To The Editor: "Walking The Walk On Education"

This was reported and written by Emily Eisenlohr, May 10, 2013

Walking the Walk on Education

Although my son is no longer in the Madison school system, I will vote for the education budget Tuesday, May 14th. Having observed both Madison and Connecticut state education funding for nearly a decade, I see tremendous value here.

The Board of Education wrestled with significant increases in health care costs and declining state support, yet recommended an operational budget with only a 1.84% increase. Few of the state’s high-performing school districts still have half-day kindergarten, so in the kindergarten initiative we are followers rather than leaders. Declining enrollment provides an opportunity to make the leap while minimizing the financial impact.

This is a budget at a fork in the state’s road. Education is going through radical change. Connecticut towns and cities spend over $7 billion in public funds on education each year. It is tough for such a large bureaucracy to be radical. Madison isn’t isolated from the most disruptive changes affecting our poorer communities. An educated workforce is essential to attracting employers. Education equals jobs. Jobs mean incomes, which can support taxes. As I try to show why Madison cannot isolate itself from what is going on in the state, you will see why I find our situation so blessed.

 A 21st-Century Education

Nothing illustrates the complexity of these issues better than looking at the work of our superintendent and the values and concerns of my very elderly mother, a retired Madison teacher.

Decades apart in age, they are similar in worldview.   Superintendent Tom Scarice is leading an initiative to create a 21st-century education program within the town.

He and our teachers are exploring the skills that will be needed by our graduates and revising the education enterprise to ensure students will be successful when they enter the job market.

A rapidly expanding global economy means American children will compete with students from many other countries. Yes, China has 1.3 billion citizens and is wrestling with its own education system. We neglect to notice that India has another 1.2 billion. Other Asian countries’ populations total more than the U.S.’s 316 million. We also compete with Europe.

These are statistics to jolt any thinking American out of his or her cushy-lifestyle comfort zone. I am honored to be included in Mr. Scarice’s education summit and applaud both his focus on Madison education and leadership within the state.   The 21st-century skills identified in the work of the education summit include: ·       enhanced critical thinking,
·       ability to innovate,
·       communicating effectively in speech and writing,
·       collaborating on team projects,
·       persistently keeping to a task in the face of hurdles and
·       (talk about radical and new!) a willingness to take risks, relishing learning from failures even more than successes.
This challenge is huge.
It’s about changing what a student faces in the classroom and at home. For example, some schools have already adopted flipped classrooms. Using modern technology, the student watches a video lecture at home.
If he or she misses a point, he or she can back up and repeat that section of the lecture. The classroom work engages the students in dealing with what they learned through activities that they themselves lead. (A student needs a good computer to hear the lecture, an issue for less wealthy communities.)
Flipped classes mean very different approaches to excellent teaching. And different teacher training. The amount of change may seem overwhelming. But the population statistics and globalizing economies won’t allow us to pretend we can procrastinate.

The Scarcest Resource: Leadership

The state needs good leaders to accelerate and manage change. Good leaders help target the needs, set objectives and measure success. This is management much more than bureaucracy. It is not a recipe for happiness. Talking about a 21st century education is very exciting.

Making change happen is hard work. My mother would be a leader if she were younger. Some say we should add ethics to the skill list and teach it in our schools and universities. My mother would show them how you teach ethics and compassion. When I was about ten, as we drove by the section in Barberton, Ohio, where the black community resided and I observed them since I’d had virtually no exposure to them in that pre-integration world, she told me to walk a mile in their shoes.

I would need to think through my heart about their lives and their views. This is the essence of compassion and a lesson about where ethics education begins – by example from other humans important to a child.

Challenging Accepted Thinking: No Child Left Behind

Over the past eight years I’ve been walking that walk, first looking at the Madison education system, then the education cost-sharing formula, then state education.

That path led me to New Haven’s game-changing charter schools. And to the subject of testing. Just using the four-letter word “test” these days gets a rise out of most people, particularly in Madison.

But I invite you to engage in some critical thinking and take a look at some comparisons. George W. Bush (i.e. 43) has a troubled reputation. I have mixed feelings about No Child Left Behind (NCLB), one of his signature accomplishments. It’s not a popular bill.

A critical thinker needs to ask, “If President Bush hadn’t pushed through No Child Left Behind, would New Haven have been the site where a new charter school grew to influence a whole nation?”

The performance of inner city schools was abysmal at the time. He called it the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”

New Haven’s Strategic School Profile for the school year 2001-2002 showed test results from the prior year as follows. In grade four, 21% of students met “Goal” in Reading, which means that “students are capable of successfully performing appropriate tasks with minimal teacher assistance.”

In Writing the percentage was 34% and in Math 31%. The state averages for each of these in that year were 57.9%, 61.2% and 62.0%. Grades six and eight were similar. I’ve heard a lot of complaints about testing in this community. I sympathize with the dismay for Madison, but allow me to suggest some perspective.

We all have been tested and assessed over our lives. One heard few complaints about testing prior to NCLB. Two things changed with that bill. Testing is now annual from 3rd through 8th grades plus 10th grade, and teachers are now more accountable for test results, among other criteria. These tests assess whether a child can do basics – reading, writing and math. That should be the starting point for a good 21st-century education.

Fast forward to the academic years ending in 2008, 2009 and 2010. The average of students meeting Goal for those three subjects over those three years for the traditional New Haven public schools was 38%. There was some improvement. The state average over the same years was 66.4%.

The whole state improved. Pressure from NCLB. I could have done without the tax cuts in the face of the war on terror, but thank you, President Bush, for sticking your neck out on this issue.

Madison students, in contrast to New Haven, perform very well. In the same years, Madison’s students’ test scores exceeded 80% and often even 90%, vastly better than even the state average. Madison’s students do not need to be tested for the basics each year.

But should Madison’s teachers be held accountable for students achieving 21st-century education standards? What are they, and how would they be measured? What might be the rewards for good teaching or the consequences for poor teaching? The current system imposes little differentiation.

Teachers know this. I have no answers, but we all know we all need these answers – teachers, parents and students.

Time: We Need a Lot, But Have So Little

Democratic Governor Dannel Malloy proposed a bold education reform bill in the last session. I mention his party only because the bill was a challenge to traditional Democratic segments, such as the teachers’ union. There are two teachers’ unions operating in the state, with rather different approaches to the education challenge.

This is where New Haven and education get really interesting. The more progressive of the two is the union for New Haven. A Democratic mayor appointed an education reform leader to the Board of Education. The Governor’s bill that ultimately passed in a much watered down version created 30 Alliance Districts.

The Alliance Districts are the 30 worst-performing school districts, including some rural districts. There are 169 towns in the state. Using state Department of Education data for the most recent year, the Alliance Districts comprise 42% of total statewide public education expenditures, 40% of enrollment and nearly two-thirds of state Education Cost-Sharing financial equalization subsidies to school districts.

School districts with truly abysmal performance – those where fewer than 50% of students achieved Goal level on tests – also comprise a large portion of enrollment and spending. They account for a quarter of expenditures and enrollment and half of the state’s ECS subsidies.

If you were governor of a state that needed jobs, would you ignore this or take on the unions? I attended Appropriations and Education Committee hearings on the Governor’s bill last year. Some union officials stated that the Governor was going too fast. The state needed to set the standards before teacher accountability could kick in.

This is true. But I’d like to push back on the teachers’ unions (as contrasted with individual teachers, many of whom are working to achieve reform). If the Governor is going too fast, where were these unions over the past ten years? Fast backward to the 2004-2005 school year.

A rather new charter school, Amistad Academy, serving middle school students, was changing the lives of those few students who were chosen by lottery run by the public school system. They tested at the low traditional school levels in sixth grade, but were exceeding state average test scores by eighth grade – sometimes by a wide margin.

Their average for the three most recent years for grades five through eight was 65.8% -- at the state average. The success of this charter school network has attracted attention from educators all over the state and the nation. They have expanded to kindergarten through twelfth grade in New Haven and Hartford and also into New York City. They show that children from disadvantaged backgrounds can master the basics.

They also have attracted considerable heat from the education community. Connecticut has the widest achievement gap in the U.S. That is just measuring the basics. As the Madisons of the state pursue 21st-century education skills, can the state afford to stall education reform and actually widen the gap?

Hidden Battle Lines Among Us

Politicians might have us believe the battle is between rich and poor. In a country that values individual opportunity and social mobility, defining the battle isn’t that simple. But no politician, particularly one from New Haven, would want to discuss the battles within other groups in our society.

They rage in this election in New Haven and will infiltrate the gubernatorial election next year. The education issue pits black and Hispanic citizens against some of their elected representatives, particularly those who have served as co-chairs of influential committees. New Haven’s minorities look at the test scores and know where they’d like to send their children to school. 

Students gain admission to charter schools through a lottery run by the school system’s administration. Parents of all New Haven school children must fill out a simple form showing the child’s name, address and choice of public school – traditional, magnet or charter. For every child wanting these charter schools whose name is pulled from the bin, six others are disappointed.

The enrollment in the Amistad and Elm City charter schools totaled 1,422 in the 2010 school year. Multiplying by 7, for the one who got in plus the six who didn’t, shows that the parents of at least 9,954 children wish they could attend a school that produces these results. That would have been half the enrollment in New Haven public schools.

When another Madisonite and I went to Hartford last year to lobby for the Governor’s bill, legislators told us that the Governor wasn’t up for re-election as they were. They were afraid. Afraid to support reform due to the backlash they expected from the teachers’ union in the election. One large, state-wide teachers’ union funded by dues against 169 individual towns.

Now that I’ve infuriated some teachers, let me explain the teachers’ side of the reform movement. I pay my mother’s bills, so I have a rather close-hand view.   Teachers do not collect Social Security.

They have to work many years to get a good pension. It is tough to move to a different school system. Connecticut’s teachers pension system is among the most underfunded in the nation. The pension obligations are contractual, so this is just like debt. And the bond markets know this. Both the Governor and teachers are fully justified to care about this issue.

Health care is a national issue. The teachers differ only in that their health care benefits are contractual – like debt – and better than the private sector’s.

This pits private sector workers against unionized workers, as was seen in Wisconsin. Information my mother has received shows Medicare cutting benefits and those cuts being transmitted down through the state to the teachers’ pocketbooks. Medicare affects nearly everyone, so the teachers aren’t alone in their concerns.   The state needs a new structure for the professional organization of teachers. New training. New curriculum. The world economy won’t wait for us to sort this out. We have no choice but to work quickly, take some risks and reassess as we learn from some of the failures. This is what a 21st-century education is about, isn’t it? Let’s walk the walk.

I’m glad Mr. Scarice is leading Madison’s schools down the right path. He isn’t really being paid to solve the state’s education issues. But you can see why I find so much value here.

Join me at the polls Tuesday to vote FOR Madison’s education budget.