New Blog – Change Your Links

The School Turnaround Group has a new blog:

IN THE ZONE

Please change your links accordingly, and thanks for continuing to follow our work!

Tighter on Ends, Looser on Means

No child should have to attend a school that for years has failed to improve student outcomes. Fortunately, most of the country seems to agree on this, and lately I spend far less time convincing folks that something has to change. Unfortunately, there’s not a ton of agreement about what exactly should change, and in the meantime, there are still thousands of schools that continue to let down children and families every single day. 

That said, a plethora of recent studies on the effectiveness of school turnaround – and more specifically, the federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) program  – should spur some conversation about future efforts to remedy chronic failure.

The good news? Turnaround can dramatically – and surprisingly quickly – increase student achievement, when districts address fundamental, politically sensitive issues. The bad news? It’s still too easy to do what we know doesn’t work: light-touch, silver-bullet solutions that are much less politically risky.

So how do we stop doing what doesn’t work? The feds and states have an important role to play, but I worry that policymakers are focused on the wrong issues. We need to stop worrying whether there are four turnaround models or six models or a dozen models.

Instead, we need to worry about two things: 

1)   Are districts fundamentally changing the structures and operating conditions around chronically underperforming schools, while delegating day-to-day decisions to accountable operational units that are closer to children? We’re foolish if we think that the top-down bureaucracies that were complicit in chronic failure will be the same ones that reverse the trend. We need to make decisions – and spend dollars – closer to students.

2)   Are schools seeing measurable increases in student achievement after two years? Are leading indicators of change – like increases in credit accumulation and decreases in absences/dropouts – changing after one year?

It’s an easy enough trade to conceptualize: big changes for big results. But it’s still politically difficult. SIG funds are both a carrot and a stick. If used smartly, they can make a real difference for the hundreds of thousands of kids still trapped in bad schools. Some states like Delaware, Indiana, New York and Louisiana get it; they are using SIG as a lever to demand real structural changes in districts and schools. In essence, they are making the risk of maintaining the failing status quo greater than the risk of doing things differently. Until that approach becomes the norm, we’re making it too easy for folks to get off the hook for real change. 

Turnaround Grants for Bad Charters

Look out, Joe Siedlecki from the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation is blogging!

He has a good post up about whether or not it’s wise to use School Improvement Grants to turnaround bad charter schools. He thinks “no,” and I basically agree. The whole bargain with charters is more authority for more accountability, and without the credible threat of closure, the whole accountability thing goes out the window.

I feel basically the same about traditional public schools, AFTER they’ve been given charter-like authority in a turnaround context.

NCLB, We Hardly Knew Ye

Politics K-12 has a good summary of EdSec Duncan’s weekend offer to states: adopt RtTT style reforms, and  we’ll relax those pesky NCLB requirements that you hate. Andy Rotherham has a smart take here, basically arguing that most of federal policy under Obama/Duncan has already made some of this moot.

So, you basically have Duncan pulling the levers at his disposal, in spite of a sclerotic congress. And with this move – set against RtTT, SIG, and a host of other activities – NCLB continues to die, not in one swift motion, but by the proverbial thousand paper cuts.

While the policy and politics play out at the federal level, I’m worried about what schools, teachers, and principals are going to do amidst the inevitable communications headache that comes with this new information. Districts already have a hard enough time implementing the dictates of federal policy. While policy makers might be able to understand the realpolitik of federal policy suddenly becoming “moot,” I predict messiness as educators try to figure out what to do amidst the ambiguity.

Student Voice!

Gotham Schools has a great story about students in the Bronx organizing around school turnaround:

The students, who attend Samuel Gompers High School, have a specific improvement model in mind: the “re-start” option … Gompers is one of nine poorly performing high schools that are eligible for the federal help, but are not part of the city’s application for federal turnaround grants … “Why hasn’t the DOE given the grants to all the schools?” Gompers sophomore Sony Cabral asked at the rally. “They’re setting us up for failure.”

I’ve touched on this before, but the student voice often is completely absent from conversations about school turnaround. “Sistas and Brothas United” – the student group that organized around this issue – is filling a very important void. Kudos to them for that. Student and family demand should be a factor – though one of many – in determining school reform strategies, especially from the standpoint of sustainability.

All that said, the school improvement grants already constitute a relatively small portion of city and state budget. The only way to create the conditions for those grants to be successful is to give larger grants to fewer schools. Unpopular? Certainly, so school officials should choose grantees wisely. And it’s not bad to have a bunch of students begging for change!

What Can Federal Policy Do?

Rick has a good post about an event he hosted on Monday to discuss the history of federal intervention in schooling:

There seemed to be a shared sense that the feds can have enjoyed substantial success when it came to ensuring access for vulnerable populations (think IDEA), using cash to push states to adopt clear-cut policies (as with NCLB’s assessment requirements), using the bully pulpit to raise issues on the agenda, and promoting transparency and information … There was much more skepticism about the federal government’s ability to actually improve schools.

That sounds about right to me. When it comes to K-12 education, the feds have an outsized influence on the agenda relative to the proportion of money and energy that we spend at the federal level. That asymmetry lends itself well to aspirational goal setting, but doesn’t necessarily assure a clear path to improving schools. I’ve said this a few times, but you can’t legislate schools and people being better at their jobs. That said, the slowness of bureaucratic change almost necessitates the establishment of unreasonable goals. That’s the only way to get systems to move with urgency. Providing those systems and people with the tools to move in the right direction is an entirely different exercise.

Getting in the Weeds

If you’re interested in seeing what the local politics of school turnaround look like, you could do a lot worse than this BuffaloNews.com blog item by Mary Pasciak. It’s got a lot of great stuff about community engagement, school board tactics, union politics, and more.

This piece also provides a great opportunity to make a point about how the average American’s “political attention span” interfaces with education policy. While Americans are paying more attention to national politics these days, participation in local politics is still pretty dismal. But,the vast majority of education policy decisions are still made at the local level. My take is that the average citizen attends most closely to presidential politics, followed by other major state and federal political figures, then local officeholders, then school boards, then local union politics. You should probably invert that structure when thinking about relative importance for education policy. This is somewhat of a straw-man, because federal influence varies depending on concentrations of poverty and state funding systems, but it’s not far off.

Political Cover in Practice

Now that we’ve moved from the uber-sexy competition for Race to the Top dollars to the just-as-important-but-optically-banal implementation phase, it’s harder to make salient reform points about the program.

Oh wait, what’s that Delaware?

In a warning to districts that want to backtrack on their Race to the Top promises, Education Secretary Arne Duncan is publicly supporting state officials in Delaware who plan to withhold $11 million from the Christina School District for reneging on school-turnaround plans.

Duncan’s statement issued this evening marks the first time he’s had to take sides as 12 states and their participating districts work to implement the $4 billion in Race to the Top awards.

From now on, whenever someone asks me what “political cover” looks like in practice, I will send them this article. Also, this is a great example of back-end accountability. As you all know, I maintain healthy skepticism with respect to accountability that looks at inputs instead of outcomes. Here you have a state chief holding folks accountable for implementation – not just promises – and that’s great.

Keeping Teachers in Challenged Schools

Andy Rotherham’s TIME column for the week looks at some recent studies on teacher effectiveness. The whole thing is worth a read, and I want to expand on one part, which deals with expanding the number of National Board teachers in challenged schools:

Simpkins found that the number of National Board teachers in challenging schools is increasing … but mostly because teachers in those schools are earning the credential — not because teachers with the credential are changing schools. He also found that National Board teachers are no more likely to stay in those schools than other teachers. These results are disappointing for proponents … of tying National Board bonuses to service in high-poverty schools as a way to improve equity for low-income students.

It’s important to recognize that compensation alone rarely is the reason folks make professional decisions or express job satisfaction. There’s a fairly dense body of research that illustrates this point. Compensation is a factor in job satisfaction, but it usually ranks lower than things like having the opportunity to use one’s skills/abilities, feeling like there’s more potential for learning in one’s role, maintaining manageable levels of stress, and being a part of something meaningful. All of those things are REALLY hard to accomplish in a chronically under-performing school, and additional compensation will never be sufficient to drive the most effective teachers to teach in those schools.

Putting those things in place, however, is easier said than done. In short, that’s “culture change,” and it’s nearly impossible to do in the old district structure that treats challenged schools as a scourge. We need new organizational units within districts that can flip that mentality on its head and make failing schools the place where rockstar teachers go to get even more effective.

Risk Calculus and Turnaround

My last post at “Rick Hess Straight Up” was about the federal and state roles in school turnaround. You can read it here. It was a lot of fun to steal someone else’s blog space, and I hope that some new readers have found this blog as a result. Thanks again to Rick for making that happen!

I want to reiterate something I said in that post:

Right now, the downside risk of trying something new in failing schools, and subsequently falling short, is greater than continuing to fail in the same old ways.

This is just another manifestation of low expectations. Warren Buffett apparently once suggested that if we wanted to fix failing schools we should just outlaw private schools and then randomly assign every child in America to a public school. This is a clever thought experiment, but it’s also illustrative of our tolerance for inadequacy in education outcomes when it comes to disadvantaged children.

The point is, the downside risk of continuing to fail would be ENORMOUS if the communities served by failing schools were more politically empowered. One great way to maintain a sense of urgency around fixing chronically underperforming schools is for states and the feds to continue to leverage the bully pulpit.