School Reform
We are at the end of another school year, and a year or so into a new administration in Washington. This is the time when the focus is on what reforms a new year in the Public schools to try to improve learning, graduation rates, and general public perception.
Unfortunately the later is often what is the focus of public school reform. Schools will, and always have, <a href=”http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/06/60II/main591676.shtml”>manipulated numbers to create the impression they are doing a better job than they are</a>. Students are strategically removed from a school to improve scores. Attendance numbers are faked. Student who drop out are misclassified as moving to another school. In essence, schools, like corporations have been doing for year, are cooking the books so that stake holders believe that the situation is all milk and honey. As the continuos financial crisis since 2001 have shown, such fabrication almost always lead to very negative consequences.
This is why only structural changes taht promote learning, not end of year quality control, are useful. As an analogy take a look at the current oild spill in the gulf. Drilling for oil is a very complex procedure, and incidents will happen. The way to minimize these incidents is to insure quality through the process, not just a the end. If the rig has been built properly, it likely never would have exploded, and we would not likely not be in the current situation. While testing of milestones is important, those tests much be truly high stakes, meaning no work continues if quality does not exist, and the test must be backed up with a culture that builds in quality, not just adds it at the last minute with jury rigged additions.
No Child Left Behind, even with all it’s faults, did add two critical structural elements to the school system. The first is the ‘Well Qualified Teacher’. The well qualified teacher not only knows that art and science of teaching, but also the subject being taught. Unfortunately, as in a political process, loopholes were left open. A minor problem is that a teacher can be in the process of becoming well qualified and still teach. Since a teacher tends to a have bachelor degree in the subject being taught, this is more like on the job training. A more critical loophole is that charter schools, those publicly funded schools that often teach our students in most need of an excellent teacher, can have state exemption to the well qualified teacher.
A second issue is the high stakes testing. This is where we see the importance of the quality control process. If I manufacturing a part with 13 steps, say steps k-12, I will have at least one quality check at each step. If I am really smart, and can hire the proper staff, I would have the line worker that actaully completes eat step to perform the quality check of the product at the ingress of egress of each step. If a part does not meet the spec, it would either be sent back or reworked. A part that is sent back would incurr a higher penalty than a part that is reworked within a department. At the end of the line a part is inspected, and if does not meet spec, is investigated, the department that missed the spec is determined, and some further penalty is applied. This is of course an overgeneralization, but it is what is often attributed to manufacturing, and is the method of high stakes testing in the school today.
At each grade level a test is given. If the student does not pass then test, then the student is reworked. At certain steps, or grades, the student is held back, unless a committee says not to. The big difference is that the only people who are penalized for off spec end product is the high school teacher. This system does not encourage quality at each step, any more that the BP procedures did.
This is what I was thinking about as I read a the recent review of <a href=”http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/328/5982/1107″>A Reformer’s Change of Heart</a> in a recent issue of Science Magazine. Like Diane Ravitch, I have come to see testing as a tool of limited value. Not becasue measuement and quality assurance is not good, but because we do not have the feeback mechansims we need. A student may not meet the standards of a test, but what can we do with those results? If we have enough such students we can close the school, but what do we replace it with? Do we close down the Gulf to drilling or close down BP because of an uncontrolled spill? Do we close down the banks becasuse they nearly crash the economy? No.
We can hold student back, but does that work for all, even most, students. Social promotion is a norm, and holding students back and closing schools are just threats that cannot be universally enforced, so why waste our time with a threat?
Then there is letter in another issue of Nature , stated the, in my opinion, quite obvious fact that <a href=”http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v465/n7295/full/465157a.html”>Asia should be educating kids for innovation, not taking tests</a>. By corollary, US education should not go the test taking route, but continue our successful educational system that encourages students to innovate. By it’s imperfection, by it’s lack of absolute structure, it requires students to innovate to be successful.
So what can we do to keep our tradition of innovation and improve quality control through testing. First, while it is reasonable to enforce absolute or growth test standards at certail places in the educational process, the enforcement process must be geared to help the student, not punish teachers or students. These means innovative alternatives. If a student is not succeeding, that likely means the process is not working. Like manufacturing, if a process is not working that does not mean we blame the material or the worker. We must adjust the process. Charter schools can be part of this adjustment. A big issue is at the middle school level. If a student is failing in a traditional middle school, the a charter school might help, or some other program. It is silly to do what we are doing now which is to just infinitely reprocess. If we are taking measurement, we must respond to these in a meaningful manner.
Second, we must innovate the proces so we can respond to all feedback, not only formalized testing. but any meaningful object measure we might wish to make. In my opinion this innovation must involve some sort of skills based process. Not in the traditional sense of fixing air conditioning, but in the basic skills sense. If we teach a student who an air condition works, then they can not only fix but improve. If we teach a student how to program a computer, then they can improve, not only fix.
This to me is the key. If we have skill based schools, charter or otherwise, that not only teach basic skills but an innovative process, then that is a useful school. If we have schools, charter or otherwsie, that are required to teach all students as much as possible, or place them in better environments based on objective data, then we have schools that will educate. Right now we have schools, mostly charter, that just pick the students they want, and ship the unwanted students elsewhere. The comprehensvice schools are punished for trying to teach all students, whille the other are lauded for teaching the few. We known how to teach the few. We have the innovative process to teach everyone. It is just hat teaching everyone requires work.
