THOMPSON: Getting the Facts Straight About the Realities of Urban Education

I’ve always respected the work of Robin Chait and Raegen Miller, so I’m dismayed by their report "Getting the Facts Straight on the Teacher Incentive Fund." They admit that the "TIF requires that compensation systems consider gains in student achievement ... and that their grants "are explicitly structured to help schools transform their compensation ..."

Is it any reassurance that TIF’s efforts to stimulate NATIONWIDE, SYSTEMIC change do not allow test scores as the "sole" method of evaluation? 

THOMPSON: The Schools Teachers Leave

The Consortium on Chicago School Research has another "must read" report on teacher mobility. About 100 Chicago schools suffer from chronically high rates of turnover and the reasons are hiding in plain sight. Thirteen high schools and 84 elementary schools lose more than 30% of their teachers every year. "Most important for teacher stability is the degree to which teachers feel they have an influence over school decisions," wrote the Consortium. "Teachers are more likely to stay where the environment is conducive to teaching," and particularly for high schools, "teachers are more likely to stay at schools where students feel safe, and where students report that their classroom peers engage in appropriate academic behavior."

There has been a lot of discussion about teachers fleeing African-American schools, but in high schools it is classroom behavior that explains ½ of this mobility. Please excuse the social scientific phrasing, but the following is representative of the care in which this invaluable report explains these sensitive issues. "In fact, once we consider teachers’ reports of the climate and organization of the work at their school, only a quarter of the variation in teacher stability rates among elementary schools remains to be explained (24%), and almost no variation remains among high schools." - John Thompson

THOMPSON: Mr. Duncan, Rebuild That Wall

Senator Michael Bennet writes that "the accountability system we have ought to be a way to check right direction/wrong direction. The idea that from Washington we're going to be able to materially inform people's instruction is a little bit of an illusion, and I'm not sure we should be trying to do it anyway. And I think there's usefulness to having some distance between the accountability framework and the tools that people use every day to (give) quality instruction to our kids."  (emphasis mine)

That essential "distance" has traditionally been protected by due process, collective bargaining, and tenure. Bennet’s Denver Plan for performance pay, like the Toledo Plan and other methods of peer review, are great examples of negotiating improved systems for the 21^st century.

The next steps should be a "no-brainer" for President Obama. We can tear down the "firewalls" between teacher identifiers that link test scores to individual teachers when we have a firewall that prevents that data from being used for evaluations or tenure. The rationale should be obvious. We have Value Added Models that are valid enough for incentives or for rough "right direction/wrong direction" judgments regarding schools. But results from primitive growth models are not reliable enough to destroy a teacher’s career.

THOMPSON: Cultivating Narrow-mindedness or Open-mindedness

My students know the drill when Roger Wilkins speaks during documentaries like PBS's LBJ or The Kennedys.  The students' job is to explain the filmmaker's main idea in order to answer the course's Standards.  Since Wilkins' statements are always extra perceptive and quotable, the students know to listen carefully, and after I rewind they are required to write and discuss Wilkin's main ideas and how they fit into the filmmaker's story.  Or, when Wilkins makes statements so compelling that the students can't wait, we discuss his words and then write.

Wilkins, as a board member of the Citizen's Commission on Civil Rights, presumably supports NCLB, but does he know that that law is robbing many students of the right to learn from his story and from PBS, C-Span, and other fantastic sources of knowledge?  Typically, when children are denied the opportunity to study contemporary or African-American history, or multiculturalism, art, music, and PE, it is called "Curriculum Narrowing."  I call it the Narrowing of the American Mind.    When my Black History students arrive in high school without ever studying their own history, that is called an "opportunity cost," as a rich and engaging curriculum was sacrificed for test prep.  I call it the narrowing of my kids' horizons.  Given his wonderful powers of communication, and the learning he shared with his daughter, I wonder what Roger Wilkins could accomplish if he would talk directly to neighborhood school students, cross examine the authors of the Commission's latest attacks on unions, and open up the Commission's discussion beyond their narrow focus of seeking scapegoats - I mean people to hold accountable. - John Thompson     

THOMPSON: With Friends Like These

Our friends at the Citizens Commission on Civil Rights, after acknowledging organized labor's long history of fighting for justice, offered "a full and fair explication of the words and actions of national unions."  The Commission argues that teachers' unions have "posed a barrier to improving educational opportunity for the most disadvantaged students."  They claim that test-driven accountablity is the "watchword of school reform."  To unions, however, standardized test-driven models "have not been thoroughly developed, researched, and rigorously evaluated."  Sounds like a difference of opinion to me.

Why should such a difference of opinon split the civil rights community? 

THOMPSON: Pass Em On

Kristen Graham’s series in the Philadephia Inquirer on pressuring teachers to just pass on all students is illustrative on many levels. Teachers complain that they are supposed to pass everyone, "even those who can’t multiply a three digit number or who have 100 or more absences." A principal’s memo asked teachers to give credit for doing a make-up worksheet packet or for "fulfilling promises such as showing up on time and wearing a required school uniform." Teachers were especially upset with the policy of passing students who "do a dumbed-down packet and pass."

Not surprisingly to anyone familiar with the concept of "rational expectations," few students took advantage the opportunities. Kids who have just been passed along until they landed in an Algebra class without knowing arithmetic are not likely to thus become "consumers of their own education" and thus develop "self-esteem." Attendance was said to have dropped to 50% and as few as five students in one class of thirty were still showing up.

Equally illustrative was the rationale of administrators.

THOMPSON: Our Toughest Challenges

Mass Insight's "The Turnaround Challenge" brilliantly explained why instruction-driven efforts that are successful in relatively lower poverty and selective schools are inherently incapable of turning around the neighborhood schools that produce the majority of America’s dropouts. Then the Center on Education Policy explained why the conventional methods of turning around high schools under NCLB have rarely been successful. Now, Robert Balfanz’s study of 23 middle schools in Philadelphia in "Keeping Middle Grades Students on the Path to Graduate," could signal an end to fratricide between various schools of educational reformers.

Average achievement gains for entire schools provide false impressions, Balfanz explains. "Within each school, students either significantly closed their achievement gaps or fell further behind."  When students attended class at a rate of 95%, had excellent behavior, and put forth "greater-than-average effort in class, "a remarkable 77% closed their achievement gaps." On the other hand, sixth graders who failed math or English, who had an attendance rate of 80% or less, or had a poor behavior grade, had only a 10 to 20% chance of graduating on time. Worse, even "mild but sustained misbehavior" is a significant risk factor.  (emphasis mine)

THOMPSON: Doing the Right Thing for the Right Reason

Oklahoma’s "bubble" or gap between soaring NCLB test scores and flat NAEP scores has been one of the worst in the nation, but Secretary of Education Sandy Garrett just announced that scores are being recalibrated for this spring’s data. We can expect Reading scores, for instance, to drop from passing rates of 77 to 92% to 63 and 70%.

Oklahoma acted because we listened to social scientists, and to Robert Balfanz’s Everyone Graduates Center which just published the brilliant study, "Keeping Middle Grades Students on the Path to Graduate." Sandy Garrett is in the tradition of heroic progressives who have "used smoke and mirrors" to keep Oklahoma from being another Mississippi. State educational leaders mostly have to rely of "the bully pulpit." Garrett has used her pulpit to promote universal pre-school, graduation coaches, and "the Gift of Time." - John Thompson

THOMPSON: Real World Standards

The best thing about Linda Lutton’s series on Robeson High School in Chicago is that it dared to quote an eminent scholar with the courage to say, "They should kick them (disruptive students) out ... If they don’t want to learn. ...Start writing more people up." Just kidding! That sentiment was expressed by a student named Sarah.

Only 150 of the incoming freshmen were identified as at-risk due to academic and/or absenteeism issues, but apparently, little attention is paid to the other 250. Just having good "soft skills" is enough for A’s. Consequently, only 17 graduates of the 2004 class attended college and only four of them remain on track to graduate. One teacher explained, "My standards have gone down so much since teaching here. Part of me, when kids show up and sit down and write - anything ... I want to pass them. Which is really unfair to them ..."

THOMPSON: Robeson High School

Robeson High School in Chicago has 400 incoming freshmen, with 150 already identified as "at risk." Despite having 17 pregnant freshmen, the school’s options are constrained by the lack of counselors and the district only has one alternative school for young mothers. Not surprisingly, many of the younger students have limited educational horizons, thinking that they just need "Food. Water. Place to Live. (and) You gonna need weed."

THOMPSON: Same As It Ever Was - or Not

The week before I began teaching in an alternative school for juvenile felons, NPR introduced me to Richard Price and his novel Clockers. A decade of living in a neighborhood devastated by the Reagan/Bush recession and crack and gangs had taught me what happens when the fragile wiring of our brains and the fabric of our social institutions are unraveled.

Price’s Clockers, and afterwards The Wire, were able to articulate the human struggle for survival and dignity in a thrown-away community. Soon, I intimately knew students like the "Buffalo," who was a teenaged version of Price’s character, Rodney, who knew every species of tree in the neighboring nursery and loved to watch the backhoe in operation. And I understood the logic of my scarred, brain-damaged young sociopath destined for life in prison, who was the spitting image of the character in The Wire, who in the last episode accepted a sweet deal and traded murder for legitimate profits.

THOMPSON: Will We Measure Up?

"If a hostile and wily foreign power had somehow imposed on America the pervasively mediocre educational performance that exists today, we would have declared war on it."

Would a hostile power be more likely to challenge the gumption and the creative insubordination that we knew as "the American Character," or generations trained to fill-in-the-blanks and survive in an educational culture of compliance? Who would have thunk it, the creative culture that produced Google would be displaced in schools by "a culture of accountability?"

I partially blame the litigious desire for guarantees; "reformers" demand policies that educators can’t weasel out of, so education leaders demand "teacher proof" solutions that make it certain that the numbers will come out right. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, "Cover Your Ass" is hardly the posture we expect of a great nation.

The last time we faced such an economic challenge, Americans repudiated social engineering and adopted the unlovely infrastructure-building of the W.P.A, the C.C.C., and dam construction. Now, the challenge of building an informational $80 billion infrastructure for medical records is also daunting, but

THOMPSON: Climb to the Top

If we did a real cost benefit analysis of the greater good for the greater number of families by funding the proposed "Race to the Top" innovations with the benefits of "No Child Left Inside," the race would not be close. Test scores may or may not reflect real learning, but blood pressure test scores; blood sugar counts; and Body Mass Indices are unquestionably real. Yes, we must build a "green economy," but how can we do that without building green values, and bringing children out into the green world?

Candidate Obama recognized that a huge part of the Achievement Gap is the result of summer learning loss when poor children are not exposed to museums, outdoor activities, and travel. Chairman George Miller recognizes that environmental education builds "critical thinking, problem-solving, team work, ... and critical analysis." The tough-minded approach, though, would be to use "Race to the Top" funds to meet the immediate and absolutely necessary challenge of creating innovative environmental education and getting kids into the countryside.  We could invest in data systems if money is available during NCLB reauthorization.

The first time I took inner city kids camping and fossil hunting, a 3^rdgrader found a "real live dinosaur nose! It still has blood on it!" When the toughest brawler tried to summon the courage to take his first step into the woods, it was like a kabuki dance, taking several minutes of wrestling with his terrors. I gained new insights into the fears that drove T___ to violence as I held him all night during his migraine headaches.

THOMPSON: Win Win Solutions

The Democrats for Education Reform propose an expansion of charter pre-schools for ages three and four.  I ambiguously support charters for k-12, but those schools have the inherent disadvantage of "creaming" top students and educators from neighborhood schools, and often inciting more animosity in school reform debates. 

But I sure can't see a downside to DFER's pre-school proposal.  I can only see the potential to bring new resources, talent, and quality to pre-school.  And charter pre-schools could be the antidote to the situation where educated parents pick early childhood education that respects the whole humanity of their kids, while poor children end up in "high cost day care."

THOMPSON: Reflections on Graduation

I took three punches breaking up the annual fistfight among family members at commencement. But as always, student behavior at the ceremony was exemplary. When I graduated in 1971, it was the students who did the fighting, frisbee throwing, and egging on the outrageous behavior of my buddy who was tripping on LSD. And this year it was hard to top the lyrics, "Sing along with President Obama ‘Yes We Can,’" that accompanied the typical dignity of our graduates.

When I began as a traveling teacher, clearly our city’s schools were social not educational institutions. Then, a master teacher trying to recruit me to the Advanced Placement program was accurate in saying "You have to decide whether to be a social worker or a teacher." Then, my love of teaching in urban schools had not yet grown so intense, but I saw the surplus of talent migrating to magnet schools so I took my stand in the inner city.

THOMPSON: Friendly Advice

The civil war between reformers who want accountability to drive school improvement, and those of us who believe that accountability is one important focus, is so bitter that unsolicited advice is probably not helpful but I will try anyway.

For their own good, advocates of data-driven accountability should repudiate Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee. Klein could have learned about people skills and politics from Randi Weingarten, but he seems congenitally unable to learn from her collaborative leadership. The five page online Washington Post retrospective said little about "pockets of promise" produced by Rhee as the district dropped by 4,000 students, down from 49,000 two years ago, while charters have increased by 3,000 to 28,000 students.

Just as America needs a kinder, gentler, smarter Republican Party, education needs a more modest accountability movement to keep us on our toes. With our urban schools, we need an accountability movement to help get us on our toes for the first time in history.

THOMPSON: Talking about Race

Charles Payne inventories a long list a prerequisites for successful reform, and in "Still Crazy After All These Years" he astutely explores one key factor that is almost always missing - the ability to speak candidly about race. For instance, there are varying "patterns to the way forms of instruction gets racially coded. In some places enquiry methods of math instruction are seen as "the white, elite, upper-class program" while "those kids" get "drill and kill." But in other places that approach "becomes the black and Latino math program. ... math for those kids."

When discussing discipline, balancing the rights of the individual with the welfare of the school is always baffling. "For educators there is the problem that when the race of people occupying positions of authority is the same race of the people who have traditionally been identified with the process of oppression." Payne uses the example of dress codes to explain the extra complexity that comes from the belief that "individual freedom is not the point; it’s the freedom of the group that matters." For many blacks, enforcement of the code is maintaining the old "communal sense of responsibility for children."

I love Payne’s work because it provided a personal epiphany, where I realized that I believe in the "Authoritative Supportive" approach of many traditional Black communities, Catholic schooling, and some Afrocentric charters.   

THOMPSON: Real Standards

Hopefully, Arne Duncan will listen closely to John Easton, Charles Payne, and others who have studied reform efforts in Chicago (and elsewhere). Payne calls for "Standards of Implementation" or guidelines for minimum prerequisites required for reforms to be successful. Just as teachers tend to be isolated from each other, "reformers are isolated - by ideology, attitude, ... and tribalisms." Just as teachers need learning "Standards," reformers need Standards or a guide as to whether a minimum amount of professional development, follow-up support, on-going assessment, and capacity for addressing disengagement are available.  To borrow Payne's analysis of a previous systemic reform, "one need not spend a decade and $130 million dollars to find out that one doesn't have a theory of action connected to the real world." 

In 1971, Seymour Sarason explained the failure of reformers to understand schools as social organizations and their cultures. For another 15 years, he kept a file of letters from people who led failed reform efforts and learned "that reformers ‘had vastly underestimated the force of existing power relationships and had vastly overestimated the willingness of school personnel to confront the implication of those relationships.’"

And above all, "when people who have led a reform effort are asked what they would do differently," writes Payne, "perhaps the single most common answer is 'take more time.'" - John Thompson

THOMPSON: Hubris

Commenter Steve Andrews turned me on the So Much Reform, So Little Change, a marvelous book by Charles Payne. Payne calls for a "School Reformers’ Pledge of Good Conduct" which includes the following: "I will not overpromise. I will not disrespect teachers. I will not try to scale up prematurely. ... I will take seriously what field workers say. I will give school people realistic estimates of how much time and money it takes to implement my program."

The "hubris" of reformers did not begin with NCLB. By 2002, "there may have been 8 or 9,000 schools, representing a few million students, implementing a whole school model (and in some unhappy cases, implementing more than one), writes Payne, but it created "the situation [which] was made to order for learning what it took to build the capacity to implement." Not only did reformers seek to replicate "what works" at a rate that was "just delusional," but they expanded to "systemic reforms" which "mean ‘let’s pretend to do on a grand scale what we have no idea how to do on a small scale.’" A result was that NCLB-type accountability "did motivate educators but it motivated them to avoid sanctions by raising test scores ... which typically results in less ambitious teaching, especially for low performing students."

The "smugness" of the educational reform movement, writes Payne, "easily crosses into contempt

THOMPSON: Resourcefulness

Second, cut out textbooks. Governor Schwarzenegger seeks to save $350 million this year by canceling new textbooks. Yes, we should invest more in digital resources, but we should also search storerooms to take a fresh look at surplus materials. Think of all of the high-interest, appropriately skilled paperbacks that students loved before NCLB encouraged curriculum departments to veto the judgments of teachers and to purchase materials that are years above the reading levels of many students.

I doubt we’ll ever see a textbook as wonderful as American Voices (1995) which is available for 74 cents on Amazon. After students read the last (audiotaped) letter home from the last man killed in the Vietnam War, listen to his words on NPR, and then see if any student balks at reading "Guerrilla War" or any of the other poetry featured in that amazing textbook.

Publishers assemble an nice package of materials to accompany new textbooks, but has anyone ever attempted to use it all? And what about those innovative products that teachers never opened just because of the high-handed way that they were mandated by the central office? I hate to punish publishers for spending so much in order to assemble a better combination of print, audio, video, and digital materials. Taxpayers, however, have already paid for a variety of multi-disciplinary, multi-media resources such as PBS.org, Smithsonian.org, and NPR.org. (Ironically, my district blocks access to video on PBS and NPR, but allows The Onion. [How about their "Report: Increasing Numbers Of Educators Found To Be Suffering From Teaching Disabilities?"])

What is the first step? Fire all lawyers turned "reformers." - John Thompson

THOMPSON: Learn to Read and Read to Learn

Waiting for his book to arrive, I read everything I could google on Gordon MacInnes and he seems to reinforce my thesis that education needs fewer grandiose theories and more humility. Besides MacInnes’ In Plain Sight seems to be common sense. Due to the Abbott school finance case, New Jersey’s poorest districts invested an additional $3,000 per year per student. Though averaging more than $15,000 per student, districts like Camden, Newark, and Trenton have seen a "relative decline" in achievement. But systems like Union City, Elizabeth, and Orange, have seen "virtually unprecedented" improvements over entire districts, as opposed to gains in scattered schools. They succeeded by narrowing the "kindergarten gap." Their "sensible" strategy is to start early and spend whatever time is necessary to bring young students up to grade level in reading and writing.

So many Whole School Reforms follow the "delusional" approach of emulating outliers like KIPP or "some other blue-ribbon exemplar."  I have never understood the hubris of "reformers" who seek to choreograph secondary school instruction, or move teachers around districts like they were chess pieces, or sidestep the human element by inventing statistical accountability models. But, "there are national norms, for example, for determining where a 2nd grader should be reading in April of a given year." And when students fall behind in reading comprehension, the obvious solution is to invest in whatever rifle-shot interventions are necessary.

As MacInnes argues, providing excellent and coordinated early childhood education, using data and professional development, while trusting in the informed judgements of teachers, is a difficult enough task. Common sense says that we meet that challenge before gambling on "disruptive innovations." - John Thompson

THOMPSON: Pride Before the Fall

One pole of the Obama administration’s commitment to innovation is personified by Van Jones, who seeks neighborhood "solution centers" based upon traditional wisdom. Jones describes the $5 billion Stimulus fund for weatherization as the "hardest working, most humble" of investment dollars. Jones makes a special effort to communicate across lines of race and class

The hubris of other pole is exemplified by a new generation of educational "reformers" that has been manifestly uninterested in the "cultures and institutional norms" of the "status quo." Their pride is illustrated by the Center for American Progress, American Enterprise Institute’s "Stimulating Excellence," which argues for "clearing obstacles that hinder entrepreneurial innovation." The CAP,AEI proposal merely assumes a) that those obstacles serve no valid purposes and b) ignores the wisdom of veteran educators who explain why their innovations are not nearly ready to be replicated.

At one pole, Arne Duncan wants "an earful" from veteran educators about our modest capacity and he says, "I can count on one hand the number of turnaround specialists" doing this "dramatic" work of overhauling the lowest-performing schools. 

THOMPSON: Unfair, Imbalanced, and Inexcusable

Few policies can succeed if the adults and students in schools do not see them as fair and balanced. Andres Alonso’s disciplinary manifestos fail on all counts. First, he sent a strong message to principals by reviewing all of their efforts to suspend students for five days or more. Alonso then prohibited out-of-school suspensions for disrespect, insubordination, disruption, attendance, cell phones, and refusal to obey school policies.

Given his top down management style, Alonso’s prohibition of suspensions for nonviolent infractions was bound to be interpreted in ways that would make it impossible to maintain safe and orderly schools. Under his latest mandate, suspensions dropped by more than 1,500, and that also may have contributed to an epidemic of fatal and non-fatal stabbings, assaults on teachers, and general mayhem. Then, Alonso swung to the other extreme and permanently expelled 34 students including one elementary student for lighting fires and other violent acts.

THOMPSON: Try Ignorance

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

Nearly 80 percent of New York City’s principals were not on the job in 2001. The percentage of principals under the age of forty has nearly quadrupled (to 22%), as the percentage who had less than five years of teaching experience doubled to 20%.  The principals' payroll increased by 43% while the number of students under their purview dropped from an average of 879 to 649 students.  Pay per pupil has jumped from $138 to $205 in 2008 dollars.  But a New York Times analysis shows that graduates of Bloom/Klein Leadership Academy were less than half as likely to earn A's on the district report card and almost twice as likely to earn Cs or less.

Orson Welles famously derided the arrogance of power with the line, "badges, we don't need no stinkin badges."  NYC schools, Bloom/Klein believed, didn't need no stinkin experience, and the results are not pretty. Teacher turnover has been higher at schools run by Leadership Academy principals — "over the summer of 2007, nearly a quarter of these principals lost at least a third of their teachers, compared with 9 percent of other principals. More than a third of teachers leaving the system cited the quality of school leadership as among the main reasons. 'Perceptions of principal leadership skills are drivers of attrition,' an internal report concluded."                                                                                                  

THOMPSON: Delayed Gratification

Few teachers doubt the wisdom of the old marsh-mellow studies that revealed delayed gratification as a key to success in school and beyond.  One teacher turned cognitive researcher "became convinced that trying to teach a teen-ager algebra when they don't have self-control is a pretty futile exercise."  In the 1950s Trinidadians attributed the cultural differences regarding delayed gratification to racial differences between Africans and East Indians, but Walter Mischel showed that those differences were better explained by the absence of a father at home. With today's new research tools (and in cooperation with KIPP and other schools) the importance of self-control is being documented further.  And brain scans may help explore methods of teaching delayed gratification.

Mischel concludes, "even the most mundane routines of childhood - such as not snacking before dinner, or saving up your allowance ... are really sly excises in cognitive training: we're teaching ourselves how to think so that we can outsmart our desires."  If we could only teach "No Excuses" reformers to abandon their desire for the instant gratification of test score boosts, together we could invest the time necessary to teach students to be students.

Afterthought.  In the question and answer on the New Yorker blog, the lack of a father was discussed.  Mischel theorized that the "trust expectation" which is essential to delayed gratification is undercut when the male role model is missing.- John Thompson 

THOMPSON: Talking about Race and More

William Julius Wilson’s More Than Race supplies the balance that is still missing in educational debates. Conservatives often criticize Wilson’s conclusion that the legacy of Jim Crow, and deindustrialization are more important than gangsta rap in explaining the Achievement Gap. "No Excuses" true believers like Michelle Rhee and Andres Alonso, when challenging Wilson’s conclusions that structural conditions produced "often dysfunctional social norms," are as strident as the Black Power ideologues who attacked Patrick Moynihan for mentioning the breakdown of the Black family. When jobs disappear, "The work ethic, investment in the future and deferred gratification make no sense. ... Men, unable to support their families, abandon them; women become resigned to single motherhood; children suffer from broken homes and from the bad examples set by both peers and adults."

It is easy to understand why today’s education reformers, especially those rooted in civil rights litigation, would recoil from Wilson’s "levelheaded" approach. But "the urban poor need remedies that judges" (and school superintendents) "cannot order: public and private investment to create jobs that pay a living wage, training to help them learn new skills and understand the job market, and ... economically integrated neighborhoods where there are better opportunities and healthier cultural norms." Even so, Wilson’s "unemotional analysis should help such badly needed policies prevail in the court of public opinion." - John Thompson

THOMPSON: Say it Ain’t So

I am still hoping that Outliers will be an outlier. I am hoping that my favorite popular science writer hasn’t "jumped the shark." I laughed off the implication that my city’s schools were failing because Okie "good ol boys" were the descendants of sharecroppers, not Asian wet rice farmers. While not knowing enough to disagree with Gladwell on the merits of KIPP, I wondered whether he knew enough about educational systems to conclude that KIPP is the "most promising charter school movement" in terms of being replicable. I was enjoying Gladwell’s account of the full court press, and I was assuming he would then explain why it wasn’t as effective with the long NBA season. But, Gladwell then wrote that the "David," underdog strategy, was rejected by the "basketball establishment" because the effort required to run a full court press is "too daunting. They would rather lose."

In other words when faced with additional nuance, Gladwell took the easy path and issued a blanket indictment of the "status quo." Rather than ask how to sustain "David" strategies, like the full court press or KIPP, Gladwell played the "drama" card, instigating conflict and disparaging the other views. Checking hyperlinks, I learned that the sports blogosphere is not forgiving of newcomers who do not bother to learn enough about their field before issuing blanket statements.  Supposedly Gladwell asked for an hour interview with Rick Pitino, the Kentucky coach who used the press to win a championship,  and was told, "Son, you’ll be lucky to get five minutes."

THOMPSON: Out of the Closet

A recent study in Education Next prompted a great discussion at the Core Knowledge Blog. Robert Pondiscio has long argued that the "time on task gap" aggravated by chronic classroom disruptions, explains much of the Achievement Gap, and 77% of teachers have agreed that discipline problems undercut their instructional effectiveness.

Researchers identified 4.6% of the children in a school district of 30,000 as coming from households where domestic violence charges were brought by a parent. Elementary school boys exposed to domestic violence performed at the 37 percentile academically, as opposed to boys not exposed who ranked in the 52^nd percentile. Forty-three percent of the boys exposed to domestic violence had disciplinary incidents as opposed to 25% of boys not exposed.

The study also found statistically significant negative effects on the peers of the children exposed to domestic violence, such as increasing disciplinary infractions of classmates by 16%. Adding one troubled boy to a class of twenty decreased the male classmates’ test scores by two percentile points. (That is 7% of a standard deviation.)  And that is before the domino effect of chronic disruption spreads into middle school and beyond!

Fortunately, the study found that

THOMPSON: Whats Not To Like, Part II?

"Smart Options: Investing the Recovery Funds for Student Success" reveals the new kinder and gentler version of the Gates/Broad school of reform. There is barely a mention of proposals that would contradict Randi Weingarten’s ideas or the Broader Bolder approach. Proposals include a "learning stabilization" program for summer learning and extended school days for the lowest-performing students; incentives to bring the best teachers to the most challenged schools; a common core of fewer, clearer, and higher standards so that teachers can "teach to the standards" not the standardized tests; and they even counter-balance the word "accountability" with "autonomy." In contrast to the pre-Obama days, these (reborn?) accountability hawks retain an inflated belief in the potential benefits of renegotiating tenure and transfer language, but they drop no hints that existing contracts should be abrogated. They still believe that classroom instruction is the key to closing the achievement gap, but there was no implication that educators who want to address the full complexity of generational poverty are guilty of low expectations.

The data systems recommendations are downright touchy feely, emphasizing their roles in evaluating professional development, directing resources to the most needy students, reducing the dropout rate, and signaling when students need additional help. The section on school turnarounds did not mention the wholesale removal of teachers, and the only mention of "value-added" models was in the context of helping struggling students. Only on pages 22 and 23 did the wording of the primitive, old test-driven accountability seem to intrude

THOMPSON: What Causes Burnout? All of the Above

Debra Viadero’s new blog presents a wake-up call that should force us to stop the blame game, "... In 2007 more than half of African-American 8th graders, compared with a fifth of white 8th graders, had a teacher who left before the end of the school year? Among students poor enough to qualify for federal free-lunch programs, two-thirds had teachers who failed to finish out that year."

Viadero's source, the ETS’ "Parsing the Achievement Gap" is the un-McKinsey report - full of data illustrating the complexity of our challenges. ETS shows that 82% of Whites but only 57% of Black and 58% of low-income 4th graders attend schools where the same teachers started and ended the year. In comparison to Whites, more than twice as many low-income students, Black and Hispanic 12^th graders attend schools where 6 to 10% of teachers are absent on an average day. Of course, plenty of those absences are "mental health days" by burned out teachers, but they also are the result of conditions that would defeat the most dedicated of educators, and students, and drive younger teachers from the schools. (When my school's teachers were mostly forty-somethings we had the best attendance rate in the district, but now we're nearly ten years older....)  

ETS shows the interconnectedness of conditions that produce the achievement gap.

THOMPSON: Fear Strikes Out

Press coverage for recently released NAEP data ranged from describing the results as "mixed" to recognizing the report as an indictment and virtual conviction of NCLB-type accountability. Seventeen year olds, who have spent most of their educational lives under the law have not increased their reading comprehension or even their math scores. Who cares if State tests scores, or even NAEP scores, increase in the elementary years if the gains do not persist into high school? As predicted, NCLB may have increased decoding skills, but not reading comprehension or numeracy, while narrowing the curriculum, destroying recess and the values of free play time, overemphasizing destructive test prep, and perverting the principles of public education.

When the Boston All Star, Jimmy Piersall, had his nervous breakdown at Yankee Stadium, the moral was not lost on my generation. We began to discuss the ethics of a pitching coach ruining a kid’s arm by throwing curve balls for a Little League championship. Now rules prevent a wrestling coach from requiring excessive weight-pulling to win an 8^th grade championship or a football coach from denying water to players during August two-a-days. Even if a coach believes that "putting points on the board" is the highest value in life, imposing such an ethic in high school sports is no longer sanctioned.

So, why do we allow the same sort of instructional malpractice in our classrooms?

THOMPSON: "So, I Won't Be Graduating"

Standardized testing season has closed and everyone feels horrible. Its time to comfort and energize discouraged students, especially the freshmen who must pass four End of Instruction (EOI) tests in order to graduate.

The adults in the school, however, are equally demoralized. The EOI teachers have given their all. Some claim their students gave in to test anxiety and would have done better had the teacher been allowed to provide encouragement. Others beat themselves up over their failure to cover more of the "scope and sequence" guide. Several are already adjusting next year’s lesson plans. This time of year, though, even our most fervent believers in "high expectations" have to recognize the damage done by NCLB testing. You would have to be a stone to have shared the building with our teenagers for the last three weeks and not recognize the self-defeating nature of test-driven accountability and the real harm it inflicts on children.

The students and the adults in our building have all been shamed. The kids react to the humiliation in predictably inappropriate and self-destructive ways. Most of the adults, however, are already discussing plans for next year. As hard as it is for some to admit it, we all recognize the need for reinforcements. We are now united in asking for more people to help with the social and emotional needs of our children. We need a restoration of electives. We need help from the community. - John Thompson

THOMPSON: The Enron School of Educational Reform

Wikipedia has an excellent debate over the McKinsey group’s allegedly "Thug-like habits," such as its system to prevent insurance payments after Hurricane Katrina through the "tactics of deny, delay, and defend." An English civil servant described McKinsey as "people who come in and use Power Point to state the bleeding obvious." McKinsey supposedly suffers from "Groupthink" or the tendency "to simply offer whatever the latest fashionable ‘management theory’ is as their reasoned and expensive ‘analysis.’"

In "The Talent Myth," Malcolm Gladwell predicted almost exactly the educational reform strategies that McKinsey would be offering seven years later. Gladwell described how "the talent mind-set" which disregards "relevant experience" and "common sense" was essential to the collapse of Enron. The McKinsey/Enron focus on I.Q. undercut their ability to work with people in real-world environments.

McKinsey’s problem is that "an employer really wants to assess not potential but performance," so it invariably ends up with "performance evaluations that aren't based on performance."

THOMPSON: Balanced Words

PBS’s Now included an excellent discussion of Chicago’s Renaissance 2010 and whether struggling schools should be completely reorganized with all teachers and staff having to reapply for their jobs or whether replacing the schools’ leadership is effective.

If we hope to address "the bottom one percent," or the toughest 95,000 schools, surely America will need both strategies - and others. All types of principal and teacher training programs would need to be in overdrive for years before we have the talent for the challenge. The key is whether Arne Duncan, and the rest of us, follow his own words, "We can’t move forward without an honest assessment of the facts."

I will defer to Alexander and other journalists to evaluate the actual facts regarding Duncan’s previous reforms in Chicago. 

Update/Correction:  Doug Levin caught an error that I should have caught.  Apparently the Secretary of Education might have been referring to the statement "Currently 6,000 of the nation’s 95,000 schools are labeled as needing corrective action or restructuring."  Thank you.

Still, Duncan worries:

THOMPSON: Challenging the Poison of Poverty

Attempting to fix inner city schools without fixing the city in which they are embedded is like trying to clean the air on one side of a screen door. - Jean Anyon.

David Berliner's "Our Impoverished View of Education," provides a corrective to the post modern, counter-factual speculations of the recent McKinsey report.  Building on generations of social science, Berliner offers fresh insights into the "600 pound gorilla" of closing the achievement gap - zip codes. The challenge is the interacting complexities of neighborhoods including low birth weight, lead and mercury poisoning, stress, poor nutrition, asthma, crime and domestic violence, mobility, inadequate child care, alcohol and drug abuse, and mental illness.  After all, a poor child spends 1000 hours per year in school and 5000 hours at home in the neighborhood.

Berliner is impressed with two studies that show how increased family income affects student behavior and school achievement. In one study, children whose families' income went up showed increased school readiness and scored as well as the students who had never been poor. In another study, after four years of moving out of poverty, formerly poor children had no more psychiatric symptoms than children who had never been poor. - John Thompson

THOMPSON: Our Dumb World

The McKinsey report, "The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools," argues that America's GDP might be $2.3 trillion greater if the achievement gap disappeared after we read The Nation at Risk. 

The report resembles an Onion parody, displaying nuggets of information with the full glory of digital graphics while being literally absurd. McKinsey’s scatter-grams isolate three pairs of neighboring states with large achievement gap differences. Three pages later, hidden in a multi-colored display, is the best explanation for the gaps. The lagging states have far greater black child poverty rates. Who would have thunk it? Delaware’s rate, for instance, is 50% worse than Maryland's, a gap-closer of that chart. In another part of the study, however, Delaware is cited as one of the success stories in closing the achievement gap.

My favorite was a scatter-gram of 91 dots representing unnamed urban districts,

THOMPSON: Have you No Shame?

Al Sharpton compares people like me to George Wallace, saying we are "smiling liberals" and "all a bunch of condescending bigots." We "co-conspirators" and "door blockers" are robbing America of $670 billion per year because we protect the educational "status quo."

Forty years ago, the United States had the highest graduation rate in the world, but we also had an industrial base. If my students’ parents were making $30 to $40 per hour for blue collar work, as opposed to $6 or $7 or so, perhaps we would still be making significant progress in closing the Achievement Gap. So, do we condemn our liberal brethren for failing to defeat Supply Side Economics and the deindustrialization of America? Do we need new witch trials into "Who Lost Health Care?," "Who Lost Welfare?," and "Who Lost the War to End the War on Drugs?."

The bigger question for the EEP, and Sharpton’s co-chair, is when will an apology be issued? - John Thompson

THOMPSON: IEPs for All

This time of year I always wish I could have known each student's story in August as I am now learning to understand them.  When our high school and middle school merged, I had a chance to review the old paper files from my students' feeder schools.  I was struck by the number of kids who were reported to be cheerful, bright, and successful before tragedies struck.  We're in the 21st century, and yet the system has no way adjusting so that the death of a mother in the 4th grade, for instance, does not sentence the child to a lifetime of educational failure and poverty?

When GEAR UP introduced the idea of IEPs for all students, I groaned as I anticipated another primitive, underfunded "quick fix" that generated more meaningless paperwork and prevented the assessment of disciplinary consequences.  Maybe I'm naive, but could the Stimulus money finance a state-of-the-art digital system for individual records and the results of previous interventions?  As with the health care industry's challenge of putting medical records online, the challenge would be huge - not something that teachers slap together in their spare time.  Even with the proper funding and recruiting the talent for such a task, the mission should keep the the computer people so busy that they wouldn't have time for devising silly value-added accountability models. - John Thompson  

THOMPSON: Constructive Criticism of IDEA

It was at the funeral of my Seriously Emotionally Disturbed student when his father, who had repeatedly insisted that his son had no future, walked out of the services when I decided I could not leave the classroom and turned down a prestigious opportunity in Denver that would have tripled my salary, so please do not take this wrong. Most special educational students are delightful and have too much dignity to abuse IDEA protections. And the Progressive Policy Institute’s outstanding report on special education covers a range of issues. I just have to cite its analysis of the issue, discipline, where so much damage is done to neighborhood inner city schools.

"Fair or not, there is a perception among school personnel that the IDEA simply blocks discipline," said a principal in Virginia, describing a case where an elementary student’s "drug-holding was related to disability... that the student had low self-esteem rooted in his speech and language deficits, and that the student became involved in drug use in an effort to obtain peer approval."

Other Virginia principals described the difficulty of maintaining two sets of disciplinary consequences, and the temptation to lower behavioral standards for all because the school could not discipline students on IEPs,

THOMPSON: Predictably Irrational

Dan Ariely's experiments in Predictably Irrational offer another explanation of why it was inevitable that data-driven accountability would have a corrupting effect on schools, and the theorists who embraced it. Ariely showed that cheating increases dramatically when the stakes are not money but a coupon, even if it can immediately be transformed into money. This obviously explains the additional lure of corruption with stocks and complex financial packages, as well as NCLB-type accountability. Dishonesty also increases when people see others cheating in an open manner, thus creating a social acceptance of the transgression. Cheating grows further when it is obvious that violators come from the same social milieu. Dishonesty is discouraged, however, when people see cheating by people from another social set.

Neither does Behavioral Economics does not lend support for Pay for Performance. People who would change a flat tire for free are less likely to help if offered five dollars, because the transaction is thus switched from the "social domain" to the "market domain."

THOMPSON: Juking the Stats

Ed Burns' and David Simon's The Wire was a "love letter" to the individuals of Baltimore, to honesty, and to the "equivocations and connections" that is the human comedy.  The "fraud of education in the inner city" is that "we pretend to educate kids," as "we pretend that we (post-industrial society) need them." 

The answer?  Simon's character, Bunny, responds, "I'm not sure.  It can't be a lie."  As Bunny explains to a clueless superintendent, honesty is doubly important for students who are "not learning for our world.  ... Jesus, they see right through us." 

And as Bill Moyer's wryly observed, with the decline of newspapers, "Nobody is de-juking the stats."

Please, let's drop the ideology for a moment, contemplate Simon's wisdom and then try to say it ain't so.

THOMPSON: No Second Thoughts?

"Before Joel Klein ..., before Michelle Rhee ..., there was Alan Bersin."  Bersin gives credit to a consistent curriculum for increasing student performance.  But he does not seem to have second thoughts about the failure of his reforms (and similar efforts throughout the nation) to increase high school performance.  But what is the purpose of k-8th education - boosting test scores or improved learning throughout high school and beyond?

I know little about Bersin so I am making a narrow point.  If Bersin had teaching experience, he might still support curriculum alignment.  But if he had had classroom experience, I would hope that Bersin would be engaging in some soul-searching.  Should he have focused on student engagement instead?   Was the principle of teacher autonomy too precious to be sacrificed for gains that haven't even persisted through students' teenage years?  Is it possible for engaging high school instruction and curriculum alignment to co-exist?  

THOMPSON: I Shall Reform

General MacArthur was as much of publicity hound as Michelle Rhee and he did not appreciate the sign welcoming his staged inspection of the troops which read, "With the Grace of God and a Few Marines, MacArthur Returned to the Philippines."  Whenever data-driven "reformers" need a public relations stunt, they "round up the usual suspects," returning to the same few outliers.  Last week the D.C. schools' "dog and pony show" again returned to Shaw Middle School, a school of 257 students (with a poverty rate down to 63%) which is "just awash in resources."  Armed only with a hand-picked staff (75% have masters degrees), "high expectations," "accountability," AND a student teacher ratio of eight to one; two counselors, two social workers, two mentors, a mental health therapist, and a Respect Coordinator; "pay for behavior" incentives, partnerships with John Hopkins and North Carolina University and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation;  new technology and science labs, music, arts and AP preparatory programs; and wrap around services beyond the dreams of the Bolder Broader approach, Shaw presumably demonstrated to Senator Dick Durbin and Congressman George Miller what neighborhood schools, who barely have a fraction of its per pupil funding, could do.if they would just follow heroic leadership.

When Rhee set out to restore order at Ron Brown Middle School, her new principal also received two additional assistant principals, two more deans, and a forty-camera security system. 

THOMPSON: Illogic of "Reform"

A parent explained her experience in Harlem schools, writing "I got jumped the first day of school. I was beaten up regularly. My scores dropped. ... I enrolled my daughter in our local zone school. She, too, got jumped her first day. She got beat up regularly and wasn't learning. ... I adopted my 10-year-old niece ... she enrolled in our local zone school, PS 194. What do you know, her first day of school, she got jumped."

According to Logic 101, we should seek blame in the longterm policies of the central offices that perpetuate mayhem in schools, but the New York Post guest columnist attacked the teachers union?!?!  Next to students and parents, it is teachers who suffer the most from the stress and disorder of inner city schools.  Even if teachers, all across the nation, are callous enough to ignore the violence and chaos inflicted on children, if educators inside the schools were allowed to control the disorder would we idly endure the wretched conditions described by the parent/op ed writer?

Similarly, Elizabeth Green describes the "two different sets of tools" available to principals in Harlem. 

THOMPSON: Eduwonk versus the Education Sector

Eduwonk is disappointed by the lack of data-driven accountability in Secretary Duncan’s Stimulus guidelines, but he offered no concrete counter-proposals. So, I followed his link to Andrew Rotherham’s 148 page Achieving Teacher and Principal Excellence, A Guide for Donors seeking specifics. As with all Education Sector publications, I was impressed with the report’s careful use of words, and I found nothing that I would dispute. I was dismayed, however, by many silences.

Missing was any evidence or explanations why the worthy efforts of charters and pilot programs for training educators would be replicable in high poverty neighborhood schools. Rotherham wants to "work with" teacher unions, and Eduwonk presumably wants to "work around" unions, but missing is any indication that either want to listen and perhaps acknowledge that unions (and education schools) might have better ideas regarding the toughest challenge - neighborhood secondary schools.

If we really believe in science, maybe donors should endow research programs in institutions with a long history of, and respect for, collegial exchanges of ideas and evidence. If they believe that data-driven approaches have not been given due respect by unions or universities, why not fund studies that would test their theories according to accepted scholarly and social scientific principles? - John Thompson

THOMPSON: Washington Consensus

Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Institute proclaims that the "Washington Consensus" is "alive and well." Washington demands "no excuses" in closing the achievement gap and a "focus on test-based accountability."

But there is a social science consensus that school systems alone can not overcome poverty, and that the statistical models demanded by a national accountability system do not exist.

Petrilli once claimed that Hillary Clinton could be the last best hope of NCLB-type accountability, and now they hope that Arne Duncan will pick up the cudgel. But why is Petrilli so triumphant when the Big Swifty and the Eduwonk are singing the blues over the recently announced Stimulus rules? - John Thompson

THOMPSON: The Obama-Clinton-McCain-Bush School of Foreign Policy

Even if it was just an Op Ed proposal, Fred Hiatt, the foreign affairs editor, would have questions regarding the thesis that President Obama’s policies on Afghanistan are no different from those of peace activists, foreign affairs "realists," and "neo-conservatives."

Michelle Rhee has gambled everything on data-driven accountability and union-bashing. She supports vouchers, rejects community schools and the "Broader Bolder" recommendations as excuses designed to let teachers off the hook and says that Obama "scares" her. On the contrary, Secretary Duncan and President Obama want a balanced approach, reject mindless "bubble" testing, advocate community schools, seek compromises with unions and the Broader Bolder supporters, and understand that vouchers for a few are a distraction. And yet Hiatt writes of the "Obama-Duncan-Gates-Rhee" reform movement?!?!

If Hiatt does not know what he doesn’t know about education, he should consult with the Washington Post’s or Education Week’s excellent reporters.

THOMPSON: Charters Futures

The father of one of my all-time favorite students supports charter schools because no neighborhood school could have allowed his son to sit on the bookshelves and pace around the room as he pontificated about the day’s politics. Until neighborhood schools are orderly enough to respect the rights of children to use the restroom when they need to, there will be a market for charter schools. Until neighborhood middle schools can a try to implement the middle school model of team-building and exploration, I will support charters.

Its not easy to run a school system, navigating the overwhelming maze of regulations. But neither is it easy being a teenager in this era of broken families - hence the need for those protections. IDEA, for instance, produces incredible headaches for neighborhood schools where a critical mass of students are on IEPs, but that is a cross we adults must gladly bear. The children did not ask to be born with learning disabilities. Demand for charters would decline dramatically, however, if schools could address the two worst absurdities - removing the 8% or so of teachers who do not belong in a classroom, and providing humane services for the most troubled children who are emotionally incapable of functioning in neighborhood schools.

A RAND study of nine systems concluded that charters, as a whole, do not "cream," but neither do they raise student performance.  And RAND did not address the common sense observation that SELECTIVE charters disproportionately serve easier-to-teach students.  As charters face the increased complexity of dealing with the full diversity of our children, the idea of running a one-school school system will seem less enchanting.

THOMPSON: What Works

Russ Whitehurst, the former director of the What Works Clearinghouse, makes a particularly profound argument that innovative "processes," are more effective than innovative "products."  His wisdom is timely because the rules for Stimulus funding, seeking to avoid "falling off the cliff" after the money ends, tend to favor the purchase of products as opposed to investing in the human capital for more promising, ongoing reforms.

Whitehurst is equally astute in recommending measurable efficiencies, as opposed to measurable outputs (test scores). Fundamentally, Whitehurst is counseling more modesty and less infatuation with  products.  Hospitals, for instance, get better outcomes from simple processes like checklists and ensuring that hands are washed properly than from  "paradigm shifting" innovations.  

In other words, should Joel Klein reconsider his $300 million annual investment in accountability and $10,000 per day in courier services for delivery of test data, while threatening to cut teachers? - John Thompson 

THOMPSON: Citizenship II

Tom Friedman says that today is September 12.  Today is December 8, 1941 and we need all hands on deck. I had a friend who was torpedoed three times in the North Sea, and later blacklisted for being "a premature anti-fascist."  The non-communist Left continued to pit anti-communists against anti-anti-communists for decades.

Will a litmus test be imposed on today's educators seeking to serve in the "Race to the Top?"   Will educators be asked, "Are you now, or were you ever a non-anti-accountability sympathizer in the Broader Bolder tradition? - John Thompson