Here’s an Even Better Idea!

Here at the Save Our Schools protest and conference, we heard a lot about what’s wrong with No Child Left Behind. Shout “no more high-stakes testing!” and every parent, student and teacher there knew what you were talking about.

The problem with the fight against high-stakes testing—and its parent law NCLB—is that getting rid of this top-down policy is only half the equation. If we want the Obama administration to respond seriously to a protest of their ideas, we’d need to provide new ones. We must replace NCLB with something better.

Fortunately, schools across the country are demonstrating successful models for strengthening teacher performance that can and should be used nationwide. In programs developed at the Alameda County Office of Education’s Art IS Education, we are using classroom-based, teacher-driven assessments of student success and learning to help teachers reflect on what they’re doing right and what they need to do better.

Then, through our Teacher Action Research Institute, we provide an ongoing network of training and support to help teachers improve their work—like using the arts to make curriculum in other subjects come alive for students. Studies over the past ten years prove TARI is working, but we think our Principals make an even more compelling case.

Principal Garry Grotke Discusses the Teacher Action Research Institute from ACOE on Vimeo.

Learning the Hardest Lessons from NCLB

No Child Left Behind stifles learning by equating it with memorization, repetition, and testing. NCLB takes responsibility out of the hands of teachers by waiving the expectation that students become critical thinkers and problem solvers. NCLB diverts resources from home-grown programs and solutions that work best. There are many reasons to oppose NCLB, but it’s important not to throw the good out with the bad.

Ten years ago, NCLB did one very important thing: through the systemic, nationwide measurement of school performance, it exposed the long-ignored reality that we were chronically failing certain students. There was a frightening pattern: schools throughout the country were allowing students of color to fall behind their peers. NCLB forced educators to admit this, and required us to take responsibility for it.

As we gather at the Save Our Schools conference to oppose NCLB and offer new ideas, we can’t lose sight of the need for school performance measures that identify where we need to improve. This is also the time for educators to ask ourselves a hard question: what have we done in the past ten years to address the inequality that NCLB exposed?

At the Alameda County Office of Education, we support school districts in the East San Francisco Bay Area which serve primarily African American and Latino students, English learners, and students from low-income families. Ten years ago, as we faced the challenge of overcoming the trend of inequality in our schools, we made an important discovery.

Teachers and administrators need to be able to recognize the experiences and the history that every child brings from their community to their school. We call this cultural competence, but it’s really the simple idea that we all learn by adding new knowledge to what we already know. If educators can’t recognize—or value—what students already know, there’s no base to build on.

Through the ACOE’s Art IS Education program, we’ve partnered with districts throughout the county to train our teachers and administrators to be responsible for culturally competent teaching. We utilize arts integrated learning because we recognize the arts as a language that transcends cultural barriers. We rely on the arts as a tool to teach across all subjects because they create a broad range of opportunities for teachers and students to understand each other. The arts also provide a structure in which students build critical self-esteem by reflecting on their unique experiences and developing a sense of meaning in their own lives.

Other groups are promoting culturally competent schools, too. Our long-time ally Justice Matters is at work with Professor Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University on a project to identify schools that provide a truly just education for low-income students of color.

As we think about overturning one national system with many shortcomings, ACOE Art IS Education programs and the schools to be identified by Justice Matters provide important examples of the solutions we need nationwide.

We can’t lose sight of our responsibility as educators to measure our own work, identify our successes, and turn them into solutions where we still need to improve.

Make Your Voice Heard!

Diane Ravitch addressed the Save Our Schools conference on Day 2 and claimed that No Child Left Behind is a manufactured crisis designed to fail every school in America. "Today 87% of our nation's schools are failing under No Child Left Behind. Its central goal is testing, which has been a bonanza for testing companies and, a disaster for teachers, students and families." She cited both national and international studies that reveal that tests and incentives do not predict success in post-secondary education, or in economic success.

"American education is not a 'race to the top'," said Ravitch, where there are winners that cross the finish line, and losers that bring up the middle and the rear. Her words harkened to Kozol's expressed fear the day before, that President Obama's Race to the Top and turnaround strategies will dishonor him in history.

Ravitch told the 450 person gathering that "We know what works!" She cited performance assessments, where students apply skills and knowledge to demonstrate their understanding. She called for a curriculum that "includes the arts, music, science, and active, project-based learning that inspires a sense of purpose and passion in young people."

Today the action moves to the Whitehouse, where teachers, parents and students will carry their demands forward:

1. Equitable funding for all public school communities



2. An end to high stakes testing used for the purposes of student, teacher and school evaluation



3. Teacher, family and community leadership in forming public education policies



4. Curriculum developed for and by school communities

Members from Parents Across America, including a strong California contingent, will be leaders in today's protest www.parentsacrossamerica.org . Speakers will include Jonathan Kozol, Diane Ravitch, Mary Stone Hanley, Deborah Meier, Pedro Noguera and Linda Darling Hammond.

Join in on our blog and add your voice to the conversation about what works, and your ideas for necessary new directions in public education!

Diane "The Jackhammer" Ravitch

"Diane "The Jackhammer" Ravitch!

It's Day 2 of the SOS conference! Day 1 with Jonathan Kozol was a thrill. Well Day 2 with author Diane Ravitch felt like the rush you get after knocking down a stubborn brick wall. She was clear, tough and methodical, as she drilled into the very foundation of misguided education reform strategies currently so well cemented in public discourse and policy making. One by one she hammered at all the policy proposals this administration and localities around the country have just accepted as good ideas regardless of evidence to the contrary.

Merit pay for teachers, an Obama favorite. There's no compelling evidence to say this works. The teachers say it doesn't work! BANG- went the Ravitch hammer! Even still, New York City who had a failed attempt at merit pay, persists on trying to make it happen. Evaluating teachers based on test scores; another loser. Ravitch was clear. At best it leads to teaching to the test, or in increasing incidences, it leads to cheating and gaming the test to boost scores. WHAMO! Charter schools, this is the real prom queen at the policy ballroom. Everyone seems to want them. Meanwhile at the end of the day, this prom queen's true dance partner seems to be big business. Overall their results are no better than traditional public schools, yet they introduce a profit motive, where only the easiest to serve may benefit, while the hardest to serve youth are left to languish in increasingly under resourced schools. BOOYAH! Teachers don't get fired. Nonsense, Ravitch blasted! Teachers have an attrition rate of 50% in the first five years! With these numbers, surely some are getting fired.

Ravtich cited study after study, expert after expert. She carefully chiseled away at the very foundation of what makes up the nation's current approach to education. It was both cathartic and dismal to hear. But she ended with hope. Fear not, says this Jackhammer of Policy! These misguided reformers may have all the money and power, but things change. This story is not over, we live in a democracy, she argued. "There are more of us than there are of them!" Well said!

Check out SOS Coverage from Justice Matters

Justice Matters is also covering the SOS Conference and March.  Be sure to catch their updates at http://justicemattersblog.blogspot.com/

Bay Area Coverage for SOS March

Bay Area Reporter, Katy Murphy covered SOS founder, Anthony Cody on the Education Report, her blog following Oakland Schools.  It’s a good read.... check it out here.

On Jonathan Kozol: Passionate Impatience and Savage Inequalities

I remember reading Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities when I was in high school and having two distinct responses; the first was a sense of relief at the recognition of what I experienced as a student of inner-city public schools (I wasn’t imagining things); the second was a combination of hurt and anger that what I saw and felt was not an isolated experience -- it wasn’t just a symptom of the unique qualities of my school or the city, but was much more pervasive. While I didn’t quite have the vocabulary yet, it, was through reading that book that I began to understand the problem of miseducation for many poor and students of color as systemic.

I recognized this even as I experienced some of the best the system had to offer.  Having been “tracked” from first grade, I had great teachers and participated in great programs.  But I was one of the lucky ones.  My “success” was always colored by the knowledge that such an educational experience was not available to the masses of students who looked like me and who grew up in the same neighborhoods.... And it didn’t feel right.

Kozol’s book included the reflections of students in their own words (students I could identify with) and connected those experiences with policies regarding how schools are funded, governed and managed on a daily basis.  It was an important part of my education as a student and provided more fuel for the engine of justice that helped to propel me through my college years and subsequent career in nonprofit and education work.  I wish I could have been there for his talk, but am glad to be connected through this blog and the presence of my colleagues from ACOE.

Passionate Impatience

Yesterday was a full and exciting day at the Save Our Schools Conference. Jonathan Kozol provided vivid examples of the disparities in our nation's schools. He compared the education of the children of the elite at:

• Exeter Academy and Andover with class sizes of 12 - 15, near his own home in Maine, to
• the education of students he has visited in Los Angeles and Oakland, California, where students are crammed 40 at a time into portables, 2/3 of the year is consumed with exams, and music, art, social studies and science are squeezed out of the day.

Kozol was with Dr. Martin Luther King when he spoke the words, "I have a dream that black and white children will sit down together at the table of brotherhood," and lamented that black and brown children are more segregated in our nation's public schools today, than at any time since 1968.

Kozol called for a "passionate impatience" with our current public education system, and an end to the systematic waste of childhood. Other speakers echoed the call, referring to the "fierce urgency of now", and the need for development of relationships among educators, community organizations, governmental organizations, parents and students as, "the problem is too complex for any organization to be working on its own."

In an afternoon panel on the topic of Arts and Social Change, I presented with:

• Dr. Mary Stone Hanley, from George Mason University, presented on the arts as tools to create a counter-narrative about the strength and knowledge and wisdom in our communities
• Morna McDermott spoke about her "Out of the Box Doll Project" and being invited to sit down with members of the US Department of Education when she delivered her political art installation earlier this week

The big consensus ideas that emerged were that 1) the arts are essential for individual development and meaning-making, strong schools and healthy communities, 2) we must move out of our silos, and recognize the need for comprehensive approaches that provide for culturally responsive and well-rounded learning experiences, and 3) that we know what works and we need to speak with a unified voice about alternatives to No Child Left Behind.

As we go into day 2 of the conference, the over 400 person assembly is cohering around central ideas of the need to move out of isolation in order to make a collective impact in reinventing a public education system that fully engages all students to their potential.

What is working in your schools and community?

What ideas and solutions would you offer as the Washington DC conversations move forward?

What next steps do you hope the Sunday Congress will name?

ACOE’s Teacher Action Research Institute: Integrated Learning for Educational Equity

ACOE’s Teacher Action Research Institute (TARI) began as an attempt at a research project to demonstrate what we knew to be true, but had little data to support it. We began with our work with Lois Hetland and Harvard’s Project Zero and expanded using the approach of the national teachers project to launch action research as a model to gather the necessary data.



Over the past several years, there has been an amazing three year collaboration among ACOE subject matter experts in Art, History and English language arts to build a professional community of engaged teacher. We look forward to expanding our work with our science and STEM programs in middle school science to weave culturally responsive, arts integrated teacher action research into the science professional development.

Today, we are able to build upon this past work to implement a research-based professional development model for equity-focused, whole-school arts integration and performance-based student and teacher assessments; and to increase public understanding of and support for arts learning in public schools.

VIPs: Who is (and isn’t) at the SOS March

The Save Our Schools (SOS) Conference and March on Washington DC began this morning with a keynote address from Jonathan Kozol, PhD, and a news briefing at American University. You may remember Kozol as the author of Savage Inequalities (1991), which exposed disparities in education spending between schools of different classes and races. He’s an outspoken critic of No Child Left Behind and school vouchers.

Tomorrow, we’re hearing from Diane Ravitch, PhD, former-defender-of-NCLB-turned-critic, and author of the recent best-seller The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Undermine Education (2010). She opposes high-stakes testing and charter schools.

Among 400 registered attendees, the conference lists the endorsement of 73 “Noted Educators, Education Authors, Writers, Bloggers & Policy Experts” like Kozol and Ravitch, 55 unions, and 68 “Education Organizations, Organization Leaders, Unions, and Civic and Political Organizations” which—with a few notable exceptions—are primarily representative of politically sophisticated public policy experts or other educator unions. Undoubtedly, these are all important voices in education policy.

At the same time, when education “insiders” easily comprise half of the registrants at a conference billed to represent the interests of “teachers, parents, and students,” I wonder who we think we’re talking to. Where are the students, and where are the parents?
Kozol and Ravitch have built public careers pushing back against ideas like charter schools and vouchers. They’re right that in practice charter schools and vouchers have been implemented or proposed in a manner that only deepens disparities in our public schools. The research is indisputable. So why are both ideas growing in popularity among parents, even if their own children may wind up in worse-off public schools because of charters or vouchers?

It could be as simple as the notion of choice—both charter schools and vouchers offer a prominent role for parents in developing an educational path for their students, and most parents want to be involved. This is good news, given that supportive parents are critical in student success, and it’s up to all of us here at the SOS Conference to envision models that do a better job of including parents.

At the Alameda County Office of Education’s Art IS Education, we’ve made it a top priority to work in relationship with parents and our community. A great example of this work is our Freedom Bus Project, which makes our work visible throughout the community. We’ve also worked with our allies Justice Matters and the Los Cenzontles Cultural Center to create opportunities for parents to participate in arts-learning projects with their students. We’re not stopping there.

Following the SOS Conference and March, participants will take part in a Congress on Sunday to develop alternatives to NCLB that provide new solutions for our public schools. At the Congress, we’ll be calling on our fellow educators to imagine solutions that provide a prominent role for parents in choosing and supporting successful public schools for their children.

Can Integrated Learning Stem the Dropout Crisis?

This week, NPR has run a special series on the national dropout crisis by sharing stories from the lives of 5 people, some students at-risk of dropping out and the rest adults who are struggling with the consequences of never completing high school.

I caught up with the report on Tuesday as I was driving in to work and was struck by both the familiarity of the problem and how difficult it is to address.

The stories are heartbreaking.  If nothing else it reminds me of what’s really at stake when we discuss education policies. According to the report:

"The unemployment rate for people without a high school diploma is nearly twice that of the general population.

• Over a lifetime, a high school dropout will earn $200,000 less than a high school graduate and almost $1 million less than a college graduate.

• Dropouts are more likely to commit crimes, abuse drugs and alcohol, become teenage parents, live in poverty and commit suicide.

• Dropouts cost federal and state governments hundreds of billions of dollars in lost earnings, welfare and medical costs, and billions more for dropouts who end up in prison."

Take a minute to check out the series at here.

It’s clear that we have to act now to change the course of current policies and practices that result in a dropout rate of 27 - 37% for African American and Latino Students in California.  Whatever we can do to keep our young people in school, we need to do it.  And, no, I don’t think that includes arresting parents of truant schoolchildren.  I think it means coordinating more between schools, government agencies and nonprofits to meet student needs. It also means that we take a good long look at how we reintegrate students who’ve dropped out back into class through teaching methods that build on their assets, and inspire them to learn more.  It can be done.  

Great examples of this can be seen through an partnership between Alameda County Probation, Alameda County Health Department and a community organization called Bay EMT to provide medical training to youth offenders attending Camp Sweeney.  Another excellent example highlighting the arts.

Unfortunately, the alarming dropout rates are only part of the problem, as it seems there are significant hurdles for students of color who do manage to graduate from high school.  According to a study by College Board, nearly  half of young men of color ages 15 – 24 who graduate from high school in the U.S. will end up unemployed, incarcerated, or dead (emphasis mine). 

I’m sure that the dropout crisis and the racial opportunity gap will be covered at the SOS conference. Readers, what do you think? Did you hear the report?  What are your thoughts about how we address the dropout crisis?

Inspiration and Might

Pondering the disarray, inequity and shifting sands of public education policy and practice, as well as stalemate, tensions between contrasting approaches, dwindling
funding and massive cutbacks in art education, I have to confront and challenge my own assumptions, cynicism and desire for retreat in despairing times. How about you?

Sources I call on regularly for inspiration and might (in addition to my colleagues working with the Alliance for Arts Learning Leadership in the Bay Area) include:

1. Margaret Wheatly’s book Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World where she mines quantum physics, self-organizing systems, and chaos theory to challenge our thinking about observation and perception, participation and relationships, and the influences and connections that work across large and complex systems. This enlightening book discusses ideas from biology and chemistry about living systems and the creative role of disequilibrium in transformation and change, inspiring hope and patience. Wheately contrasts old Newtonian ideas of cause/effect thinking with counter-intuitive nonlinear logic and discusses the value of remaining open, fostering new leadership, cultivating relationships, networks and dialogue within and across diverse communities of practice in order to create the conditions from which change will emerge.

2. Lois Hetland, Ellen Winner, Shirley Veenema and Kimberly Sheridan’s book Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Arts Education that identify teaching structures and habits of mind that the arts cultivate and that are being utilized in a diversity of ways to advance teaching and learning in and through the arts.

3. Olivia Gude’s Principles of Possibility and the UIC Spiral Art Education website:

What about you? What are your discoveries, sources of inspiration and/or resources for advancing positive social change and approaches to transformative education that employ the arts?

Welcome to our new Blog… Creating Solutions Together!

The main goals for this site are to:

• Motivate our community to advocate for systemic change;
• Share concrete examples of positive change at district level through arts integration; and
• Connect our school-based work with broader regional, state and national movements.

The launch of our new online space is supports the Save Our Schools (SOS) Conference and March on Washington DC which kicks off this Thursday. I am thrilled to participate on a panel with Dr. Mary Stone Hanley on the role of arts integration and social justice in education. An amazing crowd is expected. The conference has reached full capacity of 400 participants. Keynote and workshop presenters include Jonathan Kozol, Diane Ravitch and Deborah Meier.


At the conference, I’ll be speaking about our work in Alameda County to create equitable, high achieving, and culturally responsive classrooms through arts integration. I am excited to present how educators have developed expertise in the arts to successfully engage students, re-ignite the joy of teaching and learning, and to offer students’ own unique vision of a future that is good for everyone.


The SOS Conference is a perfect opportunity to share our successes and connect with a national movement of educators united for change -- to speak up for what we know works in education, hear stories of successful activism, and access strategies to use at home.

Throughout the week the Creating Solutions Blog will present posts related to themes of the conference, including: Curriculum/ Integrated learning; assessment; family involvement; high-stakes testing; teacher training; and arts & activism. I’ll be joined by Alameda County Superintendent Sheila Jordan and Pam Bachilla of K Street Consulting, and Amina Luqman-Dawson from Justice Matters. We’ll also have a number of special guest bloggers chiming in.

We want to hear from you. Share your examples of what’s working to transform schools. This is not just about the arts, but how to work together to develop ongoing collegial support for strong professional practice that best supports student development. It will be an exciting week of growth and dialogue. I invite you to participate. Subscribe and Share!

A new post will be up every day!

- Louise

Visit the Save Our Schools March homepage