Tag: school policy

Positively Deviant School Reform?

Posted on | by Sam

If you had six months, little to no resources, and a clear mandate to solve a chronic country-wide problem – knowing that, if you failed, you would be asked to leave that country altogether – what would you do?

I ask because this was precisely the challenge Save the Children was faced with, in Vietnam, in the early 1990s. And the way they succeeded has great relevance for those of us who continue to struggle with other intractable problems (like, say, comprehensive school reform).

In 1990, two-thirds of Vietnamese children under the age of five were suffering from malnutrition. A string of typhoons had decimated the country’s central food staple: rice. Consequently, traditional supplemental feeding programs offered little more than a temporary solution.

Under these circumstances, Save the Children (STC) was asked to help Vietnam solve its widening problem of child malnutrition – and told that the solution could not come from more food, more money, or more resources of any kind: the people were going to have to solve the problem themselves. And if STC couldn’t help them figure out how in six months, its visa would not be renewed.

In response to these desperate circumstances, STC decided the first thing they should do was see if any of the country’s poorest families had children who weren’t malnourished; surely, if there were, something valuable could be learned from them. As STC’s Jerry Sternin explains, “Aid workers visited households, asked questions, and, most importantly, observed how mothers and other family members fed and cared for their well-nourished kids.” And as it turned out, “in every instance where a poor family had a well-nourished child, the mother or father was collecting tiny shrimps or crabs or snails (the size of one joint of one finger) from the rice paddies and adding these to the child’s diet, along with the greens from sweet potato tops. Although readily available and free for the taking, the conventional wisdom held these foods to be inappropriate, or even dangerous, for young children.”

Other atypical habits emerged. Most families fed their young children twice a day – in the morning, before they left to work in rice fields, and in the afternoon, after they returned. But because small children have small stomachs, they could only eat so much of the available rice at each sitting. By contrast, the outlier parents had instructed an adult in the house (usually a grandparent or older sibling) to feed their children regularly – as much as five times a day. As a result, even though every family had the same amount of rice, some children were getting twice as many calories as their friends and neighbors.

Armed with these insights, STC worked to help the parents of the malnourished children change their behavior. Within weeks, the early morning trip to the rice paddy with a small net and empty tin can – for retrieving the shrimp, crabs and greens – had become routine. And by the time STC’s six months were up, more than 40% of the children who participated in the program were rehabilitated; another 20% moved from severe malnutrition to moderate malnutrition; and Save the Children received another six-month visa.

What explains STC’s remarkable success? A strategy called Positive Deviance (PD) – or the idea that in every community, there are already individuals and/or groups behaving in a way that will engender better solutions to community-wide problems.

As the Positive Deviance Institute explains, the PD approach “is an asset-based, problem-solving, and community-driven approach that enables the community to discover these successful behaviors and strategies and develop a plan of action to promote their adoption by all concerned.” And as Sternin suggests, “because PD is based on the successful behaviors of individuals and groups within the socio-cultural context of each program community, it is always, by definition, culturally appropriate. It is very much an ‘approach’ not a ‘model.’”

As someone who cares deeply about American public education, I believe the PD approach could yield great returns for our ongoing reform efforts – but only if we become clear on what it is that constitutes “positive deviance.”

Currently, we celebrate the teachers or schools that demonstrate unusual gains in reading and math scores. But that’s like trying to solve malnutrition by focusing on whether children eat out of bowls or on a plate; it’s related to the goal, but only indirectly.

What, then, is the central goal of American school reform? I would suggest it’s creating a system that is capable of supporting the development and growth – cognitively, socially, emotionally, and ethically – of every child. And if that is our goal (or close to it), then our examples of positive deviance must come from schools and communities that, despite limited resources, are helping children to holistically develop and grow.

That means no private school examples will suffice – and it means no highly unique, highly expensive models like Harlem Children’s Zone. It probably also needs to mean only public schools that do not screen for certain types of students – so, no magnets, either. We’re looking for places that are positively deviant even though they have the same resources as the rest of us.

So who fits the bill? For districts that are reorienting themselves around the personalized needs of every student, we might want to spend more time looking at what RSU2 is doing in Maine, or what superintendent Pam Moran has helped engineer in Albemarle County, Virginia. For individual schools that are attuned to the holistic developmental needs of kids, we can look to Malcolm Price Lab School in Iowa, or The Project School in Indiana. And for networks that help their members focus on the right combination of inputs and outcomes for kids, we should study Expeditionary Learning, New Tech Network, and James Comer’s School Development Program.

There are, in other words, lots of examples of positive deviance in our current system – and lots of places that are refusing to be limited by the current myopic definition of what constitutes “success.” And while none of these places are perfect, together, their examples of positive deviance just might add up to the perfect plan for American public education going forward.

What other examples are you aware of — and what is the positive deviance your example brings to light?

(This article originally appeared in Huffington Post.)

OK, Brown v. Board is 60; Now What?

Posted on | by Sam

As I travel around the country this month, participating in public conversations about the promise and peril of school choice, it seems fitting that right as we marked the 60th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, I would end up having lunch with Michael Alves.

For those of you that don’t know, Alves has made a career out of helping communities and districts craft new student assignment policies that promote greater equity throughout their schools.

The 1980 effort to create more diverse schools in Cambridge, Massachusetts? That was Alves. The celebrated effort to merge city and county schools in Raleigh, North Carolina? Alves. Indeed, although as recently as 2000 the number of U.S. school districts pursuing socioeconomic integration policies could be added up on one hand, today there are more than 80 that are using socioeconomic status as a factor in student assignment – and Alves has had a hand in almost all of them.

A bald, jovial Bostonian who raised his six boys in a stately house that was built in 1882, Alves provides a clarity to core questions of equity that I rarely encounter in school reform circles. “The problem with most of the current efforts around school choice,” he explained, “is that we aren’t clear on what the goals are. The goal can’t be a zero-sum game between charters and districts. So how do kids get distributed? In my mind, the purpose of any student assignment policy should be to facilitate the mission and vision of the district. Is our goal to promote greater socioeconomic diversity? Are we motivated by a need to ease overcrowding? Whatever the answer, you can’t craft a good plan unless you really understand the makeup of your community. And the reality is that charters are operating as their own islands, and most school districts don’t know much more than the percentage of their kids that receive free and reduced lunch. That’s not good enough.”

To help districts solve this information problem, Alves has a simple solution: treat student registration the way an obstetrician treats a pregnant mother’s first visit to the doctor’s office. “When a couple makes that first visit to the OB/GYN,” he says, “the doctor gets all kinds of information – not to hurt the child, but to help him. We tell districts to do the same. When that parent registers their child, schools should be asking all kinds of questions (all of which are voluntary): what is the monthly income of the household; how many adults are in the house; how many other children are there in the house; what is the highest educational attainment level of the parents; what sort of preschool program was the child enrolled in; and so on.

“Everything we ask is designed to create an assignment algorithm that correlates to educational readiness while still prioritizing proximity,” Alves continued. “Once districts start to understand, on a more granular level, where their kids are coming from and what their school readiness is likely to be, they have the chance to craft assignment policies that ensure a more equitable distribution of children and families across their network of schools.”

“We have diversity everywhere, except in schools. “Where you live, you live. But that doesn’t mean you have to go to school strictly based on where you live.”

For me, that last point is one we need to take more seriously as we mark the 60th anniversary of The U.S. Supreme Court’s historic decision in Brown – and our inability to fulfill its promise. Too often, we assume that schools and school policies can somehow solve by themselves the intractable, entrenched legacies of race-and class-based inequity in American society. But schools can’t impact economic and housing policies, or deepen our commitment to public health. And even though the Court came within one vote, in 1973, of ruling that the way we fund schools – via property taxes – was unconstitutional, the reality is that many of our most celebrated school reform efforts are actually deepening, not diminishing, our commitment to “separate but equal” schools.

This is why I support school choice – albeit not the limited concept of choice that so many want to promote. Simply put, you can’t solve the equity problem in American society merely by razing the old system and rebuilding everything from scratch. But neither can you solve it solely by preserving and improving what we already have; a both/and strategy is needed, one that creates space for new schools and ideas, and that puts as much energy into renovating the old as it does to revering the new.

What would such a strategy look like? I’d start by having more urban districts mirror the efforts of Boston Public Schools, which has built into its traditional district model the space to seed 21 schools that have charter-like autonomy, and keep them within the larger network of the district. Does the system work perfectly in its efforts to have the best ideas of those pilot schools funnel through the rest of the schools in the district? No. But as Mission Hill principal Ayla Gavins puts it, “what the pilot program does is create the conditions for greater innovation and collaboration to take place; the rest is up to us.”

Next, I’d encourage more schools to adopt intentional, district-wide socioeconomic diversity assignment policies – the sorts of policies Michael Alves has been tinkering with for over thirty years. “I believe a central goal for any district should be to help any kid at any school feel like, “No matter who I am, I fit in somewhere at that school. No one wants to be the ‘only’ anything – that’s the goal; that’s inclusion. And that’s the only way, until these other aspects of our society change, we can get closer to the promise of Brown.”

Raze and renovate. Freedom within structure. And policies that balance individual choice alongside communal commitments to equity.

Would that sort of recipe get us closer to honoring the Court’s declaration, on May 17, 1954, that education is “a right which must be made available to all on equal terms?”

I think it would.

(This article originally appeared in Education Week.)