Informed urgency needed to help improve schools / Joe Nathan’s Column
About 250 parents, business community members, legislators, teachers and others gathered to listen, learn and list possible next steps. The two highlights for me were hearing from George Parker and Kati Haycock.
Parker grew up in the rural south. His family members were “share-croppers” – among the poorest of the poor. His father completed fifth grade, his mother completed third.
Parker taught math for 30 years in the Washington, D.C., public schools. He became a teacher in part because “many of my teachers inspired me. They would not let my family’s poverty be an excuse.”
In 2005 teachers elected him to be their union president. He recalls having “typical teacher union president attitudes. Some things were sacred, including protecting seniority and opposing teacher evaluation tied to student performance.”
He began to change after he spoke one day in a third-grade classroom. After he told students that his job was to “make sure you have the best teachers,” a little girl hugged him.
As he left the school, Parker thought, “I lied to those children.” The union had just spent $10,000 to retain a teacher that “I wouldn’t want working with my grandchildren.” He reconsidered some of his ideas, and “began to focus on child-based rather than adult-based” decisions.
Working with Michelle Rhee, the district’s chancellor (what Minnesotans call “superintendent”), Parker negotiated a new contract that increased teacher pay, included student performance as part of the evaluation and reduced seniority as a criterion when layoffs were needed. While some teachers strongly objected, “more than 80 percent of the teachers voted in favor of the contract.”
Parker is clear (and I think right) that the most effective schools have strong principals and well-designed professional development. He points out that the best schools serving students from low-income families have more time with students. He also thinks teachers deserve “a good base pay, with performance measures on top.”
Parker’s views complement those of Kati Haycock, president of a research and advocacy group, Education Trust. Haycock has many awards for her careful research and use of data to highlight problems and describe outstanding elementary and secondary public schools as well as colleges and universities.
She thinks Americans need to work simultaneously inside and outside schools to help young people. I agree. For Haycock, poverty absolutely is a problem that urgently needs work. She also urges learning from strong early childhood programs and from public schools around the country that are producing excellent results with students from low-income families. Unfortunately, “We are taking the diversity that should be our competitive advantage in the international marketplace and obliterating it,” she said. Her data-packed slide show presentation is available for download online.
Another speaker was Michelle Rhee, former D.C. school chancellor, who is one of the nation’s most controversial educators. Parker currently works part time with her. Rhee has founded a group called Students First, which recently rated Minnesota’s school reform efforts as a D. She was asked why her group rated Minnesota so much lower than some other states when, overall, Minnesota has better results. Rhee responded that she focuses on what states are doing to improve. There’s an ongoing, intense debate about Rhee’s record in D.C. (See, for example, this article.)
The conference opened with Jeff DeYoung, managing partner of a local firm that provides audit, tax, wealth management and other services. DeYoung praised teachers at Central High School in St. Paul, where his children received what he described as a “fine education.” He also feels improvements are needed urgently because “too many of our children’s friends didn’t finish.”
Informed urgency is what Amy Walstien, the Chamber’s director of education and workforce development policy, wants. She told me, “Our goal was to introduce the business community to national figures with ideas for commonsense reforms in Minnesota, highlight some great local initiatives and ignite a greater sense of urgency for changes to the education system.”
Joe Nathan, formerly a Minnesota public school teacher, administrator and PTA president, directs the Center for School Change. Reactions welcome, please comment below.
Darren Beck
February 25, 2014 @ 10:17 am
Love the notion or concept of informed urgency. Sadly, we have a great deal of uninformed lethargy. We can talk the heck out of the issues in and around education, family and economic matters, but what we need is to be genuinely informed, with one and all at the table, and then an urgency to stop letting students fail or flail about without proper support.
This hails back to previous columns and comments that this is not about a single focus, but a rational, all-hands-on-deck approach that says forget titles or labels and then asks “what are we willing to do to not fail even one more kid?” Short of that and short of refusing to play the mind-numbing game of finger-pointing, blame-laying, name-calling, and shoulder-shrugging, we risk further failure of what it means to be America. Plain and simple.
Thanks Joe for sharing this about some great people who are crawling out of silos to engage the real enemies, poverty, apathy, and an increasing acceptance of mediocrity and failure as being just fine. Very much appreciated.
Gary Gruber
February 25, 2014 @ 10:17 am
Dear Joe,
Your article hit the proverbial nail on the head as you often do when talking about real school reform. In order to design and implement systemic change in our public and private schools, we need something on the magnitude of the Protestant Reformation. I am not sure who the Martin Luther is in education today but there are many with good intentions like George Parker, Kati Haycock and Michelle Rhee. I would add to the cast of characters people like Ken Robinson, Will Richardson, Tony Wagner, and perhaps Doug Thomas and John Seely Brown, authors of A New Culture of Learning. What it’s going to take is a very big paradigm shift, not only from teacher centered instruction (learning) to student centered instruction (learning) but really changing the way schools are organized and how education is delivered. Schools today look and sound and smell much like they have for the past 70 years that I have been part of them. There seems to be a lack of intelligent design for change as well as a dearth of leadership that might move things forward in a more thoughtful way and in a more radical way. That was dearth of leadership, not death of leadership although that crossed my mind.
There are many outstanding educators and educational reformers hard at work every day, great teachers who are talented, energetic, and committed to their students, parents who want the best for their kids and students who are fired up about learning . We need to find a way to put them into the same arena so that they might all speak with one voice and become the embodiment of Margaret Mead’s famous quote: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world for indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
Keep up the good work up there in Minnesota and let that light keep shining and showing the way for others.
Tom King
February 25, 2014 @ 10:17 am
I am all for teacher evaluation. But it needs to be tied to teacher performance, not student performance based on tests.
Let me tell you why. Many classrooms, particularly urban classrooms, have significant student turnover between pretest and posttest. In other words, gains can’t be measured because the students are different between the fall and spring, when the testings occur.
There is a way to measure teacher performance. Peer/Mentor video review of teachers teaching students. There are many measurable teaching principles that can be reviewed on video. Assessments of teacher performance can be shared with teachers to improve their performance.
In my mind this makes far more sense than using a metric that doesn’t belong. Far too many of our so-called reformers don’t get it. Often, their efforts are being financially supported by big businesses who make the standardized tests for so-called student gains.
Not only do these tests have little value in remediating student performance, they have even less value in improving our teachers.
Scott R Sands
February 25, 2014 @ 10:18 am
Child-based decisions start with asking the child about her short and long term goals and what she feels we can do to help. Then we must act on what learn from her. Anything else will be wide of the mark. It will be adult-based.
karen seashore
February 25, 2014 @ 10:18 am
In a four-book review entitled of four controversial books on education published in 2013 entitled Ravitch, Ripley, Ravitch and me I included this observation about Rhee: “She is an academically brilliant person lacking sufficient personal experience or literate study to lurch into the management position she held in DC, or to write about it in her memoir. Her extraordinarily publicized appearance on the national educational scene was due in large part to a coincident thrust by investment and industry moguls aimed at privatizing management of the public schools. Their support money and public attention helped mightily to move her management activities forward for a limited time–which has now passed.”
Jerry Von Korff
February 25, 2014 @ 10:19 am
Did the state chamber support or oppose the revenue increases proposed by the Dayton administration and the DFL majorities in House and Senate? Is the chamber’s position, that it will support any school reform as long as it doesn’t cost money or require taxes and takes a bite out of labor unions? Or, is the chamber really an advocate for improving education for children by doing what it takes?
If chamber backed candidates for state office had prevailed last time, we were planning in our school district that we would be making 5- 10 million in cuts during this biennium. It would be wonderful if the Chamber were a real partner in improving education, but there is a lot of evidence that the Chamber is doing exactly what Education Minnesota is doing, but just on the other side of the aisle. It is easy for the chamber to support reforms that damage labor and don’t require taxes and revenue. Just as its easy for Education Minnesota to support taxes and revenues as long as there is no labor reform.
We are entitled to take the Chamber seriously when it supports a bold proposal that includes both labor reforms AND adequate revenue and taxes.
Patrick Grant
February 25, 2014 @ 10:20 am
I have to agree with Tom King, with his comments about not evaluating teachers on how students do on tests. I think that standardized testing should go away completely! We have this new Common Core Standards now, so let’s let the teachers teach and students learn and when they are seniors let them take their test then like other countries do. All the tests are, is a way of doing tracking any way. I suggest that we get rid of testing for two years and see what happens. I think people would be shocked! Our education system hasn’t changed with the times and the reform hasn’t either and it needs to start!