A Place in the World

by Guest Blogger
March 2nd, 2012

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Posted in Assessment and Testing, Educational Policy, Opinion, Teaching | 19 Comments »

by Jessica Lahey

In the wake of last week’s release of New York City Teacher Data Reports, educators and administrators are debating what exactly the value in a high value-added teacher looks like. Even teachers who scored high marks on the Teacher Data Reports question the value of tests that cannot possibly evaluate every aspect of what it means to be a great teacher, and the value that teacher imparts to his or her students.

The new feature-length documentary A Place in the World, directed by Adam Maurer and William Reddington, addresses the question of teacher value and the role of a school in building community. The documentary chronicles two years at The International Community School (ICS), a K-6 charter school in DeKalb County, Georgia. DeKalb County is the largest refugee resettlement area in the country and the most diverse county in the state of Georgia. Half the students at ICS are recent immigrants and refugees from war zones, and half are local children from DeKalb County.

The film focuses on two educators: Drew Whitelegg (Mr. Drew to his students), a first-year teacher, and Dr. Laurent Ditman, Principal of ICS. Mr. Drew, formerly a post-doctoral Fellow at Emory University, speaks honestly about how tiring his job as a fourth-grade teacher is, how difficult it is to avoid being consumed by the challenges inherent in teaching a population of barely English-literate, emotionally and physically terrorized children how to function as educated members of American society. “Teaching at a university was a dawdle compared to teaching here. I mean it really was. And there’s a sense that you are in this for the long haul. But the rewards – the rewards here are absolutely endless. And they don’t come from all the great moments, they come from the small moments.”

According to Mr. Drew, the education gap that divides the American and refugee students in his fourth grade classroom at ICS is created by language deficits. Mr. Drew is not talking about language deficits in terms of the ability to hold a basic conversation, he’s talking about cultural vocabulary, the connotation words carry in American culture that help proficient readers understand context and relevance. Mr. Drew gives an example in the film: The math problem 1/2 + 1/4 written numerically, as a math problem, is something his students can do. But ask this same problem as a word problem, with one kid baking cakes and giving half away to friends and then deciding to give another quarter away to another friend, “then it’s not a test of math, it’s a test of language ability.” Many of Mr. Drew’s students come to his classroom with no knowledge of English, and some students, such as Bashir, who was born in a refugee camp in Ethiopia, have no understanding of the concept of school. Bashir spent his first days at ICS wandering the halls, walking in and out of classrooms, calling out for his father. Principal Laurent Dittman recounts the story of a girl from the refugee camps in the Sudan who spent her first weeks at ICS huddled under a table, hiding from whatever dangers she had survived in the Sudanese refugee camp.

Dr. Dittman, himself an immigrant and the child of Holocaust survivors, believes in school as a refuge from his students’ unsettled home lives. He understands his students’ impulse to hide under tables in order to escape. “The first thing I learned from my parents was how to hide. When something bad happens, or is about to happen, you hide. I see that in many of the kids at the school.” Dr. Dittman views his school as a refuge for his students, a place to come out of hiding and learn. Dr. Dittman says of his own upbringing in an immigrant family in France, “I really liked school. It was a safe place. My parents were refugees and things at home were not always a lot of fun, and I saw school clearly as a refuge.”

When asked about the standards his students are expected to meet under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), his outlook is not quite as hopeful. “According to NCLB 2014, all students – 100% – will be proficient in all subject matters. What’s the old Garrison Keillor, everybody is above average? That doesn’t make any sense. My guess is that in a few years, all those standards, all those compulsory standardized tests will be a bad memory. I think that the pendulum is going to swing back the other way and return to a more rational, less ideological approach to education.”

ICS did not make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) in 2011 under NCLB. Dr. Dittman and Mr. Drew, who educate malnourished, traumatized, impoverished and previously uneducated children, must cover core subjects such as math, science, and history while helping their students find a place in American society. They are not simply teaching American history, they are teaching their students how to be Americans. The making of Americans is currently not a category in the Teacher Data Reports’ calculation of a teacher’s value-added assessments.

For validation on that front, Dr. Dittman and Mr. Drew do not look to test scores and value-added assessments; they look to their students. Dr. Dittman thinks back to that that one Sudanese girl, hiding under the classroom table. His voice breaks as he recounts the ending to her story. The girl refused to come out until one day her teacher crawled under the table and joined her there. Once her teacher had gained the girls’ trust, she felt safe enough to crawl out from under the table and join the class. According to Mr. Drew, “I don’t think teachers should blow their own trumpets or credit themselves overtly, but I think that you can go home at the end of the day and say, you know what, I’ve made a difference, you know, and the world is actually a better place from what I did today.”

As teachers and administrators move forward and continue to do the job of teaching this country’s students, it is important to remember that not all value is quantifiable. The Teacher Data Reports, in all their margins of error and fuzzy logic, can never get at the real value of this country’s teachers.

Jessica Potts Lahey is a teacher of English, Latin, and composition at Crossroads Academy, an independent Core Knowledge K-8 school in Lyme, New Hampshire. Jessica’s blog on middle school education, Coming of Age in the Middle, where this piece also appears, can be found at http://jessicalahey.com.

What is the Value in a High Value-Added Teacher?

by Guest Blogger
January 12th, 2012

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Posted in accountability, Assessment and Testing, Education Practice, Education Theory, Teaching | 20 Comments »

by Jessica Lahey

Great news emerged this week for elementary- and middle-school teachers who make gains in their students test scores.  While the teachers themselves may not be pulling down big salaries, their efforts result in increased earnings for their students. In a study that tracked 2.5 million students for over 20 years, researchers found that good teachers have a long-lasting positive effect on their students’ lives, including those higher salaries, lower teen-pregnancy rates, and higher college matriculation rates.

I’m a practical person.  I understand that we spend billions of dollars educating our children and that the taxpayer deserves some assurance that the money is not being squandered.  Accountability matters.  I get it.  Still, as a teacher, it’s hard not to feel a little bit wistful, perhaps even wince a little, reading this study.

It’s important to remember that its authors, Raj Chetty, John N. Freidman, and Jonah E. Rockoff, are all economists. Their study measures tangible, economic outcomes from what they call high versus low “value-added” teachers. This “value-added” approach, which is defined as “the average test-score gain for his or her students, adjusted for differences across classrooms in student characteristics such as prior scores,” may work for measuring such measurable outcomes as future earnings, but it misses so much of the point of education.

I asked my Uncle Michael, a professor of law and economics, what he thought of the study, and he compared the proponents of the study’s mathematical economic approach to education to acolytes of The Who’s Tommy, pinball wizards who “sought to isolate themselves from the world so as to improve their perception of a very narrow sliver of that world. The entire ‘assessment’ enterprise defiles education as that word once meant.”

He attempted to explain his feelings about the study in terms of mathematical equations – something to do with linear regression thinking and educational outcomes, but I got lost in the Y = a + bX + errors of it all.

Tim Ogburn, 5th grade teacher in California, phrases the debate a bit more simply: Why are we educating children?

His answer goes like this: Until fairly recently, teachers would have answered that they were educating children to become good Americans or good citizens, but now we seem to teach only to prepare elementary- and middle-school children for high paying jobs. When money figures into the goal, we lose so much along the way, such as curiosity, a love of learning for its own sake, and an awareness that many of the most worthwhile endeavors (both personally and socially) are not those with the highest monetary rewards.

To which I reply: Hear, hear. If economic gain is the measure of our success, we have lost sight our goals in education.

In order to round out the definition of “value” as defined by Chetty’s study, I conducted my own research project. Sure, my sample was smaller – about thirty versus Chetty’s 2.5 million, and the duration of my study was three days rather than 20 years…and of course there might just have been a wee bit of selection bias in my Facebook sampling. Oh, and I chose not to apply Uncle Michael’s formulas because they gave me a headache.

The goal of my study was to find out what some of the other, less measurable benefits of good teaching. I asked people to write in with examples of good teaching, teaching that has resulted in positive outcomes in their lives. Who were their “high value-added” teachers?

Sarah Pinneo, a writer from New Hampshire, recalled her third grade teacher, who took her aside one day and said, “You are going to be a writer. Here’s your portfolio. Every poem you finish, we’re going to save it in here.” Sarah’s first novel will be released on February first, and she still has that poetry portfolio.

Carol Blymire, a food writer and public relations executive in Washington, D.C, recalled her kindergarten teacher “who taught me that letters make words and words make sentences…and is the reason I love to write today.” She counts among her low value-added teachers, “Every other teacher reprimanded me for asking questions that came across as challenging them, even though it was really my way of wanting to know more and understand the bigger picture.”

My favorite example came from Dr. Jeffrey Fast, an English teacher in Massachusetts.

“One morning, when I was a senior, we were discussing Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset. While I can no longer remember exactly what I said, it was something about the interaction among the characters. Immediately after I spoke, [my teacher] responded by saying – for all to hear: ‘I like you!’ His response, of course, was coded language to identify and mark – for both me and my peers – something insightful. I felt enormously rewarded. That was the benchmark that I tried to replicate in dealing with literature ever afterwards. That was 50 years ago. He never knew that those three words catapulted me – to a Ph.D. and a career as an English teacher!”

While the studies of economists may add to the discussion about what makes teachers valuable in our lives, I believe that if we reduce teachers’ value to dollars and cents, we run the risk of becoming, in Oscar Wilde’s phrase, “the kind of people who know the price of everything, but the value of nothing.”

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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.”

Education Week

by Guest Blogger
November 21st, 2011

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Posted in accountability, Assessment and Testing, Education Practice, Teaching | 16 Comments »

by Jessica Lahey

Last Friday, the Illinois State Board of Education proposed new rules that will link teacher performance to their students’ performance on assessments. Up to thirty percent of teacher evaluations will be based on how students perform on tests, and while I understand the value of student progress in evaluating teachers, it’s certainly not the main thing that determines success in education. My mind has been on assessments lately because I just came out of a week defined by what I initially labeled a colossal assessment failure. I gave unit tests to cap off a couple of weeks in Latin and English grammar, and things did not go well. My students failed, failed, failed, and as teachers are wont to do, I used the transitive property and concluded that I had failed, failed, failed.

I spent the following weekend going over the assessments, my preparation, my teaching, the students’ homework scores, and found that the week of failure was much more complicated than one faulty assessment or a failure to teach some critical aspect of the lesson. As I could not go back and re-do the previous month of teaching, I decided to move forward, and figure out how to turn failure in to a learning experience. Once some time had passed, and I’d gained the benefit of hindsight, I wrote about the solution I came up with in my blog, Coming of Age in the Middle . I wrote about my teaching methods, but mostly, I wrote about how I had managed to make it through the week without tucking my tail between my legs and quitting my job.

A writer friend of mine liked the post, one thing led to another, and the next thing I knew, my failure was in the Gray Lady herself. When K.J. Dell’Antonia wrote her piece on my blog, titled “What Good Teachers Do When Kids Fail,” in the New York Times’ parenting blog Motherlode , the comments fell into two distinct camps: Parents who wished their teachers had more time to address student failure and teachers who lamented that they had no time to address student failure. A few teachers wrote about the time they took for re-writes and remedy, but for the most part, the message from educators was one of regret and frustration with a testing-centric schedule that did not allow for reflection.

The solution I came up with for my students required humility on both sides of the classroom – I had to admit I had failed my students and my students had to admit that they had not held up their end of the pedagogical bargain – but mostly, it took time. Time that, according to the comments after the article, most teachers just don’t have. I handed out blank tests and asked the students re-take the assessment as an open book exercise. They were asked to work in pairs I had strategically assigned, and teach each other the material on the test. They were required to not only find the correct answer, but to show why all of the other answers were wrong. This process ate up two classes, and as I only see my Latin students twice a week, this one remedial exercise burned an entire week of the school year. Clearly, this is simply not an option in many classrooms. Maria, from Baltimore, MD, wrote:

“I am a public high school math teacher. It’s only November, and I’m already 10 days behind schedule in one class, 3 days behind in another. And this is without me taking any sick days, no snow days, just a few days away from class for . . . you guessed it, administering the No Child Left Behind tests. I would love to have students retake their tests and learn from mistakes, but thanks to NCLB, and curricula that are an inch deep and a mile wide, we need to press on to the next topic.”

Many comments stressed the vital role that failure plays in education. Dr. Kim, from Ithaca, NY wrote,

“We need to allow students opportunities to fail. Too often our kids are afraid of failure. If we don’t fail, we’re not pushing our limits–we’re not challenging ourselves. I have a friend who is an amazing skier who says “if you don’t fall, you’re not pushing yourself hard enough.” This is true. Plus, we learn much more from failure. Our brains are programmed to remember those things with strong emotional attachments — positive or negative. Failures are memorable.”

I completely agree that some of the best lessons are learned from failure. Failure can shock a student out of complacency, particularly among those students who are smart enough to do well on a bare minimum of effort. Middle school is the ideal time for this time of shock; the stakes are still low(ish) and the potential for growth is huge. I’m not one for sports quotes, but in this case, baseball player and coach Vernon Law had it right. “Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards.” It would have been much easier to teach the lessons first and give the test after, but in the end, I think the experience taught all of us a greater lesson. Everyone has to admit to failure – teacher and student. As a result of this failure, I grew as a teacher and they grew as students. Crossroads Academy was built on a core virtues curriculum as well as a core knowledge curriculum, so our journey through this week of failure became an important part of the students’ character education. That’s where commenter T. Zinner of Boston hits the nail on the head:

This article goes to the heart of our goal as parents and the ideal of teachers: creating individuals with strength of character. The happiest and most successful people seem to be the individuals who take their talents and face obstacles either directly with perseverance or creatively so that the obstacles are no longer viewed as challenges. This is the case for the most exceptional physicians I work with, the patients who live fully despite illness and friends and neighbors who create lives of joy and depth in the face of unexpected loss or change in circumstance.

That’s the kind of teaching I love to do, teaching that helps students become better people, teaching that takes into account the unpredictability inherent teaching adolescents.

But this sort of teaching is increasingly not what is valued today, and it’s certainly not what counts as quality teaching or a gauge of student progress. Failure makes people nervous because in order to find anything of value in the situation, everyone has to face their role in the failure. It would have been much easier for me to fail the students and move on, or curve the exam so much that the failure got lost in a sea of amended numbers. The grades would have looked good, the students would have felt good, and everyone would have been satisfied with my performance. But lurking under this neat and tidy appearance, my students would know. They would know they had not really learned the material, that I had swept something under the rug. Worse, I would know that somewhere down the line that gap in their education would come back to haunt them.

Assessments are often blunt instruments, and to decide a teacher’s worth based on student testing measures just one small fraction of the learning that goes on in the classroom. This one assessment failure taught me valuable lessons about my teaching methods, the quality of my assessments, and the courage of my students. Two of my students summed up our week perfectly as they handed in their remedy exam: “I think I learned more from that one failing grade than from any A,” and “You know, now that we have gone through every question, that test really wasn’t that hard.”

My sentiments exactly.

It’s a Video Library, Not a Revolution

by Guest Blogger
November 17th, 2011

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Posted in Assessment and Testing, Curriculum, Education Practice, Teaching | 29 Comments »

by Diana Senechal

Ever since the entrepreneur Salman Khan burst forth in 2011 with his
education revolution—a massive video library and proposal that the classroom be “flipped”—there has been no end to the euphoric roar from reporters. They delight in the idea that students could watch instructional videos at home, then come to school to solve problems, work in groups, and engage in discussion. That’s the flip, right there: the instruction takes place at home; the problem-solving, in school. Khan argues, and his fans believe, that such a reversal would “humanize the classroom.” But something about this humanization doesn’t sit well in the belly. Is it really so wonderful to make problem-solving a social activity, or to remove lectures from the classroom? Is the video as flexible a tool as Khan suggests?

Practical problems come to mind first of all. Who ensures that the students actually learn the material at home, or that the videos convey it well? Khan suggests that their activity should be electronically monitored, so that teachers know how much time they have been spending on each video and what they have been doing with it. But isn’t that a bit intrusive? Isn’t one’s study time at home supposed to be somewhat private? Moreover, what will students and teachers gain from such monitoring? Some will find ways around it: they will pretend to watch the videos while doing something else. Others will do the work yet need additional explanation. There is no getting around the difficulty of some material; it requires more than one mode of presentation.

The advanced students, those who already understand the material, have even more to lose. They may not want to solve problems among their peers, in the noise and chatter of the classroom. They might not want or need a teacher peering over their shoulder. During class time, they may need something that pushes their thinking further: a lively lecture or discussion or both. At home, they might need nothing more than challenging assignments and good books. Khan states that each student may progress at his or her own pace, but this goes only so far. Students ultimately reach a point where they need the insights of the teacher: not just a brief check-in, but a substantial presentation and discussion. Where will they get this, if the teacher must circulate from student to student?

Videos allow for thorough learning, proponents argue. Students may watch them repeatedly until they fully grasp the lesson. But who wants to watch an instructional video over and over, unless it is superb? Doesn’t a book allow for a more compelling sort of repetition? When reading a book, you can dwell on a sentence or paragraph as long as you want. If you need to find something specific, you can look in the index or flip through the pages. What’s more, you can hear the words in your mind and give them the emphasis or tone that seems right. A video can become a trap; though you may move backward and forward, you hear the same voice, watch the same gestures, and witness the same explanation in motion. The instructor seems a moving cadaver—unaffected by anything in the room, intent on repeating the same inflections and making the same marks on the board. This can get irritating, if not depressing.

The model has problems of principle as well as of practice. It implicitly downplays the importance of the lecture by taking it out of the teacher’s hands. Supposedly this “frees” her up for real teaching. But what sort of freedom is this, when the teacher is no longer supposed to present the subject? Lectures, even short ones, contain not only information but insights. Teachers and professors raise questions, take apart false conclusions, point to overlooked details, and leave the student with a keener view of the subject than he or she had before. A video—even a superb one—cannot do this as well as a teacher can in person, nor would many teachers want this aspect of their work taken away. Even when the lecture is purely unidirectional, there is subtle exchange: students’ facial expressions and gestures, the teacher’s tone of voice, and the anticipation of the discussion that will follow. A teacher, unlike a video, has the ability to enhance the instruction spontaneously—for instance, by offering yet another angle on a problem (“Here’s another way of looking at it.”). The “flip” model could turn out to be the opposite of freedom, as it would lack many of these subtleties.

In order to learn subject matter, one needs instruction, practice, review, reinforcement, and extension. A student listens to the teacher, thinks about the material, reads about the topic, thinks about it some more, works on problems, discusses the problems in class, and considers how the topic relates to those before and after it. Videos can play a part in this, but there’s no reason to flip anything at all for them. Why not have them handy and let teachers and students use them as they see fit? No grandiose terms, no education revolution—just a resource for those who need it.

But there is little glamour in a resource for those who need it. Khan started out with a modest vision—helping his cousins with school—but before long, it grew louder and louder until it reached the status of a momentous potential reform. Khan has some fine ideas: he recognizes the value of puzzling over material on one’s own, of repeating concepts until they come clear. But even a fine idea can be ruined when turned into a grand model. The challenge for the Khan Academy, and for much of education reform, is to offer something helpful without exaggerating its import. Those who do so will one day be recognized as wise.

Diana Senechal is the 2011 winner of the Hiett Prize in the Humanities, awarded by the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Her book, Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture, will be published by Rowman & Littlefield Education in January 2012.

NAEP: Proof of Education Insanity

by Robert Pondiscio
November 7th, 2011

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Posted in Assessment and Testing, Core Knowledge, Curriculum | 12 Comments »

The following post by Lynne Munson appeared originally on the blog of Common Core, a Washington, DC-based organization that works to promote a liberal arts, core curriculum in U.S. schools.  Munson is Common Core’s executive director and a former deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities — rp.

I challenge anyone to think of a nation that works as hard as we do to find silver linings in its educational failures. On Tuesday morning NAEP reported that, in the course of two years, our nation’s 4th and 8th graders improved a single point (on a 500-point scale) in three of four reading and math assessments, and flatlined on the fourth. If you look at figures plotting NAEP scores over the last 30 years, any upward slope in the data is nearly undetectable to the naked eye. Analysts have spent the last few days slicing and dicing this data and making unconvincing arguments that some positive trends can be detected.

But the reality is that these results are appalling—particularly if you consider the massive federal funding increases, intense reform debates, and the incessant promises of new technologies that have dominated the education discussion for nearly two decades. We have spent a great deal and worked very hard but gotten unimpressive results. And this is in reading and math where, to the detriment of so many other core subjects, we’ve aimed nearly all of our firepower.

Einstein* defined “insanity” as “doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results.” Well, my bet is that Einstein would have deemed NAEP data absolute proof of America’s educational insanity.

We’ve spent the last twenty years attempting to make what, on the surface, appears to be a diverse, creative, and wide-ranging series of reforms to public education. We’ve tried to bring market pressures to bear through charters and choice. We’ve attempted to set high standards and given high-stakes tests. We’ve experimented with shrinking school and class sizes. We’ve focused on “21st century skills” and used the latest technologies. We’ve collected and analyzed data on an unprecedented scale. We’ve experimented with a seemingly endless array of “strategies” for teaching reading and math and have tried to “differentiate” for every imaginable “type” of student. And we’ve paid dearly in tax dollars and in other ways for each of these “reforms.”

Interestingly, all of these reforms have one thing in common (aside from their failure to improve student performance except in isolated instances): None deals directly with the content of what we teach our students.

Maybe we need to give content a chance. What I mean by “content” is the actual knowledge that is imbedded in quality curricula. Knowledge of things like standard algorithms, poetry, America’s past, foreign languages, great painters, chemistry, our form of government, and much more. There are a few widely used curricula (e.g. International Baccalaureate, Latin schools curricula, Core Knowledge) that effectively incorporate much of this knowledge base. And performance data strongly suggests that these curricula work for ALL students.

So let’s draw on such successes and, sure, conduct more research, do more experiments, and spend more money. But let’s do it to build a shared understanding what our students need to learn —the content they need to learn. Then let’s use the best technology available and make the kind of investments we need in professional development to teach that content effectively. In light of the poor results other approaches have yielded, is there any other sane course?

Educational Reform: Slow but Sure vs. Fast and Fail

by E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
September 19th, 2011

Posted in Assessment and Testing, Curriculum, Education Practice, Teaching | 12 Comments »

A version of this column, “How to Stop the Drop in Verbal Scores,” by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., appears in today’s editions of the New York Times — rp.

The latest bad news from our nation’s schools is that the verbal scores of our top students – college bound 17-year-olds who sign up to take the SAT – have once again declined. This unsurprising result is consistent with verbal scores for 17-year-olds on the more broadly based National Assessment of Educational Progress, which have remained essentially unchanged for 40 years.

How worried should we be? Very. And our concerns should be particularly acute because nearly nothing in our otherwise laudable and energetic education reform efforts takes direct aim at the Great Verbal Decline that took place among 17-year-olds from (roughly) 1970 to 1980.

Cognitive psychologists, who are rarely heeded in the intense rough and tumble of the education wars, agree that early childhood language learning (age two to ten) is critical to later verbal competence because of something they call the “Matthew Effect,” which determines the rate at which new word meanings are learned. The name comes from a passage in the Book of Matthew: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” Those who are language-poor in early childhood get relatively poorer, and fall further behind, while the verbally rich get richer.

In short, the more words you already know, the faster the rate at which you will acquire new words. This sounds like an invitation to vocabulary study for tots, but that’s been tried, and it’s not effective. Most of the word meanings we know are acquired by indirect means — by intuitively guessing new meanings as we understand the overall gist of what we are hearing or reading. The Matthew Effect in language can therefore be restated this way: “To those who understand the gist shall be given new word meanings, but to those who do not understand the gist there shall ensue boredom, frustration and discouragement, but not new words.” Multiply that classroom experience thousands of times over the years, and you get lower vocabularies, lower verbal scores.

But note the first half of the Matthew Effect. “Unto every one that hath shall be given.” Clearly the key is to make sure that from kindergarten on every student is brought along from the first days of preschool to understand the gist of what is heard or read. And that means children need to be offered coherent knowledge about the world around them from the first days of school. This is no mere theoretical notion: a recent article in Science by Professor David Dickenson showed that when children in preschool and kindergarten are taught substantial and coherent content concerning the human and natural worlds, the results show up five or six years later in significantly improved verbal scores. (Five years is the time span by which this kind of educational intervention needs to be judged.) By systematically staying on a subject long enough to make all pre-school children familiar with it, the gist becomes understood by all and the rate of word learning increases. This is particularly important for low-income children who come to school with smaller vocabularies and rely on school to impart the knowledge base that affluent children take for granted. Research conducted in France showed that if disadvantaged children receive coherent and cumulative content from a very early age, and if that practice is sustained through the early grades, verbal scores are higher for all by the time they reach later grades, and the demographic achievement gap is greatly reduced. Daniel Willingham, a cognitive scientist at the University of Virginia puts it simply: Teaching content is teaching reading.

The insights of the Matthew Effect seem simply absent from the most visible current reform strategies, which focus on testing, improving teacher quality, increasing the number of charter schools and other fast-paced structural issues. Attention to these structural issues is good, but not enough–we need to pay equal attention to the substance and year-to-year coherence of what teachers teach and children learn, especially in the critical early years. Under the influence of recent reforms our best public schools – both charter and non-charter — have certainly improved the verbal scores of their students, but not as much as their math scores, and not nearly enough to overcome the huge gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students.

Our national verbal decline transcends this “achievement gap” between demographic groups. The language competence of our high school graduates fell precipitously in the seventies, and has never recovered. What changed—and what remains largely un-discussed in education reform—is that in the decades prior to the Great Decline, a content-rich elementary school experience evolved into a content-light, skills-based, test-based approach that dominates in our schools today. On the surface, this is a paradox. De-emphasizing history, science, art and music in favor of spending time learning to read, and take reading tests should raise scores on those tests. The Matthew Effect explains why it doesn’t work.

Nonetheless verbal scores on the standardized tests taken by 17-year-olds may be the closest thing we have to a crystal ball or a canary in a coal mine. Some firm correlations of life chances with verbal skills have been established over many years of research on the large data sets of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth. Verbal scores of 17-year-olds predict the students’ future and our collective future. An ability to read, write, speak and listen competently correlates with a students’ capacity to learn new things readily, to communicate with others, and to work at a job effectively. It predicts their future income levels. As the verbal competency of each new generation declines or stagnates, so too will our general economic effectiveness. The single most urgent need of our schools is to raise our children’s verbal scores.

The lesson is a simple one for education reform: the administrative structure of a school, and the heroic abilities of the individual teacher, important as they are, matter less than whether a child gradually gains a critical mass of enabling knowledge over thirteen years of schooling. The key to verbal competence is a broad base of knowledge. The best-intentioned reform efforts will not succeed—cannot succeed—without a commitment to ensuring that all children receive such enabling knowledge from the first days of school.

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