A100 Week 13

Logistics

Race, Class, Power and School Reform, Friday, December 10th, 2 – 4 p.m.

Today:

Part I: Montgomery County and course synthesis

Part II: Section – Reflecting on your trajectories

Part III: Visions of the Future

New Topic: Montgomery County

Some Questions to Discuss About Montgomery County

1. What was the theory of action in Montgomery County?

2. What ideas from the course do you see in Montgomery County?

3. How did Weast respond to issues of race?

4. Do you prefer the Montgomery County strategy to the D.C. strategy? Why? Why not?

5. Are the lessons of Montgomery County more broadly generalizable?

New Topic:

“10 Lessons from A100”

10 Lessons From A100

10. Improving education at scale is an adaptive, not a technical, challenge.

We know the characteristics of good schools.

We know much less about how to generate those characteristics at scale.

10 Lessons From A100

9. Although rarely explicitly discussed, conflicting purposes of education underlie everything we do in education.

Economic Civic

Freire

Newman/liberal arts

Dewey

Counts

Purposes of education

10 Lessons From A100

8. The continued segregation of schools by race and class makes school reform much more difficult than it would otherwise be.

Coleman report

Harris study of likelihood of success of high poverty schools

Research on desegregation favorable

Politics of desegregation unfavorable.

http://www.agi.harvard.edu/presentations/2008Conference/Calkins.pdf

10 Lessons From A100

7. Human capital is key; how to get more of it highly contentious

Teacher quality most important variable in student outcomes

Research on certification is mixed at best

In-service training and residency programs more promising

Variation within types as great as across types

Pipeline from recruitment through retention

10 Lessons From A100

6. The school is the right unit of analysis for intervention.

Effective schools consistently share similar characteristics.

Putting good programs or good teachers into failing schools is generally a losing proposition.

The culture is set at the level of the school. Payne: demoralized schools.

In my view, most promising approaches couple school autonomy (hiring, firing, budgeting) with strong human capital strategies.

10 Lessons From A100

5. There are multiple (but not unlimited) pieces to the school reform puzzle. All could stand to get much better.

A Problem With Many Pieces

State

Combating poverty

• Visiting nurses

• Early childhood programs

• After-school programs

• Extended learning time

• HCZ

Improving incentives

• Better human resource policies (hiring and firing)

• Greater flexibility in return for accountability

•Massively streamlining bureaucracy

• Inverting pyramid

Increasing knowledge

• Better training and induction of new teachers

• Instructional rounds to improve practice

• Coaching

• Individual, team and organizational learning

• New systems of R & D

Market Profession

Create coherence

• Common core standards

• Build needed “infrastructure”

Assets of communities

• Build on local assets

• Involve parents and communities

Governance

Layers of Thinking About Improving Schooling at Scale

Schools

Districts

States

Federal Knowledge r &d

Human Capital(Week 11)

Org process in schools

System Account-ability

NCLB

Week 9

Charter networks (Week 10)

Ontario and Victoria (Week 8)

10 Lessons From A100

4. Changing structures is easy; changing practice is hard.

Many forces mitigate against change of practice Culture/templates Human psychology Lack of knowledge Lack of incentives

Good policy approaches explicitly build this in: Teachers as learners Extensive coaching, rounding, in-service training Attention to the granular level of practice

10 Lessons From A100

3. When faced with either/or, look for better.

Not top down vs. bottom-up, but comparative advantage

Not charters or no, but how do we get more good ones

The structure is only as good as the culture (practices) it creates.

10 Lessons From A100

2. Building public confidence is key

Ontario – How you talk, who you consult, setting reasonable expectations (and meeting them)

D.C. – Cannot treat schooling as purely technical problem

Montgomery County – Building a wide coalition

What’s Next? 5 Big Projects That Someone Should Take On

What’s Next? 5 Big Projects That Someone Should Take On

1. Create a city-wide strategy that intelligently marries in school and out of school approaches

What’s Next? 5 Big Projects That Someone Should Take On

1. Create a city-wide strategy that intelligently marries in school and out of school approaches

2. Develop the next generation of assessments

What’s Next? 5 Big Projects That Someone Should Take On

1. Create a city-wide strategy that intelligently marries in school and out of school approaches

2. Develop the next generation of assessments

3. Create an NIH for education

What’s Next? 5 Big Projects That Someone Should Take On

1. Create a city-wide strategy that intelligently marries in school and out of school approaches

2. Develop the next generation of assessments

3. Create an NIH for education

4. Invent an alternative to teachers unions

What’s Next? 5 Big Projects That Someone Should Take On

1. Create a city-wide strategy that intelligently marries in school and out of school approaches

2. Develop the next generation of assessments

3. Create an NIH for education

4. Invent an alternative to teachers unions

5. Create a workable strategy to professionalize teaching

B/c it’s the last day, I’ll tell you what I think

Any questions?

New Topic:

“6 Visions of the Future”

3 Final Things

# 1 Lesson From A100

1. You matter! We are depending on you to shape a better future!

Decentralized system Lots of leverage points Policy and practice are both important Pick a piece and make it better Combine efforts with similarly minded folks Tell us what you are learning Rinse, cycle, repeat.

(And for those of you crazy enough to want to continue on, keep in touch here:)

A100 alum facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=208747736624

Thank you!

Four Perspectives on Race to the Top

1. Go harder and deeper (Amy Wilkins, Ed Trust)

2. Wrong priorities

3. Over-reaching the knowledge base

4. Wrong role for federal government

Developing Your View of RTTT

1. Is RTTT supported by evidence? Yes or no?

2. Make an argument about race to the top drawing on lessons from A100. Draw on readings from the course to make your point.

Things to consider:

Does it reflect the right priorities?

Is the right role for the federal gov’t?

Are there other things they could have done which would have been better?

Developing Your View of RTTT

A Few Thoughts on RTTT

A blunt instrument for a complicated problem

School turnarounds agenda seems promising

Too much emphasis on tests for my taste

What happens to states that lose?

What happens when money runs out?

Needs to be coupled with efforts at district and school levels if it is to come to anything.