Change to improve

By Steve Atwater | Published: June 8, 2014

Last week, the Assembly voted to increase our funding for next year by $500,000.  The vote to do so, while close, illustrates a general confidence in the district to use our funds wisely.  I am appreciative of Mayor Navarre’s lead on this increase and to the Assembly for their support.  Prior to the vote I shared some information about the district including the good news that our graduation rate is inching up.  This important measure of our district is for many, what defines us.  I know that all of our borough’s residents expect our students to complete high school.  There is also an expectation that the district will recognize the changing needs of our students and in turn, refine its practices to help them earn their diplomas.  The need to improve our practices is on-going and was heightened when the legislature created a more favorable set of rules for the establishment and funding of charter schools.  My take from these changes is that there is a growing desire to do away with some of the old of public education and embrace alternatives to the norm.

I sense that some are drawn to alternatives without fully vetting or understanding the consequence of the promoted change.  There is however, little doubt that public schools must continue to look for innovative ways to educate our students.  I am afraid that if we do not explore and then when appropriate, adopt such changes, we will be forced to do more with less.  The expectation that this year’s 700 kindergarten students will graduate in 2026 is dependent on this.

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Free Car

By Steve Atwater | Published: May 18, 2014

Two or three times each year, I receive letters from students that were written for a class assignment.  This past week, three such letters arrived. Two of them asked me to think about the need for the district to provide incentives to help motivate students to attend school.  With the increased focus on a school’s attendance rate and the correlation of attending school regularly with more learning, the logic of the district offering an incentive to help students show up, on the surface, makes sense.  The Anchorage School District partnering with a automobile dealership to give away a car to a student who has perfect attendance, is partially driving the students’ appeal to me.  I wrote back and shared that I did not feel that extrinsic rewards are the way to go.  I offered the predictable you don’t get these as an adult and used paying taxes or being at work on time as reasons why we do not want to create such an expectation for attending school.  A couple of days later, I stumbled upon an article1 that synthesized research on the use of extrinsic rewards in school.  The findings were that an extrinsic reward that is designed to control behavior will ultimately reduce intrinsic motivation and hence, can only be considered as a short term solution to a bigger issue.  The more pressing bigger issue for for me then, is why some students do not attend school as faithfully as others.

I expect that if asked, you will receive a lot of different answers for why students elect to miss school.  Some will say that school is not relevant, some will say it is boring and others I suspect, will have excuses for missing school that are external such as family obligations.  So what to do?  I feel that increasing the level of autonomy that a student has over his or her studies will increase intrinsic motivation to attend school.  As a student ages, I feel that it is more and more important to have the content of the assignments driven by the student.  Here’s the concept, you get to choose how you demonstrate how you have mastered it with the expectation that you will share or teach what you have done.  We all respond to the pressure to look good in front of our peers- why not use this intrinsic motivation to help students stay focused on school? If we offer a free car for not missing school perhaps we should push the IRS to give us an ice cream sundae for sending in our taxes.

1 Gardiner, Steve. “ Stop the pay, stop the play.”  Phi Delta Kappan 95.8 (2014): 39- 42

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Rote Learning

By Steve Atwater | Published: May 10, 2014

Yesterday, while visiting Bill Noomah’s 5th grade classroom at McNeil Canyon, his students gathered to practice their recitation of the Robert Service poem Cremation of Sam McGee. I was impressed that the group had memorized all the verses and pleased to know that they would soon recite it to some of Homer’s senior citizens.  Later, I wondered how much time was devoted to this memorization and pondered, in light of the move away from rote learning, whether such an exercise is beneficial to students.  I think it is.

I am convinced that because of the efficiency of search engines, some of our students’ learning does not need to include memorizing facts, e.g., how many people died in the Civil War.  I feel that there is however, value for younger students to memorize passages of literature or poetry.  I know that in many of our homes children memorize scripture.  The benefit of such memorization for these young children is that it helps their brains establish language patterns, articulate words, expand vocabulary and use complex English syntax.  You can also argue that the mental exercise of memorizing something gives a child a stronger mind.  For me, the single most important responsibility of elementary education is facilitating the acquisition of literacy.  The practice of memorizing a long poem is a way to help with this.  It also provides a warm memory of school and the occasional chance to show off.

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Fork in the road

By Steve Atwater | Published: May 3, 2014

Earlier this week after giving a presentation on the state of the district, I was asked what we are doing for our students who do not plan to go to college.  The expressed concern is that for some students, the final years of school are increasingly irrelevant to their lives.  As an example, it was noted that taking British Literature for some of our older boys is not all that appealing. I explained what we are doing with our career and technical education courses and partnerships and noted that we are doing much more today than in the past to prepare students for non-academic life after high school.  The question however, does raise the issue of what should be included in a high school education.  Is it important for our graduates to take all that we currently require, or, should there be more freedom to forgo some of the academics to instead take more vocational classes?  Such an option would likely include a fork in the road at the end of 10th grade that offers two paths: one for college prep and one for a vocational track.  This is a recurring conversation that on the surface is appealing. But when you look at the potential consequences of this model, you uncover some difficult questions.

Our mission statement (our purpose) includes preparing productive, responsible citizens and our vision (what we want to become) is to have engaged students who participate in their community and are prepared for the future.  For me, the key to meeting this mission and vision is that we train students to be independent learners who have the basic skills to pursue whatever it is that they want, and have a good understanding of how our society works.  While it is easy to argue that reading Jane Eyre is not that important, the greater importance of the humanities that help you see the big picture and in turn better understand how you fit into the whole, is an important part of meeting our mission and vision.  It is not enough to simply train someone to be a welder and hope that he or she figures out the rest.  A healthy, vibrant community and society requires an engaged citizenry who understand the importance of working toward a common good.  This means that the heavy equipment operator and the lawyer are both independent learners who recognize that one’s vocation is not the end all.

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Fixed Practice

By Steve Atwater | Published: April 27, 2014

Each year, the masonic lodges of Kenai, Seward and Sterling hold an awards ceremony to recognize a student from each of our schools.  At the beginning of the event a flag presentation walks the audience through the history of our nation’s flag.  Friday was my fourth time in the past six years to see this presentation, it is unchanged.  While watching this history lesson I thought about how ritual and fixed practice are a part of our education system.  Schools and teachers have routines that are much the same as they were twenty or even forty years ago.  Most of these are important and provide a necessary consistency to the schooling experience.  But with an increasing set of expectations, the challenge for schools is to decide which of these to stop as a way to make room for doing new things.

On the last day of this year’s legislative session there was a desperate push to secure monies so that districts could establish a 1:1 computer-to-student ratio for some or all its students.  I feel that the response to this by some of the legislators was appropriate.  In sum, they said, “You just received a lot of new money and if you want to do a 1:1 initiative then stop doing some of what you are doing and do that instead.”  It is clear that our schools have little or no capacity to add anything more to their plates.  Our challenge is not to figure out how to add 1:1 computing (there are well established practices to guide this), but to decide what to stop doing so that we can make this change. Continuous improvement requires a regular assessment of practice.  If such an assessment cannot show effectiveness, then it is time to let it go.  The key is deciding, like the history of our flag, what is foundational and what has run its course.

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Causal Relationship

By Steve Atwater | Published: April 13, 2014

Swirling around the edges of K-12 education is a multi-billion dollar services industry that sells products to support our schools.  Most of these products are programs designed to improve student achievement and each one of these comes with slick advertising that claims superiority when compared to other like programs.  While the advertising is fair, the science behind the claims often depends on a causal relationship that may or may not be fully understood.  It is with this in mind that I view current legislation that proposes to give schools a letter grade of A to F.  A is for a school making excellent progress while an F is for a school failing to make adequate progress.  If adopted, the grade designation will be in addition to the state’s current star rating.  The criteria to determine the star rating varies depending on whether the school is an elementary or secondary school and uses more than one data point.  The letter grade could have a single data point that I assume will be based on the state’s annual assessment.

While it may be easy to assume a causal relationship between three days of testing in April and school quality, we all know that such a determination is not so simple.  The variables that affect school quality are complicated and in many cases external to the school. I applaud the cry to have schools show progress, to be accountable for their use of public money.  I am saddened however, that a school could receive a one star rating and then be labeled an “F school.” Such a demoralizing set of labels would likely incite despair and not the intended motivation to improve.  There is nothing wrong with expecting schools to improve.  I feel there is something terribly wrong with shaming a school into doing so.  The causal relationship between one variable and school quality just doesn’t exist.

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Parental Involvement

By Steve Atwater | Published: April 6, 2014

I recall a homework assignment when I was in first grade that asked my class to draw a map of their neighborhood.  I remember dutifully finding a piece of cardboard and drawing a crude bird’s eye view of our cul-de-sac and its 15 houses.  One of my classmates returned to school the following morning with a rolled poster board.  Once opened, the poster revealed an intricate set of roads neatly drawn in fine pencil with a ruler used to guide the lines.  At the time I was shocked that a 6-year old could produce such quality and embarrassed that my effort was by comparison, pitiful. I now of course recognize that his parents did the work.  I remembered this story while reading about recent research (The Broken Promise: Parental Involvement With Children’s Education), that surprisingly shows that parents doing such things as volunteering at school and helping with homework have little effect on their child’s academic achievement.  The study tracked 63 measures of parental participation in kids’ academic lives and found that most of these yielded few academic benefits for students.  The findings are of course in stark contrast to the common assumption that more parental involvement means better grades.

The analysis did reveal that the acquisition of literacy was the key to academic success and that children who are raised in homes with limited intellectual conversation and reading opportunities will struggle to keep pace with those who have this advantage.  So are we to turn parents away at the school house door?  Of course not.  We should not however, expect a child to magically get straight As because his mom volunteers each Friday.  What this all points to is a greater emphasis on helping parents understand that school does not begin in kindergarten, that the ability to learn can be greatly enhanced by parental involvement that starts well before a child can walk.

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Collective Effort

By Steve Atwater | Published: March 30, 2014

One of the more uplifting parts of my job is receiving news that one of our students or staff members has been recognized for an award.  In the past two weeks I learned that we have a regional principal of the year (Jason Bickling, Seward Middle School), the Ken Haycock Award recipient given by the San Jose State University School of Library and Information Science (Valerie Kingsland, Seward Elementary  School), and two students (Nianiella Dorvall, Nikolaevsk and Courtney Stroh, Kenai) who will be awarded with the June Nelson Memorial Scholarship that is given by the Association of Alaska School Boards. Because I know that such recognitions are in part due to the collective effort of those who work with the student or staff member, it is appropriate that those immediate to the award also take some credit; education is not an individual sport.

 The recent changes that will tie student learning to teacher performance are logical and should be a part of the evaluation equation.  This should however, be tempered by the broader picture that an education is a collective effort that includes a myriad of pieces.  As we seek to improve, let’s continue to expect first rate teaching, but also recognize that the most successful schools are those that have a team of educators and supportive parents and community members working hard to make the individual student’s education a success.  Perhaps the evaluation regulation should be rewritten so that the collective staff, not the individual teacher is evaluated on students’ growth.

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Stimulating change

By Steve Atwater | Published: March 22, 2014

While in Juneau this week I met with several legislators to share my reservation about HB 278, the large education bill that includes several proposed changes to how charter schools are approved and supported.  I consider our charter schools to be an important part of KPBSD and feel that they work just fine- there is no urgency to change how we approve or support them.  After talking with colleagues from around the state, I sense that this is true for them too.  With this as a backdrop, I have to ask why the bill includes these changes, what is driving this?  My take is that if you peel back the layers, you will find that the inclusion of pro charter school sections in this legislation is an effort to challenge our neighborhood schools. I view it as a way to stimulate change. 

Over the years I have learned that schools and districts tend to be protective about their work and often without realizing it, strive to maintain the status quo.  Creating a culture of continuous improvement that necessarily requires a shedding of some of what it is doing, is difficult.  It is imperative then, that we continue to reflect on our performance and in turn, be willing to let go of the practices that are no longer working.  We shouldn’t need the legislature to motivate us to do this. 

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Where’s the public initiative?

By Steve Atwater | Published: March 16, 2014

Last week the State Senate was scheduled to debate and then vote on a resolution that if passed, would let the public vote on changing our constitution to allow public money to be used for tuition at a private school.  Without getting into the pros and cons of this, it is important to note that a change to our state’s constitution can only occur when the people vote to make this happen.  After counting votes, the Senate decided to put this on hold for now.  We will however, vote in August on whether to legalize marijuana.  This vote is possible through the initiative process.  While I will vote no on this initiative-I think it is a terrible idea for our students to have greater access to pot- I have to wonder why there isn’t a grass roots initiative to do what the legislators are trying to do with their resolution.

In simple terms, our legislators are tasked with making Alaska a better place to live.  With this in mind, whenever I read new legislation I ask myself  what is this bill trying to improve?  In the case of public money paying for private K-12 tuition, one can thus assume that the sponsors view public schools as not meeting the needs of all Alaska’s children.  And if this is true, why am I not being stopped in the grocery store parking lot to sign a petition to change the constitution?  Although biased, I like to think that the public schools on the Kenai are working.  Our school doors are open to whomever comes through them.  We educate students from wealthy homes and from poor homes.  We educate students with severe  physical and cognitive disabilities and those who are bright and physically gifted.  We have several school options for our students who live in the central peninsula and in Homer.  I don’t sense that people are fleeing our borough because the schools are terrible.  If this was the case, I’d be stopped in the Fred Meyer parking lot by a guy with a clipboard.

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