Urban school reformers need to strike a better balance between improving the conditions of education and increasing the outcomes of teaching and learning, said Warren Simmons, executive director of the Philadephia Education Fund, at his session on "Systemic Urban Education Reform: Lessons from the Front Line."
Many urban reform efforts have focused on "controlling inputs," Simmons said, such as boosting teachers' pay, allowing local decision making, creating a safe learning environment, and ensuring fair evaluation and placement practices. While these conditions are "critically important," they are not sufficient to reform urban education because they are not directly related to outcomes. "You can increase pay, or create local school councils, but you won't necessarily increase student achievement," Simmons said.
The public is beginning to suspect that reform efforts are "making things comfortable for adults" but not helping students, he said. By focusing solely on conditions—and failing to produce results—reformers are undermining the public's perception of the importance of providing good conditions for education.
Simmons described two groups of reformers who have very different perspectives: the "top-downers" and the "bottom-uppers." Top-downers focus on the need for standards and assessments, he said. "They readily talk about skills, knowledge, and concepts; but if you bring up race, social class, gender, or culture, there's silence or nodding, but no conversation."
Top-downers also emphasize accountability, but their models are based on "naive notions" of using rewards and punishments to motivate people to change, Simmons said. "Rewards and punishments are not sufficient to build people's capacity for change," he asserted. Capacity building requires an "infrastructure" to provide support such as training and a clear delineation of people's new roles and responsibilities.
Bottom-uppers, by contrast, are student-centered, and committed to the belief that change must happen "school by school," Simmons said. Like top-downers, they focus discussions on cognitive issues, not on the social/cultural context of learning. They, too, fail to address issues of race, gender, social class, and sexual orientation. "They're reluctant to unpack it," he said.
Bottom-uppers also avoid community and parent empowerment. "They take almost as patronizing an attitude toward parents as top-downers," Simmons said. Lastly, bottom-uppers "avoid talking about accountability." They want to foster a climate of conversation, but don't seem concerned about when it will lead to outcomes.
"Both sides believe they alone have the truth," Simmons said. Yet both sides are "on shaky ground with the public," whose concerns center on issues of violence and safety, multiculturalism and racism, and economic policies that hurt the poor and middle class.
Even cities with reform designs in place are struggling, Simmons said in conclusion. "There's still an enormous lack of capacity," he maintained. No one has been given the "intense professional development support" needed to function well in the new system. A further threat to reforms, he added, is the fact that "all of our strategies are now confronting unspoken issues of race and social class."