Are We Really Waiting for Superman?

by Lisa Hansel
May 10th, 2013

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Posted in Curriculum, Education Leadership, Teacher Training | 21 Comments »

Having spent the last week thinking a lot about teacher preparation, I’d like to share a few more thoughts on teaching, teacher preparation, and student achievement. In the last two posts, we’ve seen that far too many teacher preparation programs eschew preparation and that, instead, there’s an emphasis on social-justice activism, which often results in academic programs that try to build character while ignoring the social-justice lessons embedded in many great works of literature.

So the typical new teacher is minimally prepared, yet feels responsible for ameliorating the ills of society. On top of that, few administrators, leaders, or reformers offer any meaningful support.

We really are waiting for Superman (and using the dedicated, non-superhero teachers as scapegoats).

Most who care about education seem to agree that, while many of our schools are doing great things, many are not. Yet we skirt around the one lever for improvement that has shown the greatest potential: curriculum.

In a policy paper last year, two Brookings scholars, Matthew M. Chingos and Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst, argued that we ought to be paying far more attention to curriculum:

Students learn principally through interactions with people (teachers and peers) and instructional materials (textbooks, workbooks, instructional software, web-based content, homework, projects, quizzes, and tests). But education policymakers focus primarily on factors removed from those interactions, such as academic standards, teacher evaluation systems, and school accountability policies. It’s as if the medical profession worried about the administration of hospitals and patient insurance but paid no attention to the treatments that doctors give their patients.

There is strong evidence that the choice of instructional materials has large effects on student learning—effects that rival in size those that are associated with differences in teacher effectiveness. But whereas improving teacher quality through changes in the preparation and professional development of teachers and the human resources policies surrounding their employment is challenging, expensive, and time-consuming, making better choices among available instructional materials should be relatively easy, inexpensive, and quick.

Administrators are prevented from making better choices of instructional materials by the lack of evidence on the effectiveness of the materials currently in use. For example, the vast majority of elementary school mathematics curricula examined by the Institute of Education Sciences What Works Clearinghouse either have no studies of their effectiveness or have no studies that meet reasonable standards of evidence.

The two problems noted—ignoring curriculum and not having adequate studies of curriculum—go together. Since curriculum is not a policy priority, it is very hard to win grant money to study curriculum. The Core Knowledge Foundation, for example, has some evidence of the student achievement increasing with high-quality implementation of the Core Knowledge Sequence and Core Knowledge Language Arts—but we are not satisfied with the amount of research we currently have. (Calling all researchers, doctoral students, and grant makers: We would welcome additional studies!) Core Knowledge materials are based on an extremely strong research foundation from cognitive science showing that reading comprehension, critical thinking, and other important abilities rely heavily on having relevant knowledge stored in memory. Still, we would love to have an even stronger set of classroom-based studies comparing Core Knowledge with other programs.

Let’s briefly imagine a new educational universe in which we did put time and money into studying curricula and could say with confidence that programs A, B, and C are more effective than programs X, Y, and Z. Then we could take a crucial step toward excellence and equity: We could build educational systems around effective programs.

School districts could select a specific program (or more than one, assuming they did not overlap or interfere with each other) and have more intensive, targeted professional development. Students that changed schools (at least within the district) would not fall so far behind academically because their academic program would not change dramatically with each school change.

Best of all, teacher preparation programs could offer minors in the most-effective curricula. So, an aspiring elementary-grades teacher could, for example, major in elementary education and minor in Core Knowledge Language Arts. An aspiring 8th grade science teacher could major in secondary science and minor in the Core Knowledge Sequence with a specialization in how the Sequence enables teachers to make cross-curricular connections.

Contrast this with typical preparation, in which, as University of Michigan education professor David Cohen puts it, aspiring teachers learn to teach nothing in particular:

Absent a common curriculum, teachers-in-training could not learn how to teach it, let alone how to teach it well. Hence, teacher education consists of efforts to teach future teachers to teach no particular curriculum. This is very strange, since to teach is always to teach something, but the governance structure of U.S. education has long forbidden the specification of what that something would be. For the most part, teacher education has been accommodating: typically, teacher candidates are taught how to teach no particular version of their subjects. That arrangement creates no incentives for those training to be teachers to learn, relatively deeply, what they would teach, nor does it create incentives for teacher educators to learn how to help teacher candidates learn how to teach a particular curriculum well. Instead, it offers incentives for them to teach novices whatever the teacher educators think is interesting or important (which often is not related to what happens in schools) or to offer a generic sort of teacher education. Most teachers report that, after receiving a teaching degree, they arrived in schools with little or no capability to teach particular subjects.

If teacher preparation were largely devoted to the content teachers will be teaching, then there would be time to address not only content knowledge, but pedagogical content knowledge. Pedagogical content knowledge is about knowing the most effective methods for teaching the particular content students must master. It is a relatively young concept, but it appears powerful. So far, what seems most important is being able to predict and correct students’ misconceptions.

A recent study of middle schools science teachers provides a good example:

The study, conducted by researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, targeted middle school physical science. The researchers enlisted 181 teachers to administer a multiple-choice test of student knowledge of science concepts. Twelve of the 20 items were designed to have a “particularly wrong answer corresponding to a commonly held misconception,” explained Philip Sadler, the lead author and a senior lecturer at the Harvard-Smithsonian center.

The “unusual” part of the study, he said, was that teachers also took the test, and were asked to identify both the correct answer and the one students were most often likely to incorrectly select. Although the teachers overall did “quite well” at selecting the correct answer, the results were more mixed in predicting students’ incorrect response.

“Teacher knowledge was predictive of higher student gains. No surprise there,” Sadler explained in an email. “However, for more difficult concepts where many students had a misconception, only teachers who knew the science and the common misconceptions have large student gains.” What’s key, he said, is knowing “what was going on in their students’ heads.”

Over time, many teachers do see patterns in students’ questions and errors, and eventually figure out which misconceptions are common and how to prevent or correct prevent them. If the whole educational field would take curriculum more seriously, studies could be done to rapidly accumulate such knowledge.

Ultimately, the achievement gap is a knowledge gap, which has its roots in an opportunity-to-learn gap. For students and teachers, we could close the opportunity gap by figuring out which curricula are most effective, conducting ongoing studies to increase effectiveness, and making the best curricula the foundation for teacher preparation.

We don’t have to wait for Superman. We can make teaching a profession that “regular” teachers (i.e., many of our country’s most dedicated, caring people) can succeed in. The nation’s teachers don’t deserve blame; they deserve support. Let’s start with developing better curricula and training.

 

Happy 85th Birthday E. D. Hirsch, Part 3: Breaking Free from the Siren Song

by Lisa Hansel
March 21st, 2013

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Posted in Core Knowledge, Curriculum, Literacy, Research and Reports | 5 Comments »

Three decades ago, in the spring of 1983, E. D. Hirsch published an essay titled “Cultural Literacy” in the American Scholar. He also turned 55. At an age when most people are getting serious about their retirement planning, Hirsch was embarking on a new career. He didn’t know it at the time; he thought the research on the need for background knowledge for skilled communication was so clear that all schools would rapidly revise their curricula and his job would be done. The research was clear, but the resistance to new ideas and evidence was not. Today, the siren song that elevates skills above content remains strong. Here is an excerpt from “Cultural Literacy” in which Hirsch explains how he broke free.

The received and dominant view of educational specialists is that the specific materials of reading and writing instruction are interchangeable so long as they are “appropriate,” and of “high quality.”…

I call this the doctrine of educational formalism….

During most of the time that I was pursuing research in literacy I was, like others in the field, a confirmed formalist. In 1977 I came out with a book on the subject, The Philosophy of Composition, that was entirely formalistic in outlook. One of my arguments, for instance, was that the effectiveness of English prose as an instrument of communication gradually increased, after the invention of printing, through a trial-and-error process that slowly uncovered some of the psycholinguistic principles of efficient communication in prose. I suggested that freshman could learn in a semester what earlier writers had taken centuries to achieve, if they were directly taught those underlying psycholinguistic principles….

So intent was I upon this idea that I undertook some arduous research…. For about two years I was deeply engaged in this work. It was this detailed engagement with the realities of reading and writing under controlled conditions that caused me finally to abandon my formalistic assumptions….

[My colleagues and I] devised a way of comparing the effects of well-written and badly written versions of the same paper…. To our delight, we discovered that good style did make an appreciable difference, and that the degree of difference was replicable and predictable. So far so good. But what became very disconcerting about these results was that they came out properly only when the subjects of the papers were highly familiar to our audiences…. What we discovered was that good writing makes very little difference when the subject is unfamiliar. We English teachers tend to believe that a good style is all the more helpful when the content is difficult, but it turns out that we are wrong….

While the variability of reading skills within the same person was making itself disconcertingly known to me, I learned that similar variability was showing up in formal writing skills—and for the same reasons. Researchers at the City University of New York were finding that when a topic is unfamiliar, writing skill declines in all of its dimensions—including grammar and spelling—not to mention sentence structure, parallelism, unity, focus, and other skills taught in writing courses. One part of the explanation for such results is that we all have limited attention space, and cannot pay much heed to form when we are devoting a lot of our attention to unfamiliar content. But another part of the explanation is more interesting. Part of our skill in reading and in writing is skill not just with linguistic structures but with words. Words are not purely formal counters of language; they represent large domains of content….

It would be useful … to have guidance about the words that high school graduates ought to know—a lexicon of cultural literacy. I am thinking of a special sort of lexicon that would include not just some ordinary dictionary words, but would also include proper names, important phrases, and conventions. Nobody likes word lists as objects of instruction; for one thing, they don’t work. But I am not thinking of such a lexicon as an object of instruction. I am thinking of it rather as a guide to objects of instruction. Take the phrase “First Amendment,” for instance. That is a lexical item that can hardly be used without bringing in a lot of associated information. Just what are the words and phrases that our high school graduates should know?

So began E. D. Hirsch’s 30-year struggle to close the achievement gap by giving all children the skills and the broad knowledge that enable strong reading and writing. In the years following his American Scholar essay, Hirsch wrote a bestselling book version, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, and developed a lexicon of what high school graduates should know: the Core Knowledge Sequence. To find out how the Sequence came about, we turn to The Knowledge Deficit: Closing the Shocking Education Gap for American Children. Pages 74 – 77 answer the question “Which Knowledge Do We Need?”*

What exactly does that enabling knowledge consist of? That is the nuts-and-bolts question….

It is assumed by the American educational community that any “representative” knowledge will do. My colleagues Joseph Kett and James Trefil and I set out to develop more useful guidance for schools than this imprecise and inaccurate notion back in the 1980s. We asked ourselves, “In the American context, what knowledge is taken for granted in the classroom, in public orations, in serious radio and TV, in books and magazines and newspapers addressed to a general audience?” We considered various scholarly approaches to this problem. One was to look at word frequencies. If a word appeared in print quite often, then it was probably a word whose meaning was not going to be explained by the speaker or writer. We looked at a frequency analysis of the Brown Corpus, a collection of passages from very diverse kinds of publications that was lodged at Brown University, but we found that this purely mechanical approach, while partially valid, did not yield altogether accurate or intelligent results. For example, because the Brown Corpus was compiled in the 1950s, “Nikita Khrushchev” was a more frequent vocabulary item than “George Washington.”…

A much better way of finding out what knowledge speakers and writers take for granted is to ask these people themselves whether they assume specific items of knowledge in what they read and write. This direct approach proved to be a sounder way of determining the tacit knowledge, because what we must teach students is the knowledge that proficient readers and writers actually use. From people in every region of the country we found a reassuring amount of agreement on the substance of this taken-for-granted knowledge….

Several years after our compilation of such knowledge was published, independent researchers investigated whether reading comprehension ability did in fact depend on knowledge of the topics we had set forth. The studies showed an unambiguous correlation between knowledge of these topics and reading comprehension scores, school grades, and other indexes of reading skill. One researcher investigated whether the topics we set forth as taken-for-granted items are in fact taken for granted in newspaper texts addressed to a general reader. He examined the [New York] Times by computer over a period of 101 months and found that “any given day’s issue of the Times contained approximately 2,700 occurrences” of these unexplained terms, which “play a part in the daily commerce of the published language.”

An inventory of the tacit knowledge shared by good readers and writers cannot, of course, be fixed at a single point in time. The knowledge that writers and radio and TV personalities take for granted is constantly changing at the edges, especially on topical issues. But inside the edges, at the core, the body of assumed knowledge in American public discourse has remained stable for many decades…. If we want to bring all students to reading proficiency, this stable core is the enabling knowledge that we must teach.

That’s more easily said than done. One essential, preliminary question that we faced was, how can this necessary knowledge be sequenced in a practical way for use in schools? We asked teachers how to present the topics grade by grade and created working groups of experienced teachers in every region of the country to produce a sequence independently of the others. There proved to be less agreement on how to present the material grade by grade than there had been in identifying what the critical topics are…. The sequencing of many topics is inherently arbitrary. While it’s plausible in math that addition needs to come before multiplication and that in history Greece probably ought to come before Rome, maybe it’s not plausible that Greece should come before George Washington.

We collected the accumulated wisdom of these independent groups of teachers, made a provisional draft sequence, and in 1990 held a conference where 145 people from every region, scholarly discipline, and racial and ethnic group got together to work extremely hard for two and a half days to agree on an intelligent way to teach this knowledge sequentially. Over time, the Core Knowledge Sequence has been refined and adjusted, based on actual classroom experience. It is now used in several hundred schools (with positive effects on reading scores), and it is distinguished among content standards not only for its interest and richness, but also because of the carefully-thought-out scientific foundations that underlie the selection of topics.

 

* For the endnotes, please refer to the book.

 

Do you have a birthday message for E. D. Hirsch or favorite quote from him? Please share it with all of us in the comments.

You may also be interested in other posts in this birthday retrospective:

Part 1: The Secret to Lifelong Learning

Part 2: Avoidable Injustice

Part 4: Passing the Test

 

 

Choosing Curriculum Without Evidence

by Robert Pondiscio
April 13th, 2012

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Posted in Curriculum, Educational Policy | 17 Comments »

If you wanted to improve medical care, would you focus on hospital administration and patient insurance?  Or would you look at the treatment doctors were giving patients?  Would you try to improve a sports team’s won-loss record by focusing on stadium layout and the team’s travel schedule?  Then why, ask Brookings’ Matthew Chingos and Russ Whitehurst, do education policy makers focus most of their attention on academic standards, teacher evaluation, and school accountability policies?  Shouldn’t we be looking instead at instructional materials?

“There is strong evidence that the choice of instructional materials has large effects on student learning—effects that rival in size those that are associated with differences in teacher effectiveness,” the two write in a new paper from Brookings, Choosing Blindly: Instructional Materials, Teacher Effectiveness, and the Common Core.

“Whereas improving teacher quality through changes in the preparation and professional development of teachers and the human resources policies surrounding their employment is challenging, expensive, and time-consuming, making better choices among available instructional materials should be relatively easy, inexpensive, and quick.”

There’s one big hurdle to clear in correcting this rather obvious problem: Little effort has been made by the field to differentiate effective curricular materials from ineffective ones.  In fact, in most states, districts and schools, it’s nearly impossible to know what materials are being used at all.

“In every state except one, it is impossible to find out what materials districts are currently using without contacting the districts one at a time to ask them. And the districts may not even know what materials they use if adoption decisions are made by individual schools. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which has the mission of collecting and disseminating information related to education in the U.S., collects no information on the usage of particular instructional materials.”

Chingos and Whitehurst predict the blindness on curriculum will become a critical problem for Common Core Standards implementation.  “Publishers of instructional materials are lining up to declare the alignment of their materials with the Common Core standards using the most superficial of definitions,” they note.  “The Common Core standards will only have a chance of raising student achievement if they are implemented with high-quality materials, but there is currently no basis to measure the quality of materials. Efforts to improve teacher effectiveness will also fall short if they focus solely on the selection and retention of teachers and ignore the instructional tools that teachers are given to practice their craft.”

The paper offers up a number of suggestions:  State education agencies should collect data from districts on the instructional materials in use in their schools.   also wants to see the National Governors Association (NGA) and Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) “put their considerable weight behind the effort to improve the collection of information on instructional materials in order to create an environment in which states, districts, and schools will be able to choose the materials most likely to help students master the content laid out in the Common Core standards.”

Chingos and Whitehurst are dead-on in their critique of ed reform’s indifference to curriculum and materials.  When we focus on the mechanism by which schools are  created, managed, financed or evaluated, we are assuming that what kids learn, and with which materials, is pretty much settled, or doesn’t really matter.  All that’s left to do is figure out what works in terms of delivery of instruction and grow it, or figure out what doesn’t work and shut it down.  Any teacher who has worked with different literacy or math programs can easily attest this is not the case.

Storylines

by Robert Pondiscio
February 10th, 2012

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Posted in accountability, Educational Policy | 20 Comments »

“President Obama and Secretary Duncan pushed the reform envelope as far as they could be expected with these waivers….We remain skeptical, however, of the storyline that says we are a nation filled with states chomping at the bit to do the right thing for children but which are hamstrung from doing so by federal bureaucrats and paperwork.” — Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform on states receiving waivers from compliance with No Child Left Behind (via This Week in Education)

I remain equally skeptical of the storyline that says schools are dysfunctional purely as a result of adult indifference or self-interest.

I see no reason to believe that failing schools are filled with tenured layabouts refusing to teach and not getting fired.  In my experience, such schools are mainly filled with decent people trying their best and failing. And with depressing regularity, they are failing despite doing exactly what they were trained to do–even because they are doing exactly what they were trained to do.

The entire edifice of accountability assumes that American education is essentially a sound product, but it’s delivered poorly. I see no evidence to suggest this is true. I see much evidence to suggest it’s not.

Deregulating Education

by Robert Pondiscio
December 21st, 2011

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Posted in Education News, Education Practice | 20 Comments »

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What we’re really talking about is deregulating it.

News Flash! School Culture Matters

by Robert Pondiscio
December 12th, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now that would be counterintuitive. And welcome.

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.

Class Warfare—Over What?

by Guest Blogger
August 17th, 2011

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Posted in Curriculum, Education Practice, Teaching | 13 Comments »

by Diana Senechal

In a whopping 437 pages, Steven Brill’s Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools (Simon & Schuster, 2011) recounts a dramatic and vicious battle between two education camps: on the one side, hedge fund managers, aggressive chancellors, determined charter school leaders, teachers who work endlessly, all fighting for reform as they define it; on the other, the big unions who use their clout to block, complicate, or slow down reform. The book has good guys, bad guys, and a surprise twist. Yet it does not stop to consider what education is, what it contains, or what ends it serves. This weakness is not particular to Brill or his book; it is at the core of the battles he describes. But Brill takes part uncritically.

About a hundred pages into the book, Brill describes Anthony Lombardi, a tough-minded middle school principal in Queens, New York, who “would target the teachers he thought were laggards and make life miserable for them.” One of Lombardi’s initiatives was the implementation of a new curriculum that he had developed “with consultants from Columbia Teachers College”; at his urging, teachers uncomfortable with the new curriculum left the school. Former New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein told Brill that “Lombardi had emptied his whole school of the incompetents”; Brill accepts this assertion at face value, without looking into the curriculum or the objections. At the very least, Brill could have examined the curriculum; those who resisted it may have had good reasons for doing so.

As the book continues, so does Brill’s error, his dismissal of the substance of education. When describing Children First, the initial education plan of Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein, Brill fails to mention the new mandated curricula: Balanced Literacy, Everyday Mathematics, and Impact Mathematics. Balanced Literacy contained more pedagogical prescriptions than subject matter: for instance, a teacher’s direct instruction was to last no longer than 10-15 minutes, and students were to spend much time in groups. Literacy coaches told teachers how to arrange their rooms, what to say in their mini-lessons, and how to praise or correct students. None of this is brought up in the book. Brill notes that Randi Weingarten (at that time the president of the United Federation of Teachers) asked for “teacher input into textbooks and class configuration, more teacher discretion in classroom instruction,” and more. Instead of taking these demands seriously, or even considering them, Brill appears to join in with Klein, who “laughed off these demands from the union.” What is so laughable about a demand that teachers be able to exercise their best judgment? If they are not allowed to use their minds, how will they teach their students to do so?

In Brill’s view, the great teachers are the ones who do what they’re told (and much more), give students their cell phone numbers, agree to work longer days without extra pay, never sit down, and raise test scores. (Later in the book, he grants that teachers should be allowed to sit down now and then.) But education is not a hundred-meter sprint. To teach anything of substance, a teacher needs time for solitary planning and preparation, time to meet informally and formally with colleagues, time to confer with students, time to think. The class needs time to contemplate and discuss interesting topics, even when they are not related to the immediate goals. Often the goals are well served by such forays, as students learn to consider the subject from different angles. Such time does not exist in abundance, but there is nothing heroic about taking it all away.

To Brill, such quiet and ruminative work is unheard of. He criticizes the New York City teachers’ union (the UFT) for “Circular 6,” a rule that reduced teachers’ scheduled non-classroom duties from two periods to one daily. The other period would still be allotted to professional duties, but teachers could choose from a list, and they did not have to be in a specific place at a specific time. To Brill, this means an “extra period off during the day, a perk”; apparently, if teachers are not given tasks at specific places and times, they will do nothing. This assumption is false; it is precisely the self-motivated teachers who need flexibility and will be driven away by an overly prescriptive schedule. Suppose, for instance, that a teacher wishes to help write the school’s curriculum in a particular subject. She will need to write on her own, consult with others, and examine resources. To do this, she cannot always be in a specified location; she should be trusted to move around as necessary to get the work done.

Many other initiatives discussed in Brill’s book—charter school co-location in public school buildings, the Obama administration’s Race to the Top, the Los Angeles Times’ publication of teachers’ value-added ratings, the mass firing of teachers at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island—evade the question of what the schools are seeking to teach. Brill visits a KIPP classroom that in his view resembles other KIPP classrooms he has seen: “full of focused, connected children with a magnetic teacher in front of her room.” But KIPP co-founder Dave Levin sees all sorts of things wrong with it: in Brill’s words, “an imperfect bulletin board, three students whose eyes were wandering, the teacher turning her back to face the blackboard, an incomplete reading log.” Brill does not question or scrutinize Levin’s criticism, but he should. There is a fine line between “sweating the small stuff” and neglecting the larger picture. Do wandering eyes necessarily mean lack of interest or involvement? How does a bulletin board affect the lesson, the course, and the overall education of the students?

Such classroom descriptions make up only a fraction of the book. Brill seems much more interested in the politics of education reform: who is aligned with whom, who knows what about whom, and so forth. Some of his favorite reformers share his predilection for power play. Brill describes a 2008 memo written by Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) leaders who sought to prevent the selection of Linda Darling-Hammond as secretary of education. Their memo stated, among other things, that Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America, was DFER’s second-choice recommendation after Arne Duncan. According to Brill, this was an attempt to “lure” Darling-Hammond into a negative response that would weaken her prospects (she had written critically of TFA in the past). Here are influential policymakers using memos not to put forth their views but to manipulate and hurt others. Here is corruption of language and leadership, a void rolling at full speed. Brill rolls along.

Ultimately Brill discovers an error in his own thinking. For most of the book, he glorifies the teachers, leaders, and policymakers who relentlessly pursue success (in terms of student achievement on tests). Later, he acknowledges that such people—especially those who actually work in schools—cannot be sustained, let alone duplicated. He quotes a Harlem Success Academy teacher who reports feeling “overwhelmed, underappreciated, and underpaid” and who says that “this model just cannot scale.” Recognizing that not all teachers are or can be extraordinary, Brill recommends that reformers work with unions—particularly leaders like Weingarten—to “motivate and enable the less than extraordinary in the rank and file to respond to this emergency” (that is, the emergency of failing schools).

Reasonable as Brill’s conclusion sounds, it rests on a flawed definition of “extraordinary.” Extraordinary runners are those who run the fastest or longest (or both). Extraordinary—and good—educators are those who bring subjects to their students in compelling and lasting ways. Some may look like Brill’s high-energy heroes; some may not. A sense of urgency is helpful if one knows what one is doing and takes both a long and a short view. There are quiet teachers who teach their subjects with passion, knowledge, and expertise. There are schools that resist frenzy and fads and educate their students well.

Results are important, but only in relation to what we are trying to do. We may not agree on what we are trying to do, but we should ask what it is, listen to ourselves and others, and follow our best understanding. Class Warfare does not even pose the initial question; it reads like a video game, where the goal is to win points, period.

Diana Senechal has written for American Educator, Education Week, Educational Leadership, American Educational History Journal, and numerous blogs. She holds a Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures from Yale and taught for four years in New York City public schools. Her book, Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture, will be published by Rowman & Littlefield Education in November.

Hacking at Branches

by Robert Pondiscio
July 11th, 2011

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Posted in Core Knowledge, Curriculum, Educational Policy | 1 Comment »

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”  — Henry David Thoreau

As of Friday, your humble blogger completed a travel jag that had him on the road for all but one week since Memorial Day.  I was pleased to attend the 2011 National Charter Schools Conference in Atlanta, the TEAM CFA conference, and the annual Education Commission of the States Forum in Denver along the way. 

The blogging has been light to non-existent during this stretch, which I regret on the one hand.  But on the other, I’m happy to have had an excuse to sit on the sidelines during the ongoing rhetorical summer heat wave.  Like another July battle 150 years ago, lines have been drawn, and the big guns come out to boom and blast at each other from fixed positions, losing sight now as they did then, that what unites us ought to be more important than what divides us.  All wars end eventually, and common purpose, one hopes, will one day be restored to the combatants in the ”education wars” — a dispiriting term being tossed about with greater frequency of late.

Speaking at the ECS conference was a particular privilege.  I was pinch-hitting for E.D. Hirsch on the topic “What is holding back reading achievement?” and addressed the need for state-level education and elected officials to understand the problems embedded in the skills-driven, how-to approach to teaching reading comprehension that dominates elementary education.  The main message:  reading comprehension is not a skill (despite how we typically teach it and test it), and a vision of education reform that does not account for the absolute necessity to build student knowledge and vocabulary as a means of enhancing reading comprehension tacitly encourages poor classroom practice.

Hack, hack, hack…

Building a Better Edsel

by Robert Pondiscio
May 20th, 2011

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Posted in Curriculum, Education Practice, Teaching | 22 Comments »

Update:  Kitchen Table Math picks up the thread here and here.  Likewise Diana Senechal, guest blogging at Joanne Jacobs, here.

If you’ve spent any time at all on this blog, you’ve been treated—OK, subjected—to occasional rants about mainstream education reform’s blind spot on curriculum and instruction.  Teaching is a management issue; something to be measured by standardized tests.  And curriculum?  Hey, in the hands of a great teacher, every curriculum is great.  Or something like that.  With charters to build, tests to administer and performances to judge reformers remain largely agnostic, incurious or just plain indifferent about what happens inside the classroom.  This myopia informs policy:  Race to the Top enshrined 19 different fixes for American schools.  Curriculum didn’t make the cut.  If you were in charge of fixing America’s schools, could you find 19 things for your To Do list before you get around to curriculum? Seriously?  

A fascinating email found its way into my inbox last week describing a visit to a high profile, “no excuses” charter school.  The email was written by someone who is solidly pro-reform and strongly pro-charter.   She spent the morning visiting Big Name Charter and pronounced herself aghast.  “The school is fantastically well run, and the kids are on task —- and it is all fuzzery all the time. The reading curriculum is Fountas and Pinnell; the math curriculum is so bad it has sparked parent uprisings across the country,” she writes.

“Teachers aren’t allowed to use direct instruction for longer than a few  minutes; then the students must repair to their pods and discover knowledge. After they discover knowledge, which means solving ONE problem, they return to the rug and explain their “strategies” to each other.  Although the school prides itself on efficient use of time, the students I saw were spending a lot of time doing nothing at all while they waited for the other kids to finish so the whole group could migrate back to the rug.  

“Everything was ordered and timed and assessed, yet the curriculum is crap,” the observer concludes.  

How can this happen, she wanted to know, in a school that prides itself on data-driven decision-making?  What kind of data, she asked, did they use when it came time to choose a curriculum?  Tellingly, she notes it was the one moment where her host “suddenly sounded like a regular denizen of public education.”

“Tests can’t tell you that much about whether a curriculum is good because some of the kids taking the tests might have been tired that day; the only way you can decide on curriculum is to go into the classroom and ask a child a question and get his response. That’s how you “know.”  

“This is a data-driven school, and they don’t use data to choose curriculum,” she fumed.  I wish I could say I’m surprised.  When it comes to curriculum and instruction, a field that can’t reach consensus about anything suddenly treats what children should learn and how they should learn it as settled.  If your primary concern is measuring teacher perfomance, you are assuming–are you not?–that what is to be taught and learned has been established.  All that’s left to do is separate good practitioners from bad ones.

If you had a time machine and put a team of leading ed reformers in charge of the Edsel at Ford Motor Company 50 years ago, they would set to work energetically measuring the productivity of assembly workers (because we know—we know—that great assembly workers are the most important contributor to success in manufacturing). They would put a bonus plan in place to reward them when sales improved.  And when that failed, they would shut down plants turning out Edsels that sold poorly and build brand new plants.  

To make more Edsels.  

Meanwhile, across town, critics point to wages and working conditions and ask how assembly workers can build better Edsels when they can’t feed their families or afford better health care?  You can’t possibly fix the Edsel unless you fix that first.

Back to Big Name Charter School.  By all available data, the school described above is doing very, very well. That said, the oldest students are still young, and the big challenges lie ahead: Will they avoid the 8th grade slump?  Will they keep their low-income, minority students in the fold through high school?  What then?  

The long view may be slowly, quietly emerging–as it should and must–as the question in education reform.  To their great credit, KIPP recently released a remarkable report on the college completion rates of its students.  It shows “only 33 percent of students who completed a KIPP middle school 10 or more years ago have graduated from a four-year college.”  Surprised?  You shouldn’t be.  It’s slightly better that the 30% college completion rate of Americans at large, and four times better than the average for the low-income minority population KIPP serves. That’s no mean feat. But the feel-good narrative driven by boosters of these schools — high graduation rates, first kids in their families to go to college, etc. – has tended to obscure how bewilderingly difficult it is to fulfill the mission that schools like Big Name Charter have set for themselves—to get kids not through the next standardized test, but on to college and the royal road to upward mobility and productive adult lives.  

How hard is that?  Bear in mind that based on the 2010 ACT test results, fewer than one in four U.S. high school graduates (24%) are prepared to do C-level work or better in all four tested areas.  That’s ALL college-bound students—not the hard-to-serve students typically served by KIPP and other “no excuses” charters, including the one visited by my correspondent.  Seen through this prism, even closing the achievement gap starts to seem like small beer.   It means nothing less (and nothing more) than bringing under-represented students up to the very same level of mediocrity that has persisted across the board for decades.  

The bottom line: There are undoubtedly process problems in American education.  But the biggest problem is the product.  And rather than face up to this, many of our most dynamic and energetic education leaders remain committed to the best possible delivery of the worst possible product.  Billions of dollars and countless energy expended in search of ways to build the best possible Edsel.  
 
I remain deeply impressed by the purposefulness, energy, positive school tone, etc. of the best of the “no excuses” schools.  But to answer the question “Are these schools effective?” will take many more years.  My best guess is that absent a much more rigorous course of study, an end to our obsession with skills-focused education, and getting over our long-standing aversion to a content-rich curriculum, you will over time see a fadeout.  Many of the kids in these schools will do well, and certainly far better than they would have otherwise.   Many more will regress to the mean.  And then we will conclude that the issue is poor teaching, lack of accountability, incentives, unions, the inevitable effects of poverty, lack of parental support and blah, blah, blah.

And no one will think to mention the curriculum.

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