In my last post, I reflected on the work (and worry) going into revising Kentucky's education accountability system. I argued that such systems really do two things: 1) they convey vital information to help educators and the public know how schools are doing well and where they need to improve, and 2) they encourage schools to make those improvements. But I concluded my post by emphasizing that the accountability system cannot - in itself - actually make schools improve.
At best, the accountability system sends signals indicating where there is a problem. At the local level, it then falls to parents, educators, and the broader school community to take action in response to specific school performance issues. At the state level, legislators, the Kentucky Board of Education, and other officials might develop strategies to address patterns and trends in statewide school performance.
Local strategies for school improvement might include changing local leadership, the adoption of new curricular or instructional strategies, new tax levies, etc. At the state level, improvement strategies might include changes in education standards, school governance structures, improvements in financing, and state-funded initiatives to support local efforts. But I contend that whatever the state does to create the capacity for education improvement - and I do believe the state can do a lot - little of it has to do with the school accountability system, and results will depend almost entirely on decisions at the local level.
There are no silver bullets for school improvement
Some educators believe very strongly that the achievement gap is a function of poor school funding overall and inequities of funding across districts. I'm skeptical, because per pupil education spending has skyrocketed over the last four decades (only recently leveling off and declining since the 2008 recession), while achievement has remained stubbornly stagnant and achievement gaps have actually worsened a bit.
I must concede that, during that same time period, the entire mission of education changed. In the 1970's we did not expect schools to educate every child to proficiency, and the economy continued to have a place for low-skilled workers. Now we face the unprecedented challenge of educating every child to high levels, and the economy has no place for the ones we fail. We might very well need more resources to meet our new mission, but I don't believe for a second that if the state legislature handed educators billions more dollars that we'd know precisely how to use those funds to rapidly accelerate student learning.
Which is not to say we have no ideas; we just lack a consensus on which of those ideas are most appropriate for closing the achievement gap, and no single strategy has promise for rapidly boosting and sustaining high levels of student achievement by itself. I have to admit this applies to some of my own favorite strategies for education improvement, including school choice, redesigning curriculum, and creating mastery-based learning systems that are more responsive to individual student needs. Let me discuss each of these in turn.
First, I am a long-time and vocal advocate for expanding school choice, including Kentucky's recent adoption of charter school legislation and the proposed concept of a tax credit that would encourage private donations to fund scholarships for low-income students who want to attend tuition-based schools. I also favor open district enrollment, whereby students would be able to attend public schools of their choice outside the school districts where they reside. I think these strategies have promise for addressing achievement gaps among at-risk student populations. Urban charters have a good track record in this regard, as do private schools in general, and new research from Ohio suggests positive impacts from open districts enrollment as well. Furthermore, research suggests that when choice is introduced in a community, competitive effects yield a significant, if small, increase in student performance in traditional district schools, though I suspect the benefits of choice result more from each family being able to find a school that best fits their child's needs than from competition forcing low-performing schools to get better.
I also think that school choice is fundamental to making many other education improvement initiatives work by encouraging innovations that would attract and retain new students and diminishing some of the bureaucratic and anti-democratic features of school governance that often function to prop up the status quo.
I don't think, however, there's much evidence that school choice in itself will lead to enormous boosts in overall student achievement. What we've learned from other states is that the vast majority of students are still going to be educated in traditional public schools and that schools of choice are going to vary widely in their quality and performance (just like traditional public schools). So as much as I support choice, it's not a singular solution; just creating choice does not, in itself, work an education miracle. The accountability system can help us track the impact such policies are making, but cannot make the change happen.
Likewise, I've written a lot lately about how we've experienced a great hollowing out of the curriculum, especially at the elementary level, and the possible impact the draining of content from our schools has had on students of poverty. At the state level we might address this issue through improvements in our learning standards, but for a number of reasons curricular decisions (curricula are different than standards, a distinction even educators struggle to recognize sometimes) are best handled at a local level (and especially with a heightened level of school choice that helps each family find schools with the curricular approach that best suits their needs and interests). Again, accountability and state policy can nudge schools in a particular curricular direction that we hypothesize may boost improvement, but that is all.
Finally, I've written extensively on this blog arguing that our model of instructional delivery, which is rooted in a 19th-century industrial design and treats the education of students a bit like products on an assembly line, is probably incapable of ramping up student achievement to the level our educational mission and economy now demand. While I've grown a bit troubled by the looseness of the term "personalized learning," I do believe that schools must become much more focused on individual student progress toward the mastery of specific learning targets, which means instructing students at their readiness level rather than arbitrarily throwing tasks at them because of their birth year or grade level. It also means using ongoing formative assessment strategies to ensure that students have ample opportunity to actually master content and skills before they are pushed on to new material.
We've seen a widespread dabbling with mastery learning in schools across the state, especially at the elementary level. Are there state-level policies that would encourage the scaling up of such strategies? Possibly there are, but they exist outside the structures of the accountability system. And they would require much greater clarity about what "personalized learning" really is, and which elements actually work to improve student achievement.
I do not mean to convey a sense of pessimism about our chances to improve student learning in Kentucky. I am passionate about pursuing and encouraging some combination of the strategies described above, among others, including improving teacher and administrator training and development, reforming School-Based Decision-Making Councils, and taking a hard look at school funding. As I said, I'm not optimistic that blanket spending increases would yield any measurable gain in learning, but every initiative I've proposed could benefit from a much more generous dose of resources, if we have the collective commitment to do so and a clear action plan. I am open to other ideas and approaches, and to critical discussion about my own proposals.
Subsidiarity and school improvement
I've written all this to make three key points. First, that no one has a silver bullet for rapidly and substantially boosting student achievement, and certainly not a way to do it through the accountability system, which is but one feature among many of a comprehensive education policy. Second, that the real work of teaching kids, and therefore making sure they've learned a lot, always happens at the local level. There's no policy substitute for high-quality teachers and school administrators and engaged parents and community leaders. This is a point American Enterprise Institute education scholar Rick Hess has been making for years, and does so especially forcefully in his new book, Letters to Young Education Reformer. We should be passionate and persistent in our education reform efforts, but we should be humble enough to recognize that the people who will actually cause kids to learn are the parents and educators in our neighborhood public, charter, private schools, and homeschools.
Which brings me to my third and final point. Politically and philosophically, I am a conservative. This means I have a deep skepticism for top-down, technocratic fixes to social and economic problems, and that definitely includes education. Andy Smarick, also from AEI, has pointed out the irony of "conservative" reformers who want to promote command-and-control types of reforms that will "force" schools to improve. Writing in 2014, Smarick essentially predicted the shift back toward a more genuine conservative education policy which we now see in the federal Every Student Succeeds Act and Kentucky's Senate Bill 1 (nicknamed "The Let Teachers Teach Act"), which re-emphasize the importance of subsidiarity in education policy.
Such a conservative approach to education reform involves a blend of strong, transparent accountability measures but also policies that empower parents and teachers to creatively solve the most local problem of all: how to help an individual child learn at the highest levels possible, and to do that over and over again for every child.
Related posts:
- What education accountability can (and cannot) do, Part I
- Feedback sought on Kentucky's proposed accountability system
- The promise - and limitations - of education policy
Usual disclaimer: All views expressed on this website are mine alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Kentucky Board of Education (where I serve as a member) or Western Kentucky University (where I am associate professor of Educational Administration, Leadership, and Research).
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