By Joshua Lavender
Dr. Linda Valli is a professor emerita in the Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership.
Dr. Linda Valli has made the College of Education her home for the last twenty-three years. In 2007, she was appointed the Jean, Jeffrey and David Mullan Professor of Teacher Education - Professional Development. Now, as she begins a well-earned retirement, we thank Dr. Valli for her unwavering dedication to the children, schools, and communities most in need.
Like many teacher educators, Dr. Valli was once a teacher herself. After studying English at what was then Mercy College (now University of Detroit Mercy), she taught humanities, literature, and social studies for seven years at a Michigan high school while taking a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University. But her interest in the sociology of education and her concerns about social inequality drew her to the Ph.D. program in Education Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Upon completing her doctoral degree, she entered the professoriate and became Director of Teacher Education at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Ten years later, she joined the faculty of the University of Maryland, where she found a community of kindred spirits.
“Toward the end of my seven years of teaching and my ten years at Catholic,” Dr. Valli recalls, “I felt an eagerness to move on, as though I needed more challenges. I’ve never felt that, even once, here in the College of Education. The people here are caring listeners, hardworking, thoughtful, and committed to improving the world. I’ve had a wealth of teaching and research opportunities. And I’ve worked with a number of wonderful doctoral students here at Maryland. I’m so proud of the work my former students have done. When I go to conferences and see them present research or run workshops, I’m amazed by their professionalism, expertise, and caring.”
Early on in her academic career, Dr. Valli dug into issues of teacher preparation and professional development. After co-editing a book on curriculum differentiation, she edited Reflective Teacher Education: Cases and Critiques (SUNY Press, 1992), which examined how teacher preparation schools across the United States gave candidates a reflective orientation to curriculum and pedagogy. The reflective education movement of the early 1990s shifted focus from simply giving teachers skills to helping them think reflectively about how their actions affect student motivation, learning, and educational inequities.
“It was quite a dramatic shift in thinking about how to prepare teachers,” Dr. Valli says. “Now we talk a lot about ‘high-leverage’ and ‘core’ practices. How do teachers learn to think about and enact complex practices that challenge and engage diverse groups of learners?”
Her focus on teacher preparation led Dr. Valli to study professional development schools. As envisioned by the Holmes Group, a network of education scholars who called for a revolution in teacher education, professional development schools would be public schools where novice teachers learn to teach and where university and school faculty work together to investigate questions of teaching and learning that arise in the school. The state of Maryland eventually rewrote its education standards to require that schools of education train teacher candidates in professional development schools. Collaborating with special education scholar David Cooper, Dr. Valli looked at challenges in creating and sustaining professional development schools. When she sought evidence for their success, she was surprised by what she found.
“One goal of professional development schools was to redress social inequalities, but we found little evidence that they were reaching that lofty goal,” Dr. Valli says. “Research continues to show that reducing inequality is one of the most complicated problems there is. In-school inequities – gaps in student achievement across socioeconomic statuses and racial categories – are so impacted by the broader picture of community support and resources.”
This broader picture increasingly became Dr. Valli’s focus. She now works with CASA de Maryland, an immigrant advocacy and assistance organization in Langley Park, to obtain grants for programming. For instance, she is an evaluator and curriculum developer on an Investing in Innovation (i3) grant, “Learning Together,” which addresses a vital factor in schooling – family engagement.
“In high-poverty neighborhoods, people often don’t know how to access and navigate social services, and many new immigrants don’t really understand the social structure of their local neighborhoods and government agencies,” she explains. “Learning Together works with schools and families to bridge the gaps between them. The idea is to make schools more hospitable to parents, and to help parents understand the school system and its expectations so that they can better support their children.”
But while some initiatives have received funding, Dr. Valli is less optimistic about the federal funding environment in general. She points out that CASA de Maryland was unable to pursue one of its most promising projects because the hoped-for Promise Neighborhoods grant never came through Congress. Promise Neighborhoods seek to make great schools the heart of revitalization in communities. One idea it endorses is “full-service schools,” which would expand on traditional schools to provide adult education as well as financial, health, and social services.
“These programs are very hard to implement well and sustain,” Dr Valli observes. “When Congress looks at their performance, they say, ‘Only a few of these grants were successful.’ Rather than look at it as a training ground – ‘If those were successful, then let’s learn from them’ – the tendency is just not to provide funding at all. It’s the wrong lesson to take from it.”
Funding is not the only area in which Dr. Valli believes schools and communities are hurt by legislative myopia. She has also been a critic of the standardized testing regime introduced by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which she believes was even more egregiously out-of-touch policymaking that hurt schools. In 2008, with fellow UMD education professors Robert Croninger, Marilyn Chambliss, and Anna Graeber, and Daria Buese of McDaniel College, she authored Test Driven: High-Stakes Accountability in Elementary Schools (Teachers College Press), a broad examination of how No Child Left Behind reshaped teaching.
“Test Driven emerged from a National Science Foundation grant on high-quality teaching we received in 2000,” Dr. Valli recalls. “Our initial goal was to find schools and teachers with better-than-average success at overcoming achievement gaps, helping struggling learners bump up to grade level, and to intensively study what they were doing. But then No Child Left Behind passed in 2001. It totally changed what was happening in the schools, especially the assessments given. More than anything, what we saw was that teachers and students came under tremendous pressure to pass benchmarks, to push kids up from a ‘basic’ to a ‘proficient’ level. All the test preparation that went into that effort meant other subjects were neglected in the curriculum.
“It was a very stressful environment. Under NCLB, the consequences were often more punitive than constructive. Instead of receiving more support, schools would be closed. I felt terrible for the students, teachers, and principals. I had to struggle to be a removed researcher and not get too involved. At one school I visited often, where there were several new teachers, they would come out of planning meetings in tears. I put my arms around one of them and said, ‘The second year is always a lot better. Just hang in there!’”
Dr. Valli also observed that, in the long term, NCLB was hurting the ability of education colleges to recruit strongly motivated, talented people – fewer people entered teaching because word had spread about the working conditions in schools. Now, as Congress changes education policy yet again with the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which shifts many accountability provisions to the states, Dr. Valli tempers her optimism about the future with a note of caution.
“I think teachers’ voices have finally been heard and policymakers are starting to realize that not all the assessments are necessary or even the best types of assessments,” she says. “We need fewer, better tests that promote thinking, not just memorization. We need to save time for teaching and learning. However, I share the civil rights community’s concern that without some way to look at achievement gaps for vulnerable populations – African Americans, Latinos, low-income, special needs students, and English Language Learners – these gaps can easily become hidden again. NCLB shone a spotlight on struggling students in high-achieving schools, not just poor urban schools. In addition to keeping a spotlight on opportunities for vulnerable students to learn, we need to strengthen communities – make sure families have access to social services, decent housing, and jobs. When there’s a safety net, so that kids have their basic needs met and feel that they have opportunities in life, school has a better chance of being positive and meaningful for them.”
Dr. Linda Valli is a professor emerita in the Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership.
(A shorter version of this story appears in the Summer 2016 issue of Endeavors.)
