Glass Talks on School Reform

For school reform to work it must be taken one step at a time and teachers must not be forced to make changes, former National Public Radio (NPR) reporter Ira Glass told a crowd of more than 100 at the Graduate School of Education last night.

Glass is something of an expert on the subject, having spent the past two years reporting on two Chicago public schools--Taft High School and Washington Irving Elementary School.

In his speech at the Gutman Conference Center, Glass emphasized that his series of radio reports in 1993 and 1994 were intended to provide tales of urban schooling rather than serve as scientific studies.

"I'm here tonight to tell you the story of two schools," said Glass, who has reported for NPR for 17 years. "My evidence is anecdotal, and you can take it as such. I'm not a social scientist."

But anecdotes were enough to hold away over the audience for Glass' 90-minute speech, during which its members--many teachers themselves--often laughed and nodded their heads in recognition.

The Chicago public school system is undergoing the largest school restructuring of any public school system in the country, Glass said, and is now in its sixth year of reform.

The main thrust is decentralization: Instead of letting school boards make major decisions, panels composed of parents, community members, teachers, principles and sometimes students make decision locally.

At Taft, according to Glass, the reforms were unsuccessful.

Taft's disheartened principal ended up leaving the Chicago public school system at the end of Glass' year there, announcing his resignation and calling for the demise of the system as it then existed.

The next year, the school abolished all reforms and went back to being a completely traditional high school.

The problems at Taft were four-fold, Glass said: Teachers did not agree with the changes, the principal tried to implement too many reforms at once; the design of the reform was flawed, containing inherently bad ideas; and the bureaucracy impeded progress.

As an example of the flawed design, Glass cited the school's decision to give only "A" and "B" grades. Those who did not earn those grades simply repeated each unit until they did. What happened, Glass said, was that nearly every student in the school stopped studying.

"They had very little hard data about what actually happened in schools that adopted these programs," he said.

Some Taft teachers also resented the efforts at reform, saying that the changes did not affect what was going on inside the classroom, Glass said.

At Irving, now in its sixth year of reform, efforts at changing the school succeeded.

While dropout rates, standardized test scores and teacher morale went down at Taft during its reform period, at Irving they rose and are still rising, Glass said.

The principal was an "old pro" accustomed to dealing with the Chicago school bureaucracy, as opposed to the Taft principal, who had come from a suburban school to the urban Taft.

She made some "smart tactical choices," Glass said, including tackling only one area at a time--writing, then reading and then science and math--and allowing teachers to choose whether they wanted to participate in the reform efforts.

All but three teachers ended up choosing to do so, and those three eventually left the school.

Irving's teachers also set high standards: eighth-graders are now expected to read 5,600 pages a year, which breaks down to about 20 pages a day.

Excerpts from and information about his school series can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.npr.org/school

"They had very little hard data about what actually happened in schools that adopted these programs," he said.

Some Taft teachers also resented the efforts at reform, saying that the changes did not affect what was going on inside the classroom, Glass said.

At Irving, now in its sixth year of reform, efforts at changing the school succeeded.

While dropout rates, standardized test scores and teacher morale went down at Taft during its reform period, at Irving they rose and are still rising, Glass said.

The principal was an "old pro" accustomed to dealing with the Chicago school bureaucracy, as opposed to the Taft principal, who had come from a suburban school to the urban Taft.

She made some "smart tactical choices," Glass said, including tackling only one area at a time--writing, then reading and then science and math--and allowing teachers to choose whether they wanted to participate in the reform efforts.

All but three teachers ended up choosing to do so, and those three eventually left the school.

Irving's teachers also set high standards: eighth-graders are now expected to read 5,600 pages a year, which breaks down to about 20 pages a day.

Excerpts from and information about his school series can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.npr.org/school