Twenty Years in Education, and the 2020 Mile March
2021 will mark my twentieth year in education, and I wanted to pause here not to attempt to recast 2020 as anything other than the pox that it has been on US public education — and particularly on our most vulnerable young people — or to share premature hope or offer platitudes. I want to expand the aperture for a few paragraphs. To celebrate some progress that we’ve made in these past twenty years, and to reflect briefly on work I’m hoping to do yet. In the past few years, I’ve come to see the wisdom in the twenty mile march, or progressing towards ambitious goals by moving at a measured pace rather than rushing downhill on sunny days and sputtering to a halt when the winter winds are bracing and the path is steep. 2020 has been a steep, cold year, but we continue moving forward.
2001
Every teacher has an origin story, and mine centers on tracking.
I became a teacher in the final moments before No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the education policy that defined the following decade, took effect. When NCLB was passed into legislation, I was taking the graduate course “Education Policy Analysis”. My professor, Linda Darling-Hammond, who now leads President-elect Joe Biden’s education transition team and serves as chair of California’s Board of Education, threw out the planned curriculum and we focused solely on an analysis of NCLB. The class concluded that while an increased focus on school quality and student learning outcomes was needed, the policy levers used in NCLB would be a disaster for students and school communities already positioned furthest from opportunity.
And while that academic prediction largely proved itself out over the following decade, and the pendulum of public opinion has rightly swung away from NCLB’s focus on accountability without support, I’m reminded of some of the advancements we’ve made due, at least in some cases, to NCLB.
I was reminded of these advancements yesterday evening, when talking with my sister about her kids’ educational experiences. My sister has a ninth grader and a seventh grader, and she was reflecting on how much better her kids’ math educations have been compared to her own, thanks to curricular changes required by Common Core State Standards, the natural evolution of NCLB. She described the value of multiple representations, the beneficial focus on the problem-solving process rather than getting the right answer, and the emphasis on fostering conceptual understanding rather than rote memorization. Her kids like math and they understand the importance of math (algebra aside, of course). By middle school, my sister and I both found math incomprehensible, unmoored from any notion of meaning or meaningfulness — hardly worth the time it took to look up the answers in the back of the textbook.
It was one of the most hopeful conversations I’ve had about education this December, and it made me think about some other things that have actually improved in the past twenty years.
Here are a few:
- When I entered the classroom…I had no way of getting a picture of a student’s performance or progress coming into my class, or across classes. Today in many schools…If they choose to use it, teachers have access to assessments, grades, and teacher reports for all students, so they can begin to plan, chunk, and target instruction early in the school year.
- When I entered the classroom…The school system had no meaningful way of getting a comprehensive picture of students’ performance or progress. Today in many schools…School systems have ready access to incomplete information about students’ performance and, in some cases, progress over time and across subjects.
- When I entered the classroom…There were no common practices for surveying students on their experience in school. Today in many schools…Regular student surveys are common, enabling school systems to link academic progress and performance to behavior and attendance data, as well as student perception data at the school and classroom level — enabling deeper root cause analysis and reflection for improvement.
- When I entered the classroom…Education data was not widely available, and what was available was often not disaggregated by race or SES. Today in many schools…Disaggregated school-level data is publicly reported.
- When I entered the classroom…Effective teaching was largely considered an art — the strange and beautiful land populated by a gifted few. Today in many schools…Effective teaching is largely considered a science — the product of expertise, dedication, deep knowledge, and yes, lots of love.
- When I entered the classroom…Parents who could not afford private schools had no alternatives to local district schools, which were often underserving students of color and low-income students. Today in many schools…Charter schools provide free local alternatives for families for whom the local district school is not meeting their child’s needs.
- When I entered the classroom…The notion of differentiated instruction was in its infancy, with Carol Ann Tomlinson’s first publication on the topic only six years old. Today in many schools…Differentiated instruction and its child, personalized learning, are being practiced in thousands of schools and classrooms across the US.
- When I entered the classroom…Teacher professional development often focused on equality and tolerance. Today in many schools…Teachers and leaders are acutely aware of the importance of equity and justice.
Many of the above points of progress have produced unintended consequences. For instance, simply having student progress and performance data is not enough; we have to know what to do with it. And, of course, not all uses of education data are created equal: NCLB used performance data as a bludgeon, when it should have been used for community engagement, continuous improvement, and more equitable school funding. As many have noted before, the incentives of NCLB were largely misplaced. Where we should have been supporting struggling students and schools, NCLB punished. This is a lesson that we have learned the hard way in these past 20 years, and we have the opportunity to apply it — and others — in the next twenty.
The Next Twenty: Personalization, Not Tracking
If, like me, you scored in the bottom half of those seven-year-old test-takers, you were relegated to an academic track that put you on the path to dropping out or entering the low-wage workforce at eighteen, just after high school graduation.
Had you asked me twenty years ago what would be better in 2021, the first words out of my mouth would have been “no more tracking.”
Every teacher has an origin story, and mine centers on tracking. I grew up in rural and suburban schools in South Carolina, many of which were majority Black and overwhelmingly poor. These schools began tracking students in second grade. Seven-year-olds were administered culturally-biased tests that determined the quality of education they would receive for the next decade.
If, like me, you scored in the bottom half of those seven-year-old test-takers, you were relegated to an academic track that put you on the path to dropping out or entering the low-wage workforce at eighteen, just after high school graduation. My mom, a white native English speaker with moxy, went to the principal and demanded that I be put into the higher track, despite my test score. Some would say her privilege enabled me to have a brighter future, and they would not be wrong. I would add that the system was broken and my mother allowed me to be an unfair exception.
My mom, a white native English speaker with moxy, went to the principal and demanded that I be put into the higher track, despite my test score.
When you’re experiencing a system, it’s difficult to see the design of the system. It wasn’t until high school that I really understood the evils of tracking. In my senior year, I served as free labor for the attendance secretary during one of my elective periods. One day, I had to pull a student from the very classroom I had been in just thirty minutes before. In my class, we performed what I would now call “Reader’s Theatre,” engaging in deep discussions about authorial intent. In the class I entered, the same teacher was slumped at his desk scoring papers while kids threw pens, screamed at each other, and listened to music on Walkmans. What had, thirty minutes prior, been orderly, scholarly, and facilitated, was now chaotic. The teacher clearly did not care about this class, which was tracked many levels below the AP class that I attended. This class had far more Black students than had my class. This class was populated by young people who scored in the bottom half of some absurd test administered some eleven years prior. This was the class I should have been sitting in, not delivering notes to.
The track we were placed in really mattered for our life outcomes. Those who were placed in the track I was in were expected to succeed, and they succeeded. Those who were placed in the track I was supposed to be in were discarded, and they responded with understandable cynicism and ambivalence. Many dropped out; few were able to pursue higher education. All were capable at eighteen and full of promise at seven years old.
I am disappointed by the widespread practice of tracking in American public schools. Tracking, which is very different from ability grouping within a class, or targeted intervention within a multi-tiered system of support (MTSS), is racist (New York Times article from 1988 here), ineffective, and at odds with Civil Rights law. And yet it remains endemic in American public education.
The next twenty years, in which we must find more ways to act in the spirit of evidence-based practice and racial justice, offer us an opportunity to reject and replace the practice of tracking and instead equip professional educators with the tools they need to effectively personalize instruction for heterogeneous classrooms.
The Next Twenty: Professionalizing and Diversifying Our Teaching Workforce
Diversity matters because student engagement and learning are impacted by representation in our education workforce.
Our best teachers are consummate professionals. It’s easy, and trite, to go on about the virtues of the profession. I deeply love teaching, and I believe it is — like storytelling and exploring — an act that makes us human, that pushes us forward, that can be an act of love.
Twenty years ago, when I became a teacher, roughly 80% of teachers were white and 80% were female. Today, the same is true. The stats are only slightly different for school leaders, who tend to skew slightly more male, particularly at the secondary level, but remain 80% white. Our professional educator workforce does not represent the increasingly diverse students we serve.
Diversity matters because student engagement and learning are impacted by representation in our education workforce. It also matters because diverse groups make better decisions.
The quality of educator preparation also matters. Twenty years ago, I took out $60,000 in loans to pay a university to become a teacher in a nearly all-white, mostly-female teacher education program. I was fortunate; it was a good program. The program costs more today, the demographic makeup of the program is similar, and it continues to serve only about 65 teacher candidates per year. Expensive university programs such as the one I attended are clearly not the future of teacher education.
Today, residency programs offer high-quality, research-based options for aspiring teachers at much lower cost than the program I attended. In fact, I would argue that residency programs often produce higher quality teachers than elite higher education programs, which exist in the bureaucratic and highly political confines of university systems. Additionally, residency programs are proven to serve far more representative aspiring teachers for our public schools. Residency graduates stay in the profession longer and have strong job prospects.
The next twenty years offer us an opportunity to equip professional educators with the tools they need to effectively personalize instruction for heterogeneous classrooms.
Yet the hurdles to residency programs are substantial. Accreditation favors institutions of higher education, the term residency is ill-defined by state agencies, mental models of accreditors are set, established financial aid models are accessible only to universities, schools are accustomed to annual budget cycles that make investing in a pipeline of diverse teaching talent difficult, philanthropic foundations are tiring of propping up residency programs given the myriad political and bureaucratic challenges of funding residencies, and — perhaps most worrisome — training teachers through an apprenticeship model requires willing master teachers, who can be difficult to find and match to residents.
The next twenty years presents an opportunity for us to eschew the perpetual “greying and greening” of the US education workforce and begin investing in excellence, retention, and evidence-based programs that credential teachers outside of the established bureaucracies of higher education. Teachers become school leaders, and we need to invest in a professional, diverse teacher workforce.
This does not mean that we spend more on teacher education, but that we enable innovative, evidence-based apprenticeship models of teacher training to begin and to grow, and we take some of the burden of paying for initial training off of the aspiring teachers themselves, reallocating the resources that schools and districts currently pay for teacher churn towards residency-style, context-rich training. Our students deserve it.
The Next Twenty: Redefining Assessment and Its Role
Honesty, vulnerability, community, and a values-orientation are hardwired into the assessment, providing space for real conversations driving towards meaningful, aligned action.
We began with assessment, so it’s only right to circle back to the many opportunities we have to continue the trajectory of improved assessments in education.
The shifts I hope we can make in the coming years regarding assessment are:
I want to provide an example of an assessment that I believe characterizes the future we should work toward.
In the past decade at Summit Public Schools, we have moved from a singular focus on college acceptance to a focus on college readiness to a focus on “concrete next step.” A cornerstone of this pivot towards postsecondary pathways that merge college and career readiness is the Oral Defense assessment. In their senior year, students present an Oral Defense of their considered postsecondary plans — their projected Concrete Next Step — to a Personal Advisory Board (PAB). This PAB is a group of individuals who will support the young person after high school. The PAB is almost always populated by family members and close friends, and often includes employers, mentors, religious leaders, and teachers.
After the senior has presented their postsecondary plans, they thank each member of their Personal Advisory Board and they ask for specific support going forward. This offer of thanks, and this ask of support, is always personal and often tearful. The student then leaves the room and the PAB members speak together about the plan presented to them. Is the plan realistic? Does it match what they know of the young person? Can they enact the roles the young person asked them to enact as part of the support requested?
When the young person reenters the room, a conversation ensues that includes questions, new ideas, commitments to support, and clarity on next steps. These Oral Defenses make space for a critical conversation that rarely happens and, when it does, seldom involves all of the individuals required to enact a clear postsecondary plan with confidence. The young person is in charge of the conversation, because they are in charge of their future. But we all need to be understood, and we all need support. These Oral Defenses are transformative experiences for young people, and they are the type of assessment that I believe we should see more regularly in the coming years.
When the young person reenters the room, a conversation ensues that includes questions, new ideas, commitments to support, and clarity on next steps.
Note that Oral Defenses are not graded. Reliability and validity are not the point, any more than wellbeing and fulfillment can be standardized and normed. These are structured conversations, filled with nuance, context, and years of messy social dynamics coming to play. The assessment is led by the student. The stakes are high, and so the young person is motivated to succeed. Plans are made to personalize support for the student in concert with the student. Honesty, vulnerability, community, and a values-orientation are hardwired into the assessment, providing space for real conversations driving towards meaningful, aligned action. Assumptions are unearthed and often debunked, opening the young person’s mind to possibilities they had moments earlier been blind to.
Imagine such an assessment making its way throughout K-12 education. It’s perfectly possible and costs almost nothing. And imagine the systems we could create to enable such honest conversations. Internships, beyond-the-walls learning experiences, family engagement efforts, the cultivation of a sense of purpose within the curriculum, the thoughtful engagement of young people with adults within the community, a reframing of electives to be opportunities for exposure to perspective-changing ideas and experiences, the purposeful development of high-value professional skills such as contextual communication and time management.
Imagine the impact on how research is conducted: we wouldn’t need to spend many millions of dollars trying to answer the backwards-looking question of “Did it work?” We could instead ask the central question of improvement: “For whom are our schools working, and under what conditions?” This latter question is one that drives improvement in service of equity rather than resulting in a research study few read and none act upon.
We have made some real progress in the past two decades. 2020 has stunted our progress, in many ways, but it has also provided us a moment to reflect on how far we’ve come and the work we’ve yet to do. Sometime in 2021, students will return to schools that are largely the same as those they left in March of 2020. Unlike some predicted in the early days of the pandemic, the legacy of 2020 will not be the productive disruption, or widespread improvement, of the American public education system. But that does not mean that we can’t continue our work of building more effective and equitable schools, a more diverse and well-prepared educator workforce, and more human systems of assessment.
Twenty miles to go tomorrow, and the sun is peeking over the horizon.
Adam Carter is the Executive Director of Marshall Street and former Chief Academic Officer of Summit Public Schools. A lifelong educator who has taught and created educational programs in the United States, Indonesia, and Argentina, Adam loves working with fiercely-driven leaders who strive for an excellent and equitable system of education for all students.
