Two Articles of Interest

American Educator arrived today, the AFT's quarterly magazine. I wish it came more often. I have only read two of the articles so far, and they were both fascinating.

The first is about a 10-year-old who learned about tsunamis in Science class, only to save her family and hundreds of other tourists on a beach in Thailand a few weeks later. Thank goodness her parents listened to what she had to say, and that the other sunbathers and the hotel staff listened to her parents. That article is not on-line, but you can request a copy from the magazine - the email address to do so is listed here (scroll down).

The other article argues that many schools rally under the (dis)incentives of NCLB, improve their scores, and quickly plateau. They might even repeat this cycle several times - making changes, seeing small but notable gains in scores, hitting a ceiling - before eventually reaching a point where they just can't make any more gains because they lack the capacity/knowledge to do so. The author, Richard F. Elmore, discusses the shortcomings of depending solely on incentives to cause improvement, and suggests specific forms of support that will be needed to help "improving" schools avoid being labeled "failing" despite their best efforts. Here's an excerpt:

These schools have been the object of intensive efforts to make them work better. People in these schools—teachers, administrators, students—are aware that they are in organizations labeled as failing, and, with certain exceptions, they are not happy or complacent about it. Liberal critiques to the contrary, failing schools are usually not resource-poor environments. They are heavily staffed, they have large numbers of specialists who work directly with students, and they have considerable access to outside guidance and expertise in most settings. They also frequently have access to community resources that bring considerable assets to the schools. Failing schools do not have uniformly weak leaders. Some do. Some don’t. The point is that “strong” leaders—as in the case of Thornton and Clemente—are often just as baffled about what to do about their situations as “weak” leaders, though strong, competent leaders may have more motivation and ability to find out what to do.

This article rings true for me. One of my nagging concerns with NCLB and similar measures to make schools improve or else is that the final punishment is often transfering the students to another school setting, or bringing in new governance. Certainly, there are a few schools that are such a mess they may need a clean slate, but I see little evidence that there are lots of educators/companies/charters out there waiting to take over failing schools and do something drastically different and significantly better. So it makes more sense to me to find ways to take what exists and transform it - and, as Elmore argues, this wil require significant resources directed at building capacity beyond the initial gains achievable through harder or even smarter work.