For at least 15 years, federal efforts at “school reform” have focused on “fixing” the schools; now it is focused (fruitlessly) on teacher evaluation. One thing that is obvious: schools can’t be “reformed” by federal legislation. They can surely use federal money to reduce class size and to reduce spending gaps between districts and schools. But federal policies and laws like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have generated more disruption than school improvement.
Aurora Moore received her doctorate from Stanford, where she studied school improvement strategies. She concluded that the school is the wrong unit of analysis. A school is a building, a “pile of bricks.” In this post on Julian Vasquez Heilig’s blog, she argues that federal policy has missed the most important variables in successful school improvement. While writing about “the myth of school improvement,” she does not say that it can’t be done and never happens, but that the federal government and “reformers” (privatizers) have rejected meaningful strategies and chosen to deploy failed strategies.
What matters most for genuine school improvement is what she calls “context stability” and autonomy. The irony is that federal policy and mandates actively weaken and destroy what matters most.
She writes:
“Variable 1: Context stability
The first variable is something that I call context stability. Context stability is a combination of low teacher turnover, stable leadership, and a demographically consistent student population. Context stability is also about having continuity in curriculum and materials, programs and program staff from year to year –or something that researchers studying Chicago schools called, “coherence.” If you dig deep into the research on effective and improving schools you find out that all of them had continuity in staff, leadership and student demographics during the period studied. Staff and leadership stability was a condition of effectiveness.
“Anyone who works in schools today can tell you that context stability is very uncommon, especially in schools deemed “in need of improvement.” Teacher turnover is an ongoing problem, particularly in schools serving large percentages of students living in poverty where the average teacher stays less than five years. And ironically, the federal School Improvement grants have convinced many district administrators that it’s a good idea to move school principals around. And in many locales, particularly urban ones with open enrollment policies and large immigrant populations, student demographics can change dramatically from year to year.
“And the real rub is that context stability itself doesn’t last forever. Most research about effective or improving schools is done in a 1-5 year period. Give me an effective school or improving school and wait three years. The effective principal or effective program will have gone, and it’ll be back to square one.
“Variable 2: Autonomy
“The other important variable we failed to consider is autonomy. During the previous eras of school reform people working in schools had much more control over their curricula, their technology and their programs than they did today. The research on Chicago’s improving schools was conducted during the 1990s during an unprecedented experiment in local school control. Nowadays districts and states often dictate what materials teachers can use, what programs they can implement, and even what page to be on in a pacing guide. Some researchers say that schools should be responsible for “crafting coherence” but in my experience, that’s more pie in the sky idealism than reality, particularly when district-school administrator power dynamics are involved.
“If you really think about it, schools are just buildings that have a constant and complicated flow of policies, programs and people moving in and out. School administrators and teachers have very little control of that flow of information, people and practices—they can only manage those things within the confines of district, state and federal policies.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is so true.
It just dawned on me that “school reform” as used by the present “reformers” doesn’t have to be synonymous at all wil school improvement, yet we’ve been giving them a pass, assuming that’s what they were claiming to do.
In reality, they were just reforming schools and education. We just thought they were claiming to make things better.
Silly us.
“To Serve Schools” (after the Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man”)
Test and VAMs
To serve our schools
With honeyed yams
To moneyed ghouls
The tail (teachers, administrators, policies, standards, curriculum, testing) rarely wags the dog (students, patents, communities, culture).
Aurora Moore has put into a dissertation something that I have been witnessing. Economic models that cannot capture all of the significant variables are useless and her concept of “context stability” exactly explains why the VAM ideology appeared specious to me.
The only ways for governments to improve schools is to resource them well and create high professional standards for classroom teachers. Then get out of the road and let the professionals do their job.
It’s a myth but a hit of myth, a useful myth, and our corporate owned government understands its uses far better than the assume-good-faith fools who imagine all they have to do is expose the myth as a myth and it will evaporate like a myth in the mist. But the Mad Ad Men already know what it is, they invented it to that purpose, it’s been their business for as long as we’ve had advertizing.
I Can’t Believe It’s Not Better Schools
Somehow it still sells …
Amen Jon Awbrey!
I’ve tried to touch on: “The Structuralist school of anthropology argued that myth is the means by which we organise our world. Some anthropologists stressed the social aspects of this; others emphasize the fact that mythic or symbolic structures were important in shaping our perceptions.
Social structure as mythic or symbolic is easy to imagine. As Hamlet says in a moment of lucid madness: “The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body.” The king is a social or symbolic function, not a physical thing. A particular king – say, James II – is no different biologically from his fellow men, yet he puts on a crown, sits on a throne and assumes a symbolic position of authority. It is from this place, backed by a mythic structure (divine right, for example), that the social structure itself borrows its substance.”
I’ve tried to “cut to the chase” with a simple question:
Would ANY “powers that be”, establish a “system”, to REDUCE
their power?
Mandatory Public Education required POWER to establish it.
I’ve qouted many “notables” in their obsevations:
“The problems won’t be solved by the level of thinking that
created them” Einstein
“Understanding what a system is and is not, is central to
improving quality” Deming
““One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” Sagan
Paint me a “good-faith-fool”, a troll, or a conspiracy nutcase.
Dismiss or ignore me.
The results or outcomes, will STILL clash with the “projected”
mission statements. The data (results) will still be in conflict
with the hypothesis.
Myths are never neutralized by amplification. Marketing
or propaganda prevail in the absence of critical thinking.
Who determines “what” is built into the social fabric, and why?
Is it SO hidden that the product of “invented tradition” or a
“set of practices of a ritual of symbolic nature” seek to inculcate
certain values and norms of behavior (conventional wisdom)?
Is it NOT evident when “approval” is mainly aquired from the
approval of others (through the lens of “conventional wisdom”),
that the result is CONFORMITY.
Has this “conformity” been calculated with a specific interest
in mind, as it’s foundation? Do the results or outcomes, hint
at what this “interest” actually is?
IF the foundational interest WAS empowerment, or equality,
leading to a change in the distribution of assets, or a nullifacation
of the mind-control regime of marketing or propaganda, through
“enlightenment”, pray tell, WHEN will that “kick” in?
“Through the Looking Glass”
Stability is needed
Disruption they pursue
The public school defeated
“Reform” is what they do
“On purpose, what they do”
Love this!
You can keep testing the functioning of the motor in a car, but it won’t run any better unless you do something more substantial. The main problem with “reform” is that it is designed by those that really don’t understand education, and it is based on false assumptions. The reformers act as though educators are stubborn children that have been refusing to follow their parents’ rules. They believe teachers have been holding out on them all these years. Like naughty children, they need to be punished and controlled. They want to rule public schools with an iron fist. In reality, schools work better when there is stability, trust and support and, of course, adequate funding. I worked in one of them for many years. My school had one principal for ten years, and another one for fifteen years. That is one reason we were able to change the culture for the better through stability and collegiality.
DAMN STATISTICS: I have a friend who was a senior editor at Consumer Reports, where they rank everything from cars to washing machines to lip balm. And I used to ask him all the time, once a company received the top rating for a product, what is stopping them from replacing all the components with cheaper materials, or to start cutting corners?
The answer was that manufacturers like Honda or Toyota establish long running records of quality and reliability – although there can always be a blip or bad year. So when we look at schools over time, we see a lot of natural, predictable fluctuation as so many interconnected moving parts are involved, it is truly impossible to quantify anything using static measures.
One thing that is tried and true, however, is the relation between poverty and performance – the affluent suburbs see high achieving classes year after year, while inner city schools see consistently low, with high turnover, transience and social-emotional obstacles to learning.
Jake, ranking cars, like Honda and Toyota, really shows the flaws in ranking schools. The components, students, teachers, families, administrators do change, and aren’t subject to the “continuous improvement” way of doing things.
But more importantly, cars are also rated over time; you can see how consumers feel even five years out.
With schools we do that very informally and unofficially. But in the end, it may the best we can do.
I’m ignoring rankings like U. S. News.
“Kids on the Skids”
Stability and autonomy
Are keys to raising kids
Disruption and authority
Put public schools on skids
USDE research on pay-for-performance consistently shows these plans tank because there is significant turnover in administrative staff, policy shifts (district or state or the feds), budget instability, and so on. Throw in some churn from the increased mobility of students to and from charter schools. Add some anxiety about the fate of the students, teachers, and administrators on mandated tests and with formulas contrived to rate 50% below average.
It is wonderful to see this scholar and others getting visibility for this “contexts matter” research and well beyond academic and research journals.
I recall more than one “school improvement” project when these were federal hatchlings and sponsored under “cooperative research grants,” vintage mid-1960s. Some were small scale. Some were long term and grandiose. Then as now, they were usually based on the false idea that you could get a model program going and then disseminate and replicate results. Back then, the idea of “replication” was less oriented toward “scaling up” per Arne Duncan, McKinsey & Co who think in terms of a franchise that packages and markets “best practices.” Back then the cooperative research program had a deeper connection to successes in agriculture where extension agents who were experts or who can tap the expertise of others actually hit the road, met with farmers, looked at their farms, looked at the “context” of work on each farm and offered specific ideas, or example, on reducing erosion, increasing yields, preventing disease in crops and livestock. Supervisors in education often had a similar role, whether state or district. They were not placed in the awful role of being enforcers and bean counters but expected to be thoughtful inspirational leaders who were not a threat if they arrived in your classroom.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
Add to the lack of autonomy the fact that sometimes teachers are obligated to follow scripted lessons, especially in ELA or Math.
Perhaps this is the wave of the future – robots teaching our kids from text written by Pearson (or individuals hired off the street to create curriculum at minimum wage).
Home schooling looks better and better.