By Jal Mehta

What would it take to generate significant improvement in American schooling?

The current path forward is not going to get us there. Despite the ideological heterogeneity of our group, there was a lot of agreement about what was broken. Expectations far outstrip performance. Teachers (on the whole) can't do what is asked of them, especially as expectations increase. Bureaucratic structures erected in the Progressive Era seek to address the problem but only compound it. Policymakers distrust teachers and schools; teachers and schools distrust policymakers. Efforts to rationalize schools through NCLB style accountability just double down on the existing structure, and are largely impotent to create the kind of significant improvement we say we seek. If we keep doing what we're doing, we're not going to get there.

Broadly speaking, four pathways have emerged that would depart significantly from our present path, and offer some reason to think that they might yield large-scale improvement. (This draws on the work of the group, but represents my view only.)

1) The International path -- One possibility would be to follow the international leaders by making teaching a more selective and higher status profession, which would put the quality control upfront, and thus decrease the need for such extensive external testing and accountability. In terms of existing teachers, we'd seek to decrease the acrimony between teachers and their representatives and policymakers, and follow Ontario's lead in finding ways to combine internal expertise with external expertise and support to generate improved practice. We would also seek greater equalization of funding. This would require a radical shift in at least three ways: a) we'd move from taking teachers from the bottom 40 percent of the distribution to the top third; b) we'd move away from our world-leading emphasis on testing and external accountability in favor of support and capacity building; c) teachers unions would need to take on a professionalized role in addition to a strictly bread and butter one.

2) Reform from the outside in -- A second possibility is that the "one best system" which has governed the U.S. since the beginning of the 20th century is gradually replaced by a group of outsiders. Challengers now exist to virtually every aspect of the traditional educational "establishment": Charter schools and regular public schools. Alternatively certified teachers and traditionally certified teachers. Newly created teacher training institutions and longstanding education schools. New foundations as opposed to older ones. Portfolio districts, like New York and New Orleans, as opposed to traditional ones. Rather than trying yet again to reform a broken system, we would simply replace the system, piece by piece, with new entrants who can start from scratch as they design what they hope will be better ways to do the work. Right now, the total number of students served by the new entrants is still relatively small compared to the system as a whole, but the new actors have made substantial inroads in a number of major cities. It is not impossible to imagine that they could end up the majority power in the top 100 systems serving poor youth in America.

3) Marrying school and social reform -- This is an old idea, but the basic insights are no less true for not being new. What might be new would be to move from this as an aspirational ideal to a more concrete set of practices--inter-agency collaborations or teachers housed in schools explicitly responsible for helping students with problems that extend beyond schools. To a remarkable degree, we are in a "schools only" moment, despite mountains of evidence of the inefficacy of schools alone, and one might imagine a path that took these external factors seriously might be significantly more successful. The intense interest in the Harlem Children's Zone is one indication of how potent this strand of thinking remains.

4) Technological reinvention -- And finally, a number of the essays suggested that we might be moving towards a world where all of the previous might become obsolete, or at least recast in light of a new set of realities. We could see this in the essay about "beyond brick and mortar schooling" as well as in some of the ideas about "unbundling" teaching and moving to a model with a mixture of adults in different roles and increasingly sophisticated technology filling some of the gap. To paraphrase Al Shanker's view, "when you have 3 million of anything, you have a whole lot of average." Technology has the potential to take the best of what we can figure out and give it to everyone, without finding 3 million above average teachers. This would also be a world with much more choice -- not just choice among schools as we know them, but choice among all the pieces that comprise an education.

In the short term, any of these paths face considerable obstacles. The institutional conservatism of the school system is legendary and has overcome generation after generation of would-be reformers. Some of the above approaches would also require more significant changes to the political economy that surrounds schools, which would likely arouse opposition from advantaged people who are perfectly happy with the schools their children attend. The most likely outcome is that we continue to muddle through -- higher standards through common core, possibly a little more choice here and there, but the ultimate shape of the system is unchanged.

But at the same time there are reasons to think that significant change is possible. The creation of the PISA has given a significant push to international comparative research; the Secretary of Education has hosted a summit and two other events on what the U.S. can learn from worldwide leaders. The birth and growth of TFA, the success of high performing charter schools, and the infusion of new money has enabled rapid expansion for those who want to move on the sector from the outside in. Harlem Children's Zone, the movement for extended school time, and the broadly shared sense that extra-school factors matter could support a renewed push for shared responsibility. And "blended learning" or "unbundled schools" are not only coming, they have already arrived--if they can prove themselves superior, one has to imagine the market for these services will only increase.

Of course, none of these changes will come absent politics. Both the best and occasionally most frustrating aspects of our public schools is that they are publicly governed, which means that we all have a say in what happens to them. If any of the above pathways are to replace the one we are currently on, it will only happen by people organizing to support policy and practice that is consistent with their preferred vision of a better school system. As you do, I hope you listen to teachers and students--history is rife with people who have wanted to remake schools without listening to the people who are inside them. I firmly believe we can create a better future--one that is both respectful of the people doing the work and is consistent with our highest aspirations for our schools and for ourselves as a people.

Jal Mehta is an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Posted by Futures of School Reform Group at 7:30 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

By Jal Mehta

As we close the blog, I wanted to thank everyone involved. Elizabeth Rich at Education Week was really important in seeing the potential for this kind of venture, the contributors did their part by laying out a wide range of potential visions, and the commenters have greatly enriched the conversation in their contributions. Helen Malone did great work in administering the blog, as well as writing a post. Thanks also to the Hewlett and Spencer Foundations for funding this work.

A couple of programming notes: There will be an online chat in a couple weeks with Bob Schwartz, where you will have a chance to discuss in real time the feasibility of some of the ideas from the series. Education Week is also going to feature some of the best from the commentaries and blogs in an upcoming issue.

One more substantive post to follow.

Jal Mehta is an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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By Jal Mehta

On Monday I'm going to offer the final post of the futures blog, trying to link together some of what we've discussed over the past few months, and lay out some of the choices that are before us. But since this is Friday, I thought I'd just share a couple of things in the school world that might give us a sense of what we might be aiming towards.

At the school level, I spent a week at High Tech High earlier this spring. It's a socio-economically mixed school which is striking for the way that it is teacher and student driven; you can't teach there if you can't come up with projects and curriculum that will arouse the kids passions; you won't thrive as a student there if you don't invest in your learning. Here's a snippet:

At the district level, last year I went to Mapleton, Colorado, which flies under the radar but is a very intentionally created portfolio district. Mapleton has project-based schools, more traditional schools, an IB school, arts schools, a school for young adults who haven't succeeded in conventional schools, all linked by a common set of expectations for all students. During the 2008 campaign, Obama visited the MESA school, an arts infused school in Mapleton that sends 100% of its high school graduates to college. (MESA used to be headed by now state senator Mike Johnston.) While there is still work to be done (the school I saw was somewhat uneven from classroom to classroom), the district shows the huge advantages of allowing parents, teachers, and students to select into an environment that fits their goals and passions.

And at the federal level, Mike Smith has a proposal for a zero-based reauthorization of ESEA. Zero-based is fancy policy language for "starting over." He suggests that our accumulated layers of titles and programs should be scrapped, and that we should focus on a few basic things, of which the ones that are most appealing to me are incentivizing more equal state funding, and trying to move from compliance type structures to adaptive systems that change, learn and evolve. In this model, rather than assuming we can specify outcomes through programs and rules, we accept the fact that in complex adaptive systems, the world is too complex to be managed from afar, and that what we need is local problem-solving informed by external expertise.

Finally, I had a chance to work on an OECD report where we profiled leading nations on the PISA, and one of the things we discovered was that several of the leaders had opted for a model with strong training upfront followed by a high level of decentralization in how teachers and schools develop the schooling. Here's Finland, in moving pictures:

What ties these together is the sense that we need to trust, empower and enable the people doing the work (principals, teachers and students). HTH shows this in action. Mapleton avoids the one size fits all district mentality and allows for the creation of different kinds of schools. While Mike has always believed in the value of standards, his proposal shows how standards doesn't have to mean standardization, and can be used to guide and enable the kind of on the ground problem-solving that we see at HTH and in Mapleton. And the Finnish system provides a proof point (yes, in a very different, more homogenous, much smaller country) for what it might look like to organize a whole system this way.

Jal Mehta is an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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By Jal Mehta

Marc Tucker has penned what I see as one of the most important reports on how to improve American education in years. (Full disclosure, I contributed a chapter to the book on which the report is based.) I know, I know, there is a report a week in the education space, but what makes this one distinctive is that it takes the accumulating evidence on how high performing countries achieve what they do, and offers a specific set of recommendations about what it would take to move the American education system in that direction.

I can't do justice to the recommendations in a blog post--you need to read the whole thing. It hits a number of the highlights of this series, most notably the need to make teaching more selective, higher paid, and with much more intensive training and preparation. It takes a hard line on what this would mean in terms of state certification of new teachers, arguing that we need to, "Raise the criteria for teacher licensure to internationally benchmarked levels and never, under any circumstances, waive the licensure standards in the face of a teacher shortage." It compliments TFA for its selectivity, but argues that it cannot replace the kind of induction system that exists in other countries.

It thinks less of the market approach, and it's most newsworthy parts might be the comparison between these leading performers and how it characterizes the American approach:

It turns out that neither the researchers whose work is reported on in this paper nor the analysts of the OECD PISA data have found any evidence that any country that leads the world's education performance league tables has gotten there by implementing any of the major agenda items that dominate the education reform agenda in the United States.

We include in this list the use of market mechanisms such as charter schools and vouchers, the identification and support of education entrepreneurs to disrupt the system, and the use of student performance data on standardized tests to identify teachers and principals who are then rewarded on that basis for the value they add to a student's education or who are punished because they fail to do so.

And, not surprisingly, this led to a reaction from Arne Duncan at the release of the report, who argued that a number of the elements of the RTTT agenda were in line with the international recommendations. You can read Duncan's comments here, or watch the whole event here.

I don't agree with everything Marc says, and actually think some of the charter networks are doing exactly the same things that the leading international performers are. But in the breadth of not only its critique, but also the vision of how we might generate a substantially better system, the report is well worth considering.

Jal Mehta is an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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By Jal Mehta

Last week I was in D.C. for a conference hosted by Rick Hess and AEI that aimed to derive lessons from 50 years of federal government involvement in schooling. The adjective in the title is "sobering" (sobering lessons), and the tone of the conference was fairly bleak. Speaker after speaker, from the left as well as the right, talked about the inability of the federal government to generate on the ground improvement in schooling. You can read an overview and links to the papers here.

As a contrarian, I started to note the examples that contradicted the thesis, and found that the speakers had actually offered a fairly lengthy list of things the federal government could do well amidst their overall pessimism. Here's a scorecard:

Feds can:
1) Keep states and districts from doing awful things (IDEA)
2) Provide political cover for people lower in the system who want to do things but are afraid of political backlash
3) Fund R and D (we could be much smarter about it, but it is a function of the feds)
4) Use the bully pulpit
5) Fund discrete things directly (magnet schools were cited)
6) Directly fund CMOs and other external actors who might be able to help provide better schooling
7) Create common data and force some degree of transparency

Feds might be able to:
1) Use incentives to get states and districts to do valuable things, especially things they were marginally inclined to do anyway.
2) Help build an infrastructure of NGOs that could help schools do things better

Feds cannot:
1) Create quality at the level of schools/force schools to get better
2) Make people do things they don't want to do well (i.e at a high level of quality)
3) Foster innovation (maybe they can, but they haven't done much yet).

Four observations about this list. The first is that what we think of as what government does -- issuing lots of regulations that seek to force lower powers to do their bidding -- is just one of many tools at the government's disposal. That particular mechanism works really badly at producing quality, but the government has a number of other arrows in its quiver.

The second is that the bully pulpit is really important. With only 10% of the overall funding, the federal government has been able to drive the conversation--first around high poverty students in the 1960s, then through A Nation at Risk (a commission sponsored by the DOE), and most recently through NCLB.

Third, there may be some things where there are just not good answers. One of the most interesting debates at the conference was between equity liberals like Kati Haycock who were defending the spirit of NCLB on the grounds that if the federal government didn't stand up for the most disadvantaged students, who would? On the other side were a number of us who were arguing that if we were moving from floors towards ceilings, regulatory mechanisms weren't going to get us there. But Kati's point was also right -- she was arguing that if we left it to states or schools, there were some states and schools that have just terrible records of treating poor and minority kids well. I find both sides of this argument persuasive -- leaving well enough alone or incentivizing the leaders means that you won't reach some kids who need it most; but trying to use regulatory mechanisms to "order" all of the nation's schools is also not likely to yield the results that you want. Perhaps the answer is more capacity building, or better mechanisms of selecting or training teachers, or turnarounds for the most disadvantaged schools, or some other policy fix, or perhaps this is just a tension with no really good answers.

Fourth, we're only one country in one period of time. What we have and haven't done well to date is not a measure of what we could or could not do well in the future. More on that tomorrow.

In any case, to justify the above list would require much more thorough documentation; think of it as a provocation to start the conversation. If the question is comparative advantage, what do you think the federal government is particularly positioned to do well? And, just as importantly, what does it not do well?

Jal Mehta is an Assistant Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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By Secretary Paul Reville

My post earlier this week framed the piece that Jeff Henig and I contributed to Ed Week's print edition and laid out the need for education reformers to review the evidence and admit that closing achievement gaps is not as simple as adopting a set of standards, accountability and instructional improvement strategies. While these strategies are necessary, the data on student achievement in Massachusetts, after nearly two decades of reform, makes it readily apparent that schooling solutions alone are not sufficient to achieve our aspiration of getting all students to proficiency. We have set the nation's highest standards, been tough on accountability and invested billions in building school capacity, yet we still see a very strong correlation between socioeconomic background and educational achievement and attainment. It is now clear that unless and until we make a more active effort to mitigate the impediments to learning that are commonly associated with poverty, we will still be faced with large numbers of children who are either unable to come to school or so distracted as not to be able to be attentive and supply effort when they get there. In other words, we must create a healthy platform in the lives of all of our children if we expect them to show the learning gains expected to result from optimized instructional strategies.

The post generated a robust dialogue about the topic, a lot of interesting philosophical debate. However, the challenge now is to translate our analysis into action by implementing a series of strategies, coupled with measurable outcomes, to ensure success.

In June of 2008, Governor Patrick, in announcing his Readiness Project, identified twin strategies for closing the achievement gaps in Massachusetts, the nation's leading state on most measures of student learning. He said we needed to improve the quality of instruction in each and every classroom in Massachusetts from early education through the university. At the same time, he articulated a second and more radical strategy by demanding that we guarantee that each child come to school on a healthy platform with the kind of services and support that would enable him/her to attend regularly, be attentive and supply motivated effort. Since the release of the Readiness Project report, the Patrick Administration has sought to bring these strategies to life.

In January 2010, the Governor signed a law triggering the most sweeping change to education in Massachusetts since the landmark 1993 Education Reform Act. The Achievement Gap Act of 2010 laid the ground work for immediate and aggressive action to transform our lowest performing schools, dramatically raised the cap for the state's highest performing charter schools and authorized promising, new Innovation Schools, allowing districts to internally charter their own exceptional schools.

One of the most powerful provisions of the Act requires the state's lowest performing schools to explicitly address, in their school turnaround plans, the health and social-emotional well-being of all students. Now, each of our thirty-five chronically underperforming schools is committed to addressing "out-of-school factors" in their improvement strategies and in their budgets. Some schools have been making provision for counselors or community engagement specialists to be employed full time to connect needy students and their families with supportive services designed to address out-of-school issues that threaten and disrupt student learning. In a related development, the Secretary of Health and Human Services recently announced that each of these schools would receive a liaison from her department, a regular presence in the school, to form the connective tissue between the school, students, and families, and the services provided by the state's many health and human service agencies.

We also wrote into our nation-leading Race to the Top (RTTT) application provisions scaling up what we are modeling in these turnaround schools. We invited city school systems to compete for grants to establish "wraparound zones," the infrastructure to connect education and social services throughout the city. These new service switchboards will be funded by our RTTT funds.

Through an executive order two years ago, the Governor established the Child and Youth Readiness Cabinet, which I co-chair with Massachusetts Health and Human Services Secretary, Dr. Judy Ann Bigby. This interagency coordinating council is comprised of the secretaries of Housing and Economic Development, Labor and Workforce Development, Public Safety and Security, Administration and Finance, and the Child Advocate. The Cabinet has chosen to focus on underperforming schools, designing an initiative to build new communication and information sharing networks and foster interagency collaboration between education, health, housing, and safety professionals with the goal of increasing children's success both in and out of school. Collaboration is far easier to talk about than to do, but the Readiness Cabinet is hard at work in developing plan for these turnaround partnerships, which will become active in the coming months.

Massachusetts is also a major contender in the federal Promise Neighborhoods competition, another approach to addressing out-of-school needs. The Commonwealth is home to three exciting, new partnerships selected among just twenty-one such partnerships nationwide for initial planning grants from the U.S. Department of Education. These pioneering partnerships, cousins of the famous Harlem Children's Zone, will help Massachusetts scale up community-wide services to its neediest children. As they contemplate diverse supports from prenatal care and parental education all the way to assistance for students attending college, these diverse partners are attempting to institutionalize the kind of wraparound attention that middle class children take for granted. In our view, that's what it's going to take to close achievement gaps.

There are dozens of examples of our robust non-profit community providing extraordinary supports to educators and government agencies in the quest to serve our neediest children better. One of our most successful programs, called City Connects, began by providing staff to oversee the inclusion of wraparound services from several local health and human service agencies into a small number of targeted Boston public schools. Now, the program is expanding statewide. At the same time, we are home to many Full-Service Schools which have been engaged in this work for years blazing a path and providing perspective on our current work. The state's nationally renowned experiment with expanded learning time is reaping outstanding results while after school programs are flourishing and many of these directly address the unmet needs of children battling the challenges of poverty.

We are also exploring better ways and means of sharing data on the health, well-being, and academic success of our students. While respectful of privacy concerns, we must do much better at providing educators the background on children and their families so that we can tailor an approach to meet the needs of each child. To this end, we are proposing the creation of a "Readiness Passport" which will be similar to a running, medical record including information on which services students have received, which issues are current, which treatments have worked, and which impediments may be preventing them from attending school and being attentive in class. With such information, educators will be better prepared to tailor educational strategies designed to overcome barriers and advance student learning.

To measure our success at this work, we will have to identify a set of leading indicators attached to some clear goals. This is very much a work in progress. A simple example is school attendance. Obviously, students can't learn if they're not in school. If we measure attendance and hold schools responsible for improving it, then they will, of necessity, begin to focus on the out-of-school factors impeding student attendance. Eliminating these barriers should result in increased student learning.

I recently witnessed this work in action. Governor Patrick and I visited the Orchard Gardens K-8 School in Boston. Orchard Gardens is really a perfect example of many of our initiatives at work. First, they were identified under the Achievement Gap Act as a school in need of immediate improvement. The superintendent utilized the changes made possible in the law to bring on an inspiring, new principal who in turn utilized the changes made possible by the law to make major changes to the staff and the structure of the school day. Additionally, again using the law, the superintendent empowered the principal to partner with various community organizations to provide services to students and families. One such partner is City Year whose young workers bring energy and a sharp focus to the challenges of student attendance at the school. Orchard Gardens began working with City Year Boston to specifically target issues with attendance. Each day, City Year corps members get a list from teachers of students who are not in school and call home, call cell phones, call families, and sometimes make visits all toward the goal of increasing attendance. The City Year professionals then become case workers with students and families guiding solutions to attendance problems. This allows teachers and administrators to focus on teaching while making sure that students are in school to enjoy the benefits of improved instruction. It's a bit early to look at results, but the principal reports that the effort is already paying dividends and substantial learning gains are in the offing. This school is just one example of the kind of comprehensive work we must take to scale if we intend to close our most persistent achievement gaps.

The inclusion of wraparound services is pragmatic approach to long unaddressed problems in the lives of children, problems that routinely interfere with learning. It's high time that we, as educators, recognize these problems and begin to get more active in working with others to solve them as they constitute such a threat to our achieving our educational aspirations. We must maintain our commitment to high expectations, regular assessments, and accountability. However, we must face up to those factors which are undermining our best instructional intentions.

S. Paul Reville is the Massachusetts secretary of education, and, in that role, directs the executive office of education and works closely with the commonwealth's education agencies and the University of Massachusetts system while serving as a voting member of the governing board of all four state education agencies. He is the governor's top adviser on education and helps shape the state's education reform agenda, including the recent Achievement Gap Act of 2010.

Posted by Futures of School Reform Group at 12:27 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

By Jeffrey R. Henig

No one, I dare to reckon, has accused Joel Klein of possessing a bureaucratic mindset. Let me be the first. I do so because it is one particular aspect of this mindset--a narrow focus on a designated function and set of institutional tools-- that seduces too many well-intentioned reforms to dismiss the "outside-in" consideration of non-school factors that Paul Reville and I argue in our commentary will be a important tools for social intervention in the future of education reform.

In most ways, of course, Klein has made his name as the ultimate anti-bureaucrat. When Michael Bloomberg selected him as his first chancellor, Klein's main claim to fame was as a trust-busting assistant attorney general in charge of the Clinton administration's landmark cases against Microsoft. "It's not an accident that the mayor selected the country's leading antitrust litigator and not a teacher to lead the DOE," one top department administrator noted. "He's a guy who breaks up monopolies," another told a reporter. "The problem was the problem of monopolies - the lack of competition, market failure. The whole thing had to be blown up." Jack Welch, to whom Klein turned to launch a principal training operation, informed a team of district leaders that they should emulate the General Electric approach of "annihilating" bureaucracy. As laid out in GE's 2000 Annual Report: "We cultivate the hatred of bureaucracy in our company, and never for a moment hesitate to use that awful word 'hate.' Bureaucrats must be ridiculed and removed."

Why has bureaucracy become everyone's favorite kicking boy? Because the same things that make bureaucracy useful - hierarchy, top-down authority, fixed jurisdiction, specialization, emphasis on expertise, a career system, impersonal application of rules -- can mutate into something that is smothering, exasperating, and occasional dangerous.

"The decisive reason for the advance of the bureaucratic organization has always been its purely technical superiority over any other form of organization," wrote Max Weber, the German sociologist sometimes referred to as the "father of bureaucracy." But while impersonal application of rules and regulations means the absence of favoritism, it also means the absence of compassion and sensitivity. Top-down authority enforces uniformity and consistency, yes, but also street-level bureaucrats unwilling to take responsibility without seeking permission from their superiors, who have to seek permission from their superiors, and so on up the line. A career system anchored in expertise can create organizational capacity to get things done, but also distance from the experience and concerns of the Joe the Plumbers of America, who see bureaucrats as a favored class who live comfortable lives without having to break a sweat.

Klein can be faulted for focusing on the stifling, routinizing, and distancing effects associated with bureaucracy, without acknowledging the positive side of the coin. But my critique goes beyond this. (I use Klein as the foil here because he has been among the most visible and vocal proponents of a point of view, and he continues to play this leadership role even after leaving his NYC position.) While actively setting up educational bureaucracies as their foil, he and many other reformers have tended to think and act like bureaucracies in one important and constricting respect.

Central to bureaucracies is their issue specialization, including a disciplined focus on the tools within their designated field. But this, too, cuts both ways. Specialization makes possible the mobilization of advanced technical expertise and a coherence and intentionality that generalist institutions are rarely able to pull off. But it also makes government incoherent and uncoordinated, a danger that political scientist Theodore Lowi warned about more than four decades ago. Bureaucracies, or what Lowi called the "New Machines," have made cities "well-run but ungoverned" by allowing neglect "of those activities around which bureaucracies are not organized, or those which fall between or among agencies' jurisdictions."

But isn't it simpler to let educators pull on the school change lever while others pull on the housing lever, income support lever, family services lever, and so on across the array of functionally organized bureaucracies? Simpler, yes. But smarter? No. That would be like telling Derek Jeter to worry only about the baseballs that are hit in his direction, when his real value includes his ability to anticipate and synchronizing with the movement of his eight other teammates on the field.

Jeffrey R. Henig is a professor of political science and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. His recent book, Spin Cycle: How Research Is Used in Policy Debates, The Case of Charter Schools (Russell Sage Foundation Publications, 2008), won the American Educational Research Association's Outstanding Book Award in 2010.

Posted by Futures of School Reform Group at 12:08 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

By Helen Janc Malone

Child and youth programs tend to be on the fringe of school reform discourse; yet, they can be a positive influence on student learning, particularly in high-poverty communities. Since NCLB, there has been increased pressure on such programs to prove their relevance in education by quickly improving students' grades and standardized test scores. While some programs are able to make such links through supplemental homework assistance and tutoring services, there are other programs that could positively shape both short- and long-term student learning outcomes but are often discredited as "extra," "luxury," or "nice, but not necessary."

A problem facing many child and youth programs is that they are largely absent from mainstream education conversations and the popular media, which are dominated by debates about teacher unions, test scores, and school budgets. This is not too surprising, given that school reform and out-of-school time supporters, although serving the same constituency--K-12 students--operate in silos with separate advocacy groups, government funding streams, and human capital structures, and are guided by a distinguishable body of research. As a result, what is often considered tacit knowledge within the child and youth development fields is often misunderstood by the public, policy-makers, and even some school reformers.

Anecdotes and personal perceptions still tend to guide much of the public's thinking about the purpose(s) of child and youth programs. Out-of-school time programs face an array of perceptions--from being considered glorified babysitters on one end of the spectrum to being viewed as essential vehicles for helping students prepare for their post-secondary futures on the other. Variable program quality, the paraprofessional staffing model, and diversity of foci are cited by some school reformers as key concerns and primary reasons for keeping such services on the periphery of the education reform debates. Out-of-school time learning supporters often push back, noting that programs vary as much as school classrooms do, and that the field has over the past decade invested in rigorous evaluations, made professional development delivery improvements, and increased quality programming that together help create diverse learning pathways for children and youth, particularly in low-income communities.

A popular phrase coined a few years back, "schools can't do it alone," suggests that we, as a society, place too high of a burden on our schools to both alleviate all the negative influences that play a role in student learning, such as those associated with poverty, and, at the same time, prepare every student to access and graduate from college. For schools feeling pressure to "do it all," having community partners that offer learning opportunities, provide enrichment activities, and engage children and youth in positive developmental experiences seems appealing; however, school-community partnerships continue to be sporadic, and the government response to include out-of-school time programs into the education fold continues to be largely haphazard and reactive.

The push to "prove" the worthiness of out-of-school time programs to have a seat at the education table tends to boil down to demands for immediate causal links to standardized test scores, grades, or school attendance. This shows a misunderstanding of what these programs are designed to do, a narrow definition of what constitutes learning, and an over-eagerness to measure every form of knowledge acquisition against the same yardstick. And, while there is growing rhetoric to move beyond the test scores and invest in the twenty-first century education system(s), the school reality and access to a wider set of learning opportunities for many students in resource-poor communities by and large remain unchanged.

So, what can be done to "prove" that out-of-school programs play a role in the school reform movement? Internal to the child and youth development field, there should be greater knowledge production, from longitudinal evaluations, value-added and cost-benefit studies, to data-driven on-the-ground practices. Externally, the education and child and youth development fields should engage in intentional knowledge sharing about effective models of learning and school-community partnerships. Research on out-of-school time learning should be disseminated to a wider range of stakeholders, from teachers, families, front-line program staff, to the general public and media in order to create congruence in language, new images of what learning looks like and could be, and what learning experiences lead to college and career-ready adolescents. Knowledge sharing could build a wider support for diverse content and skill-building delivery mechanisms and acknowledge the roles both schools and non-school institutions play in student learning.

Helen Janc Malone is an advanced doctoral candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the project manager for the Futures of School Reform initiative. Her upcoming edited volume Expanded Learning Time and Opportunities is due out in the fall (Jossey-Bass).

Posted by Futures of School Reform Group at 12:26 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

By Jeffrey R. Henig

My two daughters are full-fledged adults now, but I can remember what it was like to parent them when they were small. Sometimes our decisions were based on very near-term considerations: how to keep them from running into the street without looking, how to get through a restaurant meal without a commotion. But, I think I'm not romanticizing when I remember that most of our important decisions were oriented around our hopes for how the girls would weather challenges and opportunities five, ten, and even twenty years down the road. Any one expedition to a museum was unlikely to have a perceptible effect, but out of a series of such adventures perhaps one or more would trip a wire that would affect their appreciation of culture and the likelihood that they'd take themselves to museums when old enough to make decisions on their own. A single visit to the dentist for a regular check-up would be unlikely to uncover serious problems requiring near-term procedures, but the accumulation of those visits might reduce the risk of cavities in childhood and gum disease in their adult years. My wife and I considered these things absolutely critical to being good parents, even at the same time that we knew that no single one was likely to matter and that even in the aggregate they were unlikely to matter in ways that we would witness soon.

I raise this issue of time horizon because I believe that much of our current education policy effort is mistakenly adopting a short-term perspective that inadvertently rewards actions with an immediate impact and discounts actions - the same one that most good parents make -- that may germinate for years before blossoming in very important ways.

During the 1970s, a hot controversy centered on explanations of poverty as being rooted in individuals' and groups' orientations toward time. Political scientist Edward Banfield became a lightning rod for this controversy. In his book, The Unheavenly City, Banfield blamed poverty and, to a great extent, urban decline on lower class culture: a "'distinct patterning' of attitudes, values, and models of behavior" associated with social class and best explained by a "psychological orientation toward the future." Banfield's claim that extreme present-orientation created a self-perpetuating condition of poverty, crime, and social decay led critics to charge him with a paternalistic, smug, and even racist view that blamed the victim for social forces beyond his or her control. His defenders argued that Banfield was being caricatured and the nuances of his argument deliberately misunderstood. But no one questioned that a short time horizon was unsophisticated and dysfunctional in a world in which a high return often requires investing in ways that may take years to realize their potential.

It's ironic that today's reform crusaders, so sophisticated in so many ways, suffer from the same present-orientation that Banfield ascribed to the lower class. But accountability regimes that attach nearly all of their consequences to outcomes measured within a single school year effectively adopt that same stunted time horizon. Some policy approaches focused on non-school factors will return immediate benefits, just like occasionally one of our family visits to a museum would spark some visible excitement in one of our girls. But there is no good reason to expect the best or highest return on such investments to develop immediately and grow along a straight line. And the same goes in education reform where school-focused strategies may be more likely to pass the test of generating short-term pay-offs, but where less direct strategies addressing public health, income inequality, concentration of poverty, or a broad community engagement are likely to take longer to take root and take effect.

When it comes to assessing educational strategies, reformers are right to insist on attention to the bottom line of outcomes and their ratio to costs, and proponents of outside-in reform approaches need to build an evidence for their claims and not just ask allegiance based on faith. But combining tight focus on the bottom line with present-orientation is a recipe for defeat.

Jeffrey R. Henig is a professor of political science and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. His recent book, Spin Cycle: How Research Is Used in Policy Debates, The Case of Charter Schools (Russell Sage Foundation Publications, 2008), won the American Educational Research Association's Outstanding Book Award in 2010.

Posted by Futures of School Reform Group at 12:08 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

By Secretary Paul Reville

I have been working on education reform in Massachusetts for a long time, from my days as a teacher through my current position as Secretary of Education. I am proud of this state's many educational accomplishments and our national leadership on student achievement. I am proud of the teachers, students and leaders who have built and shaped our success story.

In spite of our success, I am, nonetheless, regularly startled by what student achievement results tell us about the yawning gap between our educational aspirations and our actual performance. We have been at the business of high standards/high accountability school reform since 1993, and yet we must confront the reality of student outcomes such as these on the 2010 MCAS tests which demonstrate from the earliest grades to the latest grades and across all subjects, our work is far from done.

Consider:

• Grade 3 reading: 57% of Low Income students scored in the two lowest performance categories compared to 26% of non-Low Income students
• Grade 3 math: 54% of Low Income students scored in the two lowest performance the categories compared to 23% of non-Low Income students
• Grade 4 English: 70% of Low Income students scored in the two lowest performance categories compared to 34% of non-Low Income students
• Grade 4 math: 48% of Low Income students scored in the two lowest performance categories compared to 23% of non-Low Income students
• Grade 5 English: 59% of Low Income students scored in the two lowest performance categories compared to 26% of non-Low Income students
• Grade 5 math: 67% of Low Income students scored in the two lowest performance categories compared to 34% of non-Low Income students
• Grade 5 science: 71% of Low Income students scored in the two lowest performance categories compared to 34% of non-Low Income students
• Grade 6 English: 52% of Low Income students scored in the two lowest performance categories compared to 19% of non-Low Income students
• Grade 6 math: 62% of Low Income students scored in the two lowest performance categories compared to 30% of non-Low Income students
• Grade 7 English: 48% of Low Income students scored in the two lowest performance categories compared to 18% of non-Low Income students
• Grade 7 math: 69% of Low Income students scored in the two lowest performance categories compared to 35% of non-Low Income students
• Grade 8 English: 41% of Low Income students scored in the two lowest performance categories compared to 13% of non-Low Income students
• Grade 8 math: 71% of Low Income students scored in the two lowest performance categories compared to 38% of non-Low Income students
• Grade 8 science: 82% of Low Income students scored in the two lowest performance categories compared to 50% of non-Low Income students
• Grade 10 English: 40% of Low Income students scored in the two lowest performance categories compared to 13% of non-Low Income students
• Grade 10 math: 43% of Low Income students scored in the two lowest performance categories compared to 16% of non-Low Income students
• Grade 10 science: 59% of Low Income students scored in the two lowest performance categories compared to 25% of non-Low Income students

Unfortunately, these results are neither new nor surprising. We readily recognize the consistent, ironclad law of association between poverty and educational achievement and attainment. However, we persist in school reform strategies that, despite success at the margins, regularly fail to address the factors associated with poverty that, on average, tend to impede student learning. While the past decade-plus of school reform has seen a necessary and laudable increase in emphasis on the need to improve curriculum and instruction for all students, we continue, for the most part, to look the other way when it comes to addressing out of school factors which get in the way of students benefitting from optimized curriculum and instruction.

Why do we look the other way? Maybe it's like looking at the sun. We know the sun is there. We know it creates and suffuses our environment, but it is difficult to look directly at it.

Some want to make the absurd argument that the reason low-income youngsters do poorly is that, mysteriously, all the incompetency in our education systems has coincidentally aggregated around low income students. In this view, all we need to do is scrub the system of incompetency and all will be well. An equally absurd variant on this theme is that poor performance in low-income districts is a function of, again coincidental, misalignment between state standards and local curriculum. Get these in line and all will be fine say the ideologues. Others want to banish any discussion of socio-economic status (SES) and educational performance for fear that it suggests that SES is destiny. It does not. We all know of notable individual exceptions to this rule, but they are exceptions. The averages tell the story.

Some fear that opening schools up to addressing the punishing realities of students' lives is simply too big and too distracting a job for schools. This is a reasonable set of concerns, but schools shouldn't have to do this work on their own and without addressing these factors, students will continue to face barriers to attendance and attentiveness that will, in turn, lead to under-achievement.

Others worry that talking about how poverty impedes learning and what to do about it undermines the value of education generally and somehow nullifies educational accountability by letting schools and teachers off the hook for continuously improving performance. It doesn't. We spend an enormous amount of money on schools, and there is every reason to believe that these schools already make substantial and unique contributions to student learning. However, we also know they can and should do significantly better.

All of these arguments typically get lumped together with the dismissive comment that considering the out of school factors is "making excuses" for students and schools. This reasoning suggests that because one individual or school can achieve excellence, everyone can do it if they try hard enough and we push them hard enough. Maybe they haven't studied statistics. In a normal distribution, there are always some outliers. Not everyone can play basketball like Michael Jordan. Modest changes to our approach to educating children will, at best, only produce minor degrees of progress. To produce a generation of educational, Michael Jordans, we would need a radically overhauled education system.

For twenty years, I have been an unabashed advocate of high standards for all of our students, and I have always said this approach is, above all, an equity strategy. I have always underlined, "all means all".

Now, we have nearly two decades experience in trying to get to this standard with a strictly schooling approach, and as well as we've done, I am forced to admit that we have not attained our goal. We have not eliminated the association between poverty and educational outcomes. Consequently, we, as policy-makers, need to look at the evidence and revise our strategy, in the same way that we ask teachers to do when they examine data on student performance.

It is now blatantly apparent to me and other education activists, ranging form Geoffrey Canada to Richard Rothstein to Linda Darling-Hammond, that the strategy of instructional improvement will not, on average, enable us to overcome the barriers to student learning posed by the conditions of poverty.

As others have argued, we need "a broader, bolder" approach, one that meets every child where he or she is and gives to each one the quality and quantity of support and instruction needed to attain the standards. Those of us who have the privileges of affluence know how to do this at scale with our children. We wrap services and supports around these children from the pre-natal period through their twenties. We know how to do it, but do we have the will to do it for "other people's children"? And do we know how to institutionalize the necessary services and supports that are best provided through families?

One thing is certain: if we want to achieve the goal of preparing all of our students for success then we will need a twenty-first century school system designed to do a very different job that our current education system was designed to do early in the last century. We are no longer batch-processing, mass-producing education for children to enter a low skill, low knowledge economy. We now need to educate all of our children to succeed in a high skill, high knowledge, post-industrial economy. We will need a system that starts in the earliest years of childhood, differentiates between children and meets their widely varying needs, a system that provides academic stimulation and engaging challenges year round while simultaneously guaranteeing that students have access to a robust platform of health and human service supports that will enable them to attend school and other educational opportunities regularly while supplying their best effort to meeting their learning challenges.

In short, we need to reinvent a child development and education system that is equal to the bold aspirations for student success that we appropriately proclaim for the 21st century. All means all.

Our nearly two decades of experience with education reform should tell us that what we have done to date, while necessary, is not sufficient achieve our goals. We need to reinvent our education system. That is the next step in the education reform movement.

S. Paul Reville is the Massachusetts secretary of education, and, in that role, directs the executive office of education and works closely with the commonwealth's education agencies and the University of Massachusetts system while serving as a voting member of the governing board of all four state education agencies. He is the governor's top adviser on education and helps shape the state's education reform agenda, including the recent Achievement Gap Act of 2010.

Posted by Futures of School Reform Group at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend