Is there a band or isn't there?

I have too much and too little to write about in my own personal teaching experience -- and I will try soon.  I no longer move from one small success to the next as I did when I started this blog -- there's been too much re-learning, and much of this is not suitable to be shared in a public forum.  (Sorry, if that's a strange remark in these share-it-all era we live in.)

But for the sake of keeping this gasping blog alive, I thought I would share some recently published pieces that may suggest we are beginning to outgrow the cant about school reform which has made our jobs as teachers so difficult and has palpably damaged the education of our children for half a generation.  It was as though you found out that you have asbestos in your house, and you called in a guy who, in order to prevent your children from contracting asbestosis, burned your house down, gave your kids cancer and pocketed a few million from the insurance company.

To begin with, here's a piece written by an education professor and published in my local paper, The Record, (called by most The Bergen Record) remembering a remarkable, life-transforming teacher and observing how unlikely it would be for that teacher to earn a high evaluation using the feckless metrics our public officials have helped put in place.  Think about that.  Remember that great teacher, that one that made you happy to be a student, that person who helped you maybe see a way through towards finding out what truly engaged you and made you happy, maybe even towards your life's work?  Did they prepare you for a standardized test?  Did they execute a perfect, tidy 48-minute lesson in which you had acquired a skill that you never had before?  No, it's ridiculous.  It's a ridiculous paradigm, and people are starting to realize it.

This piece by an actual working teacher and published in the Huffington Post suggests a metric, but one which is unmeasurable:  A teacher is a nurturer.  I do not expect my year-end eval to suggest that I need to do 23% more nurturing.  The fact is, administrators, parents and politicians, you don't understand why I do my job and therefore you have no idea how to incentivize it.  The truth is, that is beyond your powers.  My rewards come principally from my interactions with my students, and only they and I have control over that.  There's nothing you can do, despite your fervid attempts to limit and proscribe those interactions into merely preparing for and conducting endless one-dimensional low-function assessments.

And speaking of low-function assessments, the fact that the Emperors and Empresses of School Reform have no clothes is becoming more readily apparent to more walking-around regular people.  This is the worst hypocrisy.  These people use statistics to prove that our schools are failing, but have no reliable statistics to show that their proposed reforms, the academies filled with inexperienced novices, the pre-fab charter schools, the increasing testing, year after year, cutting into actual instructional time, will work.  They never have yet.  (Check the links in the Salon piece I've linked in this paragraph if you don't believe me.)

I think what America needs is to sit down and watch The Music Man.  That's a super-great musical from The Golden Age in which a slick con-man comes to a small town, invents a problem which is destroying that town's youth.



Then after the gullible villagers have been suitably riled up, he shows up again as if out of nowhere with his pre-packaged canned solution to the "Trouble," no matter what it was. A boys' band is the Magic Thing which will keep the youngsters off the street and busily engaged. Good idea, right?

 

But there's one problem. He can't do what he says he will do. And he has no intention of doing so. He just wants to collect the money and run? Sound familiar?

And then -- this is where our con, Harold, makes the Big Mistake that our school reformers never make.  He gets to know and care about one damaged and hurt kid and about that kid's family.  And then, all the slick, phony pre-packaged programs and solutions fall apart.  He admits to the boy what he can't admit to anyone else.  He's a liar and a fake.  But then he tells the broken child just how extraordinary he is -- not as a platitude, but from his own personal knowledge.

The boy is not mollified.  "You said there's a band!" he shouts.  Harold looks like he's been hit with a brick.  He shakes his head, "I always think there's a band, kid."

I don't know about our reformers -- I don't know if they think there's a band or if they know perfectly well there isn't.  But I sure do know that there COULD be a band -- if the people who know how to make music were put in charge.

Maybe we could try that.

Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons

This story in the Washington Post starts off with some good news:

School leaders in Virginia and Maryland said they are likely to seek exemptions for the most stringent requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind law after an announcement Monday that the Obama administration will offer flexibility to states willing to modernize their accountability systems.

Sadly, this is not prompted by the realization that the accountability systems don't make sense, but that most states will not reach the 2014 goals set in the original act. Education officials have got it partially right, saying they want to focus on improvements in performance, not on predetermined proficiency goals.

But the bigger problem is that there is no proven, reliable way to measure what has been learned. We can monitor what teachers intend to teach, we can measure the amount of information that has been memorized, but we still don't know how to measure learning. Which is not to say we should give up. But we need to stop pretending that standardized tests, especially multiple-choice and short answer tests, measure anything valuable at all.

I hope all 50 states apply for waivers to provide for time to figure out new, sound and reliable ways to measure what students are learning, and even better yet -- how the heck it happened... happened...

Changing educational paradigms - Animated

I love Ken Robinson, but I also love what this artist did with this talk about changing the way we think about education as a whole.

Still trying to bell that cat

No teacher with any professional pride would argue that we shouldn't try to assess a teacher's competence, and determine who is effective, who isn't, and then increase the level of effectiveness. (One would hope that we would try new learning and training to make teachers more effective before we just toss them onto the curb, but that's another discussion.)

The problem is that we still can't figure out how to measure it. And the Economic Policy Institute, a non-partisan research tank has concluded definitively that the system of tying teacher compensation directly and mechanically to student test scores called "Value-Added Measurement" doesn't work.

Here are the final paragraphs of the Executive Summary of the report (emphasis mine):

Evaluation by competent supervisors and peers...should form the foundation of teacher evaluation systems, with a supplemental role played by multiple measures of student learning gains that, where appropriate, could include test scores. Some districts have found ways to identify, improve, and as necessary, dismiss teachers using strategies like peer assistance and evaluation that offer intensive mentoring and review panels.

These and other approaches should be the focus of experimentation by states and districts.

Adopting an invalid teacher evaluation system and tying it to rewards and sanctions is likely to lead to inaccurate personnel decisions and to demoralize teachers, causing talented teachers to avoid high-needs students and schools, or to leave the profession entirely, and discouraging potentially effective teachers from entering it.

Legislatures should not mandate a test-based approach to teacher evaluation that is unproven and likely to harm not only teachers, but also the children they instruct.

The biggest problem is, as any middle school science student will tell you, is that we cannot hold all the factors in student learning--other than teaching--constant. The study doesn't say this, but I can say it from experience, experience which has been borne out by colleagues I've discussed it with. There are two and only two reasons for student under-performance. One is an actual identifiable learning disorder or disability. In most cases, there is a way to work with or work around such a problem, provided is correctly identified. The other reason is problems at home. That phrase encompasses a whole heck of a lot of different things, from problems in the parents' marriage to financial difficulties to bereavements or dislocations--the list goes on and on. But the larger point is--problems at home are things that no teacher can do anything about, idealistic TV shows and movies to the contrary. You can't fix a kid's family, and you have no business trying.

This is not to say that we should give up trying to figure out who the good teachers are and why. (Incidentally, another study I read this week found that they could find no common factor of teaching style among effective teachers. So that means it goes deeper than questions of style.) Certainly, teachers can tell by observation who is teaching and who isn't. And by the way, students can tell, too.

And here's the dirty secret of teacher evaluation that no politician or administrator is going to tell you: when we come up with a good system, it's going to cost more than whatever we're doing now. Then, I suspect, all the angry taxpayers will have less interest in teacher accountability, and perhaps the professionals will be left alone to determine the best methods.

Everybody wants to get into the act!

I have worked in two career fields about which everybody else thinks they know something : entertainment and education. And I can tell you, having lived on both sides of both fields--Everything You Know Is Wrong. In fact, in the entertainment field, even for insiders, the golden rule was coined by writer William Goldman back in 1983: "Nobody knows anything." Obviously, that doesn't mean that writers don't know how to put words on a page or a cameraman doesn't know which way to point the camera or that studio executives don't know how to park in their reserved spaces. It just means that nobody really knows what works, what's going to work, why something worked in the past. In entertainment, success is a fluke.

It's not quite so bad in education. We actually do know what works. The problem is that it's not quick and easy. I'm always skeptical of the Ross Perot types who, when speaking about an area in which they have no expertise (government finance, for instance, or education), say, "It's just so simple." What they're really saying is: "I'M just so simple. I haven't the intelligence or patience to develop or understand complex or long-range solutions. So I'm going to treat difficult social challenges like I was Ron Popeil with another amazing gadget to solve all our problems."

I just finished reading The Death and Life of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch, a research professor of Education at NYU, a blogger for Education Week, and, in earlier incarnations, involved in various school reform efforts from the political sphere, most recently a cheerleader for accountability and choice right up through the adoption of No Child Left Behind. The bulk of the book summarizes a series of attempts at school reform over the last 20-30 years, none of which were backed up by prior research and NONE of which have made documented undeniable improvements in schools. These initiatives include:

1. Hijacking of the movement for rigorous and uniform curriculum by political operatives with their own non-educational agendas:

2. Centralization and top-down management of school boards and districts (most notably in San Diego and New York) combined with insistence on conformity to unproven teaching techniques.

3. NCLB and its "measure and punish" method by which states invent their own standards (and frequently fudge them), apply tests (paid for by local districts) and close "failing" schools, without money or plans to repair the "broken" schools.

4. Free-market solutions such as vouchers and the misuse of charter schools, to punish and de-fund public education, without providing alternatives at an equal or better level.

5. Immense foundations, such as Gates, swooping in and picking pet programs to fund and de-fund at well, dictating procedures and solutions without research or results to back them up.

Let me repeat: There is no evidence that ANY of these systems HAVE WORKED or WILL WORK. They are mostly based on the pet theories of powerful people who have not spent their life in the classroom or in education research. They are mostly of the Ross Perot, "I was successful in one field, so let me apply the same procedures in every other field, because everything in life is (a) Simple and (b) Exactly Like Everything Else. And many of them are based on management principles derived from Harvard Business School case studies, the work of Tom Watson and others, and come down to the re-arrangement of the organization chart, in order to insure that everyone is reading off the same page.

But, this hasty and shallow analysis doesn't even work ON ITS OWN TERMS. Let's imagine General Motors is making lousy cars. (Hard to imagine, eh?) And Toyota makes reliably good cars (and it does, accelerator pedal problems notwithstanding). Let's say GM wants to emulate Toyota's practices so as to result in better cars. On what planet do we think that changing the size of the factories, re-adjusting the organizational chart and closing factories that make bad cars will improve the quality of a single car? Obviously, the proper course of action is to examine the entire quality process of constructing the car. It means STARTING FROM THE OTHER END. We need to study how learning happens, in order to make some conclusions about how teaching can facilitate that. Making sure everyone is uniformly applying an unproven method might make an orderly factory floor, but it does not insure quality.

The most pernicious theory is that free-market forces will improve education. But a beginning economist will tell you that competition is not a cure-all. We had competition for police and fire services 150 years ago, and the result was a lot of unpunished crime and burnt-down houses. Markets give you efficiency, but will neglect unprofitable areas of the market. In education, this means the students who are more expensive to educate, usually because they have special needs. And in fact, those are students who are selected out or "counseled out" of private and charter schools who want to keep their test numbers high. Moreover, competition will not give you the HIGHEST quality, only the highest quality at the price point the consumer wants. School reform via free-market is as flaky and unfounded a theory as the flakiest 1960s "let's roll around on the floor and get in touch with our feelings" educational theory that people on the right complain about. In one well-documented case in New York City, a single building was split into three competing academies, and they immediately fell into squabbling about the use of resources, which brought about the destruction of all three schools.

And research shows that the ideal high school size is about 600-900 students. Smaller than that, schools cannot provide the diversity in courses, advanced placement, athletics or performing arts programs sufficient to put a student in a competitive position for college placement. (Not to mention the lack of a fully-rounded school community experience.)

Moreover, this theory has brought about the misuse of charter schools. As they were originally envisioned by Albert Shanker and others, they were meant to be educational laboratories whose successful results could be examined and adopted, in whole or in part by conventional public schools. They were to work in parallel with and in collaboration with ordinary public schools, perhaps even physically housed within them. Current practice pits the charter schools against the district schools, siphoning off students and resources, sapping the conventional schools without providing reliably superior results for the charter students.

I am not anti-charter school: I began my teaching career in a charter school, and it is probably the only reason I am at all competent in a classroom today. I was in a supportive and nurturing environment, surrounded by other experienced teachers who believed in what they were doing and were commited to it, and transmitted their experience and commitment to me and to our students. Our charter school provided a unique resource to our students, many of whom were overlooked or mishandled in their home districts. We did not "counsel out" the students with learning difficulties--in fact the obverse was in effect. Struggling students were "counseled into" our lottery. And though we don't produce a crop of geniuses, and many of our students finished their time with us without reaching grade level, everyone of them received individual and individualized attention. Every student was the subject of specific care and focus, and could earn a place in the community we built there. I had always hoped teachers and administrators from our sending districts would come visit and observe us, that we could compare notes on what worked and what didn't. But most public school teachers have been taught to fear charter schools by their unions, and now we are all in this adversarial position which is to destructive to both types of schools (and which is just what I believe a lot of anti-public-school politicians want).

I am sorry to see the President, who strikes me as a practical, results-oriented person adopting the airy-fairy theories of a lot of people in suits. (I think the theories look more attractive if they're presented by people in suits instead of people in teaching clothes, but they're still just theories.) So we are still stuck with NCLB, and the government seems to be doubling down on it, even though its results are demonstrably counter-productive. Our educational standards have gotten lower and lower each year NCLB has been in force.

And the principal goal, to ensure that EVERY STUDENT will be proficient by 2014 is obviously ridiculous. Does GE promise to make EVERY JET ENGINE perfect? No--even GE, with the Six Sygma standard, permits a fail rate of .006. That's pretty darn low, but it's not zero. We all have eyes and ears and we all come into contact with children. Even without examining for all their concealed problems--family issues, mental health, etc.--it's obvious that not every child will become a proficient student. If you ran a company, would you guarantee that every customer will be satisfied and that every worker will be effective by 2014? You'd have to be crazy. We all know there will be people who will never read or do math at "grade level."

We can still educate everyone, but we need to decide what we want to teach, which means we have to know WHY we're doing it. And the solution, Ravitch suggests is a curriculum. The curriculum movement got derailed 25 years ago, and it has never really gained traction since. I wrote earlier about the Governors' Conference proposed core curriculum, but it doesn't seem to be making much news these days. The best, most logical, and most practical curriculum sequence I ever read was for music, but it presumed that a district would have a general music curriculum in place for every grade. Fat chance. So the 7th and 8th grade curriculum (which I was responsible for) made no sense without the K-6 curriculum having been mastered. That would, of course, make sense in math or science or even literacy, but given the current mania for testing, no one thinks much about what we want to teach except for the basics.

So all we are worried about is the basics. And since we have begun focusing on just the basics--literacy and numeracy, the numbers have been going down steadily. Now what does that tell you?

Belling the cat

Last month, draft common core state standards were published for comment by The National Governors' Association. It seems like simple common sense to agree on what a high school diploma in this country means, and that such agreement is best pursued as a consortium of sovereign states, rather than as a federal initiative.

I looked through the 9-12 standards for English Language Arts Literacy and they appear unexceptionable to me. (A summary of general preliminary comment appears here.) They are more simply and directly phrased than our New Jersey standards, appropriately rigorous and geared toward post-secondary education and workplace readiness. Since I was never part of the professional education system (I entered teaching via Alternate Route), I don't really have much to say about the proposed standards. They seem reasonable and I would have no problem designing lesson plans and projects to specifically address the goals.

Goals are relatively easy. Then comes assessments. When I was a kid, one of my favorite Aesop's Fables was "Belling The Cat." In case you don't remember it, here's the Harvard Classics version:

LONG ago, the mice had a general council to consider what measures they could take to outwit their common enemy, the Cat. Some said this, and some said that; but at last a young mouse got up and said he had a proposal to make, which he thought would meet the case. “You will all agree,” said he, “that our chief danger consists in the sly and treacherous manner in which the enemy approaches us. Now, if we could receive some signal of her approach, we could easily escape from her. I venture, therefore, to propose that a small bell be procured, and attached by a ribbon round the neck of the Cat. By this means we should always know when she was about, and could easily retire while she was in the neighbourhood.”

1

This proposal met with general applause, until an old mouse got up and said: “That is all very well, but who is to bell the Cat?” The mice looked at one another and nobody spoke. Then the old mouse said: “IT IS EASY TO PROPOSE IMPOSSIBLE REMEDIES.”

So how do we bell this cat? Here is what the proposed standards suggest:

• Employ a robust mix of test questions and performance assessments* necessary to measure the full breadth and depth of the Common Core State Standards. Although decisions about item types should be based on an analysis of how best to measure the standards, new summative assessments will likely need to incorporate a larger proportion of more sophisticated multiple-choice questions, constructed-response (or “fill-in-the-space”) questions, on-demand performance tasks, and—to the extent feasible— classroom-based performance assessments.

• Aggressively pursue technology-based solutions for more efficient delivery and scoring of state assessments and to report test results more rapidly, clearly, and in various formats that are useful both for accountability and for improving classroom instruction.

• Employ “universal design principles,” strategies for developing new assessments in ways that allow the widest possible range of students to participate fully from the outset, along with appropriate accommodations to ensure maximum participation of students with special educational needs.

* Performance assessments are ways to measure students’ knowledge and skills that go beyond asking them to answer multiple-choice or fill-in-the-space questions. Typically, students are asked to complete a hands on task that can take 40 minutes or can be completed over several class periods. For example, students
might be asked to research and write a magazine article or to conduct and explain the results of a scientific experiment.

• Support and involve classroom teachers in efforts to improve assessment at all levels by:

o Providing teachers support materials and tools (curriculum frameworks, syllabi,
banks of curriculum-embedded performance tasks) which help teachers to become “assessment literate”; and

o Offering teachers opportunities to participate in the development and implementation of new state assessments, including the design of constructed-response items and performance tasks for summative assessments.

This sort of assessment reform has been rumored as long as I've been in the education racket (about 9 years now). And as a teacher, I believe "classroom performance-based assessments" would be the best possible ones. But measurements in such matters defy standardization. The solution contains its own contradiction.

And it is terrifically expensive. It requires trained educators, not mere compilers of data, and it requires assessments to be gathered in groups of 25 or fewer in a classroom, rather than thousands in one fell standardized-test swoop. (And I applaud the acceptance of accommodations for special-needs students, which is not substantially embraced by NCLB. There are physical and time accommodations, but no real adjustments to the performance mode.)

So my question is--is anybody serious about this, or is it political theater? Because this type of assessment, if adopted, would represent a radical turn toward quality which our current political landscape cannot support.

High expectations vs. Uniform expectations

I am not breaking ground or being controversial when I say that most teachers accept the idea of accountability AND of raising academic standards. The question remains how that is to be done and how do we avoid turning the means into the end.

In that connection, there is a very cogent piece by Alfie Kohn in the current issue of Education Week called Debunking the Case for National Standards: One-Size-Fits-All Mandates and Their Dangers. The heart of his argument is as follows:

Are all kids entitled to a great education? Of course. But that doesn’t mean all kids should get the same education. High standards don’t require common standards. Uniformity is not the same thing as excellence – or equity. (In fact,
one-size-fits-all demands may offer the illusion of fairness, setting back the
cause of genuine equity.) To acknowledge these simple truths is to watch the
rationale for national standards – or uniform state standards -- collapse into a
heap of intellectual rubble.

This disconnect is evident every time you put the current Core Curriculum Content Standards next to a sample HSPA, which is the current high school graduation-requirement test in New Jersey. For example, here are some of my core content standards:

• Analyze how an author's use of words creates tone and mood, and how choice
  of words advances the theme or purpose of the work.
  
• Compare and evaluate the relationship between past literary traditions
  and contemporary writing.
  
• Recognize the use or abuse of ambiguity, contradiction, paradox, irony,
  incongruities, overstatement and understatement in text and explain their effect
  on the reader.

You show me the standardized multiple-guess, true-false, matching test that will effectively measure any of those. And yet those tests, despite DOE undertakings to the contrary, are the actual standard to which teachers and students are to be held.

The core curriculum content is one animal, and the standardized tests are another, and the twain does not meet. We have built a system around tests which measure things other than the things we are supposed to teach.

Can't wait to see what our politicians will propose to solve the contradiction...

Standardized tests are reliable because they're objective...oh, wait, they're not...

One of the rationales behind standardized testing is that we can hold all schools to uniform standards. Except that apparently, we can't. In an op/ed piece in today's Record newspaper (which originally appeared in the Christian Science Monitor), a person hired to grade the tests reveals how standards were lowered and fudged in order to get tests graded quickly and cheaply. The problem: the job was entrusted to a for-profit organization.

While accountability in education may be an important goal, it’s critical to realize how difficult that might be to pin down. The lesson of my career should be that trusting massive corporations that answer to a bottom line to make decisions about American schools is a whole lot different than trusting those men and women who stand every day at the front of the classroom.

Why does privatization always mean for-profit? Hasn't anybody heard of the Red Cross or the World Bank? Private organizations, answerable neither to government to shareholder, yet without the need to better the return every quarter.

But even that begs the question. I suspect that even within our little Language Arts department at New Milford we could not reach a perfect consensus in grading a given piece of writing. School ccountability, like perfect justice, is a wonderful ideal that may not be practical in this life.