Reforminess: 120, Content-rich Curriculum: 45

I saw this article in the Washington Post about DCPS's cutting the minimum recess for elementary students to 20 minutes day. It goes without saying that twenty minutes per day of recess for younger students is ridiculously inadequate. But here's what really caught my eye (emphasis mine):

Recess time varies in the District. Some schools saw a reduction this year as Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson implemented new requirements meant to ensure that all elementary students get a minimum amount of time in each subject each day: two hours of literacy, 90 minutes of math, and 45 minutes of science or social studies. An additional 45 minutes is required for an elective, such as art, music or physical education.

What? Isn't DC a Common Core adopter? Isn't the Common Core supposed the second coming of curricular education reform?

If you're spending two hours a day on "literacy" and forty-five minutes a day on non-math content (social studies or science) and if you consider art, music, physical education, or foreign language to be an "elective" rather than crucial content, then the Common Core will not help your students because you're not getting the Common Core's supposed intent. In this case, the assumption is that literacy is a skill that must be mastered before children learn content. "Literacy" is primary and content is an after thought.

So what do Common Core advocates, especially those who also support current education reforms, think of this? Just as I find their silence on expansion of central bureaucracy and spending thereon baffling, I find their silence on this topic baffling, and troubling, as well.

UPDATED: Putting off rich curriculum means putting off reading proficiency

Recently, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell proposed and the General Assembly approved a bill that allows elementary schools to apply for waivers from high-stakes science and social studies testing (aka SOLs) for third graders. So far this testing season, approximately twenty-five public elementary schools have availed themselves of this waiver. The idea is that before struggling readers can learn content they have to master reading comprehension.

Virginia's Deputy Secretary of Education Javaid Siddiqui thinks this is a good idea:

The law, which expires in 2015, is a kind of a pilot program, Siddiqi said. He said that schools with low reading pass rates often have low pass rates in social studies and science because the two are connected. “It’s not about what they know,” Siddiqi said. “They are struggling with comprehension.”

On the one hand, I am all for reducing standardized testing in Virginia. I also acknowledge that the the intention here is worthy: to help struggling students, to not set them up for failure.

However, I'm afraid that the logic is misguided and that this will mean a decrease in social studies and science instruction and an increase in reading test prep. Yes, reading is a gateway to learning and limited instruction in reading strategies can be helpful, but the reason these students are struggling to comprehend what they read is because they aren't learning enough content. It's true that "it's not about what they know;" it's about what they don't know and what they won't know if they spend so much time studying reading as a subject. A valid test of reading would have passages related to the subject matter (in science, social studies, literature, art, music, pe, etc.) the students have already been taught.

Putting off content-rich instruction to "focus on reading" will only serve to put off progress in reading proficiency.


UPDATE: Lisa Hansel picked up this post as well as  this great commentary by Robert D. Shepherd in a post on the state of language arts instruction and curriculum in the context of the Common Core Standards. While I was thrilled she chose to highlight my post, I wanted to clarify where I stood on the Common Core Standards and on Virginia's decision to not adopt them.

Here's what I said in the comments:

Thank you so much for picking up my post--I am flattered. I can empathize with your optimism about having a set of national standards. I am also in favor of having a broad set of national standards.  

However, though I respect that you are comfortable doing so, I am not comfortable endorsing the Common Core Standards as a step forward, nor do I harbor any regret thus far that Virginia has not adopted them.  

Although I am by no means an expert, from what I have read (see my commentaries here and here), the Common Core ELA standards at least in practice seem to facilitate more of the same approach to Language Arts instruction as before, meaning heavy in the out-of-context texts and reading strategies department. I also share Paul Bruno's skepticism as stated in his comment on this post. Even if the standards are appropriate and strong, I don't see how they can succeed if they are being filtered through such a rigid and corrupting accountability structure (see my commentary here).  

Finally, from what I can tell, the process by which the Common Core Standards and associated assessments was not transparent or inclusive of stakeholders. And now, there is no real means by which to provide actionable feedback and for modifications to be made before they hit the Big Time. 

From the standpoint of a parent, teacher, and advocate, the distance between me and the top is much closer and the route much clearer to the district and state level in Virginia than to the Common Core level (does anyone even know where that is?)

When the Common Core is old wine in new bottles

I have been enjoying Education Week's series about the Common Core Standards in action. The second article depicts classroom practice in a DCPS middle school Language Arts classroom. I found this post especially intriguing--I felt like a fly on the wall reading it.

This is what impresses me:

First of all, it does seem like the teacher has a certain amount of freedom--not much of the what (the curriculum), or the how is being dictated. It does seem like the standards are doing what they are supposed to do: guiding. Also, the use of coaches are apt and administrators get that the students need a lot of guidance and that they can't go straight to "grade-level" texts.

Second, the authors and the art that the students are reading and studying seem amazing. Many of the assignments also seem worthy. I would want my own children to read those authors and texts (though, in full--I'll get to this) and write such essays.

Finally, learning grammar, vocabulary,and literary devices as the students are doing in Ms. McNair-Lee's class is a good idea (and all the better that they're doing so not isolated from the text). This serves not so much to develop them as readers but to develop them as writers (though, yes, one must be a good reader to have a shot at being a good writer).

Here's what troubles me:

He [the student] gets the material one-on-one but not on the assessment. Okay, so the kid is reading the book and getting it, but this isn't reflected on the assessment. Therefore, we are failing him. Because it's all about the tests, not about what the kid actually gets and learns? This is where I would say that there is something wrong with the test. Except we can't because in the current climate the test is all mighty.

There seems to be a lot of practice that happened just the same as pre-Common Core standards, but just that the Common Core texts are more "complex." As I said before, it is a step forward that they are reading such texts and authors, but I noticed that they are often not reading entire texts but "excerpts." Yes, see with the old standards, students read "passages." If no one is reading whole books, it doesn't matter if you call them "excerpts" or "passages" because the students are still not reading whole books or whole articles or collections of poetry.

It is good practice to have students cite evidence from the text when they make arguments. But otherwise, students are also still practicing things like finding the main idea, making inferences, and using context clues to figure out meaning of words. Also, I fail to see the difference between doing a "close reading" of an "excerpt" (Common Core) and "attacking a passage" (old state standards) I have said this over and over and over again (and I will say it again in the future): Reading comprehension can't be taught. As in you can't teach someone to comprehend what they're reading. If reading is not a skill, then reading is not a skill. Finding the main idea may be a strategy, but you either know how to do it or you don't. You can't practice it and get better at it. Same with making inferences. These are strategies that can't be practiced and the ability to successfully complete such strategies is highly dependent on background knowledge. I thought the Common Core was supposed to deliver us from the misguided emphasis on reading strategies. But at least from this account, it doesn't seem to be.

And this leads me to two more points. One is what I argued here, it doesn't matter if the texts are more complex, it doesn't mean teaching reading strategies and reading as a skill works any better to make kids stronger readers. Simply promoting what students are reading from "simple" to "complex" and from "passages" to "excerpts" will not do the trick. There is not some dial on the rigor-o-meter that you turn up and presto our "scholars" are all career and college ready.

Two is that are they learning about any of this literature in context? I can't say definitively that they aren't because the article doesn't address the matter, but NCLB doesn't mandate and DCPS doesn't give comparable history assessments so I am assuming that no, the context, aka history, is de-emphasized or not taught at all. A text's meaning is heavily dependent on the context in which it is written. Truly comprehending a text is heavily dependent on what you know already. This is not to claim that previously students learned about the history or content highlighted in conjunction with reading a text, but, again, the Common Core is supposed to be a vast improvement. You can't do a true close reading of a text and get much out it if you are ignorant of the context of the text-- a "close reading" of a "complex text" puts us in the same boat we were in with the old, supposedly inferior standards.

Finally, and this isn't a Common Core practice per se, but it's emblematic of the reformy approach of which the Common Core is a part: K-12 students aren't "scholars." You're a scholar when you're making a career of studying something, which K -12 students aren't doing yet. Calling them "scholars" doesn't make them so; it's patronizing and propagandistic.

So far students of the Common Core ELA Standards seem to be attacking decontextualized isolated passages and practicing reading strategies which can't be practiced. And there is nothing scholarly or reformed about that.


UPDATE: A critical response to the same article from Lisa Hansel of the Core Knowledge Foundation is posted on the WaPo's Answer Sheet.

A Rocketship to Disappointment

John Merrow came out recently with a segment about Rocketship charter schools, touting high test scores among their low-income students. Merrow looks at Rocketship through the lens of a provocative metaphor: Is Rocketship doing what Ford did with the Model T, i.e, mass producing quality education?

First of all: Yuck. Though some certainly see education this way, education is not a product, or shouldn't be. It's not a car. It's not an item that can or should be mass produced. Even adorned with colorful cubicles, what a bleak and depressing way to envision to education.

Second of all: Innovative? Rocketship makes no secret that their mission is to raise reading and math standardized test scores. As I said in this post, where I referred to Rocketship education, I fail to see what's so innovative about that. Furthermore, using computer programs to differentiate instruction is hardly new or innovative. The school district where we live chose several years ago not to outfit schools heavily with technology, bucking the tech-innovation trend. Instead, the district invested in a solid technical and vocational program. There are computer labs in each school but each classroom has only about five computers. What do they use the computers for? Among other things, to differentiate instruction, or rather differentiate practice. Students can practice their math facts or other basics at their level. As long as such basics are developmentally appropriate and worth practicing, this is a fine use of computers, but the difference is the students in my district's schools only use them for small chunks of time and only for specific purposes. But such practice is hardly innovative. If anything, it's practical.

If I parked my kid in front of a screen for two hours a day, it might be called bad parenting. In a school, it looks, well, lazy. You better believe that if my kids' school did that, they'd be hearing from me. So not only is not new, it's inappropriate and possibly harmful. Yet, Rocketship does it and is praised for its "innovation" and invited to "scale up."

There is no art and music, so it seems that the majority most of the time is spent on tested subjects. When you see art and music as something that can be relegated to "afterschool," it shows that you don't respect them as the vital disciplines they are.

The report gives a big nod to parental involvement at Rocketship schools, but from what I can tell the parental involvement seems to involve watching and singing along as their children do their Launch (and an opening meeting and song is also not innovative--lots of schools and summer camps do that every day and have been for years) and agreeing that prep for standardized test scores is a priority. Otherwise, there's no exploration in the segment of how "parent involvement" translates at Rocketship Schools. How are parents meaningfully involved at Rocketship? What do they do? What "critical parts" do they play? How much decision-making power and input do they have? (And why doesn't John Merrow ask these questions?)

And don't get me started on the references to unions. Rocketship CEO John Danner starts off by claiming Rocketship is a "start up" and hence can't accommodate a unionized staff. So when it comes to unions, Rocketship is a start up but when it comes to equal public funding, Rocketship is a school. Which is it? And where is this 450-page document that Danner refers to "that literally says minute by minute what teachers are supposed to do"? (And why doesn't John Merrow ask about the existence of such a document?) The real answer: It doesn't exist; it's a boogeyman. The scripted, minute-by-minute aspect of public school days comes not from union contracts, but from management, like, say, um, someone in Danner's position who feels immense pressure to, um, yeah, raise test scores.

Lastly, while Merrow's segment states directly that the computer time may not be "working," it doesn't ask what is it meant to work towards. And it certainly doesn't ask what the heck the kids are actually doing on the computers. What are the programs? What are the games? What are their purpose? What are their efficacy? Are they good programs? (And, yes, again: Why isn't Merrow asking these basic but vital questions? Yes, yes, I get it: Learning matters. But learning what? And how?)

I'm dubious that this quixotic quest for innovation is the lever to improve education and I'm certain that the mass production door is the wrong one to be knocking on. Either way, though, if it's "quality" (another word in education reform discussions I've come to loathe) we're after, the prize ain't higher test scores. High scores are a side effect of good education, not an end. Unfortunately, higher test scores are precisely the prize Merrow exalts and Danner seeks. But nor for their children. As this article on another blended learning model in Newark, New Jersey, shows, this is increasingly the prize for low-income kids in schools like Rocketship's because that's what "those" kids need:

Even some technology advocates like Doug Levin of the State Educational Technology Directors Association doubt that this model will ever appeal to middle- and upper-income families whose children are not struggling below grade level. Levin says that’s because those children don’t need as much extra drilling and can use more of the school day for analysis and inquiry.“I think this approach works much better for elementary school aged children who are really struggling to build their vocabulary, to understand basic math facts and operations,” says Levin. “I think as kids get into middle and high school, what the computer can offer in that regard is less.”Levin predicts the computer drilling will succeed in raising the test scores of the low-income sixth graders of Merit Prep.

There you have it.


Updated (1/6/2013): 
Fellow education writer/blogger Adam Bessie recently (and not so recently) pointed out a possible conflict of interest: Rocketship is funded by the Gates Foundation and so is PBS and Merrow's production company Learning Matters (though I can't say what the nature of the arrangement between PBS and Learning Matters is). This was not disclosed during the segment, nor was it disclosed that Rocketship CEO Danner is also on the board of Dreambox, the for-profit company that produces the math software used by Rocketship. I would think it would be journalistic protocol to disclose such relationships.

But what really disturbs me is that Merrow says he had "no idea" of the connection between Gates and Rocketship. I don't understand what kind of basic investigative journalism wouldn't have uncovered that, especially when it's not hidden from the public--it's on Rocketship's website. I'm not a professional journalist, but I would think that would be protocol, as well.

Updated II (1/6/2013): 
Also, see this post on Rocketship (in Milwaukee) by Barbara Miner.

In Defense of Non-fiction

The overarching Common Core vs. No Common Core and Core Knowledge vs. Balanced Literacy debates (see this New York Times articleand this Learning Matters segment) have spawned another debate: fiction vs. non-fiction. I think this misses the point and causes their critics to unfairly tarnish “non-fiction” as a genre. My apprehensions about the Common Core Standards aside, just as I defended the lecture several posts ago, I feel compelled to defend non-fiction.

In the creative writing communities I’ve been a part of, there is debate over how much attention to pay to labels such as fiction and non-fiction or poetry and prose. Many advocate for sticking to the designations but others find it needlessly restrictive. Writers will critique the work of other writers not on what it does or what they learn from reading it but on whether it has the proper label affixed to it. This is a good piece of work, but is this really poetry? To which I want to respond: Does it matter? Is that the most worthwhile thing to talk about here? Why get hung up on labels? Literature is literature. Because of the This American Life-Mike Daisey scandal, a similar questioning of David Sedaris’ work is being mounted, but Sedaris is not a scientist or journalist. Does it change his contribution to the understanding of humanity that he’s embellished or made some stuff up, that his work might include fictional accounts? Not in my mind, it doesn’t.

There is a fantastic interview in The Paris Review with John McPhee about his formative experiences as a high school English student, the writing life, being a non-fiction writer, and teaching writing. Here is an excerpt that reflects some of the debates that occur around discussions of labels and fiction vs. non-fiction:

Interviewer: Was there any significant change in terms of interest, or in the way that people viewed nonfiction writing? 

McPhee: The only significant change is that, in a general way, nonfiction writing began to be regarded as more than something for wrapping fish. It acquired various forms of respectability. When I was in college, no teacher taught anything that was like the stuff that I write. The subject was beneath the consideration of the academic apparatus.

Sometime during the eighties I was invited to do a reading at the University of Utah, and I accepted. And several weeks later, the person who approached me got back in touch and said he was really embarrassed and sorry. While he had wanted me to come to Utah and do a reading and talk to students, his colleagues did not. They didn’t approve of the genre I write in. I wrote back to him and said that I really appreciated his wanting me to be there. And certainly I didn’t feel anything toward him but gratitude, but as for his colleagues—when they come into the twentieth century I’ll be standing under a lamp looking at my watch. 

Interviewer: What do you call the type of writing you do? Your course at Princeton has sometimes been called The Literature of Fact and sometimes Creative Nonfiction. 

McPhee: I prefer to call it factual writing. Those other titles all have flaws. But so does fiction. Fiction is a weird name to use. It doesn’t mean anything—it just means “made” or “to make.” Facere is the root. There’s no real way to lay brackets around something and say, This is what it is. The novelists that write terrible, trashy, horrible stuff; the people that write things that change the world by their loftiness: fiction. Well, it’s a name, and it means “to make.” Since you can’t define it in a single word, why not use a word that’s as simple as that?

Whereas nonfiction—what the hell, that just says, this is nongrapefruit we’re having this morning. It doesn’t mean anything. You had nongrapefruit for breakfast; think how much you know about that breakfast. I don’t object to any of these things because it’s so hard to pick—it’s like naming your kid. You know, the child carries that label all through life. 

Sound familiar? Non-fiction was, as science fiction is now (though in light of the recent New Yorker  "Science Fiction Issue," perhaps this is changing), a literary stepchild and remnants of that past disdain, of non-fiction as not being “serious” enough, remain. There are works of non-fiction that are great works and there are works of fiction that are junk. As a writer and voracious consumer of non-fiction, I bristle when critics of the Common Core disparage non-fiction as merely “instructional manuals” or “informational materials” (though, yes, kids need to learn how to read those, too. I, for one, would like for my kid to know how to read a bus schedule and dishwasher detergent directions). Non-fiction informs but it also contributes to our understanding of the human condition as much a fiction does.

As I said in my last post, it doesn’t help when CCS architect David Coleman diminishes fiction and student writing about “feelings," and requiring a fixed ratio of fiction to non-fiction is just as pointless as debating the worth of Sedaris' work based on the ratio of non-fictional to fictional accounts therein. So, yes, let’s beware of the Common Core, but let’s not dismiss non-fiction along the way. Two thoughtless assertions don’t make a thoughtful one.

Some Thoughts on the (ELA) Common Core Standards

The idea of having a basic, broad set of knowledge, concepts, and skills that all Americans should learn about, while leaving plenty of room for teacher discretion and creativity and plenty of time for going deeper, resonates with me. I also would like to see American schools stop teaching reading as a subject and, beyond teaching decoding and a limited teaching of reading strategies, stop teaching it as a transferable skill. Reading strategies are not something to be studied in depth, and teaching reading as a discrete subject is tedious for students and has crowded out the teaching of many other meaty subjects such as science, social studies, the arts, foreign language, literature, and English. When I look at the ELA Common Core Standards and compare them with the ELA/Reading SOLs (Virginia Standards of Learning) for elementary students, I want to cry. I desperately want my children to do more stuff that looks like the ELA CCS, i.e., more studying content, more reading literature, and more complex writing, and a lot less of reading strategies. In substance, the CCS (at least the ELA ones--I can't speak for the math ones) look like the closest thing to good that we're going to get in standards. hat all being said, the CCS make me very nervous. 


First of all, I don’t like the idea of privatizing, centralizing and mandating standards, curricula, assessments for public schools—I think they should be created and maintained under the auspices of public democratic institutions. 


Second, I don’t like that the CCS are being forced on states or on teachers—many teachers feel this is being done to them and not with them. This is a recipe for resentment and poor implementation. How have NCLB and RTTT worked out? That’s right, not well. I'm not confident about doing such things on a grand scale, especially when they are being handed down in such detailed, prescribed, and rigidity-inducing manner. If we could have the CCS without pairing it with the current accountability structure I'd feel much differently about it. The current accountability structure corrupts almost everything that gets filtered through it. Also, yes, the logistics of financing and selling all of the materials and assessments and sorting out matters of intellectual property, all of that gives me pause given the way our economy and financial system is structured right now. I am suspicious of much that gets filtered through that, too. 


And it doesn’t help when CCS architect David Coleman’s talking points includes dismissing student writing about “feelings.” And like so many percentages in education policy (e.g., the “lowest 5% of schools” must get turned around or the “lowest 5% of teachers” must be fired because as long we’re employing certain statistical models there will ALWAYS be a lowest 5%, no matter how satisfactorily anyone is performing and there will always be students not progressing within that same continuum if they’re already performing at 90 – 100%), I find it ridiculously arbitrary that teachers will now be mandated to teach a certain ratio of texts to other texts.


Kathleen Porter-Magee talks about allowing and learning from the Common Core’s failures, about seeing what works and what doesn’t. Yes! Great idea! Let's pilot them! Ooops. The CCS are already terribly far away from any tweaking stage--they're going straight to the big time. I believe teachers when they say the CCS are being rammed down their throats and that in many cases the standards and expectations are developmentally appropriate for our younger students (again, how well has NCLB heeded developmentally appropriate practices, especially for ELLs, given what language acquisition research has shown us). The current accountability structure does not allow for failure, even healthy failure. It's premised on the idea that failure is entirely intolerable, that it is the problem.


Finally, even if we accept that the ELA CCS are superior to most states' current ELA standards, that they're more intellectual and more conducive to critical thinking (and I don't know enough to claim that they do or are), it's going to be very hard to implement them in an intellectual spirit if they're being interpreted and handed down in a decidedly rigid, anti-intellectual manner. Furthermore, if systems that are adopting them are purging the more intellectual, knowledgeable, and critically thinking teachers such as the one I discussed in this post, there won't be anyone left who has the subject knowledge and experience enough to implement them as their architects say they are to be implemented. Autocracy does not beget democracy and no matter how fit and hard working they are, good athletes won't make good soccer coaches if they know next to nothing about the game and about good coaching.


I have no horse in this race, no reason to hope the the CCS will fail, but I think my skepticism is well founded. If I'm wrong about this, I shall only be glad.


UPDATE: My next post is a follow-up to this one.

Parent Jiggernaut Follow-Up: Opting out vs. Opting In

This is a follow-up to my post from earlier today:

Some people have asked me why we don't opt our kids out of testing such as this movement encourages people to do. That is definitely under consideration. My reluctance with that is two-fold:

1) I see value in the disruptive route--there are many ways to effect change. I am grateful to have been made aware of my rights as a parent and I see value in publicizing those rights. All power to unitedoptout. But I am not a disruptor. I'm a persuader (though apparently not a very successful one if measured by actions taken after reading this blog). I'd much rather try to reason with people first, citing evidence, and then try to work something out collaboratively without being disruptive, especially if children are involved.

2) Even if I did opt my kids out of the official standardized tests (in my state of Virginia they are the SOLs), that would not change everything that leads up to the tests or everything that the tests drive. In fact, if there really were only four testing days (in 3rd grade there are four SOL tests) with four tests at the end of the school year, I would not care so much. I might not care at all. It's everything else that bothers me. I don't want to opt out of the tests themselves as much as I want to opt my children out of excessive test prep, practice and benchmark tests (which mirror the official tests), as well as out of a test-narrowed curriculum. I want to opt in to rich and meaningful curriculum, to more hands-on learning, to more inter-disciplinary studies, to field trips, to more recess, to more art, to more music, to more theater, to more PE, to more history, to more civics, to more science, to more "life" skills, to a better education.

If I am going to my children's school or even school district office to tell them as a parent that I want a richer and more meaningful curriculum, a more joyful and interesting school experience for my children, one that capitalizes on children's curiosity and thirst for knowledge, and their response is We agree but we have no control over that then that's a problem. That's a big problem. And I don't see this being solved at the root by parent trigger-type laws or by the current federal and state education policies that dictate the very practices I find wanting. If the school or districts are structured such that power is not theirs to relinquish in the first place, with no flexibility to grant educators, then how can I as a parent, without there being any real change in policy or power hierarchies, locate any real power to make or advocate for change in how and what my children are learning?

Textbook Dependence

There's been lots of talk lately on textbooks (or maybe not so lately--I've been avoiding writing). First, Beverlee Jobrack's Tyranny of the Textbook: An Insider Exposes How Educational Materials Undermine Reforms was published. Next, the edu-world was all aflutter over Apple's entrance into the textbooks market. Finally, veteran textbook author and publisher Annie Keeghan offered some not-so-pretty insights into the aging, hulking industry textbooks have become.

I haven't gotten a chance to read Jobrack's work, but luckily Education Week curriculum journalist Erik Robelen and by the Fordham Institute's curriculum expert Kathleen Porter-Magee did.

I agree with Jobrack's premise as stated by Robelen that in discussions of education reform:

improving the curriculum—what actually gets taught in classrooms—is all too often left off the table. And the author, who provides an insider perspective on the world of developing and selecting curricular materials, contends that this neglect is a key obstacle to increased student learning.

Now I can't refute Jobrack's contentions, but I can speak to my opinion on textbooks, which is that they may well be inaccurate and I can only imagine that they are just slapping new labels on old content. (And this is why textbooks on i-pads will not be "revolutionary.") I also can mostly speak as a social studies teacher. When I taught strict ESOL, I didn't use one textbook in particular but various books and resources depending on what I was teaching. That was true of social studies, too, but I did lean on the textbooks more. But I think the problem with textbooks is two-fold:

1) Especially in subjects such as social studies, textbooks are over-emphasized. Sure, textbooks are useful. Especially when I teach social studies, I use them as reference books and encyclopedias. I like to have two or three sets of textbooks in the class--to check different sources but also so that students of varying reading levels can access the content. Otherwise, I have students read historical fiction and non-textbook non-fiction books, and I use articles and readings that I come across on relevant topics--from the newspaper, from periodicals. What I like about using these is that they usually reflect in some way current scholarship in certain matters, and they are what I want my students eventually to be able to read and make sense of outside of school, independently. Part of what I'm teaching students is that yes, there are facts in social studies and history, but there is also how you put together the facts, interpret them, and which facts are accepted and which are controversial and why. This leads me to the problem that. . .

2) teachers, especially at the secondary level, don't often know enough about the subjects they teach to know if the textbook is wrong or to come up with readings beyond it. When you know very little about a subject you will be teaching, if for example if you are assigned at the last minute to teach World History (as I have been), when you know much more about US History, there's going to be a lot to learn in a brief amount of time and the textbook will get leaned on more and questioned less. I won't be able to fact-check an entire textbook and nor should I have to--that's the publisher's job. And, unfortunately, these days it seems like textbooks need even more scrutiny.

Porter-Magee is right on when she says you can't just have a great curriculum and expect teachers who don't know what they're doing to implement it well. Pedagogy matters; quality of instruction matters. Nor should we just make "teacher-proof" curriculum. Where I might disagree or question Porter-Magee is when she talks about emphasizing data-driven instruction:

And so any discussion about classroom-level implementation of curriculum should include a discussion of using formal and informal assessment to track student mastery of essential content and skills, and of using the data from those assessments to really drive short- and long-term planning and instruction. This kind of data-driven instruction is essential in ensuring not only that teachers have covered essential content, but that students have actually learned it.

Implementation and assessment are vital but before they even get to the classroom (and continuing as they're there), teachers, especially at the secondary level, should be much better educated (and yes I think they should also be better trained) in the subjects they teach. Teachers should rely less on textbooks and more on other books, texts, and other sources of information. Teachers should be able to spot and to point out inacccuracies. They should help students notice diverging viewpoints or conflicting information in different sources and they should facilitate discussions about these different perspectives--their genesis and how to evaluate them. Far from making textbooks and curricula teacher-proof, teachers should be able to make sense of and judgments about the curriculum and texts they're teaching and to teach their students to do the same.

To attract people that knowledgeable and educated, we have to at least provide much better working conditions, greater professional autonomy, and better pay, but I guess I already covered that in another post.

Legislating to the Test

Recently, the Virginia Senate passed a bill that would eliminate the 3rd grade SOL (Standards of Learning) Tests in Science and Social Studies. That means less standardized testing! As a Virginia public school parent, I should be thrilled, right? Not necessarily.

See my post on this over at The Core Knowledge Blog.

Opportunity to Develop Literacy

On Monday, January 9th, Virginia Governor McDonnell announced his education agenda, entitled, "Opportunity to Learn." This has been covered by The Virginia Education Report, The Washington Post, as well as commented on by many throughout the state (For Chad Sansing's excellent commentary, read here. Or, for a partial listing of other reactions, see here.) I am going to offer my reactions in a series of posts starting with this one.

Before I comment on the agenda, I want to reiterate a point that Chad Sansing made in his piece:

McDonnell’s blueprint promises “a bold education proposal that will dramatically increase money for Virginia’s teachers and students by $480 million a year.” Meanwhile, his budget plans also include “hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts, including to child-care subsidies for low-income families and to health and parent-education programs for poor pregnant women.” Families who need social and support services to help their kids attend school and access curriculum won’t benefit from McDonnell’s cuts.

I will return to issues if budgeting and funding in later posts but for now I'll assert: We're not going to succeed in improving education for low-income children with one hand if we're squeezing their parents and communities with the other. As I explained here, single-issue advocacy is problematic and students don't lead single-issue lives. Furthermore, the more we deny help to those in need, the more needs our students will come to school with and the more resources our schools will need to adequately serve those students. And right now there is a growing number of people in need.

Now, on to the education agenda:

In the "Raise Standards - College Workforce and Readiness" section, the McDonnell administration proposes, among other things ("other things" being streamlining diploma requirements, positive youth development, and expanding dual enrollment programs--none of which I have any objections to, so far :), advancing literacy. McDonnell wants to make sure all third graders can read before they move on to fourth grade. That is a worthy goal, but I'm not sure that his way of achieving it is sound. McDonnell wants to pay kids who learn to read. Harvard Researcher Roland Fryer tried something similar to this, and it didn't really work. If kids aren't reading by third grade, it's not (good grief!) because we're not paying them. Nor do I think the strategy of waiting until third grade and then simply holding kids back will help much--it's too reactive.

If we want struggling readers to struggle less, we need to do two things:

1) Invest in reading intervention programs that work and reach out to struggling readers long before third grade. Many of the children who are likely to struggle with reading would probably benefit from the very preschool programs McDonnell is looking to cut, so if he wants to advance literacy he should reconsider cutting those programs. One program that my school district successfully uses and that helped my own son when he was struggling to learn to read was Reading Recovery. Such programs are expensive and require investment and commitment. (UPDATE: After I drafted this post, I read that McDonnell proposed adding $8.2 million to the budget for early reading programs. This is good news, though I'd want to know more about the efficacy of the specific programs being funded and the real estimated impact of the dollars allotted.)

2) We need to spend much less time teaching reading as a subject and teaching reading strategies beyond their utility and much more time teaching content or subject matters, such as literature, science, social studies, p.e., art music, foreign languages, technical education, etc. Yes, most kids need to be explicitly taught to decode and yes, to a point reading strategies are useful. Of course, content should be taught as reading and writing intensive. However, literacy is largely representative of someone's background and content knowledge, and knowledge of vocabulary and does not develop or improve without it. As the University of Virginia's own Dan Willingham says, teaching content is teaching reading. (It's also much, much more meaningful and interesting for kids.) My regular readers know that I talk about this ad nauseum. In case you're new to my writing on education, here are some posts that elaborate further: here, here, and here.

You know what I've found, as a parent and in my observations of my kids' teachers, is the best reward for kids who are working hard to learn to read or who are already reading? More books. Let's reward students for reading by giving them more books.

UPDATE: In a misguided effort to get Virginia third graders to do better on reading and math tests, State Senator John Miller (D-Newport News) wants teachers to spend even more time on reading and math and even less on science and social studies. And he wants to do so to get test scores up in fifth grade (not necessarily because it will mean better education). Ugh. Even supporters of NCLB say the bill is too limited in scope by just focusing on math and reading. Sorry, Senator Miller, but this bill will take us in the complete wrong direction!

cross-posted at The Virginia Education Report

It's the substance & the stress (not the salary), stupid.

As some of you know, I am starting to look for, ahem, a job, including positions that would put me back in the classroom. The position of "unpaid writer" isn't exactly putting food on the table and I'm starting to feel antsy writing so much about education without actually doing much about education. Reading over and updating my teaching resume, I am reminded of former students, colleagues, schools, and yes, curriculum. I am reminded of how much I enjoy teaching, for teaching itself but also for the content I got to ponder. I graduated at the top of my class in high school and went to an elite college. I'm "the type" many education reformers talk of attracting to teaching and, initially, attracted I was, but given what teaching has become in many cases, I am somewhat reluctant to go back.

The first reason is the working conditions. While I agree teachers are underpaid and I appreciate Secretary Duncan's strident acknowledgement of this, I would do the work at the current salaries if the working conditions made the job more manageable: if I knew classes would be reasonably and appropriately sized; if I were given adequate time for planning, development, collaboration, and frankly, bathroom breaks; and if I knew the school where I might work would be fully staffed with content teachers, a librarian, a nurse, a social worker, enough administrators, etc. If I knew I could do an adequate job in a 40-hour week (obviously, it would be more some weeks and a bit less during others and yes, the work would always be on my mind), I might never have taken the break I did in the first place. I can't work the punishing hours because I have my own children to raise. And I'm in favor to the idea of changing compensation systems to reflect the different roles and demands of different teaching jobs. If there are teachers out there who have the space in their life and desire to take on more work and responsibilities than I can, I think they should be paid more. I would be happy to take on a lesser teaching position for less money than a harder working colleague if it meant I could be in the classroom again and still be the parent I want to be. Unfortunately, it became clear to me that I had to choose.

Second of all, I was attracted to teaching because it's intellectual, interesting, stimulating, creative, and socially useful. Well, at least it should be. As Diana Senechal put it in this comment:

The McKinsey researchers examined teacher recruitment and retention in Singapore, Finland, and South Korea. They found many factors that make teaching an attractive profession in those countries: salary, job security, autonomy and trust, cultural respect, and more. Given their own findings, it’s odd that they or anyone would conclude that financial incentives should reign supreme. And there were things they should have investigated but didn’t–for instance, the intellectual and spiritual appeal of the profession.  

Look at the talented people in professions where the pay is decent but not stellar–the arts, humanities, teaching, scholarship, nonprofits, journalism, and more. What brings people to these professions? Not incompetence, but interest. The work has substance.  

But when the substance is driven out, when the work turns into busywork, people turn to professions that offer the combination of qualities that they seek.

Yes, the work has substance. Or it did. Or it should. Of course teaching is going to have some busy work--all jobs do. Sometimes I even look forward to the busy work as it gives me a break from the harder tasks of thinking, evaluating, planning. Of course, there are going to be some tasks I enjoy more than others. Reading up on the Bubonic Plague, planning how my students will learn about it for a world history class, and then assessing what the students have learned counts as enjoyable. Figuring out how to teach the standardized reading test to my world history students and doing a technocratic version of reading tea leaves, i.e., charting who got the "main idea" and "context clues" questions wrong on said standardized tests is not. And when the job starts to become mostly useless, fruitless busy work and mostly teaching vapid curriculum, that's when I'd rather work as a self-employed, unpaid writer and blogger or work at something less demanding that would still save time and energy for writing.

As Nancy Flanagan put it in her typically thoughtful way,

Good teaching is not about classroom rules, cute videos, raising test scores, cool field experiences or unions. It's about relationships, mastery, analysis, persistence, diagnosis and continuous reflection. It's complex, layered intellectual work. And it happens in hundreds of thousands of "regular" classrooms, every day.

Yes, it's complex, layered, challenging, and intellectual work with so many decisions to make at almost every turn. This is primarily why I want to do it. Okay, so the pay isn't great, but when you take away the substance of it, I no longer even enjoy the work and I don't want to do it. I'd rather do something mindless (wait tables, bar tend, or be someone's personal assistant) where I won't have to go against my principles.

As teacher James Boutin describes here (and again here), at some point in my teaching career, I began to feel like a bureaucrat:

During a visit I made to a private school in Denver last November, one of the teachers there confided in me that he moved out of public education because he didn't want to be a bureaucrat. The comment struck me. I'd never thought of myself as a bureaucrat before, but he's right - I am.

Yes, there's certainly more room for me to be more data-informed and consider the values of a technocratic approach. But if that's what I wanted to do, I'd go be a bureaucrat or a technocrat. If I wanted to teach test prep, I'd go work for Kaplan. That's not what I see as the primary role of a classroom teacher. As James further demonstrates in this must-read series, the data-driven dimension of teaching has gotten out of hand and has become a huge waste of time and resources for educators and students alike. Moreover, as I was engaged in it and was forced to make ill-advised curricular choices, I realized that such tasks weren't helping my students learn or improving my teaching, but were fueling political point-scoring and sustaining the education reform industry.

So thanks, Arne Duncan, for saying teachers should be paid more and thanks for your attempts at debunking flawed research that states otherwise. For a next step, consider advocating against acceptance of the "new normal" that translates to terrible working conditions for teachers and principals and terrible learning conditions for students. And then consider how you're going to attract more serious college and graduate school students to the profession if the work you're asking them to do lacks substance and insults their intelligence and, eventually, expertise. Finally, consider that if the most educated among us don't want to do to the work because it's bankrupt of creativity, intellectual exercise, meaning, and substance, then the education our students are going to be getting will hardly be rich, meaningful, and relevant. Think about how many of our best and brightest would rather get paid poverty wages working as adjunct professors and journalists than teach in the classrooms your and your predecessors' policies are molding.

Perhaps this isn't the best post to put out there as I apply for teaching jobs, but then again, I'm not going to lie or pretend. I'm going to do my best to be a team player and to be open to the advantages of a more quantitatively- or data-based approach to teaching. But I'm not going to give up my principles or knowingly engage in educational malpractice. Frankly, I'd rather scrub floors.

Will Flat NAEP Reading Scores Mean More Flat Reading Instruction?

At first I was annoyed with Matthew Di Carlo of the Shanker Blog for criticizing people for things they hadn't yet said. Speaking of the NAEP, he predicted, "People on all 'sides' will interpret the results favorably no matter how they turn out." But, he was right.


The results in my state of Virginia, were reported in The Richmond Times-Dispatch as follows: 

Virginia's fourth- and eighth-graders perform better in reading and mathematics than their peers nationwide, but less than two-fifths have a solid grasp of reading and less than half have a solid grasp of math. . . . In math, 40 percent of Virginia eighth-graders achieved proficient scores in 2011, up from 36 percent in 2009, according to the report. Forty-six percent of fourth-graders performed at the proficient level, compared to 43 percent in 2009.

According to VA DOE spokesman Charles Pyle, in short, Virginia students did relatively well nationally, but there's much room for improvement, especially in reading:

A lack of significant improvement in Virginia's eighth-grade NAEP reading scores over the last couple testing cycles as well as on state achievement tests has informed state efforts to pursue more rigorous standards in the subject, Department of Education spokesman Charles Pyle said. The new reading standards will take effect in 2012-13.

Oh dear. "More rigorous standards in reading"? Aren't they already "rigorous" enough? Let me enter the fray and tell you why I think reading scores are unimpressive in Virginia and flat nationally: Because in the (albeit, well-intentioned) mania to make American kids better readers, we're spending overwhelming amounts of time teaching reading as a subject, as a skill, at the expense of teaching knowledge of other subjects such as science, social studies, foreign language, art, music, PE, theater, etc.

Yes, my children spend more time on math than on other subjects, but that doesn't bother me nearly as much. Now, I don't know much about teaching math but from what I can tell from the elementary math curriculum used in the Virginia county where my kids attend school and from what I can tell from the work they bring home, yes, they are learning different strategies to solve math problems, but they are also learning math facts.

There is such a thing as math strategies. There is such a thing as mastering the mechanics of reading, which is essentially decoding and there is such a thing as reading strategies, but they aren't nearly as useful or applicable as math strategies and needn't be taught nearly to the extent that they are. There is such a thing as math facts. But there is no such thing as reading facts; there's just facts, background knowledge, and vocabulary, the more of which one knows, the better of a reader that one will be.

On a series of posts on Eduwonk between Eric Hanushek and Diane Ravitch about Hanushek's tiresome silver bullet solution of firing the bottom 5-10% of teachers based on standardized test scores (yes, teachers who don't do their jobs or who do them poorly should be removed, but I have no confidence that Hanushek's handwaving gimmickry will achieve that), superb edu-thinker Diana Senechal commented that:

We talk so much about achievement but do not adequately address the question “achievement of what?” This explains, in part, why “literacy” scores are much more stubborn and difficult to raise than math scores. There is no such subject as literacy, and we are spinning our wheels trying to teach it. There is literature, grammar, rhetoric, composition. Teach those things, and you will see some gains. (Math curricula are far from perfect in this country–but at least, in comparison with literacy curricula, they have some sort of substance and sequence.)

Exactly. Beyond teaching decoding and some limited reading strategies, if we want our children to be stronger readers, we need to teach them content (which yes, includes language arts as just outlined by Diana).

While Jeff Bryant did well to point out that NAEP shouldn't be looked at as a report card per se and "Nation At Risk" co-author James Harvey highlighted some short comings of NAEP as an assessment, I still fear the influence of these NAEP results over instruction and curriculum decisions. I worry that with NAEP reading scores being "flat," that educators and reformers will take an even more draconian and ill-informed approach, and call for beefing up reading standards and spending even more time on teaching reading and even less on everything else. For example, in a recent essay in Education Week unrelated to the NAEP release of NAEP results, Eric Witherspoon, superintendent of District 202 in Evanston, Illinois, called for just that:

Reading is the gateway to all learning. Literacy must be addressed in every classroom, every day—reading strategies must be an integral part of history class and math class and of physical and technical education. At ETHS, teachers receive training to help them implement literacy-learning strategies in everything from history and math to physical education.

Certainly, all public school teachers in America should be prepared to work with and help struggling readers, but do we really need kids in PE, math, and history to learn reading strategies? What will that serve other than teaching our kids to know less about PE, math, and history (and every other subject) than they already do. Yes, reading is a tool to learn content--indeed, it's a "gateway to learning"--but learning content is the gateway to becoming a stronger reader and more educated in general.

Matthew Di Carlo's prediction was right on. Let's hope for the education of our children that mine isn't.

A Lesson on Failing

This summer at the SOS March & National Call to Action, I was pleased to see some young and enthusiastic, but independent-minded and healthily skeptical teachers. Among them was DCPS elementary school teacher, Olivia Chapman (on twitter: @sedcteacher). Olivia dual-majored in special and general education at The College of Saint Rose in her native upstate New York  and then worked for a year as a substitute teacher in Albany, New York, before accepting her current position. I was so impressed with Olivia (plus I'm always looking to feature the voices of teachers and education professionals who are on the ground) that I solicited a guest post from her. If she is symbolic of the young, smart, dedicated, and energetic teachers that neo-liberal reformers so often talk of attracting and keeping in the teaching profession, from Olivia's account below, they're not doing a very good job. Who, especially with all those qualities, lasts long in a stifling and absurd environment such as Olivia describes? For our nation's sake, I pray that Olivia and so many of the discouraged newer teachers I've talked to in recent years stick it out. We need you! As one of my children's teachers told me as we talked about the limitations of standardization and high-stakes testing were doing, "The pendulum is always swinging; I'm just waiting for it to swing in the other direction." In too many schools and systems, teaching rich, meaningful, and varied content and leading our children to embrace the beauty of the life of the mind has become an act of defiance when it should be an ethos. Here is Olivia's piece:

A Lesson on Failing

We hear a great deal these days from the media and education reformers about our “broken” public school system and about “failing” public schools. While I certainly haven’t been to all public schools and seen them for myself, I see and read about success in public schools often enough to know that not all public schools are “failing.” Unfortunately, though, Ihappen to work at a school that is failing and I used to be part of the reason for that failure.

Just to be clear, I'm not referring to a label of “failure” often placed on schools due to their failure to meet No Child Left Behind's lofty and unattainable AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) requirements. My school is failing because of what NCLB’s mandates have done to the students, teachers, and to the community. My school is failing because morality, honesty, compassion, and values have been replaced by an obsession with data, accountability, standardized testing, and evaluations.

Authentic, creative, and innovational learning experiences have been replaced by practice tests, overwhelming amounts of interim assessments, multiple choice drill and practice sheets, and an inundation of mandated programs and paper work that have little impact on real student learning.  I have seen genuinely good, veteran teachers lose touch with their morals out of fear. I have seen children bow their heads in shame upon the revelation that their test scores labeled them below basic in reading or math. I have had parents refer solely to their children’s test scores to describe their abilities, telling me that their children are good at math, but bad at reading and vice versa. I have witnessed cheating and lying to save careers. I have witnessed the stealing of materials and resources because budget cuts have allowed for very little funding for what our students really need. This is the harsh reality and this is failing. We are failing ourselves and we are failing our students. We are neglecting to truly educate our students because teachers aren’t allowed to be innovative and creative. Instead, we are overwhelmed by the task of producing robotic test-takers rather than thoughtful, lifelong learners.

When I was hired at DC Public Schools I was told that if I couldn’t get the students' test scores up, I was dispensable. Teachers who have students with high test scores are put on pedestals and those without are stigmatized, humiliated, and downright disrespected by the administration. This was the culture that I was thrown into as a first year teacher. At first, I was determined to succeed at attaining this highly esteemed respect from my colleagues and my principal.

I spent my first year teaching relentlessly chasing this prize. I drilled, I practiced, I taught test-taking strategies. I made the students want to stay in for recess to practice testing by rewarding them with dollar store surprises and animal crackers. I begged and pleaded for parents to get their kids to school early and stay after for more standardized test review. I thought that if my students had awesome test scores, I would earn the veneration I had yearned for. More importantly, I thought that this would prove that I was a good teacher. In reality, I lost sight of who I was and why I had become a teacher. Oh, and my students test scores turned out to be pretty low, despite my sixty-hour work weeks and endless nights spent grading bubble sheets. In addition, at the end of the school year I was rated "minimally effective" due to my students’ low test scores.

I spent the summer after my first year reflecting on why I had become a teacher and thought about quitting and traveling the world. But I soon realized that it wasn't teaching that was the problem, it was the environment I was teaching in (not to mention I didn’t have enough money saved to even travel locally)--the high-stress intensity of the testing atmosphere, the "walking on eggshells" feeling that you get when you know something bad is going to happen despite any precautions you may have taken. I decided to scrap the entire test prep regimen that I thought, and was told, was crucial to student success. I figured I had one more year to improve my rating before being terminated, so why not teach the way that I thought would be most effective, most compelling, and most beneficial to my students? Why not teach my students the way that my best teachers had taught me?

Last year, for my students' sake as well as for my own, I took the focus off of testing. I told my students that standardized testing was something that we had to do in order to prove to the city and to the nation that they have good teachers and that they are learning at school, and my head-strong group of fourth graders was determined to prove themselves. I reassured them regularly that I would not refer to them by a label determined by their test scores and that they were so smart and had so much knowledge that they did not need to worry about taking the silly old test. I treated the test as if it were just another thing on our fourth grade “to do” list. This constant reassurance gave them confidence to take on the test, but it also took the emphasis off of the end-all-be-all aspect of high-stakes standardized testing.

With this weight off of our shoulders, I moved my students on to more authentic learning. Genuine, meaningful learning cannot prosper when the burden of bubble sheets, arbitrary teacher firings and terms like “below basic” are clouding our brains. For the most part, I replaced weekly multiple-choice assessments with projects that met the standards as well as met the students' interests. We read materials that sparked intellectual curiosity, debates, and critical thinking.  I stopped using the “preferred” textbooks and found ways to fund class sets of books and magazines that were engaging and appropriate for my demographic. In the end, their test scores were fine. No, I didn’t produce any miraculous increase in proficiency levels, but these kids now know how to think, they gained content knowledge, they know a few things about the world around them, and they genuinely care about learning more.  

Critics of my anti-teaching-to-the-test approach often ask, “Well, how do you know that the students actually learned without looking at data from their test scores?” I look at tons of data! I listen for conversation skills, I review projects, I read reports, I observe debates and discussions, and I use rubrics to assess skits and videos. Sure, I throw in some multiple-choice style tests when appropriate and yes, I look at that data too. More importantly, I know that these students learned because they left my class with authentic means to express and apply their knowledge. These students still stop by my room to tell me what they are learning and doing in school. They value what I taught them because they see the importance of each lesson in their everyday lives. Furthermore, they look to deepen their understanding of topics of interest. They still ask me for help selecting books that will interest them and help them expand their knowledge. Some of my former students still check our class facebook page for extra learning activities to do at home. They ask me questions like, “Ms. Chapman, do you have any friends who are doctors/lawyers/engineers/authors that I could write to about how they got their careers?” Their fifth grade teacher informed me that during the earthquake, my previous students climbed under their desks because they had learned what to do during natural disasters by becoming “meteorologists” and writing live weather reports in class last year. 

I read somewhere that teachers whose students do not excel on high-stakes standardized tests are probably the best teachers.  I don’t necessarily agree with that. However, I do believe that teaching to the test makes children dislike school and makes teachers loathe teaching. I have realized in my first three years of teaching that the aspects of public education that are “failing” are our current education policies, reforms, and those who are pushing them, those who think that spending large sums of money on testing and teacher evaluations will make children smarter. Then administrators continue the “failing” by pushing these policies onto teachers, and in turn, so do the teachers who reluctantly choose to go along with them.

My school did not make AYP again this year. We now have a new principal who never ceases to express his endless devotion to getting an 80% pass rate on this year’s tests. I'm sure that my defiance of his test-prep regime, of his mandated ten multiple-choice question bi-weekly formative assessments, and of his failure to see the students he is supposed to educate as anything more than test scores will cause great controversy. I have been warned that I walk on thin ice because of the test scores that are tied heavily to my evaluation. In spite of this, what I fear most is not a poor rating based on a single test. What I fear most is failing my students and their community again by believing that my students' success and my own is based on teaching to that single test.

Education Films Series III, Our Town: The kind of teaching and learning that we all want in our towns

A few weeks before Waiting for Superman came out, I watched a documentary called Our Town. It's about an English teacher in Compton, California, who leads a group of students through putting on the first play, Thorton Wilder's classic Our Town, their high school has produced in years. It is a pure documentary--there's no agenda (or at least not any obvious one to me), moralizing, politics, or what my husband terms, "auto-hommage."

I liked this film on so many levels. It's not flashy, it's not sexy, mountains are not moved, it's not "Glee." Instead, it's real. Putting on a play is painstakingly hard work and the challenges of being a student and teacher in an inner city school are not small. The play was modest, it was not perfect, and some students failed to fulfill their committments to it. Despite the challenges and the lack of miracles, the film shows what a valuable learning experience putting on a play can be and how much such performances can mean to their schools' communities: the house was full every night.

Although I wholeheartedly agree that kids need a base of factual knowledge, I'd like to see a lot more emphasis on this type of learning experience, especially in places like Compton. This type of learning can be both meaningful and academic, academic in that kids studied and learned from a rich literary masterpiece and meaningful in that they saw the fruits of their hard work and commitment and owned their performances. Furthermore, there are elements of learning to being on stage that aren't available in other traditional content classes. Finally, kids in the most underprivileged communities need the same opportunities as kids in privileged communities to study subjects such as art, music, PE, science, social studies, foreign languages, and theater, both in and after class.

One negative: I didn't like the way the basketball program was demonized. On the one hand, I understand how much high school sports, in particular male high school sports, especially football and basketball, can suck up disproportionate resources and attention, while theater groups and the like are left to fend for themselves. This is a valid complaint. But my take is that the theater programs, etc, should be equally well funded and supported. Team sports aren't at all a negative. Just as being part of a performing arts cast can be a meaningful learning experience for kids, so can being part of a sports team.

To me, this documentary serves as a much better alternative to Waiting for Superman than any other recent education documentary out there. The teacher featured isn't superman--no one can be that--but she navigates  the nitty-gritty of educating teenagers with humanity and fortitude. These are the kinds of teachers we need to focus on retaining, and we can do so in part by allowing them to move away from test prep and towards rich and meaningful education.

It also struck me, since I wrote about teaching character recently, that this is the way to teach character, not explicitly and not on some chart or report card, but through having kids engage in interesting and meaningful learning and projects, to have them work hard and be part of a team and part of a community.

As for the students, when they look back ten years later, they're not going to remember the teacher that covered two years of content in one year; they're going to remember and value this amazing learning experience they had. In experiences like this, the teacher can end up covering way more material than anyone can imagine or measure. Despite the value of rich content, the most valued content of our memories are experiences, especially experiences like these where we confront a real challenge and come out better, wiser, and prouder. I hope that we aren't so busy with what we can measure that we end up losing what students and their families treasure.

Accountability for what?

I will soon put up a guest post in response to Virginia Heffernan's recent New York Times op-ed about "archaic" learning tools and products such as research papers. Thinking about this, as well as about Robert Pondiscio and Kathleen Porter-Magee's smart responses, I woke up this morning with the question: Accountability for what? in my head.

Part of what I was trying to demonstrate in my guest post on the Core Knowledge blog, which was inspired by this post by Robert Pondiscio, is that the accountability structures (which frankly, Pondiscio says are needed--UPDATE: See Robert's clarification below--and which Porter-Magee's colleagues at Fordham advocate vigorously for) are driving what is taught and how it is taught. If accountability structures are based on high-stakes math and reading tests, then that's what's going to be taught. This is actually quite a traditional concept in education, that you look at the assessment (what you want students to know and to be able to do) and you work backwards from it. So if reading and math skills are what we want educators and schools to be accountable for on a yearly basis, that's what they're going to teach. Research papers? Not so much. Complex, whole-class novels? Not so much. Science experiments, civics debates, the arts, and foreign languages? Not so much. Supporting experienced, knowledgeable teachers (evil LIFO!) with institutional memory and knowledge of their content and content-related essential skills who are more likely to be skeptical of and to resist edu-fads such as 21st century silliness? Not. So. Much.

Some might counter: Well, that's why we need better and more tests. Okay, that's a start, in a way. That's what we have in Virginia: science and social studies standardized tests, as well as art SOLs. But let's see what the students are actually learning about science and social studies; let's see what they graduate high school with. As Chris Dovi shows us here (and as my guest blogger will show) it ain't pretty. The way to educate ourselves out of this high-stakes testing hole is not by giving more questionable high-stakes tests.

Some might counter, well, that's what the Common Core is for. Okay, that, too, is a start. But who's to say the content of the Common Core is rich and meaningful or that it makes for developmentally appropriate instruction and content? Andrew Porter disagrees on the first count and at least many elementary school teachers I've heard from disagree on the second count. (And we're not even freaking piloting the CC first!!!)

Unfortunately, the cart has been put before the horse and is getting further and further away, gaining momentum as it rolls down the hill. And guess what? It's empty. And all of those who cheered it along need to own that.

Most education reformers are barking up the wrong tree.

Major elements of the current approach to education reform include redirecting more money to classrooms by cutting pensions and increasing employee contributions to healthcare, dis-empowering teachers unions, and focusing on hiring and firing policies. Human resources practices, budgeting, and union considerations are important factors in any education reform agenda, but they shouldn't be the crowning ones.

First of all, I support creating more portable retirement funds and health insurance, and separating them from employment. People shouldn't feel forced to stay in teaching (or in any job) just for the benefits. Likewise, people should keep benefits even if they lose (to no fault of their own) their jobs. That being said, the benefits that teachers receive are not lavish, especially when you consider their lower salaries, nor are such pensions and benefits responsible for our precarious fiscal state.

Furthermore, I have a hard time when some edu-pundits hammer pensions, but remain silent when it comes to the unheard of sums of money some reformers spend on expensive and unnecessary systems, on their own salaries, and on consultants and central office employees who don't work directly with children. Why only go after pensions and compensation when there are so many more damaging budgeting practices occurring in the name of reform? Such inconsistencies lead me to believe that those who yell about slashing teachers' benefits while approving truly wasteful spending are interested more in advancing their ideology than in smart fiscal policy.

As for reforming unions, to be honest when I taught in DCPS it didn't sit well with me that deductions were automatically taken out of my paycheck whether I joined the union or not (and I did join the union). I'm just not convinced that's a good system. I don't share Modern School blogger Michael Dunn's perspectives on all matters, but I do agree with some of his criticisms of unions, for example, that automatic dues deductions should be abolished and that unions should use their money to help workers and to advocate directly to management rather than use it to make contributions to political campaigns. And this is a place where perhaps more conservative edu-folks would agree; however, they should also then advocate for ending corporations' financial influence in political campaigns. Again, this is where inconsistency can betray ideological rather than practical motives.

Criticisms of unions aside, I find this path to school reform puzzling. First of all, the right of workers to organize is grounded in their First Amendment rights and hence a larger part of the American democratic system. Furthermore, I seriously doubt that disabling teachers unions will do much towards reforming education or towards improving teaching and learning, though it will certainly disable the Democratic Party. There are definitely teachers who get so involved with union politics, activities, and ideology that they neglect their jobs and their students--teachers who don't do their jobs shouldn't be allowed to keep them, but in my time teaching in public schools and being a public school parent, I have rarely encountered any educator who talked about much union activities or about their political views. I am very liberal and I have taught and lived in some very conservative places. I've worked alongside conservatives and I'm sure some very conservative people educate my children (I live in Eric Cantor's district), but their union membership and political views, conservative or liberal, almost never come up, nor should they have, and as far as how and what I teach or how my own children are educated, they don't really matter.

What does come up then? What should we be concerned with when talking about to how improve teaching and learning? Pedagogy and curriculum. How should I best engage and teach the students before me, and how should I advise my kids' teachers to best engage them? How can my co-workers and I help one another to best reach our shared students? More importantly, what should we teach our students? What as social studies and ESOL teachers do we want out students to know and be able to do? As a parent, what do I want my kids to know and be able to do? This is what good educators focus on and this is what any education reformer worth their salt should focus on. Same with teacher talent: where teachers went to college and their pedigree is much less important than what knowledge they have about pedagogy and about the content they teach--what they teach and how they practice. This is where evaluation needs to be much more rigorous and much more useful--as a means to improve teaching and learning, and not merely as an instrument to fire people.

If the existence of unions and fairly compensating teachers has not hurt the quality of teaching and learning, the high-stakes accountability and standardization movement has. It has severely limited what and how we teach and what and how students learn. I have not yet spoken to one parent or teacher in the liberal, moderate, and conservative communities where I've lived and taught who thought that high-stakes testing and standardization was improving teaching and learning, who wasn't concerned about its corrupting and harmful effects. I know many families in central Virginia who home school, not for religious reasons and not because they don't believe in public education, but because they abhor high-stakes testing and what it's doing to curriculum and pedagogy.

Meanwhile, leaders of education reform labs such as DCPS and NYCPS focus relentlessly on these relatively irrelevant criteria as well as on the pedigree of their practitioners, elite hiring (how about first focusing on making it a sane and stimulating place to work? On not driving good people out?) and draconian firing policies (accountability!), and student test scores. DC has had several years of education reform and they're just now (just now!) thinking about curriculum--and only in Language Arts for the moment. Meanwhile, DCPS is investing more in a expensive, large, and growing Office of Human Capital. What about investing more in quality instruction and rich and meaningful curriculum? There are eleven departments within the DCPS central administration and only one of them is focused on pedagogy and curriculum. What kind of an education system only focuses 9% of their efforts on pedagogy and curriculum, the heart of teaching and learning?

No work is entirely immune to the influences of ideology and politics. Furthermore, considerations of politics, economics, human resources, and management are important to any school or system. But if we truly want to improve education, we should do our best to check our ideology at the school house door. The craft of teaching and the quality of content we convey is where the real work of educating gets done. It's time we stopped wasting our precious resources and our students' time on petty and ideological matters, that we rolled up our sleeves and got down to educating.