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Rebuilding Haiti’s school systems: Big breakthrough

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

William Browning is currently the Board President for KIPP Colorado Schools and manages a local consulting firm which focuses on solutions for the public sector.

I recently wrote here about educational reconstruction efforts in Haiti, and since my last article, I have had the distinct honor to serve with a team to help develop a new strategy for public education in Haiti.

I wanted to share my past month’s experience with the educational community in Denver; there have been some interesting developments. As some of you may be aware, the story out of Haiti on Sunday was the commitment from the Inter-American Development Bank of $2 billion to support a five year strategy for education in Haiti which was strongly endorsed by President René Préval.

A month ago I visited Haiti and was fortunate enough to connect with Paul Vallas, the Superintendent of the New Orleans Recovery School District. Vallas was about to visit Haiti under the invitation of First Lady Préval to provide his perspective on the Katrina recovery efforts in New Orleans and how these lessons could be applied to the Haiti recovery.

A group working with Haitian education officials had developed an initial strategy, and I was happy to assist in the refinement of this plan. This strategy outlined a path for radical change founded on the principle that every child in Haiti should have access to a publicly funded education.

Most children in Haiti attend private schools; nearly 500,000 attend no school at all. After the earthquake, most educational institutions in Haiti were destroyed and I have seen first-hand the heartbreaking conditions that currently exist in Port-Au-Prince.

Under Vallas’s leadership, a team of experts was assembled (all volunteers) to produce a conceptual strategy that called for a centralized authority to manage the reform efforts and specifically outlined a plan to:

Establish transparent accounting standards to ensure public funds are reaching the schools;
Establish standards for school building and implement a core team to expedite the building of facilities to these standards;
Institute national curriculum standards, with a focus on multiple languages;
Allow for multiple programs and school types to flourish;
Build international partnerships with leading educational programs to produce highly effective schools and programs;
Establish a best-of-class human capital model to develop more effective school leaders and teachers;
Implement early childhood and in-school social services to better support communities.

The Haitian leadership reviewed the plan and gave it preliminary support. We were asked to work with Jacky Lumarque, who served as the leader of the Presidential Commission on Education, which was responsible for producing recommendations to improve education in Haiti.

Lumarque flew to New Orleans and shared his own perspective on educational reform in Haiti. This included ensuring that higher education was part of the plan. He called for the creation of a Ministry of Higher Education and development of partnerships with international universities. He advocated for a decentralization of ministry functions – allowing more provincial or sectional empowerment on building new schools, which is a critical national strategy in line with developing the provinces to reduce stress and demand in Port-Au-Prince.

Lumarque also endorsed the creation of a centralized authority for building school facilities. The nation’s current school construction capabilities are weak at best.

Most importantly, Lumarque called for an Education Commission to support the government, consisting of key Haitian and international education experts to support the necessary reforms. The following organization was conceived as part of the plan:

Working around the clock, an international team following the lead of Lumarque and Vallas, and supported by the Inter-American Development Bank, produced an updated national strategy along with a more detailed operational plan. On Saturday last week, this strategy was presented to President Préval in Haiti in the only functional building left standing at the Presidential Palace.

The meeting room was crowded as Lumarque shared his plan and vision with the support of Vallas and the president of the Inter-American Development Bank, Luis Alberto Moreno. The plan was presented and there were questions about implementation. President Préval mandated the immediate implementation of the strategy.

The leadership and bravery of Lumarque to challenge the status quo with such a bold Haitian plan combined with the sheer energy and generosity of Vallas was nothing short of inspirational. Haiti remains in horrible condition with the endless tent cities and countless children wandering the streets who clearly should be in school.

But now we may have a glimmer of hope for a future where education is properly funded, international expertise is more properly harnessed, facilities are built to standards, and the children of Haiti may just have a chance to learn as all children should.

After we left the meeting in the palace on Saturday, we ate lunch near a school that consisted of old buses donated from the Dominican Republic which were converted into classrooms. As the children greeted us with waves and smiles from the classrooms, it made this glimmer seems all the more critical for a nation so troubled and distressed.

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Helping build a functioning school system in Haiti

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

William Browning is currently the Board President for KIPP Colorado Schools and manages a local consulting firm which focuses on solutions for the public sector.

I recently returned from a short trip to Haiti, as I have an interest in helping the efforts to build a public education system there. It was an amazing and emotional journey for me.

It became clear to me during the visit that while we have challenges here in the Denver community, we are indeed fortunate to operate in a stable environment, even with diverse points of view on improving education for our kids.

A few months ago, I woke up to a National Public Radio story about homeless schoolchildren in Haiti. NPR interviewed a school principal who said: “We need help, these children have no place to go to school. “ Those words had a big impact in me.

My passion over the past five years has been helping the children in the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) schools here in Denver as a volunteer board member. Working with economically disadvantaged kids, I have become an apostle for investing in education, because schools provide a measurable and vital return for our community.

Effective teachers, passionate school leaders and engaged, involved parents can provide students, especially those living in poverty, real hope and opportunity. When children start believing in themselves, communities change, leaders emerge, and we simply function better as nation.

The voice of the Haitian school leader on NPR haunted me and I decided to see if I could help. I connected with an organization out of New York and traveled down to Port-Au-Prince last week to better understand the situation on the ground.

While the media has been providing some post-earthquake coverage, it doesn’t do justice to the scale of the disaster and the profound challenges currently facing this not-so-distant nation. Most of the schools in Haiti have been heavily damaged or destroyed. Nearly every government building in the city, including the Presidential Palace, is heavily damaged or reduced to rubble.

I had a chance to visit a school in the Haitian ghetto of Cite Soleil in Port-Au-Prince. The school had completely collapsed and had killed six elementary school children, some of whom had not yet been recovered from the rubble. The majority of the children who survived were orphaned.

Walking through the rubble, I saw the ground littered with children’s homework, school supplies and even toys. It struck me how devastated I would be if the same incident had happened to one of our schools here in Denver – public, charter or private. It would simply be overwhelming and in that moment I felt the true pain of this nation and the epic scale of the loss. Tears in my eyes, I boarded the van with others and we traveled to where the school was relocated a few blocks away.

We arrived at the new school which consisted of two tarps strung in the middle of the street next to a partially functioning kitchen. Children, mostly young elementary students, were under the tarps, singing songs and clapping. They were curious about the American visitors but were very engaged with their teachers, who were leading an educational song in French.

Among the ruins of the worst natural disaster in the nation’s history, surrounded by devastation, here the children’s singing voices and smiles radiated, showcasing the true human spirit.

Under a tent, in the middle of the street, in the worst ghetto in the entire western hemisphere, children were singing, learning, and adapting to their new circumstance.

I learned profound lessons from my journey. I believe now, more than ever, that we can rebuild Haiti’s educational system, and I have decided to help with these vital efforts. I have recently joined a team that is focused on a plan which we believe has a chance for success.

Conceived by experts from recent disasters, including New Orleans, 9/11 and Honduras, the plan outlines a strategy owned by the Haitian people but strongly supported by expertise from the international community. The expertise comes from people like those in the Denver metro area who have demonstrated successful transformations in low-income communities.

The approach must have a very strong financial governance model, allow for free public education, and it must address the development of provincial educational facilities to reduce the burden on Port-Au-Prince. A strong human capital program for recruiting, training, and placing the 10,000 teachers and 6,000 administrators needed, combined with fundamental national standards and curriculum are key building blocks.

Integration of schools and social programs is also essential to helping improve the lives of the Haitian people while leveraging from the investment in education. Finally, the need to accommodate multiple models of school management will allow for the flexibility needed to produce new, innovative methods for delivery.

Is it feasible? Attempts have been made in Haiti for decades without impact. Today, Haiti still ranks as the poorest, most underdeveloped country in the western hemisphere. Why would this new plan succeed when so many other efforts have failed?

We believe the confluence of high levels of international support combined with the appropriate governance model and Haitian ownership, support, and leadership has a valid chance for success. Similar investments have worked in Korea, Ireland, and the Dominican Republic so there is precedent.

There is a direct correlation between educational investment and economic development and if Haiti can transform its educational system there can be significant improvements over time.

While I learned a great deal about Haitian culture and the current state of affairs, I also learned a tremendous amount about the human spirit. Even in the worst Haitian ghettoes, the children are resilient and they are ready for a new future that the international community is positioned to deliver.

Despite losing parents and siblings, home and school, and all material possessions, the children are there, signing songs and learning.

Haunted by their song, inspired beyond words by their courage, I left Haiti transformed, and hopeful that the international education community in partnership with the Haitian government can finally produce systemic transformation.

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Is this the best we can do?

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

A February 27 Denver Post editorial and a related article on Colorado higher education funding were frustrating in an amazing number of ways. Both barely touched upon the single most important issue: Our higher education funding levels are not sustainable.

In 2008, before the current crisis, Colorado ranked 48^th in the nation in per pupil funding. Since then our funding level has dropped. As the February 24^th School of Public Affairs event (Ungovernable States: Prospects for Constitutional Reform in California and Colorado) made clear, at the present rate within 10 years the entire general fund will be spent on K-12, health care and corrections, leaving no funding whatsoever for higher education. Without that context, the rest of the conversation is, at best, misleading.

I sure hope this is the first salvo in a longer campaign by our leadership to discuss the value of higher education with Colorado taxpayers. But inaccurately characterizing the system as inefficient and suggesting that competition is bad for government seems like a foolish way to start the conversation. How about a proactive discussion about how to make competition spur improvements in our system, or how our higher education institutions serve our communities, or what we as a state need from higher education?

I wonder why this story even made the paper. Is this the best thinking we can expect to get from leaders in our state?

The chair of the Higher Education Steering Committee Dick Montfort is quoted saying, “Maybe not all the business classes are going to be at one university, I get that, but we’ve got to come up with ideas. My biggest frustration is that no one wants to change.”

The reality is we are going to get change whether we like it or not. But does he or the editorial board of the Post honestly believe increased efficiency can get us out of this funding mess? This is like focusing on a burnt-out headlight when the engine is shot.

Efficiency is important. Heck, we are already efficient, graduating more students than the U.S. average while spending less. (See www.higheredinfo.org for information on Colorado relative to other states.) But what is the use of efficiency when the ability of the system to meet the needs of all students is in peril?

As a conversation about efficiency, this one seemed particularly empty. Efficiency has two components: How much you spend and how much you get in return. This argument was mostly about numbers of programs (as a proxy for how much we spend) and had very little about what we get from those programs. One output cited was the small number of math and biology majors at Adams State College. Does that mean we should seriously consider shutting down the math or biology departments at Adams State? Do we believe that students can get an adequate college education in, say, business or teacher training without mathematics and biology?

Finally, I question the whole premise that having multiple programs compete in one geographic area is inherently inefficient. We have learned from initiatives in the K-12 arena that competition leads to innovation and makes consumers happy. We have also learned that to support improvements through competition, we need to provide good information to consumers and sophisticated tools for evaluating programs.

The debate about duplicate programs is a red herring being tossed into a pool of sharks (one of several red herrings the Post has tossed out lately on education funding). It makes for titillating headlines, but ultimately misleads Coloradans about the crisis we face.

I expect more from our state’s leadership than leading us down a dead end that cannot possibly solve the critical problems of a higher education system that has been starved for funds for nearly two decades.

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Local is the way to go on education reporting

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

Last month I posted a commentary about a new Brookings Institution report that chronicles the alarming decline in the quality and quantity of U.S. education news coverage. One way to push back against the trend, I asserted, would involve a kind of grass-roots writing spree on the part of school administrators and teachers. The theory holds – but in the weeks since the column ran, a number of readers and colleagues have responded with opinions on the issue. Their ideas seem well worth airing here.

At the heart of the discussion lies the question of local education reporting. The writers of the Brookings report admit that local journalists tend to cover the substantive work of schools better than national reporters, but they nevertheless takes a doom-and-gloom stance. The report concludes that “it is difficult for local outlets to maintain the quality of their coverage in the face of financial cutbacks and staff layoffs.”

Local papers certainly face many of the same challenges as the national news media, but whether or not their education coverage has been adversely affected seems to be up for debate. For example, Washington Post columnist Jay Matthews recently published a column in which he challenges the very premise of the Brookings report:

Maybe national education news is hard to find. Maybe it deserves to be, as boring and repetitive as it can be. But education reporting, at least the local kind that fills most of my days, is alive and well and provides more than 1.4 percent of what Americans read in their newspapers each day. […] Smaller papers are still devoting much of their space to schools.

Jay is not alone in his optimism. One reader responded to my column by pointing out the increasingly active and visible teacher blogosphere. Another, the managing editor of a local Denver paper, wrote saying that she has readers imploring her to cut back on her paper’s schools coverage.

The most striking response came from a friend in Indiana, who alerted me to an extraordinary series that has been running for six months in the Indy Star. The project began when columnist Matthew Tully decided to embed himself at Manual High, one of Indianapolis’s toughest public schools, and the results are nothing short of dynamite. Tully’s stories are colorful, incisive, and full of analysis that connects the school’s goings-on with changing conditions at the local and national levels. The project has garnered an impassioned following – so impassioned, in fact, that more than 2,000 people showed up to the school band’s winter concert after Tully chronicled the heroic efforts of its director.

This is the stuff of reporters’ fantasies and Hollywood movies, and it certainly suggests that local education coverage is still flourishing in some corners of the country.

My question, when it comes to the Manual project, is why nobody except for local Hoosiers seem to be in the know. Sure, a series focused around a specific school seems most directly relevant to local citizens. But given the lack of substantive national educational coverage, such a coherent and insightful series deserves to be brought to the attention of interested readers everywhere.

Maybe, then, national papers should start featuring a roundup of links to the best local stories? The industry has always worked in the opposite direction, with local papers relying on AP headlines to round out their content, but unusual times call for unusual measures. The roundup would take minimal effort and space, and it is hard to imagine that audiences would mind.

For this to work, of course, local education stories need to make their national relevance utterly clear. As far as I am concerned, this should happen anyway. Most of the interesting work happening in schools right now is either influencing or responding to national policy – oftentimes both. Journalists need to follow Tully’s lead and explore these two-way connections as best they can, connecting policies to classrooms and classrooms to policies. Only then might the public begin to fully understand the real, complicated, and exciting experiments that have begun to shift the landscape of public education in America.

Sarah Fine spent four years working at a charter school in southeast Washington, D.C. Her recent piece on the community schools movement appeared in Education Week’s February 3^rd issue.

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The nightly grind

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

Editor’s note: Brendan Craine is a junior at the Denver School of the Arts.

In my dissection of the sorer points of Colorado education, I have tried to save the best for last. Naturally, as a student, this is my greatest woe.

Let’s be fair here – this post almost writes itself. The universal student opinion towards homework is far from secret. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that every person who reads this has, at some point, expressed dislike towards homework, even if it happened a while ago.

Before I begin bringing up any points, or dissecting anything, consider that. Homework is almost universally disliked. Mentioning it to a student (especially a high school student) is an invitation for grumbling and irritation. So why, then, do we have it at all?

I am not going to spend any time debating homework as an idea. I think that our school system is far too heavily based on a platform of grading, budgets, and statistics, and I am all too aware that removing homework is not only drastic, but probably also impossible without a complete revamping of the system. I may not like it, but I’m not going to waste any time yelling about it.

I will also not talk about homework amounts. Whether or not six hours of homework is too much is an entirely different debate. It’s assumed that third graders will do less work than high school sophomores, and that’s really the way it should be. As we advance on to more complicated subjects, it’s natural that they would require more work.

Finally, I readily admit that, as a student who has to deal with homework on a nightly basis, my opinions are far from neutral. I have no way to balance that, aside from plain open-mindedness. Hopefully, my points will still be valid.

So, if I’m going to pick apart homework, I’m going to need a working definition. So, what is homework?

It’s practice, and that’s it.

Whether you’re reading and re-reading a history text to memorize dates and figures of the French Revolution, moving equations from factored to standard form, or just repeating the same letter in cursive over and over, all you are doing is practicing. Nothing new is learned through the activity of repeating a task, aside from being able to do it more quickly and more naturally.

This is even the case with history, since while individual dates and events may change, the process of learning about and understanding history remains static. In fact, history tends to repeat itself often enough that it could be argued that the individual dates and events are irrelevant.

So, based on that, there is one problem I see with homework right off the bat: We are graded on it.

Why is that a problem? Well, homework is intended to be practice. I have no problem with the idea of working to become better at something – I already do it without prompting – but to grade on the practice doesn’t seem logical.

For instance, are Olympic athletes given scores based on how much they prepared for the event? No. And yet, that’s what homework has become, because our system demands frequent grade updates, and therefore, frequent assignments.

So, the first thing to change about homework:

Stop grading on homework. Yes, even if it’s just a completion grade. Completion grades make absolutely no sense, even in the current system. We have a 0%-100% grading scale, and a completion grade can only be one extreme or the other.

Students, however, don’t learn in absolutes. To grade me on whether or not I turned in a piece of paper with some writing on it immediately puts me on par with every single other person who did the same, even if they all got the questions correct, and I did not. The grade isn’t based on learning or understanding, and it doesn’t make sense. To continue the simile, it’s like giving every athlete a gold medal just for competing.

The natural argument here is that, once the grading is removed, so will be the incentive to do any work, since a student who did no homework and one who did all of it will receive the same grade for it – no grade at all. The only difference, of course, is that the second student will have a much more concrete understanding of the material, and is likely to do much better on any quizzes, which is why my next point is…

Replace the lost homework grades with quizzes and tests. Students take quizzes and tests very seriously. This is because with homework, the mindset is one of “students vs. teacher”, (“Ms. So-and-so gave us so much lit homework to do! Ugh!”) which tends to foster dislike and hostility towards the teacher.

This is opposed to quizzes, which have the mindset of “student vs. all the other students,” a much more productive environment, especially among teenagers, who enjoy feeling like victims. Suddenly, the teacher becomes more like an overseer, spurring the students to compete against each other. Plus, quizzes can be immensely diverse in their grading – almost as diverse as students.

The main benefit here is that a student has the freedom to regulate his or her own workload. Instead of being forced to stay up studying until 12:30 each night, I have the option to go to bed, (and be more awake and able to learn the next day), without it affecting my class grades. Because I want to do well on any quizzes, I will study as much as I can – but also as much as I feel I should.

The only person who really knows when they’ve mastered a set of dates, a mathematic method, or the themes of a novel is the person who is mastering them. This prevents more intelligent students from being stuck with what is essentially “busy work.” If they have mastered the coursework, then they can stop studying. A greater amount of control would also mean a higher level of maturity and structure in students, since it would be necessary, but not required, to organize one’s time. Making something like that a requirement makes it hard to obey, but students will make good choices on their own.

Finally, the most important point:

Homework should never be a substitute for teaching. This is very important, because there really is no substitute for good teaching. I have been in several classes where the teacher does nothing more than review the homework. That really is no good, especially in the fast-paced curriculum that most high schools have. Ideally, I’d be given an opportunity to try something, and then have it explained, and then be able to try again with my new knowledge.

Right now, only steps one and two in that process are taking place, and there isn’t time for a step three. I am aware that this is partially because of the poor student/teacher ratio, with as many as thirty-five or forty students in a single class. That’s something that needs working on, too, but not in this post.

The one problem with what I’m suggesting is that what is being taught in the classroom needs to parallel the studying that the students are doing. This would especially be an issue in a history class, since the teaching tends to be very sequential. However, if period in history were broken up into very small chunks and taught a week or three days at a time, then the students could study that chunk for any amount of time during the period when it was being taught, then take the test on it, then repeat.

Overall, the most important thing is to focus on the fact that school is meant to be about learning. As soon as learning is sacrificed for grades, structure, or just “getting through the year”, then changes need to be made.

A successful school system puts control in the hands of the students, and puts them in a position to make good decisions, or suffer the consequences of making bad decisions. The more the educational system is based around forcing students to be responsible, the more they will resist, and this is especially true with homework.

Anyway, I better call this a wrap, because I need to get on this math assignment…

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Loaded language and questionable data

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

Editor’s note: Jim Griffin is president of the Colorado League of Charter Schools

In the recent EdNews blog post, Charters and demographic stratification, Kevin Welner points out a new study from CU-Boulder that compares the demographics of schools operated by Education Management Organizations (EMOs) with their local school districts. The report claims findings of “extensive” segregation in these schools.

First, the Colorado League of Charter Schools takes issue with the use of the term “segregation” when referring to school choice. Segregation is a toxic term associated with governmentally sanctioned, “forced” segregation of another era. The segregation that occurred in our nation’s past was deliberate policy designed to limit public school access. By contrast, charter schools and public school choice provide parents and children an opportunity to increase educational opportunities that have been traditionally unavailable.

Second, the League put the CU-Boulder data to the test by performing its own informal study. We compared EMO-managed charter schools in Colorado with similar, non-charter, neighborhood schools, and with the district.

After backing out online charters, and one operated out of a correctional facility, our data relates to five (5) EMOs and twelve (12) charter schools across multiple districts and communities. Some of these neighborhoods are high minority and low income, while others more white and middle class. In the end, the data contradicts the study’s claim of “extensive” segregation. On the contrary, it reveals that Colorado’s EMO-managed charter schools look more like the district than the neighborhood schools with respect to the percent of minority students they serve.

Parents are demanding higher-quality public school options for their children and rightfully so. Just last week, the Denver Post revealed that of the Colorado students who graduate high school and go onto college, nearly one in three require remedial classes. This doesn’t even touch on the numerous other students (many of whom are minorities) who fall through the system completely and drop out. This is exactly why Colorado charter schools got in the business of providing ALL students, regardless of race or any other factor, a chance at a better education and a better life.

Over the past 16 years, charter schools have proven that there is another option when it comes to public education. Charters have created choice and competition in the public school market – and are showing positive results. Unfortunately, naysayers who want public education to remain exclusively in the hands of those currently operating the system – the status quo–pull out all the stops when trying to convince the public to steer away from better school options for their students, even if it means using emotionally charged terms such as “segregation.”

As Americans we demand choice and snub monopolies when it comes to selecting doctors, automobiles, and grocery stores. Yet when we want to shop for the best public school option for our children – we are criticized. To insinuate that minorities should pass up quality education options for their children if a school’s demographics are too black or too white sounds like some confused priorities.

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Posted in Integration, Newsletter guest article, School choice | 4 Comments »

Charters and demographic stratification

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

Alan Gottlieb’s post from last Thursday points readers to a study from UCLA’s Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles [11 mb pdf], which analyzed charter schools across the country and found them to be substantially more racially isolated than traditional public schools. The study has received quite a bit of attention as well as pushback from charter school advocates.

Today, CU-Boulder’s own policy center, along with its partner policy center at ASU (collectively, EPIC/EPRU) will release a study that, coincidentally, asks some of the same questions as did the UCLA study. Our study provides a comprehensive examination of enrollment patterns in schools operated by private corporations and finds these schools to be segregated by race, family income, disabilities, and English language learner status.

As compared with their local public school districts, these schools operated by Education Management Organizations, or EMOs, are substantially more segregated, and the strong segregative pattern found in 2001 is virtually unchanged through 2007.

This new study, Schools without Diversity: Education Management Organizations, Charter Schools, and the Demographic Stratification of the American School System, is written by Gary Miron, Jessica Urschel, and Elana Tornquist of Western Michigan University, and William Mathis of the University of Colorado at Boulder. Please find this new report here.

The fact that our conclusions are remarkably similar to the UCLA study is particularly noteworthy. The two studies, conducted independently using different data, different researchers, and different methods, both found extensive segregation in charter schools. This type of independent verification is extraordinarily important as it establishes that the findings are robust – are not just the result of one particular way of looking at the data. Together, these two new studies paint a powerful picture of charters adding to the school segregation caused by the nation’s highly segregated neighborhoods.

The EMO study is particularly important because the Obama administration has placed a great deal of faith in the scaling up of nonprofit EMOs (sometimes called Charter Management Organizations, or CMOs) as part of the administration’s turnaround strategy. The findings of this new study suggest that these policies have the very real potential to be harmful to the nation’s social and educational interests.

Having just read the various responses the UCLA study, allow me to preemptively address those concerns, which may also be raised in response to the EPIC/EPRU study:

Pointing to the segregation is in no way condemning the schools, teachers, or students at those segregated schools. Individually, these can be great schools. What these studies highlight is a policy shift away from the Brown v. Board understanding and ambition. We’ve moved from “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” back to a version of Plessy’s “separate but equal,” generally stated as something like, “segregation doesn’t matter; what matters is that we hold every school accountable for excellence.”
While high-quality segregated schools – whether charters or not – deserve praise for their excellent academic outcomes, I am troubled by the abandonment of the diversity goal. Why, in reading the responses to the UCLA study, do I see so many people buying into a false dichotomy between excellence and diversity? We should approach charter schools with the foundational understanding that diversity and high achievement are mutually reinforcing and then structure our charter policies accordingly.
The reality is that charter schools as a whole do not appear to generate improved test scores. So, looking at these two new studies, it seems that we are getting the harms of segregation without any significant achievement benefits. Yet charters and choice are here to stay, so the questions we should be asking concern how to best structure choice policies to further both goals – diversity and excellence. In his comment below Alan’s post, Alex Ooms offered one suggestion on how this might be done: require charters (and, one might add, non-charters) to roughly reflect the wealth diversity of their surrounding districts or community. The same can be done for English language learners and students with special needs – and issues of race can also be addressed if structured in a non-individualized manner.
Both the EPIC/EPRU study and the UCLA study show racial stratification in both directions. That is, we’re seeing both “White flight” and “minority flight”. Several comments I’ve seen therefore conclude that we’re attacking Latino and African American students for choosing non-diverse schools. Speaking for myself, I would never condemn a parent for making such a choice. If a parent perceives his or her best schooling option to be a segregated school, I would certainly hope that the segregation isn’t the reason for that conclusion. But ultimately I’m not in a position to question any given parent’s choice. I should note that surveys consistently show that parents of all races state a preference for integrated schools, all else being equal. So what I do question are state policies that fail to create incentives for schools, including charter schools, to have that diversity.
Finally, please go back and take a look at the bottom of Alan’s post to see the table that the Colorado League of Charter Schools sent him in anticipation of the UCLA report’s release. It presents Colorado state-level data showing the overall charter school enrollment to be very similar to overall Colorado non-charter public school enrollment. But this completely misses the point about school-level segregation. In fact, I imagine a similar table could have been generated for 1960 Alabama, since black students were generally in enrolled some public schools, while white students were enrolled in others. If we average out the enrollments in all-black and all-white schools, we will by definition come up with the same percentages as the schools overall. It’s a good thing that charters in Colorado end up serving a representative swath of the state’s population, but the school-level segregation pointed out in these reports raises a separate and important issue.

Ultimately, I hope those who criticized the UCLA report and who might be tempted to criticize the new EPIC/EPRU report take a step back and consider the long-term benefits to the charter movement if it embraces reforms designed to create greater school-level diversity. Yes, these reports do raise serious concerns about the current situation, but they aren’t calling for charters to be abandoned. They are calling for meaningful reflection and change so that these schools can help move the country toward its ideals.

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Posted in Integration, Newsletter guest article, School choice | 19 Comments »

The scrutiny gap

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

The issues reported in the Denver Post this weekend related to drug licenses at the University of Colorado’s Dental School as well as Mark Sass’ recent blog, remind me of how little we compare teaching to other professions or occupations. I have studied state-level regulation of several industries, and occupational regulation is one of the most fascinating areas. (See this link for my favorite review of my regulation book).

Occupational regulation is often cited as an extreme example of the “Chicago School” idea that public policy benefits mainly private actors. Professions often either “capture” the state legislative process, getting essentially self-regulation or easy regulation that makes it hard for competitors to enter their domain, or they tend to dominate the regulatory boards or agencies that are supposed to oversee their ongoing occupational practice. (The political logic here is simple – the large numbers of consumers each have very low stakes in how hair stylists, for example, are regulated, while those hair sylists care a great deal and thus organize to influence the political or regulatory process). Some 800 occupations are regulated by at least one of the United States today.

(On a local note, Colorado’s Department of Regulatory Affairs, until recently headed by Rico Munn, has a long history of being one of the better state agencies in the country for regulating professions).

One result of occupational regulation is that very few professionals lose their licenses, or face other disciplinary actions, via oversight boards, often because these boards are dominated by members of that same profession. For example, less than 1% of MDs and other health care professionals typically face disciplinary actions, compared to much higher rates of malpractice allegations (these lawsuit allegations could be over-inflated, of course, but it is hard to believe that only 1% of professionals are creating problems). Either these professionals see it in their self interest to protect each other or they are truly serving the public interest quite well.

So, how does this relate to K12 teachers? First, some differences. In most of these other professions the entry barriers to joining the field are really high to get into the professional schools and into the profession itself (students need extremely high GPAs and test scores to get into medical or dental school – the UC Denver dental school accepts only 52 students from over 1,500 applications). As a result, these students receive a lot of very expensive professional training (and sometimes they go hugely into debt to pay for it) and they later earn quite high salaries, partly to compensate. Teaching, in part because so many teachers are needed, does not require anything like these hurdles to enter.

But, there are similarities. As highly trained as some of these professional are, over time their skills and motivation can certainly erode. While most professions have some “continuing education” or professional development requirements, almost none require a re-licensing process that meaningfully tests their skills or achievements. Hence, we get stories like the nearly blind surgeon, a few years ago, who operated on the wrong body part.

What does this comparison tell us? Other, more prestigious professions than teaching, have difficulty policing their own occupations in any meaningful way, whether they have professional unions or not. Professionals are reluctant to make or support claims against others in their field, either in solidarity, or because most people one works with over time become, if not friends, at least real people with real lives, and families, that you become somewhat familiar with. And, current public policy approaches don’t help all that much in providing ongoing feedback (yes, with the Internet it is now possible to get more consumer information about professional quality care, and make competitive decisions partly on that basis (if your insurance plan allows), but it is still far from easy).

Thus, there seems to be no weeding out of the bottom 10% or more of professionals in these occupations, just as this does not happen for tenured teachers. Any model of teaching quality and evaluation that suggests weeding out a certain percentage, especially at a later stage in a teacher’s career, seems to me likely to face enormous obstacles.

While not perfect, this thought leads me back to a model of much higher initial standards, before tenure is earned. And, yes, I am part of the tenured higher education professoriate, and there are some who believe that to be a stifling model. (I’ll happily engage in that discussion in another venue – tenure at a quality higher education institution is difficult to earn and only comes after about 5-6 years of no paid rigorous graduate school, followed by 7 years of relatively low paid assistant professor-dom – if people want to change the higher education tenure rules, they’ll need to change the entry process into the profession, as well).

But, the dozen or so years involved in the higher education tenure process, just like the lengthy professional education of many medical professionals, does allow ample opportunities for a system to screen for the appropriate ability, skills, and dispositions. The 3 years of probationary teaching experience in Colorado’s K12 system, after perhaps only a BA preparation, does not allow anything near that same level of scrutiny (especially when we know that teachers, on average, tend to reach their peak in moving student achievement only after about 5 years experience).

While there are current proposals to require later career teachers to retain their tenure, based upon their students’ achievement, this comparison suggests that implementing such proposals will be very difficult, just as in other fields. But, making the original tenure decision more challenging, and more meaningful, would begin to raise the professional standards of K12 teaching, to be more comparable.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Posted in Newsletter guest article, Teacher preparation and training | 1 Comment »

Write like your school is on fire

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

In his final from-the-editor post of 2009, Alan Gottlieb makes a spirited case for the value of this website by outlining the gloomy findings of a new report published by the Brookings Institution. The report, titled “Invisible: 1.4 Percent Coverage for Education Not Enough,” chronicles the decline in both the quantity and quality of U.S. education reporting.

The authors suggest that one way of reversing the trend would be for foundations and non-profits to expand their own forms of education coverage – exactly what PEBC has done by founding Education News Colorado.

I am certainly proud to be part of such a forward-thinking project, but the Brookings report hits a raw nerve. This fall, after four years of teaching and a summer spent mulling over my professional future, I decided to apply to doctoral programs in education. The decision represents what I intend to be a lifelong commitment to the field, and more specifically a commitment to writing about the complex stories that play out in the classrooms and offices of urban public schools.

I know that traditional media journalism faces an uncertain future, and that education stories rarely make the front page – but 1.4 percent? Can the effort to reimagine and reform our nation’s school-system really be that much less compelling than, say, the H1N1 flu?

It is not just my nascent career that concerns me. I have long been intrigued by the fact that American society tends to relegate education to the realm of the un-newsworthy. The relevant issue now seems to be about causes.

Why does education rank so low on the public radar? The question is obviously complicated, and the researchers at Brookings sidestep it neatly. They attribute recent shrinking of coverage to global media budget cuts – a reasonable explanation, but one that hardly explains why education coverage so often verges on invisible.

One thing that seems clear is that the problem does not stem from a lack of actual relevance. Almost all Americans have had at least some contact with the public education system, and a significant portion of these – parents and parents-to-be, teachers and their spouses, not to mention students – have an immediate stake in its success. It is hard to imagine that the American public would be unreceptive if they were offered some ongoing, in-depth, jargon-free reporting about the state of their schools.

Sadly, this is exactly the kind of reporting that is verging on extinction.

According to the Brookings study, the majority of recent national education coverage has been devoted to budget issues, school crime, test results, and school-based outbreaks of the flu. Even publications that educators turn to with great respect have been focused almost exclusively on big-picture issues around national policies and standards. Absent are stories about the ins-and-outs of school life: experiments with new rules and curricula, hallway tangles and triumphs, board meetings, poetry slams.

“The lack of coverage of the actual work of schools remains a significant problem,” write the authors of the Brookings study. They go on to outline three strategies for addressing the problem: first, school administrators should more proactively share information with the public; second, education reporters should write meatier stories; and third, nonprofits and foundations should follow PEBC’s lead and create their own sources of education coverage.

If principals and journalists and CEOs hearken to this call, education coverage certainly will deepen in some important ways. It strikes me, however, that the people whose voices best can represent the actual work of schools include not only administrators but also the rest of the school-level corps: parents, students, staff, and teachers. These are the people who know the rhythms and questions that punctuate daily life in schools, and who can tell stories which reporters rarely have time to unearth.

Especially teachers. Anybody who has spent time in a faculty-room knows that most teachers love nothing better than discussing the ins-and-outs of daily life in their classrooms. Many also have insightful observations about the impact of particular structures and policies on their students. Too often, however, these ideas are absent in public discussions, leaving teachers feeling disempowered and making education journalism the sole domain of think-tank researchers and overburdened reporters.

Of course, being a teacher or administrator or parent does not leave much room for extracurricular activities like laboring over op-eds. But the task does not have to be “extra.” When I began writing about the goings-on in my former school, it was as much to make sense of my experiences as to contribute to the larger dialogue about public education. The project was humbling and grueling, but the process allowed me to find clarity around some of the most troubling issues I faced.

And, astonishing to me at first, people seemed interested in what I had to say. I do not think it was because I have more insight than the countless other teachers out there who fall asleep each night musing about their students. I think it was because I tried to ground big-picture education issues in real stories about a real school, and readers were, and are, hungry for that kind of perspective.

So: people who spend time in schools need to write, prolifically. They need to find space to set aside their to-do-lists and think about what the public might need to hear in order to more fully understand the experiments in reform that have begun to change the American public-school landscape. Such an effort could go a long way toward restoring depth, breadth, and visibility to education coverage. It might give a leg up to education reporters, too – and they surely need it.

Sarah Fine spent four years working at a charter school in southeast Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared in Education Week, Teacher Magazine, and The Washington Post.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Posted in Media, Newsletter guest article | 3 Comments »

In R2T, student voice will sharpen blunt instruments

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

Editor’s note: The following piece was written by Brian Barhaugh and Cristian Mendoza Espinosa. Barhaugh is executive director of Project VOYCE. Mendoza Espinoza is a junior at Denver’s George Washington High School and a member of Project VOYCE.

There’s a missing link in our efforts to use achievement data to drive school reform. From Colorado’s extensive Race to the Top (R2T) planning efforts to national school performance standards, the focus on achievement results keeps relying on blunt instruments.

Achievement data tells us where we are, but misses the essential question of how we got there or, more importantly, how to improve.

We will continue relying on blunt instruments if we don’t bring student voice into the game.

A recent case in point is the Bruce Randolph School teacher who, in one semester, went from being considered by students as one of their worst teachers to being named by those same students as the school’s first Teacher of the Month. When asked why she thought she received the award, she described her new class structure. When the students were asked how this teacher went from worst to best, they weren’t aware of a new class structure. They said she did it by constantly requesting and using their feedback. Now she’s even more excited about working with her students.

The basic business practice of asking your customers for feedback to improve your product is tragically lacking in America’s most vital industry — education. Colorado has a rare opportunity to take a leadership role in breaking out of this rut in Race to the Top (R2T). But the forces pulling us back into the old familiar tracks are persistent.

Eighteen students from 14 different metro-area high schools have been deeply engaged with the state’s R2T Work Groups. They were hired and trained by Project VOYCE (Voices of Youth Changing Education) over the summer to find ways to make a difference in education in their schools and in Colorado. While their contributions were widely praised by the lieutenant governor and numerous R2T co-chairs, and photos of their involvement in R2T were featured in the New York Times and Education Week, the recently released summary of Colorado’s proposal has them concerned.

As Cristian Mendoza Espinosa (a George Washington High School Junior) recently wrote of his R2T experience, “At every meeting I attended, I felt welcome. Everyone listened to my ideas and appreciated my comments… That said, I was confused when I did not see any explicit mention of student voice in The Race to the Top proposal.”

An education official from the governor’s office has responded that while student voice was not mentioned in the recently released proposal summary, “We, too, are committed to student engagement. When we are ready to share the details of the proposal, you will see that this commitment will stay strong throughout the implementation of Race to the Top.”

This statement is encouraging. At the same time we know that educators with the best of intentions often miss a crucial distinction between student engagement and student voice. As Cristian wrote, “The educational system has been working for (as opposed to with) students, like myself, for too long…I learn a lot more in classes where teachers work with me; they ask for my input, and actually apply it, making material easier to learn.”

Lt. Governor Barbara O’Brien has been supportive of student voice in R2T since the first meeting in April. Last week O’Brien was named one of the top 10 education reformers to watch nationally for “leading the most extensive Race to the Top outreach effort in the country.” What better way to offer proof that O’Brien’s outreach efforts truly went beyond the usual circles than by highlighting how student voice is being used in Colorado to sharpen the tools that are needed to improve student achievement?

Tapping the full power of student voice in Colorado’s R2T proposal involves these key elements:

Standards and Assessments – Make them relevant to students’ lives.

Involve students in standards support, formative assessment development and interim benchmark development.

Data – Go beyond student engagement data (attendance, etc.) to real student voice.

Utilize student-led outreach to capture feedback from disengaged students.
Disseminate data on impact of student voice best practices statewide.

Great Teachers and Leaders – Put students in the center of the learning community

Go beyond formative assessments to “Fast, Frequent Feedback” systems to accelerate improvements in teacher effectiveness.
Develop a state-wide internet-based student voice network to share best practices in student voice and student/teacher partnerships.
Build student/teacher partnership training into professional development and pre-service training.
Include students in teacher/leader recruitment and hiring.

Support Struggling Schools – As Arne Duncan said, “The students know what’s working and not working in schools before anyone else.

Identify best practices to utilize student feedback to determine school strengths and weaknesses and to select best intervention/turnaround strategies.
Provide training to build school leadership culture based on student/adult partnerships.

O’Brien and Work Group Co-chairs Monte Moses and Jesus Salazar have clearly stated the importance of student-centered strategies in R2T. If we are to meet Arne Duncan’s challenge to go beyond incremental systems change to continuous improvement and innovation, then let’s be bold and not just include these strategies, but shine a light on them.

As Cristian said in his recent letter, “… by working with their students, teachers become better connected to their students and do their best to help their students succeed.”

Popularity: 15% [?]

Posted in Newsletter guest article, Student perspective | 4 Comments »

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