Is America’s future at risk?

Opinion: May 15, 2012 at 12:00a.m.

By Karin Chenoweth

The Free Lance-Star (Fredericksburg, Va.)

WASHINGTON

It doesn’t take much effort to become disheartened about American education. Dismal statistics point to the fact that our children simply don’t know enough. Our top-performing kids can kind of pant along behind the world leaders, but the rest are left in the dust. Children who live in poverty and children of color fare particularly badly, and with both groups growing, the future bodes ill both for them as individuals and for us as a nation. The Council on Foreign Relations warned, “The United States’ failure to educate its students leaves them unprepared to compete and threatens the country’s ability to thrive in a global economy and maintain its leadership role.”

Amid all this doomsaying, is there any hope?

Yes.

The last couple of decades have seen a remarkable growth in the knowledge of practitioners and researchers about how to educate all children. The challenge for us as a country is to make sure that knowledge is understood widely and applied consistently.

Many have said that schools can do little to help students who come to school from impoverished homes. But what schools do matters — a lot.

Students’ worries

It is certainly true that schools could do even more if their students were not anxious about their next meal and where they will sleep at night. But educators around the country are demonstrating that they are able to help even children who live in poverty and isolation reach meaningful standards — if they do the right things.

So the next question is, “What are the right things?” I have spent almost eight years trying to answer that question, traveling to high-performing and rapidly improving schools that enroll significant percentages of students of color and students of poverty. Many people would expect these schools to be low-performing, but their student achievement data makes them look at least like middle-class schools; some are at the top of their state.

Take, for example, George Hall Elementary School, which serves a poor, isolated neighborhood in Mobile, Ala. All its students qualify for the federal student lunch program, and all are African-American. In 2004, George Hall was once one of the lowest performing schools in the city; today it is among the top-performing schools in the state, outperforming many of Alabama’s most affluent schools.

What does George Hall — and the other schools I have studied — do to be so successful? Each school is exemplary in its own way. Some are small, some large, some rural, some urban, some suburban, some elementary and some secondary, but they all share the same basic approach. They:

Focus on what students need to know and be able to do in order to be ready for college or career training when they leave high school.

Help the faculty collaborate in order to teach.

Assess frequently to see who has learned the material and who needs extra help.

Study class, grade, and school assessment data to find patterns of instruction in order to improve.

Deliberately build relationships between students and staff and among staff so that students trust teachers enough to learn from them and teachers trust each other enough to work together.

This list seems almost too simple, but it gets at the core of how schools should operate and avoids all the fads and fashions that too often overwhelm the field of education. As simple as this formula is, it represents a very different way of organizing schools. Most schools are organized around individual classroom teachers teaching in isolation. This means that students are highly dependent on which teachers they get.

A good teacher means a good year of learning; a not-so-good teacher can mean falling behind. Two or three bad teachers in a row can be a disaster for a student, particularly one whose family is not able to compensate for weak instruction.

‘It’s being done’ schools

The schools I have been studying — I call them “It’s Being Done” schools — do not leave teachers to teach in isolation. Their leaders and staff know that no individual teacher can possibly know enough to be able to help every single student and that only by pooling their knowledge and skill can teachers reach everyone.

The big picture? We know what is necessary to make schools work for all kids, and at least some people know how to do get the job done. Now we just have to spread that knowledge around.

Chenoweth is writer-in-residence at The Education Trust, a national education advocacy organization, and author of “It’s Being Done: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools”; “How It’s Being Done: Urgent Lessons from Unexpected Schools”; and, with Christina Theokas, “Getting It Done: Leading Academic Success in Unexpected Schools,” all published by Harvard Education Press. Distributed by MCT Information Services.