Putting It All Together - Part 5
By: Erich Bolz, MA. Ed., Vice President, Research and District Engagement
The Center for Educational Effectiveness
Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) Dean James E. Ryan states, “Right now, there exists an almost ironclad link between a child’s ZIP code and their chances of success.” In this five-part blog series I have questioned policy and practice, over reliance on standardized test scores and indirectly the standardized movement, against the stark reality of few schools providing transformative opportunities for students inside of their school systems.
This is not to say that most schools do good work on behalf of students. That is plainly not the case. The reality is most schools ensure most students make a year’s growth in a year’s time. An even harder reality is the gap between children entering school is as big as five years, with the most advantaged students performing like average eight-year-olds and the least advantaged performing cognitively five years below that level.
Little has changed at the national level in terms of students attaining scholastic proficiency despite more than twenty years of testing and standard focus. I would argue that policy makers and practitioners by extension have focused on the wrong things and this blog series has provided significant evidence to support this position.
So where to start? For schools to improve, we must relentlessly focus on building and sustaining positive cultures. As Peter Drucker stated, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Flawed policy can prompt central office administrators to promote curricular initiatives without first gauging how the school community feels about the school experience in general.
What is a better approach? Truly taking the time to know and measure how each constituency feels about the school environment and ministering to the needs of families, school staff, and above all students. Importantly, seeking and measuring those constituent voices will lead to the ability to create meaningful context for school change and improvement.
Readers of this blog learned about the keys to thirty-eight truly transformational schools in Washington State through The Center for Educational Effectiveness’s Characteristics of Positive Outliers Study found at https://www.effectiveness.org/research-resources. As opposed to the relentless focus on achievement data to improve achievement, a practice as it turns out that seldom gets the intended results, readers were steered to collect and review data across four domains (demographic, perceptual, contextual and achievement) with student achievement data being the area of least focus.
It is my hope that this series has provided each reader, not only rich food for thought but more importantly, access to the research and the tools to make the transformative difference each student deserves in their school journey. We are the wealthiest, most resourced nation the world has ever known. Imagine what would happen in the educational journey of each of our students if we focused on the right stuff?