Friday A.M. Keynote - Pedro Noguera

Re-Imagining Schools:
Creating School Cultures that Promote Academic Excellence
Pedro A. Noguera, Ph.D.
New York University

"If I told you that I know a doctor who’s very good, but only when you’re healthy, you wouldn’t like that. Same with schools. We tend to blame the kids. The problem is not the kids – it’s the way we treat the kids & limit them and conditions we put them under. If we can’t imagine schools that do that for all kids, then we’re in trouble and deserve to be." It's now been 25 years since “A Nation at Risk”. High drop-out rates – over 50% in some cities.

What's going on?

• Slovenia, S. Korea are now ahead of us…blame the schools, blame the teachers, but we never ask what those countries are doing
• Universal access to healthcare, childcare, parental leave. We keep ignoring that conditions outside of the school affect what’s going on inside. Canadians have shown that if you meet the basic needs of all children you can educate all children – can learn more than one language and start them off early. You can produce bilingual children and literacy and mathematics for all children.
• Barbados has a 98% adult literacy rate – in US it’s 80%
• Why is it that being poor and black in Barbados is not an obstacle to learning, but it is here?
• NYC has to hire 6,000 teachers/year. No shortage of teachers, shortage of people willing to work in those schools. What we have isn’t an acheivment gap – it’s an allocation gap. Anyone who says “money doesn’t matter” usually has lots of it.
• Permanent underclass. Latinos have highest employment rates of any ethnic group and the highest poverty rates. Illogical debate about immigration in this country today. Gap in achievement works under assumption that because of race or immigration status or poverty level, educational status is determined.
• Used to think of educational reform like a recipe – mix the ingredients together and you’ll have a result. We keep pursuing reforms like this. Every school has its own culture and context and community and needs. Teachers are cynical of reform because it is done to us, not with us. “Common sense is really not all that common.” So much that’s happening in the name of reform that is not doing anything. Combination of good teaching, student engagement, good leadership, parental support, etc.
• There are now large urban districts (Atlanta, Miami, Boston, New York, Denver, Abington PA) showing that you can have improvement even with poor kids. Willingness to do whatever it takes, to support innovation, to have strong, stable leadership with clear accountability.

Lessons from high performing schools -- there's a lot we know from them, and there are a lot of them out there:

• Culture of high expectations – museum of the Bronx vs. locked up science equipment
• Focus on the whole child
• Strategic partnerships – real artists teaching art, novelists teaching writing
• High standards – all 8th graders get algebra, but lower performing kids get 90 minutes instead of 50 minutes with no homework (homework = equity issue)
• Countering race & gender stereotypes – robotics club instead of just
• Staff understands external student pressures & devised ways to counter it
• Adopts strategies to help students plan/think concretely about their futures
• Commitment to Excellence & Equity
• Code Switching is taught explicitly

If we know all this, what's getting in our way of implementing change?

• Blaming students and parents
• Treating teaching and learning as disconnected activities -- to0 many teachers confuse teaching with talking. "Cover" material rather than teach it. Focused on performance. Best teachers teach the way kids learn. This is now called differentiated instruction.
  
• We group kids by ability in ways that reinforce stereotypes -- if you assign a slow teacher, you get slower kids. Longer a child is categorized, the further they fall behind.
  
• Ignore morale and legitimate concerns of your staff
• We don't treat parents as partners - neither of his parents graduated from HS, but they sent all 6 kids to top colleges in the country. When you look at your gifted and honors classes, do you see a variety of children from different backgrounds? If you don't, there's a problem.
  
• School rules/procedures that are at odds with educational goals -- suspending a student for truancy!

New Paradigm

• Schools focus on cultivating talent
• Social and emotional intelligence, language sklls and creativity are encouraged
• Resources allocated based on student need
• Organization and schdule reflect priorities
• Discipline used to reinforce school values and norms