University Times

“Smart is something you do, not something you are,” said Pittsburgh Public Schools superintendent Linda Lane. “What we want to do is get to the place where that idea is embedded in our curriculum and we’re preaching it, teaching it, talking about it to our students, that hard work, doing homework, reading books is what makes you smart. That hard work is possible for you to do and in fact you can do even more.”

Lane spoke to a packed house on “Equity Is Not an Office,” in a lecture last week hosted by the Center on Race and Social Problems. As superintendent, she oversees 64 schools and more than 26,000 students in the Pittsburgh Public Schools.

“What does equity mean to us in our district? Is it an office? No. If it’s just one person’s job, it’s not going to happen. That’s why it’s so important that we make sure we broaden it,” Lane said. “We believe equity has to be embedded in what we do, in our decisions, in our reform efforts, in our allocation of resources. Equity has to be the responsibility of everybody.”

Educational equity goes beyond equal opportunity. “There is a difference between equity and equal. Equal means that everybody gets the same thing, but that’s not necessarily equitable,” Lane said, citing the example of a child who needs a wheelchair to access a school. “That doesn’t mean we’re going to give everybody a wheelchair. But we do give our kids what they do need, and that’s what equity means in our definition. So, it’s allocation of resources and making sure we have the precursors for success for the children.”

The overall goal of achieving equity is having the programs that engender the real possibility that the kids will have similar educational results. “That means having strategies that are planned, systemic and that focus on the core of the teaching and learning process,” Lane explained. “Until we change how our teaching and learning is conducted, we’re not going to change the results we’ve already gotten.”

Under an agreement struck four years ago between the Pittsburgh Pubic Schools, a group called Advocates for African American Students and the Pittsburgh Human Relations Commission, a city-wide equity advisory panel was established, with members appointed by each group. The agreement cemented the concept of equity in the mission statement of the public schools, Lane noted.

“What are some of the things we look at as evidence of equity? We look at the inputs. We talk about money, of course. We look at facilities: This gym is too small; they don’t have a pool; they don’t have a good auditorium. We ask how experienced are the teachers, because we use teacher experience as a proxy for effectiveness,” Lane explained.

“We look at class size; we look at location of the school: What kind of neighborhood is the school in? Is there diversity or a lack of diversity in the school? We ask: How ready are students to learn? We’ve measured programs: Does a school have music courses? Does it have arts? Does it have world languages? Does it have Advanced Placement? That’s another way to decide if a school is equitable,” she said.

“We look particularly at the achievement gap. We’re not going to be a successful school district until we show substantial improvement in the achievement of our African-American students. We know that for a fact,” she said.

To narrow the achievement gap between blacks and other students, the district has established a number of racially specific efforts to accelerate learning, Lane pointed out.

One example is the Excellence for All school-reform plan launched by Mark Roosevelt, Lane’s predecessor, while she was serving as deputy superintendent for instruction, assessment and accountability. During her tenure as deputy superintendent, which began in 2006, the school district achieved Adequate Yearly Progress reports on national standardized tests under the No Child Left Behind Act for the first time in the district’s history.

One of the goals of the Excellence for All plan was to increase the achievement growth of African-American students at a level 5 percent higher than their peers’ achievement growth.

“So the goal of closing the achievement gap was called for in that plan,” Lane said. The district defines the gap as the combined percentage of other students who are proficient and advanced, minus the combined percentage of black students who are proficient and advanced.

Achievement gap closure comes with a caveat, however. “When you’re using a mathematical model there is more than one way to get there. You can decrease the achievement of the high-end students and that will close the gap, right? That’s not what we’re trying to do here. We do not define that as gap closure,” Lane said.

The district also focuses on the rate of achievement growth of African-American students over time. “Not just the level of achievement but also the growth. If you’re sitting at a low number and want to get to a high number, there’s only one way to get there: You have to grow. That’s why measuring growth and the rate of growth is critically important,” she said.

What causes the achievement gap?

“If you have no theory about the cause, how are you going to know if what you’re doing will change anything?” Lane asked.

“I believe the causes of the gap are complicated,” but first it’s important to acknowledge that some schools are succeeding, she said. “That in and of itself tells me there’s something going on in those schools that may not be going on at other schools,” she said.

There also are differences internal to the district and differences within a school and even within a classroom.

Student reading and math proficiency differs widely across the Pittsburgh district at all school levels, Lane noted. For example, at one end of a spectrum, 70 percent of the African-American K-5 students in one school are reading at proficient or advanced levels, but that rate is 24 percent at another school.

“The question would be: What is going on at the school at one end and not going on at the school at the other end? They have the same curriculum. The reading courses are basically the same. Facilities are the same. What can we learn from the school that’s doing a good job that we can transfer to that school that’s clearly struggling?” Lane said.

The stock answer is that outside risk factors account for those differences. But she said that explanation is inadequate. “Those include family engagement and child-rearing; the neighborhood environment; poverty; students’ mental and physical health, and stereotype threat. Now those are real things; we know they exist. But we also know there are schools, teachers and classrooms that have those same issues where it’s working,” Lane said.

“They call that true but useless information. Yes, it’s true that some of these kids live in poverty, but for us that’s not the information we need. The information we need is how to change the achievement levels of the kids in spite of that.”

Lane said data show that the single most important protective factors are effective schooling and hard work in the classroom. “Why? Because you can overcome all the other problems with it. Do we want family engagement? Do we want kids to live in housing that is clean and safe? Do we want neighborhoods where there is no violence? Of course we do,” she said.

“We have to work on all those things, too. But we can’t use that as an excuse, as a reason for saying we can’t do what we have to do. As adults who work in the school district, if we’re going to actually accept money to teach kids, then I think we have to do that, because that’s the job. And if we can’t do it, we have to find people who can do it.”

That puts effective teaching at the top of any educational strategy list, she added.

Empowering effective teachers

Another element of the Excellence for All program was to establish a “guaranteed curriculum.”

“That means, as a teacher, I don’t look at you and decide based on what I see as a disability or the color of your skin or your ethnicity that somehow you can’t do what the other kids can do and therefore I’m going to give you something less,” Lane said.

“No, I assume that every child in my class can do the work that we have to do. That’s what this curriculum piece is all about. Prior to this, teachers could pretty much teach what they wanted. You could go in the 6th grade class in mathematics in a school and find one thing going on and go across the hall to the other 6th grade math class and find something totally different going on. It’s not only an equity issue, because if kids transfer they could be in a totally different curriculum, which obviously is educationally damaging. So another big piece of this is teacher professional development procedures,” she said.

“We also have a new way to measure equity, called the Tripod Study, a pilot program where we survey the kids.”

The Tripod Study is part of Lane’s Empowering Effective Teachers plan, which is one of only four such programs nationally to be selected for funding last year by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

“We ask the kids: ‘In this class we don’t waste time; we get a lot done. Agree or disagree?’ or ‘My teacher holds me to a high standard in this class. Agree or disagree?’” Lane said. “These results are fascinating. The correlation of what the students say about the class and the students’ learning outcomes is fairly strong.”

Teachers obviously have a profound impact on their students’ learning, but what makes one teacher more effective than another?

“We used to look at satisfactory or unsatisfactory performance for our teachers, but now we’re looking at other things,” such as the rate at which a teacher’s student achievement gap is closing, she said. “How we define effective teaching in Pittsburgh: Equity in learning is a part of the definition and is actually on the teacher evaluation form, which it never was before.”

Pennsylvania System of School Assessment test results show that the achievement of the city’s black students is growing slightly faster than for other students.

“We know this too: The most effective teachers can produce gains in student achievement that if accumulated over several years without decay could erase the achievement gap between black and white students and between Pittsburgh students and nationwide and statewide averages,” Lane said.

“These are our data on our teachers in our district. That’s what finding effective teachers is all about. That’s why we devote our efforts to increase the number of highly effective teachers in the district and to increase exposure by students to highly effective teachers in the learning environment.”

Lane recounted the story of a white teacher in a predominantly white school, who for years was rated as highly effective.

“She moves to a school that has predominantly African-American students, and all of a sudden everything falls apart. She can’t do it, because they’re out of control,” Lane said.

“The temptation is to blame the kids and all those risk factors I mentioned before. But what she did instead was to observe a successful African-American teacher. She learned some things about working more effectively and she engaged in reflection rather than blame. That is the place we have to be. We need to examine our own practice. What can I do better? Who can help me? Who’s really doing well?”

Finally, Lane said, the teacher concluded that she needed to look upon her students as her children and treat them accordingly. “I believe for our African-American students that’s incredibly important; the relationship is critical.”

Lane told of her own son, who had a teacher he believed didn’t like him. He decided to fail the course, believing that by failing he was punishing the teacher. “I said, ‘No, no, that doesn’t punish the teacher, that punishes you.’”

In contrast are the teachers who reach out and build a relationship with him — “he’d walk through fire for them,” Lane said.

“Effective teaching in Pittsburgh means having effective teaching for every African-American student in every classroom every day.

“For kids to do better, we must do better. Because unless we change, they’re not going to.”

—Peter Hart