USC Trojan Family Magazine - Winter 1998: Dean Guilbert Hentschke: Talking out of School

A conversation on what Gib Hentschke calls “everybody’s business” – how to improve education in an urban society.

uring the past few years, USC Trojan Family Magazine has devoted significant space to USC’s involvement with its extended family of neighborhood children. Coverage began with an overview of the coalition of local elementary and secondary schools called the USC Family of Five, moved on to tell the inspiring story of the Neighborhood Academic Initiative, a unique program that prepares local youth for admission to USC, and continues with a series profiling each Family of Five school.
Throughout this body of work the recurrent theme of the USC School of Edu-cation’s participation in outreach and partnership efforts was evident. And, just as the editors had decided that education merited its own feature story in the magazine, the school provided us with some very big news to head the story. So, when associate editor Neil Miller sat down with the school’s dean, Guilbert “Gib” Hentschke, it was not only to discuss issues in the field of urban education, but to do so in the context of a $20 million school-naming gift from alumni Barbara and Roger Rossier.
Hentschke, who has been dean of the School of Education since 1988, is an expert on education reform and director of several projects aimed at improving the productivity and effectiveness of America’s schools. These include efforts to improve the quality of the teacher work force, the impact of the home on school achievement and school organization. On the eve of the school’s big announcement, he talked about the role of USC’s Rossier School of Education.

Q: Let’s start by describing USC’s Rossier School of Education. What sets it apart?
A: Our overall focus is on urban issues. The best way to think about the work of our faculty and students is to think about redefining excellence in urban education.
In the world today, the urban environment is the one that’s predominant and growing. It’s characterized by a highly developed infrastructure, enormous variety and scale, and great ethnic, social, demographic and economic heterogeneity. This is a global discussion, not just a University Park or even a Los Angeles discussion. The majority of the world is going urban. What’s happening in Melbourne, London, Tokyo and so on – how to reinvent education there – is of interest to us.
We’re looking at new ways to train teachers for the urban environment, new governance systems in schools, new incentive and management systems, and new applications of technology to enhance learning. All the things I’ve mentioned have research strands in the school with faculty working in these areas.

Why are you so involved with local schools?
One thing that makes us unusual is that we have a both a Ph.D. and an Ed.D. program. We’re very practice-oriented. We want to not only study differences, but make a difference. Higher education is no longer an ivory tower. It can no longer simply study complex social issues like education absent the context in which they occur.
We develop that context through our involvement with programs like the Family of Five Schools, the Neighborhood Aca-demic Initiative and several others. They enhance a partnership, not just of faculty and students, but policy makers and administrators, who are in the world. We can’t really do our work without a sustained connection out there.

Could you give us an example?
In educating teachers, the classic notion is that schools of education accept qualified students who want to become teachers, the students learn how to teach and then they go out and do it. It seems to make all kinds of sense. Everyone assumes teaching is a natural thing.
But it turns out that many teachers who go through that process enter an environment for which they weren’t really prepared. There’s a giant gap between what they think teaching is and what teaching turns out to be. As a consequence, with all the investment in these large numbers of teachers, there’s great wastage because a lot them only last one or two years and then they’re gone, often before they become modestly proficient. It’s an expensive, inefficient and ineffective system.
One of the programs we’ve devised and taken the lead in, the Latino Teacher Project, is addressing this problem. It’s a matter of practice changing theory – in this case, the theory of selection criteria for the profession.
We’ve found that teaching assistants – who comprise a whole cadre in American classrooms – provide the best prospective teacher pool, so to speak. Teaching assistants are typically people who live in the communities in which they work; they’re often attuned to the students’ language and culture. They’re not yet trained as teachers, but they’re already very successful in the classroom. And, after completing programs in content areas like science, they’re not only effective and productive when they become teachers, but they stay in the profession longer. So we’ve discovered that this career pathway has much more potential than the typical career pathway.

Many parents in Southern California are concerned about the public schools, and are considering relocating. What advice would you give them?
I think relocating would be a short-term solution at best. Maybe the implicit message in the question is “Where can I go where I don’t have to be as involved?” I believe that’s a mistake regardless of where you live.
Education anywhere now requires more parental involvement. I think there’s an analogy to health care. As a society we’ve come to recognize that we have to take more responsibility for our own health. Someone else doesn’t do that for us. Similarly, parents need to play a more active role in their own and their children’s development. Plus, compared to non-urban areas, there’s a wider variety of educational choices here than people might suspect. That’s a key.

What do we know today about how children learn best?
Generally they learn best when they are in a supportive environment. There are several factors involved – school organization and its instructional program are important – but with children in particular, if you have to pick one thing, it’s one adult who uncompromisingly cares about a kid. If you have that, then a lot of things are possible. If you don’t, it’s difficult, and an otherwise well-designed instructional program will have only limited effect.

How much can schools influence the home environment for learning?
They can set expectations for what could be happening in the home, introduce the notion that there is a connection between school and home if it hadn’t occurred to the family. Of course, not all schools are equally imaginative, able or free to pursue a parent involvement strategy because of their own inabilities or the parents’ lack of ability or freedom to engage in them. But parental involvement is growing. Parent contracts are required in some of the more effective schools. They not only include supervision of homework, but a formal relationship that obligates parents to do things with the school and with their child.

Like the Neighborhood Academic Initiative?
Yes. That’s a group of parents who have agreed to be seriously engaged. They defy the stereotypes of upper-middle-class or lower-middle-class, rich or poor, minority or other. I think more parents would be engaged if there were more ways to be engaged. We’re not there yet.

Let’s go back to children. What works best when they’re in school?
It begins with our information society. We used to talk about the compression of knowledge – kids used to be required to know more and more. Today it’s not so much that they need to know more information, but how to aggressively pursue information and solve problems. The saying “learn how to learn” is actually more important than it ever was.
Kids still need to know the alphabet, spelling, grammar, mathematics, the Constitution, geography and so on. That’s very important. But the rate of change of information and products and services is accelerating. More and more we have to invent our own way of learning. That’s true for all of us at any age, but particularly so for children. And that means more active engagement in their own pursuits – not just on their terms, but helping them to learn to be more aggressive and responsible, to have a sense of agency about how they pursue knowledge and their own learning.

You were one of the authors of the Los Angeles Annenberg Metropolitan Project (LAAMP) proposal. What is LAAMP and what have you learned from the project thus far?
LAAMP was launched in 1994 with a grant of $53 million from the Annenberg Foundation to boost school reform efforts in hundreds of public schools across Los Angeles County. The largest amount has been allocated to the Los Angeles Unified School District, where the money is funding efforts by “families” of schools – natural groupings of elementary, middle and secondary schools – that have joined the district’s major reform program, the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now.
Along with a team from UCLA, we’re evaluating the results of the project, including how schools organize and manage themselves to support changes in teaching and learning and how these and other reforms affect performance. The USC team of researchers is surveying principals and teachers each spring through the year 2000, so it’s difficult to say at this point what we’ll find. We hope and anticipate that there’ll be some major gains, but we recognize that there will be a time lag before changes in instruction can have a direct effect on student achievement scores.
The LAAMP approach is just one of a plethora of strategies to improve schooling. LAAMP is large scale and very public. The goal is to take business-as-usual and make it better business-as-usual. It operates within the givens of our existing system and tries to improve it. The degree to which there’ll be significant changes is not yet clear.

Is it an advantage or disadvantage to be a school of education in a private university?
Because USC is a private research university, our sensitivities are acute. There is no inherent, public or legislative mandate which requires it to have a school of education. We have to continue to prove our value in education and at USC to merit continuing support. We’re further out on the edge of redefining education, and doing so within the urban environment, because we’ve had to be. As a consequence, innovation and reform are likely to happen more here first. On balance I think an urban private research university is at an advantage because it’s forced to confront social problems earlier and more intensely.
There’s a dynamic nature to this, the continual search for a connection and an attempt to redesign and improve education on an ongoing basis. The evolution of this university and school – and the Rossiers, who have given us our new name – are evidence of that. We’ve all created new ideas, modified relationships, and provided unique services that didn’t exist in the past. The need to constantly invent and modify is true in the world today in almost all settings, but it’s most likely to happen at USC based on our past and our circumstances.

With all the challenges facing the field, the Rossier School of Education seems remarkably open to change. To what do you attribute that?
In one respect, there isn’t a great downside risk. Aspirations and expectations for education are so high, performance levels are so low, and the gap is growing. We are compelled to find ways to significantly improve achievement levels in schools and access to colleges, and the attendant risks associated with accidentally damaging the current system are small compared to the potential gains associated with attempts to improve it. It’s today’s urgency that is compelling us to try things never before considered possible. The consequences for all of us, not just as individuals but collectively, have never been greater. If you were only interested in education for personal or “selfish” reasons, you’d still be very concerned about improving education for yourself and for others.
That’s why I think education is the most important field in the world today. No matter what other field you’re in – real estate or engineering or entertainment – pulling up the learning curve is everybody’s business.