Poking the Sacred Cow

by Guest Blogger
December 30th, 2011

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Posted in Assessment and Testing, Education Practice, Essay, Teaching | 7 Comments »

by Jessica Lahey

It’s day six of my holiday break and I have finally acknowledged the large stack of paper on the floor next to my desk. I had been ignoring it, hoping it would magically grade itself, but alas, this has not been the case. It’s still there, still huge, still daunting. In the meantime, I have cleaned the entire house, gone to the dump twice, moved our furniture around, stacked another cord of wood, winterized the chicken tractor, and killed seven mice in the attic, but now, it’s time. Time to grade the mid-year writing assessments.

While I was completing all of these other acts of procrastination, I was mentally composing another essay for an upcoming deadline, a piece has been freaking me out, both as a writer and a teacher. In order to be successful in this piece, I must come clean about my homework practices. For non-teachers, that may sound like an easy task, but it’s not. Homework is a time-honored tradition among teachers, a sacred cow best left undisturbed to chew its cud in the median. We go about our daily business in its shadow, so used to its presence right there in the middle of things that we don’t even see it anymore. Even discussed delicately, teacher-to-teacher, it elicits fight-or-flight defensiveness in some and outright anger in others.

But it’s good to sharpen your Ticonderoga #2 and poke that cow from time to time, isn’t it? Otherwise, how  do you know if it’s just resting or if it’s been dead for a while and you just had not noticed?

As I am writing about homework elsewhere, I am taking on another sacred cow at my school over here – the writing assessment. These assessments make up the giant pile of menace stacked next to my desk, and as I don’t want to get around to grading them, I thought I’d spend some time poking them with a proverbial stick.

Twice a year, we give the students a prompt, two days to prepare an outline, two class periods to write a four-paragraph essay. Based on the responses I have read so far, this year’s questions went fairly well, and I actually like reading these essays once I am into the groove, but it’s an endless task. So, if I have to question why I give homework, I also have to question why I spend four full days a year of class time and hours at home spent grading on these writing assessments.

The students don’t enjoy writing them, I hate grading them…so what’s the point?

In order to answer that question, I went over to my office and pulled out a couple of my student’s files. Because we give these assessments every year from the third grade on up, I can spread a students’ entire writing education out in one place. I can see how handwriting, vocabulary, and syntax evolve over the entire length of one student’s education. Most importantly, I can see their individual voices evolve as thinking becomes more complex, more sophisticated. It’s fun to pull these files out when a student is frustrated with the slow pace of his or her learning, or an apparent backsliding in skills, and show them how far they have come in such a short time.

One of my favorite things about my job is the strategizing I get to do behind the scenes. As I teach my students for three straight years in Latin and/or English, I have the opportunity to do some real long-term planning for the future. I taught high school English before I moved to middle school, so I know what will be expected of them in a few short years. Many of them will go on to attend the very school I used to teach in, so I have very specific goals about where they need to be in terms of independence, organization and self-advocacy by the time they head off to high school.

In sixth grade, we coddle them as we ease them into the relative chaos of middle school class transitions and increased homework load. In seventh grade, however, I ease off a bit. I give them a little bit more rope and see what happens when they are expected to plan ahead or stay on top of a long-range assignment. In eighth grade, I really let them have their heads, and expect that they will know how to take charge of their education when no one else is looking out for them. Writing assessments are part of that process. I hand them the prompt and directions, and they are expected to prepare their notes or outline, find supporting evidence and plan their writing. I give them no other guidance than the prompt itself. Timed writing assignments will become a fact of life for them in the coming years, and it’s fascinating to see their progress as they master the task.

When I was first hired at my school, I was informed that the writing assessment was simply a part of what I did in English class, and I was too overwhelmed with the details of a my new position (including my first year teaching Latin, twenty years since I last cracked open a Latin text) to question any reasoning behind the tradition. But now, long settled-in and armed with perspective and experience, I think it’s good to question what I do the things I do. This week’s re-evaluation of my homework practices has been really enlightening - I have dropped some of the less effective assignments and shored up my reasoning behind the better ones. So much of what I do, particularly the most subjective aspects such as grading and assessments, leave me feeling uneasy at times, unsure of my standards, perspective, or reasoning.

In the end, some of those cows were long dead and really needed to get rolled out of the road, but I am quite fond of the ones that remain. When I return to school in the New Year, the students will notice a change. I will be more confident in my choices, and the road ahead will be much less congested. True, the writing assessments will remain, lying placidly in the middle of that road, but at least I will be able to explain why they are there.

Deregulating Education

by Robert Pondiscio
December 21st, 2011

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Posted in Education News, Education Practice | 20 Comments »

“From space travel to health care to clean energy, the federal government has a successful track record of partnering with the private sector,” writes John Bailey at The Atlantic, so why not education?  Bailey, the director of Whiteboard Advisors, points out the most federal agencies “in some way engage the private sector in addressing their priorities.”

“When it comes to education, however, Uncle Sam’s handshake with entrepreneurs clenches into a fist. Instead of involving the private sector, education policymakers have actually created policy and funding barriers that skew support to nonprofits and prevent for-profits from fully participating in programs aimed at improving teaching or learning. These barriers exist at nearly every level of government — local, state, and federal — further isolating education from potential innovations that could help children and discouraging entrepreneurship.”

It’s an interesting argument.  Privatization and profiteering, however, are among the most loaded terms in education debate.  Charter school operators, test-makers and technology companies are routinely charged with prioritizing profits over the best interests of children. Indeed, there is something viscerally distasteful about looking at children and seeing dollar signs, which alone quickly derails conversations and briskly muscles quality arguments to the sidelines.

Perhaps the more interesting frame is one that Bailey doesn’t make.  The question is not whether to introduce the profit motive, but whether to deregulate education.  Unthinkable?  Like education, broadcasting was once considered so vital to the public interest that it was tightly controlled by the government. While Bailey notes a host of industries–from airlines to the Internet–that have benefited from private sector innovation, curiously broadcasting is not one of them.

Until 30 years ago, our radio and TV airwaves were universally viewed as public property; broadcasters had an obligation by law to operate “in the public interest.” If you are over 40, you probably remember a TV and radio landscape, pre-cable, featuring much more local news and public interest programming, especially at odd hours and Sunday mornings.  Rules requiring certain amounts of public affairs content were wiped away under deregulation, along with rules limiting the number of TV and radio stations a company could own. The Fairness Doctrine, which demanded an equitable, fair and balanced presentation of controversial issues was scrapped in 1987.

Things are quite different today.  Clear Channel Communications, the nation’s largest radio broadcaster, owns roughly one in five of all radio stations in America.  That literally could not have happened 30 years ago.  The large thrust of deregulation, for good or for ill, has been to spur enormous growth in the broadcasting industry.  Technological advances–the Internet, satellite broadcasting, cable television–have also boosted the number of options available.  But without a doubt, deregulation has allowed public property to be used to build private fortunes.

Whether we as a nation are better or worse for this is an open question. There are compelling arguments to be made for and against.   Flowering choice has not always led to higher quality, as even a few minutes of prime-time TV viewing will attest. On the other hand, having spent the early years of my career in local radio, I’m hard-pressed to argue that local communities were universally well-served by mom and pop broadcasters.  I can’t pretend not to think we were better served by more local news and public affairs programming.  But having spent years producing that programming, neither can I pretend anyone was listening.

Let me anticipate that the comparison of broadcasting to education will be dismissed as trivial.  I’m not sure I agree.  I could even make a case that our consumption of media in its various forms does as much or more to shape our national character and discourse than the education system, since it takes up far more of our time and at a higher level of engagement over the course of a lifetime.

What if education was essentially deregulated, and its quality was assured not by the Department of Education, but the Federal Trade Commission?  Would KIPP or Achievement First emerge as the Clear Channel of education, becoming the dominant provider?  Someone else?  Those who favor deregulation tend also to favor free markets and local control. Yet deregulation has also brought complaints that local, religious, women, and minority broadcasters have been either marginalized or forced out of business altogether.

Spoken or unspoken, deregulation is already the thrust of many proposed reforms.  At a Manhattan Institute event in New York City last week, a panel discussion of Marcus Winters’ new book, Teachers Matter, broadly agreed that barriers to entering the teaching profession should be eliminated, since there is no correlation between certification and a teacher’s efficacy.  What is that if not an argument for deregulation of the teaching profession, if not education itself?

To be clear, I’m not advocating deregulation. This is purely a thought exercise.  Rick Hess, commenting on Bailey’s piece, wrote that he is “frequently frustrated by our inability to talk sensibly about the role of for-profits in schooling.”  Very well, let’s talk about it.  But let’s not mince words.  What we’re really talking about is not about the role of for-profits in education . Lots of companies, from textbook publishers to computer makers already profit handsomely from education.

What we’re really talking about is deregulating it.

Drawn to the Loadstone Rock

by Guest Blogger
December 20th, 2011

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Posted in Teaching | 9 Comments »

by Jessica Lahey

We are currently reading A Tale of Two Cities in the eighth grade, and things are heating up in France. Dickens is deep into his fire and water metaphors – the French Revolution as rising fire and rising sea, “the firm earth shaken by the rushes of an angry ocean which had now no ebb, but was always on the flow, higher and higher, to the terror and wonder of the beholders on the shore…”

Today’s discussion will focus on chapter 24, “Drawn to the Loadstone Rock.” I asked them to look up the meaning of “loadstone rock” over the weekend and to think about how it might figure in the chapter, why Dickens might use that title for this particular chapter. I happen to be a big fan of titles, particularly chapter titles, and Dickens is at his metaphorical best in A Tale of Two Cities. The symbolism and allusions lay thick on the ground, and even the youngest students can’t help but stumble over a couple by the time the Reign of Terror begins.

I adore teaching this novel. This novel is where even my most literal-minded students make that leap from the literal to the figurative. Students who have been steadfastly rooted in the facts and just the facts (“why doesn’t the guy in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart ’ just move his chair somewhere else when the heart starts beating again?”) suddenly emerge from the darkness, and see. They see the Fates in the guise of Mme. Defarge and all that knitting, they see that wine is more than just wine, blood more than just blood. Gorgons, scarecrows, resurrection men. Their eyes widen, breath quickens, and hands shoot up in the air, and it’s like watching a small miracle take place. I call it their Dorothy moment, the moment black and white text switches to Technicolor.

This transformation happened to a young 8th grade girl last week, and she’s been on a roll ever since. This morning, I gave over a period of composition class so we could listen to a CD of Patrick Stewart performing A Christmas Carol. We got to the part where two children emerge from under the cloak of the Ghost of Christmas Present. The children are grotesque personifications of humanity’s Ignorance and Want.

“Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.”

As the scene ended, one student raised her hand, and I paused the disc. “Those children – they are like The Vengeance in A Tale of Two Cities. She’s the personification of the vengeance in the people of St. Antoine, and those children are the personification of the bad stuff in people.”

Sweet. The day has been a success.

This was a girl who, just two months ago, could not identify the simplest metaphor. She was not the student who asked the question about “A Tell-Tale Heart,” but she may as well have been. It’s not her fault; those neurons responsible for identifying and interpreting figurative speech simply had not joined up yet, but then, about halfway through A Tale of Two Cities, they did. And there was light.

I am looking forward to today’s discussion. For the record, a loadstone rock is a naturally magnetic rock, the sort that were used in marine navigation. Here, Dickens is referring to the inexorable magnetic pull of France that will eventually lead Darnay to his imprisonment and death sentence. Dickens is not referring to just any old loadstone rock, he’s referring to the loadstone of Arabian Nights fame. In that novel, a ship was drawn to a gigantic loadstone rock, one so powerful that the nails were pulled from the wood of the hull, and the ship sank. I show my students a beautiful engraving of this scene, and hope someone will make some sort of connection between poor Agib, clinging to the loadstone rock, and Darnay, about to step on to the shores of France.

The students are always exasperated by Darnay’s decision to return to France, even to save his employee, Gabelle, from prison. They know what is going to happen – it’s inevitable, fated. It’s been registered in the knitting, after all. Today should be a good class, as the metronome of those hundreds of footsteps is picking up and the climax of the novel draws near. I still have still five or six literal-minded 8th graders, and one or two may well have their Dorothy moment today. There’s some good stuff in store for them, plenty of fertilizer to fuel those branching neurons:

“The unseen force was drawing him fast to itself, now, and all the tides and winds were setting straight and strong towards it. He left his two letters with a trusty porter, to be delivered half an hour before midnight, and no sooner; took horse for Dover; and began his journey. “For the love of Heaven, of justice, of generosity, of the honor of your noble name!” was the poor prisoner’s cry with which he strengthened his sinking heart, as he left all that was dear on earth behind him, and floated away for the Loadstone Rock.”

A Little More Text, A Little Less Self

by Robert Pondiscio
December 19th, 2011

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Posted in Assessment and Testing, Education Practice, Literacy, No category, Teaching | 10 Comments »

When studying a story or an essay, is it possible to be too concerned with what the author is saying? In an opinion piece in Education Week, Maja Wilson and Thomas Newkirk complain the publisher’s criteria for Common Core State Standards are overly “text dependent,” discouraging students from bringing their own knowledge and opinions to bear on their reading.

Wilson, a former high school English teacher, and Newkirk, a University of New Hampshire English professor applaud the guidelines’ “focus on deep sustained reading—and rereading.” However they pronounce themselves “distressed” by the insistence that students should focus on the “text itself.”

“There is a distrust of reader response in this view; while the personal connections and judgments of the reader may enter in later, they should do so only after students demonstrate ‘a clear understanding of what they read.’ Publishers are enjoined to pose ‘text-dependent questions [that] can only be answered by careful scrutiny of the text … and do not require information or evidence from outside the text or texts.’ In case there is any question about how much focus on the text is enough, ‘80 to 90 percent of the Reading Standards in each grade require text-dependent analysis; accordingly, aligned curriculum materials should have a similar percentage of text-dependent questions.”

Consider me undistressed. If this means less reliance on the creaky crutch that is “reader response” in ELA classrooms, then I’m very nearly overjoyed.

The very worst that can be said about an over-reliance on text-dependent questions is that it’s an overdue market correction. As any teacher can tell you, it’s quite easy to glom on to an inconsequential moment in a text and produce reams of empty “text-to-self” meandering using the text as nothing more than a jumping off point for a personal narrative. The skill, common to most state standards, of “producing a personal response to literature” does little to demonstrate a student’s ability to read with clarity, depth and comprehension.

Indeed, educator, author and occasional Core Knowledge Blog contributor Katharine Beals points out in a response to the piece that Wilson and Newkirk have it precisely backwards: research from cognitive science suggests that making external associations during reading can actually worsen comprehension. She cites a paper by Courtenay Frazier Norbury and Dorothy Bishop which found that “poor readers drew inferences that were distorted by associations from their personal lives. For example, when asked, in reference to a scene at the seashore with a clock on a pier, ‘Where is the clock?’ many children replied, ‘In her bedroom.’”

“Norbury and Bishop propose that these errors may arise when the child fails to suppress stereotypical information about clock locations based on his/her own experience. As Norbury and Bishop explain it: ‘As we listen to a story, we are constantly making associations beween what we hear and our experiences in the world. When we hear “clock,” representations of different clocks may be activated, including alarm clocks. If the irrelevant representation is not quickly suppressed, individuals may not take in the information presented in the story about the clock being on the pier. They would therefore not update the mental representation of the story to include references to the seaside which would in turn lead to further comprehension errors.’

Struggling readers in particular would benefit from a lot more text and a lot less self. As Beals explains, “Text-to-self connections, in other words, may be the default reading mode (emphasis mine) and not something that needs to be taught. What needs to be taught instead, at least where poor readers are concerned, is how not to make text-to-self connections.”

Wilson and Newkirk illustrate their concern about over-reliance on text by describing their preferred way of teaching Nicholas Carr’s 2008 essay from The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

“Before assigning the essay, we would have students log their media use for a day (texts, emails, video games, TV, reading, surfing the Internet) and share this 24-hour profile with classmates. We might ask students to free-write and perhaps debate the question: “What advantages or disadvantages do you see in this pattern of media use?” This ‘gateway’ activity would prepare students to think about Carr’s argument. As they read, they’d be mentally comparing their own position with Carr’s. Surely, we want them to understand Carr’s argument, but we’d help them do that by making use of their experiences and opinions.”

It’s critical to understand that this approach to teaching Carr’s essay would not be verboten under CCSS publishing guidelines, which have nothing whatsoever to say about teaching methods. In fact, there’s much to recommend Wilson and Newkirk’s approach. But the test of whether the students understand Carr’s line of argument has nothing to do with the “gateway” activity, which serves mostly as an engaging hook to draw students into Carr’s thesis. Students cannot be said to have understood the piece—or any piece—of writing without the ability to show internal evidence.

Thus if publishers are “enjoined to pose text-dependent questions [that] can only be answered by careful scrutiny of the text” that is at heart not a teaching question–it’s an assessment question that probes whether or not the student understands the text.

All those connections—to our own experience, to other works of literature, make the study of literature thrilling and rewarding. But for those connections to be deep and meaningful requires more than just the superficial, paper-thin connections that too often pass for “personal response.”

What often gets lost in our rush to engage young readers and make their reading personally relevant is the simple fact that text has communicative value. When someone commits words to print, they mean to communicate facts, ideas, imagery or opinions. They should expect, if they’ve done their job well, to be understood. Might the reader have a response? Let’s hope so. But unless they have understood the author’s words and intent clearly, any response they make is less than satisfying and may not be particularly relevant as a “response.”

The bottom line: Demonstrating comprehension based on what a text says is not a problem. It’s a baseline skill for any literate human being.

“If I Were a Poor Black Kid”

by Robert Pondiscio
December 14th, 2011

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Posted in Education News | 9 Comments »

I write about education.  I read a lot about education.  And every now and then I read a piece that is so original, so smart, and so incisive that all I can say is, “Damn. I wish I’d written that.”

This is not one of them.

A Critical Look at the Critical Lens Essay

by Guest Blogger
December 14th, 2011

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Posted in accountability, Assessment and Testing, Curriculum, Education Practice, Essay | 9 Comments »

by Diana Senechal

On standardized high school English examinations in New York, students must write what is often called a “critical lens” essay. They are given a quotation (the “lens”) and must interpret it, state whether they agree or disagree with it, and substantiate their position with examples from literary texts of their choice. This task has logical flaws and encourages poor reasoning and writing. The problem is largely due to the lack of a literature curriculum; when there are no common texts, essay questions on state tests become vague and diffuse. The test question needs an overhaul, and New York State needs a literature curriculum with some common texts and ample room for choice.

One flaw of the “critical lens” task is that students must interpret the quotation out of context. Students may or may not have read the source of the quotation; they are allowed to make it mean whatever they want it to mean (within reason). The test-taker must provide a “valid” interpretation of the quote, but without a context, “valid” simply means free of egregious error. When it comes to analysis, this is not good practice; the student latches onto the interpretation that comes to mind instead of searching for the most fitting one.

A sample New York Regents English examination illustrates how this might play out. (I discuss this example in my book, Republic of Noise.)  Here the quotation is from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly.” (See p. 21 of the PDF file.) This quotation can mean many things, but it has particular meaning in The Little Prince. It is the fox who speaks these words, after befriending the prince and being tamed by him. They have been meeting, day by day, at the same time and place; the regularity of the ritual allows the fox to prepare his heart for the prince’s arrival. Seeing with the heart in this case has to do with caring for another, spending time with another, honoring rituals together. But students are more likely to take the quotation as a comment on romantic attraction (and some of the sample responses do precisely that). Then they agree or disagree with the quotation on the basis of this incorrect interpretation.

Another flaw in the “critical lens” task is that it hinges on the student’s opinion (about a statement that may apply to a range of situations). The opinion may be hasty or superficial, yet it is unassailable. It would make more sense to ask the student to explain how a particular literary work affirms the quotation in some ways and negates it in others, and to decide whether the affirmation or the negation is ultimately stronger. That would require careful, thoughtful analysis and examination of a work and would leave room for the student’s ideas and judgment. At the very least, the prompt could ask the students to show how a literary work addresses or touches on the idea in the quotation. That runs the risk of reducing literature to ideas and themes, but at least it keeps the focus on the literature.

A third flaw is that students must cite examples from literature in support of their opinion. It is possible to do this, but one must do so cautiously. Literature is not a direct reflection of life; often its messages are oblique and contradictory. So, for instance, if one looks to Romeo and Juliet for examples of people blinded by love (not seeing rightly with the heart), one will find them, but one will also miss the point. In the play, love has both delusion and illumination and is part of a larger scheme. Help and harm intermingle, as Friar Laurence suggests in his monologue:

O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies
In herbs, plants, stones, and their true qualities:
For nought so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give,
Nor aught so good but strain’d from that fair use
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse:
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied;
And vice sometimes by action dignified.

 

The play does not pass judgment on the lovers’ passion; rather, it shows the playing out of passions, feuds, and good intentions, where no one grasps the full situation until the end. But students who ignore this can get a high score on the essay. One can even ignore key details of plot and get a high score. A sample student response with the highest score (on p. 58) states that “if Romeo had not used his heart, he would have seen rightly. He could have stayed with Rosaline, and saved both the Montagues and Capulets from enduring his reckless, love-inspired antics.” The student neglects the fact that Rosaline has sworn herself to chastity, that the Montagues and Capulets have antics of their own (the play begins with a fight that escalates), and that it is the lovers’ deaths that brings an end, finally, to the warring of the two families. This is at least partly the fault of the essay question; by requiring students to cite literary examples to support their opinion, it encourages (or at least does not penalize) shallow interpretations of these examples.

In short, the “critical lens” task rewards poor writing and thinking, precisely because it can rely on no common knowledge. There is no check on the student’s opinion; nothing  challenges the student to examine the quotation or the works closely. The student who follows the directions does well. He may provide a flawed interpretation of the literary examples and quotation, yet receive a top score. He may even get basic plot details wrong without losing any points. It would not be surprising if some students made up the details and still passed. To fight this absurdity, we should have a few texts—just a few—that everybody reads, including those scoring the tests. The essay question could then pertain to the works themselves. This would allow for coherent, probing essays and would take students out of opinion’s muddier puddles.

News Flash! School Culture Matters

by Robert Pondiscio
December 12th, 2011

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Posted in Education Practice, Research and Reports | 11 Comments »

A new study establishes something that we pretty much knew—or at least should have known–by now: school culture matters. And it seems to matter more than class size, spending, and other structural factors.

The paper by Roland G. Fryer and Will Dobbie out of Harvard examined 35 charter schools in New York City. The duo looked at three different flavors of charter schools: those that provide wrap-around services, a model focused on teacher selection and retention, and the so-called ‘No Excuses’ brand of school.

“We find that traditionally collected input measures — class size, per pupil expenditure, the fraction of teachers with no certification, and the fraction of teachers with an advanced degree — are not correlated with school effectiveness. In stark contrast, we show that an index of five policies suggested by over forty years of qualitative research — frequent teacher feedback, the use of data to guide instruction, high-dosage tutoring, increased instructional time, and high expectations — explains approximately 50 percent of the variation in school effectiveness.

The Freakonomics blog calls the results “fairly counter-intuitive,” noting that “resource-based solutions’ actually lowered school effectiveness.” These findings “could add some new fire to the debate about what makes a good school,” adds Jordan Weissmann at The Atlantic, whose piece is even titled “Everything You Know About Education Is Wrong.”

Er, speak for yourselves boys. Finding that school culture is a prominent factor in student success is as surprising as finding that glass tends to break when struck with a hammer. Not all of us subscribe to the notion that structural reforms are the royal road to school improvement.

Larry Sanger, one of the founders of Wikipedia, is among the resolutely non-surprised:

“My hat is off to these researchers for reminding us, and giving new supporting data, for what those of us outside of the education establishment already knew: a culture of commitment to academic success is the main thing that matters to academic success. But we may confidently predict that the education establishment will dismiss this study, as it has done so many others that came to similar conclusions.”

“If you want to make schools better, it’s important that they be absolutely focused on academic goals, which is to say, on knowledge,” Sanger concludes. “Sadly, increasing student knowledge is not the overriding goal of American schools.” To Sanger’s point, one of the big disappointments of the Fryer and Dobbie is the not terribly discerning manner in which they evaluate and collect data on a school’s curriculum.  Did each of the three different types of school teach identical content?   It doesn’t seen to matter. It’s all about rigor.

“The rigor of a school’s curriculum is coded from lesson plans collected from each testable grade level and subject area in a school. We code whether the most advanced objective for each lesson is at or above grade level using New York State standards for the associated subject and grade. Lesson plan complexity is coded using the cognitive domain of Bloom’s taxonomy which indicates the level of higher-order thinking required to complete the objective. In the case where a lesson has more than one objective, the most complex objective was chosen. We also code the number of differentiation strategies present in each lesson plan and the number of checks for understanding.

I don’t wish to be unkind or critical of my betters, but this is an edujargon salad.

“Finally, we create an aggregate thoroughness measure that captures whether a lesson plan includes an objective, an essential question, a do-now, key words section, materials section, introduction section, main learning activity, a check for understanding, an assessment, a closing activity, time needed for each section, homework section, teacher reflection section, and if the lesson plan follows a standardized format. The inclusion of each element increases the thoroughness measure by one, which is then standardized to have a mean of zero and a standard deviation of one.”

Yikes.  This is roughly the equivalent of judging the quality of a football team by reading its playbook. Writing perfect lesson plans is not the same as executing those plans. While the focus on in-school factors is a welcome change from the focus on structural changes, one wishes Fryer and Dobbie did not conflate writing good lesson plans with quality teaching, and standards with curriculum.

Likewise, frequent teacher feedback and “high-dosage tutoring” seem more likely in schools with a lower teacher-to-student ratio, one of the factors the study dismisses as less consequential. But let me not complain too much. Fryer’s and Dobbie’s findings might be obvious, but perhaps it will help to focus the attention of reformers on what actually happens inside classrooms.

Now that would be counterintuitive. And welcome.

Innovate or Imitate?

by Robert Pondiscio
December 6th, 2011

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Posted in accountability, Curriculum, Education Practice, Educational Policy | 24 Comments »

If education is a test, America might want to spend a little more time copying the answers the other countries are writing down on their papers.

Writing in at The Atlantic, Marc Tucker notes that despite spending “more per student on K-12 education than any other nation except Luxembourg” America continues to lag not just developed nations like Japan, Finland, Canada, “but developing countries and mega-cities such as South Korea, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.”

“You would think that, being far behind our competitors, we would be looking hard at how they are managing to outperform us. But many policymakers, business leaders, educators and advocates are not interested. Instead, they are confidently barreling down a path of American exceptionalism, insisting that America is so different from these other nations that we are better off embracing unique, unproven solutions that our foreign competitors find bizarre.”

Tucker’s list of “unproven solutions” includes charter schools, private school vouchers, entrepreneurial innovations, grade-by-grade testing, diminished teachers’ unions, and basing teachers’ pay on how their students do on standardized tests. These strategies are “nowhere to be found in the arsenal of strategies used by the top-performing nations,” he writes. “And almost everything these countries are doing to redesign their education systems, we’re not doing,” notes Tucker, the president of the National Center on Education and the Economy.

“They develop world-class academic standards for their students, a curriculum to match the standards, and high-quality exams and instructional materials based on that curriculum. In the U.S., most states have recently adopted Common Core State Standards in English and math, which is a good start. But we still have a long way to go to build a coherent, powerful instructional system that all teachers can use throughout the whole curriculum.”

The top performers also raise entry standards for the teaching profession and insist that all teachers have in-depth knowledge of the subjects they will teach” and generally make teaching a high-status profession.

“The result is a virtuous cycle: teaching ranks as one of the most attractive professions, which means no teacher shortages and no need to waive high licensing standards. That translates into top-notch teaching forces and the world’s highest student achievement. All of this makes the teaching profession even more attractive, leading to higher salaries, even greater prestige, and even more professional autonomy. The end results are even better teachers and even higher student performance.”

The cycle in the U.S., Tucker notes, is the opposite of virtuous.  Teaching is a low-status profession, lacking in prestige and colleges of education set a low bar for admissions.  Salaries are low.  Teachers also have weak knowledge of their assigned subjects “and increasingly, they’re allowed to become teachers after only weeks of training,” he notes. “When we are short on teachers, we waive our already-low standards, something the high-performing countries would never dream of doing.”

The inevitable result is ever lower student achievement, which drives more attacks on teaching and stricter accountability, which Tucker wisely observes, makes it “even less likely that our best and brightest will become teachers.”

But hey, we can innovate and disrupt with the best of them!

The problem, Tucker concludes, is not a lack of innovation but a simple lack of what successful countries have: “a coherent, well-designed state systems of education that would allow us to scale up our many pockets of innovation and deliver a high-quality education to all our students.”

An Inconvenient Truth About Teacher Quality

by Robert Pondiscio
December 5th, 2011

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Posted in accountability, Assessment and Testing, Curriculum, Education Practice, Literacy, Teaching | 11 Comments »

If teacher quality is the most important school-based factor in student outcomes, then why are math scores rising, while reading scores stay flat?  Do we just happen to have really good math teachers and really lousy reading teachers?  That can’t be: in the case of 4th grade teachers, the exact same teachers are responsible for both subjects.

Or maybe it’s not the teachers. Could it be the curriculum?

That’s the question posed by Dan Willingham and David Grismer in an op-ed in the New York Daily News this morning.  They point out intriguing data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress that has been hiding in plain sight:

“Reading scores over the last 20 years have been flat. But in math, scores have increased markedly. A fourth-grader at the 50th percentile in 1990 would score at about the 25th percentile compared to the kids taking the test in 2009. That’s an enormous improvement.

“This raises an uncomfortable question for teacher quality advocates: If teachers are so vitally important, why have fourth-grade math scores dramatically improved, but reading scores have flatlined, given that — at least at the elementary level — the same teachers are responsible for each?

Perhaps the secret sauce is not who’s teaching but what’s being taught.  It’s a lot easier to align standards, curriculum and assessment in math. “There is little controversy as to the subject matter to be covered, and the order in which one ought to tackle subjects is more obvious,” Willingham and Grissmer write.  “Indeed, substantial effort has been made over the last 25 years to develop coherent math standards and curricula from K-8.”

In reading? Not so much.

As we’ve discussed many times on this blog, there’s no direct correlation between the subject matter that gets taught and tested in reading.  We teach random, incoherent content that bears no relation to the passages children ultimately encounter on their reading tests.  We insist on teaching and testing the “skill” of reading comprehension when it’s clearly not a skill at all.  Willingham and Grissmer conclude:

“Yes, overall teaching quality would improve with a more sensible method to usher hapless teachers out of the profession. Better teacher training would help too. But in addition to these longer-term goals, policymakers ought to focus on ensuring that the unglamorous but vital work of curriculum design is done properly. The popular perception is that America’s teachers are largely ineffective compared to international peers. But the data show that when given a clear, cogent curriculum to work with, they’re a lot stronger than we think.”

There is an Eloquence in True Enthusiasm

by Guest Blogger
December 2nd, 2011

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Posted in Curriculum, Education Practice, Students, Teaching | 7 Comments »

by Jessica Lahey

I really liked Diana Senechal’s recent post over at Open Salon, “Bad Teachers or Bad Curriculum,” and I agree with much of her educational philosophy. However, there’s one little piece of the educational policy puzzle that seems to have fallen on the floor, kicked around a bit, and forgotten. Unfortunately, it’s a corner piece, and the picture isn’t ever going to be complete without it.

Enthusiasm.

I have had teachers who know their stuff, teachers who can recite the periodic table backward and forward all day long but hate having to teach those pesky students. I’ve had monotonous math teachers, wiling away their last two obligatory years before retirement, teachers who taught me more anecdotal lessons about beekeeping than the basics of Algebra II.

Fortunately, I have had more than my share of great teachers, teachers who truly love what they do. Teachers who, even 35 years into their teaching careers, can’t imagine retirement – they can’t even bear teaching the same material more than a year or two in a row for fear of boredom. Teachers who used roller coasters to teach physics, encouraged us to read Saul Bellow and Joseph Campbell, who made beauty of watercolor painting come alive for us. I wish I’d known then how lucky I was when it was happening.

I admit it; I was so very, very fortunate. I went to a great high school. This past year, Dover-Sherborn Regional High School was ranked as the #1 public school in Massachusetts, and measured against Weston, Concord-Carlisle, and Wayland, that’s quite a feat. I was fortunate to have both Don Cannon and K.C. Potts for English, two teachers who still set the high-water mark for my teaching today. They are, after nineteen years of education, the two most enthusiastic educators I have ever met. Don Cannon has retired from teaching, but K.C. Potts is still going strong, now as Head of the English Department. He’s in his 35th year teaching English at Dover-Sherborn, and it’s clear that he still loves every minute of it. We knew he wanted to be there with us every day, and we were simply grateful that he’d cared about us enough to show up and teach us about Shakespeare, Plato’s cave, Siddhartha, the Theban Plays…and we loved it. We really did. Because he loved it. His love for all of it was tangible, burbling out of him from every pore, part of his daily energy and enthusiasm for the literature, the writing, and his students.

When asked to consider why he’s still teaching after 34 years, he writes of the lessons he learns each year, the changes he has made as an educator, the adjustments he has had to make to individual student needs.

His content is awesome – I learned so much in my two years in his classroom – but as he writes, “Content alone does not ensure engagement – in fact, there are times when resistance to content is the first challenge that a teacher faces. Many courses designed with the best intentions find rocky shoals near promising shores. So I feel that I must engage my students and, obviously, get my students to engage. My classroom is based on the frequent, honest, open, honest exchange of ideas and, to this end, it is Socratic in its mode, a room where I ask hundreds of questions and help students determine how to craft meaningful answers.”

K.C. has had 34 years to relish the part of the job that I have found addictive, the element that makes my job exciting: every day is different. Every day is new. Every day is a unique change to engage and inspire. He understands that education is dynamic. As K.C. Potts says, “Each year, the people I work with change, and it is essential that I get to know the new ones so that I may teach them. […] I ask my students each year: what have you done in school that, if your house happened to be on fire, you would run in to save? And it makes me wonder when they find little worth the risk.”

I have not seen K.C. in person since 1988, but here’s how I know he still cares: when he writes about his assessments, he reveals an ongoing process of discovery. “My assessments over the years have changed. Typical test on a book 1990’s? Three parts: identifications, short answers, an essay. Get it done within the period. Typical test on a book today? None. All papers. Open-ended. Often allow the use of notes, especially at first. Sometimes reveal the questions in advance.[…] The key is this: if given a piece of writing and asked to analyze it, do my students know what to do next? Can they, with a bit of guidance, connect the literal to the inferential using reasons and evidence?”

Under his guidance, we learned how to make these connections, and our reward was the smile he bestowed upon us when he handed our papers back. I still have some of them, and I’m not the sentimental sort. His approval simply meant that much to me – to all of us. His enthusiasm for literature and the art of writing fed our burgeoning love of words. Now that I am a teacher, I have come to understand the reciprocity in that cycle. The enthusiasm and love of a subject that I puts out there in my classroom almost always comes back in some form or another to feed me for another day.

Thanks to my years in his classroom, the love and enthusiasm he instilled in me is now being passed on to my own students. And now that my some of my students have earned their own classrooms, this magical remnant of his teaching persists. I never thought to apply the law of conservation of energy to teaching, but there it is. Two generations after I first encountered it, K.C. Potts’ enthusiasm is still out there, swirling about in the hearts and minds of students in Japan, California, Switzerland, Utah, and rural New Hampshire.