​Of course you don't live in a small, fictional country, and nobody is testing your yard or your blood for lead levels. But something very similar is happening in the state of Virginia to our public schools.

Recently, the Virginia Board of Education approved a new School Performance and Support Framework to evaluate how well schools are meeting academic expectations. The new Framework replaces the current accreditation system, which critics have charged is not rigorous or transparent enough.  The Framework will  rate each school as Distinguished, On Track, Off Track, or Needs Intensive Support. The Department of Education will publish these ratings next fall. School divisions with a certain percentage of schools rated "Needs Intensive Support" will be required to enter into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the state. 

Whether or not you believe we need a more rigorous accountability system, you've got to admit (I hope) that we need one that's fully built. 

What assessments will the state use to gauge academic performance? Well, some of them exist today but some of them haven't been created yet. Even the most familiar, the Standards of Learning, will be changing this year as new standards for Math and English Language Arts have rolled out. (It's worth noting that Virginia is introducing the new math standards and the new math SOL test in the same school year; normally, teachers get a year to familiarize themselves with the new standards and the related test rolls in the following year.) 

What funding and resources will the state be providing to schools that are rated Off Track or Needs Improvement? We don't know yet.

What will the Department of Education put in the MOU it will require for the lowest performing schools and districts? No one has seen it yet. 

It's a little like not knowing if you're actually going to earn your college degree because the university hasn't figured out its degree requirements--even though you're starting your senior year and you have less than 12 months before you're supposed to graduate. 

Or like the lead testing in my imaginary country. Similar to the less affluent neighborhoods in my example, there are schools and school divisions in the Commonwealth that will be disproportionately affected by the new academic accountability system. 

Under the new system, students who are English Learners will "count" towards a school's overall accountability rating after just three semesters. Federal law requires that school divisions test all EL students after three semesters, but until now in Virginia we've used those tests to check for growth of content knowledge, not mastery of the content. After just three semesters, an EL student's science SOL score may say more about the student's understanding of English than their understanding of the science content being assessed. For this reason, many states that count EL scores after three semesters will test students in their native language; Virginia does not allow this.*

In APS, 27% of our students are English Learners. The state average is 9%. In several of our schools, EL students comprise 50% or more of the student body (Carlin Springs and Randolph are highest at 75% and 59% respectively). What will those schools' ratings look like when compared to schools like Jamestown (2% EL) or Discovery (4% EL)?  EL students and families are also often economically disadvantaged. The extra support that more affluent families tap into, like private tutoring, disability screening, occupational and speech therapies, and more, are beyond the reach of many immigrant families, which exacerbates the gaps across and within school communities.

In Arlington, most of our school funding is locally generated, with the state kicking in just 14% of the school division's revenue. In other, less affluent counties in the Commonwealth, the state contributes two-thirds or more of the school division's operating funds. 

I imagine that if the state does not appropriate additional, dedicated funds to support schools labelled Off Track or Needs Intensive Support, school divisions like Arlington will figure out another way to finance the extra staff and resources we'd need for these schools. But what if you are Lee County in Southwest Virginia, and 70% of your education funding comes from the state? Or the City of Petersburg, which is 63% funded by the state? (It's worth noting that Petersburg schools have been operating under an MOU with the Virginia Department of Education since 2004. The state's involvement for 20 years has not yielded significant improvement.) 

I'm all for accountability (just like I'm all for lead-free neighborhoods). There are parts of the new school accountability framework that I believe could be beneficial. And in our country, state, and community, we do need to act with greater urgency to close chronic opportunity and achievement gaps that can have lifelong consequences for English Learners, students with disabilities, and our Black and Brown students. 

But "getting the lead out", if the solution is not crafted with care, is in a best-case scenario blundering and ineffective. In the worst case, it will do real damage to those we had ultimately set out to serve.



*The issue of when and how to test English Learners on subject area content knowledge is complex, and (at least in my study of it) does not lend itself to blanket guidelines that dictate how "all" EL students should be assessed. Variables include the language in which instruction was delivered; whether a student is fully literate in their native language, which is not the case for many students whose formal education was limited or interrupted before coming to the US; a student's English language proficiency (e.g., are they at WIDA Level 1 or WIDA Level 3?); and more. It's also not clear to me that a blanket "number of semesters" rule makes sense. Three semesters may well be too soon for some EL students' scores to "count" as a measure of how well a school is equipping students with content knowledge. Eleven semesters (or five and a half years) feels to me like it would be too long in many cases.

I note in WestEd's 2019 independent evaluation of APS's English Learner program that a large percentage (44%) of middle school English Learners had been classified as English Learners for five or more years, and a large percentage (40%) had been English Learners since Kindergarten. Since that time, of course, APS has made significant changes and investments in English Learner instruction as part of its 2019 settlement agreement with the Department of Justice. 
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I’d been a high school teacher for four years when I determined it was time to earn my masters degree. I was deciding between UVA and NYU in the spring of 1996 when I answered a long-distance phone call (remember those??) from a professor named Alan Howard. “I’m calling to recruit you,” he told me.

Two years earlier, Alan had started a masters program in American Studies within the UVA English Department. The program required one intensive year and aimed to equip graduates with marketable skills as much as intellectual ballast. It also emphasized production of information and resources for public good: rather than writing theses that might be read by half a dozen people and then archived in the university library, we would be learning how to build websites to publish our work and we’d serve as interns with local museums, historical societies, and arts organizations. Alan’s motto was “We DO American Studies.”

I was flattered to be recruited and I accepted his invitation, joining four other grad students for what would be quite literally a life-changing experience.

Our summer reading list included George Landow’s Hypertext, which explored how the internet—and more specifically, clickable hypertext links—would change the way humans construct and consume information. Four decades later, it’s almost impossible for us to remember a time when we couldn’t follow links, but at the time it felt (and was) groundbreaking. In Alan’s American Studies program, I hand-coded websites instead of turning in papers for my courses. This included the courses Alan himself designed and taught, which explored the American West, Washington, DC, and the 1930s.

My year in the American Studies program taught me new ways to think, new ways to understand America and its place in the world, and new ways to produce and share information and ideas. When I returned to high school teaching, it changed the way I taught and how I thought about assessment. Later, it enabled me to land a job at PBS in its fledgling Interactive Learning division, where we used the internet for then-revolutionary purposes like virtual interactive field trips, online professional learning, and on-demand video streaming.

I kept in touch with Alan after I left UVA. He helped me teach HTML to my ninth graders so that they could publish an online magazine of their writing. He followed my work at PBS with great interest and shared his own work, which after retirement from UVA included establishing a scholarship for nurse practitioners in southwest Virginia and using technology to connect and support nurses in Appalachia.

He came to my wedding and I went to his retirement celebration. When I was considering moving to Arlington, he put me in touch with his son, whose children attended Arlington Public Schools. He talked with my husband, who at the time worked in real estate and construction, about housing developments that were springing up around his beautiful cattle farm just outside Charlottesville.

Two weeks ago I learned from his daughter-in-law that Alan had passed away. He died at home on his farm, and he was 85 years old.


I’ve been blessed in my life to have had some really wonderful teachers, and Alan was one of the best.

He understood that there are all kinds of things humans can know, and only a fraction of them are things that we value in our schools. Several times during that year, Alan invited me and my classmates to visit his farm, where I got the sense that his accomplishments as a farmer meant just as much, if not more, to him than his degrees from Princeton and Stanford. In his obituary, his family wrote: “He felt equally at home with William Faulkner and John Deere.”

He understood that there are all kinds of ways for humans to demonstrate and share what they know, way beyond the papers and standardized tests that we prize in education. Alan explained to my classmates and me that the UVA English Department had examined whether high scores on the Verbal section of the GRE predicted the long-term academic and professional success of its graduate program alumni: according to Alan, they discovered that the only thing correlated with high GRE scores was a greater likelihood of mental breakdown. (This led us, over the course of the year, to warn each other that we were having a “High Verbal” kind of day.)

He demanded a lot from himself as a teacher and believed that we should demand more of our systems of education. After single-handedly launching and running the American Studies program for five years, he asked the English Department to evaluate it and make recommendations for its improvement. He contributed a Self Study Narrative to that evaluation, in which he wrote:

I came to believe in 1994 that the English Department had reached a critical juncture in its graduate program: it had passed from an institution unwittingly accumulating the world's largest stock of unemployed Ph.D.s and ABDs and had become a knowing producer of unemployable graduate students in English. Unable to accept what one of my colleagues termed the "recreational Ph.D.," I determined to create a terminal M.A. in English that would re-tool bright and capable students for productive work outside the academy.

​…[the] Humanities had—by their resistance to public accountability and their inability to articulate the social value of their enterprise, by their inability to imagine the undergraduate and graduate curricula as anything more than the means to produce even more unemployable academics, and by their inability to engage in meaningful examination and reform of their own institutions, programs and curricula—essentially defaulted on its traditional obligations and filed for bankruptcy.

None of this let students off the hook, however: he expected us to own our own learning. Early in the program, I met with him in his office and he asked me what I thought I wanted to study. I had no clue, and I blathered extemporaneously about a dozen or so topics that seemed like they could be fun to investigate. He gave me what can only be described as a world-class side eye, took a long drag on his cigarette, blew smoke in the direction of the window, and said drily, “Then I can’t help you.” The meeting was over.

We need more Alan Howards in education: people with high expectations of themselves and their students, who reject complacency and catalyze change. He wrote, “Like a shark, the Program must keep moving just to stay alive. Course content can, to some degree, be rolled forward; but in very fundamental ways, it has to be new and different each year. Both the students' work and my own is in plain sight. Neither of us can simply repeat what someone else did last year because it’s already been done! And this takes a good deal of energy on everyone's part.”

Alan’s sense of responsibility to his students—his conviction that he needed to push himself, to get it right for us—is accountability in its finest form. It’s not at all the same thing as the accountability peddled by many policy makers and measured in things like Virginia’s new school accountability standards—more about that in my next post.

I’m sure that after nearly four decades as a professor, Alan’s legacy includes a stack of scholarly books and articles. I don’t know much about that, because I never read them and he never talked about them. I think he believed his students were his real legacy: “As I explain to them, they are their own best work, and they are uniquely qualified to tell you whether or not it proved a job worth doing.”

In the spring of 2007, while I was counting down the weeks until the birth of my oldest child, millions of other people were counting down the weeks until they could get their hands on this new thing called an iPhone.

I’d had a Blackberry when I was employed full-time, but when I left that job, had a baby, and switched to freelance work, I wasn’t convinced the juice was worth the financial squeeze. My flip phone and I stayed together for seven more years.

But in 2014 I relented, and right away, I was hooked. Check my email from anywhere? Text with babysitters twice as fast? Take pictures, edit them, and post on social media? What took me so long?

Still, I was acutely conscious of my device habits: I was pretty careful about my kids’ screen time and I wanted to be sure I was modeling moderation. I remember keeping my phone out of reach during certain periods of the day, and intentionally stating why I was using my phone if I had to interrupt my time with them: “I need to look up directions to the restaurant where we’re meeting Grandma and Grandpa,” or “I need to check for one email about a work deadline.”

Ten years on in 2024, things are different. When my kids stagger out of their rooms in the morning, I’m likely to be on my phone trying to finish the NYT Spelling Bee game or reading the news on the NPR app. When I cook I’m listening to Apple Music and following a recipe on my phone. Family conversations and outings are punctuated by pulling out phones to fact-check each other, pull up trivia, or sink periodically into our own texts, games, videos, and other diversions. It’s not uncommon for all four of us to be in a room together, each on their own device, in companionable silence.

I find this unsettling. Is it different from when I grew up and we’d all be at home, but each doing our own thing? When I’m on my phone, do I seem less accessible to other people than if I were reading a magazine or writing in a notebook or watching TV on a TV set?

Research conducted last year suggests that on average, American adults spend four and a half hours each day on their phones, up from three hours just a year before. We check our phones an average of 144 times each day, and 75% of us check our phones within five minutes of receiving a notification. A third of all US adults report that they go online “almost constantly,” up 10% from 2015.

This is the context for “Away for the Day” phone policies that school districts are implementing. APS will introduce an “Away for the Day” policy for students in all of its schools starting in August.  (Previously, some administrators and staff members had established an “Away for the Day” rule in certain schools and classrooms, but it was not standard practice.)

Teachers are tired of competing with phones for their students’ attention: Mitchell Rutherford, a veteran Arizona science teacher, recently made headlines when he left the profession, citing frustration with smartphones in school. He said, “It’s kind of like the frog in the boiling water. I guess it’s always been increasing as an issue. And then finally, I was like: Oh, we’re boiling now.” During the last school board meeting here in Arlington, one teacher gave public comment that phones have become “a black hole for brain power in every classroom.”

It's hard to argue with the idea that phones can be a seductive distraction: after all, haven’t they seduced most of us at this point?

In an ideal world, we’d teach students how to exercise good judgment about when and why they’re on their phones. We’d acknowledge that digital platforms can provide important information and social support for individuals who may be marginalized in their physical communities. An outright ban in schools wouldn’t be the answer: rather, we’d help students self-regulate and reflect on their relationship with digital devices and content.

The arguments against this approach include the “David and Goliath” concern that immensely powerful companies have created platforms and algorithms that are purposely addictive and undermine our volition. It’s also been noted that the executive functioning skills necessary for effective self-regulation aren’t fully developed in the adolescent brain.

I have a third concern: Who is going to teach and model this sound judgment and self-regulation? What will we do about the cognitive dissonance that comes up when young people hear us talk about their phone dependency while remaining oblivious to our own?

This is a school problem and a social problem. (If you agree that our relationships with our phones are becoming problematic, which I think is a fair assessment.) I’m intrigued by communities that are taking a holistic view of the issue and designing comprehensive solutions. In New York City, for example, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene considers unregulated social media to be a “digital toxin” and states: “We take a classic public health approach that emphasizes regulations to minimize the production of the toxin, guidance to the public to reduce exposure, and support to individuals to build skills that buffer the toxin’s effects.”  
 
The City’s public health response to social media (which is a piece of, but not equivalent to, problematic phone use) includes encouraging families to delay the initiation of smartphone use until children are at least 14 years old and set shared norms of reducing screen time, especially near bedtime; establishing tech-free zones in schools and other community facilities; and creating community programs that avoid smartphone use during certain times or in certain places to promote social connection.
 
I’m interested in this example and curious how other communities are promoting  wellbeing, which surely must include encouraging healthy media and technology habits for people of all ages.
 
In 2007, Steve Jobs said of the iPhone, “Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.” Putting it Away for the Day feels to me like a necessary though vexingly limited response to a phenomenon that is profoundly altering how we think, behave, and build community.
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