Student Centered School Improvement: Identifying Systemic Changes Essential for Success

Student Centered School Improvement

Student Centered School Improvement

Identifying Systemic Changes Essential for Success

Aimee Evan

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2023 Aimee Evan

All rights reserved.

Student Centered School Improvement

Identifying Systemic Changes Essential for Success

ISBN

979-8-88504-439-4 Paperback

979-8-88504-462-2 Ebook

To my first and best teacher, my mom.

Table of Content

Foreword

Introduction: Why We Need a New Philosophy on School Improvement

Chapter 1. Two Education Systems?

Chapter 2. Era of Accountability

Chapter 3. We’ve Tried All the Improvements and We’re Out of Ideas

Chapter 4. The Importance of Teachers

Chapter 5. We Are at a Crossroads

Chapter 6. Early Warning Systems to Prevent Schools Needing Comprehensive Improvement

Chapter 7. Revamping Accountability to Identify and Support Struggling Schools Prior to Comprehensive Decline

Chapter 8. Engaging Families

Chapter 9. Student-Centered Learning

Chapter 10. The Importance of Teacher Support

Chapter 11. Aligning Systems of Support

Conclusion: It’s Not Too Late

Acknowledgments

References

Foreword by Arne Duncan

Henry Kissinger once said, The manipulation of the internet to affect the immediate impact of stories or events has become the preoccupation of leaders, rather than a view of a more distant future.

Our education system has also been manipulated for immediate impact rather than our sustainability in the future. In fact, our education system runs on lies. That’s a bit of a provocative statement, but I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t believe it.

Let me tell you the story of Calvin Williams. I grew up working with my mother’s inner-city tutoring program, and it had an impact on all of us: my sister, brother, and me. We all ended up trying to follow in her footsteps in various ways. One summer before coming back for my senior year of college, Calvin, a young man who literally lived right across the street, right across the corner from my mother’s program, came over and asked if I could help him get ready for the ACT test. We knew Calvin’s family well. He was a basketball player; I was a basketball player. He was a lot better than I was, and I was thrilled to work with him.

I’ll never forget the day. It was warm. We sat out on the church steps. In Calvin’s first session, in the first few minutes, I saw he was reading at maybe a third or fourth grade level. It was beyond heartbreaking. He was on the B honor roll at his high school. He lived in a really violent neighborhood with drugs and alcohol available, but he didn’t touch either. He wasn’t caught up in gangs. He had played by all the rules, and he had no idea how far behind he was. It was devastating.

We did some studying together, but I knew we just didn’t have enough time. Had I started the previous summer, maybe if we would’ve had a year, but working with him for only the summer was not going to be enough time to catch him up to apply to college. Seeing how the system had absolutely failed him and lied to him throughout his life was one of many motivators to make me want to go into education. My goal going into education was to tell young people the truth. I wanted to have high expectations for them, challenge them, and take all the lessons I learned from my mother’s program every single day and try and take those to scale.

I’ve been involved in education for several decades. What I’ve learned is in many states, grade level standards—or what we expect our students to know and be able to do at each grade level—are just too low. The reality of these low expectations is kids and parents believe their children are learning what they need to be successful in school and beyond. Even honor roll students, like Calvin, are often far behind where they should be. When I was secretary of education, the driver of us trying to raise standards and remedy these low expectations was to establish college and career ready standards. We wanted to ensure all kids, regardless of which state or neighborhood they grew up in, would graduate high school ready for college and a career. Some states adopted college and career ready standards, such as Common Core. Other states created their own version of college and career ready standards. Unfortunately, when students were not rising to meet these standards, states lowered the threshold of what it meant to be proficient, repeating the same type of lies we were attempting to remedy. We know this because when students get to college, our kids are spending $8 to $9 billion (with a capital B!) each year on remedial classes in college. What that means is young people with a high school diploma go to college and then have to take noncredit-bearing classes. Kids are burning through Pell Grants and loans, which is terrible for them, terrible for their parents, and terrible for taxpayers; nobody wins. When kids get to the workforce, employers are telling them they are not ready. They cannot write, they cannot read, they cannot apply mathematical knowledge to real-world scenarios.

President Bush, who has eloquently said we had to remedy the soft bigotry of low expectations when signing the legislation No Child Left Behind, was describing an interesting and deep phenomenon within our education system. What our leaders don’t overtly talk about, but you can pick up on, is an undercurrent around expectations that, well, these kids are poor, or these kids are minority students, or these kids are immigrants. The implication is there’s only so much teachers can do to get these kids ready. Or if you really want to do well academically, you have to end poverty first. Trust me, I would love to end poverty tomorrow. President Biden has taken some pretty interesting steps to reduce poverty, but while we fight those macro battles, we can’t not educate kids. I would argue quite the opposite. The best way I know how to break cycles of poverty is by providing a high-quality education. That’s what my mother devoted her life to. She was an educator, and she was trying to lift kids out of poverty. In one generation, we were able to see how an education sent many kids into successful life trajectories even though their families did not often have a high school degree, let alone a college education. The generation she worked with broke the cycle.

I’m passionate about education because I believe education is the best path to help end cycles of poverty, provide some economic mobility, and give a ladder up and to the middle class. My life’s work has been about trying to create opportunities for young people, for communities historically denied those. The lies we tell our young people and their families are only becoming more meaningful as the need for education becomes more apparent.

What do I mean by this? We live in a globally competitive economy. There’s no longer competition for jobs where it’s Wisconsin versus Illinois versus Indiana, where I live in the Midwest. We’re competing for jobs with India, China, South Korea, and Singapore. The good jobs, the middle-class jobs, the higher-wage jobs are going to go to where the skilled workers are. We’re in a flat world now, and I worry desperately about those jobs leaving our country and going to other countries where there’s more of a skilled and educated workforce. So for me, this imperative is about trying to keep the United States globally competitive, and with an economy that can thrive and with an upwardly mobile population because of education; a society where educational opportunity creates economic opportunity. However, when you look at the indicators of how we’re doing—whether it’s reading or math scores—we’re usually somewhere between the fifteenth and thirtieth percentile. On access to pre-K, we’re twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth now. College completion rates? We led the world a generation ago. We’ve flatlined recently, and other countries passed us by. We’re about twelfth now.

So the hard truth is, we’re top ten in nothing: early childhood, K-12, higher ed. And I don’t think that’s acceptable. I don’t think we can be complacent. We should be challenging that every day and not just resting on our laurels or resting on our glory days from a couple of decades ago. Test scores don’t tell you everything, but I also think it’s an important benchmark to know where you are. It’s actually a very interesting debate now, of whether we should assess kids or not now. Honestly, how do you help kids catch up if you don’t know where they’re strong and where they’re weak?

I had my annual checkup with the doctor recently, and what does the doctor do? She doesn’t just start prescribing me a bunch of medicine. She asks me how I’m doing, how I’m feeling; she assesses my health before she does anything. I think we need to assess kids where they are educationally. Let’s help high-flying students keep moving and for students needing more help, let’s get them more help. But I don’t know how you help kids in an effective, efficient way if we don’t know where we are. I worry because maybe we’re a little embarrassed or ashamed or because it’s a hard truth; we shy from those things. I just think it’s really important not to guess, but to know. We need to know what kids’ strengths and weaknesses are, how best to help them, and then to hold us as adults accountable, particularly now, for helping tens of millions of kids who are pretty far behind after these past couple of horrific years in education. We have to help them catch up as fast as we can.

I’ll go back to my mother’s philosophy. Five decades ago, she said, See where kids are, find out where they are, and just take them from there. You’ll have kids come to you a couple of grade levels ahead or a couple of grade levels behind. You’ll have really fast learners at some things and slow in learning other things. You have kids with one passion or another. It’s less about what kids bring to the table and more about what we as adults do to meet them where they are and take them where they need to go.

I’ve had a lifetime of experience seeing kids who happen to live in all Black, all poor, very violent neighborhoods. Many do extraordinarily well and do things theoretically that should be impossible. How do we predict which students will do well and which will not? I can tell you, the predictor isn’t race, the predictor isn’t social economic class, the predictor isn’t neighborhood. So much of this is really helping young kids believe in themselves, believe even if no one in their family’s ever gone to college, they have the capacity to do so and belong in that environment. It’s about exposing kids to a world of opportunity they don’t know exists. It’s hard to aspire to a career or profession you’ve never heard of or know anyone who has. The best predictor of student success is where they have opportunities, support, and guidance. It’s not whatever strengths or challenges kids bring to the table when you first meet them.

We have communities lacking the opportunity, support, and guidance. Where there is high unemployment, where there is inferior education, where there is inferior health care, where there is lack of access to quality food, there’s disinvestment in communities and students are not likely to be successful. With the pandemic, there’s this new term, socially distanced. In the communities I work in, on the South and West sides of Chicago, the communities have been socially distanced for decades. We haven’t used that term, but they’ve been redlined, they’ve been disenfranchised, they’ve been marginalized, and they’ve seen capital leave. We don’t invest in these communities, and we don’t invest in these people.

The pandemic has taught us so many lessons, both good and bad. One of the biggest ones is just how interconnected we are: none of us are okay if we’re not all okay. And if my family is healthy, but our neighbor’s family’s sick, well, we’re all at risk. We can separate geographically, we can separate by community, we can separate by gated community, but it’s really understanding our common humanity. I’ve learned so many tough lessons every day, but probably the biggest lesson is not to judge. I have a million crazy stories, but one of our guys told me, he said, Arne, I grew up in a household full of guns. And I wish we would have had toys, but we had guns. And guess what, he grew up to be a pretty big shooter and created a lot of mayhem and havoc and destruction. He’s doing much, much better now, but I thought about… Both my parents are educators, and my sister, brother, and I grew up in a household full of books. And guess what? All three of us became educators. We followed in their footsteps. It does not make me nor my family any better than him. It’s just that we’re all at some levels, creatures of our environment, shaped by our environment.

And so what can we all do? We can do whatever we can to create opportunity and not judge and give other people’s children the same kinds of opportunities and support and guidance and love we try so hard to give our own children. On the one hand, you could say it’s altruistic, and yes, that’s true. But obviously, more than ever our fates are intertwined, interconnected. So you can almost do it in a selfish way. If you want what’s best for your children, one of the best things you can do for your children is to make sure other people’s children are doing well also.

This book provides the rationale and guidance to get there. Aimee grew up on the South side and understands the intersection of opportunity begetting opportunity. She understands students will rise, and fall, to our expectations. She has seen education lift children out of poverty or hold them hostage. And, most importantly, she provides the way forward to identify the schools where education is failing to push students to their full potential.

In closing, I leave you with several takeaways: The first being, education should be the ultimate bipartisan issue. I am pleading with everyone about to read this book to vote, in part, at every level, local, state, and national, for the candidates that are going to create educational opportunity in your community and in communities that so desperately need it. We all say we value education. But the truth is almost no one votes on education. There’s nothing partisan—Republican or Democrat—about helping more babies get off to a good start, about raising graduation rates, about trying to lead the world in college completion rates. No one has a monopoly on good ideas, but very few of us go to the voting booth and hold politicians—mayors, congressmen, governors, the president—accountable. We don’t go to the voting booth and vote with education in mind. As a result, many politicians give nice education sound bites, but don’t really invest, and don’t hold themselves accountable, and don’t put the resources in that we need. This book provides the consequences if our apathy continues and why we need to care more about education.

Second, since we’re top ten in the world in nothing, the status quo is not good enough. How do we reimagine education, how do we reinvent, how do we move from a K-12 system to a pre-K to fourteen system at a minimum? We have to do a much better job, not only for education but also for economic reasons. This book shows you how to make the systemic changes, moving from the inertia of the immediate to the long-range view of ensuring our country and our citizens remain competitive.

Third, would be to never judge or discount. I can give you countless examples of young people I grew up with, young people I worked with, who by any normal prediction should not be contributors to society but are doing extraordinary things as contributors to society because they had the education opportunities with people who loved them. Maybe judge less and invest more. This book shows you what investment looks like.

Introduction: Why We Need a New Philosophy on School Improvement

How do we improve the lives of humans?

No one will care or pay attention to the school until our outcomes take a nosedive, and by then it will be too late, said my neighbor to me one fall night as we were outside talking.

My neighbor and I often chatted about school. When teachers—either current or former—meet each other, there’s often a quick comradery. Yes! Someone else who’s been there and gets it. She was a middle school special education teacher (as was I several decades ago) and had recently taken a job at the local middle school. My son had just started his fifth-grade year and would be attending the school where she taught the following year. At least that was the plan. She shared how frustrated she was at the middle school; they had recently hired a new principal and was beginning to unravel. Her principal supervisor was close to retirement, so they never came around to help.

As a teacher who previously taught at a high-quality, well-functioning school, she knew things were beginning to fray. The school had an influx of students, and classes were swollen with kids. Teachers who had