Category: Organizational Change

(Extra)Ordinary People

Posted on | by Sam

There’s an anecdote the Calhoun School’s Steve Nelson likes to share when he speaks to teachers and parents about the purpose of education. “We should think of our children as wildflower seeds in an unmarked package,” he says. “We can’t know what will emerge. All we can do is plant them in fertile soil, give them plenty of water and sunlight, and wait patiently to see the uniqueness of their beauty.”

At a time when too many students are still being planted in highly cultivated gardens – trimmed and pruned to resemble each other closely – it is incumbent upon all of us to stand on the side of the unmarked package. And at a time when we stray further and further from our democratic roots – from Chicago to DC – it is essential we heed the words of Mission Hill founder Deborah Meier, who reminds us that “democracy rests on having respect for the judgment of ordinary people.”

These two visions – of a school filled with unmarked seeds, and a democracy fueled by ordinary citizens – come together in the tenth and final chapter of A Year at Mission Hill. We see a montage of children in various states of joy. We hear teachers sing the words of poet Kahlil Gibran at their school’s graduation ceremony (“Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.”). And we watch principal Ayla Gavins tell her staff she will refuse to administer new testing requirements under the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program.

As Mission Hill plans for the challenges of a new school year, we should pay attention to the principles its principal is willing to risk her career to protect: Trust and transparency. Experience. Variation. Autonomy. And, as she puts it, “celebrating the humanness in all of us, and trying to build on human potential and not stifle it.”

Some will have watched this series and concluded that schools like Mission Hill are little more than inspiring one-offs, with a singular vision of schooling that can never be scaled. Yet there are already hundreds of schools – from the Expeditionary Learning network to the New York Performance Standards Consortium – that assess their students similarly (and a handful of states that are following suit). There are already thousands of teachers with the ability, given the right supports and surroundings, to be just as masterful as the ones we’ve observed at Mission Hill. And there are already streamlined structures in place, from the pilot school model in Boston to the statewide funding system in Vermont, that are empowering public schools to be more innovative, inclusive, and effective.

To be fair, it makes sense that people are searching for the best way to scale the ideas in a school like Mission Hill. After all, the more children that can have experiences like the ones we’ve watched over the course of this series, the better off our society will be. But the best way to spread ideas in a democracy is not by scaling up, like McDonald’s, buy by scaling across, like farmers markets. In the first example, the goal is to make everything so uniform that walking into any store anywhere in the world should feel – and taste – exactly the same. In the second, the goal is to create a forum for people to access what will make them healthier, and to come together in a spirit of community. As a result, every farmers market shares certain common design principles. And each one also demonstrates the myriad variations in how those principles can get applied.

A Year at Mission Hill is a visual testament to the pedagogical power of the second approach. It’s a place that treats the learning process the same way a skilled gardener would nurture a package of wildflowers: by preparing the soil, planting the seeds, and waiting for the unique beauty to emerge. And it’s a place that reminds us that when you invest deeply in the capacity of ordinary adults to do their jobs well, they are capable of extraordinary things.

“The freedom of teachers to make decisions about their classrooms and their lives is essential, “ Meier adds. “The whole point of an education is to help you learn how to exercise judgment – and you can’t do that if the expert adults in your school are not allowed to exercise theirs.”

(This article originally appeared in Education Week.)

To Fix Public Education, Let’s Eliminate Private Schools

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on To Fix Public Education, Let’s Eliminate Private Schools

While hardcore progressives and Tea Party activists continue cozying up to each other in a shared rejection of the Common Core, I have a radical proposal to make – and it might just be crazy enough to garner an equally eclectic coalition of support:

Let’s eliminate private schools altogether. Or, better yet, let’s make every school both public and private.

If that idea doesn’t make sense to you, consider this: it’s already happening at Sharon Academy (TSA), a school in Vermont that offers, in its words, “the best of both private and public school education.” Kids who live near the school can attend TSA just as they would any neighborhood school. Kids who live outside the attendance zone can attend as well, as long as they pay tuition. And the genius of the Vermont system is that those fees are not paid by the family; they’re paid by the hometown of the student.

This sort of arrangement is possible thanks to a 1997 state law that was drafted in response to a Vermont Supreme Court decision that said the state’s existing educational funding system was unconstitutional, and that it must provide “substantially equal access” to education for all Vermont students, regardless of where they live.

As a result, every town in Vermont is required to pay a school up to the amount of the state’s average tuition. Schools can charge more than the average, but TSA pegs its tuition to whatever that number may be (typically no more than $12,000). As a result, no student – I repeat, no student – pays any additional tuition, and TSA commits to cover whatever shortfall exists via its own fundraising efforts.

If this seems too good to be true, it’s worth noting that other countries around the world have found a way to ensure equity. Education in Finland, for example, is free to all beginning at the voluntary pre-primary level and continuing through upper secondary school. Funding responsibilities are divided between the federal and local governments. And not surprisingly, there are very few private schools in Finland. Simply put, in a system that has prioritized (indeed, standardized) equity, they have no niche to fill.

These sorts of efforts stand in stark, uncomfortable contrast to America’s long history of separate and unequal schooling. The closest we came to correcting the inequity was 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5-4 margin, reversed a lower court’s decision in favor of a group of poor Texas parents who had claimed that their state’s tolerance of the wide disparity in school resources violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

Gone from the court’s 1973 ruling was its 1954 contention in Brown v. Board of Education that “education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments.” Gone, too, was its assertion that “it is doubtful any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity,” wrote a unanimous court in Brown, “where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.”

Instead, the five-justice majority in San Antonio v. Rodriguez wrote simply that while the Texas school system “can fairly be described as chaotic and unjust … it does not follow that this system violates the Constitution. Though education is one of the most important services performed by the state, it is not within the limited category of rights recognized by this Court as guaranteed by the Constitution.” If it were, the majority conceded, “virtually every State will not pass muster.”

For Justice Thurgood Marshall, that was precisely the point. “The Court concludes that public education is not constitutionally guaranteed,” he wrote, even though “no other state function is so uniformly recognized as an essential element of our society’s well being.”

Marshall understood that without equal access to a high-quality public education, democracy doesn’t work. “Education directly affects the ability of a child to exercise his First Amendment rights,” he explained. “Education prepares individuals to be self-reliant and self-sufficient participants in society. Both facets of this observation are suggestive of the substantial relationship which education bears to guarantees of our Constitution.”

Were he alive today, Marshall would take solace in Vermont’s decision to chart a different course. And while it is nearly impossible to imagine a future landscape in which Americans refuse the opportunity to give their child a competitive advantage in favor of ensuring equal educational opportunities for all, schools like Sharon Academy are there to remind us that a different model is possible. The rest is up to us.

(This article originally appeared in the SmartBlog on Education.)

What Happened in DC in 2008 – & Does it Still Matter in 2013?

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on What Happened in DC in 2008 – & Does it Still Matter in 2013?

If a prominent urban school leader told you he couldn’t recall being informed that half his city’s schools may have allowed the gross mistreatment of students to occur, would you believe him? And even if you did, would you still want him in charge of your children?

Now imagine that the leader in question is not just prominent locally, but nationally as well. Imagine that this individual has appeared on the cover of iconic news magazines and been interviewed on Oprah’s iconic couch. And imagine that this person has come to embody a singular approach to determining the effectiveness of schools and teachers – the rationale for which would be challenged if the allegations of mistreatment were ever proven to be true.

Would you want to know if any actual wrongdoing had occurred?

In fact this is not a hypothetical question, but an actual one we can apply to the nation’s capital, and to our nation’s most visible school reformer, Michelle Rhee. It is, therefore, a question fraught with potential implications for how we think about (and assess) modern American education reform. And it’s a question that has been given new life in the wake of PBS reporter John Merrow’s publication of a confidential memo in which an outside consultant suggested that as many as 191 teachers, scattered across nearly half the city’s public schools, may have erased and corrected their students’ answers on the city’s high-stakes standardized test, the DC-CAS, in 2008.

No one in a position of authority to inquire further is doing so – yet.  Both Mayor Vincent Gray and David Catania, the chairman of the D.C. Council’s education committee, say they do not plan to reinvestigate – even though all previous investigations forbade any sort of erasure analysis or an examination of the original answer sheets. Rhee herself, a self-described “data fiend,” stands by her original statement: “I don’t recall receiving a report  . . . regarding erasure data from the DC-CAS.”

The significance of a potentially uninvestigated cheating scandal in Washington extends beyond the personal reputation of Ms. Rhee. Other cities around the country have already suffered their own scandals, from El Paso to Atlanta. Increasing numbers of parents are opting their children out of standardized tests as a form of civil disobedience to what they see as the deleterious results of the high-stakes testing era. And anyone who spends serious time in schools knows how many educators are struggling to stay motivated in a policy climate that, albeit unintentionally, disincentivizes them from valuing anything other than literacy and numeracy.

If no subsequent investigation occurs, we will be witness in Washington D.C. to what happens when powerful people try to sweep uncomfortable subjects under the rug. Ironically, however, Atlanta has demonstrated what happens when the opposite occurs – and courageous public officials, combined with a watchful free press, commit to uncover the truth, whatever it may be. As Georgia Governor Nathan Deal (a Republican) put it: “When test results are falsified and students who have not mastered the necessary material are promoted, our students are harmed, parents lose sight of their child’s true progress, and taxpayers are cheated.”

Deal’s investigative team was equally forceful: “Superintendent Beverly Hall and her senior staff knew, or should have known, that cheating and other offenses were occurring,” they wrote in their 813-page report – a report based on interviews with more than 2,000 people and a review of more than 800,000 documents. “A culture of fear and conspiracy of silence infected (the) school system and kept many teachers from speaking freely about misconduct.” As a lead member of the Atlanta investigative team told Merrow earlier this year, “There’s not a shred of doubt in my mind that adults cheated in Washington. The big difference is that nobody in D.C. wanted to know the truth.”

Whether or not widespread cheating occurred in 2008 should matter greatly to all of us, even in 2013. What matters more is whether we are willing to find out. Because when we lose the courage and the curiosity to inquire deeply into our own practices – and the unintended consequences they may reap – we lose the capacity to reimagine education for a changing world.

(This article also appeared on the Smartblog on Education.)

The Wisdom of Crowds, Untapped

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on The Wisdom of Crowds, Untapped

The decision by DC Council Education Committee Chairman David Catania to hire an outside law firm to craft school reform legislation is an awful one, worthy of serious public rebuke – and for two interrelated reasons.

The first is that hiring a small team of lawyers is the least likely path towards achieving imaginative and effective policy. Despite public stereotypes of the profession, K-12 education is a complex web of cognitive, social, emotional, language, ethical and physical challenges and opportunities. Its systemic barriers to change are as myriad as our complicated shared memories of what schooling is (and is not). And it’s a field in the midst of a major paradigmatic shift – away from the traditional notion that a student’s job is to adjust to the school, and towards the radical notion that a school’s job is to adjust to the student.

So while it’s true that the final stages of policymaking involve a certain amount of legalese, Mr. Catania’s belief that this process should start with a team of lawyers – and not end with one – speaks to a fundamental missed opportunity, and the second reason it’s a bad idea: We are ignoring the wisdom of our own community, and the chance to imagine DC’s future education policy as a city-wide, regenerative civic event.

Of course, surfacing and applying the insights of our own community is not something we do often – perhaps because so many of us secretly agree with Thomas Carlyle, who famously said: “I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”

The thing is, Carlyle was wrong. As New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki writes in his 2004 bestseller The Wisdom of Crowds, “If you put together a big enough and diverse enough group of people and ask them to make decisions affecting matters of general interest, that group’s decision will, over time, be intellectually superior to the isolated individual.”

In other words, when our imperfect individual judgments are aggregated in the right way, our collective intelligence is often extremely helpful. That’s why Surowiecki suggests, “we should stop hunting and ask the crowd. Chances are, it knows.”

In fact, that’s exactly what Mr. Catania is doing – hunting. It’s an impulse so common sociologists have given it its own name: “Chasing the Expert,” which references our tendency when facing difficult decisions to search for that one person (or small group of people) who will have the answer.

What Surowiecki discovered was that the opposite was true, but only if the core conditions of making a good large-group decision were present: diversity, independence, and a particular form of decentralization. “Paradoxically,” he writes, “the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible.”

Imagine if instead of seeking outside funds to hire a small team of lawyers, Catania had announced a citywide initiative in which the best wisdom around crowdsourcing would be utilized in order to help the entire community arrive at a thoughtful, informed collective decision around the future of education policy? After all, politics is about the impact of government on the everyday lives of citizens. Why do we think the way to do it well is by distancing ourselves from the voices of the citizens themselves?

Indeed, the most damning implication of Mr. Catania’s decision is his inattention to the mechanisms of democracy, to the wisdom of the community, and to the regenerative power of combining both in an effort to improve public education. As Surowiecki writes, democracy “is not a way of solving cognition problems or a mechanism for revealing the public interest. But it is a way of dealing with (if not solving once and for all) the most fundamental questions of cooperation and coordination: How do we live together? How can living together work to our mutual benefit?”

“The decisions that democracies make may not always demonstrate the wisdom of the crowd,” Surowiecki concedes. “But the decision to make them democratically does.”

(This article also appeared in the Washington Post.)

Energy or Entropy?

Posted on | by Sam | 4 Comments on Energy or Entropy?

I spent the other morning in my son’s Montessori classroom. It’s a beautiful, old-school room with high ceilings, large windows and plenty of space, which is good because it’s filled each day with twenty-eight 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds. No small task.

I’ve been in Montessori classrooms before, yet I was still surprised when the day was never officially called to order. Instead the children took off their shoes, found some work (or not), and began their day in twenty-eight different ways while their two teachers, Ms. Luz and Ms. Allison, surfed in between them to check in and gauge where each child was at on that particular morning – hungry, happy, angry, sleepy.

This flow of atoms continued for the next four hours. When it was snack time, rotations of five children ate in self-organizing shifts – the order determined entirely by the classroom’s five Mardi Gras-style necklaces. (If you weren’t wearing one, it wasn’t snack time.)

Sometimes, the teachers joined a student to inquire about his work or perhaps to add a wrinkle to what she was doing, as Ms. Luz did when my son took out a container of plastic animals. She stood by as he spread the animals out on a colored mat, and then quietly asked him in Spanish (it’s a language immersion school) to identify the different figures. When he found the right one, he would get up and cross the room to repeat the Spanish name of the animal to Ms. Allison, who would either help correct his pronunciation slightly or simply say, “Exacto.” Then he would return to the mat of animals, and Ms. Luz would be ready for the pattern to repeat itself, while all around her a swirl of similar teaching moments provided plot points for the classroom’s chaotic graph of individualized ebb and flow.

When the children gathered in a circle for their first all-class activity, at 11:15am, I watched Leo’s teachers to see how they were doing. I remember reaching this point of the day as a teacher and feeling enervated, parched, and desperate for a break in the action. But because Ms. Allison and Ms. Luz had hadn’t spent the morning trying to corral all 28 students into a single activity (or into a state of singular attention), they mirrored the spirit of the children – fresh, engaged, centered.

Energy vs. entropy. Corraling vs. allowing.

There is great wisdom in a learning environment that allows the motivation and self-direction of the participants to drive the activity, and in which skilled adults work with the natural flow of energy and attention to help children develop a sense of themselves, their interests, and their place in a community. Imagine how much better both child and teacher would feel if this sort of environment was the norm and not the exception?

What is the proper role of government in public education reform?

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on What is the proper role of government in public education reform?

I read an interesting Op-Ed about education in today’s Washington Post, in which the author wrote the following: “The proper role of government is to ensure the provision of essential services, not always to provide those services itself.”

Leaving aside the author’s particular perspective on K-12 education reform, I’m curious: How many people out there agree or disagree with this general statement as it pertains to education reform? Is the “provision of essential services” a proper understanding of the proper purview of government — one in which a widening circle of choice could in theory not just be the privatization of public education, but moreso a reframing of how government can help support the highest number of high-quality public educational options? Or is the proper purview of government always to provide those services itself — especially when the services in question pertain to the education of our nation’s young people?

A Part of Us is Dying in Chicago

Posted on | by Sam

I can’t reconcile the deep sense of community that filmmakers Amy and Tom Valens have captured in their 10-part video series about a year in the life of a public school in Boston, with the painful public clashes we’re witnessing in Chicago – where 54 of the city’s schools will soon be shuttered.

Indeed, although the nation’s attention is fixed on the historic fight for marriage equality in the U.S. Supreme Court, a part of us is dying in the Windy City – and no one in the mainstream media seems to care.

No one disputes the fact that Chicago, like so many American cities, has real problems to solve. Population is down. Money is tight. School choice is growing. Tough decisions must be made.

By the same token, can anyone dispute that we have reason to worry about the state of our civic discourse when Chicago’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel, allows the announcement of something as contentious as 54 school closings while he is on a ski trip in Utah? And can anyone blame local community leaders who wonder what to think of the Mayor’s plan to hold additional hearings on the issue? “If nobody is going to be heard at the hearings, what’s the use of having the hearings?” said Marshall Hatch, a local pastor. “If it’s a done deal, then stop wasting everybody’s time.”

A part of us is dying in Chicago because so many of us are so increasingly convinced that on the most important issues of the day, we are voiceless. We know changes need to be made – and we are increasingly abandoning, or giving little more than lip service to, our historic commitment to make those changes democratically, deliberately, and delicately. The issues in Chicago are complicated, from tax policies to population declines to legacies of race-based oppression, but the willingness of elected officials to confront those challenges in a spirit of co-construction with their constituents has become as laughable as, well, the Cubs winning the World Series.

Which takes me back to A Year at Mission Hill, and the ways in which this series is quietly and consistently demonstrating the generative power of a community in which everyone’s voice is valued and actively solicited. Mission Hill is a public school with charter-like autonomy. Its teachers are all unionized, and everything the district requires of its other schools, it requires of Mission Hill. Yet this is a school where, as teacher Jenerra Williams puts it, “We take the state test, we prepare for the state test, and we don’t get consumed by the state test.” This is a school where we see teachers repeatedly working together to diagnose, support, and engage kids. And this is a school where we see highly committed and skilled adults in an ongoing dialogue with each other about the only question that matters: “Of all the things we can do together, what must we do?”

Watching what’s happening in Chicago makes we worry about the extent to which we remain committed to the “we” in that question – We the people. What’s happening there is a national tragedy, and an example of what happens when powerful people recall the first half of the famous quote by Winston Churchill – “Democracy is the worst form of government” – and conveniently forget the second half – “except all the others that have been tried.”

As Mission Hill demonstrates, democracy is messy, it is inefficient, and it is slow. But as I watch its students practice calligraphy and study honeybees, as I listen to its teachers share strategies and struggle to improve – and as I ride my bike past the throngs of demonstrators for and against marriage equality outside the Supreme Court – I’m reminded that examples of our inextinguishable commitment to the spirit of individual liberty and equality are all around us.

Mayor Emanuel, are you watching?

(This article originally appeared in Education Week.)

Making Sense of Steubenville

Posted on | by Sam

As educators, what are we to make of the ongoing tragedy in Steubenville, Ohio – a community in which one teenage girl was raped and publicly humiliated, two teenage boys are being shipped off to juvenile detention, and two other teenage girls are now under arrest after threatening to beat and kill the victim?

First, we must recognize the central role that parents play in helping their children develop a clear sense of right and wrong. As the victim’s mother said in a prepared statement to the court, “We hope that from this something good can arise. I feel I have an opportunity to bring an awareness to others, possibly change the mentality of a youth or help a parent to have more of an awareness to where their children are and what they are doing. The adults need to take responsibility and guide these children.”

Second, we must acknowledge that every community has the potential to allow this sort of behavior to occur. Like other communities, the members of Steubenville High School’s football team were afforded respect and privileges few teenagers can manage responsibly. More troubling, however – and more relevant for those of us who have dedicated our lives to supporting the learning and growth of young people – was the behavior of all the other students who gave implicit support to the boys’ actions by documenting and trading pictures of the assault – and doing nothing to protect the girl, whose drunkenness was so severe it prompted one of her assailants to say she resembled “a dead body.”

Finally, we must take stock of the work we are doing every day in our schools and classrooms – the only factor squarely in our control – and ask ourselves what it is we are explicitly working to instill in the young people we are there to serve. The fact that our state and national policies continue to overvalue academic knowledge (and a myopic definition of academic knowledge at that) at the expense of every other aspect of child and adolescent development is not an excuse for inaction. As educators, we have a responsibility to think long and hard about what kind of people we hope will graduate from our schools – and what sorts of skills and dispositions those people will need to embody – and then make sure the work we are doing each day (and the standards to which we hold ourselves accountable) are aligned with that vision.

The good news is this is already happening in scores of schools across the country – from New Hampshire to Iowa to Colorado. It’s even happening at the state level in Illinois, where every school has not just a set of academic standards – but a set of social and emotional standards as well. And it can start happening in any school, anywhere, as soon as that community decides that the holistic development and growth of children matters more than anything else.

“Human compassion is not taught by a teacher, a coach, or a parent,” the victim’s mother also said. “It is a God-given gift instilled in each of us.”

That’s not quite right. Our capacity for compassion is certainly present in each of us at birth. But it’s equally true that while all of us are born with the potential to behave compassionately, none of us is able to do so without the benefit of strong support, clear guidance, and a supportive network of adults that believe characteristics like empathy are not merely soft skills – they’re benchmarks of what we aspire, on our best days, to become.

(This article originally appeared in Education Week.)