Parents

"Love, cherish, and esteem the children of other people."—Isaac  D’Israeli

Let’s compare two schools in poverty areas.

One school has a strong parent outreach program that includes:

• mandatory parent orientation meeting with classroom teachers in which parent / teacher roles for the school year are made explicit
• monthly report to parents
• teachers calling parents when students are achieving
• home/school contracts with clear rewards and consequences at the first sign of a problem
• scheduled parent-teacher meetings that include students

The other school has a haphazard, ad-hoc relationship with parents, and communication is generally attempted only when students have deep problems.

Which school best demonstrates its concern for students’ well-being and motivation? Which school has higher student achievement?

Schools are based on relationships, on interactions between students, staff and parents. Good schools have positive outcomes when interactions include parents. Great teachers have amazing outcomes when they communicate regularly with parents. During the years I served as a principal, I observed that certain teachers contacted parents about good news and were lavish in their praise when students persevered. The parents in turn were extremely cooperative when these teachers said there was a problem and they needed the parents’ help. I asked myself, could this type of outreach be replicated? Could teachers be trained to communicate and engage parents? The program that evolved at my school, P.S. 171, was one of the factors responsible for the marked difference in achievement highlighted in this table:

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.

To recap, the purpose of Empty Playgrounds is to create a body of knowledge about what works in schools: in effect, a mega theory about what is needed for students to thrive. American education suffers today from a lack of coherence and from a lack of high-quality research. The school that I led for twenty years became a sociological laboratory for experimentation. It was a process motivated by one overarching question: “What has impact on student achievement?”

By contrast, what we have today is a cacophony of school reforms that results in constant change without progress. In some area, reforms even have a negative effect on student learning. (More to come on this topic in future installments of Empty Playgrounds.) The methods that I discuss were used in a real school, and they worked in a real school—unlike many of today’s reforms that focus on one small variable, such as a change in student grouping or a new approach to problem-solving in math.

In this installment we focus on the critical role of parents in a poverty-area school. Everyone seems to agree that (1) parents play an important role in student success, and (2) poverty and achievement are inversely correlated. Therefore you would think that it makes sense to create a program that helps parents in poverty areas replicate the behavior of parents whose children strive. And yet nothing in my graduate studies or in my training ever proposed a systematic outreach to help parents to partner with schools. There was no research on the impact of parent behaviors on high achievement. Poverty and lack of school resources were the go-to excuse for failure.

At P.S. 171, where we took into account all of the critical variables that have an impact in the classroom, we recognized that parents are one of the greatest tools available to a teacher who is trying to motivate students. Moreover, systematic outreach to parents by teachers supports academic success and psychological well-being. Not to use this tool is to deny students a support that is essential, one that allows them to function on their highest level.

Without existing models, it was my responsibility to support my staff in developing workable strategies to engage parents. We asked, what do the parents of striving children do? Can other parents learn the behaviors that encourage persistence and hard work? The approach we developed is not difficult to replicate and creates a much more positive learning environment. It also dispels the negative stereotypes sometimes projected onto parents in poverty areas. We believed in their capacity to play a constructive and supportive role, and in turn we earned their trust. Teachers developed customized relationships with each parent that, individually, helped parents help their children. Different parents required different levels of outreach, but no one was allowed to fall between the cracks.

What kinds of parental involvement and behaviors are related to student success? For one thing, participation in general school-wide activities is not the kind of parent involvement that is critical to success. Rather, what makes the difference is the parent’s involvement in the individual child’s schoolwork. And this kind of involvement doesn’t have to be complicated—and it can certainly be learned. The least educated parent is capable of this, and the school can provide the necessary tools. Attitudes and behavior and values can change; all parents can be meaningfully involved in their own child’s achievement.

The program that we used reflected many of the relational insights fundamental to Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends and Influence People. For example, it was important to figure out how to change parental behavior without giving offense. Tools that we used included being both lavish and honest in giving praise and appreciation, while refraining from complaining and criticizing.

It should be noted, however, that  since we had no educational models and had to piece together our own program, we learned by trial and error. Sadly, for many years we did not have a systematic outreach to parents—something I later understood to be a flaw in my leadership. But leadership is also about being willing to reflect and change, when mistakes are made.

One day I noticed a mistake. At dismissal time, my habit was to stand outside my school (on 103rd Street near Madison Avenue) until the last child was picked up, to ensure the children’s safety. On this day, my fifth-grade teacher was talking to a student’s father about the child’s difficult behaviors that day, such as disrupting the class and not doing his work. As the father and child left and walked down the block, the father decreased his pace until the boy was ahead of him and then, forcefully and angrily, kicked him in the small of his back. It was a direct reaction to the teacher’s report, and it was devastating.  A report from a teacher who was wonderful in the classroom had resulted in physical abuse.

It happened right outside of the school that I led, and it happened too quickly for me to intervene.   It was so troubling that at first I wanted to absolve myself and say there was nothing I could do. But then I reflected. What could I do to avoid reports of poor behavior being followed by harsh parental retribution? Was there another way to report behavior to parents? I was the leader of this school. There had to be a better way.

I reviewed the research, which was sparse. However, I came to understand that parents attending meetings and being involved in parent associations was not vital. The key was involving parents in their individual child’s success, and finding ways to move parents to change. Again, as in other areas, we found little available research, but internally, through trial and error, we came up with positive approaches and combined them with an existing program based on the observed practices of master teachers. In my search for answers, I had come across Parents on Your Side by Lee Canter. We used this and also developed our own strategies, such as a  monthly report card to parents. The outcomes were extremely successful, were not difficult to attain, and exceeded all of our expectations.

I was grateful to have found an existing program with goals similar to what we wanted to achieve, with underlying premises that matched what we were observing. As Parents on Your Side puts it, “Parents are the most powerful resource available to teachers and are in an excellent position to guide their children to a successful future. Teachers need and should expect parents to support their academic, behavior management, and homework efforts. If a teacher is not actively seeking parent support, he or she is not offering maximum educational opportunities available to the student. . . . Consistent positive and problem solving communication with parents is imperative” (Teacher’s Planbook, 1).

Our program at P.S. 171 started with a mandatory parent meeting early in September where teachers explained their classroom management plan, homework expectations, and the message that parents must be their partners if the children were to succeed. Parents were also told that they would be contacted if a problem occurred. We did this regularly so that small, easy-to-solve problems did not become overwhelming. Teachers would tell a parent that he or she was the most important person in their child’s life and that they needed that parent’s help. Joining together, teacher and parent would work to solve the problem by means of agreed-upon rewards and consequences, with frequent communication. The child would attend the meeting and would witness the unity of purpose between parent and teacher. Sometimes, I would chair these meetings and together we would decide on rewards for change—letting a child stay up later on a weekend night, parent and child playing a board game, a monetary reward—or any positive occurrence that was within the parent’s means and was something the child wanted. Consequences were defined, should the appropriate change not occur. A consequence would be to deprive the child of something he or she liked: a Walkman, perhaps, or a toy, or a television show. What mattered was the consistency of rewards and consequences, not their severity.

Also crucial was the other part of the program: maintaining positive communication when things went well. Every teacher was expected to share news with parents about individual children and their efforts, in a systematized way. Every teacher was expected to make at least two parent calls nightly or send two notes to show appreciation of student strengths. The impact of these communications was to create a bond between the school and the home. Other strategies included shared reading time and reward coupons. When a parent received a positive message from school, he or she would fill in a coupon and doubly reward a child.

By striving to solve problems while they were still small, we engaged parents meaningfully instead of humiliating them with a list of their child’s misbehaviors. In turn, parental support was wonderful and had a great impact on student motivation. Parents learned how to be involved, and they learned how to encourage school goals. The bond that we created with parents allowed our school to have the lowest rate of failure of several hundred schools in poverty areas in New York City. We know that parent involvement made a difference in the data. These parents were so committed that if they moved out of the zone they did what they could to continue enrolling and transporting their children to our school.

Far from being a liability, parents became a great resource to us and enabled us to create many successful initiatives. In an anonymous parent survey required by the central board, responses showed that parents highly approved of the school and wanted it to continue as it was.

We loved, cherished, and esteemed other people’s children. And we proved that when you do so, you earn parents’ respect and cooperation. Nurturing the triangular relationship between child, teacher, and parent creates a community of common expectations and values. When this happens, a school is perceived as trustworthy, and the result is a high level of support for school goals.

The next installment of Empty Playgrounds will look at methods of training new teachers.

Hiring—and What Teacher Training Colleges Do Not Teach

Hiring is fraught with peril because of the uneven experiences that potential teachers have at college.  Sadly, the current educational hierarchy has not been able to train teachers effectively. Many young teachers train themselves through trial and error. Theorists at prominent teacher colleges roll out one reform after another. Each one eventually fails and is followed with fanfare by the introduction of a new reform that soon fades. Colleges of education are not evaluated by outcomes and are never held accountable for their graduates. Are their graduates effective? No one can be sure, because prospective teachers are not tested for their teaching abilities.

Not only are departments of education not accountable but the current process for hiring professors is haphazard. Who teaches teachers? In my years in education, I have repeatedly seen weak teachers and unsuccessful principals hired to teach at the college level. There does not seem to be a pattern whereby the most talented teachers became faculty members in departments of education. Perhaps it happens sometimes but it is not the focus of hiring. (In a similar vein, I have been amazed by how poor-performing principals have attained powerful positions in New York City’s Department of Education. From these positions they spread their faulty notions throughout the system.)

One example of this pattern happened early in my career. When I was a new second-grade teacher, there was an early grade teacher down the hall from me who had received a very high mark on the city teaching test. And yet she was actually the weakest teacher on the grade. She “escaped” the classroom by going to graduate school, eventually getting a doctorate in education. Ultimately, she became a tenured professor, but nowhere in this progression did she learn the practical aspects of teaching that needed to be imparted to new teachers.

Two bottom-tier teachers at the school where I was principal (Patrick Henry School, P.S. 171 in Manhattan) left to teach at the college level. I remember that one of them would assign children to look up words they could not read and copy the definitions. This kept them busy and quiet but not meaningfully engaged. She later became a new teacher guide and mentor.

I observed the second one tell her class that King Arthur of the Round Table and Christ lived in the same time period. This happened even though my teachers were expected to research their texts in order to build student understanding of the story background. This teacher too was later hired to mentor and support young teachers. But here's the problem: if you cannot teach, then you cannot teach someone else to teach. 

A few classes at Patrick Henry had great teachers when I took over as principal, evidenced by the better results that they attained. I made the decision to spend blocks of time in their classrooms, even if it meant ignoring or delegating my paperwork and other duties. I continued to do so until I understood what was happening there. I saw discernible patterns, behaviors, and outcomes. My study of teachers showed them to be the greatest contributing factor toward better student achievement. I told myself to sit there until I had a complete grasp of what was happening. Passing on this knowledge would become the first step in coaching new teachers. Today, I am reminded of the aspiring artists that I see at the Metropolitan Museum, copying the artwork of the old masters. I picked out the master teachers and my new teachers thrived by learning from them.

Much can be learned from training in objective studies in the social sciences. Ultimately, my background in anthropology helped me more than my educational and administrative coursework.  In education, we must do research based on hypotheses that can provide testable empirical results. I believed then, and believe now, in an interdisciplinary approach. I felt like Margaret Mead, silently observing and perceiving patterns and relationships. I came to understand great teaching. Now the challenge was to reproduce it. 

Often, teacher colleges and departments of education do not get much attention or respect from other branches of academia. Schools of education are not known as sources of rigorous and objective research, and the programs they advocate often lack in-depth research. The answers to our educational problems are unlikely to be found in education departments. There are of course a few exceptions. An extremely fine second-grade teacher I worked with ended up with a doctorate and a tenured position at Hofstra. More recently, I was training in a school in Brooklyn and asked a wonderfully gifted first-year teacher what she attributed her knowledge to, and she told me that her methods teacher at Saint Francis College was instrumental. Unfortunately, these instances are aberrations and not the norm.

Yet the quality of teacher preparation makes a huge difference.  Early childhood programs, content-rich curricula, and parental involvement are also major factors in boosting the achievement level of inner-city children. If an inner-city student is “lost” in school for one year, the result might be an irretrievable slide into compensatory programs. Programs for failing students are costly and have low success rates. I strongly believe that failure can be averted with great teachers and great programs. But we still lack research-based training programs like those in Finland, a country that generally scores higher than the USA in international comparisons.

At Patrick Henry, we stopped relying on the colleges to prepare our teachers. Too many newly graduated teachers from these colleges flounder in their initial school assignments. We realized that it was pointless to have any expectations about what they might have learned in college. My master teachers were much more adept at training my new staff than the entire college hierarchy.
 

In future installments we will describe how we created and supported teacher greatness in one inner-city school.

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.