Anecdotes Don’t Fix Learning At Scale

We love anecdotes.

Public school advocates especially like anecdotes, especially those that explain away the problems our current educational system faces.

Recently, the Texas Education Agency (TEA) won a court case allowing it to replace the school board and superintendent in Houston.

Mike Morath, the Texas education commissioner, gave an interview to a local Houston television station. He started the interview with what? You guessed it. An anecdote.

Morath likes to tell the story about why he sold his software company and joined the Dallas school board. While serving as a big brother to a 16 year-old, Morath found out that his “little” was illiterate enough not to be able to fill out a job application to an ice cream store. According to Morath, “You don’t know why the Lord puts you on the path you’re on, but I was struck by this enough that I wanted to do everything in my power to make sure this never happened to any kid in Dallas again if I had anything to do with it.”

So Morath became a Dallas school board member and eventually became the Texas Education Agency’s commissioner.

And now he is leading state takeover efforts toward the Houston Independent School District (HISD), partly because 40% of Houston’s third graders read on grade level. And I’m sure part of what is driving Morath to do what he’s doing in Houston is because of his anecdote shared above.

But the problem is that anecdotes don’t fix learning problems. Often anecdotes only make the teller and their audience feel better.

I’m afraid Morath and TEA’s efforts in Houston will fail, much like HISD’s efforts to fix their failing schools have failed in the past.

Full disclosure – I worked in the Houston public schools for 25 years and then led an educational non-profit that worked with Houston another 10 years. Many of the schools on Morath’s low-performing list have been low-performing since 1984, the year I started teaching in the district.

That’s nearly 40 years of low performance. Generations of failure.

And do you know what Morath’s solutions are to the Houston schools that have been failing for 40 years?

Replacing the school board and superintendent.

That’s it. Replacing the school board and superintendent.

Morath claims that this strategy has improved other school districts across Texas. I doubt that, since most state takeovers in the past have involved financial malfeasance instead of learning woes. Of those districts that were taken over because of learning concerns, I’m guessing most of them fell back into low-performing behaviors after the state left.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, if you asked me for an organization less prepared to take on the learning challenges inside Houston than the current school district, I would have to answer the Texas Education Agency.

Their lack of imagination and creativity when it comes to helping districts help their kids become smarter and stronger learners is palpable.

What would help Houston improve their schools?

A plan that starts with training a new corps of adult learning leaders – let’s call them learning coaches. These coaches would be skilled in helping young learners and their families develop learning plans, much like what a special education student currently has, that would chronicle learning goals in the areas of reading, writing, problem-solving, and character development.

Once learning coaches are trained, offer families whose children currently attend low-performing Houston schools an education savings account, to be applied to schooling options selected by the family. Governor Greg Abbott is pushing education savings accounts, or vouchers, in the legislative session underway, so this could be a win-win situation – testing the effectiveness of vouchers in Texas while offering real choice to young learners and their families.

Families could use their education savings account to hire a learning coach to help them build a learning plan for their young learner. Families could use their voucher to join a homeschool, learning pod, or micro-school, with or without the support of a learning coach. Families could use state money to enroll in a private school. Or they could apply their education savings account toward enrolling their young learner in another Houston school, since the low-performing school they went to in the past would be closed and no longer an option.

Under this action research project, young learners would start owning their own learning by creating their own learning plans, with the assistance of their parents or possibly a professional learning coach. If reading, writing, and problem-solving skills increased, Houston could offer this choice to any family currently enrolled in traditional school. This would be real learner choice, and not choice constrained by places called schools.

Excuse me if I yawn at the Texas Education Agency’s weak attempt to assist Houston in improving their public schooling. If Mike Morath and TEA were really serious about improving schooling and building life-long learners, then they would surely become more creative about what they were offering young learners and their families.

Friday News Roundup tomorrow. SVB