Living in Dialogue

Why is the achievement gap so persistent? Herb Kohl thinks we are asking the wrong questions, and our efforts to close the gap are largely misguided. I first got to know Herb Kohl when I was a teen in Berkeley in the 1970s, when he was working to create alternative schools there. You may have seen Kohl's provocative thoughts recently, as he has taken Arne Duncan to task for extending and expanding the education policies of the Bush administration. I thought of Herb again when commenters on my blog raised some questions about how teachers can balance direct instruction with an inquiry approach to best close the achievement gap.

Debra Buffington posted (in part):

I found that minority students learned best in my classroom with direct, hands-on instruction and drill. The old fashioned tried and true methods work for me. Sad to say we are not allowed to use creativity in the classroom any more and are told what to say and what materials to use. I sneak and use what works anyway.

Heidi Werling responded:

Has anyone else noticed the paradox in these posts? I found it interesting to read posts stating that research shows both inquiry based instruction and direct instruction are successful in closing the achievement gap. These two instructional methods are poles apart, yet both seem to work. I wonder if there is another factor at play here? Any ideas?

I wrote to Herb this week and asked him for his thoughts on this paradox. Here is his reply:

The main factor at play in achievement is the willingness of the student to learn what you want to teach. Young people want to learn and do all the time at home, in church, on the streets. They learn through music, by talking with their friends, by listening to TV, going to movies, and by reading – not necessarily what teachers want them to read, but through what they choose to read or what their friends tell them is worth looking at. If you define learning as classroom performance, you impoverish your understanding of who your students are and what the scope and nature of their intelligence is.

The comments I read from your blog talk about that narrow channel of school based, test-oriented learning which, over the course of a lifetime, provides the mind with trivial baggage that is best dumped and replaced with a personal relationship to understanding people, politics, work, nature, and the workings of the imagination and the complexities of living in the current world.

There are many ways to learn and it is foolish to say that specific students have single stylized modes of learning. We all learn in many different ways. Sometimes memorization is essential (for example if you acting in a play or have to perform set routines every day). Other times, attending a lecture is a useful way of absorbing new information or learning about unfamiliar areas of knowledge. Often the best way of learning depends upon experimentation and imaginative speculation, or critical conversation, or project based exploration.

To wonder whether inquiry based instruction or direct teaching is “the best way” is foolish. It depends upon what you are learning, on the demands of the subject matter or problem you are considering. It also depends upon how learning can become integrated into thought and action. Pleasure, motivation, mystery, challenge all drive learning. And even at times external rewards can push one to learn things that are functional.

However I think, from the way the contributors to your blog phrased their arguments, that they are not talking about learning or teaching at all. They are talking about how best to force children to perform on adult created instruments of convenience – that is convenience to the adults who are obsessed with measuring everything and controlling young lives. Narrowing the performance gap requires, most of all, treating poor children and children of color, as intelligent, sensitive imaginative human beings who have been deprived of all the opportunity to learn that more privileged children have.

The achievement gap is not created because privileged kids naturally perform better on standardized tests. These kids perform better because they are provided with multiple opportunities to learn in the sciences and the arts, with occasions to explore the cultural resources of their communities. Their parents and schools resource them, attempt to nurture their minds and imaginations, and, as pay-back, the teachers and parents expect their children to spend part of their time utilizing what they already know and learning to fit it into the straitjacket of high stakes tests.

To expect that children who do not have rich learning environments will perform in a way that is comparable to those who bring more “educational” sophistication to the testing table is probably foolish. The impatience to equalize test results through drill and practice, narrowing the curriculum, and inhibiting teachers’ creativity is counterproductive. The best possible case is that students will do well on the test and then discover, in college and later in life, that they learned nothing in school. The worst case is to intensify the gap and the humiliation and frustration it causes. We have to dare to take issues of equity seriously and fight for resources and opportunities for all of our students. During the brief Allende administration in Chile one of the mottos painted on the walls in Santiago was: In the future the only privileged ones will be the children. I believe it is incumbent on all of us to struggle for this, but in the current climate of Duncan’s Office of Education, it is a morally necessary but dangerous and perilous road to take.

What do you think? Do you agree with Kohl's redefinition of the achievement gap? What sorts of learning opportunities should children of color and poverty be given?

photo by Anthony Cody

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This morning's San Francisco Chronicle tells the story.

Almost 200 Oakland residents, including 74 children, were forced from their homes Tuesday after city officials condemned a refuse-strewn apartment complex in the 2500 block of Foothill Boulevard as unsafe, city officials said.

The buildings had no running water, illegal wiring, boarded up windows and rodent infestations, officials said.

Many of these 74 children are presumably of school age, and will be starting one of Oakland's elementary schools next Monday. They are now homeless, living with relatives or in a shelter. When they arrive at school, they will not have a sign explaining their conditions. They will just be among the many thousands of Oakland students struggling to live way below the poverty line. Many of Oakland's schools are attended by students who live in poverty. Some schools are more than 90% economically disadvantaged.

We are often told not to make excuses for the poor performance of our schools, but I have seen firsthand the effect that poverty has on student performance. The children who lived in this apartment complex (until they were made completely homeless this week) are not that unusual. They have no place to study, so it is tough to do homework. There are drug users around the building, so it is noisy at night, making it hard to sleep. There are shootings in the neighborhood, so sometimes they have to dive to take cover from flying bullets. The nearest real grocery store is literally miles away, so food is often purchased at the neighborhood convenience store, and is highly processed and unhealthy. You can see them walking to school in the morning, eating their breakfast of corn chips and soda pop.

And just the stress of being poor takes its toll. If I am a bit short with my bills at the end of the month, I know how stressed that makes me. But those without regular work have a level of stress I have never even known. Unemployment in the Bay Area is over eleven percent, and is at least double that in many of these neighborhoods. That stress spills into family life, making people short-tempered and even violent. Children are often moved from one home to another, depending on who has space and food to take them in. Can you imagine how you would feel as a parent if you could not even afford to pay for a roof over your children's heads?

On Monday, teachers will welcome their students to class. The ones without homes, the ones who are hungry, the ones in foster care -- they will do their best to hide these conditions. Like wounded birds, they do not want to appear weak or flawed. Once they are grown and have achieved success, they may take some pride in their humble origins, but there is no pride in being homeless when it is your reality today.

Good teachers will find out soon who the hungry ones are, and work with the school and the child's parent or guardian to get them signed up for free lunches. They will make space for the children to stay after school and do homework. They will push all their students to do their best regardless of their circumstances. School can be a sanctuary for these students, a place where they are safe, and have a chance to be seen as human beings.

This fall there is less money than ever. Most of the Republicans in the state legislature have signed a pledge not to ever raise taxes, so when state revenues plummeted this year, school funding was cut by more than a thousand dollars per student. While the Bay Area remains an expensive place to live, Oakland's teachers are among the lowest paid in the region. Class sizes will expand, and there will be no money to repair the copy machine or replace broken furniture or lost books. Teachers will dip into their savings accounts to make up the difference for their children, because that is what we do.

But there is a way in which education rhetoric these days seems to deny that poverty has an impact on the ability of students to learn. Sometimes it feels as if the schools and teachers are actually being blamed for the conditions our students are forced to live in. These conditions should not be used to justify a poor quality education. But the schools and teachers that serve these students have special challenges, and need our support.

Update: This article in the New York Times reports that more than a million students across the nation are now homeless, their lives in turmoil.

What is the impact of poverty on your students? How do you respond as an educator? How should we respond as a society?

Photo by Nesster used by permission through Creative Commons.

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A major conflict between the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program and unions representing teachers has ignited in California, where current education code places limits on the use of student test score data.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has made it clear that California is ineligible for precious Race to the Top grant dollars because the state places limits on the use of student test score data, and on the expansion of charter schools. While districts and schools are free to use such data, current law prevents individual teacher data from being used at the state level. Now Governor Schwarzenegger has called a special session of the state legislature in order to change the law in time to meet Duncan’s October 5th deadline. With the schools suffering from $6 billion in cuts, legislators are desperate for funds, making them vulnerable to Duncan's pressure tactics.

In this article in the Sacramento Bee, Schwarzenegger claims: "Right now, we can't tell over the course of time how an individual teacher or principal or school is doing."

The truth is, state data can tell you exactly how well a school or principal is doing, as one can access data for every school in the state for the past eleven years right here. You can NOT access that data for the individual teachers, for privacy reasons, but that does not prevent that access at the school or district level, which is where teacher evaluation occurs.

Duncan also insists that the state must remove limits on the expansion of charter schools. Currently, California limits the number of new charters to 100 per year, and requires that supporters of a new charter gather parent signatures prior to approval. More than a thousand charters have been approved, and few have been blocked by these provisions. But the Race to the Top wants any limits removed, so as to maximize the chances that charters can expand.

The political arm of the National Education Association – the California Teachers’ Association (CTA) has taken a strong stand against this move. Dean Vogel, the organization’s vice president, states

The proposed Race to the Top requirements repeat the top-down mandates of the flawed No Child Left Behind Act, with its over-reliance on test scores to measure student achievement. Students are more than one test score and so are educators. There must be multiple measures for student achievement and evaluating teachers. Using test scores to pay and evaluate teachers will lead to more teaching to the test and will hurt those students who need the most help.

As a teacher in a district with many high needs schools, I believe moves towards tying evaluation and pay to test scores could have very bad results. We already struggle to cope with very high turnover due to the low pay and tough conditions at these schools. Students test scores at the individual teacher level are highly variable from year to year. I have had a class one year that just hums along, and I have been able to build a strong learning community where students work together well and their performance will show it. Other years the class has been disrupted by troubled students who transfer in late in the semester, or weighed down by a large number of students repeating the grade, who do not attend regularly and are major distractions when they do show up. This is part of the challenge in a high needs school – but it must be recognized that this has an effect on the test scores. If we base the evaluation and pay of teachers on their scores every year, we are going to make high needs schools even harder to staff. This will make these schools even less stable, and make it that much harder to build the learning communities we need.

This conflict may have tipped the scales for the country’s largest teacher’s union. This week the National Education Association (NEA) likewise took on the Race to the Top, stating:

We find this top-down approach disturbing; we have been down that road before with the failures of No Child Left Behind, and we cannot support yet another layer of federal mandates that have little or no research base of success and that usurp state and local government's responsibilities for public education.

The NEA endorsed Obama, and many members, including myself, actively campaigned for him. Although he pledged to reverse the emphasis on test scores embodied in No Child Left Behind, the policies enacted thus far under his leadership seem to actually intensify this emphasis.

In recent speeches, Obama has continued to confuse those of us trying to reconcile his policies with his words. In a June appearance in Wisconsin, Obama said,

There's a saying in Illinois I learned when I was down in a lot of rural communities. They said, "Just weighing a pig doesn't fatten it." (Applause.) You can weigh it all the time, but it's not making the hog fatter. So the point being, if we're all we're doing is testing and then teaching to the test, that doesn't assure that we're actually improving educational outcomes.

We do need to have accountability, however. We do need to measure progress with our kids. Maybe it's just one standardized test, plus portfolios of work that kids are doing, plus observing the classroom. There can be a whole range of assessments, but we do have to have some kind of accountability….

It appears that the administration is paying lip service to multiple measures of student performance, while in practice, implementing policies that force a reliance on the single measure of the standardized test.

What do you think? Is the NEA correct when it opposes Duncan’s Race to the Top? What stance should teachers take towards linking test scores to evaluations and pay?

Note: If you are a California resident, you can find your state representative using this link.

Image used by permission through Creative Commons, photo by ItzaFineDay.

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According to test score data released today, California students have increased their ability to pass state tests so that fully half of them are proficient in English, up from 46% proficient a year ago, and 46% are proficient in Math, up from 43% a year ago.

However the achievement gap remains as wide as ever, with only 37% of African American and Latino students performing at a proficient level in English.

This does not come as any shock to most educators. For all the emphasis on closing the gap, little has really changed for these students. Teachers and students have become more accustomed to these tests, which could provide at least part of the explanation for why scores have risen for seven years in a row. But this boosts all students, not just the groups that are lagging.

The comments that followed the online article in the San Francisco Chronicle reveal a public that seems increasingly cynical about the ability of African American and Latino students to achieve. One post after another railed about the inadequate parental support, dysfunctional culture and even intellectual deficits of these students. If these comments are any indication of popular opinion, many people place the cause of the achievement gap beyond the school doors.

One thing seems clear. Eight years of "shining a bright light" on the achievement gap seems to have made very little difference. And even if we can agree that these tests are an inadequate measure of student abilities, the relatively poor achievement of African American and Latino students is still a cause for concern.

So what do you think? Why is the achievement gap so persistent? What can be done to close it?

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Good news! The productivity of this country has risen by 6.4% in the past quarter, while labor costs have dropped by 5.8%. We seem to be getting even more competitive as a nation. But the news isn’t all so good. New economic data shows that the gap between the rich and poor is wider than ever before – even than the 1920s. Research by UC Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez shows that in the year 2007, more than 50% of the income went to the top 10 % of the population. Much of that gain was due to tax cuts favoring the wealthy enacted in the past decade.

We often hear that schools are responsible for perpetuating an achievement gap between the academic haves and have-nots. The achievement of African American and Latino students is often significantly lower than the achievement of white and Asian American students. This has been the central focus of the educational reforms of No Child Left Behind. According to this law, as a nation we should be devoted to making the best education available to every child, regardless of their race. But this concern for the well-being of our children seems to run into trouble when actual money is involved.

In California, Governor Schwarzenegger, who has demanded “world class standards” be met by public schools, including Algebra for each and every 8th grader, has just balanced the budget by cutting $1000 per student from state funding for education. Schwarzenegger also cut funding for child welfare and medical aid for the poor. According to some of our leaders, taxes cannot be increased for any reason.

This is going to have a huge impact on schools across the state. California reduced class sizes to 20 or less for grades K to 3 back in 1996, but that will be going out the window in many districts this fall. Some kindergarten classes are starting next week with 34 students. This can only worsen the achievement gap in our schools. Teachers have been laid off, and many districts will cut salaries and even shorten the school year or eliminate summer school, adult school, and after school programs.

We are about to receive a barrage of education-related messages from a variety of sources. Unlikely partners Newt Gingrich and Al Sharpton will be touring the country promoting charter schools and a “no excuses” message for parents. This week President Obama told eleven-year-old journalist Damon Weaver that on September 8, he will be giving a major speech directed at students about the importance of education. That same day, a national campaign will be launched.

The press release states:

Get Schooled: You Have the Right formally kicks off "Get Schooled," a five-year national initiative co-developed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Viacom that creates a platform for corporate and community stakeholders to address the challenges facing America's public schools.”

Spokesperson Kelly Clarkson says:

"Lots of young people run into problems beyond their control, like finances, that keep them from pursuing their education. At that point, it's easy to give up. But I believe it's important to continue to work hard and learn from everyone and everything around you."

Who can argue with the idea that young people should not give up? Or that we will all be better off if they pursue their education? However, at a certain point along here, I am starting to connect some dots. If young people are discouraged by a lack of finances, such as the absence of financial aid for education, or the lack of jobs in their communities, perhaps we should be working not just on their attitudes, but on the underlying economic realities that might affect them.

When Proposition 13 was passed in California back in 1978, the motivation was to protect elderly homeowners from annual property tax increases. Prop 13 changed the law so that taxes are only adjusted when a property changes hands – and this applies to all property in the state, including that owned by private corporations. Since property owned by corporations rarely changes hands, this has resulted in a huge multi-billion dollar loophole for corporations, and shifted the tax burden onto private homeowners. Some leaders in California have stepped up to advocate closing the Prop 13 loophole.

I appreciate the support for education our political and corporate leaders are showing. I agree that we should not give up – and we should keep learning. But I am learning we may need some more fundamental changes -- including real financial support for young people and their schools -- if we are going to keep the dreams of all our students alive.

What are the economic realities in your school and community? What do you think about the connection between the income gap and the achievement gap? What are some creative ways to close these gaps?

Graph used by permission.

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According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, California’s state senate is scheduling hearings to consider the abandonment of a policy that blocks the use of student test score data for the evaluation or compensation of teachers, in order to qualify for federal "Race to the Top" funding. California recently created a data system to manage all the standardized test data. The Education Code was revised to state:

(c) Data in the system shall not be used, either solely or in conjunction with data from the California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System, for purposes of pay, promotion, sanction, or personnel evaluation of an individual teacher or groups of teachers, or of any other employment decisions related to individual teachers. The system shall not include the names, social security numbers, home addresses, telephone numbers, or e-mail addresses of individual teachers. (California Education Code Section 10601.5, section c)

This clause has caught the attention of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who says it makes the state of California ineligible for his $4 billion “Race to the Top” fund. He intends to direct this fund towards what he considers innovative practices, including paying teachers more if they increase their students’ test scores.

Unfortunately, this approach dovetails neatly with the past seven years of federal pressure on schools to use test scores as the primary means of measuring learning.

On the face of it, it sounds reasonable to evaluate a teacher based on how well his students have learned. When I applied for National Board certification, I provided videotapes of my students engaged in discussions, samples of their work, and further evidence of all they had learned from my instruction. I deeply believe teachers should be responsible for how well their students learn. But the devil is in the details of how we measure learning.

How is Student Growth Measured?
The primary means of measuring student growth goes under the name Value Added Model (VAM). Using this method, some school districts have begun to analyze a teacher’s performance by examining her students’ growth during the time she taught them. In some ways, this seems more reasonable than the current NCLB practice of comparing this years’ students with last years’, and expecting constant growth. However, a fascinating study was released in May that sheds some disturbing light on the flaws in this approach.

Princeton scholar Jesse Rothstein points out several key problems. To quote from the study summary:

Rothstein’s study focuses on the challenge of distinguishing a teacher’s contribution from pre-existing differences among students. Teachers do disparate jobs – some teach “gifted and talented” classes, some focus on students with limited English skills, and some work with students with special needs. If accountability and merit pay policies are to produce improvements in teacher quality, it is essential to ensure that teachers who get the “right” students who test well do not get unfair advantages, and that teachers who get the “wrong” students do not get unfair disadvantages. It will do no good, and may even cause harm, to implement a merit pay system that rewards teachers for working with gifted students and penalizes those who work with more challenging students.

Rothstein came up with a brilliant means of proving just how unfair this system is. If students are not assigned randomly to classes, then a teacher might be rewarded or penalized based on who was assigned to their class – and the pre-existing condition of these students.

To show this, Rothstein develops falsification tests for the VAMs. (Falsification testing evaluates an assertion by asking whether it has implications that are known to be incorrect.) Specifically, he asks whether the VAMs imply that 5th grade teachers (for example) have effects on students’ 3rd and 4th grade test scores. This test exploits the fact that future teachers cannot have causal effects on past outcomes, so a method that successfully distinguishes causal effects from pre-existing differences among students should not find signs of such effects.

In fact, the VAMs currently used for teacher accountability indicate that 5th grade teachers have large effects on students’ 3rd and 4th grade achievement. This reflects systematic sorting of students into classrooms on the basis of past achievement, producing substantial dispersion of students’ 4th grade scores and score gains - the growth in scores between 3rd and 4th grade – across 5th grade classrooms. Sorting on past reading gains is particularly prominent, though there is clear evidence of sorting on math gains as well.

Just to explain this further, imagine three fifth grade teachers; Ms. Best, Ms. Good, and Ms. Worst. If I analyze the scores of the fourth grade students heading into these three classrooms, and find that in fact most of the highest scoring students wind up in Ms. Best's class, then I have uncovered a non-random, and therefore unfair distribution. This is exactly what Rothstein found.

I experienced this firsthand a few years ago, when one of my sixth grade math classes included six students who had been held back at least once, some of them twice. These students were much harder to move academically than others, and their concentration in that class made the group as a whole tougher to teach. A study released last year found that students in homes with domestic violence not only suffered academically, but also brought down the scores of their peers in the classes they shared.

This article in the San Francisco Chronicle reveals that as many as 40% of the children in some urban neighborhoods suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the violence they have witnessed at home and in their neighborhoods. This has profound effects on how these students learn. These problems are not distributed randomly in society, and these students are not distributed randomly within a school.

These are not excuses, but very real challenges faced by urban educators every day. It does not mean we give up on these students, but it does mean we have to be careful to craft solutions that support rather than further stigmatize these schools.

Rothstein’s research also showed that teachers who were successful in raising student scores in the short term, through test preparation for example, did not necessarily have a lasting effect on their performance. This is hugely important. Our schools already suffer from an overemphasis on test preparation. If we actually tie teacher evaluations and pay to these scores, we are likely to deepen this emphasis, and our students will suffer in the long run.

In demanding a link between test scores and teacher pay and compensation, Duncan has chosen a rather poor vehicle for innovation. There is no question that teacher evaluation should be strengthened, and there is plenty of room for innovative approaches to compensation as well. But there is nothing innovative about more emphasis on test scores.

Way back in November of 2007, candidate Obama said,

And by the way - don't tell us that the only way to teach a child is to spend most of the year preparing him to fill in a few bubbles on a standardized test. Don't tell us that these tests have to come at the expense of music, or art, or phys. ed., or science. These tests shouldn't come at the expense of a well-rounded education - they should help complete that well-rounded education. The teachers I've met didn't devote their lives to testing, they devoted them to teaching, and teaching our children is what they should be allowed to do.

He was right about that.

Now Obama says that tying test scores to pay and evaluations will not result in teachers teaching to the test. I do not comprehend how this can be so.

He and Secretary Duncan seem to have very little imagination when it comes to finding out which teachers are doing a good job. They continually return to test scores as the essential measuring stick for teacher quality. Teachers know that this shortcut will lead to a dead end.

California State Senator Gloria Romero has called for hearings to eliminate the provision separating state testing data from evaluations and pay. Here is a link to California Senators/Assembly if you would like to share your views with them.

What do you think? Is it time to evaluate and compensate teachers using student test scores?

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This week I have read two points of view about school change that both appeal to me, yet seem mutually exclusive. First I read Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach’s essay, The Fabric of Community- The Key to Transforming Education. She argues that we get stuck reforming our schools, when in fact we should actually be transforming them. Then I read Mary Kennedy's Education Week commentary, Solutions are the Problem in Education . She describes how the well-intentioned drive to solve problems in our education system is resulting in teachers being deluged with solutions – and becoming exhausted by the resulting constant turmoil. How can we reconcile the desire to improve with the reality that teachers are getting burned out?

Let's start with a closer look at each perspective. Nussbaum-Beach quotes Phillip Schlecty, who draws the distinction between reform and transformation:

REFORM usually means changing procedures, processes, and technologies with the intent of improving the performance for existing operating systems. The aim is to make existing systems more effective at doing what they have been always been intended to do.

TRANSFORMATION is intended to make it possible to do things that have never been done by the organization undergoing the transformation. It involves metamorphosis: changing from one form to another form entirely. In organizational terms, transformation almost always involves repositioning and reorienting action by putting the organization into a new business or adopting a radically different means of doing the work it has traditionally done. Transformation by necessity includes altering the beliefs, values, and meanings- the culture- in which programs are embedded, as well as changing the current system of rules, roles, and relationships- social structure- so that the innovations needed will be supported.

REFORM in contrast, means only installing innovations that will work within the context of the existing structure and culture of schools.

Nussbaum-Beach relates that in her work, most leaders she encounters are satisfied to be reformers, not willing to take the risks involved in attempting transformation. She concludes:

Personally, I believe that the secret to change lies in developing the social fabric, capacity and connectedness found in communities of practice and learning networks. I believe that by focusing on a strengths-based model of education, looking at possibilities rather than problems, by using inquiry to ask the kinds of questions that reveal the gifts each of us bring to the table, by realizing that "none of us is as good as all of us" and somehow leveraging all of that to shift the conversations toward building a new future- one that focuses on the gifts each teacher, student, parent and leader has, that we have all we need to create an alternative future for schools.

Mary Kennedy, on the other hand, focuses on the often overlooked downside of our drive to improve the schools. She explains that

…we live in a time when reforms and fads have become so commonplace that every new board member or superintendent feels a need to make a personal mark on his or her district by introducing something new. As these policymakers come and go, teachers are buffeted by the raft of competing new ideas they leave behind. So routine turnovers in leadership reignite this continuing series of distractions, further reducing teachers’ chances of finding time for reflection and maintaining a stable environment for intellectual work.

I have experienced this firsthand working in a struggling urban district, which only very recently partly emerged from a seven-year-long state takeover. We have had top-down reform initiatives come and go. Sometimes it seems like the perpetual state of change prevents us from digging in to the real problems at each school site. Instead, we close the school down and start all over, or send the whole staff off to be re-educated.

So what is the answer? I think it is a mistake for administrators to think they can reform schools simply by putting teachers through professional development workshops, no matter how good they are. The transformation that Nussbaum-Beach describes is essential to real school change. Teachers need to develop leadership through being challenged to solve problems, and given some decision-making authority. Teachers need to decide on the process they will follow to develop their inquiry, and implement their solutions. And they need time, and compensation for their efforts. But teachers need to be careful as well, because our students and parents are our partners in this endeavor, and we need to make sure their voices are heard, and their leadership is developed alongside our own.

Thinking about this systemically, the trouble is that teachers and administrators -- let alone parents and students -- are not really expected to undertake this kind of work, and it is very time-consuming. We DO have official mandates to give all sorts of benchmark tests, to align our instruction to standards, and to focus on student outcomes as revealed in the state tests. Administrators are swamped dealing with student discipline, complying with state and district mandates, parent communication, and teacher evaluations. And with current budget shortfalls, administrators and teachers have even more work, as nurses, counselors and librarians are laid off, and class sizes grow. It is difficult to find time for teachers to even meet to accomplish the mandated tasks, let alone the sort of collaboration needed to bring our practices to the next level, or accomplish the sort of transformation envisioned by Schlecty.

So it should not be a shock that the level of stress, and resulting turnover for our teachers and administrators is high. The ones who go beyond mere survival are able to develop sustaining networks of colleagues, to share the work, and provide some mutual support. Wise administrators see that no particular protocol is magic. The key is that teachers have real ownership and leadership in the process, and that they are truly engaged in active reflection on their practices, and working together to improve. That could take the form of Lesson Study, or Action Research, or the National Board’s Take One portfolio process, or any number of other processes and protocols. What matters is that they are actively engaged in an ongoing collaborative process, they are looking closely at student learning, and challenging themselves to improve.

If this sort of transformation is going to be undertaken, we need recognition from policymakers that this is beyond what has traditionally been expected of teachers. We need to recognize teachers as leaders of this work, invest some trust in their ability to tackle this challenge, and compensate them accordingly. Likewise, if we want our parents and students to be involved and developed as leaders, we need to create roles and provide funds to support this work. Without this kind of systemic support, this kind of transformation is likely to be rare and short-lived.

What do you think? Are you a reformer, a transformer or a survivor? How can we sustain educators through this process?

Photo by Rob Shenk, used by permission through Creative Commons.

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