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EDUC 695: Notes from Class October 6, 2005 David passes out information on the papers (see the handout). We know more about Chicago (vis-à-vis test scores, etc.) than we do about San Diego – less has been written about San Diego. It’s ok to bring “first-person” knowledge into the papers as long as it’s in the context of what David has asked for. There are not clear right or wrong answers to the questions we’ve been asking; there are more than one way to “skin the cat” Can send David draft paragraphs sketching your approach if you’d like comments We’ll begin this morning with today’s discussion questions: First asked you to consider the key elements in the design of standards-based reform. Second invited thought about the key elements in the TX state reform – do they differ at all from Smith and O’Day sketched? Third invited thought about the similarities and differences between what Skerla et al reported had happened in those four TX school districts that they judged to be successful – the instruments that were deployed in those four districts. Taken together, these invited thought about the policy framework and relationship between that framework and what happens inside school systems as they respond to it. (Smith and O’Day piece is the archetypical document in standards-based reform
- first and remains most coherent formulation of set of ideas that have become the dominant framework in federal and state and to large extent local school improvement throughout U.S.) What are the key elements of SBR? More decentralized – change would be initiated by people within the school? DKC: they bill this as a large element of local initiative Dan: they were also calling for a unified standards framework – not specificying what curriculum should be but setting standards and benchmarks for what students should learn in different content areas – Smith and O’Day recommend that state set standards, give each school freedom to decide how to teach those standards.
DKC: How would those standards be realized? Seneca: They imagine it as a flexible model with general guidelines for what students should learn; school would have flexibility – standards are things that school should aim for Kenyatha: professionalization – teacher training DKC: Smith and O’Day point out that state agencies and teacher education are often quite disconnected – they suggest a much more demanding teacher exam. They offer this slightly apologetically – they’d like to get better leverage on teacher education, but don’t hold higher ed or schools of ed in much esteem. Smith and O’Day proposed curriculum frameworks – for example, “Here are the 29 domains that must be covered in elementary mathematic, here is where these overlap with performance standards, and here is what we mean by good and less good work in each of those domains…” – but they indicated that localities would have lots of flexibility in figuring out how to achieve those standards, how to organize actual lessons, etc. Christine: Discretion for localities is such a driving piece of this reform…have others written more specifically on how this would play out, how the system would have to change, how job structure would have to change to accommodate this? DKC: Every state – in response to 1994 re-authorization of Title I of IASA – now has to have content standards. And NCLB is essentially a bunch of embroidery on IASA. No other analysts tried to fill in the gaps, but every state and some localities have done so. Mimi: a more qualitative than quantitative approach – in 80s was more quantitative (increasing the length of school day, more tests) – but this was more based on things in the classroom – curriculum, for example. DKC: This is an important point – earlier reforms had focused on quantities of attendance, etc. – one of most notable features of this piece and the turn in ed policy that it represents is that it focuses on instructional quality and the regulatory instruments were not the inherited quantitative forms. Julia: also an accountability system – using criterion-referenced testing to see if the reform is “working” – also represents a return to basic elements of teaching than to “quick-fixes” Nick: accountability system should be aligned to assessment system – and they suggest that assessment system focus less on basic skills
DKC: If we did an inventory of state and federal ed policy when Smith and O’Day wrote this piece, we’d find a huge number of policies and programs with any particular state – and larger and more diverse and urban the state, the more diverse the volume of policy. Most attempted to regulate schooling by regulating the inputs to schooling, both in terms of how much or how many, and in terms of how they should be used. Elaborate policies related to school finance, to curriculum coverage (how many courses of what sort in what years) – but no state had policies related to the content of the curriculum beyond specifying, for example, Texas history, American history, etc.. And no state regulated how money and other resources allocated to school were to be used. This is what one would expect in a body politic that had been carved up into as many jurisdictions as it has been in this non-system that is the U.S. – everyone makes education policy here. State and federal courts, state legislatures, localities, etc. Very different than what one would find in a parliamentary democracy, or even in a federal system in which the state operates the schools and there are no real LEAs (for example, Germany, Australia). In Australia, state agency operates all of the schools. In New South Wales, teacher assignment is entirely managed by Sydney – there are no localities. This greatly streamlines a lot of things, including education policy. The Commonwealth had organized itself to deal with a couple of areas of education policy, but most were left to the state. So one important element of what Smith and O’Day have proposed is streamlining: get rid of as many state and local policies as possible, and replace them with this relatively clear, unified approach. Sarah: But if it’s streamlined, then parts should work together. If accountability is part of the design, and Julia’s notion of avoiding the one-shot workshop is another part of the design…but how do those two entail one another? DKC: What would Smith or O’Day say? Seneca: That because of accountability, those things would get in line. DKC: that was the notion; that local accountability for student performance would create powerful incentive for everyone to do just those things that would support student improvement. Nicole: textbook publishers: Textbooks would improve because of these unified standards. Smith and O’Day claim that textbooks were watered down by fragmented standards. Alex: How expensive is it to produce a textbook? Could state commission people to write a decent textbook?
DKC: yes; it’s done that way in many countries. Or could do as Japan does, where the ministry issues guidelines and then invites publishers to write textbooks accordingly. Alex: so why not cut out the middle man? DKC: why didn’t Smith and O’Day propose that, since it’s constitutionally feasible? Beth: huge textbook industry would never allow it DKC: When Smith and O’Day published this, Bill Honig was superintendent of instruction in CA – Marshall Smith was one of his unofficial advisers. Honig thought that the French and Japanese had right idea, and beginning in 1984, CA ed dept. began rolling out new curriculum frameworks – every year and a half, a brand new curriculum framework hit the streets. Honig thought it would be a good idea to evaluate textbooks in light of the frameworks. In 1986-1987, Honig and his board rejected every proposed textbook but one. And Beth’s prophecy came true: There was explosion of outrage from textbook publishers. They are powerful industry and lobby, and Honig could not carry the day in the legislature. He lost. Alex: Japan had some trouble with this… DKC: right; they don’t mention what happened during WWII…American textbooks do a similarly good job expunging things to do with race relations in this country. When Smithsonian installed the Enola Gay (the B-29 that dropped bomb on Nagasaki), they thought to include some Japanese comments on this matter, and all hell broke loose. Japanese comments were removed. Rachel: And textbooks don’t teach themselves…without teacher incentive to teach what’s in there, or the necessary professional development, teachers won’t necessarily teach what’s in the text. DKC: although texts don’t teach themselves, if you’re a teacher anywhere operating under SBR and you have conventional text, having a text that isn’t aligned with standards and assessments puts you in a difficult position – how are you going to teach something so inchoate? But Smith and O’Day didn’t really know how to get a handle on this. It’s highly significant that they just sort of assumed that the accountability system would make textbook industry fall in line. Mike: Textbooks can also lend credibility to teachers’ instructional decisions
portrait of the topologies of American public ed – avalanche of policies and programs, fragmentation of governance, proliferation of agencies interested in education, extreme decentralization of decision-making about teaching and learning such that most LEAs don’t have any or many people in the central office who know anything about teaching and learning, the delegation of most of the key elements of guidance for instruction to textbook publishers… This is a picture of a weakly-coordinated system and which for instructional purposes is emaciated, very under-nourished, has very modest capabilities in terms of instruction. Until recently, test publishers knew more about instruction than any locality did. When Honig tried to turn CA public education on its head and tried to do version of SBR…CA is one of largest economies in world. Very populous state, and in CA state dept. of ed, to carry out Honig’s proposal to revolutionize teaching of mathematics were one and a half professionals. So can read Smith and O’Day piece as pretty damning description of U.S. public ed. The dilemma of implementation – this is the collection of entities that is the problem, and if the problem is going to be solved, those instantiations of the problem will have to solve it themselves. Whether this is possible is the big question with SBR, but also with Chicago and San Diego reforms. It’s not unique with SBR; it’s just particularly impressive here since design and instruments of SBR all operate at state level – which is many country miles from practice. There wasn’t a lot of connective tissue between practice and the state departments, not a lot of infrastructure. How does one get from standards to lessons? To academic tasks? Academic tasks are what teachers and students do. If there are problems of instruction, this is where they get solved or dealt with. Seneca: Even when you provide lessons – as Chicago’s SummerBridge did – doesn’t mean they’ll be taught or taught well. DKC: SummerBridge created an hour-by-hour curriculum aligned with the ITBS assessment…but Roderick and her colleagues found that the preponderance of teachers who taught that curriculum didn’t teach it very well. The system that is the problem is the only set of instrumentalities to solve the problem. Nate: Can you explain how that’s different from reforming any large system or organization? DKC: it’s true almost ubiquitously in social policy…it’s not distinctive to these reforms or to ed policy. One way to think about this is to ask whether it’s any
different than trying to teach somebody algebra or American literature who has imbibed some hideously contorted version of these things? It’s a problem of learning that depends on un-learning. Learning is never learning something absolutely new. First-graders do not present themselves as tabula rasas… Dan: no political will for five or ten year reform…few are willing to wait that long for something to come about, so what ends up happening with SBR is that they try to do something so fast that everyone rebels. DKC: That’s certainly what happened with Bill Honig. Andrea: They seemed to gloss over fact that schools offer poor professional environments and that so much time has to be spent on discipline instead of teaching DKC: They are aware of these issues, but don’t dwell on them. Nate: Seems amazing that they’re considering making teaching exams more difficult given this… Next: We’ll pivot to Texas. We have two questions:
- What is extent to which Texas reforms seem congruent with Smith and O’Day proposal? What does it look like when people try to flesh out these ideas?
- What are these four districts that Skerla wrote about – what do they do, what are their relation to state reform? What wasn’t being done in Corpus Christi? Dan: I think Skerla would argue that what happened in those 4 districts but not in Corpus Christi was elimination of deficit thinking. Corpus Christi teachers didn’t seem to be buying into the notion that every child can learn and succeed. : Texas reform depends on the reporting of test scores by race and class. If all of the advantaged kids are doing wonderfully enough to bump school performance level up to acceptable, but Latino or African-American or poor white kids are not doing well, then you’re not acceptable. This is one very consequential innovation in Texas. Tom: Corpus Christi was subjected to disaggregated test scores as well…but in Corpus Christi we don’t see same attention to building up people’s belief that kids can do this.
very poorly. George Bush has been a more effective advocate of big- government involvement in American education than any other American president – or all of them added together. ****BREAK***** DKC: So if one had to make a list of the instruments that these four LEAS invented, deployed, etc., what would be on the list? Dan said end of deficit thinking Deborah: Disaggregation of test scores – state did that and districts had to respond DKC: test scores were published everywhere, and it wasn’t just the scores, but the status of every single school in the state Coordinated curriculum DKC: and this was very, very unusual – and it was very difficult to coordinate curriculum – it violated teachers’ sense of their autonomy, meant building a new curriculum, and assigning responsibility for getting it taught at each grade level – meant turning teaching into a public activity, opening the classroom door. Julia: districts all set goals and tried to get everyone to focus on them DKC: this also was an unprecedented act – attempting to turn these districts into instructionally coherent entities. This meant building capabilities in central offices that hadn’t been there – not just goal-setting capabilities, but curriculum-building and coordinating capabilities which have rarely been present in American school districts. Tom: Like in San Diego, there were attempts to bring principals together across buildings to reinforce instructional focus. DKC: very interesting – it didn’t take a Tony Alvarado to figure out that if you want to turn schools and LEAs into coordinated instructional agencies, then you have to build infrastructure. Aldine is relatively large district – but it ain’t New York. Not a center of sophisticated educational theory and practice. But they figured out relatively quickly that the sorts of things that Tony tried in San Diego would have to be done in this much more parochial place if there was a chance of succeeding. Tom: Seemed in the Neufeld piece that her descriptions of when teachers were together that there was conflict that derailed efforts to improve instruction… teaching culture – when people would question, make suggestions, people’s
feelings were hurt, etc. In the Skerla piece, we don’t see that level of detail, but it’s portrayed as if things work. DKC: Teachers and principals were let go in these four districts, and they weren’t in Corpus Christi. This is about leadership, but it’s easier to say that than to unpack it. Teachers had never been let go like this before in U.S. It’s easy to underestimate the depth and scope of those changes since so much of what they propose to do. To be a good teacher in most American schools was to control your students, to get on with your principal, to not make waves.. no one ever averaged your test scores. Christine: Each of the four seemed to focus on changing the district’s climate so that there were shared beliefs – that all children could learn, that it was the responsibility of adults to ensure that children did learn. DKC: Again, easy to underestimate the magnitude of this change. Has long been absolutely conventional for teachers to say that all children cannot learn without embarrassment. And principals have long declared their schools effective even while they’re teachers pass off responsibility for student failure on the students, on families, communities, etc. In all the research on American public schools, there is little that describes this culture of teaching. Nick: They also focused on supporting and building the capacity of the teachers and principals. DKC: fascinating to run across these parallels to District 2 and to San Diego. Mike: This piece focuses on four districts…but Smith and O’Day seemed to cut out the role of the districts…districts are mediator between state and school, but districts are absent from Smith and O’Day vision Nick: and districts have to be the one creating the change. DKC: this is a profoundly important point – especially in U.S. system, if you’re looking for possible centers of capability, schools are not the first place to look. With exception of elementary school principal, everyone in a school is busy teaching…so where is time and money to figure out how to solve these problems? Seneca: In comparing this to San Diego, was useful that they had the state as agency that was making demands for these changes, because it allowed superintendent and teachers to be on the same team. In San Diego, impetus was coming from business community, but mostly from Bersin and Alvarado. DKC: right; in CA leadership was having to buffer itself from state…politics of making this work in a federal system are complicated. One way to interpret the
quick study is an attempt to turn public education in these four districts into something that is really about instruction. And to re-build the school agencies so that they can actually operate instructionally. One of most interesting questions in all this is extent to which this does or does not infringe on teachers’ autonomy. All of these reforms are associated with centralization at state and district levels. In a place like San Diego, it’s worth thinking about whether and in what ways teachers’ autonomy was infringed upon. Next week: Readings: These readings on Texas are meant to give sense of what frequency distribution of responses to TX reforms has been – we don’t actually know what the frequency distribution is – but to give sense of panoply of responses. We have readings on Houston, article by Robert Kimball, who was assistant principal in Houston school and ran into trouble when he tried to tell the truth about drop-out rate, and then two more researchy pieces, one an analysis of how TX students did on TAAS and NAEP and another that offers much more comprehensive analysis of the effects of the TX reforms. So all of these pieces are about how TX reforms were implemented and what the consequences were. But we’re opening up notion of consequences to include fudging data, careful scholarly analysis of test results. Week after next we’ll read another set of stuff. So three newspaper articles that are easy reads, and then two more analytical pieces. We may work in groups next week to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the Texas reforms. Two groups may focus on strengths, two on weaknesses – so we can get some argument going.
