Everyone has a plan for education reform, except educators.1
When I was a member of the Baltimore school board, the then new Baltimore schools CEO recruited a highly sought person to head the central office on “curriculum and instruction.” That person encountered bureaucratic obstacles from day one. She was stymied trying to hire central staff though funding was in the budget. Regional superintendents ignored or evaded her efforts to require instructional best practices. Communication up and down the chain of command was hit or miss. Bear in mind, she was the instructional commander; you can imagine how the instructional rank and file are left to fend for themselves (whether they want assistance or not).
Chapter 6 laid out how we have failed to get behind our K-12 educators. They don’t get the supports that could make RTI a reality and end the nightmare of students mislabeled as disabled. But if we have let down them, they have let down “Us.” This chapter exposes the self-inflicted damage done by their own mismanagement. It should compel school systems to own up to their share of culpability for the educational abuse of struggling learners.
Unfortunately, this mismanagement is misunderstood, though parents are aware of how school system bureaucracies bungle everyday operations. Hardly a day goes by without media accounts of budget errors and overspending, data systems that run amuck, school buses that run late, personnel papers that are lost, heating and air-conditioning systems that malfunction, textbooks that are misplaced, and you name it. But as bad as all that is, there is another kind of mismanagement that is a more potent and insidious cause of the learning failures of schoolchildren.
That cause is mismanagement of classroom instruction itself. RTI programs, in their infancy, are smothered in the crib. School officials fail to provide teachers with sound curricula, training, classroom coaching, lesson plans, and supervisory feedback and assistance. Teachers who quit teaching cite inadequate support in the classroom more than pay or hard work as their main reason for leaving.
This mismanagement has complex, tangled roots. This chapter looks first at the absence of and resistance to management norms. Educators embody a culture of professional autonomy that resists accountability. This sounds clunky and abstract. But it seeps insidiously into everyday classroom teaching. As a result, educators are slow to identify and acknowledge their own shortcomings. Many educators complain bitterly that accountability laws like the No Child Left Behind Act and its watered-down successor the Every Student Succeeds Act interfere with their professional expertise. Yet, they fail to realize that such “external” regulation has been imposed on them because they have been so lax in holding themselves accountable, particularly for the low performance of struggling learners who are disproportionately poor and minority.
The resistance to management norms is compounded by the feeble training and support received by classroom teachers. The missing support includes lack of on-the-job coaching and research-based teaching tools. Teacher toolboxes do not contain anywhere near the research-based materials that would enable more student achievement and more teacher satisfaction. Teachers are often saddled with unrealistic expectations of the curricula they are supposed to cover, and the differentiated instruction they are supposed to give. They are overloaded with paperwork, most notoriously in special education. And while it is customary to blame the paperwork overload on federal requirements, it is far more self-imposed, unnecessary and time-wasting than it need be. All the while, teachers receive few supervisory supports, such as knowledgeable classroom coaching and observations. Moreover, personnel evaluations are tainted by tolerance for unsatisfactory performance. Collegial lenience is as much a factor in the survival of unsatisfactory teachers and administrators as union contracts are.
Before further detailing these management deficiencies, let’s note the possibility that this mismanagement is so little known and understood because, in the big scheme of things, it’s no big deal. Doesn’t its impact pale in comparison to other more familiar causes of the failure of public schools? Like money and family poverty for which, as explored in Chapter 6, Us/we bear the blame.
Yes, they are major factors but so are the self-imposed management failures of the education establishment. The mismanagement alone adds up to a powerful indictment of the profession. Leon Botstein, a university president and acute critic of public schools, beat me to the punch in characterizing the system’s failures as criminal. In an interview several years ago, after lamenting that our public schools are “broken,” and after chastising elected officials, he stated that “the education establishment is routinely committing a kind of crime.”2
Botstein also put his finger on a crucial distinction in identifying the main perpetrators. It is the same point I have tried to emphasize throughout this book: The main wrongdoers aren’t frontline teachers and school administrators. They, along with students, are also victims of the “system.” Rather, it is the “education establishment” that is primarily responsible for the “system.” The guilty establishmentarians, as defined earlier, include officials in the upper ranks of federal, state and local school systems, teachers colleges, national associations of education professionals, foundations and think tanks.
Against this backdrop, we turn now to the particulars of the mismanagement of classroom instruction, and how it does so much harm to struggling learners, especially students who are mislabeled as disabled.
The education establishment is not inclined by professional training, disposition or culture to adhere to management practices that are the norm in business and other professional spheres. Ok, there’s Dilbert and bureaucratic inanities in corporate workplaces. But when it comes to mismanagement follies, public school systems may be in a class by themselves. For one thing, educators fail to set accountability standards for their own performance.
The education profession is quick to complain that political officials interfere and second-guess their professional expertise. The backlash against the late No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), with its requirements for holding schools accountable for the failure of struggling learners, is a prime example. Opponents of NCLB raged: Who were the feds to tell local schools and classroom teachers what to teach and how to teach it and impose sanctions if students didn’t make substantial annual gains in performance?
In fact, NCLB didn’t do most of what it was condemned for doing. It actually allowed states to set their own academic standards, tests and sanctions. Nonetheless, states were fearful of any strict accountability, no matter who imposed it. And so they threw up a cloud of smoke. They set up federal officials as the bad guys. And they responded with a “race to the bottom” in which their own accountability measures were deflated and students test scores were inflated.
Lost in the din of battle was the bipartisan justification for NCLB, enacted under Republican president George W. Bush. Before then, parents and policymakers were in the dark about how well (not well at all, actually) students were learning. Left to their own devices, states and local school districts had done little to hold themselves accountable for the dismal academic performance of students. Congressional legislators on both sides of the aisle saw that our nation’s economic competitiveness was endangered, and our children, especially poor and minority children, were fated to bleak futures. NCLB sought to overturn this state and local inaction and injustice. NCLB would not have been enacted if the education establishment had been proactive in taking strong reform steps on its own.
For sure, NCLB had some inept provisions. Still, the law could have been mended not ended. Instead, bowing to fierce pressure from educators, who also stoked up parental opposition, the Congress and President Obama capitulated. The successor law, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) passed in 2015, grants states virtual autonomy over accountability. A Wall Street Journal editorial heralded ESSA as “the greatest devolution of power back to the states in education in 25 years.”3
The education establishment’s victory, in the wake of the downfall of NCLB, is a loss for struggling learners including students mislabeled as disabled. Lower academic standards and weaker tests are probable in many, if not most, states. There will be much less pressure on schools to invigorate RTI and other reforms. In mid-2017, an education reporter for the Washington Post concluded, “Two years after Congress scrapped federal formulas for fixing troubled schools, states for the most part are producing only the vaguest of plans to address persistent education failure.”4 A recent study claimed that states, “by and large” were making their accountability systems “clearer and fairer,” but don’t bet that states will in fact carry out meaningful action to significantly improve achievement.5
My skepticism about counting on the states is a good transition into a discussion of the general spinelessness of state departments of education.
State departments of education should and could be forcing evidence-based RTI programs and practices on local school districts. But that isn’t the way the “system” works. In 2007 the liberal think tank Center for American Progress and the conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce found common cause in a state-by-state report card on the role of state education agencies. The report’s “unambiguous” bottom line was that “states need to do a far better job of monitoring and delivering quality schools;” states tended to “systematically paint a much rosier picture of how their schools are doing than is actually the case.”6
That’s still the pattern though there are exceptions. Some states try harder and do better than others. Yet, as a whole, the track record of state departments of education is dismal. So much so that they deserve to be singled out for their part in the education establishment’s lax self-regulation and resistance to accountability. In our federal system of government, states have primary authority over public schooling.
Their institutional spinelessness starts with abject surrender to the professional culture, described in detail below that rejects management norms. That’s their fault, though in fairness, there is a mitigating factor that is the fault of Us. We tend to put state departments of education between a rock (the feds) and a hard place (local school systems) when they try to impose accountability. Our nation has a fixation on “local control” of public schools. State educators, even if they have the management will to act tough, are under intense political pressure to allow local education agencies to do their own thing. This resistance even impedes efforts to require local school districts to use evidence-based instructional best practices within a framework of RTI, or to monitor whether instructional practices, best or otherwise, are being effectively implemented.
To bring this close to home, the Maryland department of education is not one of the worst offenders, but it has been virtually missing in action on management accountability for RTI and tutoring for struggling learners. As alluded to in Chapter 6, in the discussion of the work of the Kirwan Commission on which I serve, it must dramatically step up its management game. Otherwise, as history teaches us, funding for RTI and tutoring will not be spent as effectively and efficiently as it should. Maryland education officials must disseminate standards and best program models for evidence-based tutoring, monitor implementation, and assure robust ongoing R & D.
That doesn’t mean that the state departments of education have to carry out all these functions internally. Given the inherent limits of politically-charged and management-challenged bureaucracies like education departments, I have proposed that much of the accountability work be contracted out to outside entities that are likely to have greater expertise, capacity and independence. It won’t, however, be easy to bring this about since state officials are disposed to want to cover their flanks and protect their turf.
Not so long ago, I was a member of a task force mainly composed of a local school district’s high-level managers. Its assignment was to develop a priority plan for comprehensive RTI, and certain planning tasks were laid out. At which point, the task force chairperson asked which school system staff wanted to volunteer for which of the tasks. Was the chairperson kidding, or did he really believe that asking for volunteers was the most efficient way to get the job done? Were key tasks to be assigned to those who felt like doing them, as opposed to those who were deemed most able to do them? Can you imagine such a catch-as-catch-can scenario unfolding in the corporate world?
This is a small but not atypical example of how educators resist management norms. It illustrates the tendency of educators to form collegial rather than hierarchical relationships. And there are many other examples of how basic elements of management 101—such as structured planning, decision-making and accountability—are at odds with the temperament of many who enter the teaching profession. Even allowing for the risk of overgeneralization, it is safe to say that affinity for management norms is not part of the profession’s DNA. As one scholar on how teachers think and work put it, “the motives, values, and aspirations of those entering the teaching occupation differ dramatically from those entering many other occupations.”7
Altruism—the desire to help children—is educators’ main motivation, not personal power or financial profit. Nor do they like to be put in positions where they have to make decisions for which they are individually accountable. As noted above, collegial not hierarchical staff work is vastly preferred. To be sure, broad staff participation in and ownership of decision-making can be invaluable, but not if carried to the extreme in which an endless procession of committees, work groups and task forces avoid hard choices and gravitate toward the least common denominator. In a book Inside Teaching: How Classroom Life Undermines Reform, the expert author wrote about the “The Mysterious Gap Between Reform Ideals and Everyday Teaching.”8 The gap is attributable in part to the predisposition of teachers to avoid management practices that are commonplace in other professions.
There are exceptions of course. Good teachers sometimes make good school managers. But some of the best teachers and principals shy away from opportunities to move up the administrative ladder intro central positions, even though the mission of those positions is to support teachers in the classroom. If the best teachers don’t step up, who will? I have often urged outstanding teachers or principals to move up to central management; I argue that there they can do more good for more students.
Yet, many resist for a variety of motives. They may realize they are temperamentally unfit or just can’t bear the idea of sitting in a bureaucratic cubicle all day without direct contact with students. They may also think that central positions are a waste of time, based on their own experience with so-called central support that they regarded as useless paperwork or vague guidance. Or they may be wary of the Peter Principle that in large organizations, people rise to the level of their own incompetence.
Naturally, if the best teachers and principals don’t seek promotions to higher administrative offices, the inept output and bad reputation of central managers become self-perpetuating. The Public Education Leadership Project at Stanford University found that “[central] offices are often dumping grounds for administrators and teachers who performed poorly in the schools.”9 And the tendency to mismanagement is compounded by the fact the teachers colleges not only don’t teach teachers how to teach (more on that below); they are even worse at preparing educators to be good managers.
Another fundamental factor in the mismanagement of classroom instruction is the enshrined principle of professional autonomy. It wasn’t very long ago that the National Council on Teacher Quality reported that teachers colleges cast the decision about how best to teach reading “as a personal one, to be decided by the aspiring teachers.”10 In a recent book The Teacher Wars, journalist Dana Goldstein writes that “At teacher colleges, ‘autonomy’ in the individual classroom has been promoted as a key ethos of the profession.”11 When this chapter turns to how teachers are unsupported by enough research-based instructional tools, keep in mind that some teachers employ professional autonomy to resist using the tools they are given. A leading researcher has noted that in RTI practice, “some teachers regard [standard research-based intervention requirements] as presumptive if not insulting of their professionalism.”12
And here’s the most telling quote of all: Richard Elmore, a leading authority on school management at Harvard University, observes: “[Educators] subscribe to an extremely peculiar view of professionalism: that professionalism equals autonomy in practice. So when I come to your classroom and say, ‘Why are you teaching in this way?’ it is viewed as a violation of your autonomy and professionalism.”13 Elmore refers to educators as “solo practitioners,” which prompts a further analogy. In medicine, if doctors don’t use evidence-based treatments, it’s called malpractice. In education, if teachers don’t use evidence-based instructional practices, it’s called professional autonomy.
Parents: linger with this point a little longer. If a doctor prescribed medicine for your child that had been long discredited by medical research, you’d be outraged. Yet, this happens all the time in public school classrooms when instruction is based less on educational research and more on the materials and methods teachers have been using for the past 25 years or so.
In part, teachers get away with this because the ethos of professional autonomy is interwoven with obsession over local control of schools. The principle of local control sets off a chain reaction. Federal and state education agencies, as already noted, defer to local districts. Local districts then delegate a lot of instructional decision-making to individual schools. But that’s not the end. Principals in turn give individual teachers great leeway. A familiar quip is that education policy is what happens when a teacher closes her or his classroom door. Another quip describes a school as a series of autonomous classrooms connected by a common parking lot.
This autonomy is not found in high-performing school systems across the world, according to the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE). The culture of central standards for classroom practice in these countries is in fact “foreign” to us. The president of NCEE observed that in U.S. schools there are significant differences in instructional practices and outcomes even within a particular school. He refers to the typical U.S. “egg crate school” with “each teacher in her own classroom and the door shut.”14
It’s not that extreme. Instructional materials and methods may be more or less prescribed in some school districts or individual schools. And less experienced teachers are looking for all the help they can get. They are much more prone to latch on to mandates or guidance from above than veteran teachers. “Expecting teachers to be expert pedagogues and instructional designers,” says education policy analyst Robert Pondiscio, “is one of the ways in which we push the job far beyond the abilities of mere mortals.”15
In fairness, the balance of central versus school-based authority is far from simple. By whatever name it’s called—school-based management, school autonomy, decentralization, community control, or so on—it has been a battleground in the education wars for decades. Lost then and still lacking today is sensible common ground between school-based decision-making that balances teacher and principal professionalism with central evidence-based management dictates. Yet, finding such an equilibrium has itself been mismanaged. Rather than seeking a course that recognizes the trade-offs, the education establishment has taken the easier road of educational laissez faire. Professional autonomy continues to overshadow professional accountability. Frontline teachers are often left in the lurch without proper management support.
Educators lack the management know-how that would overcome their discomfort with management norms. To begin with, teachers colleges are a total bust at management training. The most astute and outspoken critic of teacher-education programs in recent decades has been Arthur Levine, at one time president of the prestigious Teachers College at Columbia University. Levine has written that preparation of school system administrators is “the weakest of all programs at the nation’s education schools.”16 Such programs, he writes, lack coherent and rigorous curricula, admit nearly everyone who applies, and employ faculty who have little to no administrative experience themselves.
On-the-job training is equally anemic. School system chains of command have too many weak links. School administrators learn little from their own supervisors and colleagues who are themselves ill-prepared. Organization charts of central offices tend to have mazes of dotted lines that diffuse authority and accountability. At the school level, supervision of teachers is at best lenient, at worst nonexistent. Supervision ideally is a mixture of being a good coach/mentor and evaluator. But the principal is usually too busy or too rusty on classroom instruction to fulfill the role of coach/mentor; and rarely is there an instructional specialist or lead teacher who can fulfill it.
Then there is the infamous “dance of the lemons”—the familiar practice whereby staff who don’t measure up are transferred or even promoted, rather than fired, disciplined or required to undergo further training. Educators are famously protective of each other. Administrators are extraordinarily reluctant to give bad evaluations that can jeopardize a colleague’s future. They fear that if they zealously evaluate others, they may be subject to closer scrutiny themselves. Also, informal personal and social connections, like sororities and fraternities, stand in the way of objective evaluations.
As a reform-minded member of the Baltimore school board, nothing I did was more resented by the school establishment than my public objections to top-level appointments. Too many appeared to be based more on chummy personal relationships than merit. Of some consolation was the fact that some administrators thanked me privately for telling it like it was. But I was pretty powerless to stop the golden-parachuting of weak managers into other positions for which they were unqualified.
Having taken school administrators to task for failing to be tough enough in evaluating teachers, I want to anticipate the objection that blame should really be laid on teachers unions. Certainly, teachers unions are far from perfect. They are prominent players in the education establishment and generally oppose accountability measures. Yet, they are the strongest fighters in the political arena on behalf of adequate school funding, especially for low-wealth school districts with predominantly poor and minority students. And though conservatives claim that teachers unions are guilty of allowing the “dance of the lemons” and other safe havens for unsatisfactory teachers, these conservatives ignore the significant roles that others play in these problems.
It takes two to tango: collective bargaining contracts must be agreed to by school boards. And while contract provisions impose burdens on the discipline and removal process, they are nowhere near as restrictive as commonly portrayed. Principals have much more authority than they exercise. Two experts drive the point home: “The problem is not that the teachers unions enjoy too much power or leverage, it is that other constituencies [including principals and superintendents] exercise too little.”17 No less revealing, the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which is generally critical of teachers unions, did a fair-minded study of union contracts in 50 large school districts. The study reported “the most surprising finding is that labor agreements in a majority of large districts are neither blessedly flexible nor crazily restrictive; they are simply ambiguous, silent on many key areas of management flexibility. . . . it means that, for a majority of big districts, the depiction of [collective bargaining agreements] as an all-powerful, insurmountable barrier to reform may be overstated.”18
The absence of management norms and skills carries over into the lack of training and support for classroom teachers. Perhaps it’s understandable that educators are not by nature or nurture good managers. Still, you would think that they would be good at teaching teachers how to teach all students, including struggling learners. Think again.
Acclaimed reading scientist Mark Seidenberg wrote in 2017 that “the culture of education . . . didn’t develop because teachers lack integrity, commitment, motivation, sincerity, and intelligence. It developed because they were poorly trained and advised.”19 Primal screams for day-to-day help from inexperienced teachers, who make up a large percentage of the staff in urban school systems, are suppressed. These teachers are afraid of being labeled whiners or troublemakers. Still, it is clear that most teachers crave more training on how to teach the curricula and handle classroom misbehavior. They want realistic expectations of what they—handcuffed by limits on classroom time and large pupil-teacher ratios—can be expected to teach effectively. They yearn for curricula, materials and lesson plans that are aligned with academic standards and guidance on evidence-based best instructional practices.
Yet, they get very little of any of the above. In a book Learning to Improve: How America’s Schools Can Get Better at Getting Better, the co-authors question “how our nation could possibly improve our schools without a transformation in the ways it develops and supports school professionals and the materials, ideas, and evidence with which they work.”20 “School districts are not especially proactive,” they add, “in developing and improving instructional materials, practices, and programs based on careful design and testing.”21
Of all the roots of educational abuse of struggling learners, this seems the most puzzling. Why do educators flunk management of classroom instruction since classroom teaching is the heart and soul of their profession and what they should know best?
Teachers and administrators aren’t taught the knowledge of research-based best practices that should guide proper RTI-like instruction. They aren’t taught that they are breaking the law when struggling learners are referred for special education without receiving adequate instruction in general education. They aren’t taught the fallacy and bias behind stereotypical low expectations of poor and minority children. They aren’t taught that almost all struggling learners, including those who are mislabeled as disabled, have the capacity to meet academic standards if they receive timely research-based instructional interventions.
I have participated in hundreds of school meetings, most for students in special education, in which instructional services for struggling learners were determined. I have never heard any school staff cite specific research in support of their determinations—and “never” is not an exaggeration. Yes, there are bald statements that their instruction is research-based, but there is no reference or discussion of specific literature on point. On more than one occasion, I’ve been bluntly told, “we don’t need to know the research . . . we know what we’re doing.”
These gaps in teacher knowledge are first caused by teachers colleges. Their preparation of teachers, although widely discredited, has withstood decades of reform attempts. The only surprise may be that some of the harshest critics have been deans of graduate schools of education, led by Arthur Levine, who was quoted earlier. Teacher-education programs have been indicted as “third-tier backwaters” with low admission standards, shallow and irrelevant course content, rock-bottom research capacity, and ill-prepared faculty.22
In particular, struggling learners never catch up (and many become mislabeled as disabled) because general education teachers are not properly trained to teach foundational reading in the early grades. The National Council on Teacher Quality reported in 2014: “We are disheartened that the teacher education field continues to disregard scientifically based methods of reading instruction: coursework in just 17 percent of programs equips their elementary and special education teachers to use all five fundamental components of reading instruction. . . .”23
What’s more, you may be shocked to hear that these same unprepared general education teachers teach reading to students in special education. Students in special education are taught by general education teachers in a variety of instructional settings: namely, “inclusion” in the general education classroom, with or without co-teaching, and some pull-out groups.
The under-preparation of special education teachers is even more miserable than the poor training of general education teachers. It begins with dismal programs in teachers colleges. The National Council on Teacher Quality reported in 2011: “States’ requirements for the preparation of special education teachers continue to be abysmal. Most states set an exceedingly low bar for the content knowledge special education teachers must have to work with students with special needs. Only 17 states require elementary special education candidates to demonstrate content knowledge on a subject-matter test—just like what would be expected of any other elementary school teacher.”24
Special education teachers must also shoulder the near-impossible burden of being prepared to teach students with a wide range of disabilities. As astounding as it should be, state certification as a special education teacher is mostly unspecialized beyond courses in the broad theory and practice of special education. Parents should shudder at the thought. Suppose your child has a rare disease but is being treated only by a general internist, not a specialist. That’s what, by analogy, occurs in special education.
35 states allow special education teachers to earn a completely generic special education license to teach any special education students in any grade, K-12. The so-called training is the same whether the teacher is teaching students without cognitive limitations to learn to read in the first grade or teaching students with severe cognitive limitations to learn science in the twelfth grade. The generic license is the only license offered in 19 of those states.25 And yet, it is hard to imagine any argument against requiring teacher specialization based on the markedly different students being taught.
The plot thickens. Once upon a time, “special educators” were truly special. As recounted by leading authorities in the field, they “were regarded as expert instructors—‘go-to’ professionals at the building level to whom general educators would take their most difficult-to-teach children.”26 Most of these children were on the severe end of the continuum of students with disabilities. In those days there were relatively few of the struggling learners who over the decades were mislabeled as disabled and overwhelmed special education and “special educators.”
But those days are long gone. Now, students who are mislabeled as disabled comprise the great majority of students in special education, and therefore the job description of special educators is blurred.27 For practical purposes, teaching those in special education who I’ve called the Mainly Mislabeled does not require expertise different than what general education teachers should be expected to possess.
The sorting out of the training of general and special educators would be most easily accomplished by the overall “reinvention” of special education that is recommended in Chapter 9. Special education, as we know it, would exist only for students with the most severe disabilities, and special educators would be true specialists in those disabilities.
A full consideration of proposals to improve preparation of general and special education teachers in teachers colleges is beyond the scope of this book. But action across the board is all the more urgent because on-the-job training for teachers once they enter the classroom fills in little of the holes dug by teacher colleges.
On-the-job training for teachers, known typically as “professional development (PD),” isn’t very professional or developmental. It does next to nothing to improve teaching skills. An astute education policy analyst has observed:
Teachers don’t agree on much. Ask about curriculum pedagogy, school culture or discipline and you’re likely to encounter deeply held and conflicting opinions. But if there’s one belief that unites nearly all of the nation’s three million teachers, it’s this: Professional development sucks. . . .
Despite an estimated $18 billion spent on PD per year, little evidence exists linking any of it consistently to effective improvement in teacher practices or student outcomes.28
Why is it so bad? Because it consists primarily of episodic and shallow workshops that don’t relate to teachers’ real practice needs. And what would it take to make it so much better? Most of all, classroom-embedded coaches in subject matter, classroom management, and mentoring of new teachers. Teachers would also benefit from more time in the school day to plan lessons and consult with other teachers. These PD essentials are costly, and chalk up the missing money to Us, not educators themselves. Still, the education establishment has not blown the whistle on itself and owned up to the inadequacy in current PD.
Not only don’t teachers get proper preparation in teachers college and on-the-job training. They also aren’t given the tools to deliver all facets of RTI instruction in the classroom.
Take, for example, the mismanagement of curricula. As mentioned in Chapter 4 in the discussion of Tier 1 instruction in the RTI framework, the quality of the curricula that teachers are supposed to teach matters a lot. Curricula mean the standards for what students should be expected to know and the textbooks and learning materials that are aligned to the standards. You would suppose that research-based curricula would be readily available. But not so.
A prominent authority Chester E. Finn Jr. explains this phenomenon.
Educators shun curriculum because content choices are often culture-war battles. . . . Talk of a “national curriculum” is taboo and when states venture into these waters, it’s almost as controversial. . . . Curriculum, therefore, is generally left to districts, which frequently leave it to individual schools and often to individual teachers or departments within them.29
The national fight over the Common Core standards is an obvious example. The genesis of the Common Core standards was the absurdity of 50 states (much less 15,000 local school districts) having their own versions of what students should learn about reading, math, history and science. (More on this in Chapter 8.) Yet, the standards became a battleground in the education wars. Both liberals and conservatives have their own reasons for irrational adoration of local control of academic standards. As a result, “common” (de facto national) standards and tests remain in dispute, defying logic, impeding instruction, and taking up much too much time and space in the national debates over school reform.
Still, the battle over Common Core is only about what teachers should teach. There is an even larger problem: teachers are not given sufficient evidence-based tools on how to teach students, within RTI and otherwise, to meet the standards. This fault line is caused, foremost, by the absence of R & D as an essential management component in K-12 policy and practice. R & D is taken for granted in business, medicine, science, technology and other fields. But it is a backwater in public education.
It starts with poor research, especially in teachers colleges and universities. Graduate students receive inferior training in how to do excellent research. And research faculty are constrained by cozy relationships with state and local school districts because higher education departments of education depend on school districts for enrollments, intern placements and research sites. According to two well-known critics, these departments “have relatively little incentive to want to critically study issues of productivity and costs [in public school systems].”30
Some of the research void is filled by federal dollars channeled through the Institute for Educational Sciences under the U. S. Department of Education. Its funding, along with foundation grants, flows to non-university affiliated nonprofit organizations and think tanks that produce evaluations and policy research. To name a few: the American Institutes of Research, the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and the Education Trust.
In addition, reviews of research and dissemination of best practices are the mission of several organizations. One is the What Works Clearinghouse. Under the auspices of the federal Institute of Education Sciences, it publishes reviews of research across a wide range of K-12 policies and practices. Two others research clearinghouses are located at the Johns Hopkins University: the Best Evidence Encyclopedia; and a newer website Evidence for ESSA that is geared to provide information on programs that meet evidence standards under ESSA. Both of the Hopkins sites are orchestrated by Robert Slavin, the nation’s top expert on the use and misuse of claims that programs are evidence-based.
For certain, there aren’t enough R & D dollars to go around. Federal funds are scant. And R & D on K-12 public schooling probably has more confounding variables and impediments than other fields. Consequently, evidence-based best instructional practices tend, out of practical necessity, to fall short of “gold standard” research. ESSA allows, in effect, a sliding scale of proof of effectiveness.
Even when there is a reliable pool of research-based instructional practices within RTI, many teachers resist diving in. We have encountered the resistance earlier in the book. They hold back in part because of professional autonomy. But there are other reasons, chief among them being the perennial educational Hatfields and McCoys who refuse to end the reading wars. The National Research Council Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children pointed out 20 years ago that scientific findings about the causes and cures of early reading difficulties have “been embraced by most researchers, although not yet by a majority of educators.”31 That’s still the case. Despite the vast research in support of the “phonics” approach to early literacy, “whole language” still holds sway among many teachers colleges and teachers, especially veteran teachers.
Another example is found in disputes over what is “developmentally appropriate” reading instruction in the critical pre-kindergarten to first grades. Some early childhood practitioners want to delay what others regard as developmentally appropriate identification and intervention practices. They believe that slow learners in the earliest grades are developing at their own pace and most will grow out of it. They’re usually wrong.
Many parents of students of students I’ve represented have told me that, as soon as their child entered pre-kindergarten, they could sense “something was wrong.” Their other children hadn’t experienced the same frustrations. Yet, even when the parent first asked and then pleaded with the school to diagnose and treat the child’s learning difficulty, the school would say something like, “Be patient . . . your child will get over it.” That’s simply not true. As we have seen, most lose precious early learning time and never catch up.
Beyond professional autonomy and pedagogical warfare, teachers are further dissuaded from embracing research by another customary feature of the educational R & D landscape—“institutional attention deficit disorder.” Federal, state and local educators are forever jumping from one reform to another. When this happens and happens and happens, as it does, teachers, especially veterans, choose to ignore the latest reform du jour and wait out what they see as another quick fix which won’t be around for long.
There’s got to be a better way to effect change, and there is: what I call revolution by evolution.
The obstacles that prevent teachers from sufficiently employing research-based tools of the trade must be overcome through sustained R & D. R & D to sustain RTI sounds wonky but it goes to the heart of our goal of ending educational abuse of struggling learners. Another way to capture the idea is a term I borrowed from another context: “revolution by evolution.”32 Revolution by evolution is basically ongoing, reiterative R & D: determining and disseminating evidence-based best RTI practices, professional development, faithful implementation, monitoring, evaluation, feedback loops and incremental improvements. In other words, keep plugging ‘till you get it right.
Take the example of tutoring. Few if any components of public schools in general and classroom instruction in particular are as well researched. Yet, as the discussion in Chapter 4 illustrated, there are endless variables and uncertainties. RTI and tutoring will not succeed unless tutoring, in words I heard someone say, “gets better all the time.”
Improvement of classroom instruction takes time. That’s true in medicine, science, technology and other professions. Yet, educators show little patience or long-term thinking. Rather, they suffer, as noted earlier, from institutional attention deficit disorder. But in fairness, the disorder is more our fault, than theirs. We tend to demand that education leaders pull off short-term solutions. For example, in the hiring process for state and local school superintendents, there is a public clamor by parents and public officials for assurance of a fast turnaround.
However, no such thing in the realm of K-12 public education is possible. Yet, superintendent candidates feel under the gun to over-promise and then once at the helm, to make decisions “that are politically expedient rather than managerially sound.”33 They also feel compelled to make a fast imprint by discarding the reform strategies of predecessors, though those strategies have not sufficient time to take hold. As an old saying goes, when it comes to school reform, “we keep pulling up the roots to see if the grass is growing.”
Sustained R & D also runs afoul of the obsession with “innovation” as the watchword for how to rescue public schools. These days, not unlike many past eras in the fickle world of K-12 reform, innovation is in. Not so long ago President Obama called for “a new vision for a 21st-century education—one where we aren’t just supporting existing schools, but spurring innovation.” A leading consulting firm has pushed a “U.S. Education Innovation Index.” The full name of the Maryland Kirwan Commission—charged with recommending how Maryland should prepare students for the global economy—is the Commission on Innovation and Excellence in Education.
Innovation sounds irresistible. (Silicon Valley goes even further and preaches disruption.) And who can be against finding new ways to do old things in public schools when things are going as badly as they are? Still, revolution by evolution requires that we innovate less and execute more. Robert Slavin has said it best: “The problem of education reform is not a lack of good ideas, but a lack of good ideas sensibly implemented.”34 We don’t know everything that could be done to implement RTI at large scale. Online education, for example, could be instrumental in the future. But we know far more than innovation gurus and other reformers, left and right, would lead us to believe.
The result of all this attention deficit disorder is unrealistic expectations for classroom instruction and all-too-real disappointments. When reality kicks in, school leaders are kicked out. The average tenure of urban school superintendents is longer than customarily thought.35 Yet, the revolving door of people and programs and the constant churn of educational reforms, often fads, continue to set back instructional improvement. We have been forever “Tinkering Toward Utopia,” the title of a classic history of American public schools, with erratic false stops and starts that derail reform. Its authors concluded, “Change where it counts the most—in the daily interactions of teachers and students—is the hardest to achieve [though] the most important.”36
That’s a succinct summary of the chief lesson that this chapter intends to impart. Mismanagement of classroom instruction must be better recognized as the Achilles heel of reforms like RTI. Still, the endgame of RTI that ends the educational abuse of struggling learners can be won. It calls on Us and Educators to get our collective act together. The next part of the book tells how an allied force for reform can be mobilized.