The Conley Report, Part VIII: What We Need to Do To Prove Schools are Our Paramount Duty

Part 8 in a series looking at the Washington Adequacy Funding Study from Dr. David Conley. For previous posts, scroll down or check out the archives!

There are 20 specific interventions Dr. Conley identifies that are research proven to improve student success. What I’ll do is look at them in groups of 4, because there’s an awful lot of content here, and since the report organizes the section alphabetically I’ll go ahead and do the same. If you’re reading along at home these begin on page 67 of the report.

Recommendation 1: Administrator Professional Development

Not only is it proven by research, it’s intuitive: you have a better chance at having a quality school if you have quality leadership. The report calls for an extra $12 per student to be spent on professional development for administrators, going on to explain that could mean, “workshops, induction programs for new principals, principal leadership centers, and … other professional development for principals and assistant principals.” Using the prototypical schools that they developed for the report this would mean $5,700 for each elementary school, $8,172 for each middle school, and $15,876 for each high school.

Two thoughts:

1. It’s interesting how they seem to intentionally lock district-level administration out of this money; the report is pretty specific on this being for principals and principals only. In my own mind it’s easier to justify the money when you know it’s going to the school site.
   
2. This is where the prototype model that they’re using gets hinky. In my part of Eastern Washington, for example, there are very, very few high schools that have 1,300 students the way their prototype does. I may have missed it the first time through, but does this $12 per kid apply to any size, or is it prorated up or down depending on the size of the school?

Recommendation 2: Behavioral Support Programs

This intervention would add a full-time counselor to every prototypical school site, along with a day of focused professional development on how to handle behavior problems in the classroom.

The first part of that I like, the second part I’m leery of. Our last school counselor had actually gotten her masters and worked in Social Work before coming to our school, and that background gave her some really good tools. To my mind a counselor and a social worker are two different types of positions, with the counselor focused on the academic piece in a way that the social worker wouldn’t, especially at the secondary level.

The day of professional development to “enable (teachers) to develop skills necessary to fulfill a preventative role in recognizing problem behaviors”, though, seems wasteful. Classroom management is a process of time, and my suspicion is that any workshop you take in one day will be a throw-away that is promptly forgotten.


Recommendation 3: Campus Security

I’m willing to bet anyone reading this $1 that I teach on the single most secure public campus in Washington State. It’s the ultimate gated community, because it’s a military installation. No one with a felony conviction can get on, no one can get on without a proper ID, and there’s a legion of military police who can be on the scene in seconds if the need ever arose.

We’re the happy exception, though, and the Conley Report acknowledge that by providing for a half-time security officer at every middle school and a full-time officer at every high school, along with $10 per student (I’m assuming at every level; the report isn’t clear) to be spent solely on campus safety.

Just brainstorming, but at my 600 student elementary school I could think of a couple different ways to spend that $6,000: new badges for visitors, more walkie-talkies so that the teachers can take them out to recess, and as unobtrusive a camera as we can get for the front doors. These aren’t must-have items, but they wouldn’t hurt, and if the money is there, why not?


Intervention 4: Career Academies

Because being voc ed wasn’t good enough, now they have to be an academy.

Anyone involved in Career and Technical Education (CTE) statewide should read this one page of the report (page 70), because it convincingly and clearly makes the case for the benefits that these programs offer.

I think that one of the most harmful conceits of the school reform movement has been the idea that every child needs to be “college ready.” There’s a large segment of kids who don’t want to go to college; there’s just as many who shouldn’t go to college because they can’t handle it (you can put my brother in the latter category). If these kids can spend their last two years of high school picking up skills like typing, welding, electrical work, plumbing, or whatever the case may be, they have every chance of being employable right out of high school and can begin leading useful, productive lives. There is no downside!

The thought in years past was that the woodshop is where you went when you couldn’t handle “real” school; that’s crap, because it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s different, but a good program is just as educational as the humanities track, with just as much potential. As someone who’s useless with tools, those guys have my respect.

Anyhow, the report indicates that 250 students in the prototypical high school would be interested in career academies, and adds 7.81 FTE teachers to work solely with those kids. That may seem like a lot, but if there were 2 teachers in each of the areas the school chose to follow (health professions, carpentry, childcare, whatever), you’d have good coverage.

Coming up next: Class size, counselors, extra-curriculars, and ELL.