Author: Sam

I write books and talk about stuff.

Murdering Innocent Sikhs Does Not Make You a Patriot

Posted on | by Sam

Reading the initial reports of the mass shooting in Wisconsin that claimed six Sikh worshipers, I’m reminded of a little-known event from more than a decade ago. Taken together, the two events say a lot about where we are, and who we aspire to be.

It was September 15, 2001. The terrorist attacks that took down the Twin Towers and damaged the Pentagon had just occurred, and everyone felt angry, frightened, and shell-shocked. For Frank Roque, however, mere anger or sadness was an insufficient response; he wanted blood for blood.

Roque, an aircraft mechanic from Mesa, Arizona, spoke ceaselessly in the days after the attacks about “killing some towel-heads” or “slitting some Iranian throats.” On September 15, he spent the afternoon getting drunk at a local bar and openly threatening to “kill Middle Eastern people.”

After getting kicked out of the bar, Roque drove to a local Chevron station owned by a Sikh-American named Balbir Singh Sodhi and fired five bullets from a .38 handgun through the open window of his truck, killing Singh instantly. Later, when police arrested him at his home, Roque offered a simple explanation for his actions: “I’m a damn American,” he said proudly.

Although detailed information about yesterday’s assailant in the Sikh temple has not been released, what has been confirmed is that the gunman was a 40-year-old white man. And I worry that if he hadn’t been killed at the scene, his rationale would have sounded eerily similar to the addled, ignorant patriotism of Frank Roque.

The notion that anyone could think murdering fellow citizens reflects American values tells us a lot about the ways we have failed as a nation to ensure that all people understand, at its core, what it means to uphold those values.

To be sure, extremists like Frank Roque are rare, and there are plenty among us who can distinguish not only between extraordinary terrorists and ordinary Muslims, but also between Islam and Sikhism. And yet it is also true that too many of us believe that some people are more American than others, allowing institutions like a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin to become emblematic of the false notion that there are enemies in our midst.

Since its founding, the United States has been known as the world’s first new nation because it is the only place in human history where one’s standing in the civic order is not determined by bloodlines or kinship, but by a fundamental allegiance to principles and ideals. Anyone can be an American, at anytime, and equally so. We can practice any religion, proselytize any worldview, and promote any cause. And in a way the only guidance we have to do so and not rip each other to threads in the process comes from the 45 words of the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The Frank Roques among us threaten that social compact by their willingness to threaten the safety and security of their fellow citizens. But the rest of us also play a part when we refuse to heed the implicit instructions woven throughout the First Amendment’s five freedoms – not the right to say whatever we want, but the responsibility to guard the rights of others, especially those with whom we most deeply disagree.

In a better, more hopeful version of who we are, the first people to come to the defense of a brown Sikh minority in Wisconsin will be their white Christian neighbors. The first thing children will learn in school is how to balance individual rights and civic responsibilities.  And the last people to lay claim to being American will be ignorant, violent extremists like Frank Roque.

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

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

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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.

Empathy for a Killer?

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As the bizarre courtroom faces of James Holmes start appearing in newspapers alongside the beautiful lost faces of the twelve people he murdered, I wonder: is it possible for feel empathy for a person capable of such senseless violence?

I think the answer is that it depends, and what it depends on is the larger story of James Holmes, and what that story tells us about this 24-year-old killer, and, by extension, ourselves.

To be clear, there is no excuse for what people like Holmes, Seung-Hui Cho, or Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold did. We all deserve to be judged by our actions, and there is nothing more damning than the decision to casually extinguish the lives of complete strangers. That fact is beyond debate.

Yet it is also true that too often, we reduce the most violent among us to two-dimensional caricatures, and allow ourselves to create a safe distance between what they did and what their actions say about who we are as a people, and what we allow to endure.

Take the killers at Columbine. Dave Cullen was among the first wave of reporters to cover that story. He spent the next ten years investigating the event, and the teenage boys that caused it.  As he wrote in the New York Times, “Perpetrators of mass murder are usually nothing like our conceptions of them. They are nothing like a vision of pure evil. They are complicated.

“Mr. Harris kept a sort of journal for an entire year, focused largely on his plan to blow up his school and mow down survivors with high-powered rifles. Mr. Klebold kept a more traditional journal for two years, spewing a wild array of contradictory teen angst and deep depression, grappling seriously with suicide from the very first page.

“Audiences are never surprised by the journal of Mr. Harris,” Cullen points out. “It’s hate-hate-hate all the way through. He was a coldblooded psychopath, in the clinical use of that term. He had no empathy, no regard for human suffering or even human life.”

But Mr. Klebold’s journal tells another, more complicated story. He was tormented, confused, and ferociously angry – not at jocks, as the traditional reporting of the event suggested, but himself. “What a loathsome creature he found himself. No friends, no love, not a soul who cared about him or what became of his miserable life. None of that is objectively true. But that’s what he saw.”

It’s still unclear if James Holmes entered that theater in Colorado because he was mentally ill, like Seung-Hui Cho, because he was psychopathic, like Eric Harris, or because he was consumed with anger and self-loathing, like Dylan Klebold. Yet one thing is painfully clear: while we mourn the dead in Colorado and wonder how such evil can exist in our midst, this tragedy must spark more in us than mere anger at the killer. It must remind us that we as a society are the ones who made it possible for an individual to acquire 6,000 rounds of ammunition without notice or concern. It must remind us that there are many whose illnesses, left untreated and untended, could lead them down the most destructive of paths. And it must remind us how explosively hopeless and isolating the feelings of invisibility and voicelessness can be.

As Martin Luther King Jr. once observed, violence is the language of the unheard. I say it’s time we accepted the responsibility of listening with a more empathetic ear.

Are Parent Trigger Laws a Good Idea?

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It’s hard not to feel excited for the group of parents who successfully took over their California community’s school, and who now are dreaming of bigger things. “Our children will now get the education they deserve,” said Doreen Diaz, whose daughter attends Desert Trails Elementary in Adelanto. “We are on the way to making a quality school for them, and there’s no way we will back down.”

It’s equally hard to feel confident that this story will have the ending Ms. Diaz and others envision. For starters, any proposed changes at the school won’t take place until 2013. What happens when the majority of parents who spearheaded the campaign move onto the local middle school? Will a majority of the parents who opposed the trigger seek to switch the school’s focus a second time? And with something as complex as creating a healthy school in an environment beset by poverty — 100% of the school’s students are eligible for the free lunch program — how can the members of this community become fluent around issues of teaching and learning to make thoughtful choices about the future direction of their school?

A few months back, I suggested that this debate could provide an opportunity for the nation to step up its game in two areas — making effective group decisions and understanding how people learn — via a massive national book club (hello, Oprah?).

Clearly, this will never happen. But here’s something that must: a series of well-facilitated community conversations and meetings that help all residents of the Desert Trails attendance zone imagine their ideal school, and then work backwards to make that ideal real.

A great starting point would be to ask everyone in Adelanto to share the story of the most powerful learning experience of their lives — and then to stitch those stories together in order to build a school that is designed to create those types of experiences for all kids. I’ve been gathering people’s learning stories for years now, and they all point to a small set of core conditions that any good school must possess.

In fact, I can guarantee that the sort of place the parents of Desert Trails seek will need to be challenging, engaging and supportive, and that what kids learn will need to feel relevant to their lives and be as hands-on as possible. That means any proposal disproportionately concerned with raising kids’ test scores should be rejected outright, as should any proposal that doesn’t offer kids a balanced curriculum that includes physical education, the arts, and an approach to learning that gets kids outside of the classroom and into their communities. It means throwing out any proposal that isn’t clear about how it will equally foster a child’s intellectual, social and emotional growth. It means ignoring any proposal that doesn’t directly address how it will provide wraparound services for the children and families of Adelanto, whose needs extend far beyond the schoolhouse door. And it means tossing any plan that isn’t explicit about how it will provide all of these resources in a community where school funding is still determined by local property taxes.

In other words, anything is possible — and this thing in particular is really, really hard.

Should States Be Sued for Providing Low-Quality Schools?

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How’s this for a summer blockbuster – the American Civil Liberties Union is suing the state of Michigan for violating the “right to learn” of its children, a right guaranteed under an obscure state law.

That assistance hasn’t happened, says Kary L. Moss, executive director of the Michigan chapter of the ACLU. “The Highland Park School District is among the lowest-performing districts in the nation, graduating class after class of children who are not literate. Our lawsuit . . . says that if education is to mean anything, it means that children have a right to learn to read.”

Although this case is the first of its kind, we’ve been having this debate for a loooong time now. For years, Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. has tried — and failed — to introduce language for a new amendment to the U.S. Constitution “regarding the right of all citizens of the United States to a public education of equal high quality.”

Then there’s the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child, a 1989 gathering that resulted in the first legally binding international treaty and establishment of universally recognized norms and standards for the protection and promotion of children’s rights. By any account it was an overwhelming success; all but three member nations signed on.

The three holdouts? Somalia. South Sudan. And us.

And then there’s the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in response to a group of poor Texas parents who claimed their state’s tolerance of the wide disparity in school resources violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. A state court agreed, but the U.S. Supreme Court, in a narrow 5-4 decision, reversed. “Though education is one of the most important services performed by the state, it 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.”

For Justice Thurgood Marshall, writing in dissent, that was precisely the point. “The Court concludes that public education is not constitutionally guaranteed,” even though “no other state function is so uniformly recognized as an essential element of our society’s well being . . . Education prepares individuals to be self-reliant and self-sufficient participants in society. Both facets of this observation are suggestive of the substantial relationship which education bears to guarantees of our Constitution.”

The fact that the Court’s 1973 decision was 5-4 tells you how closely contested this issue has always been. And yet I can’t help but wonder, why is it so difficult to demand of ourselves a higher set of standards – for learning, for teaching, and for fairness? And what should we do at the federal level to ensure the right to learn of all American children?

We could start by taking the following seven policy steps, which were developed during my tenure as the National Director of the Forum for Education & Democracy:

1.    Link Federal support to progress in Opportunities to Learn.

Currently, the allocation of education spending does not reflect the urgency of repaying the educational debt. The funding allocated in current federal policy — less than 10% of most schools’ budgets — does not meet the needs of the under-resourced schools where many students currently struggle to learn. It is also allocated in ways that reinforce rather than compensate for unequal funding across states. Nor does current federal policy require that states demonstrate progress toward equitable and adequate funding or greater opportunities to learn. Federal mandates that simply require equity in such things as “highly qualified teachers,” without a national agenda to provide such resources, offer a hollow promise.

Such inequality is fundamentally incompatible with the democratic mission of our schools to create an engaged and capable citizenry. This new direction must not only offer access to basic education, but also equip all citizens with the higher-order thinking skills made necessary by new economic and social realities.

Investment in a “thinking curriculum” for all students is needed to reverse the destructive trend toward a society deeply divided between the “haves” whose education prepares them to participate in the new society and the “have nots” who can’t participate — and who are increasingly part of a growing school-to-prison pipeline. The federal role must ensure that every child has an equal opportunity to learn, which research has demonstrated includes access to high-quality teachers and school leaders, challenging curricula, and schools and classes organized so that all students are well known and well supported. Further, to ensure that all bilingual learners reach their optimal potential, they must have the opportunity to develop a deep, principled command of content so that they are subsequently fairly assessed on their knowledge and skills.  Like all other students, bilingual learners must be given adequate opportunities to experience rigorous instruction that is challenging, beneficial, and college-ready.  However, rather than viewing these students as lacking the English language, our system should acknowledge and expand their bilingual assets that will benefit them and our nation.  Federal support for these efforts should be expanded so that dual language and bilingual programs that foster biliteracy skills are made optional for bilingual learners.

One central tool for this task is linking state eligibility for federal funds to state progress toward equitable school funding. The goal is to establish reciprocal or two-way accountability where it does not currently exist. While recent approaches to accountability have emphasized holding the child and the school accountable to the state or federal government for test performance, government has not been held accountable to the child or his school for providing adequate educational resources.

A new ESEA should start by asking (and helping) states to develop systems of accountability that use multiple measures of student learning which are performance-based and pegged to world-class standards of learning, and that assess gains based on how students improve over time.  The current confusing statistical gauntlet of dozens of annual targets for making “adequate yearly progress,” some of which place NCLB at odds with other federal laws and parent and student rights, should be replaced by state plans that propose a continuous progress index of performance which evaluates how schools and individual groups of students are advancing. Such an index should include a range of important measures, including continuation and progress toward graduation, as well as measures of school learning that assess higher-order thinking and understanding, provide useful diagnostic information, and ensure appropriate assessment for special education students and English language learners, guided by professional testing standards.

In addition, as a condition of receiving federal funds, states should create an accompanying opportunity index that reflects the availability of well-qualified teachers; strong curriculum opportunities; books, materials, and equipment (including science labs and computers); and adequate facilities. A report describing the state’s demonstrated movement toward adequacy and equitable access to education resources — and a plan for further progress — should be part of each state’s application for federal funds.

This notion was proposed at the start of the standards movement, when the National Council on Education Standards and Testing’s Assessment Task Force suggested that student performance standards would actually result in greater inequalities if they were not accompanied by policies ensuring access to resources, including appropriate instructional materials and well-prepared teachers, for all children.

Finally, the federal government should help to distribute well-trained teachers to all students through incentives that attract and keep educators in harder-to-staff locations, just as it currently does in medicine. In these ways, our national resources would be used strategically to ensure an adequate opportunity to learn for every child.

The federal government can help ensure equity by:

  • Better equalizing its own allocation of funds to states, accounting for concentrations of need and differences in costs of living;
  • Creating benchmarks for the pursuit of equity in the form of opportunity-to-learn standards;
  • Closing the comparability loophole in Title I by requiring districts to equalize per-pupil expenditures across schools prior to awarding Title I funds; and
  • Incentivizing states to implement equitable funding models across districts and schools.

2.  Incentivize the recruitment, development, and equitable distribution of highly qualified and highly effective teachers and school leaders.

Myriad studies have clearly demonstrated that highly effective teachers are an essential element for student learning and growth. However, students in low-resource schools do not have access to these teachers at the same rate as students in high-resource schools. Studies find that the quality of the school principal — especially the extent to which he or she engages in instructional leadership practices — is the second most important determinant of a healthy learning environment, right after teacher quality.

The federal government should ensure that all students have the same opportunity to learn from a well-trained teacher and a high-quality principal by increasing the number of highly qualified and highly effective teachers and principals in the pipeline; helping to ensure high quality preparation for these teachers and principals; and creating incentives that attract and keep educators and school leaders in harder-to-staff locations, just as it currently does in medicine. In particular, teachers of bilingual learners must be well prepared in both language development and content methodologies, each of which plays an important role in students’ opportunities for learning.  Teachers should also receive ongoing professional learning opportunities in content delivery, language sheltering, and teaching of academic language, all with a focus on college readiness.

This can be achieved by:

  • Creating incentives, such as service scholarships, to recruit teachers and principals to high need areas;
  • Strengthening teacher preparation by supporting professional development programs (akin to teaching hospitals) and high quality residency programs;
  • Supporting the development of a national teacher performance assessment that can be used for licensing;
  • Implementing a minimum ratio of experienced to inexperienced teachers for all schools;
  • Supporting mentoring programs and ongoing, practice-based collaborative learning opportunities for teachers;
  • Providing opportunities to acquire certification in ESL and bilingual education through scholarships and loan forgiveness;
  • Providing expansive teacher preparation models where an ESL endorsement is part of the regular secondary certification process and that ensures that all bilingual learners are provided with teachers who are equipped to implement a rigorous curriculum that is attuned to students’ English proficiency levels in core content areas.
  • Supporting the development of differentiated career pathways that help keep promising teachers in the profession, and
  • Investing in strong school leadership recruitment and training programs.

3. Ensure equal access to high-quality early education programs.

Access to a high-quality early education experience sets the foundation for academic success. Research conducted by Nobel Laureate James Heckman affirms that early education programs have clear educational development benefits that include higher graduation rates, higher incomes, and lower levels of criminal behavior compared to children who did not participate in early education.Heckman’s findings were corroborated by the HighScope Perry Preschool Study which found that child participation in an early education program significantly reduced arrest rates, while increasing earned income, graduation rate, and IQ scores compared to those who did not participate in an early education program.

As important as early education programs are to a child’s development, access to such programs is far from equitable. A report by the National Institute for Early Childhood Research indicates that access to early education programs varies by ethnicity, income and the educational attainment level of a child’s mother. The federal government can help to close the gap in access to early education by:

  • Establishing minimum requirements for early education programs (e.g., teachers with bachelor degrees and trained in early childhood education, small class sizes, etc.);
  • Expanding current programs to include many more children from disadvantaged backgrounds, and
  • Expanding funding for early education programs.

4. Meet the Federal Obligation for Funding Programs for High-Need Students.

A complement to requiring that states move toward more equitable spending formulas is ensuring the federal funds designated for the education of high-need children are both adequate and spent strategically. When ESEA and the Education for All Handicapped Children Act were first enacted, the federal government committed to funding 40 percent of the extra costs of educating students with disabilities and those who are “educationally disadvantaged” by reason of poverty. This commitment has not been maintained.

If we are legitimately to expect all students to reach much higher standards, the federal government must meet its promises to support the investments needed to provide students the kind of intensive, high-quality teaching and support services they need. An estimated $10 billion in additional funds would move us about half the distance toward meeting this obligation. More of these funds should also be spent to improve the actual quality of services, rather than merely to meet complex regulatory requirements and manage paperwork that takes up staff time and school resources without improving the quality of education. Rather than adding ever more procedural regulations, these programs should be streamlined to focus on the quality of teaching provided to students by expert teachers and to invest in growing that expertise by investing in top-flight professional education.

Federal funds should be targeted for purposes that can make a real difference in educational opportunity — recruiting, preparing, and retaining high-quality teachers with the skills needed to help students who experience challenges in learning; improving professional learning opportunities; supporting the development of strong curriculum and assessment strategies; and providing additional learning time for low-income students through enrichment opportunities after school and during the summer.

5. Strengthen supports for English Language Learner and Limited English Proficiency students.

English Language Learners (ELL) represent the fastest increasing segment of the public school population. Under Title III of ESEA, schools and districts are accountable for the academic achievement of ELL students and for enabling these students to reach English-language proficiency. However, ELL students face a unique set of challenges compared to other students. For example, it is difficult to generate advanced conceptual understanding from English language learners (ELLs) and students with limited English-language proficiency (LEP) when they are being tested or taught in a language in which they are not proficient. The federal government can encourage teachers, schools, and districts to provide equal education opportunities for these students by:

  • Investing in the development of fully-qualified bilingual teachers who are sensitive to language barriers and cultural differences among students and able to effectively teach ELL and LEP students;
  • Aligning Title II and III by requiring that state local education agencies (LEA’s) demonstrate how their second language acquisition programs meet the academic and linguistic needs of bilingual learners;
  • Lifting the cap on the amount of money appropriated for pre-service preparation of bilingual and English-as-a-second-language teacher candidates, combined with restoring fellowship opportunities (Title VII) for graduate study in those same areas provided in earlier versions of ESEA;
  • Encouraging states and localities to increase the pool of highly qualified bilingual teachers and personnel with expertise in working with ELLs;
  • Supporting high-quality, research-based professional development opportunities for ELL/LEP teachers;
  • Providing all staff with continuous professional development in effective practices, particularly as they apply to bilingual learners.  Teacher candidates, and those already in the profession, should be provided financial support to complete higher education coursework in ESL methodology, or equivalent professional development in sheltered instruction in the subject areas.  For those teachers already in the profession, meeting this goal should be fulfilled by the end of their second year in the classroom.
  • Supporting early school intervention programs that help prevent ELL students from falling behind academically, and
  • Prohibiting districts and schools from testing ELL student exclusively in English until they have become proficient in the English language.

6. Invest in out-of-school learning supports.

The federal government also has a role to play in offering auxiliary supports that prepare students to learn, keep them engaged in school, and make their environment beyond school conducive to high levels of skill development. The obvious truth — that schools alone are not responsible for student learning and growth — should propel attention to programs that will provide adequate health care and nutrition, safe and secure housing, and healthy communities for children.

As New York University professor Pedro Noguera has noted: “If we want to ensure that all students have the opportunity to learn, we must ensure that their basic needs are met. This means that students who are hungry should be fed, that children who need coats in the winter should receive them, and that those who have been abused or neglected receive the counseling and care they deserve. If the commitment to raise achievement is genuine, there are a variety of measures that can be taken outside of school that will produce this result. For example, removing lead paint from old apartments and homes and providing students in need with eye exams and dental care are just some of the steps that could be taken.”

The learning effects of providing safe housing, non-toxic environments, and necessary health care are substantial — by some estimates as great as improving instruction. One key to the success of other high-performing nations has been the provision of out-of-school learning supports. Nations that provide all children with health care, ensure that when students come to school toothaches, vision problems, untreated asthma, and a range of illnesses do not distract them.

The availability of high-quality preschool is also a national priority in high-performing nations. When nations view learning as a priority for all children, they ensure that students come to school ready to learn. For every dollar invested in high-quality family support and early learning programs for young children, there is a $7 to $10 return to society in higher graduation rates and employment leading to higher wages and greater tax payments, decreased need for costly special  education services, lower rates of crime and incarceration, and better health. An additional $10 billion investment annually would enable all low-income children to experience high-quality preschools and affordable day care, with additional supports to enable their parents to meet their children’s educational and health needs as well.

7.  Enforce civil rights laws that are essential for educational equity.

The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) should evaluate and enforce state compliance with the federal mandate (as stated under the Civil Rights Act, Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and NCLB) to provide an equal education opportunity for all students. Adherence to this goal would involve compliance with equitable access to equitable funding resources, early childhood education, quality teachers, and challenging curricula, along with equitable education opportunities for ELLs.

Fifty-eight years ago, the United States Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling in Brown v. Board of Education captured the most hopeful strains of the American narrative: working within a system of laws to extend the promise of freedom, more fairly and fully, to each succeeding generation. In practice, however, integrated schools today remain as much of a dream now as they were fifty years ago, and the subject of segregation has all but disappeared from the national conversation about education reform. Worse still, many of the newest and most promising schools in our nation’s cities are actually increasing the racial stratification of young people and communities – not lessening it.

Investments must be made to ensure the fair and equitable distribution of resources for education in all communities. Doing so will afford our children the opportunities to learn they deserve. While the federal government cannot eliminate the long-standing educational debt overnight, it can enact policies that encourage states to equalize resources.

I’d call that a good start.

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

Our School: Searching for Community in the Era of Choice

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(a draft introduction of my new book — feedback of all sorts welcomed and encouraged.)

Summer

Unlike the others, who set off in teams to look for the twigs, branches, and leaves they would weave together to capture the essence of their school, Laura Graber searched the ground around her, alone.

It was unlike her – the person most responsible for bringing this group together in the first place to launch the Green Earth Bilingual Public Charter School from scratch, and the person most committed to doing so democratically. But now it was June, and the inaugural year was over, and the staff of twenty-one women and two men was completing its last shared activity before the start of the summer, when the size of their team would double, when they would pack up all the records and wires and playthings and poster boards and move to a new building across town, and when the glow of what had just been accomplished would start to fade in exchange for a renewed anxiety of all the new challenges to be overcome.

Laura leaned down and grabbed a branch, thin and moldable. The spot of Rock Creek Park she was in was right next to the spot she’d gone running all year to maintain her sense of balance – the only time of the week when no one could demand anything of her, and there was no problem to solve.

Teams of teachers returned to the main clearing by the creek. Cassie Hurst came back speaking with her usual energy and excitement about what she’d found and what the group should do. Jessica Rodriguez and Beth LaPenn chatted away in Spanish, their minds on their summer adventure in Madrid, just days away. And Dora Benitez was already steeling herself to be one of the ones to get in the water, because that’s what her dad would have expected of his Dolly.

Before walking to the park from the school, which would soon become just another floor in a downtown office building, Hallie Schmidt showed everyone picture books of the artwork of Andy Goldsworthy. Each page held images of evanescent sculptures Goldsworthy had made with only the materials nature provided: Circles of reconstituted icicles. Potholes along a stream filled with bright yellow dandelions. Lines of white wool along a dark stone fence.

The group decided their own sculpture would be a circle of branches, to reflect the spirit of the Oglala Lakota poem Dora had shared with them:

In the Circle, we are all equal. When in the circle,

No one is in front of you. No one is behind you.

No one is above you. No one is below you.

Some bent stacks of sticks into shape, while others wove together the many gradients of green – grass, leaves, brush – into a long, crooked line that would, they decided, form a path to lay across the center of the circle. It was always the same, Hallie thought as she watched these young people work, remembering the first cabin she and her husband had built, and then lost to a fire the night they moved in: you gather your materials, you consult your plans, you make your final decisions, and then you build the house.

     *  *  *

The Sutpen Elementary School parade began in a small park at the confluence of five city streets and three city neighborhoods. For months the weather had been cooler than usual, but by a mid-morning in June it was still hot enough to keep most of the adults huddled under the shade of the park’s aging oak trees, each group chatting casually in a different mother tongue: Vietnamese, Spanish, Amharic, English. A police car idled at the base of the street that bore the name of the neighborhood it served – Mount Pleasant – and waited for the parade to begin.

As teachers orchestrated the final arrangements – cheerleaders up front, drum and bugle corps to follow, and flag bearers representing every nation in the community picking up the rear – nine-year-old Lourdes adjusted the yellow “Nuestra Escuela” t-shirt across her sleight shoulders and grabbed hold of the large, wide Sutpen banner with three other students. As they walked to the front of the line, past a sea of family members holding cameras and camcorders, Lourdes knew not to look for a familiar face. She wouldn’t see her dad until she boarded the plane to spend the summer with him in Texas, and she had learned long ago it was best not to think about where Mami might be at any given moment. She watched the spinning lights at the top of the police car and imagined the parade was already over so she could be back on the soccer field blazing down the sideline, past all the boys, to score another goal and remind everyone how strong she really was.

The police car started crawling up the street, and the cheerleaders began their rhythmic chant: SUT-PEN! The last remaining students and adults emerged from the shade of the trees to fall in line, while a phalanx of mothers with younger children formed an impromptu stroller brigade at the back.

Lourdes watched the people gathering in interest as the parade progressed down the street. Three heads poked out of a window above the 24-hour Laundromat. A man with a lathered face got out of his chair to stand on the top step of the Pan American barbershop.  An elderly woman sipped coffee from a mug on the porch of her aging Victorian, while younger children – future Bancroft students – weaved their tricycles in between the foot traffic of the sidewalk.

As they reached the midway point of the street, Lourdes could see the white canopies of the neighborhood farmer’s market – just past the Best World supermarket on one side of the street, and the blackened facade of the burned-out apartment building on the other. Like everyone else, Lourdes had friends that had lived there and been displaced, the letters of the sign they hung in the first weeks after the tragedy starting to fade in the summer sun: HELP ME RETURN TO OUR HOME.

Two blocks away, Sutpen’s principal, Kim Ortiz, was preparing the back of the school for the parade’s arrival. Parent volunteers set up the barbeque pit and sorted the hamburgers, hot dogs, and churros for quick cooking. Another group set up the moon bounce just beyond the dunking booth – her students always loved the chance to drop their principal into a tank of cold water.

Ms. Ortiz listened for the sound of the drums.

The year had not gone the way she had hoped – far from it, really. She’d endured two different parent insurrections. She’d struggled to gain support from her staff for a new style of classroom teaching. And she had just learned that two of her best in that new style, “the Two Sarahs,” would not be returning. Yet there were days like this that always seemed to come along at just the right time to remind her why she became an educator – days when a neighborhood’s children and families would come together and remind each other that they were participating in the same dream: to unite all the children of a single community under a single roof in order to give them all an equal shot at success.

*  *  *

Imagine a year in the life of two different communities – a public charter school that was opening its doors for the very first time, and a neighborhood public school that first opened its doors in 1924.

In the fall of 2011, I embarked on a yearlong observation of these two schools, and of the city they exist to serve: Washington, DC.

Like other major American cities, the nation’s capital is experimenting with a new concept that is dramatically reshaping public education – school choice. In the past, choosing whether to “pay or stay” was something only the wealthy could do; the rest of us merely sent our kids to the local school and hoped for the best. Now, however, in cities like DC, lower- and middle-class parents are also considering a wider set of options – and confronting a wider array of obstacles. Although less than 3% of America’s schoolchildren attend charter schools – public institutions with greater freedom to pilot different approaches to teaching, learning and governance – 41% of DC’s students are enrolled in such schools, including brand-new ones like Green Earth. At the same time, many of the city’s most promising traditional public schools are receiving an increasing number of applications from families that live outside its neighborhood boundaries. In the 2011-2012 school year, for example, nearly half of Sutpen’s students lived outside the school’s attendance zone.

Consequently, although the majority of children in rural and suburban America still attend their neighborhood school, fewer and fewer urban families are doing so, opting instead to enter the chaotic and nascent marketplace of school choice, and participating in a great intra-city migration of families, each in search of a school and a community they can claim as their own.

This move toward greater school choice is particularly vital – and potentially dangerous – when one considers that public education is the only institution in American society that is guaranteed to reach 90% of every new generation, that is governed by public authority, and that was founded with the explicit mission of preparing young people to be thoughtful and active participants in a democratic society.

In this new frontier, will the wider array of school options help parents and educators identify better strategies for helping all children learn – strategies that can then be shared for the benefit of all schools? Or will the high stakes of the marketplace lead us to guard our best practices, undermine our colleagues, and privatize this most public of institutions?

I have written Our School because I believe that before we can answer these questions, we must first understand what good teaching and learning really looks like – and requires. And we must become familiar with the state of the field as it is – and as it ought to be. The specific landscape of school choice may be new, but the general challenge is as old as the country itself: E Pluribus Unum – out of many, one.

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.)

Story Time

Posted on | by Sam

The other night, at a friend’s house for an early evening barbeque, I tried and failed repeatedly to get my 3-year-old son to eat his dinner.

It didn’t matter that the other kids at the table were eating. It didn’t matter that these were hot dogs we were talking about. And it definitely didn’t matter whether I pleaded or demanded that Leo fill his belly. He was, quite simply, not having it. And there was nothing I could do to change his mind.

Sensing my exasperation, my friend Jeremy leaned over and whispered: “Watch this.”

“Would anyone like to hear a story?” he asked. Leo stopped what he was doing, nodded, and listened intently as Jeremy spun a tale about a little boy lost in the forest who followed a single firefly, discovered a Sembar tree where all the other fireflies gathered to light up the night sky, and gained entrance to a secret, magical world.

Although there was a moral to Jeremy’s story, its message was not so symmetrical as to suggest that good boys clean their plates. And yet for the duration of the story, Leo listened, fully engaged in the wonders of an imaginary landscape, and absent-mindedly ate his dinner.

I was grateful for Jeremy’s clever parenting – and annoyed I didn’t think of it myself. After all, a convergence of recent research has confirmed something we have always instinctively known to be true: when we follow the trail of a well-crafted story, our brains light up like a Sembar tree.

Dr. James Zull is a professor of Biology at Case Western University, and the author of the book The Art of Changing the Brain. As he puts it, “We judge people by their stories, and we decide they are intelligent when their stories fit with our own stories. Recalling and creating stories are key parts of learning. We remember by connecting things with our stories, we create by connecting our stories together in unique and memorable ways, and we act out our stories in our behaviors.”

Zull says using vivid metaphors is a particularly effective way to foster new connections between the more than 100 billion neurons in a human brain. These connections are called neuronal networks, and once they’re made, they possess specific physical relationships to each other in the brain, and thus embody the concept of the relationship itself. “If you believe that learning is deepest when it engages the most parts of our brain,” Zull adds, “you can see the value of stories for the teacher. We should tell stories, create stories, and repeat stories, and we should ask our students to do the same.”

Of course, the same can be said for parents, and not just before bedtime.  If we want our children to develop the internal hardware to understand the world – and then imagine that world through the eyes of experiences of others – we should help them make sense of their surroundings through the stories we read and share. It is, quite simply, how people learn – and oh by the way, it may even help your child finish his dinner.