accountability

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Showing Up

Woody Allen is credited with the statement “80 per cent of success is showing up.” If you teach public school or engage in voter registration, you get this. Your job is to get the unwilling to be minimally willing and move on from there. If the students or voters don’t “show up,” your work is futile.

Public schooling and voting for public officials are considered the great institutions of American society. Both have fallen into disrepute because of modern inventions that confound them, standardized testing and voter suppression laws.  Both regulations rationalize against “showing up,” but rather that you must show up at the right time and meet certain qualifications. Those who advocate for such regulation believe that the processes of learning and voting need strict quality controls. As much as this makes sense, the regulations of standardized testing and voter id/ voting hours are not affecting quality, but participation.

If you are not directly involved in teaching or voter registration you may not understand that both learning and voting require engagement. Without it the rest of the process is defunct. It’s like another popular American institution, the lottery. If you don’t play, how can you win? As one who never plays the lottery, I can attest my interest in numbers chosen on TV or in the newspaper is nil. I am a nonparticipant.  I don’t even get why people throw their money away on such things.  Supposed you believed this about education or voting?  You don’t show up.

I have taught high school and listened to people explain what they vote for, and I know that people do not always show up for the right reasons. I know that there were days when I breathed a sigh of relief when Barry or Linda did not show up for class. But then Barry or Linda show up a week later and say, “What did I miss?” I’m thinking: a week of education. I’m wishing they had been there to know what was going on even if they didn’t do it.

You can say I’m suffering from low expectations, but I also know that these students can suddenly become engaged with the novel we’re reading for no particular reason and take off. Or someone will get through to them, and they will see the point of learning. And I think the same is true of voter registration.

I suspect those who disdain the “showing up” philosophy are thinking, No one begged me to show up, I just did. And why can’t everyone else do what I did? Take initiative, accept responsibility, do what’s right. But if you teach public school or attempt to get the vote out, you can see how thin the margin is between doing what’s right and doing nothing.  There is a redemptive moment in many lives that happens just because they showed up.

And if you want to get down to redemption, you have to believe, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”  If you don’t accept that grace or luck or connections have something to do with success, then you probably don’t believe in “showing up.”  You probably think it all comes of trying harder and having the right attitude. Good luck with that.

For my part, I begin this day asking for mercy not to screw up, and God takes it from there. And I will screw up, but I know that God will remember I showed up that morning. I will learn something, and I will remember to vote.

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Getting off the Reform Train

The National Council of Teachers of English has stepped off the reform train with its “Resolution on Challenging Current Education Policy and Affirming Literacy Educators’ Expertise .”  In 2011 it published a series of books under the general title Supporting Students in a Time of Core Standards. In 2012 it has second-guessed collaboration with the federal reform agenda as  defined by “high-stakes testing and the evaluation of teachers and schools based on students’ test scores.”

At issue is the targeting of schools and teachers as the source of students’ poor performances on standardized tests.  The Department of Education has made teacher evaluation based on students’ test performance an essential prerequisite for the next lap of  “Race to the Top.” In spite of Secretary Arne Duncan’s pro-teacher rhetoric, the reform train has made carrying off ineffective teachers its primary objective.

Employing student test data to evaluate teachers breaks a cardinal rule of psychometrics: that  a test should never be used to assess what it was not designed to assess.  The roar of the reform train has all but drowned out the protests of experts, declaring the misappropriation of test data for assessing teachers.  Ultimately the train has been hijacked by politicians, leaving the psychometricians, literacy specialists, curriculum developers, and practitioners in the station. Politicians, state school administrators and business tycoons have commandeered the locomotive, leaving behind the conductors, the passengers and the freight handlers.

In addition to the critique on high-stakes testing, NCTE has resolved to

  • support ongoing classroom-based assessments consistent with the NCTE/IRA 2009Standards for the Assessment of Reading and Writing;
  • evaluate teachers based on comprehensive measures of effectiveness, such as observations of instruction, teacher portfolios, parent response, and increases in achievement as evidenced by curriculum-based authentic assessments;
  • promote school/home/community partnerships by valuing the voices of all stakeholders who take part in the education of children;
  • support curriculum that develops every student’s intellectual, creative, and physical potential; and
  • provide equitable funding for all schools.

This is the “It-takes-a-Village” approach to school reform, which engages all the stakeholders and attends to the local context to fashion the appropriate strategy for each school.  And it trusts the stakeholders to know and implement what is best for their schools.  No school reform has ever succeeded apart from these principles.

For nearly two decades NCTE has attempted to coordinate its professional resources with the standards movement and with federal programs. Its proposed language arts standards could not pass muster in 1993 and its periodic resolutions on assessment, professional development and literacy have been ignored by each new administration, both Republican and Democrat.  The organization has engaged the standards movement at every station.

As the reform train recedes into the distance, a new vehicle of reform pulls up– the familiar yellow school bus.  The school bus, at least, picks up every student and stops at every school. It is slow, methodical, and a slave to routine, but it serves every constituent on its route.   The reform train drops off its registered packages and clatters on.

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A Necessary Optimism

 We’ve done it now. Eleven years we had to educate the public, to
register our protests and do everything in our power to warn people
what was coming, and we blew it. We knew the moment would eventually
come and we hem-hawed, looked at the ground, kicked at the dirt with
our shoes and failed to look the opposition in the eye and face them
down. All of us saw this coming, but very few took a stand and now
we — and our students — are paying the price. We could have been
prophets but failed the test.
http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-blog/2011/08/31/no-child-left-behind-a-conspiracy-against-public-education-that-too-few-called-out/

In a bitter reflection on the consequences of No Child Left Behind (NCLB),  Jim Arnold reprimands educators for standing by while the hurricane of so-called  “educational reform” swept through our classrooms. The dire consequences of blaming the victims, canonizing standardized tests, and allowing schools to be branded and euthanized are well-known to those who have taught for the past decade. But this kind of breast-beating over a massive federal initiative gone wrong oversimplifies what has happened since 2001, the Decade of Standards.

Arnold argues that we saw it coming and stood by and let it happen.  True enough, but what did we see coming? It was not like the hurricane coming up the coast in the sense that we could foresee its path and knew it was an ill-wind that would “blow no good.” Well, we knew that anything that relied on standardized tests as its exclusive measuring stick was ill-fated, but there were some promising high-pressure fronts moving in alongside it.

First of all,  someone in Washington was paying attention to the public schools. The federal funding surge that came with NCLB was a welcome transfusion for schools struggling to hire new teachers and make classrooms smaller.  Public education was a national priority all of a sudden. Unprecedented bipartisanship emerged on this bill, which has never been seen again, unless you want to count the invasion of  Iraq. (You might call that a “fatal bipartisanship”).  Even in the Obama administration Congressional representatives have crossed the aisles to support federal school reform, although even that good will appears to have ended.

Second, education was making headlines daily and becoming a universal concern. The amount of ink and megabytes devoted to education has skyrocketed over the past decade.  Education in the K-12 schools was finally on the public radar, right alongside the economy and political intrigue.  It’s hard to recall that, in earlier decades, public schooling was usually buried in the back pages, if mentioned at all.  As many public relations directors will claim, “All publicity is good publicity,” because being seen in print and heard on the airwaves is half the battle.

Third, accountability was promoted as a tool of reform. Although this should have raised giant red pennants, there is a strong desire for proving performance in public education.  Teachers want to be recognized for their hard work as much as anyone else. The problem is figures lie, and we have struggled for generations to make them tell a true story.  Testing has always been our measuring stick.  Perhaps this time they would show authentic progress.  Perhaps this time it would somehow reflect the hard work we invested in the most disadvantaged children in our classes.

Mark Twain said, “Teaching is the most acute form of optimism,” and probably optimism is also teaching’s fatal flaw.  We believe the conditions of schooling will somehow improve every year and that students will come eager to learn after the long summer break. How else do we psyche ourselves up for another school year? We believe we can make a difference, even when the cards are stacked against us. We even believe that our best efforts in the classroom will be reflected in the next round of test scores.  Or at least we believe someone will recognize our small victories, if the test scores do not.

Now that investigations have revealed teachers complicit in altering the results of standardized tests, perhaps even that optimism is endangered.  But the vast majority of teachers are incurable optimists, and they hoped that accountability for student performance would reflect their hard work and their zeal for the struggling student. Hoped against all reason and experience.

Was  “No Child Left Behind” a malignant conspiracy? Can we accept it as well-intentioned school reform, regardless of the intrigues of testing companies and curriculum publishers and the heavy-handedness of school administrators warping and scripting the curriculum? To read it this way is to understand why more educators did not rise up and shout against it.  It put education in the spotlight and on the national conscience.  It made Washington pay attention as never before. It made private foundations re-deploy their support to education. It made teachers critical to the success of schools. How could that be bad?

Sadly the last two administrations have shown how testing and accountability can destroy schools and optimism, regardless of good intentions and stimulus dollars.  What might have been the decade of the teacher has become the decade of inquisition, of branding and purging failure in the schools.  Arnold’s verdict on the demise of real school reform is tragically fair.

But I don’t accept the reprimand of teachers, the incurably optimistic profession that thrives on the renewal in every school year. Teachers will be fooled over and over again by the craft of Washington and the Council of State School Officers, because they expect better from them as they expect it from their students.  Teachers are near-sighted about education; they see mostly the students in their classrooms and plan how to maximize what the district and Department of Education hand them. Perhaps they need more cynicism about school reform, but would that make them better teachers?

In the decade of NCLB hindsight is 20-20. Teaching is always about the next decade.

 

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A Shared or Shackling Curriculum?

The call of 75 national leaders for a common curriculum to accompany the emerging national standards for English language arts and mathematics should be considered judiciously by educators.  The position that schools should categorically resist a common curriculum for some fraction of the school year may be too extreme. However, the impact of such a curriculum on the individual classroom may be seriously underestimated by its proponents.

Curriculum reformers  need to borrow a phrase from the physician’s oath: “First, do no harm.”

School reformers at the highest levels usually underestimate the disruption that a “voluntary” curriculum can cause in K-12 classrooms.  What is pronounced as a friendly suggestion comes down through superintendents and principals as a high priority mandate to teachers. Why? Because their schools will now be judged by how well they perform on the goals of this “voluntary” curriculum.  Curricular pressure on teachers is completely understandable, in this case, because superintendents and principals are judged entirely on their students’ performance on the “voluntary” curriculum.

Moreover,  the ELA and mathematics standards now being touted are a culmination of numerous prerequisite standards that are not firmly in place in some schools, especially struggling high schools.  Take the new standard for reading that involves analysis of so-called “foundational documents” of U.S. History:

Analyze seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth-century foundational U.S. documents of historical and literary significance (including the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, , and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address) for their themes, purposes and rhetorical features (Reading Standards for Informational Text, 6-12, #9)

As worthy a goal as this appears, it comprises so many sub-goals that it might generate a whole new course of study: 1- arcane vocabulary (“a well-regulated militia”?) 2- rhetorical strategies (ever read a “declaration” before?) 3- historical context (what was happening before that “Second Inaugural Address”?) 4- ambiguity (why does no one agree on the First Amendment?) 5- genre (what is  the effect of a”preamble” and the “amendments” on the whole?) 6- syntax ( how does the adverbial clause affect the main clause?) 7- themes (how is the Red Badge of Courage connected to the Inaugural Address?)   8- context and interpretation (how has the meaning changed over time?)

Sometimes I think curriculum and standards writers imagine that topics will merely be “covered” in the classroom and students will be tested on the gist of the meaning. These same writers will then complain that students do not read closely or rigorously and thus stumble on the challenging tasks presented by international tests of reading. Because the curriculum and standards writers have no, or very distant, classroom experience, they forget that “covering” a text does not produce good readers. When new and historically remote texts are added to a curriculum they multiply the topics and the time needed to address them. Nothing worth reading  should be merely “covered.” It should be studied.

The time consumed by these curriculum “suggestions” displaces effective curricula, which may involve students choosing texts to read, genre for writing, and language strategies to address, related to these choices.  The growing edge of writing and speaking, especially, involves reading and writing about non-canonical texts, i.e. texts that relate to students’ daily experiences.   I know curriculum writers tend to belittle young adult texts, even though they are proliferating in subject matter and quality. They assume students are not being challenged by age-appropriate subject matter.

But students learn to write and speak by addressing books and topics from their own experiences, topics which include, conformity, integrity, decision-making, respect, loyalty, independence. These lessons are assimilated and expressed through age-appropriate reading and viewing.  Writing and speaking are complex skills that are first tested on familiar ground before racheting up the difficulty of reading and listening.  Active classroom teachers understand how to bring students up to more challenging texts by “successive approximation.”  Those who abandoned teaching years ago have forgotten that teaching is a continuum of experiences from the familiar context to the remote centuries and cultures. These familiar and age-appropriate texts should not be carelessly discarded in favor of new curricula.

New curricula have a ripple effect on existing curricula, starting as a trickle and ending with a tidal wave.  Curriculum writers may anticipate the trickle and perhaps the stream of curricular change, but seldom do they understand the torrent of prerequisite goals they have unleashed with their “modest proposals.”  They expect to influence the teaching of English and mathematics, but they have no concept of how they may throttle the curriculum from top to bottom.

If a “shared curriculum” can be introduced with the caveat that the best of local curriculum can be preserved, then the change could be beneficial. We could have cross-district and cross-state dialogues about how to infuse these new topics with the old.  We could have celebrations of successful learning units around these topics.  We could have the joy of shared goals, successfully implemented.

But a shared curriculum requires respect for the those who implement it. It should come in increments, with funding for teachers to develop their own units, with  grace periods for implementation, and with caveats for school administrators who fret about test scores. It should be shared constructively and deliberately with schools, not delivered like a subpoena.

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What Do We Mean By “School Reform” ?

With the historian’s critical eye, Diane Ravitch has documented the transformation of the meaning of  “school reform” over the past two decades in The Death and Life of the Great American School System.   The same words have come to mean something entirely different over the last twenty years, without notice from journalists or national leaders, such as the Council of State School Officers (CSSO).

In this new era, school reform was characterized as accountability, high-stakes testing, data-driven decision-making, choice, charter schools, privatization, deregulation, merit pay, and competition among schools. Whatever could not be measured did not count. It is ironic that a conservative Republican president was responsible for the largest expansion of federal control in the history of American education. It was likewise ironic that Democrats embraced market reforms and other initiatives that traditionally had been favored by Republicans (21).

In the decades preceding NCLB, national educational reform targeted disadvantaged populations through Title I, Early Childhood, special education, and bilingual education initiatives, seeking to integrate marginalized students into the mainstream.  Mainstreaming students does not always raise average test scores. They often enter the testing pool at the lower end and may have a negative impact on the average score. So the overall trends recorded by the NAEP in the last twenty years have been relatively flat.

Since NCLB, test scores have become the barometer of success in education, without much notice from the media. In a previous blog (“Figures Lie,” July 24), I observed how states, such as Massachusetts, Kentucky and Texas, used exclusions of students from NAEP writing assessments to enhance or mitigate the changes in their writing scores over nine years (1998 – 2007).  These states excluded special education students at twice the national average on 4th and 8th grade writing tests.  While these might be appropriate exclusions, they show how the concern for test scores affects the inclusion of students we have been trying to mainstream over the long term of educational reform.

Another radical shift in the operational meaning of “school reform” is what Ravitch called “punitive accountability.” In a lucid chapter “The Trouble with Accountability,” Ravitch thoroughly articulated the problems with test score validity and concluded with the appalling consequences of inadequate performance.

In the NCLB era, when the ultimate penalty for a low-performing school was to close it, punitive accountability achieved a certain luster, at least among the media and politicians. Politicians and non-educator superintendents boasted of how many schools they had shuttered.  Their boasts won them headlines for “getting tough” and cracking down on bad schools. But closing a school is punitive accountability, which should happen only in the most extreme cases, when a school is beyond help (165).

Ravitch also cited examples of “positive accountability,” which run counter to this trend, particularly in New York (1996) and Atlanta (2009).  Superintendent Beverly Hall in Atlanta  “raised the quality of the professional staff by careful hiring, ‘ meaningful evaluations, and consistent job-embedded professional development'”  (165). She set accountability targets for every school and financially rewarded the entire staff of the school, when it reached 70 per cent of its targets.  And ultimately Atlanta was the only one of eleven urban districts studied by NAEP between 2003 and 2007 “to show significant progress in both reading and mathematics in fourth and eighth grades” (165).

The current federal administration has done nothing to change the dialog about “school reform.”  Test scores continue to be the significant barometer of success, even to linking teacher evaluations to the scores of their students.  The closing of schools has been acclaimed by the Secretary of Education. The dominant metaphor for school success is a “Race to the Top,” suggesting there will a host of losers.  None of this suggests a concern with inclusion and support for the disadvantaged in our schools.

To see the language of school reform become a “race to the top” is disheartening to any who have participated in school reform for more than the last decade.  The metaphor reveals what school reform has become: a competition based on highly suspect measurements.  The losers will again be representative of the disadvantaged and under-served students in our public schools. And the winners will be rewarded for managing the most students across a shifting and ill-defined line called “proficiency.”