Education Reform

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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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Out lying

“Teacher Quality Widely Diffused” trumpets the headlines in the New York Times today (February 25, 2011). The headline and the article strongly suggest that the disadvantages of poverty and literacy-poor home environments are not critical influences on student performance on standardized tests. Rather that “teachers who were most and least successful in improving their students’ test scores could be found all around–in the poorest corners of the Bronx, like Tremont and Soundview, and in middle class neighborhoods of Queens, like Bayside and Forest Hills” (1).

The same article qualifies the results of the “value-added” assessment of students and their teachers by reporting “the margin of error is so wide that the average confidence level around each rating spanned 35 percentiles in math and 53 in English. . .”  This technicality may be conveniently ignored by the Times, but it is more than an inconvenience to teachers who are now publicly evaluated by their students’ test scores.

The media, the Bloomberg administration and the Obama administration are so hungry to get the goods on bad teachers, that they are willing to sanctify any statistics that appear to support their case.  “Value-added” statistics are a clear improvement on evaluating teachers on the raw data of their students’ test scores, but with a confidence level that spans 53 percentiles in English, there is still much to question about publishing such data.

Suppose the verdict of a jury had a 53% variance with the truth?  Suppose the testing of a drug to cure HIV had a 53% confidence level of success? Suppose the computer models of an air assault on the nuclear resources of Iran had a 53% chance of disabling their nuclear program?  Would anyone take these risks? Are these test scores any less damaging of the reputation and the professional survival of a school or a teacher?

The cases that seem to fall outside the range of probability in the field of statistics are often referred to as “outliers.”  Outliers are often subjects of further experimentation, because they may speak to the validity of the data that falls within the confidence levels of the data.  Thorough scientists do not ignore outliers, because they may reveal flaws in their original hypotheses. They investigate outliers more rigorously to learn what they can from the deviations.

That is not what is happening with the “value-added” data offered up by the New York Public Schools. The data is being privileged with a public showing and sanctified by a headline like “Teacher Quality Widely Diffused.”  In criminal prosecution this would be called a “rush to judgment.”

In the media, we should call this “out lying.” The data is out, even though some of it may be lying.  It is all well and good for schools to use the data for discussion and give it further scrutiny to see what it really says. It is another thing to pretend that the data is evidence that poverty is not a mitigating influence on teaching.  This is what I get from “Teacher Quality Widely Diffused.”

Let’s not use blunt instruments to execute teachers. Let’s investigate the outliers, not lie about them.

 

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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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Voodoo Educational Reform

George I, our forty-first President, separated himself from his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, by declaring that the “trickle-down” theory of stimulating the economy was “voodoo economics.” By that he meant that the trickle-down theory assumed an outcome of prosperity from lowering income taxes or deregulating commerce: a cause and effect that were not directly connected. Like sticking a pin in a doll of your enemy was supposed to harm your enemy.

In the Twenty-first century all the happy talk of voodoo economics has spilled over to public education.  Down with restrictions and up with schools that will thrive in their absence, the charter schools, the parochial schools, the experimental schools with suspended teachers’ contracts.  Free schools mean innovation, and innovation means better schools.

Well, we have seen the results of free markets over the past decade, both in the economy and education, and reviews are mixed, to say the least.  There are pockets of success, like computer and wireless technology, like the KIPP schools which mentor new teachers in a high-pressure learning environment. But the overall health of the economy and the nation’s schools continues to falter, while the mantra of deregulation of business and unshackling of school administrators persists, with its dogged faith in freedom producing prosperity.  The triumph of hope over experience, someone once said.

Now comes Tom Watkins, former State Superintendent of Michigan’s schools with more voodoo predictions, now directed at teacher education.

What if our colleges of education did not have an exclusive franchise on preparing future teachers? What if we opened the teacher preparation business up to educational entrepreneurs who could demonstrate through scientific research that their methods actually produce more effective teachers? [http://www.thecenterformichigan.net/guest-column-taking-the-charter-school-to-college/]

In a commentary, ominously titled “Taking the Charter School to College,” Watkins suggests that the monopoly of teacher preparation institutions is stifling the growth and innovation of teacher preparation. Clearly the colleges and universities that prepare teachers are not interested in reform or applying scientific research to their methods.  This is like saying that a “small market” sports team is not interested in winning.  A mediocre record in professional sports must be an indication of lack of effort or seriousness from the mediocre team.

Anyone who has followed baseball or basketball in Cleveland knows that even when the spirit is willing, the resources may be weak. The free market has not been kind to these franchises.  Perhaps the management can be blamed, but ultimately the available resources can dictate the quality of the team.

So throwing the market open to genius and experimentation does not guarantee a better product, in baseball, basketball or pre-service education. There is no invisible current of innovation waiting to burst the dams of certification law and collective bargaining.  It is not as simple as converting potential energy to kinetic energy. Would that it were, Tom Watkins.

The research on teacher preparation cited by Linda Darling-Hammond emphasizes the collaboration of schools of education with exemplary K-12 schools in creating an environment where excellent teaching is modeled with students from culturally disadvantaged backgrounds.

One thing that is clear from current studies of strong programs is that learning to practice in practice, with expert guidance, is essential to becoming a great teacher of students with a wide range of needs.  To improve preparation, states and accreditors should require a full year of clinical training for prospective teachers, ideally undertaken in professional development schools (PDS) that, like teaching hospitals, offer yearlong residencies under the guidance of expert teachers.  These PDS sites develop state-of-the-art practice and train novices in the classrooms of expert teachers while they are completing coursework that helps them teach diverse learners well (The Flat World and Education 316-17)

The professional development school is not a vision, but a declining institution of twenty years’ experimentation.  In most cases both the university and its partner school are hobbled by the expense of paying full-time teaching supervisors and for the released time or stipends of mentor teachers.  Schools have to find the space and time to sustain professional education alongside the education of K-12 students. It is a model that hospitals have successfully maintained for medical interns, but the public schools have too often been overwhelmed by time and expense of nurturing novice teachers.

Instead the dominant model of teacher preparation in the United States is a ten-week highly controlled practicum experience, followed by certification, followed by throwing the novice in the deep end of the pool.  New teachers inevitably acquire the classes the veteran teachers are trying to avoid, are saddled with the extra-curricular activities that older teachers have jettisoned from exhaustion, and receive the closest scrutiny, based on the expectation that they will fail. The expected tightening of requirements for evaluation and tenure will only exacerbate these conditions.

The current dogma that increasing the funding of education does not improve the quality of education has led us to the ill-considered conclusion that multiplying options for education will yield better quality by driving inferior services out of the marketplace.  We subscribe to indirect means of improving education (voodoo reform) instead of direct means (infusion of material and professional resources). Rather than considering that our tax dollars might be more wisely spent, we assume that tax dollars are never wisely spent.  Hence our renewed and desperate faith in the marketplace to improve what indiscriminate funding did not.

Professional development schools could transform teacher education, but they will need financing–federal or private, it doesn’t matter. But it will be a direct infusion of resources at the point of need.  Not a magical spell cast on the educational marketplace that releases the pent-up genius of innovation.  Voodoo had its chance in the first decade of the Twenty-first century. Let’s put our money where our best institutions are and put our faith in committed professionals.

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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.

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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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Everybody Can Write (Amen)

It’s time to quiet the ranting demon and  invoke the affirming spirit of educational reform: the democratization of writing.  We will invoke the spirit with the creed “Everybody can write.”   If there is a church where this creed is reliably practiced it is The National Writing Project, a professional development network of teachers of writing that holds summer tent-meetings (actually “summer institutes” in  air-conditioned settings) for its followers, called “teacher consultants.” Since launching itself from the imagination of James Gray in 1974, the NWP has begun its Summer Invitational Institutes with the invocation: “teachers of writing should be writers.” And that mantra has persistently inspired the faithful for thirty-six years of devotion to the profession of teaching writing (http://nwp.org).

The vertical axis of educational reform is the better-known and better-funded “Standards Reform,” led by think tanks like Achieve, Inc., foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and political coalitions like the National Governors’ Associations and the Council of Chief State School Officers. You can follow their work in the current edition of the “Common Core State Standards,” which claims to be “evidence-based,”  “aligned with college and work expectations,” “rigorous,” and “internationally benchmarked.”  You can also read a cogent and critical analysis of the work of the vertical axis over the last twenty years in Diane Ravitch’s Death and Life of the Great American School System (Basic Books, 2010). I leave that in Dr. Ravitch’s very capable hands.

But the  gospel of the horizontal axis of educational reform should be proclaimed. It is an under-funded and under-publicized axis that has just begun to get traction. It begins with the origin tale of the National Writing Project (Teachers at the Center, James Gray, National Writing Project, 2000); continues in the eloquent preaching of Peter Elbow, his sermons compiled in the incomparable Everybody Can Write (Oxford University Press, 2000); it collects the epistles of its followers in the National Conversation on Writing (http://ncow.org/site/), and currently celebrates their contributions in the National Day on Writing ( http://www.ncte.org/dayonwriting), the second annual on October 20, 2010.  All of these prophets and evangelists deserve personal attention and will receive it in upcoming blogs.

You might think that “Everybody can write” would be a popular creed, but it is hardly a cultural norm . If you Google “Everybody can write” you will find lots of offers to make you a writer, including a company in the United Kingdom called “Rewrite,” which makes your miserable prose acceptable. If you are embarrassed by your writing or your employees’ writing, “The answer: put your message directly into the hands of the specialist yourself.” (http://www.rewrite.co.uk/).  This message corresponds to the memorable headline “Why Johnny Can’t Write” and other alarms that ring through the media.

So the gospel message that “Everybody can write” is not embraced by many, as the National Conversation on Writing has observed: “Public discussions about writing and writers rarely focus on the reading and writing that real people do every day. From essays for school to text messages, from grocery lists to business memos, everyone is a writer”(http://ncow.org/site/)

For the immediate future, let this gospel of the democratization of writing be proclaimed, Amen!

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Attention Deficit in the Statehouse

The National Governors Association is moving on after establishing National Standards in English Language Arts, Social Studies and Science.  With the final draft of the Standards posted on the community bulletin board, the sheriffs can move on to bring justice to another town. Left behind (uh-oh!) are the superintendents, principals, teachers, students and their families to implement these Standards on behalf of politicians on the move.

When the National Governors Association convened this week, the new chair,  West Virigina Governor Joe Manchin III “made good on his promise, announcing that his chair’s initiative would be Complete to Compete—an effort focused on increasing the number of students who complete college degrees and certificates from U.S. higher education institutions. His goal: Improve higher education degree attainment rates by 4 percent annually in each state” (“New NGA Chair Targets Completion,” Education Week, July 12, 2010).

Now this is a terrific agenda, addressing a real problem in the higher education continuum in the U.S.  The estimated 45% of students who do not complete four-year colleges is a tragic waste of time and money, both for students who leave college and the institutions that invest in them.  But what of the horse behind that cart? The students who have graduated, supposedly “college-ready,” yet somehow can not survive four years of post-secondary endeavor?

There must be something in the water at these annual conventions of the Governors that activates the attention deficit gene. They will not follow-through on a plan for education that requires them to get their hands dirty with the mechanics of schooling.  How will they align their state standards with the national standards, so that their states are best served? How can they preserve the jobs of numerous qualified teachers being cut this summer? How will they fund and preserve their most-deficient schools?  What kinds of continuous professional development can they fund in these schools? What new approaches to assessment can deepen the insights from standardized tests? What kinds of high school-to-college programs can they implement? These are a handful of implementation problems that the local sheriffs have left unsolved, as they moved on to the next town: college campuses.

Needless to say, the first year of their study will bring the startling revelation that students entering college are not prepared and thus more likely to drop out.  So when the K-12 system fixes itself,  the college attrition rate will be halved or quartered, at least. Needless to say, if they had spent that first year investing in formative assessment systems for high school performance, they might already be addressing the “college readiness” gap.  And maybe they wouldn’t bother studying “college readiness” for another year, since they were already addressing that problem.

But politicians (including some school boards and superintendents) have a need for an agenda to get them elected or hired or their contracts renewed. Whatever school reform accomplished over the last three years must be cast aside for a new plan, one that impresses their peers, the voters, or the school boards that they have the “change” that matters.  This cycle has sadly victimized public schooling, where change is measured over five to ten years and where real change must start in the classroom, not the statehouse.

Many of the teachers who leave the classroom this year will choose retirement to avoid this latest cycle of school reform, of unfunded mandates, of unresponsive regulation. They recognize when the sheriff has left town and left the hard work for the citizens. They know the NGA is too busy in the town on the other side of the county to be concerned with the town they “reformed.”

If the politicians in Washington seem unresponsive to local needs, we might assume they are just too far from us, but when the statehouse or even our school boards avoid  personal involvement with reform “on the ground,” we can only assume they don’t care.  Their careers are made by proposals, agendas and mandates, not the glacial changes from inside the school.  They suffer from the attention deficit that energizes campaigning and re-election and disillusions the stakeholders of reform.