Tag: Great Schools

Discipline in schools moves toward peacemaking

Posted on | by Sam

The first time he got in trouble, 7-year-old “Z” kicked his teacher — getting him into more trouble.

A few months later, shortly after his grandfather passed away, he kicked his teacher again.

In many schools across the country, where zero tolerance policies allow little wiggle room for understanding why a child may be misbehaving, Z would have been suspended, expelled, or even arrested.

That was how Z’s school district in Broward County, Florida, had operated for years — enforcing zero tolerance policies, and arresting or suspending children (most of them students of color, and often students as young as Z) at a higher rate than any other school district in the state.

On one level, of course, a zero tolerance policy makes sense. After all, schools can’t be safe places if students are allowed to kick their teachers. Order must be maintained. What could be clearer than saying that misbehavior will not be tolerated?

But on another level, every child is different, and students need the right kind of support if they are to be able to learn and grow. Different kids bring different sorts of issues with them to school, and punishment is rarely the best way to help a child who is most in need of love and support.

Classroom or Courtroom

Punishing children harshly does nothing for their ability to succeed academically, and statistics show that it contributes to the achievement gap. Suspended students spend less time in class, which correlates to lower test scores and grades and increased apathy and dropout rates.

Instead of being suspended, Z was placed in a Behavior Change Program the district had organized, where trained professionals teach children how to deal with their emotions and make better choices. His mother is relieved; Z still has a chance to be whatever he wants to be in the future, she says.

That distinction — keeping kids in the classroom, and out of the courtroom — is what Broward County superintendent Robert Runcie and a growing number of school leaders across the country are saying can make the difference in putting a child like Z on a path to success, instead of a path to prison.

This is a major challenge for American schools today — changing the way adults respond to student conduct, particularly with students of color. Consider this: Today, American public schools suspend roughly 3½ million kids a year — more than twice the rate in the 1970s — and we refer a quarter of a million children to the police for arrest.

Every year.

Worse still, educators suspend black students at more than double the rate for white students — even though statistics show that a student who is suspended or expelled is three times as likely to be in contact with the juvenile justice system the following year.

“When adolescents experience injustice in any context,” explains UCLA professor Phillip Goff, “they end up committing crime at much higher rates later in life regardless of how likely they were to be involved in crime to begin with. That is a sobering statistic. It means we can now show that injustice causes crime.

“When you expose young people to injustice, they lose hope that playing within the rules and working hard is going to pay off. They start to believe more and more that we live in a world where the goal is simply to get by and get over — and when you are teaching that implicitly, you shouldn’t be surprised that discipline becomes a problem.”

Restorative Justice

The good news is that more schools are heeding the advice of experts like Goff, and adopting restorative justice programs — alternative approaches to discipline in schools.

Restorative justice programs provide a way to repair the harm that occurs between people when conflicts arise. What they’re showing is that when victims, offenders and community members meet to decide how to do that, and do it well, the results can be transformational.

This is happening in Oakland, California. The city’s school district is nearly 75 percent nonwhite and 75 percent of student’s meet the requirements for the free lunch program and has experienced extensive discipline and violence issues. In 2012, however, it expanded its adoption of restorative justice work, and has seen change for the better.

It works like this: instead of suspending or expelling students who misbehave, schools with restorative justice programs bring kids together under skilled facilitation by a trained adult — and, often, fellow students — in order to resolve their conflicts peacefully, and build a stronger community in the process.

Howard Zehr, a distinguished professor at Eastern Mennonite University who is regarded as the “grandfather of restorative justice,” puts it this way: Typically, the questions our traditional systems try to address are: What rules or laws were broken? Who broke them? And what do they deserve?

By contrast, restorative justice (RJ) asks a different set of questions: Who has been hurt? What are their needs? And who has the obligation to address those needs and remedy the harm that has been done?

Positive Outcomes of Mediating Peacefully

Students are now asking for a circle, says one Oakland school staffer. “Instead of throwing a punch, they’re backing off and asking to mediate (conflicts) peacefully with words. And that’s a great thing.”

Better yet, it’s working. According to a September 2014 report that the district submitted to the Office of Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education:

• More than 88 percent of the teachers reported that restorative practices were very or somewhat helpful in managing difficult student behaviors in classroom.
• More than 47 percent reported that RJ helped reduce office referrals, and 53 percent said it helped reduce disciplinary referrals for African American students.
• Suspensions have declined significantly — and most significantly for African American students suspended for disruption and/or willful defiance, a decrease of 40 percent.

Knowing this, here are a few good questions to ask the leaders at your child’s school:

• “What is your approach to discipline? Do you have a zero tolerance policy here?” (And, if they do, are they willing to consider exploring a shift to a restorative justice program?)
• “What are the disciplinary statistics of the school?” “How often do you suspend students?” “How often are kids behaving violently?”
• “How are you helping students develop the skills they need to manage their emotions and make better choices in their interactions with other people?”
• “In what ways are the teachers here being trained to become more sensitive to the different cultural needs of their students?”

In sum, the key to a safe and healthy school climate has less to do with the children — and more to do with the adults. The approach school administrators, teachers, and other adults take to discipline in schools can make all the difference. As Broward County superintendent Robert Runcie puts it, “It isn’t about improving student conduct, as much as it is about changing the way adults respond to student conduct.”

(This article originally appeared on GreatSchools.org)

This is what every student could look like (and be)

Posted on | by Sam

Here’s the thing about me: I love schools. And I’m in them all the time. Lots of them, all over the country. So it’s safe to say that I am as aware as just about anyone what is out there when it comes to American educational options.

And yet here’s the other thing: I’m constantly hearing about new places doing great work — new to me, at least, because the folks there have been doing their thing for a long time — and whose approach to learning is precisely the sort of thing we should be hearing a lot more about.

The latest entry in that category? The June Jordan School for Equity, a remarkable public school in San Francisco.

See for yourself, by watching these three short profiles of three recent JJSE students.

And here’s the final thing to consider: schools like JJSE are filled with amazing young people like Lupe, Henry, and Sintia. So when you hear about the declining state of American education, just remember this:

The future of learning is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.

Lupe Carreno

Henry Eik

Sintia Henriquez

 

Is there a good way to close a neighborhood school?

Posted on | by Sam

I just spent some time learning about a remarkable public school in Burlington, Vermont — the Sustainability Academy — and perhaps the most remarkable thing I heard was the way it turned a potentially catastrophic community event — the closing of a neighborhood school — into a positive success story that has deepened, not diminished, Burlington’s sense of community.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this issue recently, not least because I’ll be speaking next week in Chicago — a city whose public school closings have been particularly tense and polarizing. So I asked several members of the SA community to help me understand how they could turn a struggling local school in a struggling neighborhood with declining attendance into a vibrant magnet school at which, in the words of parent Maleka Clarke, “because everyone is different, no one is different.”

You can read more about the school’s transformation here, but when it comes to the core ingredients required to remake a school in inclusive, constructive ways, here’s what they outlined:

  • Choice for families, so that no one is being redistricted into something that is not of their choosing;
  • A sense of permission, from the superintendent, to think innovatively and create something different and new;
  • The presence of “positive mediation,” one in which members of the previous school, the current community, and the new leadership are facilitated through some shared strategic planning;
  • Skilled leadership — democratic, participatory, and strategic — that can guide the thinking about what will happen next, and that prioritizes “creating an environment where all voices can be heard, and where a group’s best thinking can emerge”; and
  • Pilot funds that help the school team plan and experiment.

Were any of these elements in place during the school closings in Chicago? Would the presence of any or most of them have helped ensure a more positive result? In short, what must cities start, stop, and keep doing when it comes to making tough decisions about which schools will continue, which schools will be shuttered, and which kinds of schools will take their place?

What Makes a Great School?

Posted on | by Sam

What does a healthy, high-functioning learning environment actually look like – and how can parents determine if their child is lucky enough to be attending one?

For modern American families, those questions are more relevant than ever, as increasing numbers of students are opting out of their neighborhood schools and into the chaotic, nascent marketplace of school choice.  What they’re finding is that the recipe for school success is an elusive set of ingredients that is extremely difficult to convey simply and clearly– something Bill Jackson knows all too well.

Back in 1998, when the concept of school choice was still in its infancy, Jackson founded Great Schools as a way to harness the potential of the Internet to help parents become more effectively involved in their children’s education. Today, Great Schools is the country’s leading source of information on school performance, with listings of 200,000 public and private schools serving students from preschool through high school, a cache of more than 800,000 parent ratings and reviews, and a website that receives more than 37 million unique visitors a year.

The success of Great Schools stems in large part from Jackson’s prescient anticipation of the rise of school choice. Yet its growth owes as much to something Jackson couldn’t have anticipated – the 2001 passage of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law – and the ways that legislation would transform how people thought about what characterizes a great school.

Almost overnight, conversations about schooling shifted radically – from a belief that the core components of a school couldn’t be measured, to a commitment to measure schools solely by their students’ scores on state reading and math tests.

And predictably, the Great Schools ratings system followed suit; each school’s 10-point score has been determined by a single measure – “its performance on state standardized tests.” This made for a rating system that was easy to apply to schools and communicate to parents. And yet as time went on and Jackson and his colleagues delved deeper into the mystery of what defines a great school, they realized that test scores were valuable – and overvalued.

What else should a ratings system incorporate? And what are the core ingredients parents could look for – and demand – as a way to drive improvement across all schools?

To help answer those questions, Jackson hired Samantha Brown Olivieri, a former educator and self-styled “data diva”, and charged her with leading the process of devising a more balanced ratings system for schools. This October, that system will debut in two cities – Newark, New Jersey, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And eventually, it will be applied nationwide.

As Olivieri explains it, the new system reflects an observation that is both simple and significant: what makes or breaks a school is not its performance on a single state test, but the quality of its overall culture. “We want parents to find not just a great school, but also the best possible fit for their child – and that’s tricky. It’s a lot harder to measure qualitative data in a way that’s consistent and useful.”

Nonetheless, Olivieri and her colleague devised a five-part portrait of school culture:

  1. robust teacher support;
  2. active family engagement;
  3. supportive environmental conditions;
  4. strong social and emotional student growth; and
  5. a school-wide climate of high expectations.

For some of the categories, Olivieri knew that schools already collect quantitative data that can provide a useful snapshot: student attendance, for example, or student re-enrollment and faculty absenteeism rates. For others, an entity like Great Schools is left to rely on qualitative measures that different schools and districts must choose to collect and share, like attitudinal surveys of students, teachers and parents, or more specific information about their programmatic features and what makes them distinctive.

“We’re trying different things out right now through this pilot,” Olivieri explained, “and we’re searching for what will be both credible and actionable. Part of the challenge is that most parents do not have a depth of experience on which to rely. When people rate a restaurant on Yelp, they do so after attending hundreds of restaurants. But that’s not generally how it works with schools; for most of us, the range of reference is quite limited.”

It is, in short, a brave new world, but it’s one that Jackson and Olivieri feel will help Great Schools fulfill its goal of helping parents make better, more informed decisions about where to send their children to school. “When I was teaching in New York City,” Olivieri said, “I learned the importance of engaging kids in their own education and having a really positive school climate that was focused on the development of a much broader set of skills. I also learned that all kids can reach their full potential – and that it will never happen until the ways we evaluate our schools are aligned with the full range of possibilities we want each child to experience.

“I understand that the phrase ‘data-driven’ has taken on a negative tone because of the way it’s been misused in the past,” she added. “But that doesn’t mean we should swing back in the other direction. The data does tell us something. And it’s true that education is not a field that can easily measure the most valuable outcomes. It’s a challenge – but it’s an exciting challenge, and I’m excited to see what we can learn – and how we can help.”

(This article also appeared on Forbes.com.)

The (Keynesian) Economics of School Choice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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