What Business Needs From Schools: Character Education

by Robert Pondiscio
January 10th, 2010

“Teaching kids to be good is low hanging fruit with a lifetime payoff making for a productive society,” write a trio of high-ranking Wisconsin business executives in an opinion piece in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel calling for character education as a way to save public schools.

To people who run companies, honesty and punctuality are as important as computer literacy. Traits such as these are about respect for ourselves and others; they make up our character. Without character, quality work is almost impossible to produce no matter the number of employee incentives.

The trio, which includes the former CEO of Harley Davidson, represent a local chapter of the Character Education Partnership (CEP), a 17-year-old organization that encourages the teaching of ethical values  along with “supportive performance values” such as diligence, a strong work ethic, and perseverance.  Character education is essential, they write, and cost-effective. 

Curriculum experimentation is expensive and confusing to children. New equipment is expensive.  Instructing principals and teachers how to encourage children to exhibit good character, especially by modeling it, is not expensive.”

When teachers, students and school administrators respect each other, reading, math and science scores go up, the trio notes, without a change of curriculum, text books or the addition of expensive equipment.   “We’re not Luddites; we’re for technology, but if a school is in turmoil how will the students learn to use it?” they add.

Amen for this breath of fresh air from the business world, on a subject they know something about.  Personally, I was happy to read a prescription for schools from business executives that for once wasn’t about a lack of accountability, performance pay, how unions protect bad teachers, international competitiveness, the need innovation and to shatter the ”status quo.”

 

Whistleblowers Delight

by Robert Pondiscio
January 5th, 2010

Did anyone else get that remarkable email from the organizers of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education yesterday?  The subject line read “BBA Needs Your Help.”  If you just hit delete, you missed a fascinating email.  BBA, which argues that test-driven accountability narrows the curriculum and creates test obsession in schools is asking teachers to submit examples of schools (presumably their own) that have suffered under strict accountability measures:

In a recent meeting, we advised Department of Education staff that their policy of identifying the lowest-performing 5% of schools in each state, in order to target these schools for massive intervention and “turnaround,” was bound to have adverse consequences if these schools were identified primarily by such test scores. We said that many schools that should be considered among the lowest performing schools would be missed if they artificially boosted their test scores at the expense of a balanced curriculum, by excessive test preparation activities and other gaming. And other schools that pursued a more balanced curriculum and attended to children’s long run achievement might falsely be identified as among the lowest-performing schools because they refused to engage in activities that artificially boosted test scores.

The letter, which doesn’t seem to appear on BBA’s website, notes DOE staff ”were not persuaded,” and asked the group to provide “examples of low-performing schools whose test scores have been artificially inflated by excessive test preparation and gaming, and better schools with very low scores but that were delivering a higher quality of instruction.”  The email, which carries the signatures of BBA organizers Helen Ladd, Pedro Noguera, and Tom Payzant, then asks recipients to identify such schools by name. 

Please include the name of the school, the name(s) of your source(s) of information, and other identifying information in your description. We will not initially provide all of this identifying information in the material we supply to the Department, but we have to be prepared to back up our claims by naming names if necessary.

It’s a bold move by BBA, although they might also consider sending along a copy of Linda Perlstein’s Tested.  I suspect they will find no shortage of schools that have muscled up on test prep and played games to boost test scores.  Whether teachers at those schools are willing to publicly say so is another matter. 

BBA is on shakier ground, I believe, in looking for good schools whose efforts don’t show up on test scores.  If a school is delivering a rigorous, well-rounded curriculum and “attending to children’s long run achievement” that should show up on test scores, assuming the effort is long-running, ongoing and well-implemented.

Softballs

by Robert Pondiscio
October 6th, 2009

A-Rus at This Week in Education looks at blogosphere reactions to Arne Duncan’s sit-down with Stephen Colbert and sees a pattern:  Everyone pans Colbert for lobbing softball questions at the Ed Secretary.  Huh?!?

Yes, more and more of us take our news and cues from The Daily Show, Colbert and late night comics.  I get it.  But have we really gotten to the point where we expect comedians to play Mike Wallace?  And are we really disappointed when they fail?

Why Send Kids To School?

by Robert Pondiscio
September 27th, 2009

“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.

Observations on Observations

by Robert Pondiscio
August 27th, 2009

If you’re a teacher, would you rather be judged by a 200-page list of indicators of highly skilled teaching, or by a principal who shares your philosophy of teaching and learning, supports your approach and pretty much leaves you alone–but has the power to fire you at will? 

This question occurred to me after reading a long and excellent post by John Merrow over at Learning Matters on teacher observations. He concludes that the observation process is “changing for the better in some places, but that, unfortunately, it’s still mostly useless.”

In the old days, teachers closed their doors and did their thing, for better or for worse. As long as things were quiet, administrators [rarely] bothered to open the door to see what was going on, and teachers never watched each other at work. That’s changing, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. In some schools today, teachers are actually expected to watch their peers teach, after which they share their analysis. In other schools, however, principals armed with lists sit in the back of the class checking off ‘behaviors’ and later give the teacher a ‘scorecard’ with her ‘batting average.’

“Whether these observations are diagnostic in nature and therefore designed to help teachers improve or a ‘gotcha’ game is the essential question,” Merrow perceptively observes.  Teacher observations, like test scores, will undoubtedly loom ever larger as the issue of teacher quality bubbles to the top of the nation’s education agenda.  Like test scores, there’s a lot to learn from observations.  And like test scores, we’re equally likely to learn the wrong lessons.

Of all the “best practices” that have migrated to education from the business world, the one that didn’t make the trip is the idea that good managers hire excellent people, empower them with real decision-making authority, then get out of their way.  The closest thing to that in education is “close your door and do your thing,” as Merrow puts it.  That goes against the grain in the Age of Accountability, but it is undeniable that for many excellent and experienced teachers and their students, it works perfectly.   And while that approach is endangered, it has not disappeared.  Nor should it.  The point of any accountability system should be to help bad schools and teachers look and act like good schools and teachers, not the opposite.  Our schools still have plenty of brilliant iconoclasts who do things their own way to great effect. 

For such  teachers nothing could be worse than “observation by checklist,” where the adminstration wants to see what it wants to see: aim and standard on the board?  Check.  Students sitting in groups?  Check.  Updated work on the bulletin board?  Check. A “print rich” environment in “kid-friendly language?” Check.   Ask why these items are important and you’ll invariably hear that it’s what the principal’s supervisor expects to see.  What they are indicative of is lost.  The consummate irony is this kind of evaluation seems rigorous, but it is more likely — much more likely — to create a civil service mentality than to foster excellence.  It’s another variation of the Cargo Cult Education phenomenon.   Teachers and administrators spend all their energy manufacturing the visible markers of learning, often not knowing (and after a while no longer caring) what the “indicators” indicate. 

Indeed, this is the thing the every teacher knows, that every armchair expert does not: it is simple (but time-consuming) to create an environment that gives all the appearances of being a high-functioning classroom and still be a lousy teacher.  Among the very first survival skills a new teacher learns, either through the advice of a kindly colleague or through a series of administrative reprimands, is the art of the dog and pony show.   In some schools, it’s the quid pro quo that earns you the right to close your door and practice your craft.  In more punitive environments, it’s the tail that wags the dog.   But the aim of observation-by-checklist is not great teaching, it’s plausible deniability–and it’s the enemy of accountability, for both teachers and administrators.  Miss Jones’ classroom demonstrates a high degree of student engagement and all of the indicators of high quality teaching, but her students are still not making progress.  Why? Miss Jones’ energy is misdirected.  She’s learning to play the game, not become a great teacher.  After a few years, she gets tired of it and quits.  Mediocrity wins again. 

The bottom line is that great teaching is like Potter Stewart’s definition of hard-core pornography.  It’s hard to define but you know it when you see it.  Unfortunately, that’s never going to cut it in our data-mad, accountability-obsessed age. 

So which would you rather?  Find a school and work with a principal who shares your philosophy and approach, trusts you and supports you, but has the power to fire you at will?  Or a school where your duties are codified to the letter, where you know what’s on the checklist and spend all of your time ‘working to rule‘ and playing “gotcha.”  Where are you going to be happiest and most productive?

Am I the only one who thinks this is what the teacher quality debate is really all about?

Ready, Fire, Aim

by Robert Pondiscio
August 21st, 2009

At The Quick and the Ed, Kevin Carey attempts to take on Diane Ravitch’s criticism of Race to the Top, accusing her of…well, I’m not sure exactly. But his criticism of Ravitch’s take on tying teacher evaluations to test scores is noteworthy. 

No state has ever really tied teacher evaluations to test scores in a methodologically valid way and made those evaluations meaningful in terms of compensation, hiring, tenure, and other things people care about. So Ravitch is just engaging in garden variety chicken-and-egg obstructionism: you can’t prove X works because nobody’s ever tried it; you can’t try X because nobody’s ever proved it works.

Well, no.  It’s not that it’s never been tried.  It’s that there is not a way to evaluate teachers fairly by using test scores.  I guess I’m obstructionist too, since like Ravitch I don’t see the benefit of coming to vast conclusions based on half-vast data.  Commenter Ceolaf nails the problem precisely: 

“It is not merely a case of banning a practice or allowing it. Rather, it is a case of mandating it. Require — or pressuring very strongly — states to adopt policies that are unproven is the issue. We knew that seat belts save lives, so requiring states to adopt seatbelt laws made sense. We knew that lowering speed limits saved gas, so requiring states to lower theirs to 55mph made sense. But that is not the case here.”

Just so.  But argue that this well-intentioned idea has too many problems to be taken seriously and you’re immediately a status quo loving, running dog lackey of the teachers unions, or as Carey describes Ravitch, the ”go-to name-brand anti-Obama quote on K–12 issues.”

Oy.

Maybe we can make this simple and unambiguous:  Accountability?  Good.  Figuring out if a teacher is competent or incompetent? Very good. Using tests to determine the difference?  Not very good.  In fact, not possible.  Forcing states to do it anyway? Not very smart.  Being incurious about the impact such a move will have on education?  Unforgivable. 

When did “not very good but it’s the best we can do” become a way of making policy?  When did suggesting we can do better become heresy?

Goal Standard

by Robert Pondiscio
May 21st, 2009

Run, don’t walk, over to Joanne Jacobs where the talented Diana Senechal is guest-blogging for Joanne between now and May 29.  Diana, a teacher at a Core Knowledge school in NYC, has been a frequent contributor here on the Core Knowledge Blog and one of the more original and thoughtful classroom observers in the edusphere wherever her comments appear.

Check out her thoughts about why failure is important, and today’s  post on goal-setting for students.  Apparently, New York City schools now require every student to have explicit, written learning goals in every subject–and to show or recite them on demand. 

The goal requirement blurs the line of responsibility. Who is responsible for the learning? If teachers must set goals for students, then students do not have to set goals for themselves. If the learning doesn’t happen, students can simply say that they never got their goals or never discussed them in conference. The focus is on documentation (what was sent out, discussed, and signed) rather than the subject matter and the learning of it.

“A goal can be vital or banal,” Diana concludes.  “Mandating it (and setting the language for it) tips it in the direction of banality.”

This is a classic example of my First Law of Bad Education Practice, which holds there is not a single good idea in education that doesn’t become a bad idea the moment it hardens into orthodoxy.  Diana nails the reason why this is ironclad law: once the focus is on documentation (Student goals? Check!) it’s all about the To Do list.  The first, immediate casualty is whatever made the idea powerful in the first place.

Location, Location, Location

by Robert Pondiscio
February 19th, 2009

The real estate agent’s mantra — location, location, location — also works for schools.  Just as an identical home can fetch different prices in different places, an identical school can make AYP in some states, but not in others. 

That’s the upshot of a terrific new report by the Fordham Foundation, The Accountability Illusion, which looked at 36 actual schools (18 elementary, 18 middle schools) and determined whether each one would make AYP under the accountability rules of 28 different states.  No, they would not. 

In Massachusetts – a state that ensures students have to score high in order to be considered proficient and one with relatively challenging annual targets and AYP rules – only one of 18 elementary schools was projected to make AYP. In Wisconsin, with lower proficiency standards and more lenient annual targets and rules, 17 schools were projected to do so. Same kids, same schools – different states, different rules.

“In short,” the report concludes, ”how a school is labeled under NCLB depends largely on the state in which it’s located. This can demoralize educators in states with tough AYP rules while letting under-performing schools in lenient states slip under the accountability radar screen. It also creates the illusion of a national accountability system where there isn’t one.”

Here’s the executive summary of Fordham’s report, and here’s a video interview with Checker Finn about it.  And if you are one of those who prefers to laugh rather than weep in the face of outrage, Mathew Ladner of Jay Greene’s blog turns this whole miasma into a parody of the Budweiser “Real Men of Genius” ad campaign.  “Here’s to you, Mr. Wisconsin No Child Left Behind compliance guy!” Hilarious.

Can we now officially say that accountability as currently conceived and practiced is a joke?  A bad school in Massachusetts is a good school in Arizona. Failure in Nevada is magically redefined as success when it moves to Wisconsin.  Our crazy quilt of accountability systems only breeds cynicism about the whole enterprise (why improve schools when you can lower the bar?) and makes it baby simple to evade responsibility and all but impossible to reach informed conclusions about your child’s school. 

One standard, one yardstick, or else don’t bother.  Instead of location, location, location, let’s try transparency, transparency, transparency.

Hell. Handbasket. Do Not Pass Go. Do Not Collect $200

by Robert Pondiscio
February 12th, 2009

I know, I know.  You’ve heard it all before.  Go ahead and dismiss this as yet another greybeard nattering on about the way things used to be. J. Edward Ketz, a Penn State accounting professor has seen a lot of changes in students in the past 35 years, none of them good.  Students’ educational backgrounds, analytical thinking, quantitative skills, reading abilities, willingness to work, and their attitudes concerning the educational process have all gone south, he says.

Why are we in this mess?  K-12 explains a lot; we face a national disgrace in what takes place during these years. I still remember my daughter’s  science teacher stating that the sun revolved around the earth. And that is only one of several follies we encountered with the modern K-12 ensemble.

“We used to view education as a learning process that liberated the individual and created mature adults,” Ketz concludes.  “Today society tends to view education as a commodity to purchase and list on a résumé, not caring whether any learning occurs.”

(Via Joanne Jacobs)

Who’s To Blame for Bad Schools? Look in the Mirror

by Robert Pondiscio
January 27th, 2009

<a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=OXQs8ykQ0dg&amp;feature">http://youtube.com/watch?v=OXQs8ykQ0dg&amp;feature</a>

Nevada’s public education system is a “disaster” says the state’s university chancellor, and Nevadans have no one to blame but themselves.  In a remarkable and scathing “State of the System” speech ostensibly to rail against proposed cuts to the state’s education budget, James Rogers calls Nevada’s parents to account.

The state of K-16 education in Nevada is where the public–that is you out there–has allowed it to sink.  Your only relationship with the education system is to ship your unprepared kids to school not with the expectation of success, but with the demand that an education system, inadequately funded, develop and/or repair children that you as a parent did not prepare for school or support while your children attended school.  If you want a competent and productive education system, tell your Governor and legislators to fund it. They do what they think you want them to do.  That’s why they’re called public servants.  It is the public–that means you– that has created this disaster of a public education system. 

It’s a blistering Jeremiad.  Nevadans once hoped to see their kids go to college, but today are satisfied if their children graduate from eighth grade, Rogers says.  And don’t blame educators for the state’s poor schools.  The founder and owner of Sunbelt Communications Company, which owns and operates 16 NBC and FOX affiliate television stations in five western states, Rogers says when he became Nevada’s chancellor five years ago he came to the job with a sense that education was “an overweight, lazy, unproductive massive intellect, with no direction and little desire to get there fast.” 

Well I have looked at the alleged inefficiencies, not only in higher education but in K through 12.  The majority of educators work very hard, are much smarter than their critics, and are far more organized and efficient than their critics.  If they have a shortcoming it is that they are for the most part not aggressive, mean-spirited people, but are instead caring, concerned individuals who want to teach, not fight….and the success of your children is more important than their own success.

Neither are school administrators to blame, according to Rogers.  “I have looked at the administration of the education system,” he notes. ”I find them no less productive than the administrators of the television stations I own or the banks of which I have served as a board member over the last 28 years.”

The state’s Republican party has fired back saying Rogers “owes every caring parent in the state a public apology.  For Chancellor Rogers to blame the failure of the government-run education system on parents is nothing short of outrageous.”

Rogers aired his speech on his Nevada TV stations.  You can watch it in two parts on YouTube, Part I here, Part II here.