Race to the Top

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Backpacks and “Game-Changers”

Mitt Romney’s school reform agenda rides the pendulum of change, carrying poor and disadvantaged students with it.  His proposal that students be equipped with a “backpack” of federal dollars to carry to the school of their choice shows how students of every new administration are the pawns of bureaucrats, who propose changes to get elected.

In the free market of schools students are movable pieces, representing federal dollars.  Grover Whitehurst, a Romney education adviser, says,

If you connected state funding with federal funding, then you’re talking about a backpack with enough money in it to really empower choice. . . . The idea would be the federal Title I funds would allow states that want to move in this direction to do so, and if they did so, all of a sudden it’s a game changer.

The metaphors of “backpacks” and “games” reveal so much about how politicians approach school reform.  The backpack represents the student as a unit of income for the school. There is no provision for what the student needs in that metaphor. Students with learning challenges need small classes, specialists who decrease the student-to-teacher ratio, programs in the arts and occupations that employ their strengths, professional development for their teachers to develop literacy across the curriculum, and paraprofessionals and volunteers to staff after-school programs.  In other words, schools need more and varied personnel, the single most-expensive budget item for schools, private or public.

In the past federal dollars have often made these programs possible, but in the current era of savage cost-cutting, what will happen to these federal dollars?  Oops, sorry, you’ll have to do more with less next year. But you’ll survive on American ingenuity and hard work.  Schools can do more with smaller backpacks.

Even more heartless is the metaphor of the “game changer.”  If a school principal says a new reading program is a “game-changer,” then we appreciate that some thought has gone into how reading instruction can be improved in her school. When a political adviser says a a voucher program is a “game changer,” we understand that “reform” means changing what has been unsuccessful in the last administration.  Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Education has traditionally been a “game” for politicians.  They believe somehow if you change the rules something good will happen.  Test and punish. Eliminate the Department of Education. Dismantle affirmative action. Invent a “race” and make your own rules.  None of this deals directly with the challenges of students lost in school bureaucracy.  But it represents “change” and that’s how candidates get elected: propose a new “game.”

A better metaphor would be to change the professional culture.  While politicians have complained that our schools do not compete with Finland, South Korea and Singapore, no one has suggested that we improve the status and conditions of teaching to emulate the teaching culture in those countries.   Because that would cost something. Linda Darling-Hammond outlines what meaningful change in the teaching profession would look like in The Flat World and Education.

  • universal high-quality teacher education
  • mentoring for all beginners from expert teachers
  • Ongoing professional learning, embedded in 15 to 25 hours per week
  • leadership development that engages expert teachers
  • equitable, competitive salaries  (198)

Most of these reforms would require major budget shifts at every level of government, and they would require more resources.  You don’t change a culture by moving the game pieces around. You invest in the members of that culture.

But since no one wants to hear that we need more resources in a decade of want, we will hear about “game changing.”  Moving students like pieces on the chess board. Moving schools out of neighborhoods. Moving teachers who can’t cut it to the unemployment line.  As they say in real estate, it’s all about “location, location, location.”

So for the next six months we will hear talk about backpacks and games, instead of slow, but relentless cultural reform.  We will hear about the magic of the free market, instead of the common sense of professional development.  We will hear about “change,” meaning moving the game pieces, instead of “reform,” which means investing in individual teachers and students.  We will hear about “races,” which are always predicated on more losers than winners.

These cheerful metaphors of American “can-do” will get someone elected. But they will not change the quality of public education.

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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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Not Waiting For Superman (II)

Like the editors of Re-thinking Schools, I am “not waiting for Superman.”  Last fall when the documentary “Waiting for Superman” made its debut, public school teachers across the nation imagined a bulls-eye on their backs, as the film portrayed charter schools and their exceptional teachers as the solution to mediocre public education. As Stan Karp, on the web site “Not Waiting for Superman,” indignantly commented,

Despite a lot of empty rhetoric about the importance of “great teachers,” the disrespect the film displays to real teachers working on the ground in public schools today is stunning. Not one has a voice in the film. There are no public school parents working together to improve the schools their children attend. There are no engaged communities. There is no serious discussion of funding, poverty, race, testing or the long and sorry history of top-down bureaucratic reform failure. [http://www.notwaitingforsuperman.org/Articles/20100920-RSEditorsNotWaiting]

I am “not waiting for Superman,” because I have spent twenty days listening to, and delighting in,  twelve amazing teachers of writing, who gave up four weeks of their summer to become better teachers of writing. And I know, from experience, that there are 200 more sites of the National Writing Project completing very similar summer institutes as I write this.  That makes about 3,000 teachers of writing becoming better writers and teachers by concentrating on their craft for six hours a day, while many of their detractors assume they are traveling or lying by the pool.

What they are doing is writing relentlessly, listening to demonstrations on teaching writing, offering feedback on the demonstrations, and setting a research agenda to investigate writing in their own classrooms.

 

They labored over their teaching and writing portfolios, which they have shared with each other, as they have shared all the products of their labor. And they appreciated each others’ work and worth and celebrated their personal and shared accomplishments. When I read their writing and witness their teaching, I wish the “Superman” film-makers were here to celebrate, too.

When these teachers return to their classrooms in the fall, they will be full of hope for their students and their schools, because nothing is so energizing as dedicated teachers working together. What will they find? Admiration? Respect? Curiosity? Structural or material support? Maybe not. As we often warn them, “A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country.”

Because their colleagues and principals are also “not waiting for Superman.” They don’t need heroes. They are a little out of patience with “born again” teachers and apostles of the “next great thing.”  But they do want help. They know teaching is a collaborative sport, even though schools treat it as a competitive one. They know they are stretched beyond what a single teacher can accomplish.  However, they will not do “better with less,” as Education Secretary Arne Duncan has exhorted them.

Do Writing Project teachers know anything that could benefit their colleagues? Yes, they know that teachers CAN collaborate with immense success and rejuvenation, given time and the inclination to listen to each other.  These teachers have listened and reflected and offered words of encouragement that made them each feel like Superman,  even if for a moment.  Every time a teacher shared a practice or a successful lesson, eleven others were taking notes furiously, sorting the best from the valuable from the problematic.  They not only offered each teacher collegial feedback, they learned from the shape and impact of each demonstration how their demonstration could be improved.  The demonstrations gathered new elements as the summer proceeded and the kinds of response and interaction multiplied.  A group understanding of excellent teaching practice grew .

They will return to their schools in the fall, because 97% of institute participants stay in their classrooms for over seventeen years (Inverness Associates).  They will not arrive as Superman, but as a colleague with a new excitement about teaching. My prayer is that the three thousand schools that receive them will respect them as equals with the same hopes and goals for the success of their students.  They will remember that teachers need each other and provide every opportunity for teachers to work together, to share professional experience and to give desperately-needed encouragement.

Superman will not be gracing our schools in September. But I know 3,000 teachers who will reach out to their colleagues and share their dreams and practices for better instruction.  There could be collegiality, instead of superstars and rivalries.  There could be a teaching community.  We are not waiting for Superman.

Summer Institute Daily Log, June 30, 2011

 

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How would a journalist “race to the top”?

In “Continue the Race” (August 29, 2010) the editors of the New York Times continue to celebrate the misguided goals of the “Race to the Top,” which include evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students. This kind of assessment of teachers is wrong on so many levels: psychometry, pedagogy, social equity, and ethics.  Why do reputable journalists continue to hold teachers to standards they would never allow for themselves?

A cardinal principal of the science of mental testing, psychometry, is that a test should never be used to evaluate what it was not designed to evaluate. Therefore, a test designed to evaluate math or reading should not be used to evaluate the teacher of math or reading.  It would require an inference that could not be supported by the data.  Otherwise we might hire journalists based on their S.A.T. scores or fire copy editors for their low scores on the Millers Analogy Test. Even reliable tests can be abused and make faulty judgments.

Standardized tests are not true indicators of academic progress, especially for students who think critically or methodically.  All teachers know students who do not test well, because of the emotional pressure or because they read questions too critically or because they need time to process their thoughts.  Standardized tests privilege the quick response and the suppression of ambiguity, so that thinking is always convergent and the first answer is better than the second one.  What we consider higher order thinking, the core of our curriculum, is not assessed by standardized tests.

Perhaps journalists are accustomed to this on-demand world or even prefer it, since theirs is a world of deadlines.  Journalism is the one kind of writing with relentless and unforgiving cycles and only certain kinds of writers can adapt to them.  Yet writing in other circumstances allows the luxury of multiple drafts and time to receive feedback from other writers and editors. The same can be said of problem-solving in math, science and the social sciences.  Standardized testing does not foster these process-oriented, critical thinking skills, yet it is becoming the primary indicator of educational success.

The test performances of students in urban schools are a target of “Race to the Top.”  The conditions in urban school environments can subvert effective teaching to the extent that good teachers will run away from them.  Good teachers know they are constrained by the effectiveness of their schools.  Numerous factors are beyond their control, such as class size, flagrant absenteeism, aliterate family environments, and undiagnosed or over-diagnosed special needs.  These conditions contribute enormously to the achievement gap. Until such conditions can be reliably addressed, urban teachers and teachers of disadvantaged children should not be evaluated by their students’ performance. Otherwise good teachers will avoid the urban schools, knowing they will be penalized for teaching there.

And if  a young journalist began her career writing for a pulpy tabloid, how would that reflect on her style?  How much opportunity would a writer have to shine under the pressure to tell the most lurid story of the day?  How does the writer’s prose reflect her ability, if the text must be written at the fifth grade level? Professionals might call this “paying their dues,” but what would a similar early career performance do to a teacher, evaluated by her students’ performance?  Would anyone take into account the above-mentioned variables that undermine her good teaching?

Ultimately fairness in evaluation is a matter of ethics. You should not evaluate a job performance with the blunt instruments of standardized tests any more than you should evaluate a journalist by the word count she produces each month.  The professional standards implied by such thoughtless evaluation are unconscionable. How can we expect teachers to teach compassionately when they are assessed by tests they don’t take, with so many factors beyond their control?  They will become as disillusioned as a stringer might over time, because he never received a special assignment or appreciation for anything except meeting the deadline.

Since I am a teacher, I do not truly understand the conditions that might coarsen a young journalist, but I try to understand.  I wish for the same consideration for teachers from the editors of the New York Times.

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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.”