Questioning Assumptions, Considering Evidence, Creating Solutions: AISR Looks at Ron Wolk’s New Book

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As the founder and former editor of Education Week, Ronald A. Wolk has had an excellent vantage point to view the modern American “school reform” movement for the past three decades of its existence. Perhaps that's why his new book, Wasting Minds: Why Our Education System Is Failing and What We Can Do About It, is such engaging and important reading.

Wasting Minds argues that most current school reform efforts are based on a set of flawed assumptions. As a result, these reforms are driving the U.S. public education system in the wrong direction — away from, rather than toward, both excellence and equity. Among the ten flawed assumptions the book identifies and debunks:

• Rigorous core content standards are the key to performance improvement and achievement gap reduction.
  
  
• Making the school day longer will increase student learning.
  
  
• Standardized test scores are accurate measures of performance that should be used for promotion and graduation.
  
  
• Investing more money in schools would allow for every student to have an excellent education.

 Although Wolk’s analysis challenges what he sees as the very assumptions on which the U.S. public education system is based, he does not call for wholesale abandonment of that system. Rather, he proposes an alternative, grassroots, “new-schools strategy” rooted in a strong belief that the nation can no longer place all its bets on improving the system we have. His concrete proposals for such an alternative approach include:

• personalized education to motivate students and maximize their abilities;
  
  
• enhanced in- and out-of-school opportunities providing different pathways to success;
  
  
• assessment based on multiple measures of actual student work;
  
  
• changed roles for teachers (more ownership of their schools and close, advisory relationships with students); and
  
  
• more choices for students and parents.

Many of the individual strategies proposed in Wasting Minds resonate with the experience of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform over the last ten years helping districts and communities improve their schools. For instance, while our work has led us to conclude that standards can provide a useful common frame for challenging and engaging content, the last twenty years of education reform have demonstrated that standards alone are not a guarantee of improved learning. We also agree that more porous boundaries between schools and the “real world” are needed and that over-reliance on standardized tests as measures of student or teacher knowledge and skill can have deeply negative consequences.

However, there is one important area in which our perspective differs from Wolk’s. He considers the school district to be an outmoded governance structure that mostly serves to perpetuate the mistakes of the past and the flawed assumptions of the present. We agree that clinging to the status quo is not an effective strategy, but we also believe strongly in the need for a city- or community-level frame for delivery of and accountability for student learning and development. It's undeniable that many traditional school districts are failing in their educational missions — but it is also clear that districts matter for at least three important reasons: results, equity, and scale (AISR 2002; Rothman 2004, 2007, 2009).

Examples of individually successful schools do abound, but they don't add up to enough good schools to go around. Thousands of schools remain that are not likely to improve if they have to go it alone. Innovation and improvement require specific dissemination methods and infrastructure to support and sustain new practices. This infrastructure might be provided by a national educational management organization under local contract, a charter management organization, a locally based reform support organization, or a traditional district office reconfigured to value differentiated service provision over one-size-fits-all.

But perhaps most importantly, there must be a system of accountability that goes beyond individual schools. A school system that is fragmented and decentralized — or a charter school model based on competition with other schools rather than responsibility for excellence at scale throughout a district — can leave many struggling schools in low-income neighborhoods without any central authority that is formally accountable to the community for educating all students in all schools. Jon Supovitz (2006), director of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education and professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, summed it up: “The more resources and expertise are spread across a system, the more equitable education in the community is likely to be.... The benefits of centralized support outweigh the constraints. While the disadvantages must be addressed, education support organizations, on balance, help to produce higher quality and more equitable education for all students in a community.” Simply put, systems do matter, and we are beginning to learn a lot more about how school districts that are improving build what Michael Fullan (2010) calls “collective capacity” and get results in the process (Honig et al. 2010; AISR 2010).

A spate of international comparative studies — most recently the report Standing on the Shoulders of Giants by the National Center on Education and the Economy — have pointed out that top-performing nations and systems nurture the teaching profession (through high entry standards, professional status, school-based supports, expectations for ownership and collaboration, and opportunities for differentiated roles), target public dollars where they are most needed, and connect what is tested to what is taught in ways that don't overly limit and narrow down the curriculum (Tucker 2011; Paine & Schleicher 2011).

Equally important, as the Asia Society and the Council of Chief State School Officers reported last year, the relatively poor competitive performance by the U.S. on international tests comes from being “both relatively low-performing and highly inequitable in results.” Nations that have surpassed U.S. performance in recent decades have done so because of conscious decisions and investments that have them doing well, in significant part, by doing right by the students most in need (Barber & Mourshed 2007).

In spite of this growing body of research and examples of best practice, the reality of too much current reform rhetoric is that it is largely unmoved by evidence, untroubled by nuance, and uninformed by the experience of those who matter most — teachers, families, and students in our communities, not to mention the systems and countries from which we might learn. In that respect, we could all learn something from Ron Wolk’s book, which takes a different tack. The components of the new strategy he advocates do not fit easily into ideological pigeonholes — and neither do the assumptions he critiques. Wolk”s analysis encourages the reader to examine his or her own assumptions one by one, based on supporting evidence and experience, rather than react to ideological labels.

In the current era of school reform, the most popular approach to public discourse seems to be to plant people and strategies in one of two allegedly rival camps: system buster or district reformer, managed instruction or capacity building, pro-charters or pro-public schools, anti-union or pro-teacher. Perhaps the most valuable contribution of a book like Wasting Minds, whether readers agree with all, none, or parts of it, is that it provides fuel for a meaningful and reasoned debate. And that, more than rigid ideologies, is what is needed for education reform to succeed.

REFERENCES 

Annenberg Institute for School Reform. 2002. Portfolio for District Redesign. Providence, RI: Brown University, AISR.
> Available online

Annenberg Institute for School Reform. 2010. MNPS Achieves: An Evaluation Report. Providence, RI: Brown University, AISR. 
> Download PDF

Asia Society and the Council of Chief State School Officers. 2010. International Perspectives on U.S. Education Policy and Practice: What Can We Learn from High-Performing Nations? New York: Asia Society.
> Download PDF

Barber, M., and M. Mourshed. 2007. How the World’s Best School Systems Come Out on Top. New York: McKinsey & Company.
> Download PDF

Fullan, M. 2010. All Systems Go: The Change Imperative for Whole System Reform. Thousand Oaks, CA and Toronto, Ontario: Corwin Press and Ontario Principals’ Council.
> Description, reviews, ordering

Honig, M. I., M. A. Copland, L. Rainey, J. A. Lorton, and M. Newton. 2010. Central Office Transformation for Districtwide Teaching and Learning Improvement. Seattle, WA: University of Washington, Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy.
> Download PDF

Paine, S. L., and A. Schleicher. 2011. What the US Can Learn from the World’s Most Successful Education Reform Efforts. Policy Paper: Lessons from PISA. New York: McGraw-Hill Research Foundation.
> Download PDF

Rothman, R., ed. 2004. “Smart Districts,” Voices in Urban Education no. 5 (Fall).
> Download PDF

Rothman, R., ed. 2007. City Schools: How Districts and Communities Can Create Smart Education Systems. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.
> Introduction PDF, reviews, ordering

Rothman, R., ed. 2009. “Redesigning the ’Central Office,’” Voices in Urban Education no. 22 (Winter).
> Download PDF

Supovitz, J. A. 2006. The Case for District-based Reform. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.
> Introduction PDF, reviews, ordering

Tucker, M. S. 2011. Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: An American Agenda for Education Reform. Washington, DC: National Center on Education and the Economy.
> Download PDF

PREPARED BY 

Marla Ucelli-Kashyap
Former Director of District Redesign and Leadership
Annenberg Institute for School Reform 

Note: Marla Ucelli-Kashyap is currently chair of the board of Education Week’s parent non-profit publishing company, Editorial Projects in Education, Inc. 

Ronald A. Wolk is the founder and former editor of Education Week, Teacher Magazine, and Quality Counts. He has served as assitant to the president of Johns Hopkins University; vice president of external affairs at Brown University; and member of the Carnegie Commission on the Future of Higher Education and the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. In 2008, he received the James Bryant Conant Award for his notable contributions to education. Currently, he is chairman of Big Picture Learning, an organization devoted to creating small, innovative schools.