Joanne Yatvin is an experienced teacher, principal, superintendent, literacy expert, author, and former president of the National Council of Teachers of English. She wrote the following post for this blog:
Since we are deep into the era of school reform, I’d like to offer my own plan for reforming America’s schools. Although I am not an official expert in the eyes of the federal Department of Education or the National Governors Association, I have better credentials* than most of the people so recognized, plus a lot of experience running successful public schools.
If I had to propose a simple solution, I’d say let’s follow Finland all the way. All their schools are free and public; school lunches are also free; there are no national tests; free pre-schools; regular schooling beginning at age seven; and teaching is a highly respected profession. Unfortunately, however, not all those things would work in America because Finland has a much lower poverty rate than we do, a homogeneous population, and a language that is much easier to read than English.
So, I will get more complicated, but never so much as the various reform ideas being proposed or implemented now.
- Limit the Federal role in education to the administration of congressionally authorized grant programs that help schools provide needed services to poor, disadvantaged, and disabled students.
- Limit the state role to distributing tax funds to public schools, licensing teachers, providing student bussing where necessary, offering grants to schools with innovative programs, and providing special services, such as a school psychologist, where needed.
- Re-design formulas for state funding to include additional amounts for schools with large numbers of students living in poverty and students identified as disabled.
- Reconstitute all public schools as charter schools, free to design and implement their own curricula, hire and evaluate teachers, select teaching materials, and determine their own class sizes, daily schedules, and number of annual school days.
5. No for-profit school may call itself a charter school or receive public funds.
6. Authorize at least thirty-three per cent of charter schools as magnet schools focusing on specialization in a particular field, such as science, the arts, or vocational training.
- Students shall attend the schools in their own community unless they wish to apply to attend a magnet school
8. Allow each school faculty to select its own principal and administrative support team. In addition, each school would allow parent observations in classrooms and encourage parent involvement in special projects.
- Require each school to have its own citizen governing board elected from the local community. Each board would hold open meetings and respond to citizen input, and each board member would be required to spend at least ten days a year observing or assisting in classrooms
- Each school would be accountable to its board for the use of public funds, the effectiveness of its curriculum and methods, the quality of its teachers, and the success of its students. The means of demonstrating such accountability would be determined jointly by the school and its board.
- Each school bargains with its board on matters of salary and benefits or it may join with other schools to form a union chapter for this purpose.
As I wrote my specifications for education reform, many exceptions, fine points, and dangers occurred to me, but adding them in would have made the structure too complicated and too susceptible to other problems. In the end, I decided that I would have to have faith in the good intentions and good sense of all the parties involved and leave the whole system open to change. Of one thing I am certain: the system I am proposing would be more flexible, democratic, and sensible than the top-down one we have now with all its misinterpretation of student needs and capabilities, scapegoating of teachers, and preferences for profiteering in materials publishing, consulting, and charter school operation.
——Joanne Yatvin
- For those who are interested, below are listed my qualifications to be a school reformer.
- B.A. in English and Drama from Douglass College, N.J.
- M.A. in English from Rutgers University, N.J.
- Ph.D. in Curriculum Development and Applied Linguistics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison
- Eighteen years as a teacher in eight schools, in two states and the territory of Puerto Rico, at almost all grade levels, K-12
- Twenty-five years as public school principal; twelve of those as a superintendent/principal
- Wisconsin Elementary Principal of the Year, 1985
- Recipient of the University of Wisconsin School of Education Distinguished Alumni Award, 1988
- Member of the National Reading Panel
- Recipient of the Kenneth S. Goodman In Defense of Good Teaching Award, 2002
- President of the National Council of Teachers of English, 2006-2007
- Member of the College Board Commission to Write Standards for AP English Courses, 2008-2010
- Adjunct Professor and supervisor of student teachers at Portland State University, OR, 2000—present
- Author of three books for teachers, numerous book chapters, and more than 100 articles and letters published in journals and newspapers
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Sorry, Joanne, you don’t have the right kind of credentials to be considered a public education “expert”. You should be like all good public school educators and just enjoy your fat union protected retirement, but most important of all BE QUIET!
What sort of credentials do you approve of? And, sorry, I haven’t the least intention of being quiet.
I think that was sarcasm.
In order for you to be given the title of “Education Expert” you must have four simple qualifications.
1. You must have attended school at sometime in your life. You do not need to have a college degree…dropping out after a year or two at Harvard is sufficient.
2. You have to be willing to lobby for untested educational practices and claim that they are going to solve all our problems. If they don’t, you need to be able to cover by saying the problem was something else or the failure was someone else’s fault — usually teachers unions will work for this. The ability to lie without flinching is helpful, but not required.
3. You must be willing to throw the entire public school system “under the bus” so to speak…from school boards to students. In addition you must claim that you are doing it “for the students” and especially for low income and traditionally hard to educate students. Again, lying is a helpful skill.
4. You have to be rich. No, not just rich — fabulously wealthy. You will need to buy politicians, pundits, policy makers and communication giants. You can do this through direct deposit, or with “grants” and “studies.”
Then you can be called an “expert.”
Joanne,
As teacher111 stated, my post was meant to be sarcastic/snarky. It seems that those who wish to change public education never allow those who know the most, like yourself, to talk out as we, those who actually teach/have taught might come up with solutions the powers that be wouldn’t like.
I was railroaded out of one school for challenging the idiotic
data driven nonsense that standards and standardized testing form the base of and have basically been silenced at my school with a new Performance Based Teacher Evaluation system that states that teachers must only speak positively about the district/school etc. . . . And now they’ve instituted a “gatekeeper” (who hasn’t been given authorization to access the necessary site) to post any kind of article on public education. That’s part of what my sarcasm was about, that the teachers/administrators should just shut up and do the work of those almighty folks above us command us to do.
Joanne Yatvin – Sec. of Education!!
Yes, I agree. Once teachers are in charge of their own schools, they will be fully professional and able to make informed decisions without interference from those without direct classroom experience. Also, when teachers are full professionals, we’ll be better able to attract and retain highly qualified men and women to the important job of teaching our nation’s children. Once teachers are fully empowered, as they should be, their unions will morph into the professional organizations they were originally intended to be.
Oh, please. That will NEVER happen. Al Shanker should have been tarred and feathered for EVER coming up with a harebrained scheme as “charter schools,” being ignorant of how easily that would be exploited. Of course, he railed against them later on.
Charter schools need to be outlawed, period.
The charter school cat is out of the bag. All teachers can do now is to take control of these schools or let others do it. That is the choice that they face, as I see it.
I do not see one point in this plan that would prevent segregation. In fact, unfettered choice as you describe here has been shown over and over again to increase segregation and stratification. It is a tragedy that our country and our schools are becoming more segregated and stratified – and that no one in power is addressing this dangerous trend. As Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote “unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together.”
You make an excellent point. In other countries (England) subsidized housing is spread throughout the country, whereas in ours, it is concentrated in areas that are already impacted by poverty. This results in poor children having to attend schools where the majority of children are also poor and frequently low-performing. Although there are laws requiring every community to have subsidized housing, almost all communities ignore the law with impunity. This is a national problem that will require a national will to improve opportunities for the poor and for children of color. It won’t be easy but I believe it will come when citizens realize providing a quality education for all children will benefit the entire country.
I may or may not agree with Joanne Yatvin, but I respect that she has a high degree of experience in the field of education. She’s someone I’d like to see on a panel; not just another business expert.
Joanne Yatvin says: “Reconstitute all public schools as charter schools…..” Just wondering, does that mean the elimination of unions, collective bargaining, tenure, seniority?
Although I don’t approve of segregation, I don’t see any way that schools themselves can control it. It is up to the city or town to provide housing open people of all races, ethnicities, and socio-economic levels throughout their jurisdictions.
School districts can prevent segregation by districting policies. And if choice is allowed, it must be controlled to prevent segregation/promote integration. That is why we cannot have unfettered choice, which is what it seems you are advocating. The Civil RIghts Project at UCLA has studied this at length, and the latest OECD report has international data on this which also leads to the same conclusion. If the entire district is homogeneous, then, of course, we have to look beyond to housing policies (something, as Richard Rothstein points out in another post on this blog, that we have utterly failed to address).
Absolutely not. I just wasn’t thinking about unions when I wrote this piece. Now, I have asked Diane to add another point to my reform list that would give a school staff the right to join a union if they so desired.
Charter schools should NOT exist in the first place. Yatvin lost what little credibility she had with that proposal.
Susan, you are forgetting that the purpose of charter schools in the first place was to allow principals and teachers to innovate and be free of restrictive regulations. It was never to make such schools exclusive or profit-seeking. Those things have happened because state governments have allowed them to and there is no public oversight of their operations..
This proposal would upset the many well-functioning suburban school systems — with little apparent gain in quality of education.
And, if, as I and many veteran inner-city teachers believe, the major problems with low-SES inner-city schools are minor but endemic student misbehavior and low reading levels, it is unclear how this proposal would address these problems.
More productive would be reforms focused primarily on the problem schools — that is, the low-SES inner-city schools + reforms focused on the difficulties uniquely impacting those problem schools — i.e., student misbehavior, low reading levels, and perhaps student health concerns.
This reform proposal — impacting all the schools, even the well-functioning schools — is similar to, if perhaps less counterproductive than, the current corporate school reforms (high stakes testing, teacher discharge, tenure elimination, charters, vouchers) that impact the well-functioning schools while ignoring the specific difficulties uniquely impacting the problem schools.
Even suburban schools are negatively affected by top-down imposition of standards, curricula, testing, and teaching materials. My goal in writing this proposal was to make schools independent of the politicians and corporate interests that now control them. Moreover, I don’t agree with you about what the problems are in low SES schools. I have been visiting such schools regularly over the past five years and found much to admire in the principals, teachers and students. The problems in such schools are under-funding, lack of wrap-around services, and top-down mandates. They would operate much better if freed from these and could determine their own modes of operatiion.
Joanne – I’ve been teaching in urban low SES schools for 12 years. I don’t think that either of you are incorrect. Unfortunately, people are looking for that silver bullet and I really don’t believe there is one. You haven’t mentioned the huge input the family has on children’s achievement, and think that with some tweaks, the public school system is mostly fine. We don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to say. I was mostly very pleased with the suburban district that my own two sons were educated in.
I taught 8th grade language arts for the first time as a classroom teacher last year to many of the students I have worked with since the 2nd grade as an academic support teacher, so I knew most of the students and their family status pretty well. For the most part, the students who had families that were at least somewhat involved did average to above-average. Even those students who in my opinion might have had lower than average intrinsic ability did pretty well because their guardian kept in touch with me, and together we made sure that assignments were completed and behavioral issues (which there WILL be in the 8th grade) were taken seriously as a family.
I had 56 students. It was incredible to me to find that 6 of my students were motherless. Over 10%! They were living with a brother, an aunt, a grandmother, you name it. All of those students were underachieving, in my opinion. One of those students was a girl who had a throbbing, horrible toothache for months, waiting for Medicaid to kick in. Because she didn’t have an outright infection, the emergency dental clinics wouldn’t see her. I spent hours on the phone trying to get help for her. She failed this year, and definitely had the potential to do well.
Meanwhile, I did have students who did beautifully. Again, for the most part, not always, I had the opportunity to meet with their parents, keep in touch by email, and felt supported (as I’m sure the student did), when there were issues. I prayed special prayers for those students who had difficult family lives and somehow, some way, managed to pull it off! 🙂
Way, way too many students are spending all of their spare time in the house, with no physical outlet. Children are not allowed out because there are gangs and shootings, and for some reason, are not involved in any organized sport. In my family, my two boys played a sport in every season, at whatever level he could have fun in. My students mostly stay in and play video games and watch TV. So, so, sad. Their parents don’t know or trust each other enough to let their kids socialize outside the home either because it is a very transient population, not the “neighborhood” that is so much better to the raised in. Out of those 56 students, maybe 8 or so played a sport. Compare that to the suburbs. Because of this, kids are not well socialized. I’ve found that Mondays were a horror, and it took me quite some time to find out why. They get to school and just can’t stop talking because many of them haven’t seen a peer all week-end!
And pair this with various other problems:
An alternative school closed in our district this year, and they dumped those students with little extra support right into our classrooms. These were sometimes violent, disruptive, and almost always defiant students who made it a game to make sure that other students didn’t receive the educational time that they needed to succeed.
In addition, and this has been mentioned, this school district has had consultants strolling in and out over the years, selling the most ridiculous under-researched programs imaginable. Millions of dollars to private enterprise for silly things that every teacher knew wasn’t worth much in the end, and tended to divert our attention from doing what we should be doing – teaching the students.
I had been told several times to only to do “test prep”. Well what on earth does that mean? How do you test the kids on what they haven’t learned yet? Is guessing which bubble to fill in seriously going to help them comprehend and interpret what they are reading? The insanity of it just makes my head want to explode. Where is this directive coming from?
Also, while we talk about getting parents involved, how do you get them involved? This is the key difference between the suburban and urban schools. When things go very wrong, I’m shocked sometimes at how some parents won’t advocate for their kids. Where I live, parents would be out in droves.
What we DO need is:
* Real medical care in the school. Maybe nurse-practitioners who can do something other than apply ice? (We once had a kid with 60 or so hidden ringworm patches, spreading it to 15 other students before we found the source, because his parents were afraid to take him to the doctor.)
* A higher level guidance in the school. So many of our kids have been traumatized (sexually, emotionally, have been abandoned, etc.) and will never receive treatment or therapy. Untreated, will that student ever reach his or her full potential? We had two counselors, now we have one, who is totally overworked in a K-8 school with 850 students.
* Reading Recovery in every low-performing school. It works. And they cut the program because “downtown” didn’t want to see a teacher working with just one student at a time. My goodness. How short-sighted can we get?
* Real parenting classes, early on. Truly, many parents just don’t know how to parent or help their child(ren) with homework. Very few of the students I’ve worked with who were below-level readers had been read to as a child.
*We haven’t had a music program for years, and art was out for a few years too. I can’t tell you how many ADULTS I know who have told me that but for art, music, or what-have-you, school would have been unbearable for them. What the heck are we thinking by taking this away?
Oh, don’t get me started. I have to stop now because I’m getting so, so sad, writing this all down. and have to start getting my class ready next week and don’t want to get down in spirit. I hope and pray that someone will listen to us, because we really are trying to hold the fort, waiting for the cavalry to come… 😦 …. but it seems that it isn’t in sight.
So Ms. Yatvin, , while you have an interesting structural idea, your plan leaves out SO MUCH. I feel that any attempt to simplify the solution is doomed to fail, but maybe I’m just looking at things from my perspective.
That post is a bunch of bunk. The problem is not with public schools but with the “reform” efforts.
Yatvin should keep her day job.
If education is treated as a public service, then what is the need for charter schools? Charters have become an artifact of a market driven economy. We have the bones of a good public system, but we recognize that the needs of children living in poverty, in particular, are being underserved. I can see grant money being available for pilot programs designed to address what we can do within the schools to more equitably serve our children, but I also think we have to agree on the limitations of the educational system. Poverty is a societal problem not just an educational issue. Perhaps well-designed pilot initiatives can help us define the role of public education, leaving room for local variation in how that role is fulfilled.
“Poverty is a societal problem not just an educational issue.”
Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, give 2old2tch a prize. Heaven forbid that those who have taken so much for themselves would acknowledge that by their hoarding avaricious behavior they may actually be part of the problem.
Dr. Y’s proposal is an excellent counter to the corporate reformers. It empowers teachers to elect their own principals and to design their own curricula. It empowers parents to become local school counsels. It forbids profiteering from any school receiving public funds. Needed: School bussing at public expense to enable kids of any color to attend any school of their choice so as to overcome the dreadful racial segregation of our neighborhoods. Govt. funding targeted at reducing poverty is exactly needed too.
Yes, this proposal would empower teachers to make most decisions regarding leadership, instruction and curriculum. I’m surprised so many teachers are uninterested in a plan that would make them fully professional. Why do you think this is?
Because they’ve been fully coerced into being compliant sheep!
While there are many questions about this reform proposal, and rightfully so, it does speak to several major problems with the reforms sweeping the nation: community control, no for profit organizations running our schools and neighborhood students can attend.
The profiters (reformers) have been successful in getting state and local education officials to make our schools: profit entities for individuals who have created schools that have discriminatory admission policies that use race and class in admitting students. Equally as damaging is that the (profiters) reformers have disengaged the public (parents and community members) in the direction of public education in their communities.
Schools are largely funded by local property taxes, not the state, so point #3 is unfortunately an impossibility. This is another way we differ from many other countries.
Local taxes contribute 44% of public school revenue nationally. The amount varies with the state: local revenue contributes only 14% in Vermont, but 72% in Illinois.
Well, that’s another detail I didn’t cover. I was thinking that all states should be like Oregon, collecting local property taxes and distributing them to cities and towns by formulae that account for special needs. such as bussing.
I agree with your suggestions to copy Finland (or Sweden) education should be free and available and that would cut down on the number of stupid voters, in other words the whole republican party
I do not see why we have to reconstitute all public schools as charter schools. Why throw away a perfectly good public school educational system just because some schools are having problems and are struggling. NJ schools are in the top tier of schools in the country, they score number 1 in some areas, it would make absolutely no sense to convert all NJ public schools to charter schools.
Joe,
I was born and grew up in Newark. I went to Ivy St. School (which was all white and mostly Catholic at the time) and to West Side High School, which was multi-racial and multi-ethnic, but tracked so that students were able to be with their “own kind.”. There were many African American kids at West Side at the time, but only a couple in my college prep track.
At present, N.J. students in the suburbs are scoring well on standardized tests, but not those in Newark or other high poverty areas. At the same time, I do not think we should equate high test scores with quality education; mostly they representd the advantages well-to-do families can provide for their children. I want a quality school for all children.
Joanne,
“I do not think we should equate high test scores with quality education;”
Yes there is a difference between training and testing vs teaching and learning.
Come explore all of the errors and invaliditities involved with standards, standardized testing and grades/grading students on my blog where we are studying Noel Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” chapter by chapter. I have posted an introduction, a “course of study” and the abstract with my comments on the abstract. We’ll be doing two chapters a month. “Promoting Just Education for All” @ revivingwilson.org
Duane
Why did you use the word charter? I almost didn’t finish reading your suggestions.
You’re right, Kathy, I should have said “independent schools.” But I was thinking of the original meaning and purpose of “charter schools,” which was innovation, independence, and accountability to their constituency. Unfortunately, the term “charter” has been corrupted over the past decade to imply social and ethnic segregation, funds stolen from public schools, and/or profiteering. Please understand me: I do not favor charter schools as they now exist, but as we once dreamed they would be. My plan aims to return them to the fulfillment of the original dream.
Perhaps you should have Diane edit that part and put a little side note by what you mean. Other wise I think people will think you are advocating for today style of charter school
Joanne, these are super great suggestions all worth consideration. We are totally impressed with your credentials and not bothered in the least by the term “charter”. It’s always good to use the reformer’s terminology and shove it back in their faces.
I think these are a great set of ideas that would probably produce great results. I just hope that they would actually come to fruition.
Dear concerned citizen regarding educational policy:
It sounds like Joanne is talking the opponent’s language when she uses words like “charter schools” with other words like “reconstitute” in the same sentence. But, in actuality, Joanne is talking a common language. Our educational system is NOT perfect; BUT not because its flawed more than anything else in our lives. NOTHING is perfect. There is room for improvement in our schools, in our communities and in ourselves.
I should know. I am working everyday on fulfilling all of my roles–as a wife to my husband, a mother to my children, teacher to my high school students, friend to my confidantes across the country, daughter to two retired, proud educators, and person to myself–by changing, learning, and growing with the world around me.
I know it is difficult to really examine your school, your community and yourself. Then, you ask yourself, “What do I do now?” “How can I not be totally depressed and want to crawl under the covers and hide from all the obligations and work to be done to make this world–our communities, and our schools–better, safer places?!”
However, admitting that there is reforming to be done to educational policy (for our schools and our future as a nation) is actually transformative. That means it should get you to…DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!!
Here is the (easy-to-list but super demanding to-do) 4-step process:
STEP 1: Admit there are issues in educational policy, in our schools, in our communities, and in ourselves.
STEP 2: List those issues (separately, of course ;0))
STEP 3: Do what you can with what you have (in all areas listed above).
STEP 4: Be at peace with change. *This is actually the most challenging one, I promise!!
Oh, and, contact your Congressmen and tell him/her that changes need to be made and that you are supportive of reform…just BE CLEAR EXACTLY WHAT SHOULD BE REFORMED. There is real change that needs to happen in educational policy.
Oh, and don’t pretend anymore that anyone out there knows ANY better than YOU what should happen with ed policy in this country.
Give them Joanne’s proposal or YOUR suggestions on WHAT EXACTLY TO CHANGE. Do something.
Tiffany, I agree. Pretending that current public school systems are perfect as they currently function only perpetuates existing problems. I think the original proposal by Joanne has merit and addresses the many problems that need attention. I am not sure when or how the republican party first thought of the current plan to take over and privatize our public schools, but it amazes me how ingeniously they have implemented that plan through our state governors. The fact that our democratic president is also on board it even more amazing. It is time to go back to the original idea of local control over local schools. The problem is that over time we have come to accept the federal and state interference and control that it will be difficult to accept responsibility and take control of our own destiny. Thanks Joane for the great points. You are exactly correct that local control is the place to start. The Republican party would never let that happen.
Thanks to everyone who gave me constructive criticism and new ideas. I’d like to make some changes in my original proposal and post it in many places. It would still be far from perfect and would do nothing to solve the overwhelming problems of poverty. My best hopes are that by working together real educators and caring parents can save our public schools, reduce the bureaucracy that shackles them, and hold the profiteers and know-nothing reformers at bay.
While I believe this is certainly headed in the right direction as far as getting teachers more in control of the classrooms, in addition to the concerns about segregation, I would also raise concerns about potential inconsistencies in the quality of education at these little “island” schools. Certainly, having the federal government involved has made a bloody mess, but at the same time, look at what is going on in places like Texas where history textbooks are being re-written to get rid of the so-called “liberal slant” or to remove things that they feel make the founding fathers look bad. Or look elsewhere, where creationism is being taught in place of evolution. Unfortunately, handing control entirely over to school and to the community around it,in particular, could just exacerbate such issues. I suppose you could argue that these communities have a right to teach their children what they want, but I do think it is in our interest as a nation to ensure that all of our students are all receiving the best possible education, not just those that were lucky enough to be born in the right area. There should be some balance between basic standards and autonomy of the teachers/community.