How Schools Work - KeynesYouDigIt/Knowledge GitHub Wiki

Lies, Lies Everywhere

Arne Duncan lied to a guy he was tutoring about his chances for getting into college. He had been told his whole school career that he was doing fine, and he was a B honor roll student. Unfortunately, he was reading and writing at a third-grade level and had no chance of going to college. He had kept his nose clean and thought he was doing well in school, and didn't find out that he wasn't doing well until it was too late.

If We Build It, They Will Come

When Arne Duncan started working for Chicago Public Schools, he checked out hundreds of schools.

  • He used basketball as an ice-breaker with kids (I could use pairing on something with teachers and students?)
  • He was told a lot things were "rules" that actually weren't. He was told engineers had to be present in the buildings at all times, but it was actually just any principal's designee. This is a kind of cultural "knowledge" that's actively harmful.

0.2

  • Good teachers don't want to work with bad teachers
  • Ending your failures redirects resources to other people who need them
  • People will hide systemic failures behind aggregated data
  • People don't want to look at bad data. It forces you to take action on it.
  • If you help chase after every missing kid, it's all you'll ever do and you won't be able to help lots of others that need your help
  • The angriest parents are just trying to advocate for their kids. They often don't know how badly they're being failed. Don't run away from angry parents, run to them. They can be your biggest allies.

The Consortium

  • "Tight on means, loose on goals"
  • Lowering standards doesn't help students, it helps everyone else
  • What are the actual goals, what are the biggest levers you can push with limited resources?
  • Swarm on students at critical moments

We Need The Carrot

People have a vested interest in the status quo; no one wants their lives upside down. Different groups have different fears around standards, curriculum, and assessment, which are tightly interrelated. They will often use a different group's fear of change in one of them to block change in any of them.

In Race To The Top, schools were incentivized to share standards with at least one other state. This made future reuse much easier. They committed to doing multiple rounds to keep states trying to improve their proposals. They issued cut scores blindly.

One Blue, One Red

Build understanding and trust by visiting the places that rarely get visited. A company called Southwire made an arrangement with a school district to have kids do unskilled labor for a few hours, then school for a few hours. A school in Massachusetts put business in the school and let kids intern at them.

Strange Bedfellows

There is never a good time for deep, fundamental change. Poor communication can turn a natural ally into an enemy. Great tools are worthless unless you have great teachers.

25 Pounds of Apples

Practice, repetition, trust, frustration, failure, success: This is what good teaching and learning look like. Teachers need to demonstrate that they're always learning too. Students need to feel like someone cares about them. Be genuine with them.

Raj Chetty published research in 2014 that indicated that standardized test scores were an effective measure of teacher ability (at least to raise test scores), and may be more effective when combined with principal evaluations. It also found that exceptional teachers raise their student's standard of living substantially. Replacing a poor teacher with an average one raises lifetime earnings of a classroom by $250,000.

In 1970 teaching colleges shifted to focusing on theory instead of practice, which has deeply hurt students. 2/3 of teachers self-report being unprepared to teach in their first year.

If you were really racist, you'd leave the system as it is. If you don't care about teachers, you keep the system as it is.

We Matter!

Use reformed people to authentically inform you and communicate and coach for you.

How Schools Work

A good lesson feels like a conversation where everyone is engaged. It should be intense and intentional. You want them to feel like "I've got so much support behind me, this is my chance!" You need to accept everything students being to school with them, including their trauma. You need educators with the same vision and same level of buy-in. Let everyone know where they stand, at all times.

How we can have better asset utilization within our buildings? Can we support student (paid) projects with resource support, if they source the project? The work could be used as evidence of mastery. It's not possible to have a great school without a great principal.

Any of us can learn. We just need consistent behavior and no violence. Care for the children. Care for the parents. Be open. It works.

People who are hustling hard can do amazing things if you wrap around them.