There have been quite a few good and useful posts and articles on school reform issues over the past few days. Here they are, along with links to “The Best…” lists I’m adding them to:
* There have been some good posts challenging comments by some “school reformers” that the experience of having many years in the classroom is over-rated. They say that after the first few years, it has no impact on student achievement. Here are some posts rebutting that claim:
Rothstein, a former New York Times national education columnist, discusses the false narrative about public education — especially urban schools — that currently exists. Rothstein maintains that many education reform proposals, especially those that focus on teacher accountability, are based on a misinterpretation and misuse of data. He stresses the direct correlation between poverty and educational failure.
Here’s a great column from The Seattle Times pointing out that small class sizes were important to Bill Gates when he went to school, and are an important reason why he sends his kids to the school they attend.
Fact-Challenged Policy is by Richard Rothstein, and is a longer version of a previous piece of his I’ve shared.
Larry Cuban has written a very important post titled Teacher Resistance and Reform Failure (the title of my post is a quote from it). He makes a number of key points refuting charges that some school reformer make about many of us being “defenders of the status quo.” In addition, because he points out how teachers have indeed changed their pedagogy over the years, it’s a good response to Bill Gates’ charge that teaching hasn’t changed in a hundred years. Because of that, I’m adding it here.
School vouchers that would allow parents pay private school tuition with public money has been in the news over the past week — both in Washington, D.C. and in Colorado.
Given these events, I thought it would be useful to readers and to me to bring together some resources on the issue. I’ve also included more general articles on the idea of school “choice.”
I hope others will provide additional suggestions.
Here are my choices for The Best Resources For Learning Why School Vouchers Are A Bad Idea:
My bias is betrayed in the title of this post. Instead of providing a detailed explanation here about my I think merit pay is a bad idea, I think I’ll leave it to those who are better versed and more articulate to to make the case.
Here are my choices for The Best Resources For Learning Why Teacher Merit Pay Is A Bad Idea:
Late last year, the most extensive study ever conducted on merit pay was unveiled in Tennessee, and showed it didn’t work. I’ll start off with several resources and analyses of that study:
Persistently Low-Performing Incentives also comes from the Shanker blog. Here, Matthew also examines other merit pay studies in addition to the one in Tennessee.
Another report was published last year by the Education Commission of the States examining several studies on merit pay. How do they analyze them?
Each of the studies of the four pay-for-performance systems found no conclusive
evidence to link the new merit pay system with higher student achievement.
Merit Pay Misfires is by Al Ramirez and appeared in Educational Leadership.
The New York City Department of Education recently abandoned a three year teacher performance bonus program that cost $56 million. The New York Times reports:
The decision was made in light of a study that found the bonuses had no positive effect on either student performance or teachers’ attitudes toward their jobs.
The study’s authors said:
Teachers also reported that improving as teachers and seeing their students learn were bigger motivators than a bonus…
Here’s one more excerpt from the article:
The results add to a growing body of evidence nationally that so-called pay-for-performance bonuses for teachers that consist only of financial incentives have no effect on student achievement, the researchers wrote.
Currently, teacher pay is based primarily on years of service and continuing education, including advanced degrees. In recent years, pay-for-performance or merit-pay systems have been tried around the country—systems in which teachers are rewarded for student achievement, with achievement usually being measured by test scores.
The ACT report argues that neither system succeeds. And it offers a framework for professional growth and compensation that creates incentives for well-qualified individuals to enter the profession, continue to grow, and to share what they know so that the entire enterprise of education improves. This report can be used to inform policy at the state and district level to create thoughtful, research-based compensation systems that actually improve teaching.
Several major foundations, including Gates and Walton, are playing an increasing large role in education policy. I thought that readers might find a short list of related resources useful, and I would appreciate additional suggestions.
Here are my choices for The Best Resources For Learning About The Role Of Private Foundations In Education Policy:
The New York Times ran a series of guest columns titled “Can $100 Million Change Newark’s Schools?” focusing on the recent donation to Newark schools by the founder of Facebook. Richard Rothstein is part of the Times’ series, and his post is titled When Billionaires’ Goals Do Harm. That piece (and several others in the series) is worth a look.
It’s not uncommon to hear someone inaccurately state that the teacher has the biggest influence on student achievement — period. Of course, the true statement is that — of the in-school factors — teachers have the biggest influence. On top of that, research has shown that over two-thirds of the factors that influence student achievement occur out of school.
That’s not to say that we shouldn’t continually look at ways to help teachers become better. It does mean that we should also figure out ways to change the outside factors, too — lack of affordable housing, health care, safety. That is one of the main messages of my book, Building Parent Engagement In Schools, which offers practical suggestions on how schools can work with parents on these issues. It also means that placing all the blame on teachers, which some “school reformers” are prone to do, is disingenuous.
In addition to my book, I thought I’d bring together links to other resources that provide research (and analyze it) about this topic. Feel free to offer additional suggestions.
Here are my choices for The Best Places To Learn What Impact A Teacher (& Outside Factors) Have On Student Achievement:
Rothstein, a former New York Times national education columnist, discusses the false narrative about public education — especially urban schools — that currently exists. Rothstein maintains that many education reform proposals, especially those that focus on teacher accountability, are based on a misinterpretation and misuse of data. He stresses the direct correlation between poverty and educational failure.
Rothstein makes many important points but, because of some of the key ones he makes, I’m adding the video to this list.
…school reform won’t fix everything. Though some poor students will succeed, others will fail. Demonizing teachers for the failures of poor students, and pretending that reforming the schools is all that is needed, as the reformers tend to do, is both misguided and counterproductive.
Over the long term, fixing our schools is going to involve a lot more than, well, just fixing our schools. In the short term, however, the reform movement could use something else: a dose of humility about what it can accomplish — and what it can’t.
After citing some pretty irrefutable data documenting the role of poverty in student achievement, here are some excerpts from what he writes:
Some want to make the absurd argument that the reason low-income youngsters do poorly is that, mysteriously, all the incompetency in our education systems has coincidentally aggregated around low income students. In this view, all we need to do is scrub the system of incompetency and all will be well. An equally absurd variant on this theme is that poor performance in low-income districts is a function of, again coincidental, misalignment between state standards and local curriculum. Get these in line and all will be fine say the ideologues. Others want to banish any discussion of socio-economic status (SES) and educational performance for fear that it suggests that SES is destiny. It does not. We all know of notable individual exceptions to this rule, but they are exceptions. The averages tell the story….
It is now blatantly apparent to me and other education activists, ranging form Geoffrey Canada to Richard Rothstein to Linda Darling-Hammond, that the strategy of instructional improvement will not, on average, enable us to overcome the barriers to student learning posed by the conditions of poverty.
As others have argued, we need “a broader, bolder” approach, one that meets every child where he or she is and gives to each one the quality and quantity of support and instruction needed to attain the standards. Those of us who have the privileges of affluence know how to do this at scale with our children. We wrap services and supports around these children from the pre-natal period through their twenties. We know how to do it, but do we have the will to do it for “other people’s children”? And do we know how to institutionalize the necessary services and supports that are best provided through families?
Yes, we need to make sure that all children, and particularly disadvantaged children, have access to good schools, as defined by the quality of teachers and principals and of internal policies and practices.
But let’s not pretend that family background does not matter and can be overlooked. Let’s agree that we know a lot about how to address the ways in which poverty undermines student learning. Whether we choose to face up to that reality is ultimately a moral question.
In it, he discusses differences between “good” teaching and “successful” teaching, and describes “successful” learning. It’s too difficult — at least for me — to summarize succinctly, so I’d recommend you read his entire post.
Here are his final two paragraphs:
Not only does this policymaker error about quality classroom instruction confuse the personal traits of the teacher with teaching, it also nurtures a heroic view of school improvement where superstars (e.g., Geoffrey Canada in “Waiting for Superman,” Jaime Escalante of “Stand and Deliver”, Erin Gruwell of “Freedom Writers”) labor day in and day out to get their students to ace AP Calculus tests and become accomplished writers and achieve in Harlem schools. Neither doctors, lawyers, soldiers, nor nuclear physicists can depend upon superstars among them to get their important work done every day. Nor should all teachers have to be heroic. Policymakers attributing quality far more to individual traits in teachers than to the context in which they teach leads to squishing “good” teaching with “successful” learning doing even further collateral damage to the profession by setting up the expectation that only heroes need apply.
By stripping away from “good” learning essential factors of students’ motivation, the contexts in which they live, and the opportunities they have to learn in school–federal, state, and district policymakers inadvertently twist the links between teaching and learning into a simpleminded formula thereby mis-educating the public they serve while encouraging a generation of idealistic newcomers to become classroom heroes who end up deserting schools in wholesale numbers within a few years because they come to understand that “good” teaching does not lead automatically to “successful” learning. Fenstermacher and Richardson help us parse “quality teaching” into distinctions between “good” and “successful” teaching and learning while revealing clearly the error that policymakers have made and continue to do so.
What’s wrong with the ‘manifesto’ — point by point is the title of an excellent post in The Washington Post’s “Answer Sheet” blog. It’s an excellent critique of the appalling op-ed written by a group of school superintendents in The Post.
The tragic loss of reduced class size is the title of an Op-Ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle by Delaine Eastin, former California superintendent of public instruction.
Ironically, a columnist from the LA Times has written what I think is the best response to her newspaper’s insulting series on ranking teacher’s “effectiveness.” Check-out A retired L.A. teacher ponders her rating by Sandy Banks.
The National Research Council and the National Academy of Education jointly issued a report on value-added approaches, and their report was summarized in The Washington Post. Don’t rush to link teacher evaluation to student achievement is a must-read.
Deborah Meier’s education advice to Obama is an excellent column in the Washington Post about “performance assessment” in evaluating both students and teachers. This is an excellent, and useful, alternative to the evaluative processes that are used right now in schools.
What Really Happens When We Pay People for Test Scores? is the title of a post by Claus von Zastrow at the Public Insights blog. It’s Claus’ take on the study covered by TIME Magazine last week on paying students for increased grades, test scores, etc.
There’s a new book out that’s getting a fair amount of attention. It’s called Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons From Chicago, and was published this month by the University of Chicago Press. One of the authors has written a blog post, though, that provides a good summary of the book. You can also access an excerpt at Google Books.
Teacher Added-Value Scores: Publish and Perish is a very thoughtful analysis of the problems inherent in publishing the “value-added” assessments of teachers. It’s from the Albert Shanker Institute, and raises some issues I haven’t seen raised elsewhere.
You may have heard about recent speeches by both Bill Gates and Arne Duncan questioning the importance of teaching experience and advanced degrees in developing good teachers. Why teaching experience really matters at the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet is a good response to both. Links to the comments of Gates and Duncan are included there.
The corporate takeover of American schools is an article appearing in the British Guardian newspaper, and it’s one of the best pieces on school policy that I’ve read all year. Its subtitle is “The trend for appointing CEOs to the top jobs is symptomatic of a declining commitment to public education and social justice.”
Lastly, I’d like to include the letter our Sacramento Superintendent wrote about Waiting For ‘Superman.” It’s not directly connected to The Post column but, coincidentally, he sent it out to staff the same day these other Superintendents published their column in The Post. Too bad they didn’t talk to him first. Check-out What Our Superintendent Says About “Waiting For ‘Superman’”
Today, The New York Times ran a series of guest columns on the topic “Can $100 Million Change Newark’s Schools?” focusing on the recent donation to Newark schools by the founder of Facebook. I also commented on that contribution in my Huffington Post piece.
Richard Rothstein is part of the Times’ series, and his post is titled When Billionaires’ Goals Do Harm. That piece (and several others in the series) is worth a look.
In new EPI report, leading educational testing experts caution against heavy reliance on the use of test scores in teacher evaluation
Student test scores are not reliable indicators of teacher effectiveness, even with the addition of value-added modeling (VAM), a new Economic Policy Institute report by leading testing experts finds. Though VAM methods have allowed for more sophisticated comparisons of teachers than were possible in the past, they are still inaccurate, so test scores should not dominate the information used by school officials in making high-stakes decisions about the evaluation, discipline and compensation of teachers.
The Obama administration has encouraged states to adopt laws that use student test scores as a significant component in evaluating teachers, and a number of states have done so already. The Los Angeles Times recently used value-added methods to evaluate teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District based on the test scores of their students, and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan supported the paper’s decision to publicly release this information, asserting that parents have a right to know how effective their teachers are. The conclusions of this report suggest that the Los Angeles Times’ analysis, which attempts to analyze teacher effectiveness, is unreliable and inaccurate.
The distinguished authors of EPI’s report, Problems with the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers, include four former presidents of the American Educational Research Association; two former presidents of the National Council on Measurement in Education; the current and two former chairs of the Board of Testing and Assessment of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences; the president-elect of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management; the former director of the Educational Testing Service’s Policy Information Center and a former associate director of the National Assessment of Educational Progress; a former assistant U.S. Secretary of Education; a former and current member of the National Assessment Governing Board; and the current vice-president, a former president, and three other members of the National Academy of Education.
The co-authors make clear that the accuracy and reliability of analyses of student test scores, even in their most sophisticated form, is highly problematic for high-stakes decisions regarding teachers. Consequently, policymakers and all stakeholders in education should rethink this new emphasis on the centrality of test scores for holding teachers accountable.
Analyses of VAM results show that they are often unstable across time, classes and tests; thus, test scores, even with the addition of VAM, are not accurate indicators of teacher effectiveness. Student test scores, even with VAM, cannot fully account for the wide range of factors that influence student learning, particularly the backgrounds of students, school supports and the effects of summer learning loss. As a result, teachers who teach students with the greatest educational needs appear to be less effective than they are. Furthermore, VAM does not take into account nonrandom sorting of teachers to students across schools and students to teachers within schools.
There are further negative consequences of using test scores to evaluate teacher performance. Teachers who are rewarded on the basis of their students’ test scores have an incentive to “teach to the test,” which narrows the curriculum not just between subject areas, but also within subject areas. Furthermore, creating a system in which teachers are, in effect, competing with each other can reduce the incentive to collaborate within schools—and studies have shown that better schools are marked by teaching staffs that work together. Finally, judging teachers based on test scores that do not genuinely assess students’ progress can demoralize teachers, encouraging them to leave the teaching field.
Evaluating teachers accurately is a critical piece of the effort to improve America’s schools, and VAM methods are appealing in that they seem to offer an objective and simplified way of comparing one teacher with another. However, as EPI’s report makes clear, “There is simply no shortcut to the identification and removal of ineffective teachers.” The authors conclude that that, “Although standardized test scores of students are one piece of information that school leaders may use to make judgments about teacher effectiveness, test scores should be only a small part of an overall comprehensive evaluation.”
The report’s co-authors are:
Eva L. Baker, Professor of education at UCLA and Co-Director of the National Center for Evaluation Standards and Student Testing (CRESST)
Paul E. Barton, former Director of the Policy Information Center of the Educational Testing Service
Linda Darling-Hammond, Professor of education at Stanford University, former President of the American Educational Research Association
Edward Haertel , Professor of education at Stanford University, former President of the National Council on Measurement in Education, Chair of the National Research Council’s Board on Testing and Assessment, former Chair of the committee on methodology of the National Assessment Governing Board
Helen F. Ladd, Professor of public policy and economics at Duke University, President-elect of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management
Robert L. Linn, professor emeritus at the University of Colorado, former President of the National Council on Measurement in Education and of the American Educational Research Association, former Chair of the National Research Council’s Board on Testing and Assessment
Diane Ravitch, Research Professor at New York University and historian of American education
Richard Rothstein, Research Associate of the Economic Policy Institute
Richard J. Shavelson, Professor of Education (Emeritus), former dean of the School of Education at Stanford University, and former president of the American Educational Research Association
Lorrie A. Shepard, Dean and professor at the School of Education at the University of Colorado at Boulder, former President of the American Educational Research Association, immediate past President of the National Academy of Education
I also had some questions about their praise of Singapore’s school system and how they trains and treat their teachers, just because I don’t know anything about how they do it. If readers have some more knowledge about it, please share it in the comments section.
One statement in the article, though, bothered me more than any other — it claims that ten is “the age at which failure starts to become irreversible” (though it doesn’t cite any source for that claim — again, if readers have some knowledge I hope they’ll share it in the comments section).
Many of the students at our inner-city high school have huge challenges — not having a home situation that can provide many educational enrichment activities; lack of health insurance; unstable family life; self-control issues; gangs; English as their second language, etc.
But, though they might have a long list of deficits, they also have many assets — their potential; their life experiences; their resiliency.
And here’s another excerpt:
I agree with Richard Rothstein, who writes that we can only narrow, not bridge, the achievement gap without public policies that will impact the problems outside the schoolhouse doors that affect student learning. And there are some days when I come home feeling emotionally-drained and wonder what it might be like teaching at a suburban school. And there are students who — for one reason or another — I am not able to reach during an entire school year, and have hopes that some other teacher will down the line.
But those days and disappointments are more than off-set by the successes I see — the students who had never read a book before and now are doing so regularly; the ones who are able to develop their own capacity for self-control and discipline; the boys and girls (and young men and young women) who go on to college after telling me in ninth-grade that they don’t need to work on their writing because they would never need it as a professional skateboarder or professional basketball player.
Does failure really “start to become irreversible” at age ten?
I thought I’d share some more resources in this new list. My hope is that not only will readers find them useful, but that you’ll be able to suggest more. I’ll be working on a report covering this topic next week, so thanks in advance for your recommendations.
Here are my choices for The Best Resources For Learning About Effective Student & Teacher Assessments:
STUDENT ASSESSMENTS:
Today, Jay Mathews wrote a column in the Washington Post titled Intriguing alternative to rating schools by tests. He speaks very positively about the student assessment process used by the New York Performance Standards Consortium.
The term “performance-based assessment” is a term used to describe one way to evaluate student achievement (the Consortium’s process would fit into this category). This basically means that students are evaluated on work they have “constructed” as opposed to choosing from a list of pre-determined answers. This could mean a writing assessment, similar to what is done in Vermont or Kentucky, or filling-in the blanks in a cloze (there are usually multiple appropriate responses), or describing how a student would develop a science experiment. The Stanford Center For Opportunity Policy In Education has developed a brief that lays-out the case for performance-based assessment and how it might be implemented. You can also learn more about this topic here.
The Other Kind of Testing is a good column by Walt Gardner in Education Week. It’s about “performance-based assessment” for students
Robert Marzano talks about teacher evaluation is his upcoming book, “Supervising the Art and Science of Teaching: A New Approach To Lesson Observation and Lesson Design.” In a speech to the National Association of Secondary School Principals, he made some great points (you can see the article about his speech in this PDF — scroll down to page four):
School leaders can’t use a checklist approach to observing teachers and providing feedback. Teacher observation requires a comprehensive model that acknowledges the segments that make up a lesson.
A comprehensive observation method includes teachers’ self-reflection, walkthroughs and formal observations by principals and peers…The goal…is for feedback to be part of the culture of the school.
In a recent article in Ed Week, James Stigler writes about the “lesson study” process in Japan, where teachers covering the same content meet regularly, develop their methods of student evaluation, and then meet together to examine the results. He contrasts that system of teacher accountability with those presently being suggested by Gates, Duncan, etc. He says W. Edwards Deming would call what Gates and Duncan want “the inspection method.” In reality, Deming says, “real and continuous improvement occurs only when the workers themselves study outcome variability and the processes that produce it.”
A study has just come out of Chicago which reinforces the potential effectiveness of using trained teachers to give feedback to colleagues. In the study, teachers were far more demanding than principals using the same evaluation system. It’s still too early to tell, though, about its effect on student achievement. This kind of system is apparently called Peer Assistance and Review.
Challenges in Evaluating Special Education Teachers and English Language Learner Specialists is the title of a new report from the National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality. I haven’t had time yet to carefully review it, but at first glance it looks pretty good. In fact, I think it makes some good points that are relevant to evaluation issues for any teacher.
Does this mean that testing makes no contribution to teaching? Absolutely not. Test scores tell teachers which students need help and where help is needed. And they also can tell school boards which schools need a bigger budget. Or a new principal.
But in evaluating a teacher, priority should be given to expert judgment. Principals and department heads worthy of their position know which teachers care about their students and know the strengths and needs of each one, which teachers are dedicated to what they teach and have advanced knowledge in the field, and which teachers painstakingly plan their lessons.
Getting Teacher Assessment Right: What Policymakers Can Learn From Researchis the title of what looks like a good new report from the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado. I have to admit I’ve only had a chance to skim it, but it appears to have a lot of wisdom.
This twelve minute video of Anthony Bryk from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is one of the best things I’ve seen about teacher evaluation. Among other points, he compares summative teacher evaluation with teacher improvement.
I learned about it from Matthew Di Carlo at The Shanker Blog, a “must-read” blog for educators.
I’m learning a lot about many things during this research, and one of them is about the “valued added” approach that’s being discussed a lot for use in teacher evaluation. And what I’m finding is leaving me deeply concerned about it.
I thought readers here might find it useful to see what I think are The Best Resources For Learning About The “Value-Added” Approach Towards Teacher Evaluation (please feel free to leave your comments and other suggestions in the comments section, too):
The National Research Council and the National Academy of Education jointly issued a report on value-added approaches, and their report has been summarized in The Washington Post. Don’t rush to link teacher evaluation to student achievement is a must-read.
No Value Added: The Mismeasurement of Teaching Quality is a column by David M. Cohen that appeared in Teacher Magazine. By the way, be sure to check-out the InterACT blog written by David and others who are members of Accomplished California Teachers (I’m a member, too!).
The No Stats All Star raises a key point in evaluating teachers…and basketball players.
The Hechinger Ed Report has a nice summary of a major study that raises questions about using test scores to evaluate teachers:
In a typical rating system aimed at identifying poorly performing teachers, one in four teachers whose performance is fine could be misidentified as bad. At the same time, teachers whose students underperform had a one in four chance of being mislabeled as average performers.
Proceed with Caution: Using Standardized Test Scores in High-Stakes Decisions is the title of a good post by Anne O’Brien at The Learning First Alliance. It shares links to stories about recent problems with New York and Florida state standardized tests, and discusses that problems like these wave a caution flag to notions like teacher merit pay.
LA Times Value-Added Release – Problems and Solutions at The Quick and The Ed (I’d recommend you skip down to the “Problems with Value Added Measures of Teacher Effectiveness” section and also read John Thompson’s comment)
Putting Teachers to the Test is a good explanation of “value-added” measures for teachers, where they are evaluated on their students’ growth in test scores. The Wall Street Journal published it today.
Assessing A Teacher’s Value is the headline of a New York Times feature that highlights four supporters and four critiques of the “value-added” approach of assessing teachers. Critics including Linda Darling-Hammond and Diane Ravitch.
Teacher Added-Value Scores: Publish and Perish is a very thoughtful analysis of the problems inherent in publishing the “value-added” assessments of teachers. It’s from the Albert Shanker Institute, and raises some issues I haven’t seen raised elsewhere.
Is D.C.’s teacher evaluation system rigged? is a guest post by Aaron Pallas at The Washington Post’s “Answer Sheet” blog. It makes some excellent points about the “value-added” assessment system for teachers, including some I hadn’t heard before.
Hurdles Emerge in Rising Effort to Rate Teachers is the headline of a New York Times article that gives a fair-to-middlin’ overview on the issue of using the value-added approach in teacher assessment. It does have some good info.
Education writers from throughout the United States recently met in New Orleans, and I read their tweets about the conference. I was particularly interested in the session on the value-added approach to teacher evaluation, and found some excellent resources.
Douglas Harris is from the University of Wisconsin, and has written a book titled Value-Added Measures in Education What Every Educator Needs to Know. He spoke at the conference, and I’ll include one related tweet a little later. Here are links to two pieces he’s written:
Whether naïfs or experts, mathematicians need to confront people who misuse their subject to intimidate others into accepting conclusions simply
because they are based on some mathematics. Unlike many policy makers, mathematicians are not bamboozled by the theory behind VAM, and they
need to speak out forcefully. Mathematical models have limitations. They do not by themselves convey authority for their conclusions. They are tools, not magic. And using the mathematics to intimidate—to preempt debate about the goals of education and measures of success—is harmful not only to
education but to mathematics itself.
This was written by Roger Tilles, a member of the New York State Board of Regents, which supervises all educational activities within the state. This post refers to action taken on Monday by the board, which adopted regulations for a teacher and principal performance evaluation system in which 20 to 40 percent of the evaluation is linked to student standardized test scores.
In it, Walt Gardner articulately reinforces Richard Rothstein’s point that, while schools might be able to narrow the achievement gap, outside factors eliminate the possibility of schools bridging it completely on their own.
Private foundations have supported a lot of good work over the years. And many supported the community organizing that I did during my twenty-year organizing career.
I often felt frustrated, however, by how most (though not all) foundations who sought public policy change would decide that they knew what the problem was; they knew how it should be fixed; and they knew how long it should take to fix it. Community groups, desperate for funding, would then often tailor their priorities around the funders’ agenda and the funders would become the groups de facto constituency. The groups’ genuine constituency — low and moderate income residents — would then be “brought along”….sometimes, and often for the short-term.
Of course, this strategy is contrary to how many major policy changes have often been made. In many instances, people who are most affected by the problem take a primary role in developing a solution and the political power to make it a reality (I’ll write more about this history in a future post). The foundation-driven strategy is the antithesis of how long-term effective community organizing works.
But many well-meaning foundations just don’t seem to see this.
A report issued this week from the Annie E. Casey Foundation is the latest example. Learning To Read:Early Warning! Why Reading By The End Of The Third Grade Matters provides an excellent summary of research on how poverty affects children’s academic growth. There’s doesn’t appear to be much in it that you couldn’t get from reading Richard Rothstein, but I figure you can never get enough well-written material showing how you have to deal with problems outside the schoolhouse walls in addition to inside them.
The report then announces the Foundation is joining with other funders to initiate an effort to expand after-school programs and summer learning opportunities.
Those are good things. However, they may very well not be the priority issues of the residents in the communities that the foundations are targeting.
A perfect example of this foundation mindset is how they write about parents:
Parents should read to and converse with their young children….Parents should understand why it’s important to read proficiently….Parents should…..Parents should find after-school activities for their children….Parents should….
There’s a lengthy list of “shoulds” for parents. Again, I’m sure it’s all well-meaning, and it’s “right.” I’m just not convinced that it’s “effective.”
Instead, how about if they had written something like this:
We feel that the best way to respond to the research findings in this report that highlight how poverty issues affect student academic achievement is by helping parents, schools, and other community residents participate more in public life and develop the self-confidence and life skills to do so effectively. Funders should support schools and community groups who want to engage residents and local institutions like religious congregations, business groups, neighborhood associations in conversations about how these problems affect their local communities and what they think should be done about it. Funders should support those schools and community groups who want to listen and work with residents as partners. Funders should leverage the relationships they have with public and corporate officials so these community groups can develop their own relationships with them.
I would characterize the kind of well-intentioned attitude that funders like Casey exhibit as paternalism. This is how one dictionary defines that word:
when people in authority think or act in a way which results in them making decisions for other people which are often to their advantage but which prevent those people from taking responsibility for their own lives
In the education field (and I’m sure in other areas, too), I’d suggest that there are a sizable group of funders who go further, and who can be even more damaging to the long-term public good. This is how Diane Ravitch describes them:
“The Billionaires Boys Club” is a discussion of how we’re in a new era of the foundations and their relation to education. We have never in the history of the United States had foundations with the wealth of the Gates Foundation and some of the other billionaire foundations—the Walton Family Foundation, The Broad Foundation. And these three foundations—Gates, Broad and Walton—are committed now to charter schools and to evaluating teachers by test scores. And that’s now the policy of the US Department of Education. We have never seen anything like this, where foundations had the ambition to direct national educational policy, and in fact are succeeding.
I’d characterize their attitude as being closer to neocolonialism, which a dictionary describes as “dominance by economic and cultural influence.”
Many might say that I’m overstating the case. But it seems to me that Eli Broad doesn’t hide that perspective when he tells the Wall Street Journal:
…he is enthusiastic about all the change that is possible when urban school districts go bankrupt—as Oakland, Calif., did a few years ago—”or what happened in New Orleans, which is the equivalent of bankruptcy.”
Every month I make a short list highlighting my choices of the best resources I shared through (and learned from) Twitter, but didn’t necessarily include them in posts here on my blog. Now and then, in order to make it a bit easier for me, I may try to break it up into mid-month and end-of-month lists.
I’ve already shared in earlier posts this month several new resources I found on Twitter — and where I gave credit to those from whom I learned about them. Those are not included again in this post.
I’ve posted already about a good PBS interview with Diane Ravitch on the new Obama Administration’s Blueprint for re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). In that same post, I shared the National PTA’s critique of its minimal focus on parent engagement.
Thanks to Teacher Ken, I’ve just learned about a very thorough analysis of the Blueprint written by Richard Rothstein titled A blueprint that needs more work. If you were going to read one analysis of the proposal, this would be the one I’d recommend.
I don’t pretend to much of a education policy wonk, so I don’t feel like I can make a whole lot of comments. I do see that the Blueprint requires each state to “Implement a system to evaluate the effectiveness of language instruction educational programs.”
That sounds reasonable. However, my experience with our state (California) trying to do that a few years back raises big questions in my mind.
The legislature approved funds to identify successful ELL programs, which it then wanted to promote throughout the state. However, in order to be considered a successful ELL program, it had to be located in a school that wasn’t in Program Improvement.
That requirement obviously dramatically limited the number of ELL programs the state would consider successful — generally to more suburban ones with very small numbers of ELL’s. Our school, for example, was in PI at the time (as you know we later exited it, but now we’re back in), so even though few, if any, other schools in the state have an ELL program that is as successful as ours, we weren’t even considered.
So, as the saying goes, the devil is in the details.
I’d be interested in hearing other people’s perspective on what the Blueprint says about ELL’s, too….
As regular readers know, I think very highly of Bill Ferriter, writer of The Tempered Radical blog and a colleague in the Teacher Leaders Network.
He’s just written a very thoughtful and honest post titled “Learning from the Met: Great Expectations?” It’s his reflection on the year he spent teaching in a non-suburban school, why he left, and how it connects to a recent survey of teachers from MetLife that show over 50% of teachers questioning whether every student could succeed academically (you can read my thoughts on the MetLife survey here).
Bill concludes his post this way:
Nope. I don’t think every student can succeed academically.
But instead of being the result of unmotivated or incapable children, that’s a direct result of the callous and under-informed approach that policymakers take towards addressing the challenges of students living in high-poverty communities.
Their unwillingness to invest tangible resources—dollars, people and time—equitably instead of equally is evidence of our unwillingness to care for other people’s children as much as we care for our own.
Maybe I’m not the only one who should be ashamed.
I can understand, and agree, with most of what Bill has written in his post.
Except for the part about not believing that every student can succeed academically.
I believe they can. And I also believe that most of my colleagues feel the same way, and it’s a school culture that is supported by our principal, Ted Appel. And it’s that belief which keeps me going.
Many of the students at our inner-city high school have huge challenges — not having a home situation that can provide many educational enrichment activities; lack of health insurance; unstable family life; self-control issues; gangs; English as their second language, etc.
But, though they might have a long list of deficits, they also have many assets — their potential; their life experiences; their resiliency.
Many years ago, I had a conversation with a man who worked with Gandhi in the struggle for Indian independence. He told me, “Larry, the key to Gandhi’s success was that he looked at every problem as an opportunity, not as a pain in the butt.”
Now, I’m not sure that Gandhi would have put it in quite the same way. But I’ve been able to use that pearl of wisdom as a key guide in my life.
I teach in Sacramento’s largest inner-city high school. I experience many of the typical frustrations of any inner-city teacher, and I write about many of them in this blog.
I agree with Richard Rothstein, who writes that we can only narrow, not bridge, the achievement gap without public policies that will impact the problems outside the schoolhouse doors that affect student learning. And there are some days when I come home feeling emotionally-drained and wonder what it might be like teaching at a suburban school. And there are students who — for one reason or another — I am not able to reach during an entire school year, and have hopes that some other teacher will down the line.
But those days and disappointments are more than off-set by the successes I see — the students who had never read a book before and now are doing so regularly; the ones who are able to develop their own capacity for self-control and discipline; the boys and girls (and young men and young women) who go on to college after telling me in ninth-grade that they don’t need to work on their writing because they would never need it as a professional skateboarder or professional basketball player.
As a teacher, I’m a subscriber to what New York Mets pitcher Tug McGraw said in 1973 when the team improbably won the National League pennant (I’m a New York native), “You gotta’ believe!”
(You might want to also read what Renee Moore, another Teacher Leaders Network colleague, writes about the same topic)
