Tag: michelle rhee

Should She Stay or Should She Go? Michelle Rhee and the Upcoming DC Election

Posted on | by Sam | 13 Comments on Should She Stay or Should She Go? Michelle Rhee and the Upcoming DC Election

(NOTE: This article also appeared in the Washington Post.)

It’s almost election season in DC, which means I need to decide once and for all if Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee – and, by extension, Mayor Adrian Fenty – deserve another four years at the helm.

Here are the arguments as I see them:

On one hand, it’s incontrovertible that Rhee has sparked both local and national conversations that were long overdue. Her decision to show up at a DCPS warehouse, with cameras, and shine a light on a system so dysfunctional and disorganized that it allowed seemingly scarce resources to remain unused was both brilliant and galvanizing. Her determination to confront the fecklessness of our current teacher evaluation system placed the issue front and center in discussions of systemic reform, where it belongs. And her millennial focus on eradicating the generational injustices of our school system has turned the issue into a mainstream conversation-starter. Those are major accomplishments for which she is largely responsible. Shame on the rest of us for not figuring out, much earlier, how to inject this work with a similar, undeniable sense of urgency. And woe is we if she leaves after just four years and the city returns to square one, denying us all the chance to make a more detailed judgment on the viability of her strategies for lasting change.

On the other hand, Rhee’s primary weapon – a fierce, uncompromising rhetoric – has also been her Achilles heel. She has recklessly alienated a majority of the very people she most needs for lasting reform to occur: DC’s public school teachers. Her unwavering reliance on “data” – and a limited definition of data at that – is leading us toward a system where schools and educators are incentivized to relentlessly, and with great discipline, move the needle on a single measure of basic-skills proficiency in math and reading. This is an extremely effective political strategy for it locates a nebulous and Sisyphean effort in a single, easily trackable number. It’s also, I believe, a largely illusory effort that hinders our ability to identify truly aspirational standards for children, and apply the same level of discipline and determination toward the establishment of a school system that is aligned around what young people really need in order to be successful in college, throughout their chosen careers, and as active and responsible citizens in our democracy.

In sum, my chief concern is that Rhee will be unable to generate what noted school reform expert Michael Fullan has described as the single most important resource for bringing about systemic change – collective capacity, or the ability to “generat[e] the emotional commitment and the technical expertise that no amount of individual capacity working alone can come close to matching.”

As I’ve written previously, this does NOT mean Ms. Rhee is merely required to give people more opportunities to collaborate. What is required, though, is disciplined, strategically employed collaboration that fosters a shared vision of how to create the optimal learning environment for children (as opposed to the optimal testing environment). As Fullan writes: “The gist of the strategy is to mobilize and engage large numbers of people who are individually and collectively committed and effective at getting results relative to core outcomes that society values. It works because it is focused, relentless (i.e., stays the course), operates as a partnership between and across layers, and above all uses the collective energy of the whole group. There is no way of achieving whole-system reform if the vast majority of the people are not working on it together.”

There are many people I respect who believe this is exactly what Michelle Rhee is bringing about. I have just as many friends and colleagues who are equally convinced that Rhee will be unable to move the city any further on its overall reform efforts.

It may be clear which way I’m leaning, but what do you think? Does Rhee deserve four more years to make a true go of it and see if DC can achieve the impossible? Or is her relentless focus on test score data and an oppositional rhetoric a guarantee that any lasting change that comes about will not be the true change we seek?

All Systems Go!

Posted on | by Sam

Increasingly, I hear people talking about the need for “systems change” and “systems thinking,” and when I do I always wonder what people mean when they say it.

My own interest in systems thinking began a few years ago when I read Peter Senge’s classic The 5th Discipline. It influenced me so much that I dedicated a full chapter to the subject in my new book American Schools. Overall, though, I haven’t seen a lot of work in education based on systems thinking. But that seems to be changing.

I’m particularly excited about Michael Fullan’s new book, All Systems Go: The Change Imperative for Whole System Reform, which I just finished and highly recommend. Not surprisingly, the book begins with a foreword from Senge, who grounds the origins of our current system in the Industrial era. “That’s why they were organized like an assembly line,” he writes. “That’s why they were based on standardized timetables governing each part of the day (complete with bells and whistles on the walls), and fixed, rigid curricula delivered by teachers whose job was first and foremost to maintain control, much like an assembly-line foreman.” Senge urges us to imagine a very different challenge today. “The challenge of our time is not economic competitiveness. The challenge is to build not only “sustainable” but also regenerative societies — ones than enhance natural and social capital.”

Amen. And in the pages that follow, Fullan shows how that work is taking place in a number of different places around the world. He cuts to the chase on page one: “If there is one thing you should remember  . . . it is the concept of collective capacity,” which Fullan defines as “generating the emotional commitment and the technical expertise that no amount of individual capacity working alone can come close to matching.”

Fullan says, and I agree, that collective capacity is the hidden resource we fail to understand or cultivate. Instead, we overvalue single-resource strategies — making smaller classrooms, raising salaries, drafting common standards, etc. — when what we need is an investment in compound resource strategies. Smaller classrooms mean nothing, after all, unless the move is coordinated with relevant professional learning for teachers that helps them employ new teaching strategies. And adding national standards will mean nothing if the end result is merely more national exams and less high-quality locally driven assessments using the standards as a common frame. But this is what we do, over and over again. We’re playing a game of chess as though it’s checkers, making one move at a time.

This does NOT mean that all we need to do is give people more opportunities to collaborate. What Michelle Rhee understands, I think correctly, is that collaboration, or student voice, or democratic governance, is not an end in itself (as I alluded to in a previous post titled, “To What Do We Owe Our Fidelity?”) What is required instead, and what Rhee fails to grasp, is disciplined, strategically-employed collaboration that fosters a shared vision of how to create the optimal learning environment for children (and, by extension, adults). As Fullan writes: “Quality instruction requires getting a small number of practices right. These practices involve knowing clearly and specifically what each student can or cannot do, followed by tailored intervention that engages students in the particular learning in question, and then does the assessment-instruction-correction process on a continuous basis.”

Fullan provides myriad examples throughout the book, but a particularly illustrative one comes from Ontario, where government officials realized they needed to provide resolute leadership on some core priorities that could impact not just the government education agencies, but also district and local school leaders. The government realized that if it wanted to engage the whole system in a coherent, focused effort, it needed to do three things:

  1. focus on a small number of ambitious instructional goals
  2. create an instructional capacity capability to help coordinate the efforts of the many players (government, district and local ed leaders)
  3. change the culture of the state education ministry so that it had greater internal coherence and a commitment to work in a true two-way partnership

As someone living in DC, I read Fullan’s case study of Ontario and saw an immediate disconnect between what they did and where we’re headed. In particular, check out this quote:

The gist of the strategy is to mobilize and engage large numbers of people who are individually and collectively committed and effective at getting results relative to core outcomes that society values. It works because it is focused, relentless (i.e., stays the course), operates as a partnership between and across layers, and above all uses the collective energy of the whole group. There is no way of achieving whole-system reform if the vast majority of the people are not working on it together.

To me, that last word sums up why I worry that Michelle Rhee will not be able to move the city any further on its overall reform efforts. In work this massive and important, how we speak, and not just what we say, matters greatly. (This is what I was trying to get at in my recent review of the new film The Lottery as well.) Fullan’s book convincingly demonstrates that systemic reform is difficult but possible. It also demonstrates, once again, that until the tenor of our national conversation suggests a deep awareness of, and commitment to, working together to achieve results, our efforts at developing collective capacity will remain agonizingly out of reach.

The Testing Carousel Goes Round and Round . . .

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on The Testing Carousel Goes Round and Round . . .

Today’s Washington Post reports that the test scores of elementary school kids slipped this year after two successive years of growth, “a setback to Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee as she seeks to overhaul the city’s schools.”

No doubt, this news is being used by Rhee’s critics to point out that her particular brand of reform can’t bring the city the lasting change in its public schools that everyone desires. Meanwhile, Rhee responded to the news with equanimity. “We like to celebrate when we do well, and when we don’t, we have to take responsibility,” she said. “We have to own this and figure out how to move forward.”

Can I please make a wish to the education fairy and ask that this be the last of this sort of story I ever see? For those of us who believe that the best way to assess a school’s overall health involves a balanced scorecard of assessments, we can’t have it both ways — you can’t criticize Rhee for focusing on tests, and then lambaste her when those same scores are poor. It either is or isn’t a viable way to assess the health of a school.

In that same spirit, why aren’t folks like Rhee proactively diffusing these sorts of stories by getting out in front of the curve and releasing their own bundle of assessment measures, as a way to diffuse the potential power of the test scores when viewed in isolation? Rhee could do this immediately, without even getting into the contentious issue of using performance assessments. The city could stitch together an interim scorecard, made up entirely of existing measures (student and faculty absenteeism rates, student disciplinary data, graduation rates, a balanced set of course offerings, school climate surveys, and yes, test scores) and use it to educate the public about the many elements that go into a high-quality learning environment? Depending on what the data tell us, it might even lead to some insights that could drive future policy proposals. So let’s stop bickering over the wrong thing — otherwise, we’ll be stuck interminably on this basic-skills testing carousel, and forced to watch it go round and round while other countries are actively revising their education systems to become more effective at imparting higher-order skills and preparing children for the 21st century.

We can do better.

Data-Driven Decision Making . . . and Soccer?

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on Data-Driven Decision Making . . . and Soccer?

Great timing.

A week after I wrote about what the World Cup can teach us about school reform, the New York Times published an article about the growing push for more detailed data in the relatively data-free world of professional soccer.

I am not, for what it’s worth, against the use of more sophisticated data in making decisions about how to improve the learning conditions for kids (or, for that matter, how to make better decisions on the soccer pitch). Who would be? In fact, I’ve written in the past about how a balanced scorecard in schools would help educators do their jobs more effectively.

That being said, I am very much against the glorification of data as a way to make extremely subjective, non-linear things — like learning how to use one’s mind well, or watching a collective burst of creativity and synchronicity that leads to a beautiful soccer goooooooaaaaaaal — into extremely objective, linear things for which we can appropriately plan and script out a desired, predictable response.

I don’t think it’s coincidental that this new push for soccer data is reported the same week as an announcement in my home city that Chancellor Michelle Rhee intends to significantly expand the use of standardized tests so that “every D.C. student from kindergarten through high school is regularly assessed to measure academic progress and the effectiveness of teachers.” What’s afoot in both instances is, on one hand, the (appropriate) desire to take human ingenuity and apply it to situations that in the past have lacked specificity, and, on the other, the (inappropriate) effort to make everything quantifiable, resulting in an overreliance on that which can be measured — at the expense of everything else.

Notably, the push for soccer data seems far more measured than what I see in education. According to Mark Brunkhart, the president of a company that provides soccer data for a fee to clubs and news organizations, he and his staff do not blindly evangelize statistics. Every month or two, he says, he gets a call from a professor or graduate student who is a rabid soccer fan and just finished Moneyball, the book that brought sabermetrics into the mainstream in 2003. (I wrote about Moneyball and its potentially positive implications for school reform in a 2009 column titled “What Would Theo Do?”)

“Every single one comes with the idea that they’re going to solve soccer with the ‘Moneyball’ approach,” Brunkhart said, “and I try to talk them all down.” Similarly, the president of the Society for American Baseball Research pointed to Miroslav Klose’s second goal in Germany’s 4-0 victory against Argentina in the World Cup quarterfinals as an example of how statistics seem to overlook the nuance and elegance of soccer. “A series of three or four absolutely beautiful passes — how do you capture that?” he said. “It’s just the nature of the game.”

Would that I were seeing similar restraint among our education leaders. As longtime educator Ted Sizer once said, “Inspiration, hunger: these are the qualities that drive good schools. The best we educational planners can do is to create the most likely conditions for them to flourish, and then get out of their way.”

More Tests on the Way in DC?

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on More Tests on the Way in DC?

In yesterday’s Washington Post, reporter Bill Turque wrote that Michelle Rhee is seeking an outside contractor to help dramatically expand DCPS’ use of standardized tests, so that every grade from K through 12 will have some form of assessment to measure student progress and teacher effectiveness.

Is this what happens when we pray too long at the altar of “data-driven decision making?”

Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for what that concept actually means — using information to guide all decisions about how to help children learn more effectively — but the faulty logic here is that adding more standardized tests at the end of every school year will achieve that worthy goal. Wouldn’t it be better to start exploring how to strategically bundle other existing measures that tell us a lot about a school’s overall health (such as attendance, graduation rates, faculty absenteeism, and, yes, attitudinal surveys of the students themselves)? Wouldn’t it be better to start experimenting with ways to have other schools in the District implement student portfolio assessments as effectively as the good people at Thurgood Marshall Academy — recently profiled on CBS News — have done?And wouldn’t it be better to stop pretending that systemic reform, and the impact those changes will have on individual students, can be as easily monitored and measured as these tests suggest?

Bring on the information revolution, I say — and this ain’t it.

John Wooden, Barack Obama & Why Smart People Are Stoopid

Posted on | by Sam | 4 Comments on John Wooden, Barack Obama & Why Smart People Are Stoopid

This week’s Frank Rich column may not be about education policy, but it might as well be.

Writing about the president’s handling of the BP oil spill, Rich believes Obama’s “most conspicuous flaw is his unshakeable confidence in the collective management brilliance of the best and the brightest he selected for his White House team — “his abiding faith in the judgment of experts,” as Joshua Green of The Atlantic has put it.

This is the primary issue I have with the leading voices of education reform today. I’ve heard Joel Klein suggest “we know how to do this” — referring to comprehensive education reform — when the truth is all we know how to do is move the needle on student test scores, not transform an apartheid education system that relies on one method of instruction for the poor, and another for the privileged. I’ve heard Michelle Rhee assert that “collaboration and consensus building are quite frankly overrated in my mind.” And I’ve grown weary of the myraid other voices who confidently participate in a groupthinkian rush to the illusory Altar of Certainty, long before we have in place the necessary metrics for a much more finely calibrated understanding of whether our schools are giving children what they really need — a balanced comprehensive education that teaches them to use their minds well over the long haul.

It seems fitting, then, that Rich’s piece would appear in a day the Times’ Sports page offered its paean to the Wizard of Westwood, John Wooden, our country’s greatest-ever coach, an exceedingly humble man who always considered himself a teacher first — and a molder of men first, and basketball players second.

Coach Wooden was known for many memorable maxims, many of which — like “Be quick, but don’t hurry” — could helpfully guide our current reform efforts if heeded. But it’s another Woodenism I thought of as I finished Rich’s piece about Obama’s Best and Brightest: “Talent is God given. Be humble. Fame is man-given. Be grateful. Conceit is self-given. Be careful.”

What the NFL Draft Can Teach School Reformers

Posted on | by Sam

This Thursday marks the prime-time return of the NFL Draft — an annual smorgasbord of possibility when each team fills out its roster with the best talent the college ranks have to offer.

I’m a huge football fan, so I’ll be tuning in to see which players my beloved San Diego Chargers select to fill our current holes at running back and defensive tackle. I’m also a huge public education fan, so I confess that I wish the leading voices in my field — from Arne Duncan to Michelle Rhee to Joel Klein — would also tune in, and heed some of the most relevant lessons to be learned from the NFL.

In particular, I wish they’d pay attention to three truisms:

Why Send My Son to Public School?

Posted on | by Sam

Earlier this week, Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee announced the latest hopeful sign for D.C.’s public schools – a spike in citywide student reading and math scores. “We’re thrilled at the progress we’ve made this year,” said Rhee. “We still have an incredibly long way to go.”

I’m grateful for the early improvements in the D.C. schools – and I share Chancellor Rhee’s caution. We all know standardized test scores offer just one window into the health of a school system. Any business school student also knows it’s foolish to judge an organization’s overall health based on a single measure of success. And yet the United States is the only nation with an accountability system based solely on standardized test scores.

We can do better. That’s why local leaders like Michelle Rhee, and national leaders like Arne Duncan, should lead the charge in demanding a better accountability system for our schools.

Here are four things we could do that would make a difference: