School Reform Should Be Bottom Up, Driven By the Collaboration Among School Leaders, Classroom Teachers and Their Union
Many years ago Ed Gottlieb was a neighbor, a retired elementary school principal from a school on the Upper West Side and chair of the War Resisters League, a conscientious objector during World War 2, a dedicated pacifist and opponent of the war in Vietnam, as well as a poet.
If you walked around his school you’d see kids painting murals on the walls, kids sitting in the hallways playing word and math games, older kids reading stories to early childhood kids, teachers tutoring kids, far from an ordinary public school. When a higher up ordered Ed to run a “normal” school a “mover and shaker” called the principal, “leave Gottfried alone or you’ll be looking for another job.” The school community was passionate and contained politically sophisticated parents.
I asked Ed whether he ever considered writing about his school, maybe publishing the curriculum, Ed replied, “We change the curriculum every year,” I was confused, Ed shrugged, “The kids change every year, the curriculum must be driven by the needs of the kids not the adults.”
At the other end of the spectrum is Paul Vallas. He was superintendent in Chicago, Philadelphia, New Orleans and Bridgeport and, in 2022 lost the race for Mayor of Chicago in a runoff. Vallas’ model was charter schools, closing schools, lockstep curriculum and a great deal of public relations, and he’s not finished, probably looking for his next superintendency.
What we call “Education Reform” over decades has rarely changed practices or outcomes. In “ Tinkering Toward Utopia”,
David Tyack and Larry Cuban explore some basic questions about the nature of educational reform. Why have Americans come to believe that schooling has regressed? .. Why has it been so difficult to change the basic institutional patterns of schooling? What actually happened when reformers tried to “reinvent” schooling?
Tyack and Cuban argue that the ahistorical nature of most current reform proposals magnifies defects and understates the difficulty of changing the system. Policy talk has alternated between lamentation and overconfidence. The authors suggest that reformers today need to focus on ways to help teachers improve instruction from the inside out instead of decreeing change by remote control, and that reformers must also keep in mind the democratic purposes that guide public education.Unless the “reform” has the support of parents and teachers it inevitably fails to change practices or outcomes.
In the years under Mayoral Control (2002-2024), under three mayors and six chancellors, with one exception (the Affinity Districts, read an excellent description by Norm Fruchter), we’ve lived under so-called reforms heralded from the airies of Tweed, with the blare of trumpets only to see them join the detritus of educational reform scattered among schools.
The Science of Reading folks have skillfully won the battle, and are scrambling to explain the decline in the just announced standardized testing reading scores.
True reform begins in the classrooms, bottom up reform has a chance of embedding in a teacher’s tool kit.
David Kirkland writes,
… while the science of reading provides a crucial framework, it cannot stand alone. Teaching reading is not merely about imparting a set of technical skills; it is about teaching students to read in a way that resonates with their individual experiences and needs. This insight compels us to rethink reading instruction, moving beyond the binaries of the reading wars to consider the broader sociocultural context in which students engage with text.
The “science of reading” has been lauded for its evidence-based approach, which emphasizes systematic phonics as a critical component of effective reading instruction. Research consistently supports the effectiveness of phonics, particularly for early readers and those with reading difficulties (Castles, Rastle, & Nation, 2018). However, the efficacy of phonics instruction alone is not uniform across all student populations. Vulnerable learners—students from low-income families, multilingual learners, students of color, and students with dis/abilities—often require more than a one-size-fits-all approach.
The persistence of reading disparities among vulnerable populations underscores the limitations of a narrow focus on phonics. According to the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), only 18 percent of Black fourth graders and 23 percent of Hispanic fourth graders scored at or above the proficient level in reading, compared to 45 percent of their White peers (National Center for Education Statistics, 2019). These gaps have persisted for decades, reflecting deeper systemic inequities that simple technical solutions like phonics cannot resolve on their own. As Reardon (2013) notes, “Achievement gaps are the product of a wide array of social and economic conditions that shape children’s experiences both inside and outside of school.”You improve at golf, tennis, dance, playing a musical instrument through guided practice. Practicing a skill, practicing skills (plural), practicing in collaboration with colleagues in supportive environments, btw, supervisory observations rarely improve practice, peer observation may, in how many schools do teachers watch colleagues teaching and exchange ideas?
In my former district kids in the 40th to 49th percentile received intense test prep, innovative, sort of … gaming the system is a skill, albeit a skill based on questionable practices.
Scattered across the 1800 schools are shining lights, the UFT contract supports hundreds of school-based options, tweaks in union and/or department rules, PROSE schools (Progressive Redesign Opportunity Schools for Excellence), schools in the Affinity District, schools that receive little attention yet in many instances are models of innovation; however, they predate the mayor, no ink!
Phonics wil continue to be lauded, math is next, teachers will attend professional development sessions, some useful, some not, maybe another mayor in 2025, the next mayoral election is the June, 2025 primary
Of course everything depends on the November election, a vice president who spent fifteen years running a lunchroom or a fight for the very survival of public education?