DoctorB's Social Ethics Blog

CHAPTER SEVEN: “Doing What Matters Most: Developing Competent Teaching”

According to Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond, the development of competent teachers should not be left to chance.  She suggests formulating a framework that consists of strong professional preparation programs, the distribution of new resources, the wider dissemination of peer-reviewed research, and significantly more organized processes of informing teachers about best practices, successful programs and initiatives, and other tools needed by both administrators and instructors.  Darling-Hammond contends that a state and national infrastructure is needed to minimize the multiple and cumulative causes that eventuate in and sustain inequities and inefficiencies.  The patchwork quilt that characterizes U.S. education policy must be seriously overhauled in order to attend to developing a more coherent and substantive teaching-and-learning environment across the professional enterprise.

The author outlines what top nations do in support of teaching.  They are: high-quality teacher education for all; mentoring for novice teachers; ongoing professional training; showcasing competent teachers to other instructors; and competitive salaries across the board with added incentives for hard-to-staff areas.  She highlights efforts assisting new teachers in places like in Scandinavian and Asian countries, as well as mentor training programs for expert teachers such as in England, France, and Israel.  One of the keys to developing competent teachers is allowing for more preparation and learning time and developing collaborative relationships with leading teachers.  In many of the countries Darling-Hammond discusses, the government has played a solid, fiduciary role in education reform.  For example, in Australia, the government has sponsored “a large-scale multi-tiered program to update teacher skills in priority areas.”  Such professional development is a rarity in the United States.

In order to build an infrastructure for quality teaching, we must first begin with preparing teachers to succeed with students—especially in schools and communities serving low-income and minority students.  Teachers need to be equipped with foundational knowledge of how diverse students learn.  To do so, teachers must witness and emulate expert practices.  The tools must exemplify the law of specification and the law of consequences—aiming towards the best possible.  Teaching, or laboratory, schools must be developed and maintained to provide such preparation and ongoing professional development.  Some places have even created new (urban) schools to serve as models for existing schools in transitioning to state-of-the-art practices and in serving as “training grounds.”  Cultural competency training, Darling-Hammond asserts, is absolutely necessary to help remove biases and stereotypes in which teachers may have been socialized.  Such training greatly contributes to forging effective educational partnerships, developing curriculum, and improving instruction in addition to undertaking broad-based school reforms.

Darling-Hammond is not opposed to teacher performance assessments and standards-based evaluation systems that help to judge effective teaching and to suggest inadequacies in performance that need to be redressed.  Such standards hold professionals accountable and reinforce the collaborative enterprise that is necessary to applying best practices.  These assessments are particularly important for beginning teachers.  “Career ladders” programs model the kind of mentoring and leadership that need to take place in order to develop a consistently coherent and competent teaching (and learning) environment.  Study groups, peer networks, collaborative work, etc., help teachers and principals alike to identify problems of practice and seek to eliminate them.  Darling-Hammond reiterates the importance of additional and shared planning and learning time genuinely to focus on school redesign and curricular enhancement.  The literacy strategies discussed in early chapters in New Jersey and Connecticut illustrate this concentration well.

The author concludes by claiming that professional development for principals is equally important to that for teachers, for the former also should know about effective practices and how to implement successful instructional strategies.  Sustained improvement in teaching and learning often rely on the understanding of and professional development opportunities for principals as well as their innovative and supportive reallocation of resources.

CHAPTER FIVE: “A Tale of Three States: What Happens When States Invest Strategically (or Don’t)”

In this chapter, Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond utilizes three states to emphasize further how good uses of resources can lead to successful student achievement.  Connecticut and North Carolina exemplify the effective utilization of resources, while California demonstrates the consequences of mismanagement and neglect.  When school systems invest in early childhood education, make improvements in quality teacher preparation, and develop teaching-and-learning standards, including the environment, over time, real growth in skills appropriation, comprehension, and application of knowledge occur and markedly increase students’ persistence to graduation.  However, when there is a reduction in the tax base that significantly contributes to investment in education, the end results are devastating: exacerbating the achievement gaps and debilitating the system’s overall ability to instruct, mentor, and equip its students.

The success in Connecticut and North Carolina, for example, is remarkable given the fact that their populations of low socioeconomic levels as well as of English Language Learners increased.  The failures in California point to the enervating results of poor funding structures combined with inadequate teacher preparation, stagnant curricula, and unreasonable expectations.   Contrasting the two assists the reader in discriminating between constructive and destructive school policies and muddling through the intricacies of governmental mandates that may benefit or incapacitate students—especially the traditionally and historically underserved.  Long-term commitments to performance assessments, making teacher salaries more equitable, professional development for teachers and administrators, and solidifying a statewide infrastructure enhanced Connecticut’s ability to improve; similarly, investments in early learning and K-12 education, in raising standards for students, teachers, and school leaders, and in providing man and sundry supports for professional learning contributed to minimizing the achievement gap over a twenty-year period in North Carolina.

CHAPTER SIX: “STEADY WORK: HOW COUNTRIES BUILD STRONG TEACHING AND LEARNING SYSTEMS”

Darling-Hammond shows in this chapter how Finland, South Korea, and Singapore managed substantively to improve their fledgling educational systems “from the ground up” over the course of two decades and beyond.  Finland shifted from a centralized to a localized system that emphasizes resources for the most needy, high standards and supports for special needs, expert and inexpensive teacher preparation and professional development opportunities, and ongoing evaluation to profit from the interplay of theory and practice.  In South Korea, curricular development and refinement occurred at the regional and local levels, albeit national standardized testing is still in force.  Again, like the Finnish system, investment in quality teacher preparation was essential in overhauling Korean educational infrastructures.  There is an oversupply of teachers in South Korea; those who teach spend less time in the classroom and more time grading, meeting with parents and students, performing administrative tasks, and sharing their professional work and development with their peers.  Singapore emphasized its human resources more than its natural resources, thereby focusing on the educational system as central to the prospering of the nation.  Improved school conditions and curriculum resulted in greater accessibility by lower-income students to both public and private schools.  Subsidies for higher education also amplified access, and a byproduct of these radical reforms was an amelioration of social cohesion and pluralism.  Once the “thinking schools, learning nation” initiative burgeoned in Singapore, the learning environments, curricula, and motivation of the people broadened and improved.  Critical thinking has become a central tenet in assessment redesigning and teachers are heartily engaged in observing and noting student achievement gains.  In the final analysis, Darling-Hammond points to these six strategic commonalities to “leap-frog” educational systems.

1. Fund schools adequately and equitably.
2. Eliminate examination systems that unduly track students.
3. Revise national standards and curriculum to accentuate higher-order thinking and technological integration.
4. Develop national teaching policies stressing solid teacher preparation and professional development.
5. Enhance continuing education and peer mentoring among teachers.
6. Pursue consistent, long-term reforms and goals for expanding, equalizing, and improving the educational system.

Chapter 4: “Inequality on Trial: Does Money Make a Difference?”

Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond takes the points with which she was dealing in the previous chapter and addresses funding issues.  She looks at the financial support structures that award schools, and she determines that they are inequitable.  She asserts that equitable accounting would all but guarantee equitable results.  Low-achieving schools should not be made bereft of the very tools and human resources needed to improve the outcomes; rather, they should be undergirded and given the educational environment and financial wherewithal to ameliorate academic achievement.  Adequate funding of schools increases students’ performance and such funding helps specifically to improve the instruction of students.  (p. 105 ff)  Darling-Hammond suggests that inadequate teaching performance and an unstable pedagogical workforce multiply educational costs and cumulatively so over time. These costs are exacerbated by the resultant remediation, retention, disciplinary actions, and dropout rates—“amounting to nearly $300 billion dollars annually.”

Effecting social change and fighting for equity are very challenging endeavors, Darling-Hammond states, but it is necessary to go through the processes to make equitable changes.  She is discussing merely reaching a point where every child has the real-life opportunity to acquire a basic and adequate education.  When Massachusetts, for example, made funding resources more equitable, improvement in educational outcomes for previously underfunded schools were obvious.  After a series of tax cuts, such funding deteriorated and, consequently, erosion of the achievement gains occurred.  In addition, Darling-Hammond highlights the two-decades long litigation over school funding in South Carolina.  One of the questions involved was whether or not a state has the responsibility, or obligation, to guarantee that all students have access to quality educational environments so that they can meet the minimum state requirements.

Darling-Hammond delineates the various national policies that corrupt schools’ abilities to make the very advances they need.  She proceeds to mount evidence that funding and quality go hand in hand.

Research analyses show that the equitable allocation of educational resources turns around school failures and significantly reduces the achievement gaps between students of color and low-income students, on the one hand, and their more economically-equipped white counterparts, on the other hand. Unfortunately, those who wish to maintain the status quo argue that there is no equation between equitable investment and school outcomes.  Their perspective reads that low-funded schools are too incompetent to handle increased budgets and that poor children would not benefit from increased resources because they live in a debilitating “culture of poverty, ” à la Flores v. Arizona.

Darling-Hammond concludes the chapter with an examination of the funding inequities in New Jersey prior to 1998, and the positive educational outcomes that transpired when those fiduciary inadequacies were addressed.  She demonstrates that investing in preschool initiatives and expert teaching is the key to enhancing learning experiences.  Professional development of teachers in pre-K classrooms prepares students to enter elementary schools at a higher level.  In addition, the development of comprehensive literacy curricula, including structured reading assignments and small-group instruction, eventuated in successful preparative and learning outcomes in New Jersey.  Significant investment in student teachers as well as in continuing education for professionals coupled with an intentional focus on high-need educational districts can buttress and bolster both effective practices and educational results.  If continued through the secondary level, Darling-Hammond avers, these professional development initiatives will be a vital part of the school reforms needed successfully to prepare youth for the adult world of college, career, and community.

CHAPTER THREE: “New Standards and Old Inequalities: How Testing Narrows and Expands the Opportunity Gap”

When schools focus on test scores, the author demonstrates, the end result is that curriculum and instruction changes—paralleling test content, format, and cognitive demands, rather than teaching more broadly and deeply.  Much time is spent preparing students by mimicking the tests and by utilizing multiple-choice layouts and stressing recall and recitation.  Consequently, competencies in writing, reading, critical thinking, research, and computer technologies are deemphasized.

Many U.S. teachers feel they must rush through subject areas—ultimately covering topics in a superficial manner.  Meanwhile, high-achieving countries teach fewer concepts, but approach them in a deeper, more comprehensive way—leading to more learning and higher-order thinking as they persist to graduation.  Unfortunately, much prepping for tests occurs in schools serving low-income and racial/ethnic minority students.  As a result, college preparatory instruction is significantly reduced in favor of meeting test score targets.

If standards are to be used, then investments must also be made in finding appropriate and accurate assessment tools as well as enhancing teacher expertise.  Professional development training, curricular and instructional resources, financial support, and sophisticated recruitment and retention measures must maintain, increase, and improve.

The changes that need to be made, according to Darling-Hammond, are systemic.  Sanctioning low performance is a facile way of deceiving the public that reform is taking place when it is not.  Harsh sanctioning has resulted not in improved schools, generally speaking, but, rather, in inequality in access to resources, highly qualified teachers, and substantive curricula.

Another problem the author highlights is that penalties levied against low-performing schools did not eventuate in higher test scores.  Instead, it merely increased retention (staying back) and dropout rates in many school districts across the country.  Grade retention is not a substitute for seriously and successfully addressing poor performing schools.  Improvements among classroom practices, teacher quality, instructional resources, and state-of-the-art technologies are elemental to any strategizing efforts to address so-called failing schools.  Investments in these components would do more than any type of retributive measures, Darling-Hammond asserts.  She states: “It is not surprising that data from the National Center for Education Statistics indicate decreases in 4-year graduation rates between 1995 and 2001 in Florida, Indiana, New York, North Carolina, and South Carolina as new high-stakes testing policies were introduced in each state.” (77)

Darling-Hammond explores the “Texas Miracle,” some features of which were instrumental in shaping the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind.  Part and parcel of the “success” of test results in Texas was the fact that many low-performing students were increasingly retained or dropped out and, therefore, were no longer taking the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS).  Unfortunately many of these students were persons of color, whose graduation rates were abysmal.

In numerous cities, in Texas and across the country, African American and Latino students have been disproportionately placed in classrooms with uncertified and inexperienced teachers.  Moreover, when a teacher’s instructional skills improved, more often than not that teacher would be assigned to classrooms that were predominantly White.  Consequently, minority students were increasingly placed in classrooms with ineffective teachers.  As a result, students and parents could not count on the schools to be places where real learning occurs.  This lack of accountability is grossly unfair and militates against the type of society we say and claim we want to be.  In Massachusetts and elsewhere, minority students would attend classes with professionals that failed to meet the guidelines of No Child Left Behind.  Darling-Hammond explains: “Rather than increasing incentives to attract well-qualified teachers to these districts, the state’s primary response was to issue waivers of certification requirements and to argue against greater investments in such districts. . .” (96)

The author clearly concludes that “substantially upgrading the quality of curriculum and teaching” across the board is the only solution to successful classroom learning!

CHAPTER ONE: “The Flat World, Educational Inequality, and America’s Future”

The author demonstrates how our present school system is based on an antiquated model designed for students who would eventually work in factories.  Providing basic skills to young pupils might have been sufficient by the turn of the twentieth century, but it is definitely not adequate in the twenty-first.  The multiple and cumulative effects of a broader base of knowledge and rapidly advancing technologies require expansion of access to education and overhaul of curricula, teaching styles, and learning assessments.  Darling-Hammond explores creative changes in Finland, South Korea, Singapore, and other places that have kept up with the growing needs for educating school children.  She poignantly shows how California pales in comparison to these places.

Clearly, the United States is lagging behind other nations, especially in mathematics and the sciences.  Moreover, that gap is steadily increasing.  In addition, the rankings are worse among people of color who are still largely educated in segregated and ill-equipped school systems.  With regards to reading, the United States fares better—primarily because of focused efforts on building literacy and improving teacher preparation in reading for comprehension and learning styles.

One major mistake in educational policy is the politicization of reform and the overlooking of best practices gleaned from peer-reviewed research.  The author indicates that policies do matter and gives examples of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act and the Elementary and Secondary Assistance Act and other Great Society programs.  During the Reagan administration, cuts in federal programs decimated the gains in educational achievement experienced through the 1970s, and those losses have never been regained since.  Hardest hit are students of color who no longer can acquire the basic skills necessary to achieve because of inadequate facilities, unequal investments, incarceration over education, and increasing low socioeconomic levels.

Darling-Hammond insists we need to educate all our citizens well if we are to compete as a so-called First World nation.  She concludes with a list of components of a successful, i.e., equitable, school system: the meeting of all existential needs for students; parity in school funding; duly compensated teachers; 21^st-century learning goals; and healthy teacher and learning environments.

CHAPTER TWO: “The Anatomy of Inequality: How the Opportunity Gap Is Constructed”

Much of what is discussed in this chapter has been mentioned in the previous one.  In the second chapter, the author seeks to give further historical references as to how the educational system developed to be so imbalanced and stultified.  She reiterates the argument that education should be disbursed widely—ideas lifted up by the quotes from Thomas Jefferson and W. E. B. Du Bois at the outset of the chapter.  It is not a linear chronology; she jumps back in forth in time.  But this dialectic strengthens her perspective that the system has not changed since the evening of the nineteenth and the dawning of the twentieth century.

Since its inception in the United States, the system of education has been racially discriminatory.  Some people want to blame the children, but Darling-Hammond asserts poor educational outcomes is as much a product of resource inaccessibility as it is because of race, class, or culture.  In the process of analyzing the inequities, the author highlights a number of obstacles: poverty; few social supports; limited early childhood development; re-segregation; unequal access to quality teachers; disproportion of inexperienced, underprepared, and uncertified teachers; low-quality curricula; differential learning opportunities; differential placements in honor and college preparatory classes; tracking of students into low-achieving areas, or learning “ghettos”; dysfunctional learning environments; and poor interrelations between teachers and pupils.

The racial disparities in academic achievement in grade school are so vast that it is all too easy to arrive at a genetic explanation for them.  Such a conclusion is certainly wrong, but many are hard pressed to disprove it.  In the United States, we attribute the lack of educational attainment by African Americans to innate characteristics that cannot be overcome, rather than to social factors that capture how students of color are treated.  When research shows that African Americans are significantly absent in college preparatory, honors, and advanced placement and, conversely, disproportionately represented in remedial and special needs classes, the preponderance of these statistics often lead us without thinking to consider this calculus condign.  For those who regard themselves as a bit more enlightened, their hermeneutic of desert for the overrepresentation is that these students live in a culture, or context, of poverty and resource insufficiency that they are, again, unable to keep up with majority/white students.  Both “explanations” are simple rationalizations along the continuum of “blaming the victims,” and are racist to the core.  What can we do to eliminate this gross inequity?

Guidance counselors and classroom teachers need to be taught that many of their perceptions and actions regarding students of color are based upon learned expectations or what is considered “realistic” to the former and for the latter.  When I was graduating from Wesleyan University in the late 1970s with a degree in government, I conferred with one of my renowned major professors about postgraduate options.  I indicated my interest in doing work like Martin Luther King, Jr., and that, perhaps, I should go to a theological seminary first.  This advisor opined that most black preachers do not have professional degrees and maybe I should simply locate a church and work my way up.  Although I was graduating from a member of the so-called Little Ivy, a celebrated political scientist who helped found Manpower and other workforce development-type establishments was relegating me to become a jackleg preacher!  Here was a progressive who nevertheless encouraged me to settle for the statistical norm, rather than seek to scale the heights of professional and academic achievement—at best, a very racially insensitive piece of advice.

As Darling-Hammond points out in the second chapter of The Flat World and Education, even students of color whose test scores are equivalent to those of their white counterparts are still siphoned away from honors and advanced placement classes much more often.  One reason for this state of affairs is that the underrepresentation occurs because placement is still extremely racialized.  If we couple that racialization with the development of inferiority complexes, the lack of parental involvement, the absence of sufficient role models, and the socioeconomic milieu many African Americans endure, it is no wonder why the disparities are so tragic.

Where do we go from here?  There is a litany that usually follows this question: parents need to be more involved in their children’s education; teachers need to appreciate students as human beings, familiarize themselves with the sociocultural circumstances of their pupils, and recognize their teaching must adjust to various learning styles; guidance counselors need to encourage success in students instead of an attitude of just getting by; and students of color need to realize that being cool or accepted has nothing to do with intellectual accomplishment.  Training and socialization are necessary in order to turn the traditional, factory outlets into bona fide places of real learning, cultural competence, and development of the students into mature adulthood.

The very nature of the educational institution must change.  Embracing each student as a person and as deserving of the best intellectual resources as possible is prerequisite to reforming school districts from dungeons of shame to havens of freedom and human dignity—to appropriate a term Dr. King used to describe jail cells.  Knowing about the subtleties of racism in educational systems is not working to destroy them; it is only a foundation to revise approaches, to reconnoiter what are the qualities of an educated person, and to discover what level of commitment is necessary to produce inclusive and effective learning environments.  This process takes a lot of time, creativity, and deracination, but it is the only course to regaining a competitive edge while participating fully in the global community!

The public school system in the United States needs serious overhauling, if this country is going to compete in the global marketplace of ideas.  We can adopt the language of our president, taken from the prophetic utterance of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “the fierce urgency of now.”  In the spring of this year, the burgeoning group, the Cedar Valley Citizens for Undoing Racism (CVCUR), organized the community read/discussion of professor and attorney Ms. Michelle Alexander’s book: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.  Fortunately, Alexander was able to visit with us at the conclusion of the sessions and to encourage us to persist in our efforts to challenge the criminal justice system’s maltreatment of African Americans and other people of color.  That work continues.

These categories of people are disproportionately and adversely represented in the major indices of life chances in this country.  Specific areas of concern, in addition to criminal justice, are: housing, health care, economic development, political empowerment, and education.  While members of CVCUR have not abandoned efforts to address and redress massive incarceration, they feel there is a pressing need for pay attention to other areas of enormous racial disparities in our society.  Consequently, the next topic of communal analysis and action is education.

In order to sharpen our examination of the U.S. educational system and our endeavors to improve it for future generations, we selected the text—upon the suggestion of Ms. Cheryl Faries—of the foremost researcher of contemporary K-12 schools, Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond, namely, The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future.  The book discussion starts on September 6 and continues until every two weeks until November 29, 2011.

My role in this book discussion is twofold.  First, I will provide one-page summaries of the current chapters of each session to help jog the memories of those who are reading the book as well as to inform those unable to read the chapters about the contents therein.  Second, I will write a blog based on some aspect of the book and/or discussion that piques my interest or sparks me to explore.  Hopefully, these entries will serve to provoke thoughts and to elicit suggestions of what needs to be done to forge a more equitable educational environment for contemporary underserved students.

Of course, Darling-Hammond has not investigated our local school districts.  She offers substantive insights into the amelioration of educational institutions that we can contour to our specific circumstances.  The goal of these sessions, according to the leadership of CVCUR, is not to put down the administration and teaching staff of the community schools; rather, it is to honor the positive, criticize the negative, and propose alternative approaches to improve and make more just the current state of affairs.  Because of her busy schedule, Darling-Hammond is unable physically to visit this area.  It may be possible for her to come to us via satellite, and that option is being explored at this moment.  An update on this possibility is forthcoming.

Ultimately, the purpose of this important dialogue is to develop action items for members of the community to pursue.  Moreover, certain of those components will be selected for the CVCUR’s legislative agenda and shared with city, county, and state officials.  Hence, this book discussion is not glossed-over exercise in futility.  Instead, it is a serious attempt not only to identify the root causes of educational failures, but also to take concerted action to make constructive, institutional changes.

We live in an exciting time; for many are beginning to recognize that our national educational product is lagging behind a number of other countries’.  We are at the threshold of technical and technological advances that will enable us to help our schools do a better job of retaining students and of heightened understanding of learning styles and environments that will direct us to the best practices of superlative academic achievement and civic engagement.  As Martin Luther King, Jr., stated upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize: “I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits.”  The urgency is now and the enhancement of our K-12 school system is within our grasp.