Public Education as a Schmoo.  If educators must conform to all demands, how can a school be anything more than a schmoo?

Tony Wagner’s article in SchoolAdministrator, September 2012, asks the right questions and, when connected with Pasi Sahlberg’s article just a few pages away, many of the answers begin to fall into place. And, public education in the United States is a humongous schmoo.

Wagner’s “Accountability for What Matters Most” asks if public education is being held accountable for what really matters in preparing our children for the best of their potential futures. Sahlberg’s “Quality and Equity in Finnish Schools” analyzes schools in his native Finland with schools in other nations, most notably the United States, and it is not what he says about Finland that is eye catching – it is what he says about our educational systems. Together, Wagner and Sahlberg confirm that public education, as practiced in our country and states, is in a world of hurt because everything assigned to public education matters and what really matters is lost in the accountability for everything.

A quieter reflection about the standing of the United States in an international comparison of student performance might begin to narrow the evaluation of our educational systems to what really is important. Decades ago Al Capp, a nationally-syndicated cartoonist, created a schmoo. A schmoo is a doughy-bodied animal that would conform its body into whatever shape or function would satisfy the needs of the moment.

Public education in the United States has become the biggest schmoo of all time. As our nation’s greatest public institution, school also is our nation’s most abused institution. No politician or social reformer ever saw a cause that could not be assigned to the local schools for resolution. The little red schoolhouse no longer looks like a schoolhouse, but like a smiling schmoo needing to please every demand and in so doing is unable to satisfy very many. The education of children is just one of the myriad of missions for which a school is accountable and too often it has become attached to non-educational demands that suborn student learning.

• The United States ranks 14th among OECD nations in reading, math and science.
• Children in our nation are obese. School lunches must conform to new mandates.
• Children are subjected to cyber-bullies. Schools must protect them from each other the world at large.
• Children may not be safe in school. Schools must fortify.
• Concussive injuries in athletics endanger children. Schools must provide access to neurologic assessments, train all staff to protect children from head injuries and respond if they occur, and assure that all athletic helmets conform to NO—standards.
• A community’s socio-economic status determines the level of academic achievement in its schools. Schools must provide compensatory education that accommodates all possible disadvantages.
• Children today do not know the history of unionism in the United States. And, all other stories related to any special interest or ethnic minority.
• Children are not involved in their communities. Schools must provide community service education and verify that every graduate has been a significant local volunteer.
• The number of children living in split or blended families increases every year. Schools must respond to the needs and demands of ever-changing family structures.
• Although 8% of the workforce is unemployed, schools are not preparing enough skilled machinists to meet the demands of computer-assisted manufacturing.

Our schmoo-schools are responsible for each of these and thousands more. Most are legislatively mandated by our federal and state governments. Most are unfunded. Others are locally-mandated responding to interests or needs presented to a board of education. However, seldom is a new mandate is ever matched with a revoked mandate. The schmoo just gets bigger and bigger and less and less accountable for much. It is not surprising that the first item in the above list gets a large press attention, but each of those that follow and another thousand mandates get our educational time.

By comparison, Sahlberg explains how educational systems in Finland evolved from national mandates and regulations to local determination of educational values. Schools in Finland appear to be schools and not schmoos. It is no wonder that Finland ranks #2 among OECD nations in student achievement in reading, math and science. The Finns insist that schools focus upon what really matters in the education of their children and their accounts are very enviable.

So, when Wagner wonders if public education is being accountable for what really matters, we should not be surprised when our schmoo looks bewildered and the answer is “probably not.” There is every reason for the Virginia Beach City schools to point at critical thinking and problem-solving as their refocused priorities and make these the outcomes for which they will be accountable. Nothing else made sense. This does not mean that the schmoo in Virginia Beach City has shed the weight of all governmental mandates; it has not. Federal and state mandates for achievement must be met. School lunch programs must be in compliance. OSHA rules rule. But, each of these can be made routine if what matters that district comes first in their priorities.

It’s time to shuck our schmoo.

A review of two works published in the 1990s indicates that strategic planning as practiced by most in public education may have strengthened a school’s public relations but may not have led to improvements in school performance, in particular in student achievement. In the Winter 2012 issue of the Harvard Educational Review, “The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning and Strategic Planning in Education” (http://www.hepg.org/her/abstract/310) by Edward Meich reviews The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning by Henry Mintzberg (New York: Free Press, 1994) and Strategic Planning in Education: Rethinking, Restructuring, Revitalizing by Roger Kaufman and Jerry Herman (Lancaster, PA: Technomic, 1991).

Meich’s review indicates that strategic planning in both the business and education realms failed to produce significant increases in profit or performance. He points to the fact that strategic planning is essentially an analytical tool for evaluating the past and present data but fails to synthesize these evaluations into strategies for the future. The missing ingredient, he claims, is the absence of training for the planners in strategizing and the real disconnect between the representative stakeholders called upon to analyze multi-faceted data and the employees who will be expected to execute a new plan. Meich states that “to do” lists and timelines with expected outcomes is not a strategy but lack the organizational changes of an encompassing strategy that will institutionalize the completion of tasks and timelines and achievement of outcomes for the organization’s future prosperity.

It may be that smaller enterprises such as school districts where the data analyzers also are the plan executors and there is a continuity of leadership have the best likelihood of benefiting from strategic planning designs. In this scenario, the disconnects found in Meich’s review may not be present and the efficiencies of a smaller scale may prove an exception to the review.

This article will discuss a potential conflict between the performances indices of the School Report Card and the traditionally strong programs of a school. This will apply to all schools rated and ranked by mandated educational outcomes.

It’s the American Way. Our culture loves to keep score. Scores allow us to point to winners and point at losers. (The prepositions “to” and “at” are significant!) We score sports, movies, cars, pizza and toilet paper. Everything has a score and ranking. Knowing the score allows consumers to make wiser choices, we are told. Scoring also holds athletes, producers, manufacturers, bakers and the paper industry accountable for what they do.

Accountability also is tied to financial efficiency. The more accountably efficient will produce quality indicators a lower cost; the less accountably efficient will produce less quality at a higher cost. All Wisconsin schools now are rated based upon quality indicators of school performance. (The DPI points the public to the School Report Card and then to the DPI’s larger web site where per pupil expenses and school-to-school financials can be found. A future iteration of the School Report Card will include a cost/benefit rating.) Once a score is assigned to a school, the public immediately can identify a school’s success or lack of success by its state assigned number. Winners and Losers. Accountability. However, a love affair with legislated scores may not make for happiness in the home.

My local schools now have numbers that score and rank their performances as effective schools. The scores are: elementary = 79.1, middle school = 73.9; and, high school = 81.8. (http://reportcards.dpi.wi.gov/rc_gibraltar) The scoring key indicates that these are very good, above average scores but not yet the best. As a point of reference, no school has earned a score in the 90s and 100 is hypothetical. Each school meets and exceeds the mandated state standards but there always is room for improvement. But, at what cost will an improved score be achieved?

According to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, “The School Report Card will help parents understand how their child’s school is doing and where it can improve. The new report cards will help all Wisconsin public schools get a better picture of how well they help children learn, advance to the next grade, and graduate ready for college and career. Our goal is to help every student in a Wisconsin school succeed, graduate, and be ready to pursue further education and a career.” (http://reportcards.dpi.wi.gov/files/oea/pdf/parentrptguide.pdf)

Interestingly, the local high school earned “Best High School in America” honors from Newsweek and US News and World Report for each of the past four academic years. Daily attendance, promotion and graduation rates, and technical school and college preparation have been solid, and academic performance on state assessments and ACT have been well above the state average. A good high school performance usually follows good elementary and middle school performances by students during their K-12 enrollment and that is true of our local schools.

So, what is the concern about legislated accountability, especially an accountability that equates success with an indexed score? Our local schools emphasize a “Four A” education for all students. A “Four A” education is a balance of academics, activities, arts and athletics. Besides creating a history of solid academic profiles, our local schools have even stronger traditions in the arts and activities. Each school has full-time music and art teachers. Seven full-time art and music teachers are employed for a K-12 enrollment of 550. All K-12 students have access to the art and music classrooms and the theater. High school students “go to state” every year with One Act theatrical performances. The high school musical has won multiple state awards for student on-stage performances. 80% of the high school students play in the bands or sing in the choirs. Middle and high school students take their forensics skills “to state” every year. Door County (WI) is known nationally for its artists and middle and high school student art work is highly supported by community artists and galleries throughout northern Wisconsin. Students in each school win awards in local, regional and state competitions with their creative writing, especially poetry. Rounding out the final “A”, more than 75% of the middle and high school enrollment is a student-athlete.

This description is not unique to our local schools. It is an accurate description of many small, rural school districts throughout Wisconsin where strong traditions and local support are attached to specific academic, arts, activity or athletic programs. In these small schools the two major complaints about public education do not typically apply. Politicians especially complain that public education does not provide an equal educational opportunity for all students and that school district bureaucracies are stacked too deeply to allow reforms to be enacted. Hence, the wide sweeping reform for accountability through mandates.

So, what should our local schools do? The effective schools research from the University of Michigan shows that with “enough time and resources we can cause all students to succeed with our learning objectives.” However, time and resources, especially time, are finite commodities in rural schools where almost all students are bussed to and from school and bus times can be an hour or more each way. Time is the school day. In order to increase student learning time and teacher time for preparation and instruction of the Common Core Standards, more time will need to be allocated to instruction of the Standards.

Here’s the dilemma. The mandates demand that schools meet increasingly more stringent performance indicators. Meet the mandates or be identified locally and statewide as a non-compliant school. Improvement on the mandated indicators will require a reallocation of resources – time and staff. In the finite world of school resources, reallocating to one area of programs typically results in a loss of resources in another area of programs.

What is the price of keeping score?

School report cards recently were released by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. Each school district and school house in Wisconsin now has an official, annual report card. Data, data everywhere and not a care to be found!

Why?

A quick read of ESEA Information Update Bulletin #02.10 titled Topic: Meeting Report Card Requirements of ESEA published in October 2002 indicates that the DPI is meeting a legislated requirement initiated in 2001 with the No Child Left Behind Act. The initial concepts of the NCLB report card have been edited and refined over the past decade. Spun forward, the purposes of a school report card are to help the school and school district make needed improvements in student academic achievement and behaviors related to academic achievement and to assist parents to make informed decisions regarding the school that is educating their child(ren).

Always insinuated in ESEA mandates is Wisconsin’s loss of federal funds if ALL schools are not compliant with the reporting criteria and accountability measures. The mandates include actions that will be taken against individual school organizations if accountability cannot be met, including the withholding of funds. These funds are an essential part of Wisconsin’s funding formula for public education; without the federal funds, the state cannot meet its commitments to local schools.

What is reported?

The DPI web site for this information is http://reportcards.dpi.wi.gov/

There are four priority areas of accountability. These are:

• Student Achievement in reading and mathematics compared with state and national standards.
• Student Growth in reading and mathematics as measured by annual assessments.
• Closing Gaps in how well specific sub-groups of students are able to meet academic achievement and growth requirements as compared to the aggregated data for all students.
• On-Track to Graduation and Post-Secondary Readiness data that displays how well student groups and students as a whole are progressing as compared to the aggregated data for all students in the school.

There are three indicators of student engagement that also are reported. These are related to DPI statewide goals established by a study of state data over time.

• Test Participation requires a minimum of 95% of students and students by sub-group to participate in required accountability assessments.
• Absenteeism sets the required rate of daily attendance at 84% of the days a student is enrolled in school.
• Drop Out Rates raise flags when more than 6% of the enrollment in the school or in a student cohort drop out of school.

Absent in the new school report card is an essential characteristic that is a consistent heritage in Wisconsin’s schools. The care factor. A local school is the community’s school and the community permeates the school. When a child enrolls in such a community school, a covenant is created between the school and the child’s parents. In a nutshell, this covenant is “We, the school, will assist you, the parents, to educate your child. We, the school, will provide a network of public care for your child, our student.”

Perhaps “care” is assumed in the new design for Wisconsin Accountability. It currently is unstated that school leaders and school staff will take care of their students. If they always have, they always will. If caring for students indeed is an assumption, it may not have to be stated as a measureable school outcome. However, in the political/economics of contemporary public education, what gets measured gets significant organizational attention. Why then should a school’s care factor be ignored?

Should the manner in which a school provides for the health and well-being of a student not matter as much as the child’s ability to read and write? The Child Care Information Center web page is replete with newsletters describing the topics of child “care.” http://165.189.80.100/rll/ccic/mat_newsletters.html and how a school is to implement these topics of care.

There are mandates related to each school’s management of the immunizations of its students. Specific literature has been produced regarding “pandemics.” Schools also are subject to mandates regarding child nutrition, school safety, student welfare, especially related to bullying, and categorical discrimination. Federal and state mandates speak to how schools are to be made safe for and respectful of students. http://sspw.dpi.wi.gov/sspw_safeschool Levels of caring practice often have school personnel teaching and monitoring toileting habits, combing student hair looking for knits and lice, and assuring that a child’s shoe laces are tied.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of the commitment to school-parent covenant regarding child wellness resides in the continuous communication between school and home. As part of their daily routines, teachers call, send texts, and written notes to parents regarding a child’s physical and emotional well-being. Parents call, send texts and written notes about every aspect of their child’s life to the student’s teacher(s). In fact, the reality of ubiquitous communication lives elementary classrooms and elementary school offices where parent communication flows to the school every minute of the day.

Not including the care factor in the new Wisconsin Accountability is tantamount to exhorting all school sports teams to win every athletic contest without a regard for sportsmanship. Opinion pieces in local media constantly rail when an athlete or team violates perceptions of good sportsmanship. Academic accountability without measures of a care for children is just as ignoble.

How interesting it would be to balance the statistically indexed score of school effectiveness that currently dominates the upper left corner of a school report card with an equally visible index of community, student and parent satisfaction with the care that a school provides for its children. Excellent schools are a balance of learned achievement and human care.

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that the thing people forget most often is the thing they are trying to do at the moment. Right now, you either know that this is a true statement because your mind already is thinking of something else or you are waiting a few moments to see if it is true. But you probably do recall a time when you lost track of the exact thing you thought you were doing. This sounds like, “Now, what was I doing?” Nietzsche’s observation is true. In fact, by the time you finish reading this brief piece more than half of your fellow readers will find that their minds have wandered off to something else and whatever Nietzsche wrote will have been forgotten. How apt!

Let’s apply Nietzsche to good teaching. What teachers do every day requires unbelievable episodes of complete concentration. Episodes. Few of us are able to sustain the level of thinking, listening, responding, analysis of ideas, and generation of quality conclusions all of the time. We do not use our mental “A” game every minute of the day; we cannot. However, we are at our “A” game level of focus a great deal of the time and these are the episodes of concentration that count when we are teaching.

Children in the classroom also experience episodic highs and lows of their concentration. A child’s mind wanders just like an adult mind wanders. So, Nietzsche reminds us to focus long enough to complete the episode of teaching we want to achieve – just long enough. Because we know that minds will wander, we need to use our skills to bring the concentration of the children we teach to an attentive focus, conduct the instruction they need to learn, check and reinforce that instruction, and move into practice activities when minds will do what they will do – wander a bit. We also need to back up to provide quality initial instruction for those children whose minds were not with us the first time.

Now, let’s apply this to good learning. We need to engage children and keep them engaged for the time it takes to achieve our learning objective. Probably we should think of child engagement looking like an old-fashioned roller coaster of ups and downs. Consider the amount of mental interactions a child receives in an hour at school. A child has dozens of conversations with classmates. She has in-class instructional activities, hallway conversations, cafeteria talk food servers and table mates, and playground interactions with many more children and other adults. She needs to meet her needs for lunch and nutrition and the need for bathroom breaks. On the upside, a teacher and child are cognitively together and engaged with the teacher’s objective. On the downside, reality touches both a teacher and a child and each must take moments to breath, let their minds expand to the places only their mind will go before the teacher begins to orchestrate the next up cycle.

Nietzsche helps us to understand that believing a child must be “on task” all of the time is not only unlikely but impossible. So, don’t measure “on task” as a time, but consider it as many times.

We know that all people, teachers and children, are vulnerable to wandering thoughts. Knowing that what Nietzsche wrote accurately applies to our abilities to focus and maintain a focus helps us to craft our work and capitalize on episodes when mental attention is riding high. Knowing Nietzsche also helps us to understand and accept those moments when our mind wanders and more importantly to understand that a student’s mind also can and does wander.