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Class Struggle
By Jay Mathews

Savvy blogger suffers real-life school reform

The "Thoughts on Public Education (TOP-Ed)" blog put out by the Silicon Valley Education Foundation had the clever idea to ask Kilian Betlach, who used to write the delightful "Teaching in the 408" blog, to ruminate on the school reform process. Betlach, previously a seventh-grade teacher in east San Jose, has just had a jarring personal experience with school reform. He is assistant principal of a small middle school in Oakland, Elmhurst Community Prep, forced to fix itself under federal rules.

Here is how he told the tale in a guest column, "Liposuction approach to school reform," posted Aug. 8. The point he makes about the limpness and aimlessness of what is supposed to be a tough and constructive process deserves attention. This is going on all over the country.

By Kilian Betlach

Last March, the California Department of Education released a list of “persistently low-performing schools” that would be part of the federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) process. Our school was on it.

In the weeks and months that followed, as every day became increasingly dominated by our place on the list, our school community went through the Kübler-Ross grief cycle:

Shock: Are you kidding? Elmhurst Community Prep has posted a net gain of 39 API points in three years, and stands 120 points higher than the last year of the since-reconstituted Elmhurst Middle School. This is persistently low-achieving?

Denial: No way this is right. Get our picture of the front page of the paper.

Anger: This is what we do now? Not teaching and learning, but reading about federal grant processes? This is what’s best for kids?

Bargaining: We’re clearly caught in an algorithmic error. Tweak the algorithm and focus on some schools that more desperately need aggressive intervention.

Depression: Turns out the Department of Education welcomes algorithm changes the way Arizona welcomes immigrants.

Testing: Okay. We’re here. We have four options. We’re not closing (#1), and we’re not reconstituting again (#2). Are we going charter (#3) or doing this transformation thing (#4)?

Acceptance: As professional educators we feel the riptide urgency to close the achievement gap. We recognize that we have to get better. Our staff and our community believe the transformation option is a way to do this. Let’s roll some sleeves and get to work.

Roll up our sleeves we did. It hasn’t been an easy road, but we came out of this with a strong finish to the 2009-2010 school year, and a compelling plan to raise the quality of education we provide.

I came out it with the belief that the SIG process — and all similar initiatives — represent an insufficient, low-leverage path toward improving our schools. I do not believe that reform-by-grant-application is capable of bringing about the dramatic change our kids deserve.

Reform-by-grant-application asks small numbers of schools to make small changes over a short period of time, supported by temporary funding. Even if presented in a manner that does not discredit past improvement or spread disharmony and discord, such initiatives lack essential staying power and capacity building. Yes, we may have funding to extend the school day for the length of the grant, but then what? Yes, we may have funding for additional specialists to work with our kids, but how will we pay them after the grant expires?

The reform-by-grant ideology sees a school system in need of tweaks and temporary fixes — change, not reform. It’s the ideology of liposuction, not diet and exercise.