The 21st Century Principal

When the 2012 PISA scores were released, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan declared the American Education system “stagnant.” He said the results were “straightforward and stark: It is a picture of educational stagnation.” Whether or not that’s true is debatable. What is not debatable is how the Obama Administration, Secretary Arne Duncan, and the US Department of Education have repeatedly used data like this to manufacture an educational crisis that only their remedies can fix.

Duncan's Department of Education and President Obama even released a report, not independently created mind you, to declare how successful their Race to the Top program has been. In a USA Today article "Obama Report Claims Success for 'Race to the Top'" Duncan even had the audacity to say, "The most powerful ideas for improving education come not from Washington, but from educators and leaders in states throughout the country." This statement is just not true. The "ideas to improve education" are coming directly from Washington, because under his Race to the Top and NCLB waiver system, they APPROVE what states are doing, which means they are the ones having the ultimate say. Arne Duncan has proved once again, he's a much better politician at bending the truth than being an educator. He even praised North Carolina for its "reforms" when more than half our teaching force is leaving and the flow of new teachers has slowed to a trickle. Both President Obama's Department of Education and our North Carolina government have done an excellent job of creating the most unattractive teaching environment in the nation. It is incredible that Duncan would declare my state, North Carolina, as one of the leaders in education reform when conditions in the classrooms and schools have never been worse.

But set aside all the "Race to the Top stretchers" coming from Arne Duncan and the Obama Administration. Let me tell Secretary Duncan what his policies have done to the schools.

• Schools are more than ever focused on teaching to the test, and what’s worse, it matters not what the quality of the test is. Any old test will do as long as it provides numbers. It is one thing to use data to inform instructional decision-making; it is quite another for politicians, policymakers and educational leaders to invent tests of dubious quality and use that data to brag about their own success. In addition, the test-centric school system culture fostered by Arne Duncan's policies have forced schools to devote inordinate amounts of time to test-prep. In North Carolina, schools take whole days to subject students with ACT prep activities with hopes that such measures will help increase their scores. This test-centric school culture has created an educational environment where the only thing not-negotiable is the "test." Testing and accommodating the record number of tests in North Carolina drives over half of our decision-making.The last days of the semester and the school year are devoted entirely to testing and nothing else.
• Teachers are leaving the profession in droves, and those that stay are morally dejected. Race to the Top has fostered an atmosphere in education where the objective is to raise test scores at all costs. I have not heard a single teacher say he or she entered the profession to “raise test scores.” All teachers, including myself, entered teaching out of love for content area, love for teaching and helping kids. When that content area is reduced to test content, out the window goes the content we love to teach, and when a teacher is forced to only see a student as a test score and their potential to improve their evaluation, then how could someone possibly want to teach in those conditions.Race the Top combined with our anti-teaching North Carolina government has simply accelerated the exodus of teachers from the classroom.
• Far fewer teachers are entering the profession. I recently attended a job fair at a university in our state. There was a time when one would expect to talk to many prospective secondary science, math, social studies, foreign language, English, career and technical education teachers. This year, I could count the number of secondary teachers I spoke to on one hand. While our North Carolina legislature and governor can certainly take some blame with their anti-public education legislation, this massive lost of interest in teaching began before their law-making activities. What the US Department of Education doesn't get is that when the focus of teaching becomes raising a test score, all else becomes irrelevant. The truth is, few people want to enter a profession that is driven by test scores. I can’t say that I blame them.
• More and more parents are getting tired of all the tests we subject their children too, and they are starting to fight back. More and more around the country parents are pushing to allow them to have their children "opt out" of testing. This growing opposition to testing is getting stronger. There was a time when educators used test scores in sane ways, not insane, such as determining student promotion or to decide whether a teacher is doing his or her job. No Child Left Behind began this intense focus on testing and Race to the Top has only only magnified that focus. It is not surprising that there is a growing crescendo of discord from parents about all the testing. Yet Arne Duncan and our state department of education turns a deaf ear.
• Because so much money is being spent on testing, many other areas of the budget have declined over the years. Sure, state leaders will point out that testing costs so little in comparison to other educational needs, but I have never heard an educational leader say, "We're cutting the fourth grade end of grade tests this year due to lack of funding." The testing budget is simply accommodated no matter what. Schools no longer receive professional development budgets. Textbook funding is not even enough to purchase a class set of books anymore, even if we wanted to. Computer systems and software are aging and there is little funding to improve these. In North Carolina, policymakers never starve their testing budgets, but they don't mind cutting funds from teacher assistants and classroom supplies. Race to the Top has focused budgets even more intensely in testing at the expense of other budgetary items.

I think I have been fairly clear. I am no fan of Race to the Top. I have never been due to its over-reliance on standardization of education, over to the top emphasis on testing, and its hyper-focus on competition. Just like its older cousin, No Child Left Behind, at the end of the day, Race to the Top will most likely go down in the history of education reform as just another failed and misguided educational reform. As someone who has worked in trenches with teachers since its inception, I have seen no improvement in education, but I have seen a great deal of deterioration in working conditions of the schools.

The biggest problem for those of us working in the schools brought on by Race to the Top has only brought is the enormous amount of new regulation, new restrictions, and new mandates that take more of our valuable time that could otherwise be used teaching and working with our students. For example, in North Carolina we now spend even more time prepping students for tests and administering tests, because in our state we subject our students to more standardized tests than has ever been done in state history. The education practitioners in the schools are also having to spend an enormous amount of time learning new software and data collection programs, purchased with Race to the Top funding, and these programs still are not fully functional and are too often causing data errors and more work staff in the schools. Because of constant glitches, staff have to take even more time trying to make this technology work. The constant failures of all this technology only adds to the burden our teachers  face in the classroom. This added technological burden comes at a time when teachers have more students in their classrooms than ever, and less instructional materials and text materials than ever, all because of a governor and state legislature unwilling to fund education in North Carolina. I scratch my head in wonder, because the philosophy behind charter schools, for which Race to the Top advocates, is to allow schools to operate with less red tape and less restriction because that is somehow better, yet our own government and state department of instruction turns around and heaps more regulation, more state mandates, and more red tape on how we operate. If that regulation is so bad, then why keep pushing more and more of it? Go figure! Ultimately, what Race to the Top has done to those of us in the schools is heap a ton of new rules, a gaggle of new mandates, a host of floundering new software and data systems, and an extra large dose of standardization and testing on our heads. 

In a time when we should be emphasizing the personalization of education in North Carolina, we're still trying to turn our schools into efficient factories to churn out students with high test scores. Somehow our leadership has come to believe that high test scores is the only equivalent to being college and career ready, when in fact, such thinking may only mean students are good test-takers. Instead to pursuing the false promises of standardization, we should be turning our schools into places where innovation, creativity, and collaboration thrive. Such schools are the opposite of standardized, one-size fits all schools we currently have.

What is the answer? The answer is, perhaps its time to let go of this fetish that if we somehow test students more and hold teachers accountable to those test scores no matter what, our students will learn more. We keep ramping up the testing, changing standards, but we cut instructional materials and professional development funding. We keep thinking that if we make the test stakes high enough, somehow teachers will miraculously rise to the occasion. What's happening instead is teachers are saying, "I quit," leaving the profession and/or moving to other states in increasing numbers. As a school leader, it becomes harder and harder to promote teaching as a career opportunity.

What our state leadership does not fully understand is that this massive increase of teacher turnover in North Carolina isn't just about pay; it's the working conditions too. With all this standardization, testing, and mandates coming down from Raleigh due to Race to the Top, it is getting less and less fulfilling to be a teacher and educator in North Carolina. Teachers are being treated more and more like factory workers whose job is to work on a assembly line and churn out students with high test scores. If they don't, then they're branded less effective or worse. Teacher professional judgment has been slowly replaced with test scores and systems of test data. In a word, being a teacher in North Carolina has become less about being a professional, and more about being an assembly-line worker, and if production isn't met, then you're out! The working conditions caused by Race to the Top and our state's efforts to meet its mandates has made being an educator in North Carolina much, much less palatable.

What then is the way out? In years past, these kinds of reform measures usually run their course and those pushing it move on to other things, then they slowly die out. This time, my fear is that our public education system will not survive. Race to the Top's push to standardize, its push to elevate testing to an even higher level of importance than No Child Left Behind, and its incessant focus on using competition to try to better education is leaving our schools tangled in a mess of new testing. It is leaving our teachers demoralized and dejected. It is turning our students off to schools and education. It is turning our schools into places of discord and competition instead of collaboration. It is making it much more difficult to personalize and meet the needs of students because we are too busy trying to meet the needs of latest federal or state mandate. I can only hope that our public education system survives it all.

"Who would want to teach in a system that measures your worth as an educator by how much your students can regurgitate on a two-hour multiple-choice test and that has reduced much of the curriculum to tedious test-prep exercises?" writes Tony Wagner in his latest book entitled Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World.

Who, indeed, would want to teach in the kind of education system Wagner describes in this question? Perhaps a better question would be, "Who would want to learn in such a system?" Yet, with all the increased emphasis across the country on test scores as part of both teacher and principal evaluations, the kind of education system Wagner predicts is already coming to fruition, and my state is on the fast track to such a system.

North Carolina schools have had a "Learning Culture" characterized as "getting students ready for THE TEST" since it began rolling out state tests in the 1990s. Now, North Carolina has moved from using those same tests to determine student proficiency to determine teacher and principal proficiency. And, for subjects that do not currently have a standardized test, they are creating a TEST, to not measure student learning, but to measure educator proficiency. The end result  of these measures will obviously be that the state that once proclaimed proudly "First in Flight" on its license plates, can soon declare "First in Test-Prep." 

Sadly, though, one can but wonder if all this emphasis on test scores is going to totally destroy or keep us from developing very kind of "Learning Culture" that we should be fostering for 21st century learners. That culture should emphasize, collaboration, multidisciplinary learning, thoughtful risk taking, trial and error, creating, and intrinsic motivational learning. Test-Prep learning cultures are an anathema to each of these.

In my experience, schools and districts with "Test-Prep Learning Cultures" are characterized by some of the following:

• Student learning is reduced to what can be fit within the confines of A, B, C, and D on a bubble sheet. There is no time for independent exploration and learning. Students spend their days taking endless quizzes and tests in multiple choice format. Projects? Forget it! They take away valuable time better spent getting students to bubble-in right answers.
• Teaching is reduced to "only the essentials found on THE TEST." Nothing else matters. No room for student curiosity. Teachers spend inordinate amounts of time analyzing tests and test items and build learning around what they find.
• Teaching is about "covering the curriculum" not about whether students actually get it or find it relevant. Teachers end up repeating to students many times, "You need to learn this because it will probably "be on the test" not because it will help you be a better 21st century citizen or even help you get a job one day.
• Signs and posters on the walls remind everyone "Days to Test Day" as if on that day, the most important event of our students' lives is going happen. What a let-down, to have the most important event of the year be one, big "Bubblesheet Fest" at the end of the year. Also, one can only imagine the pressure these kinds of things add to kids on test day. These posters and signs are a clear indicator of what Test-Prep Learning Culture Schools value the most.
• Students and teachers participate in "Test-Prep Pep Rallies" or other similar events to fire them up to take THE TEST. In "Test-Prep Learning Culture Schools" principals and teachers will go to great lengths to motivate students to get engaged in THE TEST. These kinds of events also communicate the message to students who do not score well on THE TEST that they are somehow unworthy. 
• Students are judged in every way by their TEST SCORES. The are classified as smart and proficient based on their last End of Course Test or End of Grade Test. Students who are creative and talented in the areas of art and music and not test-takers are at worst de-valued. At the least, they have no way to engage these interests.
• Subjects are separated into silos, each with its own test. There's no time for multidisciplinary learning. There is only time to teach the content that is on THE TEST. The superficial boundaries between knowledge areas are reinforced in a Test-Prep Learning Culture.
• Getting the right answer is more important than anything else. There is no room for experimentation, and the only thing you learn from a wrong answer is that "you were wrong, period." Questions that do not have only one right answer are irrelevant or ignored. Failure is not a learning experience; it is to be avoided at all costs.

The one lesson politicians should have learned from No Child Left Behind, is that when all of your energies and resources are turned to just improving test scores, failure is the result.  As education historian Diane Ravitch states eloquently in her book, The Death and the Life of the Great American School System, ”Our schools will not improve if we rely exclusively on tests as the means of deciding the fate of students, teachers, principals, and schools.” Sadly, I’m not sure our current political leaders have learned the lesson yet that schools will not improve by solely focusing on using test scores and standards to improve them.

Our national education policy is still dominated by a “test-centric” approach to reform that ignores so many other factors that impact education such as poverty, inadequate health care, and lack of gainful employment. According to education scholar Linda Darling-Hammond, “The United States has the highest poverty rate for children among industrialized nations,” (The Flat World and Education, Linda Darling-Hammond, 2010). We want to “Race to the Top” but we’re looking for short cuts to get there. We want standards and “better tests” but we don’t want to engage in the hard, difficult work of addressing poverty, lack of health care, lack of good, affordable housing, and lack of opportunity for jobs with living wages. As long as national education policy is driven by a blind belief in test results and national standards, 10 years from now, we will be either staring at the same dismal  conditions both educationally and economically if we’re lucky, or we will be much worse with a society with an even wider gap between those that have and those that have not.

What then is the answer? Just how bad are things in different parts of the country? This morning I stumbled upon a 5-year initiative by the American Federation of Teachers and partners like Cisco, Blue Cross Blue Shield, College Board, among many others, that focuses on the educational improvement of an entire community ravaged by unemployment, lost opportunity and lost promise. McDowell County West Virginia has not fared well at all since 1980 and that community is the focus of this initiative.


While it is easy to become entangled in the debate about the role of teachers unions in education when debating education policy, I think it is admirable that the AFT and its partners are putting into practice what they’ve been trying to make politicians understand all along; education reform must do more than focus on test scores and standards. It has to also address the dreadful conditions some of our fellow US citizens find themselves living in.

With this post, I am not taking sides in the debate about unions per se. I do believe, after 20+ years experience, and seeing countless students struggling to live in forgotten communities without the basics most of us take for granted, that the answer to our problems as a country lies, not in investing in more and different tests, or in national standards, but in focusing on the crushing problems facing our poorest students.

After watching the video below about “Reconnecting McDowell” I was reminded of an incident that happened in one of the schools where I once worked. I walked by a table during lunch one day, and a young 11 year old girl sat there with her head down. She had enormous tears in her eyes. I walked up, leaned down and asked her to step out the lunchroom for a minute. Once out of the hearing of others, I asked, “What’s wrong?” Through her tears, she blurted, “I don’t have any lunch money. My parents didn’t have any to give me.” She proceeded to tell me that when she went through the lunch line, the cafeteria took her plate away and refused to serve her lunch because she owed so much money. I took her back through the lunch line and told her to get anything she wanted, and that it would be taken care of. You can debate all you want about why a child does not have money to eat. You can accuse her parents of not taking care of her, but the reality for her is she was not going to be able to eat that day, and a focus on raising her test scores was not going to change that reality.

As I understand it, Reconnecting McDowell is an effort to try to improve the education of a community, and not do it by just focusing on test scores. It is an effort to focus on poverty, healthcare, housing, and  a broken community. I have been to McDowell County West Virginia and have seen firsthand all that the video describes. That is why this effort caught my attention. Poverty is real, and those of us who have worked in schools where it exists know its faces.


Link to Reconnecting McDowell Web Site.