Closing the Achievement Gap: Teaching Content
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?
“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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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)
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.
One of the best and most interesting recent articles about education disappeared beneath Thanksgiving leftovers and holiday shopping last Friday. It needs to be read and discussed. The Washington Post’s Jay Mathews tells the story of a young teacher who was rejected by the Philadelphia Teaching Fellows program, apparently for questioning the orthodoxy that good teachers should be able to raise the achievement of even the poorest kids. ”How do we address the outside influences if we pretend they don’t exist?” asks would-be teacher Erika Owens. Mathews is firmly in the “no excuses” camp, but to his credit he took Owens question seriously. ”It is too easy to make one side think they are being called racists and the other side think they are being called bullies,” observes Mathews, who opens his prodigious rolodex to ask a range of leading lights “Should teachers ignore poverty?”
“Full personal responsibility for student achievement and refusing to blame other factors does NOT mean we ignore the other factors,” KIPP co-founder Mike Feinberg wrote to Mathews. ”It simply means we view other factors as challenges and problems that require solutions, and we view the possibility of solutions as fitting inside our personal sphere of influences vs. shrugging our shoulders and giving up.”
“You have to know the challenges our kids come with, take them seriously, try to provide resources to address them but at the end of the day they CANNOT be an excuse for low achievement levels. That’s the bottom line,” writes Michelle Rhee, ever the lightning rod. “If a teacher doesn’t believe it’s possible for a teacher or school to overcome those factors, that is actually okay. Those teachers should teach in Fairfax County or somewhere where the challenges are not as great.”
As in most debates on education, there’s a false dichotomy at work. Surely there is a difference between the teacher who walks into the classroom assuming poor children can’t learn, and simply ascribing every student failure to a bad teacher. Poverty matters, clearly. And just as clearly it is unacceptable for a teacher to lower his or her expectations of a student’s capabilities based on economic status. But where this laudable belief leaves the rails is when you hold the teacher accountable if she fails to get every child to proficiency.
I think we would agree, that America would be well served if we could clone Rafe Esquith, the legendary Los Angeles 5th grade teacher and author of Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire, and put him in every classroom. But listen to this great and heroic teacher speak heresy: “People who believe that ‘all children will learn’ have watched too many Hollywood movies about teachers,” says Esquith. “The idea that all children will learn sounds wonderful, but these words need to be surrounded with a little bit of realism.” Based on this attitude alone, Esquith likely would have been rejected by the same program as the young would-be teacher who wrote to Mathews. It should go without saying that this is pure lunacy. “Never stop trying,” is an essential character trait for a teacher. “Never fail,” is a silly and ultimately self-defeating standard. Plan A is to hound our best and hardest-working teachers from the profession not for failing to believe they can work magic, but for actually failing to do so? What’s Plan B?
As Mathews correctly observes, attitude matters. But there is a world of difference between filling struggling schools with fiercely committed teachers willing to take on the hardest challenge in education, and labeling them as failures if they do not succeed with every child. By that standard, Rafe Esquith, arguably the best teacher in America, is a failure.
Finally, I can’t help but be struck by Mathews own take on the debate. “The prevailing view that impoverished children cannot be expected to learn as much as affluent children is poison in any classroom,” he writes. Sure, but let’s be clear about this: One of the reasons — perhaps THE reason — poor children don’t learn as much as affluent children has nothing to do with teacher attitudes.
The reason poor children learn less is because they are taught less.
President-elect Barack Obama’s first and hardest task on education will be to “restore the broad bipartisan support it took to pass the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act,” says the Washington Post’s Maria Glod. “That consensus has splintered, with people on both sides of the aisle souring on the law as it is overdue for reauthorization in Congress,” she writes
“Forget the details of No Child Left Behind. The big challenge there is having to rebuild that bipartisan coalition,” said Gary Huggins, director of the Commission on No Child Left Behind, an independent effort of the Aspen Institute. “On the Democratic side you have people walking away from it because of union pushback. On the GOP side you have people walking away because this is too large a federal footprint.”
I’m not sure I agree with Huggins’ broad-brush analysis. Among educators, the consensus tends be “good goal/bad bill.” In the main, teachers remain supportive of the laudable aims of NCLB, but live day-to-day with the law’s unintended consequences. Contrary to popular opinion, teachers are not accountability-averse. But the narrowing of curriculum that has occurred under NCLB has too often made school a content-free, joyless grind for teachers and students. The key to restoring bipartisan support and getting teachers on board is getting accountability right.
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