Ginger Wheeler of Glen Ellyn, Illinois, is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to The Illinois School Board Journal.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the school reform movement in Illinois was moving ahead at a steady, albeit slow, methodical pace. Schools around the state were implementing reform models with names like “Modern Red SchoolHouse,” “Blue Ribbon Schools” and “QuESt” created by organizations such as New American Schools and Quality Educational Systems Inc.
Many of these organizations, while backed by big business and government, were developed by people with deep experience in educational theory and advanced degrees from respected universities. Illinois was considered a national leader at analyzing data to improve educational outcomes.
Across the state, teachers, administrators and union leaders from both high- and low-performing schools were coming together to work toward increasing student achievement.
But the education reform models of a decade ago seem like mere child’s play compared to the big-city, take-no-prisoner education reforms of 2011.
Gone is the slow, methodical, professorial pace. Gone are the jobs and schools that don’t or can’t keep up. Also gone are the educational theory and advanced degrees. Today’s reformers are more likely billionaires and political appointees — not education professionals and researchers — often with little actual experience in the classroom.
Reformers and educators are desperate to transform low-performing public schools so that American education can “catch up” to foreign counterparts, trying anything, looking for successes to replicate on a nationwide scale. These reforms may permanently transform not only Illinois’ but the nation’s entire educational system into something else. But into what?
What will public education look like in the future? What will the desired educational outcomes be and who will decide them? The answer seems to depend on which ideology is chosen, because data can be found to back up almost any theory.
One thing is for sure: change is rampant and the future is uncertain.
Today’s focus: teachers
While the reform models named earlier were aimed at students and learning styles, school reform in 2011 is aimed at teachers: their profession, the perks, the pay, the rewards and the unions that attempt to preserve them.
Frustrated with slow or no progress in student achievement, and fueled by the media, including the 2010 documentary film “Waiting For Superman,” a growing segment of the public and certain politicians have made teachers the new target. And many teachers are feeling the heat.
“Something changed in the politics of the country because of the public conversation,” said Fred Klonsky, an outspoken blogger on education issues who is employed as an elementary school art teacher in Park Ridge, Illinois. “People know their teachers and like them. People think their schools are good, but they think other schools are crappy. They are blaming teachers for social ills and global competition.”
That blame takes the form of protests over union practices, questions about teacher and administrator salaries, and calls for more charter schools.
In Decatur, Illinois, where teachers earn on average about $50,000 annually, nine of its 21 schools appear on watch lists with too few students meeting or exceeding state standards, according to the 2010 Illinois state report card. Currently, only seven of the 21 schools display “green pencils” for making annual yearly progress goals, despite reform models and district efforts that date back to the late 1990s. (CLick here for more infomration)
Decatur reform efforts battle a stubborn achievement gap between black and white students that persists as it does in almost every school in the state with large minority populations. Its lone district-authorized charter school, however, seems to be addressing the gap.
Robertson, a K-8 charter school created through the district in 2001, is meeting its annual yearly progress marks established under federal and state No Child Left Behind legislation. Robertson students are 90 percent black and 90 percent are low income, yet 71 percent meet or exceed state standards. But Robertson also has a longer school day and smaller class sizes than the district’s other K-8, elementary or middle schools.
One possible reason for the school’s higher success rate, according to anecdotes from the community, may be due to the transfer of children with special needs, behavioral issues or those who just can’t seem to get higher test scores out of Robertson. Whether true or not, the practice of “counseling out” such students is a common allegation leveled at many charter schools.
While many educators agree that charters are an excellent option because of the special attention they can provide, they just can’t meet the scale of the need, according to Sally Kilgore, a sociologist and CEO of Modern Red SchoolHouse.
Currently, 43,234 Illinois students are in enrolled in charter schools, compared to more than 2,035,000 in regular public schools and slightly more than 200,000 in private schools, according to the reform group Advance Illinois. (The total number does not include home-schooled students, because there is no accurate data available or required.)
Until 2009, Illinois law only allowed 60 charter schools to operate. Of those, 30 were permitted in Chicago SD 299, 15 in collar counties and the rest in downstate school districts. With the passage of Public Act 96-0105, the number of permitted charters doubled to 120; 75 in Chicago and 45 downstate. Several districts are considering charter school applications and more are expected in coming years.
As the movement grows, so grows fear that charter schools are helping to create an English-style, two-tiered public school system in the United States. Currently, 40 of the 50 states permit charter schools and more than 1.5 million students are enrolled, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
The film “Waiting for Superman” painted charter schools as the “only way out” for poverty-stricken kids forced to attend “dead-end” public schools where teachers with tenure just “bide their time,” having given up on kids whose social problems are just too insurmountable to overcome. Charter schools, the movie claimed, are not “shackled” by union contracts that force well-meaning administrators to continue employing “bad” teachers.
The film has struck a chord with those who hope that their child will be the one to escape a cycle of poverty through excellent education. That hope was on display in Chicago last fall when the Chicago school board met to discuss closing underperforming schools and opening up more charters. Hundreds of people showed up, blocking streets, demanding to speak. One person even wore a Superman costume.
Hope for reform
“Hope is the thing with feathers,” wrote Emily Dickinson. But within the context of public education, maybe hope flies in on a cape, like Superman.
No matter the imagery, hope is a powerful motivator. However, the reality, according to many studies, is that charter schools, which put public funds into private hands in exchange for promised excellent outcomes, do about the same or maybe only slightly better than public schools.
A glance at the Illinois state report cards bears this out: of 39 charters in the state, 29 did not meet AYP for 2010 and 23 were on academic watch or academic early warning status. A study by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes found that only 17 percent of charter schools nationally did better than the public schools, while 37 percent did worse, and 46 percent did about the same.
Illinois’ newest charter school, Southland College Prep High School, was opened in August 2010 by Blondean Davis, superintendent of Matteson Elementary School District 162, after watching successful students from her elementary district head to the area’s public high school district where scores were lower.
The high school district is now suing the grade school district, in part because it is losing $13,000 in state money for every child who chooses Southland. The high school district director of finances is on record saying that Southland was “bankrupting his district,” something Southland’s administrators vehemently dispute.
In addition to receiving $1.3 million in public funds from the state, Southland College Prep is also bolstered by grants from the Walton Family Foundation and other groups that support education reform.
Southland currently enrolls 125 students and expects to expand to 500 within the next four years. The school says its open enrollment policy is conducted by lottery.
Tracking the money
In addition to providing grants to charter schools such as Southland Prep, millions of private dollars are being spent to make sure that reform efforts and their preferred options of charter schools, school choice and vouchers are being heard and endorsed by lawmakers.
In April, the Illinois Senate unanimously passed SB 7, also known as “Performance Counts,” and the House passed its version with just one dissenting vote. The landmark reform bill, sponsored by Senator Kimberly Lightford (D-Maywood), was a result of intense negotiations with state and Chicago teachers’ unions, reform groups, parent groups and the Illinois School Management Alliance. (Gov. Pat Quinn signed the bill, which took effect immediately, on June 13, 2011.)
Last year before negotiations began, a political action committee for the national reform group Stand for Children collected nearly $3.5 million for Illinois political campaigns. Nine key Democrat and Republican lawmakers received contributions ranging from $10,000 to $175,000, according to the organization’s D-2 filing with the Illinois State Board of Elections.
To say that the dollars had a direct bearing on negotiations would be difficult to substantiate. But to say that they didn’t would be foolish.
The bill makes it harder for teachers to strike in Illinois, reduces tenure protections, and ties teachers’ pay, as well as hiring and firing, to teacher performance. That’s something many teachers say is subjective at best and impossible to measure at worst.
Klonsky, the blogger and art teacher from Park Ridge, was opposed to the bill, despite the unions’ support for it. His blogs caught the attention of a Michigan-based foundation, which demanded to read his work e-mails through FOIA and called for him to be fired.
“The public doesn’t understand tenure,” said Klonsky. “If I had been doing my blog from work, no tenure in the world would have protected me. It does protect me from (outside criticism and influence on his employment). Tenure is designed to protect all teachers from being fired just because you are old, black, sick, female …,” he said.
Or teachers who express their opinions publicly about education reform?
Klonsky, who has negotiated seven union contracts as head of his local teacher’s union, also said that linking teacher pay to student performance doesn’t make sense to him.
“Teachers like me, who teach art, are bracketed out. At my school, we have 400 kids with lots of special needs. We get them all. The district has 25 to 30 speech pathologists, social workers, music and PE teachers, library managers, and other specialists. How do you measure their value?” he asked.
Klonsky cites teacher retention as the real problem.
“Thirty to 40 percent of teachers leave in the first three years of teaching. Not that long ago we were losing too many teachers because of non-competitive salaries and lack of professional policies. But now (they) say we don’t fire enough,” he said.
Ironically, both public school districts and the education reform groups find themselves competing for the same end: getting the country’s best teachers to want to work in the country’s worst-performing schools, especially those with high rates of low income, dropouts and mobility, and large populations of special needs and minority students.
Twenty years ago Wendy Kopp founded “Teach for America,” in part, to address that challenge. The program, which accepts several thousand applicants each year, puts newly minted teachers through a 10-week training program and then distributes them to select school districts for a minimum two-year commitment.
Many laud Kopp for her attempt at school reform: addressing a lack of qualified teachers in low-income schools and keeping those teachers interested in the long-term mission.
But many studies show that first- and even second-year teachers are still struggling to master their craft. Just when many TFA teachers should be hitting their stride, 80 percent leave the field, résumés padded, their commitment met, on to bigger and better things. In their wake: struggling students left behind to meet another new teacher.
As a matter of scale: last year, 28,000 people applied for Teach for America and the organization welcomed 4,485 incoming corps members. That compares to a national teacher base of about 4 million professionals.
Reformers digging in
Meanwhile, the reform juggernaut, led by business leaders and deep-pocket corporate foundations, seems to have sunk in its teeth.
One of those juggernauts, in addition to the Walton Family Foundation (Wal-Mart) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Microsoft), is the Eli and Edyth Broad Foundation.
Eli Broad made billions in California real estate and finance. His foundation has spent more than $440 million influencing decisions and public opinion, as well as financing start ups the foundation deems will impact education in accordance with the founder’s ideological philosophy.
Like Kopp’s Teach for America goal to reform who teaches our most vulnerable students, Broad has attempted to reform who their principals and superintendents are. The Broad Superintendents Academy accepts business and military leaders, as well as people in education, and then provides 10 months of weekend courses, an all-expenses paid curriculum. It then places them in urban districts and even sends funding with them to the district where they find work.
The Broad Academy claims to have 43 of its superintendents placed in cities around the country, including recently appointed Jean-Claude Brizard of Chicago as well as superintendents José M. Torres in Elgin and LaVonne M. Sheffield in Rockford. Sheffield, who recently resigned, followed the Broad school of thought to maximize budgets, recommending school closings, increasing class sizes and layoffs that obviously did not sit well with the community.
Other famous Broad fellows include Joel Klein of New York, whose replacement Cathie Black lasted less than 100 days in charge of the nation’s largest school system, and Michelle Rhee, whose Washington, D.C., schools shake-up ended when her boss Mayor Adrian Fenty lost his re-election bid. Rhee has started a new organization called “Students First,” also with Broad funding support, in order to build grassroots support to transform public education. She has 45,000 followers on her Facebook page.
Many of the billions poured into these reforms haven’t worked. Broad’s training program for principals now is unfunded and deemed non-successful, according to recent reports in Newsweek. And the Gates’ small schools experiment was also deemed not worthy of the hundreds of millions he spent on it.
Diane Ravitch, a noted educational policy maker and senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, recently recanted nearly 30 years of her own school reform positions that had pushed “testing, accountability, choice and markets” as the solutions to low-performing schools’ problems.
Ravitch, who was assistant secretary of education to Lamar Alexander in the George H.W. Bush administration from 1991-93, says in her Death and Life of the Great American School System (Basic Books, 2010): “I was persuaded by accumulating evidence that the latest reforms were not likely to live up to their promise. The more I saw, the more I lost the faith.”
Back to the basics
Despite all the school reform theories, 20 years of study and research on policies and practices, the University of Chicago’s Consortium on Chicago School Research has found that turning around a school must have five essential components in order to be successful.
According to Penny Sebring, a lead researcher on the project and author of Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago, there is no silver bullet for school reform, but there is a reliable recipe. She said a successful school reform turn-around must include:
• Quality instruction that advances the subject matter from one year to the next
• Excellent leadership
• Parental involvement
• A welcoming and student-centered learning environment
• A professional and knowledgeable staff with a sense of responsibility for the whole school, not just their own classroom
Sebring said if any one of these ingredients is missing in a school reform project, then the project is more likely not to succeed. The more ingredients missing, the more likely it will fail.
Another group of university educators started a program called CReATE (Chicagoland Researchers and Advocates for Transformative Education). In February 2011, they published a manifesto on the Internet and hosted a public meeting that addressed what they deemed as the myths and realities of education reform, along with recommendations for Chicago’s new mayor.
The group also provided a list of credentialed education professionals from institutions such as DePaul University, the University of Illinois at Chicago and others, willing to go on record to discuss the group’s conclusions. It also published references to 24 comprehensive research projects to support their position.
Among the myths the group addressed:
• The main problem with education is lazy and incompetent teachers protected by corrupt unions.
• School turnarounds will give “failing” schools a new start.
• Competition and school “choice” are necessary because competition leads to improvement.
• The private sector can do better than the public sector.
• A standardized curriculum with emphasis on basic reading and math will raise standards.
• High-stakes testing is an effective way to measure learning and hold students, educators and schools accountable
In a recent Education Nation broadcast, Illinois Teacher of the Year Annice Brave of Alton High School noted that her school was both a top school and a failing school in the same year, according to US News & World Report rankings and No Child Left Behind test scores. (Note: Reports have surfaced that Education Nation, like Waiting for Superman, is another program sponsored by funding from wealthy foundations seeking to influence public opinion regarding school reform.)
“Teachers can only control so much of what happens around a student’s life that affects a test,” Brave said. “Standardized tests cannot be the only measure. They can be an important measure, but not the only measure.”
And linking testing to teacher evaluations and merit pay also brings up the subject of cheating. Another recent documentary, Race to Nowhere, laments the stress children and teachers are under regarding standardized testing while reporting that of 5,000 students surveyed, only 3 percent admitted to not cheating.
Another teacher commented that school was so much more than reading and math. “How do you measure motivation, hopes and dreams? It’s a big variable, but you cannot measure it,” he said.
So school reform keeps on churning, with people digging in on their positions, and special interests playing a major role. And questions still abound:
Who should decide what is best for public schools? What do we want our schools to teach? What do we want our children to know and be able to do?
Only time will tell as school reform in America moves through the 20-teens and the next best and latest school reform efforts.
One thing is certain: no silver bullet or super human in a cape will provide the answer.