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Prosperity vs. Literacy

“Americans for Prosperity” is taking its message to the people, expecting to influence voters in the upcoming mid-term and Presidential elections. As described in The New York Times today, “The idea is to embed staff members in a  community, giving conservative advocacy a permanent, local voice through field workers who live in the neighborhood year-around and appreciate the nuances of the local issues.” This notion of grassroots organizing recalls the work of the Obama campaigns of 2008 and 2012.

It also reminds me of an influential literacy advocacy called the National Writing Project.  They, too, are committed to local organizing, trying to get out the message in K-12 schools that “everybody is a writer.” They, too, are disillusioned with big government, insofar as it promotes literacy with crude measures of success represented by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.  They, too, recruit local teachers to testify about their own beliefs and practices to substantiate the success of child-centered teaching approaches to literacy.

So much in common, but so far apart. Because ultimately the National Writing Project is about improving the quality of life through literacy, and Americans for Prosperity is about undermining government for personal gain. There is not much money to be gained by enhancing the roles and practices of literacy in local communities, unless you are in the multi-billion dollar testing business.  But there is much to be gained by undermining Social Security, Medicare and the Affordable Health Care Act, because it puts money in the pockets of the employer class at the expense of the employee class.

The National Writing Project actually works within a broken system. It competes for federal grants and then distributes them to local Writing Project sites, which carry the message that writing transforms lives into schools and communities.  This is a very hard sell to school authorities, because writing does not appear to be very marketable, except to the elite who publish their way to fame.  The Common Core Standards has promoted the idea that writing across the curriculum raises the quality of thinking and achievement in every subject area.  Writing for personal growth  and rejuvenation, however, is less marketable and more counter to the culture of  “success.”.

Nevertheless, the Writing Project works within schools, not against them. The Writing Project is less ideological and more pragmatic than Americans for Prosperity.  Following the best practices of instruction, it meets students, teachers, and care-givers where they are and offers the best, most relevant practices to improve their writing and writing process.  It is less interested in the short-term gains of test performance, than in the literacy that sustains writers for their lifetimes.

Americans for Prosperity has very short-term goals: win elections in 2014 and 2016.  They are also recruiting local professionals to get their message out. Their message is that government is the enemy, and we should do whatever it takes to tear it down, or as Grover Nyquist demurely frames it, to make it  “small enough to drown in a bathtub.” There are very few constructive messages in the mission of Americans for Prosperity, because its view of prosperity is a kind of pyramid scheme.

The ultimate beneficiaries of the drowning of government are employers, who vastly outnumber employees. The idea that employees should aspire to the privileged class of employers is a pyramid scheme, because there is no way for employers to outnumber employees. Ultimately the few will benefit from the starving of the many. Prosperity is really for the elite.

As I already have suggested, no one, except for testing companies, gets rich on literacy. It is less a material than a personal or spiritual benefit.  There is much evidence that writing indirectly brings prosperity, because it is often associated with promotions within  business, civil service, and other institutions. However, it is not a ticket you can punch with every election cycle.  It is a catalyst, but not the sole contributor to prosperity.

That’s why the National Writing Project is not on the front page of the New York Times, but Americans for Prosperity is. It is just as well-organized, but not as well-funded. It is just as locally active, but not as resonant with social discontent.  It is just as attentive to change and growth, but without the decisive measures of election results. But it is more constructive, relentless (active for forty years), and devoted to the welfare of all Americans.

The National Writing Project has attracted support from both sides of the political aisle, it is as prominent in Mississippi as in California, it has been awarded federal grants for both urban and rural school projects, it is a leading reformer in digital literacy, family literacy, and teacher leadership.

Prosperity is an individual value; literacy is a democratic value.  That’s why you can trust the National Writing Project, but you’d better ask questions from those who advocate for prosperity. With the National Writing Project, you never have to wonder who is getting the literacy.

 

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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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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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The Deliberate and the Driven

To be college and career ready writers, students must take task, purpose and audience into careful consideration, choosing words, information, structures and formats deliberately.

They must have the flexibility, concentration, and fluency to produce high-quality first draft text under a tight deadline and the capacity to revisit and make improvements to a piece of writing over multiple drafts when circumstances encourage or require it. (“College and Career Anchor Standards for Writing” 63)

Reading the Common Core State Standards, teachers of writing come away with a mixed message. Writing is described as rich in thought and content, but sometimes it is quick and dirty and sometimes it is careful and reconsidered. Both are true, but  it leaves open  the question of how to teach writing.

The above passages, from the  CCSS sidebar titled “Range and content of student writing,” illustrate how our national standards for writing are torn between the deliberate and the driven. In the first sentence, the words “careful consideration” and “deliberately” stand out.  This emphasizes that writing is a process. In the second sentence, the key words seem to be “high-quality first draft text under a tight deadline,”  which suggests the need for a “quick and dirty” approach.  However this is followed by a disclaimer which urges the “capacity to revisit and make improvements to a piece of writing.”  Then,  lest we become too leisurely in the process of writing, the final phrase cautions “when circumstances encourage or require it.”

The beauty of these contradictions about “range and content of student writing” is that they are probably all true. Writing is both deliberate and driven, according to the purpose and occasion. It would be petty to insist that the standards for writing be unwavering and consistent, because writing is not like that.

What does annoy me is that we assess only the “driven” side of writing, the world of desperation and deadlines. The language about “high-quality first draft text” is an obvious rationale for the impromptu essay, written in thirty minutes or less and unapologetically assessed as “first-draft writing.” This how the ACT, the College Board, and most state assessments evaluate writing.   The question is “Of what social or professional value is first draft writing?” Or “Why be driven?”

Some professional roles dictate a “high-quality first draft text under a tight deadline.” Newspaper reporters come to mind.  Office scribes — secretaries, document drafters, those who write for their bosses — may be required to write under short deadlines.  For some reason, this remarkable skill is often uncompensated and yet under-girds the other forms of writing that allow newspapers to publish and businesses to function.  It is a valuable skill, but not always valued.

Every other kind of writing falls under the “capacity to revisit and make improvements,” and it is the kind of writing most respected in journalism and commerce.  Feature articles, Op-ed articles, Topical columns, Investigative articles. Project or marketing proposals, contracts, human resources documents, end-user documents, public relations documents.  No one writes these in one draft or under unreasonable time constraints. Oh yes, deadlines will sometimes be sudden and arbitrary, but no one considers high pressure the formula for good writing. And writing in journalism, law and business is incurably collaborative. Numerous pairs of eyes must examine work in progress and editors may insist on putting their mark on it, even a controversial comma.

In the “real world” the writing process is alive and well and respected. Only in school is it considered a sideline, producing the kind of writing pored over by teachers, but rarely high stakes, rarely a standard for “success.”  The writing that counts is “driven” writing.  It is the kind of writing most students claim they are good at.  Why? Because that is the kind of writing we assess for success.  To many students the quickwrite is the money genre, the one that counts.  Students who claim they can write well, but need time, seem to be asking for special consideration. They are somehow deficient because their writing process is an actual process.

To be college and career ready writers, students must take task, purpose and audience into careful consideration, choosing words, information, structures and formats deliberately.

Deliberation. To me that describes what writers really do.  It comes from a Middle English word meaning to “balance or weigh.” Writers balance “task, purpose and audience . . . words, information, structures and formats.” That’s a lot of balancing, and it will not be easily executed in thirty minutes. It will be executed  . . . deliberately.  Writing teachers’ message to their students is to “trust the process.” The message of our standardized assessments is “Get ‘er done.”

. . . choosing words, information, structures and formats deliberately.

It is comforting to see deliberation validated in the Common Core State Standards. It gives dignity to writing and the teaching of writing.  Now if it would only be reinforced by the Common Core State Assessments. The Deliberate . . . not the Driven.

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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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Schooling on the Ground

“Keep the school open with existing teachers and principal and provide comprehensive outside support.” This is what 54% of poll respondents said when asked how to address a poorly performing local school this past June. In a poll conducted by Phi Delta Kappan and Gallup,  one thousand Americans responded to this question as they have in the past: preserve the school and reform it.

Paradoxically U.S. citizens always defend their local schools in polling, and at the same time object to national trends and policies in public education.  This is the perennial sky view vs. ground view of public schools. Schools viewed as test scores and dropout rates are called dysfunctional and permissive. Schools viewed as diverse and overcrowded communities are called under-funded and inclusive.

The prevailing view comes from Washington, where Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, has sanctioned the sacking of dysfunctional schools and the re-invention of education from the ground up by charter schools and private ventures.  While extreme cases call for extreme measures, the reinvention of schooling is not as simple as the Secretary imagines it to be.

Parents and local stakeholders in the public schools understand this. They know that principals and teachers develop to meet the needs of their communities.  A principal has to learn how to get parents into the building, how get them involved in their children’s education, how to balance academic subjects with athletics. A teacher has to understand the demands on the students, the language barriers, the baby-sitting demands, the neighborhood conflicts that interfere with schooling. None of this can be taught in schools of education. They are adaptations that good teachers make to serve their schools.

When a school is demolished, much of this lore dies with it.  You can build a new school around excellent faculty, but they will have to adapt to their community in the same way that the previous faculty did.  Perhaps they will even be better teachers than their predecessors in three or four or five years, if they stay that long. But if they are recruited by Teach for America or KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) they probably will not stay that long. They will be exhausted by the rigors of school-building and leave after their obligated service. The sky-view reformers should think twice before closing a school.

This is the season when thousands of schools decide how to reinvigorate their programs, their faculty, their curriculum, their disciplinary codes.  They have their work cut out for them. But they should remember that the majority of the parents and stakeholders in their community are pulling for them. They appreciate school reform from the ground view and want it to succeed.  They know that the quality of life in school buildings matters more than the test scores headlined in the media.  They know that schools offer a sanctuary for kids who otherwise learn in the streets.

Here’s to those who choose to transform, rather than demolish, schools in need.