School Reform

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The Common Core Standards: Reflections on the Race to Oblivion

The right says it’s a dangerous national curriculum. The left says it’s a threat to teacher autonomy.  Some states immediately devised tests to measure the “rigor” of their math and English language arts programs, while others have recently dropped the standards, considering them badly-aligned with their own curricula.  The Common Core State Standards, rather than unifying the goals of K-12 education, have become a stage for political theater. And this is the first turn onto the road to oblivion in educational reform.

Regardless of which side you take, you have to wonder whether the notion of “common” in school curricula has a future in the United States. Many teachers welcomed the notion of standards consistent from state to state (Education Week, May 12, 2014). With a mobile school population, there was a chance for continuity when families moved across the country.  There was a chance for national discussions of how the curricula would be locally implemented. And there was a new playing field where international competition looked beatable.

But when the federal government stepped in to validate the Common Core with “The Race to the Top,” it began to look like “No Child Left Behind” all over again.  Education Secretary Arne Duncan dangled millions in funding to states who would adopt the Common Core and connected the evaluation of teachers to adhering to the Standards. Immediately forty-four states adopted them and the “Race to the Top” was on.

As soon as pilot tests were developed in New York, and students performed poorly on them, it was clear that the Standards would be used against the schools, not to reform them.  Teacher evaluations were already being designed to expose the achievement gap between student performance and the Standards and to reward or punish teachers accordingly.  This short-sighted implementation is inevitably its death knell.  Since “A Nation at Risk,” when Education Secretary William Bennett tried to set states in competition over SAT scores, the popularizers of tests and accountability have doomed curriculum reform by turning it into assess-and-punish policy.  The vision of learning from the standards has been replaced by the spectacle of being disgraced by the standards.

Many teachers find it impossible to separate standards from the tests that evaluate them, because teachers have become the targets of “reform”  instead of the instruments of it.  The blunt and arbitrary instrument of multiple-choice tests is the crudest known tool of reform.  It makes teachers the problem, instead of understanding the complexity of failing schools. It turns standards into implements of punishment, rather than frameworks for improvement.

Curriculum standards, and the Common Core State Standards in particular, are not the problem when it comes to school reform.  The CCSS are general and selective when it comes to implementation.  They are “general” because they broadly address certain academic skills associated with “college readiness.” And they are selective in the sense that they don’t purport to be a comprehensive school curriculum, because they exclude the arts, the occupations, and health and physical education. None of these areas are optional components of a K-12 curriculum.

Schools should be considering the infusion of the Common Core Standards into a comprehensive curriculum, not displacing the full scope and sequence and then evaluating teachers based primarily on their students testing well on hastily-constructed assessments. School reform should not be a “Race to the Top.” It is more like cardiology rehabilitation, where the health of one organ is promoted by changes in diet, exercise, lifestyle, medication, and careful monitoring. Imagine treating cardiac patients by offering them bonuses for winning a triathalon.

As soon as citizens and tax-payers realized their children were at risk in this awkward implementation of reform, the drum-beat against the Standards began.  Politicians, with their ears always to the ground, realized the CCSS reform bandwagon was about to crash and were quick to jump off.

The same cycle began to turn with “No Child Left Behind,” when it was clear a lot of children were being left behind because of poor performances on standardized tests. And further, the “Texas Miracle” was exposed as manipulating school enrollments and teaching to the test. Most urban schools were not improving, as the early adopters had claimed.  They were merely gaming the system.

We are witnessing deja vu with the Common Core State Standards, because the testing establishment has once again seized control. State legislatures have conflated the Standards with the tests and the public outcry. Indiana and North Carolina have passed legislation to slow, if not stop implementation. Republicans have found attacking the Standards harmonizes nicely with federal de-regulation. Democrats have heard from their teacher constituencies and see the CCSS as a potential albatross in the midterm and Presidential elections.  Now it appears the Standards are descending from the zenith.

Veteran teachers are tired of “curriculum du’jour” that upsets their classrooms every ten years.  They cynically view each reform movement as a passing phase, and their predictions have proven true.  This cyclic implementation and dismantling of curricula harms students as well. They march from K to 12 as the wheels of reform halt and switch gears again and again. Reform has interrupted the growth of learning, rather than nurturing it.

There is usually something worth preserving in reform movements. Rather than sacrificing the current standards to the whim of politicians, school leaders should be salvaging the worthy parts of the Common Core.  With the Common Core there’s literacy across the curriculum; the recursive nature of the proficiencies; and the separation of proficiencies from content requirements, among its possible virtues.  These parts can grafted into new ideas for reform. Teachers understand that good practices can endure, while the bad practices can be culled and carried out back to the heap of futile expectations. Only politicians believe that reform programs must be canonized or shot, depending on what the lobbyists are saying that week.

The Common Core’s most significant contribution has been the distribution of literacy proficiencies across the curriculum. The notion that reading and writing should be taught in the context of the discipline of study is not new, but the CCSS made literacy central to academic study and charged teachers in each subject to model their practices of reading and writing in the context of their subject area. So when students would do research in U.S. History, they would learn how to cite valid historical evidence and imitate the style historians use to interpret history.  The teaching of reading and writing of all matters would no longer be relegated to one teacher, but to a team of content teachers: English, social studies, science and math.

If we could dispense with the metaphor of racing to the top, we could reflect on the baggage we’re carrying there. It would be a shame to cast away the consequential reform of literacy across the curriculum with the refuse of the Common Core, and it is hopefully not too late rescue it.  The CCSS might yet return to its 2013 glory, but just in case it doesn’t, I wanted to recognize its contribution.

Before politicians take it off to be shot or hang it from the highest tree.

 

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Products or Patients?

The New York Times’ Sunday Dialogue this week raises the question: Will a new set of standards and more tests help students?

The Common Core Standards have been praised, maligned and scrutinized, but mostly they have been mythologized as the solution to academic mediocrity. This comes from a business-model of product control. If you raise the quality standards, the product will improve.

The dangerous inference of this model is that testing controls the quality of students graduating from our schools.  To anyone confounded by the problem of mediocrity in the public schools, this is a seductive model, and it has driven school reform for at least fifteen years.

Rather than treating students as products, we should treat them as patients, not because they are sick, but because the decisions we make regarding their education are as complex as medical care, not as simplistic as product control.

The standardized test is the equivalent of taking a patient’s temperature: it can tell us if something is wrong, but not what. It is a crude instrument of screening. What does the doctor do with raw information? She checks it against other observations such as case history, other vital signs, and the patient’s reports.  The doctor makes a diagnosis and says, “Call me in a week, if the condition doesn’t improve.”  She does not use the body temperature to diagnose anything and the actual diagnosis is tentative.

We trust doctors because they are cautious, but methodical, in their diagnoses and, if we are good patients, we try to participate and make suggestions to be sure we are regaining our health. We understand that medicine has side-effects and diagnoses are tentative. Why do we assume testing of our minds is definitive and students are malleable products we can improve based on a single test score?

Cost. It costs a lot more to keep a patient healthy than to improve a product for the market.  Yet if we were asked if our children are more like products or patients, would any of us say they were “products”?

So we take the cheap way out: we test and fail and make our students better test-takers to improve their performance.  Or we use the tests to drive the curriculum by posting the standards on the board each day and focus our students’ attention on the product, instead of the process. That process is called “learning-how-to-learn.”

If we expect anything but the usual frustration with testing and failure, we have to invest more in our students. We need smaller classes, more collaboration of the professionals within the school, more professional development about how to use test results, more support of family literacy, and more collaboration between pre-service education and the schools.

The cost will be the hiring of more teachers, more hours in the school day for collaboration, more hours after school for professional development and family literacy, and more time devoted to training novice teachers in the schools.  Schools will become more like hospitals, where multiple measurements, collaboration across specialties, and a continuum of professional education from internship to residency has been the norm for decades.

Why would we ignore this superb model of professional practice operating right under our noses? Money. It’s cheaper to treat students like products than patients. We already spend too much medical care.

Yet, while the medical profession is learning to economize, education could be learning to assess and collaborate with the care and precision of medicine.  Eventually we will learn to control medical costs and to treat students with the dignity of primary care patients.

Unless we continue to treat students as products and their improvement as product control.

 

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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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Stop Teaching Writing?

In the recent edition of Education Week (September 21, 2011 ), Paula Stacey describes the many travesties of teaching writing inspired by a decade of standards and textbooks that function like cookbooks.*  Most of these anecdotes are from her personal teaching experience, and they ring with authenticity. Her conclusion is to “Stop Teaching Writing” and merely ask questions and consider the answers.  She does not define the characteristic challenge of teaching writing, which is, to echo the venerable Don Murray, “Teach the Process, Not the Product.”

The problem is that teaching writing is not teaching to the standards or teaching by the book. It is teaching the writer first,  then the writing. A  great writing teacher views the writer as an actor, the writing as the rehearsal, and the standards as the critics, who like to have the last word. In the tentative bursts of language students produce in writing classes, the teacher sees a performer with talents that can be coached. The standards are the afterthought, not the dialogue in the drama. The textbook is the proposal, not the script, for the play.

The teacher seems to be a director in this metaphor. When actors praise directors, they always seem to appreciate their ability to bring out the best in the actor, to understand the capabilities the actor brings to the performance. They never comment on the good reviews they received, because of the director’s savvy anticipation of the critics. Rather they admire the director’s making the most of what they bring to the drama.

Another reason to like this theatrical metaphor is that rehearsals become the focus of growth.  Rarely will anyone pay to see a rehearsal, but if you wanted to see how a play comes alive that would be the place to be. No one expects perfect performance in rehearsals, but what you can observe is the evolution of the actor and character as they perform the same scene over and over again. So it is with writers and writing.

Educators have been more fond of metaphors of teachers as sculptors or master gardeners. Although these analogies ennoble the profession, attributing depths of understanding and skill to teaching, they fail to characterize the student as an agent of learning. Statues and lilies have very little initiative in their growth. They appear more as artifacts fashioned by the skill of the artist. These metaphors miss the point about teaching writing. It is very dependent on the participation of the writer.

When teachers formulate writing, they minimize that participation. Yet every writing teacher is prey to this tendency, because every teacher wants to make learning easier for students.  The good writing teacher will read the results of these formulations and consider why the writing seems lifeless or so uniform throughout the class. The answer will often be traced to the dimensions of the writing assignment or the graphic organizer that choked the writing in its attempt to provide structure.  Teachers with the souls of directors will bring a new approach to the next rehearsal.

Unless directors are not teachers, then writing can be taught.  Like the performance, writing is taught in the rehearsals with the focus on the actor and the actor’s capabilities. The actor is never asked to  be a macho super-hero if he is built slightly with a boyish face. The actress is not required to rely on feminine wiles, if she is tall and muscular. The director teaches to their strengths, while coaching their flexibility.

So, if we are not obsessed with our reviews or expect our performers to excel at their weaknesses, we can teach writing.  It may not look pretty, but that’s what rehearsals are for.

* http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/09/21/04stacey.h31.html?tkn=LLWFXCotiHDKc1Q1skAZmvCV5dLFk4ogMpLQ&cmp=ENL-EU-VIEWS1

 

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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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In Search of a Draftable Teacher

Performance evaluation of teachers could count toward tenure, if we would take performance evaluation half as seriously as the National Football League does. As it stands, performance evaluation of teachers is a crude, untested mechanism languishing in the past, compared to the sophisticated multi-dimensional assessments of professional football teams.

In the months leading up  to the NFL Draft I was struck by the innumerable dimensions used to evaluate football talent– size, speed, quickness, strength, vertical leap, intelligence,  work ethic, “coach-ability”– these are only a sampling of criteria.  Draft prognosticators have learned to qualify the individual traits to make a complete assessment, such as “He’s only 4.7 in the 50-yard dash, but he’s quick off the ball.”   You could learn something about evaluation by listening to the media talent scouts who devote their entire year to preparing for three days in April, when the football draft ends the mind-numbing speculation.

Here are some insights I filed under “evaluation of complex skills,” based on the evaluation of football prospects.

1) No single trait outweighs the sum of the traits;

2) No statistic has more significance than the so-called “character” variables;

3) The context of the performance (weak opponent vs. a Major Bowl game) matters more than the performance itself;

4) The trajectory of a player’s development is more revealing than the performance of a single year.

Every professional football coach and director of player personnel takes these principles for granted. Why don’t they matter when we evaluate teachers?

Well, of course we don’t evaluate every teacher to the extent that we evaluate two hundred athletes with consummate physical and mental skills, but can’t we learn something about evaluation from the experts here?

Foremost, should the test scores of a teacher’s students sum up the talents of a teacher without considering:

  • The context
  • The trajectory
  • The complementary data
  • The “work ethic”?

Of course not, no more than the time of the fifty-yard dash overrules the many other parameters of football talent.

Second, should our coaching and intervention strategies be focused on a student’s success on a two-hour test once a year? Hmm, would a linebacker’s skill be multiplied if we got his 50-yard dash down to 4.5 from 4.7? That’s not what I hear from football coaches, whose jobs depend on successful evaluation of the whole player.

Third, should we just hire enough excellent teachers to manage 40-student classrooms, instead of hiring more teachers of heterogeneous ability to manage 25-student classrooms?  Maybe you could explain to Bill Belichek why two healthy players at each position is enough to keep his team competitive through a sixteen-game season. Depth turns out to be more essential than selectivity in hard-knocks football, and a deep, collaborative faculty also make a viable school.

Fourth, should we assign new teachers the most challenging classes and hold them to same standards as the veteran teachers with their college-prep schedule of classes?  Right, and we also expect the rookie quarterback to run the entire offensive playbook in his first game as a professional football player. And we break him in against the defending league champions, right? And we compare him to the retired previous  quarterback, who will probably get into the Hall of Fame.  Professional football coaches are far too shrewd to spoil young talent.

Sounds pretty stupid when we compare school policies to professional football, doesn’t it? Is this an unfair comparison or should we take a few pages out of the NFL playbook? Can we learn something from the most sophisticated machinery of talent evaluation in the civilized world? Can we consider the evaluation of the teachers of our children as important as the evaluation of our entertainment gods?

When the evaluation of teachers rises to a comparable level to the evaluation of professional athletes, public education will find status and peace. Then we can consider performance evaluation as integral to the tenure system in education.

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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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Learning: Infection or Assimilation?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As one writes and the other reads, assimilation happens.