Close the Gap

Greetings! I just got back from a two-week trip to Japan, which means I’m still getting caught up on the Obama administration’s new programs. I’m sure I’ll have lots to say about their Race to the Top initiative in a few days – if nothing else, it looks like a brilliant ploy by the Obama folks to pre-empt Congress’s debate over the next big education bill.

Even if it’s not, I’m pretty excited to learn more about it, mostly because of something that the President said in a recent, fairly lengthy press conference on education.

“…what we want to do is raise standards, but also provide the kinds of best practices, with money behind it, that evidence shows allows every child to meet these standards. And that’s what this Race to the Top is all about.”

To me, that’s a compelling statement, because it sure as heck sounds like Obama gets it.

What do I mean by “gets it?” Well, if you follow the media coverage of education reform, you might think that it’s a battle between people like Michelle Rhee (Chancellor of the DC Public Schools), who’s focused on high standards and strict accountability, and people like Linda Darling-Hammond (Stanford professor shortlisted but not picked for the Secretary of Education job), who’s focused on figuring out how to support teachers to improve teaching and learning. The solution to the education problem, according to this narrative, has to involve a tradeoff between the two: you can’t have both.

The truth, of course, is that this line of reasoning is wrong. Improving education will surely involve tradeoffs, but that isn’t one of them. We need both accountability and resources; high standards only work if we can build the capacity to help students meet those standards.

That’s why Obama’s interview is so exciting. That statement – and others like it throughout the interview – seem to indicate that, on a fundamental level, the President understands that schools will get better when we give teachers and students the resources to meet high standards and hold them accountable. That reality has been missing from the last twenty years of education reform. If Race to the Top is based on that understanding, then the President’s new program could be a very good thing, indeed.

Greetings from Cambridge! Today we heard from several more incredible high schools, all of which have closed or dramatically narrowed the achievement gap in recent years. Like yesterday, all of them reported a strong sense of community and an intense focus on skills.

The ideas that stuck out for me most today, though, came outside of the schools’ presentations. The first was in a conversation I had at lunch with a lady named Mary Skipper, who’s the principal of TechBoston Academy, a public high school in (not surprisingly) Boston.

One of the biggest challenges in urban education is teacher burnout – great teachers come, teach for a few years, then leave. And while I wouldn’t call myself a great teacher, my career path is definitely a symptom of this problem.

Mrs. Skipper, however, believes that teaching at her school was sustainable over the long term. To look at her staff, you’d believe this; all of the teachers she brought to the conference seemed energized by their jobs, not debilitated. In fact, nearly all of the teachers from all of the schools here today radiated energy and excitement – these were people who love what they’re doing.

Mrs. Skipper attributes this phenomenon to the concept of flow, the idea that when a person receives both a challenge and support to meet that challenge, magic happens. When you’re experiencing flow, you can perform at a high level for extended periods of time without burning out. This, of course, is the situation we’re trying to create in our students; I think Mrs. Skipper had an excellent point that the same applies for teachers as well. In schools where students are learning and performing at a high level, flow pervades.

The second major insight came up during the final session, a wrap-up in which four experts distilled everything we’d heard over the previous two days into eight minutes. Most compelling for me was Richard Murnane of Harvard’s Ed School list. According to Professor Murnane, all of the gap-closing schools we heard from shared the following four features:

• Clear focus – specifically, a single, highly strategic focus (e.g. writing across the curriculum) that led to changes in kids’ experiences throughout the day
• The use of data, coupled with the ability to find a balance between “drill and kill” and ignoring data completely
• The presence of both incentives and capacity-building
• Enormous attention to the details of the change process

While all four are important, Murnane’s last point may have been the biggest message of the conference. What you do matters, but so does how you do it. Schools close the achievement gap when they have the capacity to implement their plans.

On the whole, an inspiring two days! So many schools across the country are closing and narrowing the gap…it’s getting harder and harder to argue that this can’t be done.

Greetings! I’m currently in Cambridge, MA, attending the annual Harvard Achievement Gap Initiative (AGI) Conference. I’ll have a fuller posting on what went down at the conference, but in the meantime I’ll be updating you with a day-by-day report.

First of all, the conference is pretty swanky. The venue is the Harvard Business School, and the conference center feels more like a hotel than a university campus. A nice change of pace for a profession that often ends up at the bottom of the food chain when it comes to resources.

And I’m glad that the teachers and administrators have the dignity of presenting their material in a place like this, because there are some pretty impressive presentations. The theme of the conference is improving the quality of teaching at the high school level, and most presenters are from schools that are succeeding at closing the achievement gap in one or more areas (typically math or English).

That means there are more teachers in the room than consultants, which is a good thing. And the few “experts” participating in the discussion actually are experts, people like Ron Ferguson at Harvard, and Jon Saphier, co-creator of The Skillful Teacher – one of the best professional development systems for teachers out there.

The teachers and admins who are presenting have come from schools across the country. Ferguson (the conference organizer) et al have put together a mix of schools both large and small. One high school in Texas has less than 300 students, another in Massachusetts has more than 4,000. All are closing the achievement gap.

How? That, of course, is the million-dollar question. While there are no simple answers, a couple of themes emerged during this first day.

One is the importance of community. All of the schools have focused intensely on the “soft” elements of running a school: building buy-in among teachers, building strong relationships among teachers and between teacherse and administration. In most cases, teachers, not outside experts, are doing the work of making their own schools better.

A second is a focus on skills – codified in standardized tests – by digging deep to uncover and teach the skills behind the tests. And a third is the importance of working across departments and curricular areas to teach these skills. Lots of schools talk about writing across the curriculum; all of these schools have found ways to actually do it.

One surprising insight: for the conference participants, friction with teacher unions is a non-issue. Not that these schools don’t have strong unions – many of them do – but they’ve found that when good relationships exist between teachers and administrators, conflicts with unions subside.

I’ll have more over the next few days – these are just some first thoughts!

Have you heard of McKinsey & Company? They’re a global management consulting firm, which means that they hire the best and brightest grads from the world’s top universities, then send them around world to solve business problems for governments and large corporations. The folks at McKinsey have a reputation for being particularly good at what they do; in 2007, their annual revenue was over $5 billion.

Recently, however, a team in their non-profit division turned their brainpower towards a different end: analyzing the achievement gap. Last month they published their findings in a report. Chock full of data, the report also has some surprising insights into the gap’s impact on our nation’s economy, as well as some new evidence suggesting that the gap can be closed.

The single most fascinating piece of the report is a model of the economic effects of the achievement gap. According to McKinsey’s calculations, closing the black/white and Latino/white achievement gaps would raise the United States GDP by 2-4%. That’s $310-525 billion – bigger than the US recession of the early 1980s. Closing the low-income student/high-income student achievement gap would boost the economy even more: $400-670 billion. And closing the international gap – raising our kids’ performance to levels of students in Finland or Korea – would expand the economy by an incredible $1.3 – $2.3 trillion, a change in GDP much larger than the recession we’re in right now. To give you some perspective, Obama’s economic stimulus package is only $787 billion.

In describing the economic impact of these gaps, the McKinsey folks don’t mince words. According to their calculations, the combined impact of the achievement gaps, “imposes on the United States the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession.” That’s deep.

In addition to examining dollar signs, the McKinsey folks also slice and dice the test score data. Unfortunately, some of their findings reiterate the bad news we’ve heard for years. Black and Latino students tend to be two to three years behind white students of the same age. The average poor black fourth grader in Washington, DC, is five years behind the average non-poor white fourth grader in New Jersey.

However, their analysis of test scores also uncovers some new reasons for optimism. Incredibly, from a national perspective, there are places where the racial achievement gap has closed. Latino eighth-graders in Ohio, for example, outperform white students from thirteen other states in reading; they’re seven points ahead of the national average. At least from the national perspective, these students, teachers, and families are closing the racial gap. In Texas, low-income black students perform at the same level as low-income white students in Alabama – not a high bar, but from a comparative perspective they, too, are closing the gap. These numbers, by the way are from the NAEP, a nationally standardized test that’s our best source of data for state-to-state comparisons.

This is fascinating news, as is a final conclusion the report reaches: schools make a difference. McKinsey found enormous disparities between schools and school districts, even when they served similar student populations. In Texas, one large, urban, 88% low-income middle school had its black students scoring at the 75th percentile statewide; another school with almost identical demographics scored at only the 22nd percentile. We know that poverty and race throw additional obstacles in kids’ paths; clearly, what’s going on in their classrooms and schools can help kids overcome them.

Click here to access the full report.