Let's say you're a state superintendent of education and you know that 25% of your state's 8th grade students--thousands of young teenagers--failed the latest state reading and math exams. Many of these "not proficient" students come from low-income and minority and/or immigrant families and communities, but most do not. Unless something changes, the vast majority of these middle school students are not likely to do any better in high school and many of them will drop out. And next year's eighth graders (and those in the year after that) are not likely to do any better on the tests.
What should you do?
The "solution set" that seems to be available--heavily emphasized recently by the Obama Administration's "Race to the Top" competitive grant program--embraces several strategies:
- Introducing higher standards for academic achievement, linked to assessment of the college- and career-readiness of students and to international standards.
- Supporting teachers in efforts to become more effective in the classroom (including experiments with “merit pay”).
- Increasing the number of charter schools, while insisting that charters be held accountable for their performance.
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Inventing ways to address "failing schools" that year after year produce low student achievement—from closing, taking over, reconstituting, privatizing, and otherwise turning them around.
Unfortunately, these are not powerful enough solutions.
For about two decades, education policy makers have been reforming the states' education systems—introducing competition and increasing parental choice through school choice and charter schools; boosting high school graduation requirements; adopting nationally normed high school “exit” assessment based on college readiness; requiring and making public an annual school self-assessments; establishing alternative certification pathways for teachers; taking over failing schools; and more. And yet, states continues to have a large “achievement gap” between low-income, minority, and immigrant students and more affluent students—in both urban and rural areas. And they have a large "excellence gap" between their students and those in many other nations. (Michigan, for instance, has tried all of the solutions listed above, and yet about 30,000 8th grade students were rated not proficient in math and reading in the fall of 2008. If nothing changes, during the next five years alone the state education system will send nearly 150,000 8th grade students to high school who are not proficient in reading and math.)
Our own research into what works for poor urban schools found that an important lesson of the past decade of education innovation by charter and traditional district schools is that the most powerful and reliable way to dramatically boost the performance of low-income students is to design the entire school to achieve that goal. We explained in a 2008 report that “What does work, and what is already being done here and there, is the radical redesign of urban schools to ensure student engagement first and then student academic achievement. This redesign rejects the obsolete ‘factory-model’ school and creates a new school that uses teachers, curriculum, performance data, community resources, time, and technology in new ways to engage students in, and make schools accountable for, learning.” High-performing high-poverty schools—from K through 12—are custom-designed from top to bottom to engage low-income students in learning in ways that are not part of the design of traditional schools. These schools share a set of common design principles:
- They are small schools, ranging in size from 125 to 500 students—with small classes.
- They offer every child powerful and enduring relationships with teachers, and provide mentors from the world of work and other parts of the community.
- They provide each student some form of personalized learning such as individualized student learning plans tailored to each kid’s skill level, learning style, maturity, and interests, rather than using one-size-fits-all curricula and textbooks.
- They hold high expectations for all students and usually offer college preparation as the expected path for every student. There is no general education track.
- They rely heavily on partnerships with institutions in the community, especially to provide students with learning experiences in diverse real-world settings.
- Their governance systems allow the schools to maintain their strategic focus on high-performance achievement by students.
The Metropolitan Detroit High School Accelerator business plan reached a similar conclusion in 2009: “Nationally school networks operated by KIPP, Green Dot, High Tech High and Christo Rey and others have demonstrated that high student achievement is within reach for low-income urban students. In metropolitan Detroit, charter schools like University Preparatory Academy in Detroit and the Henry Ford Academy in Dearborn, public schools like University High School in Ferndale and Communications and Media Arts in Detroit and private schools like Loyola High School are examples of small, high-performing high schools that serve predominantly low-income African American students and are achieving important results: very high graduation rates and very high college attendance rates.”
These schools establish a school culture of “habits, hearts, and minds”—a powerful context for students—that does not exist at most traditional schools with large low-income enrollments. Louis Glazer, president of Michigan Future Inc and developer of the Accelerator concept, described this culture as “a school where everyone is committed to all kids succeeding in college and if the kids are not succeeding it’s the school, not the kids, that has to change.”
If what the education system needs is a rapid increase in the number of high-performing schools, the high-profile, well-intentioned strategies mentioned earlier, which may have some positive effects, will not sufficiently accelerate the production of more good schools. Across the nation the "pipeline" for more good schools is underdeveloped and blocked. Neither state governments nor charter schools nor traditional school districts have strategies to produce anywhere near the number of new-design high-performing schools needed to close the achievement and excellence gaps.
Most new schools created in the last decade or so are charter schools. While some charters outperform traditional district schools, not many of these schools demonstrate high performance (measured by academic achievement on state tests and the ACT; high school graduation rates; and college enrollment rates). And the pipeline of future charters doesn't seem to be any better.
Some traditional school districts also start new schools, although not usually in the same de novo way as charters do. Typically, districts reconstitute existing failing schools, by
- breaking them up into multiple, smaller schools or “schools within a school”;
- replacing their principal and much of the teaching staff; or
- outsourcing management, and sometimes operations, to a nonprofit or for-profit entity.
In other words, these are radical “turn around” strategies that go beyond incremental school improvement. Although there are success stories from the world of turnaround schools, usually attributed to the new principal’s leadership, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of districts doing this at a large scale. One reason is that they don’t try to do it, because the superintendent and/or school board don’t muster the will to take on business-as-usual, especially since success is not assured. Another reason is that quite often turnarounds don’t work; the low-performing school does not become a high-performing school. This may be because the new school leadership doesn’t have what it takes, or the school’s “old culture” re-emerges—in any case, the conditions for success are not created.
A final source of potential high-performing schools is existing schools that are neither failing schools nor high-performing schools. But precisely because they are not failing, these schools tend to be committed to no more than incremental improvement and few pursue the sort of transformation needed to achieve high performance. Their school boards, superintendents, principals, unions, and teachers don’t want their arrangements—contracts, culture, schedules, etc.—to be disrupted.
Whether you're a state superintendent of education, or a district superintendent, or a charter school advocate, or a legislator or civic leader championing better education, you can't solve the education system's big academic problems without closing the system's more good schools gap. But the prevailing strategies for education reform won't get that job done.
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