Education Week - September 14, 2016 - 18

COMMENTARY

Building Capacity for Blue Ribbon Schools
By Ted Kesler

A
Getty

s anyone who works in
education knows, the quality of our schools matters.
High-quality schools have
the power to affect the demographics and property
values of their communities
and can provide effective
ways to guide students out of cycles of poverty.
In recent years, the Blue Ribbon Schools
Program has served as one national indicator of some of the most successful schools in
the country.
The U.S. Department of Education created the
Blue Ribbons Schools Program in 1982 to recognize public and private schools that achieve high
levels of academic excellence and make substantial progress toward closing the achievement
gap for all students. Several hundred schools receive the award annually, with more than 8,000
recipients across the country since the program
began. The designation does not expire, but
schools must indicate the year they received the
award, and the program encourages schools to
reapply after ﬁve years.
These schools, which serve as outstanding
models of excellence for their states in an otherwise disjointed education system, benefit
from more than just a title. According to the
Education Department, the designation can
lead to partnerships with local businesses and
community volunteers as well as financial
help. Principals and school leaders may receive
invitations to present at state and regional
meetings about their most effective practices
for students and faculty. District and state educators may visit schools to learn about strategies for leadership and instruction.

As a professor of education who provides professional development for three public elementary and middle schools in New York with Blue
Ribbon designations, I have witnessed teachers'
and administrators' commitment to academic
excellence for all students. Each school prominently displays its status in its building. But
I have noticed that the designation does not
account for changes that may occur after the
award is given, such as faculty turnover, new
mandates, and curricula that affect educational
practices; changes in student population or funding for programs in the arts or sciences; or other
factors that have an impact on overall school
performance.
When I ask educators at these schools what
the status continues to signify, they admit that
after an awards ceremony in Washington, it's
back to the day-to-day work of trying to run an
excellent school. There seems to be no way to
measure whether the practices that earned a
school its award are still in place.
Moreover, with no follow-up from the federal
Education Department after designation, the
high-quality practices that these schools achieve
and the opportunities that come with the award
may peter out. This seems to be a squandered
opportunity to help excellent schools sustain
their status and harness their expertise as a
model for others.
This is why the federal department, state
and local leaders in education, and their awardwinning schools should revise the program to
more effectively build capacity for excellence in
school systems and account for schools' sustainability of that capacity. Michael Fullan, a leading
scholar on school reform, deﬁnes capacity-building as "actions that lead to an increase in the
collective power of a group to improve student
achievement, especially by raising the bar and

The Zero-Tolerance-Policy Overcorrection
By Richard Ullman

hy can't Johnny read? Or,
assuming he can, why isn't
Johnny closing the achievement gap?
It's politically fashionable
to blame his tenure-protected teacher. But might
it have more to do with the
pathologically disruptive classmate who, given inﬁnite
"second chances" by detached policymakers and feckless administrators, never gets removed from Johnny's
classroom?
Thanks, in part, to an increasingly popular behaviormanagement approach known as "restorative justice,"
soft discipline is on the rise in public schools at the
same time that education reformers are demanding
higher standards and teacher accountability.
Restorative justice emphasizes correction and counseling over punishment, and seeks to replace strict
zero-tolerance discipline policies with collaborative opportunities for restitution. Its primary goal is to keep
students in school rather than suspending or expelling
them.
Detractors argue that these programs are long on
coddling but lacking in consequences, and that they
make it a priority to warehouse students who've repeatedly demonstrated they can't be educated in a

conventional classroom setting. We're not talking here
about the kid who forgot his pencil.
So while many districts proudly point to a reduction in student-removal numbers, critics point out that
fewer suspensions don't mean fewer infractions.
The concept of restorative justice has merit. Indeed,
I've been practicing elements of it throughout my 27year teaching career. When students in my classroom
do something disruptive, I chastise the behavior and
give them the opportunity to backtrack and apologize.
"Fix it," I say. "Make it right." Almost without exception,
they do. Justice restored.
Alas, in a profession where ideologically motivated reforms abound, restorative justice in many districts has
recklessly morphed into de facto "no student removal"
policies that are every bit as ﬂawed as the inﬂexible
zero-tolerance policies they were designed to replace.
The process by which this happens is all too familiar
to teachers.
Far removed from the pedagogical trenches, federal and state education departments craft behaviormanagement guidelines designed to vastly reduce
suspensions and expulsions, and keep even the most
dangerous and deﬁant students in the least-restrictive
educational environment possible.
Then, at the district level, administrators oversee
policy speciﬁcs based on their idealistic vision of how
they wish schools could function, as well as a tendency
to blame most classroom misbehavior on teachers who

18 | EDUCATION WEEK | September 14, 2016 | www.edweek.org/go/commentary

aren't sufﬁciently "engaging" students. Factor in the
costs associated with alternative placement and the
fact that many states make graduation rates the primary instrument for administrative evaluations, and
even the most dangerous and deﬁant students aren't
going anywhere.
But administrators and other insulated "experts"
aren't the ones doing the heavy lifting in the now more
dysfunctional classroom they helped create. Ultimately,
teachers-and only teachers-are left to raise the academic bar while education policymakers lower or, in
some cases, virtually eliminate discipline standards.
Wow, that's some powerful union those teachers have.
It should be mentioned that restorative justice is a reaction in part to statistics that indicate higher suspension and expulsion ﬁgures for minority students. The
elephant in the classroom is race, and a phenomenon
generally referred to as the school-to-prison pipeline.
Students removed from schools do have a higher likelihood of ending up in the juvenile and adult criminaljustice system.
However, while all educators must be mindful of biases and pushing out kids considered at risk, it bears
emphasizing that the biggest victims of warehousing
miscreants are the large numbers of nondisruptive,
genuinely teachable students who tend to come from
the same home environments as their poorly behaved
classmates.
Teachers, especially in high-poverty areas, are some

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Education Week - September 14, 2016

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