Tattoos on the Heart.  

The suggested donation for tickets is $20.  All of the ticket price will go to support Homeboy Industries.  Fr. Boyle will also be signing copies of Tattoos on the Heart. The net proceeds from the book also will be donated to support Homeboy.

The event is co-sponsored by the Claremont United Church of Christ, and it will be held at the church, 322 W. Harrison, in Claremont.  7 p.m. sharp.

(Driving directions:  From I-10.  Off at Indian Hill Blvd.  North about 1 mile through the Claremont Village to Harrison, right two blocks to the church.  From I-210 coming east.  Off at Towne Ave. south.  Left on Foothill.  Right on Indian Hill to Harrison, then left to church.  From I-210 coming west.  Off at Baseline.  Left on Claremont Blvd.  Right on Foothill.  Left on Indian Hill to Harrison, then left to church.)

Meanwhile, happy to be back from vacation.   Many thanks to Kamil and Meral Ozerk for their hospitality and to the whole world for putting on the Cup, which we watched almost nightly while away.

In 1997, Markham was on the bottom of the heap in 1997 when the average student scored in the 16th percentile in math and the 12th in reading.  Since then, the Los Angeles Unified School District and the state have subjected it to at least three different intervention programs costing upward of $3-million.  Still, in 2009, only 12 percent of Markham’s students scored proficient or advanced in English and 8 percent in math.  The English scores declined for 48 percent of the students, and math scores declined for 59 percent between 2008 and 2009.

One would think that drastic measures would be called for.

On a larger scale, that is exactly what U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan proposes.  He is targeting the lowest five percent of schools nationwide. Earlier this year both he and President Barack Obama supported firing all the teachers and the principal in a Rhode Island school, repeating a school-closing-reopening strategy Duncan used when superintendent in Chicago.

However, the research on turning around failing schools suggests that the clean sweep approach isn’t particularly successful.  The lessons of turnaround efforts support thoroughness, coherence, and attention to detail rather than a single lightening bolt. (See reports from Chicago here and here.)

The first of history’s lessons concerns the failing school label.  California has 1,183 schools labeled as failing, nearly a quarter of those in the country.  Mississippi has 9.  No one thinks its schools are better than those here.  The disparity between states with high levels of labeled schools and those with few is largely a function of how tough each state’s tests and standards are.  California has shown singular courage in sticking to its relatively high standards.  Most states have not.  Setting low standards has been the predominant state policy response to the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

Once on the failing school list, it’s hard to get off.  A recent Brookings Institution report showed that 63 percent of California schools with an eighth grade that were in the bottom quarter two decades ago remained there in 2009.  Some 2,782 schools were listed in Program Improvement status by the California Department of Education in 2009-2010.  Only 79 exited program.  Both the state and the nation have created an unmanageable number of schools to target its failing school resources. (See John Fensterwald’s report.)

History’s second lesson is that we know how to turn around these schools; it’s just hard and complicated.

The Consortium on Chicago School Research, the country’s best city-focused education policy organization, studied 200 elementary schools over a period of two decades.  It found that schools that adopted five essential supports were ten times more likely to foster substantial improvements in reading and math than those that lacked even one of them.  (Report here)

The schools that got better scored high on measures of school leadership, parent and community ties, professional capacity of the faculty, school learning climate, and instructional guidance.  None of this is surprising.  All of it reiterates the central message that solid school organization drives improvement.  Buying an intervention program or superficial adoption does not.  Improvement comes from inside.  Help and guidance can come from external sources, but there is no substitute for the school doing the hard work of self-improvement.

Indeed, as the Center for Education Policy reported, most of the schools that continued to fail, adopted similar strategies to those that were successful.  They just did it badly or experienced repeated setbacks that made the strategies not work.

Which brings us back to Markham Middle School.  It has a history of setbacks.  The simplistic response to the school’s problems is that they are rooted in the teacher union contract that causes younger teachers to be laid off in times of financial difficulty, as they were this past year.   The American Civil Liberties Union and others have sued the school district over the layoffs saying that they denied students their rights to an education.  Indeed, 20 percent of the teachers are substitutes, and some classes have gone without permanent teachers for months.  Overall, 62 percent of the teachers left last year.

But changing the union layoff rules will only begin to address the problems.  The school has been a revolving door for teachers for many years.  Teach for America teachers leave after their two year commitment is over, and others transfer to other LAUSD schools or take jobs outside the District.  For any of the five essentials to work, the school needs a stable cadre of teachers, and for that to happen it has to be seen as a place people want to work.

It also needs leadership stability, not the 9 principals in 8 years the school experienced before it became one of the Mayor’s Partnership schools.  The school has also had massive student turnover; 38 percent in the 2007-2008 school year.

Only when these two elements are in place is it possible to work on the five essential supports.

Then it needs stability and fidelity in implementing an instructional program.  Excessive emphasis has been placed on picking a best program for failing schools, and not enough on the gritty day-to-day process of implementation.  There is a daily discipline to reform.  Looking at student work.  Setting aside time in the school day for teachers to meet and clinically discuss what’s working and what is not.  Using data from classrooms to inform decisions.  Building truth and trust among teachers and students and then among the adults in a school.  These processes have to be repeated day in and day out for a couple years before they become part of the school’s DNA.

Until this happens, Markham or any school will not be able to gain the trust of parents, the same fathers and mothers who wondered aloud to the L.A. Times Hector Tobar that they learned their times tables by third grade in Durango and why does their eighth grader still struggle with them?

Until parents have confidence in the school, the churning student population won’t stop.   The policy world discounts the extent to which poor and immigrant parents engage in school shopping.  They line up for charters and magnets.  They have lively conversations about whether to move to another neighborhood or city.  Without doubt, part of the movement of student in and out of Markham and similar schools is traceable to the circumstances of poverty, so the school will always have to be structured around the realities of a community where children live in foster homes and in housing projects.  But a core of supportive parents gives a school the necessary stability and a step toward pride.

In all other respects, Jennifer Bestor seems quite sane, but she felt called to take on the tax inequity caused by the way Proposition 13 treats commercial property.  Unlike houses, businesses don’t sell that often, and even when they do there are cleaver ways to execute a sale so it does not trigger reassessment.  More about Bestor in the Huff Post.

But what I found interesting was her personal politics.  Bestor calls herself a “Lincoln Republican.”  Her family linage extends to an ancestor who served in the Illinois legislature with Abe, and she channels that part of Lincoln who saw government as a way to get necessary things done.  Public education, for example.

We might remember what while Lincoln was trying to find a general who would actually fight the South, he managed to buy Alaska, pass the land-grant college act that would lead to a century of American supremacy in higher education, and, then there was that thing about the transcontinental railroad.  Three years after the war’s end, rails spanned the continent.

Other than David Brooks, I haven’t met a lot of Lincoln Republicans.  There must be more out there, but I think I am seeing a lot of Lincoln Democrats.

These are the folks who have tired of interest group liberalism, or just interest group deadlock.

They have come out fighting to make public services work and to redefine their nature.

For some, in education, this fight has been identified with making achievement the new civil rights.  The Education Trust provides an example. That organization has been dogged–unreasonably so in some cases–about student achievement, and their positions represent an historic break from the dominant belief in class or cultural reproduction as an excuse for low performance among African-Amerian and Latino youth.

Last week I got an email from them announcing their opposition to seniority in assigning teachers at low performing schools and favoring allowing schools to retain their most effective teachers regardless of length of service.  In this, as in other positions, the organization places itself crosswise with the California Teachers Association, which is bound by the terms of its own contracts to defend seniority.  The CTA is stuck–partly because it has a demonstrated inability to think over the horizon–a victim of its own past and the interests associated with contracts that create workplaces where success is difficult.

In contrast, new league of fix-it Democrats is willing to push back against the stalwarts of the party to get public services to work.  Teacher unions have taken a good part of the flack for standing in the way of reform.  They deserve some of it, but the problems extend to the entire institution.  The process of teaching and learning needs to be rethought and reworked, but that’s another story.  The point of this story is that we now see a league of Democrats willing to push back against the system.  Sometimes wisely, sometimes very smartly.

These folks are willing to do straight-on, “in-your-face” politics to get things done.  Los Angeles School Board member Yolie Flores Aguliar comes to mind.  Tired of inaction, she introduced the Public School Choice motion last summer that has stirred the district, teachers union, and charter operators to rapid action.

So, what if the new league of Democrats, who want government to be productive, got together with the Lincoln Republicans, who want to mend public finances?  Would there be a new political party or just a government that got things done?

Also, Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) has published a policy brief based on the book, which can be freely downloaded. And, the book has its own Facebook page that I hope will become a discussion site as it develops.

The policy brief summarizes the book and its advocacy for the five policy levers that will move the Los Angeles Unified School District beyond what we call “permanent crisis”:

Signing books at the Harvard Education Press booth at AERA

1. Legislation to allow LAUSD to create autonomous sub-districts.
2. Send money directly to schools.
3. Create positive incentives for students, teachers and administrators.
4. Invest in a technological infrastructure for student learning.
5. Deliberately add a variety of learning options and support choice among them.

PACE has also published a guide to candidates with a handful of the best ideas about what needs to be changed in California Public Education.  It’s Reforming Education in California: A Guide for Candidates and Citizens, reiterates much of what policy wonks have been saying for several years: that schools should get more flexibility but that they should target their resources, and that policies should be designed around continuous improvement.

So far, there is no evidence that any candidates are listening.  As John Fensterwald reports, Whitman and Poizner continue view charter schools as magic bullets despite evidence to the contrary, and their campaigns are a marvel in superficiality.

Last Saturday I visited the District’s annual Infotech conference to look at what students and teachers were doing with learning and technology.  At the Los Angeles Convention Center, I was struck by the extent that almost everything I saw was the result of teacher initiative.  The District, and grant funds, made access to technology possible, but it was teacher and student sweat equity that created the new forms of teaching and learning.

I didn’t have a chance to visit each of the exhibits–students were packing up for lunch and blood sugar levels, including mine were lagging–but as I sampled the student’s work I was struck by three aspects of what was going on:

First, I saw very interesting examples of moving instruction up the cognitive food chain.  Antonio Hernandez from Local District 4 was basking in the recognition of primary student’s work for robotics.  They started with straightforward constructions in the first grade, but by the time they had reached the upper elementary grades they were creating projects for which their was so single answer.  Their work had started to resemble that of adult technologists or scientists.

Second, schools were building on learning platforms that were created elsewhere.  At least two schools had built animation programs using ACME the on-line instruction platform created by Claremont Graduate University board of visitors member Dave Master.  Robert Moreau’s students at Roosevelt High School showed off some sophisticated graphics of which they were justifiably proud.  In terms of curriculum development, these novel and non-bureaucratic arrangements are good examples of how the education world is starting to look more like a network and less like a hierarchy.

Third, schools were using inventive combinations of existing software.  Students at the Los Angeles High School for the Arts were using the freely available Google docs as a means of collaborating on projects, getting feedback from their teachers, and working through revisions.  At the same time they were using computer aided design software for set design and construction.  Tara Pearson, the development coordinator at LAHSA, helped show me how pedagogy and technology meshed.  But, as was the case in the other exhibits I visited, she held back creating situations where students could explain their work to visiting adults.

Thanks and kudos to all for sharing your work.

As is so often the case with serious books, his argument follows the colon: Why the European way is the best hope in an insecure age.

Here, at last, was someone who sees Europe through the same eyes as I do: as economically dynamic and socially invested, not as a historically interesting but moribund land of high taxes and an outdated welfare state.  Every time I’ve traveled in Europe, I come away with the notion that it works pretty well.  In the two thirds of a century since it was devastated by World War II, it has undergone a remarkable transformation.

Europeans have this funny notion that they should actually get something for their taxes; so, they send their children to college with out having them run up big debits, they secure their seniors, provide healthcare for all at about half of what we spend to enrich insurance companies.  They think that “family values” means investing in family leave time and employment security rather than ranting about public morals.  They think that democracy should extend to the workplace and that employees deserve seats on boards of directors alongside of investors.

In his talk, sponsored by the European Union Center of California, Hill describes Europe’s healthcare, her socially conscious capitalism, her pluralism, foreign policy, and leadership in environmental sustainability.  But more importantly he describes a Europe that our media have largely missed, an idea as much as a place.  In the book, he calls Europe’s social contract “the ’sticky glue’ that holds it all together and keeps the human heart of darkness from ripping us apart.” (278)

At the end of the book he relays a conversation with an old Austrian who asks, “As a American, I wonder if you can even imagine what it must be like to live in a country where every person has health care.  And a decent retirement.  And day care, parental leave, sick leave, education, vacation, job retraining.   For every plumber, carpenter, taxi driver, waitress, executive, sales clerk, scientist, musician, poet, nurse, of all ages, income race, sex, whatever, not worrying about those basic arrangements.  Can you imagine what that is like?”….”In America you are so rich, why don’t you provide those things for your people?…Don’t you think that this has something to do with why you are so violent?” (364-5)

Europe faces problems, to be sure, and Hill spends about a third of the book discussing them.  A combination of only partly assimilated immigration and low birth rates threatens Europe with a non-European identity crisis.  And the continent faces its own civil rights struggles.  But it is young Europe, a government and social contract forged in this past half-century, where many of the successful approaches to combining dynamic capitalism and a vibrant social contract come together.  In many ways, they have done the hard political and conceptual work of laying the groundwork for the 21st Century while we kicked the can down road for leaving problems to fester for our children and grandchildren.

For those who want to drill down and look at the construction of specific institutions–like education–the table on page 293 provides instant illumination.