The recent release of "Bully" and the controversy over its initial "R" rating (it was eventually released "unrated") has sparked a national conversation over bullying in school. Putting aside the absurdity of the MPAA rating, I’d like to talk about the movie itself, and where we might go from here.

First, the movie is worth seeing. It is an excellent portrayal of what bullying looks like from the perspective of students. It also does a nice job of showing how clueless adults can be, adults within the school system in particular. You can imagine how frustrating that is to both affected students and parents.

It’s probably too much to ask, but where I think the movie falls short is in solutions, which don’t get much beyond insisting that the school, and the public at large, face up to the issue. While that’s a good start, it highlights the shortcomings of traditional anti-bullying efforts: they tend to be reactive, with the focus typically on changing the behavior of the “bully”.  Not enough attention is paid to the behavior of the bystanders, nor on the overall climate of the school.

Perhaps it's the arrival of spring, but I'm catching a whiff of optimism in the air: there appears to be the makings of a revolt against our national obsession with high-stakes testing.  And it's originating in Texas of all places!

Even more encouraging, it's not just educators who are standing up (which begs the question: why weren't teachers consulted in the first place?); it's also parents who are beginning to say, "enough is enough!"  Some parents have gone so far as to not allow their children to take these high-stakes tests. Just saying.

Truthfully, parents were never really on board in the first place. When you ask parents what they want from their schools, they've never supported the inevitable shrinking of the curriculum that occurs when you test only a narrow band of the curriculum, place enormously high stakes on those tests, and then cut resources.

From the parents' perspective, it's not just about being prepared to get a job, either. Parents have always believed that schools should also prepare students to be citizens - the original justification for public schools, by the way  (ask Ben Franklin); to discover what interests them, and to be exposed to the arts.

A friend recently wrote to me on the subject of standardized teacher evaluations:

"Just musing, but maybe there needs to be some standardization with respect to teacher evaluations.  I am generally of the opinion that each community knows best and that standardization means more bureaucracy, but it would be nice to compare apples to apples instead of apples to oranges.  What do you think?  Please be brutally honest."

This was my reply...  

That's an excellent question. There's certainly a strong push towards developing objective, universal standards that can be used to compare teachers across districts, states, etc.

My biggest problem with this idea is that "teacher effectiveness" depends to a considerable extent on the quality of the teaching environment. Do teachers receive appropriate administrative support and training? Do they have opportunities to collaborate with and learn from more experienced teachers? (I am very much of the opinion that most good teachers are made and not born.)

Class size, and especially the students themselves vary enormously. (Are they hungry? Are they being bullied? What's going on at home?)  Is there adequate heat, light, books?  Obviously, the "climate" for teaching and learning varies considerably from school to school. Even the "effectiveness" of an individual teacher can vary significantly from year to year, depending on the students in his/her class. (Ask any teacher.) And how do you evaluate teachers when students have more than one, or enter a class mid-year, or...?

“That makes no sense whatsoever,” said Hutchinson.

That statement begs for an explanation, which, to be honest, I was not fully prepared to give at Monday's board meeting. I did not anticipate having to defend a practice widely used by school boards in the era of Act 1, and I certainly didn't expect to have to defend the ethics /morality of that decision.

A little history on school budgeting is in order. Once upon a time, although school budgets were developed over a period of months, the actual tax rate wasn't determined until fairly late in the process - usually not until June - by which time you would have a much clearer picture of the most important factors impacting the budget, such as:

Back before I joined the school board, my first education conference was Bill Daggett's Model Schools Conference.  He made an impression on me, as did his mantra - which he still uses: "rigor, relevance and relationships".  A recent interview in Education Weekly gave me reason to think about it again.

It's hard to find an education 'reformer' today who isn't advocating for greater 'rigor' in our education curriculum - everyone seems to be calling for 'higher standards'.  (It's no surprise that not many people are calling for 'lower standards'.)  The problem is that most of the rhetoric has it backwards.

As Daggett reminds us in the interview, "relevance makes rigor possible - when students find their studies relevant, teachers can increase the rigor to meet the needs of students."

For generations (at least) we've heard calls to make education more relevant. But in the decade since I first heard Daggett, a fair amount of research has been produced that backs up Daggett's thesis.  As pointed out by John Medina in "Brain Rules", human beings do not pay attention to boring stuff.  Allow me to repeat that:  human beings (including kids) do not learn that which is not interesting to them.

And how do we know what is interesting to kids?  Daggett's third R, relationships.  "It's important for educators to know their students. Educators need to know what is interesting to them... those are the ways to engage students."

The cornerstone of the pro-voucher argument has been that vouchers encourage 'competition between schools' and that competition improves quality - as it does in the marketplace (that is, under certain conditions, as any economist would tell you).

But when voucher proponents cite the 'evidence' that supports this claim, that's not what they're talking about at all. To my knowledge, there's not a shred of evidence that the quality of education in public schools is improved by the competition brought on by vouchers. It's an intellectual bait-and-switch.

What they're talking about are the students who use the vouchers, which is something else entirely. But even that evidence is spotty, which is somewhat surprising, considering: You're giving vouchers to students to allow them to move out of schools that have been identified as "failing", and putting them in schools that are - one would assume - at least 'average', statistically-speaking. (Certainly better than 'failing'!)  Many of of these schools are private and some of them are expensive. These kids have parents who are involved and motivated concerning their education. Wouldn't you expect these students, on average, to do better?

But what happens to the 95% of students who would remain stuck in the so-called 'failing' schools, which now have even fewer resources than before? This move towards taxpayer support of private schools not only ignores the historical lack of equity in educational opportunity, it exacerbates it.

If the supporters of vouchers were serious about improving the quality of education in our struggling schools, they would be promoting strategies that have been used successfully. Unfortunately, the following* doesn't fit on a bumper sticker.

1. Create a shared vision in the school and build a sense of school community
2. Develop and nurture connections with the broader community

A couple of months back, the Center for Public Education (the research arm of NSBA) came out in support of "value-added" teacher evaluation models that track student standardized test scores, tied to individual teachers. The issue has become particularly relevant in Pennsylvania, where such a model is being piloted state-wide.  However, their arguments strike me as unpersuasive and frankly, somewhat disconcerting.

Their central point is that the current system "is lacking" - as they see it, almost by definition - because only about 1% of teachers nationwide are identified each year as "unsatisfactory". Therefore, their argument goes, as flawed as "value-added"  might be, anything would be an improvement over current practice. In fact, they directly acknowledge the unreliability of value-added data - only about a third of teachers ranking in the top 20% one year are similarly ranked the following year - but, well, it's better than what we've got.

"It's better than what we've got" sets the bar pretty low, don't you think?  One thing that's overlooked is that the current, flawed system is doing exactly what it was intended to do:  it identifies the small percentage of teachers who are performing so poorly that they deserve to be fired. It was not designed for the purpose of improving instruction and student learning.

Almost certainly, there are far better ways to accomplish those goals than to rely on test scores that don't even attempt to measure much of what's really important. (Note: no mention is made of how we're going to evaluate teachers of subjects that aren't currently tested - let's not give them any ideas - or teachers on teams, or kindergarten teachers...) I bet that if we asked teachers, they could suggest evaluation models that would actually help to make them better teachers!

The current issue of Phi Delta Kappan contains their annual national poll on education issues. Several items struck me as worth commenting on.

Do you think high-achieving high school students should be recruited to become teachers? (76%, yes)

Well, of course.  Who wouldn’t want some of our smartest students to go into the teaching profession? But I think it’s worth noting that ‘high-achieving’ isn’t clearly defined. I suppose by that we mean good grades and/or high test scores, which measure a rather narrow spectrum of intelligence and potential. We can’t overlook two important attributes that may not show up in test scores: the desire to be a teacher, and the ability to connect with other people. I know a lot of smart people who wouldn’t be particularly good teachers.

Is the ability to teach more a function of natural ability, or college training? (70%, natural ability)

The public may be right about this, but they shouldn’t be.  I expect that in the experience of most people, the handful of really good teachers were ‘naturals’. But that doesn’t mean that good teaching can’t be taught and developed – which is what happens in good schools.  In fact, we had better figure out how to do this because there aren’t enough ‘naturals’ to go around.

Should education policies require teachers to follow a prescribed curriculum … or give teachers flexibility to teach in ways they think best?

About a month ago I wrote about the theory of charter schools, and how they haven’t lived up to the promise of becoming "laboratories for reform". I come back to this because several recent commentators have noted a shift in the political/philosophical argument used in support of vouchers - no doubt in response to all the research that has shown charter schools to be no more effective, and often less effective, than traditional public schools.

The emerging argument is one of “choice”, that is, parents have the right to make educational choices for their children, regardless of whether or not those choices result in a better education.

That’s an intriguing argument, but I’m not inclined to debate it. While the deference we give to parental decision-making is not as universal as it once was, for better or worse, our society continues to give a great deal of latitude to parents in how they raise their children.

In that light, I’m even willing to consider (shocker alert) a modest, limited voucher program. The point at which I draw the line, however – and where the line should be drawn - is the point at which charter and private schools begin to siphon resources from traditional public schools, which have, and which will continue to have, the responsibility for educating the vast majority of our children.

Of course, that proposal wouldn’t please anybody, and it’s not what has been suggested in Pennsylvania or elsewhere. None of the ‘take-the-money-with-you’ plans make any allowance for the substantial fixed costs in education (primarily in facilities), and none of these proposals hold the charter and private schools that stand to receive this windfall to the same academic or administrative standards.

Dear Readers: last week I shared with a few friends on Facebook and elsewhere an interesting commentary in the Times, How to Fix Our Math Education.

In response, Marilyn, a good friend and retired high school Math teacher of 38 years, writes today’s thoughtful guest blog.

      I always sat with a very unpopular viewpoint among my math educator colleagues. The current curriculum was instituted pre-Sputnik to create a generation of engineers. This curriculum needs to be available to some, but 99% of our students do NOT pursue engineering, and yet we subject 100% of our population to a curriculum which does not suit many of them. Yes, it can be a valuable set of mental exercises, but this can be accomplished through other disciplines in more relevant settings. Furthermore, I think it's criminal that this curriculum is a gatekeeper which, over decades, has prevented some really great minds from higher education.

    Sol Garfunkle, who wrote the article you posted, has a video series (which I used at Delta) on Discrete Mathematics - a series of disconnected topics related to management and information sciences (such as graph theory, cryptography, bin packing, etc.). There are many unsolved problems in the field, because, I feel, young learners are not introduced to these topics. I had the great fortune to study with the top mathematicians in the field through three summer NSF grants in the 90's.

There is considerable political rhetoric these days that blames ‘overpaid’ teachers and recalcitrant unions for the so-called “crisis” in education. It’s sad when I hear school board members - who ought to know better - piling on, as I did at a recent state meeting.

(I say ‘so-called’ because educational quality has not declined over the past generation; the reality is that public education hasn’t kept pace with a vastly increased expectation, both in terms of the knowledge and skills we expect students to learn, but also the proportion of students - i.e., everyone - we expect to be successful.)

First, if teachers really are overpaid, how do we explain the fact that half of new teachers leave the profession after five years - three years at inner-city schools - long before they become vested in those ‘overly-generous’ pensions? Second, anyone who believes that a typical teacher works a 35-hour week, with three months vacation, hasn’t talked to any real teachers lately.

What the rhetoric overlooks is that we have no chance of accomplishing the necessary transformation of our education system unless everyone – policy-makers, administrators, teachers, students and parents – begins to see themselves as on “the same side”; as partners with differing roles. This won’t happen if we continue to pit “sides” against one another. Even the feds appear to understand this: a top DOE official recently told a gathering of state lawmakers: “States need to take a more active role in promoting cooperation between teachers' unions and school districts”.

A couple of recent book reviews have shown a lot more insight than the book they reviewed. I mentioned one Monday - Dana Goldstein's review of Steven Brill's “Class Warfare.” Today, I'd like to note Sara Mosle's piece from Sunday's New York Times.

Mosle is particularly critical of Brill's belief that "unions are the primary cause of failing public schools" in spite of the almost total lack of evidence to support that claim.

Let me repeat that. There is almost no evidence to support the belief that unions are the primary obstacle to education reform. Yet a lot of people believe just that, largely because unions are an easy, simplistic scapegoat that conveniently absolves everyone else of responsibility.

Human beings have an understandable affinity for simple answers to complex problems. The particular challenge of education reform is that it is tempting, and fairly easy, to make a simplistic argument about this particularly complicated issue; developing a coherent counter-argument is far more challenging and time consuming.

Brill bases much of his argument about unions on the success of the non-union KIPP charter schools in Harlem, which nearly everyone admires. But even a KIPP founder concedes that the program "relies on superhuman talent that cannot be duplicated in large numbers" - and cites examples of educators who unexpectedly quit, citing burnout and unsustainable workloads. KIPP does great work, but it's not a universal model for reform.

Credit to the Centre Daily Times for running this recent AP story above the fold: “Cutbacks in state aid for public schools hit Pennsylvania's poorer school districts the hardest, slashing nearly three times as many dollars in aid per student compared with wealthier districts.

On the same weekend of that story, I heard the following comparison of the “top” and “bottom 50” of Pennsylvania’s 500 school districts:

                    Avg. teacher salary    Avg. education    % of students in poverty
“Top 50”                      $74,000          Master’s +                                17%
“Bottom 50”                 $44,000          Bachelor’s                                 47%

Of course, correlation does not imply causation. Higher teacher salaries do not “cause” better education; it’s far more complicated than that. On the other hand, it’s pretty hard to say that teacher salaries don’t matter, or that level of education doesn’t matter - or that poverty doesn’t matter.

There is a natural synergy between two of (what ought to be) the most important ideas in education reform: 21st-century skills and school climate.

To review: the concept of 21st-century skills is based on the understanding that in order to prepare today’s students for successful careers and lives, nearly every student will need far more than the primarily content-based education that most of us received if we went to school in the 20th century. They will also need learning and application skills, such as:
    * Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
    * Communication and Collaboration
    * Creativity and Innovation

Good communication skills will be essential: how to communicate with different audiences, in multiple ways; knowing when to speak and how to listen. They’ll need to understand and balance diverse views in order to reach workable solutions, particularly in multi-cultural environments. (What I refer to as ‘deliberative skills’.)

Tomorrow’s citizens will need to be able to work with others collaboratively, but also know how to lead.They’ll need to be flexible, adaptable, and self-directed. They will need a deep understanding that learning is a life-long and self-directed process. To a far greater extent than our generation, they’ll need to make their own way.

Much of this may not sound all that revolutionary; what’s changed is that in tomorrow’s world, every student will need to be so equipped. There used to be an understanding that only the ‘elite’ students needed these skills, which they’d pick up when they went off to college. 

Most schools, however, are not currently designed to accomplish these outcomes for average students. How do we get there?

One of the keys will be that we pay much closer attention to the school's learning environment, also referred to as "school climate”.

Whenever I talk about charter schools, I invariably refer to the theory that is typically used as its intellectual foundation: "relieving charter schools from some bureaucratic requirements allows them to explore educational innovation that could be replicated elsewhere."

Or, as I've heard recently, charter schools were supposed to be "laboratories for reform".

As of today, I cease and desist. While intuitively appealing in theory, charter schools have existed in Pennsylvania for 14 years, and to my knowledge - and as was pointed out in the CDT series - rarely has an innovation from a charter school been used to inform the practice of a traditional public school.

For starters, our charter school law has no mechanism for implementing these "lessons learned." Rather, by design it creates an adversarial relationship between charters and the 'authorizing' school, as was also pointed out by the CDT.

Second, while charter schools are required, as a condition of the charter, to describe their 'innovative approach', it is only superficially enforced by PDE - woe to the district who challenges - and there is no follow-up.

Then there's that bit about 'freedom from mandates'. For examples, public schools are required to have 100% of their teachers certified ("highly qualified" in NCLB lingo).

But in charter schools, only 75% of their teachers must meet this requirement. Well, is "certification" important, or isn't it?  Same issue for special ed students: charter schools are not required to file the detailed reports that regular public schools must file. Well, why not? If it's not important, why do public schools have to do it? (Ask any administrator: this is not an insignificant burden.)