Tag Archive for 'joanne jacobs'

Goal Standard

Published by Robert Pondiscio on May 21, 2009 in Assessment and Testing, Core Knowledge School and accountability. 3 Comments

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.

Incentivize Everyone!

Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 18, 2009 in Education Theory and accountability. 2 Comments

The normally mild-mannered Joanne Jacobs goes off on a former Oregon teacher, principal and superintendent, who writes in a letter to the New York Times that President Obama, if he’s serious about about improving education, should “lose the words ‘achievement’ and ‘rigor,’ which have no connection to the inquisitiveness, determination, creative thinking and perseverance students need for genuine lifelong learning.” 

No connection? I remain dubious about the idea that those who’ve learned little in school will become “lifelong learners” at some happy day in the future.  As for “inquisitiveness, determination, creative thinking and perseverance,” those traits usually lead to achievement in the here and now without the necessity of waiting till winged pigs are ice-skating in hell.  I don’t even think that “achievement” and “rigor” foreclose the possibility of “creative thinking.” Not unless “creative” is a synonym for “wrong” and “thinking” means “making a poster.”

Amen to all that.  Click through to the letter in the Times and the writer’s main point (if you can ignore the nonsense about rigor and achievement) actually proposes a provocative idea.

If the federal government wants to reward school success, it should split those rewards among all those who have contributed: parents; the whole school faculty, including the principal; and the students themselves. The government might also reward the community that gave its schools financial and moral support.

Each of these ideas is fraught with baggage and “moral hazard” but each has its champions: New York City has piloted a program to offer cash incentives for things like attending their child’s parent teacher conferences, for example.  Roland Fryer and others have promoted pay-for-grades schemes.  Merit pay plans are legion.  I remain skeptical about all of them for various reasons. But I’m equally skeptical about treating teachers as the only moving part in the incentive equation.   If you believe that cash incentives matter, it would be an interesting thought exercise to think through what a Total Incentive Plan might look like.

Nag Schools

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 21, 2008 in Education Practice. 2 Comments

Over at City Journal, Joanne Jacobs reviews Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism, David Whitman’s book, and sees in it echoes of her own parenting.  “Nagging is love,” she writes.  ”If you care about a kid, you tell her what she’s doing right and what she’s doing wrong. You stick with her when she makes mistakes. You honor her successes. You nag.”  Whitman’s book, the title of which was much debated in the edusphere over the summer, looks at successful secondary schools, like KIPP and Amistad.

Many of the students at these schools are being raised by single mothers (or grandmothers) who provide unconditional love at home. Maternalism they’ve already got. At the “new paternalistic” schools, authoritative, caring adults demand good behavior as a condition for approval, adopting the traditional father’s role. Paternalistic schools explicitly teach students how to walk in the halls, sit upright in class, listen to speakers, ask questions, take notes, collaborate with classmates, and study for tests. They also teach students to shake hands, tuck in their shirts, and speak courteously using standard English. Street slang is banned.

“In some cases, the schools support values that parents hold themselves but have trouble enforcing on their own,” Jacobs writes.  It’s an important observation.  People who have never taught in inner city neighborhoods often don’t appreciate just how traditional many families are.  The methods and mindset described by Whitman are almost certainly more controversial among educators than among the parents of the children these schools serve.

Pay Me My Money Down

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 5, 2008 in Education Practice. 4 Comments

Merit pay is back in the news.  For kids, that is, not teachers.  Washington, DC’s Michelle Rhee is the latest to float the idea of paying 12-year-olds to act in their own best interest.  Fordham’s Liam Julian thinks it’s a bad idea, preferring the stick to the carrot.  But he makes the emotionally satisfying argument:

It is expected that students will complete assignments and work hard; it is legally demanded that they come to school. When these obligatory activities are rewarded with cash, what was once mundane becomes exceptional. Standards of right behavior take a prima facie tumble. The student who shunned class is paid to be there, which makes a mockery of the rules, and the pupil who already came to school on time now receives money for it and learns the false lesson that punctuality and conscientiousness are extraordinary and noteworthy. 

I’m not immune to this line of moral hazard reasoning, although I remain agnostic and willing to consider any reasonable idea to boost performance.  Still, I have a hard time arguing incentives are bad when I know darned well that there are affluent kids who are routinely bribed — er, rewarded — for good report cards with everything from a ten dollar bill to a new car in the driveway.  Add the fact that many inner city families have learned not to expect much from their education, and it becomes hard to ask them to take our good word for it that education is its own reward.

Greg Foster nails it at Pajamas Media.  “Admit it,” he writes, “you don’t care about whether it works nearly as much as you care about whether it’s just inherently wrong. This policy is the sort of thing people respond to purely by visceral reaction.”  He then goes on to explain why it’s not wrong.

Joanne Jacobs, as usual, is the voice of reason:  “If foundations want to fund pay-for-performance schemes,” she writes, ”I suggest they put the money into college (or job training) scholarship funds for hard-working students. Connect doing tomorrow’s homework with a brighter future down the road.”

21st Century Cliches

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 24, 2008 in Core Knowledge and Education Practice. 7 Comments

Does giving a kid an iPod mean you are teaching “21st century skills?”

A Chapel Hill, North Carolina middle school may become the first in the country to give an iPod to every teacher and student, “an experiment that would challenge teachers and administrators to ensure the hand-held devices are used as learning tools, not toys,” reports the News & Observer.  The school’s principal defends the iPod plan with a phrase that is rapidly becoming an education cliche:  “[Our teachers] state their commitment to teach 21st-century skills, because technology is the future for students and teachers.”

Reporter Matt Dees injects a healthy note of skepticism in his piece, noting “it’s still not clear how the iPod Touches would be used at Culbreth Middle School. And school officials know that students may use the iPod Touches more to download the new Jonas Brothers single than to tap the riches of human knowledge.” Dees quotes Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch, who comments, “There has been a tendency to use technology as a substitute for curriculum.”

Technique and how-to ideas have taken the place of deciding what it is, exactly, we want these children to learn, says Hirsch. But I have nothing against the technology if it’s in the service of grown-ups facing their responsibilities to decide what the students need to know precisely. If they did that, these technical gadgets will be valuable.

I’ve been hearing the phrase a lot, so I ask the question in earnest: What exactly does it mean to ”teach 21st century skills”?  Is learning to play an instrument a 21st century skill because you use an iPod?  Is writing a research paper a 21st century skill just because you use Google?  I’m hard-pressed to think of a single use of the phrase that didn’t conflate the tool and the task.   

In a New York Times piece last week, Steve Lohr noted the technology is starting to “turn the corner” in schools, and offered an example of how it can transform learning.  “The emphasis can shift to project-based learning, a real break with the textbook-and-lecture model of education. In a high school class, a project might begin with a hypothetical letter from the White House that says oil prices are spiking, the economy is faltering and the president’s poll numbers are falling. The assignment would be to devise a new energy policy in two weeks,” Lohr wrote.  But as Joanne Jacobs noted, there’s nothing new about project learning.  I would add that neither is working collaboratively intrinsically “21st century.”

Critical thinking? Problem solving? As old as banging rocks together to make fire.  Working collaboratively?  You mean, like hunting in groups to bring down a antelope?  I’m no Luddite, and I’m all for using technology in the service of learning.  But what are these uniquely “21st century skills?”  Are there any?