When Public Becomes Private
Earlier this month, The 74 online’s Tim DeRoche wrote,
“You might think public schools are open to everyone. Unfortunately, they’re not. I’ve spent the last five years looking at the admissions criteria and enrollment procedures for America’s top public elementary schools, and they operate under an archaic and discriminatory assignment system that sorts kids into schools based on government-drawn maps.”
“In theory, it’s supposed to ensure that kids get to attend the public school nearest their home. That’s often not the case, as powerful parents push for assignment to better public schools in wealthier parts of town.”
“More importantly, the policy empowers public elementary schools – under the cover of law – to turn children away because of where they live. The most coveted public schools have zones that cover the more expensive parts of town: those with large single-family homes on large lots. Then, because of the attendance zone, everybody bids up the real estate even further, inflating home prices by as much as $300,000. The inequalities of access then become insurmountable. The vast majority of American families are priced out of these homes, and out of these coveted schools.”
“In my old neighborhood in Los Angeles, living on one side of the street or the other can determine whether a child attends a public school with 75% reading proficiency or 16%. Of course, test scores aren’t everything, and I don’t believe any parent should rely solely on them when judging a school’s quality. But we should all be skeptical of someone who pays $300,000 so their kids can attend a specific public school and then turns around and argues the school isn’t actually any better than the one down the street. (This is the argument that I heard from some of my old neighbors when I suggested that the elite public elementary school in the neighborhood, Mount Washington Elementary, should be opened up to some of the working-class Hispanic families who live just blocks away.)”
When I was a region superintendent, there was a street where if you lived on one side you attended schools that scored 30-50 points higher on average on state tests than if you lived on the other side. Kids on one side of the street went to four-year colleges and got high paying jobs. Kids on the other side of the street attended community college and worked for minimum wage employers.
Where kids go to school is a sketchy process. And that ain’t right.
The Death of Public School
Education reporter and author Cara Fitzpatrick has a new book out. The Death of Public School’s main focus is the history of school choice in America, but Fitzpatrick comments on her book’s title in a recent interview with The 74:
“Despite the book’s title, I think the idea of a death spiral is a little much. You could say that the pandemic has opened up a moment when it’s been easier for Republicans to justify and pass school choice legislation. Give the nature of how parents had to get through the school closures, people’s lives were changed so significantly that they were willing to try forms of education that they hadn’t before. We saw a big lift in homeschooling among African American families, for example.”
“A lot of parent got a closer look inside classrooms through Zoom – not that that was necessarily a fair representation of what normally happens inside schools – and it set some families on a fundamentally different path. Other families made short-term choices that got them through the crisis, and then they returned to what they were doing before. We homeschooled my older kids for year, and it was a really interesting experience, but they’re not back in a public school full-time.”
“Some of the enrollment decline obviously comes from people leaving big, expensive cities like New York. Some of it comes from people making different school choices. In the end, the biggest questions leftover from COVID have less to do with choice and more to do with academic recovery and mental health. For a lot of kids, there’s been a disconnect from the idea that you have to go to school: the pandemic showed that they really didn’t have to go to school.”
When it comes to black, brown, and poor learners, I would disagree with Cara Fitzpatrick when she says “I think the idea of a death spiral is a little much.” To me, that’s exactly what those kids are caught in when it comes to their own learning – a death spiral.
What’s Fundamental About Personalized Learning
My friend Kelly Young from Education Reimagined wrote an interesting article recently titled “What’s Fundamental as We Start Another Year? It’s Way Beyond the Three R’s.” Here are the 3 fundamentals that matter, according to Young:
- Valuing the fundamental uniqueness of every learner and creating a sense of belonging.
- Creating learning experiences that fundamentally matter to each learner.
- Making real-world experience fundamental.
Our public school system can’t do these.
The 5 Key Areas to School Improvement
I get a lot of advertisements these days. One of the most recent is from Bob Marzano’s High Reliability Schools Network. The advertisement suggests to school leaders that, instead of seeking new initiatives, they focus on five key areas of schooling:
- Safe, supportive, and collaborative culture
- Effective teaching in the classroom
- Guaranteed and viable curriculum
- Standards-referenced reporting
- Competency-based education
Marzano has made a lot of money on schools that have accomplished these five goals, but the sad reality is that most schools can’t achieve high reliability in even one of these areas.
Steven Van Zandt
Steven Van Zandt is in the learning business. The long-time sideman to Bruce Springsteen and a member of the E Street Band, Van Zandt’s Teach Rock, a free U.S. history course for K-12 students that uses pop culture to teach about the period between World War II and the near-present, is already in more than 30,000 schools in all 50 states.
Van Zandt, when he launched his new learning program, said this:
“All I wanted was for every kid in kindergarten to be able to name the four Beatles, dance to ‘Satisfaction,’ sing along to ‘Long Tall Sally’ and recite every word of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues.’ The rest will take care of itself.”
What would learning look like if young learners had more accessibility to “field experts” like Steven Van Zandt and others?
The Carnegie Unit Again
I just finished writing about the Carnegie Unit and how it poses huge problems when it comes to rewarding learning. But Russlynn Ali, CEO of the XQ Institute and Timothy F.C. Knowles, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, recently wrote an opinion piece for The 74 online that encouraged states to do 3 things to get rid of the CU. Here they are:
- “States should incentivize communities to redesign their high schools and invite key stakeholders to be directly engaged.
- “States must catalyze high school learning that is engaging, rigorous, relevant and experiential.”
- “States must help change how we assess and credential student learning.”
I’ll keep my eye out for the number of states that take action on these suggestions over the next year.
The Principal Teacher
Historically, the school principal started as the “principal teacher.” They were the ones who came in early to start the stove and stayed late with kids who had misbehaved. But according to EducationWeek online,
“Making time to teach amid the abundance of responsibilities for principals is a rare opportunity for many in the role. In a 2017 survey, the National Center for Education Statistics found only 7 percent of principals in public schools said they had taught one or more classes that school year. And despite having an average of eight years of principal experience, many in the role had acquired only half as much teaching experience before taking on their administrative roles.”
I taught classes when I was a high school principal. It made me feel closer to the students and showed my staff that I was as committed to doing what they were doing on a daily basis than anything else. And, surprisingly, it wasn’t that difficult to manage leading a school of 2,000 and teaching a daily class.
Is STEM Dead?
According to The 74 online this week,
“In 2022, the National Science Foundation’s Science and Engineering report sounded an alarm. The report showed that the United States is falling behind in science, technology, engineering and math, the STEM fields. According to the foundation, America no longer produces the most science and engineering research publications – that’s China. Now that we no longer graduate the most natural-science Ph.D.s – that’s also China – these trends are unlikely to change anytime soon.”
“The problem isn’t that the U.S. lacks the universities to train future scientists or an economy capable of encouraging innovation. Rather, the problem originates much earlier in the supply chain. It starts in our elementary and secondary schools.”
The first “volunteer” job I had after I retired was working for JASON, a Virginia-based STEM non-profit that supported science, math, engineering, and technology practice within the K12 space throughout the country. What the NSF report says doesn’t surprise me. I’m not saying I’m the best salesperson in the world, but the number of “thanks but no thanks” I received from school districts when I asked them if they needed help from JASON to get their STEM program off the ground was overwhelming. So overwhelming I quit JASON after one and a half years “volunteering.”
The main reason school districts said “no” to JASON and STEM was that they thought they were just too busy to start anything else. To that I ask – busy doing what?
Friday News Roundup tomorrow. SVB
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