Close the Gap

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.