My Day with PDE

At the invitation of PDE, I spent Thursday morning in Harrisburg as they kicked off the first of their “Stakeholder Sessions” that will help inform the Department as they develop the regulations for the implementation of the recently passed ESSA (Every Student Succeeds Act).

This was not at all unlike the recent study groups formed by PSBA (one of which I co-chaired) for essentially the same purpose - with the hope that we could get out in front of the issue before the new regulations get set in stone.

Introductions and an overview were followed by a panel discussion on the opportunities and challenges provided by the new law. Some concerns were expressed about possibility that we might now forget about the ‘achievement gap’, which prompted me to jot down a question on the provided notecard.

Among the pile of cards that were submitted, mine was the one that was picked.  My question: “We have known about the achievement gap for decades, long before No Child Left Behind. What are the proven strategies for reducing the achievement gap, and why aren’t we implementing them?” “Ooooooh,” murmured the crowd.

What prompted me to write the question is that education policy-makers have been trying to sell this nonsense for years. “At least NCLB told us that we had an achievement gap,” they say.

Bull. Anyone who was paying attention knew long before NCLB that we had an ‘achievement gap’. Yet schools were actually punished for failing to close the gap, which always struck me as deeply hypocritical, since no one at the U.S. Dept. of Ed, or PDE, had any suggestions for what to do about it!

The first three panelists responded to my question by mumbling something along the lines of “it’s complicated”, and then the last panelist said some interesting things, mentioning three issues: 1) Equity (noting that Pennsylvania has the least equitable public education funding mechanism in the country.)  2) School climate, and 3) the Cultural Competency of Teachers.

That got my attention, since it’s pretty close to what I might have said. In addition, I saw the last two items as central to any strategy for reducing the achievement gap in State College. (And yes, we have one.)

Then on to the breakout session on “assessment.” After having everyone in the room briefly describe their ideal of what good assessment should look like – and we were all pretty much in agreement - the facilitator asked for ideas. I pointed out that we had just heard that “computer adaptive tests” aligned to state standards were now permissible under ESSA; that many of us (including State College) were already using these tests to provide useful, immediate information to teachers, and that we could take that data, aggregate it and dis-aggregate it as need be, send it to PDE, and we would be done with it!  

We could fulfill the requirements of ESSA without doing anything we weren’t already doing! And we could toss the ridiculously inappropriate, expensive, useless and time-consuming PSSA exams in the trash.

The idea that the possibility of actually eliminating the dreaded PSSAs was within our grasp seemed to go over the head of most people in the room. Partly, I think, it was too-good-to-be-true, and partly people were stuck on the idea that they had to ask permission from PDE: “Tell us if we’re allowed to do this.”  But there were a few who seemed to get it, and I hope they carry the torch through the summer meetings.

My work done there,J, I slid into the tail end of the “accountability” breakout group. I was there just long enough to support someone who was pointing out that our primary ‘accountability’ is to the people in our community. (Who else is there?)  Then another person sitting nearby asked whether there were tools available to accurately measure ‘school climate’. Apparently, there had been a lot of concern expressed that school climate – now an approved measure of accountability under ESSA – was not concrete enough to measure accurately.

This gave me the opportunity, as a member of the National School Climate Council, to inform the group that yes, good tools had been developed for measuring school climate. (Examples: the level of student engagement, the degree to which teachers feel respected, whether parents feel connected, etc..)  The issue of whether it is appropriate to incorporate school climate as a component of ‘accountability’ was left to another day.  

“Examining Racial Consciousness” at the PDS conference

For me, one of the highlights of being a school board member is the opportunity to attend the annual Professional Development School (PDS) conference each April.

The PDS is a nationally-honored collaboration between the State College Area school district and Penn State’s College of Education. The College provides us with full-year (August-June) teacher-interns to learn and work alongside our classroom teacher/mentors. It’s a wonderful model for the development of new teachers, and it deserves to be replicated nationwide.

Part of each intern’s year-long assignment is a research project based on a personal ‘wondering’: I wonder what would be the result if, as a teacher, I tried this or did that?  The conference is the opportunity to talk about that research –the quality of which is often as good as you might hear at a state or national conference. (By the way, this is a great model for ongoing teacher professional development.)

One session that I attended, “Examining Racial Consciousness through Literature Selections” struck me as having the potential to impact the entire State College school community.  Amy’s idea was simple: in her advanced English 11 class, she replaced one of the standard texts from the so-called “canon” (which, as you know, was written primarily by dead white guys) with “a raisin in the sun”. 

The impact on her students, as reflected in their end-of-unit reflections, was eye-opening. Here are a couple of their comments: “As a middle class, privileged, white child growing up in a suburban town, I have a very narrow view of life outside of my own, save from stories I have been told.” And, “I'm not really affected by a lot of issues, because I am a ... white male in a stable home in a nice community...”

And this, from an African-American student: "... most minorities who move to State College will eventually have to figure out how to (assimilate into) the white culture… Otherwise, he or she will be an outcast."

The students also began to reexamine their historical assumptions; challenging, for example, the idea that racism had ended in the northern states long before the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.

Amy’s students came to these insights almost entirely on their own, through their conversations with one another. This strikes me as exactly the conversations our students need to have, and we need to provide them with the space for those conversations to occur. Apparently, minor tweaks to the District’s approach to curriculum could make a real difference in helping our students better understand themselves and the world they live in.

I have not done justice to Amy’s presentation, but here is a conclusion of hers that I think is worth noting:  “I want to teach African American Literature as a part of an inclusive classroom canon, not as a separate course.” I couldn’t agree more.