Education Homilies and Other Empty Buckets

by Robert Pondiscio
July 5th, 2012

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Posted in Education Practice, Literacy, Teacher Training | 20 Comments »

Teaching, more than any other profession, loves its homilies.  “Be the guide on the side, not the sage on the stage.”  “Teach the child, not the lesson.”  We unthinkingly repeat these phrases not because they are correct, but because they are inspiring and ennobling.  Of all the homilies in education, none rankles more than this one: “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”  The quote is typically (and apparently mistakenly) attributed to the poet William Butler Yeats.

Writing at the Washington Post’s “Answer Sheet” blog, Carol Corbett Burris, a high school principal and former “New York State Outstanding Educator,” cites this homily to drive a takedown of the Relay Graduate School of Education (RGSE), an independent graduate school of education, which trains teachers for KIPP, Uncommon Schools, Achievement First and other so-called “no excuses” charter schools.   At Relay, “teacher education that balances research, theory and practice has been replaced by ‘filling the pail’ training,” Burris writes.  (Full disclosure: Relay started as “Teacher U” and was incubated by former Core Knowledge board member David Steiner at New York’s Hunter College, where Steiner heads the School of Education).

Burris watches a RGSE video on “Rigorous Classroom Discussion” and is not impressed.  “The teacher barks commands and questions, often with the affect and speed of a drill sergeant,” she writes.  “She is performing as taught by a system that, in my opinion, better prepares students for the dutiful obedience of the military than for the intellectual challenges they will encounter in college,” she observes. In Burris’s view RGSE and its methods portend something dark.

“I worry that the pail fillers are determining the fate of our schools. The ‘filling of the pail’ is the philosophy of those who see students as vessels into which facts and knowledge are poured. The better the teacher, the more stuff in the pail. How do we measure what is in the pail? With a standardized test, of course. Not enough in the pail? No excuses. We must identify the teachers who best fill the pail, and dismiss the rest.”

Having spent a fair amount of time in “no excuses” charter schools that use the techniques that Burris finds objectionable, I understand her criticism.  Such high-energy, tightly structured teaching techniques can seem militaristic, and in the hands of less skillful practitioners a bewildering blur.   But Burris misses badly when she dismisses what she sees as mere “pail filling.”  This badly and broadly misstates the critical role of knowledge (the stuff in the pail) to every meaningful cognitive process prized by fire-lighters: reading comprehension, critical thinking, problem solving, etc.   Dichotomies don’t get more false than between knowledge and thinking.

Few recent authors have been more pointed in decrying instructional practices that kill students’ love of reading than Kelly Gallagher, the author of Readicide.  He has been outspoken in criticizing “the development of test-takers over the development of lifelong readers.”  Yet I strongly suspect he too would dimiss pitting “bucket-filling” versus “fire-lighting” as wrong-headed.  In his 2011 book, Write Like This: Teaching Real-World Writing Through Modeling & Mentor Texts, Gallagher writes:

“I don’t want my students to read in only one particular genre.  I want my students, of course, to develop a wide spectrum of reading tastes.  To become eclectic readers, they need to broaden and deepen their background knowledge.  Likewise, one of my goals is to broaden my students’ writing spectrum, and if I have any chance of accomplishing this, again, I have to work on building their background knowledge.  whether we are talking about reading or writing, background knowledge is critical.  You have to know stuff to write about stuff.”

The damage done by those who denigrate the importance of a knowledge-rich classroom—especially for our most disadvantaged learners—can scarcely be overstated.   Education is neither the filling of a bucket or the lighting of a fire.  It’s both.

You can’t light a fire in an empty bucket.

Closing 1% of the “Parenting Gap” is Worth 150 KIPPs

by Robert Pondiscio
September 9th, 2010

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Posted in Education Theory, Educational Policy, Parents | 33 Comments »

What impact would improving parental involvement have on the overall state of student achievement in the U.S.?   

Bill Jackson, the founder and head of GreatSchools.org uses the term “parenting gap” to describe “the gap in knowledge, attitudes and behaviors between more effective and less effective parents.”  By Jackson’s estimate, closing 1% of the parenting gap nationally “would have about the same impact on college-ready high school graduation rates as replacing dozens of low-performing schools with about 150 high performing schools like KIPP.”   He’s quick to point out that his estimate is merely a back of the envelope calculation.  But the number is plausible and the reasoning unassailable.

An email from Jackson to Whitney Tilson was featured in the latter’s most recent ed reform email blast (it will appear on Tilson’s blog eventually, I assume) and is quoted here with Jackson’s permission.  Arguments about how best to teach poor children tend to come down to fix schools by addressing poverty, or address poverty by fixing schools, he notes.   But both sides are missing something.  “You don’t have to be rich to have high expectations for your children,” Jackson writes. “You don’t have to have a lot of money to make school and working hard a huge priority in your family’s life.”

“Here’s one way to dramatize this: If you’re a poor kid in New York, there is one ‘intervention’ that is at least as powerful as KIPP and other high-performing schools: having an Asian parent. I looked at the NYC NAEP data and the evidence is pretty compelling on that. I’m not saying that all parents should try to be ‘Asian’ in their parenting approach (or even that there is one ‘Asian’ way to parent). One sees effective parenting in all ethnic and income groups. I am saying that parents have a huge impact, and their potential impact depends only partly on how much money they have.”

“If we’re serious about education reform, we can’t ignore the parenting gap anymore,” Jackson concludes. 

Like curriculum, parenting is a powerful lever—and both are potentially much more impactful than the structural reforms in the standard ed reform playbook.  “Education reform is not just about school improvement,” Jackson concludes.  “It’s also about informing and inspiring parents so that they can ‘come on the team’ with high expectations and high levels of support. We’ll get much farther much faster if we think this way.”

Classroom Management Problems? Hire a Bouncer

by Robert Pondiscio
November 8th, 2009

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Posted in Education Practice | 17 Comments »

At Ed Policy Thoughts, Corey Bunje Bower looks at a letter to the editor in the New York Times from a former teacher, who suggests the way to improve public education is to hire a ‘bouncer’ for every classroom to handle disruptive students.  Corey is skeptical about the bouncer idea but points out “discipline was, far and away, the biggest problem in my school . . . and the main reason I left teaching.” 

Frequent commenter Brian Rude suggests teachers sometimes need extra help with discipline in the classroom just like a stalled car sometimes needs a wrecker.  “The wrecker provides a source of external power when needed, power in abundance, but only on those occasional times when the car cannot rescue itself,” he writes.  “So applied to classroom discipline, a wrecker would be some way to bring in an excess of control from an external source to impose very tight control of a class once in a while when needed.”

Elsewhere, writing in the Montreal Gazette, high school teacher Freda Lewkowicz observes that the ability to effectively discipline students and control the school environment is the difference between private and public schools.  Public schools, she writes, should have the same right as private schools to expel students.

Public schools don’t expel, even after repeated serious offences, while private schools do.  Parents need to ask themselves why only private schools have this right to create a positive, nurturing and safe learning environment for all. All students deserve this, don’t they? The manacles thrust on public schools forbid them to use tough love….Most parents are pro-discipline, pro-safety, pro-high standards and anti-bullying. Public schools should be allowed to free themselves from the shackles of ineffective discipline and deliver these goods for free.

In U.S. schools, of course, discipline is reflexively viewed through its impact on the disruptor, rarely the disrupted.  I’ve long wondered if the ability to control their learning environment isn’t the X Factor that allows high functioning charters to do so well.  This, to me, was one of the unwritten lessons of David Whitman’s Sweating the Small Stuff:  Getting the school environment right matters, and that’s hard to do without the ability to expel.   The usual counter-argument is that “no excuses” charters have low expulsion rates, so that’s not what’s happening.  I’m not sure I agree.

The real power of consequences comes not from their execution, but from the certainty that they can and will be used.  This simple premise explains why we never had a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union and why KIPP expels so few students.  The change in behavior comes from the the potential bad actor’s knowing he won’t get away with it.  Deterrence works.  If the price to be paid is too high, a rational decision can be made that chronic misbehavior is not worth it. 

Student discipline will probably never become the issue in ed policy that some teachers–and lots of ex-teachers–might wish.  But it should be recognized as a major impediment to student achievement.  The homily that effective instruction engages all learners at all times is lovely, but doesn’t reflect the reality many teachers face.  Indeed, I have long believed that the achievement gap is in large measure a time on-task gap.  Countless hours in chaotic schools are lost to disruption.

Work Hard, Be Good

by Robert Pondiscio
September 29th, 2009

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Posted in Curriculum, Education Practice | 5 Comments »

Schools should stop telling children to be nice and start teaching them to be good.

So writes Diana Senechal at DoubleX.  Reviewing Charles Murray’s recent book Real Education, she seizes on an unremarked upon quote in which the controversial author observes that schools “tell children to be nice but not how to be good. It tells children to be happy but does nothing to help children think about what happiness means.”  When Murray is right, she notes, “he is awfully right.”

Being nice is something of a bromide in education.  It’s enshrined in KIPP’s “Work Hard. Be Nice” slogan, and is the focus of a lot of group activity that revolves around “pleasant, uncontroversial subject matter” with familiar social messages  “Being good is more complex than being nice,” Diana observes. “It requires that we recognize our own faults and complexities; that we forgive each other; that we say what we think; that we make difficult decisions and face the consequences.”

When we read literature and history, we begin to glean what it means to be good. We see how people with the best intentions can fail; how people struggle with conflicting desires and values and make the best choices they can; how people overcome their limitations when put to the test. From works like Antigone, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Chekhov’s short stories, we learn about selfishness, cruelty, cowardice, and confusion, as well as grace, generosity, and patience. We come to see elements of all these traits in ourselves.

When the curriculum has substance, “students learn not only how to behave, but how to think and feel deeply,” Diana writes. ”They come to understand what humans are made of, what choices we have, and what reason, artistic gift, and imagination can do.”  By contrast, when the emphasis is on group work for its own sake, ”it becomes more important for students to work together than to learn something important.” 

If we only teach children to be nice, they will be at a loss when life calls for more than niceness. They will be at a loss when faced with problems—intellectual, practical, or emotional—that they have to solve on their own. And when the niceness wears out, they will reach for the next thing they know, the knee-jerk reaction. Murray is right: There is a wide gulf between being nice and being good—and while no curriculum can produce goodness, an excellent curriculum can give students a vision of what it might be.

KIPP To My U My Darlin’

by Robert Pondiscio
January 14th, 2009

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Posted in Education Leadership, Education News, Employment | 5 Comments »

UFT, that is.

By now you’ve heard the news:  Teachers at two KIPP charter schools in the Big Apple have voted to join the United Federation of Teachers.  It’s a big deal in the charter school world, since the charter movement, per the New York Times, “has long sold itself as an alternative that is not hamstrung by union contracts and work rules.”  Indeed, it was less than a week ago that KIPP’s founders were describing in a Washington Post op-ed the importance of their ability “to hire, fire and reward principals and teachers based on their students’ progress and achievement” and calling for giving “this same power to all public schools.”

“A union contract is actually at odds with a charter school,” Jeanne Allen, executive director of the Center for Education Reform, tells the Times.  Tout le blogs are weighing in.  Eduwonk parses the word “actually” in Allen’s quote.  “’Actually’ is the wrong word there.  The more accurate way to say that would be, “could be,’ writes Andy Rotherham.  “Why?  Well one example is the unionized and highly successful Green Dot Public Schools, another is KIPP Bronx, which has been unionized for some time.”  Fordham’s Flypaper says the move is “not a complete surprise.”

This movement away from zero-sum competition toward collaboration is positive, if it is done in a fashion that respects the essential operational freedoms that make charter schools successful, which include liberating schools in such areas as personnel, budget, and curriculum. Additionally, these partnerships need to emerge through a voluntary process based on mutual respect, as opposed to being foisted upon the charter school community by the state. State law should encourage partnerships, but not force them.

CER’s Jeanne Allen is having none of it, going after the UFT/AFT on Edspresso and asking “what campaign was hatched to convince so many KIPPsters that a regulatory environment would be preferable to the freedom they now enjoy.”  Says Allen:

The UFT – and its parent, the AFT – has been duplicitous in its support of charters. They often send in loyal teachers to cause dissention, as was the case across the water in New Jersey with successful charters such as the Rutgers-based LEAP more than a year ago. “Don’t you think we work too long for this money?” they ask innocently, and with a tenuous economy and fear in the hearts and minds of anyone who relies on a job for basic sustenance, drinking the union kool-aid may have been a bit easier for the NYC KIPP folks than others might have imagined.

At Edweek’s Teacher Beat, Vaishali Honawar calls it “a fairly big feather in the teachers’ unions’ let’s-organize-charter-schools cap.”  Gotham Schools’ Elizabeth Green has the letters the KIPP charter school teachers wrote to their bosses, KIPP colleagues and parents explaining their decision to unionize.

The larger question to be answered is what impact, if any, will this have on the halo effect KIPP enjoys in ed reform circles.  Sherman Dorn points out “unionization is usually driven by material and also by other considerations that motivate people to sign pledge cards: wanting to be treated decently on the job, having conditions likely to foster success, etc.”  Dana Goldstein at the American Prospect picks up thread. 

If schools like KIPP produce teacher burnout with their long days and high demands, then maybe that isn’t such a problem, the thinking goes. Maybe teaching is a profession for whip-smart folks in their twenties without families, not for tired middle-aged people who need flex-time. But what happened in Brooklyn is that the very young teachers in question disagreed. They said they were concerned about high turnover and thought it was hurting students. They want their profession to be sustainable and see unionization as a way to get there.

“But whatever happens, this is an important testing ground for the idea that the dueling corners of the education reform debate will accomplish most if they work together,” Goldstein concludes.

KIPP Founders: National Standards Will Raise Achievement

by Robert Pondiscio
January 9th, 2009

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Posted in accountability, Assessment and Testing, Educational Policy | 5 Comments »

Kipp founders Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin have an op-ed in the Washington Post today “how to channel Obama’s ‘yes, we can’ spirit into substantive education reform.”  Some of the pair’s five suggestions are pure bully pulpit stuff – inspiring Americans “to set a goal for our educational system akin to putting a man on the moon,” for example, and helping build enthusiasm and respect for teachers.  But the KIPPsters also issue a ringing call for national standards and assessments:

Perhaps the single greatest lever for raising expectations and achievement for all children in America would be the creation of national learning standards and assessments. With KIPP schools operating in 19 states, we have seen how the maze of state standards and tests keeps great teachers from sharing ideas, inhibits innovation, and prevents meaningful comparison of student, teacher and school performance. Rather than there being 50 different standards, Obama could unify the country around a common vision for the kind of teaching and learning we need to prepare our children for the future.

The pair also want Obama and Ed Secretary-designate Arne Duncan to back assessing teachers “on their demonstrated impact on student learning, not whether they hold a traditional teacher certifications,” and giving all public “the ability to hire, fire and reward principals and teachers based on their students’ progress and achievement.”

Facebook and Your Students: To Friend or Not To Friend?

by Robert Pondiscio
December 24th, 2008

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Posted in Education News, Education Practice | 6 Comments »

Should teachers allow their students to “friend” them on Facebook?  The Houston Chronicle, following up on a local story of an ex-school aide accused of having sexual exchanges with a 16-year-old former student he contacted online, asks where teachers should draw the line.

Opinions are mixed. Opponents fear innocent educators will be branded sexual predators for chatting with students online, while proponents caution against overreacting to a powerful communication tool. 

Most school districts, says the Chronicle, have yet to “define the rules of virtual engagement.  In the Houston area, many districts block access to social-networking sites on campus computers, but they don’t have policies addressing after-hours use between educators and students.”

Having current and former students as Facebook friends could be a particularly sensitive issue for KIPP charter schools and others where teachers are encouraged to give students their cell phone numbers.  KIPP co-founder Mike Feinberg tells the Chronicle he limits his Facebook contacts to alumni. “My personal threshold,” he says, “is not to accept friends on Facebook from KIPP-sters until they are in college.”  But Joseph Miller who runs the KIPP to College program tells the paper Facebook is a great way to keep in touch with current and former students.

Comments from teachers following the story show strongly divided opinions.  Says one, “Here’s the thing; a teacher is NOT a student’s “friend.” It’s called professionalism.”  Echoes another, “As a teacher of 8 years, I have never had the desire or the need to communicate with my students directly outside of the classroom. If I have an issue concerning absenteeism, behavior, or academics with my students that can not be handled in class, then I go directly to the parents and make them at least aware of the issue and leave it to them to accept their responsibility as a parent to raise their own child.”  However another teacher who uses Facebook points out,

“I teach at a school, however, where most students don’t have this kind of [parental] support at home, either because the parents are working multiple jobs or there’s something negative going on. I don’t seek my students out, but do let them “friend” me if they like. This does not mean that we are FRIENDS. It does let me keep an extra eye on them and make sure they are not doing/saying things they’re not supposed to. They find ways to slyly let me know that they appreciate that there’s someone who admonishes them with they curse, etc.”

Ultimately the question of to friend or not to friend becomes a proxy for the nature of the teacher/student relationship.  As another teacher on the Chronicle site puts it:

I am a teacher and it’s a long time coming that people wake up and realize that professionalism doesn’t mean de-humanizing yourself. A lot of times kids need to know that a teacher is human. Too many times teachers come into the classroom thinking that all the are going to do is teach. That’s the wrong assumption. Teachers are counselors, motivators, nurses aides, even temporary banks when kids forget their lunch money. Wouldn’t a parent want to know that their kids had a teacher like that?…We have to realize that this is the way the kids communicate. Most of my students are far more techno savvy than I am and have mobile applications for facebook on their iphones and smartphones. They are always on the go and this is the mode of communication. It’s a major communication shift that not just teachers, but more people need to learn how to integrate into our lives. The days of waiting for the land line phone to ring to get info are no more.

In the alternative certification program I went through, the New York City Teaching Fellows, one of the oft-repeated homilies was “students have to know that you care before they care what you know.”  While we were never explicity told to engage with our students after hours, playing basketball with kids after school, or taking them to a museum on the weekend was taken as proof of our commitment and praised.  On the other hand, the message was decidedly mixed: we were also warned explicitly never to allow ourselves to be in a classroom alone with a student with the door closed for any reason.

Poverty Matters vs. No Excuses

by Robert Pondiscio
December 3rd, 2008

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Posted in accountability, Opinion | 18 Comments »

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.

Nag Schools

by Robert Pondiscio
November 21st, 2008

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Posted 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.

KIPP Founder Supports National Standards and Assessments

by Robert Pondiscio
November 9th, 2008

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Posted in Assessment and Testing, Educational Policy | 5 Comments »

Add KIPP founder Mike Feinberg to the chorus of voices calling for national standards and assessments.  In an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle, Feinberg calls on President-elect Obama to choose an education secretary who is “committed to accountability and public school choice.”

President-elect Obama should pick a secretary of education who deeply understands the issues of funding and accountability on the federal, state and local levels, and who is passionate about student achievement and growth. Having one national test with one rigorous set of national standards will ensure our children can compete in the global marketplace as well as help parents know how well their children are progressing in school.

I’m increasingly convinced Diane Ravitch has the exact right approach to this with her recent call for national testing based on coherent curriculum standards, but without stakes or sanctions.  “The federal role should be to provide accurate information about student performance,” she wrote recently. “It should be left to states and districts to devise sanctions and reforms.  If states and localities don’t want to improve their schools, then we are in deeper trouble as a nation than any law passed by Congress can fix.”

In his op-ed, Feinberg also calls for streamlined pathways to the teaching profession, the growth of public charter schools, and a focus on pre-K and early childhood education.

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