Missing the most fundamental point about urban educational reform

I have been meaning to write an entry on this topic and yesterday's Post has a few pieces that illustrate simply the point I want to make so here goes...

For whatever reason, people in DC believe that somehow, rather than look at what works in K-12 education, they have to do something new.

The basic thrust of this comes out of a fundamental disrespect of civic engagement, democracy and participation, as well as the opportunity that DC provides to Congress for showboating, or at the least, being a fulcrum to push various ideologically-infused programs of one sort or another.

A front page story in yesterday's paper, "Thriving in District, Charter Schools Are Shunned in Suburbs" doesn't even have to be read beyond the headline (I didn't) to be able to respond:

Of course, charter schools aren't in demand in suburban public school districts because for the most part, those suburban school districts function quite well, with highly successful management, professional development, and teaching systems, and resultant high outcomes.

The big issues in Fairfax are the grading system for high school students ("Like Neighbors, County Schools Ease Grading Scale" from the Post) and whether or not to start school later for high school students ("Proposal to Push Back High School Start Time in Fairfax County" and "Fairfax School Board Votes Against Time Change" from the Post). What do they need charter schools for? Etc.

Charter schools have been pushed in DC as an _alternative_ to the public school system.

This was done out of the belief that the bureaucracy in the DC Public School System could never change. And out of a kind of racism as well, that the African-American dominated school system could never really improve. That it lacked the capacity to do so.

This book by Marion Orr is an excellent discussion of the issues facing urban school districts.

Similarly, the push on vouchers again is a way to avoid dealing with fixing the public school system, for those children (and their families) able to win the lottery and receive financial assistance to attend private schools.

In either case, with vouchers ("Don't Pull the Plug Yet: An evaluation of D.C.'s school voucher program suggests it has helped students," an editorial in yesterday's paper, plus this "Study Supports School Vouchers: In District, Pupils Outperform Peers On Reading Tests") or charter schools, these "solutions" have been pushed by well-placed interest groups and politicians in Congress in large part to push a privatization agenda. To demonstrate that the provision of public services, that the role of government in education and other areas, can best be delivered by non-government entities.

There is a headline for a completely unrelated story in today's Post, "U.S. a Stage, D.C. a Playground" but it encapsulates the problem. DC is a playground for national interest groups and politicians to play policy and ideology.

Education is important not just to families and their children, but to neighborhoods--since the local elementary school is usually the primary locus around which neighborhoods define themselves and organize community activities--and to the city as a whole, as sound educational opportunities help students succeed later in life, and help retain middle class families with school aged children as residents (and taxpayers) in the city.

A friend-colleague who graduated from McKinley Technical High School in the 1960s once said to me (I don't know if you have ever been on the campus, but it possesses a prominent view of the city, looking over downtown and the National Mall, and sadly I don't have a good photo of this):

"when we went to school here, we believed the city belonged to us, that we could do anything."

The biggest problem with these "feints" -- charter schools and vouchers -- is that communities have limited amounts of social, organizational, and political capital -- the gumption, capacity, capability, time, and will to improve or change specific things.

Rather than focusing fundamentally on improvement of the public school system in DC, the will to improve the school system is divided up amongst three different ways to "improve" schooling --charter schools, vouchers for attending private school, and blitzkreig efforts to presumably improve the public schools--and this capital is dissipated--wasted. And in response, DC Public School enrollments are shrinking at unprecedented rates, see "Study Confirms DCPS Enrollment Decline - D.C. Wire" from the Post.

Thinking about this from the perspective of the book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, which discusses what people do when they are faced with having to make a decision about continuing to work in organizations that act in ways counter to their personal ethics, the people with choice and will and motivation (a/k/a access to and possession of more social, organizational, and political capital) leave the local public schools in favor of seemingly better options*, making it that much more difficult to bring about improvement to the local school system--as resources continually shrink in favor of the other options. Thus proving the thesis that government can't provide quality local services, which was the intent all along of those originators of the policies to develop charter schools and voucher programs in the District of Columbia.

(* Note that often charter schools don't obtain better educational results, but because they are better at marketing and can be significantly more responsive, and because people who are able to express some choice in the selection of the services they receive evince higher levels of satisfaction irrespective of the quality of the service they receive, generally parents of children in charter schools are more satisfied when compared to public schools.)

Separately from the issue of charter schools and voucher schools and how their existence can diminish the available social, organizational, human and financial capital available to improving "public schools," at the same time, the efforts to improve the public education system by the DC Government are misdirected as well.

Even though we don't need to read this article, "Thriving in District, Charter Schools Are Shunned in Suburbs" beyond the headline, indirectly that article communicates something that isn't discussed much in DC either, in the context of urban education reform in the city:

why is it that suburban school districts in Maryland and Virginia, for the most part, function well, even with low income students, even with children whose first language is not English, without working to fire most of the teachers, without working to decertify unions, without trying to create charter schools, etc.?

Sure DC is a city, and the suburbs are counties. But that in and of itself isn't a significant enough difference between the systems to justify significant differences in actions and policies. (Note that Arlington and Alexandria Schools are much smaller than DC's, but Fairfax, Montgomery, and Prince George's County school districts are much much larger than DC.)

Note that Prince George's County Schools are finally on the upswing as well. I would argue that their previous dysfunction results from the same set of conditions that led DC Schools to decline so significantly, that the elites in control of the schools cared about contracts and jobs, not educational outcomes. So the schools declined. And people with choice ("Exit") for the most part left the city (or county) or sent their children to private schools. It was the parents of children possessing social and organizational capital, but not the financial capital allowing them to leave for better schools elsewhere, that helped set the stage for improvement.

And note that this wasn't always the case, that Montgomery County took for granted the relative failure of low income students, until they realized they needed to transform their methods and systems to adapt better to the needs of all children, to achieve high outcomes for all children regardless of household income status for individual children.

And about Arlington (although ArCo schools are much smaller than DC's), from the Post article, "Next Schools Chief Already Part of the Community":

Smith, a public school educator for 44 years, started in Arlington in 1997 after working in Frederick and Houston. Under his leadership, Arlington has had one new school built, six replaced or rebuilt and 19 significantly renovated. Achievement has also risen for all student groups, with the achievement gap between white students and Hispanic and African American students narrowing by about 50 percent. In 1998, only two schools were accredited by the state. Now, all boast full accreditation.

And that they do it with elected school boards? See "D.C. Wire: Fenty to Mayors: School Boards Have No Purpose" from the Post.

Here and there over the years, I have written about what is called "positive deviance." When I first read an article about it, "Your Company's Secret Change Agents," from the Harvard Business Review, I had to re-read it a couple times as it seemed quite subtle, and I didn't fully get it. But in reality, the thesis is pretty simple. (Note that in honor of one of the authors, who died in 2008, the HBR has the article available online. Just click on the link.)

As the editor of that article says, in an appreciation of Jerry Sternin:

Of all the HBR articles I've had the privilege of helping to birth, that one is my pinnacled favorite. The authors talk about what it takes to ignite deep, real, lasting transformation, even in seemingly impossible circumstances. You think implementing organizational change in your company is tough? Try stopping AIDS, hospital staph infections, starvation, or the ancient practice of female genital mutilation.

Most organizations and the personnel within them fight the adoption of best practices, finding excuses in differences in situations to justify not changing. But all organizations, even those that are the most dysfunctional, have pockets of high performance, of significant excellence. Because these pockets of excellence function within the same organizational conditions, other parts of the organization can not justify excuses for not working to migrate and adopt those best practices.

For all the bad things we hear, DC Public Schools have had a number of programs--maybe not as many as we'd like--that are successful. I don't have children, so I don't know about all the programs, but three come to mind without thinking very hard at all:

1. The Capitol Hill Cluster Schools, including pre-K, elementary, and middle school education opportunities;

2. The Spanish language immersion program at Oyster Elementary School in Northwest DC;

3. Various Montessori elementary education programs;

and I expect that there are other examples (in addition to the excellent schools in Ward 3, the city's highest income residential area).

Using the idea of positive deviance, these clusters of excellence could and should have been expanded, to take over and reposition and recast schools that didn't succeed.

For example, I suggested maybe 5 years ago, that the Capitol Hill Cluster Schools should be expanded by one or two schools on the north (such as J.O. Wilson or Ludlow-Taylor in the H Street neighborhood, and Maury Elementary) and one on the south (such as Brent).

Alternatively, I suggested that an arts cluster could be developed in the H Street neighborhood, to extend the idea of an "arts" district (Atlas Performing Arts Center, H Street Playhouse and some bars...) into the neighborhood, beyond the commercial district. (This idea was sparked in part by the same woman who graduated from McKinley Technical High School.)

So the idea was that the schools (i.e., Ludlow-Taylor, Wilson, Wheatley [in Trindidad], Miner, Webb, Maury, Eastern High School) could be repositioned around visual arts, performing arts, language arts (English and foreign languages, each school would specialize in a different foreign language) and writing, media arts (broadcast, print, digital), and graphic design. (Sadly, this idea was never taken up by people with school-aged children.)

It is very interesting that rather than take up the concept of positive deviance, which is an insurgent method of transformation that works, the Chancellor of the school system, Michelle Rhee, takes up the broom metaphor--"fire everybody, I'm doing it for the children, everybody else is stupid, and should shut up."

Instead, we could think of the concept of positive deviance in terms of looking at the countywide school districts in the region, where school districts such as Arlington County and especially Montgomery County are excelling, even with children who are defined economically as impoverished.

In fact, Montgomery County in particular is increasing recognized nationally for their success with what are called "Title I" schools. And hey, MoCo isn't that far away, it borders the northwest part of the city (I live less than one mile from MoCo...). See "When ‘Unequal’ Is Fair Treatment" from Education Week. From the article:

When Jerry D. Weast became the superintendent of the Montgomery County, Md., public schools in 1999, he spent the summer poring over student-achievement results and demographic trends. Then he created a map to illustrate what he’d found.

The map divided the suburban district, just outside the nation’s capital, into two distinct areas, which he dubbed the “red zone” and the “green zone.” Most poor, minority, and English-language learners lived in the red zone, an urbanized core that was attracting a growing immigrant population. The green zone was predominantly white, affluent, and English-speaking. Academic performance closely mirrored the demographic trends, with the lowest-performing schools overwhelmingly concentrated in the red zone.

Without swift and deliberate action, the district faced the prospect of becoming split in two, divided by opportunity. To Mr. Weast, the solution was obvious. Montgomery County needed a differentiated strategy that funneled extra attention and resources to schools in the red zone, while increasing academic rigor for everyone.

“There’s this American thing about treating everybody equal,” he explained recently. “Our theory was, the most unequal treatment is equal treatment.”

Since then, Montgomery County’s leaders have maintained a delicate balance between “raising the bar and closing the gap” that has enabled the nation’s 16th-largest school district to narrow achievement gaps while retaining the support of wealthier, highly educated parents. ...

Because acknowledging extant excellence doesn't fly with the dominant narrative of Michelle Rhee-- "everybody else is stupid, I have to fire everybody and hire new people, me me me" --extant excellence isn't supported in the present day DC school system.

That's why quality teachers get fired or transferred and principals fear "telling the truth to the power" (so mis-discussed in the tv show "West Wing" because for the most part, power isn't interested in truth, power wants to be stroked and supported and sanctioned).

See the Examiner column by Harry Jaffe, "Can Rhee reform schools and be fair?," which asks the question of why Art Siebens, a particularly well-respected AP teacher formerly at Wilson High School, was transferred and in effect demoted, is being screwed under the current regime, while a principal hired by Chancellor Rhee at Shaw Junior High School gets all the support he wants? Sadly, Mr. Jaffe can't figure out what's going on, but then most people don't think in terms of systems...

[Note that I had the wrong link in the previous paragraph. It's been corrected. -- 4/6/2009]

The Baltimore School System is being "reformed" at the same time as the DC Public School system. The Superintendent there, Andres Alonso, doesn't have to face the constant erosion of the school district's enrollments from charter schools (but frankly Michelle Rhee appears to be supportive of that trend in DC), but compared to DC, his school system has more than twice the enrollment, and deals with students experiencing much greater levels of poverty and violence.

We won't know for a few years, but if I were given the opportunity to bet on Superintendent Alonso or Chancellor Rhee, I would put all my money on Alonso. Hands down.

Click here for a Baltimore Sun story gallery on the efforts of Superintendent Alonso.

Note the summary of his challenge:

Urgency drives Andrés Alonso. He has been given uncommon power to reshape Baltimore's dysfunctional schools to make them work for, not against, the children. He knows that he cannot do it by himself.

And the emphasis on working with others and then compare that to the statements and actions of Chancellor Rhee and Mayor Fenty.