Small learning communities effective
05/09 -- If boards want to improve schools, they need to quit focusing so much on the host of intervention programs they’ve designed for struggling students. Instead, they should focus on more basic issues: the quality of classroom teachers and the size of schools and classes.
That was one of the important messages that Linda Darling-Hammond, nationally recognized professor of education at Stanford University, shared at a Council of Urban Boards of Education session.
Given the multitude of challenges that today’s urban students face, she said, it’s understandable that school leaders have responded with a host of add-on, compensatory, and counseling interventions designed to keep their focus on learning.
But such efforts overlook what research shows, she said. One study, for example, found that teacher qualifications and a learning environment where teachers really get to know their students have as much of an influence on academic success as the child’s home life.
“We’ve been spending money on the edges of the system,” Darling-Hammond said. “We’ve not made sure that kids have teachers who know what they’re doing and know their kids.”
Some of the most successful schools today are public and charter schools designed to create smaller learning environments and attract highly qualified teachers with years of experience, she said.
The success of other nations in putting these qualities into schools helps explain why the United States is no longer among the top 20 industrialized nations in international tests, she said.
Other nations have invested heavily in schools and put a high premium on teacher quality, Darling-Hammond said. They also give teachers more time to plan instruction, work collaboratively, and get to know students.
For example, Japan, where teachers and students can stay together as long as four years, consistently outscores the United States on international tests, she said.
“Our kids in urban districts have fragmented lives,” she said. “School has to be stable. There can be 50 percent gains in achievement if a student spends two years with the same teacher.”
Some success already is being seen as school boards move to create smaller high schools or use the schools-within-a-school model, Darling-Hammond said.
“These schools have a high level of personalization,” she said. “They’ve redesigned their schedules so there are longer blocks of time where kids stay with teachers. They have 80 to 100 kids per teacher, rather than 150 to 200.”
“There’s only one area where we’re number one in the world,” she said, noting the strong link between dropout and incarceration rates in the United States “We have 5 percent of the population and 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.”