Turnaround: No silver bullet

School turnaround is in these days - turnaround as in reconstitution. You eradicate a culture of low expectations and a history of low student achievement by getting rid of the adults, keeping the kids, and starting from scratch with a new staff. EdSec Arne Duncan has pledged up to $5 billion over two years for dramatic interventions like this. As an educator myself, and one who has participated in two successful urban high school turnarounds that did not depend on reconstitution of the staff, I have grave misgivings about making this approach a linchpin of our national school improvement strategy.

In an era in which data mean everything, I'd like to see data on school turnaround as a successful strategy that can be brought to scale - not just a few case studies in one district, but a significant sample size in diverse types of districts that includes longitudinal information over more than five to seven years. Frankly, I am skeptical that those data exist in the numbers that would make me feel comfortable devoting $5 billion of federal funding to this approach. I also wonder if the same amount of effort has gone into researching successful examples of school improvement that have thrived even while maintaining the majority of the existing staff in the building. Like I said, I have participated in two myself, the same number that Duncan quotes as having kicked off the recent turnaround movement in Chicago.

I can't help noting, too, that Duncan does not cite examples of high schools, the hardest nut to crack in urban education reform. We have tried small schools, which delivered mixed results. The debate about charter schools versus district schools continues to rage, with a newly released report adding fuel to the fire. Now we are focusing on the new version of turnaround.

Let's all take a step back and breathe slowly, please. Small schools may have disappointed those who funded them, but they have unquestionably added value in some contexts. The same will prove true for Duncan's version of turnaround. We need to take the lessons from these initiatives that we can apply at scale, but not limit ourselves to a single-pronged approach that will function at best as a blunt instrument over time.

School improvement has eluded us in a systemic way for too long. Any educator with a conscience can understand the impatience that we hear from the "new reformers," who have demonstrated resoundingly that any student can achieve success in an environment that demands it. Sustainable school reform that we can expand to scale, however, requires complex, strategic thinking, coupled with appropriate inputs and husbandry over time. Hopefully we can take away from the small schools experience the lesson that no one silver bullet exists. Instead, we must draw from multiple, diverse strategies and not limit ourselves to turnaround as the new cure-all for urban education.

Experience Counts!

Experience counts. That's the message that a May 25th New York Times article on principal effectiveness delivers. Although the article focuses on principals, it calls into question a similar strategy that some are advocating for the teaching corps. In sum, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein have significantly increased the presence of "best and brightest" young educators in the New York City principal corps. The article reports that schools led by experienced educators are outperforming their counterparts led by these younger, less experienced administrators.

No surprise here - I have written about the huge positive impact veteran educators have had on my own career in urban schools. My hope is that lots of people are paying attention to these data and thinking through their implications for pursuing a similar strategy at the classroom level as well.

Experience matters. I have been reading a lot on logic lately - delving into contrapositives, converses, etc. Let's be clear here. Just because urban schools have failed in large numbers with veteran teachers populating them does not mean that veteran teachers are the cause of the failure. Equating school failure with veteran teachers sets up a logical fallacy that we must identify for what it is before we go down a path that wastes invaluable human capital, i.e. talented veteran teachers.

Yes, we want and need new blood and new talent in our schools, especially urban schools. Let's not fool ourselves, though, and put far more on those young shoulders than they are prepared to bear. Importing new teachers into urban schools will not solve the problems that proponents of that strategy hope and expect it to. We need to use all of our human capital in schools with far more wisdom than we historically have - new and veteran teachers alike.

Pay for Performance

President Obama is unveiling his "cradle to career" education agenda today. News reports suggest that the agenda will focus in part on "pay for performance," a mechanism that ties teacher pay to student performance. I am interested to hear what the president has to say and I have some questions in anticipation of his remarks today:

Secondary versus elementary - Elementary school teachers have the same students all day every day for the entire year. At the secondary level, we are lucky if we have them for an hour a day. Individual teachers at these two levels of education have very different impacts on their students. Does it make sense to apply the same pay for performance formula across the board, or should we differentiate implementation, e.g., between elementary and secondary?

Classroom versus whole school - Does it make sense to think about whole school pay for performance at the secondary level, especially given the distinctions like the one noted above? I never could have moved my students by myself, given that I saw them for an hour a day, four days a week. I had to work as part of a cohesive team of teachers, all of whom taught the same students. There was no way, within that group, to say that I or one of my colleagues deserved more credit than somebody else for improving student achievement. You could identify our team, however, as highly effective overall, along with other teams of teachers in the same building. Perhaps we should be looking at a team or whole school pay for performance model at the secondary level, where individual teachers have far less of an impact than they do at the elementary level.

Clearly delineated responsibilities - What happens if students in my class do not come to school? How do we factor into the pay for performance equation students who enter my classroom in May (which happens all the time in urban districts)? On the one hand, we do not want to create a whole list of excuses about why students did not learn in a given teacher's classroom. On the other hand, if I have called the student's home repeatedly, made a home visit, and referred the student to the school's support system (counselors, social workers, etc.) and this young person still does not even show up to my class, what impact does and should that student's achievement have on my pay for performance? Once again, this leads me to a whole school solution, especially at the high school level. If the entire staff stands to benefit from whole school indicators on a pay for performance scale, the school is much more likely to set up a fluid and cohesive relationship between classroom teaching and student support.

I still hear many teachers rail against pay for performance in any form. We have moved beyond that argument, as districts like Denver illustrate, where the school district and teachers' union worked in partnership to implement a pay for performance system. By the same token, I hope we have moved beyond looking simply at an individual pay for performance system and can come up with solutions that incorporate the nuance and complexity of real life in schools.

The Facebook Connection

I recently joined Facebook and, within a week, found myself in touch with more than 30 former students. The numbers grow every day. I have had so much fun learning about what has happened to them. These are kids I taught more than 10 years ago, so they are completely grown, many with children of their own. And they have succeeded! A few are nurses, one is a preschool teacher, one is a stay-at-home mom in the suburbs, and a young man is a financial analyst in the army and about to deploy to Iraq this summer.

None of this would be surprising, except that I taught them at the Jeremiah E. Burke High School after the school had lost its accreditation and when many considered it the worst school in the city. To learn of their successes and to hear from them in their own words about how good their lives are now - nothing beats that as a teacher.

Not all the news is good. I learned recently that a former student is now sitting on death row in another state for killing a police officer. That news brought me to tears. I had reached out spontaneously to an old colleague who told me over the telephone what had happened. She said she remembered my bringing that young man to her after school, for her MassPep program, because I thought he had potential. I had forgotten that (teachers bring so many kids so many places).

Facebook has allowed me to see what has happened to those who did not make the papers, the ones who did the right thing, worked hard, and have made it in life. The numbers I am seeing as they hear that I am online suggests that they are the majority. As a teacher, I can't tell you what that means to me.

Improving State Standards...Make the Case!

According to Education Week, United States Education Secretary Arne Duncan (otherwise known as EdSec) has identified improving state standards as a key priority for his tenure. I'm all for that, but I have a feeling that my definition of "improving" may represent an outlier. Those who question the role of unions as agents of reform frequently cite the "book" size of a typical urban district's union contract. "We would might support it," they say, "if it ran only a few pages, like an employment agreement in private industry." They then point to what they see as a tome and cite it as an obstacle to change.

For the record, the urban teachers' union contracts that I have seen look more like a booklet than a book. I'd be thrilled if state education departments could distill their content standards to that length and size, let alone to the letter format of a few pages that opponents of long union contracts advocate. So my question about improving state standards is simple: what exactly does that mean? If it means distilling the absolutely essential kernels of learning that children must experience before leaving a K-12 system in no more than five pages for each content area, count me in. If it means more culture wars and debates about exactly what the state standards should cover, count me out.

Here's an example of my kind of standards, in my own discipline, History and Social Studies:

Grade 9: By the end of this year of Civics and Comparative Government, students will know how to make use of the privileges and live up to the responsibilities of the democratic system of government in the United States, at the local, state, and federal levels. They will be able to compare and contrast democracy in this country with other forms of government around the world, e.g., monarchy, dictatorship, etc. The course will take a hands-on, outcome-based case study approach that allows students to delve deeply into a diverse collection of historical episodes from around the world and from different eras. Content areas include the grassroots strategy that Barack Obama used to win the White House in 2008 (with historical references to Harold Washington's successful run for mayor of Chicago in 1983), Watergate, Renaissance Europe as seen through The Merchant of Venice, and precolonial Africa as seen through the oral tradition called Sundiata, among other areas.

Students will develop an array of critical thinking and public speaking skills over the course of this year, including the ability to write, self-edit, and peer edit an analytical five-paragraph essay that includes a thesis statement, supporting evidence, a counter-argument and accompanying discussion of why that argument is weak, and a conclusion.

I wouldn't mind adding a few more bells and whistles to this, to be sure, but if all my students could do these things by the end of Grade 9, I would feel like a highly successful teacher. So hear, hear on improving state standards, but let's be clear on what "improve" means.