Home > Fall Forum > 1999

Remarks of Lisbeth B. Schorr

Fall Forum 1999

I am flattered to have been invited to talk to you here today, because I have admired your work from the beginning. In fact, from before the beginning. I can remember meeting with Ted Sizer when the Coalition was only a gleam in his eye. We met in his office at Brown to discuss how you spread successful institutions and initiatives when you know they can't be cloned.

I come to these issues from many years of trying to understand what works in a number of different domains to improve the life prospects of all American children -- especially those who, in the midst of our extraordinary America prosperity, are in danger of being left behind.

The work I want to discuss with you today, and that I hope will connect up with your interests and concerns, has been part of a long-term effort to find and analyze successes in preventing high rates of school failure, single parenting, child abuse, and youth violence. I began in the early 1980s, trying to understand the interventions that had succeeded at least on a small scale. I was able to show that even among youngsters growing up in high-risk circumstances, life trajectories could be changed, and were being changed — by effective schools and preschool programs, health and social services, and family supports. (I visited Central Park East in 1986 and included it as one of the prime examples of what we know about what works.)

Five years after publishing these findings in my book, Within Our Reach, it turned out that half of the programs and institutions I had described, with their documented successes, were no longer in existence. Only a few were being spread and brought to scale. That started me on a new quest, which I report on in my second book, COMMON PURPOSE, asking why the initiatives that are successful in changing outcomes are so hard to sustain and spread, why we seem to be able to create successful schools, but not successful school systems, why model programs of all kinds succeed as models, but get dismembered or diluted or destroyed when they leave the hothouse.

I want to talk to you about several findings that come out of this work, and the more recent work I've been engaged in with the Harvard Children's Initiative, that I'm hoping will be relevant to your concerns.

First, the relationship between school reform and systems reform

Second, the relationship between school reform and the services and supports that could meet students' non-academic needs

Third, the matter of building the knowledge base to guide a more strategic approach to improving outcomes for children in schools and elsewhere, and

Fourth, the role of results-based accountability in our reform strategies.

First, the relationship between school reform and systems reform — between effective institutions and the systems that will support them.

After several years of looking at both successes and failures in reform, I have become convinced that in most domains of social action and social policy, the reason we haven't been able to build on success on a scale large enough to matter is that we have ignored how powerfully prevailing systems have created obstacles to the spread of effective programs and institutions. Whether you look at neighborhood health centers, family support, child protection or schools, the stuff that dedicated professionals recognize as effective, and the stuff they often fight to sustain, is typically undermined by the pressure of the systems that determine where and how the money flows, and how programs are regulated and held accountable.

This is true whether the school district is telling you how long your periods can be or which teachers can teach at your school, or whether "downtown" is telling the Head Start program that Head Start money can't be used for full-day care, or whether the auditors won't allow you to use in-service training funds to support a continuing process of professional development.

Marc Tucker of the National Center on Education and the Economy says, "When you find an individual school that works, it's almost always because it's running against the grain. You find a teacher or a principal who really doesn't give a damn about the system. They are willing to ignore or subvert every rule in the book in order to get the job done for the kids."

You can hear the same thing from child protection workers, staffs of job training programs, and everyone trying to change what happens at front lines -- they feel that when they do succeed, it's because they are able to "beat the system" by breaking the rules.

Which leads to the question of whether we have the right rules, whether our systems could be made more hospitable to what works.

In K-12 education, there is probably more of a consensus about what needs to be done at the level of the individual school than has been recognized by the general public. After all, both funding and followers tend to flow to reforms defined by their differences, not their similarities. But if you look for it, you can find good agreement on the characteristics shared by the schools that succeed, even with students from disadvantaged backgrounds:

1. they put a clear focus on academic learning, combined with expectations that all students can learn at high levels, and can learn to use their minds well
2. they establish high standards for teachers, and support teachers with ambitious and continuing professional development activities, and with enough time for teachers to plan together
3. they maintain a good fit between children's developmental stages and the climate and practices of the school, which often means smaller classes and smaller schools so that learning can be personalized. (In this morning's New York Times, Alex Kotlowitz quotes Ted Sizer as telling him that educating children takes time, and patience, and the willingness to make exceptions!)
4. Successful schools partner with the community in support of children's high achievement and in assuring that all children are ready for school learning at the time they initially enter school
5. they have enough autonomy in decision-making that the school can organize around a clear coherent mission, an "integrative principle," that the school can create a sense of community, and assure that the reforms it adopts are coherent, consistent, and interact to support each other

If you will accept for the moment that these elements, or a somewhat similar set, are likely to characterize successful schools, the contradictions between successful school and prevailing systems become readily apparent.

Unless we come to grips with this mismatch between the attributes of what works, and how our institutions are funded, regulated, and held accountable, successful models will continue to flourish briefly, and then disappear or be diluted or dissected when special funding and special political protection end, or when the initiative can no longer find leaders who are some combination of Mother Teresa, Machiavelli, and a CPA!

We have long relied on the notion that whatever is shown to be successful contains the seeds of its own replication — that promising models would automatically spread and be sustained. Not so. The fact is that pilot programs, no matter how successful, typically come to an end when the demonstration funds run out.

Now let me be clear. I am not rejecting pilots and demonstrations as the first step of a comprehensive strategy that acknowledges the need to change systems to make them hospitable to the spread of effective interventions. I'm saying that pilots and demonstrations can't be the first, last, and ONLY step. Pilots and demonstrations and model schools and charter schools that are successful show, amid much else, which rules have to change because they get in the way of getting the job done. They show how the rules have to change. But once we know what has to change, we have to be able to make those changes district-wide, community-wide, city-wide, and system-wide — if our public education system is to make good on its promise to educate all American children.

Of course reformers can differ about the particular conditions most likely to make systems hospitable to what works. And there's been a lot of confusion about the role of systems change, especially about whether the right kind of systems change will actually create good schools.

It won't.

What we have to recognize is that:

Bad systems can make it impossible to run and spread and sustain good programs and good schools.

But even the best systems can't produce good programs or good schools

If we are serious about making what works the norm rather than the exception, if we want to create a culture in which people don't have to sneak around in order to do the right thing, and we don't want "the right thing" to disappear just as it reaches more than token size, or the moment the grant funds run out, we must become much more strategic and intentional than we have been in the past about creating the conditions in which good schools can function.

And we know a lot, by now, about the systems characteristics that are, in fact, capable of sustaining the attributes of effective schools:

1. They give schools authority over resources, staffing, curriculum, schedules and organization in exchange for accountability for results (a matter I will return to.)
2. They offer schools the freedom, and provide them with the capacity -- the knowledge base, the tools, the resources as well as the incentives -- to adopt a coherent, aligned, internally consistent set of instructional practices and policies that leads to high performance.
3. They provide the working conditions and salaries that can attract and retain well-qualified teachers
4. They promote norms that support the fundamental tenets of reform -- such as the belief that successful teaching is not an idiosyncratic individual attribute, "but rather a body of deliberately acquired professional knowledge and skills."
5. They provide parents and teachers the opportunity to choose the schools within the public system that match their own convictions about the kind of education that will accomplish shared purposes

I want to pause and elaborate for a moment on the choice issue: The kind of school choice I have in mind here would sort not by income or race or ethnicity or parental sophistication, but by family and teacher beliefs about what kind of education best fits their own ideas and particular children's needs and learning styles. In Howard Gardner's new book, The Disciplined Mind, he suggests that parents and teachers be able to choose from schools that represent various philosophies of education. I would adapt his proposal to have parents and teachers choose from models representing different emphases such as the following:

• Back to Basics/Direct Instruction
• Teaching for Understanding
• Early Exposure to Foreign Languages
• Emphasis on Connections to Community and Business Resources
• Emphasis on Ethnic and Cultural Roots

We may even want to give parents and teachers a choice between schools that invent most of what they do on site, and those that adopt and adapt the curricula and methods developed by others.

In a system of choice of this kind, the monitoring and accountability could focus -- rather than on the Culture Wars that are now so divisive and the compromises that satisfy no one -- on whether a particular school was performing well within its own basic premises, as well as in attaining community goals for the skills and knowledge all children are expected to reach in order to be prepared for a responsible, productive adulthood.

My second set of findings is about sorting out the role of schools and communities in meeting students' non-academic needs — in that fascinating, but still murky, place, where schools, services, and communities intersect.

We seem to have achieved wide agreement on defining the problem. We agree that because school dropouts can no longer get the jobs that would allow them to support a family, what the public expects of schools today has changed radically. (Robert Rubin says that the US is at risk of becoming a second rate economic power if we cannot fix our urban schools.) We also agree that because of the many forces that have depleted the informal sources of support for school learning that we used to take for granted, we now have urgent new needs for more formal supports. We agree that the schools having the most difficult time meeting rapidly rising public expectations are those that serve children living in persistent and concentrated poverty, with a high incidence of poor health, inadequate housing, high rates of unemployment and crime, fractured families, substance abuse and alienation.

But we have little agreement on how schools should respond.

One response sees schools as helpless in the face of family and neighborhood disadvantage. There are people who say, "We can't educate these kids, no matter what we do!" I was intrigued by the comments of one high school teacher quoted in the NY Times earlier this year, who said that the kids being bussed in from the other side of town were unlikely to succeed because they just "don't have the same motivation to succeed, or the capacity. It comes from the home. It's a question of upbringing."

What I found so interesting about that sentiment is that this teacher was not referring to the other side of Chicago or Los Angeles, but to the other side of Tel Aviv, from where the Sephardic Jews are bussed to go to school with the presumably better endowed Ashkenazi Jews! It seems that ours is not the only society that has trouble with the notion that all children can learn at high levels!

A second response sees schools as the key to much more than school learning, arguing that all schools should become "full service community schools" in which school principals and program coordinators work as peers to provide a seamless, one-stop environment that is supportive of children, with every principal asked to become "an integral player in reforming services, growing the whole child by nurturing the whole family, and rebuilding the community." In this model, schools actually take responsibility for organizing services and keeping children constructively occupied during the after-school hours, and even during the pre-school years.

A third response acknowledges that children from disadvantaged families and neighborhoods are likely to have multiple unmet needs, but insists that efforts to meet these needs must not interfere with the schools' primary academic mission. The school reformers who espouse this position rely on others to provide the resources outside of the school as the need arises, contending that schools and school systems are most likely to achieve dramatic and sustained successes with disadvantaged students when they put a laser-like focus on academic learning

Speaking from this perspective, the Education Trust, among others, argues that the evidence is there, that the achievement gap between low income and minority students and students from more privileged schools would disappear if the nation were "willing to assure that these low income and minority students are taught at the highest levels."

I have been struck by how often I have encountered powerful leaders of commerce and industry focusing on the dirty clothes and other unpleasant baggage that poor children bring to school, and working up great enthusiasm for the idea that schools should be finding solutions to the dirty clothes or addicted dads problem, and not bringing the same energy to the schools' failure to teach reading and arithmetic.

In trying to understand what was happening here, I thought of Richard Elmore's principle of scale-up -- that the further away an innovation is from the core of institutions (in the case of schools, the core would be made up of the fundamental relationships among student, teacher, and knowledge) the more likely it is to be embraced. Did these business people prefer to deal in washing machines rather than in instructional practices because they understood them better? or because they were less threatening to the status quo? Was this a part of the widespread phenomenon of trivializing reform in order to avoid the work and the pain of trying to change institutions in fundamental ways?

I myself am primarily a services person, and no one can outdo me in my commitment to the importance of services and community supports. Nevertheless, I think there is growing evidence that no matter how much you do change at the school-community intersect, if you don't change what happens inside the classroom, you won't improve school outcomes.

The suggestive evidence comes from two sources: One source of evidence is from places where services and supports have been substantially improved without major changes in school outcomes.

Youth Futures, Savannah

The other source of evidence is the schools that have concentrated on improving instructional practice, and have succeeded in seeing school achievement dramatically. To cite just one example, 5 years ago, the superintendents of 3 El Paso school districts, the University of TX and several community based organizations including the Industrial Areas Foundation set out to make the changes in instructional practices that would radically improve school achievement. The results? Between 1992 and 1996, twice as many students performed at high levels in both math and reading. When the test scores were broken down by racial groups, every group improved every year, and the disparities between groups went from 25% to 6%!

My guess is that as we assemble more evidence, it will lead us ultimately to conclude that school-based outcomes -- including attendance, school-completion, and school achievement -- are most likely to improve when all the rest of the community supports the school and school district in putting highest priority on improving instruction.

This means a school and classroom climate conducive to school learning. It means a tone of decency and trust. It means the availability of the services and supports that will assure teachers they are not alone or abandoned in dealing with their students' non-academic barriers to school-learning.

Of course, this is easier said than done, especially in neighborhoods, where there is nothing to build on other than the schools to address the missing services, supports, and community infrastructure. But dare we really pile on the schools every burden no one else will assume?

I think the answer lies in making sure that either the needed non-academic services and primary supports become the responsibility of community-based organizations and agencies, or when these responsibilities ARE assumed by schools or school districts, they are not allowed to compete with a clear focus on teaching and learning.

Third, I want to say a word about building a stronger knowledge base, building the knowledge base we need to improve school outcomes in every part of the nation.

In American education we have a long and strong tradition of local control. Now local control is being simultaneously strengthened in some places and undermined in others by the ethos of letting 1000 flowers bloom.

In human services and community building, when we finally learned that mandates imposed from above don't work, and that you can't craft interventions centrally and parachute them into local communities, we did a complete flip and began to act as though nothing that was offered from outside had any validity. But on the basis of the experience of the last three decades we now know with some confidence that not every starting point is as good as any other, that some outcomes are more important than others, that some activities are more likely than others to accomplish specified purposes, and that some theories of change are better than others. Leaving every local school superintendent or agency administrator to painstakingly make these discoveries on their own, or to never make them at all, has been a wasteful process, and will interfere with further progress in spreading initiatives aimed at strengthening families, improving education, and transforming neighborhoods.

In services reform and community building, most of the information now readily available to local people relates mainly to individual projects or to process considerations, that is, who should be at the table to do the planning and become part of the collaborative, or how to do a needs assessment. Very little reliable guidance is available, based on thoughtful judgments of objective observers and derived from research and from relevant experience, about which interventions are most likely to lead to desired outcomes, about the pathways that connect interventions to outcomes, and about how these effective interventions can be combined, continually improved, and sustained. In the absence of such guidance, innovative reformers as well as adventurous administrators are left to create their own personal cause-effect models through guesswork -- and then rely on luck.

We could be much more aggressive about assembling what we know, while still being respectful of everything that can't be known from outside. We must be much more systematic in using knowledge to inform both policy and the design of institutions and programs. In the past we have not been thoughtful enough about what CAN be known from outside. We have had much too narrow a view of what constitutes knowledge valuable enough to use in confronting public problems. We have been much too rigid about how and where useful knowledge accumulates in the society, and have held an unrealistic view of how knowledge might best be diffused and deployed in aid of both immediate action, and continued learning.

We now need approaches to knowledge building that would acknowledge the pre-eminence of local decision-making, encourage local initiative, imagination, and adaptation and refrain from over-regulating the search for solutions. At the same time, this process would not -- like many current efforts that try to encourage local initiative and buy-in -- dismiss the existence of centrally available knowledge derived from many kinds of research and from experience, that could guide or nudge the field in promising directions.

New approaches to assembling knowledge from both research and experience would also provide us with better documentation of our successes and make it easier for us to preach what we practice! A new knowledge-building paradigm would allow us to persuade a skeptical and distrustful public that public funds are not disappearing down a black hole, that we do, in fact, know what we're doing, and that we are accomplishing the public's purposes.

I left to last my conviction that if we are serious about taming bureaucracies, if we are serious about wanting to be free to select those ways of teaching that seem most effective, if we are serious about regaining the public trust, our best strategy will be a clear and unrelenting focus on results.

I recognize that my conviction that at least some of these results should be defined outside the individual school would be controversial.

Many of you, I know, are convinced that standards will mean standardized, and that standardized assessments stymie individualized teaching.

We live in a world in which the body politic is so eager to eliminate the possibility that people at the front lines will do anything wrong, that legislators and administrators tie their hands in ways that make it virtually impossible for them to do anything right. Given that context, do we not have to find a way to buy the autonomy we seek by being willing to let an external entity hold us accountable for achieving valued results rather than for compliance with a maze of detailed rules?

Is it not preferable that we agree on what fourth graders must know, so that we can be flexible about whether they learn it with paper and pencil, sitting at their desks in straight lines, or on the floor in small groups dissecting worms? And if the "we" who decide on what fourth graders must know is a different "we" from those who decide on how to teach these fourth graders, aren't there some advantages to that?

By defining what all students are expected to learn, standards-based education raises expectations and lays the groundwork for expanding the schools capacity to meet those expectations. At least in reading, writing, and arithmetic and at least in the early grades, we could agree that some simple standards could make it possible to link curriculum, textbooks, assessment, professional development, and accountability, thereby vastly increasing the chances that students will learn the basics and be on their way to learning the thinking and problem solving that will be the 21^st century's basics.

Standards-based education will allow the true professionalism of teachers to come to the fore, as they focus on how they can immerse their particular students in demanding intellectual environments, and help each student to become a successful learner.

As a result of the great strides in cognitive research, and the understanding we have recently acquired about the functioning and organization of successful schools, we now have the tools that would allow us to close the achievement gap between the races in America, and between the classes in America. And by allowing ourselves to be held accountable for these results -- employing increasingly sensitive approaches to assessment — we will be much more likely to achieve them.

Let me conclude by suggesting that at this time of enormous change and potential, and enormous public interest and concern, we should be heartened and strengthened by how much we now know that we can act on to improve the life trajectories of the many millions of children whose destinies would otherwise be bleak.

As we come to the end of the 20^th century, we may no longer be able to count on heroic figures to mobilize us to act, but perhaps we can be mobilized on behalf of a shared heroic idea, the idea that we are all interconnected, that we're all in this together, and must share the burdens and pool some of our rich resources so that all our children will have a fair chance to succeed, and so that we can achieve our best possibilities as a nation. Surely we can agree that we cannot allow the richest country in the world to declare bankruptcy in its civic life.

Whether we are motivated by threats of the US becoming a second rate economic power, or by a sense of social justice, we must act on what we now know -- know from the research, and know from our hard-won experience. If we act boldly and strategically on what we now know we would go far toward realizing our common purposes, toward nurturing and educating our children, and toward strengthening American families and neighborhoods, and our public schools, so that all our children can grow up with a realistic stake in the American dream.

Common Purpose : Strengthening Families and Neighborhoods to Rebuild America
by Lisbeth B. Schorr, William Julius Wilson
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