Education Week - September 16, 2015 - 27

technology to complete assignments and to pursue
their own interests. Furthermore, we found that
collaborative engagement with technology can
support students' classroom learning and enhance
their tech-related skills. Parents and children fluidly trade expert and learner roles as they use technology together, and do so even more frequently in
Spanish-dominant, immigrant-headed households.
These experiences point to two especially important
family assets: strong traditions of family interaction
related to technology use, and parents' deep motivations to learn new ways to support their children's
success.
How might we strengthen the home-school and
family relationships we have found are critical to
successfully supporting Hispanic students on a
much larger scale? Here are three action steps for
policymakers and education leaders to consider:
We need to support educators so that they
can support the nation's families.
While schools are critical in the fight for educational equity, they can't do it alone-as every educator already knows. We also know that children
spend fewer hours in school than they do at home
and in community spaces that serve as informal
learning environments. Our research suggests that
mobile technologies provide exciting opportunities
to link different spaces where children learn.
Schools have yet to capitalize on the promise such
technologies hold for supporting learning and devel-

Wiring underserved
schools and
community
institutions will not
close opportunity
gaps unless we do the
same for the homes
where children live."

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VIKKI S. KATZ is an associate professor of communication
at Rutgers University and a senior fellow at the Joan
Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. MICHAEL H.
LEVINE is the executive director of the Joan Ganz Cooney
Center. CARMEN GONZALEZ is an assistant professor of
communication at the University of Washington.

a week for 105 minutes to figure out how to better integrate new curricula aligned with the Common Core State Standards into their classrooms.
Teachers model lessons for colleagues, who then
offer feedback and discuss how they can incorporate similar teaching strategies into their own
subject areas.
Without the expanded schedule, teachers at
Preuss say, the school would be hard-pressed to
find the time to give them this critical support at
a time of transition to the new standards.
Many expanded-time schools also have utilized
professional learning communities, or PLCs, in
which teachers plan and work through challenges
in smaller groups every week while students are
in enrichment activities. At Chicago's Morton
School of Excellence, a pre-K-8 Academy for Urban
School Leadership school, the PLCs offer time for
teachers to troubleshoot and work together to find
solutions to problems.
RaStar West, a 4th grade teacher at the Morton School, describes her math and science PLC
as "a safe place, not only to collaborate and plan
ahead, but also to say, 'I'm having problems with
this, and I need help.' " Teachers at the school have,
in turn, helped students more than double their
proficiency rate in the last four years, according to
Measures of Academic Progress assessment data.
These examples are not anomalies. Research
shows that schools with the strongest PLCs, as
measured by teachers' attitudes toward peers
and to their own development as educators, consistently generate higher student performance.
Moreover, the federal Institute of Education Sciences found that professional development could
generate a sizable impact on student performance,
but only if teachers invested at least 30 hours in
such learning over the course of no more than one
year. Spending less time than that yielded no measurable impact on the achievement of their classes.
Yet, despite both anecdotal and concrete evidence that giving teachers more time for dedi-

cated, regular collaboration and learning opportunities can lead to higher student achievement, in
most schools they engage in very little of it.
A recent survey by Scholastic reports that teachers have just a few minutes a day for collaborative
work. The reasons for this dearth are simple: Time
for collaborative teacher development has not
been a priority, and the standard school schedule
allows little time for teachers to meet during the
day. Meanwhile, principals surveyed by the Boston
Consulting Group said that lack of time was the
most significant obstacle in promoting professional
learning, and the 2015 state teachers of the year
identified collaborative learning as one of the top
three areas school funding should be focused on to
promote student learning.
Schools with expanded time can offer a solution. In Massachusetts, teachers at more than 50
expanded-time schools are far likelier than teachers in traditional district schools to report that
they have time to collaborate, according to the
2014 TELL MASS Survey. Seventy-eight percent
of teachers in expanded-time schools agreed with
the statement that "teachers have time available
to collaborate with colleagues," compared with 58
percent of their peers in traditional schools.
To put in place the conditions necessary for
these measures to succeed, practitioners and policymakers should take advantage of this unusual
moment in the history of education reform-a period when higher learning standards for students
are being implemented just as higher expectations for teacher performance are taking shape.
One of those conditions is surely for teachers to
have more time to work together to strengthen
the instructional practices that result in successful schools. n
JENNIFER DAVIS is the co-founder and president of
the National Center on Time & Learning. She served as
a deputy assistant secretary of education in the Clinton
administration.

Getty

Education, Not Political
Correctness, Is the Answer

"W
By Paul Marx

e'll recover-and be better than ever." That's
the pretty common response made to the TV
camera in the aftermath of disaster. Whether
it's a small town or a big city that's been hard
hit, the public face nowadays is bravado-big
talk. That's what's been mostly happening in
Baltimore since the April riots over a black
man's death in police custody.
So it felt good to see a recent story in The Baltimore Sun about some action. The
story told of volunteers renovating an empty building that would become a joyful
place for kids, a refuge from the inner city's dangerous streets. The story said the
building being worked on was in Bolton Hill. Bolton Hill? The white enclave adjacent to African-American West Baltimore?
In Baltimore, Bolton Hill is synonymous with professionals who, despite the risks,
care enough about the welfare of their city and country that they choose to live
close in. To me, that meant some of the hard work in fixing up the recreation center
would be done by doctors, lawyers, teachers, and other professionals who live in this
lovely community.
Bolton Hill kids would be among those taking advantage of a modern, up-to-date
facility. In doing so, they would mingle with African-American kids. Such integration would be a big step forward in slowing down the shooting sprees, which at the
worst, so far, led to a weekend in early July when there were at least 20 shootings,
11 of them fatal. White kids and black kids mingling might temper the urge to
settle petty grievances with guns.
Upon further investigation, however, I realized that such an integrated youth
center existed only in my mind. The references to Bolton Hill in the story were
geographical, not sociological. I had been wondering what could be done to stop a
young person from growing up ready to put a bullet in the brain of a human being
very much like himself. There wouldn't be much of middle-class white values at the
new Bolton Hill youth center.
Very disappointing. I had concluded that the only way to end the daily shootings
was to expose inner-city children to value systems different from those many have
now. Neither firing the police chief nor new police strategies nor new technology
would end the shootings. It would take a full generation of exposure to different
values.
Every day in the Baltimore area, I see clear progress in ending the racial segregation that still exists here. I see integration of employment in banks, schools, department stores, hospitals, entertainment, the professions, and all levels of government,
including the police department. Most whites react favorably to the competence and
character they observe in blacks in the workplace. White people are accustomed to
working with black people. In the workplace, usually, all employees follow the same
rules and expectations of behavior.
The 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education
had as its purpose ending racial segregation in public schools. But in big
cities across the country, by and large, that hasn't happened. While white
parents are accustomed to working with black people, many do not want
their children going to school with large numbers of black kids. When my
own children were in middle school in New Haven, Conn., and large numbers
of black kids were bused in from the inner city, the character of the school
changed. The inner-city kids brought with them inner-city values, and white
parents sought alternatives to city public schools.
Integration has worked, for the most part, in private schools, because private schools have been able to control who attends. Private schools want
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PAUL MARX is a professor emeritus of English at the University of New Haven, in Connecticut.

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Education Week - September 16, 2015

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