My Learning Story

(Reposted from Rethink Learning Now)

I recently read through the Gates report - A Silent Epidemic, which chronicled the real reason public schools fail to graduate and adequately prepare our young people - namely boredom in school, and not being pushed to succeed. A solid half of students who drop out are talented and capable. They possess the skills for success, but they do not see how their school experience is meaningful, how it connects to the future. Most importantly, they are not challenged to try hard or apply those talents, by either their peers, who feel the same sort of ambivalence and ennui about the drudgery of school, or their teachers, who fail to connect textbook curriculum to the real world. I think back to my own public school experience, and these findings ring true.

I graduated in the top ten of my high school class, was an honors/AP student, and a success by most standards. (I now have both a B.A. and an M.A. from prestigious private universities.) However I too was bored out of my mind, and performed most of my work out of a sense of duty, responding to a dreaded chore list in all but the one class where I had an inspiring teacher - Mr. Lawrence, who challenged our assumptions, and pushed us beyond adequacy. He treated us with respect and affection, as if we were his own children. He opened our eyes that textbook history always has an agenda, and to be thoughtful of what that agenda is, what the perspective of those who lack power might be, and to never assume that just because we read something in a textbook, that meant it represented the truth. My class painted a mural portrait of him as a surprise, while working on a community project after we finished preparing for the AP exam. Sadly, but not unexpectedly, that teacher was fired because he did not fit the mold. He taught us to think outside the box, and the box seemingly had no place for a non-conformist like him.

When I skipped study hall, a period where attendance and silent participation was mandatory, in order to do an independent study with that very teacher, I got written up and sent to the vice-principal's office. I unsuccessfully tried to argue against the rhetoric of blind rules and compliance. As a student of relative privilege, given my high class standing and good grades, I still chaffed at the lack of room for personal growth, personal responsibility, and most importantly, freedom of choice. However, I had parents with high expectations, and I never once considered dropping out as an option. But what of all those students who don't? They end up as statistics, a sad testament to the inadequacy of de-individuated, traditional public schooling.

This is what fuels my passion for education reform today. There is no reason why we should continually be forced to conform to the same old standard of one-size-fits all schooling. A standard which paints all students with the same wide brush, and leaves so little breathing room or support for creativity and intellectual curiosity; a dreaded "waste" rather than the path to self-realization and opportunity it was meant to be. Remember that credo - "Be cool, Stay in school?" It is our responsibility to make sure that school can be the meaningful experience worth "staying in" for.

Education in Context: Looking Ahead, Looking Back

Here is a familiar scenario:

Parents, community members and the media are outraged. Business leaders claim that today’s education fails to adequately prepare tomorrow’s workforce. Headlines criticize: “Is the public school a failure?” “How much do our schools cost the taxpayer?" And what sort of education are they getting in return? Issues of teacher incompetency and erosion of education quality prevail in the public consciousness. Superintendents across the country bring in consultants and use business tactics to run public schools, promising to lower drop-out rates through more rigorous standards and greater accountability. As a result, teachers’ ability to control their own classroom and curriculum implementation erodes. Teacher unions protest.

Now take a guess as to when such a scenario could have taken place.

Was it last year?
Ten years ago?
How about 100 years ago?

Believe it or not, the scenario above was the state of American education roughly at the turn of the century. The headline “Is the public school a failure?” ran in the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1912. Business leaders testified at the NEA “advising, urging, and warning them to make education more practical” in 1908, citing what at the time was seen as frivolous attention to impractical subjects – like literature, art, and Greek. Concerns that should be familiar to anyone working in education reform today. (Just replace Greek with Latin, or another similarly under-appreciated scholarly subject.)

In chronicling the rise of a professional class of education administrators who turned to brandishing business credentials in running their schools, Raymond E. Callahan compiled many such scenarios in his book – Education and the Cult of Efficiency (University of Chicago Press, 1962).

The stories are painfully familiar – but not unexpected in a country that is still attempting an educational experiment found nowhere else in the world. Offering free education, K through 12, to every citizen of the United States is a bold goal in and of itself, particularly given the challenges educators face. Ensuring that this education is of high quality and effective has been, of course, another matter entirely.

Please stay tuned to my future Friday posts in the Inspired Teacher blog. I hope to present many more such revelations and lessons learned as I delve into the questions of how our current system of education came to be. I am finding that the current push towards innovation and the cultivation of new Common Standards echos the struggles of educators in the 20^th century, even as we are forced to reckon with them in the 21^st.

Investing in Teachers to Turn Schools Around

Lots of voices in education seem to believe that the only way to turn low-performing schools around involves big, top-down initiatives. While the role of excellent leadership can’t be underestimated, there is plenty of evidence that the key ‘lever’ to change is teacher quality. A good example of the essential role of investing in teachers is in the Benwood schools in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The Benwood schools went from among the 20 worst-performing schools in the state of Tennessee to acclaimed models of success. The results are impressive – in the eight targeted schools, student achievement has jumped 27 percentage points on state reading tests, well above state and district averages, teacher morale is up and teacher turnover is down, and an analysis using William Sanders’ Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System shows significant gains in teacher effectiveness. Simply put—the students learned more because the teachers got better.

So what made it happen? Both Benwood reformers and outside analysts acknowledge that there were multiple factors that led to the changes, but as Elena Silva at Education Sector explained recently, the success can ultimately be ascribed to the fact that the reform was teacher-centered and partially teacher-driven. Instead of taking an ‘out with the old and in with the new’ approach (firing under-performing teachers and relying on new hires to create change), the Benwood Initiative invested in the teachers it already had, providing ongoing professional development focused on high-quality classroom instruction.

The most high-profile of the Benwood reforms was a financial incentive plan, established by local business leaders, and designed to attract top talent to Benwood classrooms. These incentives, which included help with mortgages and graduate school payments, as well as performance bonuses, appeared in the press, government proposals, and policy papers nationwide. Yet only 5% of teachers actually participated in the incentive plan. Silva concludes that the impact of financial incentives was "overstated" and that reforms that focused on existing teachers, such as mentoring, collaboration, and feedback, were at least as successful as trying to bring in new talent, if not more so.

In an ultimately successful move, the district superintendent asked Benwood teachers and principals about their needs and opinions, and then listened to what they had to say. As a result, teachers soon had "mentor and peer support, constructive principal feedback, and more time for instruction and lesson preparation." The district brought in consulting teachers, leadership coaches, and additional staff such as reading specialists, and fostered an improved relationship with the union. This new atmosphere of collaboration, support, respect, and progress led to more satisfied teachers, better schools, higher-performing students, and a more effective administration.

There are many lessons to be taken from this. As Silva affirms, "teacher effectiveness isn't fixed." Instead, supporting and inspiring teachers to challenge themselves is not only possible, but essential to building better schools. Teacher-centered reform should not mean mass firings and new hiring, but helping teachers become more effective, and allowing those teachers to have a voice in the reform process.

Sounds pretty inspired.

Thanks to Research Assistant Rebecca Shinners for researching and drafting this post.