The Spencer Foundation supporting advancement in education through research

Studying the Urban High School report

 

May 17-18, 2001

Studying the Urban High School Conference

 

Overview 

 

On May 17-18, 2001, the Spencer Foundation, together with conference organizers Michelle Fine (Graduate Center, City University of New York), Will Jordan (Johns Hopkins University), and Joseph McDonald (New York University) convened a diverse group of educators, policy makers, academics, and social scientists to explore how research can best address the urgent and compelling questions of educational reform for urban high schools. Specifically, the conference was organized to explore methodological, empirical, and policy issues in the areas of Teacher Preparation and Quality Teaching, Measuring and Evaluating School Change, and Curriculum Design. More than producing a conference record, this report will document the issues raised, the dominant themes that ran through the conference, the conversations which arose around areas of dissent, and a set of proposed research questions which emerged from the conference.

 

Introduction

 

Ellen CondliffeLagemann, Spencer Foundation President, expressed in her opening remarks an overall sense of urgency with regard to the general state of urban high schools. Three important points emerged from these initial comments:

 

  1. Even though high schools are facing enormous challenges, little is known about them;
  2. What is learned can be useful to suburban and rural high schools;
  3. It is critical to create stronger linkages between research and school reform "because at the end of the day, if research doesn't connect to the practice, it may be elegant but it's not very helpful."

 

Dr. Ramona Thomas, formerly of the Spencer Foundation and the conference's primary coordinator, underscored the importance of pragmatic research and encouraged the Spencer Foundation to be a leader in the creation of collaborative efforts that will create stronger links between research, practice, and policymaking.

 

After brief introductions by attendees, the first panel of presenters (Greg Michie, Nancy Serrano, and Juan Palacios) set an important tone for the conference. As Thomas introduced the panelists, she asserted, "We didn't want this to be a meeting where we talked about people in urban high schools and they weren't here . . . [W]e wanted [in the] opening session . . . to hear from . . . people who are in the schools, particularly students and teachers." The panelists' teaching and educational biographies provided a window into the complex and inextricable relationship between social structures and individual experiences (e. g. teacher, student, etc.), particularly as they relate to ethnicity/race and class. Their presentation argued that unless schools are prepared to contend with the ways in which students' experiences with discrimination, stereotyping, and racism permeate their educational experiences, it will be difficult to provide the kind of education that transforms students into citizens who can participate fully in a democracy.

 

How do we develop learning institutions that prepare diverse students to be citizens who are engaged in a participatory democracy?

 

Among the challenges facing urban schools is the reality of gang activity in the lives of students. Palacios, a victim of school-based gang violence, reminded us that true school reform requires us to face this issue. According to Palacios, each floor of his high school was occupied by a different gang. Students had to be concerned with their physical safety if their lockers were located on a floor that did not correspond to their gang affiliation. Palacios himself dropped out of high school when his physical safety was threatened by gang activity: "One day . . . this kid from another gang told all his boys that I said something about him . . . he showed me his hand and he had a knife. My mouth just dropped. When the bell rang I just walked out of school and never went back." Complaints to authorities were never filed. In light of his personal experience with gang violence at school, Palacios called for increased teacher involvement. " A teacher isn't there just to teach," he argued, "It's like [he/she is] a second guardian for the kid." While teachers often tune out the "gangbange[r]," they should in fact "be teaching [him] more [and be] near him more [because] that's the person [who] needs the help." Palacios's stories suggest that being a gang member, or nominally affiliated to a gang, is a matter of survival and protection in a climate of increased student surveillance (e. g. metal detectors, school security guards, etc.) and decreased district accountability.

 

Palacios also talked about the relationship between dropping out of school and police brutality. He recounted graphically the verbal and physical abuse he and his friends had experienced at the hands of neighborhood police. The experiences he shared speak to the importance of viewing the lived experiences of students as a form of valuable social knowledge. Teaching a critical perspective creates a sense of possibility and hope, and Palacios stands as an example of this. He mentioned that although he dropped out of high school, he expects to graduate from a small community-based alternative high school the week following the conference. This high school, according to Palacios, values the teaching of critical perspectives. Palacios wants to be a lawyer and a politician so that he can be in a position to serve his community, particularly around issues of police brutality as well as other forms of social injustice. Palacios's case demonstrates that teaching students to have a critical perspective while also teaching math, science, and English gives young people a language with which to better understand their own social locations and helps create possibilities for transformation and change. 

 

How do we get more committed teachers to commit to teaching Latino and African-American students? And can teachers be trained to be extraordinary educators, or are they born that way?

 

Serrano, who identifies herself as a Mexican woman, and Michie, a White male, presented on the politics of race as it affects them as teachers. They argued that whether a person is a White teacher in a predominately Mexican school or a Mexican teacher in a predominately Mexican school, the issues of identity, race, ethnicity, and class are a large part of the picture. Speaking about his book, Holler If You Hear Me, Michie commented on his goal to write a story which countered the dominant discourse of "White hero stories" (e.g., chronicles of White teachers going into urban schools comprised predominately of students of color and turning their lives around). In his experience, he found that these stories were highly exaggerated.

 

Serrano, one of the few teachers of color on staff at the high school from which she graduated, expressed that she experiences a sense of isolation from the teaching staff. She feels more at ease with her students. Serrano related this feeling to her experiences as a Mexican woman at a predominately white university: "[I]t was a cultural and social shock, social class shock. I had never met any real White people before . . . so it was the first time I was amongst people who were of a different class . . . and at first I remember going through the biggest . . . identity [crisis]." Serrano sees high schools as sites of assimilation into White American value systems. As a teacher, Serrano feels that her work includes strategically countering the ways in which traditional pedagogy and curricula socialize students out of their ethnic and/or racial identities.

 

Michie and Serrano represent two distinct positions for teachers, neither of which can escape negotiating the racial/ethnic and class politics that exist within urban high schools. While Michie can choose to slip in and out of his position of privilege as a White male in negotiating racial/ethnic and class politics, Serrano cannot make the same choice. As a Mexican woman, or a woman of color, she simply does not have the same privilege.

 

At the end of the session, the following question was posed: "If you had the chance to be a part of a team that could create a new school in your own communities, and you had a lot of power to dictate what the school would be like, what would be one or two things that you would really fight for to make part of that school?" Palacios and Serrano offered the following wish list:

 

 

Key Areas for Research:

 

 

Teacher Preparation and Quality Teaching

 

How can teachers be better prepared to teach young people, and can teacher unions play a more central role in building quality teaching?

 

Panelist Adam Urbanski (Rochester Teachers Association) noted a number of important issues in preparing teachers to teach young people in urban high schools. The first is to require academic rigor among teachers. Teachers must be learned in their subject areas. Secondly, Urbanski insisted that teacher education programs mend the present disconnect between what teachers are learning in teacher preparation programs and what they encounter in the classroom. Third, the relationship between senior and junior teachers must be strengthened so that they learn from one another. Fourth, schools should be places where adults also come to learn. Fifth, administration-level support of teacher development is critical, together with reversing teacher isolation by providing spaces where teachers can work, prepare, and reflect as a group/unit and creating schools where teachers can learn. Finally, Urbanski commented on the need to instill a sense of agency in young people by taking them seriously and engaging them through active learning. If we are to hold students to high standards of learning, we must engage in high standards of teacher preparation. On the issue of unions,Urbanski observed that we need to move beyond stereotypes about unions as self-serving organizations and recognize that when they function as intended, teacher unions ultimately help to serve the needs of students: "Teacher Union Reform Network is trying to change the very culture of teacher unions to redefine who the primary client is. Essentially . . . no community will long tolerate a disconnect between [teachers and their students]."

 

As for accountability, Urbanski argued that we need to have multiple sources of accountability and different credible sources of information for assessment. "Otherwise," he noted, "we play games where you pretend you are evaluating me, and I pretend that I'm doing what you want me to do, and then you go away and I go back to normal . . . You cannot learn about schools from official reports or from formal remarks. You can only learn about schools by being in schools."

 

Judith Warren Little (University of California, Berkeley) raised the issue of the value of coalition-building among researchers and between researchers and political and grass roots organizations as well as the importance of partnerships between researchers, school administrators, academics, and collective teacher organizations (e.g., unions). She added that teacher unions have been studied, but that the informal ways in which teachers organize themselves have yet to be studied.

 

How do we make the best use of existing models of good teaching practices?

 

Michele Foster (Claremont Graduate University) contributed to the discussion of teacher preparation by placing race at the center of the issue. She asked, "To what degree does teacher preparation contribute to how teachers perceive and interact with African American and Latino students?Relatedly, what are the roles of universities and graduate schools in teaching about racism and classism as an integral part of teacher training?" Claude Steele's research on the negative effects of stereotyping could be put to good use here. For instance, there already exist good models of teaching in communities of color, where students are learning and engaged. However, teacher training pedagogy would have to perceive them as valuable and then offer them as exemplars of good practice. Foster concluded that "[w]e must act people into new ways of thinking."

 

Key Research/Practice Concerns:

 

The debate around teacher effectiveness is located, narrowly, within the areas of certification and testing. Conversation on this debate was rich and vibrant, and it forced us to reconcile the tripartite expertise that teachers, particularly urban teachers, need to import into classrooms: 1) rigorous knowledge of subject matter; 2) strong repertoire of pedagogical and assessment strategies; and 3) a serious commitment to finding the intellectual strengths in all children, especially poor children and children of color. The research in this field tends to be organized around case studies or large scale aggregated data sets of teacher competencies in content areas. This area of research raises important questions about:

 

Teacher development - To what extent do teachers need to be "developed" inside urban schools and communities, in collaboration with universities, through rich, "real" collaborations with strong urban schools? What do these collaborations look like? Such collaboration has its roots in New York City, with the Julia Richman Complex and the Graduate Center, New York. The question of whether or not pre-service teachers can get "credit" and public schools can get "tuition dollars" toward a degree, however, remains a crucial/political sticking point. The fundamental negotiations of power between the public school educators, the community, and the university need to be studied.

 

Teacher/ School Leader recruitment and retention - It is a painful irony that the least credentialed teachers (no matter how you measure it) are employed in schools with high concentrations of poverty. Money obviously matters, but so do context and politics. People flee low performing schools because of the bureaucratic infrastructure (or lack thereof), the absence of support, and their sense of futility. These discontinuities have educationally disastrous effects on the poorest youth in the city. This "field" requires theoretical and empirical help - last minute crisis interventions are not only costly and insulting, but they are desperately inadequate to the task.

 

Building communities of educators - What are the critical elements of building an intellectual and emotional community of educators which is effective for and with youth? Do teachers in a (small - or large) school need to share an academic philosophy to affect student outcomes? If so, what are the professional development, labor union, and bureaucratic policies that need to be in place (or removed) to enable this to happen? Doesn't "shared philosophy" mean the school needs to be small? What are the limits of "shared philosophy," and how much will the public sector tolerate? Is it, therefore, unrealistic to take an existent high school faculty, "divide them up" into small schools, and assume shared philosophy/commitments will simply follow?

 

Measuring and Evaluating School Change and Reform

 

How do we create reliable systems of accountability at all levels?

 

Joe MacDonald (New York University) opened up this session by noting the "implicit ambivalence" that is inextricably connected to measuring and evaluating school change and reform. That is, there exists a high degree of uncertainty among researchers regarding how to measure meaningfully school change and reform. Specifically, McDonald was interested in including in the discussion ways of not placing all of the weight of accountability on students by using high stakes testing as the only measure of accountability: "We're sort of in a period where urban high schools, especially urban schools . . . but really all schools are, . . . are facing unprecedented demands for accountability, and those demands are more often than not narrowly focused on student test scores."

 

To address these points, McDonald introduced Walt Haney (Boston College) and Tom Corcoran (University of Pennsylvania). Haney framed the issue as an attempt "to use test scores to . . . make inferences about individual students, about teachers and about schools." He continued on to say that based on his own observations, he believes "we've got a very imperfect system to try to make categorical judgments about whether people are succeeding or failing. The institutions and the adults are always going to be in a better position to protect their interests than students." Haney reminded the audience that it is not very meaningful to hold high schools accountable without including and/or allowing students to help define what accountability means. Haney spoke of the difficulty of measuring success quantitatively. He addressed this concern by discussing a project he worked on in Texas in which he examined, in depth, the high school dropout rate. He found the rate reported by various school districts to be "terribly misleading." In response, he began to explore the dropout rate on a statewide level through a "grade progression" analysis. This kind of analysis allowed Haney to argue that the Texas dropout rate was closer to 50%, as opposed to the 10-15% which Texas reported officially. Haney then moved into a discussion of standardized testing or the "corruption of test scores." Haney, a respected statistician and educational evaluator, advocates testing playing a more constructive role in measuring what success means for a school. With a strong critique of "high stakes," he is convinced that there is mounting evidence that suggests that students are being "encouraged to leave school." He also thinks that the students who remain and succeed by doing well on these high stakes tests are not being prepared in any meaningful way to excel academically in higher education.

 

Moving from an evaluator's and/or policy maker's perspective, Corcoran confirmed some of the arguments made by Haney, but addressed the dynamics inside a school. He mentioned that at a conference he attended in Japan, the head of the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission asked one presenter why school administrators and/or evaluators are willing "to hurt a school." Dr. Corcoran explained that what he meant by "hurting schools" was an "administrator support[ing] the decision [to] clos[e] . . . a school." Corcoran's Japanese colleague noted that when a school in Japan is facing a challenge, administrators quickly employ seasoned or "senior math and science teachers" to redevelop the school's potential by mentoring and modeling younger school teachers and administers in the techniques necessary to connect curricula to the lives of their students. Corcoran asserted that the larger purpose of American schools also involves relating and/or better matching the curriculum to the lived experiences of the students-and in this case, students who attend urban high schools. With respect to measuring the success rates of school curricula he noted, "We'd be better off if we had a serious conversation about curriculum and had an examination system that was really curriculum-related . . . When you look at other countries, the other nations we compare ourselves to . . . they don't have tests like we have. They have examinations. And examinations are closely linked to a syllabus and a curriculum that's been really thought through and which usually has a lot of public support."

 

Corcoran also argued that a creative variety of methodologies and analyses are necessary to get "under" school reform, change, and/or success. He mentioned that more statistical and methodological books that explain how to apply the data toward organizational change, as opposed to texts that simply "suggest ways to array the data," are needed if real change is to occur. He ended with a discussion of the challenges involved in incorporating qualitative methodologies on "large scale (school) evaluations." Although he acknowledged and endorsed the importance of qualitative work, he admitted that "in doing large scale evaluations, you do not usually have the luxury of . . . hanging around the place for a long period of time because you're trying to look at a lot of places . . . [W]e try to deal with that problem by being in places repeatedly over time to the point where we . . . can develop a relationship with people in the site."

 

Key Research Issues:

 

During this session, a set of tensions ripe for research were introduced. The first was the distinction between standardized testing (or not) and the high stakes associated with standardized testing in urban districts throughout the nation. Critique is emerging with respect to the methodological and statistical integrity of the tests being used, and such critique necessarily demands that critical attention be paid to issues of youth disengagement, teachers leaving the field of public education, student dropout, particularly for poor youth and youth of color, and a loss of critical inquiry on the part of many youth. All of these claims merit empirical analysis.

 

Second, questions emerged with respect to the "use" of testing and assessment information. To what extent are data, of any sort, used toward organizational, systemic, and/or school based change? For community education? For rethinking pedagogy and/or personnel distributions? For punishment? Is there a research project that unions want to initiate with respect to the impact of high stakes standardized teaching (or performance-based assessment) on teachers' recruitment, retention, and job satisfaction? Are there data to be compiled for a class action suit by speakers of languages other than English, students in schools in which a substantial proportion of educators are not credentialed, or amiseducation law suit so that the stakes are not simply felt by the students but by the adults as well? Is mass reliance on standardized testing actually a move toward a reallocation of public funds into the hands of private testing companies (i.e. privatization)? To what extent do educational researchers collude in the "fantasies" about standardized tests when we rely upon them? Inversely, if we do not report standardized test scores, to what extent does it appear that we are "covering up terrible academic outcomes?"

 

Curriculum and Design / Instruction

 

In this concluding session, conversations regarding race and class predominated the discussion. The panel dealt with issues of student marginalization and alienation, schools and technology, resources and equity, as well as parent activism or involvement.

 

What would the state of urban high schools be if schools were used to challenge inequality?

 

Will Jordan (Johns Hopkins University) posed a number of provocative questions to panelists Deborah McGriff (New York Edison schools), Cornelia Brunner (New York Center for Children in Technology), Jeannie Oakes (UCLA), Ricardo Stanton-Salazar (University of Southern California), and PedroNoguera (Harvard University). Jordan asked:

 

. . . there is tremendous diversity in student academic ability at the start of high school. A substantial number of students begin the ninth grade year behind in critical subjects such as mathematics and English. However, there is increasing pressure-with few supports for teachers or students-to teach every student using high content curriculum with high academic standards. And so the question I have for the panelists is how do we then offer a rigorous secondary curriculum for all students when there is great diversity at the beginning of high school? How do we manage this diversity? How do we maintain high standards without generating more high school dropouts? How do schools and teachers overcome the poor preparation of some students without sacrificing the quality of instruction for their classmates who may be reading, writing, and computing at grade level?

 

Noguera suggested that a three-part "system" of assessment would have to be in place in order to address such questions of student preparedness. Specifically, he proposed that an overall assessment designed to include: 1) a system for "assessing kids when they come in;" 2) a system that provides support in addressing the various needs of newly arrived students throughout the school year as well as over the summer; and 3) a system that includes monitoring so that you can determine "whether or not the interventions you've applied actually result in improved . . . attainment of skills, knowledge, etc." Noguera also noted that in order for schools to see their goals reach fruition, they must increase the availability of resources to urban schools. He quoted aloud a point made earlier byUrbanski: "I can't imagine a system that has excellence without equity!"

 

Jeannie Oakes posed a chilling question to the group: What if reforming schools is actually a "strategy to sustain capitalism and racism?" If so, she concluded,

 

It's working beautifully! School systems are set up to benefit the wealthy . . . [T]he achievement gap is a wonderful thing to have if you want to have a stratified society. And if it so happens for some unfathomable coincidence that the achievement gap is along racial lines, and you have a racist society, well, all the better. You have a perfectly rational way to discriminate. It's not about race. It's about achievement.

 

Oakes continued by suggesting that rigorous curricula should be delivered in untracked classes and crafted in ways that allow students to learn from their experiences. It is via this kind of curriculum that Oakes believes students would be critical in terms of informing schools of the kinds of resources necessary for their academic success. Oakes also argued for smaller schools. She believes that smaller schools allow students to explore more deeply their learning interests.

 

Deborah McGriff is also a proponent for smaller schools. Having much experience in the public sector, she believes that public school bureaucracies are not designed to move quickly toward change, to facilitate systemic creation of a "system of small schools." McGriff introduced a conversation regarding computer technology through her discussions on smaller schools. In response to Jordan's questions ("How severe is the digital divide? Can urban high schools help to bridge the divide? And are you optimistic or skeptical about the prospects of bringing universal access to technology to urban students?"), McGriff suggested that high schools would know more effectively how to incorporate computer technology in the curriculum if they allowed students to teach and/or show school personnel how to incorporate this resource.

 

Cornelia Brunner, while not optimistic about this happening, supported this idea as well. Brunner mentioned that these students and/or high schools' "barrier to access" often stems from teachers' discomfort with newly emerging technology, the expense for the installation of computers in high schools, as well as the schools' inability and unwillingness to have student input drive the curriculum. " . . . [W]e're just beginning to get to that point where teachers are comfortable enough with technology so that they begin to see that . . . there is a whole other set of pedagogical possibilities that are opened up by having these mediums . . . I'm not as sanguine that that's going to happen soon. I think we have to wait for the kids to lead us and tell us how these technologies are going to end up being used in their lives."

 

Key Research Questions:

 

This group was both inspiring and skeptical about the need for systemic change in and around schools -- change that takes seriously questions of class and race inequities. Key research areas include:

 

 

Research Questions Developed Across the Conference

 

  1. How do we prepare students to be citizens who are engaged in a participatory democracy (pedagogy, critical thinking, etc.)?
  2. How do we develop learning institutions that make space for students to have a voice of authority?
  3. How do we create equitable systems of accountability (e. g. institutions, state, school district, students, parents, etc.) with an eye to equity and accountability?
  4. How do innovative schools move to scale?
  5. How does the community fit into discussions of urban education?
  6. What are the effects of the expanding roles of teachers?
  7. Do we want to create an educational system where all students will succeed? What do these schools look like?
  8. What are the most effective points of intersection between educational research and social policy, community organizing, school-based practice, and public education about public education? That is, do we need to "invent" more intermediary organizations in which coalitions of educators, community members, students, policy makers, and labor come together to craft the questions, write the Op Ed piece, design legislation?

 

A Note from the Spencer Foundation

 

The Spencer Foundation sponsors occasional conferences to stimulate research on important issues in education.  We thank Michelle Fine, Will Jordan, and Joe McDonald for helping organize this conference, Yasser Payne and Rosemarie Roberts for their roles in preparing this report, and the individuals who participated (see attached listing) for their good work and contributions.   We hope that interested researchers will find the theoretical, methodological, and topical issues raised at the conference thought-provoking.  The Spencer Foundation welcomes well-designed research proposals on the issues and ideas discussed in this report.