Check out this thought-provoking mini-analysis of our current President’s school reform agenda. (It’s written by David Cohen, an English teacher in California, and I found it re-posted on Nancy Flanagan’s blog on Teacher Leaders Network):

Let me know if I’m wrong, but I don’t think I am.
Compare our top-performing schools and our weakest performing schools by looking at test scores, graduation rates, whatever measure you want.
Do you find that most top-performing schools are running many more hours per day, or more days per year?
Do you find that the top-performing schools have that much more, or better data?
Do you find that they are more likely to have linked student data to teachers?
Do you find that the top-performing schools have a maniacal focus on test preparation?
No, no, no, no.
Do you find that they are disproportionately in affluent communities?
Do you find that they have greater parent and community involvement, including supplemental funding?
Do you find that they have a better trained, higher paid, and more stable teaching staff?
Do you find that they tend to have an enriched and varied curriculum, including arts and various other electives?
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Then, if you’re a politician, the solution is clear: national standards, longer school day, focus on basics, more data!

Cohen definitely makes an interesting point. But I don’t think all of his assertions stand up to careful scrutiny.

Let’s start at the beginning: While I imagine it’s true that most top-performing schools don’t run longer school days or years, I don’t think it’s safe to conclude that failing schools shouldn’t. This ties in with Cohen’s fifth question about the best schools being in the most affluent communities. I’m sure that they are, and that the children who attend these schools tend to come from stable homes where they are safe, well-fed, read to, and generally given the tools and support they need to succeed in school, so don’t need longer school days. But I’m also pretty sure that this is not always true of children attending our lowest performing schools, who can surely benefit from more time in school as long as – and here’s the key - the extra time is well spent.

For instance, at the highly successful KIPP charter schools, longer days mean that teachers have more time to allow individual students to puzzle through tough problems on their own until they figure them out for themselves without feeling pressure to hurry them along and feed them answers. More time also allows charter schools like The Urban Assembly School for Law & Justice to offer more electives and extracurricular activities to students, not to mention summer travel and internship opportunities which speaks to Cohen’s final question. And let’s face it: many kids benefit from staying later at school because it’s a quiet, peaceful place to concentrate on their homework away from the distractions they face at home.

As to Cohen’s point about maniacal test prep – I have to agree with him here. At least in their current form, standardized tests miss the mark as far as the kind of knowledge they test kids on (i.e. the quick-to-memorize-quick-to-forget-kind). I would love to see alternative forms of assessment (see previous post here) that measure more complex skills incorporated into schools which would in turn necessitate a shift in curriculum and instruction away from the drill method and would benefit all children.

Cohen mentions that the best schools have better trained, higher paid, and more stable teachers. First of all, if the best schools include private ones, I imagine many teachers in the best schools are not paid as well as their public school counterparts. Secondly, higher pay doesn’t guarantee good teaching – just that the teacher’s been in the school system for many years. Further, I don’t think President Obama or Arne Duncan would quibble with the fact that states and districts need to strike a better balance in terms of assigning the best teachers to schools that really need them, or that teachers who do their job well (especially in the lowest performing schools) should get paid more. In fact, teacher quality is one of the five major platforms of Obama’s reform agenda, and didn’t Duncan announce that $200 million dollars from the education stimulus package will be used as a Teacher Incentive Fund?

Finally, as far as collecting data goes and linking it to teacher performance, while I don’t think this alone will turn low performing schools into high performing ones, and I worry about the kind of data that will be used to do this, I definitely don’t object to the idea in principle. As long as evaluations are done fairly (i.e. not just looking at standardized test scores) and used constructively to help teachers get additional support and mentoring to improve their craft (as well as to identify those few who refuse to change and don’t belong in the classroom – and we can all name at least one teacher in that category), than why the great outcry?

What do you think about Cohen’s argument? Is the current administration totally missing the mark when it comes to school improvement?

takepart in reading more about President Obama’s school reform agenda - and here too.

(Photo: Obama-Biden Transition Project’s flickr photostream/Creative Commons)