Cooperation, not Coup D’etat

It is a mystery to me how school reform in the 21st Century has become something that is done to teachers, rather than something that is achieved by administration, teachers, students and parents together.  To be honest,  some teachers’ unions have been exposed as  intractable and not negotiating in the best interests of children. And admittedly it is very hard to dismiss bad teachers, because of the protections granted by tenure. But the “reform” of the school should not be characterized as the overthrow of these institutions.  They were once instruments of reform themselves.

The language of former New York Chancellor Joel Klein in Joe Nocera’s column in the New York Times today (April 26, 2011) is quite revealing. Asked about the impact of the child’s home environment on his or her education, Klein asserted, “We don’t yet know how much education can overcome poverty. To let us off the hook prematurely seems to me to play into the hands of the other side.” Spoken like a true lawyer.

If teachers unions remain intractable in this century, then Klein may have a case to make against them. But his adversarial approach, and the fire-breathing politician’s approach, to the reform of schools will never change the institution. They can change the rules, but not the quality of education.  They can raise the test scores, but not the critical thinking skills of the students.  They can hire younger, more compliant teachers, but the novices will not assimilate the standards of 21st century literacy, unless they remain in their positions more than three years.  The nature of reform runs deeper than these superficial adjustments to education.

Reform will come with the cooperation of all the stakeholders, the students, the parents, the teachers and the administrators, or it will not come at all.  Ramon Gonzalez, principal of M.S. 223, a middle school in the Bronx, understands this and has labored to bring his entire community together to the task.  Gonzalez was featured in a New York Times Magazine article by Jonathan Mahler and similarly on a broadcast of Sixty Minutes.  Joe Nocera portrays him as an independent reformer, somewhat dismissive of the top-down “experimentation” emanating from the central offices of the NYPS.  Gonzalez offered “goodie bags to lure parents to parent association meetings, yet barely a dozen show up.” But that is the strategy of reform: get everybody on board.

But Gonzalez and holistic reformers like Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children’s Zone are success stories of reform. Writing about Canada in this week’s  Time Magazine (May 2, 2011),  Secretary of Education Arne Duncan declares,

When Canada, 59, started HCZ Project 14 years ago, it was a one block pilot program. Today it covers 100 city blocks and serves 8,000 kids, providing not just a good education but also early-childhood programs, after-school services and guidance to help parents play a key role in their kids’ learning. Canada is driven by a deep belief that all children can succeed, regardless of race, wealth and zip code.

But this was not done with union-busting and lawsuits. Reform was a full-participation program. And it takes time or it doesn’t take. It is not a coup d’etat ala Michelle Rhee. Her reforms are being dismantled as fast as she installed them. And the same for any hit-and-run school superintendent who promises radical change, then leaves town before the test scores peak and fade. If a superintendent promises results in less than four years, watch him or her exit before the fifth year. Everyone knows that reform is a time-released medicine, but everyone wants it “fast, FAST, FAST.”

Bring back the reform that was a full-participation venture, the reform that included all the stakeholders and ripened like vintage grapes.  Bring back the reform that changed students, not their test scores.  Bring back the reform, where the adversaries lay down their non-negotiable demands and wondered together “What if?”  Bring teachers back into the process, instead of alleging they are the problem.

Learning: Infection or Assimilation?

It is probably much easier to contract a disease than to absorb a vocabulary word.  Although learning may be compared to being exposed to a virus, such exposure is temporary for the mind as a virus is short-lived in the body. Emerging research on memory and effort to learn confirms that the “exposure” version of learning is less effective than the recursion of learning.

Cognitive researchers report that studying large chunks of information repetitively may be more effective than committing smaller chunks to memory. In “The Ease of Processing Heuristic and the Stability Bias: Dissociating Memory, Memory Beliefs, and Memory Judgments” Nate Kornell and colleagues Alan D. Kastel, Matthew G. Rhodes, and Sarah K. Tauber observed that the number of times a vocabulary word was reviewed had a stronger effect on memory than the larger font size of the vocabulary word.

In the Psychological Science study, Mr. Kornell and researchers from Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Kent State, and the University of California, Los Angeles, asked online participants to predict how easily they would remember vocabulary words after studying them once or multiple times. Some of the words were presented in the standard font size on the person’s computer screen, while others were presented four times larger—something that makes the text feel easier to process but prior research shows does not improve memory. In addition, for some words, participants were told they would be allowed to study more than once. (Education Week, April 22, 2011).

The key finding was that students predicted that they would learn better from the larger font size than the repetitive learning from the smaller font size. Students associate ease of learning with memory retention. The testing of the words showed the inverse was true.  Students learned the words better with each time the memorizing task was repeated, rather than the increased font size.

Although the tasks of memorizing and writing are dissimilar, the recursive nature of writing may explain why students assimilate information better by writing about it. In the recent study “Writing to Read,” research synthesizers Steven Graham and Michael Hebert  reported that numerous studies prove the effectiveness of writing about a text for reading comprehension (Graham and Herbert 201o).  Among the recommendations from their meta-analysis:

HAVE STUDENTS WRITE ABOUT THE TEXTS THEY READ. Students’ comprehension of science,
social studies, and language arts texts is improved when they write about what they read,
specifically when they
• Respond to a Text in Writing (Writing Personal Reactions, Analyzing and Interpreting the Text)
• Write Summaries of a Text
• Write Notes About a Text
• Answer Questions About a Text in Writing, or Create and Answer Written Questions About a Text (“Writing to Read p. 11)

The act of writing demands a better assimilation of a text than merely reading it.  Even the basic challenge of summarizing a reading, demands a re-shaping of the information in a shorter format. In that re-shaping, something is added to the inert language on the page. The reader is assimilating the information by writing about it. Anyone who has paused to write a reflection or written response to a reading knows this feeling. It is more like digestion than infection. It becomes part of you.

But writing is not copying. Copying has been discredited as learning and certainly receives no welcome on an assigned paper. We call that “plagiarism.”  Writing is much harder, and the current research says that harder is better for learning. Learning is gradual, recursive, and challenging.

In the standards-driven school it is helpful to remember these principles of learning. Students will not reach the standards of complex learning by consecutive weekly injections, beginning with Standard #1 and injecting a different Standard every week until the day of reckoning.  Both writing and learning are gradual, recursive and challenging.  Both the body and mind follow this principle and both grow through assimilation.

Finally, this argues for writing across the disciplines. Writing as re-shaping is probably our most ready instrument of slowing down learning. Thoughtful writing. Writing that exasperates both student and teacher, because it is harder to compose and harder to read.  The resistance in both student and teacher is the signal that learning is happening. The student is constructing meaning and the teacher is construing it.

As one writes and the other reads, assimilation happens.

Metaphors, Money, and Speech

Perhaps the dialogue across the pages of the New York Times on Tuesday, April 12 was accidental, but it was fascinating, just the same. On one side David Brooks reminded us of the importance of metaphor as our lens for seeing reality. On the other side the lead  editorial warned us that the Supreme Court may change the metaphor of money enabling speech in political campaigns to money being the equivalent of speech and therefore deserving the same protection as speech. Both articles suggest we ought to watch what we say and be wary of what we hear.

Commenting on the research of linguists, such as James Geary ( I Is an Other) and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Brooks reminded us to be alert to the metaphors we use:

It’s to be aware of how imprecise our most important thinking is. It’s to be aware of the constant need to question metaphors with data–to separate the living from the dead ones, and the authentic metaphors that seek to illuminate the world form the tinny advertising and political metaphors that seek to manipulate it.

In the context of the upcoming budget debate these words could not be more timely. Just as poignantly, they address the debate about the financing of political campaigns and whether the right to uninhibited spending is protected by the First Amendment. The legal question must be complex ( or why would the Supreme Court be so sharply divided?), but the ethical question seems pretty stark to me.

“Money talks.” This seems to be the Supreme Court’s metaphorical view of campaign funding. I have never heard this expression used without some rueful implication that money has more influence than words.  No one says, “Money  should talk” or “We should pay attention to money more than speech.”   It is regrettable that “money talks,” and that valuable social programs are being slashed because of deficits, not because of their value to society. Perhaps it is reasonable to pay attention to funding, but it is not preferable.

So when a legislative or judicial body has the opportunity to curb the realities of funding, to curtail the power of money, it should ethically seize that responsibility.  The law should not maintain, but improve the status quo.  The law should not empower the powerful, but protect the weak.  The ethical responsibility of lawmakers and law mediators is clear.

Consider the regulation of speech. What if we allowed those with access to the press and publication to use language to slander and malign a person’s reputation? Those with the sharpest pens and most demented imaginations could wreak havoc on people they disliked. Instead the law curbs language which unfairly scars our reputations.  This is a fair restriction on speech. No matter how abundant your store of adjectives, you can not freely unleash them on your enemies in publications.

You can come pretty close to libel in a political campaign,  but if you have good lawyers and media consultants you can avoid overstepping the law.  With a substantial campaign fund you can disseminate half-truths to a wide audience. Hence, ” Money talks.” This is not an inescapable reality, but a sad commentary.

Turning money into a form of speech is a travesty of the First Amendment. A strict constructionist should be appalled by the ruling of the Supreme Court, which allows us to use money freely to consolidate power within the ample limits of free speech.

Given the power of language, however, we might be most concerned with the metaphors we use and interpret. If the Supreme Court can conflate money with speech, what other exaggerations might be unloosed on the voting public? How much will these metaphors determine what programs get cut in the coming months or which President is elected in the coming years? That is not a subject for the law, but for, you, gentle, but critical readers. Let the reader and consumer of media beware!

An Avoidable Crash

Watching the slow motion crash of the U.S. Government is not as entertaining as vehicular calamity in the movies.  In the movies we know that everything will be cleaned up by the next scene. In Washington, we know that even when the crash is over and government restarts its engines, the same manic drivers will be behind the wheels.

In the good old days, we could expect our representatives to stop at intersections and observe right of way. If they suffered a fender bender or two, we would expect them to pull over and politely exchange papers, respecting the rules of engagement. Today “compromise” is a dirty word.  Representatives who take the charge of the voters as a call to arms have come to Washington with a mission that disdains negotiation. And why shouldn’t they take their mandate seriously?

The insanity comes when a few drivers are allowed to terrorize the roads, and that is what the House majority has sanctioned in the final debacle over the budget.  A vocal minority, sometimes identified as the voice of the Tea Party, has been allowed to drive the vehicle of state, taking out every obstacle in its way.  Ruthlessness of this kind is admirable when citizens and their representatives campaign and debate their convictions; it is not respectable when actual work has to be done.  It is the kind of mania we witness in parliamentary forms of government when the formation of a coalition depends on the appeasement of a few strident interest groups. We shouldn’t suffer this fate in the House of Representatives.

There is a higher mandate than the causes that inspire men and women to run for office. It is the mandate to govern. Ultimately they represent all of us, not just the vocal few that elected them.  Most Americans appreciate this distinction between conviction and partisanship, but there are some who can only see “my way or the highway.” Unfortunately many of those are careening around the halls of Congress, wreaking havoc instead of consensus. Maybe they should take the “high way.”

It’s time for the traffic cops in Congress to take back the roads.

Testing: the Reality Show

The uproar about the SAT – “Reality Show”  writing prompt reminds us that the impromptu testing of writing is a very imperfect measurement of the writer.  The test-takers were asked to write on the question: “Do people benefit from forms of entertainment that show so-called reality, or are such forms of entertainment harmful?”

The College Board took a bold initiative in incorporating pop culture in its writing prompt. They argued that the prompt was intended to be relevant to students’ experience and attempted to engage students’ understanding.  And that is a worthy goal for a writing prompt.

Peter Kaufman, the College Board’s vice president of communication, argued that “everything you need to write the essay is in the essay prompt.’ Which is also true. In fact the prompt even  gives the writer a point of view to adopt, when it says, “Most people believe the reality these shows portray is authentic, but they are being misled.”

Designing prompts for standardized tests is tricky, because every topic gives an advantage to some and a disadvantage to some, who lack knowledge in the domain of the prompt. Because of topic bias, every writing test score should be evaluated with discretion.

The College Board attempts to reduce the bias by embedding all kinds of information in the prompt, but what they do, in many cases, is tell the writers what to say and thereby take away the ownership of the writing. The test becomes an exercise is telling the test-takers what they want to hear. If a writer is not familiar with reality shows, she is compelled to take the point of view sanctioned by the prompt and write an uncritical essay. Nice model for college writing, College Board.

In the New York Times’ article “What Shore? Kim who? SAT’s Reality TV Essay Stumps Some”  test-takers are quoted with a range of opinions, some baffled by the topic and some pleased that the subject tapped a rich domain of their experience.  The test-takers who were confounded were apparently too discerning to binge on reality TV, and so they struggled with the question.  These consequences show how good writers can be handicapped by a writing prompt.

But every impromptu writing test disenfranchises some writers, because not knowing a subject is a serious handicap in writing about it. An impromptu test creates a totally artificial and invalid set of writing conditions: no collaboration, no stylistic or data sources, and no time to revise.  Even in school, writers are given more time and access to write about topics that require serious attention. The impromptu test knocks out all the supports that good writers rely on.

So, even in trying to be relevant, the College Board has exposed the glaring inadequacies of impromptu writing tests: time constraints and topic bias.  Too bad, College Board. No good deed goes unpunished.