These schools allegedly made such amazing progress in such a short time that they prove that poverty is no barrier to high academic achievement. Bill Bennett often referred to such schools as "existence proofs": If one school can do it, then all schools can do it. I have come to believe that such existence proofs are akin to saying that if one person can run a four-minute mile, then everyone should be able to do so. If one student can score a perfect 800 on her SAT in mathematics, then all should.

If nine years of mayoral control, all sorts of experimentation and extra billions spent on incentives and other approaches leave the school system no better off, isn't it right to assume that the students -- for whatever mix of reasons -- are incapable of performing to reasonable standards in a mass education setting? And if that's the case, what are the implications?

See also http://www.minddump.org/its-pure-raw-poverty-stupid

t’s not bad teaching that got things to the current state of affairs. It’s pure, raw poverty. We don’t teach in failing schools. We teach in failing communities. It’s called the ZIP Code Quandary. If the kids live in a wealthy ZIP code, they have high scores; if they live in a ZIP code that’s entombed with poverty, guess how they do?

They say the common standards are a blow to the creative competition between different teaching systems under federalism. They say there’s little evidence that common lessons and common tests will help our kids learn more. They say many of the standards accepted by 44 states and D.C. aren’t sound. They say there is no research-based concensus on this.

I say I have been been watching great teachers at work for nearly 30 years and I have yet to hear any of them say: “That lesson worked because of the great standard that inspired it.”

Our schools will get better if we train and support our teachers better, if we are more careful in the way we pick and train their principals and if we provide more time for instruction and encourage a team spirit in every school. The anti-standards folks make one point, but only one, that is relevant to those things we have to do: a common standard may get in the way of a creative teacher who wants to emphasize something other than what the standard demands.

But I am confident that once the standards are up and running, they are going to be largely ignored by thousands of creative teachers, and nobody is going to do anything about it.

1. Given the near-instant accessibility of information made possible by the Internet, the traditional emphasis on learners storing information in their heads no longer makes much sense. The young need to learn to process and apply information, tasks that require them to infer, hypothesize, synthesize, relate, generalize, value, and so on.

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2. As small children and illiterates prove, and everyone’s daily experience demonstrates, there are myriad ways of learning that don’t involve reading words or playing with numbers. Indeed, most of what most people know hasn’t been learned that way.

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3. In times of rapid and accelerating social change such as the present era, the ability to abandon attachment to the status quo and adapt to complicated, unexpected realities is essential to survival. Adaptation requires imagination, creativity, originality, ingenuity, vision.

The reflexive critique of comparing the Finnish and U.S. educational systems is to say that Finland’s PISA results are consequences of the country being a much smaller, more homogeneous nation (5.3 million people, only 4 percent of whom are foreign-born). How could it possibly offer lessons to a country the size of the United States? The answer is next door. Norway is also small (4.8 million people) and nearly as homogeneous (10 percent foreign-born), but it is more akin to the United States than to Finland in its approach to education: Teachers don’t need master’s degrees; high school teachers with 15 years of experience earn only 70 percent of what fellow university graduates make; and in 2006, authorities implemented a national system of standardized testing. The need for talent in the classroom is now so great that the Norwegian government is spending $3.3 million on an ad campaign to attract people to teaching and, last year, launched its own version of Teach for America in collaboration with Statoil—called Teach First Norway—to recruit teachers of math and science.

Moreover, much as in the United States, classes in Norway are typically too large and equipment too scarce to run science labs. A science teacher at a middle school in Oslo told me that labs are unfortunately the exception, not the rule, and that she couldn’t recall doing any labs as a student a decade ago. Unsurprisingly, much as in 2000, 2003, and 2006, Norway in 2009 posted mediocre PISA scores, indicating that it is not necessarily size and homogeneity but, rather, policy choices that lead to a country’s educational success.

Everyone is yelling and screaming about doing what we currently do better, not fundamentally changing what we do.

In order to fix the schools, as is the common parlance, the Bloombergs and Blacks need to fix the kids. First. But this would require a tectonic shift in philosophy, from penal to uplifting, from frenetic to calm, from dictate to reality. For there to be any hope for true achievement, these kids need to feel safe, respected and secure before prepositional phrases and periodic tables can penetrate their bodies and brains. They need social workers and psychologists in every classroom, and teachers who resist screaming at children even when administrators tell them to. They need longer classes and fewer subjects each day. They need physical exercise, even if they can't afford the $10 for the mandatory check-up. The need hugs and cookies, yes, at 13. They need people to listen when they are told, finally, that their father was killed in a drug deal, not a car crash.

Then, perhaps, they can learn to write a paragraph. Or dream about a place like Princeton.

Relying on one’s past reputation is probably not the best approach for transforming an educational system to meet tomorrow’s needs and challenges.

Hat tip to http://twitter.com/#!/SchlFinance101/status/19461869651632128

The DOE states that roughly 270,000 teachers leave via attrition annually -- they choose to leave, resign, retire, etc. Demographics show we have more baby boomers retiring and that attrition will increasingly climb to over 300,000. Now, let's add the Hanushek Theory of How to Improve Schools, and fire another 6-10 percent of existing teachers annually. Principals must then weed through their dwindling staff of teachers to target another 240,000 -400,000 to terminate. Where is the army of teachers coming from to fill the 515,000 - 700,000 that they plan to lose each year?

President Obama has said the countries that out-educate us today will out-compete us tomorrow. Unfortunately for U.S. children, the top-down, test-driven, evidence-free approach to education that dominated this past decade has failed to put the United States on the path that high-achieving nations have followed.

Simply put, the highest-achieving countries in the world out-prepare, out-invest, out-respect and, as a result, outperform the United States.

The top-performing countries on PISA -- Finland, Singapore and South Korea -- place a heavy emphasis on teacher preparation, mentoring and collaboration. They de-emphasize standardized tests, and each has a well-rounded curriculum that teachers can tailor. In Finland, which I recently visited, teacher training is demanding, rigorous and extensive -- with ample clinical experience. Teachers in these countries are esteemed, and are expected to make teaching their profession, and they're virtually 100 percent unionized.

Contrast this with the United States, where teacher preparation too often is insufficient for the complexity and importance of this work. Teachers frequently are assigned a classroom and left to sink or swim. High rates of turnover are expected and even built into the system. Indeed, half of all teachers leave within their first five years. This constant churning costs American school systems $7 billion each year. The cost to American students is incalculable.

Nearly every time this country has expanded its social safety net or tried to guarantee civil rights, passionate opposition has followed.

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The federal income tax, a senator from New York said a century ago, might mean the end of “our distinctively American experiment of individual freedom.” Social Security was actually a plan “to Sovietize America,” a previous head of the Chamber of Commerce said in 1935. The minimum wage and mandated overtime pay were steps “in the direction of Communism, Bolshevism, fascism and Nazism,” the National Association of Manufacturers charged in 1938.

After Brown v. Board of Education outlawed school segregation in 1954, 101 members of Congress signed a statement calling the ruling an instance of “naked judicial power” that would sow “chaos and confusion” and diminish American greatness. A decade later, The Wall Street Journal editorial board described civil rights marchers as “asking for trouble” and civil rights laws as being on “the outer edge of constitutionality, if not more.”

This year’s health care overhaul has now joined the list.

The early discoverers didn't have a map to help them navigate from their flat world into a round world, and now it would seem that we really don't have a map to help us navigate from our round world into a world that is suddenly flat again.

When people care about a brand or a cause or an idea, it's likely that have other things in common. And the caring causes them to invest attention. Once they've done that, they can't help but notice that others don't see things the way they do. We ignore the great unwashed and reserve our disdain for those like us, that care like us, but don't see things as we do.

The really good news is that the tribe cares. If you don't have that, you've got nothing of value. In fact, the squabbling among people who care is the first sign you're on to something.

many principals simply do not have the time or resources to help the teachers at their school sites become better educators. Just like teachers, they are overworked and the demands on their time too often makes it very difficult for them to help teachers, struggling or not.

It is one of the things that really drives me crazy in the current education debate. I wish that more administrators would start speaking out against the unreasonable demands on their time. I also wish that they would acknowledge that sometimes it's easier for them to keep a struggling teacher rather than to go through the process of hiring someone new.

Yet, their voices have remained mostly silent in this debate.

it would be nice if the world was complicated – like a puzzle where every piece has a right place. But it’s not. It’s complex – like a weather system where changes in one aspect of the system cascades and influences the entire system, often in unpredictable ways. Unfortunately, complexity is not built into the educational system. We seek “general right answers” rather than “contextual right answers.”

I see (at least) two big transitions ahead of us. First, there is a tremendous need for us to move more of students’ day-to-day work up the cognitive ladder so that it more often encompasses higher-level thinking skills. Second, we need to recognize that we no longer live in an analog, notebook paper world and that schools should be pulling these digital technologies – which are radically transforming every other information-oriented societal segment – into our learning-teaching processes in ways that are authentic, meaningful, and (hopefully) powerful.

These transitions will be heroic journeys – epic changes – rather than ‘snap your fingers and they happen’ events.

isn’t it possible that teachers and their union were in an uproar at least partly because the LA Times released highly suspect, potentially error ridden and extremely biased estimates of teacher quality? And that the LA Times misrepresented those estimates to the general public as good, real estimates of actual teacher effectiveness?

We tend to devote years to studying what to change and little if any time to actually making change. In the meantime, kids continue to go through our schools without the benefit of the programs we know we should run.” George Wood

Here’s what the media says will work to ‘fix’ education:

Pay-for-performance will retain good teachers.

Creating more charter schools is the only way to ensure better schools.

Accountability and firing ‘bad’ teachers will fix the system.

Get rid of tenure and get rid of ‘bad’ teachers.

Do whatever it takes to raise test scores.

Throwing money at education will solve all of its problems.

Students need longer school days to close the achievement gap.

Increase STEM education to get ahead of China and stay ‘competitive.’

The problem with these solutions? None of them have students at the center. None of them even mention pedagogy at all.

Here’s what really works:

Organized, focused, passionate and caring leadership will retain good teachers.

Good schools are those in which there is a common vision and instruction is centered around inquiry and critical thinking.

When teachers work as a team to raise a child and provide rich learning experiences, there will be no room for ineffective teaching.

Provide teachers with professional support along with support for their students and they will be more effective and happier.

Schools should do whatever it takes to ensure that every child leaves their care capable of thinking for him or herself, engaging in discussion and asking questions about everything they see, read and hear.

Money is great when it is carefully invested with students and learning in mind, but money a good school does not make.

Parents need to be educated as well. Teach the whole child and educate the family. The achievement gap starts before children reach school.

Model the cooperation and collaboration that is now an essential skill for success in this world by reaching out to countries whose students are surpassing us and finding out what’s working.

Ask ourselves: why educate? What is the purpose of school?

It is in our everyday actions that revolution actually finds breath

Let me get this straight: If I put a cabal of pseudo-educational leaders together in one small panel and parade them around different shows and news outlets, start up conversation pages but prevent all voices to participate, rile up a fringe group of educators who laud the likes of Diane Ravitch and Leonie Haimson, and make a separate event “dedicated” to educators during a low period of TV watching, I not only succeed in not creating any solutions, I now get entry into the epicenter of the discussion about education?

It’s too easy.

school reform is not something you do to students and teachers and parents, it is something to undertake with students and teachers and parents

The problem with putting it all on the line...

is that it might not work out.

The problem with not putting it all on the line is that it will never (ever) change things for the better.

building an educational system in which students actually learn is difficult, and it takes more than money poured into broken systems