Public Education is Worth Fighting For

Public Education is about to venture back into the debate of charters and vouchers as options for turning around our struggling schools. With the appointment of Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary, Public Education is again being threatened by another "transformation" that is meant to raise standards and provide for excellence in American classrooms. However, with a focus on repealing the Common Core State Standards, providing vouchers and funding charter schools, there is little hope that this refurbished approach to transforming American education will do much more than frustrate high quality educators and leaders who have invested their lives into educating future generations of American children.

As a leader of a struggling school that is a completely different place than it was three years ago, I have a few pieces of advice for the incoming Education Secretary - not that I think they will be heard, but I have decided that if I do not use my voice to advocate for what I believe in (aka Public Education), then I am not being true to myself as a leader and I am not showing my community what I believe in and am willing to invest my time and effort into.

Common Core - Why does the Education Secretary want to repeal the Common Core? Her tweet, "Many of you are asking about Common Core. To clarify, I am not a support - period," (read more here) has been retweeted and quoted throughout the news cycles. The Common Core State Standards has put the need for more rigorous, student-centered educational practices that build on conceptual understanding the center of classroom planning and practice. How is that hurting anyone? The whole idea behind transforming our education system is that American students lag significantly behind students from around the world (see chart below) and in a global economy, we simply cannot afford for American innovation and business to continue to lag behind. 

While the roll-out of Common Core and the connection to APPR were highly (and rightly) criticized, the need for rigorous discourse, high quality instruction that builds on conceptual understanding, reading complex text, and writing across the content areas continue to be the best parts of Common Core and should not be "watered down" in the name of "transformation." The Common Core is not the problem in America's schools - if our students cannot meet the standards, we must look at effective leadership practices and effective classroom practices that will make sure that our students (that's ALL students) get the high quality instruction that they deserve. 

Vouchers and Charters - I can hear it now..."What's the big deal? If there is more choice, that will force schools to be better if they want to keep students!"Here is the real deal...it takes a considerable amount of time and effort to turn around a school. I am on year three and we are really starting to see gains across all areas. However, we have not yet reached a tipping point where the majority of our students are performing at or above their grade level. Public school dollars support charter and voucher programs that allow for students to leave public schools and attend a school of choice, which has a devastating impact on the resources available to students and in classrooms. Public schools have an obligation to provide the highest quality education to all of our students in order to have an educated citizenry and that requires having adequate resources. We cannot educate the future of our communities and our country if only some students are given the opportunity to experience excellence. 

Teacher Preparation Programs - In the past twenty-five years that I have been in education, there has been very little public debate about the quality and expectations of Teacher Preparation Programs. There is a significant amount of debate from within education, but no one else has really seemed to take on the challenge. I would encourage Betsy DeVos to take this on as one of her important first challenges - more important than Common Core revision, ESSA, or even the Voucher debate. Without having top notch teachers in our classrooms, very little matters about what the laws and regulations state about what we need in American classrooms. What we need, more than absolutely anything, is the best teachers ever. That will definitely require that colleges make changes to their programs. It will require that teacher preparation programs look much more like doctor preparation programs. And it should require changes to the salary scales for teachers as well - if we are expected to train like doctors, we should be compensated like doctors. After all, we are saving lives, too. 

So, my challenge to incoming Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, is more of an invitation. Come and visit. See first hand who American children are, what American children are learning, and American teachers are teaching. Talk with high quality school leaders who are training the teachers who are coming out of our Teacher Preparation programs over the course of three years or more in order to make young teachers who have just stepped into the classroom into effective practitioners. And lastly, I would ask you to remember that educators are making investments in our future each and every day. We wouldn't ask Wall Street Investors to make a promising future without the appropriate resources - likewise, our public schools need the resources to ensure a bright future for ALL of our children. 

Do we really value achievement?

We, as Americans, say that we value achievement. We profess to be the best - at virtually everything - and that plays throughout our culture as important. We revere professional athletes who excel at their sport and pay them exorbitant salaries. We need to have the best military, the best economy, and the best political structures. But what happens when we apply that same thinking to education?

It has been reported for many years that the United States lags behind other countries in education (read more here). We are well aware that even with higher standards, on 38% of American children are ready for college according to the NAEP National Report Card. While we could propose reasons for this that range from the numbers of mothers who have to work to the number of single parent families to the degree of poverty many families live in to the increase in refugee populations, I propose that many people are intimidated by achievement.

When my oldest son started Kindergarten, he was already reading fluently. I had a friend of mine assess him and he was reading on a 2nd grade level. When I told his Kindergarten teacher, she nodded disapprovingly at me and said "We'll see." When I went for parent teacher conferences in October, she exclaimed to me "Your son can read!" I asked for enrichment to keep him moving forward and he was assigned to a teacher for two hours a week who worked on his pencil grip. Teachers make decisions like this all of the time - we pair the "high student" with the "lower student" to help the lower student stay on track. We let our higher students be "self-directed," which too often means that we let them teach themselves. We often hear high performers being called "teacher's pet" or "brown nose" by other students. Our classrooms often teach to the middle - which leaves high performing students on the fringes, bored, or even acting out to find some level of engagement.

We, unfortunately, do this with our teachers as well. We ostracize high performing teachers and call them "Principal's Favorite" or make comments like "well, you wouldn't know what we are dealing with since everything is perfect in your classroom." We might include the high performer in our group, but assume that he or she will carry the majority of the load because it is "easy for them." We tell our high performing teachers that they should be careful about sounding "too smart" so that they don't intimidate those around them or we caution them to "slow down" or "lower their expectations" because not everyone wants to work with people who expect so much from those around them.


What is the impact of this duality on our schools? As we well know with our own families, "do as I say not as I do" is a very ineffective technique for raising children. Likewise, for creating vibrant school cultures. If you are creating a culture of achievement, high performance and achievement must be valued, honored, pushed, and grown throughout the system. For high performance to become the norm, all stakeholders must be able to find ways to nurture, appreciate, and challenge high performance.

We live in a system of standardization - a "one size fits all" approach to testing and achieving. Daniel Pink, in his new publication To Sell is Human, talks about how teachers have amazing opportunities to sell learning to children each and every day. In order to do that, we, as educators, must let go of our fear of achievement and performance and embrace the ways that our students and our teachers are changing the way we teach and learn each and every day. We have to train our brains to accept challenge as a way to grow our brains, accept that ongoing reading and learning is the way that we can and should be engaging in dialogue and discourse with our peers, and accept that we are all stronger when we push one another to higher levels.