Saturday, October 3, 2009

Talented and Gifted, Part I

The most significant obstacle to the education of Talented or Gifted children is not the lack of Talented and Gifted teachers, coordinators or programs. Those things, where they exist at all, are makeshift patches to a leaky boat. Those who care about the education of our brightest students had better attend to the boat itself and stop wasting time and energy advocating for ever more elaborate patches. There's no funding for patches, and they don't get at the root of the problem.

So what about this boat? How did it get so leaky? What can be done? Long story.

Some kids are taller than others. Some have better vision. Some weigh more than others. Some have more musical talent. Some are more mechanically inclined. Some kids are smarter than others. None of these qualities is a virtue in itself. They are just the circumstances into which various children are born.

Schools do a pretty good job of accommodating differences among children's heights, weights, visual acuity, and to a lesser degree, musical and mechanical aptitudes. But then none of these qualities is central to our mandate. The attribute that bears the most directly on the mission of schooling is intelligence, and that is where we really drop the ball. This isn't entirely the fault of schools, as our school inevitably reflect the long-standing ambivalence of our national culture toward intelligence, but we could do better.

So what's the explanation for our inability to deal with intellectual diversity? Institutionally, it's our practice of grade leveling by age, a process in which children whose birthdays are spread across a 364-day range are pronounced to be in the same 'grade' and we are told to hold them all (which winds up meaning 'hold them down' in some cases!) to the same standard. Is there any reason to believe that there is a single standard that has any relevance to children whose ages vary by 15 to 20 percent? Is there any reason to imagine that even if they were all born on the same day they should be identically prepared to pass a given test on a given day? Of course not. This practice has no basis in reason or in a knowledge of children. It is just what's cheapest and easiest for the grownups. At least it started out that way.

It seemed so simple. Put the annual crop of children in a single grade and in straight rows. Deliver the lessons. Administer the exams. Administer discipline as needed. Repeat for 12 years (kindergarten is a fairly recent invention). Issue diplomas to the 20% who made it through. Well, up until recent times. Now we are up to 60%.

The faults (and the hidden expenses) in this approach were largely invisible until the mid-20th century when, for the first time in history, over 50% of teenagers were attending high school. It's true. Even with today's headlines about dropout rates (which are horrendous) there is a larger percentage of teenagers graduating from high school today than even enrolled in high school prior to World War II. (I hope you weren't longing for those good old days in which everyone graduated from high school! Never happened.)

So what about these percentages? How do they play out today? It is likely that 90% of school aged children enter a public school at age five or six. (Kindergarten is not mandatory in Oregon, by the way). Nearly all of those students are placed in a grade-leveled classroom where they do identical work for the next several years. Along the way, about 13% of them (over 20% in some districts) are identified as having one or another sort of learning disability and are enrolled in Special Education. Another 4 or 5 percent (again, over 20% in some districts) are identified as Talented or Gifted. According to the law, students in Special Education and in Talented and Gifted programs are entitled to something more than is offered to the average student in the average classroom. Statewide, nearly one student in five is officially acknowledged as requiring something that cannot be provided in the grade leveled classroom! How cheap and efficient are these grade-leveled classrooms looking now?

But maybe you are a 'glass half full' sort of person. Isn't the ability to meet the needs of 80% of our students a pretty good argument for keeping the grade-leveled classrooms? Here's where the numbers get really bad. Nearly half of those students whose needs are supposedly being met in the 'regular' classroom are failing to graduate from high school!

The most generous interpretation that one could put to the numbers is that roughly 50% of students who enter the grade level classroom and who do not receive services through Special Education or TAG go on to graduate from high school. That's some kind of efficiency!

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

K-12 Education: A Failed Public Option?

I went to a meeting downtown last night. I was invited to speak at a public forum. The group calls itself U-Choose and it convenes to discuss matters of public policy. Meeting to discuss, and not even for a grade? I already liked them before we got started. Last night's topic was education...more precisely (according to the pre-meeting publicity) how 'K-12 Education' was a 'Failed Public Option'. I was grateful to see friendly Corbett faces in the audience, because I wasn't entirely sure how the presentation would be received.

Although I was warned that it was politically unwise (and evidently bad for my career) to attend, I am not much of a politician and any group that wants to sit down and talk about education without rancor can always have as much of my time as they can tolerate.

As evidence that I am not much of a politician, I opened my segment with a challenge to the premise of the conveners (two lovely people, by the way, who went out of their way to make me feel welcome). I pointed out that just as it is unfair to declare every economic downturn a 'failure of capitalism', it is absurd to declare the ineffectiveness of some schools a 'failure of public education'. There are good schools and bad schools, public and private, and it is not the funding mechanism that determines the quality of a school. Schools should be judged, I suggested, by their results and not by the means through which they are funded. I knew that it might be bad manners to poke a stick at the banner under which we all had gathered, but I could see that my argument struck a chord with the audience and I was encouraged at not being booed off the stage after the opening statement.

I spent the next 15 or 20 minutes sharing some of the values and beliefs that make Corbett Schools unique, and the presentation was very warmly received. As soon as the conversation was steered away from politics and toward kids and teachers and schools, it was apparent that we were among caring people who want the best for their kids and are less than fully certain how to go about getting it. A number of people wanted to visit after the meeting, and the tone wasn't unlike a number of charter meetings that we have conducted.

The big question in the room regarding public schools? "Since public schools can work, what can be done to make more of them successful?" My answer? "Public schools are not especially conducive to rapid and effective change. I believe that the Charter School movement represents the best hope for replicating quality schooling in the public domain." Based on twenty years in public education, hundreds of hours of training in how to change schools, and thousands of hours logged in fruitless meetings, I believe it to be the true. It's tempting to say that I would love to be proved wrong, but I have to think that if I am wrong the proof should have emerged at least a decade ago.

Along with other members of the Corbett staff, I have spoken to a number of groups around Oregon and at national conventions regarding the challenges and successes Corbett Schools. There was one respect in which this audience was absolutely unique. Because not many of the audience members were professional educators, there was no attempt to discount Corbett's success as being merely the result of student demographics. Most of the people who spoke were openly admiring and appreciative of what we have accomplished. Rooms filled with educators rarely exhibit that kind of reaction. For whatever reason, they immediately begin firing questions regarding SES, minority populations, ESL, Special Education...anything to overcome their concern that maybe we are on to something. There was no subterfuge in this room. Just a kind of genial curiosity that there was a small public school getting the job done. The consensus? "Good for you. Thanks for your work."

It was a good night. If we were successful, maybe there are a few engaged citizens in Multnomah County who had questions and who have been reminded of the potential of public schools. Maybe they will encourage others that we ought not throw out the baby with the bathwater when it comes to our obligations toward the next generation.

Many thanks to Debra Mervyn and Suzanne Gallagher for their wonderful hospitality.

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Demographics and the School House

I think that schools matter. I believe that leaders can help or hurt schools and that teachers are the primary difference between the best schools and the others. I believe that some students face extremely difficult circumstances, that it matters exactly how schools and teachers respond to those circumstances, and that not all responses are equally beneficial. I believe that the best educational practices are not recent inventions of cognitive scientists, computer technicians or social workers and that educational fads are dangerous in the extreme.

The most dangerous fad in the game today is an unwritten belief, almost a gentleman's agreement, as they used to say. It goes like this:

All teachers, all administrators and all schools are equally effective. The most significant variables impacting student achievement are the characteristics of the student population.
Put more succinctly, Demographics are destiny. Pass it on!

Demographics as destiny is a powerful notion. Just the word, demographics, carries the weight of sophistication, of scientific authority. Who am I to argue with someone who commands words like demographics? And the argument sounds so compassionate, so caring. No blame here, they just can't help themselves. It's demographics, you see. It's the equivalent of a socioeconomic or ethnic disability and it would be unfair to expect these kids (or these teachers, or these administrators) to...

The more pressure that is exerted by the State of Oregon and the Federal Government to produce incremental gains on meaningless tests, the more deeply the demographics argument becomes embedded in the culture of schooling as the only defense against charges of everything from incompetence to cultural insensitivity. Ironically, the State's ham-handed attempts at closing the achievement gap by brute force have probably helped to keep the demographics defense alive indefinitely.

What to do? I'm not sure. But I believe that the more emphasis that the State puts on demographics and on data regarding subgroups, the more districts are going to be encouraged to dig in and seek strength in numbers by pursuing the most recent, most 'promising' new federally funded approaches rather than grappling with their unique local circumstances.

That's what demographics really are. They are local circumstances. Like rain in Cordova, or wind in Chignik Lake, demographics are part of the working conditions around schools. They should be taken into account. But not all kids in poverty are alike. Nor are all migrant students. And whatever these students may share in common within a particular federal category, they have a lot more in common with every other student in the building. They need to be engaged as individuals and as members of their school community. They need to receive their schooling in a network of concerned, expert adults who know them and who care about their success. What they most need isn't new, it isn't glossy, and it doesn't come from a kit or from a new professional development trend. Good teachers. Adults who care about them. Food, shelter, clothing, whatever it takes.

Demographics are not destiny. Categories are not fate. They are, at most, the climate in which we build our houses. There's more than one way to build a house, and each house needs to suit (and perhaps even take positive advantage of) its environment.

If we build where the rain falls or the wind blows, and our roofs leak or the walls collapse, that's not destiny. It's not fate. It might, however, be a sign.