Schools That Engage Children

Abstract

EVER tried stuffing a week's worth of clothes into an overnight bag? No matter how carefully you roll up the dresses, jeans, sweaters, and whatnot, they get wrinkled and out of shape, and they require a lot of fixing once unpacked. This is the only picture I could think of as I listened to some very good presentations on the importance of restoring to the nation's schools the tradition of educating students for a civic life. The American Youth Policy Forum event -- one of three in a series -- focused on the research justification for integrating community service and civic education with academic goals. The evidence is there; these initiatives do enhance academic learning. But speaking in the august hearing room of the U.S. House of Representatives, most of the researchers felt compelled to use the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act as the framework for their findings. They rolled up their message and stuffed it into the NCLB bag, where, in addition to getting wrinkled, it could easily be ignored. To their credit, the panelists and the entire forum attempted to provide more balance to a public school system that is now hell-bent on chasing higher scores on standardized tests. I wish them luck. Looking at the U.S. Department of Education press releases and at most of the media coverage of education, however, I get the clear message that any role the schools might play and any values they might endorse other than those embodied in NCLB are being squeezed out of shape. Indeed, they are totally out of the picture right now. This is more than shortsighted. Certainly, the core goals of NCLB are essential and not in dispute. It's how the law expects schoolpeople to achieve them that makes NCLB its own worst enemy. Take the use of research-based evidence, for example. Studies, reports, and initiatives are coming from all directions to affirm that engagement in learning, environments that value trust, and integrity in relationships between teachers and students and their families work together to make a critical difference in learning. In fact, consistent improvements in teaching and learning essentially depend on factors such as these. The Board on Children, Youth, and Families of the National Research Council recently surveyed the research about student engagement in learning, especially among urban high-schoolers, and found three factors to be equally important contributors to student engagement: high academic standards, skillful instruction, and the supports students need. (See Committee on Increasing High School Students' Engagement and Motivation to Learn, Engaging Schools: Fostering High School Students' Motivation to Learn, National Academies Press, 2004). One initiative that directly addresses this finding is the Tripod Project, directed by Ron Ferguson of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Ferguson serves as a lead researcher for the Minority Student Achievement Network and helped it conduct and analyze a survey of the member districts' secondary school students that included more than 40,000 participants. The results indicated that student success depends on three qualities of teaching: content knowledge, pedagogy, and strong relationships with students. The Tripod Project is now in its second year of a professional development model that focuses teachers' attention and collaboration on these three legs. Early on, Ferguson observed, a key element of the project was trust -- of him as an outsider trying to influence the teachers' work and among the teachers themselves as a group able to discuss the project's work frankly. …