Newspaper articles on education began to strike a peculiar note this past summer. In July, the New York Times ran an important article on a serious scandal in the city school system:Growing numbers of students—most of them struggling academically—are being pushed out of New York City's school system and classified under bureaucratic categories that hide their failure to graduate. (Lewin & Medina, 2003, p. A1)
A persistent theme of the article was the link between such behavior and external accountability policies. But the authors did more than just draw a suggestive line between “pushouts” and accountability. They wrote,Those students represent the unintended consequence of the effort to hold schools accountable for raising standards. . . . Given the pressure on schools to show good results, it is understandable that principals would have little interest in holding onto low-performing students. (p. A1)
Greater accountability has always been accompanied by worried talk of “unintended consequences.” But that talk is becoming so lopsided that such choices are increasingly being made to seem more about physics and less about ethics.
Reducing such deplorable behavior to a kind of action-reaction causality is profoundly disturbing and says much about the low esteem in which society holds educators. When professionals in other fields act in bad faith, no one calls for less accountability. In fact, people often call for more. Take the corporate financial accounting scandals that have rocked the business world over the past few years. How many articles and editorials have suggested that the pressures of working in a profit-driven, capitalistic system engendered the “unintended consequence” of accountants cooking the books?
Choosing to break the rules and take actions that harm students will always be just that: a choice. When we begin to excuse such choices by substituting euphemisms like “unintended consequences,” we strip education administration and instruction of its professional and ethical dimensions, creating another unintended consequence: Those who attempt to defend the education profession in such ways end up undermining and cheapening it.
Yet those of us who expect accountability to help rather than hurt would do well to heed the underlying angst emanating from such newspaper articles. As the accountability requirements of No Child Left Behind begin to take full effect this fall, many teachers and administrators feel caught between a rock and a hard place.
Scattershot Curriculum, Unequal Expectations
The rock in this hostile terrain is the unreliable, hit-or-miss system of education that we have relied on until now. Most often, decisions about what to teach in each grade are left up to schools, many of which pass the choice on to individual classroom teachers. The result is an uneven hodgepodge of instructional aims and subject matter, with content and expectations varying sharply from classroom to classroom and from school to school.
Kim Marshall, the former principal of the Mather School in Boston, Massachusetts, describes how curriculum anarchy became a major stumbling block to school improvement efforts there:While teachers in one grade emphasized multiculturalism, teachers in the next grade judged students on their knowledge of traditional history facts. While one teacher focused on grammar and spelling, another cared deeply about style and voice. . . . These ragged “hand-offs” were a frequent source of unhappiness. (cited in Gordon, 2003, p. 59)
On top of that, classroom instruction, particularly in high schools, still places greater emphasis on ways of “delivering” the content than on making sure that all students get the content. Of course, many teachers strive to incorporate elements of best practice into their lessons, and many others put hours of highly creative work into crafting projects that students will find fun and engaging. But that investment mostly remains focused on how instruction feels and looks rather than on how much the teacher actually helps students learn.
But wait! Don't we know enough about what makes a good teacher that we can recognize good teaching when we see it? After all, millions of pages have been written about the topic. Surely a school principal could easily identify the classrooms in which students are learning and those in which they are not. Right?
The answer may surprise you. In districts where research departments are using value-added approaches that rely on student-level data to measure average student learning growth over the course of a year, the numbers are giving that assumption a vigorous thrashing. For example, a Dallas administrator recently recounted the following story to one of my colleagues:The test scores in one of our schools were so low that under state law we were allowed to reconstitute it—to evaluate the entire staff and replace them if necessary. So I sat down with the principal and said, “Which teachers should be replaced?” The principal said, “First, I want to replace Mrs. Jones. She's very negative. She's always complaining to me about her students, how they don't perform well enough, how they never live up to her expectations.” Well, after the meeting I went back and looked up the value-added data for that school. It turns out that Mrs. Jones was consistently the most effective teacher in the entire building. She was “negative” only in the sense that she had very high expectations for her kids and so was never really satisfied—and the kids benefited tremendously as a result.
In this age of accountability, we must define good teaching by results, not by personal characteristics or our preconceived notions. When the goal is student learning, seeming to be a good teacher and actually being a good teacher can be very different.
As long as we continue to focus on image, the outcome will be all too predictable. When it comes to the knowledge and skills that will be measured on tests, some students get it, but many others don't. Compounding the problem, most teachers receive little reliable information about exactly which students are “getting it” on a week-by-week and skill-by-skill basis.
Such a system leaves far too much to chance. Not surprisingly, the arrangement works least well for disadvantaged students whose families often lack the time and resources to fill in learning gaps. These students rely the most on schools for learning, and when the schools fail them, they fall farther and farther behind their peers. By the end of high school, the average 17-year-old African American student reads and does math only as well as the average 13-year-old white student (Campbell, Hombo, & Mazzeo, 2000).
- To keep working the way they always have and hope accountability is just another education fad that will soon fade away, or
- To game the system by engaging in practices that pump up numerical outcomes but undermine the academic interests of students—narrowly teaching to the test, completely ignoring nontested subjects, fudging the numbers, or even encouraging certain students to stay home on test day or drop out altogether.
To be sure, the vast majority of teachers and administrators would sooner turn in the keys to their classrooms and offices than entertain the notion of gaming the system in the more extreme ways. But the question remains: What is the alternative to these two options? What does good, effective, and ethically sound teaching actually look like in the age of accountability?
Districts and Schools Must Take the Lead
Real accountability for results demands a more systematic approach to instruction. Good teaching will always depend on individual classroom teachers, but responsibility for it cannot be left up to individual classroom teachers. Schools and districts need to do their share.
Develop a Common Curriculum
To overcome the problem of scattershot content and unequal expectations, teachers need a common, coherent, and specific curriculum telling them what students should have learned at the end of each grade level and at key checkpoints along the way. Simply asking teachers to “align your instruction with state standards” is not enough. Few teachers have been trained to develop curriculum, and fewer still are alignment specialists.
Although it is conceivable that schools could take on this responsibility, the more practical and fail-safe approach places it in the hands of the district. In fact, several studies released last year of the districts that are making the most progress in raising achievement all agreed on one thing: Leading districts have adopted some form of common, districtwide curriculums, instructional programs, or detailed achievement targets, whereas lower-performing systems have not.
According to Ricki Price-Baugh, the assistant superintendent for curriculum and instructional development in the Houston Independent School District, administrators realized the need for a common curriculum after conducting a study in 1994–1995 to determine what resources teachers were using to create lessons. To administrators' dismay, the most common answers were either “the textbook” or “their own heads.” Few teachers were using the voluntary curriculum guide published by the district.
After years of hard work, Houston now has a mandatory common curriculum called CLEAR that 75 percent of teachers report using to plan for instruction, 59 percent on a daily basis. Jocelyn Mouton, former principal of the Rice School in Houston, told me about its benefits:I can't clone Ms. Gomez, our curriculum coordinator, or my other master teachers, but I can give all my teachers a rigorous curriculum. We have some teachers who have only been teaching a year or two. Before, it was only in Ms. Gomez's head; now everyone has access to that high-level content.
When district administrators in Aldine, Texas, realized that scores on national assessments weren't keeping pace with gains on the state test, they decided to develop grade-by-grade “benchmark targets” to ensure that teachers were basing instruction on a common framework for learning rather than on the state test itself. In an interview, Nadine Kujawa, Aldine's current superintendent, admitted that getting started wasn't easy:We paid district teachers for a week to develop the benchmarks. We put them in a room and told them we wanted a curriculum that specifies a continuous, linked set of skills. They spent the first two days pointing fingers at one another. Sixth grade teachers blamed 5th grade teachers for sending kids to them unprepared. Fifth grade teachers blamed 4th grade teachers. There was anger. There were tears. It was probably the most difficult “come to the table” meeting we've ever had in this district.
Of course, some teachers chafed at the notion of a common curriculum. Another administrator noted thatWe had the teacher who had the four-month unit on dinosaurs and the high school teacher who did two months on genetics. We had to tell teachers, “We're in the age of accountability now, and you no longer have the right to disappear into the classroom and close the door.”
That's not to say that teaching becomes lockstep and unimaginative, however. In the age of accountability, teacher creativity simply has less to do with what to teach and much more to do with how to teach it.
Learn from Student Assessment Data
Practitioners also need much more regular, reliable, and thorough information about which students are actually mastering the knowledge and skills in the curriculum. Such data can only come from more regular assessment, a notion that may seem bizarre amid complaints about too much testing.
But some districts are making time. Schools in Houston and Aldine conduct districtwide “snapshot assessments” at regular intervals throughout the year. District offices quickly process the results and feed them back to teachers in time to identify and provide extra help for students who need it. Working together, teachers in four schools in Fontana, California, developed common weekly assessments (“quizzes”) that they can use to gauge progress. In an interview, Houston administrator Scott Tobin provided a glimpse of how powerful such data can be:After we gave the first snapshot assessment in high school history this past December, we noticed something strange in the data that we then brought to the attention of principals. The scores for the first unit were very high compared with those of later units. It turns out that many teachers were sticking with that unit, world history, much longer because they liked teaching it.
Principals were able to begin a discussion with teachers about the need to apply pacing and rigor in their instruction.
In school districts like these, teachers often find themselves less isolated. Teaching a common curriculum, they can collaborate on planning much more easily. With ready access to data on student performance, they can discuss how to help students academically rather than simply report discipline problems.
Teachers and administrators also become more aware of colleagues across town or down the hall who are getting much better results. And they become more willing to learn from those colleagues.
For example, Jocelyn Mouton used snapshot assessment results to identify teachers who were particularly successful at teaching a part of the curriculum.You can see it in the data. I use the snapshot results to look at who's getting better results on a math skill, for example, and I can pair that teacher up with another one whose students didn't do so well.
The notion that teachers can learn from one another is common enough in conversations about education reform, but it is an all too uncommon reality in schools. Some other professions are far ahead on this count. Experts in inter-national development, for example, study what they call “positive deviance” within communities to identify practices and behaviors that might ameliorate malnutrition or help stem the spread of disease. Jerry Sternin (n.d.), a visiting scholar at Tufts University and a pioneer in such work, points out thatIn every community there are certain individuals whose uncommon practices and behaviors enable them to find better solutions to problems than their neighbors who have access to the same resources.
Create a Culture of Problem Solving
Last but not least, a focus on results demands that practitioners become problem solvers who work collectively to remove barriers to learning, create new approaches when old ones fail, and think hard about how to make what they do work for all students rather than just for some. As teachers become acclimated to systems that demand results, the blind traditionalism and stultifying fatalism that have long plagued teaching begin to give way to just such a positive, proactive, problem-solving work ethic.
For example, at an Education Trust meeting a few years ago, Brad Duggan, the president and CEO of the National Center for Educational Accountability, said that many high-poverty, high-performing Texas schools were experimenting with ability grouping (see Just for the Kids, 2001). Audience members were incredulous. They had been taught that such approaches were outdated, ineffective, and bad for kids.
But this ability grouping was quite different from the long-term tracking approach of years past. It was flexible and temporary in nature. Its goal wasn't to give lower-level content to struggling students, but rather to provide differentiated, fast-track instruction to help those students catch up with the rest of their classmates.
Such strategies often develop as a rational attempt to solve a problem. In this case, given limited time and the demands of classroom management, teachers had to find a way to provide additional instruction to students who were at risk of falling behind. Flexible ability grouping provided one solution. Other schools had reshaped the school schedule and calendar to provide more time during the traditional school day or outside of it. And many schools had combined both approaches.
Nadine Kujawa calls this problem-solving approach to improving classroom and organizational practice “peeling the onion.” Rather than attempting to solve all problems at once or trying to cram an externally designed system into place, administrators and teachers identify immediate problems and obstacles and tackle them first. Crafting solutions to those problems facilitates progress and some degree of success, which in turn leads to a new set of challenges and obstacles that crop up as the work becomes more sophisticated.
For example, teachers might ask, Now that we have data on which students are not learning, what do we do about these students? Where will we find the time to help them? Layer by layer, problem-solving administrators and teachers peel the instructional onion, constructing step by step a more sophisticated system of working than those they had relied on in the past.
Educators working in these cutting-edge systems have less respect for the sacred cows and ossified traditions of the past. They no longer consider “We've always done it that way” a good enough reason to do something. They objectify and analyze the basic elements of schooling—time, space, staffing arrangements, instructional strategies—as tools for promoting learning. These educators take nothing for granted because nothing can be left to chance.
But because real accountability has yet to become a fact of life for most teachers, many are still gripped in the stranglehold of tradition. They see instructional arrangements as set in stone rather than molded in clay.
Consider the case of homework. In focus groups and informal settings, teachers have told us again and again that they find it difficult, if not impossible, to teach low-income children because “their parents aren't as involved.” Pressed to explain exactly how that hinders their classroom teaching, they frequently tell us that such parents lack the skills to help students with homework or the time to make sure that students complete it.
But homework is just an instructional tool, one of many that teachers can conceivably use. If an instructional strategy doesn't work for a large number of students, and even puts many students at a disadvantage, why continue to use it? If homework is necessary, does it necessarily have to take place at home? Are there other approaches to arranging extended practice and reinforcement activities that work for all students?
To be honest, I don't know. But chances are, some teachers and administrators are out there right now, working at the performance frontier, thinking about the homework problem critically, and coming up with all kinds of surprising solutions. Until educators at least begin asking such fundamental questions, peeling the onion to directly confront what's working and what's not, they will remain stuck between a rock and a hard place.
One thing we know: In the age of accountability, we simply can no longer respond to such questions with “We don't know. We give up. We can't think of a different approach, so we're just going to have to live with the results we're getting.”
The refusal to continue settling for these answers may prove to be the most profound professional change of all.
