We know that closing our doors, teaching in our rooms, and hoping for the best don't work. At least not in a larger global sense. We know that the events outside our doors have become so powerful that our doors are not big enough to keep us safely isolated. There is no seal hermetical enough to block out the odor of the stinky cheese of politics.
So what do we do?
Like many Americans, we have to look at the political parties and say, "None of the above."
The GOP could represent some of our interests-- after all, what is more conservative and retro than the American public school? But because teachers are so often associated in the public mind with unions, GOP-ers are unlikely to view us as allies. Because we are not rich, we're not viewed as members of the club by the business-conservative wing. Because we value education and inquiry, we're viewed with distrust by the tea party wing.
I come from a conservative background myself, and I despair of how the GOP often runs counter to its own values. The GOP ought to love gay marriage; it's a chance to let gays become just as much a conservative, family-oriented, self-sufficient part of society as straights. Nor does it make sense that the GOP is the party insisting that citizens who want to exercise their right to vote should have to get a government-issued id.
But the GOP is not our friends.
In many ways, I find that preferable to the Democrats, who pretend to be our friend and repeatedly stab us in the back. In Pennsylvania, PSEA helped elect Ed Rendell, who proceeded to undermine public schools and chip away at the profession. And many of the biggest name in reform attacks today-- Duncan, Rhee-- are card-carrying Dems. Local levels are often no better. Democrats are raiding pension funds, setting up charter sweetheart deals, promoting TFA.
It is no news that the policies of the Obama administration are simply a continuation of Bush-era NCLB. If Bush had somehow been elected to two more terms, we teachers would not be any worse off than we are now. And the Democrat leadership tendency to think that the fancy shmancy elite in DC know better than the rest of us is not serving the teaching profession well.
At the end of the day, both parties are swimming in a polluted sea of dirty money. Each party, in its own way, serves the interests of the rich and powerful.
The unions are supposed to give us some political clout. They are failing.
I know the arguments. I've heard them from my own past state union chief. They boil down into two basic ideas:
1) We need to earn a place at the table.
2) It could have been so much worse.
I'm no romantic about this stuff. I know political realities often require political sacrifice and bargain-making. But the union leadership has lost its way. They've become so enamored of sitting at that damn table that they are not noticing that nobody else at the damn table is listening to them. And I no longer care that it could be worse, because right now it's really, really bad, and we are not saying so.
I'm not sure I'll ever trust NEA leadership again. Their support of CCSS is an inexcusable betrayal of the members. It's a complete abdication of their role. I will never make a contribution to the political action wing of the union. I do not trust them to spend it on something that will actually benefit the profession.
This is not a hopeful piece. It's entirely possible that we are at a point where teachers have so little political clout and the forces of reform are so intent on climbing over our bodies to get at that big pile of money that we might as well be ants trying to stave off an elephant.
We can keep speaking and acting locally. We can keep joining up with like-minded people. We can hope that at some point we will reach critical mass. But do not say to me, "Politician ______ is our friend. He will help us and make things better." Do not say to me, "We must support this party because they are the teachers' friends."
In the political world, we have few friends, and we have to get smarter about recognizing them. We won't recognize them by political party or union certification. We certainly won't know them by what they say. We'll know them by what they do, by their policy choices, by their willingness to stand up in opposition to policies designed to destroy public education. We'll know them because they understand what our opponents are really saying. We'll know them because they actually support us.
Thursday, December 5, 2013
Wednesday, December 4, 2013
Mobile Effectiveness
While focus shifts back and forth among the many problem areas of the reformy movement (I like Russ Walsh's name for the movement, and I'm going to start borrowing it), there are some issues that lurk in the background. They are the other shoes, waiting to drop. Some of them make me nervous, and while they may never amount to a real concern, I'm going to air my concerns. At the very least, if they actually materialize, I can say that I said so.
Back in 2012, the USDOE published "Providing Effective Teachers for All Students" The most obvious focus of the report is on methods of assessing teacher effectiveness, with all the usual suspects in play. But this case study of five districts also considers what to do with the ratings once they've been manufactured ...er, I mean, tabulated with totally reliable data.
One of the uses for the data is already well known. One district considered using data as an excuse for "dismissal." Aren't words great? "Dismissal" sounds so much more pleasant than "firing" or "canning his ass." But in the report we also find this: "In one case, Houston’s Effective Teacher Pipeline project, such incentives were paired with efforts to address working conditions in high-need schools by encouraging movement of many effective teachers to a small set of high-priority, high-need schools.
This is an idea that I have sensed sitting in the wings, waiting for its time on stage. More recently, Mathematica released a report studying the idea more directly:The Talent Transfer Initiative was a brain-child of the USDOE.
Could the right amount of money get a well-rated teacher to jump ship and go to a low-score school? And if we got them to move, would it help? And how much additional money would it take to get them to stay there?
The questions are not as complicated as they might have been; the study, in true DOE fashion, defined a high-performing teacher based strictly on VAM scores. So what the study really examined was, "Can a teacher who is good at test prep in this school be equally good at test prep in this crappy school over here?" The short answer was, "Yes, in elementary schools, and not so much in middle schools."
This all speaks to an oft-repeated concern, most commonly expressed as "How do we increase low-achieving students' access to highly effective teachers?"
Like everything reformy, there's a kernel of truth here. Wouldn't high needs students be better off if they had super-duper teachers? But wrapped around that kernel are some more troublesome assumptions.
First, our old favorite teacher-blaming assumption-- all those poor kids really need is a super-great teacher in front of them and they will do just great. With the right Mr. Chips, all their issues of poverty and difficult home lives will be erased! Huzzah!
Second, the notion that teachers and students are basically interchangeable cogs in a large, uniform machine. A teacher from a rural Iowa school will be just as good if we put him in a Philadelphia classroom. After all, a student is a student is a student, and there's no need to know or plug into the local culture and community. Talking to parental units is exactly the same from Hawaii to New Orleans. One size does fit all.
Third-- well, this whole proposition rests on the notion that we can definitely identify the superlative teachers. Now, I'm not a Flat Earth Society guy. I know that some teachers are great, and some teachers kind of suck. What I don't know is that the USDOE, or any of the state DOEs, has the slightest idea how to clearly identify who is Mr. Holland and who is Mr. Vader. Using VAM? Let's be clear-- anyone who thinks that VAM tells us anything useful is a dope.
In short, this program depends on the same assumptions that lead the administration to think that the TFA is a solution to anything at all.
But it keeps coming back, this notion that getting teachers to migrate will make things better. I see it hinted at in dozens of PISA interpretations. Every time a writer suggests that we need to get the best teachers in front of the weakest classrooms, I see it suggested again.
Would it be a bad thing? I guess that depends. If we stick with the idea that bribery is the best motivator, I suppose some teachers can make some serious money being test-prep Ronins. But I imagine that some teachers who have slogged away for the usual pay for years might resent the New Kid who just got a 20K bonus for doing what the regular teacher has been doing for her whole career.
And if there's no bribery? If states decide (or are strongly prompted to decide by the same feds who volunteered us all for CCSS) to be a bit more directly suggestive about teachers changing jobs, schools, even districts? I realize that may seem like a little Orwellian and paranoid, but these are educationally paranoid times. I considered it unthinkable that a state would just steal a pension fund or wipe our union bargaining power or sell their state department autonomy to the federal government. Telling teachers, "If you want to keep your job, you're going to have to follow it where we send you," just doesn't seem that far-fetched these days.
I graduated from high school in 1975. I remember when the US observed that the support for the Viet Cong was coming from the villages, and so hit on the brilliant solution tat we would make everybody leave their villages and go live in their city. We even burned their villages down so they wouldn't go back. And all that actually made them oppose us more-- quel surprize!
This gives me flashbacks. I hope I turn out to be totally wrong, that the Teacher Relocation Program never happens. But every time I see rhetoric about how we need to put our most successful teachers in front of our least successful students, I flinch a little bit. Here's hoping I never get to say, "I told you so."
Back in 2012, the USDOE published "Providing Effective Teachers for All Students" The most obvious focus of the report is on methods of assessing teacher effectiveness, with all the usual suspects in play. But this case study of five districts also considers what to do with the ratings once they've been
One of the uses for the data is already well known. One district considered using data as an excuse for "dismissal." Aren't words great? "Dismissal" sounds so much more pleasant than "firing" or "canning his ass." But in the report we also find this: "In one case, Houston’s Effective Teacher Pipeline project, such incentives were paired with efforts to address working conditions in high-need schools by encouraging movement of many effective teachers to a small set of high-priority, high-need schools.
This is an idea that I have sensed sitting in the wings, waiting for its time on stage. More recently, Mathematica released a report studying the idea more directly:The Talent Transfer Initiative was a brain-child of the USDOE.
Could the right amount of money get a well-rated teacher to jump ship and go to a low-score school? And if we got them to move, would it help? And how much additional money would it take to get them to stay there?
The questions are not as complicated as they might have been; the study, in true DOE fashion, defined a high-performing teacher based strictly on VAM scores. So what the study really examined was, "Can a teacher who is good at test prep in this school be equally good at test prep in this crappy school over here?" The short answer was, "Yes, in elementary schools, and not so much in middle schools."
This all speaks to an oft-repeated concern, most commonly expressed as "How do we increase low-achieving students' access to highly effective teachers?"
Like everything reformy, there's a kernel of truth here. Wouldn't high needs students be better off if they had super-duper teachers? But wrapped around that kernel are some more troublesome assumptions.
First, our old favorite teacher-blaming assumption-- all those poor kids really need is a super-great teacher in front of them and they will do just great. With the right Mr. Chips, all their issues of poverty and difficult home lives will be erased! Huzzah!
Second, the notion that teachers and students are basically interchangeable cogs in a large, uniform machine. A teacher from a rural Iowa school will be just as good if we put him in a Philadelphia classroom. After all, a student is a student is a student, and there's no need to know or plug into the local culture and community. Talking to parental units is exactly the same from Hawaii to New Orleans. One size does fit all.
Third-- well, this whole proposition rests on the notion that we can definitely identify the superlative teachers. Now, I'm not a Flat Earth Society guy. I know that some teachers are great, and some teachers kind of suck. What I don't know is that the USDOE, or any of the state DOEs, has the slightest idea how to clearly identify who is Mr. Holland and who is Mr. Vader. Using VAM? Let's be clear-- anyone who thinks that VAM tells us anything useful is a dope.
In short, this program depends on the same assumptions that lead the administration to think that the TFA is a solution to anything at all.
But it keeps coming back, this notion that getting teachers to migrate will make things better. I see it hinted at in dozens of PISA interpretations. Every time a writer suggests that we need to get the best teachers in front of the weakest classrooms, I see it suggested again.
Would it be a bad thing? I guess that depends. If we stick with the idea that bribery is the best motivator, I suppose some teachers can make some serious money being test-prep Ronins. But I imagine that some teachers who have slogged away for the usual pay for years might resent the New Kid who just got a 20K bonus for doing what the regular teacher has been doing for her whole career.
And if there's no bribery? If states decide (or are strongly prompted to decide by the same feds who volunteered us all for CCSS) to be a bit more directly suggestive about teachers changing jobs, schools, even districts? I realize that may seem like a little Orwellian and paranoid, but these are educationally paranoid times. I considered it unthinkable that a state would just steal a pension fund or wipe our union bargaining power or sell their state department autonomy to the federal government. Telling teachers, "If you want to keep your job, you're going to have to follow it where we send you," just doesn't seem that far-fetched these days.
I graduated from high school in 1975. I remember when the US observed that the support for the Viet Cong was coming from the villages, and so hit on the brilliant solution tat we would make everybody leave their villages and go live in their city. We even burned their villages down so they wouldn't go back. And all that actually made them oppose us more-- quel surprize!
This gives me flashbacks. I hope I turn out to be totally wrong, that the Teacher Relocation Program never happens. But every time I see rhetoric about how we need to put our most successful teachers in front of our least successful students, I flinch a little bit. Here's hoping I never get to say, "I told you so."
Monday, December 2, 2013
The Wrongest Sentence Ever in the CCSS Debate
At Impatient Optimists, a Gates Foundation website, Allan Golston recently wrote a notable piece entitled "America's Businesses Need the Common Core." It's a notable column, not because it has anything new to add to the discussion (it's a rehash of the usual pro-CCSS fluffernuttery), but because it contains this sentence:
Businesses are the primary consumers of the output of our schools, so it’s a natural alliance.
As a semi-professional hack writer and fake journalist, I can tell you that it's a challenge to fit a lot of wrong in just one sentence, but Mr. Golston has created a masterpiece of wrong, a monument of wrong, a mighty two-clause clown car of wrong. Let's just look under the hood.
Output of our schools. Students are not output. They are not throughput. They are not toasters on an assembly line. They are not a manufactured product, and a school is not a factory. In fact, a school does not create "output" at all. Talking about the "output" of a school is like talking about the "output" of a hospital or a counseling center or a summer camp or a marriage. When talking about interactions between live carbon-based life forms (as in "That girl you've been dating is cute, but how's the output of the relationship?"), talking about output is generally not a good thing
Primary consumers. Here's another thing that students are not-- students are not consumer goods. Businesses do not purchase them and then use them until they are discarded or replaced. Students are not a good whose value is measured strictly in its utility to the business that purchased it.
Businesses are the primary consumers. Even if I correct "primary consumers" to mean something more human-friendly, this is STILL wrong. Businesses are NOT the primary recipients of the benefits of well-educated young humans, because the purpose of education is NOT simply to prepare young humans to be useful to their future employers. A good education prepares them to be good citizens, neighbors, voters, parents, and spouses. All of those people are stakeholders, too. And the number one stakeholder when it comes to the student's education-- that would be the student, whose education will prepare that student to get maximum use of his own personal constellation of skills to chart the life path that he chooses.
To shoulder yourself to the front of the great society-large crowd of stakeholders in education and declare boldly, "Yeah, we're more important than anyone else here" is a truly impressive display of ballsiness.
So it's a natural alliance. Let's pretend for a moment that this conclusion isn't predicated on the totally-wrong first clause. If business and education represent a natural alliance, then maybe business could start acting like allies instead of ham-handed paternalistic patronizing bosses. Pick the business of anybody on the Gates Foundation board of directors. Pick any one. Now imagine me, a teacher, showing up at the CEO's office and saying, "Hey, some of us at my high school formed a study group and we've come up with some recommendations about how your business should be run. And if you don't want to listen to us, we'll call up our friends in DC and make you listen to us."
I can imagine lots of responses. None of them would be, "Hey, you must be my ally!"
I thank Mr. Golston for managing to crystallize so much of what's wrong with the Gates-business crowd's view of the entire education and Common Core situation. I would like to also point out that there is some paternalistic elitist BS in this as well, because we're not talking about ALL education. This crowd will gain credibility with me the first time I pick up the paper and read about them marching into the main office of their child's exclusive private school and saying, "I pay good money to you guys in tuition and endowments, and I want YOU to become a pilot program for my school reforms. We're going to put all of these in place, here, where my child goes to school, so that I can show everybody else how great they will be."
No, if a sentence like Golston's turned up in the materials for an elite private school, the phone in that main office would be ringing, and it wouldn't be to deliver congratulations. Nobody would let a sentence this wrong come anywhere near their own child.
Businesses are the primary consumers of the output of our schools, so it’s a natural alliance.
As a semi-professional hack writer and fake journalist, I can tell you that it's a challenge to fit a lot of wrong in just one sentence, but Mr. Golston has created a masterpiece of wrong, a monument of wrong, a mighty two-clause clown car of wrong. Let's just look under the hood.
Output of our schools. Students are not output. They are not throughput. They are not toasters on an assembly line. They are not a manufactured product, and a school is not a factory. In fact, a school does not create "output" at all. Talking about the "output" of a school is like talking about the "output" of a hospital or a counseling center or a summer camp or a marriage. When talking about interactions between live carbon-based life forms (as in "That girl you've been dating is cute, but how's the output of the relationship?"), talking about output is generally not a good thing
Primary consumers. Here's another thing that students are not-- students are not consumer goods. Businesses do not purchase them and then use them until they are discarded or replaced. Students are not a good whose value is measured strictly in its utility to the business that purchased it.
Businesses are the primary consumers. Even if I correct "primary consumers" to mean something more human-friendly, this is STILL wrong. Businesses are NOT the primary recipients of the benefits of well-educated young humans, because the purpose of education is NOT simply to prepare young humans to be useful to their future employers. A good education prepares them to be good citizens, neighbors, voters, parents, and spouses. All of those people are stakeholders, too. And the number one stakeholder when it comes to the student's education-- that would be the student, whose education will prepare that student to get maximum use of his own personal constellation of skills to chart the life path that he chooses.
To shoulder yourself to the front of the great society-large crowd of stakeholders in education and declare boldly, "Yeah, we're more important than anyone else here" is a truly impressive display of ballsiness.
So it's a natural alliance. Let's pretend for a moment that this conclusion isn't predicated on the totally-wrong first clause. If business and education represent a natural alliance, then maybe business could start acting like allies instead of ham-handed paternalistic patronizing bosses. Pick the business of anybody on the Gates Foundation board of directors. Pick any one. Now imagine me, a teacher, showing up at the CEO's office and saying, "Hey, some of us at my high school formed a study group and we've come up with some recommendations about how your business should be run. And if you don't want to listen to us, we'll call up our friends in DC and make you listen to us."
I can imagine lots of responses. None of them would be, "Hey, you must be my ally!"
I thank Mr. Golston for managing to crystallize so much of what's wrong with the Gates-business crowd's view of the entire education and Common Core situation. I would like to also point out that there is some paternalistic elitist BS in this as well, because we're not talking about ALL education. This crowd will gain credibility with me the first time I pick up the paper and read about them marching into the main office of their child's exclusive private school and saying, "I pay good money to you guys in tuition and endowments, and I want YOU to become a pilot program for my school reforms. We're going to put all of these in place, here, where my child goes to school, so that I can show everybody else how great they will be."
No, if a sentence like Golston's turned up in the materials for an elite private school, the phone in that main office would be ringing, and it wouldn't be to deliver congratulations. Nobody would let a sentence this wrong come anywhere near their own child.
Sunday, December 1, 2013
Dear Philip Elliot
In the last few days I've seen several writers repeat the official narrative about CCSS-- "The states thought it up, teachers helped develop it, and now it will make education super-duper better; a handful of tea party crazypants are the only ones complaining." But nobody has done a better job this weekend of selling that story than Philip Elliot, who is kicking off a three-part series promoting the swellness of CCSS. I actually left the bulk of this post in a comments section for another article, but I'm going to add and modify just so that I can tweet this response to Mr. Elliot.
I've been gathering links at www.curmudgucation.tumblr.com (though admittedly doing a poor job of cataloging them-- I had no idea the project would get so large). Here are just a few links to take a look at.
Mercedes Schneider has done a huge amount of research and documentation of education issues. Here she takes a look at the Memorandum of Understanding that states signed to apply for Race to the Top and what it has to say about the origins and purpose of CCSS
http://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2013/10/14/the-common-core-memorandum-of-understanding-what-a-story/
Anthony Cody writes at Education Week and has done lots of solid work regarding the CCSS. Here's his piece about the sixty people who actually wrote the Core
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2009/07/national_standards_process_ign.html?intc=bs&cmp=SOC-SHR-GEN#.UmLaASTJmHs.facebook
Think that only tin hat tea party anti-government people are freaking over CCSS? Here are some other people with problems with them. Alan Singer is one of many writers to address the fundamental educational problem with the reading section of CCSS
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-singer/a-serious-flaw-in-common-_b_4212340.html?utm_source=concierge&utm_medium=onsite&utm_campaign=sailthru+slider+
This interview with a teacher who "worked on" CCSS both underlines the origin story of the standards as well as some of the fundamental educational issues
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2013/11/florida_teacher_i_was_among_th.html
And if you think that NEA top brass support means that rank and file teachers also all love the CCSS, skip past this article to the over-200 angry negative comments from actual classroom teachers
http://neatoday.org/2013/10/16/10-things-you-should-know-about-the-common-core/
There are tons more, and as a secondary teacher, I have not followed as closely the developmentally inappropriate standards operating at the elementary level. Standards were created largely with backwards scaffolding. Say you wanted a high school senior to run a four minute mile, and you decided to just work backwards--- a five minute mile as a junior, six minute mile as a sophomore, and on until you arrive at the standard of saying a one-year-old must run his mile in thirty minutes. If you ignore the developmental states of children, scaffolding leads you to dumb standards.
Are many of the stories you tell in your article great teaching stories? You bet they are. Those are mostly great techniques-- which teachers have been using for years. In that respect CCSS is like that boss you hat, the one who shows up after you've been working for years, makes a big show of telling you to do what you were doing anyway, and then takes credit for your success.
I just wish, Mr. Elliot, that you had done a more balanced and thorough round of research before putting together your article. To have this distributed across the country under the respect AP banner will be a disservice to the many teachers who are fighting to provide the best possible education for their students while under attack by the forces of "reform."
I've been gathering links at www.curmudgucation.tumblr.com (though admittedly doing a poor job of cataloging them-- I had no idea the project would get so large). Here are just a few links to take a look at.
Mercedes Schneider has done a huge amount of research and documentation of education issues. Here she takes a look at the Memorandum of Understanding that states signed to apply for Race to the Top and what it has to say about the origins and purpose of CCSS
http://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2013/10/14/the-common-core-memorandum-of-understanding-what-a-story/
Anthony Cody writes at Education Week and has done lots of solid work regarding the CCSS. Here's his piece about the sixty people who actually wrote the Core
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2009/07/national_standards_process_ign.html?intc=bs&cmp=SOC-SHR-GEN#.UmLaASTJmHs.facebook
Think that only tin hat tea party anti-government people are freaking over CCSS? Here are some other people with problems with them. Alan Singer is one of many writers to address the fundamental educational problem with the reading section of CCSS
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-singer/a-serious-flaw-in-common-_b_4212340.html?utm_source=concierge&utm_medium=onsite&utm_campaign=sailthru+slider+
This interview with a teacher who "worked on" CCSS both underlines the origin story of the standards as well as some of the fundamental educational issues
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2013/11/florida_teacher_i_was_among_th.html
And if you think that NEA top brass support means that rank and file teachers also all love the CCSS, skip past this article to the over-200 angry negative comments from actual classroom teachers
http://neatoday.org/2013/10/16/10-things-you-should-know-about-the-common-core/
There are tons more, and as a secondary teacher, I have not followed as closely the developmentally inappropriate standards operating at the elementary level. Standards were created largely with backwards scaffolding. Say you wanted a high school senior to run a four minute mile, and you decided to just work backwards--- a five minute mile as a junior, six minute mile as a sophomore, and on until you arrive at the standard of saying a one-year-old must run his mile in thirty minutes. If you ignore the developmental states of children, scaffolding leads you to dumb standards.
Are many of the stories you tell in your article great teaching stories? You bet they are. Those are mostly great techniques-- which teachers have been using for years. In that respect CCSS is like that boss you hat, the one who shows up after you've been working for years, makes a big show of telling you to do what you were doing anyway, and then takes credit for your success.
I just wish, Mr. Elliot, that you had done a more balanced and thorough round of research before putting together your article. To have this distributed across the country under the respect AP banner will be a disservice to the many teachers who are fighting to provide the best possible education for their students while under attack by the forces of "reform."
Saturday, November 30, 2013
Uncle Arne Wants You!
It has occurred to the Department of Education that teaching has a recruiting and retention problem.
"No duh," you think. And then maybe you think, "Well, perhaps that means the DoE will do something about lifting the heavy hand of regulatory oppression form teachers' backs. Maybe that means that the feds will step into the culture wars to defend teachers. Maybe the feds will stop suggesting at every turn that public school teachers suck. Maybe-- just maybe-- this means that the feds will step to take the lead in increasing the esteem and with which the profession is view. Maybe they will take a second look at how their support of CCSS and charters and TFA and new teacher accountability models are crushing the soul of the profession."
Okay, you probably aren't thinking all that because A) you haven't been living under a rock and B) you aren't delusional.
No, what the feds have given us is a nifty PR campaign and a website that works better than the ACA site, but has far less useful information.
"Make more. Teach" is the name of the campaign, and you can read all about it at teach.org.
The site puts its goals in plain English.
"No duh," you think. And then maybe you think, "Well, perhaps that means the DoE will do something about lifting the heavy hand of regulatory oppression form teachers' backs. Maybe that means that the feds will step into the culture wars to defend teachers. Maybe the feds will stop suggesting at every turn that public school teachers suck. Maybe-- just maybe-- this means that the feds will step to take the lead in increasing the esteem and with which the profession is view. Maybe they will take a second look at how their support of CCSS and charters and TFA and new teacher accountability models are crushing the soul of the profession."
Okay, you probably aren't thinking all that because A) you haven't been living under a rock and B) you aren't delusional.
No, what the feds have given us is a nifty PR campaign and a website that works better than the ACA site, but has far less useful information.
"Make more. Teach" is the name of the campaign, and you can read all about it at teach.org.
The site puts its goals in plain English.
TEACH.ORG provides the information and community support that aspiring
teachers need to design their own path to a rewarding, successful career.
teachers need to design their own path to a rewarding, successful career.
And its origins are there in black and white as well.
The TEACH campaign originated as a Department of Education initiative
to increase awareness of and support for the teaching profession.
Teach.org is actually almost two years old, but you can be forgiven for not knowing that because nobody has talked much about it, because there's nothing to talk about. A chirpy blog, a slick tumblr-style aggregator, some pretty interviews with teachers, and a many-click series of pages that will tell you less about the requirements to pursue a teaching career than you can learn from your high school guidance counselor.
The new centerpiece of the...well, one hesitates to call it a "campaign." "Limply promoted suggestion?" "Better-than-nothing lip service?" Anyway, the new feature is a PSA campaign, in which teaching is described with the kind of dewy-eyed prose usually reserved for missionary work and fine arts.
The tagline is "Make more. Teach." It is a probably a measure of my curmudgeoniness that what I hear is the same old, "Teaching is so noble that you should be above wanting money and control over your own destiny." It is teaching as missionary work, where you just go where they send you and take what they give you because your noble rewards are so much more important than that other stuff.
The missionary line is annoying because it's not all wrong. If I won the lottery today, I would still go to school to teach and do my job. I would just go there in a nicer car. But at the same time, it's a special kind of insulting that my profession and my workplace are under attack from people who are in the education biz for no reason EXCEPT the money and the power and the control.
Speaking of those folks, the teach.org campaign is a big bed with a bunch of odd bodies sleeping in it. Microsoft and State Farm are the BIG partners with the DoE, with Teach for America right behind. The NEA and the AFT are also there, and while I have no love for their leadership these days, I get that you win their participation by simply saying, "Think about how it will look if you AREN'T involved in this." Plus an odd assortment of other groups: National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, Unite Negro College Fund, American School Counselor Association, 100K in 10, and more.
The PSA gets its theme and voice-over work from Taylor Mali (Mr. What Teachers Make), and of all the things to come out of the Department of Ed, it's certainly by far the most benign. But if Arne wants to "increase awareness and support for the teaching profession," I can think of a few dozen suggestions for him. Actually, I can think of one suggestion for him, and it's the same one as always-- instead of talking as if you respect and value teachers in public education, act as if those words are the truth. Here's one thing that being a teacher and being a Secretary of Education have in common-- talking a good game is not enough.
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
How Should We Teach Writing?
Today has turned into a snow day, so I have the time to address some other issues raised by yesterday's post about writing.
My classroom instruction regarding writing starts with a few assumptions:
1) Writing is a craft.
It's not an "art." You don't sit around and squint your brain and think writerly thoughts while waiting for lightning to strike. If you can only write when you are Struck By Inspiration, you're doing it wrong. (And I'll note that actual art is not an "art" either, at least not "art" as conceived by people who don't do it).
It's not a "science." I can't hand you a set of steps to follow that will automatically result in an awesome essay every time. I can't show you a structural framework that always leads to excellence.
It's a craft. You need ideas. You need technique, and the technique has to be used well. I often compare writing to cabinet-making. You need some vision and a good eye, but you can't just flail around with your tools while thinking deep, cabinetty thoughts.
2) There are no child prodigies in writing.
Mozart was composing and playing as a child. There are kids doing amazing things with math at an early age. But there are no great works of writing produced by toddlers. And from that we can deduce one important thing-- every writer must have started from the same place of not-so-great-ness. Every writer stinks at the beginning.
Sure, some show more natural aptitude than others. And some are way more interested than others. But the writer's life is a journey of growth and improvement, and that road, however long, starts in downtown Suckville. The fact that a writer is not-so-awesome today doesn't mean she won't be awesome some day in the future, and it definitely doesn't mean that she can't grow and get better.
I assess writing backwards.
Students are used to "losing points" on assignments.
If they take a regular 100-point test, they figure they've been spotted 100 points and they "lose" one every time they make a mistake. This is not how I grade writing assignments.
I'm looking for what the students did well. I tell them, "Don't ask me why you lost ten points on the last essay. You never had them. You didn't get them because I didn't see anything in the essay to earn them."
That doesn't mean we don't talk about mistakes. I am not, and never have been, from the hang loose and don't stifle creativity with all that spelling and punctuation stuff. When you mess up the mechnicals, you distract the reader from what you have to say. When you mess up the grammar and usage, you make it harder for the reader to understand what you have to say. An effective writer has those elements under control.
But good writing is not the same thing as writing without mistakes. My students have heard all of the following analogies:
A musician can appear on stage and get every note, every rhythm, every word absolutely correct, and it can still be the most boring, mediocre performance ever.
An athlete can go through a competition without doing a single thing wrong, and still be beaten.
If the best thing you can say about your boy/girl-friend is that s/he never does anything wrong, are you in a relationship that you're really excited about?
We do not get to awesome by avoiding mistakes. We do not achieve excellence by doing nothing wrong. To get to awesome, we have to do something right. When I assess, I am looking for what they do right.
Ask the right questions
Many of what we call writing problems are really thinking problems. All the technique in the world won't help you if you don't know and understand what you want to say.
Most thinking problems start with asking the wrong question. After being presented with a prompt or a writing problem, students often go to these sorts of questions:
What am I supposed to say? What can I write to get this assignment done? What are some words I can use to fill up these five paragraph-shaped blanks?
Those are the wrong questions. The write questions look like these:
What do I think about this? What do I want to say?
Writing is about creating a relationship, a connection, between the writer, the reader, and some ideas. As with any relationship in life, the most important first important step is showing up (take it from a divorced guy). Too many student writers don't show up. They don't think about the prompt. They don't look into their own brain. They don't approach writing as an opportunity to express their own ideas, but as a slightly-more-complex fill-in-the-blank quiz.
They don't support their ideas because they are just trying to fill up a paragraph's worth of page. They don't present ideas that make sense because they haven't thought about them. They don't fully develop the connections between their ideas because they're too busy trying to fill in the five paragraphs.
If they start with the right questions, everything else follows. They can choose structure based on what best fits what they want to say. They can support ideas with support that fits and makes sense, and they can give it whatever space it needs to breathe. They can stop self-evaluating by asking "Did I fill up enough paper" and start asking "Did I make myself clear?"
It's an ATV, not a train.
I do not know at the beginning of the year where writing instruction will lead me, because I don't yet know where my students' needs will lie. It takes me the first several weeks to do a needs assessment, and that process never stops. And here's a radical thought-- I figure out what their writing issues are by having them write. I read what they write. We talk about how they write. They write some more. There isn't a standardized test on the planet that would provide me with a better diagnostic tool.
Current reform-- I don't know. I guess I'm supposed to wait until the results come back from last year's poorly-constructed standardized tests, and based on that one day's worth of work loosely related to the act of writing, I'm supposed to... heck, I don't think anybody can straight-facedly propose that this is an effective way to design and steer instruction.
So my writing program unrolls a little bit differently every year. I'm not going to talk about pre-writing, organization, development, whatever exactly the same way every year just because that's what I say every single year. That would make me like a doctor who treats every patient with the same drug regardless of the patient's needs.
Writing instruction, more than any other part of the English curriculum, MUST be flexible. It MUST be able to range all over the territory and respond to whatever the students most need. While there are certain signposts one can expect to pass, every writer's journey is different, and not necessarily linear. Instruction must reflect that.
Rinse and repeat
Writing is a skill, like shooting foul shots. Basketball coaches do not set a single day aside during the season to work foul shots and then ignore the skill the rest of the year.
Writing needs to go on all year. At least once a week. Even if you have to do free-writing or short simple essays that you barely look at to grade, keep the students writing. The more they write, the better they write. Skills are only improved and retained with practice. The old model of a few-weeks-long stand alone writing unit in the middle of the year-- that model must die.
Expectations
Have some and make them clear. Every teacher in the world brings a set of biases to writing evaluation. Make yours clear.
You don't have to use the same ones all the time. For some essays, I use a modified version of the six traits rubric. For others, I don't. I give my students a clear idea of which expectations they are writing to on a particular assignment. In effect, I'm behaving as two or three slightly different audiences for them. I'm comfortable with that-- being able to shift their writing behavior to suit a different situation or audience is a useful tool to have in their writer's kit.
You can't surprise them or suddenly pounce on them for giving the "wrong" answer to a prompt. That will force them right back into asking wrong questions like "What does the teacher want me to say."
Share strategies, writer to writer
One of the challenges of teaching writing is that process is so personal.
I'm a child of the seventies, and in my classes, we were all taught to write with an outline. Every big paper had to be handed in with the outline attached. And how did we handle that? Of course, we wrote the paper first and then created an outline to match it. Outlining was supposed to help us write, but in practice it was, for most of us, pointless busy work.
The pre-writing process doesn't look like any one thing. Some people need to sit quietly. Some people need to be awash in sound. Some people need to have their body occupied with something physical while their brain chews on the problem. Some people can't crystallize an idea until they start writing about it. Some people need to talk about it.
Give your students permission to find their own best techniques. Talk to them about options they can try. Don't get them stuck in the straight jacket of what is "supposed" to help them write. That's just as bad as telling someone how they're supposed to fall in love. Help them stop lying to themselves about what works for them (some people really do write their best work under pressure at the last minute, but not nearly as think they do). Help them trust their own knowledge of what is working and what is not.
Once they know what their strengths are, they have a foundation to build on and a basis to adapt to other writing situations.
Write
Otherwise you're trying to guide students through a foreign land that you don't visit yourself.
I haven't really touched on how exactly to assess or what factors make the difference between writing that sucks and writing that is awesome, but this is already long and rambly, and I have a car to shovel out and a dog to walk. Comments and discussion are welcome.
My classroom instruction regarding writing starts with a few assumptions:
1) Writing is a craft.
It's not an "art." You don't sit around and squint your brain and think writerly thoughts while waiting for lightning to strike. If you can only write when you are Struck By Inspiration, you're doing it wrong. (And I'll note that actual art is not an "art" either, at least not "art" as conceived by people who don't do it).
It's not a "science." I can't hand you a set of steps to follow that will automatically result in an awesome essay every time. I can't show you a structural framework that always leads to excellence.
It's a craft. You need ideas. You need technique, and the technique has to be used well. I often compare writing to cabinet-making. You need some vision and a good eye, but you can't just flail around with your tools while thinking deep, cabinetty thoughts.
2) There are no child prodigies in writing.
Mozart was composing and playing as a child. There are kids doing amazing things with math at an early age. But there are no great works of writing produced by toddlers. And from that we can deduce one important thing-- every writer must have started from the same place of not-so-great-ness. Every writer stinks at the beginning.
Sure, some show more natural aptitude than others. And some are way more interested than others. But the writer's life is a journey of growth and improvement, and that road, however long, starts in downtown Suckville. The fact that a writer is not-so-awesome today doesn't mean she won't be awesome some day in the future, and it definitely doesn't mean that she can't grow and get better.
I assess writing backwards.
Students are used to "losing points" on assignments.
If they take a regular 100-point test, they figure they've been spotted 100 points and they "lose" one every time they make a mistake. This is not how I grade writing assignments.
I'm looking for what the students did well. I tell them, "Don't ask me why you lost ten points on the last essay. You never had them. You didn't get them because I didn't see anything in the essay to earn them."
That doesn't mean we don't talk about mistakes. I am not, and never have been, from the hang loose and don't stifle creativity with all that spelling and punctuation stuff. When you mess up the mechnicals, you distract the reader from what you have to say. When you mess up the grammar and usage, you make it harder for the reader to understand what you have to say. An effective writer has those elements under control.
But good writing is not the same thing as writing without mistakes. My students have heard all of the following analogies:
A musician can appear on stage and get every note, every rhythm, every word absolutely correct, and it can still be the most boring, mediocre performance ever.
An athlete can go through a competition without doing a single thing wrong, and still be beaten.
If the best thing you can say about your boy/girl-friend is that s/he never does anything wrong, are you in a relationship that you're really excited about?
We do not get to awesome by avoiding mistakes. We do not achieve excellence by doing nothing wrong. To get to awesome, we have to do something right. When I assess, I am looking for what they do right.
Ask the right questions
Many of what we call writing problems are really thinking problems. All the technique in the world won't help you if you don't know and understand what you want to say.
Most thinking problems start with asking the wrong question. After being presented with a prompt or a writing problem, students often go to these sorts of questions:
What am I supposed to say? What can I write to get this assignment done? What are some words I can use to fill up these five paragraph-shaped blanks?
Those are the wrong questions. The write questions look like these:
What do I think about this? What do I want to say?
Writing is about creating a relationship, a connection, between the writer, the reader, and some ideas. As with any relationship in life, the most important first important step is showing up (take it from a divorced guy). Too many student writers don't show up. They don't think about the prompt. They don't look into their own brain. They don't approach writing as an opportunity to express their own ideas, but as a slightly-more-complex fill-in-the-blank quiz.
They don't support their ideas because they are just trying to fill up a paragraph's worth of page. They don't present ideas that make sense because they haven't thought about them. They don't fully develop the connections between their ideas because they're too busy trying to fill in the five paragraphs.
If they start with the right questions, everything else follows. They can choose structure based on what best fits what they want to say. They can support ideas with support that fits and makes sense, and they can give it whatever space it needs to breathe. They can stop self-evaluating by asking "Did I fill up enough paper" and start asking "Did I make myself clear?"
It's an ATV, not a train.
I do not know at the beginning of the year where writing instruction will lead me, because I don't yet know where my students' needs will lie. It takes me the first several weeks to do a needs assessment, and that process never stops. And here's a radical thought-- I figure out what their writing issues are by having them write. I read what they write. We talk about how they write. They write some more. There isn't a standardized test on the planet that would provide me with a better diagnostic tool.
Current reform-- I don't know. I guess I'm supposed to wait until the results come back from last year's poorly-constructed standardized tests, and based on that one day's worth of work loosely related to the act of writing, I'm supposed to... heck, I don't think anybody can straight-facedly propose that this is an effective way to design and steer instruction.
So my writing program unrolls a little bit differently every year. I'm not going to talk about pre-writing, organization, development, whatever exactly the same way every year just because that's what I say every single year. That would make me like a doctor who treats every patient with the same drug regardless of the patient's needs.
Writing instruction, more than any other part of the English curriculum, MUST be flexible. It MUST be able to range all over the territory and respond to whatever the students most need. While there are certain signposts one can expect to pass, every writer's journey is different, and not necessarily linear. Instruction must reflect that.
Rinse and repeat
Writing is a skill, like shooting foul shots. Basketball coaches do not set a single day aside during the season to work foul shots and then ignore the skill the rest of the year.
Writing needs to go on all year. At least once a week. Even if you have to do free-writing or short simple essays that you barely look at to grade, keep the students writing. The more they write, the better they write. Skills are only improved and retained with practice. The old model of a few-weeks-long stand alone writing unit in the middle of the year-- that model must die.
Expectations
Have some and make them clear. Every teacher in the world brings a set of biases to writing evaluation. Make yours clear.
You don't have to use the same ones all the time. For some essays, I use a modified version of the six traits rubric. For others, I don't. I give my students a clear idea of which expectations they are writing to on a particular assignment. In effect, I'm behaving as two or three slightly different audiences for them. I'm comfortable with that-- being able to shift their writing behavior to suit a different situation or audience is a useful tool to have in their writer's kit.
You can't surprise them or suddenly pounce on them for giving the "wrong" answer to a prompt. That will force them right back into asking wrong questions like "What does the teacher want me to say."
Share strategies, writer to writer
One of the challenges of teaching writing is that process is so personal.
I'm a child of the seventies, and in my classes, we were all taught to write with an outline. Every big paper had to be handed in with the outline attached. And how did we handle that? Of course, we wrote the paper first and then created an outline to match it. Outlining was supposed to help us write, but in practice it was, for most of us, pointless busy work.
The pre-writing process doesn't look like any one thing. Some people need to sit quietly. Some people need to be awash in sound. Some people need to have their body occupied with something physical while their brain chews on the problem. Some people can't crystallize an idea until they start writing about it. Some people need to talk about it.
Give your students permission to find their own best techniques. Talk to them about options they can try. Don't get them stuck in the straight jacket of what is "supposed" to help them write. That's just as bad as telling someone how they're supposed to fall in love. Help them stop lying to themselves about what works for them (some people really do write their best work under pressure at the last minute, but not nearly as think they do). Help them trust their own knowledge of what is working and what is not.
Once they know what their strengths are, they have a foundation to build on and a basis to adapt to other writing situations.
Write
Otherwise you're trying to guide students through a foreign land that you don't visit yourself.
I haven't really touched on how exactly to assess or what factors make the difference between writing that sucks and writing that is awesome, but this is already long and rambly, and I have a car to shovel out and a dog to walk. Comments and discussion are welcome.
Tuesday, November 26, 2013
Testing Badly for Robots and Drones
Anthony Cody's recent blog about the effect of robo-grading on instruction includes an eye-opening glimpse of how much worse things can get. A sample from the Smarter Balanced test reveals a writing test in which the students are given the content for their essay and simply asked to rewrite it. "Here's a list of points for each side of this question. Select a couple and put them in paragraphs."
It is, in fact, testing exactly the sort of plagiarism skills that we have been trying to purge for decades.
Not that the teaching of bad writing is a new issue. Evaluating writing is hard, and it's subjective. Virtually every revered writer has been the subject of the argument, "Is this person a genius, or does this person actually suck?" If a writer in the canon can provoke wildly divergent views among actual professional literati (and fake ones like David Coleman), then it can be no surprise that a writer in my fifth period class can provoke similar subjectivity.
Teachers have long tried to reduce the assessment of writing to a more manageable. I myself brought home the Oregon version of the six traits model from a conference years ago, and like many other teachers, I've since modified it to better suit my own personal biases about writing.
The quest for a simple, clear system of writing assessment is eternal. It's eternal because nobody has found a good, solid, simple, clear, objective way to assess writing that does not require pummeling writing with a stick, hacking off its limbs, and stuffing the bloody corpse into a tiny, cramped box. If Heisenberg says you can't observe a phenomenon without affecting it, Greene says that you can't assess writing without mangling and killing it.
The solution to "How do I master the difficult task of assessing writing?" is rarely "Build a better assessment." It's more usually "Make students write something that's easier to assess." Assess them not on their ability to express themselves, to manage prose, to use language to organize and capture concepts-- instead, assess them on their ability to follow a formula.
We have some classic studies of the bad formula essay. Paul Roberts' "How To Say Nothing in 500 Words" should be required reading in all ed programs. Way back in 2007, Inside Higher Ed ran this article about how an essay that included, among other beauties, reference to President Franklin Denelor Roosevelt was an SAT writing test winner. And I didn't find a link to the article, but in 2007 writing instructor Andy Jones took a recommendation letter, replaced every "the" with "chimpanzee," and scored a 6 out of 6 from the Criterion essay-scoring software at ETS. You can read the actual essay here.
At my school, we've learned how to beat the old state writing test. It's not hard:
1) Recycle the prompt. Get the key words of the prompt into your first paragraph. If you aren't sure which words are key, just grab them all.
2) Fill as much paper as possible. Be redundant. Babble. But fill up space.
3) Use some big words. "Plethora" has historically been a favorite.
4) Write neatly. Indent clearly.
Jesse Lussenhop's classic article shows how badly the live scorer system works. But the new info about the new CCSS-related prompts show just how much the tail has begun to wag the dog.
Bad test design has a certain sort of logic. Every English teacher is familiar with the Bad Context Clue question. This is the question where a word is used in one of its least common meanings, such as "Bob's faculties were very strong." Students are instructed to depend only on context, but many are suckered into using the knowledge they already have. Teachers despair of training students to recognize those times when they are supposed to ignore what they already know.
But suppose you wanted to test a student's sense of smell, so you put a fragrant flower on the other side of the room and said, "Find your way across the room with your sense of smell." But then you realize that they might use other senses to find their way. So you start blasting Sousa marches, and you create a realistic hologram of massive flames in the middle of the room. The idea is that ONLY their sense of smell could get them across their room. But the task has been changed-- they not only have to use one sense, but they have to disregard the others. We've completely isolated the item that we want to assess, but we have done it by creating a senseless activity that would never occur in real life.
And that's why we have to teach students how to take tests. Because testing activities are designed to be easily assessed and to focus on unreal only-in-a-test activities.
We cannot teach students to write well and to write to get good scores on standardized tests at the same time.
It is, in fact, testing exactly the sort of plagiarism skills that we have been trying to purge for decades.
Not that the teaching of bad writing is a new issue. Evaluating writing is hard, and it's subjective. Virtually every revered writer has been the subject of the argument, "Is this person a genius, or does this person actually suck?" If a writer in the canon can provoke wildly divergent views among actual professional literati (and fake ones like David Coleman), then it can be no surprise that a writer in my fifth period class can provoke similar subjectivity.
Teachers have long tried to reduce the assessment of writing to a more manageable. I myself brought home the Oregon version of the six traits model from a conference years ago, and like many other teachers, I've since modified it to better suit my own personal biases about writing.
The quest for a simple, clear system of writing assessment is eternal. It's eternal because nobody has found a good, solid, simple, clear, objective way to assess writing that does not require pummeling writing with a stick, hacking off its limbs, and stuffing the bloody corpse into a tiny, cramped box. If Heisenberg says you can't observe a phenomenon without affecting it, Greene says that you can't assess writing without mangling and killing it.
The solution to "How do I master the difficult task of assessing writing?" is rarely "Build a better assessment." It's more usually "Make students write something that's easier to assess." Assess them not on their ability to express themselves, to manage prose, to use language to organize and capture concepts-- instead, assess them on their ability to follow a formula.
We have some classic studies of the bad formula essay. Paul Roberts' "How To Say Nothing in 500 Words" should be required reading in all ed programs. Way back in 2007, Inside Higher Ed ran this article about how an essay that included, among other beauties, reference to President Franklin Denelor Roosevelt was an SAT writing test winner. And I didn't find a link to the article, but in 2007 writing instructor Andy Jones took a recommendation letter, replaced every "the" with "chimpanzee," and scored a 6 out of 6 from the Criterion essay-scoring software at ETS. You can read the actual essay here.
At my school, we've learned how to beat the old state writing test. It's not hard:
1) Recycle the prompt. Get the key words of the prompt into your first paragraph. If you aren't sure which words are key, just grab them all.
2) Fill as much paper as possible. Be redundant. Babble. But fill up space.
3) Use some big words. "Plethora" has historically been a favorite.
4) Write neatly. Indent clearly.
Jesse Lussenhop's classic article shows how badly the live scorer system works. But the new info about the new CCSS-related prompts show just how much the tail has begun to wag the dog.
Bad test design has a certain sort of logic. Every English teacher is familiar with the Bad Context Clue question. This is the question where a word is used in one of its least common meanings, such as "Bob's faculties were very strong." Students are instructed to depend only on context, but many are suckered into using the knowledge they already have. Teachers despair of training students to recognize those times when they are supposed to ignore what they already know.
But suppose you wanted to test a student's sense of smell, so you put a fragrant flower on the other side of the room and said, "Find your way across the room with your sense of smell." But then you realize that they might use other senses to find their way. So you start blasting Sousa marches, and you create a realistic hologram of massive flames in the middle of the room. The idea is that ONLY their sense of smell could get them across their room. But the task has been changed-- they not only have to use one sense, but they have to disregard the others. We've completely isolated the item that we want to assess, but we have done it by creating a senseless activity that would never occur in real life.
And that's why we have to teach students how to take tests. Because testing activities are designed to be easily assessed and to focus on unreal only-in-a-test activities.
We cannot teach students to write well and to write to get good scores on standardized tests at the same time.
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