Category Archives: Student Achievement

Petersburg Rising

Courageous Leadership, Education Reform, Educational Equity, Educational Leadership, Equity, School Culture, Student Achievement

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This a common American Story of economic boom-to-bust, with an unusual twist: an extraordinary group of leaders entered the picture to turn the tide by investing in children and their education. Petersburg was to be their model for the state, and perhaps the nation. Yet challenges remain enormous.

For more than a decade, Petersburg schools struggled, failed, and even lacked basic accreditation. Students dropped out in large numbers and faced tough times at home in one of the poorest communities in the state. Their future was bleak. Generations of children were lost.

When the superintendent of the neighboring district announced his retirement from a large, wealthy, successful district to act on his second doctorate in divinity, he was asked if he would consider instead running the poorest and lowest performing district in the state. This is that story, told through the struggles… and triumphs of 5 students we followed for a year.

 

Failure Is Not an Option™ in 2018!

Closing Achievement Gaps, Courageous Leadership, Education Policy, Educational Leadership, Student Achievement,

When I asked 13-year-old Angie why she had recently joined the Latin Kings gang on Chicago’s South Side, she looked at me like I wasn’t too bright, but entertained the question anyway. ”Why wouldn’t I join?! My uncle is on the gang, my friends are in it and so is my boyfriend,” she said nodding toward another teenager watching our exchange from about 15 feet away. Shortly after I left with Rudy Espinosa, a Boys and Girls club Youth worker hired to quell gang violence and reclaim gang members, the rival Deuces gang drove by and took the life of Angie’s boyfriend.

This set off a series of reprisals back and forth between the gangs. My friend Rudy negotiated a truce allowing him to create a silver lining to this tragedy when he later saw Angie sobbing at the funeral. “Angie, I’m really sorry about your boyfriend; he was a friend of mine too. But this is what you’ve signed up for by being in the gang – and I can help you get out.” Soon after, Angie took Rudy’s advice and helping hand of support to leave the gang.

Crisis as Opportunity in 2018

After growing up in non-traditional settings (group homes, foster care, and with grandma); getting to college on an EOP Scholarship; founding and running Solution Tree and the HOPE Foundation; and authoring 18 books (the most recent being Excellence through Equity with Pedro Noguera), I can attest to the importance of seeing crisis as an opportunity. This is exemplified in how Rudy provided Angie both a mirror to see the reality of her situation, and a supportive, caring alternative for her to pursue.

If last year is any indicator, 2018 is sure to provide us all great deal of opportunity to work through crisis! This New Year’s message is about sorting through and making meaning of the cacophony of change underway, seeing what’s likely to come next, and developing the clarity and courage to move forward, or as Winston Churchill stated: “If you’re going through Hell, keep going!”

Demographics Don’t Lie…

The fact is that in 2015 America hit a watershed in its school population which has an impact every school leader, teacher, and school community in the Nation. For the first time in history, the majority of America’s students were poor and eligible for free and reduced lunch. (The majority of our students also were not classified as Caucasian.) Meanwhile, the wealthiest 80 people in the world held more financial assets then the bottom ½ of the entire world; that’s 3.5 billion people combined. Likewise in America, the top 1% of the population holds more wealth than the bottom 95% combined. The implications for educating our children and the way to achieve Excellence through Equity will be the topic of future postings.

…but Politicians Often Do Lie

The many challenges faced by those who are in most need of help will become even greater due to the combination of greed and callousness that has guided many of our elected officials to challenge the need for Medicaid, Medicare, CHIP, Citizenship for Dreamers, and much more. While USA rankings in international tests like the PISA continue to slip, our elected officials offer not support, as Rudy had to Angie, but a heavier load of tests, accountability, public humiliation and fallacies around the wonders of School Choice and Private Education vs. Public Education. Yet the one bastion of hope for our collective future is not a patchwork of unregulated and unreliably administered and untested private schools, but a strong commitment to every child receiving a high-quality public education.

What we have learned is that those who know the least about U.S. public education are often those who have the most authority over the policies that guide it. This is now codified by the ironic choice of our Secretary of Education who has never held a single job related to the enterprise of education over which she presides. Ms. Devos has instead declared the traditional education system “a dead end.” This is part of a false narrative around public schools that is setting the stage for the dismantling of them and the diversion of public school funding to private operators.
The narrative is that public schools are failing, and therefore need to be taken over by private and/or regulatory agencies. This story runs counter to the facts – e.g. Our schools have graduated a higher percent of students each year in the past decade than at any time in history; the number of low-income-family students taking the AP exams has gone up more than 500% from 2003-2016 as well. If your income grew at this rate, you’d take your boss to dinner! What we see instead is pundits challenging the validity of graduation rates, and an ESSA regulation that will increase the cost of taking the AP exams starting next year. Poor students will again bear the brunt of public policy.

Changing the Narrative

After helping to launch the PLC movement and running Solution Tree for 12 years, I asked a group of thought leaders from throughout the country for advise on next steps. Ed Zigler, Head Start Founder, suggested we have two challenges in education:

  1. We need to improve our performance;
  2. We aren’t as bad as the rhetoric indicates and need to improve our messaging.

I dedicated to #1 for the past 30 years and realize that it has been a heavier lift than necessary due to the second challenge: we don’t own our narrative about our profession. Therefore, we are swimming upstream. As support for our work often isn’t appreciated, teachers leave the profession (see Ed Week: Teachers Are Quitting Because They’re Dissatisfied. That’s a Crisis, Scholars Say), states like PA and IL are virtually defunding public schools, and others like NJ take over their urban districts and yet fail to improve these schools with impunity.

While educators often agree on the dynamics underway the larger public gets a different message. Educators don’t have a “Waiting for Superman” film, for example. Failing schools are usually an educational manifestation of inequities in our society: they do not exist in wealthy communities. Likewise, we find very few successful schools in economically deprived areas, and when we do we should learn from them. Instead, the exceptional poor but successful school is spuriously used as “exhibit A” in painting all other failing schools as being due to inept or uncaring professionals. We often treat the struggling and impoverished school by defunding it or threatened takeover, as though this will now motivate the mythical lazy and unwilling people who work within those schools. What these schools need instead is the same kind of helping hand Rudy extended to Angie, and that the VA DOE has extended to Petersburg Schools.

Courage to Act

As leaders and defenders of our nation’s children, we must move toward the danger, else it will move toward us and prevail. I’ve written a fair amount about Courage, recently with Pedro Noguera and in the Blogpost following Nelson Mandela’s passing. Over the coming weeks, we will share specific examples of professionals at all levels acting courageously to take collective responsibility for the success of all children!

Contact us for more information.

Relational trust in schools among ADULTS is essential to student success.

Education Policy, Education Reform, Educational Equity, Educational Leadership, Student Achievement, Trust in Schools

Yet with teacher evaluation, new assessments, budget cuts and the like, trust can become frayed.

This SERIES—excerpted from the forthcoming third edition of the award-winning Failure Is NOT an Option®: 6 Principles That Advance Student Achievement in Highly Effective Schools; is focused on some specific strategies to build trust in schools.

Relationships are at the core of successful learning communities as well as student success. In its Set for Success report of 2002, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation summarizes, “Stated simply, positive relationships are essential to a child’s ability to grow up healthy and achieve later social, emotional, and academic success”.

Those positive relationships begin with the adults in the school building and district. The personal rapport among teachers, students, and parents influences students’ school attendance and their sustained efforts at difficult school tasks. The history of relations between the principal and the teaching staff determines teachers’ willingness to take on new initiatives, and the relationships among adults in the school greatly influence the extent to which students in that school will succeed academically. In essence, if the adults in the building get along, so will the students.

Building meaningful and productive relationships with people is complex; people are less predictable, and their emotions can be scary. How often are school leaders trained in the many nuances of dealing with an angry parent, a disgruntled staff member, or a crying teacher? Where is the how-to manual for these tasks? Moreover, who has time for these elements when the “real” work of increasing student achievement awaits?

Relationships are the real work of school improvement! Without people and relationships, who will administrators lead and how far will followers follow?

Building relational trust with the staff is a precursor to sustainable success. In our work in thousands of schools and districts, this trust has been built by the leader using various approaches.

The first strategy in this series is:

Listen First

It’s essential to recognize that everyone wants to be heard. The new-leader syndrome, however, often entails changing things quickly to establish authority. Many veteran leaders, on the other hand, may feel they already know what is best and may move forward without building consensus. In both cases, the “slow” part—listening—of going “fast” is cut out of the process and initiatives are short-lived.

The “listen first” strategy has many components:

  1. Show appreciation via understanding the other point of view. “I appreciate that you’ve been asked to do a LOT here…!”
  2. Finding merit in what the person does, thinks, or feels is important in showing appreciation– even when you don’t agree! “I realize that it seems easier to teach students in Like-ability groups, and you need a way to manage a lot of diverse learners. At the same time, we know putting students into tracks will doom many to staying in those tracks. Ai here’s what we need to pilot instead…”
  3. Communicate understanding in words and actions. Saying “I look forward to seeing you when you feel better” could be even more powerful were you to send over some cough drops too!
  4. Show appreciation for yourself as well! “Yes it’s been hard to handle so much change– imagine having to lead it all!…”

How Singapore Students Beat the World in “Problem-solving” and What this Means for America

Courageous Leadership, Education Policy, Education Reform, Educational Equity, Educational Leadership, Student Achievement

In the first PISA exams designed to measure problem-solving, Singapore’s 562 score toped 44 countries and economies in an area that Western countries used to claim as their last domain of preeminence. After returning from Singapore to keynote the 2014 summit along with Michael Fullan, Andy Hargreaves and Louise Stoll for some 1300 delegates from throughout Asia, I have some insights as to how this country of only 5.5 million people has outflanked 44 nations, including the richest one on earth: the USA. Some of the critical factors in Singapore’s success can’t be reproduced in the west; some can; and others can be improved upon.

Culture is King

A school’s culture will eat policies, structures, strategies and assessments for lunch – and that includes Common Core assessments. The culture is the most powerful and enduring aspect of a learning community and the greatest determinant of the success of the students in that community. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, continues an attempt to change practice through competition that creates a few winners and millions of losers (our children). Marc Tucker, President of the National Center for Education and the Economy meanwhile correctly advocate changes in policy and structure – especially pertaining to supporting teachers in ways that stick instead of with sticks (paraphrasing Fullan). Yet these two opposing viewpoints have something in common with most analysis: they overlook the extent to which both the school culture and the larger culture in which it resides is the greatest lever for sustained success.

Tapping the strength of the Singaporean Culture

Imagine arriving late a city of the western nation of your choice, claiming your baggage and awaiting a cab that will take you to your hotel via a route unknown to you. What questions or concerns arise in this scenario? Will my bags arrive? How long will customs take? Will the driver understand me? Will I be taken the “tourist route?”
Now imagine your bags arrive almost as you approach the carousel, you go through customs in a matter of minutes, hop into a taxi driven by a Malaysian man who has undertaken 30 days of intensive cab-driver training following his 2-years in college. He easily maneuvers crime-free -streets of a city with no unemployment and a code of ethics and honesty that will allow you to safely put your GPS away while in the back of that taxi. You are in Singapore!
The driver is a “professional” who knows his way. The country has agreed upon ethics and strict enforcement of them such that neither your safety nor that of your wallet is at risk. And everyone is in concert on the top priorities of this country which include their children, and the education that will enhance not only their livelihoods, but their lives.
What are the cultural ingredients that have enabled Singapore to outpace all other nations in education? Can countries like the USA, with one of the highest per pupil educational expenditures in the world, adopt any of these practices given our differing cultures? What advantages, if any, does the US have vis a’ vis top performing nations, and how could those be maximized?

The ingredients for Success

“We want our young to think independently, to explore with confidence, and to pursue their passions. Education is not just about training for jobs. It is about opening doors for our children, and giving them hope and opportunities. They are our future.”

Mr Lee Hsien Loong, Prime Minister of Singapore, Nov 2007 

  1. Integrity of leadership
    As the quote above indicates, leadership in Singapore is committed to its children and its people. There is alignment of purpose and action as well, and corruption is not tolerated. Punishments are swift and severe and their likelihood is mitigated in practical ways like paying top government officials upwards of $1M. By contrast, in America the assumption is that millionaires will leave their jobs to take one with the government that pays a fraction of what they formerly earned without a payout awaiting them on the back end, or worse, while still in office.Likewise, while their overall budget is a fraction of that of many Western nations, Singapore’s top spending priority is education after the military. Educators are well-paid professionals who do not determine the curriculum but do define how they will meet standards, which are clear.
    While moving toward Common Core Standards in America after more than a century of uncommon standards, we still have 23 states using Smarter Balanced Assessment, 14 using PARCC, and 14 “other.” Neither our national leaders (where congress rates lower in opinion polls than does the Russian Politburo) nor our state leaders (where several are under investigation, and one just narrowly avoided impeachment) have the public confidence necessary to bring about cohesive action on behalf of our children.
  2. Integrity of Implementation
    While Singapore has different types of schools, and conceivably a different quality of pedagogy, the attempt is to bring about consistency across curriculum, standards, instruction, and success for students in all schools. Not so in America. The April 23 issue of Education Week sums it up: “Like so much else in the world of teacher preparation, progress at readying new teachers for vastly different (Common Core) K-12 content expectations can probably best be described by one objective: inconsistent.”
    This inconsistency is found in all phases of our “system.” From teacher preparation in which “academic freedom” means learning based on individual professors’ predilections; to technology selection and professional development which is influenced less by student needs than by corporations’ marketing plans; to a patchwork of public, private and charter schools — each school community is more or less on its own to make myriad decisions and spending choices of $600B collectively.
  3. Practical Tradeoffs Favor the Common Good V. “Winner Take All”
    At the core of Singapore’s success is their hard-headed willingness to sacrifice some of their individual excesses in favor of their vision of collective success. The cab driver above shared that although he is not making as much money as he would like, and has little prospect at this point in changing that, he would not want to live anywhere else. Why? “It’s safe here, and my children are getting a great education.” People at the bottom of the economic latter in America could not say this. They don’t have healthcare, safety, or access to great education for their children. Singapore made a collective decision to turn away from these vast disparities they faced shortly after they were founded 50 years ago. Those at the top committed to the common good, and have since reaped the rewards. They don’t live in gated communities for protection, because like this cab driver, no one is hungry or desperate.

A Ray of HOPE for America

It’s highly unlikely that we will wake up any day soon and find cohesive leadership at the national level, cohesive implementation of our nation’s top education priorities, or a new understanding of how everyone winning (or at least having a viable stake in the game) is actually possible and far more productive and sustainable that the zero sum game we now hold so tightly (a topic my colleague Pedro Noguera and I address in a forthcoming Corwin book.). Future blog posts, however, will explore in greater depth these promising and proven strategies that we can pursue at local and regional levels. These are cutting-edge ways we can make our often destructive desire for rugged individualism and “choice” (even when it’s between many bad options) work in our favor:

  • At a system level, we can begin to tap our collective creativity in ways akin to open-source programming. I-Zone in NYC, for example, is bringing brilliant entrepreneurs into the school system to work side-by-side with educators, parents and students to collectively create tech solutions to problems defined by educators. Everyone co-creates and owns the final product, wants to implement it, and does so at a reduced cost.
  • At the regional and district level, we can tap the “Answer in the Room,” to steal the title from my last book, via a process for networking schools in a manner that yields the scaling, or diffusion, of effective strategies that are already successfully used somewhere within the network.
  • At the school and classroom levels, we can fully engage all learners and attain excellence through “equity” – assuring each student gets what s/he needs to succeed. For some students, this means putting the Arts into STEM ( ie STEAM); for others it’s project based learning. These strategies for unleashing student motivation, talent and joy will be fleshed out in future blogs.

There is hope; even in the most dire of circumstances. Mine is that we don’t have to get to that point. Our children need and deserve better, and it is up to us to give them that. Singapore provides some insights into how we can behave on their behalf. Now it’s up to us to incorporate those lessons into our own culture and context.