Wisdom for Winners Volume Four.
Fight Fire With Fire. How to Get There from Here Star Man Second Edition. Age Is an Attitude. Ten Signs of a Leadership Crash. Leadership Lessons from the Thin Blue Line. Awesome Success Principles and Quotations. The Miracle of Motivation. Your Appointment With Success. Jump Start Your Day. A Recipe for Personal Achievement. Life Almost Killed Me. The Power of Personal Achievement How to write a great review. The review must be at least 50 characters long.
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Managing a Growing Addiction to Work. E is for Effort. Wisdom for Winners Volume Four. Fight Fire With Fire. How to Get There from Here Star Man Second Edition. Age Is an Attitude. Ten Signs of a Leadership Crash. Leadership Lessons from the Thin Blue Line. Awesome Success Principles and Quotations. The Miracle of Motivation.
Your Appointment With Success. Jump Start Your Day. A Recipe for Personal Achievement. Life Almost Killed Me. The Power of Personal Achievement How to write a great review. The review must be at least 50 characters long. The title should be at least 4 characters long. Three advocacy group leaders— Ted Lempert from Children Now, Ryan Smith from Education Trust West , and Arun Ramanathan from Pivot Learning —have supported Common Core because of the potential of those standards to improve the performance of low-income students and students of color.
The expert advocates I have named in these pages make up an impressive list of Build-and-Support proponents. I offer my apologies to the countless others who have also contributed to redirecting reform on a positive path but are not included here. The list could go on, but the main point is that there is extensive and unassailable backing for a supportive approach and validation of the dangers of the punitive strategies that are being promoted and implemented throughout our country.
In summary, the experts cited have found that all successful schools, districts, states, and nations have framed their initiatives around respect and trust. Instead, they focused on long-term, comprehensive measures and adequate resources to encourage engagement, cooperative effort, relational trust, and continuous improvement. All efforts were aimed at improving the quality of instruction of individual teachers centered on a broad, liberal arts curriculum as well as developing the capacities of the whole school staff—the building of social capital.
These strategies are emphasized in business and management schools, are widely used in industry, and are especially appropriate for high-performing professional enterprises. Such organizations are staffed by professionals who deal with complicated and difficult problems on a daily basis and require skilled practitioners to repeatedly adapt craft knowledge to complex situations. Highly productive schools and districts understand that the secret to top performance is participation and teamwork. Only by unleashing their power can institutions improve and enhance the performance of each individual.
To that end, they devote significant efforts to helping teachers trapped in isolated classrooms learn how to work together in becoming better at what they do. These exemplary districts understand that punitive, high-stakes schemes often undermine engagement and cooperative effort. A Blueprint for Success Tucker, M. Prominent Experts and Authors Fullan, M.
Centre for Strategic Education. Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education. The Flat World and Education: Getting Teacher Evaluation Right: What Really Matters for Effectiveness and Improvement. Beyond the Bubble Test: Improving Middle Grades Math Performance. Leadership as the Practice of Improvement. Transforming Teaching in Every School. The Ordeal of Equality: The University of Chicago Press. Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: An American Agenda for Education Reform. National Center for Education and the Economy.
Creating Education Success at Home. Policy Insights , Issue 1. Beyond the Education Wars: The Century Foundation Press. The Origins of My Views on Education. The Missing Link in School Reform.
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Stanford Social Innovation Review. The Foundation of Student Achievement. National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. State and Local Leaders David, J. Turning Around a High-Poverty District: California Office to Reform Education. Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Organizing a Network for Collective Action. Policy Analysis for California Education.
Many of these destructive schemes were recently enacted in several states that were once staunch supporters of public education. Tea Party Republicans took control of the legislature in , and a Republican governor was elected in , the first time in a century that Republicans controlled the state. Since taking power, the Republicans have slashed the budget for public education at all levels. They have enacted a law to authorize charter schools, including for-profit charters. They enacted a voucher law.
They welcomed for-profit virtual schools. They have set out to shrink government and diminish the public sector. Per-student spending is now near the lowest in the nation, as are teacher salaries. It shut down a five-year career teaching preparation program at the University of North Carolina, called the North Carolina Teaching Fellows, yet allocated almost the same amount of money to pay for Teach for America recruits, who will come and go. See also a series of articles published in the North Carolina Observer decrying the severe cuts and negative legislation affecting public schools.
Michael Leachman and his colleagues drafted a report for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities that documents the severe cuts in education nationally since the recession:. At least 31 states provided less state funding per student in the school year that is, the school year ending in than in the school year, before the recession took hold.
In at least 15 states, the cuts exceeded 10 percent. The extreme-right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council ALEC has convinced many Republican-led legislatures and Republican governors to enact a privatization agenda driven by antagonism to government services in general and public schools specifically. Luckily for this nation, the counterargument won the day and proved to be accurate—public schools for all has a beneficial influence on the economic and democratic health of our country.
Public education is universally recognized as the cornerstone of the spectacular growth the country experienced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Regrettably, ALEC and some of its billionaire supporters such as the Kochs are trying to re-litigate the issue. Hess claims reformers advocated setting the passing levels arbitrarily high; then they used the discontent engendered by mass failures to drive their agenda of harsh accountability and privatization of public schools.
He argues that their strategy was particularly effective in suburban districts. His expressed goal is to convert all public schools to charters. A final example is the advocacy group headed by Campbell Brown and heavily funded by the same cast of characters. The former anchor is helping the billionaire-backed charter lobby spread the gospel of educational reform. Alas, much of the negative reform rhetoric is also driven by a desire to break or curtail teacher unions for political reasons or because reformers believe unions prevent the dismissal of low-performing teachers.
Ironically, the most unionized states have the best educational records. Massachusetts is a case in point. As further evidence, many states with weak or no teacher unions lag considerably in student achievement. Almost all of our highest-performing districts have figured out how to work closely with their unions to focus on improving instruction.
Often, the push for enhancing instruction and continuous improvement originates with union advocacy. It is also true that local union recalcitrance sometimes frustrates genuine improvement efforts such as making it difficult to create learning teams at schools. A Lesson from St. One disturbing aspect of the current reform storyline is particularly galling to educators. It is bad enough that reformers and the media ignore the fact that Test-and-Punish measures do not work and fail to consider the compelling body of research that shows the efficacy of Build-and-Support. But there also exists a tendency among reformers and their advocates to ascribe all examples of educational excellence to charter or private schools and to ignore exemplary practices in public schools despite their widespread existence.
This is a flagrant case of bias. Every vignette from the public school is horrendous. The film could just as easily have profiled a superstar public school and an appallingly ineffective or fraudulent charter school, which would have been similarly one sided and dishonest. Positive stories about public schools are seldom seen.
Two good examples are an article about an inner-city school in Lawrence, Massachusetts , and a story about a low-income public school in Watts whose success was powered by veteran teachers and effective teamwork. Although the story is highly positive overall, its headline begins with a gratuitous slap: It describes the valiant success of Brick Avon School, a public school in Newark, New Jersey, that faced detrimental district policies.
Even some supporters of the Build-and-Support approach fall into the trap of biased reporting. The book Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works makes the case for the importance of craft and pedagogical knowledge. In the otherwise impressive book, author Elizabeth Green writes only about charter schools when providing examples of excellence.
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After realizing that this did not produce results, a few responsive leaders shifted to a broader curriculum and an evidence-based educational philosophy that recognizes the importance of engagement. This evolution should be commended. But countless excellent public schools with a rich educational program never succumbed to a prison-like, test-prep atmosphere. They have been producing extraordinary results for years.
Green never mentioned them. The toxic narrative was exacerbated by federal and state policies that set impossible goals with severe consequences. For example, a decade ago reformers at the national level established an absurd standard: Only about a third of US students intend to attend four-year institutions.
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Increasing the number of students prepared for four-year colleges was a laudable goal and should be part of any accountability system given the rising demand for college graduates. But to enshrine that goal as the only measure of success was inappropriate and unfair for a large number of our students who could profit from rigorous alternative pathways.
It was also patently unfair for the educators who were working with them. Widespread failure was built in at the start because politicians were afraid to set reasonable goals for fear of looking weak or reducing pressure on schools. Most of our political and opinion leaders were completely indifferent to the devastating effect that setting this unreachable goal would have on public education. Others were more purposeful—intentionally attempting to discredit public education as more and more schools would be labeled failures.
Sadly, the media has joined in this unfair characterization. A few states, including Washington, balked at the requirements and had their waivers terminated. That state was in the ludicrous position of having to brand nearly every school in the state a failure, which would have devastated teacher, parent, and student morale and further eroded public support. In some extreme instances, states have privatized entire districts, converting all public schools to charter schools.
A decade ago in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Louisiana forced New Orleans to follow this path. What ensued was the wholesale elimination of the public schools that were the center of many communities, the firing of most teachers, and the creation of nonaccountable institutions under the umbrella of the state-run New Orleans Recovery School District RSD.
Unquestionably, prior to Katrina the district was severely dysfunctional and one of lowest scoring in the country. But the drastic measures taken in the name of reform created new problems. This is tragic given that better, less disruptive alternatives could have been pursued. The New Orleans experience has been hyped by reform advocates as an extraordinary success story and, until recently, uncritically covered by the media. Adam Johnson wrote an excellent critique of the fawning media coverage.
More objective analyses of the RSD have questioned the purported gains and detailed significant collateral damage: Out of 57 schools, 15 received Fs or were so low as to be in turnaround status; 17 received Ds; only 7 received Bs; and none earned an A. The RSD schools still rank among the lowest-scoring schools in the country.
Schneider has also debunked claims of better-than-average graduation rates. Among them are Julian Vasquez Heilig and Andrea Gabor , who raised potent questions about the viability of the New Orleans model for reform when she wrote a response to the defenders of the district in The New York Times. Finally, an editoria l in The New Orleans Tribune , a major African-American newspaper, decried the reform efforts in New Orleans and its meager results. The authors came to conclusions similar to those I have previously discussed.
The New Orleans experiment led to the creation of a stratified system, which more often than not produced low-quality education and was highly detrimental to large numbers of vulnerable students and their communities. They demonstrated that claims of increased performance for the RSD were not warranted and that schools in the RSD still scored extremely low on measures using accurate data.
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Even reports that found some progress demonstrate that in light of the extremely low starting point, the gains in New Orleans have been minimal. After 10 years, the effect size ranges from only 0. The alleged gains could just as easily be attributed to the substantial increases in funding that occurred over the last decade or to changes in demographics since large numbers of low-achieving students left New Orleans after Katrina. Clearly, these small increases were hardly worth the major disruptions caused by closing just about every local school and firing 7, teachers, most of whom formed the backbone of the African-American middle class in the city.
Where the Market Meets Grassroots Resistance, by Kristen Buras , provides a devastating look at the harm caused in New Orleans by the abandonment of public schools. Unquestionably, some excellent charter schools have been created in New Orleans, and many dedicated teachers and principals are making heroic efforts to improve instruction.
Yet better schools and outcomes could have been produced without such drastic measures. Even researchers who supported the reforms have declared that New Orleans should not be held up as a model for the nation. Problems similar to those in New Orleans have been found with the Achievement School District ASD in Tennessee, which is now being touted as a model for the rest of the country. The ASD forces low-scoring schools into a state-run district.
Its mission was to increase schools scoring at the fifth percentile or below to the 25th percentile in five years. Three years into the project, of the six original schools, the percentile scores of two had decreased; two stayed the same; and two increased to only the sixth percentile. Hardly a success story. He resigned at the end of the third year. In , Memphis requested a halt to expansion of the Achievement District due to low performance. Other reports show that recovery districts in Philadelphia and Michigan have been similarly ineffective.
According to a balanced review of state achievement districts, state-run districts have not been able to turn around most low-performing schools. The report includes a summary of its findings:. The rapid proliferation of the takeover district as an educational panacea is alarming. In this report, we examine the record of the three existing takeover districts, and find that there is no clear evidence that takeover districts actually achieve their stated goals of radically improving performance at failing schools.
The report instead advocates solutions aimed at improving existing neighborhoods and their schools. A local editorial took the governor to task for looking at New Orleans, instead of taking his delegation to Massachusetts, which has world-class schools. A conservative Republican legislator objected to the proposal, citing its crony capitalism and support from ALEC. On a more hopeful note, parents, educators, and other citizens in Arkansas recently defeated a statewide privatization attempt by the Walton Family Foundation that would have replaced public schools with charters.
Washington, DC , in the past decade and Milwaukee 20 years ago instituted extensive voucher and choice plans, and both continue to score at the bottom of urban districts on the NAEP test, state assessments such as PARCC, and college attendance and graduation rates. Denver instituted the full Test-and-Punish and privatization agenda several years ago and remains near the bottom of urban districts. An evaluation of the Louisiana voucher program found that students using vouchers to enroll in private schools did substantially worse—a 0.
Voucher effects for reading, science and social studies are also negative and large. The negative impacts of vouchers are consistent across income groups, geographic areas, and private school characteristics, and are larger for younger children. Those responsible should have examined the harm caused when countries such as Sweden, Chile, and Colombia pursued aggressive privatization agendas.
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Sweden , which adopted wholesale voucher and choice approaches, suffered a drastic drop in educational performance on international assessments and is reconsidering its privatization policies. Chile provides another perfect case study on what not to do. Twenty years ago, acolytes of Milton Friedman engineered a privatization voucher scheme. Results were a dramatic decrease in educational funding and a substantial rise in inequality caused by the steady decline into a two-tiered educational system.
Chile scores near the bottom on the Program for International Student Assessment PISA tests, and the country is now revising its entire educational plan, including eliminating for-profit voucher schools. Finally, the argument made by voucher advocates that they assist low-income students turns out to be false.
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There is evidence from both home and abroad that the privatization of public schools is not the answer. Yet many states—those with newly elected Republican majorities as well as New York—have intensified their interest in reform measures that are actually thinly disguised voucher plans. The initiatives have not produced worthwhile results but have drained large sums from public schools. Then they suffer further financial burdens when students opt to leave a public school for a private school.
The cost to the public schools has been substantial. Meanwhile, a new report found that Wisconsin schools have suffered the 4th biggest cuts in the nation through Even the most ardent defenders of free-market competition would never countenance requiring their industry to pay for potential competitors, yet that is exactly what states are demanding of public schools. In many states, governors and legislators are responding to pressure from well-heeled owners of charter school franchises who make sizable political contributions.
With minimal financial or educational accountability and transparency, they are pushing through lucrative property deals and public bond funding to replace large numbers of public schools. In a recent interview , Preston Green contends that unregulated charter school expansion will result in a catastrophe comparable to the subprime mortgage crisis.
Finally, while the costs of a few charters do not put a district in jeopardy, if charter expansion becomes widespread, at some point a tipping point is reached. At that point, schools serving the non-charter student must substantially cut back and the district becomes extremely vulnerable. Further widespread privatization plans severely impact communities. It is disappointing how many politicians from both parties have joined forces with or played into this agenda. At the urging of a small number of billionaire hedge funders, he has been a forceful advocate for the Test-and-Punish approach.
Unlike other states, New York rashly began high-stakes testing before teachers had a chance to implement the Common Core State Standards. It took part in setting the proficiency levels way too high, which forced large-scale failure rates. State leaders then berated the schools and teachers for their low performance. Cuomo has publically denounced teachers and their unions and, most disturbingly, has persuaded Republicans and Democrats in the state legislature to enact an extremely punitive teacher evaluation plan that incorporates all the damaging components of Test-and-Punish.
Mike Petrilli, president of the conservative Thomas B. Faced with mounting opposition, the governor backed off some of these proposals in late Thankfully, some original supporters of Test-and-Punish strategies are now revising their views in light of stalled performance gains and evidence of massive disruption and backlash. Chester Finn , president emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, is a strong advocate of choice and charters, but he now admits that he undervalued the importance of instruction and capacity building.
Petrilli has also changed his view on what he now perceives as federal overreach. We do disagree on two issues: Katy Haycock from EdTrust initially argued that it was necessity to put pressure on the schools because without coercion schools would not attend to the needs of minority children. She now supports a more nuanced position, also emphasizing the need for positive engagement and capacity building.
Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, is another thought leader who recommends a balanced view of teacher evaluation and accountability. Here is an excerpt from his blog post:. Test data also fueled the teacher accountability movement, perhaps the greatest overreach in the reform playbook and surely the source of much of the anger driving the opt-out movement. When well-loved teachers at popular suburban schools tell parents, fairly or not, that testing undermines their work and keeps them awake at night worrying about their jobs, reformers cannot expect those parents to sit idly by.
If reformers want the data that testing provides, they may simply have to abandon attempts to tie test scores to individual teachers. Test scores in a single classroom can have at least as much to do with class composition, curriculum, and district-mandated pedagogies as teacher effectiveness. Uncoupling tests from high-stakes teacher accountability to preserve the case for higher standards, charters, and choice might be the reasonable way forward. Ultimately, there may be no other choice. Many Democrats and some Republicans are backing away from severe anti-school and anti-teacher rhetoric.
The new ESSA legislation coauthored by Senators Lamar Alexander Republican and Patty Murray Democrat responded to perceived federal overreach and rejects test-driven high-stakes teacher and school evaluations. John King , who replaced Arne Duncan as secretary of education, has also embarked on an effort to reconcile with teachers.
In addition, many states and districts are retreating from questionable teacher evaluation programs and devoting more resources to teacher support and development. The school system in Washington, DC , is one example. Recently, advocates from the two camps—conventional reform and Build-and-Support—have been engaged in finding common ground. Steve Barr, who ran the Green Dot public charter schools in Los Angeles, is now the head of the California branch of Democrats for Education Reform DFER , whose parent organization and state affiliates have been strong advocates of an aggressive reform agenda.
Barr is somewhat of an outlier among reform advocates, having said: That would not even make my top ten list of important measures to pursue. Another group looking for common areas of agreement is Third Way. I would agree with many but not all of their proposed compromises. Nationally, there is also some movement toward the more engaging Build-and-Support model. He describes the two views as the Coherence Camp, which aims to build the teaching profession around teaching and learning Build-and-Support , and the Dynamic Camp, which wants to enlist American ingenuity to create new methods of schooling.
He does not define the reform group by test-driven high-stakes accountability. He believes that the coherence idea should be the default position with opportunities for the dynamic bunch to create alternatives. The Coherence Camp looks longingly at Europe and Asia, where many national systems offer teachers the opportunity to work as professionals in environments of trust, clarity, and common purpose. Japan envy yesterday, Finland envy today? The members of this camp praise national standards, a national or at least statewide curriculum that gathers the best thinking about how to reach these standards and shares this thinking with the teaching corps, authentic assessments that provide diagnostic information, and professional development pre-service and in-service that is seamlessly woven into all of the rest.
These countries can and do pore over their latest PISA results, identify areas for improvement, and get their educators to row in unison toward stronger performance. And their scores go up and up and up. I would only add that many schools and districts in this country are also raising their scores by following these ideas.
The next series of companion articles How Top Performers Build-and-Suppor t address these measures in detail. The End of Public Schools: Less Money, More Chaos. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The Common Core Kool-Aid. In Praise of American Educators: A Toxic Narrative Miles, K. Building a Better Teacher: Lessons from New Orleans Johnson, A. Failing Grades Schneider, M.
The History of La. Educational Improvement and Opportunity in 50 Cities. Ten Years After the Deluge: Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space: Where the Market Meets Grassroots Resistance. State Takeovers Rubenstein, G. Underachievement School District Edition. State Takeovers of Low-Performing Schools: The Center for Popular Democracy. National Education Policy Center. The Center for Media and Democracy. Privatization Failures Ravitch, D. Test Scores Are Disastrous. Merrow, J , Dec 8. A Premature Celebration in DC. School Vouchers and Student Achievement: Evidence from the Louisiana Scholarship Program.
National Bureau of Economic Research. Washing Machine-Style Education Reform. Swedish Experiment in Privatizing Schools Floundering. Teachers and Professional Collaboration: Proposals for Change in Chile. Does Privatization Improve Education? Are Vouchers a Panacea or Problematic? The Wall Street Journal. Hostile Charter Takeovers Sideline Communities. Seeking Common Ground Finn, C. Education Reform in How to End the Education Reform Wars. Four Lessons from the Opt-Out Debate. The New Normal in K—12 Education. One Size Fits Most.
Teach for America TFA attracts bright, motivated graduates from our top colleges who agree to teach in public or charter schools for two years. They receive just five weeks of training and then are thrown into schools to sink or swim. Not surprisingly, many flounder and, at the end of their two-year commitment, leave the classroom in large numbers. By the end of five years, large numbers have left teaching. You cannot build a profession on a two-year commitment with minimal training. Gary Rubenstein is a former TFA teacher. In another alumni critique, Andrew Gerst offers suggestions for improvement based on the Aspire charter management organization training model.
Aspire has a one-year internship, which results in large numbers of neophytes performing well in their second year and staying in the profession. Both critics claim that TFA is unwilling to spend its considerable profits to fix flagrant deficiencies. Many former TFA teachers, now dissident apostates, have written about major flaws with the program. See also an interview with Daniel Katz who recommends that his students not consider Teach for America.
The organization has been addressing some of these issues. Many of these young TFA veterans prove to be disasters as administrators. In part, this is due to their unwillingness to learn from competent educators and their ignorance of educational best practice. Of course, it did not help matters that they often were cast as knights in shining armor coming to save inept over-the-hill educators. Mathematica conducted an evaluation of a small number of high school TFA teachers and found essentially no advantage in hiring them. The analysis found no difference in reading scores and only a negligible difference in math.
A recent report on elementary TFA teachers also found no effects and revealed that most were planning to leave the profession quickly. In addition, their view of the training received had fallen compared to that of participants in previous years. Barbara Veltri is a former TFA trainer. The hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the program and its infrastructure could have been invested in supporting new teachers who wanted to make education a career and who were willing to get the proper training.
TFA obtains large federal and state grants as well as funding from conservative foundations that seem eager to replace competent experienced teachers with cheap raw recruits. For providing these low-cost replacements, TFA charges districts a hefty sum. Fortunately, the word is getting out about TFA. Its enrollments are down, and districts are starting to eliminate the program. In I was part of a similar federally funded project called Teacher Corps, which truly was a solid program.
We were given extensive training, not only in the summer before we started as interns, but for one full year after that. The education I received both at the college and on-site in the schools was excellent. No sink or swim. The Aspire charter school network has a similar internship program as do some of our best performing public school districts.
This is how the organization attempts to energize and motivate its trainees—by tearing down the existing structure. We got some of that in Teacher Corps, but were very quickly disabused of this arrogant attitude when it turned out that our supervising teachers in the schools actually knew what they were doing. We learned a great deal from them. Many Teach for America teachers who chose to stay in education have become stellar professionals.
Many others have left under duress after two years or to take more lucrative jobs in the corporate sector. But it is absolutely indefensible to build up your own organization by castigating public schools, allowing your teachers to replace qualified veteran teachers because they are cheaper, and allying yourself with extreme reformers who are bent on privatizing public education.
Merit pay sounds like a good idea.