Why Innovation Can't Fix America's Classrooms

Simple and Superb points in this piece from Marc Tucker at the Atlantic last week. Seriously. Our leaders have to get this notion out of their head that they/we know everything. We're losing on this one. Copy the countries that are winning. Like, "duh!" - sj


Forget charter schools and grade-by-grade testing. It's time to look at the best-performing countries and pragmatically adapt their solutions.


Why Innovation Can't Fix America's Classrooms
Dec 6 2011
by Marc Tucker

Most Atlantic readers know that, although the U.S. spends more per student on K-12 education than any other nation except Luxembourg, students in a growing number of nations outperform our own. But think about this: Among the consistent top performers are not only developed nations (Japan, Finland, Canada), but developing countries and mega-cities such as South Korea, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.

Even if we find a way to educate our future work force to the same standards as this latter group -- and we are a very long way from that now -- wages in the United States will continue to decline unless we outperform those countries enough to justify our higher wages. That is a very tall order.

You would think that, being far behind our competitors, we would be looking hard at how they are managing to outperform us. But many policymakers, business leaders, educators and advocates are not interested. Instead, they are confidently barreling down a path of American exceptionalism, insisting that America is so different from these other nations that we are better off embracing unique, unproven solutions that our foreign competitors find bizarre.

Some of these uniquely American solutions -- charter schools, private school vouchers, entrepreneurial innovations, grade-by-grade testing, diminished teachers' unions, and basing teachers' pay on how their students do on standardized tests -- may be appealing on their surface. To many in the financial community, these market-inspired reform ideas are very appealing.

Yet, these proposed solutions are nowhere to be found in the arsenal of strategies used by the top-performing nations. And almost everything these countries are doing to redesign their education systems, we're not doing.

The top-performing nations have followed paths that are remarkably similar and straightforward. Most start by putting more money behind their hardest-to-educate students than those who are easier to educate. In the U.S., we do the opposite.

They develop world-class academic standards for their students, a curriculum to match the standards, and high-quality exams and instructional materials based on that curriculum. In the U.S., most states have recently adopted Common Core State Standards in English and math, which is a good start. But we still have a long way to go to build a coherent, powerful instructional system that all teachers can use throughout the whole curriculum.

The top-performing nations boost the quality of their teaching forces by greatly raising entry standards for teacher education programs. They insist that all teachers have in-depth knowledge of the subjects they will teach, apprenticing new teachers to master teachers and raising teacher pay to that of other high-status professions. They then encourage these highly trained teachers to take the lead in improving classroom practices.

The result is a virtuous cycle: teaching ranks as one of the most attractive professions, which means no teacher shortages and no need to waive high licensing standards. That translates into top-notch teaching forces and the world's highest student achievement. All of this makes the teaching profession even more attractive, leading to higher salaries, even greater prestige, and even more professional autonomy. The end results are even better teachers and even higher student performance.

In the U.S., on the other hand, teaching remains a low-status profession. Our teacher colleges have minimal admission standards, and most teachers are educated in professional schools with very little prestige. Once they start working, they are paid substantially less than other professionals.

Many of our teachers also have a very weak background in the subjects they are assigned to teach, and increasingly, they're allowed to become teachers after only weeks of training. When we are short on teachers, we waive our already-low standards, something the high-performing countries would never dream of doing.

All this leads to poor student achievement, which leads to even shriller attacks on the profession and more calls for stricter accountability -- and that makes it even less likely that our best and brightest will become teachers. And that leads to low student achievement.

Thirty years ago, Japan was eating the lunch of some of America's greatest corporations. Those U.S. companies who survived figured out how the Japanese were doing it--and did it even better. The most effective way to greatly improve student performance in the U.S. is to figure out what the top-performing countries are doing and then, by capitalizing on our unique strengths, develop a strategy to do it even better.

The apostles of exceptionalism say we need more innovation. But our problem is not lack of innovation. Our problem is that we lack what the most successful countries have: coherent, well-designed state systems of education that would allow us to scale up our many pockets of innovation and deliver a high-quality education to all our students.

Playing to our strengths makes sense. Ignoring what works, simply because it was invented elsewhere, does not.

No Uncomfortable Questions Left Behind

I liked pilgrim99's blog on education issues the other day. I also laughed at spacejace's posting of Bill Maher's "Fire the Parents" rant. Like them, I am ambivalent about the Obama administration's proposed changes to No Child Left Behind, despite what is still -- for me -- much admiration and high expectations for the president.

However, some thoughts, if not exactly disagreements, of my own. I'll work backwards.

Regarding Obama on holding teachers responsible and the wisdom of wholesale firings, like the one that occurred in Central Falls, Rhode Island: the key word (or buzzword) has been responsibility. If students fail, the argument goes, someone must be responsible, someone must be held accountable. Would that this were true! But failures occur all the time and only sometimes is anyone held accountable. So I will quibble with the imperative, the word must in that statement. Crimes go unpunished, mistakes are orphaned, lies go unchallenged, secrets go to the grave -- all the time. Whether someone is held accountable for the failure of children or not, this truth persists: schoolwise, too many children have failed. I would prefer a world in which this were not so, but for now, can we recognize that this failure, this particular kind of failure, belongs to us all? And belong is not the same as the fault of? Because until we recognize this, there will be no progress toward the world I’d prefer. When the president points his finger at the Central Falls faculty and staff, it is not that he's wrong, it is that he is only so very partially right. He has stopped pointing too soon. His grade on this test is Incomplete.

Bill Maher’s standup routine begins to fill the gap between where Obama points and where he failed to point. Certainly parents also need a good talking to. But Maher's rant is, finally, only a routine, the more or less funny work of a funny man. He doesn't really know any better than the president seems to know about how to stop failing children. For instance, when he says "According to all the studies, it doesn't matter what teachers do," this is flatly untrue. ALL the studies? It doesn’t matter at all what teachers do? Really? That statement on its face is so stupid, so plainly false, that it can only be a joke. And what follows in that paragraph is the crafted patter of a talk-show comedian, ("Although everyone appreciates foreplay," is the next line), the comic exaggerations of a licensed buffoon going about his buffoony business. In short, don't take your talking points from Bill Maher any more often or seriously than you would want to hear someone dittoing Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck.

Pilgrim99 gets much closer to the heart of the problem than Obama or Maher, as we would expect from someone who has worked close to that heart. (Maher probably hasn't been near a classroom since the Carter administration. He doesn't impress me as someone who actually reads books -- though he might skim a guest’s ghostwritten pages in preparation for his show. Obama, however, is not only a famously adept student, but he was an accomplished law professor at a prestigious college -- what's his excuse?) But I hear two notes of uncertainty even in Pilgrim99's post. First, the refrain is posed as a question -- rhetorical, perhaps, but still: "When [the student] failed, was I the reason?" Every teacher, I think, when dealing with a failing student, will ask himself or herself this question -- and not rhetorically. My own college teaching experience only infrequently confronted me with this problem literally – I had no shortage of C students, but rarely an honest-to-god F -- but when I did, I would ask myself, with the pen poised above the grade sheet, did it really have to come to this? Do I really have to fail this student? Sometimes the answer was, yes. However, I also supervised and trained teachers for several years. And I had to confront teachers all the time with the question regarding the failure of students to learn: Were you the reason? But in a properly run school, the answer to this question is never alone a basis for terminating a teacher’s employment. Rather, it is a tool by which teachers and their supervisors and peers can evaluate their practice of their profession. Criticism and self-criticism and improvement are an important part of the job. What saddens me in Pilgrim99’s post is that he was apparently not allowed to ask himself in a useful way whether or to what extent he was a reason for each failing student’s failure.

Second, Pilgrim99 points out that his own solution to the problem was to leave an under-performing, dysfunctional school system for the presumably better-funded exurban district. This is the solution for many teachers and educators. And thank goodness! It is very good news for me and my children, living in a famously well-supported public school district. Good teachers and administrators give our search committees plenty of sound candidates for any open position – even though they are rarely paid enough to afford to live in the city where they wish to work. This is a system that is good for me but encourages exactly the opposite of what Obama tells us it should. Who can believe that the teachers qualified to fill vacancies in my city will be eager to take the newly-opened vacancies in Rhode Island?

And Pilgrim99’s point about the redistribution upward of educational wealth is only part of the bad news. Consider this point:

In the 1950s, smart women, except for truly determined trailblazers, had few professional options beyond teaching. Ditto for blacks and other minorities. If you had a particularly smart and ambitious daughter, people would say, "I bet she grows up to be a teacher!" While many things have happened to public schools over the last 50 years, one of the most important is that this low-cost captive labor pool of extremely talented men and women has evaporated completely—and along with it the respect that was once automatically accorded to those who entered the profession. Today, with so many more (and better-paying) careers to choose from, it's unclear [why any bright person] would be a teacher at all.

This is from a Slate review of Diane Ravitch’s new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System. I’ve not read it yet, but it is making quite a splash because Ravitch, for years a fairly reliable ally of social conservatives and Republican administrations, now rejects the articles of faith on which is based much of No Child Left Behind and Ravitch’s advocacy for those and similar policies. Among people who follow such things, Ravitch’s conversion against the gospel of standardized testing and data-driven administration and merit pay and standards-based evaluation and charter schools is truly unsettling. (I have this book on my to do list. So more later when I've read it. Meanwhile, I’m following a forum on tnr.com with Ravitch and several critics.) What’s striking in the Slate review is that the reviewer dares to mention one of the most grim truths about our society: There were people willing to teach our parents who, given it to do over again, would not teach our children -- much less the children of Central Falls, Rhode Island.

The problem -- how to teach children, how to make them smart, how to make them ready to live in the world we’re leaving them -- is so damned hard. Way too hard for a cable TV comic, too hard maybe even for our very smart president and his very smart Secretary of Education. Pilgrim99 tells us he can only resolve, sort of, his own little corner of the problem – and Allah bless his efforts! Diane Ravitch (it seems) tells us that after forty years of wrestling with the problem, she only knows that what she has tried has also failed. For me, ten years after having abandoned my own career in education, I still feel compelled to serve on the local School Councils and volunteer for city committee work and help, whenever I can, any high schooler who will sit still long enough to take some help. I don’t know whether merit pay or mass firings or portfolio evaluations will solve the enduring human problem of how to teach. But I think that the equally inextinguishable desire to learn is our only real resource in this struggle. If that’s true, then the questions we should all ask -- ceaselessly, relentlessly, ruthlessly -- are: How many impediments can I remove from a student’s desire to learn? How can I not fail the children in my charge?

Blame the Teachers

Here's a story, in light of the mass firing of an entire high school staff at a "failing" school in Rhode Island.

When I began my teaching career way back in 1994 in Youngstown, Ohio, I was well aware that working in an urban, "inner city" district would pose significant challenges. First off, though the population of the high school was racially mixed, though not "balanced" (whatever that was supposed to mean), it was the product of a downsizing merger in which the entire population of one school had been moved to one of the three remaining high schools in the city at the time. My school, naturally, had the largest number of the new students.

In their wisdom, the district administration had taken a large number of youngsters who were members of a social organization known as the Bloods and crammed them into a school with an already established social organization known as the Crips. Two smaller social clubs known as Vice Lords and the Folk also shared the halls.

And every one of them was a great kid. They didn't have much use for each other, but they were never a problem for me. Just like any other school, there was a wide range of abilities and effort represented. Just like any other school, there were wide-ranging discussions of literature and current events. Just like any other school, the vast majority of the staff did everything they could to help kids succeed.

But there was an awful lot going on outside of the school.

There was a rule that staff had to be out of the building by 3:15, so they could lock down the building. The door to the staff parking lot had a bullet-hole just below the reinforced glass window. I had nice morning conversations with the police officer who spent his entire shift out in that parking lot, as well as his five colleagues stationed inside the school every day.

There were plenty of fights each week, mostly between girls, but I can only remember one time that the officers had to actually chase down one of the male students. He was a 20 year-old sophomore who had been so horribly abused by his alcoholic father that he was considered permanently disabled and already collecting SSI. When he failed was I the reason?

One of my favorites was a petite girl named Tania. She was pregnant when school began, and had to leave around Thanksgiving to be with her baby for a while. She came back just as the winter weather was turning to spring. She was far behind, of course, and would make every effort while at school, but had very little time or willingness to work on anything outside school. By the time we said goodbye for the summer, she had become pregnant again. She had just turned 16. When she failed, was I the reason?

When it came time for parent-teacher conferences, my roommate (in a shared classroom) advised me to bring a book to read. I was appalled. After all, we had an entire day without students set aside, and an evening as well. I had a total of three parents show up, one of whom was so drunk he couldn't remember what class I taught for his son. When the son failed, was I the reason?

Every so often, I would arrive at school and notice a couple of unmarked police vans in the lot. Weapons check. That meant an absence rate of close to 50% sometimes, but at least 25%. Some of the police would walk around the building and search the bushes after the school day began. They always found a few knives. Once, a .22 pistol.

When these kids did abysmally on tests (and not all of them did), was it really the teachers' fault? For some, it was a small miracle that they even got to school every day. For many of them it meant two guaranteed meals that day, so that was all it took.

Now, I'm highlighting some of the more dramatic cases of what I experienced, but keep in mind that this was not at all unusual for high-poverty districts. It still isn't unusual for high-poverty districts to be faced with overall failure.

In the case of the Rhode Island high school, the town of Central Falls has a population of about 18,600 and a per capita income of $10,800. According to Wikipedia, over 40% of the population under age 18 lives in poverty.

So our Hope&Change president had this to say:

"If a school continues to fail its students year after year after year, if it doesn't show signs of improvement, then there's got to be a sense of accountability…And that's what happened in Rhode Island last week at a chronically troubled school, when just 7 percent of 11th-graders passed state math tests -- 7 percent."

Thanks, man.

Couldn't we make the case that it isn't so much the school that's "chronically troubled," but the neighborhood or town itself? In fact, shouldn't we take into consideration that the number one predictor of academic success is the education level of the parents and the accessibility of books (and reading) in the home? Should we maybe consider that poverty and lack of academic progress are consistently found to be related phenomena, that failing schools also have dismal attendance rates, high numbers of transient students and are usually in areas that over-rely on property taxes for school funding (a model that was found unconstitutional by the Ohio Supreme Court four times before a Republican majority was elected to the Court, which promptly overturned the decision)?

Seriously, Mr. President? That's all you've got?

Update 3-10-10: Here's a link to a blog called Tempered Radical,where the author says pretty much the same thing as I did (a colleague pointed out the similarity to me). Only, he published earlier, so hat tip to him. We even zeroed in on the same quote from Obama (originally from WaPo), which I cribbed from another blog about the speech. Personally, though I agree with this blogger on this issue, I don't have the same sense of disappointment overall. Yet.

I don't teach in Youngstown anymore. I found a job in a wealthy exurban district that is able to easily sweep all of its troubles under a rug. More on that another time.