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[Implications for Needed Research]Education Reforms and Students At Risk - October 1996
We found in all the sites we studied that the students being taught were capable of learning a great deal. We also found that these sites, generally, were able to promote learning, despite having to work, in some cases, with fewer resources in difficult-to-trying conditions. In our opinion, however, the actions of individual schools alone will not be sufficient to ensure that students placed at risk will receive a quality education. In addition to the needs for some comparability across schools in the levels of resources available to all students, many organizational factors common to all schools are in need of attention. The move across a city or state should not lead to immediate concerns about lack of educational opportunity. The move between states should not signal the need to re-evaluate students' skill levels and recommended educational placements. There is, simply, no way to safeguard the educational futures of students -- especially students who are placed at risk -- without the assurance that, as a nation, we will maintain a coordinated, coherent, and consistent program of schooling for all.
Set Clear and Agreed-Upon Goals and Objectives -- at the National, State, and School Levels
Keeping students at risk from dropping out of school is an important goal, but with only a local sense of what these students are to master while in school, we may inadvertently be supporting an inequitable system of education. The filtering process by which educational objectives set at one administrative level are transferred to the next level permits considerable flexibility, which we may well cherish. At the same time, different interpretations of standards and how they should be applied to particular schools and students introduces sufficient "wiggle room" as to permit large numbers of students to be undereducated upon graduation.
Currently, much is being made about transferring responsibilities for education from the federal to the state levels. Notwithstanding that the majority of these responsibilities have long resided within the states, the call for a reduced federal role misses the point, particularly as far as students at risk are concerned. How is the will of the nation regarding the educational progress and performance of all its youth to be motivated when there is no national voice? To be sure, federal directives and mandates have often complicated local practices, federal programs have often not worked as they were designed to work when implemented in schools, and national priorities may have in the past been stated so generally as to appear directionless for everyday practice. It is no solution, however, to discontinue the effort to mobilize educational resources from the national perspective.
When the nation's governors met together with federal representatives to formulate education goals in 1989, a dialogue began that should be continued and broadened to include federal, state, and local bureaucrats and practitioners. This continuing dialogue should be wide-ranging but focused on developing consensual goals and objectives for educational practice. The timeline for reaching these objectives should be reasonable, but it must reflect the increasing urgency reflected by the numbers of young people who are being failed by our schools. We cannot any longer assume that someone else will serve the students we fail, since they will not, and the price of failure today is staggering. For these reasons, the objectives we set together, involving all levels of the educational infrastructure, should be regarded as the basis for a contract with our students, and the outline of such an educational contract should emanate from the principle that no student will be allowed to fail; as a nation, we must say and mean that we will not tolerate student failure.
Align Federal, State, and Local Educational Programs to Serve Students
Multiple and overlapping educational programs at various levels will continue to be important resources in zeroing out the educational failure rate, but they will need to be articulated more purposefully in the future if there is to be maximum return on all the investments that are made. Shared goals and objectives across curriculum areas and grades will help provide a framework for this articulation, but it is also important to consider ways of avoiding competing initiatives and increasing complementarity of efforts.
Federally funded demonstration programs and their evaluations, for example, should build upon ongoing state and local efforts where possible and aim to return information to local practitioners in forms they can readily use. In addition, statewide assessment initiatives, for example, should build more effectively on the national efforts being made to develop standardized profiles of student performance in various curriculum areas. Finally, district policies with respect to teacher recruitment, selection, and professional development, for example, should be designed to serve the special student-related needs of individual schools. To the extent possible, research and evaluation efforts are needed that gauge, on a periodic basis, the cross-level coherence in terms of student learning of program and policy efforts being made at the federal, state, and local levels. Exclusive emphasis on the implementation and assessment of programmatic efforts at each of these levels leads to unnecessary redundancy, confusion, and reduced impact in meeting student needs.
Maintain External Sources of Support for Schoolwide Programs (e. g., Title I)
Special-purpose funding streams that are accompanied by provisions allowing schools maximum flexibility in directing the specific uses of the educational resources that are provided are critical components of an integrated service system for students at risk. These external sources of support can most responsively be aligned with national and statewide educational priorities while at the same time fostering amelioration of the problems of individual students at the level of the school.
Upgrade Teacher Training and Staff Development Programs
Substantial funds provided by special streams at federal, state, and district levels must be earmarked for the continuous improvement of teacher training and staff development programs. If we do everything else but fail to ensure that our teachers know how to promote learning, we will have failed in our goal to provide quality education for all students.
Teacher training in the United States relies on a mixture of formal instruction and limited practice; for many teachers, the "real" training begins on the job. There is a noticeable lack of consistency of approach across teacher training institutions, and particular philosophies of instruction may dominate the curricula at different colleges and universities. More important, we have not done nearly as much as we need to do in drawing upon extant research findings and setting a research agenda to develop a reliable and coherent practice of promoting student learning. Until we do this, we will have to continue to rely exclusively on the hopes that our teacher training institutions recruit capable individuals and that our new teachers fall into good company when they take their first jobs.
Ongoing staff development is also a critical factor in promoting continuous improvements in classrooms, and the comments just made about developing meaningful, standardized teaching approaches based on solid research evidence apply here as well. In addition, we must do more to encourage the development of professional and collegial networks among teachers in our schools. The tasks to be accomplished with respect to student learning are simply too great to be left to teachers working in isolation, and we may well worry about as much as marvel at those teachers who profess to having worked with students at risk in this manner for lengthy periods.
Foster the Development of Sense of Community Among Students and Staff
The encouragement of professional networks of teacher-colleagues is the first step to accomplishing an even larger and more urgent education-related goal: the building of a sense of community among the teachers, administrators, classified staff, and students on our campuses. As described earlier in this report, we refer to community as shared vision, values, and purpose; caring, trust, and teamwork; community, participation, respect, and recognition; and, perhaps most important, incorporation of diversity. When staff and students are able to relate to one another in these ways, we may have the greatest confidence that we can stop our students from failing to learn. Alternatively, without a sense of community in our schools, the best efforts and practices of education reformers are likely to be wasted. The sustainability of reform without community is difficult to imagine, let alone achieve.
Community of the sort described above enables learning, but it also constitutes an important subject matter for students in its own right. Schools that provide the experience of community to students, e. g., allow students to find a basis of shared values with others and engage in cooperative endeavors that make best use of individual talents and abilities, are helping them acquire the skills to form the sorts of meaningful connections to others that will enhance their productivity and satisfaction throughout their lives. For students at risk in particular, membership in healthy communities that respect diversity are the keys to survival and the means to lifelong learning.
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