friend wary of the effect that government support has had on citizens.
In fact, it was exactly this concern that lead to successful welfare reform in the Reagan years, in which the line between support and independence was re-drawn in a more strict fashion.
In a related vein, in a blog post to the Seattle Times web site, Claudia Rowe reviewed Washington State’s College Bound Scholar program, which supports low income student candidacy for higher education. A highlight was the report that among students who participated in the program, the gap between middle income and lower income matriculation in higher education of some sort virtually disappeared. While these figures of course do not guarantee graduation, or the transformation into a middle class life style, in my mind they are cause for buoyant spirits in the effort to lift low income kids off the low income treadmill.
But apparently not for some of the commentators to Ms. Rowe’s blog post. Though individuals raise valid questions about the details of what happens down the road with these College Bound Scholars, and make appropriate points about the need for each student to contribute something financially to their education (so as to appreciate it more), I am struck by the mean streak that threads through some of the commentary, on the order of, “I worked my way through school, and they can damn well do so themselves.” Or “Be damned if I want to pay (in taxes) so someone else doesn’t have to work as hard as I do.” In short, assorted resentment erupts toward those students who have taken advantage of a plan that didn’t exist for the commentators. Within the anger, stereotypes of lazy good for nothing low income people fester. “Be damned if I’m going to do for them what they won’t do for themselves.” Etc. You know the drill.
Don’t get me wrong. I do understand both my old friend’s sentiments, and those of the anonymous commentators to Ms. Rowe’s blog post. A free ride in a context where others are working their butts off is a hard sell, and should be.
In my experience with low income parents, as a counselor, however, I can testify that there are plenty of low income parents out there struggling mightily to make ends meet. The butt of the popular resentment, the welfare devotee, is only one character type among a very complex population, though the welfare rider clearly provides the stereotype when social anger needs a scapegoat.
Parenthetically, how do the self-righteous regard the middle aged factory worker who has been rendered superfluous by the forces of globalization?
So let us reason together here. Let us not blast all with a broad sweep blunderbuss. How is it that low income kids, for example, can be held fully accountable for the niche in society in which they find themselves?
It is not unreasonable to ask mature adults to modulate their knee jerk reactions and look more deeply, beyond stereotypes, and understand the dilemma of low income kids who may not know how to rise above their circumstances nor have role models who show them how to do so.
Middle school and high school students, toward which College Bound Scholar is pitched, are still relatively unformed passengers on the conveyor belt that tends to get stuck in a generational stasis on a low income track. If we have evidence, which we do, that the cultural framework of some low income circumstances ill prepare young people for success in schools or in a technical job market, then blame tossed in the direction of those young people is misplaced.
There are consequences to the economy and the nation if, in social isolation and neglect, low income kids make the transition to adulthood without perceiving a viable ramp up, and so continue to need the same food stamps and tax credits that are attacked by the scornful. That is what we call a vicious cycle.
While study after study has demonstrated that social investment generates multiple dollars in savings down the road (for example, see the work of Child Trends, a Bethesda think tank), all the shrinkage of government spending as envisaged in some quarters will ultimately trap more kids in poverty, beholden to food stamps and other parts of the public dole.
We are called, it seems to me, in the name of self-interest to short circuit the cycle that trains kids into their own adult poverty; that is, intervene via schools and probably also health care to ramp such kids up into a cycle of better economic circumstances. Otherwise – and this is the self-interest part – they are unproductive drags on the economy, at best marginal workers, and a social welfare drain as well. Anger and self-righteousness will not solve those problems.
So, to my friend and to the commentators on the blog site, please slow down and think, look at the whole picture, and remember that the heat of passion can cause one to shoot oneself in one’s foot.

 

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