Category: Organizational Change

The (Keynesian) Economics of School Choice

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on The (Keynesian) Economics of School Choice

In the halls of Congress and on the presidential campaign trail, a debate is raging over which set of economic proposals to pursue in order to rebuild the national economy. At the same time, K-12 education reformers are engaged in their own frantic search for the right recipe(s) that can unlock the full power of teaching and learning. But rarely do we acknowledge that one individual stands, improbably, at the center of both debates – John Maynard Keynes.

Keynes’ influence on economic thinking is well established: ever since 1936, when he first argued the economy was driven not by prices but by “effective demand,” we’ve been in a continual debate over whether outside agencies (like, say, the government) are required to intervene during times of crisis. By contrast, Keynes’ influence on education thinking remains largely invisible – yet most urban school districts across America are being recast in the image of his core theories, particularly the notion that providing more choice in schooling will empower urban parents to drive demand in a new way and, in so doing, unleash a series of tailwinds that can transform public education.

Regardless of how one feels about the move toward greater school choice, it is almost surely here to stay. Consequently, as more and more parents encounter the inchoate marketplace of public school options for their children, we should stop asking ourselves whether school choice is “good” or “bad”, and start asking a different question instead: In what ways can urban parents’ newfound power as education consumers engender more schools capable of giving more young people the skills and self-confidence they need to become active, visible contributors to the public good – a public good that, amidst the din of the ongoing battle between our intermixed democratic and capitalistic ideals, still seeks to fulfill our founding spirit of E Pluribus Unum – out of many, one?

That’s a big question, and I think it’s possible for us to answer it – but only if we understand the extent to which urban parents can actually drive “effective demand” in ways that will ultimately serve their and the larger community’s interests.

I know of what I speak, because I’m the parent of a two-year-old in Washington, DC. Most of my closest friends are also DC residents, and also the parents of children about to enter formal schooling. All of us are spending a lot of time thinking about where to send our kids, and all of us are well-educated and motivated to make the right choices: in short, we are the low-hanging fruit in an idealized marketplace in which knowledgeable parents can drive demand.

But there’s a problem: most of the resources that exist today to edify my friends and neighbors are still reflective of the myopic notion that schools can be meaningfully ranked according to a single measure – test scores. To make matters worse, whereas in theory all families in DC have the same chance to get into the same set of schools, the reality is that most middle-class families will have more of a particularly precious resource than their lower-class compatriots: the time it will take to evaluate and assess which schools are the best fit for their child.

As an example, look at Great Schools, the wildly successful organization that accurately bills itself as “the country’s leading source of information on school performance.” Great Schools receives more than 37 million unique web visitors a year, and it supports parent outreach and education programs in three cities – including here in DC. In a world where parents are feeling overwhelmed and under-informed, Great Schools is the closest thing to a one-stop-shop out there.

The good news is that Great Schools is filled with great information that will be helpful to parents – from individual school data to concrete recommendations about ways to stay connected to their school; build new play structures; start a school library; or identify the attributes of a great principal. Ultimately, however, the main factor fueling Great Schools’ growth is its school ratings system, and the bad news is that each school’s 10-point score is still determined by a single measure – “its performance on state standardized tests.”

The appeal of such a simple recipe is clear; it’s equally clear that such a formula will never drive effective demand. Instead, this sort of rating system is feeding a different beast. Keynes had a name for that, too – he called it our “animal spirits,” and warned that, absent a holistic picture of any given situation, these spirits can lead us “to depend on nothing but a mathematical expectation.” When that happens, Keynes cautioned, “enterprise will fade and die,” and where “effective demand is deficient not only is the public scandal of wasted resources intolerable, but the individual enterpriser who seeks to bring these resources into action is operating with the odds loaded against him.”

In other words, parents and policymakers need to be guided by more than their animal urges for simple answers to complex problems, and schools need to be evaluated by more than one criterion. As Keynes first suggested, 75 years ago, “it may be possible by a right analysis of the problem to cure the disease whilst preserving efficiency and freedom.”

The same sort of recipe can apply to school choice – but only if we prevent ourselves from seeing choice itself as the panacea; it is freedom and efficiency that we need. And until our freedom to choose is matched by our efficiency to help parents better understand what powerful learning looks like – and requires – our future efforts to help parents drive demand are likely to remain as elusive as our current efforts to get many of those same parents back to work.

What (& Where) Are the World’s Most Transformational Schools?

Posted on | by Sam | 18 Comments on What (& Where) Are the World’s Most Transformational Schools?

OK, people, let’s get specific: Out of all the schools in the world, which ones are the most transformational when it comes to imagining a new way to think about teaching and learning in the 21st century?

There are a lot of inspiring schools out there, so I want to repeat: which are the most transformational – by which I mean schools that are demonstrating, by policy and practice, 10 or more of the 22 core categories from QED Foundation’s Transformational Change Model?

What I find so useful about the QED model (scroll down a bit on their home page to see it) is the way it identifies the central pillars of a high-quality education, and then demarcates what each pillar looks like in a traditional, transitional, and transformational setting. In a traditional school, for example, we tend to assume the student bears the primary responsibility for learning; in a transitional environment, that responsibility shifts to the teacher (see, e.g., just about every recently proposed accountability policy in the U.S.); but in a transformational context, the responsibility is shared via a learning team that includes, and extends beyond, teacher and student.

Of course, learning teams are just one part of a holistic system of environmental conditions. That’s why, taken together, the QED change model helps clarify what we need, and which stages our own evolution will need to pass through, in order to pull K-12 schooling out of the Industrial-era model and into a new, Democratic-era paradigm.

Because that sort of clarity is in short supply, too often we hold up models of school reform that are, at best, examples of transitional progress, not transformational change.

With that caveat in place, please help me find the best set of transformational schools the world has to offer – and please ground your recommendations in the QED change model.

I’ll start the bidding with two examples, and a sample of the ways in which the school is modeling transformational practices:

Science Leadership Academy (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) – SLA is an inquiry-driven high school that opened its doors in 2006. Students at SLA learn in a project-based environment where the core values of inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation and reflection are emphasized in all classes.

Selected Transformational Practices:

  • Philosophy: Traditional – Coverage; Transitional – Depth/Breadth; Transformational – Standards-based Inquiry
  • Goals: Traditional – Test Results Targets; Transitional – Curricular goals; Transformational – Learner Aspirations & Life Options
  • Assessment: Traditional – Of Learning; Transitional – For Learning; Transformational – As Learning
  • Educator Development: Traditional – Re-certification Hours; Transitional – Group Learning; Transformational – Collaborative Inquiry

Riverside School (Ahmedabad, India) — Riverside offers a curriculum and experiences of engagement with the city that enables children to better understand their skills, potential, and responsibilities as citizens. It is also developing social intervention initiatives in the city to provide a wide array of activities (cultural, instructional, and recreational) that can be synchronized with the regular school curriculum.

Selected transformational practices:

  • Model of Success is Based On: Traditional – The Willing and Able; Transitional – Inclusion; Transformational – Racial and Social Justice
  • Context for Learning: Traditional – Classroom; Transitional – School; Transformational – Learning Community
  • When/Where Learning Happens: Traditional – In School; Transitional – Coordination between in- and out-of-school; Transformational – Anywhere/Everywhere
  • Student Investment: Traditional – Requirements; Transitional – Engagement; Transformational – Passion

To be sure, Riverside and SLA are just two of the schools out there doing several things really well, and being very intentional about the way they do so. What other schools are demonstrating a transformational approach to teaching and learning? And in which specific ways are they doing so?

I look forward to your recommendations and ideas.

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

What We Can Learn from Tim Tebow

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on What We Can Learn from Tim Tebow

Late last night, alone in my TV room and still struggling to get back onto east-coast time, I watched Tim Tebow’s improbable 95-yard game-winning drive, and marveled at the uniqueness of his unfolding storyline.

As the dumbstruck commentators on NFL Network made clear, we are witnessing something unprecedented in the otherwise rigid, groupthinkian world of the NFL – a team that has completely (and, thus far, successfully) adjusted its overall strategy to align with the strengths of its newest, most essential player.

Well, that’s not exactly it; after all, franchises often build around their best player to build a championship team. But what’s so noteworthy is that in order to support its new field general, the Denver Broncos are also ignoring decades of conventional wisdom about what a successful NFL quarterback looks like – and does.

To wit: look at the three top-ranked quarterbacks in the league – Aaron Rodgers, Tom Brady, and Drew Brees – and there’s a unanimity to their core competencies: a quick release and accurate delivery. Judged against this standard, Tebow might as well be playing flag football; his release is long, slow, and awkward, and he is painfully inaccurate (as evidenced by his 44.8% completion rate). Indeed, for the bulk of the games he has played thus far in his short career, you almost want to look away, so unusual is it to see a player at that position so clearly ill-equipped to do what NFL quarterbacks do most of the time: stand tall in the pocket, read the defense, and quickly deliver the ball into tight windows.

But then there are those other moments – like last night’s game-winning drive – when Tebow does what he does better than anyone: get outside the pocket, read the defense, react to what he sees, and run to the open space. He is a classic option quarterback – a skill-set of great value to many of the country’s most successful college programs, and of little interest to the NFL, where, conventional wisdom has it, the overall speed of the professional game, coupled with the excessive pounding a quarterback takes while running the option, make the offense a non-starter.

To be sure, there are other factors at play that make Tebow such a charismatic, polarizing figure – particularly his deep, public, evangelical faith. Purely from a sports perspective, however, what makes him so compelling is that, despite his seemingly fatal weaknesses as a player, he just. Keeps. Winning. (the Broncos were 1-4 when he became the starter; after last night’s upset victory, they are now an even 5-5 and within reach of the playoffs).

Of course, the bulk of the Tebow story has yet to be told, and the overwhelming likelihood remains that one of the league’s more archetypal quarterbacks will be the one to raise this year’s championship trophy. But for now, the education of Tim Tebow is also a chance for the rest of us to be reminded of some essential truths: that we must continually create spaces for new ways of seeing and understanding old systems; that we should always play to a person’s strengths, not their weaknesses; and that, sometimes, our institutions – and not the individuals who inhabit them – should be the ones to do the adjusting. As Williams College president Mark Hopkins advised one of his graduating classes, nearly two centuries ago (!), the mark of a true learning organization is “to regard the mind, not as a piece of iron to be laid upon the anvil and hammered into shape, nor as a block of marble in which we are to find the statue by removing the rubbish, or as a receptacle into which knowledge may be poured; but as a flame that is to be fed, as an active being that must be strengthened to think and to feel – and to dare, to do, and to suffer.”

Run Timmy, RUN!

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

Occupy Third Grade?

Posted on | by Sam | 5 Comments on Occupy Third Grade?

On a crisp fall morning in the nation’s capital, 3rd grade teacher Rebecca Lebowitz gathered her 29 public school students on their familiar giant multicolored carpet, and reminded them how to make sense of the characters whose worlds they would soon enter during independent reading time.

“What are the four things we want to look for when we meet a new character?” Ms. Lebowitz asked from her chair at the foot of the rug. Several hands shot up before nine-year-old Monica spoke confidently over the steady hum of the classroom’s antiquated radiator. “We want to pay attention to what they do, what they say, how they feel, and what their body language tells us.” “That’s right,” her teacher said cheerily. “When we look for those four things, we have a much better sense of who a person really is.”

As the calendar shifts to the eleventh month of 2011 – a year of near-constant revolution and upheaval, from the Arab Spring to the Wisconsin statehouse to the global effort to Occupy Wall Street – what might the rest of us learn from students like Monica? If, in short, we were as smart as a third-grader, what would we observe about the character of this year’s global protests, and what might we decide to do next?

1. It is not about “democracy” – As much as we glorify and value the principles and practices of our democratic system of government, it’s not democracy per se that is at the root of this unleashed global yearning. As New York Times columnist Tom Friedman recently pointed out, what motivated the protesters in Tahrir Square – and what most animates those who continue to brave the wintry weather in public squares around the world – is a deeper quest for what lies at the root of a genuinely democratic society: justice.

The people protesting around the world are not just looking to be seen; they’re demanding to be heard. And what they’re saying is that from Egypt to the United States, essential social contracts have been broken – contracts that require at least a modicum of fairness and balance. If anything, therefore, these movements are about highlighting an uncomfortable truth: merely having a democracy does not guarantee a just society, and the tendencies of democracy and capitalism, left untended, tend to flow in different directions.

2. It is about unsustainable social orders – Across the Middle East, citizens have been risking their lives for months to protest the injustice of their daily lives. And yet the absence of social justice is a cancer that has already spread well beyond the borders of the Arab world. According to a recent analysis of the 31 countries that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), nearly 11% of all people in OECD countries live in poverty. Worse still, 22% of American children are affected by poverty, yet the United States spends only 0.33% of its GDP on pre-primary education.

When these data are combined with other indicators like income inequality, access to health care, and the percentage of elderly citizens living in poverty, the United States gets a social justice rating that trails all but four of the OECD’s 31 countries. Add to that the now-well-known fact that the top 1% of Americans now control 40% of the total wealth, and you have an unsustainable social system, plain and simple. Clearly, people are angry, and they’re not going to take it anymore.

3. It does require a reboot of public education – History has shown us that to sustain a movement for transformational social change, anger is both necessary and insufficient. To sustain our energy, we are best fueled by an empathetic regard for the needs of others, not just our own. As Gandhi put it, “I discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one’s opponent but that he must be weaned from error by patience and compassion.”

If what we seek, then, is a more sustainable and just social order, how should we recalibrate our public schools – the institutions most responsible for equipping children with the skills and self-confidence they need to become effective and justice-oriented change agents as adults?

We might start by evaluating each other the same way Ms. Lebowitz’s students evaluate new characters in a book. To fulfill the egalitarian vision of 2011, children must grow up in learning environments that are sensitive not just to what they do and say, but also to how they feel and what their body language tells us about the larger world they inhabit. This, too, is a central insight of those who study systemic change. “We need to learn to attend to both dimensions simultaneously,” says M.I.T management professor Otto Scharmer. “What we say, see, and do (our visible realm), and the inner place from which we operate (the invisible realm, in which our sources of attention reside and from which they operate).”

Recent events have underscored just how essential it is to acknowledge our global interdependence; after all, it was the financial subterfuge of the few that affected the personal wellbeing of the many. That’s why a healthy democracy is more than just policies and practices – and a healthy school is more than just test scores and teacher policies. That’s why the American activists of tomorrow need more than just the occasional lesson about Gandhi or King; they need consistent opportunities to actively apply their own developing compassion for others in the service of creating a better world. And that’s why students like Monica need to grow up in a society willing to heed the rising voices of the protesters and recommit to our nation’s founding promise:  “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice.”

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

If the shoe doesn’t fit . . .

Posted on | by Sam

Thanks to the good people at GOOD, there’s a really interesting article about the power of social and emotional learning (SEL) – and it’s making me wonder what would happen if we stopped modifying the word “learning” so much and started thinking more holistically about what powerful learning really looks like, and requires.

In the article, Marc Brackett, a research scientist in Yale’s psychology department, recounts his own disaffected relationship with school as a child, and, knowing far too many children still feel the same way, “wants to do a complete emotional makeover of the nation’s schools.” What follows is a laundry list of ideas and approaches we would be wise to adopt: from integrating lessons in emotions into all subjects, to ensuring all teachers understand the skills, knowledge, and attitudes necessary for the emotional literacy of children. “You have to think about what motivates students to want to learn,” Brackett explains. “If you know how emotions drive attention, learning, memory, and decision making you know that integrating SEL is going to enhance those areas.”

Amen, I say. So why aren’t these sorts of practices more widely adopted?

Perhaps part of the answer is couched in the way Brackett describes the benefits themselves – as a valuable approach that must be integrated across the existing curriculum. If you’re a busy principal – and if you’re a principal, you’re busy – it’s hard to read that and not see the prospect of strengthening your school’s commitment to SEL as “one more thing.” Sure enough, I’ve heard many principals use that exact phrase when referencing the many different networks and organizations whose primary value proposition is couched as a modification of the word “learning.” Whether it’s civic-, service-, character-, or social-and-emotional-learning you’re after, it may be that the “just add us” strategy is its own worst enemy.

This is ironic since the latest brain-based research across a range of fields confirms each of the value propositions of these different networks. Powerful learning, we now know, is experiential, it’s relationship-driven, and it’s as much about helping us understand ourselves as it is about helping us make sense of the scientific method or learn to diagram a sentence.  Yet even well-intentioned articles like this one point to “substantial data indicating that SEL raises test scores,” reflecting an ongoing perception that the only way you can make traction for your program is to speak the language of the system, and thereby leaving unchallenged and unnamed the anachronistic practices and policies of the Industrial era – in which the primary needs were to batch and queue unprecedented numbers of children through the system and prepare them for a more certain set of expectations and opportunities than today’s students can expect.

So what if we stopped seeking to integrate these seemingly separate approaches into the existing structure of schools, and started insisting instead on a wholesale reboot of schooling itself? In the former, overworked principals will continue to feel the need to choose between individual programs (“are we a civic-minded or a character-driven school?”), and we’ll continue to break up the core components of a transformational learning environment into different projects, programs, and campaigns. In the latter, we will challenge ourselves to align our practices and policies with the latest knowledge about how people learn, and the latest understanding about which skills and competencies are most essential for young people in order to be successful global citizens.

I vote choice B.

E Pluribus Pluribus: Is Differentiated Instruction Possible?

Posted on | by Sam | 11 Comments on E Pluribus Pluribus: Is Differentiated Instruction Possible?

It’s not even Noon, and nine-year-old Harvey is already back on the floor.

His three tablemates, their efforts at independent reading on hold, watch and wait for Ms. Serber to arrive and restore order. Harvey’s pear-shaped body writhes on the floor, animated by neither malice nor mischief. He chews absent-mindedly on his silver necklace and gazes at the ceiling until she arrives.

“Let’s get up and get back into it,” Ms. Serber implores, her hand gently rubbing his back to coax him up to the table. After a few minutes, Harvey picks his book back up, and Ms. Serber resumes scanning the faces of her other twenty-eight 3rd graders to assess their needs. Mid-morning light cuts across her eighty-year-old classroom from the large windows that line the west wall, casting strips of shadow on the homemade plates to which each child attaches a clothespin to register his or her daily mood: sad, angry, worried, frustrated, frightened, excited, bored, happy. This morning – most mornings – most pins clasp the same plate: sleepy.

Nearby, a reed-thin boy named Elliott keeps working. Pale and quiet, his hair still bearing the shape of last night’s sleep, Elliott is an avid reader; this summer alone, he finished more than twenty books, from The Hobbit to The Trumpet of the Swan. Ms. Serber observes him working quietly, and then transfers her attention to a different table where her presence is more sorely needed.

Elliott’s reading list is among the many things displayed proudly on the back wall of room 121, where each student has identified what he or she hopes to learn about in third grade. Some of the preferences are predictable: Harvey, for example, wants to “lrn abto sharks”; others wish “to learn about weather systems,” or “go to the Baltimore museum and see the dolfin show.”  Taken together, the children’s goals reflect just how varied their levels of engagement and readiness are. One student outlines an admirable goal with nearly unintelligible spelling: “I hope to lun to slpel wrs because a m ging to go te colejig.” Another merely outlines something unintelligible. “Matlattrusala is big. You like Matlatirusla.”

At 12:30pm, Serber and her co-teacher, Ms. Creagh – whose shared first name has led them to be known as “The Two Sarahs” – get their first break in five hours. In that time, they’ve taught the students about reading the date and time; reading content for mood and rhythm; differentiating between fiction and non-fiction; writing reflectively and creatively; sounding out phonics; practicing addition and subtraction; and solving mathematical word problems. As their students head for the lunchroom and descend the school’s weathered marble stairs in a winding line of spasmodic energy, their teachers take their first bathroom break, unpack their homemade lunches, and use the quiet time to fine-tune their afternoon lessons.

A few miles away, at a different school, Cassie Hurst is contemplating her own classroom’s eclectic set of needs. A first-year kindergarten teacher in a first-year charter school, Cassie is tall, slender and kinetic. When she speaks, whether it’s to a five-year-old or an adult, she uses her long limbs expressively – and often – to animate her words. Her intelligent eyes jump out from behind her black Jill Stuart glasses.

The school year is barely a month old, yet Cassie already feels energized professionally – and exhausted personally. “I think we’re doing a really good job of reaching different kids and differentiating our instruction,” she explained on a sunny October afternoon. “At the same time, I’m worn out. I hadn’t expected to feel this strained this early in the year. But I’m with my kids every day from 8:30 to 3:30, without any breaks; that’s a long time to be “on” every day. And the needs of my kids are so varied. For example, a lot of our students came to us from the same play-based preschool; they are the sweetest boys, but they didn’t spend a lot of time on academics so they don’t know their letters at all. Then there are other kids who bring with them such complicated family and emotional issues. We assess everyone every four weeks to make sure we’re keeping track of their progress, and we’re grouping kids by ability in different “learning teams” within each classroom – but even within those groups, the highest-achieving kids have such different strengths and weaknesses, and for so many reasons, and the same is true for the lowest-achieving ones. It’s a lot, and it’s a constant challenge, and I work in a team of three. Thinking about trying to do that work on my own gives me chills at night. I just don’t think it would be possible.”

*  *  *

Is it possible? Can one, two or even three teachers in a classroom of twenty to thirty children not just diagnose the needs of each child, but also meet those needs, consistently and measurably?

In theory, such a goal has always directed America’s efforts to improve its public schools; after all, the first major federal legislation affecting public education was part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s equity-oriented “War on Poverty.” But the goal was never explicitly stated – and incentivized – until 2002, when the 107th U.S. Congress rechristened Johnson’s legislation as the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, and President George W. Bush heralded the dawn of “a new time in public education in our country.  As of this hour,” he said, just before signing the bill at a public high school in Ohio, “America’s schools will be on a new path of reform, and a new path of results.”

Under Bush’s new path, schools receiving federal funding were now required to annually test every child in certain grades in both reading and math. The students’ scores would be broken down and reported by subgroups – both as a way to highlight the progress of historically under-served groups of children, and to ensure that no single group’s performance could be concealed amidst a single, all-encompassing number. “The story of children being just shuffled through the system is one of the saddest stories of America,” said Bush. “The first step to making sure that a child is not shuffled through is to test that child as to whether or not he or she can read and write, or add and subtract . . . We need to know whether or not children have got the basic education . . . And now it’s up to you, the local citizens of our great land, the compassionate, decent citizens of America, to stand up and demand high standards, and to demand that no child – not one single child in America – is left behind.”

A decade after its passage, President Barack Obama and members of the 112th Congress were aggressively pursuing a re-write of NCLB before the end of the year – and opinions remained split about whether it had been more helpful or hurtful to American schools. On one side, critics decry that the bill’s narrow focus on reading and math scores has had the unintended effects of squeezing other subjects out of the curriculum, and stifling the creative capacity of teachers to engage their kids in different ways. On the other side, advocates celebrate the ways NCLB has forced America to publicly confront just how poorly some students have been served in the past. No Child Left Behind shone a data-drenched light on the actual academic differences between kids, they argue, and sunshine is a powerful disinfectant with the potential to highlight the most necessary reforms.

Across the same general time frame, an equally seismic policy shift had occurred: the virtual disappearance of “tracking” – or the process of assigning students to classes based on categorizations of their perceived academic potential. In its place, today’s teachers are increasingly expected to “differentiate” their lessons – and not merely to each class, but to each child, every day, all year.

By the start of the 2011-2012 school year, this constellation of forces – the dawn of high-stakes testing, the death of tracking, and the desirability of differentiated instruction – had resulted in a perfect storm of reform that had dramatically recast the daily experiences and expectations of teachers like Cassie and the Two Sarahs. And once again, education experts remained split over whether the forces at play were ultimately for the better.

“We are shortchanging America’s brightest students,” argues education scholar Frederick Hess, “and we’re doing it reflexively and furtively. A big part of the problem is our desire to duck hard choices when it comes to kids and schooling. Differentiated instruction — the notion that any teacher can simultaneously instruct children of wildly different levels of ability in a single classroom — is appealing precisely because it seemingly allows us to avoid having to decide where to focus finite time, energy and resources. Truth is, few teachers have the extraordinary skill and stamina to constantly fine-tune instruction to the needs of 20- or 30-odd students, six hours a day, 180 days a year. What happens instead is that teachers tend to focus on the middle of the pack. Or, more typically of late, on the least proficient students.

“Focusing on the neediest students, even at the expense of their peers, is not unreasonable,” Hess explains. “After all, we can’t do everything. But self-interest and a proper respect for all children demand that we wrestle with such decisions and pay more than lip service to the needs of advanced students.”

Carol Ann Tomlinson, a nationally-known expert on issues of differentiation, defines the core issue differently: “Is the primary goal a separate room for students with particular needs, or should our primary goal be high-quality learning experiences wherever a student is taught? The range of students in schools indicates the need for a range of services. Since most students have always received most of their instruction in general education classrooms, it’s quite important that differentiation in that setting be robust. There are some very bright students whose academic needs are quite well addressed in some “regular” classrooms, some who require extended instruction in a specific subject, some whose need for challenge suggests specialized instruction in all content areas — perhaps even outside the student’s school. Effective differentiation would serve the student in each of those situations.”

*  *  *

Of course, there are theoretical conversations about school reform that take place at 30,000 feet. And then there’s the daily reality teachers must experience and negotiate on the ground.

One afternoon after school, over the din of the few remaining students’ voices still bouncing off the room’s ten-foot-high brick walls, the Two Sarahs pause to reflect on the question, and their work.

Sarah Serber speaks first. Her face is expressive and illustrative – the sort of visage her students rely on to gauge how she feels at any given time. Small and compact, Serber has the gait of a gymnast, more powerful than delicate: one imagines her approaching a pommel horse like the young Mary Lou Retton – focused, confident, fearless. “I don’t think it would be possible for me not to teach in this way,” she says. “Before, in my first and second years of teaching, I did a lot more whole-group lessons, and although they took less time to plan, they ended up taking much more total time because of all the follow-up work I had to do with different kids. So I’ve adjusted my own sense of where my time is best invested. And now we know that those late nights of breaking down not just the different activities, but also the different goals for the different students within each activity, is the only way we can realistically do our job.”

Sarah Creagh agrees. Tall and blonde and in her fifth year of teaching, Creagh has a quieter, softer air about her. She also shares her co-teacher’s passion about both her decision to teach in a public school, and her conviction that it’s possible, even in a class as big as theirs, to identify and meet every child’s needs.  “I feel a social justice calling in this work – or, maybe that’s too corny, but I feel very personally a need to contribute to our larger commitment to equity and equality.”

Creagh’s own conversion occurred one summer, when, after graduating from college with a major in psychology and women’s studies, she followed her parents to DC and haphazardly got a job with a reading research company. Up to that point, Creagh had never seriously considered teaching. “But then I found myself working intensively with children who simply could not read, and watching them make phenomenal progress. It was amazing to see that power – and it occurred to me that the real place this needed to be happening was not in some summer program, but in their full-time, yearlong classroom, day in and day out.”

After their last remaining students exit the school’s red front doors to head home down different leafy streets, past houses and housing projects, the Sarahs spend the last minutes of their work day examining the latest iteration of the DCPS report card to assess which standards they will address before the first quarter comes to a close.

The form reflects the efforts of city administrators to provide greater clarity about what all students are expected to learn. Most of the standards are in the two tested subjects – reading and math – but other categories exist for science, social studies, music, art, health, and work habits. To review their efforts, Creagh and Serber check the standards they have addressed thus far, from “comparing and recognizing that plants and animals have predictable life cycles” to “speaking in complete sentences when appropriate to task and situation.”

Another section of the report card addresses “personal and social development” – fitting, since on most days it’s this sort of attention most 3rd graders most acutely need.  Of the section’s five benchmarks, four place a value on children following the rules; the other is about self-regulating emotions and behavior. It’s ironic, since even a casual visitor to room 121 would quickly see that in order for Serber and Creagh to create the sort of environment that can support the desired intellectual growth of their students, they must first construct a complex web of interpersonal trust, expectations, and empathy.

What would happen if such skills were weighted equally, and identified more specifically? Would teachers’ daily efforts at differentiating their instruction become more or less difficult?

The next morning, Harvey enters the classroom, hangs up his jacket, and sits down at his table to eat the breakfast provided by his city to its schoolchildren – an egg burrito, banana, and milk. He finishes, lumbers up to a visitor stationed near the back wall of the room, and points to his personal goals for the year, which feature a colorful drawing of the sharks he hopes to study. “That’s my name there!” he reports excitedly. Moments later, Ms. Creagh asks the class to help clean up the trash from breakfast. Harvey returns to his seat, and resumes gazing out the large windows in front of him.

It’s a new day.

New Rules for School Reform

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on New Rules for School Reform

You know there’s a dearth of creative thinking in education when an article trumpeting cutting-edge teaching quotes somebody, without irony, saying the following:

“Get a computer, please! Log on . . . and go to your textbook.”

Yet that’s what the Washington Post did this morning – and they’re not alone. Despite ubiquitous calls for innovation and paradigm shifts, most would-be reformers are little more than well-intentioned people perfecting our ability to succeed in a system that no longer serves our interests.

Compounding the problem, even the best new ideas face a minefield of the same old obstacles that, left unaddressed, will lead to nothing new. For example, there’s a growing push to make homework more passive (i.e., watching a lecture at home, something that in the past would have taken up a class period), so that the school day can become more active (i.e., venturing outside to leverage community resources, something that in the past would have required a field trip). Yet the early-adopter schools are finding a familiar nemesis – inflexible definitions of “seat-time”, and strict requirements associated with course credits that inhibit teachers from letting different kids proceed at different paces and in different ways. They are, in short, the intractable rules of the Industrial Era, which was about standardization and scale, being applied to the flexible needs of the Democratic Era, which is about individualization and customization.

Instead of installing Smart Boards, and then using them as Blackboards, how can we think more imaginatively about the opportunities and obstacles in our field?

In the spirit of Bill Maher, I’d like to suggest three “new rules”:

1. Name your non-negotiables – I’m not expecting everyone to agree on these, but we should at least be clear as individuals about what our efforts are designed to accomplish. For example, do you think 3rd and 8th grade reading and math scores are a sufficient metric, by themselves, for evaluating whether or not schools and teachers are successful? If so, fire away with any and every study that supports your claim. But if not, stop cherry-picking the studies that benefit your argument (i.e., “schools that add art classes show a XX% rise in achievement.”) Either these tests are a valid stand-alone metric or they aren’t. Decide what you believe, and be consistent.

2. Begin with the end in mind – Thanks to Stephen Covey, this mantra has been with us for a while now. Yet I rarely encounter schools or school reformers that clearly understand what they’re looking for, and why it’s different in a transformational way. If we let current policies answer this question for us, we’re back to test scores; after all, nothing else matters in an era of high-stakes accountability. But what if we seek a more balanced learning environment, and a more balanced set of skills and competencies in young people? What would we need to do in order to bring that environment about, and how would we know if we were successful?

This goes beyond merely a new organizational mission statement – although for many places that would be a good start. Instead, it gets to the core questions we as a field must grapple with: What should be the primary context for learning – the classroom, the school, or the larger community? Will our goals be evaluated by test results, by curricular goals, or by individual learner aspirations? And does the responsibility for learning rest primarily with the student, the teacher, or a learning team that includes both?

Until we ask and answer these questions, both as a field and as individuals seeking to contribute something meaningful, the structural dysfunctions of the Industrial model we’ve worked within for nearly a century will remain invisible to us, and we’ll do things like get rid of textbooks  . . . so students can read them online. Or renovate old schools  . . . without also asking what new schools should look like. Or celebrate our increased efficiency in the old system . . . rather than create a truly disruptive new set of values and models.

At least one organization has clearly thought this through – check out the QED Foundation’s change model, in which they break out the primary components of a learning environment and then characterize reforms in each area as traditional, transitional, or transformational. QED has decided it will commit no less than 80% of its efforts in the transformational space. What have the rest of us decided? Have we even though our work through to this degree?

3. Stop waiting for the planets to align– Too many educators feel as though the current test-obsessed system has been imposed upon us. This has led too many of us to spend too much time complaining about what’s wrong, and not enough time actively amplifying what’s right. We are all complicit in the current system, and we all have a responsibility to change it for the better.

So if you’re a teacher or a principal, what are you waiting for? Be more proactive in demonstrating a better way to equip young people with the skills and self-confidence they need to be successful in school and in life – and show us how you did it. Band together with others to generate your own sense of political cover if the current policy environment continues to hinder your capacity to create a balanced, healthy learning environment. And define, and then maintain fidelity to, your own non-negotiables and end-goals.

In the end, transformational change really is that simple – and that difficult.

(This article also appeared in the Washington Post.)

Mission Accomplished? What the U.S. Can Learn from China

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on Mission Accomplished? What the U.S. Can Learn from China

I just returned from my first visit to China in 15 years, and I still can’t get over how aligned the Middle Kingdom remains around its core “mission statement” – and how misaligned we remain in the United States.

In China, the mission that directs the priorities of its private, public and social sectors is the one first laid out by former premier Deng Xiaoping back in 1984 – “building socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Deng’s vision was an unlikely pairing – on one hand, robust financial freedoms and a willingness to welcome foreign economic influences (like McDonald’s and Microsoft); on the other, sharply circumscribed social freedoms and a determination to forbid foreign cultural influences (like Facebook and Twitter).

Back in 1994, when I taught at a university in Beijing, this shared purpose was already well ingrained: the schools existed to instill a dialectical pair of aspirations in young people: the homogeneity of ideas, and the heterogeneity of the marketplace.

Regardless of how one feels about its mission, China’s ability to align the myriad aspects of its society around such a clearly defined goal is a major contributor to its current position as an ascendant power. And not surprisingly, this sort of clarity is characteristic of other global success stories. Take Finland – just thirty years ago a Soviet backwater, and now, after steadily following through on a thoughtful 20-year vision of reform, the unquestioned home of the world’s best schools.

When I look at countries like China and Finland, I see more starkly the misalignment between America’s historic vision as a nation and the current mission of its public schools. Ask anyone to describe the former, and you’ll hear slight variations on the same foundational theme: E Pluribus Unum – Out of many, one. Ask folks to describe the latter, and you’ll hear everything under the sun.

To some degree, mission misalignment is to be expected in a country of 50 states, 15,000 school districts, one overarching federal policy, and a chaotic, inchoate marketplace of reforms du jour. Yet if we take federal policy as our guide, the central mission of public education since 2000 has actually been quite clear: to eliminate the achievement gap between white students and students of color.

Will such a mission help America move closer to its larger vision of an equitable democratic society? In theory, definitely. And yet in a new article for National Affairs, education policy expert Rick Hess carefully chronicles how our decade-long obsession with the achievement gap, and our willingness to evaluate that gap based on a single metric – basic skills standardized test scores in reading and math – “has led to education policy that has shortchanged many children. It has narrowed the scope of schooling. It has hollowed out public support for school reform. It has stifled educational innovation. And it has distorted the way we approach educational choice, accountability, and reform.”

Unquestionably, these efforts have crippled our collective capacity to enact a shared mission for the public schools that is aligned with our shared vision for the public good. We all know we need schools that help children become more confident and creative – and yet we overvalue a small subset of academic skills to the detriment of all other forms of learning. We all know we need schools that nurture the needs of all children – and yet we pursue policies that prioritize the needs of some children more than others. And we know we need schools that pledge fidelity to the same overarching mission and fulfill that mission in myriad ways – and yet we impose stifling evaluative controls that hinder the ability of educators to make real-time decisions about how best to engage and inspire the children under their care.

The good news, I believe, is that we have reached the point in our history where the pendulum’s motion is about to swing back. A growing chorus of unlikely allies, from a wide range of perspectives, is saying ENOUGH – it’s time to restore our collective focus on the intellectual, emotional and vocational needs of children, and it’s time to align the overarching vision of our society with the shared mission of our public schools.

How do we get there? I propose a simple starting point: Since the main factor hindering our efforts is the ongoing exclusive emphasis on reading and math scores – and since the fecklessness of our elected officials suggests it may take a while before we see any serious revisions to federal education policy – let’s invite schools and communities across the country to do two things: opt out of the current system and its myopic metrics of success, and opt in to an open network of innovators that all pledge to find – and share – a better way of evaluating their capacity to equip young people to fulfill our shared vision as a nation? The goal would be twofold: to free schools from feeling like they can’t be innovative; and then, by doing so, to challenge ourselves to proactively chart a better way forward.

I say it’s time for the United States to align itself more proactively around the vision that has animated our history and inspired the world. So who’s in? And what simple structures would such a movement need in order to be effective, inspiring, and mission-driven?

Is School Renovation The Change We Seek?

Posted on | by Sam | 5 Comments on Is School Renovation The Change We Seek?

OK, I realize I’m late to the game – I was in China last week when President Obama first outlined his jobs proposal to a joint session of Congress. But I’m back now, and I just read it, and as I look at it I’m wondering if anyone else has made a simple observation about his idea to renovate America’s crumbling public school buildings:

Is this really the change we seek?

Don’t get me wrong – scores of schools need renovating, and lots of people need jobs, so anything that tackles both of those issues must have some merit. And yet it’s odd that, at a time when we’re all in search of the best ways to transition from the Industrial-Age model of schooling to an as-yet unnamed future vision (the Democratic-Age model, anyone?), we would choose to double down on the use of buildings that were designed to accommodate the needs of a bygone era.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since I’ll be spending the 2011-2012 school year observing three different schools — district, charter, and private — here in DC. The traditional neighborhood public school is housed in a traditional American school building – first constructed in 1924. By contrast, the brand new charter school is located in a brand new office building.

At first blush, you’d think the neighborhood school would have all the advantages when it comes to its use of physical space, and its capacity to think creatively about how to create the optimal learning environment for children. And, to be sure, the building – large, airy, and complete with playgrounds, art rooms and science labs – does afford certain privileges and conveniences (the children at the charter school, for example, must traverse a busy street in downtown DC just to reach an outside playground). But as I watched the staff of the new charter school use the final weeks of August to transform an otherwise nondescript office floor into an engaging and attractive learning space, I realized that the absence of a traditional building was also liberating, and, ironically, providing the space for people to think more innovatively about what a school actually needs to look like.

This point has been made before. As Rick Hess notes in The Same Thing Over and Over, “If the schools erected over centuries past were a road map for the system of schooling that we want, the strategy of walking the same path faster and more energetically would have much to commend it. But our schools do not provide that road map. They were never intended to take us where we desire to go. Our schools are not a solid foundation for twenty-first century schooling but a rickety structure that wobbles under the weight of each new addition.”

I agree with Mr. Obama when he asks rhetorically: “How can we expect our kids to do their best in places that are literally falling apart?  This is America.  Every child deserves a great school – and we can give it to them, if we act now. “ I also think it makes sense to make needed repairs. But as we do so, we would be wise to be more intentional in thinking about what the school buildings of tomorrow will need to look like – and not look like – and Mr. Obama would be wise to lead us in that process, else we move ahead blindly to renovate a sea of rickety structures that will do little more than provide cover for our ongoing efforts to succeed in a system that no longer serves our interests.

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

What Plato Would Think of School Choice

Posted on | by Sam | 3 Comments on What Plato Would Think of School Choice

“But how, exactly, will they be reared and educated by us? And does our considering this contribute anything to our goal of discerning that for the sake of which we are considering all these things – in what way justice and injustice come into being in a city.”

— Plato, The Republic

Heard the bass ride out like an ancient mating call, I can’t take it y’all, I can feel the city breathin’, Chest heavin’, against the flesh of the evening, Sigh before we die like the last train leaving.

—Black Star, Respiration

What characterizes the ideal city – and the cities in which we live? How accurately does the health of a city reflect the quality of its plan for educating its youngest citizens? And does the push towards greater school choice get us closer to, or farther from, that ideal?

I’ve been thinking about those questions a lot since reading a column by George Will in last weekend’s Washington Post. In it he references two U.S. Supreme Court opinions in which the Court affirmed the constitutional right of parents “to direct the … education of children under their control.” As a student of the 14th Amendment, I sought the opinions out. What struck me had less to do with the legal arguments, however, and more to do with an excerpt in one of the opinions from Plato’s Republic, arguably the most famous political work of all time, and a work squarely concerned with the role a city – and, by extension, its education system – must play in helping all people develop their fullest potential.

The Republic is about decay as much as it is about rebirth. Socrates is visiting Athens during a period of decline (Plato, it’s worth noting, is not exactly a fan of democracy). While there, Socrates falls into conversation with a number of other men, who then co-construct a vision of the ideal city, and, by extension, the ideal state of humanity.

If you’ve never read The Republic (I hadn’t until this week), you may be surprised by how radical the vision really is. To wit, the section in which he explains the structure of schooling is the one Justice James McReynolds chose to cite in his 1923 opinion for Meyer v. Nebraska:

“That the wives of our guardians are to be common, and their children are to be common, and no parent is to know his own child, nor any child his parent. … The proper officers will take the offspring of the good parents to the pen or fold, and there they will deposit them with certain nurses who dwell in a separate quarter; but the offspring of the inferior, or of the better when they chance to be deformed, will be put away in some mysterious, unknown place, as they should be.”

“The desire of the Legislature to foster a homogeneous people with American ideals prepared readily to understand current discussions of civic matters is easy to appreciate,” McReynolds wrote, referencing a 1919 law that had outlawed the teaching of any subject to any person in any language other than English. “But the means adopted, we think, exceed the limitations upon the power of the state and conflict with [the] rights” of both teachers and parents.

Fair enough. After all, such a law seems to be a clear case of legislative overreach. But excepting its own forms of overreach (raise your hands, for example, if you’re willing to give up your children at birth so they can be raised in a common pen, or if you believe America should be recast as a communist country), in what ways can The Republic help illuminate the core opportunities – and pitfalls – of the greater push towards school choice?

On one level, The Republic seems to suggest that the very notion of choice is what ultimately undoes a community. “Have we any greater evil for a city,” says Socrates, “than what splits it and makes it many instead of one? Or a greater good than what binds it together and makes it one?” Seen in this light, the increasing balkanization of public education is merely the latest vehicle for pitting the motivations and self-interests of individuals and families against each other.  Socrates seems to confirm this notion later, when he suggests that “in founding the city we are not looking for the exceptional happiness of any one group among us but, as far as possible, that of the city as a whole.”

OK, so choice bad, no choice good. Right?

Not so fast. Although Plato would clearly take issue with the individualistic nature of our modern society, and perhaps too with our decision to make public education even more heterogeneous than it was before, he also believes that the highest calling of each person is to be “a seeker and student of that study by which he might be able to learn and find out who will give him the capacity and the knowledge to distinguish the good and the bad life, and so everywhere and always to choose the better from among those that are possible. . . From all this he will be able to draw a conclusion and choose – in looking off toward the nature of the soul – between the worse and the better life, calling worse the one that leads it toward becoming more unjust, and better the one that leads it to becoming juster. He will let everything else go. For we have seen that this is the most important choice for him in life and death.”

When I look at the current landscape of school choice in DC (a landscape I’ll be exploring in great detail this year as I follow the fortunes of three area schools – district, charter and private), I wonder how we can learn from Plato’s caution and heed his advice. Will greater school choice be a means toward helping more children and families “choose between the worse and the better life,” while also furthering our capacity as a city to live “free from faction”? Is this even possible? Or is our shared fidelity to the twin pillars of democracy and capitalism such that a vision of greater equity and spiritual fulfillment is merely illusory, and as misleading as the shadows of the puppets that dance on the wall of Plato’s allegorical cave?

In part, Plato’s allegory is a way for Socrates to make another key point: “education is not what the professions of certain men assert it to be. They presumably assert that they put into the soul knowledge that isn’t in it, as though they were putting sight into blind eyes.”

Plato’s larger point here is that we delude ourselves into thinking we understand the nature of things, when in fact all we are doing is constructing a false sense of the world and calling it real (as theoretical physicist David Bohm once said, “Thought makes the world and then says, ‘I didn’t do it.’”). For those of us trying to improve schools, I think the analogy is also an appropriate condemnation of the current system of schooling we have – a system that was designed to meet the needs of the Industrial Age that was, not the Democratic Age that will be.

So, now that the school choice genie has been released from the bottle, I ask you: In what ways can it engender more schools capable of giving more people the skills and self-confidence they need to become active, visible contributors to the public good – a public good that, amidst the din of the ongoing battle between our intermixed democratic and capitalistic ideals, still seeks to fulfill our founding spirit of E Pluribus Unum – out of many, one?