If students designed their own schools....

On the long list of things I want to know more about, we have the Independent Project.  Students designed their own questions and found ways of answering them.  They also wrote a white paper about it, which I would like to read, you know, soonish.

Their website.  Their blog.

Hat tip The Answer Sheet

I told myself I wouldn't do this

Gov. Rick Snyder came out with proposals for reforming Michigan's education system.  I'm not watching the press conference.

I'm not going to read the article or the accompanying PDF.  I'm certainly not reading the follow-up articles on mlive.com.

And whatever I do, I'm not going to blog about it.

I won't be happy with anything I hear.  I've got real work to do.  I don't have time.  I had four hours of sleep yesterday.  My clothes are slimy with the humidity.  I'm cranky.  No good can come of it.  It will only upset me.

Dammit....

(All of these references come from the Special Message on Education Reform PDF.)

Do schools really give pizza parties on count day?  I think that the attendance taking system actually sees through that ploy.  I have the exact same criticism for this funding model that I had for it when Bush proposed it under NCLB: He wants to give money to schools doing well. A "reward," he calls it, or an incentive, or something.  What about the schools that don't improve?  Well, less money for you.  I forget who said it, but it's still true: Money can't solve everything, but it can solve some things.  It's obvious that a businessman would want to put more money into what works, but it just leaves too many schools behind, and there's no way--NO way--the remaining "good" schools could pick up the slack.  In a competitive environment, the winners pull further ahead, the losers stay really lost.  His solution to this is to erase all school borders and increase on-line learning opportunities.

I disapprove of charter schools.  I don't think more of them will do anything to improve education.  Indeed, in an environment where the people furthest ahead are likely to continue to be so by dint of increased funding, the charter schools won't last long.  They'll be nothing more than an expensive distraction for the next 10 years.

Merit pay is a pipe dream.  It may or may not work for the next 5 years, while people still think it's a great idea.  Then, some funding emergency will come up.  The funding for merit pay will dry up.  Then, all the "incentive" teachers had to do a good job will be gone.  Here's hoping the good teachers stay.  This scenario is just as probable for schools and districts as it is for individual teachers.

I kind of like the idea presented in "Any Time, Any Place, Any Way, Any Pace."  Anything that makes success in school less dependent on the game of school is a good thing.  The rest of that paragraph sounds like it was inspired by Waiting for Superman.

"Cost-efficient, competitive, innovative, and effective."  Hmm.  I'll ponder the grouping of these four adjectives later.  Particularly their order.

The symbolic gesture of creating "a P-20 state education system" by making the state school fund pay for the whole thing, while simultaneously not paying anything extra into the system, would be laughable, if there were anything at all funny about it.

Effective feedback for teachers is important. Fair, rigorous and meaningful evaluation systems are important.  Peer learning and shared practice are important.  Intelligent use of technology to enhance performance is important.  Recognition of high performance is important.  I don't know if reward for high performance is or not.  Research suggests not.  The point is, though, we don't have any of those other things.  We're not getting them any time soon.  It will be good to have them.  If nothing else, this speech should be able to push everyone in the direction of getting them.

I will be evaluated on the effectiveness of my teaching to the tune of 40% based on student achievement growth, when I've seen some evidence that the state's standardized tests are in any way a meaningful assessment of same.


I don't think most administrators are able to put in the time to do teacher evaluations properly.  On a similar note, who's evaluating the efficacy of administrators?  We're all about transparency and accountability, right?  And I don't mind about effectiveness in teaching being more important than seniority, although I think more experienced teachers often have a great deal to add.  We simply have no system for determining effectiveness of teachers.  I really need to find the link, but not so long ago, I remember reading that when Arizona got rid of its seniority priority laws, they fired all the experienced teachers.  This was not because they were ineffective, but because they're expensive.  Whether or not the law is intended this way, it will be used this way by increasingly cash-strapped school districts.

And the money phrase: "Michigan has to nurture great teachers, make sure they find satisfying career paths that reward them for teaching excellence, and keep them in the classroom[...]."  You're doing a heck of a job, Rickie.

PD.  I am going to write to my congressman and ask him to propose legislation to officially change the name of our state from Michigan to New Michigan.  This will allow us to break completely with the old way of educating our kids, and symbolize the new and shining future that we'll create for them.  I further propose that every 100 years we successfully manage not to be annexed by Indiana, we add another "New" to the name.  Not necessarily to the beginning.  "New Michigan New" has a nice symmetry to it.

Edited to add:  I just saw the Education Dashboard.  Under the category "Value for money," the only metric is the percentage of school districts running a deficit for 3 years or more.

Reform is in the air!

One of the reasons I think teachers have been so reluctant to embrace "reform" is because we were afraid it was going to look like...well, what it's looking like now.  Things in the mid-west are getting ugly fast.  Dianne Ravitch speaks to the AASA of demoralized teachers all over the country.  School districts can't count on the states to continue funding operations at a sustainable level; states can't trust the federal government to step in and fill the breach; parents can't trust that students are getting the education the students deserve (and the parents are pretty sure they're paying for.)  In the face of this, the reforms have largely come in the form of draconian budget cuts, calls on school districts to do less with more, and unrealistic demands on teachers.  We are expected to do less with more, to make concessions in pay and benefits that "the state just can't afford anymore," to meet ever-increasing standards, and not to complain about it because we're lucky we still have jobs.

This causes real problems for actual, genuine, honest-to-goodness school reformers.  At the end of the two thousandsies, I think we were really making progress towards figuring out what would make our schools massively better.  A number of excellent organizations had developed effective teacher-ed programs that would improve student achievement.  Research was pointing the way towards what works: consistently high standards for students and teachers, coupled with effective support programs for those who need them; greater collaborative decision-making at the school level; effective teacher training and on-going professional development.  Research had also begun to show that some common themes of reform were ineffective--competition through increased charter schools; merit pay; firing "bad" teachers en masse.

I fear now that this moment of opportunity has been lost.  In Wisconsin, the biggest attention-getter in the news, the national focus has landed on the union-busting measures.  In Indiana, these union-busting measures passed months ago, and people are just now realizing their implications.  In Ohio, the governor's proposed budget would slightly increase funding on paper, while in fact meaning significant budget cuts in action.  Because of this, the conversation circles around what we can afford, not what is right.  We're talking about teachers' compensation packages, not what works.

Because of this, teachers don't trust anything that comes down the pike, and they're unlikely to do so any time soon.  State policy makers have never trusted union teacher members to be legitimate partners in reform.  (I suspect this is why all of the recent reform efforts have included some element of union-busting.)  This lack of trust means that genuine partnerships to improve the American education system are in jeopardy, perhaps for years to come.

Some of the articles I was reading that led to this post:

5 myths about teachers that are distracting policymakers by Barnett Berry, guest posting on The Answer Sheet at the Washington Post.  H/T Larry Ferlazzo.

Gov. Rick Snyder says public school cuts will be 'difficult,' but denies he's trying to break unions by Julie Mack, in my hometown rag.


And a little political cartoon, just for good measure.


(I've obviously referred to a lot of information I haven't cited.  If anyone asks me about it, I'll try to pull the reference list together.) 

Another book to read someday

Catching up or leading the way by Yong Zhao.  It examines the role of the American education system in the world.  The selling point seems to be this: as the US education system moves closer to that of the rest of the world, the rest of the world's education systems move closer to that of the US. 

My principal has told me a little bit about it.  I'd be interested to read the book, because the blurbs and the bullet points off of ASCD's website immediately raise my hackles.


Available here.

Insufficient answers to pressing questions

Bob Herbert describes extraordinary results in a charter school (2 charter schools, actually--a middle school, and a high school that they made in response to their initial success in the middle school). 48 of 48 students in the graduating class are going on to college. All of these students face the difficulties educators point to--poverty, first to attend college, etc.

Eduwonk (hat tip for the article) frames this as the reason to have charter schools.

But my fundamental question remains unanswered--why can't we do this with public education? Why don't we? I think Eduwonk would say "Teachers' Unions! Vested Interests! Education Lobbyists!" Is my industry so politically powerful? Is it so short-sighted that we'd betray our professional principles and destroy our credibility?

At the same time I write this post, I happen to be listening to a Smithsonian Folkways podcast about labor movement folk songs, and it occurs to me that I toe the Union line pretty strongly. So let me clarify: I, of course, celebrate the success of all the students of Gaston Prep Middle and the high school (unnamed in the article). I honor the tremendous effort and sacrifice, and admire the professional dedication, of Tammi Sutton and Caleb Dolan, the educators responsible for creating and driving the schools that have helped this graduating class. I look forward to continued success from these schools. I don't question that in another educational setting these students would not have met anywhere near the same degree of success. I look forward to continued success from these schools.

What I question is, why wouldn't these students have had the same degree of success in their local public schools? What did this school do that public schools don't do? Why don't they do it?

The heart of my criticism of charter school is this: Charter schools and similar reform efforts are based on the notion of competition between education providers. The theory runs thus: as charter schools show their worth, non-charter schools will have to reform and improve student services, or parents will choose schools that will do the best job by their students. "Free and open market forces" will decide the distribution of limited resources--the victors will survive, the failures will dissolve. With the failure of just a few schools, we'll achieve a much higher degree of educational efficacy in education. And maybe that's the case.

But we already have a system of distribution of limited resources. It's called the "public education system." It is not immune from criticism: It is a near-monopoly; it's a bulky bureaucracy with many share-holders whose objectives sometimes work at cross-purpses; change is nearly impossible; every rule change has a million unintended consequences. Public schools fail a huge number of students, and these students are disproportionately the ones who most need help from the public sector--minorities and special-needs students.

But, and here's the rub of it, I think, charter schools and other competitive systems of education reform seek to dilute pools of limited resources, in effect robbing Peter to pay Paul. This inevitably leads to incentivizing "trade secrets," which is the opposite of what we want. If a school finds something that works that nobody else is doing, we want people standing on the rooftops screaming about it. We want successful teachers to be rock stars, the subjects of articles and TV specials, teacher educators, article-writers. We want their techniques studied, spread, maximized. To that extent, anything that charter schools can do to make us better, I'm all for it. I remain extremely sceptical, however, that diffusing the nation's education resources is the best way to do that.