Nationally recognized education journalist Jennifer Berkshire discusses big questions that will continue to shape the future of K-12 with KnowAtom CEO Francis Vigeant.
"We're seeing the whole conversation around testing start to shift. The conversation around the relationship between charter and district schools is going to, if not shift, get sort of more concrete and out in the open. I think that as we have this sort of bigger debate about the future, about what kind of jobs people are going to have, it's going to be impossible to talk about schools without having a more vigorous argument about what schools are supposed to be doing." -Berkshire
In this transcript of their conversation, Jennifer and Francis discuss these Five Debates:
- What is school for?
- Should school be about adults pulling or kids pushing?
- What should the relationship between charter schools and traditional school districts be?
- How should we measure school quality?
- What is the relationship between schools and neighborhoods?
Francis Vigeant: Hi there, and thanks for joining us for this webinar discussion of five big questions shaping the future of K-12 education. My name is Francis. I'm CEO here at KnowAtom. Glad to have you all with us, as well as our special guest, Jennifer Berkshire.
To tell you a little about KnowAtom and our interest in these five key questions shaping the future of K-12, KnowAtom is a group of educators. We're located just north of Boston, in Salem, Massachusetts.
If you haven't noticed, there's been a kind of education revolution that's been underway for some time. At KnowAtom, we're not education reformers, but we find ourselves often times in schools where education reform, and other aspects of change, are underway. As we're helping schools and districts meet the needs of the new next generation science standards, which is our focus, why we're called KnowAtom. This kind of tug of war, at times, is playing out. These five questions, in part, are a way of discussing that tug of war. At the same time, helping all of us sort of wrestle with the ideas that really may not have entirely clear answers.
I'm very excited to have our special guest, Jennifer Berkshire, with us. Jennifer is a nationally recognized education journalist and blogger at EduShyster. Her latest venture is as co-creator, co-host and co-producer of Have You Heard, along with Aaron French. Have You Heard is a monthly podcast focused on education issues ranging from education turnaround to kindergarten suspensions. Berkshire spent six years editing a newspaper for the American Federation of Teachers, in Massachusetts, before freelancing as an education journalist. Her articles and interviews on the debate over the future of public education have appeared in the Washington Post, Salon, Baffler, The Progressive, and also most recently I noticed, in the New York Times she was quoted. Jennifer, thank you for joining us.
Jennifer Berkshire: Thanks for having me.
Francis: I have this picture of you here from Have You Heard? I guess that's your Have You Heard self. I was wondering if you could tell us maybe a little bit about your inspiration for Have You Heard, and what it's about.
Jennifer: Sure. That picture, it may appear like a cartoon, but that is really what I look like, so thanks for putting that up. The inspiration for starting our new podcast had a lot to do with the five debates that we're going to be talking about today. No doubt, if you are in a school or near a school, or have anything to do with education, you've noticed that the debate over the future of public education in this country, is really intense. Yet, it can often be really kind of stale too.
You tend to hear a lot of the same talking points and arguments over and over again, and we thought, well wouldn't it be great to go around and hear what people who were in the thick of this stuff have to say? Whether they're students, whether they're teachers, and that in some way, by bringing the voices of people who don't really get to participate in the conversation out into the open, we might be able to change the debate. So far so good.
Francis: I know I've enjoyed the Have You Heard podcast series so far, you have four sessions up so far? I believe.
Jennifer: The fourth episode came out last Friday. It dropped, as my co-creator would say. He's a millennial, so he uses words like that. We're planning a series of 10 to start, and then we'll see what happens next.
Francis: If you'd like a direct link it's soundcloud.com/haveyouheardpodast. We'll show this again later at the end. Just to let you know, if you are on the live session, we are going to do our best to take questions at the end. Please, as we're going through, feel free to drop questions into the little part of your screen there. Send them over and we will try to entertain those at the end.
Jennifer, I've got to ask you, in all your travels, have you figured out yet, what is school all about? What's it for?
Jennifer: One of the things that's become really clear to me is even that big and so fundamental question, is one we don't share even the most common agreement upon. People who are listening, you can carry this experiment out yourself. This afternoon, run this question by a student, by a teacher, by and administrator and by a parent, and then just be sort of dazzled at how different their answers are.
I think what Francis is alluding to in the opening, this sort of sense of kind of clashing ideas on the ground. There isn't an agreement about whether the point of school now to train kids for jobs, or for what particular kinds of jobs? Is it about college readiness?
If we go back in history, where this picture is taken from, you'll see that people started with a much broader definition of what school was for, and it always included things like self-development and civic responsibility. Over time, even as we heap more and more responsibility on the schools, our understanding of what school is actually supposed to do has gotten narrower. You don't tend to hear as much about civic responsibility. In some cases, the definition of what school is for has been narrowed all the way down just to raising math and English test scores.
Francis: How do you see this playing out in maybe specific schools? Do you feel like, not necessarily naming names, but do you feel like there are dominant schools of thought that are basically at odds, that represent that tug of war?
Jennifer: Yeah. Absolutely. When I travel around, whether it's for writing or for the podcast, I'm always interested in examples of what's happening on the ground. Our latest podcast is about some students in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and what you can see there is that these students, many of whom have a tie to the Dominican Republic, have a broader definition of what school is for than maybe their school leaders. Lawrence is in the midst of a turnaround. There's a lot of emphasis on boosting academic achievement there. If you listen to the students, they envision the purpose of school as being about education through experience, with an eye towards helping them be leaders who can transform their own communities. The different schools of thought, I would say, are almost like different sizes of thought. How big your vision is of what's possible ends up determining your answer for what school is for.
You see, in some communities, take Nashville for example, there's been a huge effort there to tie schools to particular kinds of job training. You'll see more and more academies in the communities, where kids basically pick their occupation early on and get trained for it. You're being trained for a health career, for example, or you might end up at a hospitality academy. Think about how much narrower that school of thought it, the school as a kind of vocational training center, versus what the kids in Lawrence, you can hear on my latest podcast, they're talking about, where they see school as broadening their horizons.
Francis: It's interesting. It seems like how one defines school is largely about how broad your vision of what's possible in education is. In the sense that the origins of education, and again it depends I guess where we're particularly pointing, in other time periods it's for literacy's purpose is the basic skills necessary to be part of mill work and different manufacturing operations like this. Today I think the maximum vision that I'm seeing, and I don't know if you agree, has to do with empowering children and their futures, and communities.
It seems to me that perhaps this debate for some may be flipping around, back to its origins, and being prepared for industry in some cases. Is it maybe more the case that there are some places, where maybe the debate hasn't progressed past that point? Perhaps that the debate isn't circling around, it just never really left the basics in the first place. Does that make sense?
Jennifer: Yeah. I feel like you are starting to see the pendulum swing a little bit on this debate. I'm seeing more and more references to civic education. We've come through this long period where there's been just immense emphasis on math and English scores. It's hard to find anyone who doesn't think that one of the unintended consequences has been the sort of narrowing of not just the curriculum, but the vision of what school is for. You'll hear people express concern that maybe this debate we're having in our current election, for example, is a sign that we need to be thinking about what kind of citizens our schools are producing as well.
I think the tension is going to be that you see schools in different areas, and schools that serve different student populations, evolving in different ways. The skills that say, urban students who attend high performing charter schools, for example. The skills that they're being equipped with are completely different from their middle class peers who are being encouraged to question authority, and how have a kind of, there's expectation of civic development, and even civic leadership, built into their education. I think we're going to be talking a lot more about this. I think that's good, for question number one.
Francis: When you think about that idea of civic development, are we preparing children to question or to respond? I feel like that kind of leads into question number two, should school be about the adults pulling from the students, or really the kids pushing and developing their own skills within the context of the unknown? Or perhaps another way to think of this: what can student do verses what they can say from what they've been fed?
Jennifer: I think this is such an important question. You don't usually hear it phrased this way. I will acknowledge that I did steal this from somebody else, but what our experiment in urban education reform, in particular, has shown that you can really drive achievement up if you have a model where adults are just pulling and pulling kids like crazy, and that the problem is that once kids then get to college and then that sort of structured environment isn't there, that it becomes really hard for them to succeed on those terms. One of the reasons that I so enjoy interviewing students is that they can often tell you exactly where they would like to be pushing.
For example, there's a fantastic story just today in Chalkbeat in New York. Somebody went and talked to kids about why they think it should be a goal of schools to have fewer suspensions and instead to pursue restorative discipline. It's really amazing, you can sort of see, the kids can explain exactly why a discipline heavy approach is bad for them, why it leads them to hate school. Then they come to understand that so much of what gets them in trouble are these sort of petty misunderstandings that get blown way out of proportion. Once they start to understand that, you feel their horizons broaden, that they're not totally at the mercy of these kind of forces that are constantly threatening to blow up. That's a great example where that's a kids pushing model. Lots of discipline may make for a quiet school, it may work for the adults, but if you listen to the kids, they'll say that, "This isn't working for us." Maybe this other model is a little bit more labor intensive, but at the end of the day it's going to get better results.
Francis: Do you see any trends? Is there a socioeconomic component here that's a part of this, or is it really just two different approaches?
Jennifer: I think that would certainly be the expectation, like middle class kids are going to have more room to push. I'm always looking for the examples that defy the odds and inspire everybody else. I was just out in San Francisco. This is going to be the future episode of Have You Heard? It makes a lot of sense that if students have a curriculum that they're invested in that they're going to stay in school longer and maybe do better in their classes, but no one has really studied this in any kind of systematic way, so I went to San Francisco where there's a really cool kind of culturally responsive curriculum in the high schools now. I went and I talked to kids and I got to hear what they were learning. This particular group of students, they had a bunch of questions about how school lunch plays out at their school. It's a big urban high school. Like a lot of schools crowding is a problem and so they have some ridiculously short amount of time to eat lunch.
The students were learning all sorts of research skills, but they were also learning these things that they weren't even aware that they were learning, about how to navigate what seemed to be a kind of insurmountable bureaucracy. What to do when an adult tells you, "No." Then it happened that some researchers at Stanford also studied the program and were able to show that for kids who had been at risk of earning low grades and dropping out, that this hands-on curriculum made a huge difference. I'm looking for examples like that, where kids get to exercise more freedom, and then as a result of having measurable success, maybe we can hold that up for other schools in other districts.
Francis: When you think about measurable success, one of the things that I think is often discussed is the role of charter schools. I know that charter schools are a kind of petri dish for new ideas and new models that often times may not have been tested in a sort of formal school setting over the course of many years and months. We have charter schools, but I think in the vision for charter schools, it's often thought of that there should be a close relationship and that charter schools are basically the petri dishes developing, essentially in a scientific sense, new knowledge, or practices, which could be leveraged by district schools. I wanted to ask a bit about your thoughts on that relationship, if that was really the intention, if that's what you see playing out, and what you think that relationship, how are folks answering this question?
Jennifer: I think that that absolutely was the intention, but that it's harder and harder to find examples where that's what's happening. I'm particularly interested in what's happening in urban districts. I refer to it as the unintended consequences of education reform. What you see more and more of is an expanding charter sector that competes with the district. The original vision, that charters would be sort of a laboratory of innovation and then export their best practices back to the district. That is not what's happened. Instead in many cases you have a competitive relationship, often a really strained relationship.
In some cities it looks as if charters will eventually replace the district, or dominate. If that's going to be the case it raises a whole other set of questions, some of which are on our list of the big five questions. This is one question where I feel like the answer is less clear, and sort of less hopeful, that it's hard to find places that have really resolved this tension. It's hard to meet the demand the parents have for more choices, but also take care of kids who, for whatever reason, are not going to exercise that choice.
Francis: Thinking about exercising choice and this idea of competition. Maybe competition first, where do you feel like the root of that competition is coming from, such that the competition can actually result in a district becoming essentially an entire charter district?
Jennifer: You mean who's driving that?
Francis: Exactly, what do you feel drives the competition? It seems like it's a big shift from the intention of sharing best practices, to kind of trying to compete with each other. Those two don't seem very compatible.
Jennifer: Right, yeah, and that's, when you talk about sort of the forces that people are feeling on the ground, it's the incompatibility of those that can make your life in a school building, or as a parent, really complicated. You have a few different things going on.
One is that we're living through a period of just intense anxiety about the future. Parents are tremendously concerned about what lies ahead for their kids, and so they are making the very rational decision to just pursue what they see as the best choice possible.
Then you have an education conversation that's really dominated by people who believe that whatever ails our public systems, that the answer lies to make them function more like a market. The market answer is to treat families more like consumers and provide them with more choices.
These choices aren't made in a vacuum. Our cities are highly unequal places. If you're in Boston, you know Boston's now the most unequal city in America. This idea of people sort of picking and choosing and chasing quality, as reform advocates often refer to it, is happening in a landscape where people don't bring the same sort of set of options to making that choice. That's where this sort of contradiction about, is our goal to lift everybody up, or is our goal to just offer people as much choice as possible even though you're going to leave a whole bunch of kids behind as a result?
Francis: Just on that point though, I don't think that most folks involved in charter schools would see it that way, as children being left behind by giving an option for a charter school. I find it hard to believe that's happening in an active process, but perhaps a byproduct. I was wondering, in terms of a byproduct of having choices, how students get left behind, as you're describing?
Jennifer: One of the things that you're seeing in cities where this experiment is further along, take a city like Newark, for example, where the charter sector has expanded really dramatically. It achieves some great results, but the sort of architects of this transition never thought to ask the question, what happens to the kids who aren't going to be attending charter schools? It's now widely accepted that the kids who did not end up in a high performing seat, as they're called, have fared badly. Their schools have fewer resources and more kids with higher needs.
I do feel like you're starting to hear many more charter advocates acknowledge that this is a big issue. If the goal is to really expand charter schools, that this sort of thinking about what happens to the schools that aren't going to be part of that, and the kids who are in those schools, has to be part of that conversation from the beginning. The idea that you're going to have, you know, 60% of your students, or 40% of your students in schools that have fewer resources but are having to attend to kids with higher needs, that's an impossible scenario. There's no one who really thinks that's an ideal outcome.
Francis: Well it seems like what you're describing is as money follows the child, in many cases, that while all students have a choice, those who execute their choice are the ones that actually are moving. If there's a situation where, particularly if there's a correlation between those who don't execute a choice, as well as need, then those are the folks who are left behind, the children who are left behind. The picture I get, I guess, is you have sort of a concentrating effect of need within the district schools. For instance a sort of flight effect to the charter schools. Does the debate go full-circle here too? How are best practices ever being developed because, in a transferable sense? The environment changes, you have two totally different ecosystems now. I wonder how those best practices then can flow back, because the school landscape seems like it would be entirely different. Is that something that you see? Where the landscape of the, let's say fictional Lincoln Elementary School in, you know, middle of America somewhere city, does it look very different as a result of this transition sometimes?
Jennifer: I think, in some ways, I think the worst case scenario is that you just have these two sectors that are now completely different and are at war with each other. That seems like the worst possible outcome. This goes back to one of our earlier questions about, is there a way, can that sort of experimentation process continue, even though the process has evolved in a way that seems totally counter to how it first started out?
Since we're at KnowAtom, I think it's okay to talk in sort of science terms. What we've ended up with here is a new set of problems that weren't envisioned when all of this started. So far, we're stuck in the part of the debate where there hasn't been a lot of acknowledgement that we have this new set of problems. I feel that starting to change, then that does sort of open up this possibility. What then are we going to do? If we have these two systems, and having them compete against each other on unequal ground is not an ideal outcome, what are the other options?
Francis: I think what you're describing, and I feel also, it seems to come to, for one, the transfer of funding. When I hear a lot of the charter debates, that seems to be the first place people go, whether or not they have ever had children in schools or any relationship to education. That funding piece is only one part though.
I think another piece, which I don't think has much to do with charters at all, it's really more of a by product of No Child Left Behind, and the high stakes testing environments that have evolved over the last 20 years or so.
What are your thoughts on how school quality should be measured, and some of the ramifications of the way we measure it now?
Jennifer: Almost everyone agrees now that just focusing on math and English is way too narrow and has taken us into a sort of tragi-comical cul-de-sac in a lot of ways. There are some really interesting experiments underway about how you create broader measures of school quality, that align more with what parents want, what students want, what teachers want, but also produce the achievement gains that everyone is so focused on. One of them is happening right here in Massachusetts.
A friend of mine, a scholar named Jack Schneider, who's an education professor at Holy Cross, has been working with urban districts to come up with an alternate measure of school quality.
He's focused on schools where he lives, in Somerville, because what happens when schools are graded, for example, parents go to look for a school and they're looking at their real estate listing site, and often what they'll do is they'll just show you how the schools fare with, say, SAT scores. What ended up happening was schools, they're really diverse, like in Somerville, where an astonishing range of languages are spoken and you have kids from all these backgrounds, they end up at the very bottom of the pile, and so parents would be told, "Oh don't go to school here, you want to go some place more affluent." That just exacerbates all the inequalities we've been talking about.
He and a whole team of researchers set out to see if they could come up with a measure of school quality that would more accurately value what Somerville has to offer, but also take into account all these things that parents and teachers and school leaders and students, really care about. The measurement is so much broader, and I sort of felt my world opening up a little bit as I read about it, because you could see, if we started with this broader definition, and then it came time if we needed to sort of try to step in and sort of fix the school, we'd be trying to fix it in a broader way.
Francis: I'll use Massachusetts as an example, even the quality measures that we have now are lacking for ELA and Math, because they not focused on proficiency, Massachusetts as an example, the CPI indexes that Massachusetts use, really don't look at proficiency. They look at failing. What we see, particularly within science data, is that folks try to kind of get rid of the bottom, "bring the bottom up" as they say, but they never really get students over the line to a level of proficiency or advanced, even on the existing metrics because that's kind of how the formula is structured, and as soon as that lowest tier kind of empties out, then it's kind of off to put out the next fire in a differ
