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Teaching
Old Dogs New Tricks
Mark
Warner isn't just shoveling money into Virginia's public
schools -- he's raising standards and holding
administrators accountable for results.
The
way Gov. Mark R. Warner figures it, after fighting for a
$642 million increase in
state aid to education this year, he's entitled to make
some demands of Virginia's educational establishment. He
didn't raise taxes this year for the purpose of writing
a blank check to school administrators. "We're
going to make record new investment in public
education," he says. "There are going to be
some strings attached."
The
bottom line: No more excuses, no more business as usual.
Educators have to be accountable, and they have to be
willing to change. In a knowledge-based economy, the
consequences of failing Virginia's children are too
calamitous to tolerate. Says Warner: "Doing more of
the same is not enough."
It
was a tough-talking governor I encountered several days
ago when I met with him on the Third Floor of the
Capitol Building for an interview. Warner was hard-nosed
but also enthusiastic about the prospects for reforming Virginia's bureaucratic and risk-averse
educational system. Citing a number of initiatives --
school efficiency reviews, the school turnaround program
and the refusal to back down on the Standards of
Learning -- the Governor clearly believes he can
inspire, cajole or arm-twist Virginia's schools to
achieve a higher level of efficiency and quality.
As
loyal Bacon's Rebellion readers will recall, I
opposed this year's tax hikes, which
clearly overshot the mark. (Indeed, I hope to address
the impending $800 million to $1 billion budget surplus in a future
column.) But I can't quarrel with where Gov.
Warner is putting the tax money. If we want our children
to prosper in a globally integrated economy, we must
ensure they develop the cognitive skills they need to
compete with the best and brightest from around the
world.
I
also was impressed by the Governor's willingness to
consider alternatives to the usual educational bromides,
which invariably entail spending more money. In
particular, I found his school turnaround program to
offer intriguing possibilities. The idea, though alien
to the public sector, is disarmingly simple to anyone in
the business world acquainted with corporate turnaround
specialists. With Warner's encouragement, the Darden
School of Business and Curry School of Education at the
University of Virginia developed a program to equip
school principals with the managerial and financial
tools to turn around the state's worst under-performing
schools. The first 10 principals went through the
program this summer.
The
turnaround program sounded like a great idea in theory,
but I wondered how much it could accomplish in practice.
After all, school principals have limited power, and the
U.S. educational system couldn't be more dysfunctional
if someone had designed it to fail. Funding comes from
federal, state and local governments, each with
conflicting priorities and mandates. School principals
are subject to the political dictates of superintendents
and school boards, and they contend daily with
disrespectful children, litigious parents and the
distractions of a hedonistic youth culture. It would be
unwise to expect too much from the principals, I mused,
even if the Governor armed them with MBAs.
I
couldn't have been more surprised by the Governor's
response.
Before
talking about the school turnaround program, the Warner wanted to discuss the larger context of
educational reform. In doing so, he addressed almost
every question I'd come prepared to throw his way, and
rendering many of them moot in the process.
Early
in his administration, the administration
implemented the PASS (Partnership for Achieving
Successful Schools) program focusing on 34 of the
schools having the most trouble meeting the state's
Standards of Learning (SOL) goals. Warner personally
visited all 34 schools, and he helped recruit educators,
businesses and faith-based organizations to partner with
them. After a couple of years, nine of these troubled
schools have won accreditation. Half have made
"Adequate Yearly Progress" as defined by the
No Child Left Behind Act.
One
of the lessons he extracted from the experience,
Warner says, is that leadership makes a difference.
"I'd get these excuses: 'You just don't understand.
The community is too tough, the students have too many
disadvantages, you have to give us a break.' I reject
that. If others can do it, don't give me the excuse that
your circumstances are different."
Whoah.
Not what I expected. I consider myself a
take-no-prisoners kind of guy when it comes to
government reform, but even I was impressed. Clearly,
Warner can talk the talk. Whether he can walk the walk
is another question, of course. I'm not in a position to
judge -- I don't have the contacts in the educational
community to know whether the Governor's policies are
being diluted or hijacked as they percolate through the system. With the caveat that the
ultimate fate of Warner's reforms are at present
unknown, I have to say that they appear to be well
thought out.
The
tenets of Warner's philosophy for educational reform can
be summarized as follows:
Funding
and efficiency. K-12 schools are the big winner in
the state's current budget. Total state aid to public
education will total nearly $5 billion this year, and
somwhat more next year -- enough to meet the so-called
"Standards of Quality" (not to be confused
with the "Standards of Learning") that define
the level of resources that schools require to do their
jobs properly.
While
delivering record sums to education, the Governor
insists that the schools spend it well. He hopes to expand a
voluntary program launched earlier in his term that sends
out state auditors to conduct school efficiency reviews.
Says Warner: "We're going to come in and look at
your business practices and see if you can save
money."
An
audit of the city of Richmond school system identified
$2.1 million in potential savings through such basics as
increasing the energy efficiency of school buildings,
reducing bus driver overtime and using software to plot
more efficient school bus routes.
As
success stories roll in, the state is getting more
takers. It's one thing to identify the
savings and another to follow through and achieve them,
as Warner acknowledges. But it's clear that the
cost-cutting opportunities abound.
Standards
of Learning. With money off the table as an excuse
for failure,
Warner is hanging tough on the Standards of Learning,
the standardized tests that students must pass in order
to advance through the school system, despite heavy push back
from
schools and parents. "There is no retreat on our
consequences component," he says. If students fail,
they will not graduate. If schools fail to educate
students, heads will roll.
That's
not to say he's abandoning students who flunk the tests.
"Schools have to work with us on extra remediation
for kids who need it," the Governor says.
"Even if kids don't graduate, we won't leave them.
It's the responsibility of the school to continue
working with them. We raise the bar, but we also raise
the level of help."
Many
thought Virginia would see a decline in the graduation
rate if the state raised its SOL standards; some
predicted a loss of 10 percent to 15 percent of the
student body. But it didn't happen, Warner says. Last
year's graduation rate of 94.3 percent was stable.
Metrics.
Those graduation numbers leave some room for ambiguity,
Warner concedes. The 94.3 percent graduation rate for high
school seniors would be less impressive, for instance, if it were
accompanied by a surge in the drop-out rate for 10th and
11th graders. He thinks the drop-out rate has remained
flat, but there are different definitions for drop outs
-- how do you know if a kid has dropped out of school,
or just moved to a different locality? -- so it's hard
to know for sure.
The
metrics issue brings out the policy wonk in
Warner. It strikes him as remarkable, he says, that the
educational sector, after all these years, has never
settled upon a standard definition of something as basic
as the "drop out rate." Developing reliable measures
is imperative; without them, it's difficult to evaluate
anything objectively.
"It's
hard to know what makes a good teacher because there's
no good data," Warner says. "Without data, you're basing
policy on a bunch of anecdotes." Thanks to the federal No Child
Left Behind program, Virginia is beginning to collect
the right kind of data,
and that's a start. Eventually, it should be possible to track
the performance of students, teachers and schools.
The
ultimate goal of having reliable, objective data is to
be able to reward good teachers, administrators and
educational institutions. Says
Warner: "I want to be able to look at teachers'
performance all the way back to what school they
graduated from." If Education School A is putting
out better-performing teachers than Education School B,
maybe the state should be expanding enrollments at
School A and shrinking them at School B.
School
turnarounds. In the final analysis, delivering
results in schools is all about leadership. The idea
behind Warner's school turnaround program is to spot
administrators who have demonstrated a capacity for
leadership, equipping them with greater analytical
skills, and putting them in charge of the tough schools.
It
sounds so obvious, but Virginia had never tried anything
like it before -- indeed, no one anywhere in the
United States has tried anything like it. "We'd never identified the
successful principals in a systematic way," says
Warner. "We'd never provided them with successful
training on the business side. And we'd never been
willing to reward them with additional
compensation."
In
the turnaround program, 10 of the state's most promising
administrators were plucked out of their local school
systems and assembled at the Darden School in
Charlottesville for a couple of weeks of intensive
training. The "students" examined case studies
of successful schools, strengthened leadership skills,
learned change-management techniques, and polished
their financial knowledge. After the boot camp, all 10
returned to their assigned schools
with a mandate to instigate change.
As
part of the bargain, the state negotiated
with local school system to give the turnaround
specialists "the freedom to try new stuff,"
Warner says. He admits, though, that "we probably
didn't give them as much flexibility as I'd like."
But
that's OK. The turnaround program is still an
experiment. "These 10 principals are going back to
their schools. They're really charged up. We'll see what
difference they make."
As
a former venture capitalist, Gov. Warner is comfortable
with the possibility of failure. If the turnaround
program is successful, he's prepared to ramp it up to
another level, building a cadre of 30, 40, maybe 50
turnaround pros. If it doesn't work, he's presumably
prepared to pull the plug -- and try something else.
This
may really be stretching the imagination, but it's a
comforting thought to contemplate: Wouldn't it be
interesting if, in the long run, Gov. Warner's greatest contribution
to educational reform doesn't turn out to be raising the
SOL standards, or devising reliable metrics, or even
introducing the concept of school turnaround
specialists? Wouldn't it be marvelous if Warner's most
lasting impact were the transformation Virginia's school
administrators into prudent risk takers... if one day,
Virginia's schools became known as a hotbed of
experimentation, innovation and change?
-- November
15, 2004
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