Bright Ideas

An array of educators and education advocates pondered long and hard before writing the following essays. Their strategies for improving public schools in the United States range from fostering greater choice to strengthening the role of school boards to adopting universal preschool. You may weigh in with your own opinions by going to the online forum at: http://cfserv.dickinson.edu/magazine/weighin/. Following the essays are several topical articles, faculty and alumni profiles—all related to education.

The Power of Teaching

The relationship between student and teacher is still paramount for success

By Tim Potts ’71

Socrates and Plato.
Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller.
Haydn and Beethoven.
Jen and Hannah.

Learning happens in the relationship between teachers and students. If we want to improve public education, we should strengthen that relationship in every way that makes a difference in learning. Absent that, other attempts at increasing student achievement are not likely to succeed.

Before going further, it’s worth noting that we should not define “teacher” as only a professional pedagogue. As a child, I knew that most adults in the community were teachers to me, even the clerks at stores where I bought bubble gum and marbles. They would look me in the eye and patiently count the change into my hand. They demonstrated that it was important to learn money math—and they wanted me to learn it.

I don’t see many interactions like that today, which makes the job of public schools more difficult. Pennsylvania’s elementary students are required to attend 900 hours of instruction each year. This represents just 15 percent of a child’s waking hours in a year, and it is folly to expect classroom teachers to impart 100 percent of what a child needs to learn in 15 percent of a child’s time. All adults—pre-eminently but not solely parents—have to accept some responsibilities as teachers. It’s simple math, and adults-as-teachers of all children too often are a missing factor.

“Reforms” that do not focus on the relationship between teachers and students, or that are disrespectful of that relationship, do not succeed. In Pennsylvania, charter schools are a sad example.

Pennsylvania has 109 charter schools that enroll 42,000 students. If they constituted their own district, charter schools would be the second largest school district in Pennsylvania, behind only Philadelphia. And if that were the case, they would have ranked 490th in reading and 494th in math achievement out of 502 districts last year.

Contributing to this dismal record is a state law that requires only 75 percent of teachers in charter schools to hold teaching certificates. In practice, the average has been significantly below 75 percent. Add to this a charter-school teaching corps that averages several fewer years of experience with high turnover rates, and it’s tempting to conclude that failure becomes not just predictable but unavoidable.

Another “reform” that fails to put the teacher-student relationship at the core of improving public schools is “choice”—the romantic idea that simply allowing parents to choose the charter or other schools their children attend will automatically produce better results.

While the market force that underlies choice may eventually contribute to better public schools, it will do so only if parental choices are informed choices based on what matters in teaching and learning. Yet most advocates of choice oppose universal accountability systems that would permit parents to compare all schools—public, private, charter, religious—on the basis of a common set of performance standards such as the quality of teaching. Until that happens, choice will remain little more than an ideological sound bite, not a strategy for real improvement.

So how can public education improve the relationship between teachers and students? There are several ways, ranging from small classes to better management of disruptive students to team teaching.

More specifically, states and schools can encourage teachers to achieve certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Some states provide grants to help teachers obtain national certification. Private foundations, such as Pittsburgh’s Grable Foundation, also are committing significant sums to help schools promote national certification among their teachers.

Short of national certification, most states insist on more and better continuing education for teachers in both content and pedagogy. Fortunately, technology is making such demands perfectly reasonable. Today the Internet can deliver interactive, research-based and classroom-applied professional development to all teachers regardless of where or what they teach and at minimal cost.

We can celebrate and strengthen teaching, or we can denigrate and weaken it. But its fundamental value remains because we all remember turning points when an excellent teacher made all the difference to us.

Jen and Hannah? This teacher and student are not famous, but they are equally important for being closer to home.

Jen is Jennifer Blyth, associate professor of music and chair of Dickinson’s music department. Hannah is a piano student and the daughter of some family friends. When the two met recently, Jen managed to reach Hannah in ways that inspired her to a new love of music and piano when Hannah was discouraged and disinterested. Hannah’s parents now wonder at her spending so much time at the piano.

Such is the power of great teaching. If we want great public schools, we should start there.

A consultant in education policy, politics and communication, Tim Potts ’71 was the director of the Pennsylvania School Reform Network from 1997 until late 2004. Potts, who majored in English, serves on the communications committee of Dickinson’s Alumni Council.

RX for Education

Accountability and freedom to choose are key ingredients for an effective remedy

By Jeanne Abate Allen ’82

Prescriptions from the pharmacy usually mean something needs to be fixed, cured, corrected or balanced. The term “RX” suggests something’s off enough to warrant a dosage. Medicine is most often a good thing, a way to improve, to get better. It’s not always a cure but often a course correction.

Pundits often disagree—does education need a cure, or just some Vitamin B? Some people who work in school administration become defensive when prescriptions are proposed—and enacted—that structurally alter how schools operate. For many in the education establishment, the patient is not sick; he or she just needs more attention, some new clothes and a pay raise.

Would that it were that easy! For decades, the patient got just that. More resources were poured in to fix a widening achievement gap, thereby stagnating achievement. The history of enormous effort and energy put in to correcting the system is well documented.

The reality is the patient was diagnosed late in the process with serious maladies that feel-good prescriptions could not cure. Because of modern medicine, a miraculous recovery is under way, owing to four simple concepts that are hallmarks of any great enterprise:

1) Measurable standards enabling teachers, parents and others to know what children should know and be able to do at every level, from history to math. Such knowledge breeds success, because one cannot learn what cannot be measured. States once required courses to measure success, which tells nothing about achievement.

2) Restoration of true control—to parents, teachers and principals—who, in deciding how and where students are educated and resources spent, have greater success than when decisions are made far from communities by officials who don’t know your child and bureaucracies that can’t understand her.
Small schools are now succeeding where large high-school communities were once impervious. Charter-school choice has created a public-school revolution that unites parents with teachers in delivering personalized, effective learning environments that better fit kids.

3) Teacher-quality programs restore dignity to teachers who have long been discouraged by requirements having little to do with good teaching. States with teacher-advancement programs, such as Arizona and Florida, ensure that teachers are paid for work done well, increased responsibility and experience, rather than just uniform pay scales and tenure—relics of a bygone era. Pay is only one factor. Teachers also need real authority over work to develop new ways to teach and to help lead schools. Today, new graduates are moving into poor communities to teach, encouraged by the promise of affecting directly students they will teach.

4) Accountability for results—a demand for quality—is no longer eschewed as it was. As a college graduate I entered the Department of Education and learned that one did not discuss quality when evaluating programs, since the feds were not legally permitted to make such determinations. Some 20 years later I watched with excitement as senators like Ted Kennedy debated and argued about quality—what it is, how it’s measured and its relationship to spending. The result was No Child Left Behind (NCLB), an act that has transformed how school districts operate, because they are, for the first time, liable for whether or not students succeed as a condition of being able to be free to do as they please.

Yes, some have problems with these prescriptions. We hear that NCLB made teachers teach only to the test. This comment ignores the reality that, to succeed, children need to meet standards and to know the result. Good teachers always teach content. Accountability does not make teachers robots—it provides a roadmap against which one may judge if students are succeeding or if they need a course correction.

The most powerful foundation of all reform—which has sparked major improvements—is freedom. Freedom to choose is the fundamental tenet of our nation’s founding, as Dickinson scholars taught me. Freedom to pursue life, liberty and happiness are uniquely American.

The slow, steady implementation of programs in the last decade that fostered more choice has sparked the development of standards and the strengthening of public education; brought recognition that teacher recruitment and retention needed a qualitative edge not just a monetary one; that there are children in all communities, but some in particular, who had little opportunity to learn because there was no accountability for results. New, quality schooling options have demonstrated that the most needy child can learn when he has a quality school that is focused on results, not rules and paperwork. Today about 8 million children are exercising some form of choice, and learning is improving. This is a direct result of new pressures, new incentives and new accountability.

Thanks to substantive, comprehensive reform, the doctor is in.

Jeanne Abate Allen ’82 is the founder and president of the Center for Education Reform, a nonprofit group that advocates school-choice programs, teacher initiatives and instructional programs and other reforms that adhere to high standards, accountability and freedom. Allen is interviewed regularly by the national media as an authority on education reform. The mother of four school-aged children earned a B.A. in political science from Dickinson and pursued graduate studies at Catholic University.

Building Smarter Boards

Education reform could be enhanced by tending to citizen decision makers

By David Kranz

Mark Twain, as he did on almost everything, had the last word on school boards: “In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.”

Indeed, just last November the Dover Area School Board, less than 50 miles from Dickinson, decided to require that its ninth-grade science curriculum include an exploration of the untested pseudo-scientific concept of “intelligent design” as an alternative to the widely held and oft-validated Darwinian theory of evolution. However, since intelligent design, unlike evolutionary theory, is not capable of experimental validation, several parents, the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (led by Barry Lynn ’70, profiled on page 28), sued the district, alleging that the requirement was covert religious indoctrination. (A more intelligent ploy would have inserted the theory into the social-studies curriculum, but the Dover board wasn’t up to it.)

Meanwhile, on the national scene, Chester E. Finn Jr., former assistant secretary of education in the Reagan administration and conservative gadfly on educational issues for the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and the Hoover Institution, has argued for the abolition of all school boards, calling them at a Harvard forum in 2003 “worse than a dinosaur” and “an educational sinkhole.” Because the states already have taken over the lion’s share of financial matters—and, with the recent No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, academic accountability as well—Finn and Lisa G. Keegan assert, in a recent edition of the journal Education Next, that school boards are obsolete.

In Finn’s view, elected school boards, established a century ago as a refuge from politics and patronage, now are filled by would-be pols, teacher-union reps and single-issue advocates who do more harm than good by their ignorance of education and overall resistance to significant reform. Finn and Keegan look with glassy eyes toward a time when students, like consumers, will have a “financial backpack” with which to pick “independently operated and competing education-delivery organizations” of their choice based on state-testing criteria. The arrival of this educational utopia, say Finn and Keegan, unfortunately is retarded by teacher unions, school boards and state school-board associations.

As if on cue, the National School Board Association (NSBA) Web site includes two broadsides defending the status quo. The NSBA answered yes to two self-posed questions—”Are school boards necessary?” “Should the present governance structure remain in place?”—offering five reasons why school boards “should be the decision maker in today’s schools.” Boards are devoted only to education (as opposed to other political institutions), are advocates of the community, set and measure educational standards, are accountable for performance by election, and are the taxpayers’ watchdogs.

Both sides in this debate present some truth and something less than truth. On one hand, as Finn suggests, boards sometimes have been politicized, but they are still largely stocked with citizen amateurs, not political hopefuls, union lackeys and ideologues. Although these amateurs are educated by state school-board associations and local experience about issues of law, governance and finance, Finn is right that most school directors know little about how education works.

Ultimately, lacking both expertise and, given the voluntary and unpaid nature of board service, the time and incentive to develop it, board members are at the mercy of state law and the opinions of their superintendents and central office staff. In addition, the unwieldy size of most boards (usually seven to nine members) diminishes the chances for significant change; few have time for the persuasive discussion needed to build a majority.

Thus, despite (and partly because of) its genuine democratic virtues, the school board is a neutered institution. Yet abolition, as Finn suggests, brings with it great risks which could be worse than the status quo. My solution? I think that national and state governments should reform school boards by making them smarter, more efficient, more powerful and more open to educational improvements while keeping their democratic foundation.

How? First, reduce the size of boards to three or five members depending on the size of the district. This streamlines the board, decreasing the time and effort needed to educate and build a majority while not giving up local democratic control. Second, pay school-board members for their service, enough to find the time to investigate educational issues seriously and to feel responsible for the district’s academic achievement.

This new cadre of citizen experts, as opposed to today’s amateurs, should be more persuasive with politicians who know little about education yet control it by law and more effective when interacting with the knowledgeable but inertial educational establishment at state departments of education and district central offices, thereby discovering new and practical ways to increase educational achievement. Moreover, with money on the line, strong board candidates will more likely emerge, and real debates over educational policy might occur, perhaps increasing community involvement in education.

My third recommendation would be to alter state law to reduce the size and scope of the state’s educational bureaucracy by putting more power for changing academic and financial policy in the hands of local school boards.

Smaller, smarter boards may adapt reforms to their districts more effectively than the one-size-fits-all approach of legislatures and departments of education without resorting to the risky, chaotic, privatized consumerist model fantasized by Finn. Whatever the merits of my suggestions, I believe that improving educational leadership at the local level, while hardly a sine qua non, should be part of the effort to reform the public schools.

David Kranz, a professor of English at Dickinson since 1979, has been a member of the Carlisle Area School Board, which he describes as “a good board in an excellent school district,” for nine years.

Choice Challenged

Universal preschool is a ready remedy for barriers to equity and access

By Rebecca Rylander Kline ’73

Just as medical experiments are halted when a treatment proves so effective that we cannot deprive the control group of its benefits, so should we immediately adopt educational solutions supported by evidence. Among those solutions, confirmed by 40 years of research, is universal access to preschool.

Universal preschool is advocated by groups as disparate as the National Association of Elementary School Principals, the Business Round Table and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis but also by teachers who can distinguish children with preschool experience from those without.

Preschool advocates point to its “cost effectiveness,” citing its positive impact on test scores, high-school graduation rates, median annual earnings and behavior later in life (fewer drug convictions, for example). They also cite brain research that posits critical “windows of opportunity” for cognitive development before age 5. Finally, educators confirm that gaps in reading readiness and social/emotional maturity characterize groups of children who have not attended preschool.

Of course, some preschools are more successful than others. Nonetheless, the evidence supports universal access. I would argue that preschool should be compulsory.

Two obstacles spring to mind. First, the cost is enormous. And despite calling children “our most precious resource,” the real money in this country tends to be spent on anything but their education.

Second, the reigning educational ideology centers on the notion of choice. States and local districts should thus be free to choose to make preschool optional or, perhaps, even to outlaw it. Parents should have the right to choose to keep their children home, perhaps glued to the TV.

The problem with local control and parental choice is that they work against the very raisons d’être of a federal role in education: equity and access. If children’s educational experiences depend substantially on whether they are born in Connecticut or Alabama or on whether they attend school in Abington or Philadelphia, equity is threatened. Of course, those are the breaks—because public schools cannot change many of the influential circumstances of a child’s life.

And some of the effects of such circumstances should not be changed. Differences that do not impede equal opportunity should be maintained, respected and celebrated. But given the striking and persistent disadvantages suffered at school by children battling obstacles such as neglect, poverty or racism, it is incumbent on us as a nation to level the playing field, the earlier in children’s lives, the better.

Public schools are a means for combating the inequities that divide our children from birth. And, although I am a parent and a great admirer of certain other parents, I see the first inequity as one’s fate in being born to a specific mother and father.

Of course, most parents are their children’s best advocates, and a parent’s love is usually of the highest order. But parents simply are not uniformly able or willing to put a child’s best interests first. Some parents, regardless of their means or intentions, are seriously unfit, and to impose on their already disadvantaged children the further injustice of society’s refusal to hold itself accountable for them is unacceptable.

Parents cannot treat all children equitably. Schools can, assuming that we encourage the best and the brightest to become teachers and that we deploy resources to create safe, welcoming and inspiring classrooms.

However, since we have not yet done so, to suggest that schools are ineffective institutions is to mislead parents and the public. Since we have often directed our most talented citizens, either tacitly or overtly, toward careers other than teaching, to suggest that many educators are incompetent is hypocritical. To suggest that parents replace educators, given these realities, is to refuse the burden of accountability by transferring it elsewhere under the guise of providing more choice.

And choice, as Barry Schwartz, a psychologist from Swarthmore College, maintains, is not always a good thing. His research demonstrates that greater choice can result in paralysis: people cannot make decisions because it is too difficult to weigh the options and because they know from past experience that they eventually may regret what they have chosen. Such regret is trivial when selecting jam flavor or car color. It can be overwhelming when deciding about social promotion or preschool for one’s child.

Members of the general public do not control decisions concerning the specifics of infrastructure maintenance or food safety. Citizens do not have the “right” to choose materials for repairing bridges near their homes nor the “freedom” to buy tainted meat. If research has shown a reform such as universal preschool to be an instrument of positive change, let’s not relinquish it in favor of options people cannot exercise in a meaningful way and thus either will ignore or come to regret.

Rebecca Rylander Kline ’73 is a French and Fine Arts graduate with an M.A. from New York University and Ph.D. from Penn State. She joined the Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (NECTFL), the nation’s oldest and largest regional association of pre-kindergarten through university language educators, as executive director 10 years ago. She is an adjunct professor in French at Penn State and, occasionally, at Dickinson. Dickinson students regularly work as interns for her at NECTFL.

Evaluating ‘No Child’

A classroom teacher struggles to balance test success with love of learning

By Rachel Placek ’01

I recall the excitement with which I viewed my entrance into the real world of teaching. Eager to enter a classroom where I could guide students and create my own lessons—rather than sit in someone else’s classroom—I enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to teach fourth grade in the Carlisle Area Public Schools. High expectations for what I could accomplish, along with typical, youthful idealism, shaped my plans.

During my first year I worked tirelessly to pursue the best interests of my students and to carry out the philosophies of education that had been imbued at Dickinson and Gettysburg College, where I completed some of my certification course work. With the help of other teachers, mentors and the kids themselves, I survived that first year. I was part of an incredible community that was supportive of children.

Just when I thought I had become more at ease with my journey as an educator, obstacles arose for my school district. In fact, public elementary schools in all states would be greatly affected by the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act signed into law in 2002. NCLB, which expanded the federal role in education, calls for increased accountability in schools and includes the potential for parents to choose where their children attend school. On the plus side, it seemed NCLB would provide greater funding for schools that attained high levels of achievement.

From a teacher’s standpoint, I can relate that the new law emphasizes student performance on standardized tests but not how to enhance educational services through new funding.

According to the U. S. Department of Education Budget Service (2004), $12.4 million of Pennsylvania’s federal funding was provided for annual assessment costs. Before NCLB, Pennsylvania was revising state education standards and assessment practices, with students taking annual Pennsylvania System of School Assessment exams. The advent of NCLB has validated and increased the importance of scoring well on these exams throughout the state.

Many educators are not great fans of NCLB or, at least, find it to be flawed. Often, my fellow teachers wonder aloud if lawmakers and politicians have set foot in the classrooms that they want to control. Other people believe that NCLB is a much-needed avenue to educational reform and that complaints come from lazy educators. Still others feel better about paying taxes to schools if they think the test scores indicate that high-level achievement is being reached. My opinion on NCLB emanates from my experiences in an elementary-school classroom.

I acknowledge the need for consistent assessment and standards of accountability, for teachers should have standards to measure themselves against and to guide classroom goal setting. Consistent evaluation and assessment helps me, as a beginning teacher, to become more aware of my strengths and weaknesses.

Unfortunately, I think that the NCLB promotes scores as a measure of a student’s potential or of a teacher’s successes and failures. The perception has created stress for me and my students. Children do not need to experience this type of pressure. To become competent problem-solvers and contributors to society they need to first feel confident and not full of anxiety about test performance.

Each day I consider my students’ backgrounds, personalities, strengths and weaknesses in my teaching and in my evaluation of them. On the days that I become too consumed with testing dates or with pushing the material that I need to cover for a test, I believe my kids have their worst learning days. I’m ashamed to admit that quantity becomes the goal and that the quality of a student’s thinking process is ignored. Opportunities to discover new ideas are traded for more study drills.

Losing my focus on children as individual learners has an effect greater than the sum of their test scores. Sometimes I fear that I’m creating narrower minds and inflexible thinkers. And as I struggle to balance test success with my students’ creative talents, I worry that I am not helping my kids to become lifelong learners. I want to instill a love of learning—as was instilled in me at
Dickinson—that will carry them through all of life’s challenges. But if teachers continue to be swamped with testing deadlines and data collection we will be in danger of losing sight of this goal.

Despite the obstacles, I will continue to teach quality over quantity—to promote divergent thinking over simple, one-solution answers. I try to communicate that the best efforts of my students should supersede the significance of their overall test scores. The kids should know that rewards lie in establishing character and self-worth beyond grades.

It is my hope that schools and states will change the way they react to NCLB, perhaps discover other ways to achieve accountability while building a positive educational foundation for children. I will keep this in mind on the days when it’s harder to keep my focus on lifelong learning and imparting the educational values that I gained at Dickinson to the children I teach today.

Rachel Placek ’01, an honors English graduate of Dickinson, has taught at Carlisle’s Mooreland Elementary School since August 2001.

In a Fix

Are Public Schools Really Broken?

By William Lance Landauer

We’ve just read a series of essays by Dickinsonians who pose remedies for the ills afflicting public schools. But is the patient—i.e., public schools—really ailing? Data indicate that schools are doing better today than ever before. In fact, public-school achievement is at an all-time high. Data also suggest that we need to improve the quality of education, especially in urban and poor rural communities.

One call for change comes from the school-choice movement, which has been a failure. But that doesn’t mean all choice is bad. We need to examine the data—not to advance a particular political point of view—but to make policy decisions that are in the best interests of our children. Magnet schools that are integrated into the school system need to be made more available, especially in urban areas. School choice needs to be available, but the choices need to be of excellent quality and those making them held publicly accountable.

Another school reform that needs to be more thoroughly examined is the creation of charter schools. I agree with essayist Jeanne Abate Allen ’82’s contention that we need to “restore true control to parents, teachers and principals.” However, it should not be through charter schools. As Tim Potts ’71 notes, abysmal results have been achieved by charter schools in Pennsylvania. And the federal government recently released a report indicating that charter-school students are not achieving as well as their public-school counterparts. Despite data to the contrary, charter schools have been hailed as a success by the politicians who created them.

Other suggestions made by our essayists require further research. David Kranz wants to change the size of school boards and preparation of school-board members. The current system of “lay” boards provides a rather democratic approach to school governance. Working properly, boards select administrative staff members who are knowledgeable about education and hold them accountable for results. Unfortunately, some boards try to micromanage or impose policies that are not advisable or seek employment for relatives.

Another essayist, Rebecca Rylander Kline ’73, advocates for preschool education. As with other good ideas it is important to proceed with caution—implement universal preschool education slowly and carefully. We must be careful that we have qualified staff and sufficient resources (money, classrooms, etc.).

A good first step toward real school improvement—and an area of general agreement among the essayists—is the central role of the teacher. Rachel Placek ’01 describes her frustration with the No Child Left Behind Act’s emphasis on testing and wants to make decisions about her students’ needs. Potts states that “learning happens in the relationship between teachers and students.” He believes that school reform is best approached by designing methods that would improve that relationship. Allen notes that we need to focus on improving the conditions in which teachers work. It is essential that we listen to our teachers as we seek to make changes that will be focused on enhancing the instructional environment of schools.

A second step would be to prioritize the use of our resources and equitably distribute funds to all students. We should focus on student learning and limit the use of school resources for programs and services that are not related to that objective. Education is a function of the state and not of local communities. We need to change our method of funding education so that children from poor communities are granted the same quality of public education as children from wealthy communities.

Third, we spend enormous amounts of time and money on programs and services that have little to do with learning. Our massive paper-and-pencil-accountability system is an example of the waste of valuable time and financial resources. Schools should be held accountable for making data-driven decisions. Objective data is very important, but the data should be collected at the local level and should measure learning. One-size-fits-all testing, as imposed by the No Child Left Behind law, that is used to measure a school’s effectiveness, is pure folly and only can be justified in the political arena. As Placek points out, it causes schools—and teachers—to value the trivial at the expense of the important to achieve higher scores on high-stakes tests.

Fourth, reduce district, school and class size—a difficult goal but one that can be attained. The structure of schools has led us to a large and impersonal brand of education that is most unfortunate. Tony Wagner in his book, Making the Grade: Reinventing America’s Schools, contends that we should create smaller school organizations and promote greater involvement of local communities in the education of our young people. It is almost impossible to create an atmosphere of warmth with the large school organizations of today. If we really want to involve parents, teachers and others in decision making we need to reduce size.

American schools are not failing, but they need to be better, and it is essential that we continue to try to make them better. The moment we become complacent we will become less effective. The ideas posed by our essayists are worthy of consideration. We must stay open to new ideas, but when the ideas we support are demonstrated to be failures, we must recognize them as failures and move on. •

William Lance Landauer, chair of Dickinson’s education department, is a former public secondary- and elementary-school teacher, guidance counselor, assistant principal, principal, assistant superintendent, superintendent and consultant to public and charter schools. He has taught and supervised student teachers and administrative interns at the graduate and undergraduate levels.

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