When systems work well, we hardly think about why or how they got that way. We just appreciate it.

Our public schools system is a system of schooling that is mostly regulated by state laws. Some federal laws apply as well. As much as we tout the “idea” of local control. Local school districts have very little influence over the educational aspects of our schools. The tests are set by the states. The curricula is developed by distant publishers. There are fed requirements on schooling. And really shouldn’t we be talking about reponsiblity rather than control? Who is responsible for ensuring that each and every child receives a quality education? No one.

So in our chaotic, disfunctional school system, there really is no responsiblity whatsoever to ensure that each and every child receives a quality education. We rely completely upon inertia and the goodwill of teachers to transmit as much knowledge/ideas as they see fit. But this system is a system of status quo, not a system of improvement.

But the status quo is not enough. The achievement gap is huge. Our best students are not being challenged and the average learning of our students is significantly lower than is seen in the best school systems around the world.

There is much that we can learn from other systems that are designed to improve, but there is one caveat; education is an ideal, not a product. Education represents our hopes and aspirations for our children, not a TV or iPod. So the non-educational systems need to be carefully considered whether the specifics of those systems will work well with education or not. But nonetheless, there are lessons we could learn from changes in other systems.

Case 1: The approval of new healthcare treatments in our country. We have a very rigorous system of approving a new pharmaceutical treatment. A company must prove to the FDA (a government agency) that any new treatment is both safe and efficacious before doctors are allowed to prescribe it.

Prior to the FDA system, “snake oil” really did rule the day. Nobody knew or had any confidence that a prescribed treatment would work or not. With our current system, the public is confident that any FDA approved treatment is the best possible chance of improving health. The greatest benefit of this system is confidence. Even if people do not recover from an illness, the public is confident that the best possible strategies were tried.

Case 2: Business systems have been all the rage in ed reform lately with a great deal of emphasis on “testing and accountability”. Certainly many businesses operate very successfully using this model. (Set goals and reward employees based upon sales or marketshare.) The downside to completely adopting this system for education is that in business “the marketplace” serves as the ultimate judge, but in education there is no “market”. If the product failed in the market then the business failed.

Failure is not an option in education. Tests can not serve as an artificial marketplace. Tests have a good role in evaluating learning but to use them to drive education mistakes the tail (tests) for the dog (education). The goals of education *must* be first and the use of tests as only a feedback to determine if those goals were met. Education is more akin to the commons and not the freemarket.

Case 3: Quality school systems around the world. While not an explict model for the US, there is much that can be learned from Singapore. Over the past 30+ years Singapore has dramatically changed their schooling system. In the 1980s their high school drop out rate was ~25%. It is now currently less than 2%. During that time, their students’ learning increased dramatically in math and science (TIMSS) and more recently in reading (PIRLS). How they did this is quite a story. For more info check out:
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EDUCATION/Resources/278200-1121703274255/1439264-1153425508901/Development_Edu_Singapore_draft.pdf

But other school systems around the world are also designed to improve. Even though there are dramatic cultural differences, the common elements that separate successful school systems form ineffective systems (such as ours) is:

1) Checks and Balances in the school system to ensure that each aspect (teaching, curricula, assessments) of school is continually improved and every child receives a quality education.

2) The use of external evaluations (little/no teacher grading) in determining how much students have learned.

3) School autonomy in deciding curricula and in-school budget allocations

So it is possible to dramatically change our schools to enable our students to learn better. But we need to start with a school system that is set up to ensure that each and every child receives a great education. Our disfunctional, chaotic school system currently does not do that.

With that caveat, I think it is worth noting that the test scores from MESA aren’t very impressive. They are linked here: http://www.cde.state.co.us/cdeassess/documents/csap/csap_summary.html and here: http://www.cde.state.co.us/cdeassess/documents/csap/csap_disag.html.

2008, 10th grade reading, only 28% advanced and proficient. For Free/Reduced Lunch, only 21.8%.

It is hard to tell without knowing the history of the school, but it looks like some significant drop out/push out issues too, with reductions in cohorts each year.

I have written an open letter to Sen. Obama on his selection of Jeanne Century, located at:
http://ednews.org/articles/26924/1/Open-letter-to-Barack-Obama-from-John-Dewey/Page1.html

The letter cites a report of which Jeanne Century was one of the authors and is directed at principals of schools. It offers advice on how to handle such “recalcitrant” teachers. One option is to “encourage” them to leave.

I later suggested to a veteran administrator that it was the educators, not the business and political communities, that implemented destructive “top mandates.” He thoughtfully replied, “You are right if you look at the last five years. We saw the law in the context of the last thirty years, and we knew what would be coming. We have to take the long view and protect the very survival of the school system.”

As is explained in The Turnaround Challenge, “instruction-driven” reforms that increase student performance in lower poverty and magnet schools are inherently incapable of turning around the highest poverty, neighborhood secondary schools. Curriculum-driven reforms only work after a foundation of trusting relationships is laid.

Why did so many districts turn to “best practice” quick fixes, despite our best professional judgements? With NCLB every consultant and their dog descended on schools with Power Point presentations (citing false and misleading data from the Education Trust and others), and above all their proposals had a price tag that poor districts could afford.

As the web site of your school implies, our goal should be a learning culture. Lacking the time and money required to build such a culture, it is not surprising that so many school systems followed Cover Your Ass approaches to data-driven accountability.

The Education Sector web site is full of great analyses of policies similar to those that Obama has promised. Combine the Ed Sector’s wisdom on educational issues, with the wisdom of Diane Ravitch on Accountability, and we would have a great synthesis. Remove sanctions from NCLB-type testing and turn it into a Consumers Report, and we could then benefit from data-driven decision-making, and create the trusting relationships necessary for balanced systems of accountability.