Why K-12 education continues to have subpar outcomes for lower income students: we're investing in the wrong stuff

"Educators Framed Stamp Collection," from A Simpler Time.

Robert Samuelson, the economics columnist for the Washington Post, has a piece in Monday's paper, "Can we fix the schools? (Maybe not.)" that to me, misses the big point.

(I happened to write about this last month, but focused on DC, "Schools #2: Successful school programs in low income communities and the failure of DC to respond similarly.")

From the Samuelson op-ed:

"The achievement gap fails to close,” headlined an article in Education Next. “Half century of testing shows [a] persistent divide between haves and have-nots.”

The explanation is not that public policy wasn’t trying. The discouraging conclusion occurred despite the federal government’s decision to provide extra funding for poor schools under Title I of the Education and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Previously, public schools were funded mainly by localities and states. Corrected for inflation, overall spending per student nearly quadrupled from 1960 to 2015. ...

Broadly speaking, the study vindicates the results of earlier research conducted by sociologist James Coleman (usually called the “Coleman report”) in 1966. As part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, Coleman examined what factors promoted educational success. He found parental education, income and race to be strongly connected to student achievement, while per-pupil expenditures and class size were much less so. ...

The upshot is that schools are being asked to do for their students what families usually do. This is a tall order that is probably beyond the capability of most schools.

As a society, we should keep trying. But we should not ignore history. The national strategy of controlling the country’s schools — through subsidies and regulatory requirements — has prevailed for half a century. It has failed. The federal government should exit the business of overseeing K-12 education. Federal aid would halt, and the financial loss would be offset by having the national government assume all the states’ Medicaid costs.

We should let states and localities see whether they can make schools work better. The grandiose fix-it national plans are mostly exercises in political marketing. We need solutions, not slogans.

The big point is what does research and practice show needs to be done on how to improve school outcomes and are we doing that?/what are we doing?

For example, close to home, while not perfect, Montgomery County, Maryland has a successful and award-winning approach to addressing the achievement gap, one that is yielding results ("When ‘Unequal’ Is Fair Treatment," Education Week).

Research shows that to improve outcomes in high poverty schools, you need to:

1.  Provide additional supports to the principal/school as a whole ("Bucking School Reform, a Leader Gets Results," New York Times), teachers, including additional staff in the classroom ("‘Get it the right way first’: Principal of the Year finds success in a Virginia school," Washington Post), students, and families ("As need soars, schools rally behind families in Vancouver, Wash. — and other cities take notice," Seattle Times); the example from Brazil in "Your Company's Secret Change Agents," Harvard Business Review).

2.  An enriching curriculum, not merely a focus on standardized testing.  A friend is a teacher at a school in Salt Lake City.  This video that a one class of sixth graders produced about anti-immigrant initiatives on the US-Mexican border made me cry.  It's beautifully done.



3.  Extra-normal support in the early grades for students learning how to read. From the cited Post article featuring Nathaniel Provencio, the 2017 Principal of the year:

... In his early years, test scores showed that the school was faltering. It was one of 485 across the state required to implement an improvement plan for failing to meet benchmarks in 2012. But in 2013, scores began rising.

Provencio said that teachers told him students were floundering because they lacked basic literacy skills — but no one was noticing before serious intervention was required. So he sent teachers to Bensley Elementary in Richmond, a Title I school known in education circles for its successful literacy program, and replicated it, with tweaks. The program sends extra teachers into classrooms to run reading groups, so each student gets a half-hour of intensive reading instruction, in groups no larger than six students, every school day.

In 2015, the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader ran a series of articles on local reading teaching initiatives. Research shows that to best succeed, children need to have their reading skills well developed by the age of 9.  These articles reminded me that in the mid-1990s, the Baltimore Sun did a similar series that at the time was quite path-breaking.

-- "Language, poverty a barrier to reading skills"
-- "Experts: third grade key for reading ability"
-- "Reading scores highlight barriers to learning"
-- "Poor preschool access hurting S.D. reading scores
-- "Reading lessons start with sound
-- "Long summer creates drain on reading"
-- "Reading gets legs at book walk"

The Sioux Falls school system also opens school libraries for at least one day each week in the summer.

4.  Provide more instructional time in the school day.

5.  A longer school year for more instructional time, not merely summer day camp.

6. Base funding for a full set of desirable "student services" at schools, separate from funding based on a per student basis. These include health services including a school nurse, software support for outcomes management, library and media services including a librarian, etc.  Most school budgeting processes require schools to choose because funding for basic services is included within the per student budget, which is an especial problem for small schools, even if they get extra money as part of Title I.

What are we doing, mostly?

Focusing on standardized tests.

So no wonder outcomes aren't improving.

While national standards could make a difference, since everything is built around test scores and not providing the necessary resources outlined in the six points above, of course federal initiatives don't have much impact.

And because too many states wrap up educational policy, practice, and funding in culture wars, state initiatives often don't have the right impact either.

Business process redesign #1.  When I first came to DC, more than 30 years ago, it's when reengineering and the book Reinventing Government were all the rage.  In the early 1990s I learned about business process design more generally through the book by Tom Davenport, Process Innovation: Reengineering Work Through Information Technology.

One example of BPR is what I did wrt bicycle and pedestrian planning in Baltimore County.  Routine outcomes from various planning and building regulation processes didn't produce desirable outcomes when it came to bike and ped infrastructure and facilities, so I looked backward at the processes and made a number of recommendations on how to change the structure of the processes to generate different, more positive outcomes as a routine product of the process.

Business process redesign #2:  Community planning should focus on making and maintaining great neighborhood schools as anchors of community success and key building blocks in a network of civic assets.  In 2011, I wrote some pieces about how community planning/neighborhood planning is backwards or upside down, because too often it fails to recognize that local schools are the building blocks of successful neighborhoods. Shouldn't community planning be focused on making neighborhoods great?

-- "One way in which community planning is completely backwards
-- "Missing the most important point about Clifton School closure in Fairfax County"
-- "Rethinking community planning around maintaining neighborhood civic assets and anchors"

I revisited the point last month in "The bilingual Key Elementary School in Arlington County as another example of the "upsidedownness" of community planning". Like the closing of Clifton School in a rural part of Fairfax County, which touched off my thinking about this point, closing schools in urban neighborhoods (I am not against this, but it needs to be judicious), Arlington County schools plan to move a bilingual school program which anchors the Spanish-speaking community in the Columbia Pike corridor.

My point is that sometimes what's right for the school district might not be right for a community and in such cases, extra-normal funding from non-school sources should be provided to maintain provision of neighborhood-based schools in these situations.