If President Obama were to visit University Preparatory Academy (UPA) in Detroit, he’d meet hundreds of students living the story of his own childhood: poor, black, and intent on succeeding. Like the president, some of these kids can attribute their motivation to a grandmother or parent. But for many of them, motivation to learn and go to college comes from the relationships they develop over the years with the teachers in a K-12 school designed especially to make sure those deep and emotional connections are forged.
It doesn’t take a profound understanding of Obama’s biography to figure that, as he considers federal education policy, he’ll want to do as much as he can for the millions of kids living in poverty and attending low-performing schools. But what should he support?
In a speech on March 10, Obama made his selections. Saying he wanted more “laboratories of innovation” and a “culture of accountability” in the education system, he called for more charter schools, merit pay for teachers, tougher curriculum standards, and more spending on early childhood programs.
We applaud the goals, but feel it’s important to ground-truth this in our own experience of pushing for education innovation and accountability.
- Most charter schools are not “innovation laboratories.” They repeat the design and practices of traditional schools and get about the same results. Or they manifest a social entrepreneur’s vision for what a school should be like, but without the disciplined self-assessment that a lab would apply, and no one can figure out what caused the results or if it’s replicable in other settings. Too often, “innovation” is just another word for “different.”
- The education system lacks an “innovation distribution” system. The schools we helped to start in Detroit—UPA and University Prep Science and Math—are laboratories of innovation where much is being learned about what works for engaging low-income minority students and boosting their academic achievement. As a result, we’ve concluded that the most effective innovation for dramatically increasing the achievement of low-income students is to design the entire school for that purpose. But there are few ways to share this learning with others or to find out what others are learning. And school systems dedicate very little money to this purpose.
- There’s no consensus about what precisely schools should be accountable for. The president says it’s “student achievement.” But, as we’ve explained elsewhere, that goal can mean different things. State legislatures and departments of education, which establish the playing field for local schools, say it means student proficiency on state tests based on state curricula. The federal government’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) bought into this, but sets targets for the percentage of students in a school who must be proficient—or else. Colleges say it means how students do on college readiness tests like the ACT. Employers say something else. Parents are more likely to point to high school graduation and enrollment in college as the goal. As a result of this fragmentation, we have multiple and incomplete accountability systems.
- All the accountability in the world won’t change the fact that we don’t have enough knowledge or capacity to improve the performance of the thousands of low-performing schools. What do you do with chronically failing schools?
-
Option A: Close the schools. But if you do, where do the students go? The supply of high performing schools in poor communities is remarkably small.
- Option B: Reconstitute them—with a new principal who can hire/fire the teachers and start the school anew. Two problems with this: The “new” school is likely to repeat the design of the old school, due to requirements of the district and the state—but, as we said earlier, total redesign is crucial. Where’s the supply of new leaders who really can redesign, restart, energize, and sustain a reconstituted school?
- Option C: Invest in them. First, help them develop plans for incremental improvement. Then support the plans. But of course this is what’s been going on for years, with little improvement to show for it. School administrators don’t know much about running change processes and education regulations, funding, and contracts severely constrain the changes they can make.
President Obama’s framing of goals for the education system is a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t address these systemic barriers to achieving the goals. Yet that’s the only way to deliver on his promise to students like those at University Prep. |
