Schools vs. Slogans: Listen to Educators Not "Reformers"

On August 24 Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced the ten
winners of the latest Race to the Top competition. "These states show
what is possible when adults come together to do the right thing for
children," said Duncan. The winners-the District of Columbia, Florida,
Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio
and Rhode Island-were understandably thrilled. Each will receive tens
of millions of dollars (large states, even more) to implement reforms
that the administration believes will spur innovation and promote
academic excellence.

The losers, however, were more than just mildly disappointed. Some,
like the governors of Colorado and New Jersey, were enraged. Chris
Christie, New Jersey's new conservative governor, blamed bureaucrats at
the Education Department, then sacked his education commissioner.
Colorado Governor Bill Ritter, a Democrat once seen as an Obama ally,
claimed his state's exclusion was part of a "communist plot" and charged
that it reflected a bias against Western states.

Their anger over Race to the Top, while a bit extreme, is nonetheless
understandable. The bad news comes at a time when states across the
country are making severe cuts to public education. As the nation
struggles to emerge from recession, school districts nationwide have
been forced to lay off teachers in droves, defer maintenance and repairs
to school buildings and, in states like California and Michigan, allow
class sizes to increase to levels never before seen.

The administration should receive some credit for trying to reform
public education and for directing some of the federal stimulus funds to
support its goals. However, by choosing to reward some states over
others because they followed the preferred reform strategy, the
administration runs the risk of alienating more than just a couple of
governors. At a time when so little is going in its favor, the Obama
administration has adopted policies on education that have angered an
important part of its base-teachers and their unions.

With backup from the Bill & Melinda Gates and Eli and Edythe
Broad foundations, the administration has focused its reform efforts on
four strategies: raising academic standards, expanding charter schools,
evaluating the performance of teachers using student test scores and
turning around chronically underperforming schools. In its "Blueprint"
for education, released in March, all four strategies were touted as
initiatives that will lead to better schools and higher levels of
student achievement.

Despite the administration's preference for "evidence-based"
measures, however, ideology and favoritism rather than sound research
appear to be the primary rationales for the policy direction it has
prescribed.

For example, the administration recently awarded $50 milaEUR"lion
through its innovation grants to Teach for America (TFA). Many liberals
and conservatives are enthusiastic about the program because it provides
teaching jobs to Ivy League graduates. They are dispatched, with little
training, to the most challenging schools, in high-poverty communities
(and they typically stick around for no more than two years). But a
growing body of research shows that low-income children need highly
trained teachers. Indeed, it is telling that KIPP-the Knowledge Is Power
Program, an organization that runs a number of relatively successful
charter schools, and whose CEO is married to TFA's CEO-will hire TFA
fellows only as assistants until they have proven their effectiveness in
the classroom.

Or consider the uneven record of charter schools, also heavily
promoted by the administration. In states such as Ohio, Arizona and
California, many charter schools are floundering, and unlike traditional
public schools, they are not required to meet state performance
standards. Charter schools are largely an urban phenomenon, so in many
rural areas in Western states where one public school may serve children
from a wide geographic area, the push for charter schools makes no
sense at all. Finally, there is clear evidence that in many of the
better charter schools there is a deliberate effort to exclude children
who are hard to serve-English language learners, or students with
learning disabilities or severe behavior problems. It is unfair for
charter schools and their proponents to claim success when they are
allowed to screen or push out students who are hard to teach.
Invariably, those students end up back in public schools, which are then
penalized for the lower performance that results.

In keeping with the administration's interest in evaluating teachers based on student test scores, the Los Angeles Times
ran a series of articles in August that discussed the relationship
between teacher efficacy and student test scores. In a bold and
controversial ploy the Times released the names and test-score
rankings of individual teachers. While advocates like Washington, DC,
school chancellor Michelle Rhee applauded the move as "the right
approach to accountability," critics pointed out the numerous problems
with judging teachers in such a narrow manner, given the high mobility
rates of students and the wide variety of factors influencing their
performance on standardized tests.

The call for states to adopt strategies to turn around failing
schools is perhaps the most ambitious and troubling of the
administration's proposals. The Education Department has estimated that
as many as 5,000 of the nation's schools are failing. Secretary Duncan
has referred to them as "dropout factories" and called for them to be
improved or shut down. Yet, while his concern about school failure is
well placed, it seems Duncan must not have read a recent study that
analyzed the results of seven years of reform in the Chicago district he
led before his cabinet appointment. The University of Chicago study,
which ironically was written with John Easton, appointed by Duncan to
lead the Institute of Education Sciences, found that in schools serving
the neediest children, those the authors described as the "truly
disadvantaged," new curriculums, increased funding for books, technology
and teacher training, and even extreme pressure failed to produce the
improvements the system sought to bring about. The study concluded that
these schools did not improve because they lacked the ability to respond
to the tremendous nonacademic needs of the children they serve.

This disconnect between the realities of public schools and the
policy prescriptions coming from Washington is the crux of the problem.
The policy wonks guiding the administration seem to think that the only
thing wrong with No Child Left Behind-the law adopted by the Bush
administration to guide education policy-is that the slogan got a bad
name because it promised far more than it could deliver. Instead of
developing a new strategy, they've merely devised a new slogan, Race to
the Top, without really understanding what it might take to move the
nation's schools forward.

Given its desire to turn around failing schools, it's unfortunate
that the administration has not closely examined the experiences of the
small but significant number of schools that have gone from failing to
high performing, and used the strategies they've employed to promote
success on a larger scale-schools like PS 12 in the Brownsville section
of Brooklyn. In 2006, PS 12 was identified by the State of New York as a
school in need of improvement. In 2009, the school was awarded an A by
the New York City Education Department because 58 percent of its
students had achieved proficiency in reading, and 92 percent in math.
Much of the credit for this turnaround can be attributed to the
leadership of Nyree Dixon, the 33-year-old principal. In three years
Dixon focused on improving instruction by deploying her best math and
literacy teachers as coaches for other teachers so that they could
provide direct support in the classroom. She reached out to parents to
get their support and co-operation to improve school safety. She worked
with a local nonprofit to create an after-school program, and later a
summer program, focused on academic acceleration (not remediation).
Dixon explains her improvement efforts this way:

"We've been willing to try everything, from changing the curriculum
to changing the makeup of classrooms [boys and girls are now separated
for literacy classes in the fourth grade]. We evaluate everything we do,
but we also know that we've got to get this community involved. My kids
need a lot, and there's no way we can do it all by ourselves. I've been
able to get parents and community agencies to work with us, and this
has made a big difference."

Turning around a failing school sounds so simple when you listen to
someone who actually knows what she's doing. The question is, Why isn't
the administration listening to people like Dixon? When so much is going
wrong, the administration and its allies in Congress need an issue by
which they can demonstrate that their leadership is making a difference.
Education could still be that issue if the administration changes its
tone when challenging allies, distributes federal funds in a manner that
allows successful practices to grow throughout the country and not just
a few lucky states and adopts a more integrated approach to schools in
high-poverty areas, one that links school reform to improvements in
health and economic opportunities.

The clock is ticking, and time is running out for the Obama
administration to show the critical members of his base in the education
community that it can deliver on its promise of change we can believe
in.