Month: January 2014

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Homework: The Elephant in the Schoolroom

Thomas Friedman’s positive review of an Arne Duncan speech in Sunday’s New York Times (“Obama’s Homework Assignment,” January 19, 2014) resonates on so many levels, because it is a cultural critique, not a scapegoating about failures in public education.  At different times students, teachers, and principals have been blamed for the shortfall in the scores on international tests, but the word “homework” captures the space and time in which our culture does not support formal learning.

Friedman cites one teacher who reported that a student explained she could not keep up with assignments, because ” I have two hours of Facebook and over 4,000 text messages a month to deal with. How do you expect me to deal with all this work?” There’s no need to target either Facebook or text-messaging as the root cause of the lack of growth in K-12 student learning, because they are among dozens of distractions that keep students, and especially teenagers, from developing life-long habits and skills for learning.  There’s  online chat rooms and blogs, streaming of movies and TV series, music,  sports-fandom, video-games, automobiles, part-time jobs evolving to full-time, and distractions too numerous to name.

And distraction is good, when it helps divert us from problems and tensions we can’t control, but distraction also keeps us from developing learning habits, such as reading, writing, inquiry skills, problem-solving skills, moral-reasoning and reflection, all of which can not be reduced to compact lessons in the classroom. There are practices that develop only with practice, and there are not enough hours in the school day to turn complex practices into life-long learning. If it were possible for children in the early grades to develop literacies by exposure, it becomes increasingly challenging to acquire more complex habits as they age.

So Arne Duncan’s challenge to parents is more than a shifting of blame for faltering progress in schooling. It points to the increasing limitations of compartmentalizing learning between home and school as students grow in years and sophistication. Parents may honor sacred hours in the day for eating, for praying, for exercise, for a favorite sit-com, for chores, but they need to institutionalize study at home in the same fashion. Or, if there are no sacred institutions in the home, they need to make one or more hours sacred to study, reading, and focus on academic projects. You have no homework? Then what form of study will you engage in between 7:00 and prime time television? You have a project due in one week? How many hours will you allot to it each day from now till then? You don’t understand the geometric theorems you have to solve? Who are your resources, either in school, among friends, or online?  This is how  sacred practices or institutions are formed outside of  school.

Despite being a lifetime educator I have always struggled with the consecrated hours of homework. My parents raised me to make it a priority, but the sacred hours have always been threatened by the baseball season and sit-com manias. It’s all wholesome entertainment, but it stunts the growing edges of literacy, the kind of reading and writing that challenges me and calls for concentration and frequent attention.  My very identity as a teacher depends on making those growing edges expand. And these growing edges surround adults their entire lives.

There is a sense in which homework is forever. Will you study to become a better voter or to accomplish some household improvement you can’t afford to delegate to professionals? Will you study to improve your health or be better-informed about a degenerative illness? Will you study to decide what is the most reliable appliance or automobile to buy? The answer may depend on whether homework has ever been an institution in your home.

The opportunity to learn at home is the least-considered variable when we compare American schools to schools abroad, probably because our public institutions have the least control of that time and space.  The President has exhorted families to take responsibility for their children’s learning since his first day in office, but it is questionable if he has moved the needle on homework. Schools try to rally parents at back-to-school nights, but the parents stay home or at work.  There are powerful economic and cultural tides against the island of homework.

But we are coming to an end of our list of scapegoats for mediocre school performances and need to consider the most obvious one: the hours after school when learning needs to be practiced and reinforced. The time between 4:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m., when learning sprouts need to be cultivated. It takes no more time than the preparation for a family vacation or a spring break odyssey. It takes less time than training for a sports season.  It takes about the same time as preparing for the fantasy football season or planning and sustaining a garden.  Many of us find time for these things, but not for a scheduled interval of homework.

Whether anyone is listening or not, Arne Duncan, President Obama and Thomas Friedman have it right. Homework makes a difference, because it is a commitment. It opens up space we have lately abdicated for education. It keeps us from going 24 hours without learning anything.  If we didn’t have other nations to shame us, that sobering truth should drive us on.

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Carpetbagging

Once upon a time the South was invaded by Northern opportunists who manuevered into political office and bought up Southern plantations with the advantages of the spoils of the Civil War.  They managed to inject Northern views and influence into the South at a time when the defeated Confederacy was vulnerable and unable to mount the financial resources to resist candidates with Northern money.  These opportunists were derisively called “carpetbaggers” after the luggage they carried and had barely unpacked before they ascended to political office.

Today we see carpetbags full of campaign donations making their way north from the south to turn the political tide in northern states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania, according to an article in today’s New York Times [“One-Party Rule: A National Strategy Funds State Political Monopolies” January 12, 2014].  The Times traced funds from big donors in Texas, such as Bob Perry and David Koch, to a p0litical action committee set up by the governors association, and then to the Michigan Republican Party.  Nearly $8.5 million in donations reached Michigan in this way, turning both legislative chambers and the governorship Republican in a state traditionally divided between the west coast conservatives and the southeastern liberals.  With this political clout the Republican legislature has passed Right-to-Work laws, banned gay partnership benefits, and increased the opportunities for charter schools in a state already leading the nation in charter schools.

Adding to the genius of this diversion of funds was the transfer of Michigan Republican donations to the governors’ association to be distributed in states where campaign financing was less restricted, specifically Maine and Florida. Thus political contributions in Michigan, Maine and Florida were maximized to the full extent of each state’s campaign finance laws. You have to admire the Republicans’ ability to manipulate campaign financing laws across the country to benefit their local causes and politicians.

However, the same Times article documents how gay-rights donors were organized to sway elections in Minnesota, thus allowing Minnesota to enact a same-sex marriage law in May, 2013.  In this case gay rights support was mobilized in Minnesota to elect a Democratic governor, a Democratic Senator and a candidate for the House.  Again local campaign finance laws were used to the advantage of political interests from outside the state.

What is common to Michigan and Minnesota is a divided electorate that was influenced to allow one political party to dominate the other.  There’s nothing illegal or necessarily unethical about donating to support your political interests, but it is clear that democracy is undermined by such practices, even as the anti-slavery Republicans dominated Southern politics for a season following the Civil War.  Regardless of their political agendas, the carpetbaggers were seen as meddlers in political contests and did not represent the South. States instituted candidate residency laws to counter the untoward influence of outsiders in their politics.

With several million dollars crossing state lines, political donors have made their impact in states outside their voting residence.  That doesn’t seem right, even if it is legal.  When the money is used to support causes we believe in, we may feel reassured that the ends justifies the means, but it is easy to see how we are victimized by campaign donors who get laws passed we don’t believe in.  Today a Republican legislature in Michigan is micromanaging the teacher preparation curriculum and indirectly closing down public schools to be replaced by charter schools of unproven value. That does not seem like policy that should be dictated from outside the State of Michigan, but it has been.

Those who advocate for states’ rights should be questioning this trend. Their assumption is that the state understands its own needs better than the monolithic federal government.  If states should have more discretion about how their people are governed, then out-of-state donors should not determine who does the governing.  It is hypocrisy to insist on Block Grants at the federal level on the assumption that the states know best how to meet their own needs, then to try to dictate how those needs are determined by campaign carpetbagging. The ends do not justify the means.

It is only when the election dust has cleared and a new party has gained ascendance, that we realize we have been carpetbagged.  Now that we have one-party rule in Michigan, we see how the delicate political balance we have enjoyed over the decades since George (the Moderate) Romney was governor has been destroyed by southern money, by absentee power-brokers.  It feels like a violation of our sovereignty. We feel what the defeated South must have felt in the wake of the Civil War.

It was legal but wrong in 1870, and it is legal but wrong today. State voters should determine state government, not the power of political donors who believe everyone’s business is their business.

1872 cartoon depiction of Carl Schurz as a Carpetbagger

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The Pope Teaches Literacy

Pope Francis, the Person of the Year! That was refreshing on so many levels. A man so transparently devoted to the lowly, the struggling, and the disenfranchised. How much we needed the recognition of  “A Big Heart Open to God.”

Most exciting to me was that his teaching practices echoed his message. The young and inexperienced were valued for their tastes and creativity.  Literature was the way to enrich the thinking of students, not tokens of accomplishment. Writing was for authentic and appreciative audiences, not only for getting a grade and fulfilling an objective. A teacher was a servant, as much as a leader.

In “A Big Heart Open to God” (Antonio Spadero, SJ September 30, 2013) Pope Francis revealed the soul of a teacher dedicated to his students, ready to balance the requirements of the canon with the motivation of adolescent readers. I was absorbed by the interview introducing the mind and heart of the new prelate, but the two paragraphs about “the pope teaching literature to his secondary students” inspired me.

“‘Then, Holy Father, creativity is important for the life of a person?’ I [Spadero] asks. He laughs and replies: ‘For the Jesuit it is extremely important! A Jesuit must be creative.'”

I had heard that Jesuits were supreme philosophers and logicians, but creative? That was new to me.

Faced with task of introducing his class to El Cid, he found it was not a hit. “Then I decided that they would study El Cid at home and that in class I would teach the authors that the boys liked the most.

Of course young people want to read more racy works, like La Casada Infiel or classics like La Celestina by Fernando de Rojas. But by reading these things they acquired a taste in literature, and we went on to other authors. And that was for me a great experience. I completed the program, but in an unstructured way–that is, not ordered according to what we expected in the beginning, but in an order that came naturally by reading these authors.

The curriculum Pope Francis was dealt was totally unfamiliar to me, but I could insert familiar obligations of the secondary curriculum, Great Expectations, Grapes of Wrath, Wuthering Heights,  and I could get his drift. He was not content to “expose” his students to the classics. He wanted them to love reading and talk with authority about novels they read, to have a “taste in literature.” It was teaching not by inoculation, but by assimilation.  He saw the impenetrability of the required texts, and opted to discuss the engaging, inspiring texts in class. He wanted to have literate conversation with this students, not a professorial commentary of what they should have gathered from texts on the margins of their understanding. This from a man who had absolute authority in his classroom.

What about writing? What kinds of essays were assigned? “In the end I decided to send Borges two stories written by my boys. I knew his secretary, who had been my piano teacher. And Borges liked those stories very much. And then he set out to write the introduction to a collection of these writings.”

So much in a few sentences! First, they were writing their own stories, not critical essays. Second, the teacher loved his students’ writing enough to bring it to the attention of an editor acquaintance, who introduced them for publication.  Third, he was proud of his students’ accomplishments. They were the means and the ends, not the artifacts of success.  I remembered sending my own students’ papers about a locally-written novel to the author and how much they appreciated his attention, not all of it laudatory. Students who connect with an audience beyond the classroom are blessed with a real writing experience.

So much in this article about Pope Francis reveals his “big heart,” but nothing was more significant to me than his teaching practices.  He shows a heart open to students. “As much as you have done it for the least of these, you have done it to me.”

 

 

 

 

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The Residue of Reform

          In my first meeting with School Improvement Team leaders at a local high school, I was asked about the future of the Common Core State Standards in Michigan. The legislature has committed some funding to implementation, but nothing yet to the huge investment required for the Smarter Balanced Assessment, the testing component of the CCSS.  So we are at a crossroads.

            I replied that I didn’t know the future of the Common Core in Michigan, but I hoped we could preserve the principles of literacy across the curriculum and the residue of common language for talking about writing in every subject. To which the social studies coordinator replied,

            “That’s o.k. Teachers are used to working with the residue of policies.” It was a somber moment as we all nodded in agreement and moved on.

          Although the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) could be described as wishful thinking, one requirement that could transform secondary education is literacy across the curriculum. From the early roll out of English Language Arts standards the CCSS has portrayed reading and writing as integral to all disciplinary subjects. This was before the actual standards for science and social studies were even laid out. As a teacher of writing and writing teachers, I’m hoping that whatever else happens to the CCSS, this will be the residue of reform.

            I’m sure literacy across the curriculum is not universally welcomed in departments of science and social studies across Michigan, but I’ve heard teachers say they appreciate having a common language with which to talk about writing in their subject areas.  I’d never considered how important such language was to curriculum reform, but the lack of common language may be the greatest impediment to reform across the curriculum.

            In the teaching of writing, here are some words now in circulation across the curriculum, because of the Common Core State Standards:

             Argument, claims, counter-claims, evidence, reasons
            Informative/ explanatory, style appropriate to the discipline and
                        context
short as well as more sustained research projects;
            Craft and structure
            Write routinely over extended time frames (time for research,
                        reflection, and revision) and shorter time frames (a single
                        sitting or a day or two)
 

            Writing teachers will find the language both commonplace and controversial. The distinction between argumentative and explanatory texts can be arbitrary, and the subordination of narrative text-types to more analytical types stokes long-smoldering fires of controversy.   Much of the language is borrowed from the research and assessment practices of the NAEP, our only true national test of achievement, but that may add to its usefulness, in spite of its association with standardized testing.  While the NAEP persists as a national testing instrument, the vocabulary of writing could prevail, despite the erosion of reform.

            School reform in K-12 schools, and especially urban schools, has consisted of a carousel of new programs every seven years or so for the past decades. Frederick Hess argued that much of what ails urban education is actually the result of continuous or fragmentary reform. Hess explained that political incentives drive school superintendents to promote reforms – to demonstrate that they are “making a difference.” Superintendents have to do this quickly, both because their tenure is usually three years or less and because urban communities are impatient to see educational improvement. However, the literacy culture of urban school districts makes it very difficult to demonstrate short-term improvement, especially on standardized tests.  The result is what Hess terms “policy churn,” which distracts teachers and principals from efforts to improve teaching, while seldom resulting in successful long-term changes (http://www.frederickhess.org/books/spinning-wheels).  “Policy churn” explains why reform is short-lived, and why teachers have come to dismiss it.

            The teachers who represent the only stable identity of a school in perpetual transition find the process both futile and laughable. They portray themselves as survivors of endless cycles of reform, viewing each new regime with a jaundiced eye.  Many of these survivors are targeted by new principals and superintendents as impediments to reform, but they remain on the job long after their administrators have sought higher and more visible office in education.  Their reforms evaporate with them.

            So, if schools have an identity, it is in the survivors, who have latched onto the “residue of reform,” and adapt to the changing demography and teaching conditions in the school. As in nature, the survivors are those who successfully adapt to, but also change, the environment to make it a niche for their success. 

            But it would be a mistake to assume that “the more things change, the more things remain the same” in education.  After decades of programmatic reform, the research and practice has finally fixed on the teacher as the crucial element of reform. Ironically this could be the legacy of “No Child Left Behind,” because teaching to the test and scripted teaching were perceived as the most direct means to improving test scores.  While such practices have not contributed to the professionalization of teachers, they have made U.S. reformers pay closer attention to the preparation and professional development of teachers, something the rest of the developed world caught onto in the 1990’s.  So the means of reform in the United States has finally moved on from programs to teachers.

            But how we view teachers has not changed, and that has turned the reform of teaching into coercion and manipulation.  Teachers are not viewed as the solution, but the problem.  Teachers have been defined as replaceable parts, with a career-expectancy of 3-5 years by such institutions as “Teach for America.” Eighty percent of graduates of TFA leave teaching after three years, but that is not considered a problem by TFA. Rather it is a means for teachers to advance into politically powerful professions.

            The career teachers, those “left behind,” will be the actual implementers of reform or the “residue of reform.”  Does this mean the Common Core State Standards will meet the same fate as other generations of reform? Can we safely predict that within seven years, or four years from now, the Common Core will have run its course and the purveyors of the status quo will be vindicated?

            As a teacher of writing and of teachers of writing, I want to say “no,” because the legacy of the Common Core could be “literacy across the curriculum,” which writing teachers have advocated for decades.  It could be wishful thinking, but when I hear secondary teachers welcoming the “common language” that the CCSS has brought to writing pedagogy, I hear a commitment to more than temporary reform.  The idea that writing can improve teaching in all other disciplines is timely and credible. Writing in the disciplines might well be the residue of the reform of the Common Core.

            What we learn again from the cycle of educational reform is that the survivors are the teachers, not the programs, and the teachers carry forward what is essential in every reform.  I don’t mean the “rent-a-teachers” who come to education as a transition in their professional lives, the ones that TFA founder Wendy Kipp expect to influence educational policies in their future incarnations as national leaders. (How is that working out? See Reign of Error by Diane Ravitch).  I mean, rather, those who stay in teaching long enough to influence a school culture or improve a program.

            These teachers are not the problem, but the solution, because they implement the residue of reform in their own classrooms and support like-minded colleagues in the same.  True, every survivor is not a reformer, but it is also true that those who do not adapt do not survive in school, as in nature. So the career teachers are the vital link to implement the residue of reform.

          We learn something else from the history of school reform. Reforms should not be trashed or discredited wholesale. Education needs continuity, as well as change, so teachers, teacher educators, and policy-makers should learn to preserve what is useful, rather than nullifying reforms because of their bad associations. While we may rail against the the purveyors of the Common Core State Standards, we may yet find principles or methods worth preserving, and we should resist “policy churn,” which keeps teachers off balance through endless cycles of reform.  Continuity is not the same as the status quo.  It is necessary for school improvement.

            So even as we stand on the threshold of school reform, represented by the Common Core State Standards, we should consider how schools will be changed in the long view and how we can preserve a reform mentality.   Teaching will be changed by career teachers, who can negotiate the conflicts of a stressful learning environment by implementing the residue of reform.   That residue and the teachers who survive to incorporate it should be the targets for investment in schools, not the “rent-a-teacher” programs like Teach for America.  And if that residue is the infusion of literacy across the curriculum, it would make this teacher very happy.