Issue

A set of high content standards for all students should be endorsed by urban school leaders, politicians, school board members, national policymakers, and reformers.Watered-down content standards are at the root of the widespread lack of confidence in public education. Many urban schools hold low expectations for far too many students. Yet students who do not acquire a body of knowledge and the wherewithal to use it will not have access to the table, as it were, of economic and political decision making. Instead, they will be relegated to the few menial jobs available—a state of bondage for which they themselves will be blamed.From my vantage point as an urban educator, too many reform initiatives skirt the issue of content standards for all students. I grant that content standards are not the single, final answer to the problems of urban education. They do, however, promote the delivery of rigorous instruction and allow many paths for assessing student achievement.Maybe, just maybe, content standards will redirect the energies of those who have proposed vouchers, magnets, and charters as the panacea for American education. Maybe, just maybe, we will recognize that these alternatives offer no promise for replication on a wide enough scale to reform hundreds of thousands of classrooms. Privatization is merely another means of denying access to those who need it most.—Wayman Shiver, Jr., is deputy superintendent of the Birmingham, Alabama, public schools.

Instruction, the core activity of our profession, continues to be ignored as reformers propose an endless array of solutions to cure the real and perceived ills of urban public education. Individual and organizational development strategies, which hold the potential for sparking internal change, are the key to improving conditions and should be at the center of all reform initiatives.When reformers accept the premise that organizational growth follows individual growth and that individuals change and grow only through intrinsic motivation, the next logical step is to provide the resources necessary for staff members to improve their instructional competencies. Currently, staff development efforts in urban school districts lack adequate long-term funding and design. In contrast, effective private enterprises allocate five to seven percent of their annual budgets for staff training and product improvement.If we have learned anything from the reform efforts of the past decade, we have learned that failure is predictable when legislators, school boards, and managers neglect to involve practitioners in the important decisions that directly affect their work. No reform effort in urban schools will produce lasting change without substantive training programs that focus on instruction and provide opportunities for teachers, support staff, and administrators to design, deliver, and assess their own professional development.—Monte Littell is deputy superintendent of the Tucson Unified School District in Tucson, Ariz.

A comprehensive training program for professional staff. Urban educators who wish to engage in reform efforts must provide such a program to educate staff in the following areas: technology, quality principles, multicultural initiatives for addressing the needs of diverse students, basic democratic principles upon which to base curricular and other decisions, and benchmarked world-class curriculums that ensure mastery by all students. For no one initiative can reform our urban districts. Reform requires a comprehensive approach to planning through quality principles, using technology for this new age, and focusing on students' diverse needs by ensuring mastery of world-class curriculums. This can be accomplished only through a comprehensive training program for all professional staff that ensures competence in the areas mentioned.Comprehensive training of all professional staff will require a commitment of time, resources, and a philosophical belief that educators must be continuing learners involved in a process that is ever-improving for their clients (the students and society). Thomas Jefferson stated that if we believe we can have a democracy without an educated populace, we believe in what never was nor never can be. It is therefore imperative to the survival of this democracy that staff can prepare young people to be literate, creative, critical thinkers; and that we ourselves as professional educators are in a continuous-growth mode.—Shirley Ison-Newsome is division executive for academic design and development with the Dallas Public Schools.

Improving achievement in urban schools requires reforms that are comprehensive and systemic, so choosing any one initiative is something I am hesitant to do. But I believe that setting high, clear, and explicit standards for all students is essential to focus and organize the other critical elements of school reform, such as local school governance, school finance equity, planning and professional development, new forms of curriculum and instruction, and school-linked services. Each innovation should be judged by the extent to which it helps students, educators, and the community meet academic standards that have ideally been adopted with broad-based community input.Without clearly defined standards, schools and communities have no yardstick to select and measure the impact of new and old curriculum, assessments, and instructional strategies; and no way to organize and judge the effectiveness of teacher selection and assignment, professional development, and school-based decision making and compensatory education efforts.Without standards, schools are susceptible to trying something new for the sake of change rather than improving outcomes for children. This kind of blind experimentation leads to poor understanding and implementation of classroom reforms such as cooperative learning, detracking, and hands-on learning experiences, which are more likely to succeed when tethered to academic standards. Standards also lend coherence to governance reforms such as school-based management, which can otherwise result in local, rather than centralized, control of failing schools.—Warren Simmons is a senior associate at the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore, Md.