Another Look At Evolving Ed Reform

Mike Petrilli at the reformster-minded Thomas Fordham Institute has been taking a look at the current state of ed reform  (apparently many of us are in that mood right now?)  and it's worth taking a look at what the guy in every education reporter's rolodex thinks the state of ed reform is right now. And I promise what I think is an interesting observation at the end.

In "The Evolving Education Reform Agenda," Petrilli starts with his previous argument that while the "Washington Consensus" is dead, ed reform itself is not. This hints at one of the challenges of the ed reform brand these days, which is that nobody really knows what the term actually means any more. He tries to address that in this piece.

Petrilli argues that the agenda has shifted (a more positive phrase than "we keep moving the goal posts") from a focus on data and getting students to score proficient on state tests (circa NCLB) and then moved to trying to hold individual teachers responsible, a movement that Petrilli assess pretty frankly:

By the early 2010s, much of the conversation was about holding individual teachers accountable via test-informed teacher evaluations. Ham-handed implementation and poisonous politics led us to leave that misguided reform behind.

If only they had taken the policy with it, but its hammy hands are still felt by many teachers in many states. But one of ed reforms annoying features is that it never picks up after itself; it never puts as much energy into undoing its mistakes as it does into making them in the first place. Just imagine a world in which these thinky tank guys picked up the phone to call their contacts and say, "Look, that thing we convinced you to try? You've got to make people stop doing that." Imagine if Bill Gates put the same kind of money into cleaning up his policy messes as he puts into pushing them. 

Sigh. Anyway, Petrilli lists some other new-ish policy foci, like high quality instructional materials. He aptly notes that a new support for better school funding coincides with A) recognition by reformsters that funding does improve student outcomes and B) a desire to get charter and voucher schools more money (the old "choice gets it done more cheaply" talk is toast). 

Parental choice? There's still debate about using tax dollars to fund private and religious schools, particularly those that discriminate, says Petrilli, though I've missed the folks in the reformster camp arguing the anti-discrimination side. Unbundling is still a thing.

Testing and transparency? Reformsters still believe in the value of the Big Standardized Test, a point on which they remain resolutely and absolutely wrong, though they are now, he says, also interested in alternative assessments--but that's still hung up on the obsession with test scores. Writes Petrilli, "How would assessments be different? If schools do well on “alternative measures” but not on test-score growth, then what? Should we ever consider such schools “good”?" I can help, Mike--the answer is "Yes."

Petrilli mentions in passing that reform has left high schools "largely untouched" (I have some thoughts about why, starting with "high school is hard" passing through "teens are resistant to bullshit" and leading to "nobody has figured out how to make money at it"). He throws weight behind the career and technical education bandwagon (I renew my invite to anyone interested in the "new" CTE to come to my neck of the woods, where we've been doing it for over 60 years), and tosses in "mastery based learning" for some reason.

Finally, he arrives at an interesting observation-- "The reform agenda is mostly about policy, not practice." Though he goes on to note that policy has often been aimed at trying to find levers to move practice because, as he correctly notes, "the classroom is where consensus goes to die." In other words, policy can be passed all day, but teachers will still do what they do.

Various policy tools have been tried by reformsters to address this, most notably tying teacher evaluation to student test scores. But, he notes correctly, many things like personalized learning and the culture wars and school discipline resist consensus and demand trade-offs and so "strain the bipartisan reform coalition." Such as it is these days.

But Petrilli is wrestling with the tension between policy and practice. Policy makes for good politics, he says, but...

But the endpoint of these reforms is to improve what actually happens in the classroom, and thus boost educational outcomes—and, one would hope, life outcomes for students as well. Stopping at the schoolhouse door, then, is far from satisfactory.

I suggest looking at it this way. It's not a choice, but a continuum. On one end you have groups trying to tell other groups what to do, and that's policy. On the other end, you have individuals influencing other individuals, via professional training or administrative managing or collegial mentoring and collaboration, which is how practice is affected. What Petrilli is wishing for is a way for groups to make individuals behave in a certain way, which not only rubs a lot of people the wrong way, but is hard to pull off (I am thinking of Rick Hess's great insight that you can make people do something, but you can't make them do it well). 

This is further complicated by the fact that the individual-to-individual practice end of the scale only happens if the individual has some credibility, and reformsters have always been hampered by their amateur status in education practice (I can think of exactly one who can legitimately claim classroom experience--and no, Temp For America doesn't count), and that has been further hampered by their insistence that their amateur status actually made them wiser than the teachers who has actually spent their professional career in the classroom. 

Petrilli says that reformsters have to enter the world of practice:

So we reformers face a choice: Stay in the relative comfort zone of public policy—or engage in the messy world of classroom practice, too. If we want to make a real difference for kids, and our country, I vote for the latter. But we are going to have to be thoughtful to find ways of doing so while keeping our coalition together.

His concern here is that practice is fraught with so many controversial choices that it will strain the already-splintered reformster coalition. That's a reasonable emphasis for his piece, which is after all aimed at the reform audience. But beyond that, if this crew wants to "engage in the messy world of classroom practice," they cannot do it from comfy offices in well-funded thinky tanks. They cannot do it by relying on the expertise of people whose educational "background" is strictly in policy and government, and that includes people who just breezed through a TFA classroom as a resume builder. 

Hire some actual classroom teachers to consult, and then listen to them. Spend at least one day a week as a substitute teacher in a public school. Socialize with actual working teachers, including those who don't pay much attention to all the policy and politics. And consider the possibility that some of your best loved policy ideas actually become toxic when they filter down to the classroom level (looking at you, high stakes testing). 

There is no way to engage with classroom practice without engaging with actual classrooms, and it's really hard, if not nearly impossible, to do it at scale. I'd love to see outfits like Fordham engage with the actual practice implications of policy ideas, but I suspect that they can't do it without changing their operational strategy.