Reform with Results: Why Juvenile Justice Policy is succeeding as Education Policy Falters , Part 1 of 2

Stephen Lentz is an Assistant District Attorney in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania and an Adjunct Instructor of Educational Leadership at Marywood University in Scranton.  Following graduation from Syracuse College of Law in 2002, he taught elementary school for nine years before returning to the legal field as a prosecutor in juvenile delinquency proceedings.

Our nation’s juvenile justice system and its public schools share many of the same goals; mainly, they both seek to create capable and productive adult citizens.  However, despite a litany of overlapping interests and constituencies, policy makers in the two fields have spent the last decade following very divergent paths.  In this first of two parts I will describe some of the national policy trends that have dramatically changed the way public schools operate in this country.  In the next entry, I will contrast controversial developments in education with the remarkable reforms that have occurred in the field of juvenile justice.

When I graduated from the College of Law in 2002, we lived in a dramatically different social and political climate from what exists today.  September 11^th was still fresh in everyone’s mind, and No Child Left Behind, George Bush’s sweeping and signature education reform law, passed through Congress with broad bi-partisan support.  It was in that environment that I decided to become a teacher and to postpone, and possibly forgo altogether, a career in law.  While my classmates studied for the bar exam, I moved to the South Bronx and spent the summer training to be an elementary school teacher with the New York City Teaching Fellows.

Those were heady days in education reform, and I believe that in 2002 most educators were on board with many of the core ideals behind No Child Left Behind: that children should learn from “highly qualified” teachers, that testing should provide data that drives instruction, and that underperforming schools should be identified and given the support needed to improve.

For three years I taught elementary school in the South Bronx, followed by two years in Philadelphia, and then four years in rural Tennessee.  Across the arc of this teaching experience, I personally observed the bi-partisan policies of 2002 morph into something completely different by the time I left education in 2011.  Whereas narrow testing data was largely used as a curricular guide in 2002, it regrettably had become the primary determinant of student and teacher success by 2011.

For anyone who is not directly involved with K-12 public education, this might not seem like such a bad thing.  After all, most professions do use data extensively to drive both assessments of work performance, as well strategic decision making.  And as I argued before, it does have its place in teaching.  However, the way student testing is now applied to public education differs enormously with virtually all other professions and their use of data.

Virtually every component of public school curricula is now scripted down to the day so that students can prepare for federally required state exams.  When I first started teaching, “drill and grill” test prep was something that we really only did for a few weeks before the spring exams.  As the years went by though, the drill and grill testing climate transformed the schools where I taught.  It was really hard to see welcoming, child friendly places of learning transformed into largely sterile, imagination free centers of constant test preparation.  I was not alone in my feelings about the effects these changes were having on both my students, as well as the profession.  Nearly every teacher and administrator that I worked with criticized, at least privately, the wide-spread reforms that flew in the face of what anyone who has ever spent time in a classroom knew to be good pedagogy.

I believe, and I think many others do as well, that the purpose of public school in an industrialized democracy is to create productive, educated adults who are able to participate meaningfully in our society.  Our current educational policies are having the opposite effect.  Even if we assume for a moment that it is developmentally appropriate for eight year olds to sit for two to three hours at time for multiple days in a row to take paper-based, written exams, how can we possibly argue that students who struggle within this system are being adequately prepared to become confident and capable adults later on?

By not taking a more holistic view of the many ways that students both struggle and succeed at both school and life, we have created a climate where more students than ever feel that they are not good at what they have been told is the end all and be all of success in our country.  The way our public schools now narrowly define success for both students and teachers is dangerous.  While it may raise student academic standards as measured by testing (more on that in a later post), it only does so at the expense of hampering students who struggle within that system.  It leaves them psychologically damaged and without truly useful skills for the world they will face once they leave school.

It is also important to point out that the laws that created this testing climate.  George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind and Barack Obama’s Race to the Top apply only to public schools; private schools are basically free to do whatever they want.  The fact that so many politicians send their own children to private schools, where they are not drilled and grilled all year, but are instead exposed to robust curricular offerings that are taught and assessed in a more nuanced manner, really demonstrates that creating capable, confident students is not the end goal of their policies.  If it was, our public school policies would look a lot more like those of private schools.

After nine years of teaching under increasingly dysfunctional policies, I decided to take the bar exam and return to the legal profession.  I was fortunate enough to obtain a clerkship with a senior juvenile delinquency judge in New Jersey, and it was there that I learned first hand about the sweeping reforms and success stories that were taking place nationally in juvenile justice.  In my next piece, I will describe how the juvenile justice system has used a more balanced approach to data to create truly-evidence based programs that benefit not only youthful offenders and their victims, but also our society as a whole.