The Treasure Hunter

By coincidence two  articles about school reform came to my attention in the past week. The first one ,“Money, Race and Success: How Your School District Compares” appeared in the April 29th edition of the New York Times. The second one, which also appeared in the Times, I am posting below. What you will find if you read the first article is a report of recent research showing not only that students in wealthy schools do better on high stakes tests, but also that students of color–even those in wealthy schools– do worse than their white classmates.  Although the  writers of the article do their best not to be racist, that insinuation creeps through.  

Despite the research results reported and their implications, I believe that the key to student success is in how a school operates; whether or not it addresses the needs and aspirations of its students.  Although my beliefs are supported in the article below: “How to Fix the Country’s Failing Schools. And How Not To”, by David Kirp, I still feel that schools can do  more to make all students winners. I plan to write specifically about that topic in the near future.

A quarter century ago, Newark and nearby Union City epitomized the failure of American urban school systems. Students, mostly poor minority and immigrant children, were performing abysmally. Graduation rates were low. Plagued by corruption and cronyism, both districts had a revolving door of superintendents. New Jersey officials threatened to take over Union City’s schools in 1989 but gave them a one-year reprieve instead. Six years later, state education officials, decrying the gross mismanagement of the Newark schools, seized control there.

In 2009, the political odd couple of Chris Christie, the Republican governor-elect, and Cory Booker, Newark’s charismatic mayor, joined forces, convinced that the Newark system could be reinvented in just five years, in part by closing underperforming schools, encouraging charter schools and weakening teacher tenure. In 2010 they persuaded Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, to invest $100 million in their grand experiment. “We can flip a whole city!” the mayor enthused, “and create a national model.”

No one expected a national model out of Union City. Without the resources given to Newark, the school district there, led by a middle-level bureaucrat named Fred Carrigg, was confronted with two huge challenges: How could English learners, three-quarters of the students, become fluent in English? And how could youngsters, many of whom came from homes where books were rarities, be turned into adept readers?

Today Union City, which opted for homegrown gradualism, is regarded as a poster child for good urban education. Newark, despite huge infusions of money and outside talent, has struggled by comparison. In 2014, Union City’s graduation rate was 81 percent, exceeding the national average; Newark’s was 69 percent.

What explains this difference? The experience of Union City, as well as other districts, like Montgomery County, Md., and Long Beach, Calif., that have beaten the demographic odds, show that there’s no miracle cure for what ails public education. What business gurus label “continuous improvement,” and the rest of us call slow-and-steady, wins the race.

Slow-and-steady was anathema to Mr. Booker and Mr. Christie, who had big dreams for Newark. But as Dale Russakoff writes in her absorbing account “The Prize,” the politicians’ optimism proved misplaced. What went wrong had as much to do with their top-down approach as with the proposals themselves.

The mayor pledged to involve the public before making any decisions, but efforts at community engagement, orchestrated by out-of-town advisers, proved shambolic. The only recommendations that got traction — closing 11 public schools, opening charters and themed high schools — were advanced by consultants, who gobbled up more than $20 million in fees.

In 2011, Mr. Christie appointed 39-year-old Cami Anderson — a Teach for America alumna — superintendent. She introduced some solid ideas, like replacing the weakest performers with “renew schools” and persuading charters to enroll more poor kids. But she ran into trouble with parents when she did away with neighborhood schools and laid off hundreds of workers to pay for her initiatives.

Her hurry-up style made matters worse. “She didn’t listen,” contends Ms. Russakoff. “She said her plan — ‘16-dimensional chess’ — was too complex for parents.” After repeated heckling by teachers and parents, Ms. Anderson stopped attending board meetings.

One of Mr. Booker’s goals was to make Newark the nation’s “charter school capital,” and he largely succeeded. While these schools have recorded higher test scores and graduation rates than the traditional schools, money explains much of that gap. Freed from the district’s bureaucracy, the charters have nearly a third more dollars to spend on each student, $12,650 versus $9,604, which buys additional teachers, tutors and social workers.

The push to expand charters angers activists like Junius Williams, director of the Abbott Leadership Institute at Rutgers University. “Charters have drained resources necessary to teach most Newark students,” he told me.

In 1989, with one year to shape up Union City, Mr. Carrigg, with a cadre of teachers and administrators, devised a multipronged strategy: Focus on how kids learn best, how teachers teach most effectively and how parents can be engaged. Non-English speakers had previously been expected to acquire the language through the sink-or-swim method. So the district junked its old approach. Instead, English learners are initially taught in their own language, mainly Spanish, and then are gradually shifted to English. The system started hiring more teachers who spoke Spanish or had E.S.L. (English as a Second Language) training.

The bilingual approach went beyond the classroom. Even though many parents speak only Spanish, meetings had been conducted and written information prepared only in English. In the new era, bilingualism quickly became the norm. Parents, made to feel welcome in the schools, were conscripted to help with their children’s homework and reinforce the schools’ high expectations for them.

To get students excited about reading, the schools became word-soaked environments, with tons of reading and daily writing assignments linked even to subjects like art and science that traditionally don’t require as much writing.

The Union City reformers opted to focus initially on the youngest children, whose potential for improvement was greatest. When New Jersey began to fund preschool for poor urban districts in the late 1990s, the district seized on the opportunity to devise a state-of-the-art program that enrolled almost every 3- and 4-year-old in the community.

Teachers rethought skill-and-drill instruction, instead emphasizing hands-on learning and group projects. Help came, in the form of coaches — veteran teachers — working side by side with newbies and time set aside for teachers to collaborate. Students were frequently assessed, not to punish teachers but to pinpoint areas where help was needed.

Stable leadership proved essential. In the years preceding the state’s near-takeover, superintendents were hired and fired based on their politics; during the past quarter-century there have been just three superintendents, all of them products of the district. Nationwide, the average tenure of a city schools chief is only three years.

“The real story of Union City is that it didn’t fall back,” Mr. Carrigg told me. “It stabilized and has continued to improve.” Recent changes include the introduction of Mandarin Chinese from preschool on, a STEM-focused elementary school and a nursery for young parents in high school.

Newark’s big mistake was not so much that the school officials embraced one solution or another but that they placed their faith in the idea of disruptive change and charismatic leaders. Union City adopted the opposite approach, embracing the idea of gradual change and working within existing structures.

Newark is beginning to do the same. Since the appointment in 2015 of Christopher Cerf, formerly New Jersey’s education commissioner, as Newark’s superintendent, more attention is being paid to the positive side of the school district ledger. While charters remain controversial in Newark, Mr. Cerf emphasizes helping the public schools achieve similar results. “Charters are succeeding,” he told me, “because they have substantially more discretion. We need to level the playing field.”

Mr. Cerf and Raz Baraka, who succeeded Cory Booker as mayor, recently announced that up to $12.5 million of the Zuckerberg gift will be invested in a network of “community schools” — sunrise-to-sunset schools that offer health care and social services, located in the city’s most troubled neighborhoods.

“Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million gift isn’t a lot of money in a district that spends $1 billion a year, but it sparked the conversation,” Dominique Lee, the executive director of Brick, which runs two Newark schools, told me. “People are angry now at what’s been going on, but it’s ‘good angry,’ not ‘bad angry,’ like before. They’re asking: ‘What do we need to do to save traditional public schools?’ ”

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Although today’s essay was previously posted on Valerie Strauss’ blog in 2011, I have chosen to repeat it with only a few changes. I strongly believe that the biggest problem in education today is disregard for the feelings, hopes, and needs of students. Policy makers consider only what they want, and they think that foisting their preferences on students and teachers, supported by threats of punishment, will make them happen.

I admit I am a novice when it comes to critiquing basketball. Growing up, I never played the game, and I never watched it or read about it until I became a Portland Trail Blazer fan some years ago. Yet, I am an experienced teacher and principal, used to studying the performance of students in order to help them learn better. I’ve brought my eyes to the game, and what I’ve learned there I’d like to bring back to the classroom.

During the regular season, as I watched the Blazers play erratically, I accepted the professional wisdom that the trouble was that they were playing better teams, using the wrong strategies, being away from their home court, or having insufficient time off between games.

But now, after watching the playoffs between the Blazers and the Clippers and seeing the differences in team and individual player performance from game to game, none of those explanations answer my essential question about basketball: Why does a team play so much better on one night than on another?

In education the questions are not much different. All of the recent reports of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) show that the No Child Left Behind law did not shrink the achievement gap between students from wealthy families and students living in poverty. It also showed that high school students have made less progress than their elementary counterparts and that students in large cities did not score as high as those in smaller communities.

In all those instances the question is,“Why”? In accordance with their educational philosophies and politics, different groups and individuals give different answers: bad schools, poverty, unequal distribution of effective teachers, lack of early childhood education, insufficient school funding.

Yes, all these conditions have some negative effect on student performance, but I think there are additional factors that make students learn less and score lower on tests than expected. But my answer to the question is the same as it is would be for inconsistency in basketball: players’ attitudes and feelings.

How does it feel to be a hungry child at a dilapidated school in a dangerous neighborhood with a teacher who reads from a script? How much does a teenager who has little hope of going to college or living the “American Dream” care about acing the big test?  How much confidence does a middle schooler who has been told that he is careless and inattentive by teachers all through the grades have when he faces the 8th grade test? It is just as difficult for those students to perform well as it is for a basketball player whose team is three games down in a seven-game series.

Although we can’t do much more than cheer for our own favorite team, we could do a lot more for our students. Fixing all the things noted in the NAEP results would be a long, slow, expensive process, but it would work better than just tightening the screws on schools, teachers, and students, which was the prevailing government policy under the Bush administration and has continued with only cosmetic changes under President Obama.

What we need are individual school changes that fit the needs of the students at hand. Only when we can bring more positive attitudes and feelings into every classroom will all our kids be winners in the education game.

Later this week I will post an article about one city where the schools have done what I propose and how those changes have affected its test scores.