To make this more manageable, I’m not going to say much about early childhood except that the model that strikes me as most strategic right now would be a "Great at 8"model, but with a focus on the ages from 3- 8 (as opposed to starting at birth, which I think would be great but I’m not convinced it’s necessary).  The example I know best is probably the Chicago Child Parent Centers,  documented by Arthur Reynolds, U Minnesota.  In Chicago,  they were available only in schools similar to what the papers call "higher need schools" and their long-term impact was very impressive.  What we have to understand better here are the implementation issues, but NJ and Boston seem to have made some progress in that regard.  The parent  component seems to reach young parents who aren’t reached by very many programs; It’s important to take advantage of the program to build linkages among parents. 

I’m also not going to say much about high schools, even though the Ready et al paper is focused there.   Given limited time,  I would rather talk about what happens before high school, for reasons made clear in the paper.   Suffice it to say that, the kind of rigor , personalization, collaboration  model that the last MDRC report  pointed to is the right direction but we don’t know much about how to scale those things.

All I’ll say about out-of-school learning time is that the Ford Foundation’s More and Better Learning Time approach feels very right to me.  There will be the usual implementation issues.   To be more than obvious,  it is the higher need schools where one would expect these to matter most.  Even in those schools,  higher need students won’t participate at the rate we want unless there are explicit efforts to recruit then and keep them involved.

I’m going to ignore the question’s long-term/ short-term distinction which just feels pernicious to me.  

One of the themes undergirding this is that I’m increasingly come to feel that starting with instruction is often the wrong path;   you get deeper change when you improve the context first.

I’m blue-skying here, not worrying much about the resource issues.  

 

Background Assumptions

By  way of context, I should probably say something about how I think about NYC at this juncture (not claiming it to be based on much).   Even though I’m still a little suspicious of the graduation rates,  I’m pretty well in agreement that the system did improve, at least for some kinds of students (the middle kid), over the Bloomberg –Klein years.   I’m agnostic about the arguments that this came at the expense of degrading the educational experience for other students but the data in the paper about the system becoming more academically stratified ARE very, very concerning.   I think the progress can be partly attributed to the emphasis on accountability, and that that shouldn’t be lost going forward even though there is plenty of room to think about how it should be constituted.   I also have a suspicion that, in contrast to many other cities where the leadership has embraced corporate reforms, NY’s leaders have maintained space in the debate for people with instructional expertise.  I think it’s actually a more balanced approach than the fiery rhetoric would suggest.   If so, it’s important to maintain that balance.   It is also my impression that many of NY’s community and parent leaders feel disregarded by the system, and they are among many constituencies which just do not trust central office.    As common as that distrust is in big cities, it feels to me deeper in NY. 

Rebuilding public confidence, especially in low-income communities,  should be a major priority.  (Baltimore under Alonso may offer some lessons;  while Montgomery County , Maryland gets written about a lot, many accounts overlook their commitment to community involvement.)

Strategic Process

One of the truisms of urban school reform is that the same reforms that are “working” in one place are producing no results in another.  Many of us would assume that how a process is developed has bearing on how likely it is to work.   I’m not close enough to NYC to talk about that with confidence but maybe the most obvious question is which constituencies need to be  involved   -- this should not be an elite process—and what basic information  you need to think about strategy.      Again, given my remove from NYC,  I have to be pretty generic about this but I would think that some of informational issues would include:

• Where in the system do you find the strongest performance for poor children.  What areas, what programs ?  The small schools of choice are one much talked-about model but there must be more.    How can they be leveraged up?  There are many advantages to building from present strength as opposed to starting new.
• What has been learned about the development of building level leadership over the Bloomberg –Klein years?   I have heard different opinions about the leadership academy there.  Figuring this out is one of the most important things you can do.
•  What are your patterns of teacher retention like?  How can you improve them, especially in low performing schools?   Do the Small Learning Communities help?
•  What are the metrics by which the system should be judged?  Is that data available in transparent form? (Again, NY seems to be one of the places where people are most distrustful of the data.) This is one of the points where it is most important to have vigorous community involvement;  community people are likely to bring a more complex and actually more rigorous vision about system goals.   They are also likely to keep the focus on all children, including the most troubled.   Are you collecting the right data to inform both policy decisions and teaching practice?  Are there data that should be more broadly known; e.g, the point in the paper about children having only a 33% of high school graduation if they attend three higher need schools? My sense is that New York’s standing on the NAEP is not widely understood by New Yorkers. Come to think of it, the broad outlines of the Ready et al  paper would make a wonderful basis for community discussion ( which is ironic in that the paper  makes the process of collaboration sound much easier than it is).
• What is the distribution of academic rigor across the system?  What keeps poor children, Black and Latino children out of those experiences.?   The Ready et al paper is very good as far as it goes, but the question is a larger one.
• How can we further unpack the problem of racial disparities in suspensions?  This is a strategic conversation partly because it is likely to lead back to broader issues of school climate.
• How well is the system serving the most vulnerable children (special ed, ELL, court-adjudicated)?  Making them a central part of the conversation helps to re-moralize systems (I think).  
• How do resources, including human capital, flow to the schools identified here as higher need?

 

Improving Schools as Organizations

Before you get too far into more specific strategies,  I would strongly urge you to think about improving the basic organizational functioning of schools (the Five Essentials from the Consortium on Chicago School Research, and the 11 preconditions for school improvement from the Mass. Dept. of Elementary and Secondary Education).   For present purposes,   take it to mean leadership,  stabilization (  i.e., reducing teacher and student mobility, improving teacher and student behavior and attendance),  collegial relationships, school climate and parent-community ties).   Again, leadership is first among equals here.  It’s  just hard to make anything work without  strong leadership at the building level,  which to me now means both the principal and some form of instructional leadership team.   The Wallace Foundation seems to be ahead of everyone trying to figure leadership out and it might be well worth your time to figure out what they are figuring out.  

Part of what’s important about improving attendance and behavior  is that we can do that more reliably than we can improve instructional quality.   (This is probably true of reducing mobility as well, but we have less experience with that.)  Come to think of it,  attendance is one thing that can change very quickly.  Concentrate attendance resources on the younger students , including pre-school.  Bob Balfanz’s Center at Johns Hopkins has lots of  resources on attendance, but teachers and parents will devise good programs if encouraged.  Stabilization issues offer rich opportunities for community involvement.  In fact, involved parents will have higher standards for student behavior than schools do.  

If we make progress on those fronts, improving instruction should be a lot easier.   Put differently, every system should have strategies for improving student outcomes whether or not instruction improves.

I have no idea what the state of the thinking in the city is about the Quality Review process , or even if the process  is still going on but I was always impressed with its potential if it didn’t get diluted or bureaucratized.  I was also afraid that trying to do it city-wide was an error.  I like it because it can be a (partly) bottom up way to think holistically about schools as organization.

Teacher Deployment/Evaluation:  In general, we should be trying to assign the strongest teachers to the weakest students, and giving them incentives to stay. Obviously, this is not likely to work if the organizational environment is chaotic and  the leadership  unsupportive.  (Don’t get too hung up on figuring out who the good teachers are;  principals pretty much know. )  I interpret the Tennessee Starr study to suggest that there may be a lot of advantages to stacking the best teachers so that young children got three consecutive years of the best their school has to offer.  (In the study, poor children who got three consecutive years of strong teachers were thereafter not damaged if they got a weaker teacher.) I’m making some large inferential leaps here, of course,  but it is one of those policies that won’t do harm and might do good.   At a minimum, we need to think about what is the most strategic way to distribute teaching talent at the building level.

Re: teacher evaluation,  I am skeptical about some of what is going on to make evaluations center on test scores.   I am much more enthusiastic about Montgomery County , MD and the way in which they have created a culture in which the strongest teachers and principals are the central evaluators of their colleagues. Not sure it can be done at NY’ s scale but I would hope you would consider it.  In fact, there is much about the Montgomery experience that I would urge you to consider, including their policy that resources should follow need, and their policy for reducing teacher mobility in high need schools.

At the same time, we need to be thinking about how to support teachers collectively, as opposed to how to judge them individually.  This is a literature I don’t know well but I am increasingly convinced that it is hard for teachers to believe in their students partly because they don’t believe in themselves or their colleagues;  collective efficacy looks to be very powerful.   My impression is that the people associated with the Renaissance schools movement in Philadelphia have thought a lot about this.

Race

I want to note that my guess is that the Bloomberg - Klein years saw as further racial polarization of the system, which actually threatens some of the positive things that happened on other fronts during those years.

At the level of students, the problems of race are partly a problem of students not feeling connected and valued.   Extended learning time is important to me partly because it speaks to both, when done well.  Similarly,  I think the discourse about combining high academic standards with strong personalization speaks to the devaluation of youngsters.   At some level,  they understand that the low standards that surround them mark them as inferior (which doesn’t mean they will accept higher standards right away).   Black and Latino males are implicated in these problems in especially severe ways.  Part of the way to speak to them, is to position them as solutions rather than as problems.   Brotherhood Sister Sol in Harlem is doing exemplary work in this regard.

I have to stop now but thanks for giving me a chance to think about this.

Best,

Charles Payne