There has been much talk on this?blog and elsewhere about the movie Waiting For ?Superman' and its promotion of the idea that we know ?what works? in education. (Click here and here for Mike's and Jaime's take down of that notion.) I would happily jump on the bandwagon of beating up on director Davis Guggenheim for being a naive Johnny-come-lately to ed reform except for two problems: 1) I haven't actually seen the movie, and 2) everything he is accused of saying has been said more dramatically and for much longer by bona fide members of the ed reform movement.
In my own education circles here in Connecticut, I once heard someone describe the results achieved by places like Achievement First and KIPP as the education equivalent of discovering penicillin?that these schools had discovered what works, and all we had to do now was implement it across the country and weren't we all being so silly and selfish to keep this magic elixir from students everywhere?
Of course, that's at best overly simplistic and at worst incredibly damaging to the education reform movement for lots of reasons.
The reality is that there is no one-sized-fits-all curricular, instructional, or even management solution that is going to raise student achievement in thousands of classrooms across the country. In short: if there were penicillin to be discovered, I've no doubt we would have discovered it and implemented it large-scale. So, let's stop looking.
That might sound awfully pessimistic, but I think there is something liberating about it. If we can all agree that students have different needs and teachers and principals different strengths, than we can stop looking for the one silver bullet that will fix all and instead allow teaching to be the messy and creative profession it needs to be. And, like all creative work, we need to stop pretending that copying the work of one artist will give us the same beauty. Let's face it: paint-by-numbers is never going to be Monet.
That's of course not to say that we need to just leave schools alone, let them close their doors, and assume all is going according to plan. Or to throw up our hands and give up.
On the contrary, it means we need to get out of the business of holding teachers and schools accountable to the faithful implementation of a particular curricular, instructional, or classroom management model. Instead, we need to shift the focus of departments of education and central offices to the roles they are best suited to playing?to helping to define clear and measurable outcomes and to managing schools to those outcomes. (And to getting the hell out of the way when schools and teachers are achieving great results, even if it doesn't look exactly as we think it should.)
Some great CMOs have learned this already. It's no doubt why KIPP affords school leaders a tremendous amount of flexibility to build their teams and run their schools as they see fit (while still holding them accountable to results). And it's no doubt why no two KIPP schools look exactly the same, even though they all share the same values (some even the same scope and sequences and curriculum resources) and many the same life-altering results.
Of course, it's easier to look to high-performing schools and to try to simply copy what they've done and assume you'll get the same results. But by doing so, we're losing sight of the fact that high performing schools earn their results not because they've adopted a particular model for curriculum, instruction, management, teacher pay, etc., but rather because those school leaders have brought together a group of smart, dedicated individuals who own their students' achievement results and who will do whatever it takes to ensure that their students achieve at the highest levels.
And when you visit the classrooms of the highest performing teachers across the country, you will find some messiness. The implementation of their vision isn't always perfect?curricula are supplemented when they need to be, classroom management is strong but sometimes imperfect, and instruction is tweaked almost daily. But what you will find at the helm is a dedicated professional who knows what she's driving towards, who personally owns her students' success or failure, and who will do whatever it takes to get them where they need to be.
And really, while we can say a lot about what doesn't work in education, that may be the best we can say about what does.
?Kathleen Porter-Magee
