UGA professor: Make every school a charter school
UGA professor Peter Smagorinsky says he voted for Barack Obama but not Arne Duncan. He wrote a piece earlier this month about his concerns about Ducan’s belief — embedded in the Race to the Top criteria — that test data should be used to define talented teachers.
Now, he has written a piece that asks a question that I’ve raised myself and that I have heard Georgia lawmakers raise: If the charter schools work because they enjoy increased flexibility and are not bound by all the DOE regulations, why not make all schools charter schools? If freedom from regulation is the answer, why not free everybody?
Here is Peter Smagorinsky’s view on this issue:
Charter schools have been offered as one way of invigorating g public education by excusing them from many of the rules that bind ordinary public schools. In exchange, they provide charters that outline their mission and means of accountability. They therefore act somewhat like private schools, without the problem of charging their students tuition.
Charter schools are criticized by their doubters on several grounds. One is that they divert resources and high-achieving students from existing neighborhood schools and so undermine the overall quality of public education. Another is that some masquerade as public school alternatives while encouraging (perhaps deliberately) de facto segregation by writing the charter to accommodate privileged white students. In terms of their success in meeting their charters, they are further criticized by failing to produce significantly greater results than the resource-depleted schools that the charter movement is designed to out-perform.
I have recently written about my concerns with Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top agenda and its effects on the teaching profession. I would like to offer one solution to both the charter school debate and the overkill of Race to the Top in one sweeping educational reform: Make every school a charter school, rather than only those presently designated.
This change would have a number of positive effects. Teachers in the present accountability era have become deeply discouraged because decision-making has been taken out of their hands and placed under the authority of people with little experience in schools. Test-developers, policymakers, and politicians believe that endless batteries of standardized tests will make both teachers and students accountable. The more tests, they seem to believe, the more accountable the schools will be, and the clearer it will be who is teaching well and who is not.
In the present climate, teachers are treated like children, and bad children at that. And yet teachers are the lifeblood of schools. Over the years, everyone else comes and goes: students, principals, parents, and politicians. What gives a school its character and continuity is the teaching force, those who commit to the institution and carry out its most important work over years and decades.
Race to the Top is designed to identify and punish teachers whose students perform poorly on tests, even if those students are also hungry, abused at home, discouraged by peers from studying, living under dangerous circumstances, unloved, and otherwise in need of much more than today’s math or grammar lesson. Race to the Top has centralized decision-making so as to erase such differences in students, making them all appear to be well-fed, emotionally healthy, school-ready, and equally fit to fill in blanks on tests designed for generic children. Yet the teachers who are never consulted are responsible for driving their diversely prepared and talented groups of students through the same narrow assessment chute.
Imagine a different situation, however, one in which every school is a charter school that defines its own mission and assessment practices. Adopting this plan would require every faculty to discuss its students, community, beliefs, views of students’ social and professional futures, and other concerns in order to determine what sort of education its students deserve. I think that any faculty charged with the responsibility to determine its own goals and assessment practices would be highly energized by the process and the confidence invested in them by the system. Faculty morale, which has been battered in recent decades, would inevitably improve given the faith placed in their local knowledge and the respect accorded them as authorities on students and teaching.
I suspect that most faculties given this opportunity would not choose to subject themselves and their students to endless batteries of standardized tests. Perhaps to satisfy those who believe that we do need some form of standardized assessment to make cross-school comparisons of “achievement”—and I am not among them—faculties would be required to administer at least one such test over the course of the year. But they would be given the latitude to choose that test, which would require them to examine the various assessments to see which provides the greatest degree of authenticity relative to their curriculum and teaching. The competition would also force test-makers to continually refine their assessments so that teachers, not policymakers and psychometricians, regard them as authentic, which I think would produce better tests.
Race to the Top considers “merit” to be a function of teaching to standardized tests. I see meritorious teaching very differently. I find merit in trying to become a better teacher. A plan proposed long ago by Temple professor Michael W. Smith would have merit pay distributed to teachers who study their own teaching in order to improve it. A school’s charter could include a component that assesses effective teaching through teachers’ participation in action research teams in which they identify a local teaching problem or challenge and systematically study it to come up with instructional or programmatic solutions to experiment with. Again, the goal is to improve teaching in part by vesting teachers with decision-making authority. In this system, a principal would be less of an overlord looking to keep ill-behaved teachers in line, and more of a collaborator in helping teachers think of how to teach more effectively toward the charter’s mission.
Of course, the teaching force, like any other professional group, does include people unfit for the job. I don’t pretend that my proposal would completely remove all dead wood. On the whole, however, I think it would help make schools more energetic, dynamic, and satisfying places for students and teachers who seek out the classroom for intellectual, emotional, and practical rewards.
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65 comments Add your comment
watching closely
June 8th, 2010
5:13 pm
Enter your comments here
watching closely
June 8th, 2010
5:19 pm
The requirement for parental involvement and the discipline code keeps all schools from being a charter school. Where are you going to educate those who can’t meet the requirements that are placed on
charter school students and parents? Part of the beauty of the charter system is the ability to require
some accountibility instead of viewing school to be an entitlement.
Ed Johnson
June 8th, 2010
8:23 pm
At 1:02 pm, Peter Smagorinsky wrote: “There’s much more to say on the topic.”
Indeed there is. Here, for example, is UCLA psychology professor James W. Stigler’s EdWeek piece, “Needed: Fresh Thinking on Teacher Accountability”
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/06/09/33stigler_ep.h29.html?r=1438990651
(registration may be required to fully access the article)
Peter, I would love to hear from you through where I copied and posted your first AJC op-ed at http://www.ChangeTheSchools.ning.com/
ScienceTeacher671
June 8th, 2010
11:21 pm
Agree with 36 Years and William Casey that grouping by chronological age is definitely not the most efficient method to maximize teaching and learning.
Also, I’ve heard that honest people aren’t the ones who need laws…it’s probably also true that are best schools aren’t the ones that need the rules the General Assembly, GADOE and USDOE impose on all schools…
NOT GoodforKids
June 9th, 2010
12:06 am
Peter Smagorinsky says “with confidence that the current sort of centralized, assessment-driven system will make the profession dull and uninspiring, and will make students’ classroom experiences rote and tedious.”
I only disagree with the future tense…Not WILL, but IS…
It IS making the profession dull and uninspiring, and IS making students’ classroom experiences rote and tedious.”
Bottom line is that teachers need to be treated professionally and given many opportunities for input and direction. Just curious, what happened to the Site-Based Management popular in the early nineties when I was just starting out in Cobb? Anyone?
Peter Smagorinsky
June 9th, 2010
6:49 am
To “Question for Peter” commenter: I’ve always believed that the best approach to discipline is to plan and conduct interesting classes that students are too involved with to disrupt others. Disruptions occur when kids are bored or looking to revolt against something. Conducting school as a test-prep factory is sure to invite discipline problems. Teaching so that kids are, like Atlanta, “too busy to hate” cuts behavior problems down so that the fewer cases are more manageable. For English teachers, I’ve developed resources at http://www.coe.uga.edu/~smago/VirtualLibrary/Unit_Outlines.htm that suggest some ways to organize instruction in English classes so that kids are more likely to find them worthwhile enough not to disrupt. Other subjects can be stimulating and engaging as well, although not if they spend all day in “drill and kill” test preparation.
Ed Johnson–Thanks for posting my column at your site. The Education Week piece requires a subscription so I couldn’t access it. In any case, I appreciate your posting information on the Change the Schools website. Ed, please drop me a line at smago@uga.edu if I’m missing your point and are looking for something else from me.
One thing to consider in all these issues is that there’s little agreement on what an “educational product”–that is, a student who completes formal education–should be. To Arne Duncan, it’s someone who can successfully take multiple choice tests on topics that don’t interest them under high-stakes circumstances. In something I wrote a while back in a research publication, I listed a set of educational outcomes stressed by various educational theorists. Please excuse anything that you consider to be edspeak jargon in the following cut/paste from that book chapter:
“A Vygotskian perspective would hold that the social and physical organization of schooling implies and encourages an ideal student and, eventually, adult and citizen. The notion of what constitutes an ideal adult, however, is under dispute, viewed variously as one who is caring (Noddings, 1993), subversive (Postman & Weingartner, 1987), thoughtful (Brown, 1993), culturally literate (Hirsch, 1987), civic-minded (Stotsky, 1991), imaginative (Bogdan, 1992), democratic (Dewey, 1966), joyous (Newman, 1996), virtuous (Bennett, 1993), politically liberated (Freire, 1970), personally liberated (Montessori, 1964), self-motivated (Csikszentmihalyi & Larson, 1984), scientific (Piaget, 1952), skeptical (Foucault, 1972), reflective (Schon, 1991), free (Greene, 1988), domestic (Martin, 1995), inquiring (Dewey, 1960), and compassionate (Jesus Christ, n.d.)–to name just a few qualities that educators have identified over the years. We should stress that (1) each of these terms may be defined in ways different from the way intended by its advocate, (2) each of these theorists, while foregrounding one trait, endorses others as well, and (3) many of these different qualities of an ideal adult are compatible with one another. Each ideal endpoint can, however, suggest the need to promote specific frameworks for thinking and conceptions of human purpose and thus, for educators, engagement in different social and intellectual practices in school.”
Any and all of these views of the ideal student “product” may be in play on any school faculty or school community. Each is part of a tradition concerning what U.S. schools should be focusing on in educating youth. All of them seek to use education to cultivate a particular sort of person and citizen. None of them is amenable to assessment through standardized tests, which is the primary means of identifying effective teaching under Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top initiative.
My point is simply that there is no consensus on what the purpose of education is. If “college prep” is the answer, then what becomes of the vast numbers of students who don’t attend college? A strictly academic focus overlooks much about adolescents and their human development; and difficulties with learning often stem from problems outside the classroom: hunger, abuse, bullying, peer pressure not to study, the need to work to make ends meet, and much else. Considering all kids to be equally ready to become test-taking machines is inattentive to the very real obstacles that many students have to being successful students of the sort envisioned by Duncan.
The issues are very complex and if the solutions were simple, I think we’d have found them by now. But things are getting more, not less, complicated, in schools. That’s one reason I like local control: It draws on faculty and administrative expertise in addressing the problems of their particular community. As Not Goodforkids notes, “teachers need to be treated professionally and given many opportunities for input and direction.” Assuming that teachers are bad until proven good by their students’ standardized test scores is indicative of the lack of professional respect that teachers are currently getting. It further indicates a lack of respect for kids, whose many other abilities and potentials go untapped in the name of multiple choice test proficiency.
Thanks again to all who’ve chimed in, even if you think I’m one of those liberal pinhead UGA professors, as we’ve been called by Rep. Paul Broun. Keep in mind that I also spent a decade and a half as a high school teacher, and have spent the last two decades teaching English teachers, so I have been around a school or two in my day. That doesn’t make me the world’s greatest expert in anything, but does give me some experience in making these observations.
Monica Bomengen
June 9th, 2010
9:15 am
This professor is making an incredibly naive proposition based on the erroneous assumption that charter schools are not subject to state testing requirements. They are. Chartering a district school does not exempt the school form accountability. In fact, it greatly increases the accountability, because if the school doesn’t meet proficiency requirements in five years, it is closed down.
I love the idea that every public school should become chartered. Imagine what would happen if the school faculty and administration knew that they had to produce or be shut down in five years. Reform would suddenly be put not on the fast track, but the high-speed Acela track.
ScienceTeacher671
June 9th, 2010
10:06 am
Professor Smagorinsky, I agree that interesting classes can cut down on behavior problems, but I’ve found that students who lack basic skills are also likely to be behavior problems, because they find it so difficult to participate in challenging lessons.
This leads us back to a basic problem: while we’ve very much gone overboard with the current testing mania, we mustn’t forget that schools to some extent brought the problems on themselves by producing graduates who made it to the workplace without basic reading, writing, and math skills. (I suspect that administrators are more to blame than teachers, but SCHOOLS did this.)
There IS a need for SOME testing – if it’s valid, and if we act on the results of the testing.
Peter Smagorinsky
June 9th, 2010
12:45 pm
Thanks to Monica for (1) identifying herself, and (2) pointing out that charter schools do have accountability measures. Actually I think I acknowledged this before but it does bear emphasis. I’m not a charter school expert but all definitions I’ve seen say that they have the opportunity to propose their own accountability system, which is an option I’d like to see for all schools, not just charters. I think it’s nutty that non-charter public schools are constantly bombarded by test after test without any consultation of the faculty about which ones are valid, which are redundant, and so on.
ScienceTeacher671 notes that some kids will disrupt even an interesting class. Point well taken. But the goal is to reduce disruption, which I think an interesting class can accomplish, which then makes discipline more manageable than if many students are disruptive.
ST671 also argues that we do need some kind of accountability testing. Most people who’ve written me agree with that perspective. If the tests were authentic, I might agree. But I think that the tests now given do more harm than good.
Lindy Johnson
June 9th, 2010
3:34 pm
As a parent and teacher, I’d love to see more schooling options. If making every school a charter would create more choices for both students and teachers, then I say let the chartering begin! Many of our traditional, one-size fits all schools are simply not working for many of our kids. Yet we continue to hope for better results when all we are doing is the same thing over and over again. Amidst so much finger-pointing, and negativity in education, I find Prof. Smagorinsky’s possible solutions for our troubled schools refreshing.
Not Impressed
June 9th, 2010
5:17 pm
Local control is just as political, misguided, “Top Heavy”, anti-teacher, and usually has no leadership with a backbone, so what is the difference?
GA Teach
June 9th, 2010
10:56 pm
IE2 is the accountability tool used in the largest school district in the state. Why become a charter if you already have flexibility. All schools but two or three in Gwinnett are under IE2 contract. If they do not show gains in the accepted areas by the state in five years…. the school fall under state control. Just for reference…I find it hard to believe that the majority of teachers at schools fail to discuss how to make their communities better….I would be willing to bet that teachers do discuss the problems in their communities and give suggestions on how to fix the problem. Blame the teachers….they caused it all to happen…There are some bad apples….just like every profession…but as a whole teachers strive to make the schools better….but the leaders in government and in school districts are held accountable to the public…..What is the easiest measurement to use. Multiple Choice standardized test. Give the teachers some respect…..
ScienceTeacher671
June 9th, 2010
11:00 pm
Professor Smagorinsky, I agree that our current state tests are worthless.
Former DOE leader: What matters isn’t boldest reform, but most effective. And charter model is effective. | Get Schooled
July 3rd, 2010
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[...] One of our recent discussions of charter schools led to this interesting e-mail from Andrew Broy, former DOE head of charter schools and now president of the Illinois Network of Charter Schools. (Has anyone noticed this exodus of smart education leaders to other states?) Broy was responding to a blog by UGA professor Peter Smagorinsky. [...]
Former DOE leader: What matters isn’t boldest reform, but most effective. And charter model is effective. » iThinkEducation.net!
July 3rd, 2010
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[...] One of our recent discussions of charter schools led to this interesting e-mail from Andrew Broy, former DOE head of charter schools and now president of the Illinois Network of Charter Schools. (Has anyone noticed this exodus of smart education leaders to other states?) Broy was responding to a blog by UGA professor Peter Smagorinsky. [...]