March 30, 2007 | Volume 4, Issue 1
Susan Brownlee, The Grable Foundation
Susan Brownlee is a Senior Fellow and former Executive Director at the Grable Foundation in Pittsburgh. The Foundation supports programs that help children develop by improving educational opportunities, supporting community efforts, and strengthening families.
Personal Experiences and Reflections on Education
Heinz School Review (HSR):
Thank you for participating in this interview for the Heinz School Review. We would like to begin with your own experiences as a teacher and with the education system. What initially brought you to the field of education?
Susan Brownlee:
I had just finished graduate school, my husband was in law school, I needed a job, and I got one teaching in a suburban New Haven Connecticut high school. Unexpectedly, I discovered that I loved teaching and the great joy of the ‘aha’ moment when a student understands or sees something that she hadn’t before.
HSR:
What was your most memorable experience as a teacher and how did that experience shape your future work?
Brownlee:
My most memorable experience my first year of teaching was a haunting mistake I made: I failed a high school senior in a required American history course. When the guidance counselor asked me if I could do something, I self-righteously refused.
HSR:
Do you think that you shouldn’t have failed her?
Brownlee:
I should have found some way to help her pass the course – other ways to interest her, through different assignments, and more thoughtful assessments. Her failure was due in part to the fact I was an inexperienced and a boring teacher. I used my college notes, I lectured, and gave “hard” tests. It isn’t that I should have changed her grade, but I should have figured out how she could have mastered sufficient material to pass. I wasn’t experienced or imaginative enough to do that.
HSR:
It seems frustrating. When you’re in there so young as a teacher and you can’t reach a child.
Brownlee:
Yes, but good teachers find ways to teach children who want to learn and to motivate others to want to learn. Another happier memorable experience my first year illustrated this for me. When the principal came in to evaluate my teaching, my usually bored and slouching students sat up, raised their hands, and brightly asked questions. They even responded to my discussion questions. When the principal left, they slumped back down. They were well disposed toward me and wanted to learn. I needed to make use of that good will and to make the subject interesting and challenging.
HSR:
Looking back on your time as a teacher, what do you see as the main differences between the education system with regard to schools and teachers, then and now?
Brownlee:
I think that the system hasn’t changed very much and that the students and their world have changed a lot. In education, as in raising children, generational differences impact communication and teaching and learning. The personality characteristics given to succeeding generations of Americans in popular literature – the Traditionals, Baby Boomers, Generation X, Generation Y or Millennials – capture these differences. People are shaped by historical events and the social and economic realities of their generation. Students’ values, music, expectations, technological skills, and their ways of viewing the world and of learning have changed dramatically over three generations.
Children come to school now with skills, attitudes, and ways of learning that are very different from those of teachers one or two generations removed from them. This is particularly true in regions, such as ours, where the population is declining and teachers tend to be older. So teachers must find different ways of motivating and teaching students. Equally important, schools are not organized, planned, or administered to deal with the changed and changing students. School districts tend to be bureaucratic and compliance oriented; it is very difficult to change the culture of schools.
Bill Daggert, the educator and futurist, dramatically illustrated this discrepancy between the world of students and the educational system in a presentation to educators in the region this fall. Daggert put on a large screen a photo from the 70’s of a very large room of IBM computers linked together. He then held up a computer the size of a pencil that had the processing capability of that room of computers. He followed this comparison with a series of six photos: The American High School in 1950, The American High School in 1960, The American High School in 1970, etc. and it is, of course, a photo of the same brick building. These examples vividly captured for the audience the tremendous changes of the past 50 years to which schools have not adequately responded.
We must develop strategies and policies to help schools adapt to different students. There are organizational issues – how you structure the school day, how long the school day is, and how you use technology. There are also more fundamental and more difficult issues of training educators to work effectively with students from a different generation. We need to consider how these students learn, what they pay attention to, how long they pay attention. We do know that lecturing to children sitting in rows is not the way to reach them.
HSR:
That’s really interesting because a group of Heinz School students is addressing the same issues in a systems synthesis project with Pittsburgh Public Schools to design a new Science and Technology High School.
Brownlee:
The Science and Technology High School project is fantastic. I must confess that when I first heard about the project, I thought: “What do a group of graduate students know about education? I’ve been a teacher, a school administrator, and involved in school improvement for 30 years. What can they tell me?” Then I saw the presentation, and I was blown away. The designers responded to the critical challenges in reaching and teaching students today. They created a school where children of different ability levels and academic backgrounds could attend and progress. There was a depth of understanding of education and of students today that I tend to think only comes with real experience in the field.
Work with the Grable Foundation
HSR:
We are interested in learning more about the grant making process. Can you share any success stories?
Brownlee:
One of the key strategies of the Foundation is to improve the quality of teachers in the classroom. Over the years we have supported many projects related to teacher recruitment, retention, and professional development. I would count many as successful but would mention two. We support the participation of teachers in the Pittsburgh Public Schools in a certification program – the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Over 70 teachers have successfully completed this very rigorous accreditation program. The project also gave us the opportunity to partner with the teachers’ union, the school district, a national organization, and other foundations. A second grant, notable because the project actually became self-sustaining, is the creation of PA-Educator.net, an online hiring system for teachers. Candidates submit their credentials online, selecting districts or areas where they want to be considered. Member school districts can use multiple search criteria to select candidates to interview, for instance a district could search for a math teacher who can coach lacrosse and graduated with a 3.8 GPA. Membership costs much less than a single job search and the system allows school districts to escape politics and patronage. Membership fees are based on the size of student population and the socioeconomic backgrounds of the students, So PA-Educator.net is of particular benefit to smaller, rural, and less well-resourced districts.
HSR:
In general, it can be very difficult to measure impacts of education programs. How did Grable identify and evaluate successful programs?
Brownlee:
On a macro level we determine to some extent our strategies in our areas of funding based on large national studies that have been done in the area. Our research is often to find the best research in our areas of interest. For instance, major, long-term, well-designed (and very expensive) studies have demonstrated that the classroom teacher is the most important factor in a student’s progress, and research also has established what are the components of successful teacher professional development programs. Hence, the Foundation has focused resources on various programs of teacher professional development and has looked for components that indicate quality.
In our application process and interviews, we try to determine the capacity of a particular organization to carry out what it plans to do. We ask for the specific goals, measurable outcomes and measures of success. For example, The National Board program in Pittsburgh has annual goals for recruiting and teacher candidate completion. PA-Educator.net similarly has goals for the number of candidate participants and the number of school district members.
I suspect the type of evaluation I think Heinz School graduates would regard as valid – longitudinal studies with control groups, is too expensive for many of the programs we support.
HSR:
When discussing the issue of education, so many issues come up such as parental involvement. It is interesting to hear that teachers are the single most important factor in a child’s education.
Brownlee:
I think the phrase you frequently hear – parents are a child’s first and most important teachers – is true. Parental involvement is important. But of the factors involved in a child’s formal education, the quality of the teacher, as compared with the size of the class, the size or structure of the school, etc. is what is most important.
Pittsburgh Public Schools
HSR:
What kind of impact did Grable’s suspension of funds in have on Pittsburgh Public Schools in 2002?
Brownlee:
This is clearly one of the cases in which it is difficult to measure impact. The school district budget is half a billion dollars. The suspension of funding involved $3.5 million, so clearly on one level, the action did not impact the district’s spending. However, the issues for the participating foundations was 1) to get the public involved – discussing, caring, and gaining knowledge about the Pittsburgh public schools and 2) to create a demand for a more productive relationship among the board members and superintendent. And I believe that the action did have a major impact in achieving these goals.
HSR:
Your decision to pull funding from Pittsburgh Public Schools raises some interesting issues about how to evaluate programs that receive your funding. How do organizations such as The Grable Foundation evaluate whether or not the money donated is going to good use?
Brownlee:
I think your questions raise two different issues. The suspension of funding was a strategy to involve the broader public in a discussion of what we saw as a system that was failing its students. We made that decision to suspend funding with the understanding that the mayor would call together a citizens’ group, broad-based geographically and socio-economically, that would examine the state of PPS and produce a report on the district. At the time of suspension, the governance system was dysfunctional, and we were deliberately and dramatically (for us) drawing attention to that fact. We hoped that by setting up a mechanism for a public discussion of the problems that faced the district, we could engage the public in an important discussion of student achievement and the role of the board and superintendent. At the time, neither the administration, nor the board, nor the public was focused on student achievement. The Mayor’s Commission said that student achievement was a crucial issue for the future of the city and the region and that the differences in student achievement as measured by race, individual schools, and socioeconomic class were not acceptable. The Commission also, of course, emphasized the overcapacity of the district and recommended changes in the governance structure.
HSR:
Pittsburgh Public Schools narrowed in on the academic achievement gap issue after the mayor’s commission report came out. This made an effort to call attention to it afterwards. Do you think progress has been made in that area in Pittsburgh Public Schools? And if so, how or why?
Brownlee:
I think there has been tremendous progress in the Pittsburgh Public Schools since the report and more specifically since Mark Roosevelt became superintendent. The board and superintendent are, on the whole, working reasonably well together and Superintendent Mark Roosevelt has moved with incredible speed to address the most important challenges to the district. He has a clear, detailed agenda focused on improving student achievement. Whether it is closing schools, evaluating principals, or adopting a new reading program, the goal is to improve student achievement. For example, Roosevelt successfully closed 20 schools, a feat that no other school district has even come close to achieving; and by creating with RAND a process, the School Performance Index, of grading schools on the basis of how well they improved students’ test scores over a three-year period. Roosevelt and the board have also allocated additional resources, in particular a longer school day and a longer school year, to the Accelerated Learning Academies that serve the students in the district most in need of extra support.
HSR:
It will be interesting to see how the Accelerated Learning Academies will perform.
Brownlee:
There is, as I’m sure you know, generally an “implementation dip” in the first year of reforms or changes at the level of magnitude we are seeing at the ALAs, so the first year we may not see the changes that we all hope for. Also we have to keep in mind that the district is establishing higher standards that are essential but also controversial. Some students who were getting B’s last year are coming home with C’s, and their parents are not happy. But I think by the following year, the district will be able to show real student achievement gains.
HSR:
What are your thoughts on the growing grade inflation problem?
Brownlee:
It is quite amazing, and I don’t know quite what to make of it. I do think that it demonstrates the critical importance of having clear standards for all students at all grade levels. Grade inflation also illustrates for me how valuable it would be to have national standards that would allow for meaningful comparisons among states and with other nations. On a regional level, it is important that parents with children in the Pittsburgh public schools can be confident that the standards for their children are the same standards set for students in Quaker Valley and Mount Lebanon because these are the students with whom they will compete.
HSR:
What do you think Grable’s impact on the public schools in Pittsburgh has been?
Brownlee:
Since its inception, the Foundation has been a significant supporter of programs and projects in the Pittsburgh Public Schools. In addition to leadership and teacher training, we have supported math and literacy programs, which have been evaluated for their impact in student achievement. We also have supported literally dozens of arts organizations to work with students in the district. These programs have not been evaluated in terms of their impact on test scores, but they encourage the development of critical skills and enrich the students’ worlds. The impact on students from Phillips Elementary School who worked with singers from the Pittsburgh Opera and attended performances at the Benedum is hard to measure in terms of impact, but I think programs such as this have been of tremendous importance to students and teachers.
Perhaps the Foundation has had its greatest impact through the suspension of funding, support for the Mayor’s Commission and A+Schools, and now for the creation of the Fund for Excellence in the Pittsburgh Public Schools. Eight foundations contribute to the multi-million dollar Fund, which is administered by The Pittsburgh Foundation. The Superintendent requests, with the necessary narrative and budget information, support from participating funders for projects that advance the district’s reform agenda. Foundations have the advantage of seeing the projects in the context of reform agenda and the Superintendent has a relatively flexible and accessible source of funding for the district’s priority projects.
The Foundation’s largest grants to the district have been to support the leadership of Mark Roosevelt and his reform agenda. The trustees and staff of Grable believe that Roosevelt is an extraordinary leader capable of achieving in Pittsburgh what no other school district in the nation has been able to do. So in spite of all the talk in the field of evaluation and impact, to some extent, the Foundation is placing its confidence and money on a person.
Public Education Reform
HSR:
Where do you see the role of charter and privately managed public schools?
Brownlee:
I think charters are important for two reasons: First by offering choice to parents and students, charters can drive accountability. When a school district is losing students to charters, it is more apt to look at what it needs to do to retain students. Second, freed from some restrictions and bureaucracy, charters can provide examples of successful innovations. For example, City High Charter School in Pittsburgh has a state of the art student information system that allows students, teachers, and parent to know immediately and continuously how their students are doing. And City High teachers used the information system to individualize instruction.
HSR:
What role has “No Child Left Behind” played in the reform efforts in your opinion?
Brownlee:
Despite its drawbacks, I think that “No Child Left Behind” has been beneficial and productive. The critics are obviously correct that standardized tests are not the only measure of what a child has learned or needs to learn. However, NCLB has driven school districts to be more accountable for the students’ performances and has forced all of us to face unconscionable discrepancies in performance among different groups of students. In some sense, NCLB is the logical outcome of the standards based education reform movement, which holds out the admirable goal of educating all students to levels of competency.
Advice to Students
HSR:
Can you leave us with a few words of wisdom to take back to our fellow Heinz students?
Brownlee:
I think that the Heinz school provides great preparation for “the policy making” community. In my experience, the Heinz School students have excellent research and analytical skills. Some of the analytical skills in which the students seem to excel are sorely lacking in the non-profit world and in education. For example, the project group that designed the Science and Technology High School demonstrated a capacity to apply theory and knowledge to difficult real life problems. The School also teaches its students to be good listeners.