Book Review: First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America's First Black Public High School

The following guest post is written by Jeff Tignor. Jeff has undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard and Duke University, respectively. He lives in Washington, DC, where he is a telecommunications lawyer and fellow at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, researching how local communities can use the internet and wireless technologies to foster civic engagement. 



In the excellent new book First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America’s First Black Public High School, Alison Stewart tells the story of one of the best and most important American high schools of the 20th century. The stories that Ms. Stewart shares of the tight-knit African-American community in Washington, DC with high school teachers with master’s degrees and PhDs sending students from a segregated high school to the best colleges and universities in the country amplify stories I’ve heard throughout my life. My father, paternal grandparents, two uncles, a great aunt and a cousin all attended Dunbar. After receiving his master’s degree from Columbia, my grandfather returned to Dunbar to teach English. My father and one of my uncles both left Dunbar for Yale and went on, respectively, to become a professor at Yale’s School of Epidemiology and Public Health and a surgeon in Kokomo, Indiana and part-time professor at Indiana University. My Dunbar family tree is filled with educators. The legacy of Dunbar has deeply influenced and affected me, even though I did not grow up in Washington, DC. For example, a few years after I moved to DC as an adult, I decided to run for Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner for my neighborhood. On election day, as I stood in the rain handing out flyers, a woman said, as my opponent attempted to reach out to her, “Sorry, but I’m voting for Mr. Tignor’s Grandson.” I won.

Dunbar was a groundbreaking educational institution born in Washington, DC, as a result of a unique set of circumstances and later hobbled by home rule politics, social class conflicts, and racial desegregation without integration. In the first half of the 20th century  this public school produced numerous leaders in medicine, science, education, law, politics, and the military. With the end of segregation, the conditions that resulted in Dunbar’s creation ceased to exist. Ms. Stewart, an award-winning journalist who has worked as an anchor and reporter for several major commercial TV networks, as well as NPR and PBS, and whose parents graduated from Dunbar in the 1940s, uses Dunbar as a lens for examining the history of education in Washington, DC. The book covers three distinct eras:  First, from 1807-1954, a detailed history of African-American education in Washington, DC, and of how Dunbar became America’s first African-American public high school; second, beginning with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education and Bolling v. Sharpe decisions, a transitional period in the years surrounding school integration; and third, Dunbar’s post-1960 full transformation to the neighborhood school it is today, struggling with the challenges of urban education. As someone whose family history in Washington, DC, dates to the post-civil war 1800s, I learned new facts about DC’s history and was struck by the irony of Dunbar alums arguing for desegregation at the Supreme Court and then seeing their prestigious and beloved alma mater fray as the unconstitutional system of segregation was dismantled. I was moved by the heartbreaking stories of students and educators trying to honor Dunbar’s past and simultaneously create a present and future that will allow the school to once again become a launching pad for great careers.

Dunbar came to be because unlike in much of the South, there were no laws restricting the education of free blacks in Washington, DC.  Small schools such as the Bell School and the Normal School for Colored Girls begat the Preparatory High School for Colored Youth, M Street High School, and ultimately in 1916, Dunbar High School. As the only academic high school for African-Americans in Washington, DC, Dunbar effectively became a magnet school. Students from DC had to pass an 8 to enroll and students transferring into Dunbar as part of the Great Migration had to take an entrance exam. Dunbar’s curriculum focused on English, math, the sciences, ancient history, music, Latin, French and German. Many of Dunbar’s teachers and administrators, like my grandfather, had advanced degrees and included doctors, lawyers, and two of the first three African-American women to receive PhDs. Dunbar sent students to prestigious colleges such as Harvard, Yale, Brown, Amherst, Williams, Dartmouth, Wellesley, and the University of Michigan. Notable alums include Edward Brooke, the first black US Senator elected by popular vote; Charles Drew, the creator of the blood bank; William Hastie, the first African-American Federal judge; and, Wesley Brown, the first African-American graduate of the Naval Academy.

In 1954, Charles Hamilton Houston and two of his fellow alums from the M Street School, Dunbar’s forerunner, were key members of the team that successfully argued for outlawing legally segregated schools in the states in Brown v. Board of Education and in the District of Columbia in Bolling v. Sharpe. From 1955 onward, Dunbar became a neighborhood school, with attendance solely based on the boundaries within which a child resided. One educator commented at the time that First & O, NW, was infamous as a gathering place for young men who were unemployed, out of school and “indecent in their public conduct.” Ms. Stewart writes: “It is bitterly ironic that three of the key players in dismantling legal segregation…learned their lessons at a school that became an unintended casualty of necessary civil rights action.” In a July NPR interview, Ms. Stewart described Dunbar's benefitting from the glass ceiling segregation placed on Dunbar’s highly educated teachers as a “perversity.”

By the mid-1960s, Dunbar and several of its alumni and former teachers, who had moved on to other leadership positions in education in the city, found students not nearly as interested in the tradition-bound lessons that began in 1807. My grandfather, Madison Tignor, found himself having to answer tough questions from students such as: Why doesn’t Eastern High School have an Afrocentric curriculum? Architect of school desegregation, now Howard University President James Nabrit was asked: Why is Howard Law School no longer serving the needs of African-Americans seeking equality? Marion Barry came to prominence. Dunbar never did integrate. From the 1970s forward, “the economic and social woes of DC were Dunbar’s woes.”

Over the years, there have been periodic signs of hope; a pre-engineering magnet program focused heavily on the sciences and partially financed by corporate sponsors, a Dunbar graduate becoming a Stanford graduate, and most recently, the track coach who will pick up girls at home as early as 3:30 am to get them to practice and who can point to every girl in a team photo and name where she is in college. Ms. Stewart ends on a positive note suggesting that given the demographic changes in the neighborhood maybe Dunbar will make history again, as its founders would have wished, “as the first truly, organically integrated school in Washington, DC.” Here's to hoping she's right.

Ssshhhh! Testing in Progress

This is a guest post by a DCPS teacher who wishes to remain anonymous due to fears of reprisal by administrators.

"Ssshhhh! Testing in Progress" 

These signs hang on every classroom door and throughout the hallways of the elementary school where I teach. Bulletin boards throughout the building are plastered with test-taking tips, countdown to testing days, and even testing-themed poetry. Teachers are feverishly reviewing the pages and pages of rules, regulations, and routines that will serve as a survival guide for the next two weeks. Administrators walk around inquiring about the happenings in each classroom, wanting to know how each lesson will contribute to the students' achievement on the upcoming standardized tests. Flyers are sent home describing the stress that will ensue in the following weeks and how we will cover up this anguish with a makeshift “spirit week.” Pajama day, crazy sock day, class color day. I momentarily found myself reminiscing about the days of high school homecoming, but this is no homecoming. Our school has become a den of bubble-sheet masters, nervous teachers, and strangers with clipboards, taking notes on every move made and the potential breaches of test security. 

I’m not sure what's worse, the testing itself or the preparation and anxiety built up beforehand. As I sat through a DC-CAS pep rally, the magnitude of this testing madness hit me like a freight train. This is what children are getting pumped up for? This is what teachers have been “working towards all year”? This is the “pinnacle” of our teaching? I felt like I was in some creepy twilight zone as I watched other teachers and administrators chant and watched the confused students cheer. To see the students get excited about their potential success on the test was not the point of contention for me. The fact that the students are subject to poorly-conceived, low-quality tests and used as pawns to determine educational funding, as well as the fate of their teachers, is not something worth cheering about. 

Other than the pep rally, teachers spent the week prior to the testing in meetings being lectured on the importance of test security, the protocols that would be our bible for the next two weeks, and on just exactly what would happen to us if these rules were not followed. The plans outlined what would happen from the moment the students entered the classroom until the last test was signed back into our testing coordinator. We were instructed to go over the plans, ask any questions we had and be prepared in the weeks to come. Due to the fact that our school was under scrutiny for previous allegations of cheating, we were warned that any negligence in conforming our classrooms and ourselves to these guidelines would result in an investigation and strict consequences.

I planned lessons throughout the meetings and graded papers in the background, only contributing my thoughts in areas which I found to be egregiously unreasonable or unjust. For example, lined paper for scrap paper, smiling at students (this is what they say is “coaching”), and allowing students to stand and stretch during testing would absolutely not be tolerated. As I listened to these rules, I pictured my bubbly bunch of eight year olds' faces. Then, the real bomb was dropped: Absolutely no bathroom breaks during testing unless the child was showing physical signs of distress. In addition, we also needed to prevent multiple bathroom trips by determining how badly each child had to use the restroom. Well, any teacher knows that once one student has “an emergency,” they all have emergencies. How am I to be the judge of the content of each child's bladder? To this I was told it would be easier to deal with angry parents of a child who had wet themselves, than to have to explain the situation to the monitors from central offices. 

I decided that I'd be escorted out by authorities before I let nervous eight year old test-takers wet themselves on my watch. Are we that afraid of losing our jobs that we relinquish our humanity? Are we that desperate to prove that we are not cheating on these  McTests that we deny children their basic needs? Thisis the “pinnacle” of insanity. Thisis the “pinnacle” of what an era of high-stakes testing is doing to our children and to our educators. 

As testing was underway I became more and more irritated with not only the rules, but the fact that teachers’ discretion was being undermined by outsiders claiming to be experts on data, but not on children. Who are these people moving chairs from place to place around my room to see my test administration from multiple angles? Why are these strangers writing pages of notes on the condition of my classroom and my position in the room? The thought crossed my mind of just throwing the pile of test booklets in the air and screaming of its insanity, but what good would that do? I wouldn’t be allowed to finish the year with my students who had to put their science projects on the back burner for the two-week testing period. I would never get to see how they turned out if I was punished for breaching test security. I had already been scolded for allowing children to read books after they finished the test, as well as for allowing them to go to the bathroom. I decided to not push any further.   

After being stalked throughout the building for two weeks in order to ensure that I would not change any test answers and spied on from just beyond my classroom door, my anxiety and disgust became overwhelming. After being witness to little children crying with anxiety and acting out in resistance and being forced to sit for hours completing endless assessments that they would most likely never see the results of, my faith in public education was diminishing. Why are teachers subject to this level of disrespect and distrust? Why are students subject to this much of a loss of real learning  time?

Every day, more and more evidence comes out that challenges the reliability and validity of test results and demonstrates the unfairness of using these results to evaluate teachers. But I will comply with the rules and regulations--if for nothing else than to see my students' science projects and to see how much more they will accomplish this year; I am committed to my students and their learning even as I am opposed to the insane high-stakes testing regime that has been imposed on them. I will not, however, allow my students or myself to be de-humanized in the process.

How much longer can we allow our schools to feed the high-stakes testing machine rather than feed students’ imperative to learn? How much longer can we let testing replace teaching and learning? And how much longer can we remain silent throughout it all? 

Rather than Choosing "Best" Teacher, Parents Should Seek Best Match

I have another guest post up, this one over at Nacy Flanagan's Education Week blog, Teacher in a Strange Land. In it, I respond to the matter of letting parents choose their children's teachers.

Check it out.

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.

School "Reform" in DC: Is the Problem Choice or What Compels Families to Choose?

After reading the New York times op-ed on school choice in DC, I asked some folks close to what's happening in education there for their thoughts. Mary Levy sent me what is written below and (with her permission), I decided to use it as a guest post. Mary Levy has analyzed DC Public School staffing, budget and expenditures, and monitored the progress of education reform for thirty years. She is a major source for fiscal, statistical and general information on DCPS for the media, government officials and non-profit, business and civic groups. She directed the Public Education Reform Project at the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs for 19 years, during which she played a major role in developing the District of Columbia’s school funding systems, wrote numerous reports on DCPS, and participated in every major reform planning initiative. Previously, in private practice with Rauh, Lichtman, Levy & Turner, she did civil litigation in civil rights, labor law, and school finance, including major litigations in New York  and Maryland.

I share Natalie Hopkinson’s frustration, as expressed in an op-ed in today's New York Times and have for a long time. Unfortunately, some of her facts are wrong (Has the New York Times now dispensed with fact checkers?) Furthermore, the larger problem in the District isn't choice per se, but why families feel compelled to exercise choice. 

To address some of the inaccuracies, what Congress has done is little compared to the work of DC's own elected officials. In 1995 Congress produced only the charter law and there was nothing about an option to transfer. The DC Council at the same time separately enacted a parallel law. Congress never did a choice policy for DC. Vouchers, which came later, were in fact, much to the chagrin of some of us, endorsed by our elected officials, including the Mayor, the Council Chair, and the President of the Board of Education. As for performance on tests, charter schools in DC on average have test scores somewhat higher than DCPS schools, though not by a lot. As to the closure of schools whose students struggle the most, the schools that then Chancellor Rhee closed on the whole actually had higher test scores than the schools to which their students were later sent; they were also more likely to have made Adequate Yearly Progress. And a reminder: Rhee was not appointed by Congress but by the popularly elected Mayor Fenty.

The argument about choice has been going on at least since I become involved in DCPS in the mid-1970s and probably before that. Many school activists from east of Rock Creek Park argued passionately against out-of-boundary placements, even when they were (allegedly) based on need. The assumption is that if the government forces people to stay in neighborhood schools, the parents will stay and make the schools be good. The result here has not been so felicitous--those with the means, or the moxie to get outside help, move to the suburbs or pay for low-cost independent or parochial schools. In fact, part of charter growth is from those schools, rather than from DCPS. I have watched over thirty years while determined parents tried to make their neighborhood schools better--and were mostly rebuffed or ignored. Even west of the Park, where my children attended DC Public Schools, we spent the majority of our efforts trying to neutralize the damage done by the DCPS administration. Still, we were more successful than those east of the Park. 

With the appointment of Michelle Rhee and the end of any avenue for meaningful parent involvement or influence, the situation is even worse. The schools west of the Park and some in gentrified Capitol Hill are favored, and DCPS administration is more authoritarian and unresponsive than ever to the rest. It is also elitist, and more uninformed, more unstable, more arbitrary, and less competent than before the mayoral takeover--a distinctly dubious achievement, since the situation was pretty bad before. That’s why so many people--both families and good staff--leave.

Now our elected officials and their appointees are threatening to close more neighborhood schools and bring in outside charter operators. Currently, charter schools in DC are city-wide by law and may not give preference to neighborhood children. Many current DC charter schools are local products, started by DCPS parents, teachers, principals, and social service providers who couldn’t take any more of DCPS. They’re going to be under threat too--because of the latest “reform” panacea, closing schools in order to bring in new operators and their programs with no little or no evidence of effectiveness, and new teachers and principals, many poorly prepared and foreign to communities here. I see the advent of charter school chains as trading a remote DCPS bureaucracy for a remote private bureaucracy located elsewhere in the country. 

In the old days there was a lot more out-of-boundary space in the schools west of the Park; in addition, though few people realized it, there was a lot of out-of-boundary placement within neighborhoods and wards. Now, due to demographic change and favorable treatment, there is not much out-of-boundary space in schools west of the Park, so we could get a test of the parents-can-make-their-neighborhood-schools-good proposition east of the Park. But only if the schools stay open and only if the parents stay. 

Remake the university? How about we understand its purpose first.

Today's piece is a guest post by Michael Lopez. Michael is a few of my favorite things: an attorney-philosopher-graduate student-educator. He previously guest posted here on our shared alma mater and he also guest posts at Joanne Jacob's blog, Linking and Thinking on Education. His own blog is Highered Intelligence.


"But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution." -CK Chesterton.

Preliminarily, I'd like to thank Rachel for inviting me to guest-blog here once more. I've immense respect for her education writing and am honored to be a part of it. She's asked me to write a "response" to this article  in The New Republic about Rick Perry's "higher education vision." The author of the piece is Kevin Carey, the policy director of Education Sector, a DC think tank. And he apparently thinks that Rick Perry has great ideas for the university. So let's do two things up front (besides reading the article): let's identify Perry's ideas, and identify why Carey thinks they're so great.

The article itself provides a link to Perry's "7 Solutions". Carey also provides this brief summary of the relevant steps:

Taken together, the seven solutions are remarkably student-friendly. Four of them focus on improving the quality of university teaching by developing new methods of evaluating teaching performance, tying tenure to success in the classroom, separating the teaching and research functions within university budgets, and using teaching budgets to reward professors who excel at helping students learn. The fifth solution would give prospective students choosing colleges more information about things like class size, graduation rates, and earnings in the job market after graduation. The sixth would make state higher education subsidies more student-focused, and the seventh would shift university accreditation toward measures of academic outcomes.

So what's so wonderful about these efforts on Carey's account? Well, the long and the short of it is that both Carey and Perry share a vision of the role of the university in our society, a vision that has quite a grip on our collective consciousness these days. That vision has a few assumptions behind it: (1) that the role of the university is primarily economic; (2) that the university is part of the "social assembly line" that our elementary and high schools have become in which institutions produce citizens something in the way a screw machine turns out screws; and, (3) that college benefits (or should benefit) everyone who attends, and, specifically, does so through advancing their career prospects.

We can see these assumptions at play throughout Carey's article. For example:

A landmark study of college student learning published earlier this year by the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa of NYU and the University of Virginia found that “American higher education is characterized by limited or no learning for a large proportion of students, and persistent or growing [race- and income-based] inequalities over time.” Fixing this problem ought to be a bipartisan concern.

That Carey assumes that these findings "should" be a universal concern convinces me that he doesn't even entertain two notions: (1) that university might not actually have as its mission teaching everyone equally; and, (2) that the university may not be a suitable a tool for eliminating at least some race- and income-based inequalities. These aren't implausible views, in my estimation, and they deserve at least consideration.

The balance of the article is really more about progressivism than it is about Rick Perry. (Although one might have guessed this by looking at the last sentence of the first paragraph, the traditional location of the "thesis statement."--Carey's doesn't mention Perry at all, despite the title and the picture.) His conclusion is, essentially, that progressives should be seriously committed to their goals of equality-through-social-engineering, that they should treat the university as a tool to accomplish those goals, and that they shouldn't allow party-line loyalty to interfere with their vision. Carey is, in other words, calling for a more consistent progressive idealism that pursues goals over political positioning:

Making college more accessible and affordable is, of course, the foundation of progressive higher education policy. Yet Democrats in Texas have almost uniformly denounced Perry’s plans.

Running through much of this discussion is a common theme: that students aren't getting everything they should from college, that some professors are not great teachers, and that the university is failing in its primary mission to educate the population and prepare them for the workforce. And there's no doubt in my mind whatsoever that universities are, indeed, failing to prepare students for the workforce. Carey and I agree about that. 

Where we disagree is that I question whether universities should be in the workforce-preparation business in the first place. That might seem like a bit of heresy these days, when the phrase "get a college degree" is almost ubiquitously followed with the words "in order to get a good job." But the fact of the matter is that while certain portions of the university are geared towards employment preparation--schools of engineering, education, law, medicine, and the like--the undergraduate curriculum is typically a curriculum in the liberal arts. That is, it is a preparation not for employment, but for life as a free, educated member of the civic body. The university has always had this split, since its inception: there was the arts curriculum on the one hand, and then there was advanced study in Theology, Medicine, or Law on the other.

The study of the liberal arts-- the preparation to live a civic life--is primarily about maturity, reflectiveness, and grounding in culture and philosophy. It's about the development of reason and the contextualization of experience, all so that one's "wider view" of the world might be brought to bear in the course of one's life. Public universities were established in order to make this sort of personal development more available to the populace, on the theory that an informed citizenry is a better citizenry, not necessarily a wealthier citizenry. (Please note that I am referring only to the more common programs at colleges of Arts and Sciences; there is a difference between the purposes of liberal arts programs on the one hand, and technical colleges such as Texas A&M on the other.)

Now perhaps this is something that we should hope for everyone, and maybe college should be more accessible, and cheaper. But if so, it's not because college is simply the last step in preparation for the workforce. The benefit of college (in the sense I'm talking about) isn't economic and the outcome of a college education should not be judged in terms of either economic outcome or economic parity.

This vision of the university does not see the professor as a content-delivery system. That is the role of the teacher in high school, which really is an institution developed and geared towards the distribution of foundational skills for use in one's economic life. Indeed, the K-12 system was developed after the university system, and can credibly be seen as a way to fill a foundational-skills void that the university system was never designed to address. A college professor is not a high school teacher; a professor is there because he or she ostensibly has a subject-matter expertise that makes him or her a resource for those who would like to learn about those things. The burden of learning, however, is on the student; the college student should be one who can teach him or herself, and who can use the professor as a resource in their own educational development.

The high school, by contrast, is an institution for imparting foundational skills that enable students to pursue their own goals and interests. If we see education as the project of providing students with the ability to lead good, flourishing lives, we can see high school as providing the student with the means, the capacities for action, while the liberal arts curriculum helps refine the student's goals.

Yet somewhere along the line--I suspect it was in the 60's--someone decided that college should become the new high school, that a college degree should be the natural continuation and culmination of the basic-skills acquisition that the K-12 system was designed to impart. Progressives like Kevin Carey see college as a way to level the playing field, to achieve their dream of economic egalitarianism. But I think it's the wrong tool for the job, and by leaving it to colleges to pick up the slack left off by a failing high school system that has substantially abandoned any attempt at hard and fast academic standards, we're asking colleges to deliver something that they are not originally equipped to deliver.

It's hardly a surprise that colleges fail at tasks for which they are, by design, incredibly ill-suited. That failure may be a problem, but by proposing seven-point reforms like those advocated by Perry, we're not "fixing" the university, but rather reshaping it into something else.

Now maybe that's really for the best. So far, I've been merely descriptive, offering an alternative vision of the university. It happens that, historically speaking, my vision is much more accurate than Perry's or Carey's. But that doesn't mean it's the best vision for our future. Nevertheless, I think that it's important that we understand what we are doing, and that we avoid the fallacy of Chesterton's Fence, that is, the reform or changing of institutions without regard to the purposes for which they were initially constructed. (Megan McArdle discusses that fallacy here. Please, especially read the block quote from CK Chesterton.) We have universities that provide a liberal arts curriculum for a reason--presumably because the society which attends to such things is a better society. If we "reform" the university, we do so at the risk of losing the benefit of that original purpose. To overstate the case somewhat, by transforming that which gives us a vision of the good life into that which gives us financial success, we risk pursuing money at the expense of our national soul.

I hope readers will excuse me if I'm not quite as eager as Perry and Carey to sprint down that road.

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.

Research Papers vs Blogs: Defending "Antiquated" Teaching from 21st Century Education Reform

Here is the guest post I mentioned earlier today, from Cedar Riener, a college professor of psychology who normally blogs at Cedar's Digest:



Cathy Davidson is making the rounds again in the education blogosphere. A few years ago, she gave up on grading, structuring her classes around peer review. Each assignment was graded by peers (pass/fail) and the final grade was determined by the number of assignments completed. Now she is promoting her new book Now You See It, which, as I see it, is an effort to apply Dan Simons' and Christopher Chabris' Invisible Gorilla to... well, everything. But the edu-blogsphere is all a-twitter through Virginia Heffernan's post on the NYT about how Davidson shows that education needs a 21st Century upgrade, because 65% of our students are going to have jobs that don't exist yet:

"One of the nation’s great digital minds, she has written an immensely enjoyable omni-manifesto that’s officially about the brain science of attention. But the book also challenges nearly every assumption about American education."

With the limited scope of a blog post, Heffernan starts blindfolding and lining up these poor assumptions on the wall. The first is... the antiquated 19th century research paper. Which, is always a reliable old scarecrow to shoot to shreds as you are speculating on the wonders of the 21st century jobs and skills.

Once the stage is set, Davidson points out that students are prolific publishers, only they blog. When they are forced to write a solitary, industrial age research paper, their hearts aren't in it, and they are awful:

“Online blogs directed at peers exhibit fewer typographical and factual errors, less plagiarism, and generally better, more elegant and persuasive prose than classroom assignments by the same writers.”

Some aren't buying what Heffernan is selling.

Kathleen Porter-Magee from the reformy Fordham Institute, points out that if we can't predict the future, we might as well prepare students for rigorous, evidence-based reasoning:

"Regardless of what is the hip new medium, we do our students a grave disservice by pretending that pithy diatribes or observational blog posts are on the same level as more thoughtful, well-developed arguments, grounded in evidence derived from texts, with clear theses that come from something other than their personal feelings."

Robert Pondiscio adds a delightfully snarky reply, beginning by pointing out that "65% of future jobs" is a silly Potemkin number and continuing on about the ridiculousness of the 21st Century skills movement that Davidson seems to be a part of. He highlights the inconvenient fact that no one assigns research papers any more, and reiterates his point that rich factual knowledge is necessary for reasoning of any sort:

"We talk about rigor and academic achievement while dismissing the legitimate products of scholarship as inauthentic and anachronistic."

As a college professor who assigns and supervises both real research papers (I make students write them in industrial age chairs with broken typewriters, naturally) as well as short responses that might as well be blog entries.

First, the distinction between research papers and blogs is largely meaningless. Do we mean brief? Then say "short form writing." Do we mean talky, informal? Then say, "informal writing." Do we mean collaborative? Then say "collaborative." I often feel that people use "blog" as a shorthand for "everything that is good about the internet" while opponents use it as a shorthand for "everything that is bad about the internet." The vague distinction as Heffernan uses it, and as adopted by Porter-Magee and Pondiscio does not help. Research papers, in my field at least, are most often incredibly collaborative, and sometimes brief. Blogs can be solitary affairs, as well as informed by a rich scholarly knowledge of the field, even if that field happens to be side-scrolling video games made in the 1980s for left-handed suburban thirteen-year-olds.

With that caveat, let me just lay out why I think both "research papers" (by which I mean: long-form, formal, describing a consensus of scholarly literature, organized around the author's own thesis) and "blogs" (short, informal, current, multimedia, collaborative) are important for a complete education, at any level. I will give examples from college, but I have no doubt many K-12 teachers could describe their experiences with using both.

Any conception of the goals of education must include both breadth and depth. Students should learn a bit of everything, even those subjects they are not naturally drawn to. Students should also have the freedom to follow their interests, and experience mastery through sustained practice and background knowledge. What does this have to do with blogs and research papers? I think it might help if I gave a few examples from my own teaching.

A "Blog" Assignment

Short-form, collaborative writing is suitable for a quick dip into many different subjects. In my General Psychology class, I assign three very short papers (1-2 pages), as well as more frequent short responses to the class material. The first short paper is a summary and response to a TED talk video. This might as well be a blog post (perhaps Davidson thinks that peer-review and collaboration are the key ingredients, but I'll get to that later). I give students a fair amount of choice about which video they write on, and the TED talks are, as everyone knows, fun, interesting, and only fifteen minutes long.

Why is this assignment awesome? Students are given choice, but also must choose, demonstrating some interest in one of the videos. They learn interesting psychology content, their curiosity is aroused, and they get the practice of putting some of their thoughts on paper. They get some practice at the struggle of writers everywhere (bloggers and scholars alike) to put themselves in the minds of their reader, and organize their thoughts to be understood by someone else.

Why does this assignment suck? Students do not do well on these assignments. Why not? The first reason is that they don't know enough: their vocabularies are often limited and they have limited scientific knowledge, and even more limited psychology knowledge. As accessible as the TED talks are, they suppose some broad liberal-artsy knowledge, and some of my students don't have enough (yet). The second reason is that they have not had much practice writing (really in any format) yet, and they are understandably bad at it. There are several structural changes in K-12 that discourage practice writing. High stakes standardized testing pushes teachers to teach "testing skills" and large class sizes increase the already high time commitment necessary to give feedback to all students.

So, to recap: to be better writers, students need knowledge and practice. That knowledge has to start somewhere, and writing is a good way to learn something. I try to encourage students to accumulate a bit of knowledge as they gain practice writing. I try to make the knowledge gathering interesting and the writing practice as painless as possible, but painful enough to make it clear that they need more practice. That means low grades on writing assignments, more drafts, that means meeting them where they are, and helping them to the next stop. If that means helping them realize that they need topic sentences for each of their paragraphs, then I help them with that. If that means their sentences are too long, overly wordy and the passive voice is adopted too often in their well-meaning efforts to sound formal and scientific then I point that out to them.
If they need help writing brief and direct sentences, I patiently urge them to make their sentences active.

I suppose I could make this assignment peer-reviewed, on a collaborative blog, but I resist for the same reason my father refuses to display his high school students' English papers on the walls in his classroom. Real feedback on their writing means someone telling them some hard truths:

You are a conscientious student, and you have tried your best, but you don't know how to do this yet. I know you are not satisfied with your evaluation, but let's look to the future, you can turn this back in, and here are the next steps you need to take to improve. I feel confident that you can do this, but you will need to work hard.

If you can imagine an eighteen-year-old college freshman saying that to another 18-year-old, you have a livelier imagination than I do. This simply will not happen on a collaborative blog. Further, although they may collaborate to reach a deeper truth, as James Surowiecki points out in his Wisdom of Crowds, and others have pointed out more recently, crowds are only wise when there is a diversity of knowledge and of perspectives. Despite some racial, ethnic and class diversity, most everyone in my classes are eighteen to twenty years old, and know very little about psychology. They are only going to be but of so much help to one other.

A Research Paper

After students have had General Psychology, Research Methods in Psychology (which I do not currently teach) as well as my Sensation and Perception, I find a select few still interested enough to take a class called Sensation and Perception Research and Theoretical Systems, or S&P RATS. Psychology majors at Randolph-Macon are required to take two of these "RATS" classes, in which they conduct a research project and write it up. The research paper is a formal, APA-style research paper, with the requisite sections of a scientific journal article: introduction, method, results, discussion. How 19th century of us!

Why is this assignment awesome? By now students (juniors and seniors) have some knowledge, and some practice writing. They know some psychology, they have been taught some statistical tests, and they even have some limited background in sensation and perception. They get to apply that knowledge, design a scientific experiment, and see it through over the course of the semester. They will learn first hand what science really is through actually doing it. They will learn how scientists communicate, by struggling to express their methods so that someone might reproduce them, and their results so that they can be interpreted. Through writing a report on an experiment they conducted, on a topic of their choosing (okay, with a few nudges) students experience the second side of our university system, not the transfer of knowledge through teaching and learning, but the creation of new knowledge through scholarly research. They must explore what other people have written on this topic (and realize how much research has been done already). They may not exactly create any new knowledge themselves, but they see what sorts of long, painful efforts are necessary to add another grain of sand to our castle of knowledge. Perhaps in the future scientists may communicate through blog posts (some do in the present, see Rosie Redfield on arsenic life). But the assignment's value is the same: this is how scientists communicate, these are the critical elements of an experiment, this is how we separate the experimental methods and the data from the interpretation.

Why does this assignment suck? Most of these students will not become scientists, but through this assignment they learn first-hand what science really is: repeated, soul-sucking failure punctuated by brief moments of relief. They will learn how scientists communicate, in rigid, impersonal format, like an OCD's desktop, everything in its place. NO! You cannot say why you wanted that to happen in the results section! Nein! The participants section does not include your experimental groups! I think this is valuable, and I know they will eventually find useful the habits of mind demanded by my field. But some (not all) don't find it all that interesting or valuable in the moment. Further, even though they do have more knowledge than they did as entering students, they still do not have enough knowledge to fully understand a scientific journal article. In short, some students struggle.

What does any of this have to do with K-12 reform?

First, these are exactly the conversations that K-12 teachers should be able to have about their assignments and courses, and are actively discouraged from having by the current reform scheme. Unfortunately, the "thoughtful, well-developed arguments, grounded in evidence derived from texts, with clear theses" that Porter-Magee and Pondiscio value fall by the wayside when everyone has to teach basic math and reading skills to be accountable to standardized tests. The ability to do a research paper in high school depends on knowledge and interest gained throughout a students schooling. When curriculum is driven by test-based accountability, it undermines teachers efforts to develop practical wisdom.

Second, it affects what students can do once they get to college. Faculty at my institution have noticed a decrease in students' proficiency in writing since the advent of the Standards of Learning in Virginia. These high stakes tests push teachers away from writing, and towards test prep, and we college teachers notice. The worst part about it is that while accountability falls hardest on teachers in urban high-poverty settings, intended to decrease the achievement gap, what I see in college is a widening of the gap. Those who went to private schools or who had teachers who were able to bypass the SOLs are more equipped to write at the college level than those who didn't, and the testing and accountability craze is widening this gap.

Finally, education is a long game. This is true for a teacher like myself, having an internal dialogue as above, trying to gradually improve my craft, fitting it better for my students, but it is also true for the students. Some of the things I do in general psychology for enjoyment in the moment (like candy) but other things are for payoff down the road, like brushing and flossing. The same is true for research papers. The capability to write with depth and rigor in a field must be cultivated over years and years, by content-rich curriculum to give students background knowledge, and by practice in writing that is nearly impossible to assess cheaply with bubble tests, or by underpaid graduate students.

Accountability through high-stakes, standardized, multiple choice tests narrows administrators and teachers attention on those aspects of student learning that can be easily measured in a single year. Emphasis on practicing writing or developing a broad base of knowledge may not be reflected at the end of the year, just as my efforts in General Psychology may not bear fruit until four years later. Education is incremental, but it is not always measurably so.

Gentle reader, are you still here? Thanks for bearing with me for a blog post the length of a research paper (if not the focus). I have two take-home messages:

First, college professors like myself should realize that their teaching is being changed for the worse by standardized testing. The brains in our classrooms are shaped by the SOLs just as much as they are shaped by Google, and we have to clean up the mess. Many more students come in unprepared for writing at a college level, but also unprepared to focus and apply their own interests to a topic. Naturally, I believe the best place to realize their interests and gain that preparation is a small liberal arts college, where people like me have a passion for teaching as well as the time and support to focus on a lower number of students, and follow them for 3-4 years.

Second, I would remind those educational "conservatives" like those at the Fordham Institute who championed Core Knowledge when E.D. Hirsch was derided for his traditionalism, and now rise to the defense of the research paper that I appreciate that your right hand is fighting hard to preserve valuable aspects of the "industrial model" of education: broad factual knowledge and rigorous arguments based on legitimate, scholarly authorities. Unfortunately, you don't realize that the true enemy of these cherished elements of education is ... your left hand, which is pursuing awful test-based accountability. The research paper was in hiding and on life support long before Cathy Davidson came along, and it was not driven mortally wounded from K-12 education by blog cheerleaders like Heffernan and Davidson, but by the very Reformy Idols that you celebrate.

Restrictive and Inappropriate: How High-stakes Testing & NCLB Abuse Sped Students

Friends of the the SOS March & National Call to Action blogged all this month about why they were marching in DC July 30th. And, today, we marched! I never wrote a post of my own, but this guest post by Chaya Rubenstein provides at least one reason for why I marched today and why I will continue to fight for real reform: federal education policy under Presidents W. Bush and now Obama such as NCLB and RTTT, and particularly high-stakes testing, are undermining quality public education. The effects of these policies on special education students are especially harmful and the special ed community has been especially under-represented (I, for example, have not blogged much at all about sped issues). 

Chaya is a retired special education teacher, and is a vice president of Professionals in Learning Disabilities & Special Education. In 1985, she was named Blue Island Teacher of the Year and, as such, was nominated for Illinois Teacher of the Year.  In 1999, her principal nominated her for a Golden Apple Award. Chaya is also a friend of the SOS March. Here's her post:

Not so long ago, teacher Paul Karrer's letter to President Obama in Education Week brought me to tears. Now here's another situation that brings me to tears: special education students who are forced to take high-stakes tests.

In Illinois, these tests are known as the ISATs. At the annual dinner for Professionals in Learning Disabilities & Special Ed., a colleague told me about a student in a self-contained classroom who eats paper. During the high-stakes testing of this past March, this student ate his test. In my experience, students hid under their desks, shaking, refusing to take the test. One student threw his three pointy and perfectly sharpened #3 pencils into the ceiling while loudly proclaiming, "Not taking this, not taking this, not taking this. . ." thus disrupting the other five students in the room, who then lost their concentration. The principal had to be buzzed to come and remove him, but brought him back to the room ten minutes later, saying he was now ready to test; the student repeated his previous behavior. Yet another student returned home from a vacation at 12:00 AM the morning of the test, not having gone to bed until 1:00 am. Her parents were called and yes, they insisted that she take the test; she fell asleep after the first fifteen minutes and continued to sleep throughout the rest of the testing that morning. Another student used her highlighting pen to fill in the bubbles on the answer sheet (remember, #3 pencils only!). One of MANY students with Attention Hyperactivity Disorder NOT on medication got up and wandered about the room during testing. These are but a few--I can assure you, there is no end to these stories!

The misery caused to many sped students (not to mention the loss of REAL education time spent otherwise on test preparation) aside, because they may comprise a subgroup large enough to be counted in the testing results, an entire school may not make average yearly progress. One of the most exceptional and high-performing schools in the country--New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois—was the subject of a Chicago Tribune editorial, "New Trier Gets an F." Why? New Trier did not make AYP this year because the sped subgroup had only 68% (the Math & Reading averaged together) “meet” or “exceed.” (& that percentage is undoubtedly one of the highest in the country for SpEd.—but not, according to the Feds—high enough.) At the middle school where I taught, our sped subgroup made AYP only one year out of six, but that year the English Language Learners (ELL) subgroup did not make it. The Illinois State Board of Education had been told to come up with a better form of testing within a certain time period, which it did not. Therefore, a month before the ISATs, though the ELL teachers had been given an alternative test—the Logaramos, I think—all of the bi-lingual teachers were told that they had to give their students the ISATs! All of us had been giving these tests for years, and we had begun prepping in September, using books and materials we'd already had. We, as Resource Teachers, scrambled, trying to help the teachers prep their students as best they could under the circumstances.

The result? A restructuring of our school, at a great loss to our children--a large number of teachers were sent to other schools, for example: the very dedicated and experienced art teacher (when told she was leaving, the kids asked, "What does art have to do with test scores?"); an extremely talented math teacher who had won a teaching award--sent to the Alternative Learning Center (and his kids had consistently earned the highest ISAT Math scores of the three grade levels!); the sixth grade social studies teacher who was sent to second grade (she tried, but she has been having a very difficult year, as she was a middle school expert and had never taught in the lower grades--now her job is in jeopardy); and, the learning disabilities resource teacher (whose students consistently scored well on the tests) was sent to be a fourth grade teacher. Feeling she could not successfully teach in that capacity, she resigned.

So, I ask: what was the gain here? The students lost many, many experienced, well-liked, respected and highly caring teachers because a small number of students--who shouldn't even be tested on these particular tests in the first place--did not make the grade. Many people do not understand that the alternative assessments are only given to those students who are “developmentally disabled” (the old classification was “mentally retarded”). Therefore, even if students have severe learning disabilities with social/emotional disorders, even if students have Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity (even just Attention Deficit Disorder is debilitating) and are not on medication (tending to be the case in low-income areas, where test scores tend to be lower), if the subgroup is large enough, test scores are counted, and the entire faculty is held accountable for them. (Our wonderful principal lost his position, as well.) Teachers who stayed on at the school do not think that the sped population's test scores improved this past year. (It has been said that the school did not pass this year, as well.) In fact, one of the sped teachers who was hired to replace another was recently fired for continual verbal abuse and for pushing a student. The learning disabilities resource teacher hired to replace another (this teacher not trained in specialized reading programs such as Wilson) is being re-placed into general ed reading and language position for next year.

But here is an even worse scenario: the new measure for determining learning disabilities (and it is supposed to be only for diagnosing learning disabilities, not for other learning problems) is now something called Response to Intervention (RTI), an agonizingly slow and often questionable (districts all over the country are utilizing/interpreting it in may different ways, with various, lengthy timetables) method. RTI is being used as an excuse to keep students from receiving sped services, thus accomplishing two things often beneficial to a school district, but not to the children: 1) the sped subgroup can be kept under the number that would make it eligible to be counted in the test results, and 2) school districts save money by not having to service these students.

Besides Mr. Karrer’s letter, Arne Duncan's recent dialogue in April with the Council for Exceptional Children, prompted me to write this. In it, Secretary Duncan acknowledges that sped students are testing behind the general population, and yet, even though the kids are not reading/working at grade level, they still need to be involved in this testing and must be tested at grade level in order to “raise the bar” and have high expectations set for them, so that they will be able go to college! Having been a sped teacher for thirty-five years, every dedicated teacher I know has the highest expectations for his/her students. I, for one, expected that ALL my students could succeed in college (I taught LD resource) and always told these middle school students--as well as their parents--to start researching colleges.

Yet, I ask, what does that have to do with this ludicrous testing program?! How does this help them go to college? A highly touted school here in Chicago, Urban Prep, had 100% of its students accepted to college; however, the school's test scores have been poor: the school has not made A.Y.P. It serves as proof that students can and will do well in their studies, even if they don't necessarily test well.

Finally, some time ago, I had read in the National Education Association Advocate about a group of special education teachers who did not administer state tests to their students as it was believed (as per school board policy &/or by union contract) that parents could refuse to have their children tested. As the teachers were charged to do so, they asked all the parents if they wanted their children tested. The parents said no, and the testing day(s) came and went with the teachers actually teaching and not testing their classes. Subsequently, the teachers were reprimanded for this, having letters placed into their files, along with other sanctions.

In conclusion, it is my hope and the hope of my colleagues that the mandated testing of all sped students will stop this year. Some sped students should be tested, of course, but that needs to be determined on a case-by-case basis (to be written into the I.E.P.) by teachers and parents. This is but part of a greater solution to repair our federal government’s damaging, restrictive, and inappropriate education policies, but it will help enormously. Our students deserve no less.

Diversity University: University First, Diversity Second

I was "introduced" to Michael Lopez when he was guest blogging over at Joanne Jacob's place. Among others, he wrote a post in response to this piece in the New York Times about admissions policies at Amherst College (and at other elite colleges). (This is a bit off topic, but after you read the NYT piece, read these letters to the editor in response.) Since he mentioned he had gone to Wesleyan, I shared my posts in reference to admissions policies there (here's the first and the second one). We chatted a bit and one thing led to another and next thing you know I asked him to write a guest post in response to mine. Michael's blog is "Highered Intelligence." I will soon respond to his post, but in the meantime, here's Michael:


This post is an outgrowth of a comment I left on Rachel's "Diversity University, No Longer" post. It covers much of the same ground, but also includes a few important ideas that I had neglected before. I will assume that the reader of this post has read her post in its entirety; there's quite a bit there, and it's not all obvious, but I think it boils down in the end to this paragraph:

"No matter how diverse racially and geographically the student body seems to be, in order to be truly committed to diversity, equality, and social justice, Wesleyan must change their admissions policies and must get out of the US News and World Report ratings game. Otherwise, no matter how much they're marketing themselves as part of the meritocracy, Wesleyan is still the same elitist animal."

Let me start out by saying that it's pretty clear that there's an uneasy social compact about what constitutes "academic merit". It's some ill-defined composite of test scores, grades, writing ability, accomplishments, school activities, and various types of service projects. The unifying theme of these constituents is that they are all things that the student does, not things that the student is. Whenever a school wanders outside these factors, it is engaging in what I think can fairly be called "affirmative action," insofar as the admissions office is taking an affirmative step to increase the likelihood that a candidate will be admitted on some other basis.

Now many of these semi-agreed-upon factors are the sorts of things that are tracked by US News and World Report. If there wasn't some degree of widespread agreement, the magazine wouldn't use these figures, because they wouldn't matter to the audience. I thus take it that Rachel is explicitly calling for "affirmative action" on the basis of a student's inferior position in our "increasingly stratified American class system". (I use "inferior" here in its technical, not qualitative sense.)

I've got no objection to this, as such. But I do think that I've got a different view than Rachel does, and that it's informed by a different perspective that I have on our shared alma mater, Wesleyan. See, I was one of the "low income" students that supposedly contributed to whatever diversity Wesleyan had back in the early/mid 1990's. I was also part of their ostensible racial diversity, but I'm not going to talk about race in this post other than to say that I'm not going to talk about race.

Now, from a certain perspective, Wesleyan was a tremendously diverse place. My closest circle of friends included students of five different races from four different parts of the country. Inter alia, we had 1.5 Mexicans, a West Virginian, a black guy from Brooklyn, a Caribbean/African American fellow from the Bronx, two white guys from the South, some half-Asian kids, and two Jews for good measure. Some were rich, some poor, and a few were in between. You might be asking what this group actually had in common, as any group of friends must have SOMETHING in common to stay together. The answer is simple: we were smart and we played D&D.

But I said "from a certain perspective" Wesleyan was diverse. Diversity really is a matter of perspective. If you've lived your entire life in the New York City or Boston upper middle class, or lower upper class, Wesleyan probably seems like it's a cornucopia of human variegation, even though a plurality of the students are actually pretty much just like you. If, on the other hand, you're a poor kid from California, it seems a little less diverse. How is that possible? Well, for the person in the former situation, there's all these new people who are so very different running around. For the person in the latter position--for me, that is--pretty much the entire school seems like rich folks from the East Coast. (And all y'all seemed rich to me, even those who protested about how you were thoroughly "middle class," but that's the perspective thing coming up again.)

While I had no expectations about the make-up of the student body coming in my freshman year, I pretty quickly figured out that despite being "Diversity University," Wesleyan was nonetheless primarily a bastion of a certain type of exercised, cultivated social privilege, and that I was a bit of a guest, free to take advantage of the facilities and treated like any other member of the society, but it was definitely not "my world." This was brought into graphic relief when I would go home. My father and my paternal grandparents, may they rest in peace, used to actually refer to it as "Mike's finishing school".

Now that's not to say I wasn't prepared to do the work--I was just as prepared or even more prepared than many of my classmates. (At least in this respect, I was a typical college student: it was motivation that caused me all my problems.) And while I don't want to go into boring detail, my application was what could probably best be called "inconstant." I had some very strong indicators (test scores and recs) and some very weak ones (GPA and certain curricular choices I made in high school). In short, it wasn't obvious that I was a shining candidate for admission.

I am thus exceedingly grateful to Wesleyan for taking a risk on me, and not least because it was the only school that accepted me. (And not the lowest ranked, either. My bona fides really were inconstant.) I know I was a risk--they could have just as easily taken one of their 4.2/1490 community service Manhattan-based demigods, the ones that they reject every year. That would have been a safer bet for them. They saw something they liked in my application, though, and off I went.

So I don't feel quite the same sense of outrage if the university decides to take fewer risks, if, as I heard some members of Rachel's class once remark, Wesleyan in the late 90's became "L.L. Bean-i-fied." If there are a few less borderline cases, a few less rolls of the admissions dice from an administration concerned with their national reputation, well, that's the way the cookie crumbles. From my vantage, extending their assistance and considerable financial generosity was something that they didn't have to do in the first place.

Frankly, I didn't go to Wesleyan to experience diversity. I didn't go to meet poor and rich students, Jewish and Episcopal students, or brown, black and yellow students. I went to meet really smart, engaging students who would push me, and with whom I could form an intellectual community. I don't know how many of you actually remember high school, but in many cases (not all, but many) it was a place where ideas and originality went to die. I wanted something different from Wesleyan, in fact, I recall writing in my hurried, last-minute application, the following sentence in response to the prompt, "How do you want to be remembered by your college community: "If college is anything like high school, I don't want to be remembered at all because I'd rather not have been there." I paraphrase only slightly and claim the pass of years as an excuse. Please don't think I hated high school completely--the good teachers I had were excellent, and thankfully, I had them often; the classes I enjoyed, I really enjoyed. But the classes I didn't enjoy were the worst sort of soul-crushing tedium, and the environment as a whole could fairly be called anti-intellectual.

I sometimes think that the "diversity" of a student body, in terms of race or money or accents or whatever, is the sort of luxury that you have to be middle- or upper-class to care about in the first place. And not being part of that club, I didn't care about diversity. In fact, what attracted me was the homogeneity of the student body: they were all wicked smart! My purpose was to get a first-class education, and a better future for myself. (To be fair, I didn't realize that "better future" included an extremely painful, emotionally taxing four-year crash-course on middle-class mores, but there it is.) And I believe that the prospect of a better future and a first rate education has to be the first and primary mission of the university.

That's not to say that a certain amount of risk-taking in admissions isn't a good thing. I'm a fan. As I've said elsewhere, I support SES-based affirmative action, up to a point. And I think that most of Rachel's suggestions--outreach, summer programs, etc.--are well-taken and, funds permitting, would be capital ideas. "Rolling the dice" on a student means taking a gamble, but the gamble I want Wesleyan taking is the gamble that the student they are admitting really are the sort of wicked smart, well-prepared student who will help grow the discourse of learning.

So I'm wary of pushing the thumb too hard against the scale. Rachel talks about students who are "capable" of doing the work (her emphasis). Based on the rest of her essay, she seems to be indicating that there's a certain amount of potential that should be recognized in college admissions; that a student might be good raw material, but just not quite as developed. And that's probably a good idea, to some extent. Nevertheless, as I wrote recently at Joanne Jacob's blog in response to the argument that a lower SAT score from the Bronx was "as impressive" as a higher score from a richer area:

"That, too, is a lovely sentiment. And it’s probably true if the 'merit' that you’re trying to measure is some sort of absolute potential. But the counterargument is a strong one, and runs thusly: college is a bit late to be relying on your potential. College, particularly college at any of the schools on the list above, is going to draw upon your actual preparation as a foundation for more advanced studies. If you don’t have that foundation, you’re going to fall behind because for all your magnificent potential, you just don’t read as well, or just don’t add as well, as the more prepared students with the higher test scores."

And if as admissions officers you degrade the average abilities of your student body too much, you'll also start to change the discourse of learning that goes on in your school. You'll start chipping away at the very reason that kids--especially the kids from the lower classes you ostensibly crave--want to be in your school in the first place, assuming it's not merely rank careerism.

So, just by way of bringing this back to Rachel's post, I'm not so sure about more radical steps like lifting the four-year cap that Wesleyan has; I think that's a good thing: a firm floor to ability. If you don't have the ability to graduate in four years, given the lax graduation requirements and how ridiculously easy it is to get classes at Wes, then I can't imagine that you have any business attending a school like that. There's stretching the standards and then there's simply abandoning them.

Education Films Series II: Why I Didn't Like Race to Nowhere

Race to Nowhere resonated with a lot of edu-folks I find common cause with. When it first came out I cheered it as an alternative perspective to the one presented in Waiting for Superman. Then my husband, Cedar Riener, saw Race to Nowhere and presented me with some valid criticisms. Cedar is an assistant professor of cognitive psychology at Randolph-Macon College. He normally blogs at Cedar's Digest. Here are his thoughts on the film:

I watched Race to Nowhere as part of a special preview opportunity last summer. While I found much to agree with in this film, there are two critical flaws that made me dislike it. First, the film takes the upper middle class problems of wealthy suburban California and presumes that the entire American educational system has these same problems. Second, it places too much blame for increased rates of depression and suicide on high stakes testing and homework.

First, let’s address the common ground. I agree that increased emphasis on high stakes testing is negatively affecting all of our schools. I agree that stress, depression, and suicide are important problems that deserve better solutions. I agree that in some schools there is too much homework and that many high schoolers stress too much about getting into a good college.

Given that director Vicki Abeles and I agree on the above, why am I not a fan? Maybe it is because as a scientist, I recoil at sloppy generalizing logic. Maybe it is because as a psychologist, I am skeptical of “single cause” explanations of complex problems. Maybe it is because as a teacher, every semester I can look out into my class, and tell that yes, some are stressed out. If I get a chance, I tell them to relax a little, that 89 on the exam isn’t going to kill them. But plenty of others need exactly the opposite; hey, that D- is kind of a big deal, maybe you should try stressing out a little bit more…

So here is a brief synopsis of the logic of the film. Kids today are over scheduled, over worked, and over stressed. They stress about high stakes tests, they have performance anxiety about their extracurricular activities, they start worrying about college way too early. A few scapegoats for this dire situation are the mountains of homework and AP classes.  The film presents a compelling emotional narrative, culminating with statistics of a rising suicide rate, and a heart-wrenching story of a thirteen-year-old girl who committed suicide after a poor math test score. How can we go along with a system which does this to poor innocent little girls?

My first problem with this logic is that there are (at least) two educational systems, each with their own brand of high stakes testing, which each result in different bad consequences. In Lafayette, California, where Vicki Abeles is from, and in Marin County, where this film has quite a few fans, AP exams, the SAT, and PSAT are high stakes for the students, and they get stressed about them because they see them as determining whether they get to have a future or whether they have to endure utter shame and failure by attending a non-Ivy, non-elite Cal State School. I have a sneaking feeling that some of them may even get some stress and expectations from their high-powered, elite-educated parents, who also may be a little more concerned about college than they should be.

In many other places, however, the high stakes tests are important for the teachers, but not for the students. Student disengagement is a problem in many urban systems. Ironically, many reformers talk about needing to include them in the “achievement culture,” which of course is seen as a good thing. And for students at the many urban charter schools with names that might as well be Achievement Academy for Achieving Achievers, promoting a culture of engagement and achievement may actually be part of the solution (although I am dubious that the names have anything to do with it).

In other words, for some wealthy students the problem is caring too much about school, but for many other children the problem is not caring enough. Overall, students do less homework in college, with less rigor, than they did even ten years ago, and this has been a gradual trend for thirty years. These are not the students from this movie.

My second problem is that suicide is a multiply-caused, complex problem, and we should not blame it on too much homework. The recent small uptick in suicides is a mystery, attributable to many different factors (and probably is due to a combination). Many psychologists argue that we should treat suicides as acute problems, rather than the tragic end of a chronic battle with depression. Many who commit suicide would not satisfy the criteria for depression. It is horrifically tragic that thirteen-year-old girls commit suicide (and so do seven-year-old boys, the age of my twins). And I agree that caring too much about your five upcoming  AP tests is a bad thing. But I don’t have to say that homework causes suicide to have a reasonable conversation about homework, do I?

I wanted to like Race to Nowhere. There are benefits to having a big tent of high-stakes test doubters. Placing too much emphasis on unreliable quantitative test data is bad anywhere. Anything that chips away at the market-based reformers stranglehold on the national dialogue is a good thing. If the hard-working immigrant 10^th grader who is expected to read on grade level after two years of formal schooling won’t do it as a poster child for why the NCLB “failing schools” model of testing doesn’t work, maybe a rich thirteen-year-old suicide victim from Lafayette, California will work.

On the other hand, the schools and the students in Lafayette and Marin are actually different than those in the DC Public Schools that I remember, and the public schools that my kids have gone to, and lumping them together does each a disservice. We need to treat them differently because they have different problems. I disagree vehemently with the view presented by Megan McArdle and Matt Yglesias, that rich kids can have their creativity (and content), but poor kids just need to learn how to read and get basic math skills before they get anything else (let’s eliminate recess! drill baby, drill!). But the attitude in Race to Nowhere doesn’t address the urban reformers like Michelle Rhee who don’t care about creativity and curiosity if you can’t read.

But you know what? Some homework is fantastic. Some tests are necessary. Some students are too motivated and some are not motivated enough. The sooner we all can realize this and start trusting their teachers more to find the right solutions for the students in front of them, the better. Unfortunately, I am not sure that Race to Nowhere starts us on the road to the somewhere.