Studying School Improvement

Public Education Matters

1-27-09

Studying School Improvement


Tonight the President gave his State of the Union Address. He talked about the economy mostly, of course. He also spoke a bit about education.

As you might be aware, despite the fact that I am a big supporter of Barak Obama, I’ve not exactly been thrilled about his educational policies as proposed by his Education Secretary, Arne Duncan. You might even think that so far all I’ve done in this blog is whine about those policies or about my own state’s education agendas.

Am I just a malcontent? Possibly. But I don’t really think so. There is very much in education that I find to be very positive. Generally, my problem is that I don’t think that there is enough real thought put into educational policies before they are set into motion. I don’t think that there is enough inclusiveness of the thoughts of educators who are down in the “trenches” or even those of educational researchers.

I think that the policies generally start with an agenda that is something other than providing our nation’s children with good education. I don’t think the research is looked at critically enough or in the right ways. I think there is a business agenda. I think “the numbers” are manipulated until they don’t mean what they mean anymore. And, I think “they” always want to put a square peg in a round hole. The square peg meaning what is true and the round hole being what policy makers want to believe.

Today I read an excellent article in Education Week entitled “Scholars Identify 5 Keys to Urban School Success.” The article is a review of a new book called “Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons From Chicago.” I’d sure like our nation’s educational leader to read this book. I’d like Tony Bennett and Mitch Daniels to read it as well. I personally can’t wait to get my hands on it.

The article’s opening statement is “Offering a counter-narrative to the school improvement prescriptions that dominate national education debates, a new book based on 15 years of data on public elementary schools in Chicago identifies five tried and true ingredients that work, in combination with one another, to spur success in urban schools.”

What does the author mean by “a counter-narrative?” Basically, the book is saying that the things that are on our Education Department’s school improvement agenda are NOT the things that their independently researched data bears out as being effective in improving schools and improving the education of our children.

What are the five keys that the book discusses as being essential? According to the article they are:

1. Strong Leadership, in the sense that principals are “strategic, focused on instruction, and inclusive of others in their work.” (Note this doesn’t say “focused on testing and standards.” Note the word INCLUSIVE)
2. A welcoming attitude toward parents, and formation of connections with the community. (Note the word CONNECTION.)
3. Development of professional capacity, which refers to the quality of the teaching staff, teachers’ belief that schools can change, and participation in good professional development and collaborative work. (Note that this doesn’t talk about pitting teacher against teacher for merit pay or being evaluated based on student achievement. Note the word COLLABORATIVE.)
4. A learning climate that is safe, welcoming, stimulating, and nurturing to all students. (Note- this really is counterintuitive to the testing fests we have going on in schools today. Note the words SAFE, WELCOMING, STIMULATING, NURTURING.)
5. Strong instructional guidance and materials. (Note the words STRONG and GUIDANCE.)

What’s further interesting to me is that the data gathered for this book took charter schools, and magnet schools, and gifted schools out of the equation when they studied schools and student achievement. In essence they did not study schools who have the unfair advantage of being selective about who they will enroll. Since they are attempting to answer the question of what makes for PUBLC school improvements, they only looked at “true” PUBLIC schools.

They looked only at neighborhood schools that were determined to be “truly disadvantaged” and compared them against each other and found out which ones were able to boost achievement and attendance. And lo and behold, the ones that were able to do these things were the ones who shared the above 5 commonalities. The schools that were not successful in raising student achievement and attendance only had some of these 5 “ingredients.” The authors propose that all 5 are essentials in improving schools. You can’t just have some of them in place.

So my questions- If there is this great research out there about what can make a school great and what can raise student achievement, then WHY aren’t my legislators looking at it? Why aren’t my state and national education leaders asking the right questions and/or even listening to the answers or at objective data? Why instead do they seem only to be listening to “big business” and billionaires who don’t live in the real world about what will work in schools?