The Myth of the Heroic Leader

This from Larry Cuban at WaPo's Answer Sheet blog:

... the heroic view of superintendents (Wonder Woman, Batman, Superman—take your pick) breaking china in order to build a better district for students—an image loved by media and the public—is a sure-fire recipe for disappointment and cynicism over turning around failing schools.How do I know?

Think Alan Bersin (1998-2005) in San Diego and Mark Shedd (1967-1971) in Philadelphia.

In less than 18 months, Bersin had given electro-shock treatment to a district of 146,000 students in an effort to improve student achievement: He fired administrators, altered the district central office dramatically, and installed a plan to improve achievement by realigning the bureaucracy. National media made him a rock star.

The teachers union and school board, however, fought Bersin every step of the way (after recovering from the initial jolt). He left in 2005. Since then, San Diego has had three superintendents each dismantling the Bersin reforms and in their own ways trying to heal the conflicts of those years. Disappointment and cynicism about school reform are at peak levels in the city.

Most policymakers have heard of Alan Bersin but few remember Mark Shedd
in Philadelphia. The president of the school board of this 285,000-student
district, an ex-mayor of the city, wanted a superintendent who could deal with chronic low performance of the largely minority district, inspire teachers and principals to raise student achievement, and make Philadelphia a national lighthouse for school reform. He brought Harvard-trained Shedd from Englewood, N.J., where he had eased racial tensions over desegregation in a multiracial community.

The 41 year-old Shedd came, saw, and conquered Philadelphia with a deluge of lively ideas. At least, for a short time.

He decentralized the system to give principals more freedom to make decisions; he brought in new reading programs, encouraged the open classroom and service learning; established Black Studies at high schools and alternative schools such as the first “school without walls”; he gave students a "bill of rights.”

But he encountered a deeply resistant bureaucracy in his district office and members of the white community who resented his focus on black students and their problems. He also clashed with then Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo.

A rally of 3,500 black students demanding better schools turned violent after police intervened. More than 50 people were arrested and nearly 30 treated for injuries. Rizzo met with Shedd and the commissioner vowed that he would get rid of the superintendent. He did after he was elected Mayor in 1971.

Rizzo maneuvered the appointment of two “insider” superintendents during the 1970s who quickly dismantled Shedd’s reforms. A statue of Rizzo sits outside the Municipal Building. No statue honors Mark Shedd.

What’s the alternative to heroes entering and exiting leaving broken china scattered behind? Yes, some china must be broken. That’s the easy part. The hard part is building a strong political consensus among teachers, students, parents, and larger community that the job can be done, will take a lot of time, and the folks who can do the job are right here in River City.

Where has this occurred?

Tom Payzant in Boston (1996-2006), Carl Cohn in Long Beach, CA (1992-2002), Pat Forgione in Austin, TX (1999-2009), and Laura Schwalm (1999- ) in Garden Grove, CA.

They wore no capes and donned no tights. They slogged through a decade or more of battles, some of which they lost, to accumulate small victories. They helped create a generation of civic and district leaders and a teacher corps who shared their vision.
They built brick-by-brick the capacities among hundreds and thousands of teachers, principals, parents, and community members to continue the work.

Yes, they angered many and, yes, they fought to win but they persevered. They left legacies that teachers, principals, and parents can, indeed, improve schools by working together.

These superintendents were non-heroic marathoners who finished the race, not sprinters going for the gold that faded well before the finish line.

Miami Argues Over Removal of Schoolbook on Cuba

A three-judge panel heard arguments earlier this month over the Miami-Dade County school board’s decision to remove a children’s book about Cuba from elementary school libraries. Board members said the book painted too rosy a picture of life in Cuba.

“The books are rife with factual omissions, misrepresentations and inaccuracies that render them educationally unsuitable,” Richard Ovelmen, a lawyer for the board, told the judges in the Federal Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. “The basic fact that there is a dictatorship, that there is a regime of 48 years is not mentioned.”

But a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, JoNel Newman, argued, “The school board can’t pull a book because of a political viewpoint.”

The board initially took the 32-page book, “Vamos a Cuba,” and its English version, “A Visit to Cuba,” off school library shelves in June 2006 after a parent objected to its contents.

The book, written by Alta Schreier and published in 2001, is part of a 24-book series for children in kindergarten through second grade that discusses travel around the world and different cultures. Its cover shows smiling schoolchildren dressed in the uniform of the Pioneers, the Communist youth group to which every Cuban student must belong.

This from the New York Times.

Allergic to the Charming Peddlers of Panaceas

Lessons Learned from Urban School Reform

As H. L. Menchan understood, "There is always an easy solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.

Larry Cuban's sober commentary in Education Week outlines the the "dismal history of school reform policy" and discounts those snake oil peddlers who try to reduce the complex problems of school reform to simple sounding solutions. Cuban argues that we "need to think smarter about the steady rollout of school reforms."

Let's review.

Four reform strategies have dominated national policy agendas over the past 25 years.

1. Whole-school reform began in the early 1980s, with the “effective schools” movement’s focus on transforming one school at a time by working on school climate, curriculum, instruction, and testing.
2. Since the early 1990s, vouchers, charter schools, magnets, and theme schools have breathed life into the theory that having a choice of schools motivates parents and engages students.
3. Standards-based accountability shifted into high gear in the 1990s, when U.S. presidents, governors, and mayors embraced it wholeheartedly.
4. The fourth reform strategy is to concentrate authority and accountability in elected federal, state, and local officials who can do something about bad schools.

"The good news in all of this is that some strategies have worked in some districts for a while. Many urban systems using standards-based accountability strategies, for instance, have raised the percentages of their students testing proficient in reading and math in the elementary grades."

"There is bad news, too, however. None of these district reform strategies, alone or in combination, has yet to overcome persistent challenges in raising test scores and graduation rates."

Cuban outlines the challenges school reformers face:

1. Few district reforms are implemented full.
2. Fully implemented strategies still may not alter classroom practice.
3. Failure to improve the lowest quartile of students continues.
4. Sustaining reforms still remains out of reach of most districts.

"If these are the challenges, then what must be done? In trying to think smarter about district reform, I offer the following five questions that reform-minded civic and business leaders, parents, and practitioners must ask again and again when districts advertise major changes in direction:

1. Did the reform strategy’s new structures and processes (standards-based accountability, choice, governance, and so forth) get fully implemented? Incompletely implemented reform means you never know whether what was invested ever worked, much less touched teachers and students.

2. When implemented, did they change the content and practice of teaching? Putting parental-choice structures and curriculum standards in place occurs frequently. But if these are intended to alter classroom content and practices, and yet cause hardly a ripple of change in what teachers and students do daily, then the reform has failed.

3. Did altered classroom content and teaching practice lead to desired student learning? If the answer is yes, exactly what students learned from the changes teachers instituted in content and methods must be determined and documented. If the answer is no, then dump the reform.

4. Was student learning captured by state tests? Some of what students learn in classrooms as a result of reform policies can be assessed by standardized tests, but much cannot. If the state tests miss, say, critical-thinking skills—a desired outcome—then either they should be changed or other assessments used.

5. Did students who achieved proficiency on state tests go to college, graduate, and enter jobs paying solid salaries? This question puts on trial the quarter-century- old assumption that education is linked to the economy, and demands evidence on whether the assumption is accurate. Few districts do this.

If the challenges to current reform strategies are met, and these questions answered, then the deeper (and unaddressed) issues of student access to equitable resources can come to the surface: the narrowness of current definitions of “good” schools, for example, and whether or not schools alone can make a difference in students’ lives. If that happens, we will finally be thinking smarter about school reform."