Education

** Reprinted here in the Washington Post

Last week, I attended a Center for American Progress (CAP) discussion, where UC Berkeley professor David Kirp spoke about his research on Union City’s school system, and offered some ideas from his new book, Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America’s Schools.

Kirp’s work and Union City have received a lot of attention in the last month or so, and while most find the story heartening, a few commentators have had more skeptical reactions. True, this is the story of one district in one state finding success through collaboration and hard work, but research from other disciplines – sociology, business, management, organizational studies – suggests that similar human dynamics can be observed in settings other than schools and school districts. I would like to situate Kirp’s work in this broader framework; that is, among a myriad of studies – case studies, if you will – pointing to the same fundamental phenomena.

Union City is a community with an unemployment rate 60 percent higher than the national average, where three-quarters of public school students live in homes where only Spanish is spoken. About 25 years ago, the school district was in so much trouble that state officials threatened a state takeover. Since then, Union City’s measured performance has improved considerably. In 2011, almost 90 percent of the district’s students graduated from high school, and 60 percent went on to college. The change is large enough to suggest some degree of "real" improvement, and it’s plausible to believe that better school quality had at least something to do with that. So, what was Union City’s school improvement strategy?

Controversial proposals for new teacher evaluation systems have generated a tremendous amount of misinformation. It has come from both “sides," ranging from minor misunderstandings to gross inaccuracies. Ostensibly to address some of these misconceptions, the advocacy group Students First (SF) recently released a "myth/fact sheet” on evaluations.

Despite the need for oversimplification inherent in “myth/fact” sheets, the genre can be useful, especially about topics such as evaluation, about which there is much confusion. When advocacy groups produce them, however, the myths and facts sometimes take the form of “arguments we don’t like versus arguments we do like."

This SF document falls into that trap. In fact, several of its claims are a little shocking. I would still like to discuss the sheet, not because I enjoy picking apart the work of others (I don’t), but rather because I think elements of both the “myths” and “facts” in this sheet could be recast as "dual myths” in a new sheet. That is, this document helps to illustrate how, in many of our most heated education debates, the polar opposite viewpoints that receive the most attention are often both incorrect, or at least severely overstated, and usually serve to preclude more productive, nuanced discussions.

Let’s take all four of SF’s “myth/fact” combinations in turn.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, is often called “the nation’s report card." Advocates sometimes use the results of the main NAEP tests to argue for their policy agendas. One example (among many) is when supporters of the so-called “Florida Formula," a battery of market-based reforms that went into effect throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s and are currently spreading throughout the nation, make their case primarily on Florida’s NAEP performance. The basic logic is that average test scores increased during this time period, and thus whatever Florida did must have worked, and should be exported en masse to other states.

However, since 2003, the state that has brought home the most proverbial A’s on the nation’s report card is not Florida. It is Maryland. In fact, the increase in math and reading performance among fourth and eighth graders in the state’s public schools can only be called the “Maryland Miracle."

There's too much at stake for policy makers to waste time worrying about trivial details, such as policy analysis. Whatever laws and practices were in place in Maryland during this time period are clearly responsible for the Miracle. They should serve as a model for the nation.

** Reprinted here in the Washington Post

Our guest author today is Stephen Lazar, a founding teacher at Harvest Collegiate High School in New York City, where he teaches Social Studies. A National Board certified teacher, he blogs at Outside the Cave. Stephen is also one of the organizers of Insightful Social Studies, a grass roots campaign of teachers to reform the newly proposed New York State Social Studies standards.

The Common Core Learning Standards (CCLS) seek to define “college and career readiness expectations." Forty-five states have adopted them, and are moving briskly towards full implementation in the coming year. Last January, I wrote that the standards “represent the greatest opportunity for history teaching and learning to be widely re-imagined since the Committee of Ten set the basic outlines for American education over a hundred years ago."

While I stand by that statement, with each step towards implementation I see the opportunity being squandered. We cannot possibly continue to move solely in the direction of “college and career readiness” in History & Social Studies education without ensuring that “civic” readiness is valued equally.  Additionally, we need to ensure that as states write new curricula, that they contain the proper balance of content, skills, and understandings.  New curricula will need to ensure students use an inquiry-based approach to go in depth with a smaller amount of content to gain the wider breadth of skills and dispositions required for civic, college, and career readiness.