"Reform" at the Expense of Relationships

"We've got the student-to-teacher ratios, timing, and scheduling wrong in the way schools are run right now," small schools advocate Deborah Meier said in an EWA panel, yesterday. "We prevent ourselves from using and developing our most powerful resource—relationships."

In a later panel, University of Chicago professor Charles Payne presented data from his latest book, So Much Reform, So Little Change, which emphasizes the importances of maximizing schools' social capital, and how many reform efforts neglect this keystone to supporting any lasting improvements. 

Payne said in schools with low academic achievement, building high levels of trust makes academic improvement three times as likely than in schools with low levels of trust among educators and students. He cited a ten percent improvement in graduation rate in schools where students say they know and trust their teachers.

In another example from his data, he said high levels of press (expectations) and support translate into two years progress in a year of instruction (he studied 6th and 8th graders) vs. six months of progress in a year of instruction where there were low expectation and support levels. He also cited better rates of student achievement in schools where teachers and the community had a collective sense of responsibility for student success.

DCPS Chancellor Michelle Rhee sat on the panel with Payne. In her first year, Rhee closed 23 D.C. public schools--or 15 percent of the public schools in the District. Payne had a lesson for Rhee that I wonder may have come too late:

"The way schools are being closed in Chicago has eroded an enormous amount of social capital by not including parents in the process. These parents care about their kids and schools,and have been marginalized by people doing things for their children, without including them in the process." 

He added, on school choice--"There’s nothing wrong with school choice—it’s the way it's implemented without educating and empowering parents on how to use it. Choice has the potential for further stratifying differences by cutting parents out of the process."