Rebecca Fernandez

Shaun,
I believe in innovation, absolutely, but I think we should build a framework to allow teachers to do it. I also think we need to be careful about using at-risk children for the bulk of our experiments, which is one thing that often happens.

I have gone back and forth about the problem of low student achievement (generally constricted to various demographic groups, for example urban or rural low-income children), and I think the problem is that we expect teachers to work miracles, and we blame them when they don't.

We also fail to look at data, which shows that private schools don't perform any better than public when you control for demographics, and that there are twice as many bad charter schools as good ones.

I have to look at my own kids, who come from a middle class family, and see that I could put them into any school, good or bad, and they'd probably be just fine. They'd have above-average scores if they were in an under-performing urban school, average in a typical school, etc.

Yet my own school district (Wake County) has found that even a good socio-economic integration program that avoids creating bad schools isn't enough to significantly raise achievement in most at-risk students. (That doesn't mean the system isn't without its own merits, like stabilizing the housing market and not having any child in a bad school, of course!)

We have studied the handful of urban low-income schools that truly succeed--both public and charter--and no one can seem to apply their methods elsewhere with success. (Again, when you're comparing apples to apples, as far as student population goes. It means nothing to have great test scores if you're pushing your lowest performing students out of your school in various ways.) To me that suggests that it's largely related to the culture of their school and the personalities of their leaders.

We recognize that the world has only a handful of Albert Einsteins and Ben Franklins, but we don't seem to realize that truly gifted teachers who can move mountains are the same class. I don't believe for a second that you can turn a normal, good teacher into one of the few who could close the achievement gap no matter how much you incentivize or share knowledge with them. I may want to be Einstein, but no matter how much you pay me or how much I study under him, it's just not going to happen for me. :) And every math teacher has watched "Stand and Deliver," but we have very few Jaime Escalantes to show for it.

None of that is to say that we should give up; instead, I think we need to fund our schools better, because low-income areas have notoriously poor equipment, programs, etc. We need to realize that charter schools rarely perform better than public schools if you compare student-for-student rather than assuming the children in both are the same. (Even when they come from the same neighborhood.) We also need to realize that when charters take the most motivated and family-backed kids out of the neighborhood school, we can't blame the teachers at the neighborhood school when the grades drop further.

I guess I'd say the first solution is to make sure every child is in a school that they don't need to escape from. Wake County has done a pretty good job of that, although we're now heading down a darker road and heading back toward the creation of high-poverty schools. I think we're going to see student achievement in our at-risk groups decline as a result, but time will tell.

The second solution I think is something that falls outside of traditional school budgets, and that is that we need to address the problems of poverty that are giving rise to these at-risk children. We need to find a way to reach out to parents, especially young single parents, and give them hope for their own future and their children. I don't pretend to know how, but I think we need to at least study the problem and stop assuming that children who come to school late, eat a free lunch, struggle to keep up with the class, and come back the next day with undone homework have parents that are fundamentally flawed and different from ourselves, and people who can't be helped. We also need fewer at-risk children in any one classroom, so that teachers can give them the extra help they need.

And my last solution is to suggest that we need to listen to teachers who work in low-performing urban schools, instead of assuming they are clueless or apathetic. Many are quite committed and passionate. We need to ask them how to help, and try actually listening and making the changes they suggest, instead of assuming they are shifting the blame. We need to realize that if you took the "good" teachers from a typical suburban middle to upper middle class classroom and put them into the schools that struggle, they'd no longer be "good" teachers on paper.

I don't at all disagree with standardized testing, though of course it needs continuous improvement. I do think that we need to stop with the high-stakes variety, and instead use it to direct help and attention to areas and schools that are falling significantly below the curve.

...is because informal groups (i.e., communities) often have a hard time getting members to do the hard work that making a difference in any area provides. Not because they're not interested, exactly, but because people are busy and often figure someone else will do it. By having people "buy in" or in some way feel obligations toward the club, they essentially secure more involvement and loyalty.

IOW, when the Rotary Club does a neighborhood litter clean-up, there's usually quite a crowd. When we send out an email on our community email list to organize one, we get a lot of "Thanks for doing this!" and "What a great idea!"... and about three people who show up on Saturday morning ready to bag up beer cans. :)