(NOTE: This article is cross-posted at www.samchaltain.com)

It’s almost election season in DC, which means I need to decide once and for all if Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee – and, by extension, Mayor Adrian Fenty – deserve another four years at the helm.

Here are the arguments as I see them:

On one hand, it’s incontrovertible that Rhee has sparked both local and national conversations that were long overdue. Her decision to show up at a DCPS warehouse, with cameras, and shine a light on a system so dysfunctional and disorganized that it allowed seemingly scarce resources to remain unused was both brilliant and galvanizing. Her determination to confront the fecklessness of our current teacher evaluation system placed the issue front and center in discussions of systemic reform, where it belongs. And her millennial focus on eradicating the generational injustices of our school system has turned the issue into a mainstream conversation-starter. Those are major accomplishments for which she is largely responsible. Shame on the rest of us for not figuring out, much earlier, how to inject this work with a similar, undeniable sense of urgency. And woe is we if she leaves after just four years and the city returns to square one, denying us all the chance to make a more detailed judgment on the viability of her strategies for lasting change.

On the other hand, Rhee’s primary weapon – a fierce, uncompromising rhetoric – has also been her Achilles heel. She has recklessly alienated a majority of the very people she most needs for lasting reform to occur: DC’s public school teachers. Her unwavering reliance on “data” – and a limited definition of data at that – is leading us toward a system where schools and educators are incentivized to relentlessly, and with great discipline, move the needle on a single measure of basic-skills proficiency in math and reading. This is an extremely effective political strategy for it locates a nebulous and Sisyphean effort in a single, easily trackable number. It’s also, I believe, a largely illusory effort that hinders our ability to identify truly aspirational standards for children, and apply the same level of discipline and determination toward the establishment of a school system that is aligned around what young people really need in order to be successful in college, throughout their chosen careers, and as active and responsible citizens in our democracy.

In sum, my chief concern is that Rhee will be unable to generate what noted school reform expert Michael Fullan has described as the single most important resource for bringing about systemic change – collective capacity, or the ability to “generat[e] the emotional commitment and the technical expertise that no amount of individual capacity working alone can come close to matching.”

As I’ve written previously, this does NOT mean Ms. Rhee is merely required to give people more opportunities to collaborate. What is required, though, is disciplined, strategically employed collaboration that fosters a shared vision of how to create the optimal learning environment for children (as opposed to the optimal testing environment). As Fullan writes: “The gist of the strategy is to mobilize and engage large numbers of people who are individually and collectively committed and effective at getting results relative to core outcomes that society values. It works because it is focused, relentless (i.e., stays the course), operates as a partnership between and across layers, and above all uses the collective energy of the whole group. There is no way of achieving whole-system reform if the vast majority of the people are not working on it together.“

There are many people I respect who believe this is exactly what Michelle Rhee is bringing about. I have just as many friends and colleagues who are equally convinced that Rhee will be unable to move the city any further on its overall reform efforts.

It may be clear which way I’m leaning, but what do you think? Does Rhee deserve four more years to make a true go of it and see if DC can achieve the impossible? Or is her relentless focus on test score data and an oppositional rhetoric a guarantee that any lasting change that comes about will not be the true change we seek?

On the radio this morning, I heard three different stories about public education reform. In each story, I heard the same three words — data, testing, and accountability.

Before I get any more depressed about how uninspiring this language makes me feel, I have a proposal to make: let’s stop the madness and start identifying some new words that can more accurately describe the changes we seek for children.

Fittingly, the person who first made me aware of the power of language was none other than William Shakespeare, whose plays I used to teach in a variety of classrooms across the boroughs of New York City.

Hamlet was always my favorite. He is, like most teenagers, a searcher, occasionally brooding and introspective. He has visions of his future that don’t align with the visions the adults in his life have for him. He is an artist, an actor, and a dreamer – a person more comfortable in the world of words than the world of actions. And he is in love. But Hamlet is also the future King of Denmark, which means he is bound by custom to avenge his father’s murder – a duty that leads to his untimely death, in no small part because the act of killing goes against his very being.

No matter your age, then, to read the play is to watch a fellow human being struggle between staying true to his nature or accepting the role society has assigned him. Hamlet’s struggle also illuminates an essential question of human nature, not coincidentally posed by the first two words of the play – “Who’s there?”

This is not a question many of us choose to ask of ourselves. Instead, we keep busy with work and other distractions. We ignore the inherent, unarticulated contradictions between our internal passions and our external actions. And we wonder why we are left feeling unfulfilled.

Everything we do as individuals is determined by who we think we are — or, in the case of school reform, by what we define as our ultimate goals. And yet part of Hamlet’s challenge is that throughout his struggle, his only recourse for greater self-understanding is to “unpack [his] heart with words.”

This tension between thoughts, words and actions continues throughout the play. At one point, Hamlet finds himself standing directly behind the man who killed his father – the King’s brother, Claudius. All the young prince needs to do is unsheathe his sword and complete his duty. But Hamlet feels paralyzed, even as he struggles to talk himself into the act. He tries to “suit the action to the word, the word to the action” – but to no effect. Later, Hamlet bemoans the futility of “words, words, words” – at once his (and our) greatest resource and chief source of frustration.

Shakespeare’s exploration of the relationship between thoughts, words and actions illuminates a universal human tension, and a particular challenge I see reflected in our current efforts to create a more equitable school system: Before any of us can use our talents to make ourselves seen and heard, we must first understand how to “suit the action to the word, [and] the word to the action.” And before we can ever hope to become the most effective teacher, parent, boss or school leader, we must be willing to do the internal, reflective work necessary to answer the question, “Who’s there?”

If I apply this question to the current reform landscape, it’s unquestionable that the words we use are somehow divorced from the essence of what schooling is all about — helping children unlock the mystery of who they are by acquiring the skills and self-confidence they need to be seen and heard (at college, in their careers, and as citizens in a democracy) in meaningful, responsible ways.

Why is the significance and power of this goal so absent from the most common vocabulary of the current reform movement? The optimistic side of me says it’s simply because we haven’t thought about it enough. The pessimistic side wonders if it’s because we’re so blinded by the current charade of labeling schools (or reform efforts) as successful or unsuccessful based on a single measure of success that we’ve come of believe our own press clippings: if the scores go up, we really are closing the achievement gap. If the scores stay stagnant or go down, we’ve made no progress whatsoever.

As anyone who has studied Shakespeare knows, a worthy plot line is more complicated than that. And so is the work we have ahead of us.

To get us started in the right direction, I have three simple proposals:

1. Every time you find yourself wanting to say data, say information instead. It’s a good thing, for example, that we’re more concerned now with acquiring relevant information about whether or not kids are learning, and how well or poorly our schools are creating healthy learning environments for kids. But the fact that schools now talk about “Data Days” at their school suggests to me that we’ve gone a little too far in the direction of valuing the number and not the story behind the number. We need both, and information strikes me as a more neutral term.
2. Every time you want to talk about testing, talk about learning instead. Tests will always be a component of our education system. But take a moment to reflect back on your most powerful personal learning experience, and I can guarantee you it did not involve a test. I know this because I was part of a powerful data-collection campaign — I mean, information-gathering campaign — to uncover the core conditions of a powerful learning environment, based on people’s lived experiences. After hundreds of individual stories were collected, the Rethink Learning Now campaign made a word cloud of the most essential conditions, and, no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention in their life, the top five were challenging, engaging, relevant, supportive and experiential. So let’s stop playing it safe and focusing on tests that can only skim the surface of what real learning looks like, and let’s start asking ourselves, relentlessly and collaboratively, How can we create more learning opportunities for kids that are challenging, engaging, relevant, supportive and experiential — and how will we know if we’ve succeeded?
3. Every time you want to talk about accountability, talk about sustainability instead. What we seek is not just a system that holds people accountable — after all, the most successful systems are the ones where people are intrinsically motivated to do that for themselves. No, what we seek is a system that can sustain its capacity to use meaningful information to improve the overall learning conditions for children. And in case you think this is flowery progressivism at its worst, you should know that I’m partially basing this notion on the insights of renown business guru Jim Collins, who says the best organizations create environments where employees need no motivation, and leaders trip up when they destroy that drive.

So how do we create such a climate for change? Well, one way would be to start paying more attention to the “words, words, words” we use, and to stop using language that is more likely to de-motivate people than connect them to the core mission of a high-quality public education. The changes we seek, after all, are to bring about a system that can help every child not just learn about “who’s there,” but also acquire the knowledge and skills that will allow them, over the long haul, “to thine own self be true.”

The ESEA Toolkit includes information on the state of education, U.S. Senators and Representatives who serve on the education committees in the House and Senate as well as the issues they champion and bills they have introduced.  It also includes tools for working more effectively with the press, meeting successfully with elected officials, and launching your own local campaign on the reauthorization of ESEA.

Increasingly, I hear people talking about the need for “systems change” and “systems thinking,” and when I do I always wonder what people mean when they say it.

My own interest in systems thinking began a few years ago when I read Peter Senge’s classic The 5th Discipline. It influenced me so much that I dedicated a full chapter to the subject in my new book American Schools. Overall, though, I haven’t seen a lot of work in education based on systems thinking. But that seems to be changing.

I’m particularly excited about Michael Fullan’s new book, All Systems Go: The Change Imperative for Whole System Reform, which I just finished and highly recommend. Not surprisingly, the book begins with a foreword from Senge, who grounds the origins of our current system in the Industrial era. “That’s why they were organized like an assembly line,” he writes. “That’s why they were based on standardized timetables governing each part of the day (complete with bells and whistles on the walls), and fixed, rigid curricula delivered by teachers whose job was first and foremost to maintain control, much like an assembly-line foreman.” Senge urges us to imagine a very different challenge today. “The challenge of our time is not economic competitiveness. The challenge is to build not only “sustainable” but also regenerative societies — ones than enhance natural and social capital.”

Amen. And in the pages that follow, Fullan shows how that work is taking place in a number of different places around the world. He cuts to the chase on page one: “If there is one thing you should remember  . . . it is the concept of collective capacity,” which Fullan defines as “generating the emotional commitment and the technical expertise that no amount of individual capacity working alone can come close to matching.”

Fullan says, and I agree, that collective capacity is the hidden resource we fail to understand or cultivate. Instead, we overvalue single-resource strategies — making smaller classrooms, raising salaries, drafting common standards, etc. — when what we need is an investment in compound resource strategies. Smaller classrooms mean nothing, after all, unless the move is coordinated with relevant professional learning for teachers that helps them employ new teaching strategies. And adding national standards will mean nothing if the end result is merely more national exams and less high-quality locally driven assessments using the standards as a common frame. But this is what we do, over and over again. We’re playing a game of chess as though it’s checkers, making one move at a time.

This does NOT mean that all we need to do is give people more opportunities to collaborate. What Michelle Rhee understands, I think correctly, is that collaboration, or student voice, or democratic governance, is not an end in itself (as I alluded to in a previous post titled, “To What Do We Owe Our Fidelity?”) What is required instead, and what Rhee fails to grasp, is disciplined, strategically-employed collaboration that fosters a shared vision of how to create the optimal learning environment for children (and, by extension, adults). As Fullan writes: “Quality instruction requires getting a small number of practices right. These practices involve knowing clearly and specifically what each student can or cannot do, followed by tailored intervention that engages students in the particular learning in question, and then does the assessment-instruction-correction process on a continuous basis.”

Fullan provides myriad examples throughout the book, but a particularly illustrative one comes from Ontario, where government officials realized they needed to provide resolute leadership on some core priorities that could impact not just the government education agencies, but also district and local school leaders. The government realized that if it wanted to engage the whole system in a coherent, focused effort, it needed to do three things:

1. focus on a small number of ambitious instructional goals
2. create an instructional capacity capability to help coordinate the efforts of the many players (government, district and local ed leaders)
3. change the culture of the state education ministry so that it had greater internal coherence and a commitment to work in a true two-way partnership

As someone living in DC, I read Fullan’s case study of Ontario and saw an immediate disconnect between what they did and where we’re headed. In particular, check out this quote:

The gist of the strategy is to mobilize and engage large numbers of people who are individually and collectively committed and effective at getting results relative to core outcomes that society values. It works because it is focused, relentless (i.e., stays the course), operates as a partnership between and across layers, and above all uses the collective energy of the whole group. There is no way of achieving whole-system reform if the vast majority of the people are not working on it together.

To me, that last word sums up why I worry that Michelle Rhee will not be able to move the city any further on its overall reform efforts. In work this massive and important, how we speak, and not just what we say, matters greatly. (This is what I was trying to get at in my recent review of the new film The Lottery as well.) Fullan’s book convincingly demonstrates that systemic reform is difficult but possible. It also demonstrates, once again, that until the tenor of our national conversation suggests a deep awareness of, and commitment to, working together to achieve results, our efforts at developing collective capacity will remain agonizingly out of reach.

There’s an interesting debate unfolding on the New York Times web site this week around this question: Does Teach for America Improve the Teaching Profession?

Unfortunately, too many of the featured contributors — who have sparked hundreds of readers to offer their own feedback — chose to cast TFA in one of two terms: as either the White Knight of education reform (e.g., Donna Foote’s “A Corps of True Reformers”) or as the down-n-dirty Devil himself (e.g., Margaret Crocco’s “A Threat to Public Schools”).

As I wrote last week, in a piece titled “What Gandhi would think of The Lottery“, this sort of polarized rhetoric is the latest iteration of the “I/It” way of seeing public education, and it will get us nowhere. So as someone who neither loves nor hates TFA, let me offer a succinct summary of how I see them, since no one seems to want to acknowledge the fuller picture of what they represent:

First, the good news: TFA is closer to a key recipe for systems improvement than any other entity in either the traditional or alternative teacher certification route — they have figured out how to make their program among the most highly competitive in the country. As the Times reported earlier in the week, 18% of Yale’s most recent crop of seniors applied to TFA — nearly one out of every five graduates — and 46,359 candidates across the country applied for just 4,500 spots.

It may seem odd to praise TFA via the research of Linda Darling-Hammond, but LDH’s most recent book, The Flat World and Education, cites as a key component of the Finnish success story its ability to raise the competitiveness of its teacher preparation programs (which now accept only ~15% of those who apply). So we should all celebrate — and learn from — TFA’s ability to attract so many bright and passionate young people to a profession that still scores low on the prestige scale.

Now, the bad news: One thing TFA does NOT do that has also been essential to Finland’s success is invest deeply in preparing teachers for a research-based professional career. Finland’s teachers don’t drink from a fire hose and then inherit a classroom of high-needs children — their preparation includes both extensive (and excellent) coursework on how to teach, and a full year of clinical experience in a school associated with their university of study.

This is not a foreign concept in the United States — it’s called medical school. Or law school (with its summer internships). Or just about any other graduate degree that’s designed to prepare people for a top profession. Which gets us to the crux of the problem with TFA — on the whole it takes us further from, not closer to, the establishment of teaching as a truly prestigious profession, rather than merely a noble way to gain valuable experience as an individual on the evolving path of twenty-something life. We would never tolerate Doctors for America in our most overused emergency rooms. We would never send Architects for America to Haiti to experiment on earthquake-resistant housing design. Why then do we not only embrace the concept of placing our smartest and least experienced teachers before our neediest children, but go even further and suggest that the TFA model is actually what all teacher preparation should look like?

To be fair, part of the void that was filled by TFA existed because so many of our graduate education programs are, well, sucky. And until they change and get better, we can’t begin to aspire to the sorts of transformations other countries have been able to bring about.

If we really value learning and teaching, as Finland and other countries do, we need to invest deeply in the creation of a true long-term teaching profession, and not just a short-term teaching force. That means both traditional and alternative certification programs need to raise their game. And while TFA has much to teach the field about attracting the best and the brightest to our nation’s classrooms, until it revises its preparation model it will unintentionally perpetuate the illusion that reforming our education system simply means smarter, younger teachers. It’s just not that simple. And we can do better.

The film is beautiful, and deeply moving, It is impossible not to fall in love with the four children (and their families) whose bittersweet paths we follow in the lead-up to the lottery that decides who is admitted to Harlem Success Academy, a successful new charter school, and whose dream is, so randomly, denied.

I’m equally struck by the way the film further entrenches the “us v. them” mentality that is, I believe, one of the greatest challenges to our establishing a new system of public education that can truly serve the interests of the families in the film.  It is, in short, a film about heroes (the families and pro-charter school advocates) and villains (teachers’ unions and anti-charter advocates). And it’s asking you to pick sides.

Watching it, I found myself thinking of two great philosophers – Martin Buber and Mohandas K. Gandhi – and wondering what they would say about the tenor of our national movement, and what that tenor augurs for our children over the long-term.

It was Buber whose 1923 book I and Thou first suggested that all human beings interact with the world – and each other – in one of two ways:

• By seeing others in two-dimensional terms – as “I/It” – and by moving into a limited subject/object relationship; or
• By seeing others in three-dimensional terms – as ‘I/Thou” – and by moving into existence in a relationship without bounds.

Buber’s central message was that human life finds its meaningfulness in relationships. And it is only when we paint each other in human terms (“I/Thou”) that we create the conditions to support both personal and group transformation.

Similarly – and much more familiarly – Gandhi’s success as a leader stemmed from his faith in the principle of Satyagraha, a synthesis of the Sanskrit words Satya, or “truth,” and Agraha, or “holding firmly to.” As Gandhi explained it: “Satya implies love, and Agraha engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian movement Satyagraha . . . . I have also called it love-force or soul-force. In the application of Satyagraha, I discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one’s opponent but that he must be weaned from error by patience and compassion.”

Both Buber and Gandhi clearly understood what the producers of The Lottery do not – that to bring about a true revolution (as Gandhi did), we must lead with a fundamental respect for our opponents. We must, as Lincoln said, appeal to the “better angels” of our natures. And we must resist the ideological short cut of painting each other in two-dimensional terms.

Unfortunately, what I see taking shape nationally is exactly that. It’s a traditional paradigm of conflict, in which both sides (e.g., pro- or anti-union, pro- or anti-charter, etc.) seek to defeat the opponent or frustrate the opponent’s objectives. By contrast, Gandhi’s goal was “to convert, not to coerce, the wrong-doer.”

What if we heeded Gandhi’s advice and flipped the script? What if both sides started defining success as cooperating with our opponent to meet a just end – best personified by the families in The Lottery and their hopes for their children? And what if we did so by proactively interacting with each other through an “I/Thou” frame?

I’m not suggesting that by doing so, all of our problems would magically go away. To be sure, there are some real differences, and real obstacles, to reform. I am suggesting, however, that it may serve us all better if we start fighting fire with water by refusing to engage in the most off-base accusations that suck up the oxygen in our public discussions (from Arne Duncan conspiracy theories to the notion that a union supporter can’t really want what’s good for kids). We’re all educators, after all, committed to careers in the service of children. Let’s all start acting like it.

I’m in Chicago this week attending the National Charter Schools Conference, and on the plane this morning I continued reading a book that was recommended to me last week by Zappos’ Tony Hsieh, called Tribal Leadership.

It’s a fascinating book to be reading as we prepare to start a completely new school. And as someone who has written previously about the prevalence of the wrong sort of business thinking in school reform, I’m struck by how poorly most of my field’s most visible leaders heed the authors’ advice.

To test this theory, check out the following quotations and post a comment to let me know if you think it sounds a lot like (or unlike) any of our current national figures in education:

1. (Describing a hospital that had effectively remade itself) — “The leaders spent most of their efforts building strong relationships between the company’s employees, volunteers, and patients. Instead of telling people what to do, they engineered experiences in which staff members would look at the same issues they were dealing with, so that strategy became everyone’s problem. And they got out of the way and let people contribute in their own way to the emerging goals.”
2. (Describing a dehumanizing organizational culture) — “Within this sort of culture, knowledge is power, so people hoard it. People at this stage have to win, and for them winning is personal. They’ll outwork and outthink their competitors on an individual basis. The mood that results is a collection of ‘lone warriors,’ wanting help and support and being continually disappointed that others don’t have their ambition or skill. Because they have to do the tough work (remembering that others just aren’t as savvy) , their complaint is that they don’t have enough time or competent support.”
3. (Describing the late 19th/early 20th century origins of our public education system) — “The solution was to train a new generation of workers by teaching them inside a system that looked a lot like a factory. A star pupil is one who does the homework and has the right answers. This new system undid the classical liberal education, which said that the value was in the well-designed question, and this shift in focus made the worker exploitable. The system didn’t emphasize creative thinking, strategizing, leadership or innovation. Stars were smart conformists, and people who stuck to the pattern became model students . That approach also bred the “I’m great (and you’re not)” mentality, based on homework, grades, and knowing the right answer. It does not emphasize empowerment, creativity, or individual satisfaction.”

The main point of the authors — who, although they may sound like Linda Darling-Hammond or John Dewey, are actually career business consultants — is that the best leaders are those that “focus on two things, and only two things: the words people use and the types of relationships they form.” Words, because they shape how we view the world and our place in it; and relationships, because without a strong amount of trust, transparency, and mutual accountability, the best you can hope for is short-term (illusory) change.

I can understand why we must be mindful of tending to these insights as we grow our school from the ground up. What I can’t understand is why doing so puts us largely at odds with the most visible “reformers” of our day.

The fact that we call something “Progressive” or “Traditional” doesn’t make it inherently good or bad.

For lots of reasons, I’ve been thinking about this today. I’ve written before (here and elsewhere) about my struggles to wear both my mommy hat with my educator hat. As an educator, I don’t equivocate in my views of what is best for kids. I’m clear on my progressive/ constructivist/ inquiry-driven worldview. As a mama, things get trickier. I have to balance all of the factors- distance, cost, friendships, curriculum, pedagogy- in order to make good school choices for my kids. I’ve spent agonizing hours wondering if the local, fairly traditional school that my kids attend is best for them.

But what if the philosophy to which a school aspires or adheres is less important than the quality of the implementation? What if we’re once again drawing false boundaries between schools based upon labels rather than quality? What if, as Barack Obama said, “there’s more that unites us than divides us?”

First off, thanks are in order to everyone who has weighed in thus far to offer useful feedback on our ongoing search for a title to the forthcoming book of 50 learning stories. Yesterday, I had a long meeting with the publisher’s marketing folks, and when I explained to them the concept for the cover — a mosaic of images of either each author’s profile photo, or a montage of photos that remind them of the learning story they shared, or perhaps a combo of the two — I think we may have found our title: Faces of Learning.

Likey/No likey?

The true measure of fairness is not to be found in equal outcomes but in equal opportunity for each student to learn as much as he or she can. There will always be some who learn more than others, just as there will always be some who are taller than others. But regardless of where students start out, we can make sure they progress as rapidly as possible. Maximizing progress maximizes performance—and maximizing the performance of every student is the key to maximizing our success.

Every group of kids, even groups that are highly tracked, will present a range of abilities and therefore a variety of different learning needs. But today’s standardized curricula and standardized tests imply that such variation does not exist. How are we to help all students learn the same thing at the same time when every student needs to learn something different?

Consider a hypothetical example based on sub-group achievement data from my local school district. Let’s pretend that I’m a middle school Language Arts teacher. I have six classes filled with a mix of Asian, White, Black, and Hispanic students. On average in my district, Asian students perform 5% higher than White students; White students perform 25% higher than Black students; and Black students perform 15% higher than Hispanic students, some of whom may be recent immigrants to this country.

I notice after the first month of school that my students have not mastered English grammar. Even though this is not on my list of state standards to teach at this time, I can’t abide the thought of these kids heading off to high school without this basic skill set. In my judgment and experience, kids who cannot write conventionally and speak conventionally have a difficult time succeeding in high school and beyond. I would be thrilled if every student arrived each year with the uniform degree of knowledge specified by our standards. But this never seems to happen. So I will teach first to the needs of the students and then to the requirements of the state.

Most of my White and Asian students are likely to be ahead of my Black and Hispanic students when it comes to mastering Common Standard English (or CSE). Some of my Black students may have grown up with an English language variant of CSE called Black English Vernacular (or BEV). Most of my Hispanic students will likely have grown up learning some form of Spanish, but we have kids from so many different Spanish-speaking countries that there will be many variations. In any case, it’s possible that half of my students did not grow up speaking CSE, the language of academia and the world of business.

If I have native CSE-speakers and kids who grew up speaking languages other than CSE in the same classroom, the teaching of CSE grammar is potentially prejudicial. Yet all kids need to know CSE to have a fair shot at success in a CSE country. Kids who grew up as native CSE speakers, or who have mastered CSE through diligent study, may not need much help, and if they do, they could probably succeed with the traditional “grammar book” approach. But for poor or rural White children, BEV-speaking Black children, and Spanish-speaking Hispanic children, CSE may qualify as a foreign language. These students will gain little from the traditional approach to grammar instruction.

Situations like this tend to exacerbate gaps in achievement. When teachers faced with diverse classrooms rely on a single traditional method that favors those students who need the least help, inequities are compounded. I don’t want to make that mistake. I want to teach in a way that allows CSE-speaking students to polish the skills they may already have already while giving non-CSE speakers a chance to develop CSE skills in a more accessible way.

To do this, I need to consider two things: First, resorting to the grammar book approach, with the workbooks, worksheets, and traditional Latin-inspired rules and vocabulary, isn’t going to help me reach my goal of helping all kids reach their potential. Second, the purpose of grammar instruction is not the memorization of grammar terms and rules but the production of well-formed sentences. So I’ll throw out the grammar book and bring in the real books.

We’ll start by looking at well-formed CSE sentences in the books we read. I’ve already made sure that kids reading at different levels have different books that are matched to their abilities. This ensures that all kids will be able to start by analyzing sentence structures with which they are already familiar. For my part, I will provide model sentences from the simplest to the most complex. But we won’t engage in traditional diagramming; that would be prejudicial, not to mention useless since diagramming doesn’t help kids learn to create well-formed sentences. Instead, I’ll show kids a simple system for analyzing sentence structure that does not require an understanding of traditional grammar but that helps them develop important sentence-building skills nonetheless.

To make it easier for kids to study sentence structure, I came up with a different way of describing sentences. This is not an “official” way. I’ve never seen it in a textbook or had it taught to me in a class. But I have found that it works for just about anyone—something that can’t be said for the traditional sentence diagramming approach.

Take a look at this smooth-sounding forty-one-word sentence:

On a bitter cold winter morning, Malcolm Maxwell, a young man of simple means but good intentions, left the quiet country town in which he’d been raised and set off on the bold errand he’d been preparing for all his life.

Not bad, eh? And it wasn’t very hard to put together. You’ll notice that it’s made up of several different parts. In our system, there are four kinds of sentence parts you can use:

• Main Parts. These parts usually contain the main action of the sentence: “Malcolm Maxwell,… left the quiet country town in which he’d been raised,….”

• Intro Parts. These parts often introduce or lead into other parts, especially main parts: “On a bitter cold winter morning,….”

• In-Between Parts. As the name implies, these parts go in between other parts. They feel like a slight interruption: “…a young man of simple means but good intentions,….”

• Add-On Parts. These are extra parts that convey additional information about any of the other parts: “…and set off on the bold errand he’d been preparing for all his life.”

Using our system, we can describe the structure of the sentence like this: Lead-In + Main + In-Between + Main + Add-On. Here again are those five parts written out in order:

• Intro Part. “On a bitter cold winter morning,”

• Main Part. “Malcolm Maxwell,”

• In-Between Part. “a young man of simple means but good intentions,”

• Main Part, continued. “left the quiet country town in which he’d been raised,”

• Add-On Part. “and set off on the bold errand he’d been preparing for all his life.”

And that’s all there is to it. You can create new sentences by combining the different kinds of parts in different ways. To make longer sentences, just add more parts. By analyzing the sentences kids read with this system, and then writing their own sentences to fit increasingly complex sentence patterns, kids develop a repertoire well-formed sentences they can use in both speaking and writing.

Here are six sample patterns typical of the ones I use as models to help kids construct their own:

• Intro + Main. “As class began, Mr. Funston dreamed of Christmas vacation.”

• Main + Add-On. “He stared at the blank faces of his students, perplexed that he had nothing whatsoever to teach them today.”

• Main + In-Between + Main. “The Lesser Antilles, he realized, would be the perfect place for a warm winter hiatus.”

• Main + Add-On + Add-On. “He saw himself on the beach, baking in the midday sun, enjoying tasty snacks and refreshing beverages.”

• Intro + In-Between + Main. “Ten minutes later, having dismissed his students early to lunch, he sat at his computer hunting and pecking his way to a good deal on a two-week trip to the West Indies.”

• Main + In-Between + Add-On. “Mr. Funston leaned back in his big teacher chair, forgetting about the twelve pounds he’d put on at Thanksgiving, and immediately tumbled backward into the Halloween bulletin board he’d neglected to take down.”

Why go to all the trouble of developing a completely new way to teach sentence construction when we already have a way that has been used for generations? Why not stick with the tried and true? Perhaps it’s as simple as this: What was true when older methods were created is no longer true today; and many teachers have tried with little success to educate many children in the current generation with these approaches.

In one sense, the answer to the riddle of education reform is simple: to get different learning outcomes, use different teaching techniques. Traditional techniques were created for a different time, a time when we aspired to educate a smaller and less diverse population for a simpler world with fewer requirements. In generations past, we didn’t think much about teaching, learning, and fairness. We taught the way we taught. Some kids learned, some didn’t. And most of us never worried about whether education was fair or not.

In expressing our sense of fairness, then, we should strive not to close achievement gaps but to help all students maximize their achievement. In any unit of study, kids who start out farther behind will have to work harder and put in more time. Kids who may already be competent will have to focus on advanced skills. Our teaching must account for both of these realities. Kids with more to learn will likely spend more time learning it and will tend to make more progress than others. At the same time, other kids must not be held back from pursuing new skills and more advanced understanding. In the end, if everyone learns as much as they can, the most meaningful gaps will narrow, not because we’ve held some kids back or pushed other kids ahead by diverting resources from the more privileged to the less privileged, but simply because kids with more to learn tend to make faster progress through less complicated material.

At the intersection of teaching, learning, and fairness, striving for standardized outcomes is inherently unfair to kids with high pre-existing skill levels who will likely learn faster and achieve more if they are only aloud to do so. Striving for state-sanctioned minimum competence is also unfair to kids with low pre-existing skill levels who are rarely given the chance to develop meaningful abilities. Instead, true fairness demands that we work toward mastery for all by optimizing individual progress and by making sure that each student learns as much as possible.

In a system of standards, tests, and legislated learning timelines, fairness requires us to teach with more regard for our students than our state because we know that official benchmarks are often too low to be useful indicators of meaningful achievement, and. that learning is not as linear or as consistent as standards and tests imply. Fairness demands that we set higher expectations for all students and that we provide the tools and support they need to meet them, while at the same time accounting for individual differences in where kids begin and how they proceed. In striving for fairness, we acknowledge that different students will achieve differently. But if we teach with individual learning as our focus, and work to assure that students learn as much as they can, we will move consistently closer to the goal of achieving fairness in education as all students move closer to realizing their potential.