In her 2007 book,
"It’s Being Done": Academic Success in Unexpected Schools, former Washington Post columnist and Education Trust senior writer Karin Chenoweth used a strict set of criteria to identify fifteen schools with challenging student demographics that were nonetheless achieving academically. In her new book, How It’s Being Done: Urgent Lessons from Unexpected Schools, Chenoweth visits eight new schools with a significant number of low-income students and students of color and reveals just how these educators are achieving their success. She spoke with Harvard Education Letter
about the successful approaches and methods that she believes must be systematized at the district, state, and national level. To read the 2007 HEL
interview with Chenoweth about her first book, click here.
What does How It’s Being Done have to offer educators as a sequel to your last book, "It’s Being Done"?
"It’s Being Done" laid out the case that the work of educating all kids can be done, and that we know it can be done because it’s being done in a variety of schools. I received two types of criticism for that book. The first was that these schools are outliers and that it’s unfair to expect all schools to be operating at that level. I ignored that criticism. The second was more compelling, and that was from educators. They said, “Okay, so it can be done, but I still don’t have enough information about
how.” This book is an attempt to provide educators with more specific information as to how these schools succeed (see sidebar "The 'How It’s Being Done Schools’").
How did you go about selecting the eight schools discussed in your new book?
These eight schools are all winners of Education Trust’s “Dispelling the Myth” award, which goes to high-achieving schools where low-income students and students of color do well (see sidebar “Criteria for Education Trust’s ‘Dispelling the Myth’ Award”). That is, schools that are achieving at levels above state averages with small or non-existent gaps in achievement. A lot of educators really wanted to understand what made those schools so special. So this is an attempt to give readers a real, practical, on-the-ground understanding of what these schools do.
What successful methods were most prominent in each of the eight schools you visited?
Each of them performs in slightly different ways, but they each focus on collaboration and instruction. They think very deeply about what students need to know and then they teach it to them. And they use a variety of teaching methods—they don’t limit themselves to one method. They are always working to find what will work for each student. Also, they all have a very conscious and systematic way of building a school environment that is warm, welcoming, respectful, and geared toward academic achievement. Some have “canned” discipline and school environment programs that they purchase, and some develop a way of operating on their own, but they all work very hard at creating an effective learning environment.
In your book you use the image of a “wheel” of school reform. Can you explain what that means?
Each of the schools incorporated what I call the five elements of the wheel of school reform, although some use different words and put together the ideas in different ways. The way I framed the elements came from Molly Bensinger-Lacy, principal of the high-performing Graham Road Elementary School in Fairfax County, Virginia: Teacher collaboration; a laser-like focus on what we want children to learn; formative assessment to see if they learned it; data-driven instruction; and personal relationship building. The wheel represents the essential elements that produce the characteristics I noted in the first book. None of these elements are unfamiliar concepts to folks who have been working on school reform. But these schools have put them together in ways that make a lot of sense and produce success.
You discuss the importance of systematizing the work of “How It’s Being Done” schools so that it becomes the “norm for districts, states, and the nation.” What do you think are the necessary first steps in making this happen?
We’ve started on the first steps, which involve clarifying what we want children to learn so that when they’re done with their formal schooling they have a solid basis of knowledge and skill. That is to say, as a nation we’ve acknowledged that we need to do that work, but we have not yet done it. Some states have moved faster than other states in establishing clear standards, but as a nation we have not.
In
How It’s Being Done, I talk about the fact that Massachusetts began this work before many other states, and partly as a result they have made the most progress of any state in the country. In fact, their elementary and middle school students are competitive with students in the rest of the world in math and science. Most people don’t realize that Massachusetts participated in the last
Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) as if it were a country. The state’s fourth and eighth graders are up with Japan and Hong Kong in terms of the math and science that they know. Massachusetts is still not in Singapore’s league, but it’s up with the big boys. That’s a huge accomplishment that no other state can boast.
So we’ve started this work, but we need to do much more in terms of clarifying what needs to be done and how to get there—and making sure that all students have teachers who can teach them what they need to know, and that all kids have access to the same resources. We still have a very unequal playing field for low-income kids and kids of color.
What is the greatest obstacle for educators who are faced with the task of boosting achievement in struggling schools? What do they stand to learn from your book?
Sometimes it’s hard for educators who are in dysfunctional schools to envision what a truly functional school looks, sounds, and feels like. In this book, I try to give those educators a real sense of what a fully functional school is like. I hope it’s helpful. Right now there’s a huge debate going on in policy circles about what can be expected of very low-performing schools. President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have called for the turning around of 5,000 low performing schools in the next 5 years, which has thrown some people into paroxysms of paralysis. They say, “We don’t know how to do that.”
There
are educators who know how to turn around schools—they’re doing that as we speak. We need to find those educators and learn from what they’re doing. They don’t always fit preconceived notions of how they’ve done this; and they don’t often fit into any of the categories that academics and policy makers think they should fit into. They’re just doing their work with a lot of skill, a lot of knowledge, and a lot of heart. Many of them have gone unnoticed until now, because they don’t have time to toot their own horns—they’re running schools, which is a massive job.
Chris Rand is the editorial assistant of the Harvard Education Letter.
