A Program to Address Chronically Low-Performing Schools

This month I am sharing a grant proposal I submitted to the Chase Mission Main Street program. If successful, we will develop a degree completion program for inner-city community college graduates to get certified to teach in their neighborhood schools. This program addresses a number of ideas that I have been discussing in my blog:

• First and foremost, teacher turnover is a huge barrier to sustaining improvement in low performing schools. Policies related to firing teachers and closing schools are harmful towards addressing this core issue.

• Students who graduate from the Chicago Public Schools and matriculate to college are much more likely to end their schooling with an associate degree rather than a 4-year degree needed for professional careers. Inner city students as a whole cannot compete head to head with students from middle to upper-income families based on test scores. Alternative approaches are needed.

• If we create a program that focuses on the unique characteristics of inner-city students it is never too late for students to complete a bachelors degree and start a teaching career.

• We plan to graduate 50 new teachers per year, so in 10 years we will have flooded the poorest performing schools with 500 teachers who are much more likely to stay in the same school and live in the neighborhoods.

Below is the set of 5 questions we had to answer followed by the 500-character responses to each questions. 

Please cast your Vote for this proposal at: https://www.missionmainstreetgrants.com/business/detail/49670

If our idea gets 250 votes by Nov 15, then we move to the next round of consideration by a panel of business experts at Chase.

The Learning Partnership

Mission Main Street Grant Application

1. Tell us about your business. What inspired you to start your business? How is your business successful? What makes it unique? 

The academic community has produced many innovative curriculum and professional development programs that have turned around the most difficult school settings. However, schools can’t sustain these innovations once grant funding for the programs ends. Schools return to business as usual due to high teacher turnover rates. We serve as a broker between the academic community and schools by exploring new business models for sustaining innovation in the inner city schools that need the most help.

2. How is your business involved with the community you serve? 

Our Journey to El Yunque program provides a good example of how we are an active partner with the Chicago Public Schools. The program supports best teaching practices to connect teachers and students with scientists who conduct long-term scientific research on hurricane disturbance in Puerto Rico. The scientists' research questions, data and computational models are brought to the classroom through the web. We provide professional development to help teachers adapt their teaching practices.

3. What would a $250,000 grant mean to your business and how will you utilize the funds to ensure long-term growth and stability? 

We seek to expand our business by creating a bachelors degree completion program for inner city community college graduates. They would become state certified in inquiry-based teaching methods through a combination of internships in inner city neighborhood schools and online pedagogical courses. They would also conduct local research related to their content major as models for engaging their future K-12 students. The grant would fund curriculum development and achieving regional accreditation.

4. What challenges can you identify for your business, and how do you plan to overcome them? 

Our significant challenge is the high teacher turnover rate in the schools that need help the most. This high turnover inhibits our ability to gain traction in inner city schools. Teachers like to work close to where they grew up, but inner city students are much more likely to complete an associate degree, rather than a bachelor degree needed for teaching. A degree completion program will supply inner city schools with local teachers who understand best teaching practices and will stick around.

5. Describe the talent and skill of your employees, and how they contribute to a successful business. 

Dr. Steven McGee, president, completed the first dissertation in the learning sciences at Northwestern University. He is co-founder and faculty in the NU masters of teacher leadership program. He specializes in conducting research and program development to inspire interest in science. His knowledge of best practices in teaching and learning, adult education, and educational technology are an invaluable asset to the degree completion program. He is surrounded by content and logistical expertise.

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UPDATE: As of the Nov 15 deadline, we ended with 64 votes, so we did not move to the next round. Thanks to all those who voted. I will provide any future updates as a new post.

How We Can End The Government Shutdown and Improve Education at the Same Time

The conflict over passing a budget for the federal government centers around how we as a society should ensure that all citizens have health insurance. The current Affordable Care Act takes a three-pronged approach. (1) Healthy people will pay more in insurance so that high risk people can pay less insurance. (2) There are government subsidies to supplement the cost of purchasing insurance depending on family income. (3) Set restrictions on how much insurers, doctors, and hospitals can charge. The Democrats are willing to hold the government hostage to defend this marginal approach. Alternatively, the Republicans are willing to hold the government hostage to replace the Affordable Care Act with equally marginal approaches, such as, (1) funneling federal subsidies for health insurance to individuals through tax credits as opposed to funneling federal subsidies through tax free fringe benefits and (2) creating competition in the insurance marketplace by allowing individuals to purchase insurance across state lines. Both of these approaches focus on how to pay for health care. Neither one focuses on how we can reduce the costs of health care.

I don't pretend to be an expert on health insurance policy, but it strikes me that basic principles of supply and demand seem to be ignored on both sides of the aisle. As the population of the U.S. grows, as baby boomers reach retirement age, and as more people get health insurance, the demand for doctor's visits continues to rise. Yet, the supply of doctors has been flat for around 20 years. What students learn in Economics 101 is that when demand rises in the face of fixed supply, the cost of the product or service will rise or supply will be reduced when price is restricted from rising. Policy makers should not be surprised that the cost of doctor's reimbursements in the U.S. are higher than in any other country and we are seeing increasing scarcity of access to doctors.

Since 1990, the U.S. population has risen 25% from 250 million to 310 million. Yet, the number of medical residency slots remains fixed at the 1990 level of around 100,000. Without completing a residency, a medical school graduate cannot practice medicine. Therefore the number of doctors we produce each year is fixed. Currently, the federal government pays for these residencies through medicare. There has even been debate about reducing the number of slots that medicare will fund as a way to reduce medicare expenses. I have not researched the history of the development of the policy of why the federal government pays for all of the residency costs, but it would seem that through some combination of expanded federal funding, funding from insurance companies, and funding from hospitals, we should be able to dramatically increase the number of residency slots and thus the number of doctors will rise. If we end up with a glut of doctors, Economics 101 suggests that access to health services will increase and the price for those services will stabilize or decrease.

One countervailing concept from Managerial Economics is that as you expand the labor supply, there is likely to be a diminishment in the quality of labor, since you have first selected all of the best so the remaining pool is necessarily of lower quality. However, we can expand the supply of doctors significantly without lowering standards. Our population has expanded by 25% in 20 years. Unless our education system is worse than it was 20 years ago, we are producing 25% more qualified candidates of the same quality that we had 20 years ago. In addition, there are many reasons to believe that our education system is better and we are have much higher rates of college completion than we did 20 years ago. So there is plenty of excess capacity to expand the number of doctors. This seems like a straightforward solution to reducing the costs of health care and obviating the need to hold the government hostage over how to pay for health insurance.

The educational benefit of expanding the pool of doctors is that premed faculty would have to shift from being gatekeepers of the medical field to becoming teachers that actually try to get as many people to understand science as possible. We could pass a corresponding legislation called No Doctor Left Behind that holds college faculty accountable for the number of premed students who fail to graduate with medical school acceptances. We can label those colleges with high dropout rates as medical dropout factories. And those with differential passing rates by race and socioeconomic status can be labeled as failed premed programs. One consequence of this policy might be that premed programs will stop wasting doctors' time studying irrelevant content and shape a program around those math and science concepts that relate to human biology. Focus and relevance are the very things that help all students learn.

As we bemoan the hiatus of government services, it would be helpful to shift the focus away from one crisis to the next and begin to direct our focus on long-term solutions that benefit both our health care system and the education of our next generation.

It's Time to End Affirmative Action as We Know It

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."  Declaration of Independence

In the context of heated conflict about specific strategies for implementing the principle of equality for all, it is important from time to time to return to the foundational principles that form the basis for how our society should be structured. Even though our country has not always lived up to the principle of equality or upheld each person's unalienable Rights, these foundational principles are something that we can all agree on.

The current chapter in the fight to neutralize past inequalities unfolded this past June in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin. The Supreme Court upheld the legality of universities considering race in their admissions decisions. However, the Supreme Court narrowed the scope of race-conscious admissions policies by requiring that the consideration of race be used only as a last resort to maintain a critical mass of minority students. The decision to uphold the use of race hinges on sociological evidence that student body diversity is a college dimension that leads to a host of desirable academic outcomes for all students. Therefore, the Supreme Court has deemed that is permissible to admit less qualified minority students in order to maintain a critical mass of minority students on campus.

In its idealized form, affirmative action does not advocate any specific strategy for increasing diversity. Instead, affirmative action is a generalized principle regarding the importance of taking proactive steps to eradicate the vestiges of legalized discrimination:

“Affirmative action does not mean entitlements to proportional representation. It means action to eliminate discrimination: creation of more adequate talent pools, active searches for talent wherever it exists, revision of policies and practices that permitted or abetted discrimination, development of expectations for a staff whose composition does not reflect the impacts of discrimination, provision of judicial process to hear complaints, and the making of decisions without proper regards to sex, race, or other origin.” (Reed, 1993, 1-2)

In this idealized form, it is difficult to rationalize opposition to the idea that as a country we should eradicate the effects of past discrimination. Unfortunately, the implementation of affirmative action in higher education over time has devolved into and become equated with race-conscious admissions policies.

The term affirmative action was first introduced by John F. Kennedy in 1961 as an executive order mandating that all government contracting agencies hire and treat employees without regard to race, creed, color, or national origin. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson built upon JFK's executive order by requiring all government contractors to document the affirmative steps they have taken to increase representation of women and minorities in the workplace. In 1969, Nixon went a step further by requiring federal contractors in Philadelphia, and then other cities, to meet specific quotas for hiring African American employees, which became known as the Philadelphia Plan.

Universities followed the lead of the Philadelphia Plan and began setting aside specific slots in the admissions process for minority students. For example, the medical school at the University of California - Davis set aside 16 out of 100 medical school slots for minority students. A medical school applicant, named Allan Bakke, sued the university when he was denied admission (Bakke v. Regents). In 1978, the Supreme Court found that setting quotas was unconstitutional, but did not strike down the the idea that universities could consider race as a goal. The idea of race-conscious admissions policies was challenged again in the case of  Grutter v Bollinger, which was decided in 2003. The Supreme Court upheld the idea of using race as one consideration among many in the admissions process, but made clear that the consideration of race should no longer be necessary in 25 years.

There have been a variety studies investigating the relationship between race-conscious admissions policies and the resulting levels of desegregation on college campuses.

• A recent study found that the long-term enrollment trends for black and white students have shown increasing tendency towards integration, which suggests that race-conscious admissions policies are working. However, most of the increased integration occurred during the era of specified quotas prior to Bakke v. Regents. Since the early 1970s, the trend has shown gradual increase, but has mostly been stagnant. In fact, the same study suggests that states that have banned race-conscious admissions policies at public universities have seen increased integration.
• When examining income disparity, socioeconomic data show that the representation of upper income students has increased at selective colleges since the late 1970s, while the representation of lower income students has remained stagnant. Therefore, the most economically disadvantaged minority students are not benefiting from race-conscious admissions policies.
• Some have argued that current forms of race-conscious admissions policies mainly benefit descendants of recent immigrants or children of biracial couples, not children whose four grandparents are descendants of slaves. It is “students like these, disadvantaged by the legacy of Jim Crow laws, segregation and decades of racism, poverty and inferior schools, who were intended as principal beneficiaries of affirmative action in university admissions.”
• In the wake of the Grutter v Bollinger decision, a group of researchers explored the likelihood that race-conscious admissions policies could be eliminated by 2028 as suggested by Justice O'Connor in the Grutter decision. Projected decreases in income gaps between families of black and white students as well as increased K12 school integration will have small effects on the ability to eliminate race-conscious admissions policies. The biggest hope for eliminating the need for race-conscious admissions policies by 2028 would be reducing the test score gaps between black and white students.

In all of this historical effort to defend the constitutionality of race-conscious admissions policies, there seems to be little discussion about the effectiveness of the strategy. Taking the long-term view, there seems to be very little impact of these policies on creating a sustainable trend to reverse the effects of discrimination. The tragedy of the legal fight around race-conscious admissions policies is that the legal arguments on both sides continue to reinforce the idea that test scores are what defines qualification for college entrance. The opponents of race-conscious admissions policies argue that test scores should be the primary determinant of college entrance.They believe that using race to trump test scores should be unconstitutional. The proponents of race-conscious admissions policies concede that tests are the primary determinant of college qualifications, but argue, and the Supreme Court agrees for now, that race should be allowed to trump test scores as a means for overcoming past injustices.

In contrast to the central role that test scores play in the fight to eliminate past discrimination, test scores play a minor role in predicting actual student outcomes. By design, ACT and SAT scores are meant only to predict a student's first year GPA. At the very heart of the college entrance decision is estimating the level of performance of first year students in large, introductory survey courses. These are the same courses that have been shown to negatively correlate with important qualifications for high quality medical and engineering practice. The same can be said of the LSAT legal entrance exam. Any important quality of legal practice that is not predictive of first year law school grades has been eliminated from the LSAT test.

Even when we narrow our focus on what the entrance exams are designed to do, it becomes troubling to think that they play such a central role in the debate around race-conscious admissions policies. Studies that have examined how well students at selective schools performed in their first year courses based on their test scores have only been able to account for about one-third of the variability in first year GPA. That means that two-thirds of the reasons why students do well or don't do well in their first year classes is explained by other factors. The impotency of college entrance exams is amplified when attempting to predict overall college performance and eventual career outcomes.

In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, it is useful to juxtapose the history of the SAT that is at the core of thwarting King's dreams. The first SAT was administered in 1926; nineteen years before the first computer (1946); twenty-five years before the cognitive revolution which challenged the very foundation of the SAT (1950s); twenty-eight years before Brown v. Board of Education (1954); and 37 years before the March on Washington (1963). In the face of technological, social, and psychological revolution over the past 87 years, the SAT has merely tweaked its name and its scoring methodology, but fundamentally remains the same test that was developed during the heart of our discriminatory past.

It is had for me to believe that such a vestige of our troubled past will ever be the road to fulfilling King's dreams. Instead, I firmly believe that if we scrapped the entire admissions process and built a new one from scratch with modern ideas of the American dream and taking advantage of modern technology and modern cognitive science, we would have a fundamentally different system that would end the need for affirmative action and give everyone one an Equal shot at a high quality of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That is my dream.

Rahm Emanuel's Intuition-Based Reform

Rahm Emanuel is about to unleash the greatest carnage on public schools in our nation's history. Both the Chicago Public Schools' school board that he appointed and the CEO that he appointed have reviewed all of the data, listened to public comment, and determined that the trauma of closing 50 schools and displacing 30,000 students will be in the best interest of students and parents in the long run. This decision makes intuitive sense according to the portfolio management model that is in vogue in many school districts. In this model, if a school is not helping the vast majority of its students to meet the standards there must be something wrong with the school, the administration, and its teachers. This portfolio model of school management is metaphorically similar to how brokers manage stock portfolios. Brokers buy and sell stocks based on which company is performing well. If one company is not performing well in the stock market, brokers will move their money (e.g., children) to a different company that is performing well. By actively managing clients' money and making smart decisions about which company will be performing well, brokers get the best return on investment. High quality brokers get insanely rewarded for high returns on investment, irregardless of the impact on companies, communities, and the environment for those investment decisions. Also the riskier the investment the greater the reward, but also the easier to be discarded for one bad investment decision (see the rise and fall of the London Whale).

Last month's decisions by the CPS school board is the culmination of almost a decade of operating under the portfolio management model. In 2004, CPS initiated the Renaissance 2010 initiative, under Arne Duncan, that sought to create 100 new contract schools by 2010. These contract schools could be discarded after 5 years if they are not performing well. The portfolio mentality seeped into the management of the neighborhood school. If a neighborhood school is not performing well or becomes underutilized because students go to other schools, it too can be discarded. In fact from 2001 to 2009, 44 schools in CPS were closed for underperformance or underutilization (p. 1). As is promised now, the district had promised that students who are in closing schools would be sent to higher performing schools and our overall return on investment would increase for the district as a whole.

As much as this makes sense if take the perspective of thinking about schools the way stock brokers think about their money, let's evaluate CPS's past return on investment from their portfolio approach as a gauge for the likelihood of success for their future portfolio management.  A recent report from the University of Chicago's Consortium on Chicago School Research (CCSR), evaluated CPS's return on investment of their portfolio of underperforming schools from 2001 to 2006. In that time frame, CPS closed 38 schools. In other words, CPS sought to move their children from lower performing schools to higher performing schools to boost the return on the overall portfolio. These school closings were smaller in scale than the current 50 and spread out over 5 years, as opposed to one year. Since there were a relatively small number of schools that closed each year, the district could focus their efforts on actively managing the portfolio of students to ensure they were placed in new schools that had higher average performance on standardized tests.

CCSR found that students who transferred to schools performing in the top 25% of the portfolio did indeed score higher in both reading (1 month higher) and math (almost three months higher) than they would have had they stayed in their closed school. However, only 6% of the students from closed schools were placed in these top performing schools. Those schools were on average 3.5 miles further from home than their closed schools. The overwhelming majority of students ended up at schools in the middle to lower end of the CPS portfolio. A year later in their new schools, students on average scored equivalent to what they would have done had they stayed at their old school. In other words, after five years of active portfolio management of 38 schools, the return on investment is zero. Some students did better, some did worse, but overall the portfolio remained unchanged.

If a bank allowed a stock broker with a track record of zero return on investment to double down on their investment with a much riskier bet, the bank would be hauled before Congress. When JP Morgan Chase was hauled before Congress over the London Whale, they were chastised for letting a broker with a track record of outstanding returns place a huge bet that failed. In the public sector it is much easier to second guess the private sector than it is to second guess and hold themselves accountable. While these data only point to a failed implementation of the portfolio model, it also raises the question of whether the value system that treats children like money that can be shifted around at will can really be successful at all. Perhaps even a slight shift towards a socially responsible investment approach might be an improvement in which the broker chooses the best possible investment that balances both the return on investment as well as the overall social good of the investment. Perhaps a zero return on investment would be more palatable if the carnage to local communities had been minimized.

In the Garden of STEM

"April showers bring May flowers," is a common expression in the midwest of the United States. Those April showers also bring May weeds. The state of Illinois lists the dandelion as an official weed. Dandelions are particularly pernicious for homeowners as they have evolved to bring joy to children. When the dandelion flower turns to seeds, it looks like a cotton ball. The gentle blowing of a child's breath sends the seeds floating on the wind like summer snow to spread throughout your yard and your neighbors' yards. Homeowners spend countless hours either pulling these weeds from their lawn or spreading weed killer.

I often think of the dandelion when I hear college students discuss their experiences with premedical science classes. I look upon those students and wonder whether they are a medical dandelion or a medical flower. Built into the core of premedical education is the notion that students who do not have the aptitude for medical school should be counseled out of notions of continuing their medical education. In other words, courses should be designed to weed these students from the garden of STEM. These courses are commonly known as weed out classes. This core characteristic of premedical education dates back to a 1950s medical education report: "Effort should be made as early in the student's college career as possible to determine whether, on the basis of personality, character, motivation, and academic performance, he is qualified to go into medicine. If it is decided he is not qualified, then every intelligent device, including aptitude and interest tests, should be used to persuade him to reevaluate his professional objective." (1953 Survey of Medical Education, p. 11)

What do these medical dandelions look like? At Stanford University, as well as many other universities, medical dandelions are most likely women, African American, and Hispanic. Caucasian males are least likely to become medical dandelions. Given that there is no evidence to suggest that women, African Americans, and Hispanics are inherently inferior doctors, there must be something wrong with what we conceive to be important in preparing students for medical school.

Every weed, pest, and invasive species has a place on Earth where they belong and are treasured. The dandelion comes from Eurasia. It was brought to North America by European immigrants. The dandelion has many positive attributes. In the garden, the dandelion helps other plants by making nutrients available, attracting pollinators, and enhancing the process of fruit ripening. In the kitchen, the dandelion is used to make salad, wine, coffee, and as an ingredient in root beer. In medicine, the dandelion has been used as an herbal remedy to treat infections, liver problems, and urinary difficulties. Thus, unbeknownst to many homeowners, there are places on Earth that grow the dandelion on purpose for sustenance and medical treatment.

In medical practice, empathy is a practice that patients highly value from their doctors. It is the ability to relate to another person on an emotional level. Since the vast majority of time we need to see a doctor, we are in a heightened emotional state, it is greatly appreciated to be cared for by someone who understands what we are going through. However, empathy is another one of those dandelions that is weeded from premedical education. Several studies have found that performance in the weed out science classes is actually negatively correlated with empathy. One study (p. 123) concluded that: "students with high achievement in many components of the curriculum tend to have personality profiles that seem inappropriate for their chosen careers as physicians."

About 90% of medical schools follow this paradigm of premedical education requirements. The lack of empathy in the medical profession is well portrayed in a 1991 movie called The Doctor, starring William Hurt. It is based on the true story of a surgeon who made fun of doctors who showed empathy, until he contracted throat cancer himself and got to experience medicine from the patient's perspective. It changed the way he viewed the role of empathy in medicine. It would be nice if medical schools and premedical education embedded empathy into the core of their education programs.

One notable example of university that highly values personality characteristics is the DeGroote School of Medicine at McMaster University in Canada. Entrance to their program is not determined by how well students did in the weed out science classes. Instead, roughly one-third of the entrance score is based on overall GPA, regardless of major, one-third is based on a verbal reasoning score, and one-third is based on a personality assessment. Ranking on these scores is used to select for an on-site interview, which focuses on personality characteristics. Entrance to the medical school is based on the combination of both general academic strengths and personality characteristics. The result is that roughly 10% of the class comes from majors outside of science, such as the humanities, business, education and journalism. In the end, a McMaster student's undergraduate field of study does not predict the quality of their performance as a doctor.

Diversity matters in ecology and it matters in education. Declaring a plant as a weed based on one characteristic eliminates consideration of the variety of benefits that it has for the ecosystem. Likewise, weeding out premedical students based on only one of the characteristics of good physicians diminishes our access to individuals who are superior on many other qualities that make a good physician. I wish that universities would alter their selection criteria to focus on what actually matters for any given profession instead of using one yardstick to weed out the very qualities that we value.

The Election of Pope Francis Highlights that Everyday is April Fools' Day

If you believe that this essay was posted on April 1, 2013, you can thank Pope Gregory XIII. If you identify the date this article was posted in some other fashion, April Fools' Day is for you.

Prior to 1582, much of the world used a calendar that was developed under Julius Caesar, known as the Julian calendar. The Romans identified January as the first month of the year. However, there were many people who recognized March 25 as the beginning of the new year. Because of Easter, they would celebrate the new year on April 1. The Julian calendar has a technical problem in how it handles leap years. The days have been slipping for centuries. By the mid 1500s, the date of Easter no longer aligned to the lunar cycle. The current difference stands at 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar. Thus, April 1, 2013 in Gregorian is March 19, 2013 in Julian. This issue was known by astronomers for centuries, but no one had an alternative.

Pope Gregory XIII enlisted the best minds and made a commitment to correct the technical problems with the Julian calendar by adjusting how leap years are handled. The purpose of the Gregorian calendar was to establish the dates of Catholic feast days. Over the course of the next few centuries, the Gregorian calendar became the accepted secular calendar in most countries. Those countries that adopted the Gregorian calendar also adopted January 1 as New Year's day. In the United States, January 1 is the legal holiday for New Year's day.

Unfortunately, during the long transition from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, there remained confusion about when New Year's Day should be celebrated. There were those that adopted January 1 as New Year's day and those that continued to celebrate April 1 as New Year's day. These latter celebrants were known as April Fools. They were often the butt of practical jokes.

What started as good natured humor has become a daily barrage of name calling (and calling people fools would be a step up from today's discourse). It is common practice now to resort to name calling whenever people disagree about religion, politics, and social issues. Even when people are attempting to serve the common good, they routinely tear down those who oppose their ideas. Rather than address the issues directly, opponents are attacked personally and it is not good natured humor. In his most recent inaugural address, Obama called for an end to name calling in politics. In his book on the Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Lencioni highlights mistrust among team members and unhealthy conflict as two foundational dysfunctions of effective teams. Calling people fools (and worse) breeds division and mistrust not only in teams but also communities and society.

During his mass of installation last month, Pope Francis gave a different message for serving the weakest and the poorest in the world:  we need to serve one another with love and tenderness. Jesus Christ calls upon us to love our enemies. To be called a child of God means you must be a peacemaker (Matthew 5:9). In  Jesus' last public prayer,  he called for unity (John 17: 20-21) as the ultimate strength. Conflict is inevitable and healthy when focused on the issues and not the person. Pope Francis' message is that these conflicts should be rooted in love for one another. That is the hallmark of a Catholic as well as most religions.

Although religion has been crowded out of the public, political sphere, it is a unifying force within communities. In searching for empirical solutions, it would be helpful if political leaders actually paid attention to empirical data. There is ambiguous data at best that firing teachers and principals and closing schools leads to better outcomes for children. There is also empirical evidence that these strategies make children's lives worse. However, there is empirical evidence (p. 178, Figure 6.7) that the social bonds of the community surrounding a school can ameliorate the effects of poverty on children's lives. In particular, poor communities with high percentages of religious participation in the community achieved higher outcomes in their schools than poor communities with lower percentages of religious participation in the community. Rather than stamp out religion from the public sphere, we should be embracing religion as a powerful tool for community building and school reform.

Pope Francis' message calls for an end of everyday as April Fools' day and calls for embracing service with love for another as the means to protect and serve the world's most vulnerable people.

The End of My Writer's Block with Educational Lessons from One of the "Worst American CEOs of All Time"

"Oh, darn writers block
Why is my mind in a lock?
It's taking over my mind
Oh, the right words are so hard to find

I think my sanity is gone
'Cause this writer's block has lasted far too long
Why can't I get the words dead-on?
Every single word I write seems wrong!"

- Boo to Writers' Block by fruitilicious


It only took me six entries into the relaunch of my blog before I felt like I was in a rut. I found this poem on the Internet and it captures where I have been at mentally with my blog for the last several months. I truly admire those people who can maintain a relevant voice on a regular basis. My goal is to publish an essay each month that attacks traditional notions of what education is and provides a vision of what education can be.

Back in November, I wrote about the outbreak of teacher strikes in Illinois schools this year. Even last month, West Chicago District 33 was the latest to go on strike. In my November essay, I argued that the new evaluation system based on student test scores has broken down any remaining trust between teachers and administrators. Much of the ongoing rhetoric around the new teacher evaluation system reminds me of Jack Welch, the high flying CEO of General Electric (GE) during the dot-com craze of the late 90s. For my December entry, I had planned on writing an essay about Jack Welch's management philosophy of measuring the quality of everything using Six Sigma and annually firing the bottom 10% of managers, which sounds a lot like the rhetoric around measuring students in every subject and firing teachers and principals and closing schools based on the results. The danger is that we measure the wrong thing and fire the wrong people. However, I could not get the right angle on an essay about Jack Welch and GE.

I finally figured out that the interesting story is not Jack Welch, but instead the relevant story is Robert Nardelli, who was one of Jack Welch's lieutenants. When Jack Welch announced he would be retiring by 2001, there were two other lieutenants, who with Nardelli, were all vying for Jack Welch's job. In those days, Robert Nardelli was known as "Little Jack" for his similarities to Jack Welch. Although he personified much of the Jack Welch philosophy, he was not selected as Welch's successor. Instead, GE selected Jeffery Immelt. Home Depot wasted no time in hiring Nardelli as its CEO.

At Home Depot, Nardelli quickly instilled the Six Sigma discipline and overhauled the company, including shifting from full-time to part time staff. Through Nardelli's cost costing and standardization, Home Depot doubled revenue and profits in 5 years. Just like Home Depot, districts can get large test score gains by overhauling school structures, installing outcomes-focused principals, and standardizing the curriculum.

However, investors saw a different picture of Home Depot. Home Depot's stock price remained flat during Nardelli's tenure. Meanwhile, the stock price doubled at Home Depot's main competitor - Lowes. In addition Lowes was gaining market share against Home Depot and had significantly higher customer service ratings.

The problem for Home Depot was that the Jack Welch/GE management style destroyed Home Depot's competitive advantage. The full time store employees were all home improvement experts in their own right. The Orange Apron culture was a force to be reckoned with. They could give trusted advice to customers about what products were needed to accomplish their home improvement project. In addition, there was an entrepreneur culture at each store, which allowed the stores to respond to local conditions. Replacing the experienced full time staff with part-time, inexperienced staff and standardizing the store management led to inferior customer service ratings, declining same store sales, and flat stock prices.

This imposition of the wrong management style earned Nardelli a place on the list of Worst American CEOs of All Time. In fact, the Jack Welch management philosophy is not even relevant at GE anymore. Welch's successor, Jeffery Immelt, revolutionized the corporate culture at GE. He squelched the focus on process improvement and instead focused on creating new business through innovation. Eight years ago Businessweek declared that the most successful companies in America are those that focus on design and innovation. Apple and the new GE were the poster children of this declaration.

Last month, the Chicago Public Schools announced the potential closure of 129 "underpeforming" schools in Chicago. The students in those schools will be transferred to other schools that are "higher performing." CPS is taking a page out of Jack Welch's outdated, irrelevant play book. Unfortunately, this model has been proven destructive when applied in other industries. Early indicators show that the teacher and principal firing and school closing policy that is sweeping the nation is heading down the Home Depot road. Instead of increasing the quality of teachers that displaced students get, a University of Chicago study shows that, "The teacher workforce after interventions across all models was more likely to be white, younger, and less experienced, and was more likely to have provisional certification than the teachers who worked at those schools before the intervention." (p. 3) Just like at Home Depot, the policy is shifting the workforce from experienced to inexperienced teachers that have little connection to the local communities.

As a footnote to the Nardelli story, when the next Home Depot CEO reinstated the experienced workforce and reestablished the entrepreneurial culture, Home Depot gained ground on Lowes and is better positioned today for growth when the housing market recovers. If our education leaders are going to look to the corporate world for management models, it is imperative that they focus on up-to-date successful business models to emulate and attract high quality teaching staff by creating cultures of innovation rather than standardization.