Tag: education policy

As Fifty States Reimagine Education Policy, Four Are Ready to Offer Guidance

Posted on | by Sam

What makes a mind come alive?

How can one community impact every child?

What do schools need to be changing from, and to?

And how can states set the conditions for lasting change?

In theory, these questions have always mattered. In reality, they are about to matter a lot more now that the United States Congress is poised to reauthorize its central education policy for the first time in thirteen years – and usher in an era of state authority on everything from school accountability to teacher education policies.

Now that the balance of power is shifting back towards the states, what should they do with it?

That’s the riddle of the moment – and it’s one the Innovation Lab Network (ILN) has been trying to solve for years.

A network of states that work collaboratively to transform their respective school systems, the ILN includes several members that are fostering meaningful, systems-level changes in their states. And now the ILN is ready to share some of the insights of that work – by way of four short films and a website of related resources – in the hope that other states will parlay their newfound autonomy into decisions that can lead to, as the ILN puts it, the “Next State of Learning.”

In New Hampshire, for example, state officials have done away with the Carnegie Unit – the form of credit which, beginning in 1909, made time, not learning, the key metric by which high schools nationwide would measure student performance. In its place they’ve established a core set of competencies that all graduates need to develop in order to graduate – and they’ve allowed students to demonstrate mastery of those competencies in a number of ways: via a school course, an internship, or a course of independent study. In addition, eight districts are experimenting with a way to assess student learning that relies less on standardized tests, and more on locally developed performance tasks.

According to Ellen Hume-Howard, a longtime educator in the state and the Curriculum Director for the Sanborn School District, what’s driving all of these state-level changes is an observation that many would find self-evident: “One of the things that has been really fascinating for me around what’s happening in New Hampshire is that so much of it is what classrooms teachers have thought we should have been doing for quite a long time. It’s really driven by common sense: If we’re serious about putting students at the center of what we do, then we need to change a lot of the things that have been in existence for a long time. There are simply a lot of practices that no longer fit.”

They’ve reached the same conclusion in Maine, where legislators have stipulated that by 2017, all graduates will be assessed by specific, demonstrable skills– not time-based determinants of credit. For educators like Derek Pierce, the principal of Casco Bay High School in Portland, that has made all the difference. “Schools are getting better at breaking down the walls and recognizing that the world is where we need to do our learning,” he said. “In Portland we’re super fortunate to have a lot of support from our local school board and our district, and even the state in the kinds of practices that we’re doing.

“We’re not fighting against the tide to support kids to have a more personalized path to reaching their goals.  The state of Maine supports proficiency-based work, and it’s helped to have legislation that supports our values – it strengthens our standing in the community to know that we’re not just making this stuff up.”

In Colorado, there are examples like the St. Vrain School District, which decided several years ago to remake its entire feeder system into one that could provide high-quality STEM training to its students – the majority of who are low-income and Latino. When they decided that training needed to continue after graduation – by way of a program called P-TECH that lets graduates complete a two-year associate’s degree for free – they approached their legislators for help.

It sounds strange – educators approaching their legislators for help. But according to Gretchen Morgan, the Colorado Department of Education’s Interim Associate Commissioner of Innovation, Choice, & Engagement (and a former teacher and school principal), that’s the sort of arrangement more states should be preparing to follow. “I think our role at the department isn’t necessarily to seek specific legislation. But we are in a unique position to know who’s doing things in different parts of the state. And so, being able to bring them together so they can learn and build momentum is our role; it’s to help facilitate those conversations.

“What happened in St. Vrain is a good example,” Morgan continued. “There was a district doing some really good work around STEM. They had found some great partners to work with. And they wanted to have P-TECH legislation passed that could enable them to partner in stronger ways and set up a high school with some very specific characteristics. Because we knew they were working on that, we tried to put them in places to talk with other people who had similar interests. And now we have a pathway for those kids that can extend beyond their high school graduations.”

And then there’s Wisconsin, a state whose highly partisan political climate makes the passage of legislation particularly challenging. How, then, have they been able to establish themselves as a leader in the push to make learning more personalized for every student?

Part of the answer comes from an innovative approach to governance: twelve cooperative educational service agencies (CESAs), independent of the state, that exist solely to help local districts coordinate services and receive the type of professional learning their educators feel is most important towards advancing their professional practice. According to Jim Rickabaugh, the head of the CESA in Southeastern Wisconsin, “If the things we offer districts are not the things that they want and need, we will cease to exist; it’s all fee for service. That means we have a clear role to play, and part of it is connecting local districts to the state in ways that make everyone feel they are less driven by compliance, and more by a need to generate deeper levels of commitment among learners, educators, and the communities they serve.”

This sort of culture is evident in places like the Waukesha School District, where a number of schools have begun providing alternative approaches to teaching and learning. As Assistant Superintendent Ryan Krohn puts it, “The primary function of education over the last 150 years was to efficiently deliver instruction. Well, the function has changed. The function is now to ensure high levels of learning for all, but the designs are still about efficient instruction. So we need to come up with a set of designs that match that, and here in Waukesha, we’re starting to see examples of redesigned systems that ensure high levels of learning for all students by flipping the script and providing students with the ownership of this work.

Look across those four states and the work they have undertaken, and you start to see some patterns: a clear emphasis on local engagement and authority; compelling examples of district-level innovation and change; an “urgently patient” approach to systems change; and a clear understanding that if public education is going to be reimagined for a changing world, young people – their strengths, their passions, and their own unique paths to proficiency – must be placed at the center.

How this new era of school reform unfolds remains to be seen. But it’s notable that a move to make learning more personalized and restore local authority in decision-making has already generated strong bipartisan appeal.

Perhaps, then, the ILN’s question is the right one to be asking: In this post-NCLB policy climate, where will the Next State(s) of Learning emerge?

 

New PBS documentary tells a story about education we don’t ever hear

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on New PBS documentary tells a story about education we don’t ever hear

In the small town of Hartsville, South Carolina, which sits just about two hours from anywhere you’ve ever heard of, Monay Parran and her two young sons – eight-year-old Ja’quez, and eleven-year-old Rashon – begin each day in the darkness of the pre-dawn hours.

Parran, a single parent who works two minimum-wage jobs in two towns that are almost an hour apart, must drop her boys off at the bus stop early enough to make it to her first job on time. By the time she sees her sons again, after her second shift wraps up, it will be almost midnight.

This is the daily cycle for scores of families, who must make ends meet while living below the poverty line. It’s a cycle that results in young people who are often overtired and undernourished. It’s also a widespread reality that is largely invisible to most Americans, and made more complex by the distances rural families must traverse to access foundational resources like a school, a hospital – or even a minimum-wage job.

Beginning March 17, the particular struggles – and successes – of families like Ms. Parran’s will be given close attention via a new PBS documentary film, 180 Days: Hartsville (I am one of its producers), a project that was funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s American Graduate: Let’s Make it Happen initiative. Viewers will experience a year in the life of one small Southern town, two schools that work primarily with low-income children, and one family’s efforts to break the generational cycle of poverty.

What the film will also make visible, albeit indirectly, is our national preoccupation with the needs of cities, and the extent to which many of our most hotly debated national strategies for school reform – from charter schools to online learning – simply aren’t viable in towns like Hartsville, where transportation costs alone circumscribe the choices many rural families can make, and where many residents still have no Internet access. In places like these, if you want to transform the schools, you are going to have to do it from within the traditional systems and structures – from neighborhood schools to school boards to local politicians angling for re-election — no matter how change-averse those actors and institutions tend to be.

At this moment of intense national interest in public education, you would think that figuring out how to improve the systems we already have would matter a lot more than it does, if for no other reason than because renovating a house is more cost-efficient than razing it and starting from scratch. But the particular challenges and opportunities associated with reform in rural schools matter for another reason – those schools house nearly ten million American students, or slightly more than 20% of the nation’s total enrollment. And yet, as a recent report of the Rural School and Community Trust made clear, “the invisibility of rural education persists in many states. Many rural students are largely invisible to state policy makers because they live in states where education policy is dominated by highly visible urban problems.”

Consequently, it’s my hope that films like 180 Days: Hartsville can elevate the particular circumstances and needs of rural communities, poor families, and public school educators. After all, we can’t begin to reimagine American schools for the modern era if we remain fixed on merely one type of American school. And we can’t identify solutions that will work in the majority of American communities if we continue to disproportionately share the success stories of individual schools of choice.

The questions before us have wide-ranging implications: can a community like Hartsville really change the fortunes of a generation by doubling down on its neighborhood schools? Does the stark reality of the 21st century global economy outweigh the impact of one rural town’s efforts to prepare its children to compete in that economy?

On March 17, I hope you’ll tune in to find out, and help us all widen the lens through which we see American public education.

(This article originally appeared in the Washington Post.)

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.)

Something’s Happening Here . . .

Posted on | by Sam | 6 Comments on Something’s Happening Here . . .

In the span of a few weeks, all of DC seems to be abuzz with the prospect that our elected officials may actually try to ensure greater racial and socioeconomic equity in the city’s public schools — apple carts be damned.

First, there was the Op-Ed two colleagues and I published in the Washington Post, calling for the adoption of controlled-choice policies as part of the city’s current effort to reconsider neighborhood school boundary lines.

The next day, the Department of Education released new guidelines that would allow charter schools to employ weighted lotteries that gave preference to disadvantaged student populations.

Meanwhile, the latest edition of Washington City Paper features a cover story about Roosevelt High School that places the issue of integration and school boundaries squarely in context, by way of a crumbling beauty of a school building that is currently under renovation — and seriously under-enrolled. And listerves like this one are burning up with a mixture of interest, anxiety and vitriol at the idea of such a dramatic departure from the norm (does someone really think I should be tarred and feathered?).

What do you think? Is integration worthy of being prioritized as a policy goal in a city like Washington, DC? If cities have a responsibility to ensure greater equity in their public schools, are there other, better ways to do so? And, in the end, is there any way to strike the right balance between honoring people’s individual choices against a community’s shared sense of values and responsibilities?

Looking forward to hearing people’s ideas and concerns.

Turning School Chance Into School Choice

Posted on | by Sam

There are a lot of smart people in Washington, D.C., and one of them is Evelyn Boyd Simmons.

A longtime D.C. resident, an effective parental advocate, and a firm believer in the unmatched promise of public education, Evelyn has a way of cutting to the quick on complicated, contentious issues. And so it was when in a recent conversation, she summarized the state of affairs in American public education with a clever turn of phrase.

“What people like to call school choice,” she said flatly, “is nothing more than clever marketing. What folks really have is school chance.”

I’d never heard it described that way, and she’s right. In cities like ours, where an increasing number of families are opting into the chaotic dance of the charter school waiting lists – or trying their hand at an out-of-boundary admission to a sought-after neighborhood school – what we like to celebrate as an enlightened era of self-determination is in fact little more than a citywide game of craps.

Which begs the question: when it comes to something as important as a city’s public schools, can’t we do better than hoping enough people come up “Boxcars?”

I believe we can, which is why my colleagues Mike Petrilli, Rick Kahlenberg and I have urged the city to adopt policies that can transform a system of chance into a city of choice.

To do that, we need to eliminate the historic notion that each family has a property right to their neighborhood school, while at the same time guaranteeing admission to a high-quality public school that is within a reasonable proximity. Let people rank the schools closest to their home, and build a system that balances parental preferences with a commitment to evenly distribute children from different socioeconomic backgrounds. What we’ve proposed is only a first step – it does not address, for example, the areas of the city that remain largely segregated – but we believe it’s a way to begin building more racially and socioeconomically diverse schools. And, significantly, it’s an idea that has been tested, and proven effective, in many cities across the country.

It’s also, needless to say, an idea that raises complicated issues of race, class and privilege, and already our proposals have sparked a number of heated responses, accusations, and dismissals. This, to me, reinforces why it’s a conversation worth having. Indeed, it’s the conversation Thurgood Marshall tried to have with us forty years ago – and no, I don’t mean Brown v Board of Education.

The case was San Antonio v. Rodriguez, the year was 1973, and the issue was whether Texas’s method of funding its schools (via property taxes) constituted a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. Marshall and three of his colleagues on the Court believed that it was, meaning we came that close to overturning our country’s historic (and historically inequitable) way of funding public schools.

Think about that for a second.

What strikes me most, however, is what the five Justices in the majority said. “Though education is one of the most important services performed by the state,” they wrote – and even though the way we fund schools in America “can fairly be described as chaotic and unjust” – the promise of a more equitable system of schools “is not within the limited category of rights recognized by this Court as guaranteed by the Constitution.” If it were, the majority conceded, “virtually every State will not pass muster.”

To Marshall, that was precisely the point: something as vital as a high-quality public education for every child should not be left to chance. And while there’s nothing that can be done about the Court’s decision in 1973, there’s plenty that can be done in cities like Washington, D.C., where rapid changes in schooling and geographic diversity are making possible some new ways of thinking about how best to ensure that every child has the same opportunity to receive a high-quality public education.

History has shown that when we let the goal of school quality be determined by the invisible hand of the market, our schools do not regress to the (positive) mean: they bunch at the poles. School choice cannot, therefore, be left to chance; it will require simple sorting structures that are grounded in our founding values as a nation – liberty and equality – and that respond to the ever-present challenge that is as old as the country itself: E Pluribus unum—out of many, one.

Boxcars!

(This article originally appeared in Education Week.)

Should Integration Be a Goal of DC Public Schools?

Posted on | by Sam

From 2000 to 2010, the white share of the District of Columbia’s population grew from 30.8 percent to38 percent . And from 2000 to 2012, the median household income in the city rose 23.3 percent while the nation saw a 6.6?percent decline, adjusted for inflation. This rapid gentrification provides a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create racially and socioeconomically integrated public schools. The D.C. Advisory Committee on Student Assignment, which is redrawing school boundary lines and feeder patterns, should seize this opportunity.

Middle-class families have moved into neighborhoods such as Columbia Heights and Petworth in large numbers. And many of these families are staying in the District even after their kids are old enough to attend school.

Meanwhile, more parents in D.C. neighborhoods west of Rock Creek Park are sending their kids to public schools, resulting in fewer spots for “out of boundary” students in the most sought-after neighborhood schools such as Lafayette, Murch and Eaton elementary schools or Deal Middle School.

As a result, more-affluent parents in the transitioning neighborhoods — squeezed out of schools west of the park and unable to afford private schools — are taking a shot at either the elementary school down the street or a diverse charter school nearby. In several cases, this has been an orchestrated effort, organized via community meetings or e-mail discussion groups. The trend is particularly pronounced in both district and charter preschool programs, resulting in class rolls that are much more diverse than those in the upper grades.

If you believe that the overall value of a community is enhanced when it can support high-quality, integrated schools, these shifts mark a significant development for the city. There are plenty of reasons to cheer school integration beyond promoting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s powerful dream of creating a multiracial “beloved community.” Evidence shows that poor and rich kids benefit when they attend integrated schools. Indeed, research finds that students of all backgrounds experience civic, social and cognitive benefits from learning in diverse settings — benefits that are increasingly important as students prepare to enter an economy that values critical thinking, collaboration and creativity.

But these changes are not without their challenges. At some D.C. elementary schools, rather than settling into a healthy racial and socioeconomic balance, student populations are flipping from one extreme to the other, with fourth-grade classes dominated by minorities and preschool classes that are mostly white.

At these rapidly changing schools, mostly white, middle- and upper-middle-class families are pushing out poor or working-class “out of boundary” minority families. Many of these middle-class parents want their schools to remain diverse, and lower-income families want to be a part of these successful schools. Yet both are powerless to keep this Big Flip from happening.

Even some charter schools — which don’t have “in boundary” families — may face kindred challenges as they gain popularity among more affluent families. Because charter schools in the District generally are required to select students via a blind (unweighted) lottery, the more affluent parents who apply, the more who are likely to get in.

We can do better. Here’s how:

The first strategy we propose is to create controlled-choice zones in strategic parts of the city (namely, Capitol Hill, Columbia Heights, Mount Pleasant, Adams Morgan, Dupont/Logan Circle and Petworth). In these neighborhoods, school attendance zones would eventually go away, as they have in a number of other districts across the country that use the controlled-choice model. Parents would express preferences among a cluster of schools, and an algorithm would make matches by balancing personal preferences with the shared civic goal of maximizing socioeconomic integration. Ideally, this list of options would include both district schools and public charter schools. Neighborhood schools in these zones that are disproportionately low-income would be reformed as magnet schools with attractive educational programs and themes to appeal to more middle-income families. Because all of the school options would be in the general neighborhood, no one would be forced to trek across town.

The second strategy we propose is to allow public charter schools and magnet schools to use weighted lotteries to create or maintain socioeconomic diversity. With a weighted lottery, charter schools could ensure that their proportion of poor students served never drops below 50 percent, even if a large number of middle-class families enters the lottery.

The D.C. Advisory Committee on Student Assignment has the opportunity to shape school enrollment patterns in the city in this pivotal time of demographic change. We encourage the committee to include policies that preserve and promote socioeconomically integrated options for families in their recommended strategies and guidelines for student assignment and school choice.

Sam Chaltain is a D.C. educational consultant. Richard Kahlenberg is senior fellow at the Century Foundation. Michael J. Petrilli is executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

This article originally appeared in the Washington Post.

High Stakes Tests For 3-Year-Olds?

Posted on | by Sam | 5 Comments on High Stakes Tests For 3-Year-Olds?

If you’re a parent of a young charter school student in DC – or just someone who cares about early education – you need to know what’s happening here in the nation’s capital, and fast.

In less than a week, all charter schools that serve young children will start being held accountable to their students’ test scores on reading and math.

Just to clarify: we’re talking about three-, four-, and five-year-olds. Being Tested. In Reading and Math. With High Stakes attached for the schools that care for them.

First, some context: Like many other cities, DC is a place where daycare waiting lists can last for years, and where the costs of childcare can amount to a second mortgage. Unlike other cities, however, Washington ranks first in the nation for its percentage of 3- and 4-year-old children enrolled in preschool programs – 88% in all, and at an expense of nearly $15,000 per child. That’s a huge advantage for DC’s families, and a huge influence on the overall development and growth of the city’s youngest residents.

As DC inches closer to its goal of providing universal preschool by 2014, our civic leaders are rightfully asking themselves what else they should do to ensure that our deep investments in early childhood reap deep civic returns. And in their effort to provide an answer, DC’s sole authorizing and oversight body for charter schools – the Public Charter School Board – has proposed an accountability plan for the youngest children that would mimic the format that’s already in place for the oldest.

If the plan is approved – and it will be, barring significant community objections – all of the city’s Pre-K and lower elementary charter school programs will forthwith be ranked according to a weighted formula that assigns between 60 and 80% of a school’s overall performance to student reading and math scores. And although the proposal includes the possibility for schools to “opt-in” to adding an assessment that measures the social and emotional (SEL) growth of children, it would count for just 15% of the total for Preschool and PreK, and 10% for Kindergarten.

This sort of weighted formula squares neatly with the latest trends in education policy. It does not, however, align with the latest research on the brain.

“Everything that happens to us affects the way the brain develops,” says Dan Siegel, a clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA and the author of The Whole Brain Child. “The brain is a social organ, made to be in relationship. What happens between brains has a great deal to do with what happens within each individual brain . . . [And] the physical architecture of the brain changes according to where we direct our attention and what we practice doing.”

Where we direct our attention, then, matters greatly when it comes to determining what our children will practice doing, and how their brains will develop.  And what scholars like Siegel are saying is that the worst thing we can do is disproportionately weight one piece of the developmental puzzle. “We want to help our children become better integrated so they can use their whole brain in a coordinated way,” he explains. “We want them to be horizontally integrated, so that their left-brain logic can work well with their right-brain emotion. We also want them to be vertically integrated, so that the physically higher parts of the brain, which let them thoughtfully consider their actions, work well with the lower parts, which are more concerned with instinct, gut reactions, and survival.”

Siegel’s suggestions align with the recommendations of other leading researchers, all of who confirm that the foundation of learning is social, not academic. In fact, according to the Collaborative for Academic, Social & Emotional Learning (CASEL), an organization that works to advance the science and evidence-based practice of social and emotional learning, the best way for schools to provide the optimal foundation for learning is by helping students develop five core competencies: self-awareness, or the ability to accurately recognize one’s emotions and thoughts and their influence on behavior; self-management, or the ability to regulate one’s emotions, thoughts, and behaviors effectively in different situations; social awareness, or the ability to take the perspective of and empathize with others from diverse backgrounds and cultures; relationship skills, or the ability to establish and maintain healthy and rewarding relationships with diverse individuals and groups; and responsible decision-making, or the ability to make constructive and respectful choices about personal behavior and social interactions. CASEL has even published a compendium of the available assessment measures when it comes to measuring these sorts of skills in children.

In other words, the research is clear, the tools are out there, and the common sense is self-evident to anyone who is a parent to young children. So I ask you: will an accountability framework that places as much as 80% of its weight behind reading and math scores engender a generation of children with the skills CASEL identifies as the foundation of all learning, or lead to the sort of neurobiological integration scholars like Siegel are calling for?

If you think the answer is yes, sit tight. But if you think the answer is no, I urge you to call or email the PCSB’s executive director, Scott Pearson (spearson@dcpubliccharter.com, 202.328.2660) and insist that any accountability system assign equal weight to the different components of a healthy, high-functioning learning environment – including, and not limited to, social and emotional growth. (You can also sign this petition.)

The past twelve years of federal policy have taught us that when it comes to assessing the upper grades, reading and math are valuable – and overvalued. Let’s not make the same mistake twice.

Reimagining Our Schools, NOW

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on Reimagining Our Schools, NOW

It’s a presidential election season, which means we can all be sure of two things: conversations about education will take a backseat to more “pressing” issues like the economy and foreign policy, and Congress will once again do nothing to address our desperate need for a new federal education policy.

However, just because our elected officials can’t get the job done doesn’t mean the rest of us are powerless to be the change we wish to see in the world. In fact, local educators could do a lot to sidestep national policymakers by committing to do just three things this coming school year:

1.   Be Visionary – Almost every school in America has a mission statement to guide its short-term decisions. Almost no school in America has a vision statement to guide its long-term aspirations. Is it any wonder that educators feel overwhelmed by the day-to-day responsibilities of their work?

One of the defining characteristics of any transformational organization – whether it’s an elementary school or a Fortune 500 company – is an ability to manage the creative tension between a distant vision and an up-close focus. As educators, that means it’s essential we keep an eye on the daily progress of our students in subjects like reading and math. And it means articulating a long-range goal to which we aspire, and being mindful of which decisions will get us there – and which will take us off course.

As an example, consider Science Leadership Academy, a public high school in Philadelphia with a mission of “providing a rigorous, college-preparatory curriculum with a focus on science, technology, mathematics and entrepreneurship.” SLA’s mission clarifies the curricular focus of the school, but it tells us little about what shapes its philosophy of learning. For that, you need to consider its vision: to consistently ask and answer three questions – “How do we learn? What can we create? And what does it mean to lead?”

That extra layer of specificity is helpful not just to prospective parents, but also to SLA students, staff and administrators. And while educators are right to feel that the last ten years of federal education policy have narrowed their work to little more than basic-skills literacy and numeracy, there’s nothing preventing schools from taking the time to dream bigger.

2.   Be Specific About What Matters Most – Everyone agrees that in an ideal school, young people acquire the skills and habits to develop not just intellectually, but also socially and emotionally. According to our lawmakers, however, the mark of a successful school is still disproportionately based on reading and math scores. That’s ridiculous – but so are we if we refuse to take the time to explicitly identify which additional skills and habits we want students to practice and acquire.

This sort of work occurs informally in most schools, which hold generalized values for things like character, collaboration and empathy. Sometimes these words may appear on a wall;  other times they may get discussed during an advisory class. But there’s a big difference between implicitly valuing something in a person and explicitly committing to ensure that a person embodies those values.

The good news is that in a lot of schools, this sort of work has already begun. At the Project School in Indiana, educators work every day to nurture three sets of habits in their students: mind, heart and voice. And at the MC2 school in New Hampshire, students are assessed by their ability to master seventeen habits of lifelong learning – habits with specific rubrics and sub-skills that build a clear map for personal growth and evaluation.

Imagine if every school took the time to decide which skills and habits were most important to them, and then went the extra step by deciding how to measure what matters most?

3.   Be Comprehensive – It is both necessary and insufficient to craft a shared vision or identify which skills are most important for a young person’s overall learning and growth. What distinguishes transformational schools from the rest is their commitment to align everything they do – from student assessment to teacher evaluation to parent inclusion – around what they aspire to become.

This is not a code our elected lawmakers are likely to crack anytime soon. So let’s stop waiting. Let’s use the coming school year to take back our profession by raising it to a different standard of clarity and possibility. And let’s start holding ourselves accountable to a vision that actually reflects what we know is required to leave no child behind.

How Should Teachers Spell R-E-S-P-E-C-T?

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on How Should Teachers Spell R-E-S-P-E-C-T?

For the past several years, conversations about American public education – and how to improve it – have grown increasingly loud and contentious. In fact, there’s only one issue on which it seems all sides can agree: when it comes to the learning environment, nothing matters more than a great teacher.

It’s ironic, then, that as a society we act as though nothing matters less. We internalize the notion that “Those who can’t, teach.” We speak in two-dimensional terms that portray educators as either mythical saviors or selfish laggards. And we accept the notion that the best way to address the needs of our poorest children is to temporarily drop our smartest, most inexperienced educators into the center of communities that are not their own.

Ted Sizer, the man whose Horace series of books portrayed teachers in rich, three-dimensional terms, put it this way: “Americans underrate the craft of teaching.  We treat it mechanistically.  We expect to know how to teach fractions as though one needed only formulaic routine to do so, a way to plug in.  We talk about ‘delivering a service’ to students by means of ‘instructional strategies’; our metaphors arise from the factory and issue from the military manual. Education is apparently something someone does to somebody else.  Paradoxically, while we know that we don’t learn very well that way, nor want very much to have someone else’s definition of ‘service’ to be ‘delivered’ to us, we accept these metaphors for the mass of children.  We thus underrate the mystery, challenge, and complexity of learning and, as a result, operate schools that are extraordinarily wasteful.”

To be sure, part of the blame for this atmosphere of ignorance rests outside the schoolhouse door; but the remainder rests with teachers ourselves. If others do not fully appreciate the mystery and challenge of what we do every day, it is partly because we have failed to communicate the magic of that mystery outside of our own inner circle. And if the field we love has become wrongly obsessed with a single measure of student progress, our collective silence has extended the length of that particular fool’s errand.

The good news is that educators are starting to demonstrate how we can invest in the creation of a long-term teaching profession – not a short-term teaching force. More than half the states are rethinking how they grant teacher licenses to make the process more action-oriented. Solution-minded networks of educators are gathering at conferences like EduCon and #140edu to start crafting a different public narrative of what schools should be doing for students. And organizations like the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) are sharing videos that document what powerful teaching & learning really looks like – and requires.

And then there’s the Department of Education, which is trying to better integrate the voices and perspectives of teachers into its policymaking through the Teacher Ambassador RESPECT Program. Fellows spend a year learning about federal programs and policies, and witnessing the process by which they are designed and implemented. These teachers are then asked to share their expertise with federal staff and serve as a bridge between the work of the Department and the wishes of the field.

Gregory Mullenholz, a fifth grade Teacher from Montgomery County, Maryland, spent the 2011-2012 school year as a Fellow in Washington. To him, it’s all part of a larger effort to “change the conversation around teaching. Rather than accepted martyrdom, this is about elevating the profession. Teachers cannot sit back and hope change happens to them; we have to lead the transformation. Districts need higher quality professional development that is aligned with higher-quality evaluations. And as a profession, we cannot accept the fact that we have a shelf-life, that there comes a point where it is no longer financially sustainable to teach and we have to go get a “real job” to support our families. We have to hold our profession to a higher standard.”

Claire Jellinek, Mullenholz’s colleague in the class of 2011-2012 fellows, agrees: “Certainly one of the most significant things I’ve learned is that creating policy is a process,” she said. “That means it’s on us to help spark the conversations that need to happen to effect meaningful change.”

If he were still alive, Ted Sizer would agree. “It is a radical idea that all children grow at the same rate and in the same way and thus can thereby be accurately classified and ‘graded’ in narrow, standardized ways,” he cautioned. “It is a radical idea that the power of a child’s mind can be plumbed by a single test and reduced to a small clutch of numbers. It is a radical idea that people of any age can learn well in crowded, noisy, and ill-equipped places. It is a radical idea that serious learning can best emerge from a student’s exposure to short blasts of ‘delivered’ content, each of less than an hour in length, and unified by no coherent set of common ideas. And it is a radical idea that a child can learn what is needed to live well in a complex society with schooling that encompasses barely half the days of a calendar year, and that ignores the opportunities —or lack of opportunities— available to each child.”

Fellow teachers – how will we contribute to a different sort of conversation about what it is we do and raise the standards of our own profession at the same time? What stories must we tell, and what innovations must we help create?

The waiting is over. It’s time to be the change.