Making Policy Without Reading It?

I've been stewing on this one for a few days. Last summer the Hernando County School Board voted on a number of district policies, making changes based on recommendations from a committee. And now that some have realized what was actually in some of those changes, there is some general unhappiness. This part doesn't surprise me - anytime you make a change, there will be some people who dislike it for one reason or another. The change that is making waves this time is the elimination of valedictorian and salutatorian designations for high school classes beginning with the class of 2016. I know that this is an idea that has been floating around for a while, and some places have already made this move. Again, no matter which way this goes, someone will be unhappy.

Here's the part that really, really, REALLY blows me away. The school board members hadn't read the changes they unanimously voted to approve! They weren't even aware they had done away with vals & sals! Even the superintendent didn't realize that was included in the changes being voted on. What?! *deep breath* I decided to give these good people the benefit of a doubt. So, I went back to the board agendas for last summer and looked over the information that is publicly available on the county web site. What did I find? June 19, 2012 Workshop minutes with plenty of documents attached.

This one gives an overview of all the changes being made to the High School Procedures handbook. (Yep, there it is..."Added language related to change in the designation for valedictorian and salutatorian for the class of 2016 (students entering 9th grade in 2012-13)." In case they were curious about what exactly this change included, they could have looked here (page H69 to be precise) to see that this change was included. The full handbook is again attached to the agenda for the July 31 school board meeting, when it was voted on and approved.

But they didn’t read it.  Not even, apparently, the single page overview of the changes made.  No discussion of any aspect of the high school handbook was ever discussed according to the minutes of either meeting, although the topic of whether cursive is still taught in elementary school was a hot topic at the June workshop. And now, in typical style, time will be spent to change the change…to try and make the voters happy and to save some face.  And really, wouldn’t it have been easier to read the document in the first place?

Policy messages: the texts versus the talk

In my reading for a multicultural education class, I came across an article by Michele Kahn (2008).  In response to a quote from President G.W. Bush about NCLB reforms having the mission to "build the mind and character of every child, from every background, in every part of America," she asked a question that I immediately wanted to put on a billboard:

"How do schools build the mind and character of, for example, gay and lesbian children, ethnic minority children and children with disabilities, when the people who decide what their minds and character should be judge the end result with standardized testing?" (Kahn, 2008, p. 531).

How indeed!  Despite the message being delivered by Bush (and many presidents since), we are still limiting our way of assessing student learning to a single measure; the great and mighty standardized test. How can we assess so many individuals with their own challenges, skills, and backgrounds with a single measure?  How can we label those who don't have the needed background knowledge (a la Florida's FCAT Writes camel prompt debacle) as unsuccessful when we've damned them before even putting the assessment in front of them?  Why don't we give all these kids raised in the Florida sunshine a prompt about a snowball fight or skiing in Colorado while we're at it? 

In a world where the tools we can use to express ourselves are changing and expanding, why are we still using a single measure to gauge the success of all?  And since when does putting this same measure on a computer (computer based testing, anyone?) count as authentically integrating technology?

Article Citation:
Kahn, Michele(2008). Multicultural education in the United States: Reflections. Intercultural Education,19:6,527 — 536.

Thoughts & Reflections: So Much Reform, So Little Change by Charles M. Payne

This book gave me (and the other members of my group) a lot of food for thought and inspired a lot of thoughtful discussion, both in our book club meetings and in the whole class discussion we facilitated.

In So Much Reform, So Little Change, by Charles M. Payne, he clearly articulates the reasons for the failure of reform in urban schools. To begin, he notes the demoralization of urban schools, faculties, administrators, and teachers. In addition to demoralization, urban schools and those who work in them often exhibit organizational irrationality.

As evidence of organizational irrationality, novice teachers, with weak skills are often placed in the most difficult schools. This is something I experienced in my first year as a teacher, not just in terms of the school in which I found myself, but also with the students who were assigned to me; I was assigned the students that the other, more experienced, teachers did not want in their classes.  A “degraded professional culture” permeates underperforming urban schools, where teachers frequently work in isolation, have low expectations for achievement, and …When considering many children who enter low performing urban schools, Lee & Burkam state, “…They start out behind, and then we systematically undermine them with poor schools. Poor children start their school careers in much lower-quality schools where they will be in larger classes, with less well-prepared teachers who have a weaker sense of collective responsibility and professional community than the teachers of more advantaged children”  (p.70-74).

Furthermore, urban school reform has not succeeded in many instances due to fixed mindsets, which focus on stereotypes, self-efficacy, and a lack of connectedness to a larger, more successful society.  

Bureaucracy and fragmentation further complicate the needs of urban schools. Bureaucracy often leads to shifts in leadership at the school and district levels, and teachers lack the confidence to use professional judgment when various reform agendas are shared. Therefore, lack of stability in personnel, as well as curriculum, leads to more instability.

There is a significant disconnect between policymakers/reformers and realities of the every day world of urban schools, including toxic urban school environments, cultures of failure, distrust, leadership issues, personalities, communication, and unstable staffs. Much of the support offered to schools when new programs are introduced is often superficial, and there is a lack of trust between the providers of the support and school faculty. Too often, programs are introduced, attempted, and abandoned long before implementation can prove successful, for educators or students. The fast food mentality that we can drive through, select a program, and implement it quickly is a major impediment to successful reform. Plant posits, “…programs have been oversold and under-thought-out, adopted with exaggerated hopes, expanded at unrealistic rates, and then jettisoned …The politics which drove that process are still operative, now strengthened by top-down government mandates” (p. 168-169). Again, this instant gratification mentality is one that I have seen played out in the schools where I have worked, with a new program intriduced nearly every year because the previous one (used for a year) did not show the dramatic growth so desperately hoped for.

Payne concludes the text by elucidating the pitfalls of conservative and progressive ideology. He asks, “…do we balance urgency with complexity?” (p.199).  He also notes that educators and reformers should advocate for parents to be a part of the solution seeking team focused on changing urban schools.

Considerations for success in urban schools should include time, a more reasonable pace, scale, community, politics, parents, teacher opt-in, follow through, sustainability, and perceptions of stakeholders. Examination should include school culture, attitudes of those trying to reform, strategy sessions with school leaders, and past experience. Plans should be made in advance to foster authentic collaboration, adapt to local contexts, develop guidelines for data collection, and strategies for examining multiple outcome measures. Perhaps his next book will elucidate how to make these things happen!

Finally, in the epilogue, Payne quotes a former teacher and principal. He states the educators had two main goals. “…to make the school so attractive that the children were happy to be there” and “…to make the school a sort of community center” (p. 208). Perhaps, if we aspired to these goals that appear to focus on children, rather than accountability, urban schools would change.
 

 Payne, C.M. (2008) . So much reform, so little change: The persistence of failure in urban schools.  
     Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

 

 Below are artifacts from the class presentation/discussion on the book.  We started out with a Wordle that contained words we saw often repeated within the text.

 
Wordle Link: http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/6724203/So_Much_Reform%2C_So_Little_Change

 The presentation continued with a slide of quotes we found to be especially thought-provoking. One that I found to be pertainent to my own experiences is the one in the bottom left corner, regarding teacher skepticism.  I agree that many teachers are skeptical when faced with the latest "research based" curriculum or strategy, but I also see that many long-time teachers have seen so many educational fads come and go that they are jaded by this merry-go-round of education's greatest hits being repackaged into shiny new cellophane.

I really enjoyed the chance to see how my classmates defined the problems facing education in urban schools. The wheel activity was a fabulous way to facilitate this discussion.

 

We closed with this quote, which is sad but also true to my own experiences, not just with bureaucracy, but with educational struggles in general.  There's nothing like coming into a struggling school with ideas and being told to do whatever because you can't make it any worse.