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Blog Entries
When it comes to schools, does the business community suffer from split personality?
We hear a lot about the influence of business on school reform. But I'm not sure there's a monolithic "business" perspective on schools. Instead, I've seen at least two major thrusts in what business leaders have said about school reform. First, there are those who championed No Child Left Behind. Then there are those who urge hands-on learning, higher-order thinking skills, and rich opportunities to learn outside school walls. Needless to say, the two approaches don't always mingle happily.
Maybe that's why a new set of business recommendations on ESEA seemed almost at war with itself. The Business Coalition for Student Achievement's (BCSA) "Principles for the Reauthorization of ESEA" combine many of NCLB's greatest hits with more muted appeals for a broader vision of schooling. In these very lean years, I worry that NCLB's narrow vision will prevail as the broader vision falls by the wayside.
First, the Blast from the Past. BCSA wants to retain the major hallmarks of NCLB: Annual testing in math and reading, full proficiency, and sanctions for struggling schools. They even want to keep the SES provisions. (Because they were such a smashing success?) What's more, they want to add merit pay to this mix, a move that might actually ratchet up the pressure to teach to tests and dump all but math, reading and science out of the curriculum.
Now the Kinder, Gentler Vision of the Future. But then BCSA includes a kinder, gentler vision of schooling. They call for ESEA to support "inquiry ...
Principal Stephanie Smith of Seaford Middle School has seen the highs and lows of school reform. She has seen her school shake off the stigma it bore as a school "in need of improvement." (Delaware named her its 2008 Principal of the Year for her role in that school's remarkable transformation.) She has seen the school sustain its students' performance despite the fact that many more now live in poverty than did just a few years ago. She has even seen the school begin to stem the tide of its highest-performing students into a neighboring charter school.
But now she worries that the school might not be able to keep clearing the bar that No Child Left Behind sets higher every year. And she faces the prospect of slipping back into "needs improvement" status less than a decade after her school emerged from it.
We recently spoke with Smith, who told us the remarkable story of her school's triumphs and struggles in the era of No Child Left Behind.
Public School Insights: What kind of a school is Seaford Middle School?
Smith: It is a grade six through eight middle school. We are the only middle school in our school system. We have four feeder elementary schools and we feed into one high school. We have about 750 students.
Seaford is a demographically diverse school. We really don’t have a majority population anymore—we run about 40% African-American and Caucasian populations, with a Hispanic population as well. We are 71% free and reduced price lunch. That number has gone up drastically, probably since you last got information on our school. We are about 21% special ed.
Public School Insights: What do you think prompted the rise in free and reduced price lunch numbers?
Smith: I think just the status of the economy. Our community—the city of Seaford and its outlying areas—has been given the title of the poorest community in ...
We often hear that students in other countries are leaving ours in the dust. That fact, in turn, becomes the rationale for all manner of reforms.
But reformers often pay scant attention to what those countries actually do to get where they are. Are we slipping in the rankings? Quick--institute merit pay! Grease the rails for alt cert programs! Open more charter schools! That oughta do it!
These may be worthy goals to pursue in their own right, but they won't be enough to close the gap between us and our high-flying competitors.
Linda Darling-Hammond draws a much broader set of lessons from countries that succeed. This 9-minute video from Edutopia sums them up nicely.
[The image above is a link that will take you off site]
Common, high academic standards. Excellent (and often free) teacher preparation. Strong and sustained support for staff. Time in the schedule for staff to work together. And--crucially--very good assessments that don't knock everything else off course. Darling-Hammond finds all of these things in countries that ...
Thomas Edison Elementary School in Port Chester, NY has earned its reputation as a success story. A decade ago, only 19% of Edison’s fourth graders were proficient in English language arts. Last year 75% were. Proficiency rates in math and social studies are even higher. Not bad for a school where over 80% of students live in poverty.
If you ask the school’s principal, Dr. Eileen Santiago, the decision over ten years ago to turn Edison into a full-service community school has played a key role in its transformation. Working with strong community partners, the school offers on-site health care, education for parents, counseling for children and their families, and after-school enrichment. Add that community focus to a robust instructional program and close attention to data on how students are doing, and you get a stirring turnaround story.
Dr. Santiago recently told us more.
Public School Insights: Tell me about your school.
Santiago: I have served as principal of this school for 14 years. And I have always felt fortunate that I came into a school with many, many caring people. I did not walk into a school where the adults felt negatively about the children.
However, I was faced with other concerns. One of them was that the school had a pretty significant level of poverty. We were at over 80% free lunch. We continue to have that level of poverty today.
In addition, Edison has always served an immigrant population. The school was constructed in 1872, so you can imagine that the population has changed a lot over the years. Today the population is primarily multi-ethnic Hispanic, coming from different areas of the Hispanic world. And many of our children are undocumented immigrants. That in itself adds several levels of challenge: ...
Don't judge schools solely by their students' test scores in math and reading. Also judge them by those students' later success in college and work. That's the thrust of a new report by Education Sector's Chad Aldeman (PDF). It's a compelling piece of work.
First, Aldeman does a better job than most of exposing flaws in current state accountability systems. He finds little correlation between a school's success in making "Adequate Yearly Progress" on state test scores and its students' later success in college.
Two Florida schools help him tell his story. The state gave the first an "A" for two years running, and Newsweek anointed it as one of the best high schools in the country. But students from the second, a D-rated school across the state, did better in college:
D-rated Manatee was arguably doing a better job at achieving the ultimate goal of high school: preparing students to succeed in college and careers. But because Florida's accountability system didn't ...
Amanda Ripley ran a piece in The Atlantic this week praising Teach for America for its work to define what a great teacher looks like. That article had me running all hot and cold. Here I'll focus on what left me cold: The overuse of standardized tests to define greatness.
We're already creating students in the image of these tests. If I'm to believe The Atlantic, we'll be creating teachers in their image, too. Not only will we use test scores to determine which teachers are doing the best teaching. We'll use them to decide what character traits, academic background, hobbies and who knows what else teachers should possess. We could hitch everything, everything to that engine. (See Diana Seneshal's provocative piece on why that should ...
Robert Pondiscio unearthed this story about the U.K.'s plans to grade student essays by computer.
It turns out that the computer doesn't much like writers like Churchill and Hemingway. Hemingway's prose was too simplistic. Churchill's stirring call to "fight them on the beaches"? Too repetitive:
We shall fight on the beaches,
We shall fight on the landing grounds,
We shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
We shall fight in the hills;
We shall never surrender.
Churchill also loses points elsewhere for mentioning the "might of" the German army. "Might have" is apparently the appropriate phrase.
The lure of computer grading systems is growing, especially for those who balk at the cost of living, breathing essay graders. The British article notes that such ...
How you measure a school's progress matters. A lot. Just ask Beth Madison, principal of a school that is thriving by common-sense measures and failing by official measures.
George Middle School has made robust gains over the past decade. Over 80 percent of George students receive free or reduced price lunch, and a full 23 percent are special education students. Yet students' test scores are at or above state averages in most subjects.
Still, the school has not made Adequate Yearly Progress seven years running. Why? Because year after year, Madison tells us, it has been a hair's breadth away from meeting its targets for one particular subgroup of students in one particular area, like attendance. Madison is bracing herself for the impact of the H1N1 flu, which could hurt her attendance numbers for yet another year. You can't win.
What does Madison want? In short, some flexibility. She feels her school should be judged for its students' academic growth over time rather than against absolute performance targets. The school has made steady strides despite big demographic shifts that have increased its share of low-income students. But it still falls short of state goals.
Madison is no whiner. She praises No Child Left Behind for pushing schools to do much more for vulnerable children. She believes the extra money she has received for missing performance targets has helped the school improve. But she still feels No Child Left Behind is a "messed up" law.
She can thank her lucky stars that the Portland school district will not throw George Middle School on a Procrustean bed of reform. District leaders will not hobble her by imposing one-size-fits-all reform strategies. (Madison has particularly harsh words for strategies that require struggling schools to fire most teachers. She calls them a “train wreck.”)
The district listens when she describes her school’s success, Madison told us. And the district offers support tailored to her school’s specific needs.
George Middle School is not in thrall to the official version of success. That's good news for teachers and students alike.
Listen to Madison's interview on the Public School Insights podcast (~26 minutes).
Or read an edited transcript:
Public School Insights: George Middle School has made tremendous strides since the early 2000s. But you've missed Adequate Yearly Progress seven times. Could you tell me a little bit about how you see the school’s progress in the light of the AYP issue?
Madison: AYP in Oregon is not a growth-based model. It is a model with many subcategories within English language arts and math in which [the state] judges students' ability based on a RIT score [which is essentially] a simple score of grade level. [AYP also includes student attendance measures, again divided into subcategories].
So regardless of the fact that the kids who come in at very low levels of previous performance may make years and years of growth gains in one year — or at least their testing shows they do — that may not be enough to meet the magic number.
If Oregon used a growth-based model, then I think that we would not have had any trouble making AYP the last three years. But we have a very large population of special education students -- about 23 percent. Many of these kids come in [to sixth grade] with their learning achievement level between Kindergarten and second grade. We have one of the ...
Bryan and Emily Hassel have a modest proposal for turning around struggling schools: Try, Try Again. They say we should give school turnaround efforts less time to succeed before hitting the reset button. Give leaders one to two years to fix a school. If they fail, start over with a new leader and a new plan. In five years, they claim, this rapid restart strategy will fix many more schools than more incremental models will. I think their proposal is both bad and good.
The Bad
Let's get the bad out of the way first.
1. Beware the Siren Song of the Quick Fix
The Hassels make grand calculations about how many schools will be "fixed" in one, two, or five years. But struggling schools aren't carburetors. You improve them over time. You don't fix 'em good as new by plugging some holes or replacing the air adjustment valve.
It might seem like I'm quibbling over words here. What the Hassels mean to say is that schools should show signs of strong and sustainable improvement early on or leaders should pull the plug.
But when you say a school is "fixed," you don't acknowledge that schools can slide back after a promising start, or that they can plateau after a few years. The ...
Who knew Michelle Rhee was such a lilly-livered apologist for failing schools? Who knew that Jay Mathews would join her in finding excuses to squirm out from under real accountability?
Mathews tells the story of DC's Shaw Middle School, whose test scores actually dropped after Rhee installed a new and well-regarded principal. He praises Rhee for her continued confidence in the principal. Rhee is willing to wait, because "the Shaw people are doing nearly everything that the most successful school turnaround artists have done." There was even a mitigating factor: "Only 17 percent of Shaw's 2009 students had attended the school in 2008, distorting the official test score comparisons." Excuses, excuses.
Even Mathews's title is just the kind of thing that earns groans from accountability hawks: "Measuring Progress At Shaw With More Than Numbers."
Of course, Rhee and Mathews are right. It would be foolish to expect dramatic gains a scant year after the turnaround process begins. Shaw needs time. Shaw needs understanding and support.
And I'll admit that I've indulged in caricature here. Rhee and Mathews aren't accountability ogres. Rhee is doing what any reasonable person would do under the circumstances.
What concerns me most about Mathews's article is the gulf between the rhetoric and the reality of reform. Liam Goldrick puts it best:
I would argue that, in addition to doing the right thing (as happened in this instance), reform advocates and school leaders like Rhee also have a responsibility to say and advocate for the right thing. They have a responsibility to be honest about the complexity of student learning and the inability of student assessments to accurately capture all of the nuance going on within schools and classrooms
As Goldrick notes, Rhee's enthusiasm for "year-to-year" gains in test scores defies logic. Scores fluctuate from one year to the next, and unexpected winds can ...
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