When I was first appointed to the Kentucky Board of Education (KBE) in 2016, I mused on the irony. As a professor of education administration, I was accustomed to telling my students (all aspiring school principals) to pay little attention to education policy or the workings of the state legislature or state board. School leaders spend way too much time fretting over the state accountability system or other mandates, all of which have an extremely indirect impact on student learning, and not nearly enough time on the building-level factors that actually make a difference in student achievement. That’s where I want my students to focus their efforts.
And then suddenly I was a member of the state board of education, helping make the policies I was telling practitioners not to worry with so much. At the time I argued that of course I believe policy does matter, but its function is in creating an environment where educational excellence can flourish by unleashing the innovative capacity of empowered teachers, parents, students, and local school and community leaders.
In the two years that have followed I’ve had many opportunities to reflect further on the tension between what we do at the state level and what happens at the local level in the larger effort to improve student learning. For example, when KBE was reworking the statewide school accountability system to conform with new federal guidelines, I cautioned fellow board members and education stakeholders that while we should build the best accountability system possible, we should not overestimate its capacity to actually accelerate student achievement. Only the work of local actors could make that happen, and the accountability system exists primarily to provide feedback on their efforts.
In April of this year several new members joined KBE as the terms of members appointed by the previous governor expired. These new members (several of whom I had worked with previously in their role as governor-appointed advisors to the board or in other capacities) have a refreshing and passionate urgency to press our educational system to much more rapid levels of improvement. While I am the only member of KBE to have served as a professional K-12 educator, these new members draw on their considerable experience as business and community leaders to provide new perspectives and ask demanding questions about our lackluster progress and how we can do better.
In our discussions about policy, I often find myself trying to explain the complexities of what educators do and the confounding, immeasurable, and often uncontrollable variables at work in the results. I anticipate that, as we move forward with our board agenda, I will often urge caution and careful consideration of sweeping policy ideas that, while well-intentioned, may not achieve the desired results and may ultimately do more harm than good. I expect to frequently advocate for giving educators more flexibility in their work and greater consideration of their perspectives and frustrations.
This is all good. I am grateful for board members who are fiercely dedicated to educational improvement, because no one should be satisfied with the results we are currently getting. Like everyone who has spent decades in a professional environment, I have my own blind spots where perhaps I have grown accustomed to the way we do things. I can readily admit that I’ve been wrong about certain educational ideas in the past and therefore I’m likely to be wrong about some of the ideas I currently hold as well.
But I also don’t want my reservations about state-level policy to come across as a defense of the educational status quo. Read virtually any post on my blog from the last eight years and it should be clear that I don’t endorse business as usual in education. I believe I was appointed to the KBE in the first place because of my advocacy for education reforms that might seriously disrupt the way we have traditionally thought about schooling. So I want to be clear, both for myself and others, what guides my thinking about the role of state policy, student learning, and the work of K-12 education.
In this extended post I’d like to unpack some of my thoughts about all this, first as an intellectual exercise for myself, but secondarily as a help to any education stakeholders interested in how we balance all the tensions we encounter while trying to make K-12 education far more effective than it has been in the past. As always, let me be clear that I speak strictly for myself, and no one else affiliated with the Kentucky Board of Education or my employer, Western Kentucky University.
We’re not getting better fast enough, for many reasons
The first thing to say is that the education system is, indeed, not getting the results we need. I won’t go into great detail about this as I’ve presented this argument elsewhere with data to demonstrate that, while Kentucky may be having some modest progress in certain areas of student achievement, the rate of improvement is so painfully slow that vast swaths of children will still be lacking in basic academic proficiency for generations to come. Of course there are serious limitations to what test scores can really tell us about student learning, but even with those limitations, our rate of progress (or lack thereof) is simply unacceptable.
Why are our schools not successfully meeting this challenge? The reasons are legion and no single cause accounts for a measurably larger explanation than others. Poverty certainly has a key role to play. There is overwhelming evidence that students who grow up in low-income homes face a multitude of learning challenges. A few bold voices have recently started naming the role of family breakdown (a phenomenon closely, but not exclusively, linked to poverty) as an enormous obstacle to student achievement. Sometimes educators want to blame low student performance exclusively on poverty and family instability, but this ignores the reality that there are schools serving high percentages of low-income students that are nevertheless getting strong results (updated: see this new New York Times piece on how Chicago schools are beating the odds with high percentages of students living in poverty). In my own experience, there are qualitative differences between high and low-performing schools in terms of learning processes and leadership decision-making that can explain more than poverty. But even when all those best practices are in place, it is demonstrably harder to accelerate learning with at-risk kids and schools have not been able to scale up a more rapid improvement in overall student achievement.
Some education reformers assume that teachers themselves are to blame for poor school performance in that they are perpetually resistant to changes in practice that might make a difference in student learning. In my 21 years in this business, I’ve certainly met some teachers who felt they knew all they needed to know about teaching and preferred their own classroom status quo. But these teachers have largely been in the minority. The willingness of educators (or at least education leaders) to jump on every single bandwagon of shiny new ideas and strategies suggests to me that teachers are hungry for new approaches that may help improve their performance, if skeptical about the capacity of leaders to follow through on new initiatives.
Maximizing accountability and local flexibility
What is more common is that the very bureaucratic structures of schooling itself undermine reform efforts. Many good teachers want desperately to do better by their students and have innovative ideas to do so, but feel perpetually constrained by the professional culture of their schools, indifferent leaders, and one-size-fits-all structures that prevent creative instructional approaches. Entire books have been written about this problem (among others, I recommend Charles Payne’s 2008 book, So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools). This perspective argues that to improve schools, we need to loosen the grip of teachers unions, empower principals and superintendents to make more sweeping changes in their schools and districts by rethinking teacher tenure and loosening certification requirements that make it harder to effectively staff schools, and introduce competition as an additional form of accountability through charter schools and possibly private school choice. In Common Sense School Reform (2006), Rick Hess characterized this approach to reform as promoting both accountability (high expectations and meaningful consequences for poor school performance) and flexibility (maximizing local autonomy to figure out how to meet higher performance goals).
I wholeheartedly endorse this perspective. While I have a few minor disagreements, David Osborne’s 2017 book, Reinventing America’s Schools: Creating a 21st Century Education System, documents how such approaches are working in places like New Orleans, Denver, and Washington, D.C. to rapidly improve student learning outcomes. If I had to characterize my own priorities for state education policy, they would align closely with this striving for a high level of accountability balanced with a focus on local empowerment and autonomy.
An example of this approach, I believe, can be found in the proposed changes to Kentucky’s high school graduation requirements currently under KBE consideration. Interim Commissioner Wayne Lewis and his team have provided a new framework for high school graduation that blends a new level of accountability with greater flexibility for schools and students. These changes are driven by the fact that, while Kentucky’s graduation rate has continued to rise, there is little evidence that student learning has actually improved. Under the new guidelines, Kentucky high school graduates would take a foundational set of courses (mostly in their first two years of high school) and then take a basic proficiency exam in reading and math that must be passed before graduation (students who fail will still have two years for remediation and follow up attempts). Meanwhile, the last two years of high school will be characterized by a more personalized set of coursework that still has to meet certain credit requirements but gives students new options in the classes they take to do so. We are raising the accountability bar for school and student performance, but increasing autonomy for how those goals are met.
Coupled with a robust system of school choice (still not a reality in Kentucky, despite last year’s successful charter school law), I believe this approach to policy goes a long way toward creating the conditions by which schools can accelerate student learning. Whether they do or not, however, is not something under our control at the state policy level, even under systems of high accountability and maximum local choice and autonomy.
For example, giving parents more choices and empowering principals and superintendents to make more personnel, management, and instructional decisions has the potential to benefit every community, but will have the biggest impact in cities and urban areas where the demand for different types of learning environments will always be higher and where bureaucratic impediments to change seem most entrenched. But in a mostly rural state like Kentucky, there are natural limitations, both to how many different kinds of schools local demand will sustain and in terms of the personnel pool school leaders can draw from to staff their schools. I often tell aspiring principals from my region of Kentucky, “You simply cannot hire and fire your way into being an excellent school.” In most communities, you are going to need to grow the teachers you’ve got and make them better teachers.
The “rocket science” of local school effectiveness
In this way, improving teacher effectiveness and enhancing the learning experience of students must be the unrelenting focus of local educators. This requires a combination of ingredients:
- seamless teacher (and principal) development pipelines linking university preparation programs to ongoing, job-embedded training, instructional coaching, and high-quality performance feedback loops
- rigorous, well-planned local curricula
- classroom-level assessment and intervention systems that give teachers, students, and parents actionable information on students’ academic progress
- safe, orderly school environments that demand high expectations for all students
- and robust community involvement, including a critical mass of parents, educators, and business and political leaders on fire to ensure local schools deliver high-levels of student learning and willing to hold educational leaders accountable for results.
These ingredients can be found in various combinations in frameworks like Robert Marzano’s Levels of School Effectiveness, John Hattie’s Visible Learning, and similar collections of “best practice” strategies, none of which is irrefutable gospel and all of which, in combination, have something important to offer education improvement efforts. This is not rocket science, but most schools have found it extremely difficult to put together the total combination of elements to significantly ramp up student learning. Many schools are doing these things piecemeal, or at low levels of implementation that still have relatively little impact on the learning experience in the average classroom. Making these elements of school effectiveness normal operating procedure must be the top priority for local education leaders and the communities that must hold them accountable.
Teachers can’t do it, certainly not by themselves; they are too busy teaching kids every day and lack the power to control many of these macro-level elements of school operations. Parents can’t do it either, though giving them the power to choose the school that best fits their child’s needs, where possible, gives schools consequences for not doing so. Primarily, putting together the elements of school improvement is the responsibility of principals, superintendents, and boards of education and especially of their local communities to demand more from them all, under a strong system of accountability, oversight, and monitoring by state education leaders.
Blending urgency and humility
This combination of state level policy and local improvement efforts requires bold reformers and advocates at all levels. While many teachers may be open to new ideas, their unions and professional associations are arguably the most powerful political entities in Kentucky and systematically oppose the kinds of reforms to school governance and management that would empower parents with more choices, give local educational leaders more autonomy, and hold schools to higher levels of accountability. As long as they do so, the education establishment must be opposed at the state policy level.
Likewise, institutional inertia and complacency at the local level sometimes means resistance to meaningful whole school improvement strategies. Democratic control of local boards of education is no remedy for this problem, as powerful, adult political interests often advance a kind of majoritarian dominance of decision-making structures that effectively shut out the concerns of many parents, educators, and community stakeholders. This bureaucratic, institutional inertia has to be countered by courageous teachers, school leaders, and especially parents and community activists with a vision for how schools can do better by all students through focusing on teacher effectiveness, rigorous curriculum, meaningful assessment, and strong, safe school cultures and community involvement.
State leaders can help these local efforts through thoughtful policy strategies, but at the end of the day we must operate with a distinct sense of humility about our place in the process. We need to establish an unrelenting sense of urgency for educational improvement, set rigorous accountability measures, and remove as many barriers as possible to parental, student, and teacher empowerment and innovation. We also must be mindful that if schools improve as a result of the policy environment we’ve created, it will be because of local educators who embraced new opportunities that policymakers likely never imagined.
To sum up my approach to education reform, I am fundamentally a conservative. As such, I am skeptical of top-down, technocratic fixes for complex social and economic problems and have a natural disposition toward localism and an appreciation for the value of long-standing institutions. Likewise, as a career educator, I have observed how calcified bureaucratic mindsets and powerful adult interests have repeatedly foiled meaningful attempts at school improvement at both the local and state level. No one, regardless of their political philosophy or affiliations, should be satisfied with the results we’re getting from the education system.
This perspective suggests we should commit to a hair-on-fire sense of urgency about school improvement and push for bold reforms that establish rigorous standards of performance while liberating parents, teachers, and administrators to pursue new pathways of educational innovation. Let’s use state policy to advance this cause whenever possible while respecting the necessary reality that local actors are going to actually carry out the work and dictate its success, possibly in a variety of different ways. Finally, none of this is possible without deeply engaged local communities. Let’s all insist on a high-quality learning experience for every student in every school, especially those in our very own neighborhoods, and accept no excuses to the contrary.
Usual disclaimer: All views expressed on this website are mine alone and do not reflect the collective opinions of the Kentucky Board of Education (where I serve as a member) or Western Kentucky University (where I serve as professor of educational administration, leadership, and research).
Image above: October 2016 KBE Meeting, via Kentucky Teacher.
Related posts:
- The promise - and limitations - of education policy
- What education accountability can (and cannot) do, Part I and Part II.
- What I see in low-performing schools
- A School Choice Primer, Parts I, II, and III.
- Kentucky charter school basics.
As a former public school teacher, I think the education reform movement has two major flaws which keep it from being successful.
1. Most people involved with the movement are not ground level educators. For some odd reason they choose not to become teachers, but seem to feel their untried theories to be sound, and plausible. They read a lot of white papers, and studies, then with the experience of their own K-12 education, generate a magical philosophy. In the end it seems their idea of education nirvana is one where more time is spent raising the bar and separating the student wheat from the chaff.
2. Virtually all public education is driven by the belief system out lined in the "Education Gospel" Like all faith based systems, the education gospel is a hierarchy of educational attainment goals, with a college degree as being the most divine state. As a result all practical education, including vocational, career, and technical education programs as seen as not pertaining to this educational trajectory, and thus not necessary. The Germans and the American military do not follow this educational ordering nor do they denigrate people who for many reasons choose these "lesser" paths of life. They understand that there is a needs for many different skill sets, and urge people to select one which fits their interests and abilities. We do a disservice when our public K-12 schools try to mimic that of the private schools. Their goals are different, and their outlook is different. Theirs is one which accepts that there will be winners and losers, and do not care about the losers. At one time our public schools were better at meeting a wide range of student needs, and provide support for many different trajectories. Its criminal what has happened, and the fact that hundreds of thousands of students leave school with no marketable skills.
Posted by: Stephen Kunst | 08/04/2019 at 08:13 AM