Sunday Commentary: What Can Obama Really Do?

Following his first major address on education, the education world has been abuzz with reaction to and advice for the President. Every major newspaper ran editorials, and every blogger threw in their two cents. But two things about the dialogue over the past week bother me:

1.) Too many people base their judgment on the degree to which their pet reform was mentioned in the speech rather than the degree to which new policies might affect our schools

2.) Too few stop to ask what, exactly, the federal government can do that will actually impact our schools

Call me cynical, but I remain skeptical that the president or the Secretary of Education can enact any policy that will turn around our worst school systems. The problem with school reform is that it never works unless it affects the details of daily school life. Everybody thinks they know how school should be taught but very few can say they have actually turned their vision into reality.

The federal government is so far removed from your typical classroom that it is incredibly difficult for decisions at that level to effect significant and sustained change. Schools are largely local endeavors in America, and it becomes increasingly difficult to effect change the further removed one is from daily life in the classroom. It is difficult enough for teachers to impact students' lives, but it is many times more difficult for a principal, a superintendent, a mayor, or a governor, yet alone the President or the Secretary of Education.

In order for the federal government to effect change it either needs to change the way that schools are governed -- so that teachers report directly to the president -- or, more realistically, it needs to affect the way that governors, mayors, school boards, principals, teachers, and students behave. In other words, reforming schools from the oval office is a bit like playing telephone -- the odds are that the person at the end of the chain is not going to hear the message the way you meant it to be heard.

That said, I will be the last one to argue that we should give up. But before we lay out sweeping plans, we need to be aware of how they will end up affecting individual schools, classrooms, teachers, and students. And herein lies the largest dilemma for Obama and Duncan. If they lay out broad and sweeping reform, only little bits will trickle down to the classroom. But if they lay out detailed and incremental reform, they will hardly inspire the nation. In short, they are between a rock and a hard place. I don't envy their position.

The Biggest Problem with Schools: Tradition

I've finally found something with which every single education reformer can agree: the biggest problem facing our schools today is tradition. We do so many things for no other reason than because that's the way they were done in the past.

Why should everybody agree with this? Below is a list of various solutions that people push and how tradition keeps them from happening:

School Choice
Every neighborhood has, traditionally, had its own school. The neighborhood builds, maintains, and governs these schools for the use of locals -- not for the use of people from other neighborhoods -- and is used to spending their money on their schools; not on sending children to other people's schools.

Smaller Classes
Classes have, traditionally, been somewhere between 20-40 kids. Classrooms are built for classes this size.

Longer School Year
Traditionally, schools have taken the summer off to allow people to move to different places (not to harvest crops -- that's a myth) and then have everybody start fresh, at the same level, when September rolls around. Summer camps, swim team, family vacation, etc. are all scheduled for the summer when school's out.

A More Progressive Pedagogy
Traditionally, the teacher has been the "sage on the stage" and run a mini dictatorship in the their classroom. In other words: teachers teach the way they were taught, not the way they were taught to teach.

Smaller Schools
Traditionally, schools have housed all of the students from a certain region. Those regions coalesce around their schools to attend school plays, high school football games, etc. In some places, very little property is available where another school could open.

Banish Unions
Traditionally, teachers in many places have belonged to unions. The current contracts have been negotiated by unions. Unions have influenced the salary schedule, work rules, seniority, etc.

Recruit/Retain Better Teachers
Traditionally, most teachers have been females who had few better career options. Now that the most successful female students can enter just about any field, the teaching field continues to attract and retain people who don't feel they or rather would not pursue employment in other fields.

I could go on and on, but I think those are most of the major reform ideas floating around right now. In each case, the biggest hindrance to the idea's implementation is tradition. Still unconvinced? Here are a few other examples of ways in which tradition influences decisions:

-College professors assign hundreds of pages of reading each week, not because it's the best pedagogy but because that's what they did when they were college students.
-Grad schools assign comprehensive exams, not necessarily b/c it helps the students in any particular way but b/c the people in charge all had to take comprehensive exams when they were in grad school.
-Report cards are sent home each semester with letter or number grades (which are virtually identical across schools), not because this necessarily serves a purpose, but b/c that's the way it's always been done.
-Teachers at all levels often use textbooks as the main way to educate their class -- certainly not because textbooks are always fantastic but, rather, b/c that's the way people have always done it.

Ok, that's enough. None of those things are necessarily bad in and of themselves, but ask yourself this: if you were starting a school from scratch -- blank slate, you can do anything you want -- how many of those would you want done in the same way they are now? And you're not allowed to use the phrase "when I was in school" in your justification.

The point is this: people are comfortable doing things the way they've always been done. But we can't eliminate either tradition or human nature, so what's the solution? I don't know exactly, but here are some things to think about:

First of all, I guarantee you that none of those ideas, alone, are a silver bullet -- and everybody needs to come to grips with that. Let me repeat: there is no silver bullet. No one idea is going to magically transform our schools. As such, it's not worth losing your temper when your pet reform meets some opposition.

With that said, I think we also need to realize that a great deal of the opposition to the ideas we know will magically transform the schools comes from human nature, not ill will. Not everybody who doesn't implement your reform is a bad person. I have a lot of pet peeves around education reform, but I'll tell you my top one: when reformers blame the people in place for not implementing their reform correctly.

Time after time we see studies of education reform done and almost all of them find either no changes to results or very small ones. At this finding the people who were sure that the reform would work work become indignant -- "the curriculum is solid, but the teachers just kept teaching the way they've always taught" or some such complaint. In other words, "if they just would've done things exactly as I wanted them done . . ."

Well, let me give you hint: nobody will ever do things exactly the way that you want them done. And they certainly won't do them that way if you simply go in and demand that they be done that way. Too many people forget to factor in whether the people they're trying to change a.) want to do things that way and b.) know how to do things that way. In this case, if the teachers didn't want to and/or know how to implement the curriculum correctly, it is a failure of your reform. Part of the job of a reformer or policymaker is to take into account how people will respond to the new policy/reform. Things don't always work out as planned, and when that happens you can chalk it up to human nature on the part of the reformees and lack of understanding of human nature on the part of the reformers.

So, in short, the first step to overcoming the limitations that tradition is placing on our school is this: understand that tradition that's holding us back. Then try and find a way to change tradition. And remember, changing a tradition is hard.

Where do we Draw the Line?

The Times has an interesting piece today about a school in upstate NY and their attempts to deal with discipline and teach kids responsibility. The school has, essentially, taken a no-nonsense approach: anybody who breaks any rule (or falters in any class) is barred from all activities and, in some cases, given detention or served lunch last. Students are assigned seats at lunch and not allowed to get up until given permission. Students have to walk to the right of the line in the middle of the hall (which the school where I taught used to do -- when I was there we just had the tape running down the middle of the hall and chaos all around it).

It would be easy to simply condemn this policy, but I hesitate for three reasons:

1. I read a short newspaper article about it; I don't really have a clear picture of what things are like on the ground

2. The new principal has coupled this no-nonsense approach with more fun activities in which the kids who aren't in trouble can participate

3. There has to be some structure in place to teach kids respect, responsibility, etc.

The strongest evidence against it is that about 1/4 of the students are currently on the no activities list. If that continues to be the case after a couple years of the policy then I think it would be fair to declare it a failure.

There's a fundamental question here that needs to be answered. How do we teach kids respect, responsibility, etc. without creating resentment and, at the same time, teaching self-control? Apparently lunchtime was a problem, so they clamped down. I'll assume that the students in the school are now more likely to view lunch as a controlled atmosphere rather than a time to goof off. But if they can't even get up when they want or sit with their friends, how are they supposed to learn to create such a controlled atmosphere on their own? (a conversation along similar lines has been taking place over at Bridging Differences).

In other words, it doesn't matter how much discipline can be imposed on the students in a school if they have no self-discipline outside of the system. But, at the same time, a system with no discipline does the kids a disservice. So, where do we draw the line? How do ensure the best of both worlds?

Class Size and the Achievement Gap

I hesitate to say this before having read the article (it's not out yet), but I think I figured out what's going on. This article in was published last Wednesday in EdWeek and describes a forthcoming journal article in which the author claims that smaller classes do not reduce achievement gaps. Meanwhile, another researcher who looked at the same data says that they do. I didn't have time to really think it through the first time I read it, but I think I see the difference now.

Both researchers look at data from the Tennessee STAR project, which is the only randomized trial of class size (students were randomly assigned to a class with either 13-17 or 22-26 students for a few years) and took place about 20 years ago. The author of this article, Spyros Konstantopoulos, says that the gap between the high and achievers was higher within small classes than it was in large classes. In other words, higher achieving students benefited more from smaller classes, so smaller class sizes do not impact achievement gaps.

Meanwhile, another researcher, Alan Kreuger, says that his research shows that lower-performing students and African-American students benefited more, and that, therefore, smaller classes reduce achievement gaps.

What? They're both looking at the same data. How can they reach different conclusions? Barring dishonesty or highly-technical formulas, here's what I think it is:

I think the answer is simple. In the newer article, he looks at the gap between the high and low achievers within each class, not the average score for each class. Meanwhile, the older study looks at the gap between the higher and lower performers across the sample. So the average score for lower performing classes could rise more than the average score for higher performing classes (many, if not most, classes are not extremely diverse -- they're within schools that are in wealthy suburbs or poor inner-city neighborhoods), meaning that the gap between high and low performing classes shrinks while the gap between the high and low performers within these classes actually increases. In other words, the lowest scoring students overall gained more than the highest performing students, but the highest-scoring kids within each class gained more than the lowest scoring kids within each class. So, in short, both of them are right.

If they're both right, to whom should we listen? Does reducing class size work or not? Well, you can argue it both ways. On the one hand, the society-wide "achievement gap" is really what we care about but, on the other, it seems that reducing class size doesn't reduce this in quite the way we'd anticipate. It seems that using the newest study to imply that smaller classes don't reduce the achievement gap is misleading, but that the way these changes affect distributions of achievement within classes offers food for thought. Of course, it would be nice to have a second study, one that's less than twenty years old, to compare to these findings.

Single-Sex Public Schools

The New York Times Magazine ran a very long piece on single-sex education in public schools on Sunday. In short, there seem to be five positions explored: some argue that boys' brains differ fundamentally from girls' brains and that, therefore, they should be separated; some argue that separation is merited in order to end discrimination; some argue that separation is inherently sexist; some argue that separation by gender is only a rough proxy for separation by learning style; and some argue that boys and girls need to interact with each other.

I think each of the five sides has some merit. When this issue came up in our sociology class last year there was some spirited debate, particularly since research has been inconclusive to date. I asked people if research conclusively proved that single-sex schools led to much higher test scores if they would then be willing to enroll their children in these schools; nobody was willing to commit. This says two things to me: that there's more to a good school than high test scores, and that there's something less easily describable driving the opposition to such schools. Personally, I would hesitate to send my (future) children to such a school.

Prior to teaching I would have unequivocally ruled out the idea without so much as a second thought, but my experience led me to reconsider the merits. Teaching sixth graders, I noticed substantial differences between the boys and girls in my class. My personality and teaching style clearly worked better with the girls, and I had significantly more discipline problems with the girls. Maybe it was just the stress, but it often seemed that teaching a class of only girls would've worked a lot better. That said, segregating by sex still seems wrong to me on some level. I wonder if it might be possible to experience the best of both worlds; perhaps have single-sex classes only during middle school or only for certain subjects or activities. Or maybe Jay Giedd is right; gender is too rough a proxy. Has anybody tried separating students into classes based on different styles of learning? Is that feasible or desirable? It would certainly be easier for teachers than the "differentiated instruction" that is currently pushed, but I'm skeptical of any cure-all, especially one that requires some form of segregation or tracking.

Convincing Schools to Change

I was forwarded an interesting piece that Robert Weisbuch, the new president of my alma mater, wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education the other day. He argues that universities, rather than looking down on, or simply ignoring, K-12 schools, should form a partnership that he calls the "third culture" with primary and secondary schools across the country.

If that third culture is to develop, college faculty members might stop coming on to their school counterparts like gods delivering grace to undeserving sinners. We need to acknowledge that a strong teacher in the schools knows a great deal more about pedagogy than we do. Even beyond the obvious fact that we share the same kids at different stages and the more emotionally compelling fact that professors have kids, too, it is well past time to shed our pretensions, share our status as intellectual leaders, and acknowledge both what school teachers bring to the party and the mutual benefit that accrues from a partnership between equals.

I'm not sure how much he's referencing higher education in general and how much he's directing his plea at education researchers, but I find his comments particularly relevant for researchers. It seems that every article I've read about effecting change in the way that schools are run (particularly regarding the way that teachers teach) basically asks one question: we know how to run schools/classrooms, how can we convince administrators/teachers to things the way we tell them to?

The flaw that I see in this question is that it's exceedingly arrogant, which is probably a large part of the reason that the question never seems to be answered. Yes, research is not effectively utilized in schools, but the fact is that people who work in schools know a great deal more about some things than researchers could ever hope to. The fact that (most) researchers are experts on something does not give them the right to treat teachers and other education officials as inferior beings. Perhaps the way to effect change in schools is to work with people instead of talking at them.