Category: Equity

Big Bird Can Close the Achievement Gap? Not So Fast . . .

Posted on | by Sam | 3 Comments on Big Bird Can Close the Achievement Gap? Not So Fast . . .

Don’t get me wrong: I love Big Bird as much as the next guy. But when people start talking about how Sesame Street is just as effective at closing the achievement gap as preschool, I start to worry that we’re becoming enamored with a seductively simple characterization of a deeply complex problem.

To wit: this article, in which we are told the “new findings offer comforting news for parents who put their children in front of public TV every day.” Or this radio story, in which the reporter claims that the show’s heavy dosage of reading and math can yield long-term academic benefits that “close the achievement gap.”

The lure of a set of findings like this is pretty clear: plug your kids into an educational TV show, help them learn their letters and numbers, and voila! No more class inequality. And actually, when one considers how we measure the achievement gap — via the reading and math test scores of schoolchildren — the opportunity to draw a linear line of cause and effect is available to us.

The problem, of course, is that school is about a lot more than literacy and numeracy — and the problems that beset poor children run a lot deeper than the 30 million word gap.

Consider the research around ACE Scores — or the number of adverse childhood experiences young people have — and how much those scores shape a child’s readiness to learn and develop (you can take a short quiz to get your own score here).

Dr. Pamela Cantor has spent a lot of time thinking about ACE Scores. She founded Turnaround for Children to help schools become more attuned to the cognitive, social and emotional needs of kids, and she’s one of many out there who are urging us to understand what the latest research in child development is telling us about what we need to be doing in schools. As she puts it, “The profound impact of extreme stress on a child’s developing brain can have huge implications for the way children learn, the design of classrooms, the preparation of teachers and school leaders, and what is measured as part of the school improvement effort as a whole.”

Consequently, whereas reduced exposure to the building blocks of reading and math is a problem (and one that Sesame Street can clearly help address), the biggest problem for at-risk children — the root cause — has to do with their social and emotional health.

The good news is that although these deficits are profound, they are also predictable, since they stem directly from the effects that stress and trauma have on young people’s brains and bodies. “These stresses impact the development of the brain centers involved in learning,” Cantor explains. “It is because these challenges are knowable and predictable that it is possible to design an intervention to address them. Collectively, they represent a pattern of risk—risk to student development, risk to classroom instruction, and risk to school-wide culture—each of which is capable of derailing academic achievement.”

That means the best way to help poor and at-risk children become prepared for school is by ensuring that high-poverty schools have universal practices and supports that specifically address the impact of adverse childhood experiences. So while I love and appreciate the benefits of Sesame Street, I’d feel better if instead of suggesting that every child needs more time with Grover in the morning, we suggested that every child’s ACE Score needs more weight in determining how schools allocate resources to support their students’ holistic development.  

I hope that doesn’t make me seem like Oscar the Grouch.

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

Posted on | by Sam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(This article originally appeared in the Huffington Post.)

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

Posted on | by Sam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think it would.

(This article originally appeared in Education Week.)

Something’s Happening Here . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking forward to hearing people’s ideas and concerns.

Turning School Chance Into School Choice

Posted on | by Sam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Think about that for a second.

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

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

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

Boxcars!

(This article originally appeared in Education Week.)

Should Integration Be a Goal of DC Public Schools?

Posted on | by Sam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We can do better. Here’s how:

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

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

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

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

This article originally appeared in the Washington Post.

Rethinking School Boundaries

Posted on | by Sam

Now that DC is taking up the delicate question of whether its boundary lines for neighborhood schools needs revisiting — the first time they’ve done so since 1968 — it’s worth thinking through the issue with them.

This morning, I was part of a public radio conversation that featured DC Deputy Mayor Abigail Smith and local parent activist Evelyn Boyd Simmons. You can hear that 30 minute conversation here. But you might also want to read Mike Petrilli’s 2011 piece about controlled choice, or Rick Kahlenberg’s research into the feasibility of race-neutral admissions policies, or one school’s use of a zip code lottery to ensure an even representation from kids throughout the city it serves.

What other policies or programs are worth looking at?

To Fix Public Education, Let’s Eliminate Private Schools

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on To Fix Public Education, Let’s Eliminate Private Schools

While hardcore progressives and Tea Party activists continue cozying up to each other in a shared rejection of the Common Core, I have a radical proposal to make – and it might just be crazy enough to garner an equally eclectic coalition of support:

Let’s eliminate private schools altogether. Or, better yet, let’s make every school both public and private.

If that idea doesn’t make sense to you, consider this: it’s already happening at Sharon Academy (TSA), a school in Vermont that offers, in its words, “the best of both private and public school education.” Kids who live near the school can attend TSA just as they would any neighborhood school. Kids who live outside the attendance zone can attend as well, as long as they pay tuition. And the genius of the Vermont system is that those fees are not paid by the family; they’re paid by the hometown of the student.

This sort of arrangement is possible thanks to a 1997 state law that was drafted in response to a Vermont Supreme Court decision that said the state’s existing educational funding system was unconstitutional, and that it must provide “substantially equal access” to education for all Vermont students, regardless of where they live.

As a result, every town in Vermont is required to pay a school up to the amount of the state’s average tuition. Schools can charge more than the average, but TSA pegs its tuition to whatever that number may be (typically no more than $12,000). As a result, no student – I repeat, no student – pays any additional tuition, and TSA commits to cover whatever shortfall exists via its own fundraising efforts.

If this seems too good to be true, it’s worth noting that other countries around the world have found a way to ensure equity. Education in Finland, for example, is free to all beginning at the voluntary pre-primary level and continuing through upper secondary school. Funding responsibilities are divided between the federal and local governments. And not surprisingly, there are very few private schools in Finland. Simply put, in a system that has prioritized (indeed, standardized) equity, they have no niche to fill.

These sorts of efforts stand in stark, uncomfortable contrast to America’s long history of separate and unequal schooling. The closest we came to correcting the inequity was 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5-4 margin, reversed a lower court’s decision in favor of a group of poor Texas parents who had claimed that their state’s tolerance of the wide disparity in school resources violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

Gone from the court’s 1973 ruling was its 1954 contention in Brown v. Board of Education that “education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments.” Gone, too, was its assertion that “it is doubtful any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity,” wrote a unanimous court in Brown, “where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.”

Instead, the five-justice majority in San Antonio v. Rodriguez wrote simply that while the Texas school system “can fairly be described as chaotic and unjust … it does not follow that this system violates the Constitution. 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, that was precisely the point. “The Court concludes that public education is not constitutionally guaranteed,” he wrote, even though “no other state function is so uniformly recognized as an essential element of our society’s well being.”

Marshall understood that without equal access to a high-quality public education, democracy doesn’t work. “Education directly affects the ability of a child to exercise his First Amendment rights,” he explained. “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.”

Were he alive today, Marshall would take solace in Vermont’s decision to chart a different course. And while it is nearly impossible to imagine a future landscape in which Americans refuse the opportunity to give their child a competitive advantage in favor of ensuring equal educational opportunities for all, schools like Sharon Academy are there to remind us that a different model is possible. The rest is up to us.

(This article originally appeared in the SmartBlog on Education.)

What is the proper role of government in public education reform?

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on What is the proper role of government in public education reform?

I read an interesting Op-Ed about education in today’s Washington Post, in which the author wrote the following: “The proper role of government is to ensure the provision of essential services, not always to provide those services itself.”

Leaving aside the author’s particular perspective on K-12 education reform, I’m curious: How many people out there agree or disagree with this general statement as it pertains to education reform? Is the “provision of essential services” a proper understanding of the proper purview of government — one in which a widening circle of choice could in theory not just be the privatization of public education, but moreso a reframing of how government can help support the highest number of high-quality public educational options? Or is the proper purview of government always to provide those services itself — especially when the services in question pertain to the education of our nation’s young people?

“Standardization” is not a dirty word

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on “Standardization” is not a dirty word

The reviews are in — in 2013, inequality is out, and equality is in.

“Each time we gather to inaugurate a president,” President Obama began on Monday morning, “we bear witness to the enduring strength of our Constitution. We affirm the promise of our democracy. We recall that what binds this nation together is not the colors of our skin or the tenets of our faith or the origins of our names.

“What makes us exceptional, what makes us America is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Today we continue a never ending journey to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time. For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they’ve never been self-executing. That while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by his people here on earth.”

Those of us who work to improve American public education no doubt heard his words through a certain lens. Indeed, public education has always been — and remains — unequal, inequitable, and incomplete (as I have written here, here and here). Unless we start behaving differently, so it will remain.

If you want illuminating statistics about the extent of this inequality, check out this video from the National Civil Rights Museum. And if you want something to chew on, consider this: standardization, as a word, is not actually “dirty” in and of itself. Indeed, standardization is a useful way to ensure quality control across a system.

The problem is this: here in the United States, the thing we have chosen to make uniform in order to ensure quality control are content standards. (I’m not opposed to content standards per se, though it seems somewhat anachronistic at this particular point in human history.) By contrast, in Finland, they chose to standardize two other things: school funding, and teacher preparation.

What would happen if we followed suit? Might we put ourselves in a better position to fulfill the lofty aspirations of Obama’s second inaugural address?