​Here’s what a social worker had to say:

And from a school counselor: ​

And finally, from a teacher: ​

In America, nearly one in five graduating seniors (19%) leave school with only marginal reading ability. Despite decades of investment in reading research, curricula and teacher education catalyzed by the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, we haven’t made much progress.

​Here’s what test data from the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) show:

In Arlington, there are two ways we measure high school reading ability. First, juniors take a state-required Reading SOL test at the end of 11th grade. Second, APS just began using the  HMH Growth Measure, which students in grades 3-12 will take three times each year.

In APS, 97% of white students passed the 11th grade Reading SOL test last year. The pass rate for Black and Hispanic students was 20% lower, and nearly 30 percentage points lower for students with disabilities (69% pass rate). Less than half of our English learners (45%) passed this test.

​The HMH Growth Measure categorizes performance as Far Below Level, Below Level, Approaching Level, On Level and Above Level. Looking just at “Far Below Level” and “Below Level,” here’s what the most recent testing reveals:

What does research tell us about the problem?

I spent some time earlier this year reading the research and talking with two local experts: Dr. Olivia Williams, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland and adjunct professor with the Goucher Prison Education Partnership Program; and Dr. Carrie Simkin, a UVA professor and the director of AdLit.org. Here’s what I’m learning from my reading and my conversations:

1. There’s not a lot of research on high school students who struggle with reading.

In the decades since the National Reading Panel released its report, researchers have published thousands of studies on reading. Yet when I looked online, I could find very few that looked specifically at students in grades 9-12.

I found only one literature review focused on high school reading. Olivia Williams, the author of the review, searched for studies that a) examined interventions conducted on or after 2002; b) measured reading performance both before and after the intervention; and c) studied native English-speaking, general education high school struggling readers. Only 26 studies met her criteria.

Williams notes that even this small group of studies lacked consistent terminology. What does “comprehension” mean? How are we defining “struggling reader”? In the studies she reviewed, “struggling reader” meant everything from being at least one grade level behind to failing an 8th grade state assessment to being at least five years below grade level. “There’s a difference between kids who are significantly behind and those who are just a couple of years behind,” comments Carrie Simkin. “The approaches have to be different.”


2. There’s a disconnect around phonics.
It’s commonly believed that students have mastered phonics by the time they get to high school unless they have specific diagnosed learning disabilities. There’s some research, however, that suggests this might not be true.

As Williams recounts in her review, a 2015 study of reading comprehension among 9th grade struggling readers showed no effect until the researchers looked separately at students with high- and low-level decoding skills. Doing so revealed that the students with higher-level decoding abilities did in fact make statistically significant gains in comprehension (Solis et al., 2015). This is complicated, however: Williams comments that because publishers usually design phonics materials for younger students, their use with teens can be “stigmatizing.”

I asked Carrie Simkin whether high school struggling readers are really students with learning disabilities that have gone undiagnosed. Simkin concedes this is a reasonable explanation for some students, but not all. “Maybe,” she counters, “they have an instructional disability. Our first impulse is always to look at the student, when maybe that student just didn’t get great instruction.”


3. Sustained support may be needed.
Some research suggests that short-term interventions may not be particularly effective. For example, in one study, researchers evaluated the effects of two different reading programs during an intervention year and the year that followed. There were gains in GPAs, grades and performance on state exams during the intervention year—but the benefits disappeared the year following (Somers et al., 2010). Olivia Williams notes that we can’t be sure whether this points to flaws in the interventions themselves, or whether it says something about the need to work with struggling readers over multiple years; more research is needed.


4. Executive functioning plays a role.

Recent research (not specific to high school students) demonstrates how executive functioning skills contribute to success in reading. These skills include cognitive flexibility (shifting), maintaining attention, using working memory, planning ahead, controlling impulses, and more (for a recent literature review, see Duke & Cartwright, 2021).

In one study, researchers looked at students who had poor reading comprehension despite adequate word recognition ability. The study revealed that a third of the students (36.8%) showed weaknesses in executive function but not in their component reading skills, like receptive vocabulary. In other words: for a third of the students in the study, weaknesses in executive functioning appeared to be the primary cause for their reading difficulty (Cutting & Scarborough, 2012).  

This suggests that what some students may need are interventions focused on executive functioning and the root causes of executive functioning delays or impairment, which include things like trauma, autism spectrum disorder, ADHD and depression.


5. Identity is important.

Only one of the 26 studies Olivia Williams examined factored in the social and emotional needs of high school students who struggle with reading (Frankel et al., 2015).  Williams writes: “The repeated experience of failure [by the time students reach high school] takes an emotional toll… Noncognitive aspects of academic development are important at all ages, but especially so in high school, where students with a history of “failure” may struggle with self-efficacy, motivation and engagement.”

What’s more, only one study among the 26 presented findings within the context of race, gender and class (Vaughn et al., 2015).  Williams writes: “Since we know that struggling readers are disproportionately minority, male and poor, it is worth exploring whether different reading interventions are more or less effective with these groups and whether the origins of their struggles demand different remedial attention.”

This is not just about the need to develop culturally-responsive curricula and interventions: it’s about the student’s overall experience of school. Students who are on the receiving end of any kind of “ism” in their school environment (racism, ableism, misogyny, homophobia, religious intolerance, and/or others) are less likely to be comfortable taking risks academically and more likely to be focused on shielding themselves from bias and aggression.



What can we do?

Based on my understanding of the research, here are some of my takeaways:

1. Avoid “one-size-fits-all” fixes. Carrie Simkin counsels, “Struggling readers shouldn’t be lumped together in a single, catch-all remedial class. Instead, through assessment, we can discern what kinds of support students need and, to the extent possible, treat them as individuals.” This might involve a combination of approaches, including special reading classes, tutoring services, virtual programs that students could take advantage of at home or in advisory periods, after school programs and more. Olivia Williams adds, “You have to know what’s available and have the time to plan and differentiate across reading levels.”


2. Look for authentic opportunities in core content classes. With proper support, every high school teacher can help strengthen students’ reading skills. This is particularly true when we think about “disciplinary literacy” and “academic literacy.” Disciplinary literacy involves developing the ways of thinking and communicating that are specific to a particular discipline. Academic literacy involves acquiring the skills needed to read, comprehend and learn from texts dealing with particular subjects (e.g., medical information; financial analyses).

Beyond academic and disciplinary literacy, core content teachers can help strengthen students’ general reading skills, but it has to be done with care. Carrie Simkin shares that we need to focus on “authentic opportunities” to do this—for example, decoding unfamiliar words in a biology class and understanding them by breaking them down into component parts (e.g., omnivore, ectotherm). Simkin suggests, “A literacy coach in a school can help a math or science teacher do this.”

In core classes, we can also apply universal design principles, normalizing audio access to content (and required subject-area assessments) for all students. This accommodation would ensure that students who are struggling readers can access the core content they need to know in an age-appropriate way while they are working in other settings to build their reading proficiency.


3. Build a bigger library. In reading intervention classes, teachers should use a wide range of texts that reflect student interests: it’s “literally anything they care about,” says Olivia Williams. Carrie Simkin adds, “Trust teachers’ professional judgment to curate resources. Give them time to know students and make personal connections.”

This speaks to the essential ingredient of student motivation. Hailey Love, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says, “Often when children are perceived as being behind, they’re subject to practices that are actually found to decrease motivation.”


4. Set goals with students. In reading classes, teachers should establish daily purposes for instruction that connect to week-long, month-long and year-long goals created collaboratively with students. Carrie Simkin advises, “We have to ask kids, ‘What’s your goal?’ You have to give a purpose to everything, and kids have to buy into that.”


5. Let students lead. Add in opportunities for peer-mediated group discussions of texts, invite students to generate their own questions, and create other opportunities for students to play meaningful roles in classroom activities. Research supports the positive impact these practices can have (Vaughn et al., 2015; Balfanz et al., 2004; Frey & Fisher, 2014).


6. Recruit and retain exceptional reading teachers. In one study, comprehension gains from the same intervention were twice as high in classes taught by the most effective teachers (Balfanz et al., 2004). Olivia Williams writes, “The success of a reading intervention may not lie exclusively in the strength of the intervention materials or process alone, but may also depend upon a number of outside, less-tangible factors like a teacher’s ability to maintain engagement.”


7. Design special programs that offer struggling readers unique opportunities.  “If placement in remedial reading classes is a tangible reminder of the label of deficiency and serves as an affront to identity,” Olivia Williams observes, “then students may understandably choose to disengage with remedial strategies.”

When we spoke, Williams described with enthusiasm one program in which ninth grade struggling readers tutored second- and third-grade readers who were experiencing their own reading challenges. The ninth graders, who initially reacted with “anger and outrage at being categories as remedial,” grew to view the experience as a privilege. They practiced with the children’s books they used in the program—thus bolstering their own reading skills—so that they would be prepared to work well with their tutorees. The ninth graders scored an average of two grade levels higher on the program post-test and reported higher levels of motivation and attachment to reading (Paterson & Elliott, 2006).

This example reminded me of my own million-years-ago time as a high school English teacher, working with one class of students who were reading below grade level (in some cases, far below grade level). At the time, I wondered what experience I could create for them that would really engage them and reinforce their sense of themselves as worthy and capable. I ended up asking them if they’d like to create an online magazine full of their own writing and artwork—something no other students in the school were doing. They wrote, read each other’s work, peer reviewed, rewrote, created companion artwork, and then hand coded HTML to create the magazine’s website pages. We invited friends and family members to an after school launch party (because it was 1998 and not many of them had computers and internet access at home). The experience was painful for me as a teacher (dial-up modems, only sporadic access to the school’s computer lab…) but highly motivating for my reluctant readers and writers.
Fast-forward 25 years and I’m now a school board member in Arlington. I wonder what we could design, today, that would feel like a privilege and not a punishment for our high school students who are struggling readers.

For example, could we pair reading instruction with corporate/community job shadowing and paid internship experiences? Students would be incentivized to improve their general, academic and disciplinary literacy if they had the opportunity to spend part of their time in “real world” settings where the relevance of their reading skills was immediately evident. Are there summer learning experiences we could offer that look radically different from traditional summer school, combining environmental study (involving reading) with outdoor activities? How could we engage students in the social justice work that so many of them care about and layer in reading instruction?

I’m interested in this subject because it’s creative work—but also because it’s a moral imperative. In one of the articles I read, former NPR reporter Claudio Sanchez recalled visiting a public high school in Tennessee. There, a vice principal told him, “Having a high school diploma does not mean that you can read and write.”

​The United Nations, together with most of the humans on the planet, considers literacy to be a fundamental human right. It’s the very heart of public education. We must do more—and do better.

When we left off in Part One, Shelley Moore’s student had just pointed out that this illustration doesn’t really represent inclusion.  Can you see why?

Shelley’s student pointed out that this illustration is really about assimilation, not inclusion. It subtly suggests that green is the majority and the norm to which we should aspire.

Wouldn’t a more realistic rendering look something like this?

​Another student then chimed in: doesn’t each of us have multiple identities that we’d like to see welcomed and valued in our schools?

​The challenge for us, in operating any kind of community we want to be inclusive—as public education surely must be—is this:

I have many thoughts about how we show that we value all colors, what Shelley calls “teaching to identity”—too many thoughts to list here. There are educators inside APS and in other school divisions who are doing this exceptionally well, and they are my teachers.

Our APS superintendent talks about knowing every student “by name, strength and need.” We have an obligation to identify and address the needs, to be sure. But we’d be doing our students a great injustice if we don’t also help them name and build on their individual strengths and identities, and assure them that our school communities are better because of their presence.

Last Saturday I went to Baltimore to attend an education conference and hear a talk by Shelley Moore, a Canadian educator, researcher and storyteller.

Shelley asked us to define for ourselves each of these terms:

• Exclusion
• Segregation
• Inclusion
• Integration

​Next, she showed us this slide:​

What do you think? Which one of A, B, C or D represents inclusion? Which one shows integration? How about exclusion and segregation?

(You think about it for a minute while I eat a quick snack. :) Then scroll down a little for the Big Reveal.)

What’s the difference between “exclusion” and “segregation”? According to Shelley, exclusion is when the people inside the circle decide that individuals can’t be part of their community. Segregation happens when the people inside the circle decide that a particular group (or groups) don’t belong.

Shelley distinguishes between “integration” and “inclusion” in this way: integration happens when someone decides that it’s a good idea for those outside the circle to be brought in—but it’s often not by their own choice. She says it’s like a mandatory all-staff meeting: you know you have to attend, but when you get to the meeting you’ll likely sit next to your closest co-workers and you may not be all that interested in the updates from other teams or departments (particularly if you’re thinking, “This meeting could have been an email!”)

FYI, this tendency to prefer the company of your own group is perfectly natural, and at times necessary and comforting: Shelley calls it “congregation” when we are birds of a feather flocking together. (As a side question, Shelley asks: do our schools offer spaces and opportunities for congregation?)

Inclusion is different from integration because instead of thinking “I have to,” we think “I want to.”  That’s why the community in Shelley’s top circle looks different from the one on the lower right.


Except… after she’d shared this slide dozens if not hundreds of times, one of Shelley’s graduate students told her, “Shelley, I don’t think that this diagram [the top circle] is inclusion either.” And once her student pointed out a few things, Shelley realized the student was absolutely right.

Can you figure out why? There’s more than one change Shelley made; I’ll share them in Part Two next week.

 Good teachers and school leaders routinely work to connect the curriculum to their students' local community. "Place-based education" leverages local heritage, cultures, landscapes, opportunities and experiences to make learning more relevant and engaging.

Often this takes the form of interdisciplinary projects involving field work or culminating in field trips. For older students, it might be service learning or internships.

But there's a more radical form of place-based learning, one that dissolves the traditional distinctions between "school" and "community." Teaching and learning are happening in spaces shared by local businesses, cultural institutions and other organizations--to everyone's benefit. 

​Here are nine examples from across the country:

(if you are looking at this on a phone, I apologize that the captions are covering up the pictures...)
​
Examples like these inspire me. I think about the incredible assets and opportunities we have here in Arlington and I wonder: what kinds of programs and partnerships could we create in the future?

For instance, (and purely hypothetically), what about a high school program with a focus on  international relations, offered in partnership with the State Department's Foreign Service Institute, USAID (Crystal City office), IDS International, the International Foundation for Electoral Systems and/or GMU's Schar School of Policy and Government?

While we're dreaming, how about a healthcare-focused high school program, where students are learning at INOVA, Virginia Hospital Center, and/or one of the many national associations headquartered in the county (the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the National Council on Aging, the National Diabetes Association, the Asthma and Allergy Foundation, and more)?

Students interested in the environment could enroll in a program that places them at the Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, the EPA (Crystal City office), the Student Conservation Association, or Trout Unlimited.

In the area of aerospace, engineering and national defense we have in Arlington Raytheon, BAE, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, CNA and the Office of Naval Research. 

Performing arts: Signature Theater, Synetic Theater, Avant Bard, the Museum of Contemporary Art and more.

Education: Council for Exceptional Children, National Board of Professional Teaching Standards, Communities in Schools, National Science Teachers Association, Organization for Autism Research, National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies and more.

Media: PBS, WETA, Politico, Axios, WJLA, and Arlington Independent Media. 

This is by no means a complete list--but you get the idea. 

Local governments are grappling with rising commercial vacancy rates. Companies are feeling their way forward in the new world of hybrid and remote work. School districts are looking for ways to reimagine teaching and learning so that students are engaged and ready to thrive in their lives after graduation.

I think there's an opportunity here. If schools co-locate with organizations that can contribute real-world, place-based learning experiences, could we use our urban spaces more effectively and imaginatively? Would companies feel a different and deeper sense of commitment to our community, and less tempted to relocate? 

​I'm intrigued by the possibilities, and I'd be curious to learn what you think, too.

Over the winter break, I’ve been thinking a lot about our APS students who are ready for advanced work. These students have been on my mind because of a recent report-out from the Gifted Services Advisory Committee and the recommendation currently under consideration by the School Board to expand intensified course offerings in middle school.

During my campaign and in my first year as a board member, I’ve talked a lot about every student getting the right level of support and challenge. This includes students who are testing and performing above grade level: they deserve their year's worth of academic growth, too, and to argue otherwise would mean accepting the idea that public education can only serve certain kinds of kids. I don’t believe any of us are well-served by a scarcity mindset.

So, how do we educate students who are ready for advanced work? (Note that I use the term “capable of advanced work” instead of “gifted” intentionally; these are separate but often related groups.) In broad strokes, the approaches have included separate magnet schools; acceleration by skipping grades or particular subjects; separate classes within a school; ability grouping within a general ed classroom; and personalized instruction. It’s a question with a complicated history and no perfect solution (yet).

I was one of these students and experienced all of the approaches mentioned above. I’m the parent of a student who craves more challenge and has on more than one occasion pleaded to be homeschooled or attend private school. And I’m a former teacher.

​
In 1992, I was a first year high school teacher and in my school system, like most across the country, tracking was accepted practice.

​“Tracking” was the pre-Harry Potter version of the Sorting Hat. Teachers and guidance counselors determined whether a student should be sorted into a vocational track, a college track, or honors-level coursework.

In my first year I taught two sections of “Tech Prep 10” and three sections of “College Prep 9” English. The Tech Prep English curriculum was very different and emphasized the kinds of real-world reading and writing tasks that students going straight into the workforce would be most likely to perform: interpreting lease agreements and employment contracts; filling out applications for jobs and bank accounts; writing resumes and cover letters.

Leaders in our school system launched Tech Prep with good intentions: the idea was to make the curriculum more relevant to students’ lives after high school. The problem, of course, was that the adults in charge got to determine each student’s life trajectory before they’d turned 14, and that often these decisions were colored by implicit (or sometimes explicit) bias.

In the 1980s and ‘90s, groups like the National Governors Association, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Children’s Defense Fund rallied to end tracking, correctly arguing that it perpetuated racial and economic inequity by setting up segregated school experiences within single school buildings.

Mixed-ability classrooms then became the norm. Teachers were tasked with meeting a wider range of student interests, abilities and needs, as had been the case decades before in the days of one-room, mixed-age schoolhouses. In modern mixed-ability classrooms, “differentiated instruction” (which had always been a part of teaching, even in the days of tracking) became even more important.
​
In her book The Differentiated Classroom: Responding to the Needs of All Learners, Carol Ann Tomlinson writes that teachers who excel at differentiated instruction

​There’s a whole body of literature describing the strategies that teachers can use to do this well; three overriding considerations are training, class size and time.

I mention training because most often, teachers themselves weren’t taught this way. In their undergraduate schools of education, professors may have talked about differentiated instruction, but they weren’t modeling it in a large lecture hall. And once they’ve started teaching, educators’ ongoing professional learning is all too often a one-size-fits-all affair.

Class size is a factor because it’s harder to be a “student of your students” when your average high school class size is 29 (California) versus 15-16 (Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire).

And last but not least, teachers need the time to design differentiated learning experiences and continually assess student progress. But in reality, teachers’ time to plan and collaborate with colleagues on this most essential task is often insufficient, because there are too many other competing demands.


Perhaps due to the challenges cited above, or the top-down pressures created by federally-mandated school accountability and accreditation measures, ability grouping is again on the rise, though in different forms than 20th century tracking. These new forms of ability grouping are more flexible and (ideally) give students and families more say--but they still draw criticism. The debate about how to meet the full range of student needs continues.

Short of a serious overhaul of our Industrial-era public education system (which I’ve written about before, here and here), we need to continually question our assumptions and fine-tune our practices. Former school principal and author Peter DeWitt says it well:

It’s Friday morning, about nine hours after I wrapped a five hour School Board meeting and the tail end of week-long business trip (currently on Amtrak coming home).

If you asked me this week, “How’s work?” I would reply, “Hard.” I have no doubt you’ve felt the same at one point or another in your adult life.

But what do we mean when we say our work is “hard”?  And why did I get so nerdy-excited in my Uber an hour ago when I thought, “OMG! That is so connected to last night’s School Board meeting!”?

What we mean by “hard work”

First off, let me say that what I am about to write has some privilege attached to it. For many people, “hard work” involves hazardous conditions, needing to work multiple jobs because their labor is undervalued, or not being able to find work at all.

For those of us who are fortunate enough to have a safe, stable job that pays a living wage, “hard work” usually means some combination of three things:

1. The knowledge and skills needed to do the job. Sometimes our work is hard because we feel ill-equipped to do it. For example, in the job I took last year at TED I create online courses for adult learners. I know a lot about instructional design and educational media, but I have never had to film anyone in a studio. Words cannot convey how little A-Game I brought to this task. Fortunately, I found freelancers who are helping and schooling me. What once seemed overwhelming is now really exciting.

For managers and leaders, this means making sure your employees have the professional learning they need to do their job well and feel like they are learning and growing. For employees, it means speaking up to ask for the training and resources you need.

2. The time we need to do our jobs well (and live the rest of our lives). Work can be hard because there’s simply too much of it at any given time. Sometimes we are tasked with too much, and other times it’s because we overcommit ourselves. (My husband and I talk about my overscheduling All. The. Time.)

​This can be painfully obvious, as in “You are now expected to create eight reports a week instead of five.” But often it’s more subtle and accumulates over time—we find ourselves logging in an hour earlier, dining al desko, taking on more work to be a “team player” during a hiring freeze.

3. The emotional labor that work requires. Researchers define “emotional labor” as the work of managing one’s own emotions that is required by certain professions. Think about flight attendants, who are expected to be friendly and respectful to passengers even in stressful situations. I include in “emotional labor” the significant emotional freight that’s inherent in certain kinds of work: for example, ICU nursing, human rights law, the ministry.

If we care about our colleagues and the people we serve in our jobs, then a certain amount of emotional labor comes with the territory. We run into trouble, however, when we pile on additional, unnecessary emotional labor for others. Office politics. Dysfunctional communication. A hostile work environment.

I once joined a nonprofit as its executive director and discovered that its financial health had been wildly overstated during the hiring process. Because my predecessor hadn’t been able to bring herself to conduct the necessary layoffs I had to do it, two months in and a week after my father died. It was one of the hardest times in my life. There was no question the layoffs had to be done, but it mattered a lot to me how it was done. I had to combine a dispassionate acceptance of our finances with a lot of compassionate, honest and vulnerable communication with my team.


When I talk to people about how their work is “hard,” most often they tell me about the emotional labor they’re performing. It’s been my experience that we’ll go the extra mile to upskill or take on an extra task, but it’s harder for us to accept feeling undervalued, patronized or taken for granted.

I’ve been a perpetrator and a victim of this. [Note to self: need to watch a little less Law & Order.]  For example, last December I wrote about my initial impressions as a School Board Member-Elect.

I had only good intentions when I wrote this piece: were were coming out of a tense time when the relationship between the community and the School Board had been badly damaged. I felt (and still do) that there was room for improvement on both sides to communicate more effectively.

But in writing about the School Board as an institution, I unintentionally harmed the individual humans who serve in this role and who were still grappling with (and I think it’s fair to say “recovering from”) the tremendous emotional labor of the previous year and a half. (Whether you agree with the decisions they made during that time—I think we can all agree that the emotional labor involved was significant.) In short, I ended up creating extra, unnecessary emotional labor for them.

For that, I am sorry. The job is hard enough as it is.


Why I’m thinking about last night’s School Board meeting

I see application of what I’ve written above in so many parts of my School Board work—last night’s meeting is a fine example. For instance:

Staff retention and engagement.  Last night several APS employees spoke during public comment. I am reflecting on the question: How can we make their work “less hard”?

• Are we doing all we can to provide them with the knowledge, skills, resources and time to do their jobs well?
• Are we equipping them to perform the emotional labor that’s inherent in their work and not creating extra, unnecessary emotional labor for them?
• How can we navigate the advent of collective bargaining—new territory for all of us—in a way that allows us to communicate institutionally/collectively and human-to-human?

Consequential votes. Last night APS Facilities staff presented the proposed schematic design for the Career Center. This is a significant and costly project, and one that’s understandably emotional for the school community involved.

• How do School Board members acquire and analyze the necessary information? How do we respect the expertise of APS staff and use a “critical friend” lens to achieve the best possible governance?
• How do we make decisions dispassionately (looking as objectively as possible at the data, weighing the needs across the system now and in the future) and compassionately?

My first consequential vote as a School Board member was to pause the VLP program last February. I’d been assigned to be the VLP School Board liaison and had gotten to know several of these families pretty well during my first six weeks. For me, this vote was as emotional as the layoffs I’d had to make in a previous work life.

Restorative practices. Gradis White talked last night about restorative work with students in our schools. I think we can apply this in other areas, too.

Are we taking the time to understand the root causes of other people’s statements and actions?

When tough calls need to be made—whether it’s a mandatory student suspension, a grievance  or a consequential School Board vote—are we taking steps to follow up with those affected and repair relationships that may have been damaged so that we can interact productively in the future?


As a public servant, I can’t make everyone happy. But I can aim to avoid missteps that create unnecessary “hard work” for myself and others.

How much influence should parents have over what happens in their children’s schools?

You already know this question has sparked some lively discussion across our state and in the national news.

And it doesn’t have a simple answer.

At one extreme: an old-school approach. Parents are “informed” more often than “engaged” as collaborators. Parents are invited to support the school in certain limited ways: as a room parent, a chaperone, a fundraiser.

I don’t like this approach because I know parents have more to offer and that schools are stronger when parents play a larger role. Research tells us that schools with strong family engagement are 10 times more likely to improve student learning outcomes, and that it matters as much as rigorous curriculum and high-quality school leadership.

At the other extreme, however, is an approach that feels equally untenable to me: parents who feel like they can—and must—weigh in on nearly every facet of their school’s operation. This approach is cumbersome, advantages those parents with the time and skills to advocate, telegraphs mistrust of school staff, and often has unintended negative consequences for the students we’re trying to educate.

For example, a new state law in Tennessee requires educators to catalog every book in every school. Some teachers who have built up sizable classroom libraries are opting to dismantle them because the cataloguing directive seems too daunting; it’s Tennessee’s students—only one-third of whom are reading at a “proficient” level—who will suffer.

So how do we strike the right balance? To help guide my own thinking, I’ve been spending some time with the PTA’s National Standards for Family-School Partnerships. There are several national organizations that have produced guidance about family engagement, but I am partial to the PTA’s work because it is a nonpartisan group with well-established governance regulations and financial transparency.

Just this year the PTA updated its Standards for Family-School Partnerships. The PTA’s iterative process involved more than 600 local and state PTA leaders, members, researchers and administrators.

​Each of the six standards has related goals and performance indicators. You can find the full text on the PTA website, but in brief here are the standards:

If you dig into what changed when the PTA updated its standards this year, you’ll find the following revisions, which feel very significant to me:

1. A shift from “opportunities to volunteer” to “opportunities to contribute”—signaling that parents have more to offer than simply filling volunteer slots. (But keep doing that, too!)
2. Where the standards previously acknowledged “economic barriers to participation,” they now speak to other linguistic and cultural barriers.
3. The standards now talk about co-developing communication expectations and protocols with families and staff.
4. Adding clear statements about eliminating bias in family engagement approaches and encouraging leadership among historically marginalized groups.
5. A shift from “informing” families about students’ academic progress to partnering with families to ensure two-way communication about students’ strengths and needs and to set goals.
6. Engaging families in decision making in ways that go beyond surveys. Tracking data and filling gaps for representative input and power in decisions so that diverse perspectives are considered.
7. Describing in more detail how school-community partnerships could be conceived and managed to benefit students and staff, including mapping community assets and needs, and aligning community partners to school improvement planning.

In short, what I see (that I like) in these standards is a shift towards inclusiveness, collaboration and sharing power.

​But what does “sharing power” between schools and families entail?

I think it means drawing upon the strengths of the various players. Parents know their students in a way that teachers can’t. They know what may be particularly motivating or challenging for their kids, and this knowledge is gold in the hands of an interested teacher. Educators know the research-based approaches that will help all kinds of students move from Point A to Point B. They also have additional context: they’ve worked with dozens (or hundreds, or thousands) of students who may have benefitted from similar instructional strategies. 

Educators also commit to serve the greater good—that means doing what’s right for all kids, not just what I think is right for my kid. Think about that: the significant work it takes and the incredible promise of every child feeing safe, valued, appropriately supported and intellectually challenged.  No parent should ever have the right, in the name of “sharing power” or “parental control,” to take that away from another parent’s child.

Creating effective family-school partnerships is complex and increasingly contentious work. But just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile. The answer is not to double down on the old-school model that shuts families out or boxes them in. Instead, maybe we can create spaces where we can talk about this partnership model. Maybe in your parent group or school staff meeting—or better yet, all together—you can explore questions like these:

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• How can we learn about and meet families’ communication preferences?
• How can parents improve the ways they communicate with school staff?
• What would it look like if teachers, families and students worked together to set social, emotional and academic goals?
• What are some new and potentially promising ways that school staff could get to know students and families and their strengths?
• What work do we need to do (all around) to recognize and eliminate biases?
• How could we give families and students a voice in decisions that affect children? What kinds of decisions? What does “a voice” mean to us?

I’d love to hear how you would answer these questions. Please reach out. I’m interested as a parent, a former PTA leader, and as a School Board member—because of course I believe that what the PTA has outlined for family-school partnerships is relevant for family-school district partnerships, too.

At Harvard, Rose founded the Laboratory for the Science of Individuality. In 2016, he combined his personal story and his research in The End of Average--a book that rocked my world. (And no, that’s not hyperbole.) It’s changed the way I think about education.

​Rose opens the book with a problem that puzzled the U.S. Air Force in the 1950s: multiple, mysterious accidents that could not be explained by pilot error or mechanical malfunction in the aircraft.

They eventually discovered the cause: the cockpits had been designed using the average range of 10 body measurements from a population of approximately 4,000 pilots (e.g. height, thigh circumference, arm length, etc.). But zero pilots were “average” across all ten measurements. If a cockpit was designed for an average pilot, the cockpit fit no pilot. So the Air Force banned the average and forced jet manufacturers to design “to the edges,” meaning a cockpit that would be adjustable for even the tallest, shortest, thickest and thinnest.

What does this mean for education?

Think of a classroom or school designed for “the average.” It would likely feature

• One style and size of student desks
• Lots of whole-group instruction
• One way for students to demonstrate what they know—e.g., a multiple-choice end-of-unit test that every student must take
• Seat time: a standard number of hours all students must log to get a class credit.
• One-dimensional, high-level reporting against an average: “I am a B student in math because I am above average.”
• You’re gifted. Or not.
• Rigid tracking systems where students are sorted based on performance relative to an average (that is, you are “honors track” or “remedial track” in most or all of your classes)
• Standard operating procedures: all students are expected to eat at an assigned table in the cafeteria, walk silently in a straight line, and take notes in a certain way.

​This was Todd Rose’s K-12 school experience (and maybe yours, too). It wasn’t until college, when he discovered an honors program built around inquiry and the Socratic Method, that he felt inspired and challenged. Rose says, “I gradually realized that if I could just figure out how to improve the fit between my environment and myself, I might be able to turn my life around.”

In The End of Average, Rose explores the ways that none of us is really “average.” Instead, he argues, each of us has “jaggedness”— a unique set of strengths and weaknesses that all too often get obscured when we use overly simplistic, one-dimensional measurements.

Here's an example. Which man is bigger?

​Here's another example: Which 9th grade English student is smarter?

​Rose says, “If we want to know your intelligence, we give you an IQ test that is supposed to tap a range of abilities, but then we merge that into a single score. Imagine two young students have the same IQ score of 110 — the exact same number. One has great spatial abilities but poor working memory, and the other has the exact opposite jaggedness. If we just want to rank them then we could say the students are more or less the same in intelligence because they have the same aggregate scores. But if we wanted to really understand who they are as individuals enough to nurture their potential, we can’t ignore the jaggedness.”

"Right now because we believe in the myth of average, we believe that opportunity means providing equal access to standardized educational experiences,” Rose says in a Harvard interview. “However, since we know that nobody is actually average, it is obvious that equal access to standardized experiences is not nearly enough… it requires equal fit between individuals and their educational environments.”

What would a school or classroom committed to equal fit include?

• Flexible seating
• Dynamic grouping of students based on the level of support they need to master a particular skill or topic during that day/week/month
• Multiple ways for students to demonstrate what they know
• Multiple styles of instruction: project-based learning; workplace apprenticeships; virtual learning; etc.
• Self-assessment and reflection: helping students understand their own strengths and weaknesses
• Multiple categories of giftedness
• More nuanced assessment and reporting. Instead of “I am a B student in math because I am above average,” a student could say, “I worked on these six math standards this quarter and here’s information about how well I understand each one.”
• Flexible pacing: students can take the time they need to master a particular concept or skill. As soon as they’re ready for something more challenging, they move on.
• Advancement based on competency instead of seat time.

School doesn’t have to feel like a 1950s Air Force fighter jet cockpit. Indeed, it can’t. For Rose, this is a social justice issue, it’s an economic imperative, and it’s deeply personal. “I know what it feels like, at least in my context, when you don't fit into the current system. Like the kid who is always feeling … worthless. And I also know what it means to find your fit—to actually find your potential and your calling in life. It leaves me with this sense that from the so-called bottom to the top of our academic system, there's an enormous amount of talent and potential and contributions waiting to tapped.”

A few months before she died unexpectedly at age 61, Texas educator Rita Pierson gave a TED Talk and recalled a colleague telling her, "They don't pay me to like the kids." Her response: "Kids don't learn from people they don't like." 

We’ve known for quite some time that positive teacher-student relationships boost students’ academic achievement. We’ve always assumed that this is because students feel safe to take risks with someone they trust and are motivated to do their best work.

Research published earlier this month, however, explores a different explanation for the higher test scores and GPAs in classrooms where relationships are strongest: Are these students learning more because they are being taught more effectively? That is: do positive teacher-student relationships actually change the way that teachers teach?

It turns out the answer is “Yes.” This is some of the first research that really examines the effect of positive teacher-student relationships on teachers themselves.

The study recently published in the journal Learning and Instruction focused on evaluation data gathered over two school years for Missouri educators teaching grades 4-10. The researchers conclude:

Positive teacher-student relationships lead primary and secondary teachers to move effectively implement three complex teaching practices examined in this study: cognitive engagement in the content, problem solving and critical thinking, and instructional monitoring… teachers are more likely to check in, monitor, scaffold, provide more constructive feedback to students, have greater confidence in their students’ abilities and use better scaffolding strategies for critical thinking.

The researchers were also able to test “the direction of effect,” meaning they were able to show that the positive teacher-student relationships predict and precede higher-quality instruction. This was true regardless of the teacher’s years of experience, the percentage of economically disadvantaged students at the school, and the school-level proficiency rate on state tests.

Why do I bring this up right now? Because we’re heading into a new school year, and we would do well to spend some time in the first weeks attending to relationships. I don’t mean the traditional “fill out this questionnaire, Back To School Night” kinds of interactions: I mean prioritizing and investing the time it takes for teachers to deeply know their students, and vice versa. This investment will pay dividends all year long. Last August, I wrote about what this could look like. At the time I was thinking about its effect on students, but this recent research now has me considering its effect on teachers, too.

When I was a teacher a million years ago, conventional wisdom held that teachers should be especially stern the first few weeks of school. Lay down the law. Demonstrate that you are in control. This was especially true if you were a 23-year-old teaching high school students just seven or eight years younger than you.
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There’s no question that teachers need classroom management skills. But they also need relationship skills, and the time to apply them, which I believe create the conditions for a well-functioning classroom.

Good relationships improve student learning. And it just may be that teachers have as much to gain as their students in the bargain.