93-05-07: Genuine Local Control Is Key to Public School Reform, Expert Says Some of Dwight Allen's Longstanding Proposals for School Reform Are Looking New Again Radical public school reform is still needed and it can be accomplished "conservatively," according to Dwight Allen, author of "Schools for a New Century," who recently explained his four-point program at the Curry School of Education. The role of the teacher must be changed from that of "expert" to that of "coach or guide"; the trial and error nature of learning must be acknowledged; localities must be given genuine control over their schools; and a national curriculum must be drafted, he said. These ideas, which he has been advocating since the late 1960s, are not new, but they are getting more attention now in school reform debate. Teachers are "burdened" by their role as experts, he said. "They are expected to have the answers to all questions and not to have them is a threat to their status and credibility. It's going to require a different kind of education of teachers" that will also allow them to learn alongside their students. The current classroom structure expects students to "learn in one trial and all mistakes are criticized," he said. "We have to learn how to celebrate error. That's a radical departure. I doubt the average teacher or school administrator could talk about trial and error teaching." The locus of school control must be meaningfully established at the local level. "We have the illusion of local control, but it is an illusion because many factors -- textbooks, standardized testing, advanced placement testing and college admissions -- create a de facto system of national curriculum and schedule: national control." For the purposes of greater local control, school divisions should be reorganized into districts made up of a single high school and its feeder schools, he said. "We need a national framework to increase local control. I'm really into local control. If we got really serious about it we could get a lot of things, like accountability," he said. Accountability should be established according to a bell curve index of performance measures with the top 15 percent of schools getting rewarded (such as with the authority to hire teachers without regard to their credentials), and the bottom 15 percent should go into "receivership": removed from all local control and perhaps being taken over by the state board of education (who would appoint a new local board) or an education school at a university to run as an experimental school. The accountability graph would have two components, the second a demographic one. "Measure the job they do with the type of students they have and reward those who do well." America's highly mobile society requires it to have a national curriculum, he said. "The problem is, who are you going to trust to devise it?" Its goal should be to "educate kids to be smart and to be good," two things that he noted a generally distrustful society is going to have difficulty defining. "The national curriculum would not be monolithic. My guess is it would be a combination of multidisciplinary [i.e. ask questions about solving environmental problems] and disciplinary [i.e. ask questions about math]. Some of it would be problem-centered, contextual, not discipline-centered. "If we are going to have a meaningful reform, we have to have some mechanism that will produce a national consensus. We need will and leadership. I'm a long-term optimist and a short-term pessimist. There has been lots of talk about reform over the last 10 years, but as far as I'm concerned, there has been no school reform," said Mr. Allen, who holds the title of Eminent Professor of Educational Reform at Old Dominion University. He earned that reputation as an education innovator at the University of Massachusetts during the late 1960s, according to Curry School dean James Cooper. "I'm delighted we have national goals," said Mr. Allen. "They're a starting point. But they are very embarrassing. One-third of our goals are about getting back to zero, being drug-free and having kids ready to enter school. We say we want to be number one in the world in math and science education. We have no idea how that sounds in Paris and Tokyo. It's impossible, silly. We know it takes 25 years to see the results of a reform cycle." Mr. Allen advocates a national system of experimental schools overseen by a national school board. Their experimental programs would be based on the current availability of funds and each would be matched with a sister non-experimental school with the same budget as a control. "They wouldn't be elitist. I don't want anything done in an experimental school that couldn't be done in every school in America." He describes his position on the reform spectrum as "eclectic." He says he has a "conservative perspective" because he is working within the system. "Large scale reform is easier to pull off than incremental reform. One of the reasons I like radical change is people give up on assessing how well you're doing the way they do in judging incremental changes. You get yourself so far away [from the usual] that what you are doing has no comparator." Some of his other suggestions include: o Year-round school scheduling with four 13-week terms. The first nine weeks would be for ordinary instruction, the next three for supplemental or remedial work and the last week would be vacation. Schools performing well by accountability measures could get longer vacations. o More emphasis on video in the classroom with "Cosby Show" production quality. Demonstrate the capacity of TV to support the curriculum. There isn't anything about TV that requires us to use it passively." o A telephone on the desk of every teacher (so they can call parents). "Teachers are the only professionals in America without a phone on their desks." o No private school vouchers paid for by public funds. "The good, educable kids will move into more conducive environments, leaving behind intense concentrations of those who need more resources to learn with." o No business/school partnerships. "It's muddleheaded. It confuses the issue and is counterproductive. You get unequal distribution of resources." o More rigorous college admissions standards to help high schools shape up. A tougher college core curriculum with a merciful waiver policy that allows the substitution of work of equal rigor.