Dear Deborah,

As I watch events across the nation, I have concluded that district leadership today falls into one of two varieties.

On one hand is the traditional superintendent, who believes that he is responsible for the schools and students in his care. He visits the schools often and consults frequently with mid-level superintendents to make sure that the schools get the resources they need. When a school is in trouble, he sends in a team of experienced educators to assess its needs and devise a plan to help the staff. If the school continues to struggle, he works harder to try to solve the problems. He may decide to remove the principal and shake up the staff. He is relentless in trying to get the school to function well. This superintendent believes that he will be judged by his efforts to help the neediest of the students and schools.

On the other hand is the new breed of reform superintendent. Whether he (or she) was a business executive, an education entrepreneur, or a lawyer, he is steeped in a business mindset. He wants results. He surrounds himself with business school graduates, lawyers, marketing consultants, and public relations staff. He focuses on management, organization, budgeting, and data-driven decision-making. He shows little or no interest in curriculum and instruction, about which he knows very little. He is certain that the way to reform the schools is to "incent" the workforce. He believes that accountability, with rewards and sanctions, makes the world go round. He plans to "drive" change through the system by being a tough manager, awarding merit pay to teachers and principals, closing struggling schools, and opening new schools and charter schools, all the while using data as his guide. He believes that the schools he oversees are like a stock portfolio; it is his job not to fix them but to pick winners and losers. The winners get extra money, and the losers are thrown out of the portfolio. When addressing the business community, he speaks proudly of his plan to give maximum autonomy to school principals, thus absolving himself of any responsibility for the performance of the schools, and then sits back to manage his portfolio. If a school fails, he is fast to close it. The failure is not his fault, but the fault of the principal and the teachers.

You can see why the reform superintendent would love the Race to the Top. It incorporates all the principles that he loves. Charter schools, accountability, merit pay, school closings, data-driven decision-making. It is the same mindset, the same belief in rewards and sanctions that we have seen in NCLB, taken to a higher level with a pot of gold containing almost $5 billion at the end of the rainbow. (I read a blog a few days ago, forget which one, that refers to RTTT as "dash to the cash.")

Now, the problem with the reform superintendent is that he usually knows very little about schooling and education. He focuses on organization and strategic planning and so on, but is in the dark about what happens in the classroom. This is why he relies so much on data. Numbers don't lie, do they?

Well, yes, they do. A major front-page story in The New York Times on February 6 described a major study conducted by criminologists who found that the numbers do lie. More than 100 retired, high-ranking police officers in New York City told them that intense pressure to produce improved crime statistics had led to manipulation of the data. For the past 15 years or so, the city boasted that its data system, known as CompStat, had brought about a major reduction in crime. But the survey said that the data system had encouraged supervisors and precinct commanders to relabel crimes to less serious offenses. The data mattered more than truth. Some, for example, would scout eBay and other Web sites to find values for stolen items that would reduce the complaint from a grand larceny (over $1,000 in value) to a misdemeanor. There were reports of officers who persuaded crime victims not to file a complaint or to change their accounts so that a crime's seriousness could be downgraded.

This is not only a major scandal, it is a validation once again of Campbell's Law, which holds that: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decisionmaking, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."

Anyone who wants to learn more about Campbell's law and how it applies to education should read Richard Rothstein's Grading Education and Daniel Koretz's Measuring Up. Or Google Rothstein's "Holding Accountability to Account," if you want to see what happens when data becomes our most important goal.

For just as the police officers felt compelled to game the system to meet the demands of CompStat, so educators are now gaming the system to meet the demands of NCLB. Some states have dumbed down their tests; some have rigged the scores to produce greater numbers of "proficient" students. Some districts have narrowed their curriculum and have replaced instruction with intensive test-prep. Some schools of choice exclude low-performing students. All in the service of making the numbers, making AYP, looking good rather than doing well.

Anyone who thinks that these methods will produce first-class education for our nation's children is either a fool or is fooling himself.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 10:02 AM | Permalink | No Comments | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

Funny you should ask, Diane. Yes, I am still a sort-of supporter of small schools—within the right context.

I came across a big, heavy award from 2004 called The Small Schools Award: "In honor of your support, in a bold way and over the long haul of small schools that educate one student at a time." I'm frequently introduced as "the mother/grandmother of small schools." So, why aren't I feeling smug and successful? There are more urban small schools than ever before—even though small often now means 600, not 300.

Nearly 20 years ago a group of us proposed phasing out one big high school in each NYC borough and simultaneously opening six new small schools in available alternate spaces in each neighborhood. We barely got beyond doing one very successful "turnaround" in Manhattan when a variant of this idea swept city after city. NYC is going wild with "turn-arounds," and today I'm largely an opponent! Why?

Context.

When I was teaching and principal-ing I regularly had great ideas. Usually just before falling asleep. They looked a little less exciting the next morning, but I plowed ahead filling in the details and arrived at school still enthusiastic. Some worked out. Most didn't. They got shot down by the students' reactions—which were ho-hum at best, or by my colleagues' lack of interest, often accompanied by compelling reasons for their lack of enthusiasm. Greater "experts" than I have suffered this fate. Sometimes the "experts" see it as an ugly form of resistance to any change, laziness, self-interest, or a combination of such bad habits.

At some point I began to rethink the oft-accused culprit resistance. Maybe resistance is the response of choice given relative powerlessness. Suppose we had actually jumped on every bandwagon that came along? Maybe calling it "resistance" is a self-serving interpretation by true believers to explain disagreement from the ranks. Sometimes, of course, the idea might actually be great, but the resisters have embarked on another path already and now is not the time to interrupt. I always hoped it was the latter and that I could renew my great idea at a later date—if I still liked it myself. Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

I reminded myself that in WWII (my pre-teen years), collaborators were the bad guys and resisters the heroes. When had we switched sides?

Once again, context is everything. The habit of "resistance" became my habitual stance, until others began to resist my best ideas. Then I became pro collaboration—with me—and founded a wonderful organization in NYC called the Center for Collaborative Education. It has since died, but I'm still on the board of Boston's Center for Collaborative Education. Sometimes I collaborate, sometimes I resist.

I recently re-read an op-ed I wrote for The New York Times in 1989. ("In Education, Small is Sensible," Sept. 8, 1989) I agree with every word of it. Except that.... It's more complicated.

So, my next blog essay will be devoted to a defense of "yes, small schools, but..." Unless I get carried in another direction by your next letter, Diane.

When and how might "small schools" and "choice" become a favorite of teachers and parents and kids rather than, as in NYC these days, a heavy-handed intruder? Ditto for choice, which for some is also a new burden that further disempowers rather than empowers them. (See my 1991 piece in The Nation: "Choice Can Save Public Education.") How did small schools and choice become the enemy of thousands of good teachers, parents, and students? Why have they launched attacks against New York's mayor and school chancellor for mandating the closing of their large neighborhood schools, in order to morph them into small schools?

Wait and see. (Of course, if you've been reading Diane and me, you already know part of the answer.) Express your views on small schools and choice on this site. I hope, Diane, that you will weigh in, too. (You can also go to my Web site—www.deborahmeier.com—for a longer account of what happened.)

Deborah

Afterword: It has been a hard few months. Last week, one of the most thoughtful voices in education—Seymour Sarason—died. At 91. He led a long, fruitful life, wrote many books and inspired many educators, including K-12 teachers, mental health practitioners, and more. He was curious about everything, including why deliberate change was so hard to "make" happen. The more things change, the more they stay the same, he reminded us. But he didn't stop working for change. He was a friend and adviser to all those naïve enough to keep at the task. I owe him so much—even if we didn't solve the conundrum posed. Read his books, starting with Revisiting: "The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change" and including the one I read over and over before starting Central Park East Secondary School, The Predictable Failure of Educational Reform. Or Rob Fried's The Skeptical Visionary, a compilation and commentary on Seymour's work.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 9:46 AM | Permalink | No Comments | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

Last week, the New York City Department of Education pushed through a decision to close 19 high schools. With the encouragement of the "Race to the Top," we will surely see similar closings across the nation, hundreds or perhaps thousands of them. Entrepreneurs cheer when public schools close, as new space opens up for their ventures in philanthropy and profits.

It is odd that school leaders feel triumphant when they close schools, as though they were not responsible for them. They enjoy the role of executioner, shirking any responsibility for the schools in their care. Every time a school is closed, those at the top should hang their heads in shame for their inability or refusal to offer timely assistance. Instead they exult in the failure of schools that are entrusted to their stewardship.

The decision in NYC was probably made long ago, but the law required a public hearing by the city's school board (named the Panel for Educational Policy by Mayor Bloomberg). An overflow crowd of 2,000-3,000 parents, teachers, and students turned out for the hearing to protest the closing of their schools; some 350 people signed up to speak against the closings.

But to no avail. The panel—whose majority is appointed by the mayor and serves at his pleasure—sat impassively and listened without being moved by what they heard. The vote was taken at 3 a.m., when most of the audience had given up and gone home. As expected, the panel voted to close the schools; representatives of four of the city's five borough presidents voted against, but in vain because the mayor controls the panel. This is what mayoral control means. The mayor does whatever he wishes, regardless of the views of parents, students, and teachers. The schools belong to him, not them. Democracy at work.

The mayor claims that he could not let students remain even one more day in a failing school, so he never wavered in his determination to close schools with low test scores and poor graduation rates. His Department of Education felt no obligation to provide the resources to change those numbers.

But let's look at those numbers. For the past several years, with the support of the Gates Foundation, the city closed nearly 100 schools and opened more than 350 small ones. As large schools closed, the new small schools (and charter schools) that replaced them did not take a fair share of high-needs students, which enabled them to have better results. So the remaining large schools have disproportionate numbers of children with high needs—those who are homeless, low-performing, immigrants, non-English-speaking, or with extreme disabilities. With each new round of closures, other large schools are set up to fail.

Among the schools closed were Columbus High School in the Bronx and Jamaica High School in Queens. These are schools that had been pillars of their communities for many years. Yet in both cases, the Department of Education had overloaded them with the most challenging students, stigmatized them as "failures" (which encouraged the flight of many students), and never supplied the support and resources they needed. The more they struggled, the more the DOE abandoned them and readied them for closure. In reality, they were victims of the DOE's own policies. Now their valuable space can be turned into small schools and handed over to charter operators.

Jamaica High School, once the jewel of its community, was labeled "persistently dangerous" after a cautious principal reported every disciplinary incident. Many students fled once the label was posted. As enrollment dropped, the DOE installed a spiffy small school inside Jamaica High, whose students had smaller classes, more technology, freshly painted classrooms, and the resources denied to the larger enrollment. Jamaica High was not too dangerous for them! Marc Epstein, a teacher at Jamaica for many years, refers to the situation as "academic apartheid": excellent facilities for the few, disdain and decay for the many.

Christine Rowland, a teacher at Columbus High School, described how the school received disproportionate numbers of poorly prepared students and how it struggled to educate them. Last year, only about 5 percent of the students who entered Columbus in 9th grade were on grade level in reading, and less than 15 percent in math, a dramatic decrease over the past decade. Similarly, the proportion of special education students grew from 7 percent in 2001 to nearly 25 percent. As it was overburdened with the high-needs students from other large schools that closed, Columbus was set up for failure, as Jamaica was.

This is a great and terrible charade. It is not about improving education or helping kids. It is about producing data to demonstrate that small schools are better than large ones and that charters are better than regular public schools. The destruction of neighborhood public schools is merely collateral damage, though it may also be a goal of free-market zealots. The neediest kids will continue to be pushed out and bounced around until they give up. And the data will get better and better until the day comes when the DOE runs out of large high schools to close.

I know you are a major supporter of small schools, but this is a terrible corruption of your ideas. These new small schools are produced not by an educator with a vision, but by a bureaucracy with a business plan.

Over the course of the mayor's third term, we can expect to see more privatization, continued closings of schools (including his own small schools, six of which were closed last week), and continued disruption of the lives of students, teachers, and communities. Schools will be treated like chain stores, opened and closed in response to market forces. New York City is repeating the pattern established in Chicago, where many schools were closed, but displaced students, on average, did no better or worse, and nearly half the displaced students ended up in other low-performing schools.

Race to the Top encourages the shell games that are being played to the applause of politicians and foundations, but to the detriment of students and communities. What matters most are the data. How anyone can confuse the data with better education is beyond my understanding.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:39 AM | Permalink | No Comments | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

It was good to read your summary of our plight with my old hometown Chicago, not NYC, as the centerpiece. It's a replay of the scenario under the former Secretary of Education Rod Paige who shipped his "Texas miracle" to the nation under President George W. Bush. The result—NCLB. Only later did we discover that his "success" was based on lies, lies, and more damn lies.

The term "best practices" in education always gives me trouble. Normally I wince, but let it pass. So I was delighted when Dr. Jerome Groopman shared the same reaction regarding "best practices" in medicine in a recent essay in The New York Review of Books. (He is Dina and Raphael Recanati Chair of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Chief of Experimental Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.)

Rhetoric around education reform has long borrowed from the world of business. But it has also latched onto the reforms in medicine. I've argued that neither was comparable to education, since both are easier to measure along lines that do not involve political or ideological biases. Defining good health does not divide Blues from Reds, although how to pay for it and who decides what surely does. (I was always puzzled how whole language vs. phonics became a right vs. left issue.)

Groopman reminds us that what constitutes "best practice" in medicine is controversial, even when it comes to the "basics" of curing people or preventing illness. Evidence (and best practice) shifts rapidly. Doctors (looking at the same data) offer conflicting opinions and large-scale studies conducted to "settle it" produce results that get overturned 10 years later. The knowledge needed, he argues, may well best be situated in the contextual knowledge that rests between doctor and patient—plus easy access to second opinions by both parties. You have to read it all to realize how comparable the arguments are about the weight we should give The Data in either field in making decisions about "Patient X."

Groopman presents the case from two perspectives. On one side are Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. Sunstein is a professor of law and Thaler of behavioral science, respectively. They seem roughly to be taking Groopman's position regarding "best practice." (He describes it as a sort of "nudge" approach, in the service of "libertarian paternalism.") On the other side is Peter Orszag, director of the federal Office of Management and Budget. (Note that none are experts in the field in review, but all are friends of Obama.) Orszag believes that behavioral economics should guide the delivery of health care; he doesn't trust doctors and health administrators to do what is "best" unless there are clear and unambiguous mandates along with "aggressive promulgation of standards and changes in financial and other incentives." (Sound familiar?) Groopman describes his own work in the field and how often his own research created 'best practice' that turned into bad practice.

There is, Groopman contends, "a growing awareness....that past efforts to standardize and broadly mandate 'best practices' were scientifically misconceived..." What was to one research scientists a "no-brainer" was to another far more complex. "The care of patients is complex, and choices about treatment involve different tradeoffs. That the uncertainties can be erased by mandates from experts is a misconceived panacea, a 'focusing illusion.' "

What Groopman suggests is not that we cease engaging in scientific research and the sharing of information, but that we remain open to the importance in medicine of interpreting the complexities of the data closer to the field of practice. Creating institutions—hospitals and departments of medicine that keep abreast, demand collegiality and good documentation of practice is what is needed to keep medicine both honest and forward-looking. In a field such as education, whose essential underlying purpose includes far more unsettled issues of purpose, including something as elusive as "character," not to mention its default position in favor of democracy with its peculiar respect for individual judgment, the Groopman argument holds up even better.

If we demand only practices that meet the "evidence-based" authorities, the critical experimental work by educators with deviant ideas will never get off the ground. Where will the ideas critical for our long-term future come from if we mandate a single path? When we think about schooling as a "race" against adversaries, with "test scores" as the only acceptable evidence, we forget that the human species is in for a long-distance run. Had we not been allowed to experiment with small schools of choice in East Harlem, the "small schools movement" might not have happened. (Which, for all the faulty implementation of the idea, is still, I believe, a powerful tool.)

The tricky role of "trust" must be confronted head on. In "In Schools We Trust," written some nine years ago, I tried to think "trust" through around one school—Mission Hill. We have much work to do to discover ways to improve education that do not further undermine trust—without which democracy and even learning the "basics" depend.

Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 6:53 AM | Permalink | No Comments | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

It is time to appraise the first year of the Obama administration and its impact on American education. I met with Arne Duncan in October, and I liked him very much. He is a very likeable guy. But I strongly disagree with his priorities. In a recent Education Week article about Duncan, I was quoted as giving him an A for effectiveness, and a D- for bad ideas. Let me explain.

Duncan's "Race to the Top" competition has had an enormous effect on American education. He has $4.3 billion to hand out, without any congressional authorization or oversight, and states are starved for money. Many states have changed their laws and are now prepared to privatize hundreds of schools to qualify for RTTT. Spurred on by their eagerness to get RTTT money and the largesse of the Gates Foundation, many districts now intend to judge teachers by their students' test scores.

I can't recall any secretary of education who was more effective in getting states to make changes quickly. That is why I gave him an A. But I think the changes are wrong and will not improve American education, so I gave him a D- for bad ideas.

When a leader acts as forcefully as Duncan, he has in mind a template for success. In his case, it must be Chicago. When President Obama introduced Duncan as his choice, he described dramatic improvements in Chicago during Duncan's tenure. As superintendent of schools, Duncan closed many low-performing schools and opened many new schools.

However, further analysis has shown that the dramatic improvements hailed by President Obama were a mirage. The Chicago Tribune recently analyzed the results of Duncan's "Renaissance 2010" program and concluded that "it has done little to improve the educational performance of the city's school system."

Everyone who has looked at Chicago's academic performance has reached similar conclusions, including the Civic Committee of The Commercial Club of Chicago, Catalyst Notebook, and the Consortium on Chicago School Research.

Blogger Alexander Russo has covered this story well. So have reporters Gregg Toppo of USA Today, Nick Anderson of The Washington Post, and Sam Dillon of The New York Times. (Registration required for NYT story.)

And, of course, Chicago was among the nation's lowest-performing districts from 2003 to 2009 on NAEP.

Yet the clamor to install mayoral control (like Chicago) and to close struggling schools (like Chicago) continues.

None of the news stories and evaluations has slowed the momentum for the Race to the Top. The states need the money. In fact, President Obama plans to add another $1.3 billion to promote the same failed policies across the nation.

What is your take on the Race to the Top?

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 9:14 AM | Permalink | No Comments | TrackBacks (0)