Tag Archives: public schools

Excerpt #8 from Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream – Introduction

Posted on by

Outdated Facilities and Technology

With respect to school facilities and resources, there are abysmal facilities in communities around the nation and, while they are certainly substandard and contribute to an overall unfavorable atmosphere, replacing these facilities with modern state-of-the-art physical structures will not result in a dramatic turnaround. Fort Wayne Community Schools (FWCS) provides a marvelous example. Two of the eleven FWCS schools that were identified by the State of Indiana as at risk of takeover because of their performance as measured against a number of criteria, had been renovated, in the recent past, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars. These two schools are, arguably, two of the finest high school facilities in all of northeast Indiana. Quality buildings are a real positive but they do not alter the level of student motivation and they do not alter the recipe for educational success.

Should we continue to improve school buildings and technology? Absolutely but it must not be our first priority.

Curriculum

While many advocate curriculum reforms, most schools within individual states are held to the same educational standards and have curricula that vary minimally with other schools, irrespective of the performance of those schools. Can we do a better job at the development of curricula that are well-suited to the needs of the Twenty-first Century? Yes, we can and we must do better but curricula alone do not explain divergent results within schools of the same community and a focus on curriculums must not be our highest priority.

Often, lowered expectations account for curriculum variances as underperforming schools often lower their expectations in an effort to make gains in competency test results and graduation rates. Even more critically, expectations correlate to our perception of relative disadvantage with respect to a child’s circumstances. Whether we admit it or not, there is a tendency to consider it unfair to expect as much from disadvantaged students as we do from their counterparts.

Another common assertion is that we must extend the number of hours in the classroom and increase the proportion of those hours devoted to math, language arts, and science. It is unrealistic to think that this is anything other than a small part of the solution and certainly not one at the top of our priority list. In schools comprised of large populations of unmotivated students, such initiatives will only serve to prolong the daily agony of students and teachers alike

Race and Ethnicity

Is the problem race or ethnicity? The most glaring fact in all of public education is the performance gap between African-American and white students. It is a fact of which we all are aware but about which few will talk, candidly. For many experts, it is safer to cling to the idea that poverty is the culprit. Sadly, there are some Americans who are content to believe that the performance results of black children are the best that we can expect. Some actually believe that black children are predisposed to fail. That the majority of Americans are unwilling to talk about this issue openly and frankly contributes greatly to the persistence of such ignorance.

The performance gap between white students and Hispanic and other ethnic and racial subgroups may not be as glaring but it is every bit as disconcerting. The indisputable fact is that students from a wide range of racial and ethnic backgrounds excel academically and that some white students fail just as badly as their minority counterparts. When will we wake up to the fact that the issue is one of culture rather than of race or color, and then act accordingly? One of the most important lessons to be gained from the success of the “model” schools about which we have talked is that kids from diverse backgrounds can and will learn.

Student Behavior

Is the problem behavior? There is no doubt that teachers who labor in under-performing schools spend a disproportionate amount of their time striving to restore order. Stories of teachers who have time for little else are well documented. Disruptive behavior is nothing other than a manifestation of a lack of motivation, which we believe to be a symptom of a counter-cultural devaluation of education, and a system that is focused on failure.

Fractured Families

Finally, we return to the subject of supportive families. The single greatest advantage enjoyed by high-performing schools, of whatever genesis or jurisdiction, is the support of the parents of their students. The more a parent values education and the more he or she wants the best possible education for his or her children the more involved and supportive he or she will be and it does not seem to matter whether it is a one or two-parent home. What matters is that parents truly consider themselves to be partners who share in the responsibility for the success of their children. The more relentless these mothers, fathers, and grandparents are with respect to academic expectations, the more successful the child, whatever his or her racial, ethnic, or economic circumstances.

One of the more interesting developments since the emergence of charter schools is that many of these schools have failed to produce significantly better results on competency examinations than their public school counterparts. While we encourage research into the dynamics of this phenomenon, we think we can predict one of if not the biggest contributing factor.

Parents who make sacrifices, both financial and otherwise, to enroll their children in private, parochial, or charter schools are typically invested in the education of their children. They are motivated to see a positive return on their investment and they accept responsibility as partners in the education of their children. Unfortunately, some parents take advantage of vouchers but think, having made such a choice, their job is complete. Such parents are not invested and may not accept responsibility as partners in the education of their children. The students of such parents will be no more likely to succeed academically than they were in their former school. As is so often true, when people get something for nothing, they have an entitlement mentality. We repeat our assertion that, it is not the school that makes the difference in education and that vouchers are not the solution.

If educators could have just one wish, and truly took the time to think about it, the overwhelming majority would wish that each of their students had parents who care, who want to be involved, who truly accept responsibility for their kids, and who support the teachers and principals. Proving this assertion is the greatest single contribution special schools make in an aggregate sense. Creating such a reality in every school in the United States of American is the categorical imperative of our time.

Excerpt #6 from Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream, The Introduction, cont.

Posted on by

All educational policy makers, decision-makers, administrators, and practitioners are challenged to step back to a vantage point from which they can examine the system as an integral whole and challenge their fundamental assumptions about the educational process. We will show how this can be done, very specifically, in a later section of this work. All players in the system must be tasked to break out of their encapsulation and to think exponentially. What we need from teachers is that they acquire a willingness to try new things and be willing to leave their zones of comfort. Not everything we try will work but we will find no new solutions until we do try.

We can predict with a high level of confidence that increased student motivation and parental participation will make a difference in any educational setting. What is not so clear is whether the innovations in curriculum and instructional methodology utilized in these special schools would translate to all students across the spectrum of our diverse population of American children.

Honors programs in our mainstream public schools provide supportive evidence for this argument. In such honors programs, students have been selected on the basis of their demonstrated accomplishments. These are highly motivated students, almost all of whom are supported by committed parents who view themselves as full partners in the educational process. Within honors programs, the students, already successful academically, enjoy some of but not all of the advantages enjoyed by students in special schools. Often, principals assign their best and most experienced teachers to honors programs. In addition, the students in honors programs are sheltered from much of the negative peer pressure that pervades the classrooms, hallways, and playgrounds of most urban public schools. Honor students, for example, rarely are required to deal with the harassment of students who view education with disdain. They might have to deal with it in the corridors but not in an adjacent seat within an honors classroom.

The attributes that distinguish honor students, who are essentially self-selected for the program, from the non-honors students of their school are their motivation to learn, a demonstrated proficiency in an academic arena, and the fact that they are supported by parents who rigorously support the educational process. Our argument is further supported by the fact, to which many teachers will attest, that there are many other students who could be honors students if only they cared and if only they could be encouraged to try. Excellent teachers can and do provide such encouragement and we know that the encouragement of committed parents can be a powerful influence. The encouragement of teachers and parents working in partnership, however, creates the absolute best environment for the success of students. It is imperative that we work relentlessly to bring all American parents into this partnership. Although I have no evidence to prove my assertion, I believe that even teachers at the lower end of the performance curve do their best work with those students whose parents make an effort to show up at conferences and call or drop by to see how their children are doing.

An important difference between special schools outside of the mainstream system of education and highly successful honors classes is that while special schools are able to employ innovations in curriculum and teaching methods, honors programs must rely on the same curriculum and educational methodology found in the mainstream classrooms of their state. The only apparent difference for the honors classrooms are the motivation of students, their demonstrated accomplishments, and the rigorous support of families. This suggests to this author, that student motivation and parental responsibility are the most important components of educational success, wherever we find it. Honors students are also children for whom the traditional educational process is ideally suited. The flip side, here, poses a serious question: Could this be construed as evidence that our traditional educational processes are not a good fit for the majority of the students in our public schools?

The motivation of students and the active support and participation of parents are clearly the crucial difference makers in education, both public and private. The sooner we acknowledge this reality and begin to restructure our strategies accordingly, the sooner we will begin to see a transformation in the quality of American education for all students. Our second over-riding priority must be to challenge an educational process that seems to be both designed and focused on identifying and celebrating the accomplishments of a small percentage of elite students for whom academic success comes relatively easily, to the great disadvantage of the millions of other American children.

As we shall see when we examine the results of competency tests in the State of Indiana, thirty percent of the students throughout Indiana are unable to pass the ISTEP+ or the End of Class Assessments, which are meant to determine eligibility for graduation. Just because they passed does not mean that these students scored high on the assessments. Many passed by the slimmest of margins.

Over the coming century, the success of our nation requires a diverse range of skills. Excellence in any one venue will be as vital to our nation’s success as any other. Ron Flickinger, an educational consultant who provided feedback to me when this book was being written observed that, “The larger social system will value some skills more than others and will obviously pay more for those skills, but the culture has to find a way to communicate to its young that the guy that gets your plumbing right enhances the quality of your life just as much as the mayor of your city.”

An urgent need to completely rethink the reasons why so many children fail in our mainstream schools throughout the whole of the United States seems apparent.

Exerpt #5 from Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream, from The Introduction

Posted on by

Most Americans are unaware of the poor showing of the American educational system when compared to other nations in the world marketplace, but there does appear to be clear evidence that our children are performing poorly when compared to the children of other nations. This is particularly true of American children in our urban communities. As a result, our public schools are facing scathing criticism as are the educators who struggle to make the system work for our children. The cry goes out that our public schools are failing us and that teachers are to blame. Such claims are, at a minimum, misguided, at their worst a travesty.

In response to mounting pressure from federal and state officials, some school districts have resorted to major housecleaning; terminating teachers and administrators in groups both large and small. In other communities, state departments of public education are placing failing schools on probation and, in some cases, are threatening to take the schools over in an attempt to improve lagging test scores. In Fort Wayne Community Schools, the system to which we will often refer throughout this book, the district gave notices to more than 300 teachers and administrators at the end of the 2010/2011 school year and required them to reapply for their jobs as part of the district’s strategy for an academic shake up.

Such actions are tantamount to blaming soldiers for a war they were asked to fight. These efforts make an insignificant impact on the problem, especially when these schools rehire the same teachers and administrators and then move them to a different building. It does not work because teachers and administrators are only a small part of the problem and, in many cases, are themselves victims of an educational system that is both misdirected and poorly designed to do what we desperately need it to do in this ever-more complicated world.

So, what is the problem with public education in the United States of America? In response to what was meant as a rhetorical question, “What is the matter with these kids?” a middle school teacher with whom I shared a table in a faculty lounge summed up the problem with public education in the United States elegantly and concisely, if not kindly, in six words: “They just don’t give a shit!” And, he spat the words out.

My first response was to laugh. After ten years of substitute teaching, it has become glaringly obvious to me that there was more than a nugget of truth in the observations of this teacher, whose name and school I cannot recall. It is anything but a laughing matter, however.

There are, indeed, students who do care and parents who do support the educational process. The reality, however, is that an alarming percentage of those parents are pulling their children out of our urban public schools and placing them in a variety of private alternatives from parochial, charter schools, or other private schools to home schooling. In many places, state governments are encouraging such transfers through the use of voucher programs that allow the use of tax dollars to subsidize such transfers. Other parents are moving their families out of cities and into suburban and rural public school districts where they believe their children will receive a better education. The sad but compelling fact is that these suburban and rural public schools, and parochial and private alternatives, are out-performing their urban public counterparts on test scores to such a degree that it is difficult to be critical of parents who make such choices. The subsequent consequences with which our urban public school students and teachers must deal as a result of such departures are scary. We will return to this subject later in this chapter. Scarier, still, is that even our better schools are under performing relative to the school systems of other developed nations.

The only places where American students are consistently performing at an exceptional level are in special schools that exist, in small numbers, along the fringes of the mainstream educational system. Readers who have viewed the documentary, Waiting for Superman , were given a glimpse of a few examples of these remarkable little schools. As exciting as their performance might appear, these special little schools are not the answer to the American educational dilemma although they do offer a glimpse of the secret to solving the problem. They are not the solution because they are too few in number and simply cannot be replicated in sufficient numbers to solve the problem for the other ninety-nine percent of our nation’s student population. More importantly, they are not the solution because we have not made the effort to fully understand the reasons for their success. Instead, we stumble along in search of answers, blinded by our assumptions.

The leaders and advocates of such special schools suggest that their success can be attributed to two key factors. The first, these advocates suggest, is that these programs enjoy the luxury of being able to recruit exemplary teachers; the proverbial cream of the crop. The second is that, because these schools exist outside of the formal educational system, they are constrained by neither the bureaucracy of the public school system nor the power of teacher unions. Absent these constraints, according to their administrators, these schools are able to develop innovative curricula and place their exemplary teachers in exceptionally conducive environments, allowing them to do extraordinary things.

The freedom to do things differently and to break away from conventional wisdom creates a tremendous advantage for these schools and their students and mainstream educational policy makers and administrators must learn from their example. What we often ignore is that the most important advantage enjoyed by these special schools, we believe, is that the student populations of these schools are made up almost entirely of children whose parents are fiercely determined to see that their sons and daughters will get the best possible education.

Whether they are black, white, rich, poor, come from intact or fractured families is inconsequential. These parents took extraordinary action to get their children into these special schools, sometimes agonizing through a lottery process before their children are even accepted, and they are fully on board as partners in the educational process. It is from this fierce passion on the part of parents that students derive a powerful motivation to learn. When motivated students are supported by a sustained and active partnership between parents and educators, truly remarkable things happen. When combined with exemplary teachers utilizing innovative curricula and instructional methodology what takes place could be described as magical.

One would think it should be glaringly obvious that committed parents and their motivated sons and daughters are an essential ingredient in successful schools, wherever we find them, but the overwhelming majority of American educators and policy makers are so caught up in their daily challenges and so blinded by their preconceptions that they fail to see it.

Excerpt # 2 from the Preface of Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream

Posted on by

Page 10 -12

America’s schools, both public and private, are the grounds upon which a battle is being waged for the very future of the United States and we are losing the battle. Many communities throughout the nation are perceived to have exemplary schools yet in cities across the United States the percentage of students unable to pass state competency exams ranges from twenty to over eighty percent. More often than not, the lowest passage rates are found in urban public schools. While outperforming their urban counterparts; even our best schools, whether public, private, parochial, or charter are not performing well enough to propel the U.S. into the top-twenty list of developed nations with respect to the performance in math and science. That we rank as high as 15th in language literacy is hardly cause for celebration. That China, arguably our biggest competitor in the international marketplace and also our nation’s largest creditor, ranks first in all three categories should be cause for alarm if not outright panic.

The consequence of this systemic indifference is that the number of children exiting our public schools with little in the way of marketable skills and who are functionally illiterate is growing at an untenable rate. Under the misguided belief that greatest problems with public education in America are poverty, bad schools, and bad teachers and in the wake of such federal initiatives as President George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) legislation and President Barack Obama’s “Race to the Top” our educational leaders and policy makers are under great pressure to reverse the declining performance of American school children.

Under the leadership of what are thought to be the best and brightest minds from the world of business and public policy think tanks, and with the backing of billionaires and private foundations we are in the midst of a rush toward privatization of our schools, Common Core, charter schools, holding schools and their teachers accountable on the basis of standardized competency examinations, minimizing if not eliminating the role of teachers unions, and the expansion of voucher programs. With full support of federal and many state governments, the sentiment is that private enterprise can do a better job of educating our children than community-based school corporations.

It is even suggested that, with the application of business principles such privatization can even bring an end to poverty, which is widely believed to be the root cause of the problems of education and almost every other social problem in America.

That poverty is an outcome of the evolution of our free-market economy, along with the federal government’s ineffectual tampering, begs the question of why we would ever think privatized schools will somehow create different outcomes. The one thing we can say with certainty is that free market forces will follow the money. This will remain true whether the marketplace is producing goods and services or educating our children. We can also say with some certainty that there “ain’t no money” in the poorest neighborhoods of urban or rural America.

Chapter 5 – Journalled review of Diane Ravitch’s Reign of Error. “The Facts about Test Scores.”

Posted on by

In Chapter 5 of her monumental work, Reign of Error, Diane Ravitch offers the results of The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) assessments as compelling evidence that “students in American public schools today are studying and mastering far more difficult topics in science and mathematics than their peers forty to fifty years ago.” On the basis of this evidence she believes that “Test scores are at their highest point ever recorded” and, therefore, claims that “the educational system is broken and obsolete” are simply not true. It may be true that scores are higher than ever for the students at the elite end of the academic continuum but it ignores the stark reality that is the performance of the majority of American school children.

It is somewhat ironic that Ravitch is critical of the value of standardized testing in assessing the efficacy of public education on the one hand but cites NAEP results as evidence of the health of public education in America on the other. Her argument is that the NAEP assessment process is a different sort of testing and is far more meaningful that they typical standardized competency examinations used in states throughout the U.S. About this she is correct and we will examine the NAEP assessments and their results, shortly.

It is also important that we examine the context in which Ravitch’s arguments are made. Like most educators, Ravitch is frustrated at the savagery with which our schools and teachers are being blamed for the perceived failure of public education in America. Being attacked, even when criticisms are justified, is far more effective at putting educators on the defensive than it is as a catalyst for meaningful educational reform. When the criticisms are unfair and based upon claims that are unfounded or prejudicial, the intensity of one’s defensive posture is magnified.

As we have said throughout this “journaled review of Ravitch’s Reign of Error,” she is right to challenge the basis for such claims and also the solutions proffered by the “evil corporate reformers.” Where she is wrong is to insist that the documented improvements in the performance of our public schools, as measured by NAEP, are acceptable and that they prove that public education in America is not failing. We would suggest that the NAEP results prove rather clearly that public education is, indeed, failing.

Let us digress for a few paragraphs and take a look at the NAEP assessment process. Ravitch is correct that the NAEP assessment process is a meaningful tool and that the NAEP, which is part of the US Department of Education, and its independent governing board, the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) are a highly reputable, bipartisan body comprised of educators, elected officials, business people, and members of the general public.

The NAEP measures student performance in reading, math, and other subjects over time and reports results in two ways. The first is by scale scores, ranging from zero to 500 which reflect what students know and can do, without making judgments about whether the performance is good or bad. To use the vernacular, the results “are what they are.”
The second component is that Achievement Levels have been established in an attempt to put the raw results into some sort of meaningful context. It is acknowledged that these achievement levels are somewhat arbitrary and have created opportunities for over-interpretation.

On the NAEP assessments, an “advanced” level of achievement denotes “superior performance at each grade assessed.”
“Proficient” is defined, by the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) as “solid academic performance for each grade assessed. This is a very high level of academic achievement. Students reaching this level have demonstrated competency over challenging subject matter, including subject matter knowledge, application of such knowledge to real-world situations, and analytical skills appropriate to the subject matter.”

The NAGB defines “Basic” as “partial mastery of prerequisite knowledge and skills that are fundamental for proficient work at each grade assessed.”

The NAGB “believes, however, that all students should reach the Proficient level; the Basic level is not the desired goal, but rather represents partial mastery that is a step toward Proficient.”

“Below Basic” represents students who are unable to demonstrate even partial mastery of the work at each grade assessed.

We must maintain an awareness that these achievement levels are determined by the judgment of a panel of people on the basis of the performance of actual testers using percentiles. In effect, we are superimposing a distribution curve over the scores in order to make it more meaningful for us. As we shall see, later, the results tell us how much students know but it does not even begin to tell us where they should be performing at a given grade.

We can draw meaningful conclusions from the scores that will help us chart a course for the future, however and we will discuss this in some detail.

An important distinction with respect to NAEP results is that the scale scores of 0-500 change very little over time and actually show how students are moving up the scale, i.e. from the 4th grade assessment to the 8th grade assessment. In essence, the assessment shows how much kids know and can utilize at a given point in time. It might be helpful to think of it as a continuum along which students move as they gain increasing levels of mastery over the subject matter with no ceiling as to how far they can progress other than topping out at a score of 500.

Now, we want to compare the NAEP assessment process with state competency exams and we will use Indiana’s ISTEP+ simply because of the author’s relative level of familiarity with it.

Right out of the gate, be aware that we are going to over-simplify this process but it is the logic of the process that we want to illustrate.

On ISTEP+ for Grade 3 Math, for example, there is an expectation that a given number of areas of content will have been presented to the students by the time the ISTEP+ for that grade level is scheduled to be administered. The primary question the ISTEP+ is designed to measure is whether or not students “have learned what we expect them to know.” Specifically, what they are expected to know is defined within the context of state standards. What is not obvious from the published data are such questions as “How were passing scores determined?” In other words, how high was the bar set? For example is passing 60 percent? Eighty percent?

So, in the case of NAEP we are assessing how much a child of a given age knows and can utilize, without regard for how his or her classmates might be doing. For the ISTEP+ we seem more concerned about how a given student’s performance compares to the performance of his or her classmates.

Returning to our discussion of how NAEP results are to be interpreted, Ravitch disagrees with those who “assume that students who were not “Proficient” on the NAEP were “below grade level”.” “That is wrong” Ravitch insists and she suggests that having “76 percent” or some comparable percentage of the student population at “basic or above” is something to be touted.

I tend to agree with the NAGB that “Basic” is not our desired goal and that all students should reach the “Proficient” level of achievement, which is a point at which they have “demonstrated competency over challenging subject matter. . . .” and can apply “that knowledge to real-world situations. . . .”

Think about the difference, here. Ravitch is stating that the NAEP results in which 71 percent of eighth grade students are at “Basic or above” is validation that our schools are not in a state of crisis.

I would suggest just the opposite, and the NAEP would seem to agree, that it is clearly unacceptable that only 44 percent of eighth grade math students are “Proficient or Advanced.” Why would we ever think our job is done when any student has achieved only “partial mastery of prerequisite knowledge and skills that are fundamental. . .” to achieving proficiency rather than “Proficiency” itself? Why would we ever think it acceptable that 56 percent of eighth grade math students are not at a point where they have mastered the material sufficiently to apply that knowledge to real world problem-solving?

And, let us not forget about the 29 percent of eighth grade math students who have yet to demonstrate even partial mastery of the material. The two realities taken together spell crisis in this author’s mind in bold upper-case letters.

Other points of concern include:

The fact that we have no sense at all about whether or not the bar has been set sufficiently high;
The fact that only 6 to 8 percent are performing at an advanced level;
The fact that the variance between the 10th percentile and the 90th percentile is a cavernous 94 points (for eighth grade math students); and
The fact that the performance gaps between white students and their black and Hispanic classmates remains at an unconscionably high rate and that closing the gap from 32 points to 25 points for African-American students over a twenty plus year period is an accomplishment about which we should feel embarrassed rather than proud.

In American educational thinking, we are caught up in the idea that only 6 to 8 percent of students can be A students. In the business world, no production manager would be content to have such disparity of performance. The expectation would be that 75 percent of more of employees are working at the highest level of productivity and that those employees who are not are receiving aggressive remedial attention.

What we can say with some certainty, when talking about American public education, is that few if any students are performing at the highest level of which they are capable and the vast majority are nowhere close to achieving their potential. Helping individual students reach the highest tiers of their potential should always be the goal of our schools and teachers and we should not be squandering a single second worrying about whether Child “A” is keeping up with his or her classmates.

The NAEP Assessment tools appear to offer a high level of utility in judging the efficacy of our systems of public education. What we need to focus on is closing the gaps and raising the bar.
Let us not forget that the biggest fallacy in over-reliance on standardized testing, of any kind, as the ultimate measure of accountability for schools and teachers is that schools and teachers are only a small part of the equation for academic excellence.

To suggest that our current level of achievements provide evidence that no crisis exists in American public education is nothing short of absurd.

Charter Schools Are Not the Solution to Public Education in the US

Posted on by

While I would enthusiastically support the concept of creating a charter school to test a new instructional model and would certainly approve the use of incentives to encourage families to place their children in that school, that is not the way charter schools are being utilized here in Fort Wayne, Indiana nor, I suspect, in most other communities in the US.

The Charter schools with which I am familiar are might posture themselves as innovative but, in reality, they are little more than lifeboats floated out into the murky sea of public education to give the few families that are so inclined a place to which they can escape from the public schools.

There are insufficient numbers of these lifeboats to accept more than a miniscule percentage of the total population of children who are in the figurative “damaged ships” that are our urban public schools; thus, such schools can have no more than a marginal impact on the challenges facing public education in America.

The fact that we create these avenues of escape for the most motivated families and their children and still expect the teachers of the abandoned school to improve scores on standardized competency examinations is absurd. Charter schools may be a lifeline for a small number of families but they are a virtual sentence of death, or at least imprisonment, to the abandoned schools and to their students and educators.

The message this sends to the community at large is “we cannot do anything to fix our most challenged public schools so let us, at the very least, help a few families and their children escape.

The practice of using school vouchers is also creating its own series of adverse impacts. Not only do vouchers drain scarce tax dollars out of the accounts of our most challenged schools, those dollars are not creating outcomes that are significantly better for the students as, at least locally, the performance of charter schools on competency exams is disappointing. Worse yet, is that a portion of the tax revenue siphoned out of the budgets of our public schools is being utilized for purposes other than the education of our children.

I know, personally, of two Catholic parishes in Fort Wayne that have found vouchers to be a profitable enterprise and have used the revenue to pay off the parishes debts to the Dioceses or to address non-school related financial concerns while requests for school related uses of the funds have been denied. Now that this practice has come to light, that unfortunate and inappropriate practice will be discouraged, hopefully, if not discontinued.

We say that our purpose is to fix public education and that is expressed in our collective mission statements. Our behavior suggests that we have given up on at least our urban public schools as lost causes.

The fundamental problem with education reform is that it amounts to little more than tinkering with obsolete educational processes that contributes, greatly, to the failure of its students and the overwhelming majority of educational reformers, “corporate reformers” or “traditional,” seem oblivious to this reality. No matter how many times we keep re-shuffling the same deck we will continue to get the same 52 cards. Unfortunately, they are the wrong cards.

If the reader can allow his or her mind to consider, imagine that we have landed on another planet with a couple of million families and we want to set up schools for our children. If we were to take advantage of this unique opportunity and design and educational process from scratch, would it appear anything like public education looks in the United States of America, today? If we were to apply any amount of imaginative, exponential thinking the answer would be that the system we would create would bear little resemblance to what we have here and now.

The saddest fact of all is that reinventing our educational systems and processes would not be all that difficult if only we would open our hearts and minds to a new way of thinking about education. With but a few exceptions, most of the things we would do differently would require nothing more than a majority vote of the local school district.

I am proposing that we apply a systems-thinking approach utilizing present day business principles to reinvent education in America. I am not talking about such business principles of the corporate board room as financial incentives, competition, privatization and entrepreneurialism. In fact, these are the exact wrong business principles.

The business principles to which I refer are the principles learned in an operational setting such has: focus on one’s customer; identifying and focus on one’s mission, structuring the operation to meet its objectives, problem-solving, teamwork, integrating quality assessments into the learning process, and giving the people on the production line (teachers and administrators) the tools and resources they need to do the best job of which they are capable.
In my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America, I offer a comprehensive blueprint for change.

My request to educators and reformers alike is: let us pause for a moment, clear our minds, and listen to the ideas of someone with a fresh perspective. What do we have to lose other than a few minutes of our time? This is something else smart businesspeople have learned. They often seek out consultants with a broader perspective to challenge their assumptions and paradigms. They even pay for this service, which is the best indicator of its perceived value.

Response to the Column on Culture and Poverty by Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post

Posted on by

Bravo for the rejection, by @eugenerobinson of the @washingtonPost, of Rep. Paul Ryan’s assertion that culture is to blame for poverty in the U.S. It is what I have been trying to say in my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream, but Robinson has said it better. Such proclamations do, indeed, provide an excuse for doing nothing. Such thinking also provides fodder for corporate reformers of education who want to privatize our schools and minimize the amount of influence a local community will have over the schools their children must attend.

Ironically, when traditional educators challenge such corporate reform agendas they make the same excuses by claiming that poverty is the cause of the problems with public education in America and, yes, I know this sounds counter-intuitive. Blaming poverty gives educators license to lower their expectations because “there really isn’t anything of significance we can do until our government effectively addresses the problems of poverty.”

I wish I could go back and add Robinson’s comment on culture, in the section of my book where I say that the problem with education in America is not poverty, it is the hopelessness that so often accompanies poverty. That hopelessness and powerlessness also contribute to a cultural devaluation of education on the part of a growing population of Americans; citizens who have become effectively disenfranchised and have given up hope that a quality education can create a better life for their children.

I wish I had done a better job of saying that the problems of poverty and educational failure are not the result of the many subcultures of American society; whether African-American, Hispanic-American, or other ethnic groups.

Why can we not recognize that this cultural diversity is not a weakness of American society but rather a strength that adds rich textures, flavors, sounds, and perspectives to a pluralistic democracy.

Blaming poverty for the problems in education, like blaming culture for the existence of poverty, is convoluted logic that blinds us to pragmatic solutions and is nothing more than an excuse for continuing to make the same mistakes we have been repeating for generations. Until we change this thinking our schools will continue to chew up and spit out huge numbers of American school children.

Even though this cultural devaluation is prevalent in many African-American communities in cities and poor rural communities throughout the U.S., it transcends race and exists anywhere that people have given up hope and no longer believe that they can exert control over the outcomes in their lives.

Poverty and the problems with education in America are symptoms of the same pathology as is the cancerous, cultural devaluation of education. They are all functions of hopelessness and powerlessness. The operative question becomes, “why don’t we attack hopelessness relentlessly.”

In my book, I suggest that education not only provides a barometer with which we can measure the severity of the problem, education also provides our society with the best opportunity to alter this reality. Make no mistake, if we continue to allow the spread of hopelessness it has ominous implications for the future of America. This is particularly true given the emergence of whole new economies that are challenging American supremacy in the dynamic and highly competitive world marketplace of the Twenty-first Century.

We must transform the educational process in America from a system that is focused on failure to one that acknowledges the cavernous disparity with respect to the level of motivation and preparation that young children carry with them on their first day of school. We must have a system that puts teachers in a position to help their students learn how to be successful rather than the current system that sets up huge numbers of children for failure and humiliation. And, then, we wonder why they begin to lose hope that an education provides a pathway to better opportunities.

We must urge Americans of all backgrounds and economic circumstances to believe that we are anything but powerless to change the outcomes that flow from our society’s shortcomings.

Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America, offers a blueprint for change that outlines thirty-three specific action strategies for transforming American public education and also for infusing hope and faith in the American dream in the hearts and minds of every American man, woman, and child.

Let Teachers Lead Students to Success

Posted on by

Below is a guest column by Ron Flickinger that appeared in the March 10, 2014 edition of the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel referencing my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America.

“Abandon Current Focus on Failure, let teachers lead students toward success.”

A Response to Diane Ravitch Blog Post, Poverty Matters

Posted on by

Poverty Does Matter, but not the way we like to think!

Poverty is important and it does matter, very much, in fact. And no, poverty is not a state of mind; it is a tragic condition in which millions of Americans languish.

Poverty is also an excuse for throwing up our collective hands as if the outcomes are out of our control. It is an excuse for continuing to do the same things we have always done, unquestioningly, convinced we are doing the best we can for the children in our classrooms, under adverse circumstances.

We cry out: “If only Congress would raise minimum wages; change the tax structure to more equitably spread the burden; if only they would find a way to lift the horrible mantle of poverty we could really help these kids.”

And, before you rush to stereotype reformers and their pseudo-counterparts and shut down your minds, I grew up in a low-income family and attended a school that, sixty years ago, was 30 percent black and 50% impoverished. In my first job as a juvenile probation officer I sat across a rickety card table that served as the dinner table for a mother striving to rear 4 children on welfare, drinking coffee while trying to find a way to keep her sons in school and out of the juvenile detention facility.

I sent my own three children to city public schools so they would learn to feel at home in the midst of diversity and not grow up to be elitist, upper-middleclass Americans, out of touch with how so many of our fellow citizens must live.

What I have learned from my own parents and from a lifetime of experience is that it is not poverty that keeps children from succeeding in school. For generations there have been children from the poorest families who have somehow learned how to excel academically; and these were not outliers to be discounted as not relevant to our discussion. Almost without exception there is a characteristic common to all of these youngsters. These children are blessed to have a parent or guardian who somehow still clings to hope that their child can have a better life.

Let’s cling to no illusions about the difficulties these parents face or that such parents are always successful. Sadly, many do fail in spite of the heroic efforts that are made . What matters, however, is that many do not fail and, as a result, their children enjoy some level of academic success.

It is not poverty that keeps children in poverty, it is the hopelessness that so often accompanies poverty. Poverty is, indeed, a very real condition but hopelessness is very much a state of mind. The operative question is why we do not attack hopelessness, ferociously. Hope and expectations are inextricably connected.

As much as I admire and respect public school teachers our public educators, as a whole, whether policy-makers, professors in college departments of education, administrators, or teachers cling to the traditions of an early twentieth century educational process that is woefully inadequate in a twenty-first century world; totally unaware of how what they do contributes to and reinforces the hopelessness of our nation’s disadvantaged.

These educators are blind to the fact that our educational process is focused on failure and sets the most vulnerable of our nation’s children up for failure and humiliation. Is it any wonder that these youngsters grow up to spawn new generations of children with little if any motivation to learn and even less hope for a better life.

For the love of all that is precious in life, can we not abandon our outdated assumptions and biases and open our hearts and minds to a new way of thinking about education in America? If only we will relinquish our obsession with tradition and open our minds to new possibilities we will discover answers that have existed, right in front of us, just beyond the illusory horizon of intransigence.

To you, Diane Ravitch, who for so long has been one of our best and brightest advocates for excellence in education, we need you seek to understand rather than rebut. We need you to think exponentially and to provide a whole new level of leadership in a fresh paradigm.

I am not suggesting that there is a perfect solution to the challenges of education in America; there is no such thing as a perfect solution. With each stride down a new avenue of thinking, however, we will discover new and better ideas and each new answer will lead to whole new sets of questions followed by even more answers and even better ideas.

You know better than any of us that time is of the essence. We must act before those who are rushing to privatize education, place even more reliance on standardized competency examinations, and who want to separate our schools from the communities they exist to serve lead us to disaster.

Reign of Error, by Diane Ravitch, a Journaled Review by Mel Hawkins, Entry #1

Posted on by

This is the first installment of what will be a journaled review of Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools, by Diane Ravitch; her latest and possibly most important work.

In her Intro, Diane Ravitch says that her purpose is to answer 4 questions:

1. Is American Education in crisis?
2. Is American education failing and declining
3. What is the evidence for the reforms now being promoted by the federal government and adopted in many states
4. What should we do to improve our schools and the lives of children?

Ravitch says that American education is in crisis “because of persistent, orchestrated attacks on them and their teachers and principals, and attacks on the very principle of public responsibility for public education.” She adds that “these attacks create a false sense of crisis and serve the interests of those who want to privatize the public schools.”

This statement begs the question of why did the orchestrators of such attacks find it necessary to attack public education in the first place? While I agree with her that the evolving focus on privatization is a bad thing, there must be some acknowledgement of responsibility for the outcomes to which these unidentified forces are reacting.

While it is natural for educators to be defensive and feel unfairly blamed while in the midst of the criticisms raining down on them, claiming the criticisms to be unfair without addressing the outcomes about which the critics are concerned is simply not acceptable. Educators are no more able to fairly judge, unilaterally, the efficacy of their product than members of a production line in a manufacturing operation are able to judge the performance of the goods they produce outside the context of the customer who pays for those goods.

The only people who can fairly judge the value of education are the people who rely on the ability of public school students to perform in the marketplace upon completion of their schooling. As a former employer, I can tell you that it became increasingly difficult to find young men and women who have the minimal academic skills necessary to do the work for which we were prepared to pay them. Employers have a right to pass judgment on the performance of our public schools.

As an tester responsible for administering the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), I am in a position to judge the efficacy of an educational system that produces so many young men and women who are either unable to meet the minimum requirements for enlistment eligibility or who, if eligible, are able to perform the work required of them after induction in only the lowest career areas.

If teachers, particularly of middle and high school students, were able to set aside worries about who is to blame for the problem, they would be in a great position to tell us that far too many students are either unwilling or unable, either, to do the academic work on the one hand or display good citizenship on the other.

The question is not whether or not our systems of public education are in crisis, because it most surely is, rather it is what and who are responsible for the crisis.

Sadly, most of these critics assign responsibility for the poor performance of our public schools on the wrong things. We blame poverty, we blame racial discrimination and segregation, and we blame our teachers and our schools.

As was noted in my initial review of Ravitch’s book, as well as in my own book and blog, we misinterpret the causes of the disappointing performance of our public schools. Because of our incorrect assessment, we fail to see that teachers, rather than bearing the brunt of the responsibility for what is clearly a crisis in public education, are as much victims of the system as are their students.

As is always the case, if we are unable to come up with an accurate diagnosis of the problem, we are rarely able to identify meaningful solutions.

Were we able to discover and agree on the true causes of our educational crisis we would know, with a high degree of certainty that testing, privatization, vouchers and other tools to give parents more choices are not the solution to the problems of public education. These things make it more difficult for teachers and schools to do their important work rather than easier.

The true causes, as we have so frequently pointed out, are 1) a growing cultural disdain for the value of education on the part of far too many American parents and the resulting lack of a strong motivation to learn on the part of their children, and 2) that the educational process that has evolved, over the last century or more, is poorly designed and structured to produce the outcomes we so desperately need. The American educational process is the equivalent of early twentieth-century design and technology striving to compete in the Twenty-first Century. No amount of tinkering with the system with incremental modifications will work. The system must be reinvented to produce the outcomes we need from it.

Let us return to Ravitch’s purpose which was to answer her four questions. The American systems of public education are clearly in crisis and it is failing to meet the needs of both American school children and the society which will someday depend on their contributions.

As far as question number three is concerned, there is no evidence for the reform initiatives being promoted by the federal government and other policy-making forces as they are all premised on faulty logic. Any solution constructed on a faulty foundation must, inevitably, crumble.

The answer to question number four is that we must do nothing “to improve our schools and the lives of our children?” until we take the time to understand the root causes of the problems of public education in America. For that reason, finding the root causes is the categorical imperative of our time.

It was for this very purpose that my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America was written.

Ravitch, correctly, goes on to say that our schools are not “fine just as they are.” She then lists what she believes “American education needs,” and while none of these things are bad for our public schools, not a single one of them addresses the root causes for our system’s problems. As a result, they will not only make no appreciable difference, they will be harmful because of the opportunity cost they engender as they keep us from doing what we should be doing.

The sad thing is, that we already have the capability to fix public education in America even though it will be a formidable challenge.

Ravitch is absolutely correct, however, when she says that “The purpose of elementary and secondary education is to develop the minds and character of young children and adolescents and help them grow up to become healthy, knowledgeable, and competent citizens.”

She is also correct that the solution is to give schools and their teachers the resources that they need to do their jobs. We simply must rethink what those resources are.

Another area where Ravitch and other opponents of many of the “privatization” reform initiatives are wrong is in seemingly suggesting that schools and teachers should not be held accountable through the independent measurement of outcomes. As we will discuss later on, we need to develop an integrated quality system much like modern business organizations have done. What the skeptics will discover, if they make an effort to understand how such systems work, is that such quality systems actually help rather than hinder the worker’s ability to do his or her job. The same will be most assuredly true for teachers.