An ongoing conversation about Tacoma schools (Part 1 of 2)

By Nathan Bowling on April 23, 2013

Everywhere I go someone has an idea about how to save or fix Tacoma's "broken schools." It's one of the hazards of being a teacher. When I tell people in Tacoma that I work at Lincoln High School or that I work in the Lincoln Center Program, about 60 percent of the time the reaction is "ooooh" - a long, drawn out version of the word, a mildly sympathetic noise that roughly translates to "poor you." More often than not it is followed something along the following continuum: "that must be hard" on the more socially refined end, "I hear that's a rough school" in the middle range and "break up any fights lately?" from people who have no guilt about stereotyping people, specifically children, of poverty. Basically, over half the people I meet think my job is the midpoint between prison guard and nightclub bouncer. It seems, their vision is clouded by their own prejudices and urban legend. And as long as that is the way the community views the children within its schools, we will never have the schools our kids - especially our most vulnerable deserve.

Our views of our schools are clouded by our poor vision and metrics.

Everyone wants to make sure that schools serve the kids of our community. But, it seems the biggest issue with measuring (in order to improve) school quality, within Tacoma and beyond is that while we are awash in data, there is no real metric for what a "quality school" really is.

There's not even consensus on what a "good school" is supposed to do: Should schools help kids improve themselves? Should we focus on individual student progress? Is school supposed to prepare kids to score well on state tests? Is school supposed to prepare kids for college? Cultivate their creativity and artistry? Should schools teach kids budgeting and financial management? Prepare kids for the workplace? Handwriting? Personal hygiene? Send food home to needy families over weekends via backpack programs? Teach citizenship? Acculturate recent immigrants in American Values? Create better athletes? Substance abuse education and awareness? The truth is that we expect all of the above, and more, from schools. This all begs the following: if our community is really asking schools to do all of this, can we really measure its effectiveness at any of it? There is a simple answer: no and a more complex answer: yes, but only if we are honest about expectations.

Nobody is satisfied with Tacoma schools because everyone has a different set of outcomes and definitions for what quality education looks like. As policymakers roll out new initiatives our focus drifts to match. In one year we focus on increasing "rigor" - eduspeak for how challenging classes and tasks are - then we turn around and laser focus on increasing graduation rates. If we pause for a moment we might realize if you ratchet up the difficulty of school, you are going to have a negative impact on the rate or number of students graduating at the lower end of the spectrum. Increasing graduation rates and increasing rigor are both are admirable pursuits, but pursuing them simultaneously and expecting an increases in both measurements dooms the system to fail.

A great example of this failure to think about the consequences of competing initiatives is Senate Bill 5328. SB 5328 would create an A-F grading system for Washington's schools based on how students perform on various state assessments and other factors including graduation rate. It would replace the current Achievement Index. I wonder aloud, what exactly does it mean to be an "A" school in Mercer Island? What does success look like when 90 percent of your students enter school at grade level or ahead? How about when when 90 percent enter at or below? What does an A school look like in that case? What are we asking each school to do? Most importantly (to me and hopefully us as a city) is what are the implications of calling an urban, school already burdened by poverty and its associated impacts on student focus and achievement, a failure, a F school?

Who is bettered by this, certainly not the kids.

Nathan Bowling is a teacher at the Lincoln Center program at Lincoln High School.