Close the Gap

Moving to the HuffPo

Eric — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 07:31:34 +0000

Greetings, and thanks for checking out my site!

As of September of 2009 I’m honored to be blogging for the Huffington Post. Please cruise on over there if you’d like to read some recent postings. Otherwise, please feel free to poke around here, and have a great day!

Does Obama “Get” Education?

Eric — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:50:26 +0000

The President in interview mode

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.

Harvard AGI Conference: Focus and Flow

Eric — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 03:16:55 +0000

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.

Flow
(Hint: it's the point in the middle!)

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.

Harvard AGI Conference: Turning Schools Around

Eric — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 03:00:19 +0000

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!

A Permanent National Recession

Eric — Wed, 27 May 2009 04:03:55 +0000

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.

McKinsey's new report

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.

Why is Wendy Kopp Hopeful?

Eric — Sat, 16 May 2009 07:41:35 +0000

Wendy Kopp

In the world of public education, Wendy Kopp carries a very big stick. While still an undergrad at Princeton she came up with the idea of a national teacher corps, then moved to New York and founded a little organization called Teach for America (TFA). Twenty years later, her brainchild has become one of the premier public service institutions in the country. She’s been on the cover of Fortune magazine; alumni of her program lead the vanguard of ed reform nationwide.

In person, however, Ms. Kopp speaks surprisingly softly. Of modest height and build, she leans forward when she talks, and her cadence is measured – no drama there. But when she addressed the Commonwealth Club of California last week, it felt like all 100+ people in the room were paying close attention. What draws you in is her focus.

Kopp believes that the key to education reform is people; specifically, the “talent and leadership” we channel into public education. I think she’s on to something. Teachers, principals, and other leaders play a critical role – perhaps the critical role – in closing the achievement gap. This was the main point of her talk — no big surprise, given that TFA is essentially a human resources organization.

More intriguing was her response to an audience question. Kopp was asked whether she was discouraged by the lack of progress over the past twenty years; specifically, the fact the achievement gap is just as wide now as it was then. It’s a fair question. If you look at math and reading scores of 17 year-olds, the achievement gap has not closed at all since 1990, when TFA sent its first class of teachers into some of America’s poorest schools.

Kopp responded that she’s not only not discouraged, she’s actually more optimistic than ever. From her view, the last two decades have seen major changes behind the scenes, changes that may soon tip the balance towards eradicating those depressing numbers.

One change is that there is a, “new generation of high-performing schools.” Every major city in America now has at least one high-performing inner-city school – some have more – something that was not true 10 or 15 years ago. If you think about it, this is a big deal. Not only are these schools proving that the achievement gap can be narrowed, they also have the potential to be seeds, catalysts for larger-scale change.

A second change is the emergence of a, “new generation of leaders leading in a very different way.” Without diminishing the tireless, sustained efforts of reformers like Linda Darling-Hammond, I have to agree that Kopp is absolutely right. The emerging leaders of the education reform movement – many of them TFA alums – are bringing to the table a set of viewpoints, networks, and skills that many in the old guard of education lack. Two of the most obvious and promising examples are Michelle Rhee, the new chancellor of the Washington, DC public schools, and Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, the founders of KIPP. Their views and methods are not the only way, but they are adding something new and, I think, absolutely critical to the struggle.

Now I do wish Ms. Kopp had addressed the numbers more directly. They’re quite frustrating, and they make you wonder why, despite all the investment and hard work over the past few decades, the big picture remains essentially unchanged.

However, it’s hard not to get swept away by the force of Kopp’s optimism, and her way of framing the situation. It’s clear that the key to closing the gap is people. People teach, and people drive the organizations in which teachers succeed or fail. I left her talk wondering if she was right: will the behind-the-scenes changes that have been building up for decades soon tip us towards closing the achievement gap? It’s an exciting thought.

Our Only Natural Resource

Eric — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:30:13 +0000

Ambassador Fujisaki

Last week I had the good fortune to hear Ichiro Fujisaki, the Japanese Ambassador to the United States, address the Commonwealth Club of California.

Ambassador Fujisaki was speaking about the green economy, but towards the end of his speech he said something that has direct bearing on schools. After talking about Japan’s geography and demographics, he said almost in passing that the Japanese, “…have no natural resources other than people.”

Now that’s a big idea. The Ambassador didn’t say “Our greatest resource is our people,” or, “Our #1 natural resource is our people.” He said that people are his country’s only natural resource.

Ambassador Fujisaki, of course, was speaking about Japan, an island nation with meager natural resources. Japan is small — about the size of California — and 70% of the country is mountainous and not farmable. Its 127 million people (over 1/3 the population of the USA) are crowded into a tiny, mostly costal fraction of the island’s surface. And beneath that surface lie very few mineral deposits — Japan wasn’t blessed with much coal, oil, or iron.

Contrast their situation with that of America, where we have one of the most diverse, richest endowments of “stuff” on the planet. From our mountain majesties to our fruited plains, we’ve been blessed with fertile land, rich mineral deposits, dense forests, plentiful oil and natural gas reserves.

And yet, when you think about it, as we transition to an information based, global economy, that kind of stuff is becoming less important, less expensive in the global marketplace. Not yet oil and coal, of course — there’s still quite a premium on energy — but as the green revolution takes off, it’s likely that they, too, will, decrease in value.

What’s getting more expensive? Human capital. And not just any human capital, but precisely the sets of cognitive and non-cognitive skills that will help us close the achievement gap. As the global economy transforms into a knowledge economy, the relative importance of individual humans as resources — their skills, creativity, and other abilities — is increasing dramatically. We’re already seeing this in the high wage premiums paid to the most educated and entrepreneurial workers, both in America and abroad, and in the increasing concentration of wealth in the high-technology countries with the best education systems.

And this, of course, brings us back to schools. Unlike investments in developing oil or coal fields, investments in human capacity don’t tap into limited supplies of existing resources, they create new ones. To Ambassador Fujisaki’s point, how would it change our society if we thought of people as our only resource? What if we saw every child, whether she’s born in South Central or on the Upper East Side, as worthy of investment, not just because she’s a human with the same inherent worth and dignity as every other human, but because she contains, within her, the most important resource our country has? I’d imagine we’d be spending a lot more time, energy, and money on getting education right, and less on corporate bonuses and oil wars.

The Google School

Eric — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 06:46:03 +0000

Google's campus in Mountain View, CA

Last Friday I had the opportunity to visit Google’s headquarters and eat lunch at the world-famous Googleplex. It was an amazing experience, but one of the biggest surprises was how underwhelming their campus is.

We’ve all heard about Google’s cushy employee perks, so I was expecting the look and feel of a spa, something like the dreamy images of resorts that Starwood emails me each month. But the Googleplex actually feels less luxurious than most corporate offices I’ve spent time in – flat-white drywall, industrial carpet, exposed ducts and wires running everywhere. Think corporate skunkworks or university lab building. Even the cafeteria feels, well, a bit like a college cafeteria – plastic chairs, fluorescent lighting, lunchroom trays – albeit a college cafeteria with a sushi chef!

What impressed me, however, was Google’s bathrooms. Above every urinal (and presumably in the stalls of the women’s bathrooms) there’s a one-page “Did you know?” sheet explaining how to do a bit of coding. Now that’s pretty cool. At Google, it seems, the software engineers are learning about their craft even when they’re peeing.

How does this relate to education? That sheet in the bathroom suggests that the Googleplex is a place where learning is occurring 24/7. But not just any kind of learning – highly intentional learning that’s directly related to the company’s mission: creating great software.

Given Google’s success, I think this invites a thought experiment: What would a Google school look like? (FYI, journalist Jeff Jarvis asks this question about other types of businesses in his fascinating book What Would Google Do?) If you were to imitate Google at the surface level, you might put up some posters above the urinals to, say, help the kids review for a big test. That could be a good starting point, but I think the real answer lies in the intent behind the pee-friendly postings – and the cafeteria and the other perks, for that matter.

Google’s founders have made it clear that the whole point of “giving away” all these perks is to create an environment in which their engineers can focus on doing what engineers do: writing code. So to create a Google school, you’d want to ask the same question about your community: how can you create an environment in which students can focus on learning and teachers can focus on teaching?

I think this question points back to a lot of the same solutions we’ve been talking about on the blog and in the book. First, be very intentional in how you structure learning in your school. As my old boss Dr. Shairzay used to say, you want a school in which kids are so engaged in their classes that they’re still talking about them in the lunchroom. Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, where I first taught, was that kind of place.

The way to do make this happen is straightforward but difficult: Figure out what your kids know and don’t know, what they can and can’t yet do, then build a curriculum to take them from where they are to a clear endpoint. When you do this, you open the door to creating a learning community anywhere; we all know that when kids are engaged and learning, they want to learn more. And when they’re part of a well-designed curriculum, details like helpful hints in the bathroom can go a long way.

But (and this is very important), we also need to make sure that our kids’ basic needs – the lower levels on Maslow’s Hierarchy – are met, so that they can focus on learning. At Google, these needs are met and exceeded by the company’s perks. At schools, of course, basic needs aren’t met by sushi, massages, and on-site personal training. Instead, we meet them when we provide students with adequate food, emotional support (including counseling when necessary), and health care. The debate over whether we should be providing poor kids these resources is ridiculous, as is the debate over whether or not all kids should be held to high standards. The debates should be over how to provide these resources, and how to help kids meet these high standards.

Now I didn’t get to go inside Google’s boardroom, but I bet these are exactly the kind of conversations that happen behind closed doors at the Googleplex. Hmm. Google is one of twenty-first century America’s great corporate success stories. If Google is that intentional about creating a productive, supportive environment for their employees, shouldn’t we be doing the same thing for our children?

Solving the Ed School Conundrum

Eric — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 01:09:08 +0000

David M. Steiner, Dean of Hunter's School of Education, teaching a class in the new program

One of the recurrent themes around the achievement gap has been the failure of ed schools (most of them, at least) to prepare teachers for the rigors of inner-city education. This afternoon I was having a fascinating conversation with an education editor at Jossey-Bass, and in the middle of it she mentioned a new project that sounds really cool.

Apparently, the heads of three charter school networks — KIPP NYC, Uncommon Schools, and Achievement First — have teamed up to create a radically different kind of ed school. Based at Hunter College on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the school is called the Teacher YOU Training Institute, and focuses on giving teachers the kind of practical preparation that will help them succeed in the classroom. An article in Education Week quotes a student in an early cohort saying that other masters in education programs offered, “nothing practical, and this is superpractical.”

Last year, Teacher YOU started small with 100 students. This fall they’re planning to double that to 200 students, and long-term they hope to admit 500 students a year. Very curious to watch this and see how it turns out.

Why? I have yet to meet a teacher who said that their ed school prepared them to teach in the inner-city. Now that might sound controversial, and I should make it clear that ed schools do a lot of good. George Washington University in DC, for example, has an excellent track record of preparing teachers for suburban schools, as do many other programs. Several small, progressive programs (e.g. Harvard, Stanford) that are narrowly focused on urban education are also doing incredible work.

Most ed schools, though, don’t serve inner-city teachers very well. They don’t give them the management skills they need to survive their first year, and they don’t give them tools to teach the knowledge and skills that most inner-city kids lack, and need just as much as suburban kids. This is a major problem, and fixing it is absolutely critical to closing the achievement gap. If it starts to change this, the Hunter College project could be the start of something big.

Achievement Gap + International Rankings = Education Deficit?

Eric — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 06:04:47 +0000

The old way of framing it?

In his big education speech last week President Obama didn’t use the term “achievement gap” once. I was a bit surprised by this, since the gap is certainly the biggest domestic issue in education. He did address the issue, explaining that, “a stubborn gap persists between how well white students are doing compared to their African American and Latino classmates.” But he didn’t use the magic words “achievement gap.”

Why not? The president’s other recent speeches may provide some clues. Two days later, in his speech to the Business Roundtable, he talked about our “education deficit,” a phrase that also came up in yesterday’s weekly YouTube/radio address.

President Obama is a pretty savvy user of the English language, and he seems to be moving towards using this term of art to frame education reform. Why? It might be about finding some common ground. “Education deficit” could refer to a lot of things — it could be about the achievement gap, but it could also be about our low rankings in comparisons with other developed countries. Or it could be both. My money’s on the latter — Obama is reframing the debate to wrap the two issues into one, so that he can attack both at the same time. This could be a very good idea, BTW, since the causes are related, and the solution to one will help solve the other.