What Are Schools For?
by Forum Convener John I. Goodlad
Winston Churchill gave democracy only a modest passing grade but, nonetheless, viewed it as the best form of government humans have managed to put together. Since then, democracy has achieved a higher global rating, increasingly tied to education and the making of a good society. The essentials of a good society are a wise and healthy people and a supportive culture. All else is derivative. The renewal of this culture requires a democratic people.
The Founding generation of the United States of America saw the necessity of this reciprocal relationship and the role of education in sustaining it. But they wrote nothing about schools. Are we to assume that they viewed education as the near-ubiquitous context comprised of family, church, and school for developing a unique human being? In effect, that we the people would build and sustain a nationwide moral ecology of communities in which freedom and responsibility would be both studied and practiced?
There is today a chorus of discontent and anticipation of fundamental change in the conduct of our affairs: political, social, economic, educational, organizational, institutional. We heard President Obama’s stunning speech last November in a Chicago park and around the world about his commitment to widespread change and his expression of hope. Almost in unison came the response: “Yes we can.” But already, from right and left, comes the criticism that his preoccupation with big problems and big ideas is mere abstraction lacking the necessary specifics. Are we forgetting the WE?
I turn now to schooling, an enterprise driven more by ideology than knowledge and evidence. Unless we get above the endless bickering that has kept our system of schooling stranded in the deep structure that hardened into place many decades ago, we will find ourselves only tinkering with school reform one more time. Enough already! There are children here.
There are some obvious improvements to be made that will arouse little controversy, such as upgrading the infrastructure of schooling and providing high-level equity in instructional and curricular learning and teaching resources. And there is a rich array of ideas that have been briefly implemented in innovative school programs that were not brought to scale and sustained. Their stories are readily accessible but have been virtually ignored by policymakers, even by federally appointed committees such as the National Commission on Excellence in Education that in 1983 produced the influential report A Nation at Risk. In all probability, some of these will be rediscovered, funded, not brought to scale, and fade, largely because of the ideological differences embedded in our multilayered system of schooling.
Over a period of sixty years, I have taught in a one-room school and school for delinquent boys, taught in every grade from the first through graduate school, been a dean for sixteen years, and studied in depth and breadth educational change, schooling, the education of educators, and more. I now look back in wonderment, anger, and near-despair at the stark reality of we the people scarcely murmuring for eight years over the imposition of the No Child Left Behind Act on our PUBLIC SCHOOLS. No powerful intellect is required for coming to the conclusion that we the people are grossly undereducated in what education is and negligent in the informed care of our irreplaceable asset, the public school. Where art thou, Horace Mann, arguably its founder, who proclaimed over 150 years ago that “the public school is the greatest discovery made by man”?
I have concluded that we will never have the schools our democracy requires until their well-being is a major priority of local communities. And we will not have them until policymakers, business roundtables, educational organizations, teacher-preparing institutions, and community leaders agree on what all schools are for. The challenges are enormous and, unless we take them seriously and begin the necessary learning now, our century-old tinkering with schooling will continue.
These are not tasks to delegate to national commissions. They are for all of us—the “yes we can” people, the young and the old, and everyone in between. We can start with Renaissance cafés, coffee klatches, book clubs, symposia, debates, and of course, common readings.
The time is ripe for us to stop tinkering and do three things:
1. First, we must provide ALL communities with the material and human resources they need to ensure that their schools will become places of learning and joy.
2. Second, we must generate in all communities a richly comprehensive conversation about what our schools are for and how we help them do it. Perhaps the introductory topic should be about what education is. Let the conversation begin.
3. Third, we must identify the unresolved, formidable issues that have plagued the reconstruction of our schooling enterprise for many years, cultivate the mandate, progressively provide the human and financial resources, and begin the great turning of forging a system of uniquely different schools ever-renewing one by one. And what are they for? The essential educating not being done well elsewhere – or at all.
Why Send My Son to Public School?
by Forum National Director Sam Chaltain
Earlier this week, Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee announced the latest hopeful sign for DC’s public schools – a spike in citywide student reading and math scores. "We're thrilled at the progress we've made this year," said Rhee. "We still have an incredibly long way to go."
I’m grateful for the early improvements in the DC schools – and I share Chancellor Rhee’s caution. We all know standardized test scores offer just one window into the health of a school system. Any business school student also knows it’s foolish to judge an organization’s overall health based on a single measure of success. And yet the United States is the only nation with an accountability system based solely on standardized test scores.
We can do better. That’s why local leaders like Michelle Rhee, and national leaders like Arne Duncan, should lead the charge in demanding a better accountability system for our schools.
Here are four things we could do that would make a difference:
1. Restore the Proper Balance Between Federal and State Authority
The federal government has a few vital roles to play in public education – and holding local schools accountable for student achievement isn’t one of them. Instead, the primary role of the feds should be to build the capacity of schools to ensure a high-quality public education for every child.
This can be achieved by limiting the federal role to doing a few things well: ensuring every state has adequate resources to provide to its schools; holding states accountable to providing equal opportunities to learn for all children; collecting comparative information on the performance of schools across states; and supporting the research and innovation needed to support the growth of stronger, more engaging schools.
2. Use the Old NAEP as The New National Report Card
In its early years, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) was designed to assess any goal area for which schools devoted 15-20% of their time. That meant students were asked questions about not just math and science, but also art, citizenship, career and occupational development, health, physical fitness, literature and writing. The exam was administered in such a way that no one student finished the same exam, and results were reported based on a complex sampling methodology that resulted in valuable information for state and large district leaders about what their students, on average, did or did not know.
By restoring the old NAEP, we’d stop using test scores to hold individual schools accountable, and start providing state lawmakers and education officials with valuable information about what in their school systems was working, what wasn’t, and what areas of improvement would need to be given top priority.
3. Make School Accreditation Mandatory
Approximately one-fifth of the nation’s elementary and secondary schools are accredited. The process is administered by six different regional agencies, which coordinate extensive peer review processes. Schools tend to set their own goals for improvement, and the focus tends to be on the quality of school programs, not student achievement.
In some parts of the country, this system results in strong accountability, quality feedback, and genuine school improvement. In others, it is little more than excessive paperwork, accreditation fees, and a symbolic feather in the cap. So taking the current system and simply making it mandatory is not a viable solution.
However, most other countries in the world have mandatory accreditation systems and rely on trained professionals to conduct in-depth peer review processes that give educators feedback on how to improve learning conditions. England relies on a network of professional inspectors – usually retired or active principals and teachers – who are retrained annually and certified prior to employment. Each inspection results in a report that is immediately posted online for all to see. If a school fails inspection, local government assumes control.
A similar system already exists here in the U.S. – in the private schools, via the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS). Let’s learn from countries like England and organizations like NAIS by retooling our accreditation system, making it mandatory, and providing another vehicle for ensuring system-wide quality control.
4. Develop a Balanced Scorecard for Schools
The balanced scorecard, a well-known private sector innovation, would be an invaluable tool for the public school system.
The rationale for it was simple – net income, viewed by itself, doesn’t reveal enough about the overall health of a company. If profits go up, but customer satisfaction and staff morale go down, your company may not be as healthy as you think.
For a fuller picture, executives need to monitor different metrics across a number of interrelated aspects of a business’s overall health. With the scorecard, financial benchmarks remain vital, but it becomes equally important to monitor other indicators, such as customer feedback, internal communications processes, and investments in new skills for employees.
Why not do something similar for public schools? We’d immediately stop looking exclusively at test scores, and start evaluating achievement data in tandem with other indicators of a school’s health, such as faculty absenteeism rates, student attendance, resource equity, incidents of violence, even student aspirations.
With the shared structure of the scorecard in place, individual schools could even experiment with different combinations of metrics and see which ones result in the best feedback to support student learning and achievement.
The feds could trumpet the most promising insights and combinations.
The public could hold state officials and local schools accountable to their performance on the scorecards.
And I’d know where to send my son to school.
NOTE: This article originally appeared in the Huffington Post.
What Would Theo Do?
by Forum National Director Sam Chaltain
I’m a lifelong Red Sox fan, so as this year’s trading deadline approaches, I’m wondering once again what Theo Epstein, the GM of my beloved Boston Red Sox, will do to improve his team’s chances of winning their third championship in six years – after not winning one for eighty-six.
I’m also a lifelong public education fan, so with the Department of Education’s Race to the Top Fund poised to provide billions of dollars in competitive grants, I’m wondering if Arne Duncan can do for public schools what Theo Epstein has done for the Red Sox – take a maligned institution known more commonly for its failures than its successes, and turn it into a perennial winner.
Duncan should start by asking himself a simple question – What Would Theo Do?
If Theo was in Arne’s shoes, I think he’d immediately do three things:
1. Find the right statistics
For generations, baseball fans and managers glamorized three offensive stats – batting average, home runs, and runs batted in. Along the way, everyone also assumed that the best way to improve a team’s overall run production was by raising the team’s batting average and finding players who hit more home runs.
It makes sense. And yet team batting average actually bears a low correlation to the amount of runs a team is likely to score. Two other statistics, it turns out, are the ones to pay attention to – on-base and slugging percentage.
Initially, this insight was uncovered by a small number of general managers who, as a result, enjoyed a large competitive advantage. Now, all GM’s are clear that the stat that matters most is the one that didn’t exist as recently as the 1990s – OPS, or on-base plus slugging percentage.
If Theo was in Arne’s shoes, he’d use the Race to the Top funds to spark a search for the equivalent insight in education. It’s clear, for example, that although everyone pays attention to 3rd and 8th grade reading and math scores, there is a low correlation between a spike in those scores and a school’s overall ability to prepare kids for success in college, the workplace, and life. We can do better. The statistical revolution helped baseball teams become more effective and efficient; let’s use this opportunity to do the same thing in public education.
2. Revamp the scouting department
It wasn’t that long ago that Billy Beane, the GM of the Oakland A’s, said baseball scouting was at the same stage of development in the 21st century as professional medicine had been in the 18th. One could say the same thing about our current set of school accountability measures.
The problem in both arenas is that people tend to focus disproportionately on what is easiest to measure. Anyone can capture the speed of a high school pitcher’s fastball, for example, yet what matters much more to long-term success in the ability to deceive hitters – not just throw hard. Just ask Jamie Moyer, still pitching for the division-leading Philadelphia Phillies at 46 years of age, despite rarely topping 75 miles an hour on the radar gun.
What Beane, Epstein and others have learned is that you can’t just rely on the most convenient statistical measures if you want to be really effective at evaluating players. Secretary Epstein would therefore start searching for the OPS of school reform. Instead of exclusively using test scores, he’d tinker with a balanced scorecard approach by measuring academic achievement in areas other than math and reading, creating a student aspirations meter, holding states accountable for providing equal opportunities to learn, and investing in programs that could help prepare, place and support highly effective teachers in our neediest public schools. Along the way, we’d uncover a more sophisticated method of understanding how people learn and helping schools understand how to serve all children. Then, we could recalibrate public education’s “scouting departments” (e.g., teacher preparation programs, accountability systems, student assessment metrics) to ensure that we know how to find what we’re looking for – in teacher candidates, in school leaders, and in the students themselves.
3. Start with the game, not the numbers
Despite the many recent innovations in player evaluation, teams still make the mistake of falling in love with a prospect’s pure numbers and ignoring other factors – mental makeup, passion for the game, etc. – that are equally vital to a successful pro career.
As Bill James, a leading statistical guru of baseball – and an advisor to Theo Epstein – has cautioned, “I wonder if we haven’t become so numbed by all these numbers that we are no longer capable of truly assimilating any knowledge which might result from them.” As James explains, “I do not start with the numbers any more than a mechanic starts with a monkey wrench. I start with the game, with the things that I see there and the things that people say there.”
Paul DePodesta, the statistically minded GM of the Los Angeles Dodgers, says something similar. “It’s looking at process rather than outcomes. Too many people make decisions based on outcomes rather than process. But it’s not always what happened that matters. It’s how our guy approached the situation that matters.”
Even in the data-driven environment of professional baseball, Theo and his colleagues recognize that a blind allegiance to numbers will lead you astray.
So before you start writing giant checks to states, Arne, don’t start with the numbers – start with the game, and with the primary purpose of public education – to create a healthy, supportive environment in which all children can learn, discover their passions and potential, and achieve success in college, and the workplace, and throughout their lives.
Now that would be a blockbuster move.
(This article originally appeared in the Huffington Post.)
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