Tag: charter schools

Across the Country, a New Type of Partnership Between Charters and Districts Emerges  

Posted on | by Sam

Increasingly, I’m hearing a question that drives me crazy: “Are you for or against charter schools?”

There can only be one legitimate answer to that question: It depends.

Are you speaking of the situation in Michigan, in which four out of five charter school operators are for-profit entities? Or the overall tendency for charters to be even more segregated than their public school neighbors? Or the reluctance by some charter leaders to hold themselves to the same standards of transparency and openness as traditional public schools?

If so, thumbs down.

But if you’re talking about places like Baltimore, where all charter school teachers are unionized (and the charters themselves are almost all locally conceived and teacher-led), or if you’re pointing to the growing movement among some charters to intentionally enroll and serve integrated student bodies – by way of the National Coalition of Diverse Charter Schools – the picture takes a very different shape.

And then there’s what’s happening with Summit Basecamp – a new sort of partnership between charters and traditional public schools that may very well offer the best evidence so far of what Al Shanker first called for back in 1988, when he imagined a new kind of school in which teachers could experiment with different ways of reaching students, and then inject that wisdom back throughout the public school system.

That’s what Diane Tavenner has done at Summit Public Schools, a successful network of charter schools in California and Washington that represent the bleeding edge of innovative approaches to personalized learning.

Unlike other models – I’m looking at you, Rocketship – whose efforts to leverage technology seem to be more concerned with creating magic in the balance sheet than in the classroom – Summit Schools have created scores of “playlists” that let students navigate their own pace and path through content knowledge, in order to free up more time for project-based learning, mentoring, and community-based work.

As a result, Summit Schools are besieged with visitors from around the world, all of them eager to see how technology can be used in ways that augment, not replace, the foundational social and emotional bonds between teachers and students.

And yet, as exciting as the attention has been, Tavenner felt it wasn’t going to allow her to fulfill her school’s overarching mission, so she sought out a transformative partnership with Facebook, whose engineers have helped her perfect the digital learning platform that allows Summit’s personalized learning system to function. And then she made that platform available for free, open source, to anyone who thought it would be useful to them.

You read that right. She perfected a product that could be worth millions – perhaps even billions – of dollars. And then she gave it away.

Still, Tavenner and her team realized that merely making the tool open source wasn’t optimal educationally. Surely, there must be schools and communities out there who would benefit from integrating the platform into their schools as a cohort, and continually learning from one another about how to get better at shifting to a different way of thinking about school – one that requires the kids, not their teachers, to be the hardest workers in the room.

From that idea, the Summit Basecamp project was born – a nascent, growing network of nineteen schools (across ten states) who are working to adapt Summit’s Personalized Learning Platform, or PLP, to their own needs and norms.

Two of those schools are located near where I live in Washington, D.C., so I set out to visit both of them – Truesdell Education Campus and Columbia Heights Educational Campus, or CHEC – and see what all the fuss was about.

What I wondered was this: Is it possible that a charter school 3,000 miles away can exert a positive influence on the growth of a neighborhood school just a short walk from my home? Or is the reality of this transcontinental game of Telephone such that most of what makes a school special will get lost in translation somewhere along the way?

***

Truesdell and CHEC offer good test cases for the Basecamp idea, albeit for different reasons.

CHEC is located on a busy corner of one of D.C’s most racially and socioeconomically diverse neighborhoods. Its students, who are overwhelmingly poor, Black and Brown, mulled about in their school uniforms the morning I visited, awaiting the start of the school day, while white-collar professionals passed hurriedly by on their way to the nearby subway.

When you enter the building, you must first pass through metal detectors that are staffed by a uniformed school resource officer. The halls of the school are wide and deep, evoking memories of an archetypal American public school. And while the 6th and 7th graders can still expect a rather traditional school day here – 65-minute classes, one after the other, divided by subject – for the 8th graders, Basecamp has meant the beginning of a very different school experience.

The day begins with individual goal setting – each student must establish daily and weekly learning goals, as well as a long-term aspirational goal (i.e., “to be the first in my family to go to college”) to which their daily decisions are pegged. It includes consistent time with an adult mentor. And it is anchored by personal learning time during which students must self-direct themselves through a series of content-specific playlists; and by group project time, during which kids and teachers can directly engage in more hands-on work together.

“The key,” Tukeva explained to me as we wandered CHEC’s cavernous halls, “is to target the kids who are not ‘buying what we’re selling’ in the old model. We have a lot of kids who are already thriving, but we also have a lot of kids who need different ways to get them engaged.

“Overall, this project represents a pretty intense jump for us. Before we signed up for Basecamp, we weren’t a 1-to-1 school; now, every student has his or her own computer. That’s a big jump. Before Basecamp, we didn’t have an integrated digital platform, so that’s a really big jump, too. We’d also never allocated time before for a mentor to work with each student intensively. So all of these steps are making our approach to personalized teaching and learning more comprehensive – it’s taking the different pieces we’d been working on and making them all more integrated.”

It’s true – it’s a big jump – and yet CHEC has also been piloting new approaches to teaching and learning for years. Consequently, it had already established an internal culture of experimentation. “We’ve been piloting different things for a while now,” she added, “so this doesn’t feel as foreign as it might in a different school. Our entire 8th grade team went out to Summit together this summer, where they worked as a team for two weeks. And so far, our kids are really liking both the technology and the increased levels of freedom.”

In that sense, early returns suggest that for a school like CHEC, which was already well on its way to becoming more student-centered and tech-savvy, a project like Basecamp is an effective accelerator. “We’ve had some small technological glitches,” she added, “and we have a much more bilingual population than Summit, so we have dual language needs they don’t which has forced us to do a lot of translating. But mostly it’s enabled us to go farther faster, because we can take everything that Summit has already done – from their playlists to their insights about how best to use the PLP – and modify it to our own purposes.”

By contrast, at Truesdell, Basecamp provided the impetus to start from scratch. “We’ve had crazy turnover here,” said Adam Zimmerman, a former classroom teacher at Truesdell and the school’s first-ever Director of Operations, Culture & Innovation. “But there’s a group of us that all arrived together about four years ago and feel some real continuity with one another and a desire to build something together. We’re all trying to find ways to keep growing as professionals. We also knew that if we just kept doing what we’d been doing, we weren’t ever going to effectively reach every kid. So we said, let’s bring in something that’s exciting that we can all get behind as a team. Basecamp is a retention tool for our teachers as much as a new learning strategy for our kids.”

I saw evidence of Truesdell’s upstart energy everywhere. One class I visited had been looking at injustice in the U.S. After spending a few weeks exploring topics together – police brutality, wealth inequality, etc. – they were able to choose their own for a culminating project. And as their teacher, Leah Myers, explained to me, “They’re allowed to decide if they want to work alone or in groups. The project is a public awareness campaign – either on social media, or in the local community – which they’re going to have to track the success of and then present a civic action project based on their findings.”

I asked Adam what was most exciting and most challenging about this new way of thinking about school – whereas, for example, organizing student projects had happened at Truesdell before, providing intense mentoring and unleashing kids to be the lead drivers of their own content acquisition had not. “It’s a new set of muscles we’re all trying to develop,” he explained. “Many of the teachers you’re seeing here were rated ‘Highly Effective’ before we ever brought Basecamp into the picture. That’s an important title to have in D.C. So how do you get teachers working towards something totally new and not merely reverting to what has worked best in the past whenever it gets challenging? We’re still figuring that part out.”

To be sure, both campuses still have plenty to figure out. Giving kids more freedom and authority over their own learning sounds great; but if what you’re giving them authority over is still not that interesting to them, there are limits. In one class, for example, I spoke to a group of students who were working on a project around percentages and figuring out how much a product might have been marked up.

“So you guys are using these rubrics all the time now to evaluate yourselves, huh?” I asked them.

“Yeah.”

“Is it better than what you did before, or worse, or do you not really care?”

“We don’t care,” they replied flatly.

Fair enough.

Yet for every exchange like that, there were ones like the kind I had with Diana, Leslie and Dania, three eighth graders who had decided to work together on a campaign about xenophobia.

I asked them what they thought about the new approach to learning. “It’s our choice now if we want to work together or alone,” Diana offered, a slight smile of embarrassment breaking across her face as she spoke. “It doesn’t really feel the same because last year we were used to having the teacher stand up and teach us but now we have this new program so we’re using the computer a lot. It’s hard, but I get to do it at my own pace so I can learn it more better and if I don’t understand it I can go over it again and I don’t get frustrated if other people are ahead of or behind me.”

Leslie nodded her head in agreement. “It just changes the way we interact with the teacher,” she explained in halting English. “Now she don’t stands up there teaching the whole class about migration. Now everybody’s doing different things and so she walks around answering questions. It’s given us more freedom. When a teacher stands up there she sometimes moves too fast and we’re behind. But now we can go at our own pace.”

Before I left, I spoke to another student – a young man named Kyree – who Zimmerman said embodied the potential of what schools like Summit, CHEC and Truesdell were trying to bring about. Kyree had been a Truesdell student, and then left – the result of instability at home – only to return after a rocky, violent tenure at another school. He spoke with a slow deliberateness, his eyes focused both squarely on me and on a distant horizon in which he was actively imagining the possibilities of his own future.

“I have a strain to be perfect at everything I do,” he began, “but sometimes it doesn’t actually come out to be what I want it to be. So I just strive to do more than usual, and do better the next time.

“I like this school better than my last one. At my old school, there wasn’t much learning or motivation to learn. But this school helps me learn faster than usual – I can go beyond the class or if I need to catch up I can catch up. I like that. You can find your own pace. But mostly I like hand work and there’s a lot more of that now.”

I love the way Kyree described what he liked – that there was more “hand work.” And we wonder why so many kids are so bored in school!

Because I get to visit schools all the time, I know how many Kyrees there are out there – young people with heavy burdens, great potential and a set of needs that have not been well met by the traditional classroom approach. I also know how many schools there are that are taking positive steps to support and inspire them more. So while it’s early, and the future is still a little murky, projects like Basecamp suggest to me what’s possible in the future of public education – and what type of standard we should establish for the charter sector.

As Summit founder Diane Tavenner has said, schools like hers – and projects like these – are “fueled by a deep dissatisfaction with the status of even our best schools, but also an extraordinary optimism that we can and will change them. We know that students are capable of so much, and so are our schools.

“Despite our hard work, we are far from realizing our full aspirations: classrooms, schools and systems where every student is joyfully realizing his or her potential. But we are optimistic that there has never been a better moment to harness this potential. We know more than we ever have about how people learn, what motivates them, and what drives success and satisfaction in life and work. We have access to technology that can help students and educators create and pursue knowledge more effectively than ever before, technology that can even bring communities together. And we are beginning to see glimpses of what’s possible when schools embrace the challenge of entirely redesigning the way they meet students’ needs and interests.”

(This article also appeared in Medium.)

A Public Charter School Is Trying to Model Itself After A Private School: Is That A Good Thing?

Posted on | by Sam

Yesterday, Senator Lamar Alexander stuck his foot in it when he suggested that not all charter schools are, in the end, public.

“There are some private charter schools, are there not?” Alexander said at a Brookings Institution event about school choice.

In fact, charter schools are publicly funded, privately run entities, although the extent to which they err on the public or private side of the equation has become grist for an increasingly contentious public debate about the future of American public education.

That debate matters greatly: after all, charter schools exist to inject more creativity and autonomy into perhaps our most sacred public trust: our public schools. Yet there’s also another side of the debate that is much less contentious, and much less talked about – the extent to which public charter schools can learn from, and then export, some of the best ideas that undergird our nation’s most outstanding, innovative private schools.

It was this impulse that led Marlene Magrino and Emily Bloomfield, the founding principal and executive director of Monument Academy, a not-yet-opened new charter school in Washington, D.C., to spend a few days in the bucolic Pennsylvania countryside late last fall.

Magrino’s and Bloomfield’s school is designed to be a residential boarding school for children who have experienced stress and trauma – especially young people who are either in foster care or in contact with the child welfare system. As a start-up school, they have no students, no staff, and, until last month, no building. What they do have is a well-thought-out idea about how to provide the requisite supports and services that can help their targeted student population learn and grow. And so they were in Pennsylvania to observe the inner workings of the Milton Hershey School, a private boarding school that works with children with acute financial and/or social needs, a school with more than a century of history, nearly 2,000 students, and an endowment of nearly six billion dollars – making it one of the wealthiest schools in the world.

At first blush, such a visit could quickly feel like a fool’s errand – or an inadvertent lesson in discouragement. When you have nothing, and you’re trying to make something, does it help or hurt to see an example of someone else that has everything?

But Bloomfield and Magrino didn’t spend their time traversing Hershey’s lush campus and endless resources feeling overwhelmed; they spent it taking notes on what design principles could most easily be borrowed in order to improve their nascent, public project.

“I started thinking about this school after getting involved in trying to close the achievement gap,” Bloomfield explained. “What I saw was lots of charters that were doing good work – but there were still all these kids who were falling through the cracks. And a lot of those children were either homeless or in the foster care system.

“That led me to wonder, how might we create a public school that could give those kids the sort of round-the-clock treatment and support they needed to become successful? And that question led us here.”

Magrino, fresh from a tour of the school’s expansive auditorium, agreed. “This hall will probably be the size of our entire school,” she said. “But being here is helping me think about how to maximize the spaces that we will have – and how to make do with less in order to provide our kids with as many opportunities as possible.

“This school has a dance studio; will we have a dance studio? No. But setting up electives like Tap Dancing aren’t expensive. Can we sponsor a band? Probably not. But we can probably afford to establish a choir. We can match the people, and we can match the practices, even if we can’t match the money. It’s thinking about what’s most important, and then figuring out how to make that work on our scale and with our resources. So it doesn’t make me wish for things we don’t have. It makes me think about how we can choose wisely about where we’re putting our resources.”

Monument will open its doors for the first time in August 2015, with an inaugural class of just forty students. Its ability to translate the essence of a model like Hershey, and to make it available to increasing numbers of underserved young people, remains to be seen. But its willingness to try is precisely the sort of bet the charter experiment is designed to incentivize people into making.

So let’s keep guarding against the proliferation of for-profit entities in the charter space, and insisting on financial transparency, and demanding that charters and districts find ways to work collaboratively. And let’s start seeing how well some of our most celebrated models of private education can be transported into our most sacredly held public spaces.

In the end, having some public charter schools with the right amount of private in them might actually be a good thing.

Is it time for schools to rethink, well, time?

Posted on | by Sam

On a recent weekday morning in Washington D.C., several hundred teenagers hurriedly made their way through their high school’s hallways in a frantic effort to get to class on time.

I know – nothing new there. Except that in this particular school, the hallways had ubiquitous electronic clocks that measured time in bright red numerals down to the second, and these particular students had just three minutes to move from one class to another. “They had five minutes last year,” principal Caroline Hill told me, in between passionate exhortations for her students to keep moving. “And it was a complete waste of time.”

Admittedly, Hill – the founding principal of the E.L. Haynes Charter High School – is a little time-obsessed. That’s because she’s also obsessed with making sure that the most timeless experience in American public life – the school day – jettison its anachronistic habits and enter the modern age. “We can’t transform school,” she continued, “until we transform the way we think about time and its relationship to learning.”

Ostensibly, Hill’s school is as good a place as any to try to bring about such a mindshift. One of D.C.’s most sought after public options, the Haynes high school building reflects a mixture of traditional and innovative roots. Formerly a neighborhood public school until it was closed in 2008, Haynes secured the right to the building a year later, in 2009, and launched an ambitious renovation plan soon after. The end result is a $25 million, space capsule-style addition to the original building – and more than 46,000 additional square feet. The main entrance opens onto a sun-filled atrium that feels more like a university student center than a high school. And although the pace of the day still feels a lot like the high school you and your parents (and your grandparents) probably attended – with classes in fifty-minute increments, spread across a seven-hour day – what happens during those classes feels a lot different. That’s because E.L. Haynes is determined to rethink the two most important parts of the high school experience: ninth grade, and the way students start; and twelfth grade, and the way they finish. “And what we’re learning,” Hill told me, “is that in order for those experiences to be meaningfully different, adults and young people first need to completely rethink what it means to be a teacher or a student.”

Hill’s interest in reimagining the entry and exit points for her students was piqued shortly after the school welcomed its first group of ninth graders. “We had assumed that all of our high school kids would come directly from our lower school,” she explained, “but three-fourths of them were coming from other schools across the city, which meant the skill-levels and expectations each student had about what school was about were all over the map. Meanwhile, our ninth grade was structured as this typical one-size-fits-all experience, regardless of where the kids were at individually.”

Hill and her faculty quickly decided that if they wanted to ensure that all students were ready for life after high school, they had to get serious about closing those gaps. “And it’s really hard to create a more personalized high school experience when you have constraints on time and talent, and all these pieces that say you have to do ‘school’ a certain way.”

In particular, Hill means a timeworn way of thinking about school in which, simply put, time is the constant, and learning is the variable. Typically, American schools are structured this way, such that if a student doesn’t master the material presented in the allocated time, he or she fails the unit, the class marches on, and whatever skills or information were supposed to be acquired simply get left behind. Sound familiar?

But Haynes and a growing number of other schools around the country are trying to flip the script by making learning the constant, and time the variable. “If we’re not willing to have a revolving door on our talent and our students, then something’s going to have to change in the way we do ‘school,’” she said. “Why not, on the first day, give students everything they need to succeed, as opposed to this lesson today, and that book tomorrow. Instead, say these are the books we’re going to read this year. Here. Have them. These are the lessons and models we’re going to do in math. Here. Have them. And then spend the rest of your time tending to individual needs and letting everyone proceed at their own pace.”

Of course, that sort of culture shift is easier said than done. American schools have conferred degrees based on Andrew Carnegie’s century-old notion of the “Carnegie Unit” – aka the credit hour – for generations. This is especially ironic since the Carnegie Unit was never supposed to be a measure of learning; instead, its original purpose was simply to measure how much teachers were working, as a way to differentiate high school from college – and as a method for determining teacher pensions. If learning is to replace time as the constant, however, our methods for evaluating each individual’s learning must become much more nuanced and precise. And yet once again, time looms large. As Lee Shulman, president emeritus of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, puts it: “The reason students fail . . . is not that they’re not smart. It’s that they need more time to succeed, and time is precisely what educators fail to give them.

“Learning should never result in a normal curve,” Shulman argues. “It should result in a kind of ‘J curve’ in which most students end up clustered at the successful end of the continuum. And the only way that can happen is if we permit time to vary.”

I saw firsthand what this looks like after entering Shane Donovan’s ninth grade physics class. An early adopter of this approach, Donovan received the Citybridge Foundation’s Education Innovation Fellowship, a yearlong program that introduces teachers to promising innovations in personalized learning, as well as the chance to pilot personalized learning models in their schools. While Donovan surfed the room, his students – all but two of who are either designated as special-needs learners, or English-language-learners, or both – worked in small clusters based on whichever standard in the curriculum they were working on.

Occasionally, Donovan would address the entire room, but it was only to remind them to monitor their own needs. “If you’re not done with Standard Seven by the end of the period,” he bellowed at one point, “you have homework. If it’s just a matter of time, finish it on your own. But if you’re stuck, come find me so you can get yourself unstuck.”

Donovan is bouncy and bound, with glasses, a lanyard around his neck, and rolled-up sleeves. After the period ends, I asked him what it takes to run a class this way. “I spent the summer making screencasts of all the traditional lectures I would have to give this year,” he said, “but the hardest part has been learning to let go so I can let the kids do, without the typical minute-to-minute feedback.

“For me,” he continued, “the important question was not how to make school self-paced; it was how to stop getting crappy projects that didn’t show depth of understanding. How can we shift what we do as adults so that if kids are doing assessments, they’re doing them well?”

Since making that shift, Donovan says something surprising emerged: a much clearer demonstration of high-impact life skills that didn’t necessarily have anything to do with physics – skills like learning how to organize your time, keep track of your own progress, and get help when you need it, but not before. “I’ve come to believe that the most important thing happening here isn’t the physics; it’s them understanding how to correct their own mistakes. We still have kids who are always pressing the ejector seat – ‘I need a teacher! I need a teacher!’ – but it’s much easier now to see who got it and who didn’t, and who knows how to organize their time, and who doesn’t.”

That transparency is key for the school’s plans to reimagine twelfth grade as well. “We need to teach our students how to work with independent time,” Hill explained.  “If they’re flailing with us, that’s a gift, because it means we still have some time to teach them how to manage their time before they leave us and have to do it on their own. It’s like peeling back an extra layer of the onion.”

Donovan agrees, and is surprised by how much it’s changed the way he thinks about teaching. “In a way, I don’t really care how much physics they learn,” he admitted. “I want them to learn how to correct their own mistakes. That can make it harder – to see kids struggle – but if our boys don’t graduate, we know what the statistics tell us will await them. So helping them learn how to struggle and become more self-aware matters much more than, say, Standard Twelve in the ninth grade Physics curriculum.

“To teach this way is definitely messy and weird,” Donovan said while welcoming his next group of students into class. “And I’m definitely never going back.”

(This article originally appeared in the Huffington Post.)

A School is Not a Pet. And Yet . . .

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on A School is Not a Pet. And Yet . . .

This weekend’s story in the New York Times about former NFL star Deion Sanders’ struggling charter school lays bare much of what’s wrong with the way Americans think about public education in general, and charter schools in particular.

The story begins with Sanders being approached with a “splendid business proposition,” “deep-pocketed backers,” and a state board of education that “fell over itself” to accommodate one of the greatest pro football players of all time.

Never mind the fact that being a great NFL cornerback has nothing to do with knowing how to build a great school. Unless, of course, the only goal for the school is to become an athletic powerhouse, in which case, hey, do your thing.

You can already guess how the rest of the story goes. A rapid rise in the national sports rankings. Televised games on ESPN. A steady infusion of uniforms and equipment. And a near-complete inattention to the things that actually determine a healthy school.

As one former member of Prime Prep’s board put it, parents were seduced by the promise that under Sanders’ tutelage, their children would get athletic scholarships to college and, eventually, pro contracts. “The parents wanted a 2.5 G.P.A. so the kids could play,” he said. “And it happened.”

It gets worse. In a recording obtained by The Dallas Observer, Sanders explains to a colleague how the school came to be. “Senators, political leaders that you hooked me up with, that you put me down with — that’s how we got the school. You’re talking about a nigger sitting up there that was an athlete who didn’t graduate, another nigger sitting up there saying he’s the president, that ain’t graduate nothing, and we got a school. Think about that, man.

“How in the world do you think we got a school?”

How indeed. And although the Texas Education Agency has vowed to revoke the school’s charter, the toxic mix that birthed it in the first place – our celebrity-worshipping culture, and our endemic disrespect for both the teaching profession and young black and brown children – has already spread far and wide.

Let me say that again: Deion Sanders is right. What allowed a school like Prime Prep to come into being at all was a particularly American combination of celebrity worship, disrespect for teachers, and racist indifference to the plight of minority boys and girls.

To be clear, the space for innovation that charter school laws have allowed has led to many outstanding schools, many of which I have written about and will continue to hold up as examples of what’s possible in American public education. But it has also laid bare a widespread myopic belief that starting a school is a lot like raising a pet: provide enough love (cash), food (connections) and water (shiny stuff), and the rest will take care of itself. And yet schools are not puppies; they are complex systems of human beings with incredibly nonlinear, complex tasks to complete: the holistic development and growth of every child in the building, over the course of several formative, complicated, emotionally loaded years. A school like Prime Prep, with its naïve belief that the other parts of a school could be faked in order to engender nationally ranked sports teams, underscores this point well.

A big part of what makes this possible is our historic, and growing, disrespect for the teaching profession, and for the (few) men and (many) women who make it their life’s work. Teacher/blogger Jose Vilson has made this point numerous times, most notably in response to one of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s repeated public excoriations of female teachers. “As Christie wags a finger at this woman,” Vilson writes, “the crowd cheers, signaling a societal acknowledgment that politicians can lay waste to any courtesy towards anyone, and that democracy is overrated. Surely, dissenters get jeers at any rally, but this particular type of jeer further solidified the idea that teachers’ rights are aligned with women’s rights.

“None of this othering happens without society’s consent,” he argues. “Aside from Christie’s ego, gender plays a huge role here, and if you can’t see that, then perhaps you’re part of the problem, too.”

Of course, this isn’t just about the devaluing of women in American life; it’s about the devaluing of minorities too, especially young black men. How else to explain the senseless murder this weekend of Michael Brown, a college-bound 18-year-old who was shot ten times by a local policeman – a killing that marks only the most recent example of such a tragedy, one that extends not just to Trayvon Martin, but all the way back to Emmett Till and beyond.

These cultural flash points and news reports should be electric jolts to the system, and to all of us who exist inside the bubble together, in order to underscore just how much work we have to do as a society to transcend the historical baggage we have accrued over the past two centuries.

There is a reason our society has coined the “Those that can” line about teachers, while other countries have afforded the profession their greatest levels of respect.

There is a reason the U.S. houses 25% of the world’s prisoners, despite representing just 5% of the world’s population.

There is a reason almost half of those prisoners, 150 years after the end of slavery, have black skin – and that reason is not because of an innate pathology or proclivity for violence.

And there is a reason that so many of the most celebrated new pedagogies for poor children have never been piloted in the schools of children of privilege.

Simply put, we are anchored by troublesome mindsets that are difficult to shake off: What is good for us would not work for them. What they do in the present has nothing to do with what we have done in the past. And what they do for a living proves that they are not capable of doing anything more.

These thoughts are not unrelated. They are a huge barrier to our ongoing dream of a society that can provide greater equity and social opportunity. And they are chains we will never break until we’re willing, collectively and courageously, to reckon publicly with the world that we have wrought, and the ideas about one another we continue to carry.

New Orleans is an all-charter city. Is that a good thing?

Posted on | by Sam

This week, the last five traditional neighborhood schools in New Orleans’ Recovery School district were closed – making it the country’s first district made up entirely of charter schools.

That’s a good thing, right?

If you look at some of the baseline data, it’s hard not to say yes. According to the Washington Post‘s Lyndsey Layton, prior to Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans’ high school graduation rate was just over 50 percent. In 2013, it was just shy of 80 percent. Similarly, student math and reading scores have risen over thirty points higher than they were before the storm. Indeed, as longtime PBS education reporter John Merrow shows in his documentary film, Rebirth, there’s a lot to like about what’s happening in the Crescent City.

Of course, Merrow’s balanced coverage also exposes some of the problems with the reform strategy in New Orleans – from reduced financial oversight to increased social stratification. And community activists like Karran Harper Royal have gone further, arguing that school closures in cities like hers disproportionately affect African American students and families. “This push to close schools  . . . is the new Jim Crow,” she explained, pointing out that New Orleans’ “new normal” means something very different to residents like her. In an all-charter city, she says, “You have a chance, not a choice.”

Which is it? Are charter schools the answer? Or are they the beginning of the end of public education in America?

I’ve been thinking about these questions a lot these days, after spending the month of May traveling around the country to talk about my new book, which is (surprise surprise) all about school choice. What I learned can be boiled down to these two observations: first, school choice feels (and is) very different depending on where you live; and second, the question we ask when we talk about school choice – are charter schools the solution or the problem? – is not the question we should be asking.

With regard to the first point, let’s begin with a city like Washington, D.C., where enrollment in both charters and district schools is rising, and where the district and charter community are collaborative enough to have held their first unified lottery this year. Contrast that with a state like Michigan, where four out of five charter schools are for-profit entities. Then look at a city like Chicago, where more than fifty neighborhood schools have already been closed, where more will undoubtedly be shuttered this fall, and where shiny new ones are opening all the time – and this amid a larger climate of declining enrollment overall (you do the math), and you begin to see that speaking broadly about “school choice” or “charter schools” is appealingly simple, and completely inappropriate.

How choice feels depends on where you live, and how high (or low) the levels of trust, transparency, and cross-sector collaboration are in those communities. Period.

To be clear, school choice should feel different in different places, because different driving forces are at the root of different parts of the movement. Is the goal to build space for more innovation as a way to not just increase the number of charter schools but also create a rising tide that lifts all boats and improves all schools (of all stripes) in a city? I would argue that’s what’s happening, mostly, in D.C. Or is the goal to create a zero-sum game that results in the disappearance of everything old in order to make way for anything new? That’s what it feels like, partly, in Chicago.

Too often, our infatuation with charter schools has led too many of us – from soccer moms to President Obama – to equate them with reform. More charter schools, the logic goes, equals more quality and a reimagined public school system. And, to be sure, I’ve seen a lot more good charter schools in my travels than bad ones. But you can’t improve American public education, systemically, one school at a time (and, to be clear, although cities like New Orleans and D.C. are inundated, less than 5% of children nationwide attend charters).

This is not surprising to anyone who knows anything about systems change. “From a very early age,” Peter Senge writes in his classic book, The Fifth Discipline, “we are taught to break apart problems, to fragment the world.” This reflex makes complex tasks seem more approachable. But the truth is we all pay a price for deluding ourselves into thinking that complex problems can be addressed with piecemeal, or, in this case, school-by-school, solutions.

In Solving Tough Problems, Adam Kahane postulates that one reason we do this is because we fail to recognize the interplay of three different types of complexity: dynamic, generative, and social. “A problem has low dynamic complexity,” Kahane writes, “if cause and effect are close together in space and time. In a car engine, for example, causes produce effects that are nearby, immediate, and obvious; and so, why an engine doesn’t run can be understood and solved be testing and fixing one piece at a time.” By contrast, a problem has high dynamic complexity if cause and effect are far apart in space and time. This characterizes just about any major challenge faced by American public education today. Kahane says such problems “can only be understood systemically, taking account of the interrelationship among the pieces and the functioning of the system as a whole.

“A problem has low generative complexity,” he continues, “if its future is familiar and predictable. In a traditional village, for example, the future simply replays the past, and so solutions and rules from the past will work in the future.” By contrast, a problem has high generative complexity if its future is unfamiliar and unpredictable. Think again of the challenges faced by schools, which must depart from the traditional Industrial-era model of schooling to match the needs of students who are entering a radically different world than the one their parents grew up in. “Solutions to problems with high generative complexity cannot be calculated in advance, on paper, based on what has worked in the past, but have to be worked out as the situation unfolds.

“A problem has low social complexity if the people who are part of the problem have common assumptions, values, rationales, and objectives.” This may have been true in the past, when one’s neighborhood school was more likely to attract families of similar faiths, economic levels, and ethnicities. But a problem has high social complexity if the people who must solve it together see the world in very different ways. “Problems of high social complexity,” Kahane says, “cannot be peacefully solved by authorities from on high; the people involved must participate in creating and implementing solutions.”

So how do we identify solutions for a field that is marked by high degrees of dynamic, generative, and social complexity? One step is merely by asking the question, as opposed to debating whether we need more or less charter schools. And another step, impossible to avoid when the opening question is a different one, is to start seeing public schools and the communities they serve as systems, not parallel tracks.

Too often, this interdependence between charters and traditional public schools (not to mention between charters themselves) is given short shrift. Yet our still-nascent experiment in school choice – national and/or local – won’t work until we do. And although New Orleans’ highly localized experiment as an all-charter city may ultimately succeed, its strategy, applied nationwide, is a fool’s errand. “The most profound strategy for changing a living network comes from biology,” Meg Wheatley explains in Leadership & The New Science. “If a system is in trouble, it can only be restored by connecting itself to more of itself.”

So what does this all mean?

To unleash the sort of generative feedback loop that can improve all schools, we must see reform as a both/and proposition. We need to raze and rebuild, and we need to preserve and improve. We need the ingenuity of single-school autonomy, and we need the scalability of whole-community structures. We need to incentivize schools to instill in young people the skills, habits and dispositions they’ll need to navigate this brave new world, and we need to stop rewarding schools that are merely perfecting our ability to succeed in a system that no longer serves our interests. And, finally, we need to realize that as appealing as it may be to assume otherwise, concepts like “choice” and “charter” are not monolithic terms; they are fluid, fulsome, and unfolding before our eyes.

In New Orleans, and everywhere else, we remain in the eye of the storm.

(This column originally appeared in Education Week.)

OK, Brown v. Board is 60; Now What?

Posted on | by Sam

As I travel around the country this month, participating in public conversations about the promise and peril of school choice, it seems fitting that right as we marked the 60th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, I would end up having lunch with Michael Alves.

For those of you that don’t know, Alves has made a career out of helping communities and districts craft new student assignment policies that promote greater equity throughout their schools.

The 1980 effort to create more diverse schools in Cambridge, Massachusetts? That was Alves. The celebrated effort to merge city and county schools in Raleigh, North Carolina? Alves. Indeed, although as recently as 2000 the number of U.S. school districts pursuing socioeconomic integration policies could be added up on one hand, today there are more than 80 that are using socioeconomic status as a factor in student assignment – and Alves has had a hand in almost all of them.

A bald, jovial Bostonian who raised his six boys in a stately house that was built in 1882, Alves provides a clarity to core questions of equity that I rarely encounter in school reform circles. “The problem with most of the current efforts around school choice,” he explained, “is that we aren’t clear on what the goals are. The goal can’t be a zero-sum game between charters and districts. So how do kids get distributed? In my mind, the purpose of any student assignment policy should be to facilitate the mission and vision of the district. Is our goal to promote greater socioeconomic diversity? Are we motivated by a need to ease overcrowding? Whatever the answer, you can’t craft a good plan unless you really understand the makeup of your community. And the reality is that charters are operating as their own islands, and most school districts don’t know much more than the percentage of their kids that receive free and reduced lunch. That’s not good enough.”

To help districts solve this information problem, Alves has a simple solution: treat student registration the way an obstetrician treats a pregnant mother’s first visit to the doctor’s office. “When a couple makes that first visit to the OB/GYN,” he says, “the doctor gets all kinds of information – not to hurt the child, but to help him. We tell districts to do the same. When that parent registers their child, schools should be asking all kinds of questions (all of which are voluntary): what is the monthly income of the household; how many adults are in the house; how many other children are there in the house; what is the highest educational attainment level of the parents; what sort of preschool program was the child enrolled in; and so on.

“Everything we ask is designed to create an assignment algorithm that correlates to educational readiness while still prioritizing proximity,” Alves continued. “Once districts start to understand, on a more granular level, where their kids are coming from and what their school readiness is likely to be, they have the chance to craft assignment policies that ensure a more equitable distribution of children and families across their network of schools.”

“We have diversity everywhere, except in schools. “Where you live, you live. But that doesn’t mean you have to go to school strictly based on where you live.”

For me, that last point is one we need to take more seriously as we mark the 60th anniversary of The U.S. Supreme Court’s historic decision in Brown – and our inability to fulfill its promise. Too often, we assume that schools and school policies can somehow solve by themselves the intractable, entrenched legacies of race-and class-based inequity in American society. But schools can’t impact economic and housing policies, or deepen our commitment to public health. And even though the Court came within one vote, in 1973, of ruling that the way we fund schools – via property taxes – was unconstitutional, the reality is that many of our most celebrated school reform efforts are actually deepening, not diminishing, our commitment to “separate but equal” schools.

This is why I support school choice – albeit not the limited concept of choice that so many want to promote. Simply put, you can’t solve the equity problem in American society merely by razing the old system and rebuilding everything from scratch. But neither can you solve it solely by preserving and improving what we already have; a both/and strategy is needed, one that creates space for new schools and ideas, and that puts as much energy into renovating the old as it does to revering the new.

What would such a strategy look like? I’d start by having more urban districts mirror the efforts of Boston Public Schools, which has built into its traditional district model the space to seed 21 schools that have charter-like autonomy, and keep them within the larger network of the district. Does the system work perfectly in its efforts to have the best ideas of those pilot schools funnel through the rest of the schools in the district? No. But as Mission Hill principal Ayla Gavins puts it, “what the pilot program does is create the conditions for greater innovation and collaboration to take place; the rest is up to us.”

Next, I’d encourage more schools to adopt intentional, district-wide socioeconomic diversity assignment policies – the sorts of policies Michael Alves has been tinkering with for over thirty years. “I believe a central goal for any district should be to help any kid at any school feel like, “No matter who I am, I fit in somewhere at that school. No one wants to be the ‘only’ anything – that’s the goal; that’s inclusion. And that’s the only way, until these other aspects of our society change, we can get closer to the promise of Brown.”

Raze and renovate. Freedom within structure. And policies that balance individual choice alongside communal commitments to equity.

Would that sort of recipe get us closer to honoring the Court’s declaration, on May 17, 1954, that education is “a right which must be made available to all on equal terms?”

I think it would.

(This article originally appeared in Education Week.)

In New York, A Tale of Two Cities (and Two Selves)

Posted on | by Sam | 9 Comments on In New York, A Tale of Two Cities (and Two Selves)

At the New Teacher Center conference a few years ago, I watched a master teacher model a great way to introduce students to new material. She projected a single image onto the screen in our conference room — it was Liberty Leading the People — and asked us a single question, over and over again: “What do you see?” Any observation (“I see a strong woman”) would prompt a second question from the instructor (“What’s your evidence?”). It was fun, and illuminating, and after ten minutes, based on nothing more than our own close observations, we were ready to study the French Revolution.

I was reminded of that workshop recently, when I saw someone on Twitter share the following picture:

Absent any context, what do you see? And what is your evidence?

Now let’s try another one, this time a 30-second video:

Or this one:

Again, what do you see? And what is your evidence?

If you’re someone who closely follows the news about school reform, you already know that the standing woman in the photograph is Eva Moskowitz, the founder of the Success Academy network of charter schools in New York City. You know that her salary — $475,000 a year — is twice that of the NYC Schools Chancellor. And you know that the video, and others like it, appeared shortly after Mayor Bill de Blasio announced he was canceling plans for three of her schools in New York City — and allowing virtually every other charter proposal to proceed.

It’s been disconcerting to watch this fight escalate — particularly because, as I’ve said repeatedly, issues of school choice are complicated. Nuance is required, and once again, nuance is nowhere to be found. But there’s another issue I see playing out in this fight, and that picture, and those videos, and it’s the one we really don’t want to talk about: the extent to which our current reform efforts are either redefining, or merely reinforcing, traditional notions of race, privilege, and power.

Indeed, the battle between the Matriarch and the Mayor isn’t really about co-locations, or charter schools, or the right of a parent to choose: it’s about the ongoing tension between our country’s delicate, dual allegiance to the core values of capitalism (consumption & competition) and the core values of democracy (conscience & consensus). It’s about a mayor’s clumsy attempt to swing the ideological pendulum back — perhaps too far — in the direction of democracy by making a political point. And it’s about whether it’s OK or a little shady that a white woman can make a personal fortune by dramatically raising the test scores of poor black and brown kids.

Personally, I think it’s a little shady. Not because schools like Success Academy are inherently wrong or misguided, but because it’s a vivid example of the ways in which our society in general, and public school reform in particular, has shifted its moral center to the capitalist side of the values continuum. In that world, competition is king, and to the victor goes the acres of diamonds.

This is an old tension, and an ongoing argument between two competing sides of ourselves. Plato first laid it out for us, in The Republic, when he said that liberty was democracy’s greatest good. What type of liberty will generate the greatest good, however, has been debated ever since, though philosophers have clarified the distinction. One vision, described as the liberty of the ancients, refers to the need for people to have a voice into the policies and politicians that govern their lives. The other, the liberty of the moderns, speaks to the right of each individual to pursue his or her own private interests free form state oversight or control.

I would suggest that the core of the current fight over school reform policies can be traced back to which side of the liberty equation speaks to you most. Consider the central rallying cry of the charter school movement: My child, My choice. Consider the rallying cry on the other side — less pithily stated, but the essence is, public schools are the foundation of a healthy democracy (gotta work on that messaging, guys). Or consider the words of Khari Shabazz, the principal of Success Academy’s fifth Harlem location, in an interview with a reporter from the New Yorker. “They are going to be competing for spaces in colleges and universities across the country,” he said of his students. “Coming from the socio-economic background that they’re coming from, it’s important to learn to be competitive. And none of us work for free.”

There’s nothing wrong with that statement; it’s simply a market-oriented approach to school change — a liberty of the moderns worldview, if you will — and it’s a view that’s very much in line with the larger sea change in American society. “Markets don’t just allocate goods,” says Harvard’s Michael Sandel. “They also express and promote certain attitudes towards the goods being exchanged. And what has occurred over the past thirty years is that without quite realizing it, we have shifted from having a market economy to being a market society. The difference is this: A market economy is a tool – a valuable and effective tool – for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavor. It’s a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.”

For a society in which social relations are deeply rooted in a shared history of race-based inequality and oppression, will the application of market thinking to public schools result in the erosion, or the entrenchment, of those legacies? Indeed, the center of the fight in NYC seems to be about what will happen when the considerable wealth and influence of a capitalist economy begins to remake the institution that was founded to be the ultimate safeguard of our democratic society. It’s about what happens when educators start to make private-sector salaries by improving achievement in communities that have been left behind. And it’s about what happens when two increasingly entrenched groups of people debate the future of public education from perspectives that can sometimes feel mutually exclusive.

This is what makes modern school reform so complicated. It isn’t that one side is evil and out to ruin America, and the other is righteous and out to save it — though both sides have claimed exactly that; it’s that the values people are working from to solve our most intractable problems are, in many ways, diametrically opposed.

Which takes me back to that picture, which feels like a Rorshach test for the values you bring to this debate. Does the imagery make you uncomfortable, even angry? Or does it seem like much ado about nothing, or perhaps even a positive representation of precisely what you want to be fighting for?

Knowing where we stand on the values question doesn’t immediately lend itself to any clear-cut, system-wide solutions. But perhaps it can clarify what we’re actually fighting over, and why any effort to find the happy medium between our democratic and our capitalistic selves may prove as elusive as the search for Plato’s ideal republic — now 2,500 years long, and counting.

DC’s Plan to Assess Early Childhood Programs: Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down?

Posted on | by Sam

In case you missed it, the Public Charter School Board (PCSB) of DC has proposed a common framework for assessing the quality of all preschool and lower elementary programs. The original proposal sparked arguments for and against the plan; led to a petition campaign of protest; and anchored a lively hourlong discussion on public radio. Lots of people wrote the board to share their own ideas and feedback, and, earlier this week, the Board unanimously approved a revised policy.

What did the PCSB get right, and where is its plan still lacking? First, here’s what they proposed (with all changes highlighted in yellow):

 

 

To evaluate these changes, I reviewed the modifications against my three central design principles of a good assessment framework.

  1. Measure the Essential Skills: On the positive side, any school that opts to measure social-emotional growth will be held to roughly equal percentages of importance (14% v. 12% in preschool, and 25% v. 20% in lower elementary). Not what I would do, but I can live with it. On the negative side, SEL measures are still not required, and the past twelve years or so of education policy would suggest that, despite one’s wishes to the contrary, a school that is only required to do A is less likely to do B, C or D with the same degree of intensity. Will a majority of schools opt in to the SEL framework? Time will tell, but I’m skeptical. I do think, however, that the addition of a mission-specific goal provides another way for schools to elevate an essential skill, such as creativity. In sum, a mixed bag.
  2. Default to the Highest Common Denominator: As I wrote previously, “One of the biggest problems with the PCSB’s framework is that even though all schools would be held accountable to the same categories, not all schools would be using the same tools to assess their progress.” The danger of this was pointed out to me by the founder of a prominent charter school in DC, who cautioned that any school that chooses a less challenging assessment in, say, math will be more likely to score higher than a school that chooses a more challenging one. “This,” she says, “creates an incentive for schools to choose less challenging assessments which may provide less actionable/useful data for teachers to use in the classroom, which is what the real point of assessment is.” As far as I can tell, this design flaw is unaddressed by the revisions. That’s a big problem, and one the PCSB will need to get right in the coming year.
  3. Identify the other elements of a healthy school culture: This is where the original proposal was closest to the endgoal, and that’s still true here. Its metric for evaluating teachers has three separate components — emotional support, instructional support, and classroom organization — and its attention to attendance and re-enrollment make sense. Here, too, the addition of a mission-specific goal, depending on what schools choose, could apply to this category (measuring school climate, for example).

Overall, then, I think the PCSB heeded much of what it heard from the public, and its final proposal still needs some small but significant tweaks. What do YOU think?

The Good, the Bad & The Maybe on Charter Schools

Posted on | by Sam

Three recent articles seem to capture the promise and the peril of the charter movement all at once.

First, there was my piece exploring the evolving case law that challenges the notion that public charters are indeed, under the law, public schools.

Then there was the news from a recent study suggesting that charters are not, as is widely believed, pushing out kids with special needs at a disproportionate rate.

And then there was the question of whether charter schools should allow children who live in the neighborhood to receive preferential treatment in the admissions process.

Good food for thought on all fronts — and a reminder to me that anyone who speaks of charter schools as purely good or evil should not be trusted. As with interpreting the law, the best answer is almost always, “It depends.”

Happy Friday.