Here's some edureading for the weekend.
Five Cynical Observationa about Teacher Leadership
I mean to include Nancy Flanagan's insightful list about how teacher leadership isn't happening last week, and then, somehow, I didn't. But here it is. These days Flanagan is one of the consistently rewarding bloggers for Ed Week-- save your limited freebie reads for her.
Educators Release Updates VAM Score for Secretary Duncan
Educators for Shared Responsibility have come up with a VAM formula for evaluating Education Secretaries. Not entirely a joke.
Classroom Surveillance and Testing
At the 21st Century Principal, John Robinson makes the striking observation that our classroom data collection bears a striking resemblance to the tools of surveillance and, well, spying.
Drinking Charter Kool-Aid? Here Is Evidence.
Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig has provided an essential resource. You may not read through it all today, but you'll want to bookmark it somewhere. Here's a very thorough listing of legitimate peer-reviewed research on the effectiveness of charter schools. Handling of special populations, segregation, competition, creaming-- it's all here, and all the real deal. You will want to keep this resource handy.
Stop, Start, Continue
Not always a fan of things I find at Edutopia, but this is a short simple piece focused on three things teachers should stop doing, three things we should start doing, and three things to continue doing. A good piece for sparking a little mental focus.
Sunday, November 22, 2015
Saturday, November 21, 2015
Resume Bombs
Here's the problem. You can't build a resume with the following:
I took over a program that was doing pretty well, so I just kept things humming along in the same general direction. I may have tweaked a few things here and there, but basically I just left well enough alone.
No, to really put some beef on the old resume, you need a sentence that starts with "Implemented..."
And so, the resume bomb.
Someone moves into a new administrative position and starts looking for a way to Make a Splash, Leave Their Mark, or Show They Are a Dynamic Change Agent.
They may consolidate power by taking over functions previously performed by staff or other offices. They will certainly create a new program. And they will develop and start the implementation of the policies and procedures needed to support the new program. Congratulations. You have your brand new resume bomb, and your new administrator will grab his brightly polished resume and get out the door to his next job before the bomb ever goes off.
Some bombs have a long fuse. The program gets up and running without too much incident, and it is only once you get further down the road that serious problems begin to emerge, that the new program begins to create some real problems for the district. But by then, the one person who knows exactly how it's supposed to work and how to keep it functioning and can answer questions about it-- that person is at his next job.
Some bombs have a short fuse, or are set off by the administrative departure itself. "We just need to rip up this system here, and I'm going to create a new policy with software support over here, and we'll just reassign those functions to my office and then we'll be able to-- oh, look at the time! I need to get to my next job." The short-fuse quick-departure resume bomb is the contractor who does the demolition on your porch and then never comes back to build it.
Is every new program and agent of change the sign of an impending resume bomb? Of course not. Many times you'll get an administrator who has a real vision for change and forward motion, and she puts new programs in place, and then she sticks around and sees them through until they are running smoothly on their own. That person is not building a resume bomb. If your administrator is more concerned about the program's success than his own, he's not building a resume bomb.
But if you are standing in the middle of a mess, and the person responsible is nowhere to be seen because they have moved on to bigger, better things-- congratulations. You are the victim of a resume bomb.
Common Core is arguably the largest resume bomb ever-- Coleman and company built it, lit the fuse, and let their "success" pave the way to big money gigs. The revolving door world of government gig and private enterprise is run on resume bombs. But even on the small scale, in little school districts, resume bombs happen and cause unending mess. Almost every district has some piece of related shrapnel stuck in a policy handbook somewhere.
Consequently, change resistance isn't always about being conservative or stodgy or lazy. Sometimes it's just shell shock. You say you're an agent of change, and I wonder, what is going to blow up now, and how much will I feel the impact. But don't expect the people who set the resume bombs to feel too bad about it. Explosions always look prettier from far away.
I took over a program that was doing pretty well, so I just kept things humming along in the same general direction. I may have tweaked a few things here and there, but basically I just left well enough alone.
No, to really put some beef on the old resume, you need a sentence that starts with "Implemented..."
And so, the resume bomb.
Someone moves into a new administrative position and starts looking for a way to Make a Splash, Leave Their Mark, or Show They Are a Dynamic Change Agent.
They may consolidate power by taking over functions previously performed by staff or other offices. They will certainly create a new program. And they will develop and start the implementation of the policies and procedures needed to support the new program. Congratulations. You have your brand new resume bomb, and your new administrator will grab his brightly polished resume and get out the door to his next job before the bomb ever goes off.
Some bombs have a long fuse. The program gets up and running without too much incident, and it is only once you get further down the road that serious problems begin to emerge, that the new program begins to create some real problems for the district. But by then, the one person who knows exactly how it's supposed to work and how to keep it functioning and can answer questions about it-- that person is at his next job.
Some bombs have a short fuse, or are set off by the administrative departure itself. "We just need to rip up this system here, and I'm going to create a new policy with software support over here, and we'll just reassign those functions to my office and then we'll be able to-- oh, look at the time! I need to get to my next job." The short-fuse quick-departure resume bomb is the contractor who does the demolition on your porch and then never comes back to build it.
Is every new program and agent of change the sign of an impending resume bomb? Of course not. Many times you'll get an administrator who has a real vision for change and forward motion, and she puts new programs in place, and then she sticks around and sees them through until they are running smoothly on their own. That person is not building a resume bomb. If your administrator is more concerned about the program's success than his own, he's not building a resume bomb.
But if you are standing in the middle of a mess, and the person responsible is nowhere to be seen because they have moved on to bigger, better things-- congratulations. You are the victim of a resume bomb.
Common Core is arguably the largest resume bomb ever-- Coleman and company built it, lit the fuse, and let their "success" pave the way to big money gigs. The revolving door world of government gig and private enterprise is run on resume bombs. But even on the small scale, in little school districts, resume bombs happen and cause unending mess. Almost every district has some piece of related shrapnel stuck in a policy handbook somewhere.
Consequently, change resistance isn't always about being conservative or stodgy or lazy. Sometimes it's just shell shock. You say you're an agent of change, and I wonder, what is going to blow up now, and how much will I feel the impact. But don't expect the people who set the resume bombs to feel too bad about it. Explosions always look prettier from far away.
Friday, November 20, 2015
St. Louis Schools Continue To Crumble
St. Louis teachers are currently caught at the epicenter of just about every kind of assault on public education going on these days.
Their immediate concern is easy enough to spot. St. Louis teachers have remained frozen in time, sitting on the same step of the salary schedule for six years. In other words, if you were hired as a first-year teacher for St. Louis schools back in 2009, you are still making a first-year teacher's salary today. The school district's salary schedule shows that the steps have been adjusted once in that time span. So if you started in 2009 at $38,250, you're now making $39,270. This is of course problematic because it would take $42,404 just to keep pave with inflation. Meanwhile, as of two years ago, the mean wage for an elementary teacher in Missouri was $48,460. The union did reject the offer, but there's not much more they can do-- teacher strikes are illegal in Missouri.
So St. Louis teachers have been taking an inflation-created pay cut every year, along with the added insult of remaining in the same place on the salary scale. The district has offered a 3.5% raise over a year and a half, with no prospect of advancing. (Also, just in case that's not insulting enough, I just discovered that Missouri allows anyone to look up individual teacher salaries.)
You'll be unshocked to learn that St. Louis teachers have been heading out the door in record numbers-- in many cases within their very first week of school. This is not just a St. Louis thing-- Missouri has been battling an inability to attract and retain teachers for years, to the point that they actually put together a group to study on the problem. It's enough of a problem that a "non-profit" group is on the scene trying to help. Even TFA has been in St. Louis, but has not even met its own goals for putting faux teachers in St. Louis classrooms. And while there's no reason to think that St. Louis teachers are mercenary and money-grubbing, when you are having trouble feeding your family and another district will offer you over $20K more to work there-- well, who wants to tell their own children, "Sorry, no meat this week because I want to keep being noble."
Meanwhile, there are folks who claim that St. Louis schools are extra tough because of discipline problems, and there is clearly some sort of problem with the administration of discipline in Missouri school. A report released last spring shows that Missouri suspends African-American youths at a higher rate than any other state in the nation.
Other problems? St. Louis schools are losing students rapidly. The district is down another 1,500 this year.
But the school system's population problems are part of the city's problems, and the city's problems include white flight. St. Louis is discredited with "the highest thirty-year rate of building and neighborhood abandonment in North American history." The 2010 census revealed a loss of 29,000 residents since the previous head count.
Schools have been standing empty, and the public system has been in trouble going back to at least 2007, when the state stripped it of its accreditation and took it over, stripping local control from the elected school board. The school district is run by a three-person Special Administrative Board; they hire the superintendent and are themselves political appointees.
This big bunch of troubles has made St. Louis a prime target for charters, a confluence of sincerely concerned parents who wanted to get their children out of a struggling public system and charteristas who smelled a market ripe for profit overseen by a charter-friendly mayor. The newspapers and city leaders don't seem to like to mention it much, but on top of everything else, the St. Louis schools suffer from the charter effect-- students leave for charters, but there is no proportionate lessening of expenses in the schools they leave, and so they leave many students behind in an already troubled public school that now has that much less money with which to work.
And so last spring, charters were predicting a banner year with great enrollment. This even though the charter schools of St. Louis have not been anything to write home about, either; at one point the city shut down the chain of six Imagine Charters (containing a third of the city's charter students) for academic failure and financial shadiness.
Meanwhile, Missouri is one of those magical states where the government has a funding formula in place-- which it simply ignores. At the beginning of 2015, Missouri schools were being underfunded by nearly a whopping half billion-with-a-b dollars.
St. Louis Schools have suffered from the financial drain of a plummeting population as well as being financially hollowed out by a series of mostly-failed charter experiments. And the end result is that St. Louis can't figure out how to pay the teachers it has or attract the additional teachers it needs.
I don't know how you compute the effects of a situation like this. How does it affect students to be in a classroom with a teacher who is exhausted from working a second job and stressed because she doesn't know how she's going to pay her own bills. How does it affect students to see one more teacher say, "I'm sorry, but I can't stay here." How does it affect to see this piled on top of the experience of watching your neighborhood empty out because the white folks don't want to live on the same block as your family.
How the state can get involved in a district like St. Louis and not take the basic steps to pump in the necessary resources is a mystery. This is like coming upon a table of starving children and declaring, "Clearly what's needed here is for these children to learn to set the table properly."
What the children of St. Louis need are quality teachers in well-maintained facilities. Leaders and politicians can shrug and hope that a magic fairy fixes things, or they can figure out how to do what needs to be done. In the meantime, St. Louis teachers face hard choices, tight wallets, and the prospect, in some cases, of being a first year teacher for the rest of their career.
Their immediate concern is easy enough to spot. St. Louis teachers have remained frozen in time, sitting on the same step of the salary schedule for six years. In other words, if you were hired as a first-year teacher for St. Louis schools back in 2009, you are still making a first-year teacher's salary today. The school district's salary schedule shows that the steps have been adjusted once in that time span. So if you started in 2009 at $38,250, you're now making $39,270. This is of course problematic because it would take $42,404 just to keep pave with inflation. Meanwhile, as of two years ago, the mean wage for an elementary teacher in Missouri was $48,460. The union did reject the offer, but there's not much more they can do-- teacher strikes are illegal in Missouri.
So St. Louis teachers have been taking an inflation-created pay cut every year, along with the added insult of remaining in the same place on the salary scale. The district has offered a 3.5% raise over a year and a half, with no prospect of advancing. (Also, just in case that's not insulting enough, I just discovered that Missouri allows anyone to look up individual teacher salaries.)
You'll be unshocked to learn that St. Louis teachers have been heading out the door in record numbers-- in many cases within their very first week of school. This is not just a St. Louis thing-- Missouri has been battling an inability to attract and retain teachers for years, to the point that they actually put together a group to study on the problem. It's enough of a problem that a "non-profit" group is on the scene trying to help. Even TFA has been in St. Louis, but has not even met its own goals for putting faux teachers in St. Louis classrooms. And while there's no reason to think that St. Louis teachers are mercenary and money-grubbing, when you are having trouble feeding your family and another district will offer you over $20K more to work there-- well, who wants to tell their own children, "Sorry, no meat this week because I want to keep being noble."
Meanwhile, there are folks who claim that St. Louis schools are extra tough because of discipline problems, and there is clearly some sort of problem with the administration of discipline in Missouri school. A report released last spring shows that Missouri suspends African-American youths at a higher rate than any other state in the nation.
Other problems? St. Louis schools are losing students rapidly. The district is down another 1,500 this year.
But the school system's population problems are part of the city's problems, and the city's problems include white flight. St. Louis is discredited with "the highest thirty-year rate of building and neighborhood abandonment in North American history." The 2010 census revealed a loss of 29,000 residents since the previous head count.
Schools have been standing empty, and the public system has been in trouble going back to at least 2007, when the state stripped it of its accreditation and took it over, stripping local control from the elected school board. The school district is run by a three-person Special Administrative Board; they hire the superintendent and are themselves political appointees.
This big bunch of troubles has made St. Louis a prime target for charters, a confluence of sincerely concerned parents who wanted to get their children out of a struggling public system and charteristas who smelled a market ripe for profit overseen by a charter-friendly mayor. The newspapers and city leaders don't seem to like to mention it much, but on top of everything else, the St. Louis schools suffer from the charter effect-- students leave for charters, but there is no proportionate lessening of expenses in the schools they leave, and so they leave many students behind in an already troubled public school that now has that much less money with which to work.
And so last spring, charters were predicting a banner year with great enrollment. This even though the charter schools of St. Louis have not been anything to write home about, either; at one point the city shut down the chain of six Imagine Charters (containing a third of the city's charter students) for academic failure and financial shadiness.
Meanwhile, Missouri is one of those magical states where the government has a funding formula in place-- which it simply ignores. At the beginning of 2015, Missouri schools were being underfunded by nearly a whopping half billion-with-a-b dollars.
St. Louis Schools have suffered from the financial drain of a plummeting population as well as being financially hollowed out by a series of mostly-failed charter experiments. And the end result is that St. Louis can't figure out how to pay the teachers it has or attract the additional teachers it needs.
I don't know how you compute the effects of a situation like this. How does it affect students to be in a classroom with a teacher who is exhausted from working a second job and stressed because she doesn't know how she's going to pay her own bills. How does it affect students to see one more teacher say, "I'm sorry, but I can't stay here." How does it affect to see this piled on top of the experience of watching your neighborhood empty out because the white folks don't want to live on the same block as your family.
How the state can get involved in a district like St. Louis and not take the basic steps to pump in the necessary resources is a mystery. This is like coming upon a table of starving children and declaring, "Clearly what's needed here is for these children to learn to set the table properly."
What the children of St. Louis need are quality teachers in well-maintained facilities. Leaders and politicians can shrug and hope that a magic fairy fixes things, or they can figure out how to do what needs to be done. In the meantime, St. Louis teachers face hard choices, tight wallets, and the prospect, in some cases, of being a first year teacher for the rest of their career.
6 Guidelines for Extracurricular Advisers
I have been an extracurricular activity adviser for as long as I've been a teacher. I have been the faculty adviser for class councils, student council, radio club, and a few school magazines. I have been the assistant director for the marching band and every kind of director for school plays. I am the adviser for yearbook and stage crew.
I'm pretty committed to extracurriculars in part because they were a big influence in my own high school years. I learned plenty of things in the classroom, but I learned a lot about leadership and responsibility and working with other people and just generally how to get things done in band and on yearbook staff.
School activities can be enormously empowering for students, but they can also be an avenue for just wringing the power right out of them, and it is a real challenge for teachers to stay on the path that allows students to find and exercise their own voice.
Here are the things I try to stay mindful of when working as a faculty adviser.
1) What Are the Actual Stakes?
I have seen adults act as is getting decorations properly assembled for a school dance was going to decide the Fate of Western Civilization As We Know It. But as it turns out, almost nobody has ever died because tissue poms were not fluffy enough. Prom decorations are almost never a life or death issue.
This does not mean you set slack, half-baked standards for your students. But your most important stakes are not the dance or the class elections or the layout on pages 44-45. Your most important stakes are your students and their learning and their experience and growth as human beings.
It's important to remember that the stakes of your actual activity are not life or death because
2) This Is a Terrible Way To Do Things
There are very few projects in the world for which the best approach is to hand the work over to a bunch of teenagers. The best way for me to get a good yearbook done would be to shove the students out of the way and just do it myself, or do it myself with a few well-trained students who would work only under my direction, doing exactly what I would do. That would certainly be more efficient and yield a more uniformly good product. But what would be the point?
The best way to get a dance well-decorated is to have experienced adults do it. For that matter, your school band would probably sound better if you replaced students with trained adult musicians.
An inexperienced fourteen-year-old is not anybody's first choice for getting a job done quickly, efficiently, and well. But of course, getting the job done quickly, efficiently and well isn't the point. The point is to provide an opportunity for that inexperienced fourteen-year-old. But when you get caught up in creating a good product, it's really easy to forget that. That's when you have to remember the most important question
3) What Are the Students Learning?
This is a school activity. In a school. Are your students learning anything?
The yearbook biz has been highly technified. At this point, I could choose a bunch of pre-made page layouts, hire a local photographer to come to school and take all the pictures, and assign my students the task of plugging pictures into spots in the layout. But what would they learn? So we start with a blank page, and they learn about design principles and layout and the editors decide what the graphic elements will be for the book and they design every aspect of the book from the ground up, and when it's done, not only do we have a book that they created themselves, but they've learned some things.
I know there are schools where the teachers and/or parents basically do all the decorating for Prom. That's sweet, but what do the students learn from it?
And here's the absolute hardest part of this-- sometimes the lessons come from failure. They have to-- because if the students don't have the chance to fail, they don't have the chance to succeed. This can be a tough judgment call-- I may allow my yearbook students to make decisions that I think are kind of ugly, but I can't allow them to make decisions that might lead to the book never coming out at all.
The lessons are not always the ones you want, the way you want them. Years ago I had a class in which some guys ran for senior class president and vice-president as a goof, and students voted for them as a goof-- and they won. I know advisers who would have quietly changed those results. I didn't. The students learned a lesson in democracy ("Oh, man. Did we do that?"), the defeated officers learned a lesson in not taking positions for granted, and the elected goofballs learned about having to step up.
As an adviser I have to constantly ask that question-- what are my students learning? Because if all they're learning in my activity is how to take orders from an adult, well, I think they've already got a handle on that lesson and we don't need to reinforce it.
4) Guardrails and Railroad Tracks
So do I do anything as an adviser, or do I just let them run wild?
Anarchy is not an option. The school district has hired me to make it possible for students to pursue certain activities in a safe and responsible manner. I have a responsibility to the district to make sure the students are safe and don't make a terrible mess.
I see myself as a set of guardrails. It's my job to make sure they don't end up too far into the weeds, to set some boundaries, but to give the freedom to wander within those boundaries.
That means setting first principles. The yearbook is supposed to be representative of and supportive of all students in the school, so no, you can't put only your friends in it and no, "Most likely to die alone" can't be a senior superlative.
That means sharing experience and laying out options, particularly when students are stuck. Here are three ways I can think of to write this sketch for the talent show, and here's what happened in the past to groups that tried Option #2. Now you decide.
It does not mean being a set of railroad tracks, determining exactly where they must go. Because nobody actually needs to learn how to follow railroad tracks.
5) Know Your People
Does this all sound like a balancing act? It is, and it depends so much on the actual students involved. What they can do, what they already know, what they need to know, how willing and ready they are to use their own judgment and voices-- these are all huge factors, and you have to be able to gauge them. In every activity there are years in which you're dealing with students who are pro's and just need plenty of space. In other years, they may need plenty of support and encouragement. Sometimes it's just a building year.
6) It's Not About You
Yeah, we can type that out in forty-foot font. It's not your prom. It's not your yearbook. It's not your show. The whole enterprise, whatever it may be, is not there to express your voice, your aesthetic, your view of the world. No, you can't complete ignore those things because they are wrapped up with your experience and your professional understanding and that's what you're there to provide. But you are not the point, the goal, the purpose.
It's the vanishing test. If you disappeared tomorrow, could your students keep things running smoothly for quite a while? If the answer is "no," you are doing it wrong. If you have made yourself indispensable, you are doing it wrong. It may make you feel Really Important, but it's no help to the students.
Yes, these are hard things
Lord knows, I have failed miserably many times. But I keep working at doing better. There are few things as cool as seeing your students realize their own strength, their own voices. For them to look at a project, a performance, a Thing they have created and to realize that the Thing is them, themselves, taken form in the world and taken a form that is completely in-formed by who they are.
But every time you take a choice or decision away from them, you tell them "Well, this is a thing you can't do" or "You couldn't handle it if anything went wrong" and that message just makes them smaller. Don't give them that message. Don't lead them to suspect that their voices aren't legit, can't hold up, shouldn't speak out.
Confidence comes with competence, but students aren't always good judges of their own competence (and in some times and places they don't have much to judge). But we can help them build both by giving them support and freedom. Maybe you are a genius visionary and students will benefit immensely just by following in your wake and sweeping up the crumbs of your attention and direction. But for the rest of us mortals, giving students the safe space to figure out how they will get things done in the world and still be their best selves will just have to do.
I'm pretty committed to extracurriculars in part because they were a big influence in my own high school years. I learned plenty of things in the classroom, but I learned a lot about leadership and responsibility and working with other people and just generally how to get things done in band and on yearbook staff.
School activities can be enormously empowering for students, but they can also be an avenue for just wringing the power right out of them, and it is a real challenge for teachers to stay on the path that allows students to find and exercise their own voice.
Here are the things I try to stay mindful of when working as a faculty adviser.
1) What Are the Actual Stakes?
I have seen adults act as is getting decorations properly assembled for a school dance was going to decide the Fate of Western Civilization As We Know It. But as it turns out, almost nobody has ever died because tissue poms were not fluffy enough. Prom decorations are almost never a life or death issue.
This does not mean you set slack, half-baked standards for your students. But your most important stakes are not the dance or the class elections or the layout on pages 44-45. Your most important stakes are your students and their learning and their experience and growth as human beings.
It's important to remember that the stakes of your actual activity are not life or death because
2) This Is a Terrible Way To Do Things
There are very few projects in the world for which the best approach is to hand the work over to a bunch of teenagers. The best way for me to get a good yearbook done would be to shove the students out of the way and just do it myself, or do it myself with a few well-trained students who would work only under my direction, doing exactly what I would do. That would certainly be more efficient and yield a more uniformly good product. But what would be the point?
The best way to get a dance well-decorated is to have experienced adults do it. For that matter, your school band would probably sound better if you replaced students with trained adult musicians.
An inexperienced fourteen-year-old is not anybody's first choice for getting a job done quickly, efficiently, and well. But of course, getting the job done quickly, efficiently and well isn't the point. The point is to provide an opportunity for that inexperienced fourteen-year-old. But when you get caught up in creating a good product, it's really easy to forget that. That's when you have to remember the most important question
3) What Are the Students Learning?
This is a school activity. In a school. Are your students learning anything?
The yearbook biz has been highly technified. At this point, I could choose a bunch of pre-made page layouts, hire a local photographer to come to school and take all the pictures, and assign my students the task of plugging pictures into spots in the layout. But what would they learn? So we start with a blank page, and they learn about design principles and layout and the editors decide what the graphic elements will be for the book and they design every aspect of the book from the ground up, and when it's done, not only do we have a book that they created themselves, but they've learned some things.
I know there are schools where the teachers and/or parents basically do all the decorating for Prom. That's sweet, but what do the students learn from it?
And here's the absolute hardest part of this-- sometimes the lessons come from failure. They have to-- because if the students don't have the chance to fail, they don't have the chance to succeed. This can be a tough judgment call-- I may allow my yearbook students to make decisions that I think are kind of ugly, but I can't allow them to make decisions that might lead to the book never coming out at all.
The lessons are not always the ones you want, the way you want them. Years ago I had a class in which some guys ran for senior class president and vice-president as a goof, and students voted for them as a goof-- and they won. I know advisers who would have quietly changed those results. I didn't. The students learned a lesson in democracy ("Oh, man. Did we do that?"), the defeated officers learned a lesson in not taking positions for granted, and the elected goofballs learned about having to step up.
As an adviser I have to constantly ask that question-- what are my students learning? Because if all they're learning in my activity is how to take orders from an adult, well, I think they've already got a handle on that lesson and we don't need to reinforce it.
4) Guardrails and Railroad Tracks
So do I do anything as an adviser, or do I just let them run wild?
Anarchy is not an option. The school district has hired me to make it possible for students to pursue certain activities in a safe and responsible manner. I have a responsibility to the district to make sure the students are safe and don't make a terrible mess.
I see myself as a set of guardrails. It's my job to make sure they don't end up too far into the weeds, to set some boundaries, but to give the freedom to wander within those boundaries.
That means setting first principles. The yearbook is supposed to be representative of and supportive of all students in the school, so no, you can't put only your friends in it and no, "Most likely to die alone" can't be a senior superlative.
That means sharing experience and laying out options, particularly when students are stuck. Here are three ways I can think of to write this sketch for the talent show, and here's what happened in the past to groups that tried Option #2. Now you decide.
It does not mean being a set of railroad tracks, determining exactly where they must go. Because nobody actually needs to learn how to follow railroad tracks.
5) Know Your People
Does this all sound like a balancing act? It is, and it depends so much on the actual students involved. What they can do, what they already know, what they need to know, how willing and ready they are to use their own judgment and voices-- these are all huge factors, and you have to be able to gauge them. In every activity there are years in which you're dealing with students who are pro's and just need plenty of space. In other years, they may need plenty of support and encouragement. Sometimes it's just a building year.
6) It's Not About You
Yeah, we can type that out in forty-foot font. It's not your prom. It's not your yearbook. It's not your show. The whole enterprise, whatever it may be, is not there to express your voice, your aesthetic, your view of the world. No, you can't complete ignore those things because they are wrapped up with your experience and your professional understanding and that's what you're there to provide. But you are not the point, the goal, the purpose.
It's the vanishing test. If you disappeared tomorrow, could your students keep things running smoothly for quite a while? If the answer is "no," you are doing it wrong. If you have made yourself indispensable, you are doing it wrong. It may make you feel Really Important, but it's no help to the students.
Yes, these are hard things
Lord knows, I have failed miserably many times. But I keep working at doing better. There are few things as cool as seeing your students realize their own strength, their own voices. For them to look at a project, a performance, a Thing they have created and to realize that the Thing is them, themselves, taken form in the world and taken a form that is completely in-formed by who they are.
But every time you take a choice or decision away from them, you tell them "Well, this is a thing you can't do" or "You couldn't handle it if anything went wrong" and that message just makes them smaller. Don't give them that message. Don't lead them to suspect that their voices aren't legit, can't hold up, shouldn't speak out.
Confidence comes with competence, but students aren't always good judges of their own competence (and in some times and places they don't have much to judge). But we can help them build both by giving them support and freedom. Maybe you are a genius visionary and students will benefit immensely just by following in your wake and sweeping up the crumbs of your attention and direction. But for the rest of us mortals, giving students the safe space to figure out how they will get things done in the world and still be their best selves will just have to do.
Thursday, November 19, 2015
The Free College Problem
Allison Schrager is an economist who writes about retirement and how to hedge risk in more unconventional situations. But in this article, she addresses the question of free college and whether or not it addresses the bigger problem.
Her arguments echo several being brought up as free college emerges as a Democratic platform item.
The first, largest issue is college completion.
Poor students are far less likely to finish college than their rich counterparts. And that includes poor kids who are smart and get high scores on, well, anything. Here's a chart that lays it out:
Poor students apply to less selective schools, and their are fewer poor students who rank as high achievers (which is unsurprising since "high achiever" means "good standardized test score-getter" which we know doesn't correlate closely with poverty).
It's possible that tuition costs are part of what forces poor students out of school, and that free tuition might help. But there's also a strong case to be made that poor students take all of the problems of poverty to college with them. It's not just that it costs money to pay tuition to go to college; it costs money just to be there, to live in a lifestyle that is in many ways upper class. It's like tossing students over the wall into an exclusive swimming pool without ever checking to see if they can swim.
And here's another depressing factoid. We can talk about how hard it is for poor students to finish college, but data suggests that middle class students have a lousy completion rate as well.
The second issue is just how much value a college education provides.
Folks keep discussing college degrees as if there's a direct correlation between degree and lifetime earnings. The emphasis onCommon Core college and career readiness is predicated on the notion that if everyone had a college degree, everyone would be making much more money. Some of this notion is based on the work of guys like Raj Chetty, whose research is hugely doubtworthy. And it fails the common sense test-- if everyone had a college degree, what would happen to minimum wage jobs? Would McDonald's start paying big bucks to burger flippers with BA's? Would those jobs just vanish somehow?
What research suggests repeatedly is that your eventual earning power is best predicted by that of your parents. I've seen various charts for these data, but here's one that Schrager uses
In other words, a man who comes from the lowest SES level who gets a Bachelors degree will still make about a third of the lifetime earnings of a rich-kid high school grad.
I've seen various numbers associated with this argument, but the basic point remains unchanged-- college does not remotely come close to magically erasing the effects of your SES of origin.
So does all this mean that free tuition is a bust of an idea? I don't think so-- a college degree is still worth having (though good welding certification is also an excellent career move). But to suggest that free college will cure societies ills, reverse social injustice, and revitalize America's stalling social mobility-- well, it's not going to do those things. It's foolish to expect it to, and even more foolish to institute free tuition and then declare, "Mission accomplished," and stop looking for better solutions for the underlying issues.
Her arguments echo several being brought up as free college emerges as a Democratic platform item.
The first, largest issue is college completion.
Poor students are far less likely to finish college than their rich counterparts. And that includes poor kids who are smart and get high scores on, well, anything. Here's a chart that lays it out:
Poor students apply to less selective schools, and their are fewer poor students who rank as high achievers (which is unsurprising since "high achiever" means "good standardized test score-getter" which we know doesn't correlate closely with poverty).
It's possible that tuition costs are part of what forces poor students out of school, and that free tuition might help. But there's also a strong case to be made that poor students take all of the problems of poverty to college with them. It's not just that it costs money to pay tuition to go to college; it costs money just to be there, to live in a lifestyle that is in many ways upper class. It's like tossing students over the wall into an exclusive swimming pool without ever checking to see if they can swim.
And here's another depressing factoid. We can talk about how hard it is for poor students to finish college, but data suggests that middle class students have a lousy completion rate as well.
The second issue is just how much value a college education provides.
Folks keep discussing college degrees as if there's a direct correlation between degree and lifetime earnings. The emphasis on
What research suggests repeatedly is that your eventual earning power is best predicted by that of your parents. I've seen various charts for these data, but here's one that Schrager uses
In other words, a man who comes from the lowest SES level who gets a Bachelors degree will still make about a third of the lifetime earnings of a rich-kid high school grad.
I've seen various numbers associated with this argument, but the basic point remains unchanged-- college does not remotely come close to magically erasing the effects of your SES of origin.
So does all this mean that free tuition is a bust of an idea? I don't think so-- a college degree is still worth having (though good welding certification is also an excellent career move). But to suggest that free college will cure societies ills, reverse social injustice, and revitalize America's stalling social mobility-- well, it's not going to do those things. It's foolish to expect it to, and even more foolish to institute free tuition and then declare, "Mission accomplished," and stop looking for better solutions for the underlying issues.
More Evidence That Tests Measure SES
Want more proof, again, some more, of the connection between socio-economic status and standardized test results? Twitter follower Joseph Robertshaw pointed me at a pair of studies by Randy Hoover, PhD, at the Department of Teacher Education, Beeghly College of Education, Youngstown State University.
Hoover is now a professor emeritus, but the validity of standardized testing and the search for a valid and reliable accountability system. He now runs a website called the Teacher Advocate and it's worth a look.
Hoover released two studies-- one in 2000, and one in 2007-- that looked at the validity of the Ohio Achievement Tests and the Ohio Graduate Test, and while there are no surprises here, you can add these to your file of scientific debunking of standardized testing. We're just going to look at the 2007 study, which was in part intended to check on the results of the 2000 study.
The bottom line of the earlier study appears right up front in the first paragraph of the 2007 paper:
The primary finding of this previous study was that student performance on the tests was most significantly (r = 0.80) affected by the non-school variables within the student social-economic living conditions. Indeed, the statistical significance of the predictive power of SES led to the inescapable conclusion that the tests had no academic accountability or validity whatsoever.
The 2007 study wanted to re-examine the findings, check the fairness and validity of the tests, and draw conclusions about what those findings meant to the Ohio School Report Card.
So what did Hoover find? Well, mostly that he was right the first time. He does take the time to offer a short lesson in statistical correlation analysis, which will be helpful if, like me, you are not a research scholar. Basically, the thing to remember is that a perfect correlation is 1.0 (or -1,0). So, getting punched in the nose correlates about 1.0 to feeling pain.
Hoover is out to find the correlation between what he calls the students' "lived experience" to district level performance is 0.78. Which is high.
If you like scatterplot charts (calling Jersey Jazzman), then Hoover has some of those for you, all driving home the same point. For instance, here's one looking at the percent of economically disadvantaged students as a predictor of district performance.
That's an r value of -0.75, which means you can do a pretty good job of predicting how a district will do based on how few or many economically disadvantaged students there are.
Hoover crunched together three factors to create what he calls a Lived Experience Index that shows, in fact, a 0.78 r value. Like Chris Tienken, Hoover has shown that we can pretty well assign a school or district a rating based on their demographics and just skip the whole testing business entirely.
Hoover takes things a step further, and reverse-maths the results to a plot of results with his live experience index factored out-- a sort of crude VAM sauce. He has a chart for those results, showing that there are poor schools performing well and rich schools performing poorly. Frankly, I think he's probably on shakier ground here, but it does support his conclusion about the Ohio school accountability system of the time to be "grossly misleading at best and grossly unfair at worst," a system that "perpetuates the political fiction that poor children can't learn and teachers in schools with poor children can't teach."
That was back in 2007, so some of the landscape such as the Ohio school accountability system (well, public school accountability-- Ohio charters are apparently not accountable to anybody) has changed, along with many reformster advances of the past eight years.
But this research does stand as one more data point regarding standardized tests and their ability to measure SES far better than they measure anything else.
Hoover is now a professor emeritus, but the validity of standardized testing and the search for a valid and reliable accountability system. He now runs a website called the Teacher Advocate and it's worth a look.
Hoover released two studies-- one in 2000, and one in 2007-- that looked at the validity of the Ohio Achievement Tests and the Ohio Graduate Test, and while there are no surprises here, you can add these to your file of scientific debunking of standardized testing. We're just going to look at the 2007 study, which was in part intended to check on the results of the 2000 study.
The bottom line of the earlier study appears right up front in the first paragraph of the 2007 paper:
The primary finding of this previous study was that student performance on the tests was most significantly (r = 0.80) affected by the non-school variables within the student social-economic living conditions. Indeed, the statistical significance of the predictive power of SES led to the inescapable conclusion that the tests had no academic accountability or validity whatsoever.
The 2007 study wanted to re-examine the findings, check the fairness and validity of the tests, and draw conclusions about what those findings meant to the Ohio School Report Card.
So what did Hoover find? Well, mostly that he was right the first time. He does take the time to offer a short lesson in statistical correlation analysis, which will be helpful if, like me, you are not a research scholar. Basically, the thing to remember is that a perfect correlation is 1.0 (or -1,0). So, getting punched in the nose correlates about 1.0 to feeling pain.
Hoover is out to find the correlation between what he calls the students' "lived experience" to district level performance is 0.78. Which is high.
If you like scatterplot charts (calling Jersey Jazzman), then Hoover has some of those for you, all driving home the same point. For instance, here's one looking at the percent of economically disadvantaged students as a predictor of district performance.
That's an r value of -0.75, which means you can do a pretty good job of predicting how a district will do based on how few or many economically disadvantaged students there are.
Hoover crunched together three factors to create what he calls a Lived Experience Index that shows, in fact, a 0.78 r value. Like Chris Tienken, Hoover has shown that we can pretty well assign a school or district a rating based on their demographics and just skip the whole testing business entirely.
Hoover takes things a step further, and reverse-maths the results to a plot of results with his live experience index factored out-- a sort of crude VAM sauce. He has a chart for those results, showing that there are poor schools performing well and rich schools performing poorly. Frankly, I think he's probably on shakier ground here, but it does support his conclusion about the Ohio school accountability system of the time to be "grossly misleading at best and grossly unfair at worst," a system that "perpetuates the political fiction that poor children can't learn and teachers in schools with poor children can't teach."
That was back in 2007, so some of the landscape such as the Ohio school accountability system (well, public school accountability-- Ohio charters are apparently not accountable to anybody) has changed, along with many reformster advances of the past eight years.
But this research does stand as one more data point regarding standardized tests and their ability to measure SES far better than they measure anything else.
Wednesday, November 18, 2015
Gates Takes Aim at Teacher Education
As noted today at Education Week, the Gates Foundation has fastened its aim on teacher preparation programs. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is ready to drop $34 million cool ones on "cooperative initiatives designed to improve teacher-preparation programs' overall effectiveness."
So what does that mean? Good news? Bad news?
The three year grants are based on four principles:
* developing strong partnerships with school districts
* giving teacher-candidates opportunities to refine a specific set of teaching skills
* using data for improvement and accountability
* ensuring that faculty mentors are effective at guiding novices into the profession
The first sounds great. The second sounds... well, I don't know. Exactly what specific set are we talking about, and what does that even mean? Becoming an interrogatory specialist? Learning to be excellent at teaching fractions? I'm worried that the Gates tendency to believe that all complex activities can be broken down into disconnected, context-free skills is at play here, in which case I'm doubting this will be useful.
Third? Well, if I thought "data" meant what I mean by "data, I'd think this was fine. I use data every minute of every day. But since this is Gates, I'm afraid that "data" means "results from a computer-based bunch of competency-based-baloney" or even "more of the useless data from those dreadful Big Standardized Tests."
Fourth point. Yes, excellent idea, if in fact you have any idea of how to tell that mentors are effective at guiding etc etc. Which I'm betting you don't, or worse, you have some sort of "based on student test scores VAM sauce baloney," which won't do anyone any good.
But hey, maybe the recipients of the Gates money will give us a clue about where this is headed.
Grantee #1 is TeacherSquared (you know-- a place that makes teacher teachers) which is mostly "nontraditional" preparation programs. In fact, it's mostly RelayGSE, a fake teacher school set up by charters so that non-teachers with a little experience could teach non-teachers with no experience how to be teachers. So that is not a good sign.
#2 Texas Tech University, "which will head the University-School Partnerships for the Renewal of Educator Preparation National Center" which is six Southern universities welded together. Lord only knows what that will look like.
#3 Massachusetts Department of Education, which will head up an EPIC (Elevate Preparation, Impact Children) center to work with all the teacher ed programs in the state. This is just going to be confusing, because the EPIC acronym has been used before-- including by charter schools in Massachusetts (Effective Practice Incentive Community). But the Massachusetts DoE has a mixed track record on reformy issues, so we'll see.
#4 National Center for Teacher Residencies, which is promoting a full-year residency model which has been popping up around the country and which I think could actually be a great idea.
TeachingWorks at University of Michigan will be a coordinating hub for all the cool things these other grantees will come up with.
According to EdWeek's Stephen Sawchuk, Gates wants each of these "centers" to crank out 2,500 teachers per year which is-- well, that is huge. I'm pretty sure that's more than most entire states produce. It is a grand total of 10,000 teachers. Per year. At a time when enrollment in teacher education programs is plummeting. The USPREPNC would have to get upwards of 600 teacher-grads per year out of its six member universities. I mean, we can turn this number around many ways, and from every angle, it's a huge number. Of the four grantees, only the state of Massachusetts seems likely to handle that kind of capacity.
Want more bad signs? Here's a quote from Vicki Phillips:
“The timing is great because of having great consistent, high standards in the country and more meaningful, actionable teacher-feedback systems and some clear definitions about what excellence in teaching looks like,” said Vicki Phillips, the Gates Foundation’s director of college-ready programs.
In other words, this is way to drive Common Core up into teacher education programs, where it can do more damage.
Anissa Listak of the NCTR points out that making sure clinical faculty (i.e. co-operating teachers) are top notch will be a game changer, and I don't disagree. But it sidesteps the question of how the top notch faculty will be identified, and it really side steps the issue of how the program will find 10,000 master teachers who want to share their classes with a student teacher for a whole year-- especially in locations where test scores will reflect on their own teacher ratings (including, perhaps, the ratings that marked them as "qualified" to host a teacher-resident in the first place).
The Gates has identified a need here-- evaluating teacher preparation programs. Nobody is doing it (well, nobody except the scam artists at NCTQ who do it by reading commencement programs and syllabi), and if we had a legitimate method of measuring program quality, it could be helpful to aspiring teachers. But we don't, and it's not clear that any of these grantees have a clue, either.
It all rests on knowing exactly how to measure and quantify teacher excellence. With data. And boy, there's no way that can end badly.
Will the Gates money be well-spent? I'm not optimistic-- particularly not with an outfit like Relay GSE on the list of recipients. And the Gates has a bad history of using grants to push a narrow and unbending agenda that it has already formed rather than truly exploring an issue or trying to get ideas from people who might know something. In other words, if this is all just a way for Gates to impose his own ideas of what teacher training should look like, then it's likely to be as wasteful and destructive as his championing of Common Core.
So what does that mean? Good news? Bad news?
The three year grants are based on four principles:
* developing strong partnerships with school districts
* giving teacher-candidates opportunities to refine a specific set of teaching skills
* using data for improvement and accountability
* ensuring that faculty mentors are effective at guiding novices into the profession
The first sounds great. The second sounds... well, I don't know. Exactly what specific set are we talking about, and what does that even mean? Becoming an interrogatory specialist? Learning to be excellent at teaching fractions? I'm worried that the Gates tendency to believe that all complex activities can be broken down into disconnected, context-free skills is at play here, in which case I'm doubting this will be useful.
Third? Well, if I thought "data" meant what I mean by "data, I'd think this was fine. I use data every minute of every day. But since this is Gates, I'm afraid that "data" means "results from a computer-based bunch of competency-based-baloney" or even "more of the useless data from those dreadful Big Standardized Tests."
Fourth point. Yes, excellent idea, if in fact you have any idea of how to tell that mentors are effective at guiding etc etc. Which I'm betting you don't, or worse, you have some sort of "based on student test scores VAM sauce baloney," which won't do anyone any good.
But hey, maybe the recipients of the Gates money will give us a clue about where this is headed.
Grantee #1 is TeacherSquared (you know-- a place that makes teacher teachers) which is mostly "nontraditional" preparation programs. In fact, it's mostly RelayGSE, a fake teacher school set up by charters so that non-teachers with a little experience could teach non-teachers with no experience how to be teachers. So that is not a good sign.
#2 Texas Tech University, "which will head the University-School Partnerships for the Renewal of Educator Preparation National Center" which is six Southern universities welded together. Lord only knows what that will look like.
#3 Massachusetts Department of Education, which will head up an EPIC (Elevate Preparation, Impact Children) center to work with all the teacher ed programs in the state. This is just going to be confusing, because the EPIC acronym has been used before-- including by charter schools in Massachusetts (Effective Practice Incentive Community). But the Massachusetts DoE has a mixed track record on reformy issues, so we'll see.
#4 National Center for Teacher Residencies, which is promoting a full-year residency model which has been popping up around the country and which I think could actually be a great idea.
TeachingWorks at University of Michigan will be a coordinating hub for all the cool things these other grantees will come up with.
According to EdWeek's Stephen Sawchuk, Gates wants each of these "centers" to crank out 2,500 teachers per year which is-- well, that is huge. I'm pretty sure that's more than most entire states produce. It is a grand total of 10,000 teachers. Per year. At a time when enrollment in teacher education programs is plummeting. The USPREPNC would have to get upwards of 600 teacher-grads per year out of its six member universities. I mean, we can turn this number around many ways, and from every angle, it's a huge number. Of the four grantees, only the state of Massachusetts seems likely to handle that kind of capacity.
Want more bad signs? Here's a quote from Vicki Phillips:
“The timing is great because of having great consistent, high standards in the country and more meaningful, actionable teacher-feedback systems and some clear definitions about what excellence in teaching looks like,” said Vicki Phillips, the Gates Foundation’s director of college-ready programs.
In other words, this is way to drive Common Core up into teacher education programs, where it can do more damage.
Anissa Listak of the NCTR points out that making sure clinical faculty (i.e. co-operating teachers) are top notch will be a game changer, and I don't disagree. But it sidesteps the question of how the top notch faculty will be identified, and it really side steps the issue of how the program will find 10,000 master teachers who want to share their classes with a student teacher for a whole year-- especially in locations where test scores will reflect on their own teacher ratings (including, perhaps, the ratings that marked them as "qualified" to host a teacher-resident in the first place).
The Gates has identified a need here-- evaluating teacher preparation programs. Nobody is doing it (well, nobody except the scam artists at NCTQ who do it by reading commencement programs and syllabi), and if we had a legitimate method of measuring program quality, it could be helpful to aspiring teachers. But we don't, and it's not clear that any of these grantees have a clue, either.
It all rests on knowing exactly how to measure and quantify teacher excellence. With data. And boy, there's no way that can end badly.
Will the Gates money be well-spent? I'm not optimistic-- particularly not with an outfit like Relay GSE on the list of recipients. And the Gates has a bad history of using grants to push a narrow and unbending agenda that it has already formed rather than truly exploring an issue or trying to get ideas from people who might know something. In other words, if this is all just a way for Gates to impose his own ideas of what teacher training should look like, then it's likely to be as wasteful and destructive as his championing of Common Core.
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