So Much Reform, So Little Change, part 2: the impact of race

Beginning with the first item on our list, (see previous post) one of Payne’s most disturbing observations about struggling schools is how quickly and early students are sorted into two categories: those who have potential, and those who don’t. This is often based on physical appearance, and prior to having any actual evidence! (In modern parlance, this is called having a ‘fixed’ mindset.)  Once so identified, teachers proceed to teach students differently, with higher quality interactions and higher expectations for the ‘smart’ kids.  This, of course, becomes reinforcing; the smart kids flourish (relatively); the ‘dumb’ kids begin to withdraw.

Then it gets worse. By the following year, the next teacher now has ‘data’ to back up her assumptions.  The effect on students is significant and long-lasting: research shows a high correlation between how students feel about their early years of public schooling and how likely they are to stay in school until graduation.

But there’s complicating factor at work here: low expectations on the part of teachers is not entirely unjustified. (Although the ‘sorting’ is.)  Years of experience have demonstrated to teachers that the barriers to success for these students is so high, that realistically, not many of them are going to ‘make it’. Teachers see the entire system as conspiring against their students. The administration is hopelessly inept (the average superintendent lasts less than three years) and the parents are unreachable. Why not invest your (unfairly) limited resources into the few kids who appear to have a chance?

Of course, such a view absolves teachers of responsibility for their role, and this mindset is a huge impediment to implementing systemic change. (That program may have worked where you come from, but it won’t work here, not with these kids!)  Payne refers to this as ‘racialist’ thinking. It’s not really racist in the sense that it isn’t a judgment as to genetic capacity - it’s not the kids’ fault, after all - but the impact is pretty much the same.  And this prejudging is just as common among Black teachers as White teachers.

Payne has a lot to say about race that is especially relevant in our current environment, and he spends an excellent chapter addressing one of the great mysteries of education policy: Why do Black students in relatively wealthy suburban schools not perform as well as their White counterparts? 

There is a common assumption – misunderstanding - by policy-makers is that race is essentially a stand-in for poverty, and that if you address issues directly relating to poverty, ‘race’ is not relevant. And while it is clearly important to address the issues significantly impacted by poverty– including physical health, parental support, the sense of emotional safety, as well as actual resources - the idea that Black students are essentially the same as everyone else, and that they will respond to an intervention in pretty much in the same way as everyone else, ignores the world we actually live in.

The problem is that our cultural environment is essentially poisonous for students of color. 

In our society, we tend to reduce the concept of racism to its most extreme manifestation; that is, when a ‘prejudiced’ persons discriminates in an explicit way. By that definition, racism really is largely a thing of the past; to act in a blatantly racist way has become culturally unacceptable. No one in the public eye gets away with it today. (Even the racists have to pretend not to be racists.)

Here’s one example of the insidious effect of cultural racism. There are years of studies demonstrating that in our society, Blacks are less ‘trusting’ than Whites. (Not surprisingly, since the more vulnerable one feels, the less trusting one tends to be.)  Now consider the impact of this on educational capacity, where the student-teacher relationship is so critical. For example, how willing is a student to ask for help if he’s afraid of reinforcing a cultural stereotype that ‘his kind’ isn’t particularly smart?  Most insidiously, over time, these perceptions get internalized.

But an even larger issue is the degree to which one “trusts the future”; that is, how much control do you think you have over your own fate? Again, not surprisingly, the degree of control that one believes one has is closely correlated to future achievement - more so “than all school-related factors put together.”

Further, this is not an irrational assumption. It is hard to argue that the system isn’t rigged. There are mountains of data that show Blacks are disproportionately disciplined for similar transgressions as Whites, both within the educational system, and without. What’s the point of making an effort if the system is rigged?  We cannot pretend that students are unaware of this.

This dynamic explains why immigrants from predominantly Black regions, such as Africa or the West Indies, often become more successful than African-Americans who have been here for generations. In their formative years, they weren’t poisoned by the cultural water.  A wise person once said, “The sins of the fathers are visited upon their children, even unto the third and fourth generation.”  Think about that. From the time that we begin to address an idea in our collective psyche as false and dangerous, it takes three or four generations to root out its detrimental effects. And that’s if we don’t go into collective denial and take a generation ‘off’.

This goes a long way to explain the ironic sense of nostalgia that many older Black Americans have for the kind of education they received during the ‘good old days’ of white supremacy, even with resources that were typically a third of their White counterparts. They remember those schools as “symbols of institutionalized caring” in which “building men and women” was seen as part of the school leader's mission – and which included an explicit challenge to the notion of racial inferiority. There is something about this education that many older Black adults now wish they could give to their grandchildren. What has been lost is so significant that some still believe that desegregation was a deliberate plot to break the spirit of Black communities. 

More summer reading: So Much Reform, So Little Change

 The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools, Payne

(The first of several posts)

This is a wonderful, important book. In my view, it is especially important because our desire to move education policy away from the current obsession with standardized tests and misguided efforts at “accountability” - and into the 21^st-centruy - is going to remain stuck (at least at the state and national level) until we figure out how to address “the persistence of failure in urban schools”.  Here are the ideas that I found most compelling.

Early on, Payne notes that most school “reform” interventions typically deliver considerably less than they promise, No Child Left Behind being the classic example. Over ten years after the initial legislation, it is hard to find anyone who still believes that NCLB will transform education - with the possible exception of those who are paid to believe it. (I saw this particular dynamic at work at a couple of recent PDE presentations at a PSBA conference.)  How does it go, “it’s hard to persuade a man of something when he is paid to believe otherwise?” (Upton Sinclair, more or less)

While this disconnect between theory and reality is sometimes explained by “political expediency or earnest incompetence”, the larger issue is that “people in leadership positions do not have a systemic understanding of the causes of failure.”  Put another way, discussions at the policy level are often –usually- completely disconnected from the daily reality of the classroom, particularly one in an urban school.

Although Payne shares the widely held concern about our overreliance on test scores, he makes the useful point that it’s very difficult to talk about large-scale change, particularly in bottom-tier schools, without referring to test scores. And while there are other useful ways of measuring progress, such as graduation rates and post-secondary achievement, test scores may have greater relevance in these schools. If over half of your students aren’t reading at grade level - as measured by test scores - that is a problem screaming to be addressed. If you’re at 92%, however, moving your scores to 94% may not be your highest priority.

He also suggests that we can learn a lot more from closely examining a few successful outliers to see what they’re doing differently, instead of looking for modest movements in overall averages - where it’s very difficult to tease out the components that are actually making a difference. In his view, we should be trying to determine the set of conditions that produce an environment conducive to significant improvement.

Here’s a key fact:  the degree to which teachers in a given school “trust one another” is highly correlated with whether the school is improving or stagnating. This is entirely consistent with over a decade of school climate research. “Do teachers care about each other?” “Is it safe to discuss frustrations and concerns?” It turns out that the culture of a school is far more important than how the school is organized.  Another critical factor is the level of trust and respect between teachers and principals.  It should be obvious, however, that there is no quick, easy way to create a climate of trust and collaboration.

Here’s another key point, one greatly at odds with most public policy initiatives: there is no magic bullet, no ‘one thing’ that will magically transform these schools. Rather, a lot of issues have to be addressed, all more-or-less together, because they are highly interrelated and any one of them has the potential to pull down a new initiative. 

     Here’s a partial list of what we’re up against:
·        Teacher skepticism about student learning capacity; fixed mindset
·        Weak pre-professional teacher training
·        Weak sense of teacher agency
·        Inadequate instructional supervision
·        Teacher isolation; unwillingness to accept leadership from other teachers
·        Drive-by, unfocused professional development
·        Disconnect between curriculum and assessment
·        Lack of discipline/ classroom management skills
·        Lack of teacher knowledge about students’ backgrounds and interests
·        Inadequate resources
·        Instability of instructional staff and leadership

And perhaps most importantly:

·        A generalized belief that nothing we could do will actually make a difference.

Tinkering Toward Utopia, part 2 – Lessons learned

So, what can we learn from a century’s worth of experiments in progressive, student-centered education?

One important ‘lesson learned’ is the importance of continuity in instructional leadership – many of these attempts were undermined by high principal turnover and teacher burnout. But perhaps the greatest fault of reformers has been in placing too much emphasis on persuading fellow education experts, and not enough on convincing the greater public of the importance and value of change – and a clear picture of what it might look like. People have a deeply embedded idea of what ‘real school’ is; changing that mental framework is no small task.

Student-centered reform is not the only educational policy to have run in cycles. Back in 1921, a school superintendent wrote, “We all agree that one teacher differs from another, yet few practical schoolmen have attempted to rate and pay them by merit, and most of those … have lived to repent of their rashness.” Teachers have (correctly, I believe) traditionally “viewed merit pay not as an incentive, but as a threat to professional comity” and irrelevant to the intellectual and social growth of their students. ‘Merit pay’ became fashionable in the 1950s, but had almost disappeared by the 1970s. And yet, here we are again.

The fundamental problem with making merit pay work is that there is little agreement on “just what effective teaching is and how to measure it.” Beyond that, promoting competition among teachers is likely to reduce productivity because it incentivizes teachers to conceal their best ideas, and to pursue their own interests rather than the general good.

Another problem is the deep disconnect between what teachers find most valuable in their profession, compared with public perception. In the public’s view, the two greatest concerns for teachers in 1981 were poor discipline and salary. For teachers, however, their greatest concern was the public’s perception of education! (Little has changed since 1981.) Salaries came in fourth. (As I’ve argued more than once, it’s not about the money, it’s about respect.)  The greatest motivating factor for teachers: the intrinsic rewards of seeing their students grow intellectually, and as people. If we really understood this, merit pay would seem like the silly idea that it is.

Reforms that fundamentally hope to alter the cultural construction of ‘school’ won’t succeed without a lengthy and substantial public dialogue about both the ends and means of schooling. (What is the 21^st-century mission of the public school?)  The challenge is to negotiate a common ground of purpose sufficiently compelling that it unifies citizens in support of a renewed vision for public education.

One way we might approach this is to begin by asking people to recall their best experience as public school students. Invariably, they will recall the influence of a teacher who challenged them, made a subject come alive, or provided support at a stressful point in their lives. Which, come to think of it, aligns pretty well with what teachers identify as the most rewarding aspect of their profession. This suggests that the way to frame school reform is that we want to make such encounters between students and teachers more common.

A final note: it is essential that policymakers understand the limitations of what can be accomplished at the policy level. At best, education policy can set the conditions for effective administration and practice. The actual work has to be done by the administrators and teachers who interact with students on a daily basis. 

Book Report: Tinkering Toward Utopia

by David Tyack

Part 1 of my summer reading series

The Carnegie unit was established in 1906, and over a century later it is still the primary means of measuring student academic advancement. It was developed by an elite group of university presidents, who “confident that they had the answers to improving American education, were determined to reform from the top down a system of schooling they regarded as chaotic and ineffective.”  Since what’s good for the universities is good for the country, this system remains fundamentally in place even now.

The presidents group further determined that a minimum of 14 Carnegie credits should be required for university admission, as well as the content of these academic units - the reason most high schools still follow the traditional biology-chemistry-physics sequence. (And probably why we now have a biology Keystone exam graduation requirement.)  It’s also the main reason most high schools are still organized by content area departments. Much of the rigidity of the typical high school curriculum lies in this tie to college entrance requirements.

There have been challenges to this structure every twenty years or so, but none has really taken root because there is just too great of an investment in the current system. Interestingly - perhaps depressingly - a century of reform attempts will sound familiar to modern education progressives.

For example, beginning in the early 1920s, progressive educators in Denver objected to what they saw as domination by colleges of the secondary school program. Regarding the Carnegie unit as a straightjacket, they began to blend subjects, and experiment with time and space.  The Dalton Plan required “that teachers negotiate monthly contracts with their students.”  All students were required to study certain subjects, but it was the responsibility of the students to decide the pace of the work, who to work with, etc. No 50-minute periods, no ‘bells’, no teachers lecturing in front of large classes.

In the 1930s, the Progressive Education Association sponsored the Eight Year study. With a million dollars at their disposal, they were able to persuade over 200 colleges to admit students on a principal’s recommendation alone – GPAs and SATs not required. Freed from the ‘tyranny’ of the Carnegie unit, teachers developed curricula that crossed departmental boundaries, with less emphasis on traditional academic subjects and more time on the arts. Teachers spent less time lecturing, and more time planning – with each other, and with their students. Education became more individualized and student-centered. And much of this was accomplished using the ‘school within a school’ structure.

Any of this sound familiar?

Among the research findings from the study: graduates of these progressive schools did far better in college, on average, than their peers.  But by the early 1950s these reforms began to fade. Why?  The general consensus was that World War II and the specter of the Cold War brought a concern for security that strengthened the cultural tendency towards authoritarianism, in both society and in school. Compounding this, the passage of the GI bill allowed universities to become more selective in their admissions.

In the 1960s, yet another wave of reformers attempted to “overthrow the Carnegie unit … the teacher-dominated traditional curriculum, passive styles of learning, and the isolation of teachers from each other.”  And again, this idea seemed to have real potential, particularly for the most motivated and creative students.

It is interesting to note, however, that students who had already learned to succeed in a more directive environment often became frustrated when teachers no longer told them what to do. The greater flexibility that was a boon for some students was problematic for others.  In the public’s mind, this came to be seen as a ‘lack of discipline’, resulting in a desire to ‘get back to basics’. And so, in the 1970s the pendulum began to swing back again.

So, what can be learned from a century's worth of experiments in progressive, student-centered education?