Experts Disagree on Direction for School Reforms

During 30 years in public schools, Dorothy Mayfield has seen it all.

Staggered-day schedules, pre-kindergarten classes, new-fangled reading programs, rotating “learning centers,” new math, metrics--these are just some of the “innovations” that Mayfield, a third-grade teacher at 10th Street Elementary School in Los Angeles, has been asked to try in the last three decades.

Now, there are new buzzwords--”parental choice,” “restructuring” and “shared decision-making.” But Mayfield, like many who struggle in the trenches of public education, is not convinced that these ideas have any more staying power than ones she saw “go by the wayside.”

The latest advocates of revamping public schools, including President Bush, will have to overcome the skepticism of educators like Mayfield, who have seen so many seemingly good ideas fall into the compost heap of education reform’s long and inglorious history.

And yet, many observers say, there may be no better time than now to push through a national agenda for improving America’s schools. Bush’s recent education summit with all 50 governors was remarkable, one education leader said, for the unanimity with which they envisioned the need for--and direction of--change.

Educators from all levels have praised the summit for focusing the nation’s attention on schools’ problems, and there is broad consensus that such concerns as reducing dropout and illiteracy rates and raising test scores are appropriate national goals.

Specific Goals

The nation’s governors are to reconvene in February to formulate more specific goals and outline methods to achieve them. But since the latest “reform movement” began about six years ago, there has been wide disagreement about what approaches are effective.

“There is no single answer,” said Guilbert C. Hentschke, dean of the USC School of Education.

“We know what needs to be done,” said George McKenna, who gained national prominence for fighting gangs and low achievement as principal of Los Angeles’ George Washington Preparatory High School and is now superintendent of the Inglewood Unified School District. “There are enough effective models in existence.

“For example, we should have the Jaime Escalante method of teaching mathematics institutionalized,” McKenna said, referring to the celebrated Garfield High School calculus instructor who was featured in the movie, “Stand and Deliver.”

But “everybody is still doing their own thing. We don’t systemically replicate our successes. This is most frustrating to me as an educator . . . when we the educators are the most resistant to change.”

A Grim Picture

Study after study tells the same grim story about public schools in America: Students lag behind their counterparts in other industrialized nations, especially in mathematics and science. Teachers are under-paid and poorly qualified. Companies have trouble finding workers who can fill out a job application.

After a stinging 1983 report, “A Nation at Risk,” commissioned by then-U.S. Education Secretary Terrell Bell, a new reform movement in education was launched that focused on tougher standards for students, such as increased graduation requirements, more homework and longer school days.

Now a second wave of reform has unleashed a flurry of activity aimed at answering more difficult questions about fundamental issues: Who should run schools? How can schools be redesigned to increase their “productivity”? How do you make teachers, once considered the “dumb instruments” of education policy, as one analyst described them, the chief agents of change?

According to a recent National Governor’s Assn. report, “Results in Education: 1989,” 27 states, including California, have adopted statewide initiatives embracing many of these issues, which fall under the general rubric of “restructuring.” Eight other states are considering such measures.

In Chicago this fall, parent-controlled councils will begin running schools, while in Los Angeles, Miami and Rochester, teachers and parents are sharing power with administrators. In Chaska, Minn., a panel made up mostly of teachers awards grants directly to teachers for innovative restructuring ideas. One such grant allows three teachers to run an elementary school in place of the principal while continuing to teach part time.

New Responsibility

In Toledo, Ohio, and Poway in San Diego County, teachers are assuming responsibility for evaluating their peers, a job traditionally done by administrators.

And in Richmond, Calif., East Harlem in New York, Montclair, N.J., and the entire state of Minnesota, parents and students have the freedom to choose another public school if they are dissatisfied with their neighborhood school.

Many educators hailed the summit as a way of focusing attention on the various reform efforts. But Frank Newman, president of the nonprofit Education Commission of the States, nonetheless worries that only superficial changes will result.

The danger “is that everyone will start talking about restructuring and they’ll get the terminology down, but that’s all that will happen,” he said.

Others fear the consequences of gambling on unproven ideas about changing schools. Inglewood’s McKenna, for example, criticizes “shared decision-making,” in which teachers share power with administrators to run schools, as “a political concept” that may improve relations between parents, teachers and administrators but has no proven educational value.

“Where do kids improve in this process? There is no evidence” yet of that occurring in schools that have tried it, he said.

Shifting of Power

But advocates say the trend toward shifting decision-making power away from central-office bureaucrats and into the hands of those on the front lines is the most promising change on the horizon.

“In the field of education, there isn’t any proof on anything,” said National Education Assn. President Keith Geiger. “Unfortunately, too many people . . . expect results overnight. But somebody at the summit stated it pretty correctly when he said that some (schools) are so bad that anything would be better than what we have been doing. In the business field, shared decision-making has increased production, decreased absenteeism . . . I believe it can work” in schools.

At Winship Junior High School in Eureka, the principal and the faculty share authority for operating the school. “It works,” said history teacher Darrell Myers, who recently was named one of 12 California Educator Award winners by the state Department of Education. “As a teacher has more input into what goes on in (the) school, you’re going to get more cooperation.”

Throughout the Los Angeles Unified School District this fall, new shared decision-making councils begin operating at all 600 schools, with teachers making up half of each council. The councils have authority over some spending, training, discipline and scheduling but eventually will have more sweeping power to redesign schools.

May Take Some Time

Al Fox, a fourth-grade teacher at the 32nd Street/USC Performing and Visual Arts Center Magnet School in Los Angeles, said the power-sharing concept has “great potential.” But the 35-year classroom veteran, who sits on a new districtwide central committee charged with overseeing the decentralization efforts, cautioned that improvements in student achievement--the bottom line in any type of school reform--may take several years.

“You can’t expect test scores to go up next year. Kids are not marching by on an assembly line,” he said. Moreover, “in my profession, we are rarely ever asked what is going to make things work. The situation has been that way so long, it may take awhile for teachers to realize that (they) can make a decision that will make a difference.”

Another increasingly popular strategy is “parental choice,” a system that allows parents and students to cross neighborhood and district boundaries to choose their own schools. The concept is old, based on the magnet school systems that began springing up in the 1970s in response to desegregation lawsuits. Now it is spreading in response to broader concerns that schools will improve only if forced to by a “free market” approach to education. President Bush is an advocate of the choice system.

The choice program in Northern California’s Richmond Unified School District will be spotlighted next month when U.S. Education Secretary Lauro Cavazos holds a hearing there on the issue. Richmond Supt. Walter Marks said he believes in choice because “it empowers the right kind of people--the parents and the students. Those are our clients.”

It also has given the district the impetus to redesign the curriculum of each school, he said. Some campuses specialize in teaching gifted youngsters, for instance, while others emphasize classical studies and the arts.

Many Are Returning

Although it is too early to definitively assess the impact of the choice system, which began three years ago, Marks proudly notes that the district’s expulsion, suspension and dropout rates have fallen and that about 400 students have returned to the district from private and other public schools.

California Teachers Assn. President Ed Foglia said of Richmond’s experience: “They upgraded their schools and then they gave people choices. I think that is what we’re going to have to do in other places. But you have to upgrade the programs first,” so that students who can’t afford to move are not left with inferior schools.

While acknowledging that the new system “clearly has tickled the fancy and piqued the imagination of a lot of parents,” Ernie Ciarrocchi, executive director of Richmond’s teachers’ union, said it is unclear how many parents ultimately will participate because they must provide their own transportation for their children. Currently, only 4,000 of Richmond’s 30,000 pupils are enrolled in the choice program.

Critics contend that choice is a thinly veiled version of the controversial voucher system, in which parents could “spend” the tax dollars used to support their child’s education in the private or public school of their choice. “Choice is not all it’s cracked up to be,” said Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. Leonard Britton. “It’s often a way for people to play games with the school system. (The real challenge is) how do we make all our schools schools of choice?”

An Expensive Process

Many educators say that upgrading schools will be expensive. In many inner-city areas, some suggest, the work must begin by replacing dilapidated school buildings. “I’m tired of people saying that the (condition) of buildings has nothing to do with the quality of education,” said the National Education Assn.’s Geiger. “We have to do some basic restructuring (of school facilities). Blow ‘em up and start over.”

According to one recent estimate, it will cost $125 billion to repair broken-down schools or build new ones.

But that, Geiger and others stressed, is only part of the solution.

“It all hinges on the effectiveness of the classroom teacher,” said 10th Street School’s Mayfield. “You can legislate whatever you want, appropriate whatever amount of funds. But unless you have people in the classroom who are dedicated, concerned and have the skills, (none of that) is going to effect change.”

Lewis C. Solmon, dean of the UCLA Graduate School of Education, would agree. He has long argued that higher spending often has not addressed the fundamental problems.

“When money is committed, it goes to the wrong things--to reduce class sizes by one or two kids or to raise (teacher) salaries, which may help in the next generation but also keeps incompetents in,” Solmon said.

“To me the most crucial problem is getting better people into the profession. We can do all this fine tuning, but until we get really smart, competent, dedicated and hard-working people into the system, we’re just going to be spinning our wheels.”

Language of School Reform

Educators pushing for an overhaul of public schools speak in terms unfamiliar to most parents and other laymen. Here is a brief glossary of the new school reform terminology:

Accountability: Schools need to find ways to make teachers and administrators more responsible for the performance of students, perhaps by basing funding and bonuses on improvement in test scores or other measures of learning.

Professionalization: To attract and retain the best-qualified teachers, schools must make training more rigorous and the job more satisfying. Tougher examinations for new teachers would require them to demonstrate good teaching. Career ladders that pay higher salaries for greater responsibility would give many teachers the impetus to produce specific results.

Peer Review: Teachers should be involved in setting the standards for good teaching and evaluating their peers, a job now done largely by administrators. This would improve the quality of instruction and give teachers more control over their profession.

Restructuring: Schools need to be reorganized to better serve the needs of students and teachers. This can take many forms, and can include putting a group of “lead teachers” in charge of designing curriculum and class schedules, hiring outside teacher consultants to provide courses in special areas, or revamping the school day to create more flexible blocks of instruction time.

Shared Decision-Making/School-Based Management: The traditional method of running schools--teachers taking orders from principals, who get their directions from the central office--doesn’t work well. Decisions about curriculum, discipline, pedagogy, textbooks and other aspects of school operation should be made at the school by those closest to the students. This means “empowering” teachers and parents to make decisions.

Parental Choice: If the consumers of education, parents and students, are unhappy with their neighborhood school, they should be allowed to choose another school to attend. The best schools would thrive, and those considered inferior would be forced to improve.