I Caught California Being Good!

by Robert Pondiscio
November 5th, 2009

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Posted in Educational Policy, accountability | 3 Comments »

It’s the oldest trick in the elementary school classroom management book:  using positive reinforcement to get children to behave in the hope of earning a reward or recognition.  When it’s time to clean up before lunch the teacher says, “Let’s see who’s ready to line up first.  I’m looking to see who has their desk cleaned up and is sitting up nicely.”  Suddenly 25 kids are racing to sit up straight with their hands folded on their spotless desks.  Works like a charm on seven-year-olds. 

State legislatures, too. 

President Obama’s education speech in Wisconsin reinforced the criteria the Adminstration wants to see in order for states to qualify for a piece of the $4.35 billion “Race to the Top” fund.  What’s remarkable, however, is how much change in behavior is occurring in states just  hoping for a reward.  Like a first grade teacher, the President is essentially looking across the country and asking, “Who wants to be my special helper?  I’m looking for states that are doing the right thing and making good choices!”

“Oh, I like the way California is linking teachers and test scores!  You too, Indiana and Wisconsin! What an excellent job you’re doing!  Uh-oh, Nevada is definitely not ready!  Let’s see who else is doing the right thing?   Oh, look! Illinois and Tennessee must really want Race to the Top money. Look how they have lifted their charter caps!   Louisiana is ready!  Delaware is ready!  New York?  Are you making good choices? Let me see…”

“The administration has done a good job of having a lot of states make a long-odds bet that they’re going to win Race to the Top funds, so they’ve shaped their behavior a lot in advance of a single dollar being awarded,” Russ Whitehurst, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution tells the Christian Science Monitor.  “Most of what the administration is going to get [in terms of reform] it will get before the competition is actually completed.”

There must be some very shrewd former teachers at the DOE.

Not Either/Or…It’s AND

by Robert Pondiscio
October 28th, 2009

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Posted in Curriculum, Educational Policy | 2 Comments »

At Eduwonk, Andy Rotherham catches up to Russ Whitehurst’s paper, Don’t Forget Curriculum.  But he misses the boat when he writes, “I’m not sure when curriculum and reforms like choice, teacher quality, etc…became either/or.”   I’m not sure where Andy’s getting that message, but it’s not from Russ Whitehurst, who went out of his way NOT to say that.  Here’s the relevant quote from his paper:

This is not to say that curriculum reforms should be pursued instead of efforts to create more choice and competition through charters, or to reconstitute the teacher workforce towards higher levels of effectiveness, or to establish high quality, intensive, and targeted preschool programs, all of which have evidence of effectiveness. It is to say that leaving curriculum reform off the table or giving it a very small place makes no sense.

Over at the American Enterprise Institute’s blog, Charles Murray adds his voice to the curriculum choir.

The Best and Wisest Parent

by Robert Pondiscio
October 27th, 2009

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Posted in Educational Policy | 6 Comments »

Invoking John Dewey’s maxim that a community should want for all children what the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, Diane Ravitch wants small classes and the presence of the arts in schools that are physically attractive and well-maintained.  At Bridging Differences, she notes none of these ideas are driving education policy at present.

The president’s Department of Education will dispense nearly $5 billion, not to reduce class sizes, not to expand access to the arts, and not to improve the beauty and functionality of our public schools, but to incentivize the workforce with merit pay; to increase the privatization of struggling schools; and to compel teachers to teach to admittedly poor tests by tying teacher pay to students’ test scores.

If we’re making lists, I want my child to attend a school that sees itself as a place of learning first and foremost, with a rich, well-rounded curriculum; a view of reading as a means to academic achievement rather than an end in itself; and teachers and administrators who are not afraid to be grownups.

“The Most Important Education Reformer of the Last Century”

by Robert Pondiscio
October 22nd, 2009

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Posted in Core Knowledge, Curriculum, Educational Policy | 9 Comments »

[Update:  In the comments to this post, Paul Hoss questions Sol Stern giving credit to Hirsch for Massachusetts's Education Reform Act.  Stern responds below.]

In the new City Journal, Sol Stern files a comprehensive dispatch on the career of E.D. Hirsch, Jr. and judges the Core Knowledge founder to be “the most important education reformer of the last century.”   Stern writes that “Hirsch’s theories, long merely persuasive, now have solid empirical backing in Massachusetts’s miraculous educational reforms.”  So why, he wonders, isn’t Washington paying attention? 

At his Senate confirmation hearing in February, Arne Duncan succinctly summarized the Obama administration’s approach to education reform: “We must build upon what works. We must stop doing what doesn’t work.” Since becoming education secretary, Duncan has launched a $4.3 billion federal “Race to the Top” initiative that encourages states to experiment with various accountability reforms. Yet he has ignored one state reform that has proven to work, as well as the education thinker whose ideas inspired it. The state is Massachusetts, and the education thinker is E. D. Hirsch, Jr.

“Hirsch’s theories, long merely persuasive, now have solid empirical backing in Massachusetts’s miraculous educational reforms,” Stern writes.  One element of the state’s 1993 Education Reform Act was a “Hirschean knowledge-based curricula for each grade.”

In the new millennium, Massachusetts students have surged upward on the biennial National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—“the nation’s report card,” as education scholars call it. On the 2005 NAEP tests, Massachusetts ranked first in the nation in fourth- and eighth-grade reading and fourth- and eighth-grade math. It then repeated the feat in 2007. No state had ever scored first in both grades and both subjects in a single year—let alone for two consecutive test cycles.

Hirsch spoke at a luncheon event at the Manhattan Institute Wednesday, which was recorded for future broadcast by C-SPAN.  In the meantime, a podcast of a lively conversation between Stern and Hirsch is on the City Journal website here.

History, Hubris and Humility

by Robert Pondiscio
October 20th, 2009

Posted in Educational Policy, Opinion | 5 Comments »

Over at Fordham’s Flypaper, Andy Smarick posts a remarkable piece that should be tacked to the bulletin boards of would-be ed reformers everywhere.  It’s a brief reflection on Diane Ravitch’s 2000 book, Left Back. 

If you’re not in the market for a dose of humility, this probably isn’t your bag. If read with an open mind, it’s sobering stuff for hard-charging reformers chock-full of certainty. But part of me thinks it should be required reading for anyone handing out big philanthropic grants or overseeing massive government education programs, especially those dedicated to innovation, like the much-discussed I3 program.

Hear, hear.  Diane is a friend, and someone whose work I admired long before I met her, so I will not pretend to be unbiased, but I’m happy to see Smarick come to terms with the work of our greatest education historian and apply it to current efforts in education reform, a field intoxicated with triumphalism at the moment.  Blame it on the blogosphere, but it has become too easy for “hard-charging reformers” to dismiss those who decline to ride the bandwagon as in favor of the status quo, ill-informed, enemies or just plain nuts.  Diane has been on the receiving end of  these slings and arrows in disproportionate numbers in recent years.  Just about everyone who blogs on education champions a particular point of view, program or policy.  As a historian, Diane doesn’t play favorites and she isn’t on anyone’s side.  This drives some people over the edge.  That’s their problem, not Diane Ravitch’s

Smarick, to his credit, gets it.  “Ravitch’s lesson is a modest, even sage one: We need to avoid new ‘movements’ like the plague and give ‘more attention to fundamental, time-tested truths,’” he writes.  And while he still doesn’t agree with her take on charters and assessments, after reading Left Back, “I certainly now better understand the roots of her criticisms of the Race to the Top’s favored strategies.”

My father, a first-generation American with deep blue-collar roots, did not suffer fools gladly.  One of his favorite things to tell his son was “I’ve forgotten more than you’ll ever know.”  Diane Ravitch has forgotten more about education than most of us will ever know.

Breaking the ELA Skills vs. Content Logjam

by Robert Pondiscio
October 5th, 2009

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Posted in Curriculum, Educational Policy, Higher Education | 15 Comments »

If the authors of the draft national standards are unwilling to name specific works of literature children should read, they should at least name specific literary movements, writes Dan Willingham.

The draft ELA standards floated by the Common Core State Standards Initiative focus almost exclusively on skills–what students should be able to glean from written texts, for example–but remain silent on content.  Dan Willingham floats an intriguing way to split the difference in his latest post at the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog.  He points out  it’s not a problem to specify what kids should learn in other subjects.  “In science, for example, we expect that students will acquire certain skills– methods of scientific analysis–but we also believe that there is a body of scientific knowledge that students will learn,” he notes. “The same is true of history and mathematics.”  Why, he wonders, should literature be any different? 

Perhaps a better method would be to select literary movements based on their influence.  Specifying literary movements (e.g., Modernism, The Lost Generation, Harlem Renaissance) rather than specific authors would better parallel standards in other disciplines.We might expect a national body to recommend that students study Colonial American History in 3rd grade. We would not expect that national body to specify the particular events that must be studied (and by inference, what ought to be excluded).

“Influence is likely a less arbitrary criterion than aesthetic value, and it is more useful to students. Influential movements changed how future authors wrote, their subject matter, how they thought about literature, and so on,” writes Willingham, who argues understanding something of various literary movements is a key to understanding individual works of literature.

Is it really impossible for literature experts to agree on a set of major literary movements with which American high school graduates ought to be familiar? It would not be an easy task, surely, but I think that, if given the chance, a group of literature experts (teachers, editors, professors, writers, and critics) could rise to the occasion, especially if the criterion—literary influence—were made clear.

There is more at stake in getting the balance between process and content correct if the national standards movement is to succeed.  “A stated goal of the common core standards is to prepare students for college,” Willingham concludes.  ”If the standards leave the selection of literary works utterly to chance, they are unlikely to meet that goal.”

Gimme One Good Reason

by Robert Pondiscio
October 2nd, 2009

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Posted in Assessment and Testing, Educational Policy | 2 Comments »

I’ve been as critical of the squishy, content-free proposed national ELA standards as anyone, but over at Flypaper Eric Ulas reminds us that there is at least one good reason to support national standards: an end to the, er, impressionistic definitions of reading proficiency from state to state.  Ulas assumes we would have a single national test (I do too) to accompany national standards.  This would mean apples to apples comparisons and presumably an end to the race to lower cut scores.  The sunshine that would result from a national test would go a long way toward a sensible conversation about what’s working, what’s not working and why. 

Also well worth your time is Tom Hoffman’s take on the standards at Tuttle SVC.  Tom and I don’t always agree, but he knows standards, and  his point that the proposed standards are “narrower, lower, and shallower than the Language Arts standards of high performing countries” is very persuasive and backed up with good examples.  “No country with high reading scores in international assessments conceives of the discipline of Language Arts as being limited to literacy skills, or “college- and career-readiness,” as the Common Standards do,” he writes.

Willingham: Reading Is Not a Skill

by Robert Pondiscio
September 28th, 2009

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Posted in Curriculum, Education Practice, Educational Policy, Research and Reports, Teaching | 29 Comments »

Dan Willingham reviews the draft voluntary national standards in reading and sees a problem:  ”Teachers and administrators are likely to read those 18 standards and to try to teach to them,” he notes.  “But reading comprehension is not a ’skill’ that can be taught directly.”

His latest blog post at the Washington Post’s education page observes that teachers tend to teach comprehension as a series of “reading strategies” that can be practiced and mastered. “Unfortunately it really doesn’t work that way,” he writes. “The mainspring of comprehension is prior knowledge—the stuff readers already know that enables them to create understanding as they read.”

Prior knowledge is vital to comprehension because writers omit information. For example, suppose you read “He just got a new puppy. His landlord is angry.” You easily understand the logical connection between those sentences because you know things about puppies (they aren’t housebroken), carpets (urine stains them) and landlords (they are protective of their property.)

Policymakers need to pay attention here because this is what those of us who complain about curriculum narrowing are complaining about: the natural impulse to focus on pure reading instruction in an attempt to boost reading scores is self-defeating.  When you see, as Dan does, how “bad readers” look like good readers when they have background knowledge to bring to bear on a topic, the reasonable goal of education becomes increasing the number of topics children know something about.  It may sound smart, even heroic, to focus like a laser on reading instruction, but ultimately the law of diminishing returns kicks in.  You build comprehension by building background knowledge in the reader–not by endless practice in determining the author’s purpose, finding the main idea and making inferences. 

The kids who score well on reading tests are ones who know a lot about the world—they have a lot of prior knowledge about a wide range of things–and so that whatever they are asked to read about on the test, they likely know something about it….Can’t you teach kids how to reason about texts, and thereby wring the meaning out of it even if they don’t have the right prior knowledge?  To some extent, but it doesn’t seem to help as much as you might expect. For one thing, this sort of reasoning is difficult mental work. For another, it’s slow, and so it breaks up the flow of the story you’re reading, and the fun of the story is lost.

And Dan has a line in his post that I wish could be on the wall of every classroom in the country:  “Hoping that students without relevant prior knowledge will reason their way through a story is a recipe for creating a student who doesn’t like reading.”

Ultimately the draft national standards do not serve us well by reinforcing the idea that reading a a skill.  It’s not, Willingham notes:

The mistaken idea that reading is a skill—learn to crack the code, practice comprehension strategies and you can read anything—may be the single biggest factor holding back reading achievement in the country. Students will not meet standards that way. The knowledge base problem must be solved.

A request–no a plea, really:  Forward Dan’s post to every teacher you know.  Tweet it.  Blog it. Put it on your Facebook page.  Do it now.   We’re not going to solve this problem until or unless we see this for what it is.  Here’s the link: Reading Is Not a Skill.  Pass the word.  And while you’re at it, here’s Dan’s video, Teaching Content Is Teaching Reading. 

 

In Case of Accidental Overdose

by Robert Pondiscio
September 28th, 2009

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Posted in Educational Policy | 2 Comments »

…administer more poison. 

Please explain to me how doing more of what’s not working will make it work better.

Why Send Kids To School?

by Robert Pondiscio
September 27th, 2009

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Posted in Educational Policy, accountability | 5 Comments »

“The single biggest problem in American education is that no one agrees on why we educate,” observes Diane Ravitch. ”Faced with this lack of consensus, policy makers define good education as higher test scores.”  Ravitch’s comments come in a forum published by the New York Times Magazine, which also features input from Tom Vander Ark, Geoffrey Canada, Charles Murray and others.  Ravitch writes:

Why do we educate? We educate because we want citizens who are capable of taking responsibility for their lives and for our democracy. We want citizens who understand how their government works, who are knowledgeable about the history of their nation and other nations. We need citizens who are thoroughly educated in science. We need people who can communicate in other languages. We must ensure that every young person has the chance to engage in the arts.

Reflecting on the theme of “How to Remake Education,” Vander Ark stumps for more attention to technology.  “By 2020, I believe most high-school students will do most of their learning online,” he writes.  “It shouldn’t take that long, but it will.”  Charles Murray argues we should “discredit the bachelor’s degree as a job credential”; while Canada believes we should lengthen the U.S. school year, which is “one of the shortest school years in the industrialized world.”

I’m with Diane. There is a clear failure of vision in American education at present, especially in poor, urban schools.  We have narrowed the definition of what it means to be educated in America.  When affluent parents choose a school for their children—when they enroll in a private school or buy a home near specific schools–reading scores are simply not part of their calculus.  It is assumed that in a good school every child will learn to read, and then read to learn.  That’s simply what schools do. When policy makers, education reformers and even teachers and administrators evaluate what makes schools in poor, urban neighborhoods good or bad, however, a single litmus test applies: performance on standardized reading tests.  For the children of the poor, a good grade on a state reading test has become what it means to be educated.  The contrast could not be clearer:  we set the finish line for other people’s children where we set the starting line for our own.

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