School Reform

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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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Critical of Critical Thinking

The most troubling question about the study “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses” is that Bob Herbert, New York Times columnist, like most of his colleagues, does not for a minute question whether the “critical thinking” of college students has been adequately measured by whatever assessment was administered.

It is indeed troubling that “Thirty-six per cent of the students said they studied alone less than five hours a week.” And perhaps alarming that the same students are pulling an average 3.16 GPA.  There are some disclaimers that might be made about “studying alone,” because colleges encourage study groups and collaborative effort is considered a crucial skill of the marketplace.  Did they ask how many hours were spent studying in groups?

But more troubling is the undisputed claim that “after the first two years of college, 45 per cent of the students made no significant improvement in skills related to critical thinking, complex reasoning, and communication” and that two years later the percentage had only improved to 36 per cent.

Does anyone know how these critical skills were assessed? Has anyone taken such a test, in which “critical thinking, complex reasoning and communication” were validly measured? I have not investigated the testing instrument used in this study, but I would think someone would, before proclaiming that college students are dumber than they used to be.

Suppose the assessment of critical reasoning was the time and accuracy it took to fill in a crossword puzzle with the content knowledge expected of college students? Suppose it was a version of the Miller Analogies test, with content expected of a liberal education (be sure to cover art history and music) ? Suppose it was a thirty-minute essay question asking for the causes of terrorism in the Western world? Ask yourself, college graduates, do you want your critical reasoning skills assessed on any one of these tests?

The irony is the utter neglect of critical evaluation of a study that purports to measure the critical reasoning of college students.  How can we claim to know such things without knowing the nature of the assessment? The news media are the most uncritical arbiters of news about education in the literate world. They accept every test at face value. Heaven forbid we might test journalists this way.

I admit I am disturbed by the findings of Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, because, regardless of the validity of their thinking assessments, where there is smoke, there is fire.  I try to learn what I can from studies that probe the learning habits of college students.

But I think it either hypocritical or delusional that the news media in general and Bob Herbert, in particular, would report on studies of student competence and knowledge, without asking if the tests were valid.  This is a classic case of uncritical thinking.

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Politics and Education: A Failed Marriage

Politics and education just don’t mix. The disconnect between so-called budget-reforming governors ( particularly in Wisconsin, Indiana and New Jersey) and the national sentiment about teachers shows that politicians do not get education.  They view it as a budget item, rather than a national priority.

Public opinion polls consistently support teachers, especially local teachers, and the current N.Y. Times poll  supports their right to bargain collectively by 2 to 1.  Although Governors Walker, Daniels and Christie have tapped into the budget-cutting spirit of their constituents, they are taking on the wrong adversary, when they seek to de-professionalize education.  They are bringing a machete into microsurgery.

Pay attention to the destructive impact of government on education in the current fiscal climate. New Jersey’s teachers have been publicly excoriated by a governor who presumably wants to recruit better teachers to his schools. Providence’s mayor has laid off an entire teaching force, clearly a publicity stunt, and thoroughly demoralized an entire school system. The governors of Indiana and Wisconsin have attacked the collective bargaining rights of their teachers, because they were  not willing to make wealthy tax-payers help offset the deficit.  And our Congressional representatives have blithely wiped out funding for critical literacy programs, in particular the National Writing Project, because we can not afford $30 million to fund the most successful professional development program in the United States.

In Linda Darling-Hammond’s study of three countries with superior performance on the Program in International Student Assessments exams, she found several shared national policies on education. In a comparative study of Finland, South Korea and Singapore, she found that all three countries actively recruited and paid for the education of superb teachers for their schools, and that they separated the national administration of schools from the political process.

The study is summarized in Chapter Six of Darling-Hammond’s book The Flat World and Education, which highlights major differences in the recruiting, educating and mentoring of teachers between three nations and the United States. Regarding “National Teaching Policies” she says they

recruit able teachers and completely subsidize their extensive teaching programs, paying them a stipend as they learn to teach well. Salaries are equitable across schools and competitive with other careers, generally comparable to those of engineers and other key professionals (193).

Teacher education is modeled on the education that the professional ministry wants throughout the primary and secondary systems, and it continues into the early years of teaching where expert teachers are paid to mentor the first- and second-year teachers in the most difficult years of professional orientation.

But the national administration of education in all three countries is also de-coupled from the political institutions. This strategy affects the entire program of teacher education.

these systems are managed by professional ministries of education,which are substantially buffered from political winds. Frequent evaluations of schools and the system as a whole have guided reforms (193).

The reforms to schools and professional development of teachers in these three countries are a remarkable contrast to the reform incentives currently engineered by federal and state governments in this country. See Darling-Hammond’s remarkable book for the details (New York: Teachers College Press, 2010).

When will our lunacy stop? When we can perform a decisive poli-tectomy on our education system.  Politicians have mucked up our national program with alternate diet and binge budgets, with short-term reform programs, with pandering to the testing establishment, with demonizing the “enemies of reform,” and by declaring we will have to do better with less.  How would that fly in Finland, South Korea, and Singapore?

Teachers know they can do better, more than any politician could imagine. They just need the opportunity. They need better leadership. The marriage of politics and education has failed miserably.  Set them free to do what they do best.

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What’s Wrong with Public Service?

The polarization of public officials and public employees should not come to this.  Only an employment system plagued by  inequities and neglectful of sound evaluation and promotion practices could bring us to this bitter stand-off.  The default of seniority has ruled the evaluation of public employees forever, because it is the simplest and cheapest way to evaluate personnel.

As public service employees are on the firing line for their alleged pension and health excesses, the debate about evaluation and job security of these employees has also been revived. No one disputes that publicly and privately funded employees should enjoy some kind of parity in pay and benefits, but many question whether the public employees are evaluated and promoted under the same principles of merit that exist in the private sector. At least this was the question addressed by Amanda Ripley the current (March 7, 2011) Time Magazine.

Professional employees in the private sector most often depend on the judgments of their supervisors for objective evaluations of their performance.  Indeed the requirements for successful administrators often include the thoughtful evaluation of personnel in their departments.  A successful corporation depends on reliable and apolitical evaluations of its professional employees.

In most public schools, this duty falls to the principal or assistant principal, who observe their teachers at least once, preferably twice a year.  The alleged flaws in this system, are the stringent controls of the tenure system, which protects teachers from unreasonable dismissal.  How much this applies to other professions on the public payroll, I cannot say.

But the rub in teacher evaluation often goes back to the skill of the evaluator. When I was a high school English teacher, I always received decent evaluations from my principal, but it was more because he was a former math teacher and felt very insecure about evaluating my discipline.  Once, after observing a lesson on poetry for an indifferent group of sophomores, he asked, “Do you really like this stuff?”  The ensuing discussion made it clear that he could not see any value in teaching poetry to students who were not college bound.

Clearly my boss did not feel confident and perhaps not competent to judge what an English teacher did.  And this is where the rubber hits the road for evaluation of teachers. They should be evaluated not by supervisors who do not understand their discipline, nor by so-called experts viewing a video of their classroom performance. They should not be evaluated by the performance of their students on standardized tests. None of this would be tolerated in the private sector, where performance evaluation is taken seriously.

Teachers should be evaluated by disciplinary specialists who know the context of their teaching and appreciate the skills needed for that context.  They should also self-evaluate and make their own case for tenure, as university professors do.  Under such conditions we could expect that the best teachers would be retained and the worst removed.  Under such conditions, all teachers would earn respectability, both from their profession and from a deserved compensation.

How much this applies to other public employees I would not presume to say, but the requirements of informed evaluators and mutual respect certainly should hold true.  What I do understand is that the public sector has never taken employee evaluation as seriously as the privater sector.

If government wants maximum productivity out of its employees, it should be prepared to invest in appropriate systems of evaluation and promotion. This is not a cost-saving proposal, but an efficiency proposal, intended to heal the adversarial relationship that has brought us to impasse in public service.

Public service doesn’t need exorbitant benefits to attract the best and the brightest. It just needs equity and respect.

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How Long to Make a Teacher?

The “Op-Chart” in the Sunday Times takes a fascinating look at the incubation of “street cops,” “Presidents,” and “Lawyers,” and many other roles and processes. It takes three years to make a good street cop, four years to make a President, five years to make a lawyer and six years to make a friend. I could not help but wonder: How long to make a teacher?

In every case the relationship between formal education and experience is the crucial variable. You can learn everything you should know about the principles of law in three years or the essentials of education in two years of schooling, but applying that knowledge to real cases and real students is the most critical phase of the incubation period.  In fact “Teach for America” made its reputation on shortening the formal instruction of a teacher and intensifying the field experience, essentially making it “on-the-job” training.

You can make a case for a teacher’s learning curve beginning with a year of formal preparation, followed by two years of hard knocks in the classroom, as the TFA model would advocate.  Research has shown that the students of these teachers are performing nearly at the same level as traditionally-prepared teachers at the end of two years in the classroom.  As I noted in “School Reform: the Popular Narrative”

In a follow-up to this study, the alternatively certified teachers registered significant gains in their students’ scores in mathematics after two years of teaching and completed certification.  However, 80% of the Teach for America recruits had left teaching by year four. Only 30% of the traditionally prepared teachers had left teaching in the fourth year (Darling-Hammond 47).

So, by the standards of Teach for America it takes two years to make a teacher and three years to disillusion one.  Arguably the reward system of TFA does not promote longevity in teaching, but I would argue that something else is going on in that third year, based on my own experience in the classroom and the experience of teachers who attend our Summer Invitational Institute for teachers of writing.

As the current Common Core State Standards reveal, there are two kinds of learning in English Language Arts and in the other academic subjects: formal content and “capacities of the literate individual.”  The “capacities” are given cursory attention in the ELA section of the Common Core State Standards. Among them are “independence,” “adapting their communication in relation to audience, task, purpose, and discipline,” “comprehending and critiquing,” “citing specific evidence,” “using technology and digital media capably,” and understanding “other perspectives and cultures” (7)

For most teachers the centrality of these “capacities” or “habits of mind,” as they are often called, becomes evident after three years of teaching to a formal curriculum, i.e. the standards in place in their state or district.  They discover, by trial and error, that students fail to consolidate what they learn in the formal curriculum because they are not acquiring the necessary “habits of mind” along the way. They discover that habits of mind are not casually absorbed in the process of mastering the content of the curriculum, but must be taught explicitly as part of the curriculum.

This is where the Common Core State Standards misses the mark. It treats the processes of learning as incidental to the content of learning and gives the processes, i.e. the habits, short shrift. Every teacher who makes it beyond the second year of teaching eventually becomes aware of the centrality of these “habits,” and it either inspires them to reinvent their teaching or drives them out of the profession.

There are many reasons for teachers leaving the profession, but I would argue this is a significant cause: the discovery that teaching is not only the delivery of content, but the assimilation of hard-won habits.  And I would argue that this is a developmental process. You have to watch students learn and forget before you see the underpinnings of that learning, the habits, the meta-cognitive skills, the conscious disciplines.

Although teacher educators emphasize the so-called “critical” and “meta-cognitive” skills in the preparation of teachers, there is only so much about habits you can internalize without watching students trying to operate without them.  To truly get the meaning of “habits of mind” you need to see what happens in their absence, what is happening in many, if not most, high school classrooms today. This is a late-developing awareness for most teachers. To be frank, my own understanding of the significance of these habits came during my eighth and ninth years of teaching English.  I knew the essential truth of “habits of mind,” but I didn’t recognize their impact on my students until then.

So how long to make a teacher? Four years at best, and for the slow learners like me, eight, nine or ten years.  To think that teachers are made by the straightforward delivery of the formal curriculum is to maintain a short-sighted view of education. It is the unfortunate view of the current Common Core State Standards and the microwaved preparation of teachers modeled by Teach for America.

I think the Chinese proverb paraphrased in today’s Times says it best: It takes ten years to sharpen a sword (New York Times, p. 9).

Darling-Hammond, Linda. The Flat World and Education. New York: Teachers College Press, 2010.

Common Core State Standards Initiative: English Language Arts and Literacy in History/ Social Studies, Science and Technical Subjects, 2010.

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The Mustard Tree

The kingdom of heaven  is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches. (Matt 13:31-32)

The notion of productivity is hard to define in education. Should schools be measured by the number of graduates, by the advanced degrees of their teachers, by the scores achieved by students on standardized tests, by independent observations of accrediting agencies?  None of this really captures the productivity of schools.

But the National Writing Project, a federally funded professional development network, has a simple formula for productivity. Invest in the professional growth of individual teachers with an aptitude for leadership and then support their growth and dissemination of effective teaching practices in local schools. The investment begins every summer with a 4-week institute for the development of writing teachers and continues with the graduates (called “teacher consultants”) developing their skills as writers, consultants, and teacher researchers both as an organic group and as coaches and workshop providers in local schools. The investment is $25 million, a mustard seed in the enormous dissemination of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Currently there are 7,000 active teacher consultants disseminating the mustard seed of “effective practices in the teaching of writing” in the schools they serve and in other local districts. These consultants of the National Writing Project reach 120,000 other teachers in a given year and teach 1.4 million students.  This is the definition of productivity: 7,000 teachers reach 17 times their number through professional exchanges and reach 200 times their number in students.

Is the instruction any good? The Local Sites Research Initiative has made eight studies of the writing of students in Writing Project classrooms with the following aggregate results:

The results, taken across sites and across years, indicate a consistent pattern favoring the NWP. For every measured attribute in every site, the improvement of students taught by NWP-participating teachers exceeded that of students whose teachers were not participants. Moreover in 36 of the 70 contrasts (51%) the differences between NWP participants’ students and the comparison students were statistically significant” (LSRI 3)

By every measure, the seeds of the National Writing Project’s investment in teacher leaders have been super-producers, and the production has consistently grown from its modest beginnings in 1974 in Berkeley, California to a 200-site network today.  This is the nation’s longest enduring professional network, a network that has leveraged federal support for the past twenty years to yield this gratifying fruit.

In the weeks that follow, the funding of the National Writing Project, a pittance at $25 million dollars, will be in jeopardy as Congress swings its reckless budget axe.   It is easy to overlook the brilliant success of the tiny mustard tree, overshadowed by the immense orchard of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Not every seed out of that orchard has been productive.

When the axe swings in the neighborhood of the professional development of teacher leaders, let it pause before the mustard tree of the National Writing Project.  That tree is home to teachers, students, and even their families (through the grafted programs of family literacy), and it is one of the great over-producers in American education.

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Engfish

Almost fifty years ago Ken Macrorie invented a term for a pretentious and vapid style of writing that secondary and college teachers unconsciously reinforce in their push for formality in student prose: “Engfish.”  It is writing that goes through the motions, but discloses nothing, writing that skims the surface with cliches or empty words. In Uptaught Macrorie describes how a student essay inspired this term:

This girl had given me a name for the bloated, pretentious language I saw everywhere around me, in the students’ themes, in the textbooks on writing, in the professors and administrators’ communications with each other. A feel-nothing, say-nothing language, dead like Latin, devoid of the rhythms of contemporary speech. A dialect in which words are never  “attached to things,” as Emerson said they should be (18).

This style, unfortunately, often gets the “A’s,” because it sounds important and frequently shows a command of mechanics. As Macrorie observed, it pervades all levels of education. E.B. White fought it with prescriptive advice in The Elements of Style and Richard Lanham located it in the upper levels of bureaucracy and called it “The Official Style” (Revising Prose, 1999). It is hardly limited to struggling college freshmen.

Almost exactly two years ago, I confessed to my own addiction to Engfish as a high school student. In that blog, “The Science of Writing” I revealed:

I fancied myself a writer in high school, but when I look back at my preserved fragments I am shocked by the pompous and impersonal style that was rewarded by my teachers. In a series of responses to college admissions questions, I pontificated.

Question #1: Why do you want to go to college?

“The most evident purpose of the collegiate experience is to broaden the scope of education while making it especially relevant to a field of study. I sense the crying need to systemize [sic] the great chaotic whirlpool of information into the universal outlook of college training and impending need to study seriously my chosen field of work.  I expect college to carry me beyond education to the developing of a technique of study.”

One might argue that the first person singular is present in this excerpt, but I refuse to accept that cold, pretentious voice as my own. I want to have compassion on that sixteen-year-old with lofty dreams of college, but I feel completely alienated from that affected style, that pretend academic diction. If I were this kid’s teacher, I would tell him to write about why he loves the New York Yankees or pizza, get him grounded in real language about real experience.  Maybe I could deflate his diction and connect with his passions.

So this is origin of my contempt for Engfish. In high school I was considered one of the best writers in my class, wrote for the yearbook and the school newspaper, won a local essay contest,  all for the publishing of Engfish.  I was a master of saying nothing in the best style.  I shudder to think of what my Freshmen English teachers thought when my beige prose arrived in college.

Ultimately I learned to write as a reporter for the Spectator, the college newspaper, and later I retrieved what was left of my voice in a summer at the Boston Writing Project.  I learned very little about writing in actual writing classes. I felt betrayed by the system that let me loose on the world with nothing to offer but Engfish.

The National Writing Project chopped away at this unfortunate style by declaring that “all teachers of writing should be writers.” This meant we delivered our prose to real readers and heard what they heard. Ultimately this was my cure for Engfish. The summer I attended the Boston Writing Project I was among a host of would-be writers who would only affirm what touched their reader sensibilities. We learned to write what we felt without embellishment, and we discovered how powerful that could be.

Since English teachers are often the perpetrators of Engfish and its followers, I have made it my life’s mission to go after it. Not to punish students for giving in to its seductive rhythmic nothingness, but to help them find the language that still lives in them, what Macrorie has called their “voice.” This term is not without controversy, but I’ll save it for another blog.

For today I offer  the funeral rites for “Engfish” from Macrorie’s entry, May 7, 1964, “The Day We Killed Engfish.”

Not until I heard the third paper that afternoon did I realize that everyone on the grass had quit gazing around and was listening hard. Each student had written a powerful short paper and I had broken through and the students were speaking in their own voices about things that counted for them (21).

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The Day of Small Things

Time for reflection and repentance for not sustaining this conversation. Since the Fall Semester resumed, I have been mostly responding to news stories that outraged and intrigued me. Today I will try to  pick up the thread I dropped back in July: the joy and satisfaction of writing.

My text is Zechariah 4:10 – “Who despises the day of small things?” This verse drops into the midst of chapters on the apocalyptic visions of Zechariah, so I am not even sure how it sits in context. But it seemed to address the problem of writing for fun, rather than work.  “Small things” are the subjects we can write about daily, without addressing the “big things” of school reform, pronouncements of the Secretary of Education, and the failure of the “Dream Act.”  I have been guilty of dealing only with “big things” in this blog for the past six months. For this, I repent.

“Small things” are the topics of “expressive writing,” as I commented in the summer. The writing is done only for the satisfaction of writing, not for ulterior motives. It is both the most self-indulgent and the most rejuvenating writing we do. As I wrote in July,

With the proliferation of e-mail, texting, and blogging, this daily writing becomes more and more recreational, something that gives the writer pleasure in the act itself. She is not concerned with work accomplished by expressive writing, because she feels satisfaction in merely writing (July 19, 2010).

My point was that expressive writing was more inclusive and egalitarian than transactional writing and could be expected to get more people writing and feeling the benefit of writing.  I called this the horizontal axis of school reform: the axis that expands the field of writers without severely regulating what they write. I had traced this horizontal growth from the early 1970’s with the writing and research of Peter Elbow and James Britton.

The institution of the Common Core State Standards in Language Arts would be a more vertical trend in school reform, since words like “rigor”  and “high quality first draft text under a tight deadline” proliferate throughout the document.  Obviously the very notion of standards has a vertical momentum to it. Far be it from me to deny the vertical path to glory.

But my theme for 2011 will continue to be the “day of small things,” because I believe that ultimately better writers are motivated by more writers, and that writing can be fun as well as hard work.  The best analogy I can give is how water boils.

Water boils when all the molecules are in furious motion and not a moment before they reach 212 degrees Fahrenheit.  They start bumping each other and pretty soon they have the urge to evaporate. Then we get steam, a very productive form of the water molecule.   So productivity comes from individual and communal energy. The horizontal axis expands and the vertical axis rises to glory.

I am not claiming that the laws of physics pertain to literacy, but I am claiming that development of literacy is both horizontal and vertical. The small things we write about daily constitute the horizontal axis and should not be neglected.

Do not despise the “day of small things.” My New Year’s resolution and a word of encouragement for teachers of writing in 2011.

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Who Taught this Kid?

The surprisingly reflective article in today’s New York Times (“Hurdles Emerge in Rising Effort to Rate Teachers,” December 27, 2010) asks a question that statisticians often overlook in the evaluation of teachers.  Who taught this kid?

John White, Deputy Chancellor of the New York City Schools, addressed the problem of teachers getting ranked on subjects they did not teach or being omitted from the rankings altogether. This is more of an institutional problem, but it raises the more consequential issue of how to determine whether a teacher has been truly responsible for a student’s learning.

Mr. White reassured the Times that “before the next rankings was released, teachers would be able to review class lists to verify which students they taught, a practice that generally did not happen in the past” (A13).   But a more complex question that I rarely hear addressed by statisticians is: How many school days should a student be in class before he or she  can be considered a student of that teacher?   Is 90 out of 180 days enough?  70 out of 180? 50 days?

In city secondary schools this is not an academic question.  I can not cite individual attendance records for New York City schools, but 50% or lower attendance would not be irregular in an urban high school.  Should a teacher’s effectiveness be judged from the performance of a student who is present less than half the time?

Statisticians always assume that variables like school attendance will even out, if a large population is studied. Everyone will have attendance issues in their classes. But school attendance closely correlates with the socioeconomic status of secondary school students, because poverty often affects how much students have to work or baby-sit for caretakers who have to work.  So, unless each class has a random distribution of students from various socioeconomic classes, their rate of attendance will not be randomly distributed.

Every teacher knows which classes in a school will present attendance or behavior problems, and they will use every device in their repertoire to avoid teaching them. But someone will teach them, and they will be challenged by the discontinuity of learning and wearied by the endless make-up sessions that absent students demand.  They will work harder with less results, and they will be judged inferior for the test performance of students who were not in school enough days to really learn their subject.

As a writing teacher, I’ve been acutely aware of what happens to a student who does not attend school for ten consecutive days.  Consistent with good writing pedagogy, I might assign a major writing assignment over two weeks, allowing students time for brainstorming, drafting, conferencing with peers and instructor, proofreading and final publication.  Writing teachers understand that critical instruction, including grammar lessons, takes place in the midst of this process. Students learn very little from the final draft, returned with dozens of red marks and a “D.”  They learn about as much as a traffic officer learns from the wreck of an accident after the fact.

If a student misses five out of the ten days that a writing assignment was in progress, he or she will probably miss the critical instruction that occurs during the process.  It is not a question of grabbing the assignment sheet and catching up at home.  It is a question of producing a draft and getting appropriate feedback before it is ultimately due and graded.  It is a question of understanding why the writing that received a “B” last year can not qualify for a “C” this year.  It is a question of how to address a sentence structure problem that has persisted for four years, without sitting down with that student for fifteen minutes before the final draft is due. This is why you can hardly teach a student with marginal literacy, when he or she is absent 50% or more of the school year.

I’m sure teachers of other subjects, for which learning is a seamless process, could testify to this problem. I wouldn’t presume to speak for them, but I am sure that discontinuity of learning is a problem across subjects.

People who administer schools seem to have forgotten that when learning is interrupted, it is very difficult to grab the threads again when the absent student returns to school.  Your heart sinks when a student returns from a two-week absence and asks at the beginning of class, “What did I miss?”  Then you tell the student he or she will have to return at the end of school to catch up on missed work, and the student forlornly reports, ” I have to go home to babysit for my mom. She works the afternoon shift at the hospital.”  So you hand the student the assignment and steal a few minutes during class for a briefing that took twenty minutes one day of class and five minutes follow-up each day of the process. Only this students gets two minutes.

Not to get too sentimental about disadvantaged students, this vignette serves to show the impact of attendance on learning. The fewer days students attend your class, the less impact you will have you their learning. Sounds logical enough, but where is that considered in the byzantine complexity of value-added assessment? How do we decide who, if anyone,  taught this kid?

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Experience Required

On Tuesday this week, the New York Times reported the failure to thrive of African-American boys in American public schools. Policy-makers quietly tore their hair out, trying to get to the bottom of this persistent anomaly in academic performance. On Wednesday the Times reported the appointment of Cathleen Black, a white female publishing executive, with no teaching experience, to the position of Chancellor of the New York City Public Schools.

Race and gender should not be primary qualifications in school administrative appointments, but teaching experience ought to be. Choosing an administrator from outside the field of education shows a fundamental distrust and disrespect for the calling of the teacher.  It sends the message, that began with the appointment of Joel Klein to the same position, that school reform is something done to teachers, not of the teachers, by the teachers and for the teachers.

The best school administrators began their careers in classrooms. This is not a matter of paying your dues, but of walking a mile, or a hundred miles, in the shoes of a teacher.  Classroom teachers understand things that the public critics of education often do not get: that students often bring enormous distractions from their family environment to school; that chronic absenteeism affects the whole school environment as much as the absent student; that the quality of writing, speaking, and listening in a class diminishes in proportion to class size; that test performance has very little to do with actual learning.

All of this can be learned from a few days of studying the research or sitting in a focus group of teachers, but the true impact can only be felt by teaching.  Only a teacher knows the full impact of adding three students to a class of 32 or of subtracting one angry student from a class of 35. Only a teacher knows how implementing a unit plan that extends over four weeks can be subverted by 20 per cent of a class that shows up only half of those days.  Only a teacher understands how disruptive test preparation is for a class that has been developing critical habits of mind over the previous ten weeks. You have to feel the difference. You have to see it in the eyes of the students.

Politicians will see this as romanticizing the teaching profession. To them teaching and learning is no more than production and distribution. School mandates and scripted lessons are the inputs, students and their test scores are the products and distribution is reporting the data. You enrich one side of the equation and the other side naturally increases.  I had to smile when I noticed that the Common Core Readiness Standards for writing described the writing process as “production and distribution.” No teacher would have written that as a curriculum goal.

Shelley Harwayne rose to the level of Area Superintendent in New York City without losing her connection to the classroom. Her books about teaching literacy and celebrating student achievement are required reading in teacher preparation classes. No matter how far her work took her from the classroom, she always had the feeling of teaching in her bones. If she had to make tough decisions, teachers could still console themselves she had made them in the context of classroom experience.

The same will not be said about the next Chancellor of the New York Public Schools. Regardless of her skills in negotiation and management, she will not bring the experience of teaching in the classrooms she supervises. She will bring the experience of an elite education and children who attend boarding school. None of this should be held against her, but it diminishes her qualifications to lead a public school system.

It also sends a message to teachers that they will not be heard or trusted for another administration of so-called “school reform.”