Author: Sam

I write books and talk about stuff.

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

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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.

The social origins of intelligence

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There’s a fascinating new study out in which researchers studied the injuries and aptitudes of Vietnam War veterans who suffered penetrating head wounds. Among their findings? That “the ability to establish social relationships and navigate the social world is not secondary to a more general cognitive capacity for intellectual function, but that it may be the other way around. Intelligence may originate from the central role of relationships in human life and therefore may be tied to social and emotional capacities.”

Let me repeat that: cognitive intelligence is not separate from social intelligence. In fact, our capacity to deepen the former is dependent on our ability to be deeply grounded in the latter.

For anyone who has spent time as an educator, we’ve always intuitively known this to be true. As the saying goes, unmet social needs lead to unmet academic needs. Or, put more simply, the three most important words in teaching and learning are Relationships, Relationships, Relationships.

And yet the recent flood of cognitive research that confirms this intuitive truth is striking, especially when one considers how slowly it has made its way into the minds of our nation’s policymakers. Indeed, as lead researcher Aron Barbey put it, “the evidence suggests that there’s an integrated information-processing architecture in the brain, that social problem solving depends upon mechanisms that are engaged for general intelligence and emotional intelligence. This is consistent with the idea that intelligence depends to a large extent on social and emotional abilities, and we should think about intelligence in an integrated fashion rather than making a clear distinction between cognition and emotion and social processing.

“This makes sense,” Barber continues, “because our lives are fundamentally social. We direct most of our efforts to understanding others and resolving social conflict. And our study suggests that the architecture of intelligence in the brain may be fundamentally social, too.”

So what would the next generation of education policies need to look like in order to be aligned with the emerging consensus about how the brain works, and how people learn?

They would need to start incentivizing the conditions that support holistic child development and growth, and stop disproportionately weighting literacy and numeracy.

They would need to start crafting policies in concert with other departments, from health to housing to labor, as a way to try and systemically support our country’s poorest families.

They would need to ensure that teacher preparation and evaluation programs are grounded in the latest neuroscience, not our traditional notions of what teaching looks like and requires.

What else?

Summer, once the time for reflection, now the time for radical redesign

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Tanesha Dixon vividly remembers the first summer she spent as a teacher – as part of a service program in Uganda, just before her senior year at Notre Dame.

“I had my heart set on being a forensic psychologist,” she told me recently, amidst the busy midday shuffle of downtown Washington, D.C. “Then I felt what it was like to be part of a place that was changing people’s lives. And I decided I wanted to keep being that person.”

Eleven years later, Dixon has become that person for scores of young men and women at the Wheatley Education Campus in the D.C. neighborhood of Trinidad. In that time, she’d observed that the stereotype of how teachers spend their summer – a.k.a seventy-seven consecutive Saturdays – never corresponded to the reality of her and her colleagues. “Summer is always the time for reflection, for the research you can’t always complete during the year, and for doing the work you have to do to make the next year even better than the last.”

This year, however, Tanesha Dixon is still waiting for her first moment of summer respite. “Every day,” she confessed wearily, “I work all day, go home, eat something, and then work until three in the morning. I feel like I’m building Rome and the road to it, simultaneously.”

Tanesha’s principal at Wheatley, Scott Cartland, knows what she’s talking about. Six years ago, his first summer at the school coincided with the DC government’s decision to install military-like checkpoints throughout Trinidad to try and stop a spate of murders. He remembers well the first school assembly he tried to organize that September. “We couldn’t get the crowd quiet enough to say anything,” he recalled. “Security guards were chasing kids around the aisles, other kids were screaming – it was complete chaos. You realize you’re outnumbered, and the kids don’t know you or trust you. We were in for a long year.”

Since then, with the help of teachers like Dixon, Cartland had helped engineer an impressive culture shift at Wheatley. But even though crucial factors like trust, attendance and student achievement had risen considerably, “it still wasn’t fast enough. Most of our kids don’t have a lot of social supports in their lives, so it’s especially important here that they start to really assume control of their own learning. And dragging a whole class of kids through the same curriculum over an entire school year clearly ain’t the way.”

For educators like Cartland and Dixon, then, the conclusion was clear: summer could no longer be the place to reflect on how to get better in a system that was never going to meet the needs of all their kids. It had to become the laboratory for something radical – a complete redesign of the structure and purpose of schooling. “What we decided,” Cartland told me, “was that the best place to start was by shifting toward a competency-based model of learning, and putting every kid in a position to be able to determine their own pace and progress, all year long.”

Although the phrase hasn’t entered mainstream conversation, “competency education” is on the mind of lots of educators and policymakers. It emerged out of the logic that if you want to make learning more personalized, you can’t continue to assign credit hours to students based on Industrial-era notions like “seat time” or “Carnegie Units.” In response, a growing number of schools and states are starting to organize learning not by credit hours, but by competencies – or the extent to which a student can demonstrably transfer knowledge and skills in and across content areas. In such an environment, each student is allowed to move through a curriculum at his or her own pace, and no one moves on until s/he can demonstrate mastery of the core concepts.

“To do that well,” Cartland explained, “a school like ours has to rethink just about everything – from grades to tests to professional development to the structure of the school day.” And to do that at all, Dixon adds, requires a reorientation that calls into question just about everything that she and her colleagues find most familiar about their chosen profession. “Some days I feel like Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future,” she confessed. “I’m in my DeLorean, and it’s the 1950s again, and I’m fighting Biff. But the future is now. We have more people coming out of DC with HIV than we do with four-year degrees. We have to be courageous enough to hold up a mirror and describe what we see. And if we’re being honest, I think we have to conclude that the whole way we do school is wrong. Teaching to the middle is wrong. Moving kids through the same curriculum at the same pace is wrong.

“Educators today have a choice to make: are we willing to be like those early civil rights activists who chose to sit at the lunch counter, or do we want to stand and observe from a safe distance so we can run when the cops come? I understand where the impulse to protect oneself comes from. I feel it, too. But this is what it means to be a teacher today, and we need to be accept the challenge of behaving in some very different ways.”

I saw evidence of Tanesha’s claims recently during a two-day workshop for her school and five others in DC – a mixture of existing neighborhood schools like Wheatley, and new charter schools that haven’t yet opened their doors. Each school had received a grant from the Citybridge Foundation (full disclosure: Citybridge has asked me to write a series of articles about school reform issues in DC) to reimagine its school in ways that make learning more personalized for each student. “The best and worst feature of competency education is that it never looks the same,” explained Rose Colby, a national expert on the subject who kicked off the meeting. “But let’s begin by letting you all share your most pressing questions or wonders.”

Scott Cartland raised his hand first. “At Wheatley, we’re struggling to design the right performance tasks for kids, and we’re wondering how we’re going to be grouping kids and allocating time. This model requires a much more open-ended system, and we’re still working in the old model, which breaks the day into lots of periods but pushes kids through that day in rigid groups.”

“At some point,” Rose replied, “we have to acknowledge that tweaking the old schedule won’t really work. The only way forward is to begin by thinking about what kids need, and then aligning everything to flow from that.”

Every night, late into the night, that’s exactly what Tanesha Dixon is trying to do. “We’ve built systems of curriculum that are basically grade-based and fixed. Starting this fall with our 6th graders, we’re going to try and do the opposite: to lay down the entire curriculum at the start of the year, and let kids move through it at their own pace. But meanwhile the education world is obsessed with standards, and the switch to the Common Core.”

Dixon took a deep breath. “The thing is, standards are not competencies – they don’t rise to an equal weight. Competencies are the transfer; they’re the performance component that bundles lots of standards together into one demonstrable concept. It’s big. It’s right. And I like that at Wheatley we’re not shying away from the challenge – but some days I wonder how we can pull off such a massive shift when so much of the old way of thinking about all this remains in the minds of so many.”

Cartland agrees. “Right now, I feel like everything we’ve done has been one giant sprint to the starting line. The summer has been invaluable. But this fall is when the real work will begin. That’s when we’ll find out if it was all worthwhile.”

(This article originally appeared in Huffington Post.)

Positively Deviant School Reform?

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If you had six months, little to no resources, and a clear mandate to solve a chronic country-wide problem – knowing that, if you failed, you would be asked to leave that country altogether – what would you do?

I ask because this was precisely the challenge Save the Children was faced with, in Vietnam, in the early 1990s. And the way they succeeded has great relevance for those of us who continue to struggle with other intractable problems (like, say, comprehensive school reform).

In 1990, two-thirds of Vietnamese children under the age of five were suffering from malnutrition. A string of typhoons had decimated the country’s central food staple: rice. Consequently, traditional supplemental feeding programs offered little more than a temporary solution.

Under these circumstances, Save the Children (STC) was asked to help Vietnam solve its widening problem of child malnutrition – and told that the solution could not come from more food, more money, or more resources of any kind: the people were going to have to solve the problem themselves. And if STC couldn’t help them figure out how in six months, its visa would not be renewed.

In response to these desperate circumstances, STC decided the first thing they should do was see if any of the country’s poorest families had children who weren’t malnourished; surely, if there were, something valuable could be learned from them. As STC’s Jerry Sternin explains, “Aid workers visited households, asked questions, and, most importantly, observed how mothers and other family members fed and cared for their well-nourished kids.” And as it turned out, “in every instance where a poor family had a well-nourished child, the mother or father was collecting tiny shrimps or crabs or snails (the size of one joint of one finger) from the rice paddies and adding these to the child’s diet, along with the greens from sweet potato tops. Although readily available and free for the taking, the conventional wisdom held these foods to be inappropriate, or even dangerous, for young children.”

Other atypical habits emerged. Most families fed their young children twice a day – in the morning, before they left to work in rice fields, and in the afternoon, after they returned. But because small children have small stomachs, they could only eat so much of the available rice at each sitting. By contrast, the outlier parents had instructed an adult in the house (usually a grandparent or older sibling) to feed their children regularly – as much as five times a day. As a result, even though every family had the same amount of rice, some children were getting twice as many calories as their friends and neighbors.

Armed with these insights, STC worked to help the parents of the malnourished children change their behavior. Within weeks, the early morning trip to the rice paddy with a small net and empty tin can – for retrieving the shrimp, crabs and greens – had become routine. And by the time STC’s six months were up, more than 40% of the children who participated in the program were rehabilitated; another 20% moved from severe malnutrition to moderate malnutrition; and Save the Children received another six-month visa.

What explains STC’s remarkable success? A strategy called Positive Deviance (PD) – or the idea that in every community, there are already individuals and/or groups behaving in a way that will engender better solutions to community-wide problems.

As the Positive Deviance Institute explains, the PD approach “is an asset-based, problem-solving, and community-driven approach that enables the community to discover these successful behaviors and strategies and develop a plan of action to promote their adoption by all concerned.” And as Sternin suggests, “because PD is based on the successful behaviors of individuals and groups within the socio-cultural context of each program community, it is always, by definition, culturally appropriate. It is very much an ‘approach’ not a ‘model.’”

As someone who cares deeply about American public education, I believe the PD approach could yield great returns for our ongoing reform efforts – but only if we become clear on what it is that constitutes “positive deviance.”

Currently, we celebrate the teachers or schools that demonstrate unusual gains in reading and math scores. But that’s like trying to solve malnutrition by focusing on whether children eat out of bowls or on a plate; it’s related to the goal, but only indirectly.

What, then, is the central goal of American school reform? I would suggest it’s creating a system that is capable of supporting the development and growth – cognitively, socially, emotionally, and ethically – of every child. And if that is our goal (or close to it), then our examples of positive deviance must come from schools and communities that, despite limited resources, are helping children to holistically develop and grow.

That means no private school examples will suffice – and it means no highly unique, highly expensive models like Harlem Children’s Zone. It probably also needs to mean only public schools that do not screen for certain types of students – so, no magnets, either. We’re looking for places that are positively deviant even though they have the same resources as the rest of us.

So who fits the bill? For districts that are reorienting themselves around the personalized needs of every student, we might want to spend more time looking at what RSU2 is doing in Maine, or what superintendent Pam Moran has helped engineer in Albemarle County, Virginia. For individual schools that are attuned to the holistic developmental needs of kids, we can look to Malcolm Price Lab School in Iowa, or The Project School in Indiana. And for networks that help their members focus on the right combination of inputs and outcomes for kids, we should study Expeditionary Learning, New Tech Network, and James Comer’s School Development Program.

There are, in other words, lots of examples of positive deviance in our current system – and lots of places that are refusing to be limited by the current myopic definition of what constitutes “success.” And while none of these places are perfect, together, their examples of positive deviance just might add up to the perfect plan for American public education going forward.

What other examples are you aware of — and what is the positive deviance your example brings to light?

(This article originally appeared in Huffington Post.)

The (book) reviews are in!

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Well, three of them at least — from the Washington Post‘s Moira McLaughlin, the Century Foundation’s Rick Kahlenberg (via Washington Monthly), and Eduflack’s orange-jacket wearing Patrick Riccards. And they’re good!

On a related note, C-SPAN posted a video of my public reading from Our School at the Francis Parker school in Chicago. Check it out — and let me know what you think.