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Thomas Edison Elementary School in Port Chester, NY has earned its reputation as a success story. A decade ago, only 19% of Edison’s fourth graders were proficient in English language arts. Last year 75% were. Proficiency rates in math and social studies are even higher. Not bad for a school where over 80% of students live in poverty.

If you ask the school’s principal, Dr. Eileen Santiago, the decision over ten years ago to turn Edison into a full-service community school has played a key role in its transformation. Working with strong community partners, the school offers on-site health care, education for parents, counseling for children and their families, and after-school enrichment. Add that community focus to a robust instructional program and close attention to data on how students are doing, and you get a stirring turnaround story.

Dr. Santiago recently told us more.

Public School Insights: Tell me about your school.

Santiago: I have served as principal of this school for 14 years. And I have always felt fortunate that I came into a school with many, many caring people. I did not walk into a school where the adults felt negatively about the children.

However, I was faced with other concerns. One of them was that the school had a pretty significant level of poverty. We were at over 80% free lunch. We continue to have that level of poverty today.

In addition, Edison has always served an immigrant population. The school was constructed in 1872, so you can imagine that the population has changed a lot over the years. Today the population is primarily multi-ethnic Hispanic, coming from different areas of the Hispanic world. And many of our children are undocumented immigrants. That in itself adds several levels of challenge: ...

These days, you either love Teach for America and its teachers, or you hate them. The love, it seems to me, stems from an obvious source. Young, often privileged, kids are choosing the hard, hard work of teaching in some of our most struggling schools. (There are easier resume stuffers out there.)

The hatred is more complex, but I think it's instructive, even if it is unfair. The very existence of TFA shines a spotlight on some of our biggest national shortcomings, but policymakers who support TFA seem oddly oblivious to that fact. Here are a few of those shortcomings as I see them:

We Still See Teaching as Missionary Work, Not as a Profession. We cheer TFA teachers for their missionary zeal. We admire them for working 80 hours a week but understand why they often leave after a couple of years. Regular teachers who work fewer hours, we say, are just "putting in their time." Without that Ivy League degree, we assume, teaching was likely one of their only options anyway. This mindset does little to elevate teaching as a profession. (Nancy Flanagan shares similar thoughts here.)

Teachers Don't Get the Support They Need. When They Do, It Makes Headlines. TFA has learned from the struggles of its new teachers over the years. It gives its teachers intense, individual support, and it strives to strengthen its support systems all the time. You'd think all teachers could expect that kind of ...

Amanda Ripley ran a piece in The Atlantic this week praising Teach for America for its work to define what a great teacher looks like. That article had me running all hot and cold. Here I'll focus on what left me cold: The overuse of standardized tests to define greatness.

We're already creating students in the image of these tests. If I'm to believe The Atlantic, we'll be creating teachers in their image, too. Not only will we use test scores to determine which teachers are doing the best teaching. We'll use them to decide what character traits, academic background, hobbies and who knows what else teachers should possess. We could hitch everything, everything to that engine. (See Diana Seneshal's provocative piece on why that should ...

Jack Grayson has been many things in his 86 years. A farmer, FBI agent, journalist, importer/exporter, professor, business school dean, and member of three presidential commissions. But he has made a lasting name for himself as one of the nation’s most outspoken champions of productivity and quality.

Grayson rose to national fame almost forty years ago as Chairman of the U.S. Price Commission, which helped avert hyperinflation in the early 1970s. His brush with economic turmoil convinced him that productivity was key to the nation’s well-being, so he founded The American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC), a non-profit that helps organizations boost performance by improving their processes. As APQC chairman, he is devoting all of his time to the organization’s work in education.

These days, many school reformers are fond of reciting lessons they have learned from business. Be innovative. Focus on outcomes. Get the incentives right. The rest, the theory goes, will follow.

But Grayson says such reformers are missing the biggest lesson of all: Focus on process! He admits that talk of process can be dry as dust, especially when all of DC is abuzz with talk of innovation. But it is process improvements that brought the best American businesses out of the industrial age, he insists.

Yes, innovation and outcomes are critical. But if reformers ignore the hard work of building schools’ capacity to produce the best outcomes, even the most innovative school systems may well go the way of GM.

Listen to Grayson's interview on the Public School Insights podcast (~23:15).

A quick warning about our recording: It has a lot of background noise. If the side conversations and occasional pop music become too distracting, read the edited transcript below.

Public School Insights: A lot of people are talking about the promise of innovation in improving education. Do you think innovation itself holds the key to solving our problems in public education?

Grayson: No. Innovation will certainly help, and innovation in any area is the leader. It’s the new idea. But you do not want to leave the old idea behind because ...