Relay GSE v. Traditional Teacher Prep – A Symptom of a Problem
Being a change agent in education is difficult. The career arc of a reformer is likely to follow that of the shooting star/falling star with greater hyperbole than that of a “new hero” teacher. Such is the nature of the industry. So it is not surprising that leaders of education movements find themselves forced to create a pipeline for followers in order to keep their ideas alive.
My response to Bruno: You Call It Indoctrination, I Call It Effective printed in @Alexander Russo’s This Week in Education on December 3, 2012…
In Baker’s defense, I know the feeling when someone is about to offer me some Kool-Aid that will make me see the world their way…time to find the nearest exit.
However, in the binary world that pervades education debates today, either one is staunchly willing to evade accountability with complete disregard for student outcomes or one is actively hurting the children for their own good. Neither world is real, but they seem to help those who only see power in the bully pulpit sort people out and determine whether or not it is their turn to be heard.
Relay GSE is a change agent more so than a scholarly institution, but we can look forward to a time when even traditional ed programs accept the best of what they have to offer. That, of course, cannot happen until we have the kind of data that can stand up to scrutiny.
In the first place, I believe in better data. We are not really data driven. We are driven by our own world views, with some of us carrying whatever chip or war-torn paper offering flimsy support for that world view. We can do better, and informed points of view must be part of any solution to education’s woes. But that is only part of the problem. Absence of real dialogue also prevents mediation of solutions.
There is such an entrenched status quo in public education, and there is a major bullying tendency among participants to maintain it. Unions are blamed because theirs are organizations built to amass a posse with great facility. However, angry reformers sometimes practice the same tactics with digital weapons. Teachers are vilified and scapegoated without any history of real data on their effectiveness. Either way, it is a sorry combination of group think and rigid solutions. Who started it is less important than the path out of this approach.
Solutions lie between the extremes of thought. Finding middle ground without going so far as satisficing is one of the lessons we need to learn. It will begin with informed dialogue that transcends our highly polarized political arena and social networking that garners mass audiences through superficial sound bites.
Hurricanes, Waivers, and 5% Solutions
Today’s solutions are laying the groundwork for tomorrow’s problems…that look a lot like yesteryear. Left to their own momentum, many of the ideas currently trending in education networks will lead to churning at the bottom, separate but not nearly equal public education, and loss of class mobility for all but minority superstars…who probably could have made it on their own merit.
Sometimes management talent is best reflected in unnatural acts of leadership when problems assume the guise of the obvious. Clear vision and grit are needed to save the day when momentum builds around flawed ideas. Otherwise, we are quite likely to preserve the status quo or worse, even as we flatter ourselves as seasoned change agents for the good.
Consider some of the current thinking in education policy…
- The system is too big to fix…we need to focus on the bottom 5%
- Katrina forced NOLA schools to be reinvented…let’s blow through [insert urban district] like a force of nature and just take out the weakest structures.
- Good schools are getting failing grades…NCLB must be broken.
Who is going to tell us if we are wrong?
Revival of an old trick…concentrating resources in the lowest performing schools
Solutions have to start somewhere, so why not at the bottom? What could be wrong with that? Actually, it has long been the habit of school districts to focus on underperforming schools. They throw scarce resources at the worst schools, observe some good results, celebrate victory…and myopically pull the resources out from under the schools with fledgling programs for success. Because there is a new school at the bottom and resources need to be redeployed to save it. That is the type of churning that got us where we are today.
Maybe the problem is that we do not have a good way to get access to existing resources. Special money for special problems gets spun cyclically around the anointed problem children in the system, but we manage the vast majority of education dollars in a black box of regulatory accounting. About 59% of our money goes to “instruction,” and many districts are trying to decentralize more of that and create flexibility for school leaders. However, there is no standard for tracking what’s in that pool of money, nor do we have the information to assess the other 41% beyond regulatory compliance with federal spending policies. We need to build data and dollars around the mission of educating all children.
Hurricane treatment of chaotic divisions within urban school systems
New Orleans may have had some of the worst schools in the nation prior to Hurricane Katrina. The need to rapidly replace the entire infrastructure in the troubled 9th Ward created an opportunity to incubate charter school notions in the real world. The jury is still out on this experiment, but early successes have turned NOLA charters into the new magic pill.
Now DC schools are under the microscope, and Washington Post columnist Jay Matthews is suggesting the emergence of a NOLA-like mixed Charter-District plan that could be extended to DC and other urban areas. This so-called hurricane treatment generates disruptive overhauling of whole regions of a troubled school district, essentially abandoning failure mills and replacing them with presumptively successful charters. Meanwhile, district schools in affluent neighborhoods would be left alone.
The long-term problem is systemic. The hurricane strategy sets up parallel school systems that may not ultimately deliver equity in education. And the better schools that are spared the metaphorical hurricane are no longer urgently encouraged to be inclusive of children whose parents wish to opt out of replacement schools. Nor are they as apt to worry about marginalizing their own special populations, even to the point of sending some of them back into the storm.
Welcome back Separate-but-[not] Equal? No way! A better asset-based solution would keep whatever strong elements existed within turnaround schools. An empowered administrator would set up a team balanced with instructional leadership and parent representation. Teachers would be responsive to both, and they would be involved in self-assessment, goal-setting, and review annually. Every member of the team must count. This is a full-on marathon, not a sprint for the most fleet-footed favorites.
If schools were considered too far gone to recover, a creative solution would be to reorganize and realign elementary schools. Two cohorts of preK-8 students could be combined, matching pairs of high and low-performing schools. The blended schools would then be reorganized into separate preK-3 and grade 4-8 schools. The staff at each school would be collectively accountable for their respective grade 3 or grade 8 final benchmarks. Intensive professional development in the appropriate age cluster would be required for each school’s staff.
NCLB waivers that enable benign neglect in elite schools
NCLB is not as broken as some would have you believe. Poor grades for subgroup failures at elite schools have been cited as a hallmark of NCLB’s shortcomings. In fact, the inclusiveness of the best schools is an important feature of NCLB that supports families trying to give their children access to a brighter future. Many less affluent families moving to towns with better schools have found their children marginalized in special programs and falling further behind their peers in the new schools.
With waivers in place, states are less likely to notice as “the soft bigotry of lowered expectations” continues to be tolerated in middle and upper class communities. Parents can move to a better place, but their children still may be denied an educational springboard to class mobility.
The real solution is to keep the rigor of subgroup analysis within NCLB. Ethnic or income-based bias within seemingly good schools is not good enough. Districts must be accountable for all of their students. Painful self-assessment and corrective action is not just for big city schools. Creation of a success cycle for underserved populations within any district must be a priority.
Spend Education Dollars Wisely – Invest Private Equity Funds in Real Economic Capacity
This should be a no-brainer. The $500 billion dollar elementary and secondary education market needs to be fiscally responsible. And our economy needs to expand through investment in real productive assets. Yet private investors are seeking to skim profits off of the poorly administered public education money instead of going for new economic capacity. They misinterpret the difference between a stimulus package steeped in short-term spending on employment and infrastructure improvements in education and long-term profit-planning through economic growth.
Private firms eyeing profits from U.S. public schools: “…Now investors are signaling optimism that a golden moment has arrived. They’re pouring private equity and venture capital into scores of companies that aim to profit by taking over broad swaths of public education.”
This excerpt from a Reuters press release yesterday tells us that US “job creators” still don’t get it. They continue to do profit planning based on eating our young. Building a renewed private sector based on extending government spending on PreK-12 education will not make this nation stronger economically. Nor will it make sense to crowd out other investments in productive assets by developing a shadow industry for private investment money in alternative education services.
In the recent past election, the US economy was a key issue. It remains so. However, we continue to see private investment in the very public goods that conservative politicians sought to curb. Cutting healthcare spending and privatizing education were targeted as solutions, but we still need to see evidence that our great economic visionaries can see past their next short sale. The private growth opportunities cannot be healthcare and education. They crowd-out investments for the future.
Healthcare spending already consumes as much of GDP as should ever be reasonable in a stable economy. The $1 trillion investment in college loans to kids is already too high. New private dollars going into public education will continue to dampen the job opportunities for the children once they finish high school and college.
Yes, the brick-and-mortar infrastructure in education is crumbling and needs to be reinforced. And, yes, the children in the classroom should be protected from the feast and famine of economic cycles. However, compensatory money spent in either area must be seen as short-term spending.
In addition, existing private companies that serve this industry need to follow the market from paper to digital media. They must do this to survive – not expand. New players may emerge because they do this better, but the overall industry should not grow faster than the economy in the long run.
$500 billion may be enough to fund public education. We are not sure, but we need to find out what we are buying with our money. However, as long as our financial data system in education lacks transparency, the looters will come.
The NCLB Waiver Fix
NCLB waivers allow States to create modified goals for achievement. However, it appears many State and Federal education leaders have missed the point. State level goals that institutionalize an achievement gap among different populations of students cannot be defended. Each state must set a target for baseline achievement for all populations by some date, which is no longer 2014. How each district deals with its own history and revises its benchmarks is a State matter.
NCLB achievement goals were set to define the lowest common denominator among students. Any State-level regulator who proposes discrimination in goal-setting either is unclear on the concept or views its populations of students to be structurally unequal. Marginalizing students and under-serving them is not the American way. All students must pass the hurdle of a single “lowest common denominator.”
State-level goals that vary by demographic pool fail at two levels:
- They institutionalize demographic achievement gaps, which is unconstitutional.
- They reset the lowest common denominator within populations at some weighted average of past achievement across districts, thereby actually lowering the target for districts which have been making higher than average progress.
States that have received NCLB waivers should have latitude in how they deal with individual districts. However, the only demonstrable district targets should be (1) the redefined timetable for baseline proficiency for ALL populations, and (2) the benchmarks for accelerated progress toward baseline proficiency within any population that has fallen behind under NCLB.
Secretary Duncan has said that district-level NCLB waivers do not make sense. I, on the other hand, think that the district is the only place where variances should be tolerated even temporarily. Perhaps our point of agreement is that the State should be allowed input into resetting the NCLB timeline under Federal oversight. Then, it is the State’s prerogative to define a process that ensures realignment of individual district goals with that vision.
And, btw, don’t forget to keep going all you overachievers out there!
Dual Enrollment and Its Promise
My brother taught me a lesson about offering a promise at the end of goal achievement. It may just be the missing link for many high school re-engagement programs. Dual enrollment can take a student from his or her return to high school through access to a college degree. Going back to high school for that diploma is hard, and the reward it offers is limited. But a college degree means forever on a resume…clearing a hurdle for access to the middle class.
A while ago during a failed job interview for a position in student re-engagement, I totally blew it on the HR rubric. I went outside of the box and cited my brother, Tom Wright, as one of my personal heroes. Tom had spent the last 20 years creating and developing a market for home mortgages for Native Americans. My link to work with high school drop-outs must have been a bit too obtuse, but it’s still a story about keeping an eye on a prize.
Tom’s work began in an era when much of the housing stock on Indian reservations was below code, and home ownership eluded many Native Americans due to missing or low credit ratings. However, he recognized that there was a market and a dire need for access to both credit and safe housing. He just needed a method.
Tom developed a two-year course of credit counseling for Native Americans with weak financial backgrounds that promised approval on a home mortgage if they finished the program with a successful payment history. Paying ones bill could lead to 1st time home ownership, a rarity at the time. Possession of a plywood shack on tribal land was all many of his clients could hope for as they dodged their creditors.
The financing of the risk for mortgage lenders was the rub, but Tom saw a solution in money set aside for Native American housing awards through the Wounded Knee Treaty. A clause in the agreement funded a housing lottery that awarded homes to a small number of winners in Indian Nation each year. He went to tribal elders across the Midwest and Western reservations and discussed redeployment of that money to fund a risk pool that would cover a larger number of people. In short, rather than giving ten people houses, they could cover the default risk on mortgages for dozens of people. Eventually, Tom won program adoption, and a housing boom began.
Now, back to education…how can a mortgage plan for a small demographic group relate to the broad population of American drop-outs? I would form a different question…what does a high school diploma offer? It has become a serious hurdle for millions of drop-outs who cannot get access to even low paying jobs. However, a high school diploma no longer ensures access to the middle class. One needs a college degree for that. And I see that college credential to be very much like the mortgage for the highly indebted denizen of substandard housing.
Going back to high school is very difficult. It means returning to a scene of failure and, often, a place that has left students under-served in the past. Just more of the same is small incentive for participation. There has to be more, and that may account for the higher success rates seen with dual enrollment in community college systems for high school drop-outs. The prize for successful effort is an Associate’s Degree, professional certification, and, in many systems, guaranteed access to a four-year state college.
Overcoming inertia to break a failure cycle is not its own reward. The prize needs to be real and change lives. We can do that.
Tom’s story is still in progress, but I asked him a year or so ago what he considered to be his legacy. He stated quite simply that twenty years ago Native Americans had no access to traditional home mortgages, and today they are treated like any other American at the bank. Quite an accomplishment…but there’s icing on the cake. When the real estate market began to collapse a few years ago, his programs were still experiencing a default rate of about 1%. People who earned their way into a new standard of living seem to treasure it.
New PreK-12 Education Priorities for the Returning Obama Administration
The Common Core State Standards, NCLB waivers, and Race to the Top initiatives have altered the landscape in education in the absence of an NCLB rewrite. On this day of reflection after Election 2012, I offer a few thoughts on resetting policy priorities until ESEA renewal becomes feasible.
Entering the 2nd term, in my humble opinion, the Obama Administration could benefit from raising the priority of three issues in PreK-12 education…
- Decision architecture for education finance, reporting, and analysis
- Federal support for government employee pension reform
- Incentives/accountabilities for grade level proficiency for students in general or special education and students who are English language learners
Decision Architecture
The Race to the Top program (RttT) has instructed states and districts to design new approaches to student funding, teacher effectiveness, and student outcomes. Having completed the idea generation phase for reinvention of the decision architecture within education authorities, it is time to draw expertise from beyond traditional regulatory compliance models. Educators need to learn from non-education sources with more expertise in aligning information and analyses to the mission of educating children efficiently and effectively.
The finished products should draw on the best of the general industry models and those presented by RttT exemplars. They should include a standard for financial reporting that is student-centered as well as data elements to be automated in support of teacher effectiveness and student outcome reports.
Pension Reform
Government employee pensions are straining fiscal resources while yielding inequitable benefits for plan participants and limiting their career mobility. Current retirees and vested employees need security with their defined-benefit pensions. Separately, the wisdom of continuing to underwrite such pensions in the future needs to be assessed. However, any introduction of defined-contribution pensions for new or unvested employees would result in eventual bankruptcy for legacy plans.
The Federal role in the issue could be one of mitigating the financial crisis in pension funding. Changes to the tax code could lower the effective cost of borrowing for sponsors to meet pension obligations. In addition, elimination of the Social Security opt-out would extend the safety net for employees switching to higher risk, defined-contribution pension plans. A prior post discussing this issue can be found here.
Grade Level Proficiency
When redefining the data elements needed for measuring student outcomes, Federal regulators will need to keep in mind new targets and deadlines for general grade-level proficiency among PreK-12 students. Longitudinal tracking across content areas will need to be enhanced significantly, especially to ensure that students receiving services in Special Ed or ELL programs are demonstrating accelerated progress in response to accommodations and modifications.
This shift in emphasis should create incentives to move beyond regulatory compliance to demonstration of real benefits for students, a continuation of the work announced in an Education Department notice available here.
Other items on the Federal agenda…
Meanwhile, teacher preparation does not need to be such a high priority on the Federal agenda. Educators are being trained under a variety of conditions ranging from rigorous 5-year programs that combine baccalaureate and master’s degrees to boot camp immersion programs or online courses with limited apprenticeships. Aggressive evaluation of the most highly structured programs exclusively is both unfair and at risk of overestimating the state of the art in actual practice. In addition, success has been seen with many teacher prep models, raising doubt that the problem lies with the pipeline of new teachers.
Rather, a crucial lapse in quality arises because individual schools and districts show uneven results with their ability to keep teachers in top form professionally throughout their careers. That is a local problem that is being addressed retrospectively through the teacher evaluation process. Prospectively, Federal regulators should consider grants for demonstration projects to introduce general management and human resource expertise from general industry into education leadership development.
The One Thing I Would Do
Inspired by John Merrow’s blog asking educators to share their absolute 1st step to improve public education…My choice would be to align transition grade levels to mission and benchmarks.
I would reorganize elementary schools into a PreK-3 school and an adjacent school for grades 4-8. The mission of teaching children in a way that reflects their social, emotional, and intellectual development would be better served with this grouping. In addition, the crucial benchmarks for literacy and numeracy would coincide with graduation from a phase of education.
With the younger children, the whole team would work together to ensure every child could read for comprehension, tell a story through writing, reason numerically, and be familiar with patterns and geometric shapes. They would be able to work interdependently with other children and resolve minor conflicts. In addition, they would show independence in managing their own resources for school and have personalized strategies to start solving a problem while waiting for assistance.
A new intermediate school defined as Grades 4-8 would create a safe harbor for kids in puberty that avoids the disruptive grade six transition and still clusters the kids with alignment for intellectual development. Schools need to be adjacent to allow for important mentoring and connectedness across age groups. In addition, facilities could be shared, such as library, cafeteria, PE, and playground.
Related blog entries…
- My Theory on Math, Puberty, and Emerging Abstract Reasoning…and why Middle School Should Begin with Grade 4 read more…
- Finding the Best Split for Neighborhood K-8 Schools read more…
- Middle School Conundrum response read more…
- 3rd Grade on the Line read more…
Resolving the Pension Problem
Teacher’s pensions have devolved into a hornet’s nest of woes for government sponsors, unions, and beneficiaries. However, a solution may lie in matching unlikely bedfellows: government pensioners and the richest 1% of citizens who might just be willing to fund their benefits in exchange for tax-free bonds. It is one of the few win-win scenarios available in this picture.
Teacher pensions have created a dilemma for many districts and unions. Traditional pensions for teachers are not portable, so teachers cannot reap benefits unless they stay in one retirement system long enough to reach the 30 year tenure/55 year age threshold. For those who do achieve full eligibility, pension funds often are seriously underfunded.
Alternative plans cannot fix the problem alone. 40lK-type plans offer portability, but any shift of savings to a new plan will create additional underfunding of legacy plans. In addition, they are too risky for teachers in states that have opted out of the Social Security safety net. Employers will need to enroll staff in Social Security and both will need to make contributions. Regardless, pension sponsors will need a source of low-cost borrowing to meet obligations.
Tax-free bonds have been proposed as a low-impact borrowing source for government sponsors of unfunded pension obligations1. Essentially, the tax-free status will lower the effective interest rate for borrowers while offering tax-sheltered income for the lenders.
I am not often a fan of tax benefits for the rich. However, this is a case of the ends justifying the means. The dual goal of keeping retiree benefits intact while achieving greater equity among teachers in their access to pensions must be served. And who better to do this than the rich who, by the way, need to be co-opted? Otherwise, they tend to be most likely to favor a plan of privatizing education and cutting off retirement prospects for the displaced veteran teachers.
1Joshua Rauh of Northwestern University and Robert Novy-Marx of the University of Rochester via “Solving the Pension Puzzle”
My Theory on Math, Puberty, and Emerging Abstract Reasoning…and why Middle School Should Begin with Grade 4
Puberty undermines the identity of middle school-aged children and initiates their exploration of a variety of possible adult personas. Paradoxically, it is also a time when their need to fit in seems to hit an all-time high. As a result, the simple act of getting dressed in the morning actually may require students to solve a daunting set of simultaneous equations. Their intellectual development in the years leading up to that time is crucial to their successful academic and psychosocial transition to more sophisticated abstract reasoning. However, the question is when, not if, they can handle the mental gymnastics of exploding possibilities.
The psychosocial exigencies of puberty may be as important as education as a driver of need for abstract thinking in young adolescents. The baffling combination of the search for a new identity and the peer pressure for conformity sets up the conundrum; intellectual strength can be the advantage or the goal. However, the mere act of living in the body of a pubescent child will stimulate cognitive ambition. As educators, we need to give the pre-adolescent as much reasoning ability as possible to face the task. He or she will get to a higher level with or without us…but the less confident student may try to hold off the challenge through social dysfunction and academic avoidance.
The math problem: suppose, in a class of 25 students, each child is trying on three unique personas at any given time. Then the number of possible combinations in that one class is 325. That would be a bit hyperbolic, so the children solve part of their problem by limiting the number of options that qualify as cool. Then, they begin the iterative process of arranging themselves in groups with similar attributes. Leaders will emerge as trend-setters, and controlling behavior will define many friendships. Best friends will become enemies, for example, if a group member forgets to make sure the blouse she promised to wear to school was laundered the night before. (Yes, her mother really *did* ruin her life.)
Students will find temporary comfort in groups that offer options that best match their coping strategies. However, precocious children may be excluded because of their tolerance for ambiguity and may seek adult approval through individual excellence in academics, sports, or the arts. At the other end of the spectrum, insecure children may opt out socially and need safe harbors to protect them from predatory groups, the most extreme being street gangs. Alternately, in the digital age, kids may take solace in virtual worlds.
So, my theory is that the 4th and 5th grade math teachers could help us understand why one child joins a gang while another joins a choir or a study group. Or why middle school friendships can be so fleeting. Or why kids who played computer games in isolation through puberty might emerge more socially adept in high school than the most popular kids in middle school – or at least make better social choices.
And it is not just about the math. Students need the vocabulary to express themselves and journals to document their inner lives, a sense of history and perspective, and methods for exploring cause and effect. And each needs a distinctive competency that becomes the backbone for an emerging identity that transcends the social turmoil. I would go beyond visiting the K-5 faculty to gain insight on behavior to making the 4th and 5th grade teachers a part of the team with shared accountability for readiness for the middle school mission.
I believe middle school should be redefined as grades 4-8. Research suggests that the trauma of the grade 6 transition to middle school has the most negative impact on academic outcomes for children. A grade 4 transition would ease the social and intellectual leaps for the child, who will not enter puberty until later. In addition, it would allow for vertical alignment of curricular and psychosocial goals as well as continuity for faculty members and the children through this tumultuous developmental phase.
In the context of a school system that resolved basic literacy and numeracy needs in a PreK-3 early elementary school, the Grade 4-8 middle school could give students a more solid academic readiness for puberty, safe harbor in a familiar place when it hits, and greater opportunity to develop academic and psychosocial readiness for high school.
Test Results as the Floor and the Ceiling for Learning…
Comment Submitted in Response to John Merrow’s 17 Sept 2012 blog entry, Blended Learning – But to What End?
Thank you for a wonderfully cogent set of caveats with regard to blended learning. While I share your view, the issue of achieving basic literacy and numeracy as the floor and the ceiling is a problem I would love to have. Frankly, we have so many children who cannot get their footing on that floor that I side with the folks who would seek that goal by any means necessary.
Testing can never hope to make promises beyond ensuring the basic toolkit for knowledge acquisition. As educators, we should take every child beyond the basics. And that is where the multiple measures of teacher effectiveness come into play.
Suppose, for example, we could say that all children would be empowered with enough basic knowledge and skill to pursue grade level challenges as active thinkers by 2019. That would mean every child entering 6th grade or lower today would be truly prepared for college and life through a mixture of remediation and accelerated progress.
Such an accomplishment would break the failure mentality of educators, which I consider to be a major part of the problem. In addition, it would take enough time that our innovators should have come up with solutions to the very good concern you have voiced…that of raising the ceiling toward infinity.
I would like to add a link addressing this issue in the context of benchmarks…
https://schoolsretooled.com/2011/11/29/securing-the-floor-to-raise-the-ceiling/
Summary of Reform Ideas
The following outline summarizes the SchoolsRetooled thinking on K-12 reform as of this morning.
Current situation: 3-tiered system…
- Excellent school districts with some subgroup failure
- Average school districts with some quality issues and recent AYP failures
- Troubled school districts with persistent underachievement
All would benefit from some national/state/local improvements…
- No-fault reform – any reform contingent upon incumbents and/or blame is faulty in and of itself
- Better data standards for…
- Funding formulas and financial statements
- Student outcomes
- Teacher effectiveness
- Incentives to address pension fund issues leading to…
- Solvency for traditional pension beneficiaries
- Portability for non-vested employees
- Resetting NCLB accountabilities targeting…
- Near universal proficiency in ELA and Math beginning with 2019 graduates
- Sliding scale for classes of 2013-2018
- Reorganization of schools…
- Realignment of school grade clusters to mission and benchmarks…
- PreK-3rd grade (free public PreK for at-risk students)
- 4th – 8th grade
- 9th – 12th grade
- Redefinition of leadership hierarchy with…
- General manager leading each organization
- Balance of instructional leadership and parent/community leadership at the next level of management
- Teachers and support staff assigned to small learning families with administrative assistants as needed
- Restructured incentives for professional growth…
- Annual self-assessment, goal-setting, and evidence-based review
- Review team including supervisor(s), peers, students, and parents
- Bonus pools for interdependent staff and leaders
- Realignment of school grade clusters to mission and benchmarks…
- New incentives for Students with Special Needs, English Language Learners, and other subgroups for accelerated progress toward grade-level proficiency
- Advancement of pedagogy to…
- Realize new potential with technology
- Maximize student access to personalized learning…matching style, overcoming obstacles
- Combine memory banking and critical thinking for synthetic and deconstructive problem-solving
Demand Management for Public Schools?
Public education has the mission of educating all of the nation’s children. The marketing of this government service has never been much of a consideration. However, with the development of competitive education options for children, public school districts are feeling the squeeze. How can districts attract enough students to keep their schools open?
Who would choose to send their children to neighborhood public schools? The ideal response would be, “anyone.” Sadly, in many cities and towns, that response needs to be amended to say, “Anyone who doesn’t have better options.” While there are many strong school systems across the nation, the cost of living in those communities has risen with the relative value of the education system. In more affordable communities, the quality of education has come into question, and the number of children applying to the better public schools far exceeds the number of spaces available. Even financially strapped parents are opting out of public education, choosing to home school their children or give up precious child care hours for extra jobs to pay for private school options.
The federal government has attempted to drive improvements in schools through No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation. There have been pockets of success under NCLB, but far too many public schools are failing to deliver adequate results for the children. To date, educators have responded with calls for alternative measures of success, greater funding for their efforts, and expanded social programs to meet the needs of the children whose achievement is complicated by conditions of poverty, homelessness, and fractured families.
Regardless of the validity of the educators’ point of view, the public school customers are actively voting with their feet and opting out of the system. Or they are gathering in the mayor’s office to communicate the strength of their votes in the absence of remedy. Public school closings are looming because anyone with a choice tries to go to the alternative program. Districts no longer serve a captive market.
Loss of citizen support for schools must be recognized and addressed. Educators need to wake up and acknowledge the precariousness of their positions. Schools must be customer-focused, offer high quality educational services, and meet the needs of the vast majority of local citizens. Because a surprising number of constituents are proving they do have a choice.
TFA Alums for Leadership – the Rest of the Story
Comment in agreement with John Thompson and posted here inAlexander Russo’s mention of “TFA Teachers Deserve Better than TFA Alums Are Providing.”
Thank you for raising the issue of the new education leadership by TFA alums. I was certified initially through an alternative program for teacher prep, surviving the trial by fire and staying on for several years. In the first 2-3 years, I drank the Koolaid and accepted that veteran teachers accounted for most of the problems in elementary and secondary education. However, I also had an MBA and studied organizational behavior. As I grew more secure as a teacher, I began to evaluate the claims against reality. What became apparent was that there was deadwood in the system, but it did not die a natural death. The system treads teachers, cycling through a series of new heroes and failing to sustain mature staff. Veterans are trapped in a closed pension system as they become the acceptable scapegoats for naive leaders. A more robust leadership model beyond instructional role modeling (by the new kids in town) is desperately needed.
Sustain Funding to Narrow Achievement Gap in Special Education
Hold that axe, Professor Levenson. Your $10 billion solution for the Special ED budget would deliver a blunt cut to funding just as the program is implementing more functional policies to promote efficiency and efficacy of services. Let’s look at the who and the how of Special Education services before punishing districts for deviations from an arbitrary median. And don’t forget…closing the achievement gap for students with Special Needs means results measuring their achievement against that of all students, not just other students with disabilities.
Effective use of funds for students with Special Needs is essential to their futures. Outcomes for these students during K-12 schooling can be determinants of their success in life relative to their peers without disabilities. However, what constitutes optimal sources and uses of funding is still very much in flux.
Variations in expectations and the intensity of services are rising in Special Education. At the same time, emerging technologies are creating new options that could make personalized learning ubiquitous in schools. Meanwhile, budget-conscious policy analysts led by Nathan Levenson and the Fordham Institute are seeking prematurely to cut spending in Special Education based on isolated cases of better student outcomes with less money. Let’s stop for a glimpse from the special educator’s chair.
For many students with moderate disabilities, the goal is to achieve results on par with their peers without disabilities. Special educators provide classroom accommodations and modifications that level the playing field while students develop compensatory mechanisms to overcome their obstacles to learning. These students can have their best abilities harnessed to accomplish great things.
For students with severe disabilities, the goal is maximizing independence and quality of life in spite of constant challenges. They will always require services, but any strengths must be developed and leveraged to reduce the intensity of their service needs and facilitate their participation in adult lives. Their academic achievement gap is unlikely to close.
However, included among students with intensive Special Needs is a unique and growing population of children along the autism spectrum. While educators lack a full understanding of students along the spectrum, there is hope to one day unlock their potential for communication and connection to society at large. We cannot yet predict how high their performance could be with appropriate intervention. In the short run, this is a high-cost service area with evolving expectations.
Despite the variations and complexity of disabilities, the Fordham report suggests limiting spending in Special Education in a one-size-fits-all approach that ignores the essence of Special Education: the individual education plan. Further, even as we attempt to increase the personalization of education for all students, Fordham would target SPED staffing cuts that would reduce the impact of the small resource classroom, the very incubator of innovation for new teaching methods.
Many instructional techniques that have become best practices in the general education setting were developed initially for students with Special Needs. Essentially every student has learning style issues. We have a success cycle of recognizing students whose special needs interfere with their progress, designing interventions on their behalf, and, if successful, building capacity for serving more children with more general dissemination of new methods. So it could be with new technology as well.
That said…Yes, it is appropriate to question how Special Education dollars are spent. However, the size of budget requirements for Special Education is the symptom. It should not be treated with blunt cuts to match median spending at a seemingly random moment in time. Rather, the underlying causes of unbridled growth in demand for high-cost services need to be examined. Among those are…
- Financial incentives for over-diagnosing special needs in an eligibility-based model
- Systematic absence of longitudinal data on progress toward grade-level proficiency within the education planning process
- Lack of participation of the children in their own education planning until they are in transition for the end of secondary education
- Changing profiles for intensity of special needs within the population of students with disabilities
Historically, Special Education services have been funded based on eligibility without tracking performance. In addition, regulations only required reevaluation of academic achievement every three years, again to document eligibility at the given time. As a result, there has been no incentive to routinely seek longitudinal evidence of academic growth or effectiveness of modifications and accommodations.
At the Federal level, new policies are in development to collect longitudinal data and increase accountability for closing the achievement gap for students with Special Needs. Also, many state policy teams have already addressed efforts to improve classroom accommodations to keep students with minor issues in the mainstream setting using the Response to Intervention (RTI) model. In the event they are approved for Special Educattion, I have suggested another policy initiative – a more active role for the children in their individualized goal-setting and program planning – that could allow them to be their own advocates in accelerated achievement.
Beyond system adjustments, technology has become available that holds promise for blended techniques in learning. Several emerging technologies are already enhancing access to lessons and raising the level of personalized learning without increasing the number of special educators. However, technology models have not reached a level of robustness and general accessibility to dictate adjustments in staffing.
Meanwhile, the Fordham Institute sponsored the study by Levenson on spending and outcomes in Special Education. The conservative think tank has suggested pruning the budget for Special Education services by $10 billion using a simple national median rate for across-the-board SPED funding, regardless of the needs of the children. There are no best practices underwritten with this new formula. Apparently the money saved speaks for itself…the cure for any budget-busting program is to underfund it.
The study began with spending data from 1,400 school districts. However, the conclusions were drawn from ten pairs of districts that were chosen for their unique validity as cohorts that yielded the desired results for conservative spending. That desired outcome was evidence that the district that spent less outperformed the other in student outcomes. I cannot help wondering what happened with the other 1,380 districts.
Nevertheless, application of an arbitrary median spending model that is not reflective of student needs or evolving practices in Special Education is poorly informed and without merit. And it would short-circuit legitimate efforts to close the achievement gap for Students with Special Needs.
Fact-Checking the Washington Post on Governors Patrick and Romney
Comments below were posted on the Washington Post site to correct the record for Deval Patrick and support the validity of his comments in his speech at the Demoncratic National Convention. The erroneous fact-checking as reported by the Washington Post can be found here. The Washington Post had suggested that Governor Patrick’s claim that he had to pick up the pieces after Governor Romney left crumbling roads and bridges across Massachusetts was debatable because the evidence was subjective?!?
TRUE on Romney’s crumbling bridges and roads in Massachusetts…
During his first year in office, after the Minneapolis bridge collapse in August 2007, Deval Patrick ordered that all bridges in Massachusetts be assessed for safety, and hundreds were found to be in serious need of repair or replacement. Patrick has delivered on a large number of bridge repair/replacement recommendations so far in his administration, and the work continues. On the roads…The Big Dig consumed the vast majority of funds for road repair projects through the many Republican administrations in Massachusetts from 1990-2006. Highways and surface arteries were is severe disrepair. Patrick has restored the roads to far better condition.
In response to a reader comment suggesting that road work was just a timing thing…
The Big Dig was not completely over…the project had been poorly managed, taking years more than planned and cost overruns resulted in about twice the original budget. A daunting punchlist remained with no money, fatalities from falling ceiling tiles, flooding, and use of dry concrete in bridge work. Patrick was the first governor to try to hold contractors accountable.
In response to the same reader suggesting that Martha Coakley was responsible for a settlement…
Martha Coakley and Deval Patrick serve together. Ms Coakley does the legal work as Attorney General. In cases where a contractor screwed up, that firm was given the 1st option of setting things right. Then the suits were filed, if necessary.
Are You As Smart as a 10th Grader?
Every college student needs to be able to say “Yes” to that question. And that’s all any college-readiness testing is trying to demonstrate at the most basic level.
To graduate from high school more than two years behind in grade-level basics in math and literacy is to face the adult world with limitations. It starts with early elementary school when children cannot read well and do simple arithmetic by the end of 3rd grade. It continues if students do not have mastery of concrete math and literacy skills by 8th grade.
Standardized achievement tests used for accountability in elementary and secondary education do not seek the top…they measure the firmness of the foundation skills upon which to build knowledge at the next higher level of thinking. Teaching to those tests will never be acceptable, and those who feel compelled to do so must question why.
Where did the children’s learning of the basics breakdown? Why would you be teaching concrete learning to teenagers? Something is wrong in that picture. You may find yourself teaching skills needed to pass the test, but what you are really doing is remedial instruction during class time. How about organizing extended day time for remedial classes so we can get back to teaching the full curriculum at each grade level? Because just getting rid of the test will not make the children better prepared for life.
A Time for Unity
There has never been a more important Democratic National Convention. As educators, we cannot get hung up on resolving our pet issues this week. Rather, we must support the election of the political leaders we consider most ready to serve us for the next four years. If we are looking for a presidential candidate who will continue to serve all Americans, we must rally around President Obama under a big tent.
Is Barrack Obama your best choice for President as a US citizen and an educator? If so, it is time to set aside your personal agenda and rally around the President in unity. Is it odd that Chelsea Clinton will be interviewing Michelle Rhee, both life-long Democrats? Yes. Will it be awkward to cheer Democratic Party leaders while sitting next to antagonists in the debates over pedagogy, teacher contracts, or accountability? Sure. Do you have unresolved issues with the short list of policy imperatives in the party platform? Of course…No national exigency can be adequately addressed in a campaign designed for voters with short attention spans and infinite needs.
The DNC is not the place for policy debate. It is not about the tactical issues that divide us this week…unions, charters, assessments, evaluations, pedagogy, teachers, parents, funding, etc. We all have our political positions and our pivotal issues, but broad-based solutions for public education can only be negotiated on common ground. That starts with electing leaders who will be most likely to serve all Americans for the next four years.
Here’s hoping for a week that ends with a sustainable big convention pop for the President…not another dreary game of Pop Goes the Weasel in the carnival of education debate. Seriously, the real weasels could win, and that would be a lose-lose for all of us.
Why Good Business Applies to Government Infrastructure – NOT Services
In a political economy based on capitalism and democracy, the role of government is to be socially liberal and fiscally conservative. Socially, government must take care of people who fall out of the system due to market failures. Fiscally, it should be a crime to wastefully spend the money set aside for those who are under-served. Unfortunately, politicians who want to run the government like a business seem to undermine its infrastructure with privatization while setting up tax-funded social services for effective profit-takers without manifest need. This is the worst of both worlds.
Political extremism cannot solve problems for a nation. This is true with either party. In times of partisan gridlock, Democrats try to be fiscally and socially liberal while Republicans try to be fiscally and socially conservative. There is no common ground, and the problems for America’s neediest citizens remain unsolved.
The summer of 2012 has left me nostalgic for the mid-90s…when the Bill, Bob, and Newt Show offered a spectacle for the press that kept everyone abuzz while they quietly did the good work of government. While politically and ideologically diverse, our government leaders found middle ground in fiscal conservatism and social liberalism. They knew who they were serving and tried to meet their needs prudently. By the end of the decade politics had sadly run amok, but Bill Clinton left office with the US enjoying peace and prosperity. I wish the latter for Barrack Obama and the nation in 2016.
The Republican Party has just ended its national convention, where the party faithful have reveled in partisanship during a week that has turned ugly more than once. Their platform reforms government by privatizing its functions rather than using their business sense to reinvent the existing infrastructure. Further, they have redesigned the system to offer better access to government services to the rich than the poor. All this is funded mysteriously while further benefiting the wealthiest citizens with tax breaks. This would result in a dreadful breakdown of the role of government.
If only the political conservatives understood how to apply their business acumen to make government work more efficiently for the under-served rather than denying them services. And that those who thrive in the market can and should take care of themselves.
Response to EducationNext on Ryan Healthcare Plan
In response to Michael Petilli’s post of 8/20/2012 in which he misleads the public on the Ryan healthcare plan…
Rep. Ryan has proposed a budget that raises healthcare spending while reducing benefits to the poor and the elderly. Obama has added benefits and reduced payments to providers, creating a net improvement in the healthcare trust fund, which Ryan’s plan further depletes. I have addressed healthcare spending and the remedy with the aging of the population more fully in my blog as a topic of relevance to retired educators, and I concur with the President’s approach through the ACA. Read more here…https://schoolsretooled.com/2011/10/17/health-economics-rant/
What’s the Worst that Could Happen?
NCLB has a presumption-of-guilt clause that allows dismissal of up to 50% of the teaching staff without due process in persistently failing schools. Across the US, teachers are walking around with targets on their backs and many are undermining themselves in response. Genuine concerns about being tossed from the group, losing one’s job, and forfeiting pension potential are driving conformity among teachers and stifling their natural creativity. Teachers may be turning their worst fears into self-fulfilling prophecies as their schools fail to show improvement. It’s time for counter-intuitive leadership.
Sometimes it helps to face one’s worst fears. Let’s say it happens…most of the staff is laid off at the end of the year. How can teachers get ready for the job market after an epic failure and turn that into success? Ironically, this is a case in which readiness might be a good dose of preventive medicine.
In any school under NCLB sanctions, every teacher would benefit from a glimpse into the world of out-placement. He or she should draft a resume, envision the next job, and write their own best letter of recommendation for securing that position. The next step would be to reflect on these three components of career planning. Is the resume a composite for a model practice? Is that next job a realistic expectation? Does that letter of recommendation ring true? If the answer to any of these questions is negative, it’s time to develop a game plan for personal growth.
Leaders in this situation must have faith in their staff’s resilience and use honesty as a tool of benevolence. By recognizing each person as an individual and becoming an advocate against that worst fear, the leader becomes a partner for success. In addition, difficult conversations happen while there is still time for action. Supervision is directed toward facilitation of each teacher’s transformation into that exemplary job candidate.
Of course, the goal behind this exercise is to activate a vision of excellence for each teacher and create a spirit of renewal for him or her in the classroom. However, the school leader takes the intermediate step of listening to the staff, allowing them to mourn the loss of stability, and bolstering their confidence for taking personal risks to succeed. Ultimately, that self-centered reflection should turn the teacher away from inner fears and toward to a more student-centered practice.
I believe in portable pensions and career mobility for teachers, but they are not the reality today. All the same, teachers need to be liberated from their sense of impossibilities in their classrooms, in their schools, and in their careers. Often it is what is getting in the way of their visions for greatness in their students.
SchoolsRetooled TM 