A call for better leadership in education

This is the first installment of Empty Playgrounds, a commentary on elementary education in America and what can be done to solve its problems.

All of us who care about education and who care about our country’s future have heard the news: year after year, test scores show that the U.S. is sliding downward in the rankings of countries by educational achievement. Everybody agrees that we must reverse this trend; nobody can agree on how to do it.

Education fads come and go, with no perceptible improvement in classroom learning. Fragmented experimentation occurs in tightly prescribed areas, adding little to our knowledge of how to run schools. Contributing to the problem is a hierarchy that does not seek to accumulate knowledge, that does not gather evidence about the many variables that affect a child’s learning in the classroom or make decisions on the basis of that evidence, and that hires and promotes on the principle of “those who can’t teach, can administer.” It’s not just that we lack a macro-theory of how to help schoolchildren; we suffer from the hierarchy’s unwillingness to put such a theory into operation. Meanwhile, many people believe that we cannot be successful in our schools because of the nature of parenting in the inner city. Heartbreakingly, we have come to accept failure.

But failure is not acceptable. And it does not have to happen.

In each installment of Empty Playgrounds I will discuss what happened in an inner-city school that would not accept failure, and the lessons that can be drawn from it. If this school could succeed, then every school can succeed. Here is the evidence that failure is not inevitable, and that it is not an inherent feature of schools in areas of poverty.

The school was a neighborhood elementary school in East Harlem where I was the principal for twenty years. In Empty Playgrounds we will look at it as a social-science laboratory where experiments in change were evaluated. It was not a place where the latest fad flourished and withered, to be replaced by the next fad.  Constant observation, hypothesizing, and theory-building took place. In other words, something was happening here that was a departure from the norm.

In the spring of 1977, when I took over leadership of Patrick Henry School, P.S. 171 (Manhattan), it ranked in the bottom third of a district that—while improving—was one of the lowest-achieving among thirty-two districts in New York City.  When I retired twenty years later, P.S. 171 had the lowest rate of failure out of several hundred zoned inner-city schools. 

The following table shows the great variability in student achievement within the same neighborhood. The table was formulated and distributed by the New York State Department of Education and has been reformatted so that table headings are clear. Notice the great difference in the number of students falling below state standards in P.S. 171 versus the other schools in the district.  In 1998, the rate of failure at P.S. 171 was only 7.8%, versus an average of 45.3 % for the district as a whole.

Percentage of Pupils below Academic Standard, FY 1998
CSD	School	Pupils Tested	Pupils Below	Percentage Below
4	7	408	261	64.0%
4	13	344	165	48.0%
4	45	855	502	58.7%
4	50	235	98	41.7%
4	57	345	200	58.0%
4	72	319	178	55.8%
4	83	492	113	23.0%
4	96	264	132	50.0%
4	99	1367	480	35.1%
4	101	218	130	59.6%
4	102	394	209	53.0%
4	108	478	222	46.4%
4	109	339	163	48.1%
4	117	776	326	42.0%
4	121	270	149	55.2%
4	146	357	184	51.5%
4	155	413	229	55.4%
4	171	309	24	7.8%
4	206	653	238	36.4%
Total:  District 4		8836	4003	45.3%
Source:  New York State Department of Education.  CSD 4 refers to the East Harlem Community School District, one of 32 districts composing the New York City public school system at the time.

By 1998 the low rate of failure at P.S. 171 put it on a par with schools in districts with much higher socio-economic indicators, proving that achievement rates in inner-city schools can be improved

How did this happen at P.S. 171? How did we achieve these numbers, against all odds?

The answer to this question is what I will be providing, at greater length, in Empty Playgrounds. The short version is this: the paradigm for running this school diverged from current thought then and now. School change and improvement were based on accumulated empirical knowledge that was based, in turn, on observed phenomena. And failure was not an option.

                                                                                                 

Is it all a matter of who serves as school principal? Of course not. Teachers are of critical importance. After all, the life of the child is in the classroom. Other than at breakfast and lunch time, the child is in the classroom. But the education hierarchy, in its current form and composition, does not understand the classroom and does not understand how to train classroom teachers.

I think that the hierarchy succumbs to fads because it doesn’t know what else to do. The hierarchy is good at public relations and creating buzz and appearing to be engaged. What it isn’t good at is analyzing what happens in great classrooms and using that knowledge to help teachers become master teachers.

The plain truth is that many people in the hierarchy were never teachers—or if they were teachers, they were not good teachers. I remember that when Hunter College had a student teaching program at my school, they hired one of my worst teachers to be a mentor. A couple of years later, they hired another one of my fairly terrible teachers to mentor teachers. Another failing teacher ended up teaching a college-level course on methods. But she couldn’t teach a second-grade class. It’s almost as if there is no merit involved in going from one level to the next. Furthermore, the system is not structured to make sure that one attains the knowledge necessary to mentor those coming up. In the field of medicine one goes through a series of internships and builds a body of knowledge. Not so in education.

And so this very powerful hierarchy does not know how to run schools. Those who DO know how to run schools . . . Well, they do not enter the hierarchy. In my decades of experience I know almost no successful principals who have gone on to a higher level. But I do know people who have NOT succeeded, who have gone on to much higher levels.

To put it simply, if you don’t know how to run a school, then you can’t teach someone else how to run a school. And if the knowledge and the training aren’t there, then knowledge can’t accumulate. And unlike in medicine, we do not have randomized clinical trials to tell us what impacts learning and what does not. So again, we perpetuate a lack of knowledge. But every year the hierarchy gives the impression that wonderful things are going to happen. Every new fad is very exciting and gets rolled out with tremendous fanfare.

Now, for example, we have an incredible reliance on “data-driven decision-making,” and we’re intensely testing students, which generates lots and lots of data, and the data are supposed to tell people how to run a classroom. It’s a fad, and it addresses only one small segment of what happens in the classroom, and it doesn’t help teachers at all. If anything, teachers are in fear of focusing on testing and data and not focusing on great teaching.

But teachers—even great ones—do not exist in a vacuum. One thing that happened at P.S. 171 was that I analyzed leadership and its impact. And I realized that teachers’ perceptions of a principal affect their own behaviors strongly. When a principal understands what supports are needed in a classroom, then teachers and children and schools can succeed. Here was a school that overcame whatever we say exists in the inner city that cripples children. We don’t have to accept those platitudes. We don’t have to accept failure. We really can run terrific schools.

The guiding principle behind Empty Playgrounds is that when we seek out and accumulate knowledge and figure out ways to transfer it to others, we succeed. Our current rate of failure indicates that the education hierarchy hasn’t recognized this. If teachers are failing our students, it’s because the hierarchy has failed our teachers and does not know how to create viable schools. I realize that what I’m saying is unpopular. But I’m saying it because I have the experience and the evidence to back it up. Empty Playgrounds will deal in hard-earned lessons, not idle speculation.

Thank you for reading what I have to say and for spreading the word.

The next issue of Empty Playgrounds will be devoted to the topic of hiring new teachers.

Building the Background

If accumulating knowledge is important, then so is this feature of the commentary. The term “Building the Background” was used in my reading program and it required the teacher to provide the knowledge necessary for students to comprehend what they were about to read. The reader of Empty Playgrounds needs background, too. To comprehend education today we need to understand why we are where we are.  For the first “Building the Background” assignment, I am recommending a book that is the most comprehensive and insightful exposure of what’s happening in education today:

The Death and Life of the Great American School System:  How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education by Diane Ravitch.

 (Diane Ravitch is Research Professor of Education at New York University and a historian of education. She is also a former Assistant Secretary of Education.)

After extensive research Diane Ravitch has been able to investigate and cut through educational rhetoric to write what is considered by many to be the sharpest critique of current educational practices.

Reading this book is your homework assignment. It should be read by anyone with an interest in the lives of our most vulnerable children.