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In Defense of Field Trips: A Conversation with Educators from an Extraordinary Alabama Public School
People looking for a public school Cinderella story need look no further than George Hall Elementary in Mobile, Alabama. The once struggling school, which serves mostly low-income children, now boasts state math and reading test scores most wealthy suburban schools would be proud of. (See our story about George Hall's Success).
George Hall did not have to sacrifice all but the basics to get there. Instead, the school's staff courageously focused on what some would consider frills in an era of high-stakes accountability: innovative technologies; rich vocabulary and content knowledge; even field trips.
We recently spoke with George Hall principal Terri Tomlinson and teachers Elizabeth Reints and Melissa Mitchell.
Hear highlights from our interview (5 minutes)
...
Many educators speak at a frequency inaudible to pundits' ears. Perhaps that's why pundits almost always prefer broad, simple solutions to the nitty-gritty processes of improving schools.
The venerable education pundit Jay Mathews recently exhibited this tendency in his review of a book about the success of Montgomery County Maryland. Leading for Equity, he opines, is all about process, and process is too often ponderous, impenetrable and uninspiring. For Mathews, exhibit A is the cryptic set of lessons the book outlines in its first chapter. For example: "Implementing a strategy of common, rigorous standards with differentiated resources and instruction can create excellence and equity for all students." Poetry it's not.
Still, I have to agree with Elena Silva's judgment that Matthews' "critique of the book as too process-oriented is wrong. Process has tripped up many a reform, and understanding what sequence of events and efforts leads to change is key to ...
Linda Darling-Hammond turns in a thoughtful review of mayoral control at the National Journal's new blog. (The Journal recently invited their expert bloggers to comment on mayoral takeovers.) Her major point seems to be that the proof isn't in the pudding: Outcomes evidence from major urban districts suggests that mayoral control is not necessarily any more effective than other governance structures.
Oddly enough, some of the staunchest mayoral control advocates contributing to the Journal's blog focus more on inputs than outcomes. This is a remarkable reversal, given the reformers' longstanding grievance that traditional educators are outcomes-averse. Perhaps inputs are making a comeback.
Darling Hammond is characteristically balanced in her assessment of mayoral ...
Writing commentaries on the best use of stimulus funds has become a thriving cottage industry. Don’t fund the status quo! the general argument runs. Fund innovation instead!
I’m beginning to wonder if we should start using the word “improvement” instead of innovation. This strategy might help us counter the tendency of some innovation zealots to value novelty over quality.
Former IBM CEO Louis Gerstner offered an egregious example of that tendency late last year, when he advocated the abolition of all but the largest school districts. To him, innovation seems to mean doing something drastic and doing it now. ...
A new and important study of the link between middle school success and high school graduation rates offers a useful caution to anyone looking for education miracle cures. After examining early warning signs that students might drop out, study author Bob Balfanz writes:
These findings...demonstrate why reform is difficult, as no single reform stands out as the major action required. Essentially, we found that everything one might think matters, does so, but modestly at best. This included parental involvement, academic press, teacher support, and the perceived relevance of what was being taught and its intrinsic interest to students. Some of these factors influenced attendance, others influenced behavior or effort, and they either indirectly or directly impacted course performance, achievement gains, and graduation outcomes. It was only when all the elements were combined in a well-functioning system that major gains were observed.
So don't put all your reform eggs in one basket--a useful admonition for education policy's chattering classes. The flip side of that admonition, of course, is that we shouldn't ignore critical improvement strategies either. Parent involvement, academic expectations, teacher support, relevance and other factors are all important to school success. As the nation considers school turnaround strategies, ...
The education "establishment" and education "reformers" are not so different from one another after all. Just ask the Fordham Foundation’s Mike Petrilli.
As Petrilli suggests, reformers in the charter school community have received a strong dose of reality: It turns out that it’s not so easy to close achievement gaps and raise student performance. Faced with disappointing news about their schools’ performance, charter advocates have resorted to arguments than have long been anathema to reformers: We need more money! Those standardized tests don’t measure what’s really important!
More recently, charter supporters have been changing their tune about regulation. Reformers are discovering that we cannot use a regulatory vise to squeeze higher performance out of traditional schools while trusting that charter and voucher schools will flourish in boundless freedom. Frustration with both No Child Left Behind and lackluster charter school results has prompted people of various ideological stripes to think more deeply about the benefits and perils of regulation. ...
While the national debate rages over the benefits of early childhood education, an innovative, district-wide early childhood education initiative is bearing fruit in Bremerton, Washington. Since the initiative's founding, the percentage of Bremerton children entering Kindergarten knowing their letters has shot from 4% to over 50%. The percentage of Kindergarteners needing specialized education services has plummeted from 12% to 2%. And the share of first graders reading on grade level has risen from 52% to 73%.
Last week, I spoke with a woman at the center of the program: Linda Sullivan-Dudzic, the district's Director of Special programs. She described some keys to the program's success. The district:
- Aligns existing school and community resources
- Raises the quality of existing preschools rather than creating new ones
- Focuses on literacy and numeracy
- Heeds the research, and
- Holds all providers to high standards of quality
Read extensive highlights from our interview with Sullivan-Dudzic:
PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: What are the major goals of Early Childhood Care and Education Group, and what do you believe you've accomplished in striving towards those goals?
SULLIVAN-DUDZIC: We have two goals. [The first is] to increase the number of children entering kindergarten with early literacy skills--and now we've added early math foundation skills. And the second goal is to decrease the number of children, students, with learning disabilities or learning differences associated with reading.
PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: And do you feel like you've made headway in reaching your goals?
SULLIVAN-DUDZIC: Yes. In literacy definitely. We're just starting in math. We have decreasing numbers of kids qualifying as learning disabled, and we have increasing numbers of kids entering kindergarten with early reading foundation skills.
PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: So you have all kinds of community partners?
SULLIVAN-DUDZIC: Sure. I started 29 years ago with Head Start, as a ...
Grover (Russ) Whitehurst was the founding director of the Education Department’s Institute of Education Sciences. He currently directs the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy.
On June 4th, we praised him for questioning some education reformers' blind approval of innovation for innovation’s sake. (See his compelling essay, “Innovation, Motherhood and Apple Pie.”)
Whitehurst recently joined us by telephone to describe his concerns in greater detail.
PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: Thanks for joining us.
WHITEHURST: I'm pleased to be here.
PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: Let me begin with an incantation that I think you wrote. It runs, "Full moon and candles/magic times three/we summon the power of innovation/to be.” Can you explain that?
WHITEHURST: As I have talked to people in education about innovation, which seems to be the new buzzword, I have with some frequency asked them to give me an example of what they mean: an innovation that they t
hink is on the horizon that is going to transform the delivery of education in this country. The typical response is, we don't know what that would be.
So it seems to me that in many cases innovation is being invoked almost as if it is magic. We don't know exactly what it is and we don't know what it looks like, but if we could only release it, it would fix all of our problems.
What I was trying to convey is that we should not believe, as adults, in Santa Claus or magic to solve our problems. If we're thinking about innovation, we need to get serious about what it is, what types we're interested in, and how we expect to use processes of innovation to advance education.
PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: This gets to your definition of innovation….
WHITEHURST: First, I think it's important to note that innovation is just introducing something new, and you hope it's going to make things better. So much of what any organization does as it tries to solve problems falls under the general category of innovation.
Within that broad category, it is important to differentiate innovations that work from those that don't—effective versus ineffective innovations. If an innovation is the introduction of something new with the intent to be useful -- reality and intent are often two different things -- we need procedures and processes in place to carefully evaluate innovations so that we can tell the difference between those that are actually improving the state affairs versus those that are just a hope and a wish. ...
Newsweek's Jonathan Alter lives in a world of delightful simplicity.
Here's his advice on how to spend the education stimulus money: "We know what works now and should just go ahead and fund it."
And here I was, thinking it's challenging to choose among many pressing spending needs. How silly of me.
And what works, according to Alter? He doesn't give us much insight here, but he does mention performance pay for teachers. OK--that's an important idea that deserves our attention, but where's the evidence that it "works"? The most thoughtful advocates of performance pay for teachers acknowledge that it has enormous logistical and statistical hurdles to clear before it can be a very stable foundation for teacher compensation decisions.
Unfortunately, we don't have ironclad knowledge about ...
The education thinktankocracy has become bewitched by all those sexy innovations that dominate education policy discussions--charter schools, new compensation systems, etc. The national preoccupation with those innovations is crowding out critical discussions of more hum-drum, but perhaps more effective, improvements to public education. That's the conclusion Russ Whitehurst draws in an important March 2009 essay.
For those of you who don't know, Whitehurst was the beleaguered director of the Institute of Education Sciences in the Bush administration. It seems he has spread his wings since becoming head of the Brookings Institution's Brown Center on Education Policy.
In his Brookings essay, Whitehurst draws an important distinction between flashy new innovations ("product innovations") and incremental ...
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