In my last email, in which I commented on the front-page story in the NYT last week, At Charter Schools, Short Careers by Choice, I forgot to make a critical point: the four charter networks mentioned in the story (all of which I’ve visited), YES Prep, Achievement First, Success, and KIPP are all kicking serious butt, doing AMAZING things for kids: breaking the mold, showing what’s possible for even the most disadvantaged kids, and proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that demography is NOT destiny.
So why is the NYT writing an article that makes it seem as if these schools’ high teacher turnover is a bad thing? Looking at their astonishing success, why didn’t the article instead ask the following, obvious question: “Given how these networks are succeeding with the toughest kids, whereas EVERYTHING we’ve tried as a nation for decades with these same kids has failed miserably (and tragically), why isn’t EVERY school in America serving this demographic of kids shamelessly copying what these networks are doing??? Things like long hours, high expectations, and a ton of hard work, by both students AND teachers. This means hiring a very different kind of teacher – and dealing with higher turnover – but what’s the alternative? Continue to fail millions of kids?
I keep coming back to the Navy SEALs… Thanks to this highly selective process and extraordinary training, these guys are the baddest a** warriors our country can produce and they tackle our toughest, most dangerous missions. But the work is incredibly intense and not really compatible with family life, so few are doing active missions for their career – they move on into management/leadership positions or go into the private sector (egads!). Could you imagine the NY Times writing a snarky story about high turnover among SEALs?!
When our nation decides that something is really important, even if it’s really hard, it usually does a good job training people to tackle the problem. But not teachers. Other than the yeoman work of Teach for America and a few hundred high-performing charter schools, this country is doing very little in an organized, focused way to help the 5 million or so kids (out of 50 million K-12 students in total) who come from disadvantaged backgrounds and are trapped in horribly failing schools, and are thus on the fast track to welfare, jail, and broken, ruined lives.
Why can’t we be honest and say that teaching in the South Bronx is NOT THE SAME as teaching on the Upper East Side or Scarsdale? When kids come into school with two strikes already against them, we need to provide schools that have BETTER principals, BETTER teachers, LONGER hours, MORE rigor, HIGHER expectations, etc. to give these kids any chance to have a decent life. Schools serving such kids need to do pretty much everything DIFFERENTLY and BETTER!
So what do we do? Precisely the opposite. By and large (with some praiseworthy exceptions), as a nation, we give the neediest kids WORSE principals, WORSE teachers, SHORTER hours, LESS rigor, and LOWER expectations. And then, to cap it off, we throw up our hands in defeat (“You can’t blame schools when there’s so much poverty.”) or, worse yet, BLAME THE VICTIMS (“What can you expect from those kids and those parents?”. This is an outrage, an abomination. It infuriates me.
Democrats for Education Reform cofounder Whitney Tilson, articulating a point Dropout Nation has made from the beginning: That you can’t transform American public education by sticking to the same old, tired, and failed policies, practices, and perceptions — including the belief that teacher turnover is in and of itself a bad thing. This is especially true given that teaching is changing as a profession — and old thinking won’t work either for children or for the high-quality talent working in classrooms. The focus should be on continually expanding the pipeline of high-quality teachers, something that successful companies in the private sector do each and every day.
It struck me recently — amidst heated discussions around my article “Is Common Core Too Hard-Core?” — that we have precisely the same conundrum today vis-à-vis American urban education as we had twenty years ago vis-a-vis American urban crime. After all, there’s the same abject failure. For example, over 50% of urban black men do not finish high school. Of that number, 60% will spend time in prison. As I learned during my years coaching debate at the Eagle Academy for Young Men in the South Bronx, dropping out of high school not only keeps urban young men from finding jobs, but it also correlates with drug abuse, illiteracy, malnutrition, and pernicious cross-generational poverty.
This is why I propose that education reformers take a page from the NYPD’s hugely successful “Broken Windows” playbook. We need a Compstat for education, where we can minutely track how a student is performing in the classroom, and whether he or she is at risk of dropping out. We need to be nimble in where we station our best teachers, free to move them to where the real dropout spikes are occurring (and pay them accordingly). Moreover, we need to give parents and students the choice to opt out of a failing school.
Most important, instead of merely insisting on Common Core Standards of excellence, we must provide serious sticks for non-compliance. And not just docking teacher and administrative pay… When combined with … reforms pioneered by public schools like New York City’s Eagle Academy for Young Men and the Eagle-inspired 100 Black Men of the Bay Area charter school in Oakland – mentors, uniforms, strict behavior codes, and a demanding curriculum that features high-level courses in aeronautics, robotics, and medicine – we can, at long last, dramatically move the needle on America’s dropout epidemic. Just as we dramatically moved it on crime.
Naturally, the same vested apologists for failure that resisted a broken windows approach to law enforcement will resist a broken windows approach to education reform. Instead of dramatically raising the bar on how we expect all students to perform… the apologists for failure want us to lower standards even more, so that teachers, states, and school districts can better “adapt” to the “diverse” students under their care… These compassionate, if misguided, folks forget that this is the very same “soft bigotry of low expectations” that enabled both the American crime and dropout epidemics. However, such shameful bigotry does not seem to bother these entrenched interests…
Almost every single domestic problem we face, and international ones too…– can be traced back to poor education…. Even the huge budget deficits we accrue to pay, in part, for the dramatically increased number of people receiving government assistance are the invariable offspring of our collective failure to demand that every parent and every child graduate high school with tangible real-world skills that can net them a decent-paying job…
As we take time to tearfully remember Dr. Martin Luther King’s inspiring words and, albeit imperfect, example, let’s at long last provide the tough, disciplined love our at-risk young men and women need for success. Let us dare to set firm and uniform Common Core Standards for academic excellence, regardless of where you go to school. Let us dare to establish real sticks for failure to meet those standards. And let us stop passing along our most needy students because it is too much trouble to get involved.
James Marshall Crotty, in Forbes, also hitting upon on some key points articulated by this publication: The need for applying a “broken windows” approach using early warning systems to helping all children — a subject of a Dropout Nation Podcast from last year — advancing accountability, and implementing Common Core reading and math standards.